Jessica's Ghost

by Andrew Norriss

  And Aunt Jo was still talking. Her soft reassuring tones never paused for a moment and now she was moving closer and it was Lorna doing most of the speaking. In a voice full of rage, and anger, and despair, she was talking about the stories that Angela and Denise had told, those wicked, wicked stories, those terrible lies – and Aunt Jo was leading Francis across to where she stood and then Francis was helping her down from the parapet and Aunt Jo was holding the sobbing girl in her arms and telling her it was all right. It was all right. It was all going to be all right …

  A policewoman appeared with a blanket, which she wrapped around Lorna’s shoulders, and she and Aunt Jo led Lorna back across the car park to where a woman Francis recognised as Lorna’s mother was waiting.

  28

  There was a quarter of an hour or so after that when no one seemed to take much notice of either Francis or Andi. The top floor of the car park was full of an extraordinary number of people. There were policemen, paramedics, nurses and at least half a dozen security men, including the one from downstairs, walking with a slight limp. Two of the paramedics were putting Lorna on to a gurney – a process complicated by the fact that she refused to let go of Aunt Jo – while her mother was shouting angrily at any policeman who would listen that something ought to be done.

  Francis and Andi walked over to where Jessica was sitting on the parapet.

  ‘You got here just in time,’ said Jessica. ‘Another few seconds and she’d have done it.’

  ‘It was your aunt that stopped her.’ Francis picked up the stuffed dog and gently rearranged its paws. ‘She was amazing. If she hadn’t turned up, I think …’ He paused. ‘Which reminds me, how did she turn up? Who told her to come here?’

  ‘I think I did,’ said Jessica.

  ‘I thought she couldn’t see you?’

  ‘She couldn’t.’ Jessica gave a shrug. ‘Don’t ask me to explain. I don’t understand it either.’

  ‘I told you!’ Roland was striding over to join them. ‘I said there’d be another one.’ He grinned at Jessica. ‘That’s why you were here, so you could …’ He stopped. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I am now,’ said Jessica. ‘Why?’

  ‘You … um … you …’ Roland was not sure how to say it, but Jessica did look rather strange. Her skin had acquired an odd, slightly luminous glow. You could see it in her hands and her face. It was a white light with a faint tinge of gold and, as he stared, the light became stronger.

  ‘You look as if you’re on fire,’ said Andi.

  They watched in silence as the light from Jessica’s body grew brighter and brighter. Soon, it was strong enough to actually shine through her clothes.

  ‘Jessica?’ Francis sounded thoroughly alarmed. ‘What’s happening?’

  But Jessica did not answer. She was staring across at the hospital, at one of the windows on the third floor, and Francis had to repeat his question twice before she slowly turned to face him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I think I have to go now.’

  ‘Go? Go where?’ The light from Jessica’s body was now bright enough to make his eyes water, and it was a moment before he understood what she meant. ‘Oh … oh, you mean … go!’

  Jessica nodded.

  ‘Do you have to?’ said Francis. ‘I mean, can’t you stay a little longer?’

  ‘No. No, I can’t.’ By now Jessica’s body was a beacon that, for them, lit up every corner of the car park. ‘But don’t worry. It’s all right.’

  She took a step towards Francis, reached out, and put her arms round him. To his astonishment, she felt quite solid. In a funny way, Francis said afterwards, she felt more solid than he did himself. As if she were the one with the real body, and he were merely the ghost.

  ‘If you only knew,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘If any of us had only known …’

  She held him for a moment, then let him go. She smiled at the others, and began floating through the air towards the hospital. Outside the little window of the room on the third floor, they saw her turn for one last time, give a little wave … and she was gone.

  Francis, Andi and Roland were still standing there when Aunt Jo came over to join them. She looked at Francis. ‘I’ve just remembered where I’ve seen you before,’ she said. ‘You’re the boy who was standing outside my house, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Francis.

  ‘Can I ask how you came to be here tonight?’

  Francis didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I only ask,’ said Aunt Jo, ‘because the lady over there,’ she pointed to Roland’s mother, talking to a policeman, ‘tells me you suddenly announced that you knew something bad was going to happen at the hospital. And much the same thing happened to me.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Yes. I was sitting at my desk at home, and I had this feeling that I should get in the car and drive here. It was almost like someone was telling me to come. Is that what happened to you?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ said Francis.

  ‘It’s a strange world.’ Aunt Jo shook her head. ‘I don’t even pretend to understand it.’ They stood there for a moment, staring out over the town. ‘I don’t know if you know, but my niece committed suicide.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Francis, ‘I had heard.’

  ‘I wish she’d had a friend like you turn up when she …’ Aunt Jo paused for a moment. ‘Her name was Jessica. She was a lovely girl. I think, if you’d known her, you two would have got on rather well.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Francis, ‘I know we would.’

  29

  At school the following Monday, Francis found he had become something of a celebrity. The story had made the six o’clock news on Sunday evening, and on Monday morning the Daily Mail ran it on its front page, along with a picture showing Lorna silhouetted against the night sky, while Francis reached out a hand to help her down.

