Jessica's Ghost

by Andrew Norriss

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘She and Mr Boyle have been talking about you in the kitchen. They think you have magic powers. Seriously. They think you do miracles. At the moment they’re discussing how long it might take you to get Roland back to school.’

  ‘Ah …’ Francis still had no idea what, if anything, he was going to do about that one.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ Jessica smiled. ‘We’ll think of something. But in the meantime, I’d better tell Andi and Roland they can come in for a swim!’

  And she disappeared.

  *

  Later – much later – after a swim, a very large tea, another swim and a movie Roland provided about a man chained by his leg to a radiator, who had to choose between starving to death and cutting off his own foot to get free, Roland’s parents took Francis to one side, as he was getting ready to leave, and asked if he had had a chance yet to talk to Roland about school.

  ‘No …’ said Francis. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Frieda Campion told me you like to wait for the right time,’ said Mrs Boyle. ‘She said that, with her daughter, you waited till she was feeling secure before you … did whatever it is you do.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t quite like that …’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Mr Boyle interrupted, ‘we don’t have a lot of time. You see, Roland’s been out of school a month, and they’re kicking up about it already. Threatening social services, legal action, all that sort of thing.’

  ‘So if you could have a word with him, fairly quickly,’ Mrs Boyle put in.

  ‘I will talk to him,’ said Francis, ‘but, honestly … I’m not sure it will do any good. I can’t make him do something he doesn’t want to do, can I?’

  Mr Boyle readily agreed that this would indeed be impossible, and Mrs Boyle said they were just grateful to him for trying, but he could see in their eyes that neither of them believed him.

  Roland’s parents were both quite convinced that Francis was going to produce another miracle.

  21

  In the week that followed, Roland cycled over to Alma Road each day to spend the evening with his new friends – in fact he was usually waiting for them outside in the street when they got home from school – and he would stay until Francis or Andi’s mother told him it was time to go home.

  They were sitting in the attic at number forty-seven – Jessica was helping Andi finish off some maths homework – when Francis cautiously asked Roland if he’d thought at all about when he might go back to school. You could almost see the shutters close down behind Roland’s eyes as soon as the idea was mentioned.

  ‘I’m not going back,’ he said, his chin jutting out determinedly. ‘Not ever. I don’t care what anyone says. I’m not going back.’

  ‘But … don’t you have to?’ asked Francis. ‘I mean everyone has to go to school, don’t they? It’s the law.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Roland repeated, stubbornly. ‘I’m not going. And no one can make me. I’d rather die.’

  In the circumstances, this was not a threat to be taken lightly and Francis let the matter drop. He had said he would talk to Roland about school and he had done so. It hadn’t worked – he had never really expected that it would – but he had fulfilled his promise and, much as he would like to have helped, he didn’t see what else he could do.

  It was later the same evening, after Roland had walked Andi back to number thirty-nine before cycling home himself, that Jessica came up with a possible solution to the problem.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if anyone’s thought about home schooling?’

  Francis looked up from the broken zip he was removing from Andi’s school skirt before putting in a new one. ‘Home what?’

  ‘Home schooling,’ Jessica repeated. ‘The law says you have to learn somewhere, but if your parents want to teach you at home, they can.’

  ‘Really?’ This was news to Francis.

  ‘I had a friend who did it for years,’ said Jessica. ‘I don’t suppose Roland’s dad would have time to do much, but his mum might.’

  Francis considered the idea. ‘Interesting. I wonder if Roland will go for it.’

  When they told him about it the next evening, Roland went for the idea immediately. The thought that there might be some way of never going to school again, and it somehow being all right, seemed almost too good to be true. An hour on his laptop, trawling through various websites, quickly convinced him that it was indeed perfectly possible. If home schooling was what you wanted to try, there were dozens of places you could go to for help setting it up and, according to the people who’d done it, it wasn’t that difficult. Mostly what it took was a lot of time.

  ‘Dad’s too busy, so it’d have to be Mum doing most of it,’ he said, closing the lid of the laptop. ‘But I’m not sure she’ll want to. She gets very nervous about anything connected with school work. She had a panic attack helping me with my homework when I was seven.’ He paused. ‘But I could ask.’

  ‘How about getting Francis to ask?’ said Jessica. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your parents think Francis could walk on water if he put his mind to it. If he said home schooling was the thing to do, I don’t think there’d be much argument from either of them.’

  Francis put the idea to Mr and Mrs Boyle on Saturday. He sat down with them at the kitchen table before lunch, while Roland had taken Andi off for a swim, and he began by telling them that, after speaking to Roland, he did not think it would be a good idea to try and get him to return to St Saviour’s.

  ‘Oh, dear …’ Mrs Boyle could not disguise her disappointment. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I think if he went back now,’ said Francis, ‘it would just make him very unhappy. And that wouldn’t be good, would it?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Mr Boyle, ‘but he has to go back, doesn’t he? It’s the law.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Francis. He explained, with Jessica prompting him, how home schooling was the legal right of every parent, that he knew of someone who had done it and found it a lot less difficult than they expected, and that there were all sorts of places to go for help, if Mrs Boyle was prepared to take it on.

