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The milkman said he couldn’t deliver any more.

“It’s just – half five in the morning – coming up your path in the dark… I don’t… I feel…” He stared down at his money pouch.

Ellie told him it was OK to leave the milk next door and the milkman thanked her, leaving with the promise of an extra bottle of semi-skimmed, no charge, every Saturday - for the inconvenience, like.

“Barking,” said Becks, but Ellie wasn’t so sure. She saw how fast the milkman left, up the path between the privet and the junk skip the landlord had promised to shift the week they moved in. Keeping his head down the whole way. Looking up only when he was safely out on the pavement. Not even a glance back, and he was gone.

Ellie didn’t think about it again ‘til midnight, when she went to let Spike out. Spike was Becks’ cat really, but it was Ellie who ended up looking after him. Becks was so often elsewhere; Ellie, hardly ever so these days. She didn’t mind though. Spike was the sweetest kitty, curling up with her while she read, purring even as she put him out.

The claws went into her arm the moment she opened the door, and Spike dug them deep, hissing. Ellie let go, but Spike was already eeling from her grasp and back into the house.

“Oww…” She winced at the scratches, watching blood pop out. Even before she looked up, she knew he was there.

Tom.

Down by the skip, where the streetlight fell on the edge of a soggy mattress, she could see his face clearly.

It’d been three months since Tom spoke up. He wasn’t her usual type, though Ellie had felt crappy for thinking that way. He was overweight, he’d not yet beaten the teenage acne, and he rode a scooter to Uni – not a bike, an old mod scooter! But he talked with such passion in the seminars; like Ellie, he seemed to have actually read the set books; and the way he asked her – as though he’d been building up the courage all his life – it wasn’t like any way she’d ever been asked out before. There was not a bit of swagger to Tom, and maybe Ellie had had enough of swagger.

She hadn’t been on a date since the end of the First Year, and OK, that was only eight months, but it was the longest she’d gone without a snog in six years. Which might make her sound some kind of slut, though compared to Becks, she was Sister Ellie Immaculate. The trouble was, that whole cliché of girls growing up faster than boys. She’d always fancied guys a couple of years older, and that’d been fine as a fresher, but now her choices were narrowed to the mature students, most of who still lived with their mums, and the lecturers, not a Henry Higgins among them. Most of the boys in her own year (at least the ones she met when Becks dragged her out) continued to demonstrate their immaturity in startlingly imaginative ways, usually involving alcohol, vulgarity, and an almighty disregard for that there book-learning. Not a slut at all then, she’d smile to herself… more a prude-in-training. Or perhaps, if the greatest erogenous zone really was the mind: a curious, frustrated virgin!

And so she’d taken the chance with Tom, and felt immediately vindicated by the smile in his eyes. Becks accused her of charity; but surely, Ellie told herself, she was old enough to put peer pressure away with the school uniform. Tom was a new experience - wasn’t that what Uni was supposed to be all about?

He walked her home and they arranged to meet the following evening in the Union Bar. She left him at the bottom of the path, touching the back of his hand as she went, tingly with anticipation. Turning back as her key fitted the lock, she saw him smiling, holding the favoured hand to his face, as though he could still feel her there. He blushed when she caught him, and it was surprisingly contagious. But the embarrassment turned back to smiles, and for a second it seemed neither of them wanted to be the first to go. It was Ellie who finally closed the door.

The next afternoon – just hours before their first date – a juggernaut clipped Tom’s scooter on the ring road, throwing him face-first into tarmac. By the time Ellie arrived at the Union Bar, Tom was dead.

Except here he was, back at the bottom of her path, and Ellie… Ellie couldn’t move from the doorstep.

It’s just way the light’s falling on the bushes, she lied to herself. Just that and eyes tired from too much Camus. He’s not there really, of course he’s not there really…

She’d cried when she heard about the accident, more than she might have expected. But she couldn’t mourn forever from one brief conversation, and the grief passed quicker than she’d have liked to admit, leaving only an empty seat in the lecture hall and a vague sense of something undone, some calendar square unchecked, some chance lost.

