by Ben Jeapes
“Hi. I’m Zoe.” She came forward into the shop and held her hand out. Fortunately the phone was in his left hand so he could shake hands with the right. “Malcolm and Diana are through the back. Would you like some coffee? I just put some on.”
She went on ahead and Ted took the half-second opportunity to put the phone back. The utterly bastardly treacherous little heap of junk beeped when it slid into its cradle. She paused and looked back, one eyebrow raised.
“I tripped.” He tried a ghastly imitation of an innocent smile. “Sorry. Clumsy. Oops.”
The other eyebrow went up.
“Nice shirt, by the way,” she said as she turned away.
He had forgotten the t-shirt and it took a lot of self-control not to look down at it in horror. When he had put it on that morning, ‘Geek and Proud’ had been a statement to the world. He was proud. He had acquired his geekery through diligence and practice and hard work. It made him useful to friends and family, it had already got him his first job, and one day it would earn him a living.
In the meantime, though, he was pretty certain that if any female ever agreed to be his girlfriend, the word ‘geek’ would not have been mentioned for at least a couple of hours beforehand, unless prefaced with something like ‘totally not a ...’. If he had expected to get into conversation with a well fit woman that day, he would have chosen a different shirt.
“It’s, uh, totally ironic,” he assured her. He plucked at the fabric of his shirt between thumb and forefinger in several different places. “See? Irony. Everywhere.”
“Oh, yes, bursting out at the seams,” she agreed with a grin. “Come on through.”
He followed her through to the back. Her hips had just enough sway in them as she walked to make it a highly rewarding experience. She was perfectly poised in a pair of high-heeled shoes – something Ted had never worked out how women could wear, but with the right sort of woman it made their legs look fantastic, and Zoe was definitely the right sort so he wasn’t going to complain.
At the back of the shop was another room with a small kitchenette in one corner – sink and fridge and microwave – and a door into the toilet. Otherwise the room was an office, less tidy than the front room and with another computer.
“Good to see you again, Ted.” Malcolm Jackson was a tall, thin man in a suit with a loosely knotted tie. He had receding hair, grey and streaked with dark lines, and a sharp face. His eyes were friendly, but shrewd with it. “And this is Diana. I don’t think you’ve met. My wife.”
Diana had neat grey hair in a perm, and glasses, and she looked casual in a blue trouser suit that would have been smart work clothes on Ted’s mum. She had the kind of smile that could never see ill in anyone.
“Glad you could come, Ted.”
“And you’ve met Zoe. She’s the one who actually knows how a bookshop runs.”
“Hi again, Ted.”
Diana passed Ted a cup of coffee and he mumbled a ‘thanks’. He much preferred tea but if coffee helped him fit in then he would drink it. Mr Jackson tilted his head.
“Did I hear you say Ted Gorse? Not Worth?”
It hadn’t occurred to Ted, but now he came to think of it, surnames hadn’t been mentioned at the interview. He shuddered. One more victim of the Barry-trap: one more unsuspecting bystander who thought that Barry had bred and he was the result.
“Barry Worth’s only my stepdad,” he said. He took a sip of the coffee and felt his mouth shrink to half its size. God, that was bitter. He wondered how long he could nurse the mug without drinking what was in it.
“Ah. All he said to me was ‘my son, Ted’.”
“Yeah, he does that.” Ted heard the words as they came out, and realised that maybe he should try and be nicer about his stepfather. The impression he had got, Mr Jackson and Barry went back a long way. “Um, how long have you known each other?”
“Oh, about two months, on and off.” Mr Jackson downed half his mug in one swallow. “He handled the legal side when we set up the shop.”
“I thought ... oh.” Ted felt himself begin to smile. He couldn’t help it, so he disguised it by making another stab at the coffee.
“Thought what, dear?” Diana asked. She tilted her head the same way as her husband did when he asked a question, but she made her tone less challenging.
“He’s always taking about ‘us lawyers’ and ... I just got the impression you were closer. That’s all.”
