by Sant, Sharon
‘I don’t know. Clumsy, I suppose.’
‘Were you there when it happened? Was she dead straightaway?’
‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about it?’ she asks looking ahead and picking up the pace.
We reach her yellow door after walking the rest of the way in silence.
‘Shall I come for you tomorrow morning?’ I ask.
‘Yeah.’
I look up at her house. There’s just one dim light in the front downstairs window. ‘Will he give you a really hard time for being late?’
‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ she smiles, though the smile doesn’t look quite real; it’s not the one that changes her face when it’s just us, but the one that she wears at school for the teachers.
‘Maybe I could come in?’ I say.
‘I suppose it’s lonely on your own all night?’
‘A bit.’
She glances up at the house and rubs her arm absently before she replies. ‘Don’t come in tonight.’
I nod slowly. ‘Ok, I won’t.’
‘See you tomorrow,’ she says and crosses the road to her house.
I watch as she climbs the steps and the front door closes behind her.
The road is quiet, only the muffled sounds of televisions along the row and the snorting of the horse in the field behind me. Suddenly, the night air is sliced by a high pitched squeal. It sounds as though it’s coming from one of the houses.
I run away so that I don’t have to hear it again.
Bethany hasn’t come out of her house yet this morning. I think it’s pretty late but I have no way of knowing. Her green flowery curtains are still closed as though she’s in bed. I could go inside, fade through the walls and see, but it doesn’t seem right to do that when she told me last night not to go in. Besides, she might be getting dressed or something and then she’d be really pissed off. The horse from the field comes up to me.
‘Have you seen her yet? Have I missed her already?’ I ask him. Bethany told me the horse was a boy.
He looks at me as he blows a warm breath from his muzzle, and then walks back across the field.
‘Yeah, thanks!’ I call after him. ‘Thanks for nothing.’
I walk down the row of houses, and then back up again to the wall outside her door. Nothing moves at Bethany’s house; no curtain twitches, no door opens. Maybe she’s gone to school without me. I don’t know why she would and I don’t know why the idea bothers me but it does. A door a couple of houses away opens and someone comes down the steps and gets into a car. I think it’s Fred Taylor, I remember he worked with my dad for a while until they laid him off. I suppose he must have another job now, as he looks as though he’s going to work with his sandwich bag and a suit on. I wonder what he thinks of Bethany and her dad. I watch Fred drive off and then look up at Bethany’s door again, but it doesn’t open.
Bethany is not at school either. I’ve looked in the form room, then I went to the IT suite in case she went straight there for first period but there was no sign of her. I even checked the nurse station in case she had fainted or something, but the room is empty.
Nobody says a word about the fact that she isn’t in when morning register is called and when Miss Jacobs asks if anyone knows where she is, everyone just shakes their heads and looks like they don’t know and don’t care. ‘Maybe she’s finally figured out that everyone thinks she’s a loser and has hanged herself from a tree,’ Matt sniggers to Paulie.
‘You piece of shit!’ I shout at him. I want to hurt him, I really, really want to hurt him so bad. I go and stand right in front of him. I must be able to move something; maybe if I think hard about what I want to do, I can get something to fly at him. There has to be a use for all this anger that’s burning me up. I look for something small to start with. His pencil case is out on the desk in front of him. Not massive, but he’ll know about it if it hits him in the face. I close my eyes tight and concentrate. I think about moving the pencil case, about making it fly at him. I scrunch my eyes up and I try to pour all my rage into that one act.
His laughter makes my eyes open again. He’s cracking up at something Paulie has just whispered to him. The pencil case is open and he’s doodling on the front of his English book. It hasn’t even moved one tiny bit, as far as I can tell. Maybe if I concentrate on being solid somehow, I can move it with my hand. So I close my eyes again and think about my hand being real and being able to pick things up and move them. When I open them again, I make my breathing slow and I try to focus and I move my hand towards the pencil case. My hand goes through it, the same as always.
