After regarding the room appraisingly, I gave a satisfied sigh. It wasn’t perfect, and maybe it could do with slightly less broken glass, vomit on the carpet and coffee dripping down the walls, but it was so much closer to what home had been like. Fresh air, a view, some of that healthy scruffiness you only find in proper family homes … I was quite proud of it, actually.
And I felt amazing too. Happier and less freezing, for one thing. Excitement ran through me, warming and thrilling my corpse. It had been so brilliant to be able to touch stuff again, to make things happen. Honestly, although I was dead, I’d never felt so alive.
If only the same could be said for the others. They were taking the restoration quite badly. Instead of clapping in admiration, they were either wailing softly or cowering in a corner.
Medow, who had been silently pressing an emergency button on the wall for a while, sobbed with relief as Chrix forced the door open. The tourists ran out, sobbing too.
Like an athlete at the end of a marathon, I started to shake and tremble all over. I sank to the floor, exhausted and spent.
As Chrix ushered a stumbling Medow out of the room, saying, ‘It’s all right – you’re safe now’ soothingly, my head fell back against the wall.
There was a subtle movement by the door. Through a fog of tiredness, I thought I saw a glimpse of someone, pale and solemn, shaking their head at me from just beyond the doorway. But when I squinted into the shadows to check, there was no one there.
A FEW MOMENTS later, Chrix, Olivine and Skiffler came bustling into the study. They carried mops and buckets and cleaning products. No sign of Medow – she was probably breathing into a paper bag somewhere.
Instead of clapping their hands with delight at my handiwork, turning to each other and saying, ‘What a wonderful display of truth this is. Let’s leave it untouched forever,’ Chrix and his colleagues swept up the glass, mopped up the coffee, sponged at the puke, and taped cardboard over the broken window. Philistines.
And as they tidied, I heard the same word whispered over and over.
‘Poltergeist.’
Poltergeist.
I glared at them, whispering and sweeping so fussily, and my jaw clenched. I’d gone to all that effort to show them proper authenticity, and now they were scrubbing it away?
‘Stop it,’ I snapped from the carpet, not tired all of a sudden. ‘Don’t touch it. Leave it exactly like that, please.’
But they didn’t hear me, and carried on. So I decided to use the only language that worked. I went and rearranged the study again.
And this time, my reasons seemed to flex and change shape. It was more out of anger, if I was honest, less about authenticity. I did it because I was – ah, finally, the relief of feeling something properly again! – furious. Furious at being contained and trapped and ignored and labelled and dismissed and pitied and misunderstood. I was sick of being alone and abandoned. I was mad I’d never got on that stupid bus, and angry they’d never come back, and cross that some weird death guardian in huge glasses had told me I might have to do something in order to ever see my family again, but hadn’t said anything useful about what that was.
As I smashed and threw and ripped, somewhere inside me a delighted little voice said: There’s no one telling me not to. For the first time ever. No disappointed faces. No one yanking me back on a leash or talking about energy fields. It was almost a blessing. Finally, I’d found something good about being dead! I could lose my temper and no one could stop me! I was angry and it felt amazing and I was going to properly explore it, for once, without being told to stop just as I was getting going.
Once I’d done the study again, I didn’t feel quite as exhausted as I had the last time. In fact, I even had a bit of energy left over, so I trashed the kitchen too. Then my bedroom. And Birdie’s. And the upstairs bathroom.
Every now and again, I’d stop, panting, and stare at my hands wonderingly. Now I knew what made them work again. I’d worked it out. Anger made me powerful.
And really, I had quite a lot to be angry about. All that time of being ignored, mocked, and crowded out of what used to be our home, watching helplessly as my safe spaces got smaller and smaller. Hearing our real stories get distorted by holograms, and listening to people feeling sorry for us just because we didn’t have lagoon-tech banana skins or whatever gadgets they had that they thought were indispensable. Listen, sunshine, you stick around for a century, then we’ll talk about indispensable, all right?
Oh, I can’t tell you how incredibly fantastic it was to finally lose my temper, all of it, all at once! It was like tipping an entire bag of sweets into my mouth in one go, after only ever being allowed to eat them one by one before. It felt delicious, and a little bit dangerous, and way too much fun to stop. So I did it all afternoon.
Occasionally, when I was in the middle of a particularly laborious bit of healthy emotional expression – ripping a blanket in half, say, or throwing a chair down the staircase – I’d hesitate suddenly, worried about the extent of my new-found abilities.
What if I ran out halfway through? Would I wind down, like a clock without a battery? Would everything go back to how it had been before: me not being able to do anything?
But then, in a moment of dazzling clarity, I realised that there was no need for my fury to run out. All I had to do was look around. I
