Authors: Andrew Norriss
‘I had a phone call last night from someone called Angela Boyle,’ said Mrs Meredith at breakfast, ‘asking if you could help.’
‘Help with what?’ said Francis.
‘She’s got a son called Roland, who goes to St Saviour’s, but a month ago, he said he didn’t want to go any more. She was hoping you could make him change his mind.’
‘Me?’ said Francis. ‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘She wants you to talk to him. Like you did to Andi. I told her you’d call over some time this morning.’
Francis sighed. One day, he thought, he must have a serious talk with his mother about boundaries.
‘You weren’t doing anything else, were you?’
It was a Saturday, and Andi had gone to London to see her father, who was over from Kuwait for twenty-four hours. The fact that Francis had been planning a day of window shopping with Jessica was not something he could explain to his mother.
‘I don’t see how I can persuade someone I don’t know to go to school.’
‘All you have to do is talk to him.’ Mrs Meredith poured herself another cup of coffee. ‘They live in one of those big houses in Paterson Road. It won’t take you long to cycle there, and if it doesn’t work you can come straight home again. Think of it as your good deed for the day.’
Reluctantly, Francis agreed.
‘Though the whole thing’s completely pointless,’ he told Jessica, when she appeared, half an hour later. ‘I mean, what can I say that would make a complete stranger decide to go back to school when he doesn’t want to?’
‘Nothing,’ said Jessica, imagining herself into a pair of gloves and a cashmere scarf. ‘So it won’t take very long, will it?’
In fact, it took longer than either of them had expected. To start with, Francis had a flat tyre, which took twenty minutes to change, and then he found the house was right at the far end of Paterson Road, which meant cycling almost another mile and a half. By the time he arrived, hot and sweating, he was not in the mood to help anybody, but he left his bike on the gravel in front of one of the largest houses he had ever seen, and rang the front door bell.
‘I’ll go in and take a look round,’ said Jessica. ‘See you in a minute, OK?’
Francis nodded, and waited in the porch until Mrs Boyle answered the door. She was a small, worried looking woman, nervously twisting a handkerchief between her fingers.
‘This is so kind of you, Francis,’ she said, when he had introduced himself. ‘You’ve heard about Roland’s little problem, have you?’
‘Mum said he didn’t want to go to school.’
‘That’s right.’ Mrs Boyle blushed. ‘We’re not expecting miracles, of course, but if you could talk to him and find
out what’s wrong. Maybe get him to …’ She hesitated. ‘Frieda Campion said you’d done these extraordinary things for her daughter and if you were able to do anything like that for Rollo …’
‘I’ll talk to him,’ said Francis, ‘but if he doesn’t want to go to school, I don’t think it’ll do any good.’
‘No. No, possibly not’ – Mrs Boyle’s handkerchief twisting intensified – ‘but I’m
so
grateful to you for trying.’ She lifted her head and bellowed down the hall with surprising force. ‘Roland! Your friend’s here!’ She turned back to Francis. ‘I’ve told him you’re coming and he’s really looking forward to it. Roland!’ She shouted again. ‘Roland! Come and say hello!’
They waited for some time but there was no sign of Roland, and eventually Mrs Boyle took Francis down the hall and along a passageway to his room, where she knocked timidly at the door.
‘Are you there, dear?’ she asked. ‘It’s your friend Francis come to see you. I told you about him, remember?’
Still no answer.
‘Perhaps you could go in on your own,’ whispered Mrs
Boyle. ‘He’s been a bit moody recently, but I know he wants to see you, really.’
Francis pushed open the door and went inside.
The curtains were tightly drawn and the only light in the room came from a computer screen in one corner, showing two zombies advancing towards a man who was holding a chain saw. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Francis could make out an unmade bed against one wall, a floor littered with clothes and empty cans of drink, a table covered in plates of half eaten food, and a widescreen television hanging on one of the walls.
Roland himself was sitting in front of the computer, and he was … large. Sitting in a swivel chair that groaned under his weight when he moved, the flesh at the sides of his body spilled over the arm rests. Francis had never seen anyone so big.
Roland seemed quite unaware that anyone had entered the room, and continued tapping at his keyboard.
‘Hi,’ said Francis.
