An English Ghost Story (16 page)

Cold fingers brushed her hackles, like the first touch of a masseur. An electric shiver ran up her spine and she writhed in black pleasure.

Thumb-like ice spots worked against her shoulders, numbing the knots.

She felt her hair rise around her in static tendrils.

The friends she had made at the Hollow were with her. She understood they were her real friends now, her family.

* * *

H
e hated it, but there was only one conclusion. They had a traitor in the outfit. The IP disavowed any knowledge of the attack on Green Base. They were in a lather about it too.

Tim worked to secure the violated facility. Strictly, he should abandon the position and relocate to the Fall Back Point under the bridge, but he had put too much into his HQ. A line had to be drawn and here it was.

In the dark hollow of the tree, he met with the IP rep. She looked like a little girl in a straw hat. Earlier, she’d shown herself in light. Now, she kept to shadow. The incursion had spooked her people. He couldn’t blame them.

The U-Dub was loaded and ready.

He held at DefCon 4.

Over and again, he ran through the possibilities. Mum, Dad, Jordan. Each possible betrayal was a kick in the guts. He couldn’t afford to be queasy or sentimental. The IP assured him the perimeter had not been breached. The attack had come from within, from someone at the Hollow.

Mum, Dad, Jordan.

Tim thought back to before, to the trying times. He’d had to train himself up sharpish to stay out of the fire, when the flat turned into a combat zone and battle raged all around.

They had seemed different people in London. Or was it here that they seemed different?

Had the city been the truth?

It could have been any of them. They’d have had to get up before him and carry out the attack, then sneak back. The MP and the PP were in the kitchen afterwards, having breakfast or pretending to. The BS was still in her room.

Could they be working together?

In London, the three had formed shifting alliances, one out and two in, unstable enough to collapse within hours. He had always been under pressure to compromise his neutrality by pitching in with one or other of the factions.

This felt like a solo attack, a rogue mission.

That usually meant the BS.

But he wasn’t ruling anyone out.

He had no choice. He had to escalate, to show he could not be intimidated. He shifted up to DefCon 3.

* * *

S
he had crept up the tower stairs and lingered outside Jordan’s room, several times. Music leaked from inside, not the muffled tinkle that came from earphones but bone-shaking full-blast stereo easy listening. For about the thousandth time, Kirsty wondered how her daughter had come by her musical tastes. It was like a mutant throwback, the most repressed aspects of the past surging up again.

Steven was probably right: Jordan was better off without the wretched Rick. But Kirsty knew all too well what it was to live through this sort of trivial despair, either at ground zero or within the blast area. That it was a teenage-magazine problem-page cliché didn’t make it hurt any less. Jordan was an extraordinary girl; to have such an ordinary heartbreak made it all the worse.

Kirsty hovered in the passage for the fourth or fifth time, looking at the door, taking comfort from the light around the jamb. At least Jordan hadn’t sealed herself inside with black masking tape (she had done once). That time, she had taped around the window as well and blocked up a ventilation panel, presumably intending to breathe herself to death. With the old Jordan, the Jordan Kirsty was afraid would come back, it was hard to distinguish between a suicide attempt and a performance art piece.

A floorboard creaked under her. Had Jordan heard that? Unlikely, through the lounge aria.

She rapped a knuckle to the door. ‘Some tea, dear,’ she offered, the Englishwoman’s cure-all.

A groan communicated a negative.

‘Will you be down later?’ she asked, hating the high landlady’s wheedle that crept into her voice, fake cheerful but horribly nagging. ‘You haven’t eaten.’

‘Not hungry,’ came a reply, perfectly enunciated.

‘Darling?’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Crystal.’

‘I can bring you something on a tray, leave it outside.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

Kirsty was pricked by things unsaid. If she forced her way in and imposed care and attention on her daughter, she wouldn’t be thanked. At least, not this week. Maybe later, when they were both more grown up and Jordan had children of her own, they would smile, thinking back, and hug, remembering their closeness at this moment.

She put her hand against the door.

Other possibilities flashed at her. Facing the cold fury of her daughter, watching her carve patterns in her forearms or hack off all her hair with a breadknife. Kirsty might be that last element in the compound, the one that created the volatile substance. It’d be like watching Jordan go out the window.

