Storm
Page 19
‘Good luck with that,’ I said, yawning. ‘If you wanted to prise open those bars, you’d need to get properly angry.’
For a fraction of a beat, a familiar voice, as soft as a moth, began to speak in a part of my mind I’d forgotten existed. I squinted up at the ceiling, wondering what it was saying, but it fluttered away as softly as it had arrived.
Just when I thought everything had been wrapped up, a hopeful look appeared on Scanlon’s face.
‘Dad,’ he said hesitantly. ‘I’ve got another idea. It might solve the glitchy ghost problem. It could be the boost this place needs. And it wouldn’t cost you a penny.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Crawler. ‘Nice of you to take an interest. Fire away.’
WHAT SCANLON SAID was this.
‘What if I took some poison, and became a ghost too?’
Obediah and Vanessa gasped in shock.
Even I frowned at Scanlon for a second. Why was he suggesting that?
Crawler, however, cocked his head to the side, the better to consider Scanlon’s business proposal.
‘Explain,’ he said.
‘Well, if I was a ghost here, then … then I could be with all the ghosts all the time.’
Scanlon spoke in a light, reasonable voice.
‘And what’s in that for me?’ said Crawler.
‘Well, if I was here all the time, I could spot any technical difficulties and deal with them straight away. I think I’d be able to stop the ghosts from shutting down, if I was with them more. If I was … dead too.’ Scanlon’s voice was very steady and very firm.
Crawler raised his eyebrows as he considered his only child. ‘Mmmmm,’ he said finally. ‘An interesting idea. Not entirely without merit. And I’m certainly impressed at your commitment to the business, that’s for sure.’
I shot puzzled looks at them both. This was bonkers. Scanlon was offering to die just so he could fix the glitches? Had he lost his mind?
But by the earnest look on Scanlon’s face, it was clear he thought this was a logical, sensible idea. ‘I’d also be able to keep the ghosts trained, and running smoothly. You wouldn’t have to can them, or put them back in storage. Problem solved.’
‘But why can’t you train them efficiently now?’ Crawler sounded suspicious.
‘Oh, I do,’ said Scanlon smoothly. ‘But I’d do it even better if I was one of them. I’d be like a … live-in manager. Your supervisor. On the ground.’
‘Yes, I can see that,’ said Crawler, sounding excited. ‘You’d be my man on the inside. Very handy, actually. And think of the drama!’
‘Yes,’ said Scanlon, matching his father’s voice exactly, in one of his uncannily brilliant impersonations. ‘The drama. Imagine how much more punters are going to love this place if your only child is a ghost as well.’
‘Oh, I’d be devastated,’ said Crawler, after a pause.
‘Naturally,’ said Scanlon.
‘And I would choke back the tears in a manly, dignified way—’
‘A nice touch,’ said Scanlon.
‘And they’d all say how brave I was.’
‘They’d lap it up,’ said Scanlon quietly. ‘And bring all their friends.’
‘They really would.’ Crawler sighed happily. After a moment, he eyed his son. ‘Are you sure? When you’re dead, you’re dead. It seems rather extreme. I’m happy to replace the glitchy ghosts instead – stick to the plan. If you want. Never let it be said that I pushed you into this …’
Scanlon nodded. ‘I’m sure.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Crawler easily. ‘Well, you had a good innings anyway. A good life. Right?’
Scanlon looked away.
‘Well, when do you want to, er …?’
‘How about tomorrow?’ said Scanlon quietly.
‘Okey doke,’ said his father, and he put a hand, for a second, on Scanlon’s shoulder, before lifting it up and heading for the door. ‘Well done, you. A Lane through and through, eh?’
Scanlon flinched, then nodded.
‘Oh, you can lock up tonight. I’m just off for my facial,’ said Crawler.
‘Okay,’ said Scanlon. ‘Bye, Dad.’
Once Crawler had gone, Vanessa, Obediah and Theo stared at Scanlon.
