An English Ghost Story (31 page)

‘Come on then,’ Mum said, getting up, holding his hand too firmly, yanking him off the sofa. ‘I want to show you some magic. It’s in my room.’

* * *

T
urning back to look, she couldn’t see the copse or the house. The Old Girl and her After Lights-Out Gang were gone.

She had been given something to think about. She wasn’t out here for herself but for Rick.

Whatever sort of ghost he was.

Rick’s voice was still with her, hissing like an old record winding down. It was more than a memory of the voice she’d heard on the phone. It was in the wind that stirred gently against her legs and arms, raising the fine hairs she hated which no one else could see.

She had come out to meet him, to confront him.

This was nothing to do with her parents; this was between her and her ex-boyfriend, the ex-boy.

‘Rick,’ she called, not loud.

Her voice didn’t echo, but the name hung in her mind a few moments before popping like a bubble.

‘Ri-ick,’ she tried again, hating the whining.

Then, he was there.

‘Jord,’ he acknowledged.

His face shone like a shirt in a detergent ad. Death hadn’t marked him. At least, not where she could see.

She was weak with relief. Finally, after all that waiting and grief, he was here! He had kept his word after all, gone along with the plan.

‘What are you playing at?’ she asked, remembering to be angry with him. It was well past his deadline.

‘It’s you, Jord. I couldn’t stay away from you.’

‘You might have thought about that before…’

He shrugged, trying to get round her with a grin she’d once mistakenly told him was adorable. For ever after, he put it on when he wanted to make up for something unforgivable or get something unobtainable.

‘…before…’

‘Before you
died
, you bastard.’

She hauled around and slapped him, half-expecting her hand to pass through smoke. She connected and raked her nails across his cheek.

He bent with the blow, but stood up and wiped the mark off his face.

‘Kiss kiss,’ he said. ‘Kiss kiss?’

She was not going to kiss a ghost. Not yet. Not until things were straightened out.

‘What happened to you? Why didn’t you come when you said you would? How did you die?’

He waved away her questions, infuriating her.

‘It was your bloody mates, wasn’t it? They talked you out of trotting off to the country for the old ball and chain. Probably talked you into some stunt that got you bloody killed. One thing about this, you’re better off without them dragging you down all the time. Though what they did is about as bad as it could be. Which one of them was it?’

‘Which,’ he repeated.

Or had he said ‘witch’?

They stood in a rough circle. Stonehenge-height megaliths, like giant battered speakers at a death metal festival. Dark mist had given way to blackened earth and shrivelled grass, as if there had been a fire here long ago.

‘Love you, Jord,’ said Rick.

He was a real presence, who could be slapped and felt. He displaced air. His clothes moved when he did. He was not just a hologram or a vivid memory.

Rick reached out for her, hands long and white.

She backed away, grazing her feet and ankles on black brambles. She did not want to be touched.

‘Love you,’ he repeated.

He had never been able to form a sentence with both ‘I’ and ‘love you’ in it. She only just noticed that.

‘Kiss kiss,’ he implored.

There was something moronic about the repetition, as if he were a three-dimensional photocopy of the original, a degraded image that would never be a substitute for the real thing.

‘Are you really there?’ she asked, suddenly sorry for him (hating herself for that, he had deserved to die for dumping her so sneakily) and for herself.

He came close to her, angling his head to kiss her. His fingers touched her shoulders. She was colder than him. His grip was familiar, fingers and thumbs lightly holding her, arms drawing her near.

She was an open-eyed kisser. He was not.

His eyes fluttered shut as his lips closed on hers. She felt the tip of his nose touch her cheek and opened her mouth, sucking air to clear a spit bubble.

Rick stopped and stepped back, letting her go.

He was still a bastard. It had all been a trick. He didn’t want a kiss, he just wanted to prove he still owned her.

They were not alone in the circle.

Rick had a gang. She could not see the others clearly, as if their images were smeared or blurred, but she recognised the way Rick fitted in with them, head cocked to one side, hunched over so his hands reached the gorilla-pockets halfway down his jeans.

