‘More fool you then,’ she said.
She stopped them outside a blue Besser-block fence, where fading graffiti demanded ‘Free East Papua’ and exclaimed that ‘Fellatio Sucks’. She pushed the back of his head. ‘Here. Let’s have a look.’
She stood behind him and lifted his hair, finding the scar on his scalp. He’d never seen it of course, but he’d felt it. The edge of the concrete step of the Ealing flat had left a lumpy scar a thumb’s length across.
‘You think that’s why I’m seeing ghosts?’ he asked. ‘A clout on the head?’
‘Something started your seeing these things. Maybe it was the shock of losing Cate. Maybe that nasty bump just cleared the plumbing.’ She rapped his head with her knuckle and grinned. ‘When’s my birthday?’
‘My memory’s fine, bloody hell-’
‘When?’
Nicholas rolled his eyes. ‘October thirty-first. Halloween girl.’
She sent him a dark smile. ‘Yes and no. Yes, correct date — and by the way you owe me a present from last year. But, no, not a Halloween girl. Halloween’s different down here. All Hallows Eve. The Celts called it Samhain.’ She pronounced it
She watched Nicholas do a quick calculation in his head. ‘April thirtieth.’
She nodded.
‘My birthday,’ he said quietly.
She nodded again, and bumped his shoulder with her own.
‘You’re the Halloween child. And a child born on Samhain is said to have second sight.’
As they walked, Nicholas felt a lightness in his chest. What did this mean? Was his sister just telling him what he wanted to hear? That they both had some gift — or some curse — to see the dead?
He felt her eyes on his face, as if she could sense his doubt.
‘You used to have inklings,’ she said. ‘I remember. Like the time you told me not to use the toaster. Mum ignored you and plugged it in, and it sparked and gave her a shock. You just knew, didn’t you?’
‘I’d forgotten about that.’
She quizzed him. That wasn’t the only time he’d had a notion, a gut feeling, scraps of information of things, places, people that really he couldn’t have known.
It was true, though Nicholas had never given it thought. Throughout his life, every few weeks or months, he had uninvited, inexplicable feelings that something wasn’t quite right or that someone was ill or this thing was broken or that thing wasn’t lost but in a mislabelled cardboard box under the house.
During a year nine school excursion to the state art gallery, he and four classmates had been about to cross the street to the footpath opposite when Nicholas had the strongest feeling that walking on the other side would be a bad idea. He convinced his classmates to remain where they were by saying there was, he was sure, a milk bar on this side not far along where they could chip in and buy cigarettes. Not a minute later, a speeding taxi mounted the opposite kerb and came to a shatterglass stop against a power pole. The cab driver had suffered a mild stroke and lost control of the cab. Had Nicholas and his fellow students crossed the road, they’d all be in hospital — in a ward or in a steel drawer.
At seventeen, taking his driving test, he’d disobeyed the transport officer and refused to take a right turn down a Rosalie side street. He failed the test, but saw on the news that night that an unapproved LPG cylinder on a caravan parked in suburban Rosalie had freakishly exploded, destroying the caravan and sending shrapnel shards of metal into the street that was, mercifully, empty of traffic — the very road Nicholas had refused to turn down.
And he recalled one night in London when he sat curled on his couch, miserable with a heavy head cold, only half-hearing his flatmate Martin’s invitation to ‘get off your lardy white arse’ and come to a party off Portland Road. Nicholas felt lousy — it would have been a tight bet whether there was more mucus in his lungs or his stomach — but the moment Farty Marty mentioned the party he knew he had to go. Two hours later, sniffing like a coke addict but dressed in the best clothes he owned, he met Cate.
And, of course, there’d been his work around London. He’d always seemed to know which village house would yield the fading valises and old carved bookends he was hunting.
Yes, he’d had inklings. Notions. Gut feelings. Until now, he’d thought everyone had them.
‘What does it mean?’ he asked.
Suzette smiled. He could barely see it in the dusk. ‘It means I don’t think you’re crazy.’
The evening sky was gunmetal grey. Shadows were blue and amorphous. Headlights were diamonds. Her brother’s profile was all dark angles. Finally, he looked at her.
‘You’re a financial advisor, Suze. How do you know all this stuff?’
‘You see the dead. How do you not?’
‘Well, I do go to phone Psychic Hotline but always end up dialling Lesbian Nurses Chat-’
‘Do you have to make fun of everything? It’s bitter.’
Overhead, a carpet of flying foxes flew west from their mangrove riverbank havens, an armada of black cuneiforms against the cloudless evening heavens, their leather wings eerily silent. The air was crisp, faintly spiced with car fumes and potato vine.
She took a breath. ‘Well, of course it started with Dad’s books.’
Nicholas looked at her. ‘What books?’
She blinked, amazed. ‘His books? In the garage?’
He was still staring at her. Finally, he guessed, ‘In the suitcases?’
‘Yes, in the suitcases! Jesus! Are you saying you never looked in them?’
She remembered the way her mother would tell her to go fetch Nicholas for dinner. She’d find him, a thin boy with a shock of straw hair, standing in the middle of the tiny, dark garage, staring. She knew he felt their father’s death much more keenly than she did. Sometimes, he’d be staring overhead; stacked on planks strung through the trusses up there were three small cardboard suitcases. Their mother had never forbidden them touching the cases, nor had she ever encouraged it. They were just there, the only reminder at 68 Lambeth of a man that Suzette couldn’t remember.
But, clearly, Nicholas could.
‘I didn’t want to touch them.’ He spoke slowly, carefully. ‘I figured he left them because he was coming back. Then when he was dead, I didn’t want to touch them ’cause. .’ He shrugged. ‘That would have meant he definitely wasn’t coming back. But you. . you had a look?’
More than a look. On weekends, when Mum was busy cursing her new potter’s wheel and Nicholas was away at the library, she’d unfold the creaking wooden stepladder and pull down the suitcases. One was a pale olive green, the other two a beige and black herringbone. They weren’t heavy — there wasn’t much in them. One held a grey cardigan, patched trousers and half a dozen Dr Pat tobacco tins containing sinkers, spinners, hooks and fishing line. The other two cases contained what Suzette kept coming back for.
Books.
Some were cheap, flimsy things with titles like
She explained all this to Nicholas. His face was shadowed, but she could see his eyes were bright; she wasn’t sure if he was smiling or furious.
‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Mum hates that shit. Any time there was a show with Doris Stokes or some spoon- bending freak, she’d turn it off.’
Suzette looked at him patiently. ‘You might have noticed that our parents didn’t have the jolliest marriage.’
‘What do you mean, though? Dad was. . what? A druid?’
‘I didn’t know him, Nicholas. All I know is what I found in his suitcases.’