“Well, we are both lawyers,” Mr Jackson agreed. There was a twinkle in his eye. “Can’t argue there.”
“Malcolm was a barrister until he retired,” Diana said. She stroked her husband’s back fondly. “Tipped for QC, in fact.”
“Now, dear, that was just a rumour–”
“Oh, stuff the rumours, Malcolm. You’d have been next on the list.”
Ted’s knowledge of the law was sketchy, but he was pretty sure ‘tipped for QC’ ranked higher than ‘partner in a law firm specialising in conveyancing’. He was happy to re-adjust his mental order of precedence and put Mr Jackson well ahead of Barry.
“Well, here I am, anyway,” he said.
“Do you get on with your stepfather, Ted?” Diana asked. He paused, thinking he should still try and be positive. Then he realised that even that pause had answered the question.
“Not really,” he admitted, and took another sip of coffee.
“Bit of a wanker, is he?” Zoe asked.
The coffee that was halfway down his throat shot up his nose, and he could have sworn she had waited until just that moment on purpose.
“That was unkind,” Mr Jackson reproached her, though he was smiling too. He handed the spluttering Ted a paper towel. “The witness is not obliged to answer. Come on, Ted, I’ll show you your stuff.”
*
Ted’s first ever working lunch break came quickly, and it felt even more grown up than having a job in the first place. The others had brought their own sandwiches. Ted had to wander out into town to buy something.
It was a warm August day and the tall buildings on either side of New Canal hemmed in the heat. Salisbury had livened up since he arrived first thing in the morning at the shop. The one-way system, from left to right, was a solid line of cars. The pavements were crammed to capacity with tourists. He hadn’t realised what a quiet haven the shop was. He surveyed the crowd with the detached amusement of a Salisbury native. He had been born here, grown up here – what did they all see in the place?
He dodged across the traffic crawl and turned into the Old George Mall on the other side of the road. It was an L-shaped passage, a shortcut for pedestrians between New Canal and the High Street. Barry liked to grumble that malls like this could be dropped into any town centre in the country but Ted didn’t see the problem. Before being a mall it had probably been a dingy alley way. He preferred it this way, clean and friendly and full of light, music pounding out of half the shops along the way.
A tour group of French kids were coming down the mall on the other side, in the company of a couple of adults. Ted’s gaze went straight past the bored-looking boys and assessed the girls they were hanging on to. Some of the boys tightened their possessive grips when they saw the English boy looking their way and one of them distinctly gave him the finger. Ted sent a genial thumbs-up in return.
“Waterloo!”
They clustered around a shop window to gaze inside, which meant Ted could safely review the national costume of short tops and hotpants from behind as he walked past. It made him all in favour of a closer European union.
The mall was open to the sky and the bright light stung Ted’s hayfever-sensitive eyes. He began to wish he had brought sunglasses. The crowds tended to hug one side of the mall, staying in the shade where it was cooler, and so sheer population pressure pushed him out into the sunshine. It reflected off plate glass windows and bright stonework, all except for one bit where the light seemed to be sucked out of the air. Ted stopped and frowned, head cocked on one side.
He knew the
shops in the Old George Mall and he knew this wasn’t one of them. It should have been a modern clothes shop with a wide window showing mannequins dressed in expensive fashions. Instead it was a rickety, old three-storey building of the kind you saw in museums or movies – charcoal black timbers and grimy off-white plaster in between. The shade that it cast wasn’t cool and welcoming, just gloomy.
“Okay–” Ted murmured. Someone must have put up a fake front over the shop. Were they shooting a movie here? He would have thought they would do up the entire street if that was the case. Maybe it was some kind of historical exhibition. He glanced around for a camera crew but couldn’t see one. Maybe they had only just started doing up the mall and had knocked off for lunch.
Then Ted gaped, because the French group carried on walking past the old building – and without a blink and without breaking step they suddenly were right past on the other side without actually having walked in front of it. It was as if the scene was being replayed and had suddenly jumped forward a couple of seconds.
