Storm

by Nicola Skinner

  ‘Oooooh,’ said the crowd.

  ‘Go ahead. Ask them something.’

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ said a man. ‘Mrs Ripley, what do you think about the restoration of your house?’

  Mum instantly turned and faced the man head on, like a servant who’d been called to attention. After dropping to her knees in a sweeping curtsy, she said, ‘I think it’s amazing. We’re so excited to welcome you to our home. Have you got any other questions?’

  While I watched, stunned – since when had Mum curtsied? – the crowd roared their approval.

  Someone shouted, ‘What’s your favourite breakfast, Birdie?’

  Birdie cocked her head to the side, as if thinking.

  ‘We’re very proud of that gesture,’ Olivine said. ‘She does that while the tech scans for the right answer. Makes her look so lifelike.’

  ‘I like my daddy’s pancakes,’ said Birdie’s hologram finally, in a sweet voice. ‘Have you got any other questions?’

  I watched her glumly.

  She looked like Birdie, with her heart-shaped face and those two wonky front teeth, but she didn’t glow, not like Birdie did. Birdie’s face had practically shone, like a garden after a rainfall. This flickering thing in front of us was just a collection of sound bites put together by some nerd in a lab.

  But no one else downstairs seemed to care. In fact, they got a little bit overexcited, asking Birdie’s hologram lots of baffling questions at once and shouting out over one another.

  ‘What was your ping fleck subject at school?’

  ‘What did you want to be when you were fully loaded?’

  ‘Did you have a boss minister?’

  Eventually, she just looked overwhelmed and ran to Mum’s hologram and buried her head in her clothes.

  ‘Aaaaaah,’ went the crowd.

  ‘She’s rebooting,’ said the woman. ‘Let’s give her a break. Does anyone have any questions for Frankie instead?’

  There was a pause. A few people turned in the direction of my hologram, who unfortunately, at that moment, had chosen to pick her nose. (Thanks, Dad, for capturing that magical moment on camera.)

  Someone murmured, ‘Think I’ll swipe, thanks.’

  And everyone looked a bit embarrassed.

  The woman in charge nodded decisively, as if to round things up. ‘We’ve seen enough to get a sense of the experience. Thank you all so much for coming.’

  There was more clapping.

  They said: ‘What an achievement! It’s just like going back in a time machine and walking through their home!’

  But they were wrong. It wasn’t like home at all. It was like someone had taken the skin off my original home and sewn it on to another house. It was basically Frankenstein. I was abandoned in a stitched-up monster-house, my family were never coming back for me, and no one wanted to talk to my hologram.

  SEA VIEW COTTAGE: AN ORDINARY HOME MADE EXTRAORDINARY BY TRAGEDY.

  HELLO THERE, CHERISHED VISITOR. WE HOPE YOU HAVE AN AWESOME DAY DISCOVERING THE RIPLEY FAMILY HOME.

  IS IT YOUR FIRST TIME VISITING US TODAY? HERE ARE SOME FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS YOU MIGHT FIND USEFUL!

  1. Why is it so dark in here?

  The furnishings inside the cottage are now extremely old, and the wallpaper, curtains and fabrics are deteriorating by the day. Any natural light will cause further damage. By keeping the curtains shut and the lights dim, the house will live on a bit longer.

  If you do find yourself longing for natural light, feel free to wander into the back garden, where, as well as traditional twenty-first-century family meals, you can also enjoy the finest synth meat and veg plate-ups, and enjoy a delicious fresh CuppaGrubba (ExoGrinds are also available) made from the finest coffee-grubs in the cosy garden café at the back.

  2. Where are the flushers?

  Public flushers can be found in the café. There is also a small flusher next to Mrs Ripley’s study, but this is not for use as it is part of the house and for exhibition only.

  3. Why can I hear weird sighing noises from time to time?

  Unlike our modern, digitally-run houses, older houses will always ‘talk’. The ‘sighing’ noises you may hear, which also occasionally sound like exasperated ‘tuts’, are caused by nothing more than the bricks and the pipes shifting and moving as they get used to changes in temperature.

