A child’s memory is a hall of mirrors: rebounding images and sensations, disorientation between what is real and what is not, what is tangible and what is ephemeral. The people who populate that fairy-world of half-remembrance: they are the ghosts that we pull along with us into the fixed reality of adulthood.  Sometimes those ghosts follow us. 

I scream in the shower for ten minutes. Silently. My throat contorts, pressure builds. 

I don’t want to intrude on the lives around me, disturb the neighbor downstairs with her little baby girl or for my cries to bound through our heavy, fire-front-door and pinball between its cousins in the hallway. There’s a teacher, a gamer, a traveler, a man who orders a lot of takeaways and whose doorbell is connected inexplicably to ours. I’m used to swallowing my emotions, the lingering symptoms of living among those made of glass. A cross word could shatter them, a lack of attention overwhelm them. 

Today I saw the man who was once my Dad.

It was the first definite sighting in thirty years. 

I let the suds pool up around my teeth, tasting the soapy perfume on my tongue. I spit it out so it rolls down the glass, mixing with mist and limescale. I grip the plastic floor with it’s little clusters of black mold forming in the corners. I imagine it’s an edge, some undefined edge with a long fall. It’s not a picturesque cliff or the railing of wrought iron bridge, it’s the edge of that hall of mirrors. I’m fishing for the memories that have bred with dreams and sired half-formed beasts that pad through my brain. Ready to pounce, to drag, to push me into somewhere I’m too scared to go. 

I’m tottering into a small kitchen, white tiled with Mum by the cooker and her back to me. I can’t feel my body, I’m unanchored. I look up to where Dad is. He’s very tall and our photograph albums show him as nearly six-foot with a slim frame, all his limbs are long but in proportion. His hair is dark enough to appear black and he has uneven stubble, like an ancient eraser has half-failed with a pencil picture. He leers down at me, making a face and a funny noise that both delights and scares me, as his head is suddenly too big and his neck too long, contorting to reach me. I run from the room. 

The half-formed beast pads on. I’m making my way downstairs. It’s dark. It’s that forbidden period of morning, unknown to me as time is unknown to me. I can tell you with screams when I’m in need of love, but clocks mean nothing. I love that idea now, yearning to flee from city life into a mountainside oblivion where only the sunrise and sunset mark the flow. 

Dad is lying on a pull-out sofa and I can only see his feet, large and full of knobby toes. There are weights at the foot of the bed, though Mum says she can’t remember him working out. The rest of him is swallowed by duvet and darkness, only his feet poised up in the air mark his existence. 

After that, I only have two memories of him. I’m six, he ran away from us when my twin and I were three. I know of him, pine after what he represents without knowing the man himself, ask Mum - now I’ve discovered sentences - when we expect him to come home. We’re in a Homebase that no longer exists, my twin and I are running towards the giant light display that always dazzles us. All sorts of lights, hanging from rows of rafter-ceilings. There are neon lights, lights with tinkling jewels, lights with jungles and stars. My twin is already ahead of me, but I linger and look back at Mum with her trolley. She’s staring at a man to her left, who also has a trolley, and who stares at her, then me. 

I stare at him, my mind trying to pull something out of the shadows. I can see myself then, in a one-piece pink romper suit, little black shoes, short gingery-brown fine hair that stopped below my ears, a pudgy nose that would grow into a wedge that always takes me by surprise in photographs. I can’t tell where I’ve seen him before, pause only a few seconds before launching myself after my twin, towards the rows of lights. 

The next memory I didn’t know was of him until today. 

I passed a man in the high street a couple of months ago. We both double-taked, spinning round to look at each other as if some string had pulled us taught. I registered he looked similar to the photographs, but he was too healthy, the man I pictured was beer-bellied and blotchy, the style of alcoholics. Alcoholics who leave their children and refuse to pay for them, subject them to poverty. I have fond memories of the cheap meals we ate, unaware of what they represented: mash-potato volcano with ketchup as lava, Mr Brain’s Faggots in their onion gravy, fish-finger sandwiches and the cheapest chickens whose ankles were stained with their own piss.

This man was lean, clean-skinned, he had a grey floppy fringe and blue eyes like mine. I squinted at him, wondering but in no way convinced he was the mythical father. He was a myth. Myths don’t become flesh. Myths don’t look at you.

He smiled and walked away a little, pausing again to look at me as I carried on to work. 

Today I discovered who he was and that the big event I had dreamt up throughout my teenage years had come and gone. In that dream, I would hurl abuse at him or forgive him or kill him or hold him. It would be a day to remember. I had missed it completely. 

I’m stuck in traffic, caused by some badly executed four-way light system in the middle of town that already locked up with half-an-hourly trains. As I slot on to the end of the queue, I pass a man and immediately recognize his body. Not his face, his body. My memory lurches and squeals. He’s holding a newspaper. Dad read The Sun and The Daily Mail. Trash-rags. His hair is grey but the rest of him matches all the photographs I cried over. 

He passes, carries on up towards the address I know is his. I recently found out the house number. He’s only ever lived just around the corner from us. A fifteen minute walk. Somehow we’ve not met before this, despite such close proximity. I breath deep and sink into my seat. Is it him? Is it him? I decide I have to know. I need to see him go into the house that belongs to the man who left us.

I do a three-pointer and overtake him, parking in a free space on the road that leads into his. I play with my phone, head down, as he walks by me. I don’t dare look up. I watch him turn into his road, continue up until he reaches the hedge that separates his driveway from his neighbours. He turns, disappears behind it. I roar my engine to life and follow, passing the front of his house just as he’s about to close the door. We lock eyes for a fleeting moment as I drive by. It’s him. And now that I see and know him, I remember our meeting in the street. My missed opportunity. 

Now every step into my hometown is full of expectation. Haunted by the possibility of meeting the ghost, the myth made real. He’s seen me, did he recognize me? Is it her? Is it her?

The hall of mirrors cracks and shatters.

Without making a sound, I scream and scream and scream.