‘Exactly,’ I said, sensing my advantage. ‘That Urgent Barrier thingy for Juvenile Corpses – it’s as good as a babysitter. Anyway, it’s not like I’m going to be alone for long – they’ll be back by the end of the day.’
‘Tell you what,’ she said eventually. ‘I’ll come back and check on you, just in case.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Next time I find myself in your neck of the woods …’ she glanced at her clipboard, as if checking a timetable, ‘I’ll swing by, see if you’re still around. And if you are – well, I’ll save you a seat, in case you fancy joining us. How about that?’
I was oddly touched by this gesture. ‘Okay. Thanks. You really won’t have to worry though.’
Jill nodded. ‘Goodbye, Frances Ripley,’ she said. She turned to the bus.
I lifted my hand in farewell.
Just before she disappeared into the innards of the wreck one final time, however, she disembarked and walked back towards me.
To my surprise, she pressed a glass bottle into my hand. ‘Drink this when you get home,’ she urged. ‘It’s a sleeping potion for the dead. You’ll wake when anyone walks through the front door. In the meantime, the worst of your loneliness will pass you by.’ Her face was full of pity and a trace of something softer, as if she was hearing an echo from a time long gone.
She turned away and, a few moments later, the driver’s door clanged shut behind her with a laboured groan.
The weirdest bus I’d ever seen resumed its slow, lurching progress up the road, away from Cliffstones.
I waved goodbye to the children in the windows, and they waved back.
Just before the bus disappeared completely from sight, one of its rusting side panels fell on to the road.
A horrible thought occurred to me.
‘Jill!’ I shouted. ‘Jill!’
Her sigh was audible. ‘What now?’
‘Jill, will my corpse decompose? Are bits of me going to drop off too? Am I going to … rot?’
The bald tyres ground through a few painful-sounding rotations before I finally heard her reply.
‘You won’t. But your memories might.’
And then
she was
gone.
BACK AT HOME, my sense of triumph began to ebb. What if Jill was right? What if my family never showed up? What would I do?
Thanks to that corpse barrier, I wasn’t going anywhere. And as I’d discovered earlier, my fingers were useless, so turning the pages of a book or navigating the telly with a remote control would be impossible. I’d waved away all the other dead children that could have been my friends; when it came to companionship, I had literally just missed the bus.
Jill’s parting shot came back to me. What had she meant by ‘your memories might rot’?
Did she mean I might forget my family? I might forget … us?
Dizziness engulfed me. I closed my eyes briefly, feeling as if I was standing at the edge of something vast and frightening. But a seedling of indignation unfurled in my brain. Of course I won’t forget them. Jill was talking rubbish. After all, what did she know? She’d spent her entire afterlife squished into a husk of a bus with a bunch of squawking kids, that was her problem. If you wanted to talk about brains failing, let’s start with hers!
Besides, how could anything fade away in my brain? I was home. All I had to do was look around. My family were everywhere.
Well, their things were anyway.
I’d ended up in Mum and Dad’s bedroom. The bed was unmade, their chest of drawers was covered in clutter, and there was a heap of unwashed clothes next to their laundry basket, but their room looked like the most beautiful place on Earth. There were only two things missing. I thought of Birdie. Make that three.
Oh, why weren’t they here yet? Were they cross? Is this a punishment?
My thoughts twisted uneasily. I remembered the way Dad had looked at me when I was shouting about the Crab Pot. Squirming, I remembered how I’d run into Mum’s arms to say thanks, and the split second – almost as if she was hesitating – she’d taken before she’d hugged me back. That flash of hurt in Birdie’s face when I wouldn’t braid her hair.
I’d been awful that morning.
I’d been awful that Christmas.
Perhaps I’d always been awful. Had they just decided they were better off without me?
With relief, I remembered weird Jill.
‘Maybe you have a To Do.’
Let’s examine that concept for a moment, I thought. What if there was unfinished business hanging over me? That would mean my family weren’t staying away to upset me. They were merely waiting for me to do my job. So all I had to do was that one thing, and we’d be reunited, right?
But what was that?
Could it … could it be the recycling?
I raced downstairs into the kitchen, found the overflowing box stuffed with bottles and plastic. With desperate, scrabbling fingers, I tried to sort through them, tense with the brittle hope that my family were waiting outside the front door patiently. My hands slid off all the containers. I groaned with frustration. How can we be reunited if I can’t even pick up an empty yoghurt pot? And the house remained empty.
The hallway clock chimed midnight. I’d been dead for a full day, and it was exhausting.
I wandered back to Mum and Dad’s bedroom and tried to peel back the duvet so I could crawl into their bed – I was so cold – but my fingers did their new usual and nothing happened. So instead I just stretched out on top of it, right in the middle of Mum and Dad’s pillows.
Mum’s pillow smelt of her moisturiser. I turned my head to the side and laid my cheek against it. My eyes closed and I shivered all through the night with yearning and shock.
Dawn had stained the sky a pale prawny pink by the time I felt ready to get up again.