  That’s all it is.

  4. Why is there always a smell of damp somewhere in the house? And why do some of the rooms suddenly become freezing?

  We agree – there is often an inexplicable smell of seawater that curiously moves from room to room. Sometimes you can even smell it in the garden! We’re still looking into why, but a likely explanation is plumbing. That’s all it is. Just a harmless bit of plumbing! Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all!

  As for the temperature dropping – just the plumbing again. We’re reluctant to modernise the heating inside Sea View as we think it will compromise the integrity – and authenticity – of its structure. If you are cold, please help yourself to the scarves and hats that we have hung up in the rooms.

  We would be grateful if you could obey the ‘two questions per paying customer’ rule with the holograms, as too many can overrule their systems and lead to all sorts of glitches.

  Don’t forget to leave your comments in the visitors’ book in the hallway as you leave.

  Thank you for supporting Historic Homes: bringing the stories of the past into the present. And ask us about the benefits of membership!

  AND SO MY house became a tourist attraction.

  In the first few mad days after the opening ceremony, I did try, at first, to remember my manners. It was easy to guess what Mum and Dad would have said, if they’d been there. ‘Stop glaring at them like that, Frankie, and remember that they’re our guests.’ I kept myself out of the way and did not make a fuss.

  In fact, I developed a simple rule: ghosts inside the ropes, tourists outside.

  The ropes were the thick red room dividers, looped between two bronze stands, placed across every doorway in the cottage. They kept the tourists on the other side, just beyond, looking in from the doorway. Even though occasionally I felt like an invisible animal in a zoo, at least it meant I had rooms to myself.

  More or less. There were the Room Sentries to share with now.

  These were the members of staff stationed in each part of the house. They were there for two reasons: if the holograms were elsewhere, the Room Sentries could be asked questions about the house or our lives. I also think they were there to make sure that nothing got stolen or damaged.

  There were eight sentries in total. Four downstairs: Chrix (sitting room, liked to eat boiled eggs), Brae (kitchen, huge tattoo on neck, sometimes helped out in the café if they were short on staff), Medow (Mum’s study and utility room, wore experimental necklaces) and Ada (hallway, very warty). Upstairs there was: Poe (my bedroom, liked to write in notebooks), Yos (Mum and Dad’s bedroom, huge shoulders, looked quite intimidating), Turl (Birdie’s bedroom, hummed a lot) and Skiffler (hallway and the bathroom, bit smelly).

  For all of June and most of July, my days fell into this rough routine:

  8.45 a.m.: Jingle of keys in front door. My cue to get out of bed, scrape hair back, roughly swipe at my face and tug at the rotting rags on my corpse in attempt to smarten up.

  8.50 a.m.: Historic Homes lot arrive, make their weird purple tea, talk through the day and switch on the holograms.

  9 a.m.: Sea View Cottage open to the public – mostly middle-aged people and well-behaved people from different countries. They’re quiet and relatively docile and murmur a lot.

  9–12 p.m.: I stay upstairs for the morning.

  12–1 p.m.: Tourists drift to the café for those weird drinks they make from ground-up insects and some lunch. This is my ‘safe time’ to go down the stairs without anyone walking through me.

  1–5 p.m.: Depending on weather, I either stay in the sitting room behind the ropes or wander into the back garden
.

  5 p.m.: Sea View closes for the day. The holograms are finally switched off.

  5–6 p.m.: Derk and Debs, the cleaners, arrive to hoover, dust, empty bins.

  6 p.m.: Derk and Debs leave.

  6.30 p.m.: Olivine the manager leaves.

  The last thing I do is:

  6.45 p.m.: Read the latest entries in the visitors’ book – that book on the table in the hallway, which was always left open at the latest page.

  It wasn’t really out of choice – it was the only thing I could read, thanks to my fingers, which were now useless at opening paperbacks. Unfortunately, it was never going to win any Nobel Prizes in Literature, because it was pretty repetitive.

