Advent

  Even before that night he’d begun to understand that his parents didn’t like him talking about Miss Grey. It annoyed them that they couldn’t see her. That was fair enough once he thought about it, though they needn’t have felt bad since no one else could see her either, as far as he could tell; but then that had always been true, so he didn’t see why it should bother them all of a sudden. When he’d been smaller, he’d often listened to them laughingly explaining about his imaginary friend, if he’d happened to mention her to someone. ‘Oh, that’s his imaginary friend.’ It was, he learned, the proper term for someone like Miss Grey. Other children had imaginary friends, or at least some of them presumably did, although he soon found out that he didn’t know any. Also, none of the kids he did know liked being asked about the subject, though that made sense to him because he didn’t like being asked about Miss Grey either.

  It was a bit tricky explaining about her since she didn’t behave at all like other people. He guessed this was probably the point about imaginary friends. They were secret, special. The only person he’d ever known who really liked to talk about her was Auntie Gwen, and Auntie Gwen liked it so much Gavin found her eagerness a bit embarrassing, and usually tried to change the subject.

  ‘Is Miss Grey her real name?’

  Um, it’s just what I always call her, you know, like the people who look after you instead of Mummy at the school were called Miss Sandra or Miss Mara so I thought she was like that, except she didn’t say her name so I made up Miss Grey ’cos she’s quite grey.

  ‘What games do you like to play with her?’

  Um we don’t really play games, we just sort of—

  ‘Does she tell you stories?’

  Oh yes! Well, sort of.

  ‘What kind?’

  You know. Funny things. Um anyway it’s not really like telling stories. Can we get an ice cream before we go home?

  ‘Can you see her now?’ (Miss Grey smiled a little and shook her head.) No. I like plain Magnums.

  After the horrible night with the shouting and banging, Gavin became much more wary of mentioning her to anyone. He was angry with her, for the first time. He thought she’d lied to him about Mum, which made the shouting her fault, not his. It was weird and disturbing, anyway, because he was used to her being right about everything. Also, something had happened between his parents, not just the screaming. Even the next morning he could feel it wasn’t right. When they spoke to each other the silences between had a funny crackle to them.

  His mother sat him down the next day for one of her serious conversations. Did he understand that he couldn’t say things like that? Didn’t he realise that it upset people? Mummy and Daddy love you very much. And: ‘Gavin, you do understand that Miss Grey isn’t real, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ Yes, he did. ‘Real’ meant the things Mum and Dad were interested in: newspapers and cricket and the carpet and money and all that. ‘Not real’ were the things they couldn’t see and didn’t really have any interest in, like stories and Miss Grey and the inside birds and the funny people he sometimes caught glimpses of. He’d learned this distinction early on and accepted it, like the difference between red and blue.

  ‘Well, then, do you think maybe it’s time to say goodbye to Miss Grey?’

  Gav was old enough to know immediately that Mum meant something more than what she’d said. Obviously her question was stupid, since you only said goodbye to someone when they were going away, but he didn’t say that out loud. As always with the serious conversations that you had to sit down for, she was actually talking about something completely different, some other unspoken issue involving mysterious unhappiness and blame. He knew from experience that if he made the wrong guess as to what the real subject was, she’d either start crying or send him off in that particular way that made him feel like he’d done something horrible.

  ‘I just think you’re too old now to spend so much time playing a game like that.’

  He got it in a flash. He was supposed to become a different person. She wanted him to get more excited about carpets and newspapers and money. She wanted him to be more like Dad. She was telling him to ‘grow up’.

  ‘So, can you try not to talk about her any more? All right? Gavin? Would it help if we wrote her a goodbye letter? Perhaps we can think of all the adventures she’s going to have now. Places she can go instead. She might like not being stuck in London.’

  He nodded, because silent agreement was the best way to end the serious conversations as quickly as possible, but secretly he thought this whole plan ridiculous. Miss Grey wasn’t at all the type to go on adventures. She wasn’t like someone in a book.

  ‘You’re not going away, are you?’ he asked her, the next time he saw her. They were standing on the railway footbridge he crossed on his way back from school, in a sullen drizzle. She looked at him with her almost-sad face and held her hands out, cupped, gathering a puddle of rainwater. She bent and blew gently on the water, then opened her hands a fraction, letting it trickle away onto the tracks.

  ‘Please don’t,’ he said, feeling sick. ‘Please don’t leave me with Mum and Dad.’

  She made the cup again, but this time held it up over his head. He leaned back to see what she was doing and flinched as she dribbled the rain over his mouth. When he licked his lips there was a dark taste, a lonely taste, but despite that he was reassured. Though she never said a word except in dreams, he understood what she meant most of the time, like he understood some other things that didn’t speak, and he knew that she was promising he wouldn’t have to ‘grow up’ at home without her, even if the darkness and loneliness were coming.

  Unfortunately the growing-up happened all by itself, whether he liked it or (as was the case) not.

