One year while out parakeet hunting, Uncle Bick caught a little green one he named Pipsie. Pipsie had clearly had a hard life. When Uncle Bick found her, she was sitting on a stop sign, tweeting her head off. She had a broken wing and was missing one foot. Other parakeets would have given up, but Pipsie was a survivor. She managed to get herself on top of that sign and get rescued. I don’t know how. She couldn’t fly.
Pipsie was undernourished and dehydrated, and her feathers were coming out. Uncle Bick nursed little Pipsie back to health with a care and devotion I couldn’t help but admire. He’d sit for hours, dripping water into her beak through an eyedropper. He fed her mashed food from the end of a coffee stirrer. He bound up her broken wing until it healed.
“Look at how she adapts,” he’d say whenever I came into the shop. “Look at her. She’s a lesson to us all. We can all adapt.”
Which is great, except . . . Pipsie didn’t really adapt. Her wing healed crooked, so she could only fly about six inches off the ground in semicircular patterns. She fell off the perch all the time, so Uncle Bick just kept her in a box on the counter. One day, Pipsie got it in her tiny bird mind that she could fly again. She got up to the edge of the box and surveyed the landscape and spread her crooked wings and went for it. She fell off the counter and landed on the floor, just as the delivery guy swung the door open and rolled in three hundred pounds of birdseed on a hand truck.
This is all I could think about after Stephen told me to “adapt.”
Stephen drove Boo and me back to school, dropping us off a few streets away so that no one would see us coming back to school grounds in a police car. It was only five o’clock. People were filing into the refectory for dinner. I was too nauseous to eat. Boo was starving, though, so we walked over to the local coffee place, where she could get a sandwich. I watched her devour a ham and brie.
“So,” I said, “it’s your job to hang around with me?”
“Pretty much,” she said.
“How does this work?”
“Well, Stephen’s an actual police officer with a uniform and everything. Callum works undercover on the Underground, because there’s loads of ghosts down there. And I’m new. My first assignment was to come and watch over you.”
“So you had something happen to you?” I asked. “That’s why you’re like this?”
“When I was eighteen, I was a bit of a club kid—”
“When you were eighteen? How old are you now?”
“Twenty.”
“Twenty?”
“I’m a fake student,” she said. “With a fake age. Anyway, my friend Violet and I were coming home from a club. She was driving. I knew she was drunk. I should never have gotten in the car. I should have stopped her. But I was kind of drunk myself, and I didn’t always make the best decisions back then. We ran smack into a bollard. There was smoke, we were bloody, Violet was unconscious. I heard this voice telling me to keep calm, to get out of the car. I looked over, and it was Jo. She was standing there. I was crying, completely freaking out, but she talked me through it. We’ve been best friends since then. Actually, I tried to get her a phone for Christmas. She can carry things—not big things, but she can lift things like phones. But it’s kind of hard owning things when you’re a ghost. You don’t have pockets or anything. And people would just see a phone floating around, which would be weird. She picks up trash because she likes to keep busy, and apparently people don’t notice trash moving. They think the wind’s blown it or someone’s thrown it. You have to think about these kinds of things when you’re a ghost.”
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said.
“Do what?”
“This thing. This thing that I am.”
“Course you can. There’s nothing to do, anyway. It’s just natural, yeah?”
“How am I supposed to do all this work?” I said, running my hands through my hair. “This essay. I have to write it this weekend. I have to write an essay on Samuel Pepys and his stupid frickin’ diary and I can see ghosts.”
I walked around the room, picking up my things, putting them back down again, trying to establish some baseline of reality. Everything seemed the same. Same room. Same Boo. Same ashtray. Same unwashed mug with red wine residue in it.
Boo ate her sandwich and watched me.
“I’ve got it,” she said, brushing the crumbs from her lap onto the floor. “The library.”