  Most entries fitted into one of three categories:

  1) Those with enthusiastic, sweeping statements about how wonderful everything was. (Lots of exclamation marks.) For example:

  GREAT SLICE OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY LIFE!!!!!!!!

  – BILLY AND JENAX from UTAH!!!!

  2) A sniffy comment about the catering, like:

  Shame the CuppaGrubba isn’t as delectable as the views.

  Colin, Leamington Spa

  3) Someone using the word ‘thought-provoking’.

  So that was my routine.

  It wasn’t great, but I coped.

  And then the summer holidays started, and everything changed.

  SMALL ONES.

  Tall ones.

  Big smelly ruffians.

  Shy ones.

  Loud ones.

  Weird snotty whining ones.

  And that was just the parents.

  After the first day of the summer holidays, when the door had finally been shut, Olivine turned to the rest of the staff with a stunned look on her face, and said, ‘We’re going to have to get rid of the room ropes. It’s the only way we’ll be able to fit them all in.’

  ‘But the ropes are there to protect the rooms,’ protested Ada. ‘The carpets, the floorboards – they won’t survive the crowds.’

  I gave Ada a grateful glance.

  But Olivine was shaking her head. ‘That roof isn’t going to fix itself. Those holograms are expensive to run. The ropes must go. Let’s pack them in! Fill this house to the rafters! You have to make hay while the sun shines!’

  She got her way. The ropes went. My safe spaces shrank overnight. I no longer had rooms to stretch out in. Now I just had tiny divisions. Like the top of my bed. Or squished next to the fridge, while family after family filed past me and complained about the cost of the parking. There was nowhere to call my own.

  Even though I knew no one could see me, it was still horrible to become trapped there, hour after hour, while hordes of adults and their children tramped around my life, circling me, glancing my way without properly noticing me. It was like standing naked in the middle of your school’s playground, waiting for someone to start laughing, any second. It was that feeling, except all day, Monday to Sunday. (Actually, they closed at midday on Sunday. But that’s not the point here.)

  Any time I fancied some fresh air and a break, I’d have to brave the crowds, walk through at least twenty humans, then collapse on the grass outside, retching. Then, when it was time to go back in again, I’d have to do the same thing in reverse.

  As if that wasn’t enough, I became a magnet for dog wee, because I was dead and dogs like to wee on dead things. Oh, and flies. Flies loved me.

  After a few weeks, my existence felt like it had become an endless game of Monopoly, with the cottage as the board, and me a reluctant player. I could already tell I’d lost, and had no property to call my own, but I was forced to keep playing. All I could do was race around and around the board, knowing that wherever I landed, I’d have to pay.

  If I wasn’t tasting human flesh, waving flies away or getting weed on by guide dogs, I was trying to extricate myself from crowds of snotty toddlers, wincing as huge bulky handbags churned through my torso, listening to people ask our holograms the same stupid questions, or watching people smirk at the pug picture.

  There was nowhere safe to land, it all belonged to someone else, it had stopped being fun a long time ago, and no one would let me leave the game.

  And if this metaphor has bamboozled you, let me put it another way by simply saying:

  EVERYTHING WAS AWFUL.

  And those emotions inside me that I thought had faded away began to whirl and stretch.

  A month into the summer holidays and the carpets upstairs were threadbare and the holograms had started crashing from repeated overuse and the visitors’ book was filled with crayon scribbles and comments like: MY BIG BROTHER IS A SMELLY POO BUM, HA HA HA HA HA!!

  And still they kept coming. And coming. And coming.

  My standards dropped. I slouched, I lay on top of my bed all day, sighing and singing rude songs, shouting at babies.

  But here was the weird thing. Even though they came in their hordes, and queued patiently, and handed over their money – even though it was clear they’d all gone to some effort to get to our cottage and have a good look around – most of the grown-ups didn’t seem to enjoy it much. They were always so preoccupied. They liked to tell their kids off a lot, and seemed obsessed with whether anyone needed a wee.

