Jay, Lizzie and the Tale of the Stairs

by G J Lee

  Chapter 24

  The Days Before the Séance – Part 1.

  There was only two days of term left. The October half-term was coming up and I needed it. I needed to rest and make sense of everything.

  No chance.

  As the week went on I collected homework from English, Maths, Geography and Art. Even PE! I had plenty of things to keep me busy. As well as this, at home Dad was quietly concerned, his face lined with worry and I swear he looked greyer. He was starting to take days off work. Here and there. But everybody was OK about it. They understood.

  But I didn’t. I mean, not really.

  It was clear that Mum was really sick and that Dad and all the doctors and nurses were worried about her. But nobody had actually talked to me about what was likely to happen. Nobody had sat me down and said ‘Hey, little fella, your Mum’s not going to make it I’m afraid.’ Nobody had told me, honestly and frankly, that Mum was going to do the D thing. People were concerned. The teachers at school, grandparents and the few friends I had left after the ‘geek’ episode. But nobody had actually told me what was going to happen.

  Over the last few days of school I kept seeing Bethany in the busy distance. I was only in the same class as her for one subject – PE – and that wasn’t really the same class as the boys did their thing and the girls’ netball or something. Beth was good at everything, up there soaring like a bird, making study and stuff look effortless. She was in the top sets for most subjects where I only hovered around the middle and lower sets like a wasp around a bin. I heard rumours that she was going out with a boy from Brooksfield. Brooksfield is a posh school a few miles away where they wear green uniforms with huge red crests stamped on them. Like they’ve been branded or something. Nobody knew what his name was but he was meant to be really good looking and clever. I wasn’t jealous or anything. What I was angry about was that Beth had been ignoring me for weeks and I still didn’t really understand why. If it was because I was a geek then she wasn’t the person I thought she was.

  Maybe Mum and Dad were right after all. She liked a ‘bit of rough’ and when I became clever she disowned me.

  I wasn’t ‘rough’ enough for her anymore.

  I also heard something else that made me sad. Kyle was moving and leaving Brimson College. We had been good friends. We had gone to primary school together. Now he was moving away to God knows where.

  I caught him up leaving school one day and asked him about it. He told me it was all true and he’d be moving and leaving school a few weeks after half-term. Then somebody called him. Somebody holding a football and who had already swapped his school top for a Manchester United jersey. Somebody who wanted him on their side in a game against some Year 9’s on the playing fields.

  “See yu’, Jay.”

  “See yu’.”

  I walked home alone feeling like I was growing up too fast. I felt like I should be still playing with my soldiers or with Lego on my bedroom floor. Not spending all my time worrying about the D Word.

  But then, I didn’t really feel like playing games.

  The next day I spent my dinnertime in the library trying to find out what séance actually meant. Like everybody else I had a rough idea and had heard the horror stories of Ouija boards and the rest of it. But I wanted some facts. Here’s some:

  SÉANCE

  A séance is a meeting of people who hope to communicate in some way with the dead. The word is French for ‘sitting’.

  The most common kind of séance is led by a medium, through whom spirits speak or manifest paranormal phenomena. In these two cases the medium will go into a trance first. Communication can happen without the medium first achieving a trance-like state, however. Sometimes she may simply ‘listen’ to voices from the spirits and then repeat the content of them.

  “Hey, geeky!”

  I turned and Donkers was at the library window with an equally stupid friend. The librarian looked up then returned to whatever she was doing.

  I closed my books on the paranormal, returned them to their places on the shelves and left the library.

  A few days after the episode with Lizzie in 1946 I plucked up enough courage to try and find the house I had seen. The one that had sent me out of my head for no particular reason. It couldn’t be far from our house although I can’t remember ever seeing it. It must have been demolished but I still wanted to find the spot.

  It was obvious now that what we all assumed to be Ernie’s dream had ended. I had talked this through with Lizzie. She looked worried. She did ask me if I was having any other sort of messages. Maybe experiencing something stronger. I gave her some basic facts, that I was in another person’s body and trapped again (why couldn’t I dream something nice?). I kept a lot of the facts about the cupboard to myself. I just couldn’t put what I was seeing and feeling into words. I told Lizzie it was another ‘bad dream’.

