by Jean Ure
I sprang round, sending the mixing bowl crashing to the floor.
“Tom! You idiot!”
I screamed it at him. He stood there, grinning.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on!” Since when did Tom take any interest in other people’s activities? “I’m unblocking my sinuses, if you must know.”
It’s what Dad does when he gets stuffed up. He says his sinuses are blocked and he has to inhale over hot water.
Tom seemed to find it funny. He said, “So what’s all this about spirits?”
I glared at him. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to eavesdrop?”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping! I didn’t know you were down here. Is that Angel’s shawl you’re wearing?”
“I’m putting it straight back,” I said. “I haven’t done anything to it!”
“Just touching it’d be enough,” said Tom.
“Not if she doesn’t know.”
“She’ll find out. She always does. Then you’ll be for it!”
“So don’t tell her!”
“Won’t have to. She’ll just know. And you’ve broken Mum’s bowl.”
I turned to look at it.
“And the floor’s all wet.”
“Well, and whose fault is that?” I said crossly. “Coming down here making spooky noises! What are you doing down here, anyway? I thought you were upstairs?”
“I was,” said Tom. “Now I’ve come down here. I suppose I can move about if I want?”
Well, he could, but it wasn’t what he normally did. He normally stayed in his room for hours on end. Why today?
“You’d better mop that floor,” he said. “You know what happened last time… Mum nearly broke her neck.”
He helped himself to something out of the fridge and went off, eating. Rags gazed wistfully after him, his nostrils twitching. Food is such a big thing in the life of a dog! But he is very loyal. He settled down to watch as I crawled about on my hands and knees, picking up bits of mixing bowl. Mum was not going to be pleased, but at least I could make sure the floor was nice and dry, so she wouldn’t be able to complain about that.
I folded Angel’s shawl and wiped her crystal necklace on a sheet of kitchen roll, then took them back upstairs to her room. I put them away exactly as I had found them. No way could she ever suspect I had been there.
On my way back along the landing I heard the sound of a car pulling into the drive and knew that Mum and Dad had returned. Rags gave one of his loud, happy barks and went galloping off to greet them, nearly throwing me over as he did so. Angel complains that he’s an ill-mannered yob, but he’s like me, he gets enthusiastic. Not that I was feeling very enthusiastic right at that moment. I was actually tempted to turn round and go hide in my bedroom, but I knew it would only be putting off the evil moment. Mum was bound to discover sooner or later.
Oops! She already had… She was looking in the pedal bin even as I breezed my way through the kitchen door. I was still hoping that maybe she wouldn’t yet have found out, which was why I chose to breeze rather than slink. If you slink, it makes you look guilty. But breezing didn’t deceive Mum for one second.
“Frankie?” she said. “What happened with my mixing bowl?”
Immediately assuming I was the one to blame. Not Tom; not Angel. Me.
“I’m waiting,” said Mum.
“I’m really sorry,” I said, “it was an accident.”
“Well, I didn’t imagine you’d done it on purpose! I was just wondering,” said Mum, “what you were doing with it at all? I thought you were supposed to be getting on with your homework?”
For a minute I had this wild idea of claiming that it was homework, like making something for technology. Trouble was, I couldn’t think what I might be making. Last week we’d done soup, but you don’t need a mixing bowl for that.
“Still waiting,” said Mum.
I had to tell her something. “I was unblocking my sinuses,” I said. “Like Dad.”
“Dad doesn’t go smashing my mixing bowls, and what’s wrong with your sinuses, anyway?”
I sniffed. “They’re blocked. I’m all stuffed up.”
“Rubbish!” said Mum.
“I could have a polyp,” I said. A girl at school had had a polyp. It used to plop in and out of her nose and make you feel sick. She had it removed in the end.
“I don’t see any signs of a polyp,” said Mum. “I hope you’re not turning into a hypochondriac.”
Whatever that is.
“Someone who imagines they’ve got things wrong with them when they haven’t,” said Mum. “The only thing wrong with you, my girl, is that you don’t seem to have any sort of control over your movements!”
I felt like pointing out that that in itself could be a symptom of some kind of fatal disease, and that any normal mother would take it seriously, but I thought perhaps I’d better not.
“I wiped the floor for you,” I said. “It’s dry as can be!”
She didn’t even praise me for making such a good job of it. I really do wonder, sometimes, if it’s worth bothering.
Jem called me later, wanting to know how I’d got on.
“Did you discover anything?”
I told her no, Tom had come barging in making stupid noises and upset me.
“It’s a very delicate operation,” I said. “You need absolute peace and quiet.”
“So are you going to try again?”
I’d thought about that, but the only other mixing bowl Mum had was a tiny one. Plus I didn’t fancy my chances a second time, creeping into Angel’s room and helping myself to her things.
“I reckon I’m going to try something else,” I said.
“What? What are you going to try?”
“I’m going to try a pendulum.”
It was something I’d read on the Internet, when I was researching about crystal balls.
“A pendulum like on a necklace?” said Jem.
“That’s a pendant,” I said. “Pendulum’s what you get on a clock. Thing that swings to and fro.”
