I thought you said no sordid murders.
Annika laughed. The aunt was never charged.
Uh-huh … She didn’t die there too, did she?
No. It says here that she relocated to Eastbourne.
I rubbed my face and said, Thanks. That’s really helpful.
Except it wasn’t. I trudged home, hands deep in my pockets and my chin tucked into my scarf, with more questions than before; and as long as the haunting continued, there was no chance of sleep. Zombie birds, I could deal with — Marley, with his penchant for socks, had made himself quite the lovable pest since I chucked him out of the window — but the entity that resided on the landing was different. I didn’t dare take pills. Every time my eyelids grew heavy, the banging would start, once so hard a hairline crack snaked down the door like lightning.
I tried to communicate with it. All those insipid daytime-TV ghost hunts I’d watched with Mum had shown me how to make a spirit board. Marley ‘helped’ by pecking the pen nib as it ran across the card, to my great amusement. However, the upside-down tumbler remained motionless. My Dictaphone recorded nothing but static, broken by my own breathing.
I believed it was the ghost of little Charlie Bryant, the boy who’d fallen from the landing. I was wrong; his manner of haunting would be quite different. Nevertheless, despite my exhaustion, I took special care every morning to greet him by name, and to hop across the hallway floor, hoping not to land, by chance, where his head had.
As if I could possibly know that yet.
They say a child’s laughter is a beautiful thing. Well, see how beautiful you find it the first time you hear a giggle outside your bedroom door at three in the morning. You try listening to the patter of little feet followed by the startled cry and crack below, so like the dry pop of Mum’s wrist when she took that fall. I’d finally learnt to bear the assault on my bedroom door, and now I had giggle, shriek, smash, on repeat every fucking night. Can’t you give it a rest? I yelled, whipping open the bedroom door just as a waist-high blur dashed past.
I thought I could stop him at first. I risked the long-fingered ghost on the landing for him, kneeling, arms wide, braced to catch him as if he were mine. He ran through me for two weeks before I realised it made no difference: he was an echo, destined to perish as the original had done in 1967. I bought ear plugs on the way home that day — and a bottle of wine, after a moment’s hesitation. Something to knock me out, I said to the guy at the till, which earned me a smirk. The last time I’d bought myself alcohol, I’d had to show ID. It depressed me a bit that he didn’t even need to look twice to clock my age.
Standing on my doorstep, key rasping in the lock — I remember it was a cold, damp December afternoon; gaudy Christmas lights shimmered and bled across the wet pavements and the canvas bag holding my bottle of wine pulled seductively at my fingers — I heard someone call my name.
Fiona? Fiona Parkman?
I turned, door cracked open. Uh-huh?
A woman stood by the front gate, cradling a cardboard box. She smiled apologetically with only one side of her mouth. She said her name was Annika, she worked at the estate agent’s? Oh, hi, I said. It had been a while since our phone call. I told her to come in out of the rain and stepped aside to give her room. There followed lots of: Miserable today, isn’t it? And: Got much shopping left to do? Safe small talk. The blood-and-brain-matter hallway glistened with wet tracks. She apologised. It’s fine, it’s fine, I flapped. Tea? Are you here long enough for tea? A stand-in question for: Why on earth have you dropped by? Did I miss a letter or phone call warning me of a follow-up visit? After almost two months of living on my own, I’d got rather used to it — funny how quickly your initial drive for cleanliness tapers off once you realise no one’s watching — and I found myself kicking junk out of her path, moving stuff from one surface to another. She hovered, uncertain where to sit. Sorry, sorry, I laughed. Just sit anywhere. I’ll put the kettle on.
Fill the kettle, flick the switch. And breathe.
Annika was very pretty. She was younger than me by ten years and plump, whereas I was all straight edges. Sharp corners. Her perfume — a sophisticated floral chypre — made me feel horribly gauche. As the tea brewed, I peered at myself in the back of a spoon, cursing the mauve circles under my eyes. In the distorted reflection I spotted Marley lying in the laundry basket, moulting sticky feathers everywhere. He was almost bald. Oi, get out of it, I hissed, disentangling him from a bra strap and returning him to his sink where he belonged. To the
