The Girl Who Wasn't There

by Karen McCombie

  Mr Butterfield? But that doesn’t match up with the ghost story Hannah and Patience and everyone told me, I realize. My heart, my stomach, even the arm holding the heavy bucket all sink with disappointment.

  But what “bad” thing had happened to Mr Butterfield, I wonder…

  “Sorry, Maisie – how useless am I? I haven’t been of any help with the exciting ghost story, have I?” Miss Carrera laughs, bursting into my thoughts. “Now show me: where exactly is this little ghost girl meant to appear?”

  “Over there, by that window,” I tell her, pointing to the gleaming, glass-twinkling window beyond the junk sculpture.

  “Well, you know, I hate to disappoint you, Maisie, but I’m in here on my own a lot, and I’ve seen no trace of spirit girls from the late 1800s or whenever,” she says, hands on hips, blowing a stray wisp of hair from her face. “All I’ve seen is are the traces of greasy fingers made by twenty-first century girls! So can you ask your dad to do me a very big favour and clean the inside of the windows too?”

  As I make my wobbly way over with the refilled bucket of water, I see what Miss Carrera is getting at; there are fingermarks aplenty on the glass, from all the girls who sit here at Wednesday Art Club probably, chatting and staring out of the window instead of working.

  And with a gleam of sun on the glass, I make out one smudged shape in particular… A pointed edge. Several points, in fact. A squidgy star, a stick baby in the middle of it.

  I smile to myself, almost feeling Kat’s presence, even if she isn’t here today. I imagine her breathing on the glass, doing her little doodle, before salsa-ing off to the Spanish sounds of Miss Carrera’s (stolen) CD.

  I’m so glad she’s my friend.

  “Wait till I tell you what I just found out!” I whisper to Kat’s stick figure, since it’ll have to do till I next see her.

  And like Mrs Watson said, we’ve got all the time in the world…

  There IS a ghost.

  No, there isn’t.

  There IS a ghost.

  No, there isn’t.

  I’m in the dilapidated summerhouse, in our dilapidated garden. It’s the first time I’ve properly ventured out here, rather than just peering at it from the house, but Clem’s been doing my head in ever since she got home from college. She’s been playing her horrible drum and bass music so loud I couldn’t stand it.

  I couldn’t stand hearing it booming in my room-next-door-to-hers.

  I couldn’t stand it thumping and thundering everywhere I went in the cottage.

  I couldn’t stand it that she kept saying “Sorry, what? You want me to turn it up?” every time I tried to ask her to please turn it down.

  So until Dad finishes up at school, I’m planning on hiding out here, and it’s turned out to be pretty nice so far, if you just ignore the nettles on the way in and the scuttling bugs once you’ve made it inside.

  There IS a ghost.

  No, there isn’t.

  There IS a ghost.

  No, there isn’t.

  The reason those words are wafting through my head is ’cause I don’t trust my instincts one bit, which might disappoint Mum – if she was in a position to know what was going on with my life, that is.

  But who could blame me? I thought I’d always be able to rely on Lilah and Jasneet, and look how wrong I got that. I thought Saffy seemed like fun, and it turned out she was the opposite of fun.

  So when it comes to figuring out if a ghost haunts Nightingale School, or if there’s a reasonable, rational explanation for what I’ve seen, I think I’ve got a better chance of getting the right answer by sitting here in the tatty summerhouse plucking petals off this flower in my hand than trusting my useless instincts.

  And maybe my current edge-of-grouchy mood is down to the fact that I’m slightly disillusioned after Miss Carrera laughed off the idea of any unusual, out-of-the-ordinary schoolgirls materializing in her art room when I spoke to her an hour or so ago. (My instincts were pretty off-kilter when I decided to talk to her too, I guess…)

  “Oi, Maisie! Visitor!” Clem suddenly barks from the back door of our house before instantly walking straight inside again.

  Wow, my big sister is quite the hostess. (Not.)

  Then when I see who she’s left standing marooned on the small, mossy patio, I quickly stand up from my daydreaming and petal-plucking.

