An English Ghost Story (32 page)

It was some sort of stuffed animal, mounted on a base.

‘I think it’s a stoat,’ Mum said. ‘Like in
The Wind in the Willows
.’

It was a snarling, vicious thing. Mum took his hand and made him stroke its fur, which was stiff like a thousand needles. A shudder ran up his arm. The animal’s green glass eyes suggested a trapped, frozen malignance. Tiny rows of exposed teeth were like sharpened pearls.

‘Don’t like it,’ he said.

‘No, I should think you don’t,’ she said. ‘But there’s a way to give back presents we don’t want. Here, you do it. Pull out the top drawer and pop the stoat in.’

She let him go, picked up the stuffed animal by the base, and sat back on her heels, holding the thing in her lap.

Carefully, expecting to set off a tripwire, Tim opened the top drawer. It was empty, which was a relief. Mum handed him the stoat, which he reluctantly accepted.

‘Just put it in and close the drawer.’

‘It won’t fit.’

‘It’s the size of the drawer it came out of. It must fit.’

That was true. Holding the base, careful not to let his fingers touch the animal itself, he lowered the stoat into the drawer. Though it was too big outside to go in, it fitted perfectly once he dropped it into the drawer.

The stoat looked up, angry red points in its green eyes.

‘Go on, Tim,’ encouraged Mum.

He shut the drawer. It slid smoothly home.

‘Now peep inside again.’

He did. The drawer was empty.

‘Can we make the smile go away?’ he asked.

Mum was horrified. ‘The glass? We need the glass, Tim. It’s not like the horrible stoat.’

It was worse. The stoat had been trapped. The smile was free. Couldn’t she hear it chuckling?

The magic chest of drawers only gave nasty presents.

‘Here,’ Mum said, opening the bottom drawer.

A large, curly-horn seashell. She took it out and set it next to the smile.

‘And…’

She shut the door swiftly and pulled it open again, grinning with excitement, her lower lip sucked into her mouth, her eyes glistening.

A pencil box, with an inlaid jester on the lid, his face scratched away.

‘The top drawer always has the same thing in and the bottom drawer never has the same thing twice and the middle drawer is always a jumble of surprises,’ Mum recited.

Rapidly, she pulled out a series of items from the bottom drawer, the drawer that never has the same thing twice.

A long bone. A rusty pocket-knife. A tea-cup filled with webs of mould. A brown wooden human hand. A long-tailed, live rat.

The last made them both gasp.

Mum didn’t want to touch it. The magic had betrayed her, which didn’t fit in with her way of seeing things.

Tim preferred the rat to the smile.

(And the hand, which he found really repulsive, seeming to be real until it was picked up.)

‘Get rid of it, Tim,’ she said.

He gripped the tail and held the animal up. It twisted around, trying to get its teeth into his hand, but was too heavy to upend itself in the air.

He groped for the drawer handle and pulled it out, dropped the rat inside and shoved it shut.

There was a whirring and a strangled bleat.

He rubbed his thumb and fingers together, to get rid of the rat scum.

‘Wrong drawer, Tim,’ Mum said.

He realised what he had done. He had put the rat into the middle drawer, the drawer that was always an interesting jumble. That sounded nice, until you thought about it.

Mum touched the handle of the middle drawer, then thought better of it.

The smile, surrounded by the other treasures from the bottom drawer, was exultant. Tim didn’t like any of them, really. There was something horrible about all of them.

Actually, the rat had been the pick of the prizes.

The middle drawer didn’t make things go away, like the top one did.

Tim pulled it open.

The rat was still there, but it was an interesting jumble.

* * *

S
he shut the drawer, quickly. The worst thing about the rat was that it was still alive.

Tim was badly upset, and no wonder.

She should just have popped him into the top drawer and forgotten about him. But she felt the need to share, to let someone in on the magic, if only because they wouldn’t be here to share for long.

‘I don’t like this, Mum,’ he said.

She wanted to reassure him, but couldn’t. He was right not to like the chest. It was hers, not his.

Tim had come from her and she was sending him back. Like Steven and Jordan, he hadn’t worked out and there was no shame in admitting that. Kirsty always knew when to give up, to let things drop. She had done it too often to have a complex about it.

