As for their increasingly long faces, those puzzling terse exchanges between the two of them about finding ‘it’, the way Crawler stood with his arms folded while Scanlon peered into every corner of the cottage? Random! Weird!
What were they trying to find? If it was that important, why wasn’t Crawler helping out occasionally, instead of letting his son do all the work? Just how special could one item of lost property be? What was it, another hideous top? Big deal. Who cares?
Why couldn’t they just go away? Then I could begin the process of forgetting him – like I was forgetting them. And then everything would be simpler and less confusing all round.
IT WAS LATE on Friday afternoon, in the first week of September. With just an hour to go before closing time, the house was quiet. Only a few stragglers remained. I was sitting in my room when I heard someone pounding up the stairs.
‘No running,’ shouted warty Ada.
‘Sorry,’ said a voice.
A moment later, Scanlon appeared in the doorway, panting.
‘Welcome,’ said Poe from the corner of the room, not looking up from his poetry notebook.
‘Hi,’ said Scanlon.
Then he looked at me, widened his green eyes, and jerked his head in the direction of the corridor.
For a moment, I nearly got up to follow him. Then I remembered how he’d ignored me for an entire week, and how much it had hurt.
He stared at me again. Bunched up his lips in what looked like an apologetic grimace.
Too little, too late.
‘Can I help you?’ I said. ‘If you’re seeking another dead child to irritate, may I recommend you try elsewhere? I hear the local cemetery is very good at this time of year. I’m busy.’
He raised an eyebrow.
‘Busy thinking. You wouldn’t understand,’ I said.
Please, he mouthed silently.
I took a deep sigh.
‘Oh all right,’ I said. ‘This had better be good.’
And I slowly and deliberately got up from the bed, enjoying his look of barely concealed impatience. I followed him down the stairs and out into the hot quiet garden.
From the side of his mouth, he mumbled, ‘I thought we could …’
Surprised, I noted the tinge of pink creeping up his neck towards his face.
‘I thought we could brain gage IRL together.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Brain gage IRL. You and me. This afternoon?’
‘What are you talking about?’
He blinked. ‘Sorry. Sometimes I forget you’re from the past.’
I tried not to look insulted. ‘How would you say it the old-fashioned way?’
‘Erm …’ He creased his forehead in concentration. ‘Hang out?’
‘And you all say brain gage IRL now?’
‘Yeah?’ He looked at me as if that made total sense.
‘Right.’
‘I haven’t got long,’ he prompted me again. ‘Only an hour or so.’
But he wasn’t getting off the hook that easily. ‘Why have you ignored me for the last week?’
His face didn’t move a muscle. ‘I don’t want my father to know I can see you.’
‘Why?’
He flicked those eyes at me, and then I realised. How had I been so dense?
‘Oh, because I’m dead? Would he think you’d lost your marbles?’
Now it was his turn to look stumped. ‘What?’
‘Gone crackers? Mad? Er, mental data glitch?’
He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Something like that.’
I gave an airless sigh of relief.
Of course. Scanlon didn’t want to get a reputation for seeing ghosts. Well, that made total sense. I could understand why you’d want to keep a thing like that to yourself. At the start of Year Five, Melissa Troutbag went through a period of insisting she could see her dead grandmother’s face in our school canteen’s baked potatoes. No one sat next to her at lunch for a whole term.
Scanlon checked his watch. ‘I haven’t got long. Is there anywhere we can go without those flipping Historic Homes people staring at me all the time? Somewhere quiet?’
Small shadows leapt across his face. I glanced up at the leaves rustling over us and had a brilliant idea.
‘I know just the place,’ I said. ‘Brain rage ABC coming right up.’
‘It’s … Never mind.’
FOR TWO BLISSFUL weeks, I had a buddy. Our friendship didn’t, admittedly, look good on paper. It wasn’t what you’d call conventional. My friend never stayed long, never invited me back to his house, wasn’t much of a conversationalist, rarely smiled … and he smelt quite bad.
So yeah, it wasn’t standard. We weren’t giving each other Bestie For Ever! necklaces, put it that way. But there were four or five wonderful afternoons when Scanlon managed to give his dad the slip and come alone. He’d race to the house on an old bike, looking and smelling so peculiarly pungent that the other tourists in the queue would draw their children closer and mutter about raising the price of the admission to keep the place special.
I hated to admit it, but they had a point. Scanlon was no oil painting. He’d turn up in stained clothes, reeking of sweat and paint and other odd industrial smells I couldn’t place. Sometimes I’d detect another smell too, a sickly-sweet stench like a plate of fruit that had gone bad in the sun, but that would come and go.
And he was often sunburnt all over, with cuts and grazes on his hands. But he wouldn’t be drawn on how he got them. The one time I asked if he was all right, he’d muttered something about doing some DIY for his dad, he was fine and couldn’t I just drop it? Then he’d given a meaningful look at my threadbare Christmas jumper, shell-studded legs and battered face, and I hadn’t asked again.
Our favourite hide-out was the tree house. Apart from being the only place without a Room Sentry, in the drowsy late-summer afternoons there was something lovely about lying on its rough boards while the