  “Hi!” says Kat, giving me one of her funny little-kid waves. “Should I come over to you?”

  “Sure,” I say, scrunching up the half-bald rose I’ve been idly fooling around with and chucking it out of the window of the summerhouse (easy – there’s no glass in it).

  Hey, Kat’s in her school uniform … which I guess wouldn’t be so surprising if she’d actually made it into school today. Or did she, and I just didn’t see her? Unless she was avoiding me for some reason. That happened a lot at my old school.

  My sudden paranoia makes me bumbling and shy.

  “Just watch out for the nettles,” I call out, slipping Mum’s notebook into the big pocket of the baggy cardie I changed into once I got home.

  “How cool is it to have this in your garden?” says Kat, pulling at the summerhouse door to open it.

  Then realizing it’s jammed but has no glass in it, she simply steps in through the gap instead and joins me.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” I agree, warming up a little now I see her smile. “I’m going to ask my dad if he can fix it up a bit. Then I could paint the whole thing, stick some cushions and stuff in here, and have it as my special place.”

  As I chatter and Kat sits, I notice the dark rings under her eyes… She doesn’t look a hundred per cent well. She must’ve been off. Wonder what’s been up with her today? I’ll ask in a second, once my stupid shyness fades properly.

  “Sounds good. I’d love to see it returned to its former glory,” says Kat, fooling around with a fake posh voice, and a flourish of one hand.

  “I could have an opening ceremony when it’s done,” I fool around back. “With a red ribbon to cut and fancy canapés and stuff.”

  I hold my hand up, sticking my pinkie in the air.

  “Sounds very fancy,” laughs Kat. “Would I be invited?”

  “Why, of course you’d be invited,” I reply. “You’d be my guest of honour.”

  A small jangle goes off somewhere inside my head, alerting me to the fact that Kat might not have been ill; maybe she was absent because of something to do with her family, her mum, even? But I know that jangle is just my instincts talking, jabbering more like, and we all know how unreliable they are…

  “Ooh, your guest of honour? That would be fun,” Kat says, her eyes taking in every nook and cranny of this old, glorified shed as she settles herself cross-legged on the creaky, built-in box bench. “Hey, and you could always invite your old friends here, once it’s all done up.”

  “I don’t have any old friends to invite.”

  Well, that came out nice and bluntly, with no sugar on top.

  “How come?” asks Kat, her fingers running over the summerhouse’s rough weather-battered surfaces, nails picking at loose paint and wood.

  So, is this it?

  Is this when I come out and tell her?

  Well, I guess it’s been a day of being brave. An hour ago I asked Dad about Donna, told Miss Carrera about the ghost.

  It’s time to act like a diver, teetering on the top board at the swimming pool. It’s time to dive in…

  “I got in a mess at my last school,” I begin, curling my legs up underneath me, to make myself smaller, as if I’m a target.

  “Yeah? What kind of mess?” Kat asks, interested but not all super-keen, as if she’s sniffing for gossip.

  “I had these best friends, Lilah and Jasneet. I mean, for years they were my best friends, ever since primary school. And then this new girl called Saf
fy Price arrived, and she started hanging out with us.”

  Kat tilts her head as she listens, her silky hair bow flopping to one side. “Hmm, let me guess…” she says with a sympathetic smile. “It didn’t go well?”

  “It did for a while,” I tell her. “Saffy seemed pretty good fun. It felt like she fitted in with the three of us.”

  “There’s a big fat but coming, isn’t there?”

  It makes me more confident in telling my story, knowing Kat saw that but coming a mile away.

  “Uh-huh,” I say with a heavy nod.

  “Knew it,” says Kat, clapping her hands together. “I don’t like this Saffy already. Go on – tell me what happened. What was the but?”

  “But I kind of started to suss out that Saffy maybe wanted Lilah and Jasneet to herself,” I carry on, biting nervously at my thumbnail. “She began making all these snippy little comments, taking offence at things I was saying, even if I hadn’t meant anything at all.”