‘BASTARD!’ I scream. I look up at the class. ‘I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU ALL!’
Nobody hears me.
Bethany’s curtains are still closed. It’s lunchtime at school and she definitely ought to be up by now. I suppose she’s ill or something. What would she want me to do? Should I go in and see if she’s ok? If she’s puking then I don’t suppose she wants me hassling her, but if I don’t go in then she’ll think I don’t care. But what if she’s really worse than ill? What if something very bad has happened? I wonder if she’ll be ok to do her paper round later. Bert would surely sack her if she didn’t turn in on only her second day. So now I’m thinking that I really ought to go in and find out if she’s going to make it to the paper shop tonight.
I hear laughter and see that Matt and Ingrid are coming up the lane towards me. Matt is the one laughing about something but Ingrid looks worried.
‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ Ingrid says as they walk past me.
‘Don’t be so uptight,’ Matt replies, ‘he’s probably too drunk to remember who we are.’
‘He sees my dad in the pub,’ Ingrid says, ‘so he knows who I am.’
‘You don’t go in the pub, though, do you?’ Matt looks at his watch. ‘We’d better hurry up; it’ll be afternoon registration soon.’
‘This is just stupid,’ Ingrid moans but she stands at the bottom of Bethany’s steps anyway and keeps watch as Matt goes up with a parcel in his hands. Suddenly, I know what it is he’s doing; it’s a trick we’ve played a hundred times before. He gets a lighter from his pocket and sets fire to the package before shoving it through the letterbox. He bangs on the front door and then races down the steps, laughing his head off and dragging Ingrid with him, who’s laughing too now.
Bethany’s curtain moves and she peers out. She sees me.
‘Beth! There’s something inside your front door, don’t stamp on it, go and get some water to put it out!’
She frowns like she hasn’t understood me.
‘Go and get some water to put out the fire by your front door!’ I shout again.
I wait for a few minutes. Then the front door opens a tiny crack and Bethany looks out. She beckons me over.
‘What the hell was that about?’ she asks in a fierce whisper.
‘Matt and Ingrid,’ I say. ‘The dog shit on fire trick?’
She looks puzzled.
‘You know, whoever sees it on fire comes and stamps on it to put the fire out and then they’ve stamped dog shit everywhere.’
‘Well, that’s just stupid,’ she hisses.
I shrug. ‘Did you get some water like I said?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Thank God my dad didn’t see it. It’s still made a mess and it stinks, I’ll have to clean it before he gets back from the pub. She darts a nervous glance up and down the street.
I catch sight of her hand as she holds open the door. It looks badly swollen. ‘What did you do to your hand? Is that why you’re not at school today?’
‘No,’ she says, pulling it out of sight quickly. ‘I trapped this in a door. I’m not at school because I didn’t feel well today.’
‘Are you ok now?’
‘I’d be better if some idiot wasn’t pushing dog poo through my letterbox.’
‘Yeah, sorry about that.’ I feel responsible somehow for what Matt did.
She looks at me thoughtfully. ‘I can’t b
elieve you’re friends with someone like him.’
‘Was friends with him. Not now.’
‘Only because he can’t see you now.’
‘No, because I’ve realised he’s a dick.’
‘That’s good,’ she says. ‘Sorry, but I have to go so I can clean up.’ She starts to close the door.
‘Beth,’ I say. The door opens again and she pops her head around it with a questioning look. ‘What about papers tonight?’
‘What about them?’
‘Will you be able to go?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘we’ll get your money.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ I say quickly, though, of course, the only reason she is doing it is to get money for me. ‘I just wondered if you ought to let Bert know you’re ill.’
‘I’ll phone him.’ The door starts to close again.
‘Beth!’
‘What?’ she says as she appears once more.
‘Does that mean you’re not coming out tonight?’
She hesitates before answering. ‘Sorry, I can’t tonight,’ she says and closes the door.
