Authors: Kitty French
‘I know that place,’ Marina says, brushing crumbs from her jeans. ‘It’s out on the edge of town. Brimsdale Road, I think?’
I nod, listening to the owner bemoaning the fact that he can’t keep workmen on site because of the numerous reports of ghostly hauntings at Scarborough House. Leo is nodding along, frowning in all the right places as he listens to the guy, Donovan Scarborough, grumble about the fact that he’s inherited a house that’s proving nigh on impossible to sell. The buyers he’s lined up are keen to change the place from a house into a nursing home, but they’ve got a serious case of the jitters and won’t sign on the dotted line unless, in their words, it’s officially declared a poltergeist-free zone. He couldn’t load his words with more derision if he tried.
You know when you instinctively take a dislike to someone and you can’t put your finger on why? That’s exactly how I feel about Donovan Scarborough. He looks like a city banker with middle-aged spread from too many client dinners, all swish suit and red braces with shiny shoes and an even shinier face. I can’t say his highlighted hair and bottle tan look good on him; he could pass as Peter Stringfellow’s uglier brother.
The tails of Leo’s cape flutter in the sharp wind as he turns to camera and smoulders down the lens about the fact that it’s an incredibly sensitive situation and then invites us to tune in next time to find out what happens when he goes live inside the house in a bid to discover the source of the alleged hauntings.
I click the TV off and look excitedly at Marina. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
‘That I need to take Nonna’s buns away from you for your own good?’
I blow a sad kiss at the tin as she prises it from my fingers.
‘No.’ I stand up and grab my car keys. ‘That we need to get our backsides over to Brimsdale Road.’
‘
I
can’t believe
you bought this thing.’
Marina’s face is a perfect reflection of the distaste in her voice as she slides into the passenger seat of the business vehicle I’ve bought for the agency. Okay, so maybe
bought
is a tiny white lie; it was actually more a case of rescuing the van from the jaws of the scrapyard crusher. Vintage would be the kindest way to describe the 1973 Ford Transit; a shocking knacker would be more accurate. Nonetheless, I find it quite charming; what it lacks in working parts it makes up for with its faded lemon drop and white two-tone cuteness, to me at least. Marina however, is Italian. She hails from the land of fire-engine-red Ferraris and sexy white Lambos; she practically genuflected with shock when she first laid eyes on our new wheels.
‘I don’t know what you’ve got against it.’ I click my seat belt on and pat the scratched wooden dash carefully so it doesn’t fall apart. ‘It’s got loads of room for all of our stuff in the back, and these seats are genuine leather. Probably.’
Marina makes her point by silently running her painted fingertip along the length of a fraying split in the tan plastic bench seat. I push the foam that pokes out of the rip back in and grin.
‘It’ll look a million times better once we get our sign painted on the side.’
‘We have a sign?’
‘Not yet,’ I say, still cheerful about potentially bagging our first job at Scarborough House. ‘Arthur looks artistic, I’m going to make it his first job in the morning.’
‘The only way you can make this van look any worse than it already does is by letting Arthur loose on it with poster paint.’ Marina flicks the sun visor down to check her already perfect red lipstick, then sighs heavily at the dusty, empty hole where the mirror presumably used to sit. ‘I’ll paint it.’
‘You will?’ I wiggle the key into the ignition and pull the choke out to the max as I coax the engine into life. I was banking on Marina offering to paint the van because she’s a whizz at arty stuff, but it’s far better that she thinks it was her idea rather than mine.
She narrows her eyes at me. ‘Don’t think you can fool me, Bittersweet. You knew I’d say that.’
I laugh, rumbled, and then we both yelp in surprise as the van goes from zero to hero in two seconds flat and fires itself off down Chapelwick High Street like a rocket.
‘Jesus, Melody!’ Marina peels strands of her hair from where it flicked violently forwards and stuck to her lipstick. ‘Do you even know how to drive this thing?’
‘Babs is cool. You just need to get used to her.’ I ease the choke in slowly and the engine quiets and settles to a more appropriate speed. ‘See? Perfect.’
She pauses, and out of the corner of my eye I can see her staring at me. ‘Tell me you didn’t name the van Babs?’
‘It came to me just now.’
‘Should I even ask why?’
‘Because she reminds me of one of Nonna’s Limoncello babas. She’s pretty, she’s lemon and she’s lethal for our health.’
‘She doesn’t smell like Nonna’s buns.’ Marina wrinkles up her nose. ‘In fact she smells more like a big hairy mechanic.’
‘That would be because she spent the last ten years languishing in a dirty yard owned by a big hairy mechanic. Beneath this faded yellow paint lies the beating heart of Babs, the newest member of The Girls’ Ghostbusting Agency.’
Marina shakes her head, resigned as we lurch to a halt at the traffic lights. ‘Babs it is.’ She reaches out and twiddles hopefully with the heater knob.
