Grandad sighs. ‘Yes and no,’ he says. ‘Depends whether you believe that sort of nonsense or not. Your nan believed it. As far as she was concerned, they contacted James. All I know is, she didn’t feel any better at the end of it.’
‘Oh.’
‘She had it all recorded. She has tapes of it somewhere. Up in the loft, I think.’
‘Oh my God,’ I say. I feel quite shocked. I never knew about this. I don’t even know if Mum knows this. She’s never mentioned it. ‘Can I listen to them?’
Grandad looks at me. He looks so tired. He looks like he’s kind of shrivelled, like a balloon deflating. I’m sure it’s happened since Nan died. Or maybe he’s been like that for a while and I just didn’t notice it before.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ he says. And then he sighs again. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything, Summer.’
We’re both silent. I hear the trains rumble along in the background.
After a while, Grandad very suddenly springs into action, like he’s just woken from a dream. ‘Right, then,’ he says. ‘I’m going to mow the lawn.’
Johnny
I’m in the lounge watching TV with the balloon. It followed me in here. It’s bobbing around just behind the TV – the stupid skull is staring at me, like it’s mocking me.
I hear the door open. Mikey walks into the room. I ignore him. He comes over and sits down next to me on the sofa. Out of the corner of my eye I can see he’s staring at me, trying to get a reaction. But I don’t give him the satisfaction. I look straight ahead at the music video on TV.
After a while he gives up and sits back on the sofa. He’s silent for a while. But I can sense he’s waiting for his chance. I know exactly what he’s up to.
‘I know your secret,’ he says. And even without looking at him, I can tell that he’s got a smirk on his face.
I don’t say anything. I try not to react. And I wonder what he knows, what he overheard.
‘So, what’s it worth not to blab?’ he says eventually.
I don’t look at him. From his tone of voice, I can tell he’s enjoying this, that he’s got an expression on his face that I’d like to smack. But I don’t. I ignore him. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know anything. Nothing concrete anyway.
‘You’ll be in trouble when they find out,’ he says. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
I still don’t react. I stare straight ahead at the TV, but I don’t take in any of the music video. What if he does know something?
‘Even if it’s not on CCTV, I know about it,’ he says. ‘I know what you did. And I’ll tell someone. Mum. Dad. The police.’
I turn and look at him even though I know I shouldn’t. ‘Shut up, Mikey.’
This makes him smile even more. ‘Of course, we could come to some sort of agreement,’ he says. ‘Something along the lines of you paying me some money and me keeping your little secret. And then there’s Asif too. He’ll need paying off. He heard it all as well.’
I tut at him. ‘You’re so immature.’
He smirks. ‘You’ll be in so much trouble when I grass you up.’
‘I haven’t done anything.’
‘Why were you and Badger whispering in your room, then? Why are you so worried about the CCTV cameras and whether anyone saw you?’
I don’t answer his questions because I don’t have any answers other than the truth. ‘Here’s a deal for you,’ I say. ‘If you can make it up to your room before I count to five, I won’t kick your head in.’
The threat doesn’t work. Mikey stays where he is, doesn’t even shrink away from me. And the annoying grin on his face stays in place. He shakes his head.
‘We still have business to deal with,’ he says. ‘Unless, of course, you want me to blab to Mum and Dad . . .’
I take a deep breath to stop me from doing or saying something that we’ll both regret. ‘Don’t you think Mum and Dad would be interested to hear that you and your little friends have been spying on people, Mikey?’
‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘But my guess is they’ll be more interested in knowing what you’ve done.’
‘Yeah?’ I say. ‘So come on, then. What do you know? What is it that’s so bad? What happened that Mum and Dad are gonna be so outraged by?’
He stares at me for a second. The smug look on his face stays put. He pats his nose and winks. But he’s bluffing, I think.
‘Spit it out, then, Mikey. What are you gonna tell Mum and Dad?’
He gets up from the sofa and walks towards the door. ‘If that’s how you want to play it, fine,’ he says. ‘It’s your funeral.’
