I don’t even need to look in the basement, but I do. I run straight across it, pointing the torch on the ground. I don’t see a single coin and I don’t stop. I go to the front door and I rattle it but it’s definitely still locked. It’s only me in the Castle.
And now I know, a hundred thousand per cent, that the mill is haunted.
I turn and shine the torch through the dust. The dust is moving! The ghost is still here! I jump backwards and knock into the door. I take a deep breath. Hold it.
The dust stops moving when I stop breathing.
It’s not the ghost, it’s just me.
Behind me the door rattles. I spin round.
I stare at it. I step away. It’s silent now. Nothing. Maybe I made it up. Maybe it didn’t rattle.
Suddenly the door trembles and the whole basement booms.
Knock, knock . . . knock.
I can’t move.
Knock, knock . . . knock.
It’s right outside the door.
But then I hear coughing and I know that cough. It’s Ma.
I grab the key and shove it in the keyhole. I yank the door so fast that it hits me in the face. Ma steps in and the smell of salt and vinegar expands in the room.
‘Jaysus, what’s up with you?’ Ma says.
I stare at her.
‘Ye all right?’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ I whisper.
She holds up two bags. She nods her head at one – ‘Food.’ Then the other – ‘Batteries for the lights.’
I nod, that’s all. What am I supposed to say, ‘Ma, the Castle is haunted’? I’ve a feeling ‘haunted’ would be a new Stress Word.
‘Speaking of lights . . .’ Ma clicks a switch by the door and a trail of stars like the Milky Way appears above us, running through the basement to the kitchen. ‘At least those batteries are still working. Better change the ones in the kitchen, though.’ She means the fairy lights we put up after we found them in the skip last Christmas.
‘And remind me to put them in your torch too.’ Ma pushes past me. ‘Come on, I’m starving,’ she says. ‘Hurry up or I’ll eat yours too.’
CASTLES IN THE SAND
After we left Gran’s, Ma got us a tent from somewhere and for a while we lived down in the dunes on the other side of the harbour wall where the big ships come in from the sea, carrying containers stacked like Lego. Ma laughed at me when I called them dunes. She said, ‘You’ve some imagination, love.’
But they were made of sand, and there were hills and holes where you could hide and no one else could see you. And there were even these green plants, like long grass, growing out of them. So Ma was wrong. They were dunes. Even if they weren’t big yellow ones like you see in books.
When you were in the tent at night and the flap was open, you couldn’t see much, just the sand dune in front of you. But you could hear the sound of the sea and you could pretend you were way up in the mountains and the sound was the wind flowing through an enchanted forest and there was no one else around for miles and miles.
When the tide went out, the beach stretched to the end of the world. It was full of broken shells and glass and plastic. One day, when it was real sunny, Ma was lying on a towel relaxing and I was digging a hole beside her. A little further down the beach there was a boy making sandcastles.
They were real good cos he had a big red bucket and a small yellow bucket, and when he filled the red one up with sand and turned it upside down, it made round castles with little squares on top.
He was using the buckets to make one massive sandcastle. It was more like a city than a castle, though. It had loads of floors and each of them had towers on them. And it had a big space in the middle with some towers in that too.
I watched him for ages and then I went over to him and said, ‘Here, can I have a go of your bucket?’
He looked at me and then he looked over to his ma, who was sitting on one of those folding chairs near the dunes, so I said real quick, ‘I won’t nick it or anything. I just want to have a go.’
He didn’t answer but he threw the red bucket at my feet and watched me. I shoved handfuls of sand into it and turned it over to make a castle. It didn’t stand up like his did, though. It just crumbled back into sand. But he showed me how to pack the sand real tight so that when you turned the bucket over, the castle didn’t fall apart. Then he even let me help him build his.
He was making a big wall around the whole thing and he told me to dig a moat to protect the castle. The only way to cross it was over the drawbridge and you could pull it up at a second’s notice.
I found a knot of wood for the drawbridge. Flat shells are real good for windows. And labels off plastic bottles for flags.