  As the months and years went by, Gavin stopped pleading with her not to leave him. He stopped speaking to her at all. He stayed away from the empty quiet corners, the lanes behind back-garden fences and the mud and scrub of the towpath along the river, those untended nooks and crannies of the city where the things that weren’t supposed to happen most often seemed to happen. He was learning, rapidly, that they weren’t just against his parents’ rules, but broke some other set of rules as well, some huge body of law that didn’t only apply at home but was mysteriously in place everywhere else too: school, on holiday, parties, anywhere that people gathered. He had a feeling the regulations would have been relaxed if Auntie Gwen had been around, but Auntie Gwen never came to stay any more, because, he gradually discovered, she wasn’t invited. Perhaps she was as illegal as Miss Grey. He couldn’t guess. No one ever explained the system to him.

  The imaginary-friend idea had to be discarded. Apparently that was just a silly thing little kids did, on a level with Mum’s stupid idea about writing Miss Grey a letter. What was she, then? A ghost? Boys at school talked about ghosts. There were stories about them, lots of them: he read all the ones he could find. None of the things in the stories sounded anything like Miss Grey.

  ‘How do you know ghosts don’t exist?’ he asked one evening at dinner.

  His father put his glass down and went very still. Gav had thought he was being clever, finding a way to talk about Miss Grey without actually mentioning her, but it was immediately evident that Dad had sussed him out, and Mum knew it too. The funny crackle appeared in the air over the table.

  ‘Well,’ said his mother carefully, ‘it’s science, I suppose, isn’t it? I mean, we know the world works a certain way. There’s all those ways you can prove that certain things must be true and so you know ghosts can’t be. Like going through walls. Appearing and disappearing. They’re just not possible.’

  ‘Derek says he’s seen one.’

  ‘Lots of people say they’ve seen one,’ his father said.

  ‘So they’re just wrong?’

  ‘They’re just idiots,’ said Dad, at the same time as Mum said, ‘People can think they’ve seen something, but we know they actually can’t have. Not what they think they saw. So perhaps
Derek imagined something or, I don’t know, saw something in a weird light or—’

  ‘Or he’s an idiot.’

  ‘Nigel, please. Or maybe he likes telling stories.’

  ‘Oh yes, I forgot that one. He could be a liar instead of an idiot.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Nigel.’

  The crackle got so loud Gavin thought he could actually hear it in his ears, as well as in his fingertips and stomach and the skin of his cheeks.

  ‘Anyway,’ his mother went on, fiddling with the stem of her wine glass, ‘people only believed in things like that because they didn’t know better.’

  ‘So how do they know better?’

  ‘By going to expensive schools,’ said his father. ‘Though it’s obviously not working for Derek.’

  ‘I give up,’ she said.

  Gavin sat and ate until the crackle got so bad it was hurting and then went to his room.

  The next time he saw Miss Grey – it was three or four days later, at school; she was standing holding her drab cloak tight around her, in a far corner of the visitors’ car park, watching him – he tried knowing better. Even though he could see perfectly clearly that she was there, as usual, he decided to know that she wasn’t. It was like trying to know the cars weren’t there, or the trees behind them. It was like persuading himself that he didn’t exist.

  So that was how Gavin began to realise that there was something special about himself.

  At the same time that the real things – home, school, his mother and father, being eleven and then twelve and then thirteen – got worse, the things that weren’t real got worse too. His dreams started to change, in confusing ways. Sometimes he longed for Miss Grey to come back into them, because in dreams he thought she could touch him as well as say things to him, but sometimes he dreaded it because the darkness and loneliness had come closer. He still occasionally had the sensation of dreaming things that were going to happen, but now instead of simple things like a fox in the garden or a hailstorm or Mum losing her glasses, the dreams were full of dark birds with beaks the colour of fire, or smoke hanging over a city, or an Eskimo girl tending a dying whale on a cold beach: things that couldn’t happen, and yet the feeling that they were real and waiting for him was even stronger than in the old come-true-tomorrow dreams. There was a change in Miss Grey too. It was like she knew he was trying to get rid of her and now it was her turn to plead with him not to leave. He found it harder and harder to remember on waking the words she’d spoken in his dreams, but at the same time it felt more and more urgent that he listen. The more he tried to ignore or forget whatever it was that was different about himself, the tighter it pressed in on him.

  ‘Go away,’ he said to Miss Grey, one February afternoon. It was twilight. She was squatting on the concrete coping at the edge of the towpath, trailing her fingers in the river: the tide was very high. He’d planned to just walk past, but instead he marched right up to her. He saw the way the silty water eddied around her hand, making little whorls and troughs, just the way science said it should.

  ‘Just go away. OK? Leave me alone.’

  Without looking at him, she picked up a twig and lowered it gently into the water. The falling tide was running steadily, sucking its burden of leaves and litter downstream, but the twig did not move. Tiny wavelets broke over its tip, as if it was anchored. Miss Grey picked up another, longer stick. She turned to look up at Gavin as she placed the second twig beside the first. Then she spread her fingers wide above the river as the current took hold of them both and carried them away together.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Gav said. ‘Forget it. I don’t want to go with you. I don’t care any more. I just want you to get out of my life.’

