In her panic she knocked Ness over and tumbled across the tarmac herself, before she scrambled to her feet and fled up the road.
She didn’t get far before the strong grip of Ms Todd’s hand fell on her shoulder.
‘December, my dear girl,’ the woman said, her breath cold in Ember’s ear as she struggled to get free, ‘there’s nothing you can do to beat me. Listen. It’s not my fault.’
They plunged together through the water that wasn’t there as the worlds changed.
There was the hoot of a car’s horn and the sound of brakes.
Ember was thrown to the pavement, rolling in the sure protection of Ms Todd’s embrace, out of the path of a staggeringly green car.
It hooted its horn again and screeched off.
‘Are you all right?’ someone was asking.
‘Yes, we’re fine, thanks,’ Ms Todd was saying. ‘These crazy drivers come out of nowhere without looking. You’ve got to be so careful these days.’
Ms Todd delivered Ember back to school.
‘Out for a dentist’s visit,’ she explained to Mrs Holland on reception.
‘Oh yes, of course,’ the woman said. ‘How silly of us. We were worried sick. We tried calling your dad but haven’t been able to get hold of him. Thought you’d run off.’ She giggled a silly, high-pitched little giggle. ‘You’d best get back to class, December, it’s almost lunchtime.’
Mrs Holland didn’t even ask who Ms Todd was. She didn’t even seem quite to look at her. But her words had worked. Ember wasn’t even in trouble.
She might not be in trouble, she thought, but she wasn’t done yet.
She still had the magic map thing in one pocket, and Uncle Graham’s back door key in the other.
Despite Ms Todd, she’d keep trying until she’d brought Happiness back.
Ember wasn’t about to give up on her friend.
Not yet.
Not now.
Not ever.
The rest of the day went by slowly.
There was a bubble of excitement in her chest that she fought to contain.
Everyone else was still quiet and Happiness’s death still echoed in the school, dulling everything. And it echoed most especially in the classroom they’d shared. There was an empty space on their table and the poem Ness had written about Easter was still on the display board. (They’d all written poems, but only the best ones had been pinned up.)
December wanted to stand up and shout, ‘She’ll be back soon! Tomorrow, she’ll be back here! I promise!’ but she didn’t.
When she got home that afternoon, Penny let her in.
‘You OK? Nice day at school?’
‘Where’s Harry?’
‘He’s had to go see a client,’ she said. ‘A last minute thing, but he should be home before you’re in bed. You’ve got me cooking you tea. I hope you don’t mind?’
She didn’t mind. The only thing that Penny could cook was hot dogs, the sort you boil for four minutes. Anything that required more complicated cooking than that became inedible. Ember liked hot dogs.
While Penny got the water on to boil, Ember chopped an onion and put some oil in the little frying pan.
‘You be careful with that,’ Penny said.
There was a broken pair of old dark glasses in the kitchen drawer (they only had one arm) and Ember put them on to stop the oil from spitting in her eye.
‘Safety first,’ she said, dropping the shredded onion into the pan.
The sizzling was lovely, the smell mouthwatering and the hot dogs slightly overboiled, though you hardly cared once you hid them under ketchup (not mustard) and onions and swaddled them in soft white rolls.
It was only once they’d finished their tea and had wiped their hands and mouths and Ember had swapped her now rather food-stained school shirt for a clean T-shirt that she noticed the card half hidden under a pile of half-opened post on the sideboard.
It looked like an invitation, the sort of card you got from a friend telling you about a birthday party, saying what time and where and whether it was fancy dress or not. Except it was colourless. It was white and silver and simple and had the date of Happiness’s funeral in it. The following Monday. It was Thursday evening now. She needed to get Happiness back before then, she thought. Even though she knew a funeral wouldn’t make Ness any more dead, for some reason it felt like a deadline to her.
December was sat on her bed in her dressing gown, drying her hair with a towel. She’d just had her bath and other than the bathroom, which still rolled steamy air out on to the landing, the house was cold. Harry said it was immoral to have the heating on at this time of year.
There was a banging on the front door.
She jumped when she heard it.
She glanced at the window. It was already getting dark outside.
Why didn’t they ring the bell?
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
She heard her dad stacking plates in the kitchen. He’d come home while she was in the bath and had shouted a hello through the door, but she’d not seen him yet.
His footsteps crossed the hall as she scooted herself across the bed to look out at the street.
She could hear raised voices in the hall, someone shouting words she couldn’t quite make out and Harry answering in a quieter, kinder voice. What was that all about?
She pressed her face to the glass and tried to see down.
She couldn’t see who it was at the door, but there was something in the garden, something low and squat and animal-like moving around in the shadows by the front wall. It staggered as if it were uncertain on its feet. The shrubs and flowers shuddered as it banged into them, like a lamb climbing up on to all four legs for the first time.
And then she looked up and she saw the house across the road. The lights were on upstairs and the woman who lived there, a young woman with a baby and a boyfriend and two cats, looked out at her from the window of the big bedroom. Ember thought she smiled as she drew the curtains. And Ember remembered old Mrs Miłosz, who’d lived there before. Then she heard the front door slam and she looked back down to the garden and saw Uncle Graham walk away, and poor, pitiable, not-alive Betty fell out of the shadows after him, limping and hobbling and trailing grimness behind her.