  There were a lot of new houses near us. Well, I say new but they were probably twenty or thirty years old. So, late one afternoon, I decided to try and find ‘that house’. I chose our school as the starting point and stood stroking the part of the stone wall that still remained, remembering doing the same thing, but in 1946. I also noticed how quiet school was in early evening. It was chilly and there were lots of leaves around and I saw adults pulling up in cheap cars in the staff car park. They were unloading books and walking towards the parts of the school that were used for evening classes. Funny how we kids think the school is ours, and ours only and will defend its name like old knights. In reality it was just a building, something to be used, even when we weren’t there.

  So I left the adults to their schoolwork and trudged more or less the same route that me and Lizzie might have taken a few nights (in fact decades) ago. The streets were very different; the cars, the noises, the plastic and glass; the thumping car stereos and the blustery passing of buses and big lorries. There seemed to be more people too.

  I must have passed twenty people on my journey to where I thought the alley might be and not one of them talked.

  I was right to be doubtful. The back-alley was gone. I got my bearings from another street opposite and mumbled stupidly to myself trying to work out where it was. Where it might have been there was now a garage that belonged to the house next to it, a garage with a corrugated blue door. I looked closer and saw that it was a new garage as the bricks were a rich red and the mortar between them grey.

  Then, a suspicious face at the window.

  I did have a hoodie on I suppose.

  I was stumped. Everything was different now. All traces of the old alley and the houses that stood off it were gone. These new houses had been designed for a different time with different people who lived and behaved differently. Had different ideas. Like our street some things were still recognisable. Still something like they were. But you couldn’t stop change, I suppose. And the change I saw around me, in buildings and on streets, only made me think about my own life and how I was changing.

  So I returned home and sat and drank coca-cola whilst watching TV. I thought about the horror of the cupboard and the house that had once been. Even now I couldn’t imagine the place simply torn down and smashed to dusty pieces by one of those big iron balls.

  In my head the house had strained and wobbled to standing, shook itself down and lumbered, snarling defiantly, off to somewhere new.

  Friday came. Everybody was excited. It was Where What You Like Day in aid of a local charity, and a lot of the girls came in fancy dress. Some of the older boys wore make-up and painted their nails. But I wasn’t in the mood. I felt like a cloudy day and didn’t want to bring any unwanted attention to myself. So I just wore my hoodie. Jeans. White trainers.

  I was glad when the bell went for the end of the day, was glad to leave the chatter and the noise behind me, was happy to hear the shouts of boys and the screams of emotional girls recede into grey afternoon distance, was relieved and disappointed that I hadn’t spoken to Beth or Kyle. But the further away from school
I got, the happier I felt and, in the end, I rushed through the last of the elderly dog-walkers who were abandoning the streets to the oncoming crimson wave.

  Older people I looked at long and hard now. I often wondered if one of them could be Lizzie. Surely she would recognise me. Would know where I lived if she still lived nearby.

  That’s if the D Word hadn’t taken her.

  On this Friday night Lizzie visited. Once again she sat near the end of my bed with her grey legs drawn together and hands placed on bony knees. I noticed that she was twisting and turning her Jesus Christ on the Cross anxiously with her right hand.

  “You look sad,” she said and then wiped her nose with her white handkerchief.

  “Do I?”

  “I wouldn’t have said if I didn’t think so.”

  “I s’pose.”

  The truth was that, deep down, I was sad. Things just weren’t what they were a few months ago. Lizzie was waiting for me to talk, to explain why I was miserable. But I couldn’t. I just sat up in my bed staring stupidly into space.

  “You can tell me if you want,” Lizzie said after a long silence.

  I ran a hand through my hair. “I dunno, Lizzie. It’s just things are changing and I can’t stop them. I just want things back the way they were.”

  Then Lizzie smiled. It was a wise smile. A genuine smile. A smile that showed me that she understood. That she felt exactly the same. It was also a smile that knew that things could never be the same again.

  “So do I, Jay,” she whispered. “So do I”.

  I looked at her pale eyes and squinted in interest. Lizzie looked down at her grey shoes.