I don’t know how many days Bethany has been off school, but it feels like a lot. Most of the nights she was missing, I sat on the wall outside her house, talking to the horse and waiting for her to come out, but she never did. When she finally came out to see me, she didn’t say a thing about why she’d been off and I didn’t dare ask. She looked even thinner than before, but she went to see old Bert and got her paper round back and we just carried on as if nothing had happened. By the time she packed the paper job in, we had enough for Raven and some to spare. I liked to see how happy she was about that.
Raven lives in a tiny cottage that stands on its own on the outskirts of the village. It’s not one of those cute cottages you imagine with roses growing around the door and a thatched roof; instead, it sort of looks like a second world war bomb shelter that someone turned into a house. It’s a squat bungalow with a roof of green tin and a garden of lumpy black concrete and rough grass. Mum always said it was the ugliest building she’d ever seen and that the land would be worth more if someone pulled the house down.
Bethany shoves the rusting gate. From the way it scrapes on an overgrown tussock of grass at the edge of the path I’m guessing that Raven doesn’t get much in the way of custom. Or actual live visitors, for that matter. The sky is grey with low clouds.
‘I feel snow coming,’ Bethany says as she looks up. ‘I’m glad it’s not a school day.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘I don’t know, I just can. I’m always right too.’
I used to love snow. I try to remember what it felt like. ‘You should be a medium,’ I laugh, ‘you’d make loads of money.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she says, but she smiles.
We walk down the path and stop at the front door, looking up at the bead curtain behind the panes of glass that conceal what’s waiting inside. Bethany turns to me.
‘Are you ready?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Are you?’
‘No,’ she says with a nervous laugh.
‘Ok.’ I nod towards the doorbell. ‘Let’s do it.’
Bethany presses the little circle of plastic. We can’t hear it from outside. We wait.
‘Maybe it doesn’t work?’ I say when nobody comes.
Bethany presses again and we wait.
‘You’d think she’d know we were coming,’ I say, ‘being psychic and all.’
‘I don’t think that’s the same thing as seeing the dead,’ she laughs. ‘Shall I press it one more time? I did phone her first so she should be expecting us, at least she’s expecting me,’ Bethany raises her eyebrows, ‘psychic or not.’
I nod, and she’s just about to reach for the bell when there’s the sound of a chain rattling and the door swings open.
‘Bethany?’ Raven asks. Bethany nods. ‘Come in.’ Raven steps to one side to let her through the door. We’re greeted by a sweet smell that I can’t quite put a name to, but I think it’s something I used to like.
‘It’s lovely and warm in here,’ Bethany says as Raven closes the front door.
‘Yes, it’s not a big house – easy to heat,’ Raven replies.
‘And it’s all made out of metal,’ I say to Bethany. ‘I bet it’s like living inside a radiator.’
Bethany gives me a small smile.
The hallway is lined with photos of what looks like Raven at different ages; they look like they’ve been taken in some pretty exotic places – deserts, temples, jungles – but she mostly stands in them alone. I know that she lives on her own now, but wonder if there’s ever been a Mr or even a Mrs Raven. There’s a shelf running the length of the hall with loads of carved wooden stuff: wild animals, a boomerang adorned with aborigine designs, a little set of ornate drawers. Bethany looks at them with an awed expression. We follow Raven down to her living room. The door is gone from the frame but she has a curtain of coloured beads hanging there instead, like the ones behind her front door, and they click together as she passes through them. When we get into the room she scratches a hand through her dreads and crams her huge backside into an armchair.
‘Sit down, sweetie,’ she chirps, waving Bethany to a chair. Her voice sounds like she looks – bold and happy, larger-than-life. Not what you’d expect from someone who makes her living from the dead.
Bethany sits across from her and shoots me a sideways glance. Raven doesn’t look at me once.
‘What can I do for you, sweetheart?’ she asks Bethany. ‘Is it your mum you’d like me to reach?’
I’m just about to be amazed by her knowledge. I’m pretty sure that Bethany didn’t tell her on the phone what she wanted exactly, only that it was a consultation. But then I remember where we live. It’s pretty likely that she knew about Bethany’s mum anyway.
