Days of future passed.

November 1973. I lay on my bed, arranging myself around the broken spring in the mattress, and waited for it to get dark. A narrow shaft of dying light fell on the wall, slid down over the bedhead like a fragment of yellow silk and blinded me. In the bedhead a cassette player was ticking away quietly as it wound off a track from Trilogy by Emerson, Lake and Palmer.  After a while the light died and the wheels in the cassette player stopped with a ‘clack’ and I fell asleep.

*

Much later, last week in fact, in clearing the house after my mother’s death. I was in the room again. I recognised it like a palaeontologist recognises an unearthed mastodon skeleton: everything in the right place. The door, the window, the light switch. But repainted, recurtained, recarpeted. Not very well, but can’t be possessive about a room after all that time. Above the picture rail, a wall-length mural I painted in the 1970s - a kind of imitation tapestry of scalloped colours representing a sunrise - has miraculously survived. Like me.

*

I gazed at the walls as if they still echoed Finlandia, Harvest, Also sprach Zarathustra, ‘I Threw It All Away’, Brothers and Sisters, and Clare Torry’s primal scream of joy, a seminal vocal foretaste of life’s impending dramas. Is it true, I asked myself, that sound waves never really die? It would be nice.

*

Who was the ghost, I wondered. The figure standing in the room now; or its original  incarnation? From the latter’s point of view the ‘now’ figure would be merely a projection into a theoretical future, an unlived chimera, decades away. Yet here was me making a ghost of a figure in a chink of time that had been real.

*

As I stood there thinking these ridiculous thoughts a sliver of faint gold crept slowly down the wall, its silky-yellow fingers blindly feeling for a bedhead that was no longer there. After a while, neither was the finger of gold, and it was dark.