by Mark Edwards
‘Mummy, what is it? What’s the matter?’ Olivia was looking out the side window. ‘Did you see a ghost, Mummy? Was there a ghost in the park?’
Jessica stared at her. A ghost? Where had that come from? She didn’t even want to think about it. Because something very real, something tangible, had just happened. Someone had been following them. And she had no idea who, or why.
Chapter 8
Jessica ended the call as Will came back into the kitchen.
‘What did the police say?’ he asked.
‘Not much. They said if it happens again I should try to get the registration number. But they didn’t exactly sound concerned. They said it was probably a couple of boy racers messing around.’ She rubbed her arms. ‘I still feel cold. Can I have a hug?’
He put his arms around her.
‘You’re shivering,’ he said, pulling her more tightly against him and kissing her hair. He was warm and smelled good and, she thought, if it wasn’t for the kids she would take him to bed right now, hide with him beneath the covers. That’s what they used to do if either of them had a bad day, back before they had kids. They’d get home from work, open a bottle of wine and go upstairs.
Maybe he was reading her thoughts because she could feel him getting turned on. His hand went to the small of her back and she tried to enjoy the sensation as he pulled her closer, but she was unable to relax. What did Izzy use to call it? A vigilance centre, that was it. Izzy said that women were always alert to danger. It was something she had taught in her workshops. To fully enjoy herself, a woman needed her vigilance centre to be relaxed. And right now, Jessica felt like a hen surrounded by foxes.
She pulled away just as Felix came into the room. He went straight over to the cupboard where biscuits and crisps were kept.
‘There’s nothing to eat,’ he complained, staring into the cupboard, which was stuffed full of unhealthy snacks, many of which Felix had thrown into the trolley on their last visit to the supermarket, when Jessica had been too tired to argue. Too Tired To Argue. If she ever wrote a book about parenting, that would be the title.
‘Have an apple,’ Will said. ‘They’re not poisonous, I promise.’
Felix ignored his dad and approached the fridge. Jessica intercepted him and pulled him into her arms.
‘Come on, give your poor old mum a cuddle.’
‘Do I have to?’ He said it with a smile.
‘You do if you want any snacks.’
He allowed her to hug him for a few seconds before pulling away. She ruffled his hair and admired his good looks. People were always telling her he was the spitting image of her, though his strawberry-blonde hair was lighter than hers. With his hazel eyes and Cupid’s bow lips, she could mostly see Will in him. Will and, from certain angles, Isabel. Auntie Izzy. She would never forget having to tell him, aged five, that she had ‘gone to heaven’. He’d had a lot of questions. Were there shops in heaven? Could you take all your things with you? What if you forgot something – could you pop back and get it? Tears pricked her eyes when she remembered how sweet he’d been, worrying that the worst thing about death was the risk of being separated from one’s toys.
She wondered if he could actually remember Izzy now or if she only existed through family anecdotes and photos.
‘I’d better go and make sure Livvy’s cleaned her teeth, and get her to bed,’ Will said.
‘She’s acting weird again,’ said Felix as his dad left the kitchen.
‘What do you mean?’ Jessica asked.
‘She was going on about ghosts. She said Nanny’s house is haunted. I told her she was talking rubbish. I mean, Nanny doesn’t even live in a house. She lives in a flat.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t think we should have let her go trick-or-treating. She’s been acting crazy ever since.’ He took a bite of the Babybel he’d found in the fridge. ‘Still, I’m glad she didn’t fall off that balcony.’
‘I’m glad you’re glad.’
Will came back into the room, looking pained. ‘Olivia won’t let me read her bedtime story. She says you need to do it, Jess.’
‘But it’s your turn.’
Jessica enjoyed reading stories to Olivia, but after the day she’d had she couldn’t face the whole routine: ‘I’m thirsty, I’m hungry, I need a wee, I need seventeen very specific soft toys in bed with me.’
Will spun on his heel. ‘All right, I’ll try. But don’t be surprised if I’m up there for an hour, arguing with her.’
Jessica sighed. ‘Fine. I’ll do it.’
