Authors: Sharon Sant
‘Maybe we can
just talk to my mum instead?’ Bethany
asks. ‘Or David would like to see if you can find his dad.’
‘I can’t get
anyone for you now. I have a headache. Would you mind leaving?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, please.’
Raven gets out of her armchair and goes to the bead curtain, holding it open
for us to leave. Bethany stalls for
a moment before realising that she’s not going to get any more out of her. Then
she gets up from her chair and follows Raven out to the front door.
‘Can we come
back when you feel better?’ Bethany
asks when we get outside.
Raven gives her
that look again, like she would scoop her up in her arms if she could. ‘There’s
no point, sweetheart,’ she says in a quiet voice, ‘I can’t help you.’
And then she
closes the front door.
‘Sorry we didn’t
get your mum,’ I say as we walk down the overgrown path of Raven’s front
garden. ‘We should have done that first.’
‘No, you were
right,’ Bethany says. ‘Raven’s a
fake.’ She pulls her coat tight around her and shivers.
‘Do you think?’
Bethany
nods. ‘She didn’t look at you once.’
‘Yeah, but like
you said, maybe she needed to do some kind of ritual first or something.’
‘She looked
pretty surprised that I was talking to you, though.’
‘I suppose
so. Maybe she just didn’t expect someone else in the same village to be
able to do what she does.’
‘I don’t think
it was that. She was ok when she thought I just wanted to ask her about that.’
‘But she said
she’d always seen stuff since she was a little girl, just like you. So she must
be real. Have you always seen things?’
‘I don’t really
know what it is I see,’ Bethany
says. ‘Maybe it’s nothing more than other people see.’
‘But you see
me,’ I remind her.
She looks ahead
and doesn’t speak. The churchyard clock chimes as we walk – three muffled
clangs in the distance. Mid-afternoon but already a gloom is creeping
across the land.
‘Ok, so no
Raven. What do we do now?’ I say.
She shrugs. ‘I
don’t know. There’s nothing left we can do.’
‘So… I’m stuck
here?’
She nods. ‘It
looks that way.’
‘With you?’
‘It looks like
it.’
‘Maybe that
won’t be so bad,’ I say. I turn to her and try to smile.
She looks at me.
‘I suppose we’ll get used to it,’ she says.
‘Do you think
I’ll keep fading?’
‘Who knows?’ She
turns to me thoughtfully. ‘I’m not sure you are fading. You still seem
solid enough to me.’
‘I’m definitely
not solid,’ I say.
‘You know what I
mean.’
‘I’m forgetting
everything though,’ I say.
She shakes her
head. ‘Maybe you’re just re-remembering stuff.’
‘What does that
mean?’
‘That you’re
changing into someone else.’
I’m not sure I
understand. I don’t know how to ask her to explain it though.
The sky starts
to spit a flurry of tiny snowflakes.
‘Told you it
would snow,’ she says.
‘Only just,’ I
say.
‘We’ll have
more, you watch.’
‘It doesn’t make
you clever, Miss-Snow-Predictor,’ I say.
She laughs. ‘Do
you remember how snow feels?’ she asks me.
‘Not really. I
think I used to like it, though.’
‘Do you want to
play our memory game?’
‘Yeah, I’d like
that.’
She screws up
her eyes for a moment. ‘This snow that’s coming down now is too small to make
you wet, it’s not like proper snow. This snow feels like tiny cold kisses
on your face.’
I
concentrate. I can almost feel it on my skin. ‘You’re really good at
this,’ I say.
‘But you know
the best thing about snow is when you get home all freezing and wet but then
you get changed into something dry and your mum sits you in front of the fire
and gets you a hot chocolate. Remember that?’
I think about
the contentment from warm, fleecy clothing wrapping my cold skin. Then I
try to recall the taste of hot chocolate, and I suddenly remember something.
‘In Raven’s house it smelt just like hot chocolate.’
She smiles.
‘See, it works. You can remember if you try.’
I shake my head.
‘No, I only remember if you help me. It’s like you’re keeping me alive.’
‘Maybe it’s me
keeping you here,’ she says, suddenly thoughtful. ‘If we stopped hanging
out perhaps you’d move on.’
‘No,’ I
say. ‘Not that.’ I can’t tell her that I’m afraid to be alone.
‘It’s ok,’ she
says, ‘we won’t do anything you don’t want to.’
‘That’s just
it. I don’t even know what I want. How can I? Nothing makes
sense to me anymore.’