“Tom,” she said, not a question. The question would have been, “what the hell are you doing here?” but she couldn’t ask that. She closed her eyes to make him go. It felt like the only movement possible. Sure enough, when she opened them again, Tom was nowhere.

He was never anywhere, she told herself, but the empty path told another story. Because Tom wouldn’t have wanted to scare her. Tom wouldn’t have wanted that at all.

* * *

Her bladder woke her after three, as it often did, and she stumbled to the bathroom in the dark. She was alone in the house again tonight, but she was never uncomfortable with that. She didn’t recall her midnight visitor ‘til she reached the landing window.

Was it raindrops on the glass that made her glance outside? The lights of a passing taxi? Wind loose in the guttering…?

Tom wasn’t looking up. He was watching the front door from the shroud of privet, hunched against the weather, waiting.

This time Ellie wasn’t scared; fascination overwhelmed any fear. Besides, she realised, she couldn’t be scared of him. Any other… (ghost)… might have sent her scurrying back to bed, sheets up over her head - but not Tom. One thing she’d been certain of when she said yes in the first place, she’d be safe in Tom’s company. Nothing had changed.

She unlocked the front door, stretching a raincoat over her dressing gown, and stepped outside. He smiled when he saw her, and started to speak… but all Ellie heard was the storm.

She spoke his name again, without it sounding odd, then asked her question.

Tom took a step, into the circumference of the streetlight, and tried again to speak.

“Tom? I don’t… I can’t…”

He reached out then, like he was giving something to her, but his hands were empty. Only when Ellie smelt the rush of scent (Roses? No…) did she reach to take the flowers. She closed her eyes again, and tried to see.

Not roses, no…

She remembered Noel, Tom’s housemate, collecting for flowers to send to the funeral.

“Geraniums,” Noel had shrugged, when Ellie asked what he was going to buy. “Me, I don’t know roses from rohypnol, but I always remember Tomski telling me…” His words caught. He had a big, stupid, jolly face; pain didn’t fit it well. He was a knob, but still she felt bad for him, staring down at the gum-spotted refectory floor, quiet for such a long time, getting it together. “One time I was buying flowers for my bird… roses are tacky, Tom told me. Geraniums smell just as sweet, but… he was full of that shit, Tomski… if he’d ever got a lass to go out with him, he’d have romanced her right off her feet.”

Tom hadn’t told him, she realised. He hadn’t told anybody. Why tempt fate…?

A can rolling noisily in the street brought Ellie back. Damp seeped up through the soles of her slippers and she huddled into the mac. This time when she opened her eyes, Tom was still there. Waiting for her answer.

“Saturday night,” she said. “Meet me here at eight…”

* * *

She ironed a dress she thought he’d like, one her gran bought her for Christmas. Prim, not Ellie’s style at all. She laughed when she saw herself in the wardrobe mirror, then smoothed out the creases at her waist.

At five to eight she went downstairs and stood by the door. Too early. She went back up and checked her make-up. Spike folded, purring, through her ankles; she listened to a message from Becks, pissed already. She went back down and opened the door, butterflies flapping. She told herself this was the single craziest thing she’d ever done in her life.

“But it’s all about new experiences…”

By ten past, she was considering a sulk. Being stood up by a living boy was bad enough! Parking her bum on the doorstep, she remembered her Mum scolding her not to sit on cold stone ‘cos she’d get the piles. At least it was dry tonight.

Closing her eyes, she brought it back. The blush they’d shared the last time she saw Tom alive. Noel saying, “if he’d ever got a lass to go out with him…” The way Tom had asked her out, with nineteen years’ rehearsal.

When she looked up, he was waiting by the gate.