I ran up past Ma and grabbed a load of dune grass. Then I cut it up real small to make a garden inside the castle. The castle even had cannons to fight off the pirates. I made them from shells that looked like tubes and I stuck them into the walls. It was the best sandcastle I’d ever seen.
In the middle of working on it, his ma brought over sandwiches. They were filled with cheese but they had some sand stuck in them too. She had apples and yogurts and cartons of orange juice as well and she just gave me one of everything, the same as him.
My ma saw us all there and she came over with biscuits and crisps. She started chatting to his ma about real boring stuff like the weather. But it was grand cos if Ma was talking about the weather, it meant she hadn’t been drinking. And her hands hadn’t started to shake that much back then neither, so she looked dead normal.
I looked up at our tent but you couldn’t see it cos it was behind a dune. And me and Ma were in our swimming togs, so we looked like everyone else. His ma probably didn’t even know we were sleeping there. And I was happy cos I didn’t want her to know.
Then our mas went back to their towels, but not before my ma winked at me. After we ate, we kept working on the castle till it started to get cold. Then his ma said they had to go home and he turned and ran away. He didn’t even care that he was leaving behind the best castle ever.
Ma came over then and sat with me. ‘That’s some castle,’ she said. She flung her hair out behind her and she leaned back on her elbows. ‘Ah yeah, I could get used to this.’ She watched the sea for a while. ‘If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?’ she asked. But I didn’t answer cos I didn’t know anywhere else. Ma said, ‘Greece. Or Portugal. Somewhere in the sun. No stress. Just white sand and blue sea. You could sit there and watch the sunset, sipping a sangria, with no one to annoy ye.’ Ma started rubbing my back. ‘Just you and me.’
I said, ‘Kinda like here, now?’
And Ma laughed like I’d made a joke. But she didn’t answer. Instead she said, ‘What about you?’
‘I’d live in a castle with seventeen rooms and loads of towers and a massive garden and a secret escape route.’
‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Would there be room for me?’
‘’Course,’ I said. ‘There’d be loads of room. You’d have your own bedroom and everything.’ Ma arched her eyebrows at me, so I said, ‘But you could still share mine on nights you got scared.’
‘Thanks, love,’ she said and she pulled me down so I was lying beside her. Then we just lay there and I would have stayed all night but the sea came back in.
It was stupid but I remember thinking if I sat beside the castle, the sea wouldn’t come up that far. But it did. It kept coming. And even cannons can’t stop the sea.
First, the moat filled up with water. Then the next wave made all the walls rounded. It carried the drawbridge out too. Each wave dissolved a little bit more of the castle, and it got smoother and flatter till the whole thing got washed away and it looked like the castle was never there. And there was nothing I could do but watch.
That’s when Monkey Man and his mates turned up. But I didn’t know how bad he was cos I’d never seen him before. If I’d known, I’d have made Ma leave straight away.
THE WITCH AND THE ALTAR<
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‘What are you doing?’
I blink and look up at Ma. It’s the second of October. My birthday. And two whole days since I found out that the Castle is haunted.
We’re in the classroom. The walls are so crumbled they look like they have chickenpox. I’ve tried to cover the holes with pictures of castles and forests and drawbridges, but there are more holes than pictures on the walls.
Right now I’m supposed to be learning poxy maths but I can’t concentrate. It’s no wonder. Who can concentrate when they know that their house is haunted by a ghost that drags its mangled body around?
Ma taps my notebook with her fingernail. ‘Finish this up and then we’ll see about this birthday of yours.’
Maybe all castles are haunted. I think the real problem is knowing if it’s a good ghost or a bad ghost.
‘Here, you, concentrate!’ Ma says.
I look at Ma. I don’t think I should tell her about the ghost. ‘Ah, Ma, it’s my birthday, can’t I have the day off?’
‘No one gets a day off just cos it’s their birthday,’ Ma says. She leans back in her chair, which is a black one with a lever on the side so you can change the height. Ma found it on the side of the road when she was bargain hunting. She was real proud of herself when she dragged it through the front door one day. Lucky it had wheels cos it was so heavy it took both of us to carry it up the stairs. Then Ma stood there for ages looking at it and saying, ‘Not a thing wrong with that,’ over and over.