‘You’ve made new friends?’ she said. ‘Not much improvement on the last lot.’

Rick shook his head.

‘Jord, you shouldn’t.’

Puffs of flame burst in the darkness, making the circle into an arena. A bonfire rose around a flat black stone, like a cartoon witches’ cauldron. She felt the warmth of the flame. Firelight had reddened her legs and arms.

Rick’s friends had faces now. Some wore reflective motorcycle helmets or mirrored sunglasses, others badly knotted Drearcliff Grange ties and kilt-like skirts. One, a tall woman, wore full-length robes and a pointed hood which showed only her vicious eyes.

‘What happened to you?’ Jordan asked, not of Rick but of his gang. ‘Why have you changed? You weren’t like this when we came to the Hollow. You were kind, you were nice.’

‘It’s not us,’ said Rick. ‘It’s you.’

She wanted to strangle him, sink fingers into his throat until his eyes popped out of his head and his blackened tongue stuck out between his teeth.

‘It’s because of you all,’ Rick said.

She had made fists. Rick sounded like Dad at his worst.

‘Because of what you’re like, because of what you are,’ said Rick, ‘we can hurt you.’

‘Not “can”,’ boomed the witch woman, ‘“must”.’

* * *

H
ow long had he been here? He had been unconscious – or had he? – when bundled into the Steve cave. Comfortable in the dark, he must have dropped off, if only for moments. Or maybe longer. Time wasn’t behaving itself at the Hollow, anyway. Had he been dreaming or thinking? What was the difference?

Steven perfectly fitted into the cave under the stairs. It was cosy, not cramped. He no longer banged his head or elbows if he turned. He relished the dry, woody under-the-stairs smell.

If he thought of his family, his wife and children, they seemed like the ghosts. As a child, as soon as he understood he would grow up, he had thought of the wife he would have, the children who would come along. Those imaginings hadn’t had names or faces, but were like the real people in too many disturbing details.

At once, he knew why it seemed so strange.

He
had
been dreaming. Kirsty, Jordan, Tim. He had made them up. He had expected them, and there they were.

This was waking life, in the dark under the stairs.

Out there in the house,
Watch With Mother
was on television.
The Flower-Pot Men
. His Meccano set was in a box under his bed, with his neat stack of comics. Dad was out at the office and Mum doing the housework. He was home from school for the long, long holidays, happy to be at a loose end.

Everything else, he had made up.

He had been fuzzy, but his head was clear now.

Where had he got the names from? And the faces? They were vague now, like a damp magazine cover. The advertisement on the other side showed through in reverse. A black-and-white car erupted across the colour face of a smiling woman.

It was time to put his toys back in the box and have tea.

Already, with the aching melancholy of knowing they were just made up, he missed his dream family. He knew so much more about them that he hadn’t thought of, little things and big things that just hadn’t come up in the course of his latest dream.

Jordan had taken flute lessons, but given it up.

Kirsty used to have a habit of chewing a strand of her hair. Her mouth still scrunched up at one side when she was thinking, though her once-long hair was cropped and spiked when she met him and had never grown back. It had taken him years to work out what she was doing. He had never told her about it, knowing it would make her self-conscious.

They were gone. Those things were gone.

He found himself crying.

* * *

I
t was a chance to start over, to unpick all the mistakes.

Steven and Jordan were gone of their own volition, wandered off into the dark. By now, they would have found their places, away from her, on their own. From her wrong turn in life, only Tim was left.

If he were to go she would be alone again, able to start afresh, free of the domestic coral that had accrued when she wasn’t looking.

Kirsty couldn’t believe she had pretended to be interested in washing machines.

Every time she’d tried to have something for herself, one of the terrible trio got in the way, demanding to be wiped up after, to have tea made, to be listened to. Her projects stood no chance with that oh-so-casual and oh-so-devastating undermining.

Vron had been trying to tell her for years.

Kirsty would be better off.

She didn’t want to be a ghost in her own lifetime, the clanking spectre of all she could have been if only she hadn’t given in to Steven and the kids.