  A dog sniffed at his trousers. He jerked round and saw the jogger who went with the dog. She stared for a second as she splashed past.

  ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ he hissed, when the jogger was out of earshot. ‘Why me? Why can’t I be like everyone else?’

  She lifted her hands from the water and shuffled round to the muddy earth where Gav stood. He watched as she began to stroke the mud, erasing the mess of footprints, her small, rough hands quickly becoming caked black. When she’d made a smooth patch as wide as a sycamore leaf, she picked up another twig and dug a little curved furrow in the mud.

  ‘Forget it,’ Gav said, and walked past and went home.

  But he couldn’t forget it. That was his whole problem. Try as he might, he couldn’t know better. So the next time he went down to the towpath, a day or two later, he stopped at the place where she’d squatted. There, among the churned mud and gravel, was the tablet of smoothed earth, and in it a word had been engraved, like writing in the sand on a beach.

  COME

  Gavin stared at it for a long time. Then he stamped his shoe into it.

  Time weighed on him. He no longer spoke to her at all, ever. His dreams were a whirl of turbid darkness lit by fire, full of prophetic voices clamouring in alien speech. He was fourteen and miserable. The expensive school did its work and he at last knew that Miss Grey should not exist, that she was impossible, that the fact that he kept on seeing her was like an error in a calculation, a tear in the canvas of a painting, a misprint. He understood that if he tried to explain his life to anyone, the only thing they’d be able to think was that there was something seriously wrong with him. There was, surely, something seriously wrong with him. But because it had always been there, it was impossible for him to imagine how it was wrong.

  And as for these things happening in a good way, the best . . . Gavin pushed his aunt’s letter back into its envelope and scrunched his eyes shut for a moment, wincing at the memory of his conversation with Mr Bushy the week before last.

  He’d eventually decided to ask someone what he was doing wrong, someone as unlike his father as he could find.

  It had not gone well and now here he was.

  The train, he realised, was slowing.

  He tossed his bag onto the seat next to him, stretched his legs under the table as far as he could in the hope of obstructing the opposite seat too and pretended to be asleep. He felt the stop. Big doors clicked open and clunked shut; voices filled the carriage; luggage slithered into overhead racks. The sounds all seemed to pass him by, and once they were thrumming along again at full speed, he opened his eyes.

  To his irritation, an old woman had managed to sit down in the window seat opposite, not put off by his protruding shoes. She was leaning her chin in her hand and gazing out of the window, but she caught his look reflected there and gave a very brief smile, enough to make him feel like he had to sit up and pull his legs out of the way. This was a kind of defeat, which irritated him even more. She wasn’t actually an old woman, he now saw – middle-aged (to Gavin, at fifteen, this meant anything between three and four times his age), but with old-fashioned-looking hair that was all grey, and a floppy brown jumper. The smile had been quick and sharp.

  Better get the earphones in, he thought, and reached into his bag. The woman didn’t have a paperback or knitting or photos of her grandchildren or any of the other things Gavin imagined middle-aged ladies occupying themselves with on trains – no luggage at all, he noticed, let’s hope that means she’s not going far – so it seemed best not to leave open any possibility of conversation. He fitted the earphones, slumped in his seat again and stared out of the window, adopting the hard and indifferent face that he used on the way to and from school.

  Used to use.

  Nothing that might have belonged to home was in sight. No streetlights, no houses, no people. A low, dull sky lay over winter fields and stubbly hedges. As the dour landscape rolled past, he began trying to imagine how far he was from his parents. He checked his watch every half-hour or so until he guessed he’d come to the exact moment when they were being lifted off the earth, no longer attached at all to the country where he was. They’d probably be almost as relieved as him to have escaped. Mum would be worrying, but she’d never be able to say so, not
for a single moment of the whole week. (‘I am not going to let that boy spoil our time together.’) Auntie Gwen didn’t have a computer or even a phone. She lived in one of those knobbly green fingers at the very outer limits of the map. The most his mother had been able to make him promise was to find somewhere he could get reception every day or two and leave messages back at home. He pictured her having to slip away from Dad, smuggling her mobile into a bathroom so she could ring to check them. A couple of years ago that kind of thought would have upset him. Now he just let it go, sent it away with his parents. Once he’d realised they didn’t want to know about his unhappiness, he’d stopped caring much about theirs.

  The landscape grew rougher at the edges as the journey wore on. The track passed under hillsides where the fields ran out near the top and patches of scrubby brown rose above them. This was nothing like what his family called the countryside, which meant the bit around where his other aunt – Dad’s sister – lived, just far enough away that going there for Sunday lunch took absolutely all day, but near enough that they thought it was reasonable to keep doing it. The country around there looked as if it had been assembled out of accessories from Gav’s old train set: barn, fence, tree, cow, telephone box, placed indiscriminately over a green cloth with a few ripples in it. What Gav saw out of the window now couldn’t ever be shrunk into plastic miniatures. London felt very far away, and now, for certain, his parents were in the air and gone (he looked at his watch again to make sure, but it had stopped), and his week of freedom was properly under way.