by Gene Kemp
But maybe it would be as well to check up?
I spotted two nurses coming towards me. ‘Excuse me?’
They went past. Chatting.
A porter came from behind. As he reached me I said, ‘Excuse me?’
He swerved right, steering the empty trolley he was pushing into an open lift. The gates rattled shut.
The hospital was overheated like they always are, but it felt as if someone had poured icy water down my back. I shuddered.
They were treating me like I was a ghost!
Not even that. Nobody was scared except me.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed on.
Kitchen, bathroom, toilets, several closed doors, and the corridor ended in a sort of mini foyer with doorways leading off either side; the main ward in front. Back to base! I’d have known even if I hadn’t heard the murmur of Mum’s voice coming from behind a half-open door labelled Ward Sister. She wasn’t shouting, surprise surprise! I had half a mind to stroll in and join her, but something happened that drove everything else out of my head.
From where I was standing I had an angled view of a bed. The usual high hospital sort with metal ends and a prop for supporting pillows and whoever happens to be in it. Hospital beds, with or without patients, are always tidy with bedclothes tucked tight under the mattress. But this bed was different. A tornado seemed to have hit it. Pillows, sheets, blankets made a rickety hill in the middle. The green coverlet was dragged half over the side, half lying on the floor. Scrabbling in amongst the chaos was a kid in stripy pyjamas. He emerged for an instant and I had this clear view of spiky hair and freckles like syrup spreading over squashed-up nose and cheeks. Then he was gone again like a mole tunnelling in earth.
You could have knocked me down with a bus ticket. Still in a daze I put my hand in my pocket. The mechanical digger was there. Collecting my scattered wits, I started off towards the exploded bed, but before I’d taken more than a few paces, a nurse came bellowing up to Peter (yes, Peter … my mind was boggling) and started giving him a real telling off. She whisked him up and plonked him in a chair, then began sorting out the bedclothes. Her broad, energetic back kept moving between us, so I couldn’t be sure if he’d noticed me. I didn’t doubt it was the digger that he was hunting for, but it wasn’t the right moment to charge across and hand him the cause of the trouble. I decided to hang on. The nurse certainly hadn’t finished all she wanted to say. I caught a word here and there.
‘… concussion … supposed to keep quiet … romping about … have to lie down …’
The word ‘concussion’ fixed in my brain. So he’d bashed his head too. I wasn’t surprised.
In the ward were eight beds. Six (not counting Peter’s) had patients in them – all glued to the bedmaking drama. The remaining bed, across the central aisle from Peter’s and close to me now, was hidden by green flowery curtains.
I never had found out the rules about visiting times, but a quick glance told me no visitors were here. That bossy nurse had almost finished remaking the bed. I didn’t want her ordering me out before I’d had time to discover what was going on. Taking a chance on my being ignored by her was too great a risk, even though nearly everyone else had been acting as if I didn’t exist.
She gave a final smooth to the coverlet. On impulse I took the only hiding place to hand, sliding between the flowery curtains. I meant to say a reassuring word to whoever was in the hidden bed. No point in rousing complaints that might bring the nurse running. So I turned round to face the bed.
He lay quite still, eyes closed, a bandage round his forehead and a plaster across the bridge of his nose. One closed eyelid was swollen and purpling. A cold trickle of disbelief started somewhere behind my ears and went on travelling. A quarter of me felt it while the other three-quarters gaped down at myself.
So I was a ghost!
Then my body went numb as well. Thinking was out of the question. After what seemed like a thousand years a very slow message passed back from my eyes to my paralysed brain.
The body in the bed – my body – was breathing.
Relief made the floor sway and it was a case of sitting on the bed or falling. I sat, staring at the coverlet moving gently up and down, up and down. It was a pretty good sight. I still couldn’t reason, but a tiny stir of curiosity made me shift up the bed to get a better look at myself. Something wasn’t quite right, and I don’t mean the plaster or bandage or the black eye. I put out a nervous finger and prodded the nose-plaster. Not hard – very gently. A stab of pain crossed my face. Quickly I brought my hand back to feel my nose. No plaster, but the pain had been real. It set my brain-wheels turning and I began to twig what was wrong. That was me in the bed – the pain was proof. Up until now I’d only ever seen myself as a back-to-front mirror image. This was the first time I’d ever seen myself as other people see me.