Graham leant on the wall as he went out on to the pavement. He glanced up at the front of the house, and his red eyes roved across it.
She ducked backwards, falling flat on her bed with a bounce.
Had he seen her?
She knew she didn’t want him to know she’d seen him, didn’t want him to know she’d been watching.
And then there was a soft knock at her door.
‘Ember, you decent?’ Harry asked.
She sat up and pulled her dressing gown around her.
‘Yeah,’ she said.
Harry opened the door, came in, sat on the floor by the bed.
‘The weirdest thing just happened,’ he said. ‘Did you hear?’
‘Uncle Graham?’ she asked. ‘I saw him out the window.’
‘Yes. Did you hear what he said?’
‘No.’
‘The poor man,’ Harry said. ‘He was raving. He must have been drinking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him drunk before. It’s so sad, what some people become. What sadness does to them.’
‘What did he say? He sounded angry …’
‘Oh, you mustn’t pay any attention to him, love. He’s upset. He loved his Betty like she was his best friend. I don’t think that he has many friends. Your mum said he was a lonely one, even back when they were kids. They grew up in that house of his, you know. While your mum went off travelling and partying and loving the world, he stayed behind looking after their parents and tinkering with his motorbikes.’
It was nice to hear about her mum. Ember imagined her young and dancing on some tropical beach, flowers in her hair and the white crests of waves crashing on to the sand behind her. She was lovely, and suddenly Ember missed her in a wa
y she’d not done for a long time. She missed her like she missed Happiness.
‘He went on about how Betty won’t stop following him about. Won’t leave him alone. How she’s alive and dead and alive again. Weird stuff. I think poor Betty being knocked down’s knocked him for six. I hope he can find some help.’ He put a big, warm hand on December’s knee and looked up into her face. ‘Look, you keep away from him for a bit, OK? If you bump into him, just give him a smile and then come home, OK?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sure in the morning he’ll have sobered up, and if he remembers what he said, he’ll be dead embarrassed probably, but all the same … Be safe, Ember. OK?’
She patted Harry’s big, warm hand.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course I’ll be safe.’
Before she went to bed she unfolded the map on the desk where she did her homework.
It was cold, like it wasn’t made of paper, but of metal or stone or something.
Looking at the spiral path's strange slow twist made her giddy.
On top of it she laid the key to Uncle Graham’s back door.
The questions that she didn’t know the answers to were:
Will the map lead me through the alleys, even if I don’t start from Uncle Graham’s house?
Does the map only work in that alley, or might it work somewhere else too?
Will Happiness be waiting where I last saw her, at Uncle Graham’s house, or will she be back on her own front step?
(And the question she almost didn’t dare to think: How can I stop what happened to Betty from happening to Ness?)
That last question she pushed to the back of her mind. Too terrifying. She’d not thought it, or had managed to ignore it when she’d tried to rescue Ness that morning, but the shadow of it had grown in her mind, the seriousness of it.
Despite that, somehow, eventually, thoughtlessly, sleep took her hand and sank with her into darkness and silence and peace.
In the middle of the night December woke up.
There’d been a noise on the stairs.
It was pitch black and she couldn’t move.
She was lying on her side under the duvet and now there was something in the room and she couldn’t move a muscle.
She strained and heaved but her limbs were like lead, like stone. She stared at the wall, at where she knew the wall was in the darkness. Her back was to the door, to the room, and something was moving towards her.
She could hear footsteps – quiet, tiptoeing – tiny footsteps, and she wanted to scream, wanted to shout for her dad, wanted to make a noise to let whoever it was know that she knew they were there, wanted to hurl the duvet off and make a noise and scare them away.
But she was frozen.
Her heart thumped.
She could feel tears tickling over the bridge of her nose.
Lead.
Stone.
A statue.
Paralysed.
Petrified.
And then something landed on the bed.
Thud!
Something had jumped up and landed on the bed, in the dark.
Something had sat down beside her.
And then something cold touched her forehead, touched her ear, touched her cheek.
Cold and wet.
And a voice said, ‘I see you.’
Ember sat up in bed, in the dark, her knees tucked up under her chin and the duvet wrapped round her.
In the darkness she could just make out the shape of the cat in front of her.
As it moved its head its eyes glinted, damp and shining.
It spoke and she listened.
Its voice was kind, firm, honest, sharp, but reserved. A short distance away from being warm.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ it said.
‘I can hear you across the town,’ it said.
‘No good will come of it,’ it said.
‘You can’t do it,’ it said.
‘Things are the way they are,’ it said.
It licked its paw and worried at its ear.
Although she couldn’t see it now, she remembered the ragged look of the ear, the ragged look of the cat. As if it had been dragged backwards through a hedge, a ditch and a scrub of cacti and hadn’t bothered to comb its hair afterwards.
She didn’t think a little lick and brush of the ear would be enough.
