First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2020
Published in this ebook edition in 2020
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Text copyright © Nicola Skinner 2020
Illustrations copyright © Flavia Sorrentino 2020
Cover illustrations copyright © Flavia Sorrentino 2020
Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Nicola Skinner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008295325
Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008295349
Version: 2020-03-17
All of this book is dedicated to Ben and Polly. Except for a few chapters towards the end, which are for Meg and Saul.
Poltergeist: a type of ghost or spirit responsible for loud, chaotic and destructive disturbances. A noisy ghost.
From the German poltern (to make sound) and geist (ghost).
Some people think we don’t exist.
They’re wrong.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part 1
1. A Bit Eggy
2. My Birth Story
3. Buzzes
4. Freak Earthquake
5. A Dying Art
6. I Could Have Handled This Better
7. A Bad Batch of Hot Chocolate
8. They May Be Injured
9. Family Photo
10. The Truth
11. Human Flesh is Yuck
12. Not Very Proud of Myself
13. Life’s Tricky When You’re Dead
14. Thieving Gurnards, Ships in the Night
15. Get on Board, Duckie
16. A Manufacturing Snag
17. Legs and Other Problems
18. Later that Evening
Part 2
19. Sometime Later
20. Look Out for Rats
21. Shoes in the Hallway
22. Mysterious Signs, Disturbed Foxes
23. Bats in the Dark
24. Something Fishy This Way Comes
25. Make Yourself at Home
26. You’re Here!
27. Your Information Pack
28. The Calm Before the Storm
29. When They Took the Ropes Away
30. The Boy
31. There’s Only So Much a Dead Girl Can Take
32. The Face in the Doorway
33. ‘Poltergeist’
34. The Chat
35. Did I Get it all Wrong?
36. An Understanding, of Sorts
37. Friendship and Riddles
38. A Lullaby
39. Shining Eyes, Smashing Glass
Part 3
40. Where am I?
41. It’s Where We Live
42. Scanlon’s Secret
43. The Thing in the Woods
44. There are Others
45. People in Cans
46. Crawler Lane
47. The Icing on the Cake
48. Someone at the Door
49. Crawler’s Special Cocktail
50. Will does Some Counting
51. Temptation
52. Switch it on, Switch it off
53. Go and Do Your Thing
54. Wild Success and Dancing Monkeys
55. Birthday Surprise
56. What are We Doing?
57. An Unwanted Present
58. Party Tricks and Birthday Cake
59. Package D
60. Haven’t you Grown, Scanlon?
61. Not Just me, not Just you
62. Like Father, Like Son
63. Defective
64. Scanlon’s Plan
65. Jill the Death Guardian
66. Who am I? Who are you?
67. All This Will Fade Away
68. We Need to Practise our Moves
69. Final Act
70. Curtain Call
71. Let the Light in
72. I’m Ready
Thanks to
Keep Reading …
Books by Nicola Skinner
About the Publisher
WHEN YOU’RE BORN, you’re a baby. That’s something we can all agree on. But you’re not just a baby. No.
You’re a story.
A beautiful, bouncing, gurgling story.
A tale to be treasured.
And not just one story either. You’re all of the stories, all of the time. You’re an adventure, a love story, a thriller, occasionally a horror – yes, I am looking at you, you naughty little scamp – all rolled into one. And every day is story time now you’ve arrived.
Basically, babies are page-turners, and will only get more fascinating with each passing day. Or that’s what their parents think anyway.
Even if no one else does.
Parents love talking about their children, don’t they? Stick around any school gate long enough and all you’ll hear is: ‘my treasure this’ and ‘my darling that’. And what do they love to talk about the most?
Our beginning.
Also known as the Birth.
This part is special.
It is sacred.
It is long.
Have a look around. Go on.
Are there parents nearby? Is their conversation turning towards childbirth? Do any of them have a funny misty-eyed look on their face? Is anyone – this is the clincher – clearing their throat?
If the answer to any of that is yes, then I ask you this. Have you got an escape route? If you have, run to it. Now.
If not, tough luck. Did you have something planned for the day? Not any more you don’t. Because when a parent breaks into a birth story, it takes a while and there’s nowhere to hide.
You will hear:
a. When the contractions started.
b. Which hospital they decided to drive to.
c. What song was on the radio in the car.
d. Whether that glitchy traffic light had been fixed.
Not to mention:
a. How much the parking cost.
b. Whether that was reasonable.
c. What pain relief was available.
d. And how much the baby weighed.
(This last bit captivates them all, for some mysterious reason. Like farmers and their prize-winning turnips, parents are obsessed with how much their babies weigh. Why? Who knows? Ask them, if you don’t mind waving goodbye to another day of your life.)
Anyway, you’d better pay attention. Make sure you listen closely and nod thoughtfully in all the right places, as if you’re having a fantastic time. If you don’t listen hard enough, they’ll somehow know, with that uncanny parental sixth sense, and start all over again from the top. Then it will be YOU asking for pain relief.
For your ears.
And I’ll tell you another thing. For your entire life, how you were born will be used to explain you. Why you are how you are. Parents will say stuff like ‘Oh, it’s no wonder our Jasper is so good at ballroom dancing – after all, he was born on a Tuesday just after I’d had a ham sandwich’ or ‘Well, of course Deidre’s a dawdler – she was born just shy of the M25!’, and all the other parents will nod solemnly like this