As it was a Saturday night and just before dinner, there were only a handful of people in the library, and those who were weren’t the kind who paid much notice to other people. They were all deep in their zones—headphones, computers, books. Boo walked the floor quickly, weaving in and out of all the stacks downstairs, then going upstairs and doing the same thing. Alistair was sprawled on one of the wide windowsills at the end of the literature section, authors Ea–Gr row. He had one leg stretched high, his Doc Martens boot planted flat against the side of the window, the other hanging down. He seemed to be the focus of Boo’s search, because she walked right up to him.
“She knows now,” Boo said.
Alistair lazily lifted his gaze from the book.
“Congratulations,” he said drily.
I still had no idea what we were doing. My thoughts were moving very slowly. They both looked at me, and when I didn’t respond, Boo explained.
“What we just talked about,” Boo said. “Alistair is . . . like that.”
“Like . . .”
And then I realized why Alistair was looking at me like I was so stupid. The eighties look he was rocking—that was no look. That was his actual hairstyle from the actual eighties.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “You’re . . .”
“Yeah! He’s dead.”
Boo said it like she was telling me it was his birthday. Alistair looked . . . like a person. The spiked hair and the rolled jeans and the big trench coat . . . I reached up and touched my own hair—longish, straight, very dark—and was suddenly very glad that I hadn’t dyed it pink, like I’d been considering. Pink hair for a few weeks, fine. Pink hair for eternity, that I wasn’t so sure about.
Which was not a good or decent thought to be thinking. I should have been thinking about the nature of life, the idea of dying at eighteen at school, the idea that for some people, death wasn’t the end. But those were all big thoughts, too big for me right now. So I concentrated on his hair. His eternal hair. His eternal Doc Martens.
I started laughing hysterically. I laughed so hard, I thought I was pretty much going to throw up in the middle of the literature section. Someone came into the end of the aisle and stared at me in annoyance, but I couldn’t stop. When I finally got it under control a little, Alistair slipped down from his perch.
“Come on,” he said. “Might as well show you.”
He walked us down to the ground floor, to the research section, by the librarian’s desk. There was a shelf full of The Wexford Register, the school newspaper, bound in green leather.
“March 1989,” he said.
Boo pulled the 1989 volume down and set it on one of the nearby tables. She flipped through to March. The paper looked weirdly cheap and cheesy, roughly typed. We found a large photo of Alistair on the front of the issue from March 17. He was smiling in the photo, his hair particularly large and obviously bleached blond even in black-and-white. The headline read “Wexford Mourns Death of Student.” “‘Alistair Gilliam died in his sleep on Thursday evening,’” Boo read softly. “‘He was the editor of the school literary magazine and was well-known for his love of poetry and the band the Smiths’ . . . in your sleep?” “Asthma attack,” Alistair said.
I started to giggle again. It rose up in my throat. The librarian looked over with an annoyed expression and put his finger to his lips. Boo nodded, replaced the book, and we returned to the privacy of the upstairs stacks. After checking to make sure we were basically alone, she continued the conversation.
“You didn’t die here,” Boo said
quietly. “So why do you come here?”
“Would you want to stay in Aldshot all the time? At least here I can read. Got nothing else to do. Read everything in here—twice. Well, most of it. Lots of it’s shite.”
“It’s great how you can pick up the books and turn pages,” Boo said.
“It took time,” he said. “But what about you two? You usually don’t come in pairs.”
“You’ve met people like us before?” Boo asked.
“One or two over the years. But they’re always alone, and always a bit mental.”
Not a great endorsement of my kind. And from the way Alistair was looking at me, I could tell that he hadn’t quite put me in the nonmental category yet.
“We’re a bit special,” Boo said. “I’m a police officer.”
“You’re a rozzer?” Alistair laughed properly for the first time.
“Yes, me,” she said. “We’re working on the Ripper case. The Ripper is . . . like you.”
“What do you mean, like me? You mean dead?”
Boo nodded.
“Dead, but nothing like me. We’re not all alike, you know.”
“Course!” Boo said. “Sorry!”