‘Scanlon,’ said Vanessa quietly, ‘are you sure about this? You realise that you’ll be ending your life if you take that poison? To stay in here?’
Emotions scuttled around in Scanlon’s face, like wary crabs in a rock pool, reluctant to be seen. ‘I think it’s a good idea. It feels … like the right thing to do. Now, can you go to your rooms by yourself? I’ll be around later to lock up.’
Obediah and Theo lingered outside. When I walked past them, Obediah grabbed my hand with his one arm.
‘We’re moithered about Scanlon,’ he said.
‘What?’ I snapped.
But it was no use pretending I didn’t understand. They looked at me desperately.
‘Please try to change his mind. He’d listen to you. He’s making a mistake. It’s the worst idea we’ve ever heard—’
I shook Obediah’s hand away. ‘He can do what he wants, okay? It’s not like we’re friends. It’s not like we’re family.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Theo softly, as I mounted the steps to my room. ‘But who else has he got?’
BACK IN MY room, I made myself as comfortable as I could and closed my eyes, but the dull calm I’d been hoping for did not magically materialise. The air around me had become too quiet, too watchful, to be truly restful. The world began to thrum with a peculiar, unsettling energy.
And then, from outside, came a strange, scraping, rasping noise. Like bald tyres grinding painfully over a dirty track. Was this another crowd, coming for their entertainment? And why did I have the weirdest feeling of being watched …?
‘Hello again.’
Standing in front of me was a woman in a shapeless beige suit. From behind the biggest pair of glasses I’d ever seen, two huge eyes blinked at me, like a scandalised owl.
I looked at her hazily.
‘Jane?’ I said through a cloudy head. The death guardian? From the bus? From a long, long time ago.
‘Jill,’ she said wearily. ‘Forgotten me, have you?’ She pushed her glasses up her nose, and they fell straight back down again. ‘I told you I’d look you up, didn’t I, when I was in your neck of the woods? Well, here I am. And in the nick of time too, by the look of things.’
I eyed her suspiciously. ‘How did you know I’d end up in a wood? And … how’d you get in here anyway?’
‘Never mind that,’ she said firmly. ‘There are more important things to consider, and we haven’t got long. You’ve got some thinking to do. Not to mention some feelings to feel – and that’s going to be hard, because you haven’t done that for a while, have you?’
I jutted my chin out. ‘No,’ I said bolshily. ‘I haven’t.’
‘And how’s that working out for you?’ she said, raising one wispy eyebrow.
There was something unusually comforting about being told off by an adult with a kind voice. It reminded me of a world I’d once been part of, where my actions mattered, where I could tell the difference between right and wrong.
I hung my head, horribly lost. For a brief second, I was overwhelmed by an urge to cry.
Her face softened. ‘There, there. Don’t take on. I’ve come to help. Now, what did we talk about last time we met? Do you remember?’
Suddenly, I wanted to lie down on the cold hard floor and never get up again.
‘No,’ I said finally. ‘There’s so much I can’t remember. I’m forgetting everything.’
I don’t know how Scanlon and I met. Or what my name is, or how I got here. The only thing I’m really sure about is that I’m here to lose my temper and break stuff, and then I get left alone. And I’ve got used to that, and now it’s all I want.
I stared at my hands and turned them wonderingly. They looked as if they belonged to someone else. They do. They belong to Crawler.
The shadows around us seemed unfixed, curiously alive.
‘It’s funny,’ said Jill. ‘I always had you down as someone who’d work it out.’
‘Work what out?’
Her face grew sly with knowledge. ‘What you were meant To Do.’
I stared at her dully. ‘Do?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Do.’ And she raised her eyebrows again.
‘Um, I don’t know what you mean. I get angry on command. I smash stuff. I break stuff. I’m very good at it, actually. What else is there?’
In answer, she strode to the wall of my room, and beckoned me over with a long, surprisingly elegant finger.
