I saw the ghost of my father once. Just the one time. I was only seven years old.
I was a short plump girl of a child with asthma and a boys haircut. I didn't fit in and it was said, quite cruelly by the other children in the small town, that I was strange and odd. It was often said directly to my face. I thought about things that seemed perfectly normal enough to me to think about. But it seemed that I was terribly mistaken in my thinking.
I had just started at a new school a few months earlier. I was a big grade twoer, no longer on the bottom rung. Oh I had been so excited. I had stood in the mirror smiling wide and barely unable to stay still. My older siblings groaned about school being back. My little brother cried because he wasn't coming with me. All I cared about was that I was finally a big girl.
But it didn't take long for me to hate the new school. By the end of the day I was in tears. I was different to these girls as well. I didn't know enough to keep my thoughts and mouth shut. A lot of the other girls knew each other and I was the outsider from the get go. I begged my mother not to go back to school, but I was forced to return. It got better and worse.
The girls all had long hair and were thin and athletic. I showed them I could do a cartwheel, and a handstand and even a backward walkover. But after I did any of them I had to pull out my puffer and suck away on it. I couldn't run fast enough and instead of just wanting to watch the boys play I wanted to join in. Apparently these all combined with my differentness.
I don't know what sent them over the edge this day. Often they would be nice to lure me in to doing things for them. I knew I should have walked away, but there was no where to walk to. It was a too small school, and I wanted to be included, even at my own expense.
I followed them around to the toilet block. They were going to show me something. And they did.
I was in the middle of the line, but as I was passing the boys toilets, I was pushed inside. It was an education. I was terrified, and the three boys in there turned on me. I burst into tears.
The girls were reprimanded, but I was inconsolable. I became frightened of my own shadow. I was sent to my Aunty's in the 'city'. Which wasn't much bigger then the country town we had moved to, but it did have its own cinema.
I was home again. In the same street we had lived when my father had died. It was the first night back. I was still enjoying the quiet comfort of the old warm blanket of home. But already I was missing my siblings, and my mother. My Aunty was lovely, but she just didn't smell right.
I had heard them trundle off to bed. I had feigned sleep and overheard them tut-tutting about how unfortunate my life was. It was the first time I had heard myself be described as delicate. The darkness swept over me and I curled up tightly into my bed and cried.
I'm not sure what made me gasp; a sound, a smell, a chill. To this day I can't tell you the truth of it. But whatever it was, it made me sit up too quickly in my bed. My head spun for a second before my eyes focused on the man sitting at the end of my bed. My skin prickled. I knew it was and wasn't a man, even though there was merely a dark silhouette to be seen.
"Uncle Andy?"
But even I knew as the question came out that it was not Uncle Andy at all. My cousins were all too little to make such a large black spill of a shadow in the darkness.
It stood up, and I followed it. It walked through the table the phone sat on and I giggled. It dawned on me then that I should be afraid. But I wasn't. Nothing had ever made me feel so safe.
They found me the next morning curled up on the chair on the front balcony. I wasn't so scared of the world anymore.
When I finally told someone about my encounter, they couldn't understand why I didn't believe in a god. I can't explain what happened that night, but I know it was my father, and I know that once you die there isn't something as simple as heaven and hell, and there's no white bearded man judging whether you go up or down.