“Oh.”
There was a silence.
“It’s dead easy,” I said. “Anybody can make one. Though not everybody, of course, has the power to make them work.” I added this just in case she was getting any ideas in her head. “You have to be a bit psychic. I’ll probably try it out tonight, see what answers I get.”
Making a pendulum was ever so much simpler than making a crystal ball. All you needed was a key, preferably an ancient one, and a piece of cord eighteen centimetres long. What you did, you attached the key to one end of the cord, then held the other end so that the key could dangle to and fro. Easy peasy! If you were psychic. It wasn’t any use Jem thinking she could do it.
The oldest key I could find was the tiny little one belonging to the corner cabinet that stands in my bedroom and used to belong to one of my grans. I reckoned that would be plenty old enough. I didn’t have any cord, and didn’t quite like to go and root about among Mum’s sewing stuff, but there was a ball of string in one of the kitchen drawers, so I carefully measured off eighteen centimetres on my ruler and went upstairs to shut myself away where I wouldn’t be disturbed.
Now all I had to do was ask questions, but they had to be questions that could be answered with a simple yes or no. If the key swung in a north to south direction, it was giving the answer yes. If it swung east to west, that meant no. And if it went round in circles it was probably better for you not to know. I did hope it didn’t go in circles!
I only had one small problem: I had no idea which was north and which was south! I bucketed downstairs to ask Dad. He was watching football on television and pointed silently towards the windows. Right! Now I could get going.
I held my end of the cord and waited till the key had settled down. OK! I took a breath.
“Do you know where Skye’s silver pencil is?”
Yikes! It did! North to south: that meant yes. This was very encouragin
g! I asked another question.
“Is it in Skye’s back garden?”
To my disappointment, the key immediately set off in a circle. Better not to know. But why?
I tried again.
“Should we look in Skye’s back garden?”
This time, the key swung north to south. That was better! But I had to be sure.
“Is that where the pencil is? In the back garden?”
East to west: no. This wasn’t making any sense! What was the point of looking in the garden if the pencil wasn’t there?
“Please concentrate,” I said. “Is the pencil in Skye’s back garden?”
Yes.
“So is that where we should look?”
No.
Excuse me???
“You just said that that’s where it was!”
The key looped about, irritably. I waited for it to calm down.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry! I just wanted to make sure… is the pencil in the back garden?”
I waited. The key hung sullenly. I’d obviously upset it.
“Or is it somewhere else?”
No response.
“Please,” I begged, “speak to me!”
Still nothing. Bother. Bother, bother, bother! I tossed the key across the room. I knew there wasn’t any point in carrying on. Spirits are extremely sensitive and can also be rather prickly. I had read this somewhere. It is essential to treat them with respect. Once they are displeased with you they won’t communicate no matter how hard you try. You can plead as much as you like.
I would have to find another way. A new set of spirits. And this time I would take care not to say anything that might cause offence.
I was still trying to think what I might do when my phone rang and it was Jem, calling to inform me – what utter cheek! – that she had just tried “the pendulum thing” for herself. I was distinctly annoyed. What right had she to go trying it? I was the one that had discovered it; I was the one that was psychic. Probably. Maybe. Jem certainly wasn’t!
She told me that it was all a load of rubbish. “I asked it if it knew where the pencil was and it said at the North Pole!”
I was glad it hadn’t worked for her any more than it had worked for me, but the North Pole?
“Dunno how that happened,” I said. “You’re only s’posed to ask it things it can answer yes or no to.”
“I know that,” said Jem. “I read all about it.”
“So how come it said the North Pole?”
“Cos I asked it! I got sick of it just swinging about, not making any sense, so I said, ‘Is it at the North Pole?’ Like testing it, you know? See if it knew what it was doing. And it obviously didn’t, cos it said yes. Which, I mean, is just stupid!”
I said, “Like I told you, you have to be psychic.”
“You think you are?” said Jem.
Omigod, she was so jealous!
“I must be a bit,” I said.
“Why? Did yours work?”
“Sort of.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I asked if it knew where the pencil was and it said yes, but it refused to tell me where.”
Jem said, “Huh!”
“It’s my fault, I upset it. I got impatient.”
“Like you did with Saint Anthony, keeping on nagging at him.”
“I didn’t nag him! I told you to ask him nicely and promise you’d go to church every Sunday and you didn’t, you were grudging. I’m not surprised he didn’t help us!”
“He still could,” said Jem.
I said, “Yeah, and pigs could fly!”
We didn’t exactly quarrel, but we both rang off in something of a huff. I thought it was really sad that Jem should be so envious of my psychic powers that she resented my little bit of success. I had, after all, proved that the spirits knew where the pencil was. It was just a question of getting them to tell me.
Oh, and I nearly forgot. Later that evening Angel came roaring downstairs like one demented, wanting to know if I had been in her room.
I said, “Me?”
She screamed, “Who else?”
She really is quite unbalanced. I asked her what made her think anyone in their right mind would want to go in her room, at which she turned bright purple and screeched, “Did you or didn’t you?”
