Ostrich Boys (20 page)

He mulled this over. “Big Scottish shitbone bastard.” But I could tell he was at last simmering down a bit. “He’s lucky I didn’t punch his sporran in.”

I nodded. “He’s lucky you didn’t knock his haggis off.”

Sim laughed—and meant it. “Yeah. Maybe next time I will.”

Kenny said, “Will one of you come with me, then?”

“What’s up, Kenny?” Sim asked. “Scared of the headless ghost?”

Kenny didn’t answer, looked down at his feet.

“Christ-on-a-bike, Kenny …”

“You come with me, then.”

Sim said nothing.

“Why don’t you just go through there?” I pointed to the dark doorways. “Just do it far enough away from us so we don’t have to hear the splash and see the trickle. There’s no need to go outside, then, is there? Doesn’t smell like anybody else ever does anyway.”

“I’ll still need the torch.”

Sim and I looked at each other, rolled our eyes, sighed and muttered, as if it was all for Kenny’s sake that we were both going with him. But deep down neither of us wanted to be left in the dark by ourselves.

I had the torch so I had to go first. I chose the door on the left, then changed my mind and went for the one on the right. While we’d been sitting there I’d had the weird feeling we were being watched—like chilly, prickling needles at the back of my neck. I’d not said anything to the others, had done my best to ignore it. I reckoned it was either Hayley’s boyfriend come back to have a go again, or some tramp
annoyed that we were invading his doss house. But I could have sworn I’d felt eyes. As I walked across the room with Kenny and Sim behind me I thought I could sense someone waiting, listening, in the room through the door on the left. That’s why I went through the one on the right.

But before I stepped in I swept the beam around the room slowly enough that we could all see that nobody and nothing was lurking in between the shadows. It was about the same size as the first room, just as littered with detritus, both natural and unnatural. There was also a half-ruined stone fireplace set into one wall, full of black ash, with a stained and scabby mattress on the floor in front of it. A doorway leading to the room I didn’t want to go in was to our left. I stepped away from it, moved closer to the fireplace and the mattress.

“Someone really does live here,” Kenny said.

“Well, sleeps here, anyway,” I said. The rain rattled down hard on the old roof. “Just hurry up and have your piss.” I wasn’t able to keep the edginess out of my voice.

“I can’t do it where someone sleeps.”

“You wanna go looking for the gents, you do it on your own,” Sim told him.

“What about through there?” Kenny asked, turning to the door and the room I was avoiding.

“Kenny, just—”

Sim grabbed my arm. “Shhh!”

“What?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Through there.” Kenny pointed. “I heard—”

“Shut up!” Sim hissed.

And we all heard scuffles in the other room.

Cold fear, genuine fear. I was stuck to the spot. Frozen. Nobody breathed. I managed to lift the torch to aim at the empty doorway but all it did was throw shadows into the room beyond. Nothing could be seen through there.

Kenny had bobbed his head, dropped his shoulders, clenched his fists; he was ready to run. Sim still had hold of my arm, gripping it tight enough to hurt. Then the noise again. And he squeezed so hard I gasped out loud.

“Oh shit,” Kenny whispered. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit.”

The storm kicked and screamed. The whole battered cottage groaned. And we stood very, very still. Moving didn’t seem sensible. We listened almost painfully hard, but couldn’t hear anything except the storm now.

“It’s the wind,” I said. I hoped. “It’s blowing in through a window or something.”

“It’s not. I’m
telling
you: it’s not. Oh God. Oh bloody hell.”

But apart from the rain and the wind outside, it was silent. Even so we stayed where we were, didn’t move, held our breath, strained to listen.

“It could’ve been an animal,” I said. “A fox, or a badger, or … something.”

Neither Sim nor Kenny replied.

I took a deep breath, pulled myself together. “Have your piss, Kenny. Then let’s go.”

“But …”

I jiggled the torch around, pushed it as far through that door as I could. “Look—there’s nothing—”

But all three of us saw the girl’s head on the floor.