She goes quiet
for a few seconds before she answers. ‘Wake each day and deal with what it
brings. It’s all you can do.’
‘If I ever went
to sleep I would.’
‘What will you
do tonight?’
I shrug. ‘What I
do every night… wander around on my own while the world sleeps without
me. At night is when I really feel like a ghost, like one of the plague
kids.’
‘Would it help
if you stayed at mine tonight?’ she asks.
‘I thought –’
‘I know.
It didn’t seem right before, somehow. But I don’t mind tonight.’
‘What about your
dad?’
She laughs. ‘He
can’t see you.’
‘Yeah, I know
that. I just mean, what if he hears you talking to me. Won’t he
think that’s weird?’
‘I’ll just have
to talk really quietly, won’t I?’
‘You could write
stuff down for me.’
‘If we only talk
when we’re in my room, he won’t hear a thing. He always falls asleep
about ten anyway and he never wakes up after that, unless he decides to go to
the pub. Either way it won’t matter. ’
I nod slowly. ‘I
think I’d like that.’
She gives me her
special smile, the one that nobody else sees.
Five: Lisa
Bethany’s
dad keeps his glassy eyes on the TV as she walks past the open living room
door. ‘Where have you been?’ he shouts.
There’s a smell
that I recognise coming from the room, but it’s not sweet and comforting like
the smell in Raven’s hallway. Just like at Raven’s though, I can’t place
it, but something about the unpleasantness of it tells me I shouldn’t ask Bethany
what it is.
‘Chloe’s,’ she
calls back, jogging up the stairs before he has time to ask anything more.
I follow her,
checking out the stairs as I go. They’re narrow, walled on either side
with a handrail and a stained carpet. At the bottom there’s no carpet only a
red, stone-tiled floor. A speeding car – that looks like something that could kill
you, it looks dangerous. This looks so unlikely, just like someone’s safe, cosy
house. I wonder if Bethany’s mum’s
blood is still in the cracks of the tiles, just like mine is in the ground of
Bethany
closes the door of her room, throws off her coat and roots in a set of
drawers. She pulls a chunky looking jumper over her head and sits on her
bed, wrapping the duvet around her legs. I can see the breath curl from
her mouth.
‘Is it cold in
here?’
She
nods. ‘Heating doesn’t come on until eight.’
I look around.
There’s a small electric fire in a corner. It looks pretty old and
there’s a thick layer of dust on it. ‘Can’t you put that on?’ I say, pointing
to it.
‘Dad goes mad if
I use it, costs too much.’
‘What’s it here
for then?’
‘
Dunno
. It’s just always sat there.’
The wallpaper
looks as though it used to be beige stripes but it’s so faded now that it’s
almost one colour. There’s a small desk in the corner, the sort with a lid that
they used to have in schools, an old portable telly and an overflowing
bookcase. I go over to take a look at what books she has.
‘The movies,
they’ll goddamn kill you…’ I murmur.
‘
The
Catcher
in the Rye
,’ she says. ‘Did you like it?’
I turn to her.
‘I don’t remember,’ I say.
She flips the
blankets off her legs and comes to look at the bookcase with me, hugging
herself
. ‘I never had you down as the reading sort.’
‘I’m not sure I
was,’ I say. ‘But there were lots of books in my room before Mum cleared out.’
‘Are you sure
you can’t remember?’ she asks, ‘or are you just pretending to be someone
different than you are?’
‘How can I be
someone different? I’m just me.’
‘You seem to
remember some things and not others, but something like whether you used to
read a lot or not… well… I think you’d know that. I think you’re so used
to hiding the real you that you can’t stop, even now.’
I turn to
her. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Well,’ she
begins slowly, ‘what you pretended to be at school… I don’t think that was who
you really were, was it?’
I shrug. ‘I
could say the same to you. We do what we have to, don’t we?’
‘I suppose we
do.’
‘It’s funny how
we both lost parents but we never even saw how much the same that made us until
now.’
‘I did,’ she
says.
‘You did? I
didn’t really think about it.’
‘That’s because
you were an arse,’ she says.
‘Ingrid says
that,’ I reply. I haven’t thought about Ingrid in days and it’s funny,
but when I think of her now, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much. ‘I wish I’d been
nicer to you, though.’
She laughs.
‘You’re only saying that because you have nobody else now.’
‘No… I mean it.
I think at first…’ I don’t finish, because I don’t know how to.
She pulls her
copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
from the shelf.
