An English Ghost Story (15 page)

It was a miracle Jordan wasn’t sucked into repeating the cycle with Rick. She saw how easily she could be turned into a replica of her mother, or even of her father, with mismatched kids of her own and future generations of misery in the offing.

Finally, when her knee began to scream, she stopped rocking. She had work to do.

She stripped off yesterday’s musty dress and stood in front of her mirror. Her coral knickers, the only underwear she’d been wearing, were the colour of her skin. Her tummy bulged over the elastic and her thighs were huge.

How had she let herself bloat like this?

It had been part of the trick, the cruellest trick.

She turned round, recognising a definite waddle, and looked over her shoulder at herself.

She was a pudgy monster. A disaster.

Everything swelled or sagged.

She didn’t let herself despair. She held her mind rigid. She’d have to set herself right. Her next project. She was alone in this, utterly.

She concealed her horrible body in an ugly dressing gown – one of Dad’s cast-offs – that hung to the floor and could be clutched around her chin, collar up to cover the furry beginnings of jowls.

Poking her head out of her room, she found the coast clear and darted across the corridor into the smaller bathroom. She locked the door behind her and let the blind fall with a rasping rattle.

She hooked up the shower attachment and let the water run, as hot as it could get. She would need to scald off a layer of dirty skin (that Rick had touched) and start to scrub away some of the subcutaneous fat.

It would not be enough, but would be a start. She needed to scrape the fluffiness out of her hair, get rid of the conditioner. Later, she might hack it all off. For the moment, she would just pull it back.

She looked hard into the mirror over the sink, watching herself become ghostly as hot fog swarmed on the reflective surface. Her eyes finally disappeared in the murk.

That was that. It was over.

The fake Jordan, the one who had come out in the Hollow, was banished.

This was the real girl. She might not be as biddable, as beddable. But she was herself and herself alone. She didn’t have to pretend. She didn’t have to fake anything to please other people, to gull those who would gull her.

A droplet ran down the mirror like a tear, cutting a clear line, showing the reflection of her cheek. The fake Jordan was crying.

She smiled, savagely.

Good. It was good that the girl cried. She was the ‘It’s My Party’ girl, the helpless blubberer, the girl who could do nothing but whine and feel sorry for herself.

Wiping the tear away, she glimpsed bared teeth in the hand-shaped reflecting patch. Fog gathered again, swift and efficient, and grey moisture blotted out her snarly grin.

She stepped into the tub and let the wet pain fall on her, holding herself rigid under the torrent, broiling her skin lobster-red, scourging the last of the fake Jordan.

She was the ‘Judy’s Turn to Cry’ girl now.

* * *

S
teven sat in his study, warm inside from breakfast, mind alert from two cups of fresh-ground coffee. He looked out of the window at his son playing in the orchard. Tim was happy. Kirsty would come round soon, when the penny dropped. Jordan was seventeen: breaking up with a useless boyfriend was part of the process. She’d mope a bit and play misery records. He’d happily lend her his Smiths CDs when she wore out her oldies. In a week or so, she’d snap back and be ready to break hearts when she met a whole new crowd at college in September. It was like the old Kirsty to overreact and treat every minute fluctuation of adolescent mood as a harbinger of apocalypse.

If anything, he was more concerned about Kirsty.

He was looking at an e-mail from Tatum. The Oddments debts were more substantial than they’d thought. Tatum was suggesting that someone had been dipping into the account, basically stripping the business before it disappeared entirely, leaving the mess for someone else to tidy up. Tatum didn’t say who she thought that person was, but he assumed her number-one suspect was Kirsty herself. His wife had been buying things for the house but Steven had seen the paperwork on everything – the money had come from his own temporarily flush accounts. No, it could only be one person.

The Wild Witch. Veronica Gorse. Vron.

Kirsty was the main signatory for her business account but she had drafted Veronica as an alternate co-signee. She had complained it wasn’t convenient to wait until Steven was there – he had been travelling much more than now – to pay for anything. Veronica had a lot to do with the business as it was, so Kirsty brought her in as a semi-partner, whatever that meant. Things had been going awry before then, but the addition of the Wild Witch to the set-up hadn’t helped at all.