That was a possibility, too.

‘All right dear,’ she said. ‘I’m going.’

‘Thank you, Mother.’

On the stairs, Kirsty was seized by the chills. The further away she was from Jordan’s room, the more wrong things seemed. It wasn’t the Hollow, could never be that. She worried her daughter was cutting herself off from the magic, detaching from the glow the family shared here, throwing herself back into a dreary world of disorders and disappointments.

Her knees were shaky, as if a weight were humped on her back. She reached out with both hands to lean on the walls. The tower stairs were narrow. A pleasant, appley-woody smell was unique to this part of the house. The stairs seemed narrower, the walls nearer. Light spilled into the gloom from a window at the end of the landing.

She found herself sitting on the stairs.

The back of her brain buzzed with the beginnings of what Vron diagnosed as ‘complex panic attacks’ but the rest of the family just called her ‘turns’. It had been months since she’d felt this. Even in London, she had got over these episodes. Their return was not welcome, could not be allowed at the Hollow. She got over it now, by force of will. Closing her eyes, gripping the cool brass rails, inhaling the appley-woody smell, she quelled the buzzing and overcame the incipient turn.

The Hollow made her stronger.

This was something Vron would never have been able to prescribe, even in her witchiest moods. Though Vron had reached out, sent messages. Were the two books supposed to be instruction or a warning?

Kirsty opened her eyes and turned round.

From where she was, halfway down the flight of stairs, she could see only six inches or so of the landing. Tassels hung over the top stair, from a long carpet that ran down the centre of the landing, a faded red and purple strip which left grey-white boards bare at either side.

She saw a pair of shoes.

Not Jordan’s shoes. These were smaller, a child’s, and old-fashioned. The heel was high. Rows of buttons rose above the ankles.

She didn’t need to ask if there was anyone there.

She didn’t need to crane to see if anyone stood in the shoes.

There was a strange flood of relief.

‘Weezie,’ she said aloud.

A ripple of laughter sounded. Giggly, girlish, carefree, innocent. It poured over Kirsty like a warm wave. The appley-woody smell surged and became almost overpowering, like a lungful of dope smoke. The aches in her knees and elbows were taken away.

Kirsty felt a spark in her chest and was grateful.

Then, she was angry. It wasn’t fair. Everything had been going well for her, but now Jordan was demanding again, taking up her attention even as she whined about being left alone. The daughter crisis diverted Kirsty from what she wanted to do, what she wanted to be. Why should the selfish girl’s sulky moods – self-destruction laced with blatant attention-getting – make her the centre of the universe? Kirsty resented being shunted aside into a cliché trembling on the stairs. Here, in the Hollow, she mattered too, and had a right to her share of the magic.

The girl on the landing was angry too.

* * *

T
he wardrobe in her room was built into a corner and, for some reason, disguised. A pair of brass flowers concealed a hook and eye arrangement.

Jordan lifted the hook and pulled the door open.

An old-lady dress hung before her, scented with violets and medicine, a striped cardigan on the same hanger. She took it down and tossed it on the bed. Another dress hung behind it, much like the first. She reached in with her whole arm. Stiff, taffeta-like material scratched her bare skin. She pulled out an armful of dresses. The wardrobe still seemed full.

The musty collection of old-lady outfits went back and back into the wall. Louise must have kept every dress she had ever owned. Eventually, Jordan found a layer of middle-aged clothes – an evening gown with a silk flower sewn to the shoulder – and then the dresses she’d been looking for.

They were all the same, white and elegant and simple. Audrey Hepburn-style evening wear, with matching arm-length gloves and court shoes. In different sizes.

The first was a balloon. She held it against her body and looked in the mirror. Flaps and folds hung loose. The next dress was a better fit. She slipped it on over her T-shirt and knickers. It was limp on her hips.

The next dress fitted. She had to take off her T-shirt and hold her breath to get into it. The material was tight, too tight, over her ribs and bottom. She looked at herself in the mirror, holding up her hair and angling her neck, disapproving of the chubbiness growing around her chin and even under her ears.