From beyond the curtains came the squeak of shoes. A voice said:
‘You can sit with him a while if you like, Mrs Baines. He’s sleeping now.’
And Mum’s voice: ‘I’ll stay till he wakes. My husband’s home so I’ve plenty of time.’
I thought – she’ll have hysterics when she sees two of me … if she does. I couldn’t stand either possibility. No time for making plans. I did the only thing I could think of on the spur of the moment. Lifting up the covers, I got into bed with myself and shut my eyes. There wasn’t even time to take off my Silver Shadows.
The curtains were drawn back.
‘Gerry?’ Mum said.
I opened one eye wide. The other remained a slit. My body felt as if I’d done ten rounds with Muhammed Ali or somebody. Under the bandage my forehead was sore. I did manage a creaky sort of smile.
‘How are you?’
‘Battered.’ I felt about under the sheet, half expecting to find two of me still in the bed.
‘Uncomfortable, are you? Here, let me straighten your pillows.’
‘Don’t fuss, Mum. I’m OK.’ But I wasn’t. Not really. My head ached and my one eye felt as tight as a blown-up balloon. All the same I did seem to have got together with myself.
The foot of the bed was no longer screened by curtains and the little kid, Peter, was standing in the middle of the aisle, staring. He grinned at me. I knew now why that grin had been unfamiliar in the park. The only other time I’d seen him before was here, and he’d been asleep. He came and stood at the bottom of my bed.
‘Mum,’ I said, ‘feel in the pocket of my jeans.’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘I took those home last night while you were still out for the count.’ From nowhere she produced my dressing gown and drew the digger from the pocket like a conjuring trick. ‘This what you were after?’
‘It belongs to him.’ I gave up trying to fathom what was going on. I’d been out of my head, that’s for sure. Out of my body too, unless I’d gone round the bend.
Peter was grinning from ear to ear. He took the digger. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘Oh … somewhere. On the floor.’ It was the best I could do.
Mum stayed on a bit. We had tea, and after, she went home. Later Terry came to visit me.
‘Hi! You look terrible,’ he said. ‘Have a Liquorice Allsort.’
‘Thanks,’ I took a soft coconut. ‘You look beautiful.’
He loomed over me, grinning and shaking his fist. ‘Want a punch in your other eye?’
‘Get lost!’
‘You want to watch it, matey!’ He sat down by the bed and helped himself from the box of sweets again, then held them out. ‘Have another?’
But eating was too difficult, so Terry munched them for me while he gave a rundown on the snooker I’d missed that afternoon on telly. Then he described the horror film I’d missed out on last night. He talked a lot. Once he gets going, Terry can chew your ear off. Eventually he stopped and chomped several more Liquorice Allsorts.
To fill up the silence I asked, ‘Where were you off to whistling down High Street this morning?’ As soon as the
words were out I realized I’d dropped myself in it.
‘Coming here of course. To see how much uglier you’d made your ugly mug. They wouldn’t let me in the ward though …’ he stopped suddenly, staring at me. There was a long pause while he went on staring. Then he said slowly: ‘How did you know?’
How did I know? Perhaps I was going off my rocker? My head felt clogged, brains fizzing as I tried to think of a good answer. I finally dragged out,
‘Somebody told me.’
Terry seemed to believe this. Stuffing the last Liquorice Allsort into his mouth he began rabbiting on about the telly programmes I was going to miss this evening.
I relaxed back on the pillows. I couldn’t care less about the telly. It was just so good being back in my own skin.
A Ghost of One’s Own
URSULA MORAY WILLIAMS
Harriet was in the bus, on her way to a party, carrying her family ghost in a basket. She was going to see Miss Meadie, who was giving the party at her home. Her brother William sat on the seat opposite to her, looking sulky, because he had not wanted to come.