As soon as she entered Olivia’s room and saw the delight on her face – mixed, admittedly, with a smirk of victory – Jessica felt bad about being reluctant to read the bedtime story. One day soon, she knew from experience, Olivia wouldn’t want stories any more. She’d want to be on her iPad or, hopefully, she’d prefer to read books herself. Jessica should cherish these moments. That’s what everyone told her.
And she did. She really did.
‘Come on, then, let’s tuck you in.’
Olivia snuggled under the duvet with Stretch the giraffe tucked under her arm. She blinked slowly and, not for the first or even thousandth time, Jessica marvelled at her long lashes, the softness of her cheeks, the beautiful creature she had given birth to.
‘What story would you like?’
‘There’s a Monster in My Pocket.’
Jessica suppressed a moan. ‘Are you sure? We’ve had this one lots of times.’
‘I want it.’
Olivia went to sit up and Jessica hurriedly said, ‘Okay, okay.’
It was a story about a little girl who carried a tiny monster around with her. The monster whispered reassurances to the girl when she was frightened, gave her advice, helped her stand up to mean children.
Jessica didn’t need to read the book; she knew it by heart.
Halfway through, Olivia – who had already closed her eyes, so Jessica thought she was about to fall asleep – said, ‘I’m not afraid of monsters.’
‘I know, sweetheart.’
Jessica got two words into the next line when Olivia added, ‘Or ghosts.’
Jessica laid the book flat on her lap. ‘Ghosts aren’t real, Livvy. But if they were, you wouldn’t need to be afraid of them.’
‘I know.’ She still had her eyes closed, a smile on her lips.
Jessica carried on with the story. As she neared the end – when the bullies learn the error of their ways and everyone becomes friends with the monster – Olivia’s breathing changed, so Jessica was sure she was asleep. She waited, thinking about the hot bath she was going to have, lots of bubbles, while she listened to her Russell Brand podcast and imagined he was in there with her. She was just about to get up and creep from the room when Olivia spoke.
‘Auntie Izzy’s a nice ghost.’
‘What?’
But Olivia was asleep.
Jessica had a bath, listened to her podcast, drank half a bottle of wine. When she went to bed, Will stayed up to watch the football highlights.
She went to sleep thinking about Larry. When she had told Will the story, a few months into their relationship, when she trusted him enough to share, he had laughed at that name. Larry.
‘Where did that come from?’ he had asked.
‘Larry was the name of one of my mum’s uncles. He had a temper when he was a young man, apparently. Was known for throwing things around, smashing crockery and slamming doors. There were darker rumours too, that he hit his wife, smacked the kids “a bit too hard”, even by the standards of the time. A bit of a dickhead, by all accounts.’
They had been lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, curtains thrown open, sunlight on the sheets. Jessica was hopelessly in love, floating through life in a haze of blissed-out desire. But talking about Larry had made her pull the quilt up to her throat, as if there was a presence in the room, watching her, making the temperature drop.
‘Shortly after it all started, my mum said our visitor reminded her of Uncle Larry. It stu
ck. Whenever something happened, Mum would say, “Larry’s having another tantrum.” Or “Sounds like Larry’s on the warpath.”’
‘Did she think it actually was him?’ Will had asked. To his credit, he hadn’t immediately tried to explain what the family had gone through, like all Jessica’s previous boyfriends had. It was a male disease: attempting to find a solution for everything. But Will simply listened. It was one of the things she most liked about him, along with his twin abilities to make her laugh and come.
‘No, Uncle Larry – the real one – was still alive at this point, in a nursing home in Bromley. I’d met him a few times. He seemed to have mellowed in his old age.’
Unlike the new Larry, the invisible one, who got worse, more violent, more tempestuous, with every passing day.
Until the day he stopped.
At first, Jessica had felt as if she were holding her breath, unable to believe that it was really over. But she was a child back then, ten years old, and life moved on, more quickly for her than it did for Izzy, who was three years older. For most of Jessica’s teenage years, it was a strange episode in the past, one for which she had no explanation. As the memories became less vivid, so they lost their power to scare her, and when she grew up and went off to college she decided that she no longer wanted to be that girl, that haunted girl. So she didn’t tell anyone about Larry, not until she trusted them to keep her secret. Her mysterious secret. But she never fully made up her mind about whether Larry had been real. Mum was convinced that ghosts and spirits existed. Despite appearing to believe in Larry at first, Izzy had later insisted he couldn’t be real. And Jessica found herself in the middle, unsure what to believe.
