Michael – a man who always looks haunted himself, as if his skin is trying to retreat from any room he is in and hide further behind his bones – and I were talking about a very picturesque walk on the west side of the moor, where you follow a path along an old broken pipe from the clay mine. He said one time he was walking up there with an old schoolfriend, and he saw two ghosts, although it was all quite mundane and not at all what he’d grown up to expect seeing ghosts to be, as an experience. It was twenty minutes or so before sundown, he said, and the ghosts wore headtorches and were in the clothes of miners from a century earlier and had walked straight past his friend and him into the very thick and spidery copse further up the hill, without saying hello. Nothing else happened but he and his friend had both been very sure they had experienced something just out of the normal pattern of things, something not quite correct. About this they were in total agreement. I wonder increasingly if that was the way with my sighting of the girl in the blouse alone in the trees, whose face, when it has appeared in my dreams, has made me want to burst into song and has, in some way I can’t fully express, left me waking up steamrollered by a great and melancholic sense that my life has not peeled back the layers and found the magic that it should. It is probably all nonsense, of course. She was perhaps just a lonely girl, a quiet girl, a girl who had fallen out with someone, a girl who wanted some time alone, a girl who felt better on the perimeter of everything, a girl who just happened to have been wandering the woods and stumbled on a gathering that interested her. But sometimes when I am seeing that night in my mind’s eye, I feel like I am seeing it as her, as a separate bystander, but one with a greater knowledge about what is really going on, in time’s larger context: one who sees these people, some of whom are in the midst of the most thrilling twenty-four hours of their life, and sees their folly in not for a moment suspecting that it is the most thrilling twenty-four hours of their life, not seeing that this isn’t the beginning of many, many other equally thrilling twenty-four-hour periods, for many years to come.