Sim swore in a rush of breath. Kenny wailed. I almost dropped the torch. We saw her face, her eyes, her hair. We were all springing back, turning to run.

Then: “It’s a football,” Sim said. “Look, can you see? Jesus. Wow. See it? It’s a football.” His laugh was giddy.

I aimed the torch’s beam at the half-deflated football lying on the floor of the leaf-littered room. I could see the hexagonal stitching on the worn leather, underneath the wig, behind the painted face and eyes. I sagged as I let go of all that breath I’d been holding.

“Jesus,” Sim said. “I almost shit a hippo.”

I don’t think any of us wanted to go into that room, but we had to see the football up close. Again I swung the torch around before we stepped through. I guessed this was maybe once a kitchen, with its alcove for a big old-fashioned stove and what looked like a once-massive stone sink, now just broken rubble. There was an open window, and the sealed-up and vandalized metal back door we’d seen earlier from outside. On the far side of the room was half a staircase. As soon as I saw it I thought I heard footsteps on the floor above us, but told myself it was like thinking about head lice and
then having to scratch. But I thought of Ross’s mum too, standing on her stairs, looking like a living ghost.

As we stepped into the room I kept the torch sweeping into all the dark corners. Sim picked up the football. From close up it looked about as lifelike as, well, a football.

“Bet it was Kat, thinking she’s funny,” he said.

“Don’t blame her,” Kenny said. “You don’t know her.”

“Kat!” Sim shouted. “Come out, we know it’s you.”

But the wig was full of dirt and leaves, the paint was flaked and faded. “If it was her, she made it a while ago,” I said. “Kind of sick, when you think about it.”

“So it couldn’t have been her. I’m telling you: she’s not sick.”

Sim shrugged. “So maybe just something done to scare little kids.”

“And big ones.”

Sim peered at the football again, turning it over in his hands. He took a step toward the open window and drop-kicked it through. “Come on, Kenny, have a slash already,” he said.

Kenny went over to the alcove where the stove would have been. And once he started Sim and I needed to go too. So the three of us stood there and went, side by side. “Don’t cross beams,” Sim said. Then we were quick to get back to our place in the first room, sitting close to the front door with our rucksacks.

“We still heard a noise, though, didn’t we?” Kenny said.
He picked up the torch and pointed it all around the room yet again, checking, making sure we were one hundred percent alone.

Sim seemed to be deep in thought. I said, “Just a fox, probably. We scared it off.”

“Kat’s story could be true. You were scared too, Blake. Don’t tell me you weren’t.”

I took the torch off him, put it back at our feet. “I told you before, it’s not ghosts you want to be worried about in a place like this. If tramps really do use this place to doss down in, it’s them we should be worried about. Solid, live people can be a bit more of a problem than see-through ones. Meeting bearded madmen with big knives in the middle of nowhere is what scares me.”

“How do you know there’s no ghost?”

“Because there’s no such thing. Because they’re not real. Because they don’t exist.” I shrugged. “Want me to go on?”

“But you don’t know that, do you? You can’t prove it.”

I sighed. Looked to Sim to back me up.

But: “I believe in ghosts,” he said.

“You what? Bloody hell, I’m surrounded by mentalists!” I made a joke of it, but my surprise was genuine.

“I don’t believe in headless girl ghosts who come back looking for ex-boyfriends or whatever. But something’s got to happen to us when we die, hasn’t it? We’ve got to go somewhere, right?”

“Bollocks.”

“No, seriously.”

“Yes, seriously.
Bollocks.”

“Don’t you believe in God?” Kenny asked.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” I wanted to know.

“Well, heaven and hell and stuff. Where we go when we die. Don’t you believe in life after death or anything like that?”

“Nope.”

“So you reckon you’re what? An atheist?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care.”

“So what happens when we die, then?”

I sighed. “If we’re lucky, our best friends steal our ashes and—”

Kenny didn’t find it funny. “You can’t even talk about it properly. And that’s because you know we’re right. Ross believed in God.”

