Dial a Ghost (2 page)

‘It must have floated into the sponge bag when she was in the water,’ said Mr Wilkinson.

But the thing to do now was to wake the child, and this was difficult. She didn’t seem to be just asleep; she seemed to be in a coma.

In the end it was the budgie who did it by saying ‘Open wide’ in his high squawking voice. He had learnt to say this when his cage hung in the dentist’s surgery because it was what Mr Wilkinson said to his patients when they sat down in the dentist’s chair.

‘Oh the sweet thing!’ cried Mrs Wilkinson, as the child stirred and stretched. ‘Isn’t she a darling! I’m sure she’s lost and if she is, she must come and make her home with us, mustn’t she, Henry? We must adopt her!’ She bent over the child. ‘What’s your name, dear? Can you remember what you’re called?’

The girl’s eyes were open now, but she was still not properly awake. ‘Adopt ... her,’ she repeated. And then in a stronger voice, ‘Adopta.’

‘Adopta,’ repeated Mrs Wilkinson. ‘That’s an odd name – but very pretty.’

So that was what she came to be called, though they often called her Addie for short. She never remembered anything about her past life and Mr Wilkinson, who knew things, said she had had concussion, which is a blow on the head that makes you forget your past. Mr and Mrs Wilkinson never pretended to be her parents (she was told to call them Uncle Henry and Aunt Maud), but she hadn’t been with them for more than a few weeks before they felt that she was the daughter they had always longed for – and the greatest comfort in the troubled times that now began.

Because life now became very difficult. Their house was rebuilt and the people who moved in were the kind that couldn’t see ghosts. They thought nothing of putting a plate of scrambled eggs down on Grandma’s head, or running the Hoover through Eric when he wanted to be quiet and think about why Cynthia Harbottle didn’t love him.

And when they left, another set of people moved in who
could
see ghosts, and that was even worse. Every time any of the Wilkinsons appeared they shrieked and screamed and fainted, which was terribly hurtful.

‘I could understand it if we were headless,’ said Aunt Maud. ‘I’d
expect
to be screamed at if I was headless.’

‘Or bloodstained,’ agreed Grandma. ‘But we have always kept ourselves decent and the children too.’

Then the new people stopped screaming and started talking about getting the ghosts exorcized, and after that there was nothing for it. They left their beloved Resthaven and went away to find another home.

The Wilkinsons went to London thinking there would be a lot of empty houses there, but this was a mistake. No place was more bombed in the war and it was absolutely packed with ghosts. Ghosts in swimming baths and ghosts in schools, ghosts whooping about in bus stations, ghosts in factories and offices or playing about with computers. And older ghosts too, from a bygone age: knights in armour wandering round Indian takeaways, wailing nuns in toy shops, and all of them looking completely flaked out and muddled.

In the end the Wilkinsons found a shopping arcade which didn’t seem too crowded. It had all sorts of shops in it: shoe shops and grocer’s shops and sweet shops and a bunion shop which puzzled Adopta.

‘Can you
buy
bunions, Aunt Maud?’ she asked, looking at the big wooden foot in the window with a leather bunion nailed to one toe.

‘No, dear. Bunions are nasty bumps that people get on the side of their toes. But you can buy things to make bunions better, like sticking plaster and ointments.’

But the bunion shop was already haunted by a frail ghost called Mr Hofmann, a German professor who had made himself quite ill by looking at the bowls for spitting into, and the rubber tubes, and the wall charts showing what could go wrong with people’s livers – which was plenty.

So they went to live in a knicker shop.

Adopta called it the Knicker Shop but of course no one can make a living just by selling knickers. It sold pyjamas and swimsuits and nightdresses and vests, but none of them were at all like the pyjamas and swimsuits and vests the Wilkinsons were used to.

‘In my days knickers were long and decent, with elastic at the knee and pockets to keep your hankie in,’ grumbled Grandma. ‘And those bikinis! I was twenty-five before I saw my first tummy button, and look at those hussies in the fitting rooms. Shameless, I call it.’

