by Sant, Sharon
Raven nods. ‘Since I was a little girl in Jamaica. Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?’
‘Sort of,’ Bethany says. ‘But when you see those people, do you ever see them as though they’re actually there with you, real and solid, just as if they were alive?’
‘Do you?’ Raven asks. Her voice drops. She puts her biscuit back into the tin and places it on a small side-table next to her tea, never taking her eyes from Bethany.
‘You remember David Cottle?’
‘Yes…’
‘Tell her I came to see her and she couldn’t hear me,’ I say. ‘Tell her that I know she’s a big fraud.’
Bethany frowns at me. ‘I’ll get to that bit.’
Raven stares at Bethany now. ‘Who are you talking to, sweetie?’
‘David,’ Bethany says. ‘He’s here. Sitting right next to me and I can see him just as though he was alive. We want to know why he’s still here and why I can see him.’
‘He talks to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Only you?’
‘Well, we haven’t met anyone else who can hear or see him yet, Bethany says. ‘Can you?’ she asks Raven.
Raven shakes her head, still staring at Bethany. ‘No, sweetheart, I can’t.’
‘Do you know what it means?’
Raven looks at Bethany like she wants to hug the life out of her. She doesn’t speak at first.
‘Are you ok?’ Bethany asks.
Raven nods. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’
‘But I brought the money…’ Bethany begins, pulling a wad from her coat pocket.
‘It’s not the money,’ Raven says. She shrinks back in her chair, suddenly looking half the size she did. Her big, cheery expression is replaced by something that looks like fear or pity, I can’t decide which.
‘What then?’ Bethany asks. ‘Don’t you know why?’
Raven hesitates. ‘No, I don’t know. I’m sorry but I can’t help you.’
Bethany looks at me.
‘Told you so,’ I say. But it’s only to distract her because I can see she’s freaked out by Raven’s reaction.
‘Maybe we can just talk to my mum instead?’ Bethany asks. ‘Or David would like to see if you can find his dad.’
‘I can’t get anyone for you now. I have a headache. Would you mind leaving?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, please.’ Raven gets out of her armchair and goes to the bead curtain, holding it open for us to leave. Bethany stalls for a moment before realising that she’s not going to get any more out of her. Then she gets up from her chair and follows Raven out to the front door.
‘Can we come back when you feel better?’ Bethany asks when we get outside.
Raven gives her that look again, like she would scoop her up in her arms if she could. ‘There’s no point, sweetheart,’ she says in a quiet voice, ‘I can’t help you.’
And then she closes the front door.
‘Sorry we didn’t get your mum,’ I say as we walk down the overgrown path of Raven’s front garden. ‘We should have done that first.’
‘No, you were right,’ Bethany says. ‘Raven’s a fake.’ She pulls her coat tight around her and shivers.
‘Do you think?’
Bethany nods. ‘She didn’t look at you once.’
‘Yeah, but like you said, maybe she needed to do some kind of ritual first or something.’
‘She looked pretty surprised that I was talking to you, though.’
‘I suppose so. Maybe she just didn’t expect someone else in the same village to be able to do what she does.’
‘I don’t think it was that. She was ok when she thought I just wanted to ask her about that.’
‘But she said she’d always seen stuff since she was a little girl, just like you. So she must be real. Have you always seen things?’
‘I don’t really know what it is I see,’ Bethany says. ‘Maybe it’s nothing more than other people see.’
‘But you see me,’ I remind her.
She looks ahead and doesn’t speak. The churchyard clock chimes as we walk – three muffled clangs in the distance. Mid-afternoon but already a gloom is creeping across the land.
‘Ok, so no Raven. What do we do now?’ I say.
She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. There’s nothing left we can do.’
‘So… I’m stuck here?’
She nods. ‘It looks that way.’
‘With you?’
‘It looks like it.’
‘Maybe that won’t be so bad,’ I say. I turn to her and try to smile.
