She wasn’t there.
That’s why she presses her finger against panes of glass and mirrors. She can’t see her reflection. She touches to check that the surface that ought to reflect her presence is there. Wonders why, if it is, she can’t see herself in it.
She doesn’t understand that she’s dead. Not fully. I’m the same.
No. I’m not dead. I’m still alive.
Think, Louise. Think hard.
The Orphan Choir didn’t mean what I thought it meant: it wasn’t about dead parents – that wasn’t why the children were orphans. I got it the wrong way round. I saw dead children singing above the lake. Dead, like Alfie Speake. Dead, like …
No.
‘What’s that noise?’ Stuart asks. ‘Someone’s playing …’ He stops to listen, frowning.
‘She warned me.’
‘Who?’
‘Pat Jervis. She told me not to buy a house here. She knew the danger wasn’t in Cambridge.’
I replay her words in my mind: I know you shouldn’t drive to the Culver Valley. Don’t do it, Louise. Stay here.
‘Louise! What’s that singing? I can hear boys singing.’
‘It’s the Orphan Choir.’ Who else would it be?
Slowly, Stuart walks towards the French doors. Opens them.
There’s no hurry. It’s all much too late.
The children are brighter tonight, glowing gold and silver, huge radiant eyes and endless black mouths like tunnels to purest nowhere. They’re singing their favourite: ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’.
‘Joseph,’ Stuart whispers. He looks tiny beneath the enormous jagged moon of children. Powerless. As we both are and have always been. ‘Joseph’s there.’
I join him on the terrace. My feet are bare, as I need them to be. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And Ed, look, next to him. Ed’s his best friend in his new choir.’ The blond boy I saw on the bridge that leads to Bethan’s house, with the prominent Adam’s apple.
‘Ed?’
‘Bethan’s son.’ Somehow, I know what happened to him too, just like I know all about Alfie Speake and George Fairclough.
Murdered by his father, Rod. Strangled with the lead of a laptop computer after Bethan said she wanted a divorce and really meant it this time. It wasn’t enough for Rod to be his son’s primary carer; he had to punish Bethan, had to deprive her of a son altogether.
I’m not angry that she didn’t tell me. I understand. I would never have let Joseph go anywhere near her or her house if I’d known the truth.
‘Lou, we’ve got to get Joseph. I … I don’t think he’s safe at Bethan’s.’
‘Joseph’s dead,’ I tell him. ‘He’s dead because Ed needed a friend.’ I wonder if Bethan understands why she did it.
‘No!’ Stuart says. ‘Don’t say that!’
‘You know it’s true. You just don’t want to face it.’
‘Shut up! I’m going to get my son back!’
I remember that I used to say that. Used to think it, all the time. Had no idea what it might come to mean.
Stuart disappears round the side of the house. I hear him unlock the car. Good. I want him gone. I can’t do what I have to do with him here. He would stop me; he’s still in denial. I need it to be just me and the choir. They know what has to happen next.
My son is lying on the bottom bunk of a bed that once belonged to a murdered boy. Poisoned, not strangled; Bethan’s a coward.
Eyes closed. Pale skin. Wearing his favourite pyjamas: the ones with a grey smiling shark on the top.
And Stuart is driving, and crying. Soon he’ll be running …
I don’t want him to see what I see, but how can I stop him?
Across the bridge, pushing past Bethan, up the stairs, second door on the left; he’ll be drawn to the room Joseph’s in. He will turn on the light and be blinded by pain.
I don’t want him to fall to his knees and howl, but he will. I can’t stop it.
My son is a murdered boy, lying on another murdered boy’s bottom bunk.
But. The Orphan Choir would not still be singing to me if there was nothing I could do. They are showing me, Joseph is showing me, that he doesn’t need to be an orphan. Not at all. I can join him if I want to.
How could I not want to? He’s my only child.
I walk through the bodies of long-dead children to the edge of the lake. Descend the steps that one of Swallowfield’s gardeners cut into the bank, one by one. The children sing to me as I go down.
THREE
11
The antechapel is cold, as I knew it would be. Grey stone everywhere. Behind the closed wooden doors, I have no doubt that the chapel proper is colder. I have never seen or sat inside it; this is the first time I have been here, at the invitation of the choirmaster.
I don’t know who decided, and when, that religion and central heating were incompatible.
Actually, it was more of a summons than an invitation. I had no choice but to attend at the given time. He’d have come for me if I hadn’t.
It’s odd that I don’t know his name.
Still, it is better this way round. I can afford to let things happen as they will, knowing I’ll get the outcome I want. With Dr Freeman there was so much resistance; I had to make such an effort, had to hatch plans and strategise. Today, a new choirmaster will offer me what Dr Freeman never would have, however long I’d waited, and I will have to make no effort at all.
The wooden doors open with a creak. He is on the other side of them and stays where he is; doesn’t walk towards me. ‘Mrs Beeston.’
‘Yes.’ I approach. Close as I can. I want to catch a glimpse of Joseph inside. I can hear him singing the Nunc Dimittis. I hear all the voices – Alfie’s, Ed’s – but especially Joseph’s.
‘You know why I asked you to come?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Joseph’s voice is exceptional and he’s a hard worker. We’ll be very sorry to lose him, but … he has you now. He no longer meets our eligibility criteria, and there are other boys … And girls,’ the choirmaster adds, as if he’s surprised to have remembered this detail. I would like to ask him if, before, he led a boys-only choir like Saviour’s, but I would feel inappropriate if I did. There’s a lot that no one talks about. Ever.
