‘You were robbed.’

‘I was.’

Jason had never had the slightest interest in golf, but with so many of his friends passionate about the game, he’d learned the basics, intending one day to paint a golfing series. It was the clothes golfers wore that interested him most, and the more ridiculous, the better.

‘What are you doing tomorrow, for Christmas Day, Jason?’

‘Got a fairly quiet one – the outlaws coming to us for lunch. We haven’t really got the house straight enough for a bigger gathering. You?’

‘We’ve got both sets of outlaws coming, Louise’s sister and her four kids. It’s going to be anything but quiet.’

Emily and Louise were engrossed in a conversation about Louise’s two children, aged five and seven. They were interrupted by a waitress standing over them, reading out the specials, and then asking if they were ready to order. They were.

Seizing his opportunity after they were done with their choices, Jason turned to Louise. ‘I need to ask you something.’

‘Sure, what?’

‘When you were at our house last week, we were talking about time in the spirit world.’

‘Yeah…?’

‘Is there such a thing as time-slip?’

She frowned and sipped her drink. ‘Time-slip?’

‘Yes. Sort of where time becomes out of sync?’

‘Can you explain a bit more what you mean?’

‘Well, for instance, two people in the same room each see something completely different. Like, one person sees someone, but the other person doesn’t? Or you do something, have a conversation with someone, say, but then you find out that’s impossible because that person isn’t around.’ He circled his hands around each other, trying to express himself more clearly. ‘It’s like you’ve imagined something happen, but you know, you absolutely know you did not imagine it, that it was real.’

She nodded. ‘I follow you. As I think I tried to explain last week, time as we know it doesn’t exist in the spirit realm. Linear time is a human construct. In spirit everything that ever was, still is, going right back to the beginning of time – and right forward to the end of time, whenever that is.’

‘You mean the future?’

‘The past and the present and the future are all the same in the spirit realm.’

‘So, when we see a spirit – a ghost – it’s not necessarily a ghost of the past? It might be a ghost of the future?’

‘It’s possible.’

He sipped some more of his drink. ‘Will a ghost always look the same – always in the clothes they were wearing when they were alive – or at the moment when they died?’

‘For a time, yes, before they move on from the earth plane.’

‘Move on where?’

‘Up through the astral planes. All the time they are unrested souls, they remain on the first levels, in recognizable human form. Gradually, as they move up, they start to lose their earthly trappings.’

‘Until what?’

‘A few years ago I was in contact with a teenage boy killed on his bicycle, and his family, who held a weekly séance to communicate with him over many years. As his family became more and more comforted, he was able to tell us how he moved on up through the different astral levels.’