And there, next to the building on the other side, was the shop Ted had expected to be behind the old frontage. The old place seemed to have been inserted into the mall and the mall seemed to have adjusted to it without it taking up any more space.
“How the hell do they do that?” he murmured. It was a seriously cool effect.
Other people, other shoppers, walking up and down the mall, did the same. They would come up to one side of the old building – and suddenly, just like that, they were on the other side of it. And no one seemed to notice.
Ted stood and gazed. Part of him was just thinking “what the f-...?” and the other part was thinking: so, if I stand next to it and hold my hand out, will my hand appear a few feet away or ...?
The mall was turning dim as if a mighty thunder cloud had moved in front of the sun, though when Ted instinctively glanced up he could see the sky was clear. And when he looked back down, his heart began to pound. The gloom that surrounded the house seemed to be spreading, and as it spread, so the shoppers and pedestrians were growing dim too. In fact, they were turning transparent. The noise of chatter and music and traffic faded to a background murmur.
Ted glanced quickly down at his hand, front and back, suddenly desperate for assurance that he was still here: still solid and in full colour. Something bright flashed in the corner of his eye, back in the direction he had come from, and he felt a stab of gratitude because obviously not everything was fading. He looked back and saw the woman.
He couldn’t have missed her because she was easily the most colourful and most solid thing in the mall, and anyway she would have stood out anywhere. Long robes of gold and purple billowed as she moved, bedecked with silver lines and symbols that pulsed with a life of their own, like watching an animation of electrons move along the paths in a silicon chip. She moved through the crowd slowly, peering into the ghostly face of each passer-by; obviously looking for someone, because with each man or woman she would shake her head with impatience and move on to the next. Her lined face reminded him of his grandma’s generation, but while Ted’s grandma was generally nice to be with, her face kind and warm, this woman looked harsh. Her eyes glittered and her mouth was clamped into a straight line. After each disappointment it clamped a little harder.
At first Ted thought she wore a weird kind of hat until he saw it was actually her hair. It was silver with age and cut into the shape of a V so that the point hung down between her eyes. The strands were hung with jewels and gold filigree.
And then those unsympathetic eyes settled on Ted. The mouth quirked slightly in what might have been a small smile and she started to walk towards him. She walked right through a small family of dad, mum and small kid in pushchair, and neither she nor they seemed to notice.
Ted’s nerve broke. He turned and ran.
Somehow he felt she was looking for him, specifically, and he didn’t want to be found. She had too much personal authority, too much command and poise: she would just drag him into the weirdness and never let him go. And so he fled, towards the High Street end of the mall, while his feet splashed in slimy puddles and slithered on smooth cobbles and pounded on flat concrete all at the same time.
The mall was shifting. He could see the High Street at the end as it should be, but the shops he ran past were modern and seventies grey concrete and Victorian red brick and more grimy black and white timber. It seemed like the architects couldn’t decide on what style to go for, so they went for everything and got it all in at the same time. Every structure was distinct in its own style, and they were all there at once. The mall was the same size as ever but with about five times as many buildings in it.
It seemed to stretch out and the end wasn’t getting any nearer. The centuries of Salisbury pressed in on his left and his right. He forced himself to concentrate on the present day, up ahead. He would not look to either side. He would not find himself accidentally part of the 1940s or the 1820s or the 1600s or ...
He burst out into the crowded High Street and collided with a very real, very present day and very irritated biker.
“Mind where you’re going, you pillock!”
The man stomped away with a final contemptuous glance over his shoulder, while his black leathers creaked and his buckles jingled.
“Sorry–” Ted stammered after him.
He looked wildly up and down the street. Off to his left lay the gate from the High Street into the Close – a massive fourteenth century arch, ancient and venerable. To his right, the pedestrianised area of the High Street merged into the one-way traffic coming out of the end of New Canal. He seemed to be securely back in the here and now. He had to make sure so, like he was squeezing a really painful spot, something he didn’t want to do but had to, he looked back down the mall.