She pulled open the top drawer. It was empty, always the same.

‘We should put the rat in here,’ she said.

Tim agreed, nodding.

‘Please, Tim.’

He pulled out the middle drawer, which he couldn’t see into because the top drawer was in the way. The jumble shifted, with a skittering and scratching.

‘You’ll have to take out the whole drawer and pour it in.’

Tim shook his head. He would go no further.

‘So, as usual, it’s down to Mum, is it?’

She was irritated. It was just like Tim to make a mess and pretend paralysis when it had to be cleared up.

Shifting Tim aside, she took hold of the middle drawer by its corners and yanked it out of the chest. Without looking, she upended its contents into the top drawer. A wriggling and thumping made her cringe.

She set the extracted drawer on its side and shoved the top drawer shut, then pulled it open. With relief, she saw it was empty. There was one utterly reliable thing in her life, one drawer she could count on not to give her a nasty surprise.

The middle drawer slid easily back into place.

‘Well, Tim, it’s been lovely,’ she said, standing up, ‘but it’s time to go home.’

He looked up at her, not knowing what she meant.

She picked him up in her arms. His legs, longer than she remembered, hung loose. He was quite a weight. She felt the strain in her shoulders.

‘Mum?’

‘It’s not you, dear,’ she said, laying him in the top drawer, ‘it’s me.’

She admired the fit. He folded up so well and filled the drawer completely, not uncomfortable or broken and with nothing sticking out or left over.

Kirsty had never loved her son more, not since he was born.

She blew him a kiss and shut the top drawer. It didn’t feel heavy or awkward and slid home smoothly on runners that might have been freshly oiled. The drawer was a perfect fit with the chest.

Perfect.

* * *

S
omething cold and wet, like a tendril of pond-weed, slid across Jordan’s face. It stung softly, like a jelly-fish tentacle or a nettle. Her hand went to her cheek. No swelling yet.

She was slapped again, across the shoulders. Then on her bare legs.

Rick’s friends circled around her, lashing out.

They used whips she couldn’t see. Whips more alive than those wielding them.

Rick was in the circle, whirling his own whip.

The lashes forced her to her knees. She drew in her head and arms.

The witch woman darted forward on long legs and gave a delicate flick of her wrist.

Jordan waited a moment, following the invisible uncoiling with her eyes, and was struck on the crown. The blow shook her skull, rattled her brains.

No blood. Just pain.

She had mindflashes of the frenzy that had fallen on her after Dad’s slap. Then, she gave in to anger; now, she just gave in.

This was her punishment and she would take it.

Could they kill her? Could ghosts do that? Were they like vampires – who could kill her and make her one of their kind?

She was curled in a foetal ball, on her side, knees tucked in. A slithering lash fell across her shins, opening the skin with tiny hooks.

She shrank inside herself.

She might as well let go. She could be with Rick for ever, with his friends. There was a place for her and the hurt would be over.

It was all about sacrifice.

The whipping continued, but hurt less. Numbness spread, like dental anaesthetic.

She uncurled and lay flat, arms out, legs together.

They stood around and over her, more like stones than people. Leaves fluttered out of the black sky and piled up on her, an autumnal quilt.

She couldn’t feel her legs or arms. She closed her eyes.

She was ready to be kissed now, though her lips wouldn’t be able to feel it. She would be a closed-eye kisser if that was what Rick wanted.

But… tiny voices bothered her.

Her friends Ana and Mia. Anorexia and bulimia. Not eating, or eating but purging. Jordan always insisted, fiercely, she didn’t have a problem with food, no matter that she had sometimes gone weeks without solids. Anas only thought they were overweight; Jordan definitely tended to chubbiness (self-image might be unreliable – everybody’s was: Mum and Dad certainly weren’t the people they thought they were) and had to watch what she ate.

