Paula was only one-and-a-half years old when her teenage brother, George, was killed in a traffic accident, so she didn’t remember him at all. Her grieving parents, Josephine and Alex, found any reference to him terribly painful and soon after the accident, all the photos of him were silently removed, one by one. His room was cleared out and the door of his room was pulled quietly shut as his parents tried to get on with their lives.

Paula was a happy, contented child, growing up unaware of the void left in the family. Bouncy with long dark hair, she was as pretty and uncaring a child as one could imagine.

But somehow, she seemed to sense that there was someone missing.

Once when she was walking down Republic Street, on a shopping trip with her mum, she slipped her hand into her mother’s in the natural, spontaneous way children have. Then she reached out her hand as if to take someone else’s. Her mother was surprised.

“Whose hand are you holding?” she asked, thinking that Paula would say an imaginary friend. But she was not prepared for the innocent reply.

“It’s my brother.”

Her words stopped Josephine dead in her tracks.

Two years had passed by then but the wound had hardly even started to heal. Perhaps this was why she did not pursue the matter. She just turned quietly away to regain her composure and carried on walking.

But Paula carried on slipping her hand into that of an imaginary person whenever they went out.

Time ticked by and Paula grew older, going to playgroup and behaving just like any pre-schooler, but something happened which was to change her life.

The family was going through a tough time after the bereavement. There were constant fights and Paula listened to them from her bedroom, terrified that her world was to be torn apart. She started having nightmares. She would wake up screaming and scared and her parents could do little to calm her down.

Then one night, when Josephine went into the child’s bedroom after a nightmare, she found her already calm. She was sitting up on her bed whispering to someone.

Josephine did not ask her who it was. Somehow, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to know.

The nightmares gradually petered out; whether because of her ‘friend’ or not, Josephine did not dare find out.

But it was no longer just at night that Paula started to have her whispered conversations.

One day, Josephine went to tuck her in for an afternoon nap and sat on the edge of the bed. And Paula pushed her away.

“You can’t sit there, ma. That’s where George sits.”

It had been almost four years since he had been killed but no parent ever gets over the loss of a child. Josephine was torn. She was sceptical about the inexplicable. But at the same time, part of her, deep inside, wanted to believe that it was really him, that some part of him was still there.

Slipping her hand into that of an imaginary person

At the same time, she was not sure whether this was a good or bad thing for Paula. And Josephine didn’t dare mention it to Alex. Although he rarely showed his feelings, the loss of his beloved son had changed him forever.

Whoever it was that Paula could see, the sightings became more frequent.

She was once sitting at the kitchen table, poring over her homework. Her tongue was sticking out of the side of her mouth as she concentrated on her sums. She got stuck on one, rubbing out the answer, then trying again. With a little sigh of exasperation, she rubbed it out again. Then she turned to her side, had a little whispered conversation and wrote down the answer.

Obviously this time, she was content with the answer. She shut her book with a flourish, put everything back into her school backpack and went off to play.

Josephine was left in the kitchen, her fingers gripping the back of the chair where Paula had been sitting, confused by her strong emotions, feeling terribly left out.

She had no doubt that Paula really was seeing someone. But was it...?

The doubt became an obsession. Josephine thought about it all the time and finally had to give in to her tortured curiosity. She realised that she had to know, one way or the other, no matter how painful the truth might be.

One day, as Paula was lying down on the carpet, colouring pens spread all around her, Josephine went to sit down next to her and carefully started to prise information from her.

Paula was barely six – she didn’t pick up the note of emotion in her mother’s voice and quite happily described what George was wearing. The sneakers, the T-shirt, the shorts... She had some trouble explaining the colour of his shorts though, looking round the room to find something the same shade. None of her colouring pens would do, then she ran triumphantly over to the curtains and pointed to a particular shade of blue.

It was proof – if Josephine needed it. They were the exact same clothes he had been wearing on that fateful day. And she knew that Paula could have had no way of knowing that.

There is no ending to this story. Josephine bears the burden of her knowledge on her own.

Who would believe her? But she knows that, for what it is worth, George is not completely gone.

This is the second in a series of short stories the Times of Malta will run every Sunday. It is taken from The Unexplained Plus (Allied Publications) by Vanessa Macdonald. The first edition was published in 2001 and reprinted twice. It was republished, with added stories, as The Unexplained Plus. The Maltese version of the book, Ta’ Barra Minn Hawn (Klabb Kotba Maltin), is available from all leading bookstores and stationers and from www.bdlbooks.com.

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