“No he didn’t. He just had to put up with it because his mum and dad went to church. But he hadn’t gone with them in ages.”

“He wrote special prayers. I saw them.”

“That was years ago.” I’d seen them too. They were the worst, most morose poetry I’d ever read. He sort of had believed, then hadn’t. Then had, then hadn’t. I knew these days he thought the same as me because we’d talked about it. “He said that nobody believed in Odin or Jupiter or Zeus
anymore these days, so reckoned it wouldn’t be long before people stopped believing in modern gods too.”

“I think what you’re saying’s shit,” Sim said. In the light of the torch I could see he was angry, offended. “What you’re saying is that Ross’s life was a waste. But if that’s what you think, then why’re you here?”

“I’m not saying anything like that.”

“Yes you are. Course you are. If you don’t believe in God or heaven or life after death, then why are we even bothering to do this?”

“I’m not doing this because I think Ross can see me from beyond the grave, or from some other world or something. I don’t know about you, but I’m doing this because he was my best friend.” I dragged my rucksack across toward me, opened it and took out the urn. “This is Ross now. I wish—really, really wish—he was still here. But this is all he is now. He hasn’t got a clue what we’re doing. You know, because he’s
dead.”

Sim was getting aggressive with me. “So come on, what’s the point, then? If that’s all he is now, that ash in that jar, then what was the point in him living in the first place? If there’s nothing after we die, why even bother to be alive?”

I struggled to find the right words. “Because of this,” I said at last, spreading my arms to encompass Tramp’s Hotel, the dark room, and us in it. “Yeah, okay, he’s just that ash in that jar now, but if he hadn’t been alive we wouldn’t be here. Think of all the stuff we wouldn’t have done if he
hadn’t been alive. We might not have even met. He knew Kenny first, then you, then met me. He got us together, didn’t he? He was like a magnet pulling us together. And if he does have some kind of afterlife it’s in us, isn’t it? He’ll always matter because we’ll always remember him. We’ll always be telling stories about him. That’s proper immortality, that is. That’s real living forever.”

Sim still wasn’t happy, but I could see by his face he was backing down. Christ-on-a-bike, I thought. Who would’ve guessed he’d bashed the odd Bible or two?

Outside the storm seemed to be easing; the wind in the trees was nowhere near as loud as it had been. I checked my watch. 2:20. I couldn’t believe it was over sixteen hours since I’d been sitting in the Fells’ kitchen. I wondered if they were sleeping tonight. Or if we were keeping them awake, angry and anxious and wondering.

Mrs. Fell at the top of the stairs yesterday. The memory of how she’d looked kept haunting me. I reckoned that was the closest I’d ever come to seeing a ghost.

PART THREE | OSTRICHES           

It was a fitful night. We drifted in and out of sleep. A couple of times I jumped awake without realizing I’d fallen asleep, jolting back upright against the wall. Twice I woke to find Kenny sprawled across my legs, twitching and snoring, talking to himself as he slept. Both times he woke by leaping to his feet and shouting, “What? What was that?” It wasn’t until it started to get lighter again around half-four that we felt safe enough to lie down, sharing our rucksacks as pillows, and not worry about closing our eyes. Of course, I didn’t believe you only ever got murdered in the dark, but I was shattered.

The sound of scuffling woke me. It shocked me awake. I’d been dreaming of being chased by the police and I’d woken with a shot of adrenaline, my heart thumping.

I didn’t open my eyes at first. Just like a little kid: if I can’t see it, it can’t see me. But it was the same sound we’d heard last night, I was sure of it.

Kenny and Sim were still fast asleep. I was in the middle of the two of them; Sim was the one closest to the kitchen door. He lay fetal with his back to it. I opened one eye and could see over his shoulder. But I couldn’t see what was making the noise.

“Hey,” I whispered. “Sim.
Sim.”
I nudged him.

He muttered and rolled over, carried on sleeping.