There were eight sentries in total. Four downstairs: Chrix (sitting room, liked to eat boiled eggs), Brae (kitchen, huge tattoo on neck, sometimes helped out in the café if they were short on staff), Medow (Mum’s study and utility room, wore experimental necklaces) and Ada (hallway, very warty). Upstairs there was: Poe (my bedroom, liked to write in notebooks), Yos (Mum and Dad’s bedroom, huge shoulders, looked quite intimidating), Turl (Birdie’s bedroom, hummed a lot) and Skiffler (hallway and the bathroom, bit smelly).
For all of June and most of July, my days fell into this rough routine:
8.45 a.m.: Jingle of keys in front door. My cue to get out of bed, scrape hair back, roughly swipe at my face and tug at the rotting rags on my corpse in attempt to smarten up.
8.50 a.m.: Historic Homes lot arrive, make their weird purple tea, talk through the day and switch on the holograms.
9 a.m.: Sea View Cottage open to the public – mostly middle-aged people and well-behaved people from different countries. They’re quiet and relatively docile and murmur a lot.
9–12 p.m.: I stay upstairs for the morning.
12–1 p.m.: Tourists drift to the café for those weird drinks they make from ground-up insects and some lunch. This is my ‘safe time’ to go down the stairs without anyone walking through me.
1–5 p.m.: Depending on weather, I either stay in the sitting room behind the ropes or wander into the back garden.
5 p.m.: Sea View closes for the day. The holograms are finally switched off.
5–6 p.m.: Derk and Debs, the cleaners, arrive to hoover, dust, empty bins.
6 p.m.: Derk and Debs leave.
6.30 p.m.: Olivine the manager leaves.
The last thing I do is:
6.45 p.m.: Read the latest entries in the visitors’ book – that book on the table in the hallway, which was always left open at the latest page.
It wasn’t really out of choice – it was the only thing I could read, thanks to my fingers, which were now useless at opening paperbacks. Unfortunately, it was never going to win any Nobel Prizes in Literature, because it was pretty repetitive.
Most entries fitted into one of three categories:
1) Those with enthusiastic, sweeping statements about how wonderful everything was. (Lots of exclamation marks.) For example:
GREAT SLICE OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY LIFE!!!!!!!!
– BILLY AND JENAX from UTAH!!!!
2) A sniffy comment about the catering, like:
Shame the CuppaGrubba isn’t as delectable as the views.
Colin, Leamington Spa
3) Someone using the word ‘thought-provoking’.
So that was my routine.
It wasn’t great, but I coped.
And then the summer holidays started, and everything changed.
SMALL ONES.
Tall ones.
Big smelly ruffians.
Shy ones.
Loud ones.
Weird snotty whining ones.
And that was just the parents.
After the first day of the summer holidays, when the door had finally been shut, Olivine turned to the rest of the staff with a stunned look on her face, and said, ‘We’re going to have to get rid of the room ropes. It’s the only way we’ll be able to fit them all in.’
‘But the ropes are there to protect the rooms,’ protested Ada. ‘The carpets, the floorboards – they won’t survive the crowds.’
I gave Ada a grateful glance.
But Olivine was shaking her head. ‘That roof isn’t going to fix itself. Those holograms are expensive to run. The ropes must go. Let’s pack them in! Fill this house to the rafters! You have to make hay while the sun shines!’
She got her way. The ropes went. My safe spaces shrank overnight. I no longer had rooms to stretch out in. Now I just had tiny divisions. Like the top of my bed. Or squished next to the fridge, while family after family filed past me and complained about the cost of the parking. There was nowhere to call my own.
Even though I knew no one could see me, it was still horrible to become trapped there, hour after hour, while hordes of adults and their children tramped around my life, circling me, glancing my way without properly noticing me. It was like standing naked in the middle of your school’s playground, waiting for someone to start laughing, any second. It was that feeling, except all day, Monday to Sunday. (Actually, they closed at midday on Sunday. But that’s not the point here.)
Any time I fancied some fresh air and a break, I’d have to brave the crowds, walk through at least twenty humans, then collapse on the grass outside, retching. Then, when it was time to go back in again, I’d have to do the same thing in reverse.
As if that wasn’t enough, I became a magnet for dog wee, because I was dead and dogs like to wee on dead things. Oh, and flies. Flies loved me.
After a few weeks, my existence felt like it had become an endless game of Monopoly, with the cottage as the board, and me a reluctant player. I could already tell I’d lost, and had no property to call my own, but I was forced to keep playing. All I could do was race around and around the board, knowing that wherever I landed, I’d have to pay.
If I wasn’t tasting human flesh, waving flies away or getting weed on by guide dogs, I was trying to extricate myself from crowds of snotty toddlers, wincing as huge bulky handbags churned through my torso, listening to people ask our holograms the same stupid questions, or watching people smirk at the pug picture.
There was nowhere safe to land, it all belonged to someone else, it had stopped being fun a long time ago, and no one would let me leave the game.
And if this metaphor has bamboozled you, let me put it another way by simply saying:
EVERYTHING WAS AWFUL.
And those emotions inside me that I thought had faded away began to whirl and stretch.
A month into the summer holidays and the carpets upstairs were threadbare and the holograms had started crashing from repeated overuse and the visitors’ book was filled with