  ‘Me?’ Mrs Boyle’s eyes widened. ‘I couldn’t teach him! I don’t know anything!’

  ‘Like I said, there’s all these organisations that’ll help you set it up,’ Francis assured her. ‘Roland’s been finding out about them on the internet. They tell you what to do, what books to get and everything. My friend said it takes a lot of time, but it’s really not as difficult as you might think.’

  ‘And you reckon this learning at home would be the best thing for Rollo, do you?’ asked Mr Boyle.

  ‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘Yes, I do.’

  Mr Boyle looked across at his wife. ‘Well, it’s up to you, love. You’re the one who’d have to do most of the work. But if Francis says it’s the best thing …’

  And, as Jessica had said, that was the clinching argument really. Francis was, after all, the young man who, in a few brief days had turned their son’s life around. If he said home schooling was the answer, then that was what they would try, however frightening the prospect might be for Mrs Boyle.

  The lessons, once they began, went better than either Roland or his mother had expected. As a home-tutor, Mrs Boyle might have the disadvantage of knowing almost nothing about any of the subjects her son needed to study but, where Roland’s happiness was concerned, she could be very determined. By the end of the week, she had a large chart on the kitchen wall showing lesson plans for the month ahead, she had a list by the phone of people she could contact for help, and the kitchen table was covered in books on the causes of the First World War, Spanish vocabulary, and the ecology of the Amazon Basin.

  During the lessons, Roland usually found himself explaining things to his mother rather than the other way round, but he was not the first person to discover that this is in fact one of the best ways to learn. If they were both stuck, there was no shortage of people they could ring, though Roland pr
eferred to start by asking Jessica. She usually called in two or three times during the day to see how things were going and, if she did not know the answer herself, could always get Francis or Andi to ask a teacher at John Felton. Between the four of them, there weren’t many problems that couldn’t be sorted out.

  When Roland finished his work in the afternoon, he would get on his bike and hurry over to Alma Road. Regular cycling meant he was much better at coping with the journey these days, and he barely needed to stop and catch his breath before pushing open the front door and climbing the stairs to the attic room in Francis’s house, or at Andi’s.

  At the weekends, the four usually met at Roland’s. His home, after all, had the swimming pool, not to mention the attraction of Mrs Boyle’s cooking. They would swim, lie around, talk, eat – and if you had been watching them splashing noisily in the pool, you would have found it hard to believe that, only a few short weeks before, three of them had been seriously considering how best to end their own lives, and one of them already had.

  They looked like people who were enjoying life – as indeed they were – though there was one incident, three weeks after the great revelation about Jessica, that threatened to blow their new lives apart.

  22

  It was a Wednesday, and Francis had had a message from his tutor that Mrs Parsons wanted to see him at break. He was not unduly worried. On previous occasions when he had spoken to the Head Teacher she had been quite friendly – but when he arrived at her office this time, there was no smile on her face as she gestured him to sit down.

  ‘I’ve had a complaint,’ she said, looking directly at him across her desk, ‘from Quentin Howard. He says Andi Campion attacked him outside the sports hall five weeks ago, and it’s left him almost too frightened to come in to school. He says you were there when it happened. Is that true?’

  Francis wasn’t sure how to answer this. If Jessica had been there, he would have been able to ask her advice but Jessica had gone to London with a class of textiles students to see a Vivienne Westwood exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  He could have lied, but Francis decided against it. He had never been good at lying and he had a feeling Mrs Parsons was probably going to get to the truth one way or another.

  ‘Yes, I was there,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t really like Quentin said.’

  ‘No?’ The Head Teacher leaned back in her chair. ‘So tell me how it was.’

  And Francis found himself telling her what had happened – what Quentin had said, how Andi had hit him, twice, and then about all the times Quentin had teased him in the past and how much of a difference it had made to his life now that the teasing had stopped.

  Mrs Parsons listened to it all in silence.

  ‘I see,’ she said, when he had finished. ‘I think maybe we should hear what Quentin has to say about all this.’ She pressed a button on the intercom on her desk and asked the secretary to send him in.

  He was looking thinner, Francis noticed. There were dark rings under his eyes, he was clearly nervous, and he had a twitch on one side of his face – but what he said was interesting. Quentin insisted, when Mrs Parsons asked, that all his remarks about dolls and knitting had only ever been meant as a joke. He had no idea, he said, that they might have been upsetting Francis. They were just a bit of fun, and he said all this so earnestly and with such an air of desperation, that Francis was inclined to believe him.

  Nor had Francis realised how badly Quentin had been affected by Andi hitting him. It had left him very frightened. So frightened, it emerged, that he had been making up excuses not to come to school – which was why the whole matter had come to Mrs Parsons’ attention.

  Francis almost felt sorry for him but, at the time, he was more concerned about what might happen to Andi. Mrs Parsons had said on Andi’s first day that if she was involved in any sort of fight she would have to leave, and the Head Teacher was not the sort of person to make idle threats.

  It was a close-run thing. When Andi was finally hauled in to the office, there were, Mrs Parsons told her, only two reasons why she was not already on her way home. One was that she had had an excellent series of reports from her teachers – who all seemed to think that she was settling in well and making good use of her time at school – but more important than that, said Mrs Parsons, was an appeal on her behalf from Quentin.