Steven was sure it was Veronica. Kirsty had once asked him to scribble signatures on a book of blank cheques. His refusal had been the thing that made her bring Veronica in. Had Kirsty been foolish enough to do something like that herself and give the chequebook to Vron?

He would have to be careful about how he brought it up. In the city, this sort of thing had been like lighting the blue touch paper. At the Hollow, all that was behind them but he remembered only too well what Kirsty had been like.

It wasn’t so much her business – which she accused him of never treating seriously – as the combination of her business and Veronica. The woman was a menace and everything she touched came apart at the seams. Even now, he wasn’t sure whether she was dangerously inept or actively malign. She was supposed to have trained as a therapist, but her methods seemed closer to New Age voodoo.

Veronica wasn’t here. The Hollow would never let her near.

There was only Kirsty. And Kirsty was free of all evil influences. She’d been rescued from the brink, reclaimed for the good. He couldn’t claim the credit. It was down to the house as much as him, down to the establishment of a real home for the family.

He composed a reply to Tatum. She was to transfer enough funds to settle the Oddments overdraft to the penny, paying all bank charges, then close down the account – ironically, he would need to get Kirsty to co-sign a letter to make it official – so that any cheques still floating around could not be drawn on it. Ideally, he wanted this implemented today, to cut off the wandering witch and her cash-sucking ways.

The e-mail went off and he thought about how to sell the move to Kirsty. She’d be free of all debts to anyone but him, but the last vestige of her independent business would be gone.

It shouldn’t bother her, but he would be cautious.

* * *

S
teven emerged from his sanctum mid-morning with a sheaf of papers. He wanted Kirsty to witness his signature on a batch of contracts and fed them to her one by one, efficiently getting white space under her scribbling hand. Once signed, each document went in an envelope and was sealed with a deft lick and press. He told her what they were about but she didn’t take it in. From experience, she knew his business was endlessly fascinating to Steven but atrociously boring to anyone else. Just now, she was too preoccupied even to fake interest.

Mission accomplished, Steven gathered his envelopes and announced that he would walk into the village to the postbox. She let him go.

Jordan hadn’t come down, though noises had been heard. Poltergeist-clattering in her room.

It struck Kirsty as funny.

Ghosts lived at the Hollow but Jordan was haunting it. Her daughter was the stick-thin spectre in the black shroud, huge dead eyes accusing, bony fingers reaching out to clutch. The ghosts were more normal, just…

Just what?

Feelings, mostly. And objects. Warm winds and invisible caresses. The secure world of a little girl before the War, surviving in a bubble.

The ghosts would help Jordan, if only Jordan would let them.

Just as the Hollow would help Kirsty.

* * *

A
s he walked to the village, Steven’s insides unknotted. He’d slipped the letter past Kirsty, avoiding a possibly hairy scene. She need never know, since he suspected she didn’t quite realise he needed her signature to close her account. She had turned it all over to him verbally. He was just taking care of the clearing-up without troubling her. If she knew, she would be grateful for his consideration.

The further away he got from the Hollow, the surer he was.

Even in this age of electronic communication, some things had to be sent by snail mail. Legal documents that required physical signatures and matters where confidentiality was a priority.

Small chores that got him out of his study were good for him. He was working long hours but not seeming to feel tired. The Hollow was a nurturing environment and brought the best out of him, but he had to get away sometimes. Once every few days, he walked the mile or so to Sutton Mallet. It wasn’t much of a village. There wasn’t even a post office, just a red pillar box. There never seemed to be anyone about.

He popped the letters in the box.

There. That was done. No going back on it.

He promised not to beat himself over the head about it. He had done a kind deed, not a cruel one. A certain degree of sneakiness was involved, but subterfuge was a neutral tool. It wasn’t wrong to dissemble – to lie – if you were keeping a surprise party from someone. The outcome was what was important.