‘It’s the children I’m bothered about,’ said Aunt Maud. ‘They shouldn’t be seeing such things.’

And really some of the clothes sold in that shop were
not
nice! – suspender belts that were just a row of frills, and see-through slips and transparent boxes full of briefs.

‘Brief whats?’ snorted Grandma.

Still they really tried to settle down and make a life for themselves. Adopta was put to sleep in the office, where she wouldn’t be among pantalettes and tights with rude names, and Uncle Henry stayed among the socks because there is a limit to how silly you can get with socks. They hung the budgie’s cage on the rack beside the Wonderbras and told themselves that they were lucky to have a roof over their heads at all.

But they were not happy. The shopping arcade was stuffy, the people wandering up and down it looked greedy and bored. They missed the garden at Resthaven and the green fields, and although they went out and called Trixie every night, they couldn’t help wondering whether a shy person dressed in a flag would dare to appear in such a crowded place even if she heard them.

Aunt Maud did everything she could to make the knicker shop into a proper home. She arranged cobwebs on the ceiling and brought in dead thistles from the graveyard and rubbed mould into the walls, but the lady who sold the knickers was a demon with the floor polisher. She was another one who couldn’t see ghosts and, though they slept all day and tried to keep out of her way, she was forever barging through them or spinning the poor budgie round as she twiddled the Wonderbras on their stand. Grandma was getting bothered about Mr Hofmann in the bunion shop who was coming up with more and more diseases – and Eric had started counting his spots again and writing awful poetry to Cynthia Harbottle.

‘But Eric, we’ve been ghosts for years and years!’ his mother would cry. ‘Cynthia’d be a fat old lady by now.’

But this only hurt Eric who said that to him she would always be young, and he would glide off to the greetings card shop to see if he could find anything to rhyme with Cynthia, or Harbottle, or both.

‘Oh, Henry, do you think we shall ever have a proper home again?’ poor Maud would cry. And her husband would pat her back and tell her to be patient, and never let on that when he was pretending to go to the dental hospital to study new ways of filling teeth, he was really house hunting, and had found nothing at all.

But Aunt Maud’s worst worry was about Adopta. Addie was becoming a street ghost. She often stayed out all night and she was picking up bad habits and mixing with completely the wrong sort of ghost: ghosts who had been having a bath when their house caught fire and hadn’t had time to put on any clothes; the ghosts of rat-catchers and vulgar people who swore and drank in pubs.

And she was bringing in the most unsuitable pets.

Addie had always been crazy about animals. She liked living animals, but of course for a ghost to drag living animals about is silly, and the ones that held her heart were the creatures that had passed on and become ghosts and didn’t quite understand what had happened to them. But it was one thing to fill the garden at Resthaven with phantom hedgehogs and rabbits and moles, and quite another to keep a runover alley cat or a battered pigeon among the satin pyjamas and the leotards.

‘Please, dear, no more strays,’ begged Aunt Maud. ‘After all, you have the budgie and your dear fish.’

But though she wouldn’t have hurt Aunt Maud for the world, Addie couldn’t help feeling that a bird who said nothing but ‘Open wide’ and ‘My name is Billie’ wasn’t very interesting. Nor was her fish much fun. He stayed in the sponge bag and did absolutely nothing, and though Adopta didn’t blame him, she longed for an exciting pet. Something unusual.

So she began to haunt London Zoo, and it was on the way back from there one winter’s night that she saw something that was to change all their lives.

She had had her eye on a duck-billed platypus which had not looked at all well the day before. Its brown fur looked limp and dull, its eyes were filmed over and its big flat beak seemed to be covered in some kind of mould. Of course she knew that even if it died the duck-bill would not necessarily become a ghost – animals are the same as people: some become ghosts and some don’t. Even so, as she glided towards its cage, Adopta was full of hope. She imagined taking it to bed with her, holding it in her arms. No one had such an unusual pet, and though Aunt Maud would make a fuss at the beginning, she was far too kind to turn it out into the street.

