the road of ghosts

Featured in

  • Published 20240806
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-98-6 
  • Extent: 216pp
  • Paperback, ePUB, PDF

I AM ON the haunted road and then I am inside a memory and the memory is of all those cold mornings. In the memory, I am remembering: the gnarled hand flicking forward, baronial, holding mine in front of my face, mimicking the angle of his wrist. The memory inside the memory is distilled to the word fingertips. That is all I have to remember, I tell myself as I walk towards the stadium, fingertips, fingertips, fingertips, and a cocked wrist. It is his voice speaking through me. I listen. I am an adult and I harbour the child. She always listened. The stadium is empty except for the cleaner. I wave to him. He unlocks the automatic doors for me with a smile. Out on the court, the leather scales of the basketball are soft. I grip them tautly with the fingers of my right hand. I dip. I flick and snap my wrist. The ball moves: fleeing, falling. It drips like water through the net. I breathe. Fingertips, fingertips, the voice whispers. Finger, it screams, tips. There is still an hour before anyone else from the national league squad arrives for our team training. I walk to the bathroom. I can no longer breathe. I am sobbing, breathless, for no reason. My reflection surveys my wet face in the mirror. I tell her to breathe. She smiles through the tears catching on her eyelashes. 

I SLITHER OUT of this memory. I am on the road again. Looking back, I can see all the little shreds of bleeding skin I have left behind. I look at my bruised forearms and the scabs turned scars on my legs. The marks are now tiny memorials to forgotten moments. I glance backwards again. The start of the road leads to him: a man only of my memories, but still I can hear his voice. It is a voice that carries and deepens and booms as it enters me. He is a mentor, the skills specialist, my shaper. He is his own contradiction: calm and briskly furious and gentle and brutal and cold and humorous. If I cast my eyes far enough down the long road, I can see him – Graeme – as I first saw him, but only because he has never changed appearance. The ghost that stands watching on the yellow lane line thirty metres in front of me still looks like him.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Working body

We are taught to fear visible improvement. We are taught, passively and explicitly, to be ashamed. It is bad to look strong and muscular: our figures should not have a noticeable presence; they should not occupy too much space.

More from this edition

Into the void

Non-fictionThe singular achievement of mass politics was allowing otherwise powerless individuals a greater say in how society was ruled. It gave ordinary people the kind of status that hitherto they could hardly imagine. Its withering away, therefore, has allowed those in society whose status has always been higher to assert their interests more fully. Business and the wealthy are no longer forced to make big compromises to accommodate the interests of those below them in the social pecking order. For example, trade and financial liberalisation policies have permitted many companies to shift production, and even some services, offshore to capitalise on lower labour costs, weakening unions’ bargaining power considerably. Many lower paid workers have been pushed into insecure, low-paid jobs with poor conditions, a transformation justified by political and economic elites as contributing to greater economic ‘efficiency’ and labour market ‘flexibility’. Owners thus pocket a greater share of the economic pie, while workers’ incomes often stagnate or even decline in real terms, causing wealth inequality to rise steeply...

Conferral

Non-fictionBeneath my fantasy of a regular wage is the puerile hunch that if I stay in academia, I can regain some of the nervy possibility I held as an undergraduate student. It was at university that I first met people whose days were preoccupied with thinking, reading and writing, revelatory mostly because they were compensated for these activities with bourgeois trappings and validation. With hindsight, I can recognise that my straining so doggedly to become the kind of person who succeeded according to the university’s metrics mainly taught me what bell hooks says is the primary lesson of college – namely, ‘obedience to authority’.

Radioactive fallout

Non-fictionThe quake lasted six minutes – the office floor jolted convulsively; metal shelves rattled, files fell with a cacophony of thuds, and the structure of the building seemed to be squeaking. And then it stopped. My office building hadn’t collapsed. Neither had our apartment; my husband and son weren’t hurt. But it wasn’t the end. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had lost power, which was required to cool both the reactors and spent fuel rods. The government was braced for the worst: massive explosions or core meltdowns. A nuclear emergency was declared at 7.03 pm.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.