‘Look,’ she said, tapping on the rough wood.
And, because her voice had a certain firmness I didn’t want to mess with, I did as she asked, and peered through the rough timber slats.
Beyond us, far away, at the very edge of the horizon, just past the end of the forest, was a small grey cloud. As we watched, it grew bigger and darker, and a quick white arrow darted out from its underbelly.
‘A little lightning baby,’ Jill said. ‘They’re so cute when they’re that age.’
‘Huh?’
My thoughts moved like treacle dripping off a spoon. It felt like a million years since I’d been flinging small boys around a stuffy lounge, and the last few hours had been very strange indeed, and now I just wanted to lie down and close my eyes. Why did people have to keep pestering me? Why couldn’t I just be left alone?
‘What’s out there, duck?’ said Jill softly.
Reluctantly, I forced my eyes open, and looked out at the world.
‘It looks like a storm.’
She pulled away and fixed me with those leached eyes again. ‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it? The question is: whose storm is it?’
For a tiny beat, her face seemed to fill with a disturbing wisdom, and I became extremely cold.
‘Jill,’ I said, frightened, ‘are you … are you definitely not …’
She shook her head. ‘Who I am is not important. It’s also fairly complex and difficult to explain. And we’re running out of time. This is about you. You – and your destiny.’
She pushed her glasses up her nose. They fell back down again immediately.
‘Now, you’ve got a choice,’ she said. ‘You either get on the bus and come with us or you stay here, and do what needs to be done. And to do that, girl, you’re going to have to explore and release that anger of yours properly. You’ve got to show us what you’ve got, and you’ve got to do it with love mixed in. Because that’s the answer to everything, isn’t it? Do what you’re best at, even if it frightens you, and do it with love. What’s the flip side of anger, duckie? What can you turn it into?’
I heard the distant rumble of thunder. Shadowy memories ran through me, like birds flying across the surface of my bones. ‘And sometimes I think a bit of that storm’s been stuck inside you ever since.’
The dusk and the cloud had darkened the sky and the light inside my room, turning Jill’s face almost liquid, hard to distinguish. She could have been anyone. She could have been an ancient monument who had been around since the beginning of time. Her face continued to ripple and shift, and her eyes were black pools of secrets.
‘You’ve got a storm inside you, haven’t you, Frances? Isn’t it time you let it out?’
‘But …’ my throat ached with frustration, ‘I let it out every day.’
‘No, you don’t,’ she said softly. ‘That’s just a pantomime. It’s not real. It’s just a few smashed plates. That’s not proper anger, is it? And it’s not for the people that need it either.’
‘I don’t know how to make it any different.’
‘Yes, you do,’ she said.
And just like that, I did. Dizzy with the surprise of it, I regarded her for a second, and my eyes grew wide with understanding.
‘Oh,’ I said wonderingly. ‘Oh.’
Life needs to live. Then the dead can be set free.
Scanlon, I realised. And the others. They were why I was still here. I had to do something for them. And for me too.
And that soft voice I’d heard became a bit louder in my head. ‘Sometimes I wish you’d find something more important to get angry about.’
Jill blinked at me, slowly. And then she reached out her hand and laid it for a moment on my face, cupping my cheek as if it was something precious, and worth holding.
‘Between you and me,’ she whispered, ‘the tricky ones are always the best ones. In my experience. Which is …’ she produced the briefest of smiles, ‘considerable.’
She cocked her head to the side as if she heard someone calling her name. And then, just as mysteriously as she had arrived, she was gone, leaving an odd smell in the air, like burnt toast, and one single white feather dancing in her wake.
I RAN OUT of my room and pounded the winding, narrow corridors.
‘Scanlon?’ I shouted. ‘Scanlon?’
In answer, I heard a faint hiccup.
Confused by the gloom, disorientated by the growing rumble of thunder, I stumbled on the ghost train tracks and fell through a doorway, which led to …
… the little girl’s room.