Ma sighs and I know she wants to be outside, not teaching me. She can’t concentrate neither. She looks out the window like she’s staring at the ocean and not at the wall of the Silo. Then she does this shiver thing where she shakes her shoulders and goes, ‘Brrr! Someone just walked over me grave.’
She does that sometimes and I don’t know what she means. ‘Ma? I think there’s a ghost in the mill,’ I say, and I’m surprised cos I didn’t think I was going to tell her.
Ma drags her eyes away from the window. ‘What?’
I try to look at her but I’m too embarrassed, cos now I’ve said it out loud I know how stupid it sounds, so I stare down at my copy book instead. ‘I heard something yesterday when you were out. Something was shuffling around and walking up the stairs and it . . .’ I stop cos I don’t want to tell her about the coins. I don’t know why, I just don’t want her to know, so instead I say, ‘And it sounded like a ghost dragging its mangled body around.’
I look at Ma now, even though I’m real embarrassed that I told her that I think there’s a ghost. I want to see if she laughs or if she believes me. But I can’t tell.
She lifts her foot up onto the chair and rests her chin on her knee. After a while she says, ‘A ghost? Hmm. You know, when I was a young one, around your age, there was this old church at the back of our street.’
I picture the church I can see from the roof with the skinny steeple and the big clock that dongs every fifteen minutes.
‘It wasn’t used any more,’ she says. ‘It was locked up and there was this ivy that had grown all over it.’
Now I’m picturing ivy creeping up the walls of the church, sneaking through the windows and crawling up the steeple till it’s completely covered and you can’t hardly see the clock any more. ‘Like an octopus with long fingers,’ I say.
Ma turns her head towards me so her cheek is resting on her knees. She looks at me for a minute. She’s trying to figure out what I mean. When she cops on, she says, ‘Tentacles, an octopus has tentacles. And yeah, it was kinda like a massive green octopus eating the church.’
I stay quiet so that she’ll go on with the story.
‘It was real scary-looking, that church,’ she says. ‘But the scariest part?’
‘What?’
‘A witch lived there.’
‘Ah, Ma!’ I say, and I throw my eyes up to the ceiling.
‘What?’
‘A witch?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Are you listening or not?’
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘Right. Well, they said the witch used to sleep on the altar at night, lying there, stiff as a corpse. We were all real scared of that church and that witch. Still didn’t stop me and me mates from messing with it every chance we got, though.’
I can’t imagine Ma being my age. And I never liked any of Ma’s mates.
‘We used to bury eggs in the park beneath this big tree. We’d wait till they were rotten and real stinky. Then we’d dig them up and go over there to the church and open that creaky gate and stand on the path and throw the rotten eggs at the front of the church.’ Ma sits up straight now. ‘Jaysus, they stank.’
‘Like what?’ I ask.
‘Like your farts on a bad day, that’s like what.’
I laugh and Ma nods like she’s dead serious.
‘Anyway, this day we were all standing there on the path and we decided that one of us had to go in there and smash an egg right on top of the altar.’
‘What, inside the church?’
‘Yeah.’
I imagine the smell of farts filling up the church. ‘Ugh.’
‘Damn right! I’m the one who drew the short straw. Had to go in there all on me own.’
‘How did you get in if it was all locked up?’
‘I was a skinny yoke back then,’ Ma says, as if she’s not still mad skinny. ‘A few of the windows had fallen in and I could squeeze through the iron bars. So that’s what I did. Then one of me mates handed the rotten eggs in through the bars and they all stood there to watch me.’
Ma pauses for dramatic effect. All good stories need dramatic effect. I wait cos that’s what I’m supposed to do.
‘So there I am, creeping up that aisle towards the altar. Never been so scared in me whole life. It was weird in there. Dead still. I get about halfway up and I stop. Decide to chuck them from there. Lift me arm over me head –’ Ma lifts her arm – ‘and was about to throw one when suddenly, from the door behind the altar, she came flying out at me!’