The tapping did not stop. The man with the chain saw had used it to lop off the heads of the zombies, but there
were four more emerging from a ruined graveyard and Roland continued to sit there, playing his game. Francis felt a surge of irritation. He had better things to do with his time than stand in a darkened room being ignored by someone he hadn’t wanted to meet in the first place.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I take it you
don’t
want to see me, and that’s fine. But next time you might try
telling
someone before I waste half my morning cycling over here.’
He turned on his heel, walked back out the door and along the passageway to the front hall. He supposed he ought to say goodbye to Mrs Boyle but there was no sign of her and, frankly, he didn’t care. He left, not even bothering to close the front door behind him.
Jessica appeared in the driveway.
‘This is a fantastic house! You know they have an indoor swimming pool at the back? And the garden is …’ She stopped. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘He wouldn’t talk to me,’ said Francis. ‘Just sat there playing on his computer. Ignored me completely.’ He picked up his bike and began wheeling it towards the road. ‘I knew this was a waste of time.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Jessica. She was pointing back to the front door, where Roland had emerged, panting slightly, his eyes blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I was very rude and …’ He paused to catch his breath. ‘Look … um … do you want to come in and play a game or something?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Francis. ‘I’ve had enough for one day.’ He continued walking down the drive.
‘How about tomorrow?’ Roland called after him, but Francis didn’t answer.
‘Your friend can come too if she likes.’
Francis’s foot froze in mid-stride.
‘My friend?’
Roland pointed to Jessica. ‘You’d both be more than welcome. And I really am very sorry.’
There was a long pause.
‘You’re inviting me as well?’ said Jessica.
‘Sure.’ Roland nodded. ‘If you like.’
‘OK …’ Francis gave a long sigh. ‘I suppose we’d better all go inside and have a talk.’
Roland did not take the news that Jessica was a ghost as calmly as Andi had done. When they got back to his room and Jessica did her demonstration of walking through furniture, he fainted. There was a lot of him to faint and he landed on the floor with enough noise to bring Mrs Boyle scurrying down the passageway to ask rather nervously, if everything was all right.
‘It’s OK,’ Francis called through the door. ‘Roland fell over but he’s fine.’ He knelt down by the quivering mass on the floor that had at least opened its eyes. ‘You are fine, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah … Yeah, I’m OK, Mum,’ said Roland. His eyes were wide and large as he stared at Jessica, who was
tactfully keeping herself to the other side of the room. However, as he slowly absorbed the fact that, apart from being dead, she was a perfectly ordinary girl, his fear turned to a keen interest.
He sat in his chair, listening intently, as Francis and Jessica told him the story of how she had woken up at the hospital, wandered alone for over a year, and then discovered, a few weeks before, that first Francis and then Andi were able to see and talk to her.
When the story was finally told, right up to the time Francis had cycled out to Paterson Road, Roland leaned back in his chair with his hands linked together across his stomach – they only just reached – and said, ‘It’s an interesting problem, isn’t it?’
‘Problem?’ said Francis. He had never thought of Jessica as a problem.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.’ Roland smiled apologetically at Jessica. ‘But you’re not supposed to be here, are you?’
‘Aren’t I?’
‘Dead people aren’t supposed to stay around on earth,’
said Roland firmly. ‘When you die, you’re supposed to move on. That’s what you were expecting to do, wasn’t it? At the hospital? When you said you had the feeling someone should come and tell you what to do next, but nobody did?’
Jessica nodded.
‘And that’ll be why you go back there each night,’ Roland went on, ‘because you’re waiting to be told how to move on, but you can’t. You’re stuck here. That’s what ghosts are, of course. Spirits that are supposed to move on, but can’t.’
‘How do you know all this?’ asked Francis.
‘Well, I don’t really
know
it,’ Roland admitted. ‘I’m only telling you what I’ve read. But it’s in all the books.’ He gestured to the bookshelves behind him.
It turned out that most of Roland’s books were about ghosts – or vampires, voodoo, black magic, possession or the undead. He had read a good deal on the subject, and Francis was about to ask what else he knew, when Mrs Boyle knocked on the door and asked if anyone wanted lunch.