She looks at me. ‘I suppose we’ll get used to it,’ she says.
‘Do you think I’ll keep fading?’
‘Who knows?’ She turns to me thoughtfully. ‘I’m not sure you are fading. You still seem solid enough to me.’
‘I’m definitely not solid,’ I say.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I’m forgetting everything though,’ I say.
She shakes her head. ‘Maybe you’re just re-remembering stuff.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That you’re changing into someone else.’
I’m not sure I understand. I don’t know how to ask her to explain it though.
The sky starts to spit a flurry of tiny snowflakes.
‘Told you it would snow,’ she says.
‘Only just,’ I say.
‘We’ll have more, you watch.’
‘It doesn’t make you clever, Miss-Snow-Predictor,’ I say.
She laughs. ‘Do you remember how snow feels?’ she asks me.
‘Not really. I think I used to like it, though.’
‘Do you want to play our memory game?’
‘Yeah, I’d like that.’
She screws up her eyes for a moment. ‘This snow that’s coming down now is too small to make you wet, it’s not like proper snow. This snow feels like tiny cold kisses on your face.’
I concentrate. I can almost feel it on my skin. ‘You’re really good at this,’ I say.
‘But you know the best thing about snow is when you get home all freezing and wet but then you get changed into something dry and your mum sits you in front of the fire and gets you a hot chocolate. Remember that?’
I think about the contentment from warm, fleecy clothing wrapping my cold skin. Then I try to recall the taste of hot chocolate, and I suddenly remember something. ‘In Raven’s house it smelt just like hot chocolate.’
She smiles. ‘See, it works. You can remember if you try.’
I shake my head. ‘No, I only remember if you help me. It’s like you’re keeping me alive.’
‘Maybe it’s me keeping you here,’ she says, suddenly thoughtful. ‘If we stopped hanging out perhaps you’d move on.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not that.’ I can’t tell her that I’m afraid to be alone.
‘It’s ok,’ she says, ‘we won’t do anything you don’t want to.’
‘That’s just it. I don’t even know what I want. How can I? Nothing makes sense to me anymore.’
She goes quiet for a few seconds before she answers. ‘Wake each day and deal with what it brings. It’s all you can do.’
‘If I ever went to sleep I would.’
‘What will you do tonight?’
I shrug. ‘What I do every night… wander around on my own while the world sleeps without me. At night is when I really feel like a ghost, like one of the plague kids.’
‘Would it help if you stayed at mine tonight?’ she asks.
‘I thought –’
‘I know. It didn’t seem right before, somehow. But I don’t mind tonight.’
‘What about your dad?’
She laughs. ‘He can’t see you.’
‘Yeah, I know that. I just mean, what if he hears you talking to me. Won’t he think that’s weird?’
‘I’ll just have to talk really quietly, won’t I?’
‘You could write stuff down for me.’
‘If we only talk when we’re in my room, he won’t hear a thing. He always falls asleep about ten anyway and he never wakes up after that, unless he decides to go to the pub. Either way it won’t matter. ’
I nod slowly. ‘I think I’d like that.’
She gives me her special smile, the one that nobody else sees.
Five: Lisa
Bethany’s dad keeps his glassy eyes on the TV as she walks past the open living room door. ‘Where have you been?’ he shouts.
There’s a smell that I recognise coming from the room, but it’s not sweet and comforting like the smell in Raven’s hallway. Just like at Raven’s though, I can’t place it, but something about the unpleasantness of it tells me I shouldn’t ask Bethany what it is.
‘Chloe’s,’ she calls back, jogging up the stairs before he has time to ask anything more.
