Walking Through Albert

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘Oh, dear. I didn’t mean to depress you.’ Mrs Welsh reaches across and takes back the photos ‘I’ll put these away in our house file—they’re always interesting to have.’

  When she’s left the room, we go outside to the stables, and climb up to where the hay-bales used to be stored, and sit with our legs dangling into space. The whole building’s been emptied and swept out, ready to be the reception hall after Fia and Chris’s wedding.

  ‘They were real people!’ Emma whispers, as if she can hardly believe it. ‘I mean, I guess we should’ve thought of that before, that ghosts have to start off in people’s real lives.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Lee, ‘and bits of their lives just kind of come loose, come to us—’

  I don’t say anything. I feel as if it’s rude to even talk about them. Why is this happening? Why are we getting to meet these people, to feel their most private feelings? How come their lives aren’t over long ago? Why do they keep playing back—and to us, to a bunch of ordinary kids who don’t know diddly about history?

  ‘I reckon it’s a real pity your mum can’t get haunted,’ I say to Emma. ‘I mean, if she thinks a few photos are treasures—’

  ‘I know.’ Emma nods enthusiastically. ‘This would be—if she could let herself feel it—’ She’s struggling to find words.

  ‘It’s the raw stuff, the real stuff—it’s re-living bits of other people’s lives!’

  ‘I know. It’s exactly the whole point of what she’s trying to do, with all her treasure-hunting—but it’s here, now, happening all around her!’

  Lee growls. ‘Come on! As soon as some grown-up finds out, they’ll fuss and fuss until they find out why it’s happening, and then they’ll go and fix it, undo it, so it won’t happen any more.’

  ‘And that’d be bad, you’re saying?’ says Emma. ‘Isn’t that what we’re trying to do, with Andy?’

  ‘Well, all you’ll have will be Florence’s papers, then. You won’t get to know Dulcie or Albert or the handyman in the hallway—you’ll just have whatever Florence decided was okay to put in a letter to her sister. Just a few bits of news. And if you think that’ll be better—well, you’re just a bit too old and sensible yourselves!’ he says disgustedly, and gets up and stumps off down the hayloft to the ladder.

  As he disappears out the stable door, Emma says, ‘He’s right, you know.’

  ‘What, that we’re too old and sensible? We feel the things, don’t we?’

  Emma shakes her head. ‘Not like he does.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say I know Dulcie or Albert. Did you know that the man in the hall was a handyman?’

  ‘Well, I—I reckon I could’ve worked it out eventually.’

  ‘Yeah, but Lee already had. You and me, we’ve just been sitting through all these hauntings; he’s been paying attention to them. I mean, you can tell there’s other stuff there besides the feelings—it’s just that the feelings are so strong they make it hard to notice anything else. If we concentrated really hard we could find out heaps more!’ She’s sitting forward, her face all lit up with excitement, waiting for me to agree.

  I don’t answer. I don’t want to let myself in for it, for laying my finger on that electric fence and holding it there, jolt after jolt after jolt. At the same time, I know Lee’s right, that it’s kind of a privilege to get haunted, to get into these other lives. And Emma’s right, too—there’s more to be got out of being haunted than just a date in the log book.

  ‘I mean, we’ve got a month. We should make the most of it.’ She’s practically pleading with me.

  I sigh. ‘I reckon you’re going to need a new notebook.’

  She grins and jumps up. ‘Ten new ones, maybe! Come on, let’s start now!’

  12

  Ghost patrol

  Some really full weeks go by. There’s school, of course, taking up great slabs of most days. Then every afternoon and weekend Lee and I are over at Emma’s, doing ghost patrol, and doing it ‘properly’.

  Emma’s new definition of ‘properly’ half-kills us. First of all she sat Lee down and got him to tell her everything he’d noticed during the hauntings. There was heaps of stuff: the tastes in people’s mouths, the shape of Florence Whitton’s desk at the study window, all sorts of little bits of memory flashing through their brains. I’d always just waited for the emotional bits to finish, thinking to myself, It’ll be over soon—not long now, and then stepping out of each haunting as quickly as possible. So had Emma. We both had to learn to do what Lee’d been doing all along, really sink into the world of Albert and Dulcie and whoever was in the haunting.