I laugh at her optimism as I grapple with the huge, loose gearstick and then wave vaguely towards the radio that clearly hasn’t worked in decades. ‘Just stick the postcode for Brimsdale Road into the satnav would you?’
She laughs under her breath and pulls her phone out from inside her blouse. She’s stored it in her bra since she was about fifteen, maintaining that it’s the only reliably safe place in her always overcrowded house. Between you and me, Marina’s no slouch in the bust department. I’ve had more than one call from her bra when she’s been over-excited watching snooker. Don’t judge her; it’s one of her foibles, a hangover from a childhood spent hanging out with her beloved grandpa, or Nonno, as she calls him.
Marina’s thumbs fly over her phone’s keypad, and a second or two later I wince as Sharon Osbourne shrieks loudly at me to turn left.
Fifteen minutes later, we sidle stealthily along Brimsdale Road, at least, that’s what we do in my head. Given that Babs wheezes and grunts like a strangled cow, what we actually do is bone-shake, rattle and roll our way along, crossing our fingers each time we go over a speed hump that we haven’t left our rusty chrome bumper behind us on the tarmac.
‘It’s that one there,’ Marina hisses, pointing at a grand-looking house and sliding down in her seat until only her eyes are above dashboard level.
I glance at her. ‘Get up! You’ll draw attention to us.’
Marina laughs. ‘Yeah. That’s right. I’ll draw attention to us. Because no one would notice Babs otherwise, would they?’
I pull the van over to the pavement a little way down from the house in question. In actual fact, Marina’s slouching doesn’t really matter all that much, because between the still-present TV crew’s huge black van and Leo’s entourage, there isn’t much chance of us drawing people’s attention.
‘I think they’re getting ready to leave,’ I murmur, watching the camera guy packing his equipment away on the pavement. I avert my gaze in order to keep Nonna’s Limoncello babas safely in my gut; for a man whose job involves a lot of bending over, he has yet to master the art of choosing clothes that don’t flash his hairy butt-crack. Marina pulls herself back up again and peers at the house over the dash.
‘What do we do, wait it out?’
I drum my short, navy-blue-lacquered nails on the edge of the huge steering wheel as I try to think like a sassy businesswoman, rather than take my usual haphazard approach.
‘Reach into the glove box, will you?’ I nod across the dash towards it.
Marina presses the button on the hatch and nothing happens. ‘It’s stuck.’ She presses it repeatedly like an impatient child then huffs when it gets jammed in. ‘Babs says no.’
I stretch across and bat her fingers away. ‘I think you’ll find Babs just needs a firm hand.’ I give the glove box the one-inch punch and the door pops open. ‘See?’ Reaching inside, I pull out my Magic 8 Ball.
‘Seriously? This is how we’re going to make our decisions?’
Marina is more than well acquainted with my reliance on my Magic 8; I’m surprised she’s surprised. ‘You know that most of my big life decisions have been made with this ball. Why change now?’
‘Umm, because it makes you look like a thirteen-year-old girl rather than a tax-paying adult?’
I think back to the purple hair and dodgy goth makeup that featured heavily in my early teens. ‘I was fabulous back then and you damn well know it, Malone.’ Shaking the ball, I glance up sharply. ‘I have to pay tax?’
‘I don’t actually have a clue.’ Marina shrugs. ‘Write it on the “jobs for Glenda Jackson” post-it.’
‘The list got too big for a post-it. It’s now six sheets of A4.’
We both peer at the little window on the Magic 8 as the froth of bubbles slowly clears.
‘How many times do I have to tell you not to shake it?’
‘Habit,’ I sigh. I know the martini rule applies to the Magic 8 Ball; it’s supposed to be stirred rather than shaken because it foams up like a washing machine otherwise, but I like the heightened anticipation of waiting for the bubbles to burst before it reveals the answer. I genuinely love this thing. The only way they could improve on it is if it boomed out the answer in a deep, mysterious voice like my own personal genie. Or maybe not. If I’m going to use it to make actual grown-up business decisions, which it seems scarily like I am, then better that it does it in silence so I can at least pretend the ideas are mine.
‘Outlook good.’ I pass Marina the Magic 8 Ball. ‘The ball says yes. Shove it back in the glove box.’
She glances at the dashboard and then delivers a swift kick with her high-heeled shoe, laughing when the hatch pops open immediately and heat starts belting out of the side vents. ‘You’re right. Our Babs likes it rough.’
I shake my head at her. ‘You should have more respect for your elders. You pretty much just karate-kicked a pensioner.’
Marina slams the glove box shut. ‘Only after you gave her the death punch.’
‘Come on. We’ve assaulted an old woman and consulted the Magic 8 Gods. It’s time we got to work.’
I jump out of Babs and slide the door closed with an ill-advised flourish, given that she’s held together by rust, hand-applied layers of paint and luck.
‘Let’s take a casual walk past first, get the lie of the land,’ I say, as Marina joins me on the leafy pavement and links her arm through mine.
‘You should have a coat on.’ She rubs my forearm briskly.