I follow her, checking out the stairs as I go. They’re narrow, walled on either side with a handrail and a stained carpet. At the bottom there’s no carpet only a red, stone-tiled floor. A speeding car – that looks like something that could kill you, it looks dangerous. This looks so unlikely, just like someone’s safe, cosy house. I wonder if Bethany’s mum’s blood is still in the cracks of the tiles, just like mine is in the ground of
Yarrow Lane. Like my dad’s is in the cogs of the machinery that sucked him in and crushed him to death while he was working one day. I wonder if we all leave traces of ourselves everywhere. Bethany closes the door of her room, throws off her coat and roots in a set of drawers. She pulls a chunky looking jumper over her head and sits on her bed, wrapping the duvet around her legs. I can see the breath curl from her mouth.
‘Is it cold in here?’
She nods. ‘Heating doesn’t come on until eight.’
I look around. There’s a small electric fire in a corner. It looks pretty old and there’s a thick layer of dust on it. ‘Can’t you put that on?’ I say, pointing to it.
‘Dad goes mad if I use it, costs too much.’
‘What’s it here for then?’
‘Dunno. It’s just always sat there.’
The wallpaper looks as though it used to be beige stripes but it’s so faded now that it’s almost one colour. There’s a small desk in the corner, the sort with a lid that they used to have in schools, an old portable telly and an overflowing bookcase. I go over to take a look at what books she has.
‘The movies, they’ll goddamn kill you…’ I murmur.
‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ she says. ‘Did you like it?’
I turn to her. ‘I don’t remember,’ I say.
She flips the blankets off her legs and comes to look at the bookcase with me, hugging herself. ‘I never had you down as the reading sort.’
‘I’m not sure I was,’ I say. ‘But there were lots of books in my room before Mum cleared out.’
‘Are you sure you can’t remember?’ she asks, ‘or are you just pretending to be someone different than you are?’
‘How can I be someone different? I’m just me.’
‘You seem to remember some things and not others, but something like whether you used to read a lot or not… well… I think you’d know that. I think you’re so used to hiding the real you that you can’t stop, even now.’
I turn to her. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Well,’ she begins slowly, ‘what you pretended to be at school… I don’t think that was who you really were, was it?’
I shrug. ‘I could say the same to you. We do what we have to, don’t we?’
‘I suppose we do.’
‘It’s funny how we both lost parents but we never even saw how much the same that made us until now.’
‘I did,’ she says.
‘You did? I didn’t really think about it.’
‘That’s because you were an arse,’ she says.
‘Ingrid says that,’ I reply. I haven’t thought about Ingrid in days and it’s funny, but when I think of her now, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much. ‘I wish I’d been nicer to you, though.’
She laughs. ‘You’re only saying that because you have nobody else now.’
‘No… I mean it. I think at first…’ I don’t finish, because I don’t know how to.
She pulls her copy of The Catcher in the Rye from the shelf.
‘It looks old,’ I say as she opens it. That musty smell of ageing books unfurls from the yellowing pages.
‘My mum’s copy,’ she says. ‘I could read it to you, if you want.’
‘Ok,’ I say. ‘I think I’d like that.’ I sit on the floor and cross my legs, like a nursery kid waiting for the teacher to tell a story.
She sits on the bed and opens the book, but then she frowns at me. ‘David, if you melt through walls and stuff, how are you not disappearing through my floor?’
I look down at myself and shrug. ‘I haven’t figured that out. I just don’t seem to.’
She cocks her head to one side and looks at me carefully. ‘I think you’re sort of suspended, not quite touching the floor. Is that how you walk around?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ I smile suddenly. ‘I’m like Casper the Friendly Ghost.’
‘Not nearly as cute, though,’ she says smiling back.
‘I need a white sheet.’
She giggles. ‘You’d give my dad a fright.’
I suddenly remember him. ‘You think you ought to be quieter?’
‘He’s watching telly. He always watches telly on Saturday afternoons and doesn’t bother me until he wants his tea. Come to think of it, he does that every afternoon.’
‘Doesn’t he go to work?’
‘Before mum died he did. But now he has to look after me so he quit.’
‘Look after you? Seems like it’s the other way around to me.’
‘No,’ she says quickly. ‘He does loads for me.’
‘Like what?’