  “Funny, I never thought I’d say this, but I want the war back.” She looked looked up and caught my befuddled expression. “I mean, I don’t want the fighting and the bombing back exactly. Well, not really. What I do want, more than anything, is my brother back and Mum and Dad to be the way they were. I know it sounds strange but I miss the air-raids and the nightly trips to the shelter. When Ernie was home the German bombs didn’t seem to matter. We were all together. Pauline wasn’t such a cow then neither and it seemed everybody was mucking in and sharing. At some point we all got fed up with traipsing down to the shelter. Dad couldn’t get us out of bed. So he built an Anderson in the garden.”

  “Our garden,” I corrected her.

  “That’s right, our garden”. She paused then, soaking up the memory. “Yes, they were the best times. The siren would sound and up we’d get, all tired and crotchety, and walk down the garden and into the shelter. It was nippy in the winter but in the summer it was snug and warm. We’d have a candle in there and Dad would have already made a flask of tea and brought some broken biscuits.”

  Again Lizzie paused and was so deep in thought I was sure I caught the flicker of the shelter candle across her face and the taste of tea and broken biscuits on her lips.

  “What did you do all night?”

  “Well, we’d read a bit, try and sleep or Dad would sometimes read out loud or tell family stories”.

  “Family stories?”

  “Yes. You know? Funny things that have happened from when Dad was small or when Mum and Dad were first married”.

  I felt like she wanted to tell me some so I asked if she could remember.

  “Well,” Lizzie replied, smoothing her skirt and making herself comfortable, “the funniest story is when Dad told us about what his younger brother, my Uncle Tom, got up to when they were small. He was a little swine apparently and was always misbehaving. Dad said that families couldn’t afford proper holidays back then so any sort of break was good. Another member of the family had a little wooden chalet in the country that they used to let the rest of the family use. It was just a shack really. But sometimes it used to get cold and there was an old fire to keep everybody warm. So the story goes, one nippy afternoon Tom locked everybody in the shed and then stuffed the small chimney with grass. Tom let the chalet fill with smoke before he decided to let them all out.” Lizzie chuckled and I couldn’t help giggling as well. “Another time Tom pinched his Dad’s motorbike and sidecar and drove it all over the place. Dad said he still remembers everybody chasing Tom and the motorbike around a field shouting and trying to stop him.”

  We both smiled and she stopped for a moment. Thought some more.

  “What’s a motorbike and sidecar?” I asked.

  Lizzie frowned as she always did when something I said or did seemed strange to her. “It’s a motorbike with a metal box with wheels attached to it for another passenger”.

  “Oh yeah. I’ve seen one.”

  “Then why ask?”

  “Sorry”.

  “The funniest though is when I think about Uncle Tom shooting a bow and arrow through a newspaper and onto his Dad’s nose.”

  “What?” I was a little shocked. “A real bow and arrow? Into his Dad’s nose?”

  Lizzie sniggered. “No, silly. It was one of those toy ones with the suckers on the end of the arrows.” Lizzie brought her right hand up to imitate pulling back the string of the bow and the arrow. The left arm imitated holding the bow itself and she squinted her left eye to take imaginary aim. “He took careful aim at the newspaper, guessed where his Dad’s nose would be and ping!! – bullseye!”

  Lizzie laughed at the image. I did to. Uncle Tom’s Dad slowly laying his ripped newspaper on his lap and the arrow stuck to his nose, still quivering. It was then that I saw a side of Lizzie that I had always known was there, a mischievous, naughty side that might one day get her into trouble. Like her Uncle Tom.

  When the giggling stopped and the funny images blurred and disappeared I noticed Lizzie had become sad and thoughtful again. “Sometimes,” she said looking up at me, “sometimes I know things will never be the same again. And that makes me sad.”

  I nodded. I knew what she meant.

  The springs of Dad’s bed squeaked as he turned over next door and I froze out of habit. Then I realised we were in our own little bubble of a bedroom.

  “So”, Lizzie said slapping her grey kneecaps, “what about this séance?”

  “OK,” I replied cautiously, “just tell me when and where.”