Ghost

by Helen Grant

  In all those fairy tales there was always a villain: a spiteful stepmother, an evil gnome. In this one there was the poisonous little voice in my mind that said: Why did she leave you behind? It hurt to think that the all-consuming love I had imagined for her had left no room for me. But still, I preferred believing in love than in death.

  At least twice in the later part of that journey we went through built-up areas which I thought must be cities from the number of houses, although Tom said they were only towns. In these places there were more people on the pavements, and many more cars. Everything seemed chaotically busy. How did anyone ever cross one of these roads in safety? And how did the drivers find their way about, when everything went so fast and there was no time to read any of the signposts, let alone make a decision about which way to go?

  The excitement I had felt earlier on, when we had made it out of the Langlands estate, was fading away. I began to think about what would happen if I were somehow separated from Tom out here, how I would never, ever be able to find my way home by myself. It was too far and too confusing. There was no reason to think that I could be parted from Tom, or that he would abandon me, and yet once the idea of becoming separated was seeded in my mind, it grew persistently, like ivy working its tendrils in between bricks. I had been chattering about what I saw from the window; now I fell silent. The streets that slid past me seemed as hostile as a desert, or the bottom of an ocean; I had no idea how to survive out there on my own. No matter how hard I tried to push it back, an oppressive sense of dread was creeping over me. I wanted to cry out, turn around Tom, take me home now, please, Tom please. The desire was so strong that I could almost taste the words in my mouth. I bit my lip to stop myself from blurting them out.

  But now the car was slowing. Tom wasn’t turning around; he was stopping. We slid to a halt and he did something that made the engine die. Then he turned to me with a grin, though the cheerful expression wavered when he saw the look on my face.

  “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, although my throat felt so tight that I couldn’t speak.

  “We don’t have to get out. We can just go back if you want.”

  No, I thought. I need air. I pawed at the door but I couldn’t work out how to open it, and the belt across my body was restricting me.

  There was a click and the belt slackened. Tom had unfastened it. Then he was out of the car and opening the door on my side.

  It was cold and windy out there. He had to hold the door to stop it swinging outwards, and the howling of the wind was instant and tremendous.

  “Welcome to Elie,” Tom shouted in my ear as I climbed out of the car. Oddly, as soon as I was standing there with my feet on the solid ground, I began to feel better. The cold wind braced me up. I was used to tolerating cold and bad weather; we had plenty of both during the winter at Langlands. It was green here, too, and that was better than the unrelenting grey of the towns, and there were no other people in sight.

  Tom took my hand and began to pull me along. It was a good feeling, his hand in mine. His skin was warm; his grip was firm and reassuring. I stopped worrying about being somehow separated from him. I knew he wouldn’t let me go. As we stumbled over the grass with the wind in our faces I felt my spirits lift. Then we came to the top of a piece of rising ground and I saw the sea for the first time in my life.

  The sea. It was not blue nor green as I had read that it was in books, but a kind of slate grey colour, and it stretched so far into the distance that all perspective was lost: the faint horizon could have been two miles away, or twenty, or two hundred, or perhaps it was an illusion and there was no limit at all. Where the water met the land it foamed white, and sucked back and forth in restless motion. I could smell it, too; a subtle saline tinge on the air.

  We went down onto the sand, which was damp and clinging even before we got close to the water’s edge. The howling of the wind merged with the seething of the waves breaking.

  I had to raise my voice to make myself heard. “I want to go in.”

  Tom looked astonished. “What, you want to swim? You can’t, you’ll freeze to death.”

  “No,” I shouted back. “I can’t swim.” That was true; I’d never had the opportunity to learn. “Just my feet.”

  “You’ll still freeze,” he told me, but when I let go of his hand to bend and unlace my boots, he did the same.

  When I stepped into the water it was a cold shock, but still I thought: it’s not so bad. It was worth the chill to feel the new sensation of sand under my feet and the ebb and flow of the water. I moved my toes, savouring the feeling.

  Perhaps a minute later I realised my mistake. The water was so cold that I didn’t acclimatise. Instead of starting to feel warmer it simply felt colder and colder. My feet were already becoming numb. I ran out of the water and onto the sand and I was limping because I couldn’t feel my feet properly. My trousers were wet to the middle of the calf too. The fabric felt strangely stiff and uncomfortable and clung unpleasantly to my ankles. Seemingly, modern clothes were a lot less practical than my old dresses, which could have been hitched up out of the way. Tom was no better off. The bottom inches of his trousers were dark with seawater too. He didn’t seem bothered; in fact, he was grinning. The smile made him so handsome that I felt my cheeks burning and looked down hastily.

  “Happy now?” he asked me cheerfully.

  “I can’t feel my toes,” I told him, apparently studying them with great interest.

  “I did tell you.”

  I picked up my boots and we walked to a large rock where we could sit down and do our best to dry our feet. It was almost impossible to get all the wet sand off; when I put my boots back on I resigned myself to feeling as though I was walking on grit for the rest of the day. I made a face and Tom laughed.

  “Had enough?”

  I shook my head, and pushed back the hair that was being blown across my face.

