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I   Look up A woman tumbles from the sky, her dress billowing around her like a parachute as she spins The air caught in her skirt slows her fall, and she wonders what she is doing here as she panics, as she hits the mud on the River Avon, glistening silver in the light at low tide She lives  Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol She is Sarah Ann Henley, of 30 Twinnell Road, Bristol The year is 1885, and she has quarrelled with her lover She is one of only four over the next hundred years to fall from Clifton Suspension Bridge and survive Two of that number are children, who plummet over the side, together, a decade later Their picture is in a locket Sarah owns when she dies, in 1948   Cities are full of ghosts They are contained in the things we walk past every day: the roots growing from the plane tree into the pavement, the string wound round a metal fence, the cement traffic barriers lined up to stop cars driving down a lane that doesn’t exist They lurk in cracks in the sidewalk, hinting at histories that have long been ignored   This is a ghost story full of doublings and hauntings I look at Bristol — where I’m a tourist, where I have no past, only a present — and read the past everywhere, like an overlay: two maps, two cities, past and present I grew up in a small suburban town outside Washington, DC, that had been home to the country’s biggest slave traders, but no one ever mentioned that Bristol, too, is built on money from the slave trade, but all you hear about are pirates: Bristol is obsessed with its glorious history All around, Brutalist buildings are being torn down     *   Recovering in hospital, our fallen woman receives proposals, not only of marriage Her father is offered a fortune to turn her into a popular entertainment, a freak show She and her beau, a railway porter, perhaps reconcile; she begs for him He tries to