When she saw me, her little face twisted in fear, and she flung herself on the mattress.
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ I said helplessly. ‘I … I’m sorry I haven’t been very, um, friendly.’
She raised herself up from the tousled blankets and regarded me for a moment. ‘Ma. Ma,’ she said.
There was a sharp pain just behind my breastplate.
She held out her arms. ‘Ma,’ she said again.
I eyed the doorway nervously. I took a step towards it. But I couldn’t leave the little girl alone in that horrible place.
It wasn’t a room. It was a cell.
So I walked over slowly and lifted her up with shaking muscles.
I hadn’t held another person without subsequently throwing them for the longest time. Every muscle in my body automatically tensed. Throw, hurt, smash, wreck, went the training in my head. I swallowed, hard, until the voice disappeared and my muscles softened. Then I gulped, and reached right back to another time, another place.
My hand lifted and I found myself stroking her cheek. It was so soft. The room seemed to peel away from me for a moment.
There was a small scrap of a nametape sewn in the back of her cardigan. I squinted at it in the gloom.
‘Mary,’ I said aloud, as if in a daze.
The little girl clapped her hands in delight. ‘Mary,’ she said, nodding emphatically as if hearing something important.
‘Mary?’ I gasped. ‘You mean … all this time, you were trying to remember your name?’
She looked around the cold fake nursery, its corners that pulsed with silence, and shivered. I held her more snugly, safe from the gloom, and she gave a shuddering sigh of contentment.
‘You needed help remembering, didn’t you? Cos you’d forgotten a bit, right? But now we know. You’re Mary. That’s who you are.’
Suddenly I saw the room through her eyes. How frightened she must have been, stuck in there, day after day, trying to remember who she’d been once. She was so small, so alone. She needed someone to stick up for her.
They all did.
I moved my brain in directions it hadn’t been in for a while. I thought about other people – the others who were here with me. Sweet Vanessa, the pleaser, who willingly let people laugh at her, who thought her death was her fault. Isolde, who’d never b
een inside in her life, and was now trapped for ever, yet longed to feel the fresh air once more. Obediah and Theo – pain flew across me – who had never known kindness, not in their lifetime, not from the adults who should have protected them when they were at their most vulnerable, and certainly not now, and didn’t even think to question that.
And then, finally, I turned my thoughts to Scanlon Lane.
He’d always been able to see me. But had I ever properly seen him? Had I looked into his heart, and seen the love floundering around in there, with nowhere to go, no one to lavish it on?
I’d got him all wrong. He wasn’t sticking around for the money, or the condo, or the flash cloud-car. He didn’t want to be in charge of us. He wanted to be with us. He wanted to make amends. That was all he’d ever wanted. And now that was drawing to a deadly conclusion. It had turned into guilt. That was why he’d offered to take the poison: to stay with us for ever. It meant he wouldn’t have more ghosts on his conscience. He was willing to sacrifice himself for us.
And just like that, something warm began to move through my frozen corpse. He loved us. And I had to set him free. I had to set us all free.
Mary jabbed a little finger in my cheek. ‘F …’ she tried. ‘Fer. Fankee.’
‘Frankie?’ I said experimentally.
She nodded and stuck her thumb in her mouth, her eyes swimmy with comfort.
‘Yeah,’ I said softly. ‘That’s me.’
Frankie. It sounded good. It felt like home.
I’m Frankie, and the only person I belong to is me.
‘Come on then, Mary,’ I said. ‘Let’s go make some trouble.’
HE WAS IN the office, staring into space, looking completely lost. I felt suddenly shy, overwhelmed, at the sight of him. There’s so much to say. Things I should have said earlier.
At the sight of us, he sat up and rearranged his face.
‘Everything all right? Why are you carrying the little girl? That’s not like you. I mean—’
‘It’s okay. I know. And her name’s Mary.’