Some people can see ghosts and some cannot. Harriet, alone of all her family, could. Her brother William could not, but he could feel them and hear them. And he could smell them, for some ghosts have a fragrance very like old herbs and roses. William did not care for ghosts, so this caused him a lot of inconvenience.
The rest of the family just did not believe in them at all. So they would not be likely to take any notice of the advertisement in a column of the local paper that said: ‘All Ghosts Welcome at Miss Meadie’s Party on Friday Next.’ It did not say who Miss Meadie was, nor where she lived, but anyone who really wanted to go to the party could surely find out.
Harriet had found out long ago, before she had a ghost of her own, when she was riding her bicycle back from school and had turned aside to explore the driveway of an old country estate. Harriet recognized it at once as ghost territory, even before she met Miss Meadie coming down the drive carrying armfuls of freshly-cut phantom roses which could not possibly be real, since it was February. There was a ghost dog at her heels, and a real one, and two semi-invisible cats, also an old butler, who looked at Harriet and vanished.
Miss Meadie recognized Harriet at once as a Ghost Believer. She gave her a rose and invited her to tea.
‘You must come and visit me whenever you like!’ Miss Meadie told her. ‘And bring your friends with you. I mean your personal friends of course, not your flesh-and-blood ones. I know just what it is like to have your dear ones snubbed and slighted and ignored and not believed in. You must bring them to me instead!’
Harriet was too embarrassed to explain that she had no phantom of her own at present. True, she saw and heard other people’s wherever she went, but they all belonged to someone else.
‘You do have a ghost of your own, I suppose?’ Miss Meadie said sharply, and for a moment Harriet felt that she had arrived under false pretences.
She saved herself by saying calmly: ‘Well, just at present I haven’t got one, but my brother William has a skeleton.’
‘A skeleton?’ said Miss Meadie with interest. ‘And why has he not come to see me?’
‘My brother,’ Harriet explained, ‘doesn’t like ghosts!’
‘Doesn’t like them?’ Miss Meadie repeated. ‘But they are lovely things! So gentle! So affectionate … so beautiful! Why doesn’t your brother William think that ghosts are beautiful?’
‘My brother can’t see ghosts,’ Harriet explained. ‘He can only hear and feel them. It makes it difficult for him. But he found the skeleton in the loft, himself, and although he can’t see it he seems very fond of it. It goes everywhere with him, except to school. It is a very quiet skeleton, only sometimes it has some mischievous ways. It trips up my father in the hall when William leaves it around. My father does not believe in ghosts at all.’
‘So sad!’ said Miss Meadie. ‘So sad!’
‘I must be going now,’ said Harriet.
‘Very well,’ said Miss Meadie. ‘Come back when you have a ghost of your own.’
Harriet felt that she had fallen short of Miss Meadie’s expectations. The parting was a little cold. But she had no idea where she could get a ghost for herself. You couldn’t buy them, and William’s had arrived quite by accident, due to rummaging in the loft on a wet day in the holidays. As far as Harriet was concerned, he was welcome to it. She did not care for skeletons, but since meeting Miss Meadie she had realized that just seeing ghosts was not enough for a true ghost lover. One ought to have a phantom of one’s own.
She did, quite soon.
Harriet and William lived in one half of a semi-detached Victorian villa. The baby belonging to the people in the other half cried all night long, but when their mother mentioned it to the baby’s mother she was most indignant, and said that the baby slept in her room and never woke up all night, ever.
‘I didn’t hear it myself. It was the children who mentioned it,’ Harriet’s mother said, apologizing hastily.
The next time the baby cried, Harriet took a torch, woke her brother William, and climbed the stairs to the loft. There was a thin partition between their part of the loft and the next-door part. The baby was crying on the other side. Harriet made a hole in the partition, clambered through, and found the baby lying in an old-fashioned basket cradle. The moment it saw her, it stopped crying and smiled.