The others had alienated the Hollow. She was the only one who saw the place as a resource as well as a home. This was her home and her world. Eventually, she would invite Vron to share in running the place. Marketing and packaging and exploitation. It was what the Old Girl wanted.

‘It’s for the best,’ she said, over and over.

Tim didn’t resist, but didn’t help either. He was an anchor, a deadweight. It would have been easier to sling him over her shoulder in a fireman’s lift and carry him upstairs. She had done it a hundred times when he was little and needed to be put to bed after playing himself to exhaustion and falling asleep in the living room. She didn’t know if she could manage that any more; as he’d grown, she seemed to have shrunk. She wasn’t yet forty, but years had been piled on her by the family, by their unending demands and needs.

Just for once, she considered herself first.

‘Come on, Tim,’ she said, ‘nearly there.’

Had she thought this through?

No. That was a Steven thing: thinking things through. Code for putting something off and never doing it.

It was a simple matter.

And it was the top drawer for Tim.

* * *

M
um practically dragged him upstairs, step by step, cooing all the way. She was having a funny turn.

Tim told himself the ghosts had done it to her.

They had got into her head and made her strange.

But he knew that wasn’t true.

Mum had always had the strangeness inside. The ghosts hadn’t even brought it out, though Tim thought she wouldn’t be as openly strange if the sun hadn’t gone down early.

He didn’t fight her on the stairs. He might need to save his strength, to fight her – or any of them – later.

‘Here we are,’ she said, as they stood on the landing, outside the door to Mum and Dad’s room. ‘Happy as can be.’

The way she treated him reminded him of Jordan.

Sometimes, in half-light or when surprised, Mum looked like Jordan. Now, she was acting like his sister did when she wanted something, usually that Tim be quiet and get out of the way so she could be with her creepy boyfriend.

Mum opened the bedroom door.

A Mum and Dad smell wafted out, not unpleasant, but strong. It was in the bedclothes and the curtains, even the dust.

‘Magic, you’ll see,’ said Mum.

The bedroom was bigger than Tim remembered. He hadn’t been in here more than twice since they moved in. It was parental HQ, and he was too grown-up to need to sleep between them even when he had bad dreams.

The furniture had been rearranged.

‘This is Weezie’s magic chest of drawers,’ Mum explained.

It looked like ordinary furniture. The wood had been painted and stripped several times. Rinds of orange and blue were left in the deepest grain. A lamp shaped like a swan with a lightbulb in its mouth stood on a doily-like crochet cover. It was the only switched-on light in the room.

Mum knelt by the chest, coming down to his level. She held him by the shoulders.

‘The bottom drawer always has a present,’ she said.

She pulled out the bottom drawer, with a rasp. Something flashed.

‘See,’ Mum said. ‘A present.’

She took out a piece of glass. The smile. There was an actual smile in the glass, not a flaw but a lipstick crescent.

Terror bit Tim.

‘Something useful,’ said Mum. ‘It’ll fit in place of the pane that was broken. How considerate.’

Tim couldn’t look at the smile, which Mum held between thumb and forefinger, but couldn’t look away either. When Mum held it up and put the light behind the glass, a tongue seemed to lick her hand. The lips pouted, wet and red.

‘Do you want a kiss, Tim?’

Uncertain, Tim nodded.

Mum leaned close to his face, then slipped the cold glass between them and pressed it against his mouth. His lips stuck to it as to a frosted sheet of metal. His scream was gummed over. He felt a tearing as the glass was removed, as if patches of the thin skin of his lips stuck to the horrible thing.

‘There now, that showed you were grateful.’

She propped the smile against the base of the swan-light, where it could gloat at him.

‘You’re not convinced?’ Mum said, eyes wide, smiling herself, holding him tight. ‘You think the glass was there all along, not a present but waiting to be found. Maybe so, Timbo, maybe so…’

She closed the empty drawer and smiled like a fat cat with a stomach full of bird.

Tim was convinced. Of course it was magic. The broken smile was whole again.

Mum teased the drawer-handle, a brass teardrop dangling from a flower-face, and pulled the drawer slowly open again.

Glittery eyes looked up. Tim tried to back away.