The next dress in, a size smaller, was the one she fell in love with. It shone somehow, not like the drab thing she had on, and would be her second skin. She stroked it, with longing, and anticipation.

It was not beyond her. A year ago, before she got fat, she could have got into the dress. She couldn’t wait another year. It would take serious work, but she had a goal and Dad said that goals were important.

Eating only the right things. And fewer of them.

Careful exercise. Tummy and bum exercises, not arm and leg exercises. If she gained muscle mass, the dress would split at the hips and have ridiculous Popeye arms. She needed slim arms, a velvet sheath of skin over bone and wire.

She looked at herself in the dress she would make do with until then. She saw the wobble of her stomach, navel outlined against the silk, and was repulsed by the pads of fat on her hips, around her nipples,

…That’s not fat, Rick had once said, those are breasts; they come with the gender…

under her arms, on her thighs.

They would go. She had banished Rick with that letter, which she must put in the post immediately. She would forget every misleading thing he’d said, every wrong turn he had passive-aggressively let her take.

She breathed out and saw her ribs move, emphasising the pear shape she was determined to lose.

The dress, her goal, hung at the front of the wardrobe, a white tube. Behind it, she saw with a frisson, was another dress, lovelier still and a size smaller; and behind that…

* * *

‘
W
hat news from the front?’ Steven asked.

Kirsty glanced up at the ceiling.

‘All quiet,’ she said.

Tim sat by the fireplace. He had disassembled his catapult and was cleaning and testing every component, using a rag and a tin of shoe-polish.

‘Has the little shit even phoned?’

His wife shook her head.

Steven was genuinely angry, though he thought this was a lesser evil than having Mr Precious around. If the toad were beating his daughter up, he couldn’t have done her more harm. If Rick were here, he’d be tempted to slap him silly. But if he were here, this wouldn’t be happening.

‘
Should
I call his father? Just to get things settled?’

‘I think things are settled,’ said Kirsty.

‘So do I.’

He sat in his favourite armchair – high-backed, well-padded, by the fireplace. Come mid-winter, it would be the place to be in the Summer Room.

‘Did you go to the postbox?’ Kirsty asked.

How could she have known? His stomach knotted and he found himself gripping the chair’s arms.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Anything you wanted sent off?’

‘Jordan’s written a letter.’

‘Ah.’ He eased inside. This was something else.

‘Yes.’

Tim restrung the rubber of his catapult and tested the give of the material. Steven wasn’t sure whether his son had found the thing or made it. It was always with him. He slept with it under his pillow. When Steven was a boy, Dr Spock’s followers called such things fetish objects – he had prized a bright-red fire engine, and his best friend Jimmy Dee always carried an old, pea-less brass whistle – and were strict about weaning kids off them. He didn’t see the harm.

Maybe he’d just never changed. As a grown-up, he suffered terrible fire-engine-type withdrawal symptoms if he ever left his Psion organiser behind on even the most trivial or recreational venture beyond his office.

‘I’ve been talking with Mr Wing-Godfrey. A deputation from the Society are coming at the end of the month.’

‘I suppose you’ll have to feed them Weezie cakes and high tea like at Drearcliff Grange. I bet none of them have kids.’

‘You mustn’t be a bore about it,’ she chided, not smiling. ‘They take Louise Magellan Teazle seriously.’

‘I wonder if Louise would have wanted that. She might have been trying to be funny.’

He had looked at a Weezie book as a boy and shuddered at the twee overdose. He had read American superhero comics. He could remember every detail of every panel of certain Fantastic Four or Daredevil issues, though he’d not physically seen them since his Mum gave his collection to War on Want during his first term away at university.

‘I want to do something special for the Society,’ Kirsty continued. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot…’

‘Uh oh… Danger, danger, warning, warning…’

‘HH, VF,’ Kirsty said, quelling his sarky tone.

Had he overstepped the mark? At the Hollow, they’d relaxed so much he’d forgotten how sensitive she was about the way her last big plan turned out (though not so completely that he hadn’t pulled that SS – Sneaky Switcheroo – with the bank letter) and only now did the blazing meltdowns come back to him. When Oddments was going down in flames, so – it had seemed – was the family.