“I’m not into killers,” Alistair replied. “I was a vegetarian. Meat is murder, you know.”
“I’m really sorry.”
Boo reached out and touched his arm. He looked solid enough.
“How are you doing that?” I said. “I saw someone walk through that other woman.”
“Oh,” Boo said. “It depends on the person. Some people are really solid. Some are a bit more like air. Alistair is more solid. Can you pass through things? Doors, or walls?”
“I don’t like to,” he said. “I can. It takes time.”
“The more solid, the longer it takes and the harder it is. The ones who are more like air, they can do that more easily, but they’re not as physically strong. It’s harder for them to move things. But all ghosts are people, and you just respect them, no matter what they’re like, yeah?”
Alistair seemed mollified by this ghosts’ rights speech.
“Rory is needed for the investigation, see?” Boo said. “And she’s just found out what she can do, and it takes some time to adjust to that. She has this assignment to do, and obviously, she can’t do it. So, I was thinking, maybe you could help?”
Alistair didn’t, to my surprise, walk away or simply evaporate in disgust (because, for all I knew, he could do that).
“What is it?” he asked.
“Six to eight pages on the major themes of The Diary of Samuel Pepys,” I said automatically.
“The Diary of Samuel Pepys is massive,” Alistair replied.
“Oh . . . I mean, just the part about the fire.”
“The major theme of the part about the fire is the fire.”
“Also . . . rhetorical technique, or something.”
“Could you help us with that?” Boo asked. She had an alarmingly huge smile. “I mean, you’re obviously clever, and we have a murderer to stop. Can you type, or—”
“I don’t type.”
“Or write,” she said quickly. “Can you hold a pen?”
“I haven’t practiced in a while,” he replied. “I used to be able to do it. When do you need it?”
“Tomorrow morning?” I replied.
Alistair tapped his mouth with his fisted hand and thought for a moment.
“I want music,” he said.
“Music!” Boo nodded. “We can get you music! What music do you want?”
“I want Strangeways, Here We Come by the Smiths and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me by the Cure—”
“Wait, wait . . .”
Boo hurried off. I heard her making her way down the steps. While she was gone, I just stared at Alistair and he stared back at me.
“Pen,” she said as she returned. She held up a pen as proof. “Say those again.”
Alistair repeated his album choices, and Boo wrote them down on her palm.
“And London Calling,” he added, leaning over to make sure she was getting the names right. “I want London Calling by the Clash.”
“I’ll get you these albums tonight,” she said, holding out her hand so he could see what she had written. “And something to play them on. Deal?”
“I suppose,” he said. “Wait . . . I also want The Queen Is Dead. Also by the Smiths.”
“Four albums,” she said, holding up her palm to show him. “One paper. Deal?”
“Deal,” he said.
“See that?” Boo asked when we were outside. “Not scary, is he? And your paper is sorted.”
There was something in what she was saying. Alistair hadn’t scared me. There was really nothing weird about the conversation at all, if you discounted the fact that we had discussed an article about his death.
“Are there any other ghosts around here?” I asked.
“Not that I’ve seen, but sometimes they’re shy. A lot of them love attics, basements, underground areas. People scare them. Funny, isn’t it? People are scared of ghosts, ghosts are scared of people, when there’s no reason for any of it.”
“Except that the Ripper is a ghost,” I said. “There is no humanly possible way for me not to worry about that. And Jerome thinks I’m insane.”
“Oh.” Boo waved her hand dismissively. “He’ll forget.”
“I don’t think he will.”
“Course he will. And it’s only Jerome.”
My silence intrigued her.
“You?” she said. “And Jerome?”
I remained silent.
“Seriously? You and Jerome?”
“It’s not . . . It’s not a—”
“Oh,” she said, smiling hugely. “Then don’t worry. I’ll fix it.”
22
JEROME DIDN’T FORGET. OF COURSE HE DIDN’T FORGET. I saw an invisible woman and ran away from class. No one forgets that. And then I’d hidden myself away for the rest of the day, which didn’t help.