‘Things are the way they are for a reason?’ she said, half asking a question.
The cat stopped washing.
‘No,’ it said, after a moment. ‘No reason. They just are, and that’s all there is to it. Some things you just have to accept and move on from.’
‘But she didn’t deserve to die,’ Ember said.
‘No,’ said the cat. ‘Few do. But she died, all the same.’
‘But I’ve seen her. I can bring her back. Bring her back here.’
‘You’ve not seen her,’ said the cat. ‘All you’ve seen are echoes. Just an echo. You think too much. You think so much. You people. I. I. I. Me. Me. Me. All the time. It rings in the world like a bell. It takes a while to fade away, that’s all. Cogitatis ergo estis.’
‘What does that mean?’ she asked.
‘It means it takes a while to forget that you were you.’
‘That place … ?’
‘It’s where forgetting happens, that’s all. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Your people echo longest, that’s all. Nothing more.’
Ember thought of the snail she’d watched turn to dust and blow away.
‘Snails?’ she asked.
‘Think very little of themselves,’ said the cat immediately.
‘Hardly even know that they are. Only that they do. No self-reflection in a snail’s mind.’
‘Betty? The dog?’
‘Dogs think of themselves more, yes. It’s all: Does he love me? Why can’t I see him now? Have I upset him? When will he get here? Awful things, all their thoughts tangled up in their humans.’
The cat looked away, licked its shoulder. Stopped licking.
Ember nodded. She thought she understood. Then she thought of a different question.
‘And Ms Todd … is she … ?’
The cat said nothing, but jumped down from the bed.
It padded across the floor, its feet soft, its tail crooked in a sudden shaft of moonlight between the curtains.
‘Do not do what you are going to do,’ it said, as it reached the door. ‘She isn’t your friend, and I won’t be there to help next time. I’m busy. I can hear mice, voles, rats … Warm. Crunchy. Thinking of themselves just enough.’
December wondered who the ‘she’ was. Did the cat mean Ms Todd or Ness? Or both?
She sat there in silence, in the dark, long after the cat had gone, thinking.
Her dad got up.
She heard him banging into things and swearing softly as he made his way to the bathroom.
The toilet flushed.
On the way past her room he stuck his head round the door.
‘Oh, Ember,’ he said. ‘Did I wake you up?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking.’
‘Always thinking,’ he said. ‘Just like her. So smart, so full of ideas. You don’t get that from me.’ He paused. ‘She could’ve changed the world, you know. If she’d been given the chance. Changed it all round …’
He scratched at his pyjamas and came and sat on the floor beside the bed.
‘Lie down,’ he said. ‘Shut your eyes.’
And, leaning on the mattress, with his fingers in her hair, he told her all about his day at work and the changes his client wanted made to the plans and how one sort of plasterboard is much better than another, but how, because it’s more expensive, he was having a hard time making …
But by then she was asleep and dreaming of nothing.
Friday was a school day like the rest and December stayed in class, stayed at school all the way through.
She hadn’t given up on Happiness though; it was just that now she had a better plan. Or a better s
tart of a plan. Possibly. So long as she didn’t look at it too closely.
That evening Harry and Penny were going out. They had tickets to the theatre to see a long play about people sat in a room arguing about who was in love with who. The play had been a hit a few years earlier, but this was the first time it had been put on nearby, so they’d jumped at the opportunity. The tickets had been pinned to the corkboard in the kitchen and the date had been circled on the calendar for ages.
Despite all that, Harry had sat down with her at breakfast and said, ‘Ember, if you don’t want us to go, we won’t. If you want me to stay with you tonight, I will.’
He was a good man, she knew that, and he really wouldn’t have minded if she’d said, ‘Stay here.’ He was really very sweet.
But, as it happened, she didn’t want him to stay. Her plan needed him to go.
His mum and dad, Tilda and Porkpie, her gran and grandad, were going to be babysitting (even though she wasn’t a baby), and that was going to give her all the opportunity she needed.
Tilda and Porkpie weren’t like most grans and grandads she knew of.
They were old people made more like teenagers.
Ember wasn’t sure what had gone wrong with them, but they’d failed to grow up properly.
After they’d hustled her upstairs (‘I’ll read for a bit, then go to bed,’ she’d told them), they put popcorn in the microwave and snuggled up on the sofa to watch a movie they’d brought over.
Six months earlier Ember had come downstairs to get a glass of water or something, and had found them ignoring the movie entirely while cuddling and giggling and snogging. It had been absolutely horrible.
They hadn’t noticed her and she’d snuck back upstairs, embarrassed, surprised and feeling ever so slightly sick.
It had been bad enough when she’d interrupted Harry and Penny, but at least they weren’t really old and married and didn’t smell of talcum powder, and at least they’d been embarrassed. Tilda and Porkpie had been together for decades, so quite why they were still so lovey-dovey she couldn’t imagine, and she didn’t want to ask. She just knew Porkpie would say something excruciating like, ‘Phwoar, but I don’t half fancy your gran something rotten, love,’ because that was how he spoke. Embarrassingly.
The Afterwards Page 6