  The pictures had been taken by a hospital porter on his mobile and, because he had been standing on the concrete paving at the base of the car park when he took the video, Francis and Lorna were the only people in the picture. Neither Andi nor Jessica’s aunt Jo were visible, and it somehow gave the impression that Francis had conducted the rescue entirely on his own. He kept telling people this wasn’t true, but nobody seemed to take any notice.

  When he arrived at school that morning, his form tutor shook his hand when he came into the classroom and told him how proud she was, before sending him off to see Mrs Parsons. On his way there, several other people stopped him in the corridor to congratulate him, and when he got to the office, the women who worked there stood up and gave him a round of applause. Karen, the receptionist, even insisted on giving him a hug before showing him in to see the Head.

  Mrs Parsons was a little more restrained, but she smiled as she asked him to sit down and offered him a cup of tea.

  ‘It looks like you had a rather eventful weekend,’ she said, gesturing to a copy of the Daily Mail on her desk. ‘I’ve read about what happened, of course, but I’d be very interested to hear your account, if you wouldn’t mind going over it again?’

  Francis said he didn’t mind at all, and he told Mrs Parsons the same story he had given the reporter from the Mail. It was completely truthful, except that it said nothing about Jessica or the way she had warned him. He simply said he had been coming back from Southampton with Andi and Roland, when they had seen Lorna on the roof of the hospital car park.

  ‘You recognised her?’ Mrs Parsons asked. ‘Even from that distance. In the dark?’

  Francis said quite truthfully that, yes, he had known at once who it was. He went on to describe how he had run up the stairs, seen Lorna about to dive off the edge of the parapet and called out for her to stop. Again, he said nothing about finding Jessica there. It was something he had discussed with the others, and they had all agreed that it was best. He told Mrs Parsons how he had started talking to Lorna, but then run out of things to say, and how a woman – a Mrs Barfield – had appeared, and eventually persu
aded Lorna back from the edge. ‘I know it looks different in the picture,’ he said, ‘but really she was the one who did everything.’

  When he had finished, Mrs Parsons took off her glasses, twirled them for a moment between her finger and thumb, and stared thoughtfully out of the window.

  ‘I knew there was something,’ she said, eventually. She sounded, Francis thought, rather tired. ‘I knew there was something going on in that class, but I always thought the people at risk were you and Andi. Not Lorna.’ She gave a long sigh. ‘I never saw it. I never saw it at all.’

  The newspaper report had given all the details of why Lorna had wanted to kill herself, and described it as a case of attempted bullycide. Lorna had tried to end her life, they said, because two girls at her school had been inventing stories about her. They did not give the girls’ names, but the days that followed were not an easy time for Angela and Denise.

  They tried very hard to pretend they had done nothing wrong. They came into school that Monday with every appearance of being as worried and concerned about poor Lorna as everyone else. They could be heard wondering who the two girls in the paper could possibly be. Who, they asked, could have done such a dreadful thing?

  The girls were good liars. They were interviewed at length by Mrs Parsons on three separate occasions, but stuck determinedly to their story that they had only ever passed on gossip that had been told them by someone else. Nobody was really fooled but, for a while, it looked as if they might get away with it. Then on Wednesday, they didn’t come in to school.

  It turned out the girls had been swapping their ideas for stories about Lorna in a series of messages that the police had found on their computers. They were excluded from school the same day and Mrs Parsons announced in assembly that the exclusion would be permanent. It would not be fair, she said, to ask Lorna to return to school while Angela and Denise were still there, so they would have to continue their education somewhere else.

  Lorna was in hospital for a week, at home for a month and, in the end, did not come back to John Felton at all. Mrs Parsons did her best to reassure her that things would be different if she did, but Lorna steadfastly refused. She went instead to a private school, where the Head Teacher, who had read about her case, had offered her a scholarship. It was, oddly enough, the same private school at which Andi had been so unhappy – but Lorna loved it from the first day she arrived. She was a popular and successful pupil there, eventually becoming Head Girl and winning a place to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge.

  30

  Francis did not find it easy, being a celebrity, but he got used to it. He found it much harder to get used to being without Jessica. Andi and Roland missed her as well, but it was hardest for Francis. For the last five months she had been the most important person in his life and, now she was gone, he missed her more than he could say.

  Up in his attic room, there were reminders of her wherever he looked. She was there in most of the drawings on the walls. She was there in the half finished shift dress by the sewing machine. She was almost there, sitting on the sofa, when he came up the stairs and walked into the room … except that she wasn’t. She wasn’t anywhere. Because she’d gone.

  At times, the sadness of that thought threatened to overwhelm him, and a part of him was frightened that life might go back to how it had been before she first appeared … but it didn’t. He felt sad, very sad, that his friend was no longer with him, but somehow it was never like being in The Pit. For reasons he did not understand, it was a different sort of sad.

  There were two things that helped. The first was that Andi and Roland took no notice when he said that he didn’t want to see anyone and that he wanted to be alone. Andi simply took him by the arm and told him there wasn’t much chance of that.