‘It looks old,’
I say as she opens it. That musty smell of ageing books unfurls from the
yellowing pages.
‘My mum’s copy,’
she says. ‘I could read it to you, if you want.’
‘Ok,’ I say. ‘I
think I’d like that.’ I sit on the floor and cross my legs, like a nursery kid
waiting for the teacher to tell a story.
She sits on the
bed and opens the book, but then she frowns at me.
‘David, if
you melt through walls and stuff, how are you not disappearing through my
floor?’
I look down at
myself and shrug. ‘I haven’t figured that out. I just don’t seem to.’
She cocks her
head to one side and looks at me carefully. ‘I think you’re sort of suspended,
not quite touching the floor. Is that how you walk around?’
‘I don’t
know.
Maybe.’
I smile suddenly. ‘I’m like Casper
the Friendly Ghost.’
‘Not nearly as
cute, though,’ she says smiling back.
‘I need a white
sheet.’
She
giggles. ‘You’d give my dad a fright.’
I suddenly
remember him. ‘You think you ought to be quieter?’
‘He’s watching
telly. He always watches telly on Saturday afternoons and doesn’t bother me
until he wants his tea. Come to think of it, he does that every afternoon.’
‘Doesn’t he go
to work?’
‘Before mum died
he did. But now he has to look after me so he quit.’
‘Look after
you?
Seems like it’s the other way around to me.’
‘No,’ she says
quickly. ‘He does loads for me.’
‘Like what?’
‘I have this house,
for a start.’ She pauses as if she’s trying to think of some other things. ‘I’m
sick of the way people judge him around here. Like I said before, it’s a
small-minded dump.’
I think about
what she’s said. ‘People don’t seem to like him very much around here, that’s
for sure.’
‘That’s because
he’s not from the village. Mum was, but he moved here when they got
married.’
‘I don’t think
it’s that,’ I say. ‘I think people find him a bit…’ I don’t know what word I
want.
‘It was hard for
him, when Mum died,’ she cuts in. ‘People forget that.’
‘It was hard for
you too,’ I say.
‘Me and Dad… we
had to take care of each other because it was all we had.’
‘I only see you
taking care of him,’ I insist.
‘You don’t
understand,’ she frowns.
The look she gives me says
don’t argue
. Maybe she has a point,
though. Somebody, no matter how one-sided the relationship might seem, is
better than nobody, I suppose. I think about my mum and Roger. Much as I
hate Roger, I have to admit that I’m glad she has him now.
Bethany
is cooking. It’s nothing fancy: beans and sausages with oven chips. It
still smells good to me. I’ve never cooked anything so I’m impressed as I
watch her flit between tasks, and the way she knows how to make sure everything
is ready at the same time. Sometimes, she throws me a secret smile as she
works, or whispers a passing comment to me. We’re not really talking
about anything important, but I like it. If I’m honest, I’m tired of
talking about important things.
Bethany’s
kitchen is a dim square of a room, a tiny curtain-less window reflecting the
bare
lightbulb
hanging above us. Like the rest of the
house, it needs decorating and there is no way to tell what colour the walls
started out, now they’re a sort of putty grey. She puts out two plates. On
one she puts the largest share of everything, on the other a tiny portion that
doesn’t look like it would feed a flea.
‘Is that one
yours?’ I ask, frowning at the small plate.
‘I’m not really
hungry,’ she whispers as she takes a tray from the cupboard and wipes it with a
cloth before putting the large plate on it. I follow as she takes it
through to her dad in the living room. I get a good look at him now. He’s
skinny – just like Bethany – mousey
hair cropped short and washed-out eyes. He’s sunk so far in his armchair that
it’s hard to tell where the chair ends and he begins. He looks like
someone who doesn’t know what he’s for anymore. He barely glances up from
the TV – just long enough to take the food without spilling it – and doesn’t
speak to her once.
We sit at the table together while Bethany
eats her food carefully, like she daren’t even get a speck of gravy on the
table.
‘Want a taste?’
she whispers.
‘It’s ok,’ I
say. ‘Maybe you can tell me about it later.’
The silence has
a sort of gloom to it as she eats. I try to remember what mealtimes were like
in my house. Sometimes they’d be filled with blazing rows. Sometimes
they’d be filled with laughter. I don’t remember them ever being like this.
Back in Bethany’s
room it seems warmer. She flicks on the lamp and settles on the bed while I
take my place on the floor. ‘Want to watch telly?’ she asks.