Summer
As soon as I hear Mum’s key in the door, I put my book down, move the cat off my legs and get up from my bed. I take the empty mug from my bedside table and go through. Mum’s already in the kitchen by the time I get there, putting shopping away in the fridge. My mug clunks against the sink as I go to wash it. Mum looks up.
‘Oh, hello, Summer,’ she says. ‘I didn’t see you there.’
‘Hi.’
I go and sit at the table and start fiddling with the candle that’s sitting in the middle of the table, move it around across the checkered plastic tablecloth, like it’s a chess table and the candle is a knight. One place to the side and two places forward over and over again till the candle gets right to the other side of the table. I can hear Mum going through the cupboards, getting out saucepans.
‘Did you have a nice day?’ Mum says.
I look up. I’m not sure if it was good or not. It was just weird. ‘Yeah,’ I say, because I don’t feel like going into the details.
Mum doesn’t say anything. I watch as she starts to chop an onion. It makes me cringe slightly. Mum’s left-handed and it never looks safe when she chops. So instead I start moving the candle across the table like a bishop, diagonally, trying to cover every dark blue square in as few moves as possible. After a while I get bored and look up at Mum.
‘I went to Grandad’s today,’ I say.
‘Oh, you are good for doing that, Summer,’ Mum says. ‘How was he?’
I don’t answer right away. I think about it. Grandad was kind of weird today, the way he was talking to me. I’ve never really heard him talk about that sort of stuff before. I always thought he didn’t have any feelings, because he never shows them.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘I think.’
Mum doesn’t say anything. She’s concentrating on cooking tea rather than the conversation. The onions start to hiss as they drop on to the hot oil. Mum stirs with a wooden spoon and then turns down the heat.
‘I did his shopping for him, like you asked.’
Mum starts chopping some garlic. ‘Thanks, love,’ she says. ‘I do worry about him eating well. Do you think he’s looking thinner?’
‘I dunno,’ I say. ‘Not that I’ve noticed.’
‘I worry about him though,’ she says. ‘Your nan did all the cooking in that household. She wouldn’t let anyone else into her kitchen, certainly not Harry. I doubt he even knows how to boil an egg.’
She doesn’t need to tell me this. I know this much.
‘I could make him some batches of food to put in the freezer,’ she says. ‘Lasagne and stews and things. You can help if you want.’
I don’t answer her. I go over to the sink, get myself a drink of water and then go back to the table.
‘Mum,’ I say, ‘do you ever wonder what happened to Dad when he died?’
Mum stops opening the can of tomatoes and looks at me. ‘What do you mean?’
The way she looks at me makes me feel like I just brought something up that I shouldn’t have. ‘I mean, when he died, what do you think happened to him? Do you think he just stopped existing or did his spirit go somewhere?’
Mum keeps opening the tomato tin, then turns to me. ‘I’d like to think so,’ she says. ‘Definitely. It would be sad if death were the end, wouldn’t it?’
I honestly don’t know what to think. ‘S’pose,’ I say.
&n
bsp; Mum pours the tomatoes into the pan. I hear them bubble and spit as they meet the hot oil. ‘I sometimes think that I can feel Dad’s presence,’ she says.
‘Do you?’
‘Not all the time,’ she says. ‘But sometimes I just know that he’s there, watching what’s going on, guiding us, helping us.’
‘Like a ghost?’
Mum shakes her head. She stirs the pasta sauce and then lets the wooden spoon rest against the edge of the pan. She turns around, leans against the cooker. ‘Not exactly,’ she says. ‘Not like he’s haunting us. More like he’s still sharing the special things that happen. Don’t you think so too?’
I make a face like I don’t know, because I seriously have no clue.
The room’s silent for a while except for the sounds of the gas hob and the sauce in the pan bubbling away. Mum fills the kettle and puts it on. ‘Do you want a drink, Summer?’
I shake my head.