  The family’s feelings are like the little bit of an iceberg that sticks out over the surface of the sea; you can go down and down in the few seconds each haunting takes, and glimpse life out of all the people’s eyes; and you can go out and out from them, feel your way into the house around them, sense the pictures on the walls, the patterns on the wallpaper, the heavy dark furniture, the smells of beeswax and floor polish.

  But it is only a few seconds; whatever you find out you have to find out fast. It drives you nuts when you come back with nothing new, so we start setting ourselves tasks: ‘Whoever gets into Albert next, hunt around for something about his schooldays. What is that thing Dulcie puts down when Florence comes in with the telegram? Out in the upstairs hall there, is it night time? Is Florence wearing her nightgown or her day clothes?’

  We start to piece a few things together. All the hauntings, for example, seem to fit somewhere in the story Mrs Welsh told us.

  ‘It’s all about those three years when Albert was away,’ says Emma, ‘—and George, of course. Number 6, where Dulcie’s on the window-seat, crying and crying—that must be to do with George.’

  ‘I thought the guy in the kitchen with the newspaper was George,’ says Lee.

  ‘No, he’s the same one as in the hall,’ I say, ‘in number 1, the one who says Master Albert. The handyman—only he’s not a handyman like the handymen who are always hanging around here—I mean, these days.’

  ‘No, he’s an old retainer,’ says Emma. Lee and I look blank. ‘Someone who’s been with the family a long time—since Albert was little, which is why he calls him Master Albert, instead of Mr Whitton—so he’s almost a member of the family. We never meet George,’ she adds to Lee. ‘There’re just the three of them—Florence, Dulcie, and the guy in the hall and with the newspaper.’

  ‘And Albert—that’s four,’ Lee points out.

  I realise something: ‘Yeah, but he’s only there the once, when he comes back. He’s the happy ending—there’s nothing about after he came home. Mostly, it’s about them—those other three—missing him.’

  ‘And worrying about him,’ says Emma. ‘Florence wringing her hands upstairs, and all that.’

  ‘And finding out things about him,’ agrees Lee. ‘Like when he goes missing. Is that what the retainer-guy reads in the paper? Or is that when George gets listed as dead?’

  ‘I’m not sure ...’ Emma leafs through the notebook pages. ‘It’s just a list of names, as far as we’ve put down here. That big shock he gets is so strong; there’s lots about that. But there’s nothing about what caused it.’

  ‘I reckon it has to be about Albert.’ They both look at me. ‘Because everything’s about Albert.’

  ‘Dulcie crying, too?’

  ‘She has to be crying about Albert, because everything is about Albert. Albert’s the whole point. He’s the ... the ...’

  ‘The key,’ says Emma thoughtfully.

  Lee looks from me to her, to me again, and asks the question that’s on all our minds: ‘Why, though?’

  There’s only one haunting that hasn’t given us pages and pages of notes in the log—the fainting one in the kitchen. Emma and I have set that one off a couple of times, accidentally, but we’ve sort of decided without talking about it that we won’t patrol it. It just feels too dangerous—as soon as it starts, you can feel that badness sucking on yo
ur mind. You try to do what you normally do, stand inside a person and listen and feel, but the wormy voice and the smoke just keep hauling on you like vacuum cleaners, and finally they loosen you, and you get sucked away. And where do our minds disappear to, when they disappear at the end of that haunting? Also, it feels as if they disappear a little bit longer every time, as if that horrible torn hole gets bigger—how many times do we get to fall through before we can’t come back out again?

  Apart from that one, ghost patrol turns out to be fun, in a weird sort of way. It’s like stepping out of real life into a movie, but a 3-D movie, with sounds and smells rolled in. And tastes!—Lee finds a jar of green-striped white lollies on a shelf, on the safe side of the kitchen. ‘Humbugs,’ Emma calls them. Then the race is on, whenever the kitchen haunting happens, to get inside the jar and have a suck on a ghost-sweet. I manage it for a few seconds once. It’s so minty in there it makes my eyes water, but the lollies are like lollies in dreams—they don’t properly fill my mouth, and I can’t crunch them or swallow their sweetness. ‘It’s probably just as well,’ says Emma. ‘It means we can’t leave our germs on them, either.’