‘I have this house, for a start.’ She pauses as if she’s trying to think of some other things. ‘I’m sick of the way people judge him around here. Like I said before, it’s a small-minded dump.’
I think about what she’s said. ‘People don’t seem to like him very much around here, that’s for sure.’
‘That’s because he’s not from the village. Mum was, but he moved here when they got married.’
‘I don’t think it’s that,’ I say. ‘I think people find him a bit…’ I don’t know what word I want.
‘It was hard for him, when Mum died,’ she cuts in. ‘People forget that.’
‘It was hard for you too,’ I say.
‘Me and Dad… we had to take care of each other because it was all we had.’
‘I only see you taking care of him,’ I insist.
‘You don’t understand,’ she frowns.
The look she gives me says don’t argue. Maybe she has a point, though. Somebody, no matter how one-sided the relationship might seem, is better than nobody, I suppose. I think about my mum and Roger. Much as I hate Roger, I have to admit that I’m glad she has him now.
Bethany is cooking. It’s nothing fancy: beans and sausages with oven chips. It still smells good to me. I’ve never cooked anything so I’m impressed as I watch her flit between tasks, and the way she knows how to make sure everything is ready at the same time. Sometimes, she throws me a secret smile as she works, or whispers a passing comment to me. We’re not really talking about anything important, but I like it. If I’m honest, I’m tired of talking about important things.
Bethany’s kitchen is a dim square of a room, a tiny curtain-less window reflecting the bare lightbulb hanging above us. Like the rest of the house, it needs decorating and there is no way to tell what colour the walls started out, now they’re a sort of putty grey. She puts out two plates. On one she puts the largest share of everything, on the other a tiny portion that doesn’t look like it would feed a flea.
‘Is that one yours?’ I ask, frowning at the small plate.
‘I’m not really hungry,’ she whispers
as she takes a tray from the cupboard and wipes it with a cloth before putting the large plate on it. I follow as she takes it through to her dad in the living room. I get a good look at him now. He’s skinny – just like Bethany – mousey hair cropped short and washed-out eyes. He’s sunk so far in his armchair that it’s hard to tell where the chair ends and he begins. He looks like someone who doesn’t know what he’s for anymore. He barely glances up from the TV – just long enough to take the food without spilling it – and doesn’t speak to her once.
We sit at the table together while Bethany eats her food carefully, like she daren’t even get a speck of gravy on the table.
‘Want a taste?’ she whispers.
‘It’s ok,’ I say. ‘Maybe you can tell me about it later.’
The silence has a sort of gloom to it as she eats. I try to remember what mealtimes were like in my house. Sometimes they’d be filled with blazing rows. Sometimes they’d be filled with laughter. I don’t remember them ever being like this.
Back in Bethany’s room it seems warmer. She flicks on the lamp and settles on the bed while I take my place on the floor. ‘Want to watch telly?’ she asks.
I shrug. ‘I suppose we could.’
She grabs a remote and switches on the old TV, flicking through what’s on offer. ‘I don’t have many channels,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’
Telly used to seem important. Somehow, it doesn’t anymore. ‘I’m not that bothered,’ I say. ‘You could turn it off if you don’t want to watch anything.’
‘What do you want to do then?’
‘We could talk.’
‘You want to talk?’ She raises her eyebrows.
‘Yeah. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing. It’s just… ok,’ she says, ‘what do you want to talk about?’
I think for a moment. ‘Tell me about your mum,’ I say.
She pauses to gather her thoughts. ‘There are no exciting stories to tell. She wasn’t special or clever or the most beautiful woman in the world. But she was my mum.’
‘I don’t want exciting stories. I’d just like to hear you talk about her.’
She leaps off the bed and drags an old shoebox from under it, blowing away a fine layer of dust. ‘I have photos,’ she says, climbing back on the bed and taking the lid from the box. Inside is a pile of shiny images. She holds one up to me. ‘This is her.’