Everything was twenty-first century. Everything was back to normal.
A hand tapped his shoulder and he shrieked and recoiled. A saintly old granny was peering anxiously up at him.
“Are you all right, dear? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I’m–” He had to swallow to moisten his mouth a little. “I’m fine. Yes. Thanks.”
“Well, if you’re sure, dear–”
He took the long way back to the shop, not going through the mall.
Zoe drew a breath when he got back in.
“You look like–”
“–I know, I’ve seen a ghost–” He slumped down in front of the computer and pulled the mouse towards him, hoping desperately she would leave him alone.
The strategy backfired after a while, because she began to eat her packed lunch and he realised he had never got round to buying his own. But she gave him one of her sandwiches anyway.
Chapter 2
After lunch, Ted was transferred to the back room so he could work on the shop’s website. Zoe and Mr Jackson were in the front of the shop, and as far as he could tell Diana didn’t actually work there, just came and went as she pleased. So, it meant working on his own, which was exactly what he needed. Zoe was still giving him strange looks and he had some web searching in mind.
He clicked in the search box and his fingers danced on the keyboard: ‘explanation for ghosts’. The first ten of about two million results popped up on screen.
The first link led to a survey saying that ghosts were the mind’s way of interpreting the body’s reaction to its surroundings. Ted had been in the Old George Mall more times than he could possibly remember, and his mind had never decided to insert an old house or a woman who could walk through people.
The second link laid the blame at the feet of physics. ‘Time has a wavelength, like light; and just as we know that light frequencies can interfere with each other and produce visual impressions of items that are not there, so can overlapping time frequencies produce images ...’
Ted preferred the survey.
The third link started with a stern warning against placing any kind of faith at all in science, in the face of clear evidence for t
he supernatural. Ted read no further.
The fourth started to talk about mental disorders ...
Ted grunted and typed a new search query without much hope: ‘i just saw a ghost in old george mall’.
The first link led to reviews of shopping experiences in Salisbury.
Ted suddenly chuckled to himself. Come on! Okay, it was weird, but it was over, it was done, and he wasn’t being paid to do this. And so he turned to the work he was paid for, venting any remaining anxiety on the abomination that was the Agora Bookshop’s website. It was something he could get well stuck into, stripping out everything that was crap about it. Pointless introductory animation? Out! Different coloured headings? Exterminate! Oh-so-amusing comic fonts? Die, die, die!
At some point during all this, Mr Jackson came in. As Ted worked he became aware of the presence looking over his shoulder.
“Yes can I help you?” he asked without looking up, and then realised he had said it in exactly the flat, go-away-don’t-interrupt-me-now tone he used at home when someone was about to disturb him. So he made himself stop typing, folded his hands together on the keyboard and smiled extra-brightly up at Mr Jackson to make up for it.
Mr Jackson gazed down at him exactly long enough to communicate that, yes, he had heard the tone and would let it pass this once.
“It looks good,” he said, with a nod at the screen. “Ted, I’d like to pick your brains.” Mr Jackson perched on the edge of the desk and his lean height meant Ted had to tilt back to see his face. He seemed to be searching for the right words, and even though Ted barely knew him it seemed unusual. “There’s a small group of us who are in a book club.”
“Uh-huh?” Ted could have sworn he heard Mr Jackson wrap inverted commas around the phrase ‘book club’, which was stupid. What was it going to be if it wasn’t a book club? A drug smuggling ring? A secret society of cross-dressing ex-barristers? The Salisbury branch of Al Qaeda?
“We’re probably not fully up to date with the twenty first century but we have heard of email and the web.” Mr Jackson smiled to let Ted know it was a joke, so Ted smiled back. “We swap a lot of thoughts and ideas that way, and we’d like to attract other members with similar interests. So I was thinking, I’d heard of these web pages that anyone can update ...?”