  “Not yet.” I pointed at the cliffs. “Can we go up there?”

  “If you want. Aren’t you cold?”

  “No,” I lied, trying not to shiver too obviously. Now that I was actually outside Langlands, I wanted to make the most of it.

  There was a steep path zigzagging up to the clifftops. It took us a while to climb it, and by the time we got to the top I wasn’t chilly any more, despite the wind; I was warm with exertion, and I felt hampered by my tight-fitting clothes. How did anyone do anything dressed like this? I was glad of my own worn-in boots. I’d seen some of the things girls wore on their feet in the magazine pictures, and I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to walk in those at all.

  Tom took my hand and pulled me up the last bit, and when we were standing at the top he didn’t let go; we went on hand in hand. The clifftop was utterly unlike Langlands with its closely-packed trees. Up here there was grass but no trees; everything was flat and wide open, so that the wind could blast across it and the sky seemed to wheel above us, dizzyingly. I stopped walking, and Tom stopped with me. The wind was so strong here that I felt we could have taken flight altogether; I dared not go too close to the edge of the cliff in case it dragged me over. It was alarming but glorious too. From up here, where the view was not framed by the curves of the coastline, the sea looked truly infinite, as vast as the sky. As the sun pierced the clouds, the surface of the water shivered into a million sparkling fragments, too bright to look at.

  It was cold here in spite of the winter sunshine. Tom pulled me into an embrace and his lips on my cheek, my mouth, made the only warm places on my exposed skin. The wind howled in my ears, drowning out everything: my breathing, the roar of the sea, Tom’s words, if there were any. If someone had stood right beside me and said, Turn back, don’t do this, I should not have heard them. I put my cold fingers into Tom’s hair and kissed him back.

  You can’t kiss someone for long in a freezing wind like that. Ghost can’t pretend she isn’t cold any
more; I can feel her shivering in my arms. We go back to the car, and as soon as the engine’s running, I turn the heater on full blast.

  We have to stop for petrol, so with the last of the cash Ghost gave me from her grandmother’s safe, I pay for that and a takeout coffee for her. Then we set off again, and drive in silence for a few minutes while she sips the coffee. Then she says, “Tell me about 2017, Tom,” so I do.

  I tell her about modern medicine – how they can cure people of stuff that used to be incurable, and how they’re starting to be able to make bionic arms that you can move by thinking about them. How they have running blades for people without legs.

  Then I tell her about men landing on the moon, thinking that’s going to amaze her, and I’m surprised when she doesn’t seem that impressed. It takes me a while to realise that she doesn’t believe me. She doesn’t come out and say that. She just doesn’t ask me much about it; she looks kind of distant while I’m talking about it. Maybe it’s just too much for her to swallow, or maybe she thinks I’m just making it up.

  I stop going on about the moon and tell her about ordinary stuff instead. Things everyone has in their houses. She’s seen some of it in the magazines I brought her: dishwashers, microwaves, washing machines. I do a kind of tour in my head of everything we have at home, and tell her about it. Old Mrs. McAndrew didn’t have a freezer, not even a fridge, so Ghost is interested in those, in the idea of being able to keep things fresh for ages. Sometimes this look crosses her face, as though she’s angry about something but keeping it down. She never loses it with me, though, so I guess it’s the old lady she’s cross with. Who wouldn’t be, after spending years cutting logs and washing everything by hand when you didn’t really need to?

  Working out which things are new to her and which aren’t is difficult. Langlands doesn’t have any kind of power supply, but she’s heard of gas and electricity and she knows what a phone is, even though the house doesn’t have one of those either.

  I nearly forget to mention the TV because it seems so obvious, but it’s a totally new idea to her. “And everyone has one of those in their house?” she asks me, sounding like she can’t believe it.

  “Yes,” I say.

  She asks me questions about how it works that I can’t answer, and that’s frustrating for both of us. I suppose in her world things are simpler. The most complicated machine she’s ever seen is probably Mrs. McAndrew’s car, and that was ancient. Nothing fuel-injected under that bonnet.

  It occurs to me that it would probably be easier just to take Ghost over to our place and show her all these things. But I’ve promised to keep her secret for now, and if we ran into Mum or Dad, that would be the end of that. Mum already suspects I’ve been borrowing her car to visit a girl, and we’d never get away without a million questions. Just one question, like “Are you still at school?” would be a disaster.

  So I carry on doing my best to tell her how people live in 2017 – people who haven’t been brought up by some mad old lady in a house in a forest. It’s when I get on to explaining the internet that things really get complicated. I start trying to describe it, but the minute the word “computer” is out of my mouth I realise I’m going to have to go back and explain that, too. I’m halfway through doing that when I say the word “keyboard” and she says, “Like a piano?” and I get that feeling I’ve had before, like a kind of vertigo, realising there’s such a big gap between what she knows and what I know, and she’s relying on me to bridge it, and the job feels too fucking big. I’d have to be a human Wikipedia to do it.

  We’re only a mile or so from Langlands when I think, even if I can’t show her the house, I can show her the net. I fish in my pocket for my smartphone and hold it out to her, keeping my gaze on the road ahead. “Here. It’s a smartphone,” I add, realising too late that she isn’t sure what it is.