She was still thinking about all of this after her bath when Will crept into the room. She pretended to be asleep and then, shortly after he began to snore softly beside her, she really was.
Until a smashing sound woke her.
She opened her eyes. Had she dreamed it?
Was there somebody in the house?
Her mind flashed back to the car that had followed her around the park. Had they followed her home? Were they downstairs now? An intruder?
A murderer?
Will was still asleep and she nudged him with an elbow, hissing his name. He grunted and she prodded him, saying, ‘Will. Wake up. I think there’s someone in the house.’
He sat up. ‘What?’
‘I heard something smash.’
He rubbed his eyes, part of him still submerged in a dream. ‘What, like a window?’
‘I don’t know.’ She was whispering. ‘I’m going to call the police.’
‘But what if—?’
He was interrupted by a series of thudding sounds. And then much worse – a high-pitched scream.
‘What the fuck?’
But Jessica was already out of bed, heading towards the bedroom door, shouting her daughter’s name.
She hurried along the landing, Will right behind her, and into Olivia’s room. The night light was on, casting an orange glow over the room, and Olivia was sitting up in bed, eyes wide, confused and fearful. As soon as she saw her parents she began to cry.
Jessica sat on the little bed and pulled Olivia against her. The little girl trembled in her arms. Her pyjamas were wet and cold with sweat. Jessica shushed her, told her it was okay, taking in the room as she did so, while Will stood there with a look of shocked incomprehension on his unshaven face.
The room was a mess. Olivia’s books were scattered across the floor. Cuddly toys lay on the carpet. A My Little Pony poster had been torn from the wall and ripped in two. Then Jessica spotted the source of the smashing noise that had woken her. A plate Olivia had been given at her christening, which had sat on a display shelf, appeared to have been thrown against the wall. It lay in a dozen pieces in the corner.
Will stared at Jessica, then at Olivia. He crouched beside the bed. ‘What happened, princess?’
Olivia buried her face against Jessica’s chest.
‘I want to sleep in your bed.’
‘That’s fine. Let’s get you out of these wet PJs, eh? Will . . .’ She gestured towards the wardrobe.
He found a fresh pair and, as Jessica helped her out of the damp ones, Olivia looked around at the mess.
‘Izzy’s naughty, isn’t she, Mummy?’ she said. ‘It’s because she’s cross about what happened to her.’
Jessica and Will exchanged a look. In the glow of the night light, he appeared as sick as Jessica felt.
‘Livvy,’ she began, pulling the clean pyjama top over her daughter’s head, ‘it can’t have been Auntie Izzy.’
‘But it was.’
‘Sweetheart, it can’t have been.’
Olivia stamped her bare foot. ‘It was Auntie Izzy. I’m not lying.’
Jessica saw Will’s Adam’s apple bob before he spoke. ‘Why did Auntie Izzy do it, Livvy?’
Olivia didn’t hesitate. ‘She’s cross because of what he did to her.’
‘What who did to her?’ Jessica asked.
Olivia gave her that look, the one that said Don’t you know anything?
‘The bad man, Mummy.’ She picked up her toy giraffe and hugged it, little hands around its long neck. ‘The bad man who pushed her.’
Chapter 9
October 2012
‘Is it true?’
Isabel had been waiting for this question for a long time, but hadn’t expected a journalist from the local paper, the Bromley Gazette, this unassuming woman with stringy blonde hair and spots of pink in her cheeks, to be the one to bring it up. They were here to talk about Isabel’s business, not her teenage years.
‘Is it true that when you were a kid your house was haunted by a poltergeist?’