But a great disappointment awaited her. The silly keeper must have given the duck-bill some medicine because it looked much better. In fact it looked fine; it was lumbering round the cage like a two-year-old and eating a worm.

Perhaps it was because she was so sad about her lost pet that she took a wrong turning on the way home to the knicker shop. The street she was gliding down was not the one she went down usually. She was just about to turn back when she saw a sign above a tall grey house. It was picked out in blue electric light bulbs and what it said was:

Addie braked hard and stared at it. She was utterly amazed. ‘But that is extraordinary,’ she said. ‘That is
my
name. I’m called Adopta and I’m a ghost.’

She floated up to the roof and stared at the letters. ‘Is it my house?’ she wondered. ‘Is it a house for me?’

But that didn’t seem very likely. Could there be
two
Adopta Ghosts in the world? Was this the home of a very grand spook with a green skin and hollow eyes; a queenly spook with trailing dresses ordering everyone about? But when she peered through the windows she saw that the rooms looked rather dull – offices with files and a desk and a telephone. A queenly spook with green ectoplasm would never live in a place like that.

Very much excited, Addie hurried home.

‘Aunt Maud, you must come at
once
,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen the most amazing thing!’

‘Addie, it’s your bedtime; it’s nearly eight in the morning. They’ll be opening the shop in half an hour.’

‘Please,’ begged Adopta. ‘I just know this is important!’

So Maud came and landed on the ledge beneath the notice, and when she had done so she was quite as excited as the child had been.

‘My dear, it doesn’t say “Adopta Ghost”. Look carefully and you’ll see a space between the middle letters. It says “Adopt a Ghost”. And I really believe it’s an agency to find homes for people like us. Look, there’s a notice:
Ghosts wanting to be re-housed should register between midnight and three a.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays or Saturdays
.’

She turned to the child and hugged her. ‘Oh, Addie, I do believe our troubles are over. There is someone who cares about us – someone who really and truly cares!’

Aunt Maud was right. There
was
someone who cared about ghosts and who cared about them very much. Two people to be exact: Miss Pringle, who was small and twittery with round blue eyes, and Mrs Mannering, who was big and bossy and wore jackets with huge shoulder pads and had a booming voice.

The two ladies had met at an evening class for witches. They were interested in unusual ways of living and thought they might have had Special Powers, which would have been nice. But they hadn’t enjoyed the classes at all. They were held in a basement near Paddington Station and the other people there had wanted to do things that Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering could not possibly approve of, like doing anticlockwise dances dressed in nothing but their underclothes and sticking pins into puppets which had taken some poor person a long time to make.

All the same, the classes must have done some good because afterwards both the ladies found that they were much better than they had been before at seeing ghosts.

They had always been able to see ghosts in a vague and shimmery way but now they saw them as clearly as if they had been ordinary people – and they did not like what they saw.

There were ghosts eating their hearts out in cinemas and bottle factories; there were headless warriors in all-night garages, and bloodstained brides who rode round and round the Underground because they had nowhere to sleep.

And it was then they got the idea for the agency. For after all if people can adopt whales and trees in rain forests – if schoolchildren can adopt London buses and crocodiles in the zoo – why not ghosts? Only they would have to be proper adoptions, not just sending money. Ghosts after all are not whales or crocodiles; they can fit perfectly well into the right sort of house.

‘There might be people who would be only too happy to have a ghost or two in their stately home to attract tourists,’ said Miss Pringle.

‘And they’d be splendid for keeping off burglars,’ said Mrs Mannering.

So they decided to start an agency and call it
Dial A Ghost
. Miss Pringle had some money and was glad to spend it in such a useful way. She was a very kind person but a little vague, and it was Mrs Mannering who knew what to do about furnishing the office and getting filing cabinets and putting out leaflets. It was she too who arranged for separate doors, one saying
Ghosts
and one saying
People
, and printed the notice explaining that they would see ghosts on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and people who wanted to adopt them on the other days.