Nothing stirred around the triangular green. Heat haze made the air shimmer at knee-height. There was a pub, The Lady, but it never seemed open. There was a church and a graveyard. No signs of life. Maybe the village was like Paris: everyone headed to the seaside in the summer. Some cottages were shut up, the weekend retreats of yuppie city-folk who were abroad on their hols.

It had been hard to convince Brian Bowker that they planned on living full-time at the Hollow, rather than merely occupying it at two- and three-day stretches. Already, Steven thought of the absentee owners as incomers and city-folk. The Naremores were local, landed.

He walked back home.

* * *

W
ith a Burt Bacharach Collection – ‘I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself’, ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’, ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ – on loud in her room, Jordan sat at Miss Teazle’s antique PC and drafted a letter to Rick. The document was up to twenty-two pages, which she would have to cut down to a manageable size. If there were too much of it, the effect would dissipate. This communication was designed to stick in the mind.

Simple abuse wouldn’t do. If he had nerved himself up to make the break, he was ready for that. After all, he’d got out of their relationship at the lowest cost by simply not turning up. His cowardice was the weakness she had to home in on, and his susceptibility to outside influence. She laced the letter with disparaging comment on his taste in television and recreational literature. To him,
Star Trek: The Next Generation
was a sacred text.

She wrote a memoir of their life together, listing each of his many failings. She stirred a little fiction into the mix and claimed to have slept with three of his friends and a member of his family. Five pages on, still mentioning no names, she said that she had slept with two of his friends. The discrepancy was a stroke of genius. His question wouldn’t be ‘Have you really slept with my friends?’ but ‘How many of my friends have you slept with?’ The other thing would shred his family. Presumably, he’d rule out his twelve-year-old brother – though she had caught Benny looking at her breasts – and home in on his dad, with whom he was always rowing but who’d always played flirty games with her, or start wondering about her and his sister Marilyn, who was just a bit dikey.

Even if Rick didn’t believe a word of it, he wouldn’t be able to resist digging around for evidence. That sort of suspicion – as she knew only too well from the Veronica Wars – could destroy relationships as easily as any actual trespass.

By the end of the letter, she believed it herself. She had a physical memory of sex with Walker, with Rick’s dad, with Marilyn. She knew about their birthmarks, their hidden tattoos, the looks on their faces when they came. She heard the little laughs that clogged their throats afterwards as they looked at her lying there naked, and smiled hard at what they’d just done with precious Rick’s precious girlfriend.

If she was learning anything at the Hollow, it was that wishing makes it so.

‘The Look of Love’ came on, one of the lying songs that insinuated everything was all right, but she deftly zapped with the remote, skipping to ‘Blue on Blue’. Even that didn’t quite do it for her. She was beginning to resent all the whining in these songs. Why couldn’t there be more like ‘Judy’s Turn to Cry’?

She laced in choice quotations from Rick’s friends, telling him what they really thought about him. She had twigged at once to the resentment Walker and his mates had around Rick. He was going to college and university while they were just going to kick around nowhere being bullied onto training schemes that never led to jobs. Rick might be clever, but that didn’t make him smart. It was true: Rick’s mates wanted him to fall on his face. Persuading him not to come to the West Country was probably a part of it. When he read her version, he would be sure Walker – she knew he had to have been the one who kept nagging at him about it, calling for one more drink and upping him from beer to spirits – had worked a trick on his head so he could himself have a chance at her.

Maybe she
wasn’t
making it up? Walker was nineteen and had had a succession of skanky thirteen-year-old girlfriends. He had a streak of Rick’s cleverness but had been chucked out of school for vandalism and now spent most of his time at other peoples’ flats, stealing their paperbacks to sell down the market so he could buy club drugs. Maybe Walker really did have a thing for her.

It was credible.

She put in several mentions of Walker, noting (truthfully) that his favourite sentence opening when talking to Rick was ‘The trouble with you is…’

This was a letter bomb. It would go off and destroy the bastard.

Her knuckles ached from typing. Her shoulders were knotted from hunching over the keyboard. She was cultivating a hump.