  “OK, now I really don’t like her,” Kat bursts out, with a mix of jokey protectiveness that I really appreciate. She slaps her palms down on the built-in bench for emphasis, but it’s so old and crumbly that I hear something go crack.

  “It’s all right, just a sort of lid thing has come loose. Nothing broken,” she says, trying to press a raised bit of wood back into place. “Carry on.”

  And I do, since I’ve got this far.

  “Honestly, for a long time, I didn’t want to believe that Saffy was slowly turning Lilah and Jasneet against me,” I say. “Then all of a sudden, I knew for sure.”

  “Yeah? How come?” asks Kat, still listening intently – though now her fingers seem to be trying to prise the lid in the seat open.

  “It was at the school fireworks party,” I say, watching as Kat’s hand rootles around in the space below the now-opened lid.

  Is she even listening to me properly?

  “Go on,” Kat looks up and urges me, so I guess she is.

  “We were allowed sparklers, if we were careful. I was careful, but Saffy was mucking around and giggling with Jasneet and Lilah, and somehow she fell back into me…”

  I crumple into myself, the memory of the moment too awful to bear.

  “What happened?” I hear Kat ask, much more softly now, no jokiness in her voice anymore.

  The words stick in my throat like small, jaggedy stones.

  “I hurt her,” I mumble in the tiniest of voices.

  “You did what, Maisie?” Kat asks, struggling to hear me.

  “I hurt her!” I say louder, lifting my head, the truth jarring my throat as the stones scrape and scratch. “I burned her face!”

  “Hey, hold on. It’s not like you meant to do it,” says Kat sharply. “You just told me; you were holding a sparkler, right? And that Saffy girl fell – which makes it an accident. Accidents are horrible, but they happen, Maisie. It’s not your fault.”

  Her voice suddenly has a wobble in it, as if she’s angry and hurt on my behalf.

  “Try telling everyone else that,” I mutter darkly, remembering the horrible scream coming from Saffy, the gut-churning fear that I’d blinded her, the ambulance siren shrieking closer through the dark and the crowds and the chaos.

  “So what happened next?” asks Kat.

  “The head teacher told Dad it would be best if he took me home,” I say, sorrowfully. “The next morning I ran up to Lilah and Jasneet at school, asking if they’d heard how Saffy was. But they were so weird; they just shrugged and looked at each other. I had to force them to say what they were trying not to say.”

  “Yeah? And did they say in the end?”

  “Uh-huh. They accused me of deliberately burning Saffy…” I tell Kat, wincing at the memory. “Even the head teacher believed that’s what happened, ’cause that’s what Saffy told him. Same went for Lilah and Jasneet, since Saffy convinced them it was the truth.”

  “So, Saffy must have gone away and thought about it, and realized the accident was a good way for her to get everyone mad at you – and on her side?” Kat suggests.

  “Yeah, that’s about it,” I say, realizing I’m rubbing my hands over my face the way Dad does when he’s stressed. “I got excluded for a week.”

  “Excluded? Like, banned from school?”

  “Uh-huh,” I mumble.

  What a week that was. I don’t think I stopped crying the whole time. In fact, I cried so much that Dad worried I’d get dehydrated, and kept forcing me to drink glasses of water, when he wasn’t busy comforting me, or on the phone, trying to get the head teacher to reconsider. (He didn’t.)

  I remember that my mild-mannered dad got so worked up that he was determined to go charging around to Saffy’s, to demand a meeting with her parents. “Then once she admits to them that she lied, I’ll phone Lilah and Jasneet’s parents, and set the record straight!”

  Poor Dad had his jacket on, his car keys in his hand, red rage in his eyes. It took me begging him not to do it – and Clem pointing out that Saffy’s parents might get the police involved – to get him to back off.

  And so we just waited out the week, crying (me) and hugging (him).

  “How did it feel, going back to school after that?” I hear Kat ask, since my head is now somehow buried under my baggy cardie.