‘Yes…’ Bethany says, ‘but I need you to do something else too. Will it cost me more to do two things?’
Raven flashes a smile full of brilliant teeth. ‘I don’t think so. Depends on what it is, of course. Why don’t I make us a cup of tea and then you can tell me?’ She heaves herself from the chair and shuffles towards the open kitchen door.
‘Thanks, but I don’t like tea,’ Bethany says.
‘I have green tea… much cleaner taste. Or cocoa…’ Raven offers.
‘Green tea?’ I whisper. ‘Only fruit loops drink green tea. We’re not going to get any sense out of her.’
Bethany shakes her head in a tiny movement and frowns at me.
‘Just saying…’
‘I’m really ok, thanks,’ Bethany calls to her.
We listen to the sound of the kettle starting to boil as Raven searches in a cupboard for a mug and then drops a teabag in it. I glance across at Bethany. I wonder what’s going through her head. She looks nervous. We talked about how she might be able to speak to her mum too and she seemed cool about it, but I suppose things are different now that she’s here.
‘It’ll be ok,’ I say. She looks at me and tries to smile. ‘I mean, I won’t let her con you. If I see your mum in the room, I’ll tell you, but if she’s not here and Raven says she is, I’ll tell you that too… ok?’
‘But what if you can’t see her?’ she whispers. ‘You can’t see your dad, so maybe you won’t be able to see my mum. What about that different dimension idea that you had?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I just thought I might be able to somehow.’
‘You’re just trying to make me feel better,’ she smiles. ‘I know that.’
‘You’re scared though?’
‘In case she can get my mum?’
I nod.
‘Terrified.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘I’m actually a bit scared that she might have the answer to your problem too.’
I’m about to ask what she means when Bethany looks up quickly. Raven has a mug of tea and a biscuit tin and settles back into her armchair, pulling her long skirt in around her legs. The plump toes of her ba
re feet peep out from beneath the expanse of fabric and I can see rings on them, just like in that nursery rhyme.
‘It’s been about a year for your mum now?’ Raven says to Bethany in a warm voice. I can see why people feel happier when they’ve been to see her. Even if she doesn’t see their relatives, she has such a kind, friendly voice that she makes you feel better just listening to it. She still doesn’t look at me, though.
‘A year at Christmas,’ Bethany replies, twisting her fingers together. ‘Christmas day, actually.’
I give Bethany a sharp look that she doesn’t notice. She never told me her mum died on Christmas day. Come to think of it, she doesn’t tell me much about it at all.
‘So, why don’t you tell me what you want to know?’ Raven prises the lid from the biscuit tin. ‘Would you like one?’ she asks offering the tin to Bethany.
Bethany shakes her head. I look in the tin. There are chocolate covered ones and ones with cream in the centre. I’m pretty sure I used to like those. When we’re alone I think I’ll ask Bethany to remind me of the way those biscuits taste.
‘I’m not sure where to begin,’ Bethany says glancing at me.
‘If you want to speak to your mum first, it’s cool,’ I say to her.
‘No,’ she says, ‘we came for you, so we’ll do that first.’
Raven’s biscuit stops half way to her mouth as she watches Bethany talk to me. Or rather, talk to thin air, I suppose. Bethany turns back to her.
‘It’s like this…’ Bethany begins slowly, ‘sometimes I feel like dead people are around me but I don’t really see them, I just get a sense of where they are.’
‘And you think you can sense your mum nearby?’ Raven asks. ‘That’s understandable, I’m sure she’s watching over you all the time.’
Bethany shakes her head. ‘I don’t think she is. That’s not the reason I’m here, although I would like to talk to her if you could get her. It’s someone else.’
‘Ah,’ Raven nods knowingly, ‘so you have a little sight too. How long has that been going on?’
‘I can’t really remember when it started – it’s just always been. I suppose that was how it was for you?’