Fortunately at that point Mum stepped in to say that she had gone in to check the central heating, which calmed the mad woman down a bit, though she still regarded me with suspicion. Mum seemed to think it was funny.
“Are you checking up on us?” she said.
Darkly, Angel muttered that she’d found a bit of mud on one of her rugs. “Like someone had come in from the garden.”
Oops! That would have been me. I’d been out there, playing with Rags. Tom mouthed at me across the room: “Told you so!”
It was a nasty moment.
Although I say it myself, I am not the sort of person that is easily put off. Some people, when there are setbacks, will say, “Oh, I have had enough of this, I cannot be bothered,” but with me it is just the opposite. With me it is more like, No way am I going to give up! I don’t mean to boast; it is just how I am. I cannot rest until I have done what I set out to do, which in this case was find Skye’s pencil for her. There had to be other ways of using my psychic ability!
Sunday morning, I found Angel in the bathroom doing things with her hair. She is always doing things with her hair.
“What do you want?” she said.
I told her I didn’t want anything. “I just happened to be passing.”
“Well, I just happen to be in here!”
And Mum just happened to be downstairs in the kitchen. I seized the opportunity.
“I s’pose you don’t happen to know what it’s called when people sit around a table and conjure up spirits?”
I was proud of that phrase, conjure up spirits. I wasn’t totally absolutely certain what it meant, but I knew it was the right one to use. Angel gave this sharp bark of laughter.
“You mean spirits like whisky and gin, and they all get drunk?”
Honestly, Angel has even less sense of humour than Skye. That is why it is so pathetic when she tries making a joke. It is simply not funny.
I said, “No. When they sit in the dark and hold hands and someone goes into a trance and a spirit comes down and they ask it questions and it gives them the answers.”
Angel said, “Oh, you mean that sort of spirit. I thought you meant the sort Dad likes to drink at Christmas!”
Ha ha ha. I almost began to wish I’d never asked her. She is such hard work.
“So what’s it called?” I said. “It’s called something!”
Angel threw her hair back over her shoulders, splattering me with water.
“Seance?” she said.
Say-onss. “How d’you spell it?”
“S.e.a.n.c.e. Don’t they teach you people anything?”
I said, “Mostly just useless stuff. What’s that other one, where you all put your fingers on a glass and the glass moves round the table spelling things out?”
“How should I know?” said Angel. And then rather grudgingly, “I suppose you’re talking about a Ouija board?”
“Yes!” I pounced eagerly. I’d heard of Ouija boards. “How d’you spell that one?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea! Why ask me? Go and look it up.”
I said, “How can I do that if I don’t know how to spell it?”
“Use your brain for once! If you’ve got one. I don’t see why you should keep picking mine all the time. Why are you asking about all this weird stuff?”
“It’s for homework,” I said.
She probably didn’t believe me, but so what? Wasn’t any business of hers, anyway.
I went back to my room and opened up my laptop to find out about seances and Ouija boards. Seance was easy. There’s oceans and oceans about seances. I wrote down all that I needed to know, then tried “Weeja”. I didn’t think anything would come up,
but computers can be really clever at times, guessing what you want even when you can’t spell it right. Other times I find they can be completely maddening, like if you run two words together by mistake and they say they don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, that is just stupid. But I put in “Weeja” and it came right back at me: Ouija. That is so neat!
I didn’t bother taking any more notes cos a) I was tired of writing things down and b) I really actually did have homework to do. In any case, I was hoping if we had a seance, I would find a spirit that was willing to help.
The biggest difficulty, I thought, would be convincing Skye. I reckoned she’d say it was all rubbish and a waste of time, but when I put it to her next morning on the way to school, she didn’t raise any objections. She wasn’t exactly what I’d call eager, but she agreed we might as well give it a go.
“I s’pose it can’t hurt.”
“Might be fun,” urged Jem. “When shall we do it?”
I’d have liked to get going that same day, but I felt we really needed a whole evening.
“We shouldn’t rush things. Not if we want the spirits to speak to us.”
“So when, then?”
We decided that Friday after school Jem and Skye would come back with me for a sleepover.
“That way we can wait till it’s properly dark.”
Jem said, “Yes, cos that’s when the spirits are most likely to come.”
“You know it’s all rubbish,” said Skye.
But I had this feeling she was only saying it cos she felt she had to. She wanted so much to find her gran’s pencil that she was willing to try anything. I said later to Jem, “I do hope it works! But even if it doesn’t, I’m not going to give up.”
My bedroom is about the size of a broom cupboard, so when Jem and Skye stay over, it is a bit of a crush, but we don’t mind. Skye always brings her sleeping bag, while Jem and me cram together in my bed. Rags usually crams with us, flolloping about on top of the duvet and making Jem squeal when she wakes up in the middle of the night to find his big furry head right next to her on the pillow.
So, on Friday evening, we all rushed upstairs as soon as we’d finished tea. It wasn’t yet properly dark, not inky black dark, but as I said, we had to prepare. I’d made a list of all the stuff we’d need. I was getting quite good at lists!