It was a lovely fat ghostling baby. William, shining the torch for Harriet, could not see it at all, but he was forced to admit it was there when Harriet thrust its warm, curly head against his fingers. She carried it downstairs to her room, and cuddled it and loved it and thought of little else for days and days. Sometimes she fed it on bread and milk, but ghost babies do well enough living on air.
Now she had her baby ghost and William had his skeleton. Their mother could not make them out at all.
‘My children have almost too much imagination!’ she complained to her friends. ‘They play all day long with imaginary companions! Harriet pretends she is looking after a baby! She pushes it out in an old doll’s pram that she hasn’t looked at for years. She is really much too big to push a doll’s pram. And William carries round a polythene shopping bag as if there was something precious inside it! Perhaps they are geniuses! I don’t know!’
So here they were, going to Miss Meadie’s party by bus, since it was difficult to take either the baby or the skeleton on a bicycle, and William was a little sulky because he had not wanted to go, but Harriet had persuaded him it would be hard luck on the skeleton if he didn’t.
Harriet had been to visit Miss Meadie just once more, after she had found the baby.
‘Good!’ said Miss Meadie. ‘It is just in time to come to my ghost party.’
Harriet stared.
‘I give a ghost party every year,’ Miss Meadie went on. ‘On Hallowe’en, of course! The patrons like it and it keeps the ghosts off the streets. You can come!’
‘And William?’ asked Harriet.
‘If that is the skeleton boy, then of course he can come,’ said Miss Meadie. ‘But don’t tell all and sundry. I only want people with ghosts, not people without, and I don’t want newspapermen or the general public. They might win the game and that would be a pity.’
‘What game?’ asked Harriet at once.
‘Why, the Wishing Bean game!’ said Miss Meadie. ‘The darling ghosties look forward to it all the year round. You see, after everybody has eaten all they can, I bring in a great dish of hot spiced curry, very hot and very spicy, and somewhere in it there is hidden a little round yellow bean. Everybody eats and eats and eats in the hope that the bean will be found in their portion, because if it is …’
‘What?’ asked Harriet, excited.
‘They have a wish!’ said Miss Meadie. ‘And the wish comes true. Always. Just that one wish, at that one moment in the year.’
‘What do they usually wish for?’ asked Harriet, wondering what a ghost could desire on such an occasion.
‘You never can tell!’ said Miss Meadie, shaking her head. ‘The very strangest things! There was a cavalier – you know, the kind of fellow who carries his head under his arm. We were all so pleased when he got the bean. We felt sure he would wish to have his head put back on his shoulders again. Well, wouldn’t you? But not a bit of it! He wished for a really dashing hat with white feathers in it! He said he would be able to admire it much more easily if he wore it underneath his arm.’
‘What else did they wish for?’ asked Harriet.
‘Well, there was a lady who had been drowned,’ said Miss Meadie. ‘She wished for a modern permanent wave, because they did not have them in her day. But sometimes it isn’t the ghosties who get the bean. Sometimes it’s the patrons, and some are very selfish. They wish for cruises in the Mediterranean and things like that which their dear ones can’t take part in. One of them wanted a flat in Paris. His ghost couldn’t go there – it couldn’t understand French! So selfish, wasn’t it?’
‘Can they wish for just anything?’ asked Harriet.
‘Just anything!’ said Miss Meadie. ‘And when I think of all the wasted opportunities, I sometimes think I’ll never give a party again.’
Harriet immediately began to think what she would wish for if she got the bean at Miss Meadie’s party, and she decided on a really beautiful perambulator for the baby, that she could push around without being told that she was really too old for a doll’s pram.
‘I think it is very kind indeed of you to give a party for us and our ghosts,’ she told Miss Meadie. ‘Everyone must be very grateful to you.’
‘Well, we have our enemies, of course,’ said Miss Meadie. ‘No doubt you read the advertisement in the paper under the heading “Miscellaneous”?’
Harriet had not. Miss Meadie handed her the paper.
‘ “Let me solve your physic problems”,’ Harriet read aloud. ‘Is it advertising medicine?’
‘Psychic, not physic!’ said Miss Meadie, fondling the two ghost cats that were sparring for her attention. ‘Read on!’