It was Eden’s seventeenth birthday today, which reminds me
of the time last spring when the ghost of her two-year old self appeared while
I was redecorating the floorboards in the downstairs hallway.
The backstory is this: when we moved house in 2000, we
inherited carpet with a pattern so vile it looked like someone had thrown up a
Vienetta violently and repeatedly all over the floor, and so we ripped it all
up as soon as possible, revealing pine floorboards caked with thirty-odd years
of grime and covered in paint spatters from when the house was built. Conscious
to establish my credentials as Husband And Father Capable of Manly Labour, I
hired one of those big belt sanders and went to work on it – all rolled-up t-shirt
sleeves and grunting for tea. What they don’t tell you is that when the
sandpaper bites into the wood, the machine more or less pulls itself along by
its own power like a carnivorous vacuum cleaner, leaving you (okay, me) reduced
to simply hanging on and trying to guide it away from the walls and other
people’s feet.
About five minutes in, the sandpaper belt made a horrible
noise and shredded apart, and I realised that I should have gone around with a
hammer and a nail punch beforehand and made sure that all the floorboard nails
were sunk out of harm’s way – so I went and did that. And in this I had a
little helper.
Eden followed me with her Bob the Builder Hammer - its
handle had been full of sweets, but not for very long – and made sure that I
did the job properly. As anyone has seen my DIY will agree, to this day it continues
to display the quality control of a two-year old.
I skimped on the edges, basically. The big belt sander
wouldn’t go right to the skirting board and I couldn’t be arsed and you wouldn’t
have noticed it if you weren’t looking and it took me until last spring to finally
get around to doing it. So I waited until TC took the girls to her parents’,
cleared out the hall and tidied up the edges with a little detail-sander and
some left-over varnish.
Now I’m not going to say that what happened to me was an
actual hallucination, in the sense of any
weird or otherworldly apparition, but she was there. The intervening fourteen
years had folded in on themselves and become paper thin, and she was standing
right next to me, two years old, in her rainbow wellies, utterly absorbed in
the important task of Helping Daddy. We didn’t say anything to each other, just
got on with the work and then she went on her way back to whatever she’d been
doing in 2002.
The exact same thing had happened the summer before that
with Hope, when I took her for a hike up Mt Snowdon to help her complete an
objective for an internet scavenger hunt. At one point I looked at her, and she
wasn’t that long-legged teenager but the two-year old walking beside me along
Kurrawa Avenue in New South Wales on our way to the corner shop through the
tunnel under the road which made great echoes, with her hand gripped tightly to
my finger. Time folded in on itself, and we met each other in the margins.
I don’t really believe in ghosts – not the supernatural
kind, anyway. But I do believe that we are always with each other in the
memories of the times we shared together, and that at the end of the day we’re
only haunting ourselves.
What haunts me most about the photo of me and Eden is where
the fuck has all my hair gone?