The one place I will not go is the multi-storey car park. I know that whatever is in there is malign. Odd, though: there are others like me but whatever is in the multi-storey car park is something different. A ghost is someone’s past trapped in an eternal present. The grey shape on Level Six is different. It feels more like a premonition – a malevolent future rather than an unhappy history; or both, perhaps.

*

One day, as the light is fading, I flow out through the Queensgate Centre and onto Cathedral Causeway, wandering down the pedestrianised area to Bridge Street. It is a dull November day, overcast, the cloud cover dense like those great, thick folds of cotton wool you get in hospitals – something plays at the edge of my memory as I think this, myself lying on my back on a hard bed, my head on something soft, a white plastic arch above me as I am slid into the machine and a voice coming into my ears saying, ‘How are you feeling, Lisa? Alright? Just remember, it’s going to be very noisy.’

Looking at the people around me, their lack of hurry, I gather it isn’t that cold: there is an aimlessness to everything. Even the very skinny brown dog that is trotting round and round the benches in the middle of the precinct seems to do so with a lack of purpose. Maybe all the inhabitants of Peterborough are lost souls; perhaps this is just where everyone fetches up in the end. Maybe even the dog is a phantom. But if that’s true, why will no one talk to me?

To test my theory, I stand right in front of a woman as she comes out of WHSmith. She is in her mid-forties. Her hair has whitened prematurely and hangs in loose, shoulder-length curls – it suits her, her olive skin, her large dark eyes. She wears small, rimless glasses, a black leather jacket. I watch her as she comes towards me. Her face is still and she is staring into the middle distance. She is gripping her phone in one hand, not looking at it but hanging on to it as if she thinks she might fall if she lets go. I read her thought as she passes through me. When is she going to call back?

I turn and watch the woman’s back as she walks briskly away from me at a slight forward tilt, still clutching the phone. She felt nothing as she passed through me, not even a shudder.