  ‘No chance at all,’ Roland agreed. ‘You’re stuck with us, now. Whether you like it or not.’

  And Francis found, as the days passed, that he did like it. As the pain lessened, he even began to realise that having friends who stuck was one of the best things that could happen to you.

  The second thing that helped, though in a more roundabout way, was the letters. They had started arriving the day after the story featured on the news and, a month later, were still coming.

  A lot of them just wanted to congratulate Francis on what he had done, but a good many asked for his advice. They were from parents worried that their children might be thinking of doing what Lorna had done, and wanting to know how to stop them. Or from teenagers who said they were going through the same things that had happened to Lorna, and asking Francis what they should do.

  Francis had no idea how to answer them. Apart from anything else, there were so many. Within a week, there were over a hundred piled up on the table in his attic room and he knew he could never reply to them all. Even if he could, what was he supposed to say? What could you say to someone who told you they were thinking of killing themselves? He hadn’t known what to say to Lorna on the roof, so how could he be qualified to give advice now? He showed the letters to his mother, who said she had no idea how to answer them either, but pointed out that there was one person who might.

  ‘That woman who appeared on the roof of the car park,’ she said. ‘Mrs Barfield. Didn’t she turn out to be a trained counsellor or something?’

  Aunt Jo came over that evening after school, and instantly offered to take the letters away and sort them.

  ‘I’ll start by grading them for you,’ she said, ‘so you’ll know which are the most important and which you can leave for a bit. Then if you come over at the weekend, we can start working on replies to the ones that are really urgent.’

  That weekend, Francis went out to Aunt Jo’s house, and the two of them sat in the room that had once been Jessica’s bedroom and he tapped out replies on the computer, while Mrs Barfield advised him on what to say. In most cases the advice she gave was fairly obvious – the need to talk to someone, and get proper help – but Aunt Jo said that, just because it was obvious, didn’t mean it wasn’t important.

  They worked out an order of priority for the letters and Francis found he enjoyed writing his answers. It was a good thing to be doing, the sort of thing Jessica would have approved of, he thought, if she was still around, and he went out to Aunt Jo’s house most weekends, doing a few more letters each time. In fact, he even turned down the opportunity to go to Canada for a month, so that he could carry on doing it through the summer holidays.

  It was Andi’s mother who had organised the trip to Canada. Sitting in the kitchen one evening with Francis and his mother, she announced in her booming voice that she had a brother who lived on a farm near Calgary.

  ‘Andi loves it out there,’ she said. ‘So we’re going out for four weeks in August.’

  Francis wondered if anyone else had noticed that Mrs Campion no longer called her daughter Thug or Thuglette. She had been ‘Andi’ for some time now.

  ‘But she doesn’t want to go without you.’ Mrs Campion looked across at Francis. ‘So I wondered if you’d come with us. Roland’s already agreed.’

  Francis hesitated.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about the money,’ said his mother. ‘We can afford it. You wouldn’t believe what Frieda is charging for my plates these days!’

  ‘And there’ll be masses to do out there,’ said Mrs Campion, persuasively. ‘It’s a huge farm, and there’ll be horse-riding, canoeing, white-water rafting, mountain climbing …’

  Francis wondered how Roland would cope with canoeing and white-water rafting, and then thought he would probably cope rather well. As long as he was near Andi, Roland would have happily rafted over the Niagara Falls.

  ‘But neither of them wants to go without you,’ said Mrs Campion, ‘so will you think about it, at least?’

  Francis agreed that he would, but in the end announced that, though grateful for the offer, he would rather stay at home. He was not really a canoeing, white-water rafting sort of person, he explained, and he preferred to spend
the summer working with Aunt Jo on answering his letters.

  And this time, not even Andi and Roland could persuade him to change his mind.

  31

  On the Tuesday after term ended, Andi and Roland left for Canada. Francis went to wave them off from Gatwick airport and wondered, when he got back, if he had made the right choice. Sitting in his room at the top of the house in Alma Road, he suddenly felt rather lonely.

  He did not have the chance to feel lonely for long, however, because Roland’s mother appeared the next morning to drive him out to Aunt Jo’s. She had offered to do this each day, partly because she liked to have someone to talk to about Roland, but also because it meant Francis could help her sort out any problems she was having with her work for her exams.

  Francis went out to Aunt Jo’s every morning, Monday to Friday, and once he was there the two of them would sit in the office and set about answering the next batch of letters.

  Some of them were from people who had undergone abuse, or been physically harmed, or had illnesses that left them in constant pain – and when Francis read them it was easy to see why the writer had been driven to the point of despair. And a relief that Aunt Jo always seemed to find something encouraging to say, and to suggest a person or an organisation that she thought might be able to help.

  But what struck Francis most forcibly was how many of the letters came from people who were not being starved or beaten or living with chronic pain, but who were, nevertheless, desperately unhappy. They were from people like Roland, who thought they were too fat, or like Andi, who thought they weren’t pretty. Or people like himself who knew they were just … different. The reasons they gave for this feeling were as numerous as the letters themselves, but that was the one thing they all had in common. All the people who wrote described how they felt separated somehow from the world around them.