They walked out of town, through the fields towards the Bluebell Woods, and the old quarry where clay pigeons lay broken and dead. Her dress dragged in the long grass, but Ellie didn’t mind. Below, the town sparkled in the valley, the neon swagger of her regular Saturday night places; and somehow it seemed right, to be heading away from all that. Though the night was coming down around her, Ellie didn’t feel alone, and not once afraid.

Tom tried again to talk, but he was still too faraway. Instead, he took her hand, and so began (though Ellie couldn’t exactly say how) their getting-to-know-you.

He loved the countryside. The gormless sheep on the trails over the moors, the little streams going wherever they pleased. Summer was coming and he’d so wanted to share that with someone like Ellie. There was a plastic bag in his pocket; he carried one always, for the litter. There was nothing sadder, in Tom’s mind, than an empty crisp packet discarded in the gorse, an old Fanta bottle floating in a brook. People didn’t deserve the countryside. He picked up the litter and put it in his bag, carrying it back to town.

He was sad, Ellie realised, that nobody would do this anymore. All the walks he’d no longer walk, the books he’d never read… the music he wouldn’t ever hear.

“And the kisses…” she said, a little of the old Ellie slipping back (she couldn’t help herself!) “The kisses you’ll never kiss…”

It was dark, and Tom was just a shadow, but still she felt his pause. Idiot, she thought, that’d been so the wrong thing to say to a boy who’d never kissed… and way, way too soon. What was she thinking?

It was her turn to talk now, before their connection was lost. Smoothing the lace on granny’s collar, she told him how she’d always dreamed of being a forest warden, living in some cosy log cabin, counting squirrels and mending fences, filling the stove kettle with snow in the winter…

“Grizzly Adams!”

She smiled as the words came into her mind, and Tom smiled back, having put them there.

“You remember that show?” she asked, surprised.

Wet Saturday afternoons when he was a kid, ITV repeats.

Soon they were cool again and he told her about other Saturday nights, walking alone up here, wishing someone could be with him. About how much he loved the touch of the wind on his face, the shivers of its fingers between the buttons on his shirt. About how sometimes in the summer, bats would appear and follow him, swooping and bombing, ‘til he realised it was the hiss of his Walkman that attracted them. Switch it off, and the bats left him alone. Switch it back on…

Before Ellie knew, it was midnight and they were back at her gate. The overflowing skip, the taxis flashing by in the street, muffled rock from a party somewhere down the road. It was all so beautiful. She’d never felt like this after just one night…

“I’ve been on a lot of first dates,” she said, stopping the thought that Tom probably couldn’t say the same. She took a breath and continued. “I’ve been on a lot of first dates where by the end of the evening, the last thing I wanted was to kiss this lad goodnight…”

She was trembling now, but Tom’s smile was without its usual diffidence; he was with her.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been on a first date where I’ve want that kiss so very much…”

He looked so happy then. Ellie closed her eyes as they stepped together, thinking this – this was how she wanted to remember him. Because surely this would be it. Some believed ghosts remained behind for unfinished business. Tom, when the lorry cuffed him from his moped, he’d been looking forward to that first date so very long… he couldn’t have moved on with so much unresolved expectation.

So tonight had been all about closure. About bringing peace to a restless spirit. And maybe, Ellie thought with a smile, maybe about getting the milk delivered again! But nothing else, surely? She could hardly have imagined this as the beginning of some great romance… could she? How mature would that have been?

Did she feel his lips? Weren’t ghosts supposed to be immaterial? Yet, he’d held her hand… or maybe that had just been sense memory, recalling their first touch, the day he asked her out. A kiss though, for a kiss they had no precedent at all. Nothing but their imaginations. So did she feel his lips? Perhaps. Perhaps… as she felt herself saying goodnight.

Except, when Ellie opened her eyes at last, Tom was still there.

“Do you think…?” he said. “I mean… I’d really like to see you again.”

Now what did she say to that?