‘I’m only sorry to lose Joseph so soon,’ he says. ‘Obviously all the children have to move on eventually when their parents come, and it’s always a blessing for a parent to arrive, however unexpectedly, especially a mother, but … well, Joseph’s very special. As you must know, of course. I’ll be sad to see him go.’
‘Thank you.’ I smile at him.
‘Mum?’
I look down and find Joseph standing next to me. ‘Darling,’ I whisper. ‘I missed you.’
‘I missed you too,’ he says. ‘Can we go home?’
‘Yes, of course.’
It is true. I am going to take my son home. Finally, there is no one who can stop me.
The scaffolding is still up, the plastic sheeting still wrapped around our house on Weldon Road. Inside, though, it’s brighter than it’s ever been: a silver-white glare. So bright that, at first, I can’t see Joseph. I have to let my eyes adjust. I squeeze his hand and he squeezes back. I will never let go of him again. Everything will be all right. Everything has to be all right now, because now is for ever.
‘Mummy?’
‘Yes, darling?’ He hasn’t called me Mummy for a long time. It was Mum, as soon as he started primary school.
‘Will I still see Ed, now that I’ve left the choir?’
How do I answer him? I have no idea how this kind of thing works, no idea where to go or what to do.
Perhaps, because this is home, there will be no more going and doing. I will have to work it out.
‘I don’t know, darling. Maybe. I’ll know soon. I’ll sort it out, I promise.’
‘Will you ask Ed’s mummy?’
‘Ed’s mummy?’ I have no idea what to say to this.
‘She’s coming
soon, you know. Ed told me today.’
I nod, distracted, as the shine from the window pulls me towards it. When Pat pressed her fingertip against it, it was black. Not any more. I put my finger where hers was and, for a second, the brightness clears and I see my reflection in the glass. There’s someone standing behind me.
It’s Bethan. She opens her mouth as if to tell me something, then fades to a pinprick of movement in the surrounding stillness before disappearing altogether.
‘Mummy?’ Joseph tugs at my sleeve.
‘Yes, Joseph?’
‘When will Daddy come?’
‘I don’t know. Soon, I hope.’ I wonder, as I say this, if it’s true.
Give us light in the night season, we beseech thee, O Lord,
and grant that our rest may be without sin,
and our waking to thy service;
that we may come in peace and safety
to the waking of the great day;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Let us bless the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end.
Amen.
All remain standing.
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GHOSTS
I have always loved ghost stories, for the same reason that I’ve always loved crime fiction: the suspense. In both genres, the reader or viewer knows that something untoward is afoot, but doesn’t know exactly what or why, and the main thing driving her on through the narrative is the desire to find out and solve the mystery.
Though I haven’t read nearly as many ghostly novels as I’ve read detective stories, my strong impression from the few that I have read is that the overwhelming majority of ghost stories are mysteries. There might be some supernatural fiction in which the ghost is upfront, announcing himself and declaring his agenda right from the start, but if there is then I certainly haven’t stumbled across it. All the ghosts I encounter in films and in literature are as sneaky and elusive as murderers who wish to avoid exposure. Even those with grudges that border on obsession seem oddly reluctant to rant explicitly about their various beefs with the living; they all seem to feel it’s more effective to make a door slam shut or a floorboard creak, hoping to get their message across in a long-drawn-out and incredibly indirect way instead. This makes no sense, when you think about it. If I were dead and angry, and had magic non-earthly powers, I would defy ghostly convention and stand next to those who’d wronged me, screaming, ‘You poisonous git! I’ll never forgive you! Just you wait and see how many of your relatives I’m going to kill and maim before the weekend!’ All right, it’s not subtle, but since I’d probably be shimmery and transparent at the time of yelling, I like to think I could achieve some pretty devastating effects by combining verbal straightforwardness with physical ethereality.
Perhaps this is why I so admired the recent and utterly brilliant Hammer film adaptation of Susan Hill’s equally brilliant novel The Woman in Black. The ghost in that movie is a comparatively direct communicator. At one point, she writes on a wall in capital letters, ‘YOU COULD HAVE SAVED HIM’, and, in doing so, helpfully reveals what, precisely, she’s cross about. (Admittedly, she is less forthcoming about why she chooses to vent her anger on the innocent; I’d be interested to see what she might write on a wall on the subject of legitimate targets and collateral damage, but that’s another story.)
Like all my favourite ghost and horror films – Dead of Night, The Others, The Innocents, The Haunting, The Shining, The Sixth Sense – The Woman in Black was completely terrifying from start to finish; I watched most of it from behind my woolly scarf. I was sitting next to an elderly couple in the cinema, and throughout the film they regularly asked me if I was okay. I wasn’t, and nor did I want to be. There is no point in a fictional ghost if he or she doesn’t frighten the life out of you.
Which is why, when I was invited to write a novella for the new Hammer imprint, my first thought was ‘Ooh, yes, but it must be terrifying.’ And mysterious too – because all my favourite stories are driven by mysteries and the need to find out the truth and outwit the cunning author who is annoyingly trying to withhold it for as long as possible. So I resisted the temptation to redefine the genre by creating a loud-mouthed ghost who yells at people obsessively and informatively, and tried as hard as I could to frighten myself instead. Just as, in my crime writing, I have always resisted the (sometimes very strong) temptation to write a psychological thriller that begins with the heroine receiving a phone call from someone from her shady past to whom she hasn’t spoken for twenty years, and immediately announcing to her happy middle-class family in a cheery voice, ‘Hey, it’s So-and-So – remember, the one I committed that murder with twenty years ago? Remember, I did tell you …’
Sophie Hannah
January 2013
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