Ages ago, in the time of sadness after Dad had died but before we’d kind of got a bit used to him not being around, Mum went through this weird phase when she kept saying, out loud, “Pye – is that you? Are you there?”

The first time it happened was when we were watching TV. It was November-ish and windy outside, and I heard the front gate rattle and a tin can clatter along the road outside, and that’s when she did it. She sat up straight and looked towards the living room door, which was open.

“Pye?” she said. “Who’s there? Is that you, Pye?”

Now this freaked me out. I stared at Mum. “What’s up, Mum? Why do you say that?”

She had got up and gone to the front door, but soon came back.

“I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “It was … it was just the wind.”

I gave her a look that meant to say, “Well, duh.”

She didn’t mention it again, but there was this faraway look to her for the rest of the evening. She wasn’t really watching the TV, but I didn’t say anything.

She did it again, a week or so later. Same thing: sitting up, this time she was at the kitchen table. “Pye? It’s you, isn’t it? Are you there?”

“Mum,” I said, quite gently I think, “there’s nobody there. Are you OK?”

“I’m fine, darling,” she said. “Just very tired.” She rubbed her forehead with her hand and sighed.

That night I came downstairs because I couldn’t sleep again, and saw her sitting at the table with her eyes closed in the dark with a candle in front of her, very, very still, and I crept back upstairs.

A couple of days later, I was round at Grandpa Byron’s and I asked him, “Do you believe in ghosts, Grandpa Byron?”

“What sort of ghosts?”

“Well, you know – spooky ghosts, ghosts of dead people, you know … ghosts. Spirits.”

He thought for a long time. At this time, he had started to grow a beard and he looked a bit wild. Eventually, he said, “I believe wholeheartedly in the human spirit. In fact, in the spirit of all living things. And I think that spirit inhabits us while we are alive, and departs from us when our physical bodies die, and rejoins the timeless universal spirit, until such a time that it will be part of life once more, possibly in human form, possibly not.”

I thought about this, I really did. But I didn’t get it. “Is that what Hindus believe, then?”

He gave a little bark of laughter. “No, son. Not exactly.”

“Buddhists?”

He shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

So I asked him again. “Do you believe in ghosts, then?”

“Oh, aye,” he said. “Indubitably.” And then he added, “But ghosts as you’re thinking of them? No.”

“So you do and you don’t?”

He wobbled his head and smiled. “How accurately you put it, Al. Spot on!”

I had been thinking about this recently, which I guess is how what happened next came about.

And how I dragged Carly into all of this.