Mum gets herself a mug and a herbal tea bag.
‘Did you know Nan went to see spiritualists after Dad died?’
Mum immediately stops what she’s doing and looks at me. ‘Pardon?’
‘She went to spiritualists. Grandad told me today.’
‘Did he?’
I nod. ‘Spiritualists are the people who do ouija boards and stuff, aren’t they?’
‘No. Not exactly,’ Mum says. ‘They believe they can communicate with spirits. I don’t think they use ouija boards though.’
‘Do you think they can, then? Communicate with spirits?’
‘I doubt it,’ Mum says. ‘I’ve got an open mind to most things, but that sounds like a load of mumbo-jumbo to me.’
‘But you said you believe in spirits.’
Mum shifts uncomfortably. She looks away from me and stirs the saucepan. ‘That doesn’t mean I believe people can speak to them though, Summer.’
Neither of us says anything for a while. As I’m sitting here, staring at the tablecloth, I can’t help but think about the tapes in Grandad’s loft. I try and imagine Nan sitting at a table with a medium, hands linked, eyes closed, hoping to get a message from Dad, feeling desperate, guilty, sad. And it makes me feel sad too.
‘So, what did your grandad say about the spiritualists?’
I look up. Mum’s trying not to look too interested, but I can tell she is.
‘Not much,’ I say. ‘He said they were frauds and that he told Nan not to go. And when I asked him for more information, he said that he shouldn’t have said anything in the first place.’
Mum leans against the cooker again and stares into space. She lets out a noise kind of like a sigh.
‘He also said that Nan had recordings of the sessions.’
Mum looks at me again. ‘Really?’
I nod. ‘They’re in the loft at his house.’
‘Hmmm . . .’
Mum doesn’t say anything else after that and I let the subject go. But Mum slips into a strange kind of mood, like she’s not there at all, like she’s thinking about something. About Dad, I s’pose. I feel bad for bringing it up. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.
Johnny
It doesn’t take long for me to come round. I’ve started to expect this to happen now – to wake up in the middle of the night. I look at the clock. 2.43 a.m. Again.
I put my head in my hands, squeeze my eyes closed and press on them with my fingers till I see swirly shapes swimming around in my head. I was dreaming about her again. The Poisoned Dwarf. I saw her staring at me. She shook her head sadly, like she was disgusted I could sleep after what I’d done.
I look around the room. I have that same feeling again. Like someone else is here. Like I’m being watched. I sigh. I put my head in my hands again and rub my face. This is beyond a joke. I’m waking up every single night like clockwork. I see things. I’m on edge all the time. Every time I see a shadow, I think something’s there, lurking, watching me, waiting for me. And I really don’t know what to do about it because I don’t know if this is real or I’m imagining it or whether someone’s winding me up or what. I want to tell someone else what’s happening, but how can I? If I tell anyone, I’ll have to tell the whole story. The only people I could tell are Jake or Badger or Drac – and I can’t imagine they’d have any sympathy. They’d tell me to get a grip.
I look up again. There’s no one else in the room, but the window is wide open again. And the stupid helium balloon that Jake bought is hovering around halfway between the floor and the ceiling, bobbing around in the breeze, now half-deflated.
I get out of bed. I shut the window and then go through to the bathroom to take a leak. When I turn to go back to my room, the balloon’s waiting in the bathroom doorway. The skull is staring at me, mocking me, following me. I am going mad. Only mad people think they’re being followed by balloons. I take a swing at it and punch it. There’s a dull boof as the balloon moves away a bit. Then it bobs around so that the skull is facing me again.
‘Leave me alone, you stupid balloon,’ I say. ‘I’m not scared of you.’
And at that very second, I see Mikey’s bedroom door open. He comes out of his room, looking sleepy. He looks at me and the balloon and smirks.
‘Jeez, J. You really are going mental,’ he says. ‘You do know it’s not normal to talk to balloons, right?’
I take a deep breath and ignore the urge to punch Mikey. I walk back to my room and close the door before the balloon, or Mikey, can follow me.