  Anyway, with stuff like that happening, we end up on a kind of permanent ghost patrol. On school days that’s usually okay, because only Mr Welsh is around, and he’s usually working outside, but weekends can get a bit hairy. Half the time Fia’s there, squabbling about how she wants black icing on the wedding cake, or dead flowers for the flower arrangements. Sometimes Chris is there, too, calming her down—or trying to! Even if they’re not there, either of them, Mrs Welsh is pretty tense, trying to get too many things done in her two days off. We can’t always avoid smacking into a ghost right in front of a protected person.

  ‘I said, Excuse me, Rennie. My goodness, you are off in your own world, aren’t you?’

  ‘Em, would you mind getting out of the way, please?’

  ‘Shift it, Em, or I’ll thump you!’ That’s Fia, of course.

  ‘Perhaps it’s time for you to run along home, Ren. You do seem to be rather under everyone’s feet today.’

  Because the big day’s getting nearer. And as it approaches, Emma and Lee and I are trying to fit in as much patrolling as possible before Andy puts a permanent end to it with his waning-moon spell, and the Welshes are getting more tense because there are dress-fittings to arrange and buffets to price and music to organise, and—

  ‘I don’t know why people get so excited about weddings,’ I say at dinner one night. ‘They just seem to be about a lot of people getting cranky with each other.’

  ‘Too right they are,’ says Dad, looking at Mum significantly.

  Mum grins. ‘Oh, it takes a lot of work beforehand to make the day good. You’ll be amazed when it all comes together at the end.’

  ‘If it all comes together,’ says Dazza, grinning too. ‘Don’t jinx it.’

  I realise how fast the time’s passing when I go over to Glenorchie for ghost patrol one afternoon and there’s a big white tent with a point on the top in the back yard.

  ‘It’s not a tent. It’s a marquee,’ says Emma as I slap down my homework folder on the table in the study. You’ve really pulled up your socks on the homework front, haven’t you? Mum said after the first parent-teacher night this year. I suppose we’ve got your friendship with Emma to thank for that. Well, it’s a relief after doing ghost patrol to sit in some unhaunted space and do something really boring, something that belongs for sure in this world, in this time. It’s good to just push the ghosts out of my head with some maths or a spelling list or something. ‘That’s where the dance floor’s going to be.’

  ‘And the noisy band?’

  ‘Yes, they’ve finally made up their minds about that: there’s going to be a string quartet for the oldies and a mobile disco for Fia and Chris’s mob.’

  ‘Well, at least it’ll keep people out of the house.’

  She looks sidelong at me. ‘You think Andy’s going to muck it up, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know—’

  ‘I don’t know either.’ She sounds kind of glad to be saying it, kind of relieved. ‘All I can think is, well, it might work and it might not. His first spell made things worse, but his protection spells seemed to work okay. It could go either way.’

  ‘Well ... what happens if he does muck it up?’

  She counts out on her fingers, quickly, as if she’s thought this through over and over again: ‘Ghosts stay, wedding stuffed, house fixed up super-quick, Welshes move on.’

  ‘And if he gets it right?’

  ‘Ghosts go, wedding fine, house fixed up, Welshes move on. See? Same result, really, except for the wedding.’

  ‘But you get to stay longer if Andy’s spell works, because then your mum and dad don’t have to know about the ghosts.’

  ‘Mm,’ she grumps.

  ‘Well, I’d miss you.’

  She looks out the window. ‘You know, I probably wouldn’t miss you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice!’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ she says as flatly as ever. ‘I mean, I’m so used to leaving people behind. I know it feels horrible to miss people, so I just don’t, any more. I just decided, a few years ago, that I wouldn’t.’ She looks up at me. I can see how good she is at keeping all expressions tidied off her face.

  ‘Yeah? You can do that—just decide?’

  Her face ... ripples, is how it looks—as if it was a flat puddle that I threw a very small stone into. ‘Sure,’ she says coolly.

  ‘Oh, well ...’ Embarrassed, I uncap the pen and pick up the log book. ‘Okay, kitchen first?’