When I walked into breakfast the next morning, I saw him sitting with Andrew. He raised his head when he saw me come in and nodded. Boo and I got into line. She filled up a plate with a full English—eggs, bacon, fried bread, mushrooms, tomatoes. Like me, she could put it away. That morning, though, I had no appetite. I took some toast.
“No sausage?” the lady behind the counter said. “Feeling ill?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Don’t worry so much,” Boo said.
We took our seats, sitting on the opposite side of the table from Jerome and Andrew. They’d left space for us, as normal.
“Hi,” I said.
Jerome looked over at me from the remains of his breakfast.
“No sausage?” he asked.
Apparently my pork consumption habits were a matter of public record. Boo dropped down next to me, her spoon bouncing off her tray and clanking to the floor.
“Rory here,” she said. “Sick all night. Crazy fever. Babbling her head off about ponies.”
“Fever?” This caught Jerome’s attention. “You were ill yesterday?”
“Mmmm,” I said, glancing over at Boo.
“Babbling and babbling, like a babbling thing,” Boo went on. “Madness. Wouldn’t shut up.”
“Have you been to the nurse?” Jerome asked.
“Mmmm?” I said.
“She’s really fine,” Boo said. “Probably some period thing. I go completely mental too. Period fever. It’s the worst.”
This effectively killed all conversation for a while. Boo charged right on, telling us a very long story about how her friend Angela was getting cheated on by her boyfriend, Dave. No one tried to interrupt her. I just got through my toast as quickly as I could and excused myself. Boo was right behind me.
“Fixed that,” she said.
“You told him I had period fever,” I replied. “There’s no such thing as period fever.”
“No su
ch thing as ghosts either.”
“No, there is really no such thing as period fever. There’s a difference between being a guy and being an idiot.”
“Let’s get your essay,” she said, looping her arm through mine.
Boo waltzed me into the library, and I allowed myself to be waltzed. Alistair was tucked into a deep corner in the extremely unpopular microfilm section, behind a machine. Boo had provided him with a tiny iPod, and he was listening to something, eyes closed. I guess the earphones didn’t stay in his ears because he didn’t really have ears, but he managed to hold them up. The music flowed out of them into the air. As we came up, he opened his eyes slowly.
“On the shelf,” he said. “Between the bound copies of The Economist, 1995 and 1996.”
I went to the spot he directed us to. There, between the books, were fifteen handwritten pages, with footnotes and comments scribbled in the margins. I had just pulled these out when Jerome approached us. Boo grabbed them from me.
“Sorry,” he said, “but . . . can we talk?”
“Mmmm?” I replied. No guy had ever asked me if I wanted to talk, not like that. Not like a talk, talk kind of talk—if this was, in fact, a talk, talk “can we talk?” Or whatever.
“You go,” Boo said, shoving the papers into her bag. “I’ll see you later.”
I walked toward Jerome slowly, afraid to look at him. I no longer knew how to behave. I had been assured that I wasn’t insane, but that wasn’t very helpful. There was a ghost ten feet away from us who had done my homework, and Jerome couldn’t see him.
“You’re welcome,” Alistair called after me.
We stepped outside into the steel gray morning. I didn’t care that I was cold.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked. There was something nervous about the way he was standing, his shoulders hunched and his hands deep in his pockets, his arms locked to his sides.
Lacking any better idea, I suggested Spitalfields Market. It was big, it was busy, it was cheerful, and it would distract me a little. It used to be a market for fruits and vegetables. Now it was a ring of boutiques and salons. In the middle was a loosely enclosed space, one half devoted to restaurants, the other to stalls full of everything from tourist junk to handmade jewelry. Shoppers buzzed all around us. The racks were heavy with Jack the Ripper merchandise—top hats, rubber knives, I AM JACK THE RIPPER and JACK IS BACK shirts.
The Name of the Star Page 15