Summer
The more I think about Nan’s tapes, the more that I think it’s my right to listen to them. From what I’ve been told, they’re tapes that my nan made when she wanted to find out about my dad. And seeing as no one ever tells me anything about my dad, seeing as I never even got the chance to meet him, I think I should be allowed to listen to them.
I went round to Grandad’s again earlier to check in on him and make sure he’s all right. Which he was. Kind of. He’s looking after himself OK, but something’s different. I guess that’s to be expected. To be honest, there’s not that much I can do to help Grandad apart from making him the odd cup of coffee and popping to the shops. He’s too proud to accept help. As far as he’s concerned, he doesn’t need it. So I spent a lot of the time there just milling around, looking at the pictures on the mantelpiece, sitting in Nan’s chair, looking in the basket beside her chair where she kept her cross-stitch things, all the time wondering about the spiritualist tapes that Grandad mentioned, wondering where they are, whether I could have them and what’s on them.
I asked him about them at one point. But he acted like they didn’t exist, like I’d imagined the conversation we had the other day. I let the subject drop cos I didn’t want to upset him.
When I got home from Grandad’s, I searched the internet to find out exactly what spiritualists do, but I struggled to get my head around it all. What I did understand is that spiritualists believe people have spirits that still exist after they die and that they can communicate with the living. Kind of what I guessed anyway. I also found out that spiritualism is a religious movement and there are churches that have spiritualist services where they do the same thing – contact the dead. There’s a church near here.
I’m not sure whether I believe in it all, but I definitely want to hear Nan’s tapes. And I will. I have to find out what Nan found out. I have to find out about Dad. And I want to hear Nan’s voice again. Short of sneaking up into the loft and finding them for myself though, I don’t know how I’m gonna get the tapes.
Johnny
As soon as I get back from footy training, Mikey’s there, coming out of the living room, smirking. I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist.
‘All right, Johnny, you big ginger weirdo,’ he says to me.
I step inside the house and shut the front door behind me.
‘Did ickle J-J have a nasty, horrid dream last night?’ he says in a baby voice.
I ignore him. I walk straight past him to the kitchen and get myself a drink.
Mikey follows me. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t want to talk about it?’
I finish my glass of water. ‘Grow up.’
‘I think it’s you that needs to grow up,’ he says. ‘Talking to balloons is not normal.’
I shake my head. ‘Shut up, Mikey.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘It’s probably just your guilty conscience sending you a little bit cuckoo. Guilt can really mess you up.’
I barge past Mikey into the hallway and then on to the stairs. He follows me and stands in the hall. I stop on the stairs.
‘If you don’t stop acting like an idiot, I’m gonna beat you to a pulp before long,’ I say.
That doesn’t wipe the smirk from Mikey’s face. If anything, the smirk gets wider. ‘Maybe you should tell someone what’s on your mind. Confess,’ he says. ‘I’m sure the police would love to know your story.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say. And then I go up to my room.
Summer
I’m feeling nervous. Why did I think it was a good idea to approach a stranger and ask him to go on a date? It so isn’t the kind of thing that I normally do. We’ve barely even spoken thirty words to each other. He could turn out to be a total idiot for all I know. Or, more likely, he’s wondering who the freak in black is who asked him on a date when she didn’t even know him.
But I have a feeling, a hunch, a conviction deep down. I can’t explain what it is because I don’t know myself. There’s just something about him that’s right. He’s normal. He’s not putting on an act like most boys my age. I feel comfortable with him.
I guess I’ll find out if I’m right soon enough because here I am, waiting outside the shopping centre in Wimbledon. It was the first place I thought of when I texted him back, but now I’m here it seems like a pretty lousy place to meet. People usually do stuff like this at the cinema or a restaurant or something, don’t they? It’s so like me to choose the lamest place on the planet to meet. I’m so rubbish at doing things like this. This is why I’ve never had a boyfriend.
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