  Emma gives me a tired smile and gets up. ‘Whatever you say, partner.’

  13

  Emma loses it

  The wedding’s on a Saturday. On the Wednesday before, I get home from school and Mum says, ‘Emma wants you over at her place. She just rang. She sounded very excited about something.’

  Lee perks up beside me. ‘Can I come?’

  ‘Can he come, Mum? Please say no.’

  ‘Of course he can. You’ll be good, won’t you, Lee?’

  ‘Sure I will. I’ll just put our bags in our room. Give us your bag, Ren.’

  Mum and I watch as he toils off to the bedroom. ‘Oh, you can bring your lunch-boxes out while you’re at it, Lee,’ she suggests.

  When he trots out obediently with the boxes, Mum makes a pleased face at me. ‘Aren’t you lucky, to have such a helpful little brother!’

  ‘Hmm. Move it, rug-rat.’ I aim a boot at Lee’s behind as he runs happily out the back door.

  Emma, when we get there, isn’t so much excited as hysterical. She’s jittering around on the back step, her black hair frizzing out from her head, almost as wild as Fia’s used to be.

  ‘He can’t do it! He can’t get it organised in time!’

  ‘Huh?’ This house is so full of things being organised that for a second or two I think she’s talking about her dad with his painting, or the plant man with his potted palms. ‘Oh, you mean Andy!’

  ‘Of course I mean Andy,’ she practically growls.

  We’re in a ghost-free zone, the front garden, where we can’t be overheard, also where we won’t get under Mrs Welsh and Fia’s feet. They’re as hysterical as Emma, but over less important things—like potted palms.

  ‘There’s some ingredient he needs, that he can’t get hold of. I said, “But you’ve had a whole month!” but he said he only started getting it together last week!’ she moans.

  ‘What’s the ingredient?’

  ‘I don’t know—some herb with a long name. He says—can you believe—he says he knows a herbalist who can have it for him on Saturday. I said “Saturday!” I mean, I screamed at him. “Are you crazy? Saturday is when the wedding is! You have to do it before Saturday! You promised you would! You said the moon was right!” I really went off my brain; I was so angry!’

  ‘So what’d he say?’

  ‘He said he’d try.’ All the hysteria puffs
out of her and she flops onto the grass and lies there. Lee and I sit down in a sympathetic, careful way beside her. ‘I’m going to ring him up and hassle him every morning and night, and if he doesn’t find the herb, I’ll—I’ll—kill him! Or kill myself—I can’t make up my mind!’

  ‘Well,’ I say eventually. ‘He’s still got a bit of time ...’

  ‘Two days,’ snaps Emma. ‘He has to do it by Friday night. He has to!’ She clenches her fists, as if sounding determined and looking fierce will give her the power to make it happen.

  Lee squirms on the scratchy grass. ‘Maybe he can borrow some of the herb from another witch. Witches always know other witches, don’t they?’

  ‘He’s never mentioned any others, has he, Emma?’

  ‘No, but you’re right, Lee. They usually come in groups. Covens. They meet and do magic together. I’ll ask him when I ring him tomorrow morning. I’ll ring him before school—that’s how desperate I am. He’s not going to sleep in, not while I’m sitting getting worried sick about this!’

  Thursday goes by. On Thursday night Emma’s so jumpy she can’t even settle in the tree—she just stamps around underneath and kicks at the stable wall.

  ‘He’s still got tomorrow,’ I tell her. ‘Don’t panic.’

  ‘I’m panicking! I’m panicking!’

  ‘Wait until the first guests are coming up the front path on Saturday—then panic.’

  Friday goes by.

  ‘But I don’t want to go to the concert, Mum! I purposely did scene-painting so I wouldn’t have to go!’

  ‘Ren—’ Mum’s just got home from work. Now is not a good time to be fighting with her. ‘We’ve had this argument. We haven’t arranged a babysitter and you’re not, I mean not—’ she puts her hand up, stopping me interrupting ‘—not going over to Emma’s place, not the night before the wedding. You are coming, with us, to watch Lee sing in the Italian choir and to admire the scenery you painted for the play.’