‘Who, the witch?’
‘Yep.’
‘Jaysus – what did she look like?’
‘All I could see was flapping black rags and mad hair racing towards me. And, Jaysus, was she shrieking. I’m just standing there like an eejit. Mouth hanging open. I drop the eggs on the floor and they smash everywhere and they smell worse than hell.
‘She comes roaring around the altar and down the steps. Me mates are there at the window behind me, screaming at me to move, and finally I snap out of it and I turn to run but I slip on the broken eggs. Slap!’ Ma claps her hands and I jump in my seat. ‘Straight down, face first into those rotten eggs. Well, between the smell and the fear, I puked, right there in the aisle, on top of the eggs.’
‘Gross,’ I say.
‘Bleeding right. I’ve got puke and rotten egg all over me, and me mates are still screaming at me, and she’s right behind me, so I jump up and run. But I’ve lost me shoe! Slipped off me foot when I fell.
‘So I’m sprinting down the aisle with only one shoe and as soon as I get to the window, me mates are grabbing me and pulling me through, but I turn for a second and I see her. Grey face, grey eyes. Snarling at me, she was. Then I see her fingernails. They were real long, like claws, and she has my shoe in her hand. And you know what?’
I sit up straight and say, real proud of myself, ‘She comes up and hands it to you!’
I know what Ma’s doing. She’s telling me a Moral. There’s always a Moral to Ma’s stories. And the Moral is that she wasn’t a witch, she was a nice old woman. I’d bet the winning lotto ticket on it, if I had it.
Ma shakes her head. ‘Nah. She chucks it right at me and hits me in the face.’
‘Oh.’
‘No word of a lie,’ Ma says. ‘Then I’m outside and we’re all pegging it for the gate. Scariest day of me life.’ Ma sits back and nods at me. ‘I was battered for losing that shoe.’
I wait.
‘Ma?’ I say. ‘What’s the Moral?’
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Ma crosses her arms behind her head and leans back. ‘Don’t break into a witch’s house.’
‘Ah, Ma, that’s not the Moral, she probably wasn’t even a witch!’
‘Why?’ she says.
‘I don’t know. Witches boil kids’ bones or something. They don’t just throw shoes.’
‘Yeah? What would you do if someone broke in here and threw rotten eggs at ye?’
‘I’d bleeding batter them,’ I say.
‘’Zactly.’ Ma’s still leaning back with her arms behind her head. But there’s a joke in her eyes and I know that I was right. I know there’s a Moral coming. ‘She was probably just as scared as me,’ she says. ‘Worse, cos it was her home. She felt safe there. Or expected to. And I broke in and tried to throw rotten eggs at her. ’Course she was mad. Mad as hell.’
‘So she wasn’t a witch,’ I say, and I’m nodding cos I knew that all along.
‘No. Just some weird, lonely auld one.’
I think about it. Ma’s right. I’d hate it if someone broke into our Castle.
‘But what about the ghost?’ I say.
She laughs. ‘Look, she thought I was a robber or a murderer or something, yeah? And I thought she was a witch. Neither of those things were true. We just made them up cos we were afraid. I mean, in the end, we were exactly what we were supposed to be. A stupid girl and a scared old woman. That’s all.’
‘So . . .’ I say, and I’m saying it real slow cos I’m trying to figure out what Ma’s point is. ‘So when you’re scared, you make things up?’ And I know what she means. She means I didn’t hear a ghost, I just thought I did. She doesn’t know about the coins, though. ‘But . . .’ I say. That’s all I say though cos I still don’t want to tell her.
‘But nothing,’ she says. ‘Just a stupid bleeding pigeon stuck in one of the rooms, that was all.’ Ma says it real gentle, though. And she smiles. And she nods. And she lifts my hand and she kisses the top of each finger, one by one, like she used to do when we were on the streets and I was scared.
‘Now, can we please get on with maths?’ Ma is pushing my book in front of me again.
The Girl in Between Page 4