  They spent a lot of time taking photos on their phones and then sending those photos to everyone they knew. This gave us one thing in common, I suppose: we were both used to letting other people stare at our lives. Maybe they were worried about being forgotten too.

  Even the rare ones who did seem interested, who booked themselves into the Paint Your Pets sessions with Dad’s hologram, engaged with all the interactive exhibits and willingly sat through the documentary on the Cliffstones tsunami – even they ended up with what I came to call The Look on their faces.

  A shell-shocked expression. Like they’d realised somebody else’s life was pouring into them, and they didn’t like it.

  Their smiles would become strained. Their eyes would dart to the windows and they’d gasp: ‘Outside?’ Where they’d all breathe a sigh of relief as if they were filling up with themselves again.

  And they’d whisk themselves off in the direction of the car park without so much as a backward glance. Then they’d fold themselves up into their flying cars and disappear off into the smog of the twenty-second century. And I’d never see them again.

  Because no one ever returned.

  Apart from one boy, that is.

  A funny-looking boy in a funny-looking top.

  Who didn’t seem able to stay away.

  HE FIRST APPEARED at the beginning of August, in the early gasps of the school holiday madness. Even among the crowds he was hard to miss, in his oversized pink T-shirt covered in lurid lime squiggles.

  His skinny body floundered around in that T-shirt like it was quicksand. And his face was as pale as his top was colourful.

  He came to my house about three times a week and even shelled out for a Repeat Visitor card, drawing surprised looks from almost all the staff although they tried to hide them. But he never gave the impression that he actually wanted to be there.

  In fact, he seemed more interested in his shoes than anything else.

  But once or twice – if he had to navigate a particularly busy crowd out in the hallways, for example, and if our paths were crossing – his narrowed green eyes would land almost directly on me.

  He can see me! I’d think, with panicky delight.

  But then almost immediately his face would glaze over, and it would become clear he hadn’t spotted me at all. At times like this I’d feel both disappointed and relieved. If you’ve been invisible for a while, you get used to it. The idea of being seen for the first time in over a century made me nervous. Plus he looked like hard work.

  The man he was with though seemed much nicer.

  Unlike the boy, he had an interested, polite manner. He was always careful not to push in queues, and went to great lengths to smile at all the Room Sentries. His chubby pink cheeks and soft caramel-coloured hair
made him look as meek as the boy seemed sharp. The man wore clothes that soothed me just to look at them – velvety corduroy, faded denim, things in calming colours. He had a habit of blinking a lot, quite rapidly, as if he found crowds alarming, which made him look so harmless and shy I thought he must do something very mild and sweet for a living. Like breeding hamsters, or knitting things.

  And he carried a big, stained, black leather bag with him at all times, as if he wanted to be prepared for anything. Perhaps he was a Scout leader, or a teacher of something practical, like geography.

  Although, if he was a geography teacher, he can’t have been a very good one. He had a dreadful sense of direction for one thing. It didn’t matter how many times he came to the cottage, he never seemed to remember which room was which. If all the crowds were wandering in one direction, he’d go in the opposite. He opened doors marked Private and once he went straight into the staff room and interrupted Chrix’s sacred hard-boiled-egg-eating.

  The man and the boy spent hours at the cottage when they visited, but I never saw them buy anything at the café, although the boy would occasionally throw longing glances in its direction. And whenever they left, the man would lay an arm casually across the boy’s shoulders, making him jump slightly, and say, ‘Seen anything interesting today?’ And the boy would shake his head firmly, which endeared him to me even less.

  If you ever want to forget something completely or make it utterly invisible, here’s a piece of advice. Put it somewhere you’ll see it every day. Ideally in a frame, and at eye level, somewhere you’re likely to walk past a few hundred times a week.

  As August drew to a close, as the grass out on the lawn began to die, so did my memories. It was hard for me to even see the framed photographs, copies of Birdie’s drawings, the replica motivational posters in Mum’s study. Even the holograms became harder to notice. (Every cloud …) The more I saw them, the less I saw them. We had turned into the past; a faded snapshot on a wall.