  “I so didn’t want to go in and face everybody,” I mumble into the woolly material, “but Dad said I had to, or people would think I really did have something to be ashamed of, or that I was to blame.”

  “Wow. That must have been tough.”

  “Worse than tough. It was seriously bad. People thought I was to blame anyway. No one talked to me any more; not a single person. And then I saw Saffy for the first time and she had the tiniest scar on her cheek – like a spot! You wouldn’t even have known anything had happened to her.”

  The scar inside me – caused by not being believed – was much, much bigger, and still hadn’t healed.

  “Hey, it’s over,” says Kat, suddenly sounding nearer.

  I glance up slowly like a tortoise peering out of its shell and see that she’s on her knees in front of me. She grabs one of my hands in hers.

  “You’re safe and you’re here, Maisie; you know the truth. Don’t let it linger.”

  Don’t let it linger?

  My life has been ruined by an accident that someone turned to her advantage.

  “Don’t let it linger” is what you say about bad smells. Saffy Price is much more than a bad smell, she’s…

  Actually, you know something?

  Comparing her to a bad smell is kind of fitting when I think about it. And what Kat says is true: she isn’t around any more, poisoning the atmosphere.

  My life is here at Nightingale School now, and the scents of the cherry blossom trees and the lawn Dad just cut are in the air and filling my senses…

  “Want to see what’s in the box?”

  What?

  Slightly flustered, I notice that while Kat is still holding one of my hands in hers, in the other she’s grasping a slightly rusty-looking shortbread tin, complete with cutesie Scottie and Westie dogs on the front.

  Is that it? I’ve lugged around the pain of what happened at my last school for all these months and now the conversation is closed, just like that?

  No more stressing over the unfairness, the lack of loyalty, the finger-pointing, the shunning.

  It can’t just vanish because I want it to.

  Can it?

  Can it?!

  A sudden smile plays at my lips.

  What are the rules?

  Are there any rules?

  Is there a time limit for my misery, or can I just ditch it now, like a rucksack full of bricks, and walk away?

  “Yes,” I say to Kat, staring at the tin box, feeling suddenly floatily light, like someone’s turned up the brightness inside this
shady summerhouse. “Let’s open it.”

  “It was in there,” says Kat, nodding back at the bench and the hidden compartment in it.

  She prises the reluctant tin lid open with a creaky pop, and we see a collection of faded pieces of paper.

  Top Ten Singles – 1987 says one that seems to be torn out of a magazine. A list of songs and artists is underneath the heading, but I’m too curious to see what else is in the box to read any more.

  “Take a look at all this…” says Kat, passing me the sort of small plastic comb you wear in your hair when it’s piled up. “Isn’t it great?”

  I nod, examining a glass pot of iridescent blue eyeshadow; a pair of lacy, fingerless gloves; a snipped-out picture of a younger version of that old pop star Madonna. Just the sort of stuff my teenage mum and her friends would’ve been into, back in the eighties.

  “It’s like a time capsule!” I gasp, spreading out the bits and bobs on the bench next to me. “And look at this – it’s a postcard addressed to someone called Lindsey Butterfield. She must’ve been the old site manager’s daughter!”

  I’m not sure if Kat is paying any attention to what I’m saying.

  She’s too busy with what looks like a school photo.

  While she stares down at the image of the students, I gently pull the photo up, so I can read the writing I’ve just spotted on the back.

  Names – scribbled names of girls.

  Girls’ names like Lindsey.

  Other names in a row like Joanne, Laura, Sharon and Anne.

  Names that aren’t so common now, and that’s no surprise, since at the top it says Class 8G, 1987.

  My eyes scan the bottom row of names.

  Pamela, Jenny, Suzanne and Katherine…

  Kat makes a sound like a little whimper, and I glance up at her.

  Uh-oh: she really doesn’t look well, and I’ve forgotten to ask what was wrong with her today.

  “Hey, are you feeling OK?”

  I might have asked the question, but I don’t think I’ll hear Kat’s answer, even if she gets around to saying it.