Not eating was a unique addiction, a disease you had to work with. Work hard. On a day-to-day basis, to have Ana to stay, you had to be strong like an athlete on a brutal training regimen, not weak like alcoholics or problem drug users. Alkies and junkies had no will-power… with an eating disorder,
all you had
was willpower. And Ana was Jordan’s special friend, not Mia. Next to Ana, Mias were pushovers. Mias were about momentary lapses and hating yourself. Ana was the real path of pain to perfection. You had to subscribe to a vision of the world and hold to it with fanatic devotion. Against all reason, all persuasion, all logic. It was more like a religion than a condition.

If Ana really lived with Jordan, she had a firm friend. A second self, in her corner, on her side. And, now, Ana was
howling
…

Jordan had chosen who and what she wanted to be. Against peer pressure, successive advertising blitzkriegs and parental expectations, she dressed the way she wanted and listened to the music she liked. No one could tell her different. That went for the shape she was and wanted to be too. She would go to agonising lengths to be herself, the self she saw in her mind. She would fight to the death to prevent others moulding her into their own image of what Jordan Naremore should be.

The leaves stopped falling.

She could not give in. It was not in her character. Not after all this fuss. She was who she was, and she had to stick by that.

‘No,’ she said, simply.

She opened her eyes. The figures were stone. Rick was gone.

* * *

H
e could stand up in the Steve-Cave now. When he napped, it expanded. He could shape the dark space and everything within it.

Steven had friends here.

His old friends and his new friends. His family were here somewhere, but improved versions: a wife who supported him and never got into trouble on her own, children who were obedient and cheerful and a credit to him.

It wasn’t a tyranny. Everyone followed his lead, but only because he was invariably right.

He explored the cavern.

Under his feet, he found a small tube. A tin torch, with a serrated plastic toggle which fit snugly under his thumb. A familiar thing, something he’d never actually thrown away but hadn’t seen in ages. Even in the course of packing and unpacking everything he owned for the move to the Hollow, he hadn’t noticed this. It wasn’t too surprising that it should be here when he needed it.

He flicked the switch.

Tiny light grew. The batteries must be old, rusted. He remembered the lemony, acidy smell of old batteries. The nonrenewable type they didn’t make any more.

He pointed the torch upwards. A column of orange light failed to reach the ceiling.

The ground was black and featureless, gritty but not earth, grainy but not board. He let the light swing around in a circle, then flicked the torch off.

No use wasting what little light he had if there was nothing to be shown.

He paced his cave, losing count of his steps, unsure where he started. He had no idea of its size.

Something got caught up in his feet.

He shot a flash of light down. He was hobbled by a twisted bundle of wire coat hangers. Ribbons of white plastic, the remains of a shopping bag, wound around the tangle of wire and hooks.

He kicked himself free, scattering the contraptions, breaking them apart.

The hangers disturbed him. They weren’t his, and he didn’t know why they were in the Steve cave. The torch
was
his and had its place here. He expected it.

But the hangers, bent together like a clawed cushion, were an intrusion. A man-trap set where he was the only man who walked. He resented them, was slightly afraid of them.

The cave had been breached.

* * *

S
he sat up and shook out her hair. Leaves fell from her chest. The tingling memory of pain was dead and going.

Jordan stood.

Her stomach groaned. She was hungry. It had been days since she’d eaten properly.

Ana might have taught her a lesson, but wasn’t her friend, really. It took strength to know that too.

She touched one of the stones. It was smooth, as if exposed to the wind for centuries. Trees stood beyond the circle.

Something white, like a bird, fluttered against a low, dark bank, beckoning.

She walked towards the scrap, arms and legs prickling with cold. Before she was close, she recognised the thing. Her mind stretched the wrong way again.

It was the Letter.

The dark bank was a stone wall with a cavity in it. The Letter lay below. Jordan looked closer and saw the cavity was a hole stopped with a piece of iron. In the iron was a slit.

She picked up the Letter. The envelope had been neatly slit but the sheets of paper were still inside, all in order. It had been received, but by whom? She slipped the envelope down the back of her knickers. Later, she’d destroy the cursed thing.

She scrambled over the wall and lowered herself on the other side.

No matter how close she put her face to the iron plate, she couldn’t tell its colour. It could have been red. Equally, it could have been black or anything. Was it a pretend postbox? Or did things posted here make their way to unintended addressees?