‘It’s almost May, I’m making a point,’ I say, huddling closer to her and her fake fur as we start our nonchalant stroll along the pavement. Camera guy has thankfully hauled his equipment and his backside into his truck, so we amble as if we’re just two friends out for a stroll in the admittedly chilly late spring sunshine.
‘Right, so we know this one’s Leo’s.’ I incline my head towards the flashy jeep with blacked out windows and a private registration, DarKing1, that marks him out as egotistical.
‘I’d never have guessed if you hadn’t said.’ Marina rolls her eyes at his personal number plate. ‘Am I allowed to drag my nails down his paintwork?’
‘Does that say undercover to you?’
She sighs and pats my hand. ‘He’s on my kill list.’
‘I know,’ I soothe. ‘I’m working on forgiving him though, so you should try to, too.’
She snarls. ‘I hold a grudge.’
‘You’re Sicilian. Of course you do.’ I shuffle us sideways on the pavement to remove her from temptation. ‘This probably belongs to that Scarborough guy, the owner of the house?’ We sidle past an expensive white saloon with an equally knob-worthy registration plate parked halfway across the pavement at a jaunty angle. ‘He parks in a way that says he has an overblown sense of entitlement.’
Marina peers in his window and wrinkles her nose in disgust. ‘And he smokes like a chimney then chews gum to mask the smell.’
She’s really getting into this Cluedo-style sleuthing; I make a mental note to make sure she doesn’t buy a beige mac or a newspaper to cut eye-holes out of. ‘If we’re as good at analysing the dead as we are the living, we’re going to be millionaires.’
We drag our feet as we reach the boundaries of Scarborough House, masked by old rose bushes and a heavily-laden blossom tree.
‘Ssh.’ Marina flattens herself violently against the fence, shaking the tree. ‘I can hear voices.’
‘We really don’t need to be so furtive. We’re not doing anything wrong,’ I say, picking velvety pink cherry blossoms out of my hair. I look sideways at her, and she has the same floral crown going on. We look like a pair of casual bridesmaids. It’s not eye-catching at all.
I flick some of the flowers from her hair and tussle her back onto the pavement.
‘Come on. Try to pretend you’re normal.’
‘Says the girl who talks to ghosts.’
‘That
is
normal for me.’
I slow again as we clear the plant cover. Scarborough House is the kind of place that would give TV producers on the Home Channel a wet dream. It looks like a supermodel sleeping rough, shabby but with fabulous bone structure, dripping with potential and ripe for a dream makeover. It’s also the kind of house that gives impatient inheritors like Donovan Scarborough nightmares about missed opportunities for investment, which brings me smartly back to the fact that we can see someone standing in the open doorway of the grand old house.
‘That’s him, Scarborough,’ Marina whispers. I knew that, I recognised him from the TV broadcast too.
‘Hmm.’ I try to see who he’s talking to but they’re standing out of my line of vision. What do we do now? Shredding a gossamer thin pink petal in my fingers, I mull over the options. Option A; we walk up the path as bold as brass and offer our ghostbusting services. Option B; we continue to slouch along the footpath in the style of insane escapees from a pagan flower-child cult. Option C; something in the middle of the two. I like the middle, it’s usually the most inconspicuous place to be. I hope that in time I’ll become a more confident badass businesswoman than I am right now. Give me a few months and I’ll be marching boldly up to my prospective customers rather than dithering about in their shrubbery for ten minutes beforehand.
‘Let’s just shake the flowers out of our hair and get nearer so we can hear what he’s saying.’
We bend forward and shake our fingers through our hair, and I start laughing when we stand up again and look at each other, because Marina’s hair has grown to twice its original size.
‘You look like you’re auditioning for an 80s rock band.’
‘And you look like you’ve been ravaged by the singer from an 80s rock band,’ she shoots back, nodding, then finger combs my dark bob back into place for me.
‘Perfect.’
I can hear the conversation more clearly now as we draw nearer; it’s distinctly ranty. ‘Someone’s not a happy camper,’ I whisper, straining to catch their words.
‘Is he yelling at Leo?’
We mosey a little closer.
‘Mumbo jumbo clap trap . . .’
Okay, so I heard
that
pretty clearly. Scarborough is definitely not in the best of moods, and the cordial, chatty relationship we’d witnessed between them on screen is nowhere to be seen.
‘Just do your psycho-babble-shit thing and get this place emptied of everything but the furniture, got that? In fact you can order a skip up for that load of tat as well. This place is due to be a nursing home just as soon as I can offload it and they won’t want all that junk.’
‘You
can
say the word spirit.’ Leo’s disdainful voice carries down the path as we approach the door along the uneven crazy-paved front path. I have a silent little laugh to myself at the fact that Scarborough just ordered Leo to arrange a skip. That will have pissed him off far more than the psycho-babble comment. They have their backs turned, giving us the advantage of listening to them unannounced. ‘Or ghost, if you’re feeling particularly brave. It’s not like saying candyman, candyman, candyman, you know.’