I shrug. ‘I
suppose we could.’
She grabs a
remote and switches on the old TV, flicking through what’s on offer. ‘I don’t have
many channels,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’
Telly used to
seem important. Somehow, it doesn’t anymore. ‘I’m not that bothered,’ I
say. ‘You could turn it off if you don’t want to watch anything.’
‘What do you
want to do then?’
‘We could talk.’
‘You want to
talk?’ She raises her eyebrows.
‘Yeah.
What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing.
It’s just… ok,’ she says, ‘what do you want to
talk about?’
I think for a
moment. ‘Tell me about your mum,’ I say.
She pauses to
gather her thoughts. ‘There are no exciting stories to tell. She wasn’t special
or clever or the most beautiful woman in the world. But she was my mum.’
‘I don’t want
exciting stories. I’d just like to hear you talk about her.’
She leaps off
the bed and drags an old shoebox from under it, blowing away a fine layer of
dust. ‘I have photos,’ she says, climbing back on the bed and taking the
lid from the box. Inside is a pile of shiny images. She holds one
up to me. ‘This is her.’
I lean forwards
to look. I see a woman with a slender face, bright blue eyes wrinkled into
a huge smile, a peppering of tiny freckles, blonde hair blowing about her face.
‘She looks a lot like you,’ I say glancing back up at Bethany.
‘I’m not as
pretty,’ she says.
‘Your hair’s a
bit darker,’ I say. ‘That’s all.’
She beams at me,
the biggest smile I’ve ever seen from her. Then she pulls out another one and
holds it up. ‘This is us at the Lake District. This
was taken about two years ago.’
I look. Her
dad and mum are holding hands. Bethany
is standing in front of them. She’s a lot smaller, a bit chubbier, though
she’s still pretty skinny. Her hair is tied up in a ponytail. They’re
next to a jetty where there’s a sign announcing boat trips and a white cruiser
waits. It looks windy and they’re all dressed in raincoats. Bethany
looks really happy.
‘Who took that
one?’ I ask.
‘Someone else
waiting for the boat trip, I think.’
‘I don’t think
your dad was having a very good time,’ I say.
She whips the
photo around and stares at it. ‘I think maybe Dad was grumpy about how much the
trip cost,’ she decides. ‘But mum and
me
wanted
to go on it. He’s always had to be careful about money.’
The photo flirts
from her hand. She reaches down over the edge of the bed to fetch it from
the floor and her sleeve hitches up. There’s a black bruise over her
wrist, though the swelling on her hand I saw that day Matt came to play the dog
dirt trick has gone down. She glances at me and then pulls the fabric
back over her arm again. I pretend not to notice.
‘So… your mum
liked books?’ I say.
Bethany
nods gratefully. ‘She loved to read.
All the classics –
never anything trashy.’
‘Are those all
hers, then?’ I ask, tilting my head at the bookshelf.
‘Quite a lot of them.’
‘I think I would
have liked her,’ I say.
‘I hope so,’ she
replies. ‘So, now you can tell me about your dad.’
‘What do you
want to know?’
‘Anything you
like.’
‘He was really
into music. He played guitar and was always trying to persuade me to
learn but I couldn’t be bothered. I wish I had now.’
‘He died at work,
didn’t he? I remember hearing it at school.’
I nod. ‘He got
stuck in some machinery that was on the
fritz
.
He climbed in to fix it without getting someone to turn it off first. There was
an investigation and stuff, but it was his fault.’
She gives me
that look that she gave me once before, the one that says she wishes she could
make it better for me. ‘It must have been horrible for you.’
‘Worse for Mum.
She was pregnant, but she lost the
baby too after he died. She says it was from the stress.’ Something comes
back into my mind, something about Mum and the reason we had that massive
argument on the night I died, and I realise that pretty soon, we’re going to
have to talk about those important things again if I’m going to help her.
Bethany’s
eyelids are drooping as she leans on her pillow, legs hanging over the edge of
the bed. She’s wearing fluffy pyjamas and smells all clean and
minty
.
‘You’re tired.’
‘A bit,’ she
says.
‘Do you want to
go to bed?’
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘You want me to
go?’
She gazes at me
for a moment. ‘Do you want to go?’
‘I just
thought…. it might be creepy, having a dead kid sit next to you while you
sleep…’
‘You don’t seem
like a dead kid to me,’ she says.
‘That might be
even creepier then. That just makes me a crazy staring stalker watching
you sleep.’