Isabel took a long drink of water, gathering her thoughts. They were in a little bistro that had recently opened in the centre of Beckenham. Isabel knew the chef – he and his wife were clients – and part of her wanted to flee to the kitchen to avoid this question. Since setting up Mind+Body, she hadn’t mentioned Larry to anyone. She knew how it would look to potential customers, not to mention her bank manager and backers. Her business was a hard enough sell as it was, and it was vital for her to seem credible and down to earth.
But she also knew that denying it would be fruitless. It had been in the news back then, after one of the investigators, that idiot Simon Parker, had talked to the press. Isabel had been thirteen at that point. Mum had gone along with it, letting a journalist and photographer from a national tabloid come along and take photos and spend a night in the house. Nothing had happened that evening, though the disappointed writer reported ‘a chilly atmosphere and an air of menace’. Their cat, Oscar, had ‘hissed at an unseen presence’ too.
It was just enough for the story to run, containing juicy details of what Isabel and the rest of the family had experienced. Crockery flying across the dining room. Coming home to find a knife embedded in a kitchen cupboard. Mysterious puddles in the bathroom. The terrifying phone calls that, according to Mum, sounded like someone was calling from hell.
There was a photo of the three of them, Mum, Isabel and Jessica, on the sofa, beneath the family portrait with the cracked glass. Oscar was on Isabel’s lap in the picture, glaring at the camera.
In the report Simon Parker, the so-called ‘Ghostbuster of South London’, had said it was quite common for unexplained phenomena to occur in the homes of pubescent girls, as if Isabel’s hormones were causing cups to fly from shelves. How she wished she did have that power. She’d have sent a whole set of cups and saucers, complete with teapot, flying at his stupid head.
The next day, Isabel had been the centre of attention at her school. The freak.
A clear memory came back to her: she was standing alone by the lockers, wiping her eyes and cursing Mum for inviting the press into their home. She banged her locker shut and swore aloud, using a word she would never normally use, a word beginning with c, and then heard a noise behind her. She whirled around, thinking it was a teache
r or one of the bullies, but it was some kid in her year. A nerdy-looking boy with a bowl haircut and a bad case of acne.
‘I believe you,’ he said in a tremulous voice. ‘They’re all idiots . . . They’re not like us.’
That had been the worst moment – realising this spotty kid thought they had something in common. That she was a member of the loser crowd now, and for a while she had given in to it.
But not for long. Soon afterwards she had broken free, doing everything possible to fit in, to be popular and successful, to prove she wasn’t a loser.
And look at her now! Although she had no desire to be famous, she wanted success, and because of the nature of her business she was already a kind of local celebrity. Recently she’d been at an event for local entrepreneurs and a guy her age had approached her and told her how he’d always known she’d do well. She didn’t recognise him, which made him look hurt, and then someone had whisked her off before she could ask him how she knew him.
The Bromley Gazette journalist, whose name was Suzanna Salter, reached into her bag and produced a printout. The two-page spread from the tabloid, dated September 1993.
‘It was a lot of nonsense,’ Isabel said, hoping her fake laugh was convincing.
‘Do you mean your mother made it all up?’ Suzanna asked.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t feel particularly comfortable discussing it.’
‘I understand, but I think our readers will be interested.’
‘I doubt that, Suzanna. Listen, it was a difficult time, my dad had left us, my mum was in a state. I really don’t want to upset her by stirring it all up again. Okay?’
‘I guess . . .’
‘Good. Now, can we get back to the subject we’re supposed to be talking about? It’s supposed to be about my business. I thought you were going to ask me about being an entrepreneur, not all this rubbish.’
Chastened, Suzanna nodded. ‘You’re right. Sorry, Isabel. So . . . when did you come up with the idea for Mind+Body?’
Isabel drove away having promised to give Suzanna and her bloke a free taster session. She wouldn’t be the first journalist to visit Mind+Body. They all arrived thinking they were going to get an amusing story about sex in the suburbs but went away with the glow of converts, writing rapturous articles that brought even more clients through the front door. They came from all over London and Kent; she’d even had people coming from Manchester and Birmingham, and there was talk of opening a centre up north, plus another in the capital. It was her vision: Blissful Massage spreading out across the country, joy and calm and satisfaction radiating through the nation. A happier Britain, all because of her.