  ‘Quentin asked for you not to be thrown out?’ Francis had been waiting for Andi outside the office to hear what had happened, and was understandably puzzled. ‘Why would he do that?’

  Andi gave a shrug. ‘He said he realised it was partly his fault, and it didn’t seem fair for me to get all the blame. He said as long as I promised not to hit him again, he was OK.’

  ‘So you didn’t get punished at all?’ asked Francis.

  ‘Three weeks litter duty,’ said Andi, as they set off down the corridor. ‘I can live with that.’ She took his arm. ‘If I had been thrown out, would you have missed me?’

  ‘Hugely,’ said Francis. ‘In fact, I’d probably have had to kill myself.’

  And for some reason that made both of them laugh.

  Jessica thought Andi had had a lucky escape.

  ‘If Quentin hadn’t stepped in, Mrs Parsons would have thrown her out. I know she would,’ she said. ‘I wonder why he did?’

  ‘I wonder why I didn’t tell him to stop with the teasing, like you suggested,’ said Francis. ‘I don’t know if he would have stopped, but I should have tried.’

  As Andi was still doing her litter duty and Roland had had to go to the dentist, it was just the two of them sitting on the sofa in the attic of number forty-seven. After hearing the story of what had happened with Mrs Parsons that day, the conversation turned to Jessica’s trip to London.

  The day out at the Victoria and Albert Museum had had its ups and downs – Jackie Wilmot had been sick over Miss Jossaume on the coach, and there was a story that someone had seen Lorna Gilchrist stealing books from the museum shop – but the exhibition itself had more than made up for all of that.

  Vivienne Westwood was a designer they both admired enormously, and as a ghost, Jessica was able not only to describe the costumes she had seen, but to show them. Francis sat on the sofa while she modelled one outfit after another, finishing up with a dress made from an Aztec print with an angular hem that Francis particularly admired and said suited her brilliantly. The next time the school organised a trip to the V&A, he said, he would have to insist on being allowed to go with them.

  One way and another it had been a good day for both of them, though Jessica found she was left with the odd feeling that she had missed something.

  ‘It’s a bit like when I was at the hospital,’ she said, trying to explain what she meant, ‘on the day I found I was dead, you know? When I felt there was something I should be doing.’

  ‘I seem to remember the trouble then was you had no idea what you were supposed to be doing,’ said Francis.

  ‘I didn’t. I still don’t. But I’ve been thinking about what Roland said – about there being someone else, and how I need to find them so I can move on. I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t go out and start looking for them.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can,’ said Francis. ‘Unless you plan on walking around town and shouting to ask if anyone can hear you.’

  This was in fact pretty much what Jessica had had in mind.

  ‘It might work, mightn’t it?’

  ‘It might,’ said Francis, ‘but I doubt it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, if I was walking round town and heard someone shouting, “Can anyone hear me? I’m a ghost and I need to talk to you,” I’d probably start walking in the other direction as fast as possible.’

  ‘Ah …’ Jessica sighed. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘And anyway it’s not how it’s worked before, is it?’ Francis continued. ‘I mean, you didn’t have to look for me, did you? You didn’t have to look for any of us. We were just … there.’
>
  ‘So I should just sit around and wait?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?’ said Francis. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m quite enjoying all this. I’ve got three friends now – one of whom has a swimming pool, another who makes me feel like I’m protected by the SAS, and a third who is not only incredibly beautiful but goes around after school in a Vivienne Westwood original … I’m having the best time I’ve had in years.’

  From downstairs, there came the sound of the front doorbell.

  ‘That’ll be Andi. I’d better let her in.’ Francis headed for the stairs, but turned before leaving. ‘I know Roland’s friend said it was important that you move on and not be stuck here, but I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to go anywhere. As far as I’m concerned, the longer you stay the better.’

  Jessica watched him leave, and decided that perhaps he was right. Maybe there was no real need for her to do anything. If there was someone else who needed her help, they would turn up – or not – in their own good time. In the meantime, she could, as Francis said, make the most of things while she waited. Enjoy her friends. Enjoy their company. Enjoy being together …

  And what was that other thing Francis had said? Incredibly beautiful …

  Jessica smiled to herself.

  Funny if he was right about that as well …

  23

  At Easter, Roland’s mother took all four of them on holiday to Center Parcs at Longleat. Mrs Boyle thought she was only taking three people, of course, but none of them would have gone without Jessica, who took up very little room in the car, sitting in the middle of the back seat.

  Center Parcs is chiefly designed for families that enjoy outdoor leisure activities and, despite the fact that Francis had no great interest in sports and that Jessica was a ghost, it worked remarkably well. The apartment they had taken was spacious and comfortable and almost the first thing Francis discovered when they arrived was about a hundred back numbers of Harper’s Bazaar left in one of the cupboards. He and Jessica spent a large part of the holiday sitting by the pool flipping through the pages and taking notes, and occasionally joining Andi and Roland as they swam, roamed the woods on bicycles, played badminton, rode horses and climbed rocks.