*
Roland’s mother had gone to some pains to prepare a meal that the two boys might enjoy. The kitchen table – which was bigger than some of the rooms at Francis’s house – was piled with plates of sausages, garlic bread, pieces of pizza, fried chicken, slices of pie, cheeses and hams. It was, as Jessica said, enough to make even a ghost wish they had a body. Watching the amount Roland tucked away gave some explanation of his size, but if it worried Mrs Boyle she gave no sign of it. Then, when Francis felt he really couldn’t eat another thing, she cleared the table and produced a couple of large fruit tarts, a bowl of trifle and two tubs of chocolate fudge ice cream.
‘I don’t know if you can stay, Francis,’ she said, as she laid the bowls and spoons on the table, ‘but I’ve turned up the heat in the pool in case either of you wanted a swim this afternoon.’
The indoor swimming pool was as large as everything else in Roland’s house. It had a glass ceiling, a diving board at one end and steps leading down into the water at
the other. Through a door by the shallow end, there was a changing room with whole shelves full of towels and spare swimming costumes, and the water was so warm Francis could see steam rising from its surface.
He and Roland lay on sun loungers – they knew it wasn’t safe to swim straight after a heavy meal – and watched while Jessica swam. She moved through the water as easily as she could move through walls and doors – and could make her costume change colour while she was doing it. As they watched, it occurred to Francis that Roland might be able to answer the question that Jessica had asked the first day they met.
‘We’ve sometimes wondered,’ he said, ‘why Andi and I were the only people who could see Jessica. Andi thought maybe it was because we were psychic, but we weren’t sure.’
‘You could be,’ Roland admitted, ‘but I don’t think so.’
‘No?’
‘In all the books I’ve read, psychics usually show signs of their power when they’re very young, and you
said nothing like this had ever happened to you or Andi before.’ Roland paused before adding, ‘And it’s certainly never happened to me.’
‘So what do you think it is?’
‘The only thing I can think of is that we’re supposed to help her in some way,’ said Roland. ‘Like I told you, she’s not supposed to be here, so maybe it’s our job to help her get to wherever she
is
meant to be.’
‘Oh,’ said Francis. ‘How would we do that?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Roland shifted on his sun lounger, which creaked alarmingly. ‘There’s a woman in Australia I talk to on the internet about this sort of thing …’ He glanced at his watch. ‘She’ll be asleep at the moment, but she usually comes online about two or three in the morning. I’d like to ask her what she thinks. Would that be all right?’
‘I guess,’ said Francis. ‘Though, to be honest, I don’t want Jessica to go anywhere.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No,’ said Francis. ‘I like having her here.’
In the pool, Jessica was doing little dolphin dives,
in and out of the water, while making her bikini flash through all the separate colours of the rainbow. The two boys watched her for a moment.
‘Yes,’ Roland nodded. ‘I can understand that.’
Half an hour later, they went into the pool themselves, and Roland turned out to be a very competent swimmer. He might be slow and clumsy on land, but in the water he moved with the casual confidence of a walrus. For more than an hour they played, throwing a ball, diving, snorkelling – and then Mrs Boyle came in wheeling a tea trolley containing a plate of scones, some buttered crumpets and a large chocolate cake – in case they were hungry after all that exercise.
‘You don’t seem to have had any trouble getting him to talk,’ she said to Francis as he climbed out of the water.
‘No, not really.’
‘I wish I knew your secret!’ Mrs Boyle picked up a napkin and began twisting it. ‘Has he said anything about school yet?’
‘Ah …’ Francis had quite forgotten that this was why he had originally been invited. ‘No. Not yet. I thought I’d
leave talking about school till we got to know each other a bit.’
Mrs Boyle nodded, deeply impressed. This was undoubtedly the sort of sophisticated thinking that had led to his success with Frieda Campion’s girl.
‘So you’re going to see him again?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Francis nodded. ‘He’s coming round to my house tomorrow, if that’s all right. I’ve got a friend I’d like him to meet.’
Another friend! The napkin in Mrs Boyle’s fingers was twisted as tight as a wire hawser. How did he do it! Roland had refused to speak to anyone for over a fortnight and barely came out of his room for meals. Yet Francis had walked straight into the house, got him talking, got him into the pool, and now he’d arranged for him to meet someone else the following day!
Frieda Campion was right, she thought. Francis Meredith was clearly a most remarkable young man.