  “A telephone?”

  “Yes. But you can go online with it too. I mean, you can look at the internet.”

  “I don’t know how to.”

  “I’ll talk you through it. You see that button at the bottom of the screen? Press that first.”

  Silence. Then she says: “Nothing happened.”

  “The screen should light up.”

  Silence again, then: “No,” she says.

  We’re at the edge of the Langlands estate; a moment later we rattle over the cattle grid.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll look at it when we stop.”

  “What is it supposed to do?” she asks me.

  “Everything,” I say, with a shrug. “You can go online with it, call people with it. Listen to music. Watch videos. I don’t know. Take photos. Stuff like that.”

  I’m aware of her turning the phone over and over in her hands, as though it’s a puzzle she can’t begin to solve. We draw up in front of Langlands House and I turn off the engine.

  “Here,” I say, and she gives me the phone.

  I thumb the on button confidently and nothing happens. The phone is dead. And then my mind skips back to this morning before I came to Langlands. I’d meant to put the phone on charge and then I never did it. I’ve been out all day, and there isn’t even enough charge left now to turn the phone on.

  Ghost is looking over my shoulder expectantly.

  “It’s no good,” I tell her. “It’s dead. It needs charging.”

  She doesn’t say anything to that, so I glance at her and catch the sly grin that’s gone almost as soon as it appears, the way she bites her lip before she turns her head to look innocently out of the window.

  I slump back in my seat, torn between laughter and indignation. I’m holding the smartphone in my hand and it’s nothing but a sleek piece of junk; I might as well be holding a stone.

  “It does do all that stuff,” I say lamely.

  “Yes,” she says, without catching my eye.

  “I’ll charge it up before I come next time.” I pause. “It will work then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Stop laughing.”

  “I’m not laughing,” she says, but now she is; the last word is lost in it. Ghost looks at me then, looks me right in the face, and her eyes are full of laughter too. She doesn’t look like some strange refugee from 1945. She looks amazing. She looks like someone I could love.

  I was glad to get back to Langlands that day, the first time I ever saw the world outside. It was terrifying and exhilarating, knowing that I had crossed the border and nothing had happened; the sky hadn’t fallen on my head. I saw the sea at last, and heard its whisper and felt its glacial coldness on my bare skin. I wanted to think about all of that, and about Tom’s arms around me and the heat of his kiss.

  I thought he would just leave me at the door of Langlands then and go, because it was getting late in the day. But he came into the house with me, standing at my shoulder as I unlocked the door. It took me a moment to manage the lock. My fingers were suddenly clumsy, and the light touch of his hand on my waist seemed to make it worse; I fumbled and almost dropped the key.

  At last I managed it. Inside, the house was cold and rather dark. After the brisk wind and the sea air, the stillness had a dead quality to it. I imagined the dust drifting down and settling in layers over everything. Supposing I had left with Tom and never come back – what difference would it have made? Langlands would have decayed neither faster nor slower for my absence. I was not sure whether the thought was comforting or melancholy.

  We went to the kitchen, where there was at least some warmth from the stove. I went immediately to stoke it up.

  “Would you light the lamp, Tom?” I said over my shoulder as I knelt in front of the stove. There was an oil lamp on the table; I heard a rattle as he picked it up.

  After a moment, I heard him say, “I don’t know how to.” And that was strange, finding out that growing up in the twenty-first century didn’t mean you knew how to do everything people ha
d done before.

  I stood up and went over to where Tom was standing holding the lamp with a puzzled expression on his face, and held out my hands for the lamp and the matches. I showed him how to light it, and when I had replaced the glass I glanced up and found I was looking right into Tom’s eyes.

  He’d kissed me before of course, when we opened Grandmother’s safe, and he had kissed me on the clifftop while the wind screamed around our heads. Now, even before he leaned in, I knew he was going to kiss me again and I felt a surge of something like vertigo, a sense of anticipation so sharp that it was almost like being afraid.

  Afraid of what? That was the question. Not afraid of Tom. No. I was afraid of myself.

  I wanted him to kiss me. The closeness, the feeling of his lips on mine, his hands in my hair – it was the most exciting thing I had ever felt, like falling and flying all at once, like being the falcon who cleaves through the air and then sweeps upwards without ever meeting the ground. I wanted it again, that feeling, so when Tom put his arms around me and pulled me towards him, I didn’t resist. My lips parted naturally under his. My heart was thudding; I could hardly breathe. I put my arms around him, too, holding on, and I was astounded at my own daring.

  Because it was daring. I knew I shouldn’t be doing this. Spiting Grandmother was one thing; after her lies, there was no reason I should care what she would have said. But that didn’t make it right to be here alone with Tom, clinging on to him as his mouth moved languorously over mine. I wasn’t naive enough to think that because it felt beautiful it was good.

  Tom was pressing against me; I took a step backwards, off balance, and felt the cool of the wall at my back. I tilted my head. My eyes slid closed; Tom’s fingers snagged in my hair.