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Peter asked Nita to stand ... just there. He claimed that was just where ... well, just where the ghost had stood earlier, when he had been looking through the bedroom window straight into the blinding sun of freak weather conditions, a time of day when he often expected Nita to arrive, but today she had been late, and instead of Nita, he had witnessed just there the appearance, apparition, approach of what he could only call a ghost ... the ghost of his own mother. Yes, just there. Peter waved and pointed as he stage-managed Nita into position beside the bullace tree, just in front of the grinding, creaking wooden-gate, a step poised upon taking another step up the stone steps towards the front-door that Nita always rang with a happy flourish. You see, Peter and Nita were in love. And today Nita had been late.

Peter actually noticed that sunshine lit things in a weird way that night – for day had indeed soon turned into night uncharacteristically without any intervening twilight or dusk, a fact that Peter blamed on the freak weather conditions. The sun still seemed to shine, however, despite the coming of night; the sun was a dark blob on the horizon which shook Peter to his roots. He feared that he might not survive the implications of global warming that had been described by scaremongers day in and day out throughout the pages of his consciousness. It was almost a relief to worry about something as old-fashioned or as traditional as a ghost. The ghost of his own mother. But his mother was not dead. One cannot have a ghost if one were not dead, could one? He squinted at Nita's shape masquerading as a ghost in the garden, simply so that he could rationalise, reconcile something he knew in his heart of hearts to be essentially irrational, irreconcilable. Nita would do anything for him, though, would even play silly goose or ghost games or games with the light and with the imagination. But it had not been imagination, he assured her. What about a quirk of the light, then, she asked?

Putting aside nasty thoughts, stuffing the head of his necktie tight within the white starched collar (as meticulously laundered by his mother), Peter suddenly decided to answer the door – it having now been rung by Nita following her masquerade as a ghost in the garden – he himself now intent upon disappearing off with her to the pictures. In those old-fashioned, traditional days in England, the only way courting couples could snatch a kiss was upon the back row of a cinema as the film played itself out upon a loop of customers coming in and going out to the continuous performance rhythm of seeing through a film up to the point when they had started watching it ... at the same time as kissing and cuddling amid the luminously smouldering cigarettes. One of his mother's favourite sayings was about people who reached the end of the long road by kneeling along it: a religious conviction that could not be expressed in any other way. She also made sure Peter wore clean underpants when he went out with Nita, not that Nita would ever likely see them.

Pathé News today, somehow with an anachronistic monochrome of stilted cinematic commentary, predicted that modern weather patterns would become even more memorable – almost like science fiction in reverse ... but did future problems infect their own past with renewed dangers? ... unless all of us, in those days, were too busy watching the passing of reality itself in the same way as we watched films, from the middle to the beginning, and then back again.

Peter and Nita tentatively stared up towards the huge flat moving faces, their own kisses forgotten when contemplating the future's ghosts passing in silhouette or in shadow across the wide white screen ... while a giant usherette's torch shone out beam-like, disguised as a projector populating the darkness with shapes thus summoned to give credibility to these same shapes in reality. Peter whispered sweet nothings in Nita's ear as they returned to canoodling ... oblivious of his mother watching them from the upper circle, where her last short breaths were intensifying amid the billowing tobacco-stained air.

Prayers and Nuances tremble, shadowily bent towards the gate they hoped to enter without a creak or grind. Silence is a language with too many words, so many words indeed that one cannot even begin to choose which words to speak.

Peter and Nita tease sweet dark kisses from each other just as an approaching dawn skidmarks the sky ... just along and above the horizon ... just there.

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