Maybe she was dead. Jonah heard Lucy giggle in his head. But her ghost would be here, until they burnt her body. He glanced around him. Was a ghost the same as a soul? He tried to remember what Miss Swann had said. That a ghost was a soul that was stuck, waiting to go to Heaven, or be reborn? ‘Leave him be, poor soul.’ But the Raggedy Man seemed more of a ghost than a soul, a sad, lost, waiting thing. Leonie pulled a tissue out of the box on the desk, and pressed it under her nose, leaning back in her chair. The loud electric buzz made the boys jump and the old lady’s eyes fly open. Leonie put the tissue down and said, ‘That’s my 4 o’clock.’
‘Bit early, ain’t he?’ said Pat. The old woman’s eyes closed again.
Leonie swung round in her chair. Her legs splayed and her hands rested on her belly as she and the boys surveyed the man on the tiny screen above the doorway that led out to the back. He was a fat white man, in shorts and a vest and flipflops. As they watched him he looked edgily around Leonie’s little backyard.
‘Better get him over with. He won’t take long,’ said Leonie, and with a groan she got back to her feet. They watched as she disappeared through the doorway, and then as the back of her head appeared on the screen. The man moved towards her, and then they were both gone, and the yard was empty again.
Jonah sank deep into the squishy sofa. The noise of the fans was making him feel sleepy, and he closed his eyes. Where have you gone, Lucy? He got a flash of her face, but then Bad Granny came looming at him, and he opened his eyes and sat up. He felt Raff’s elbow in his ribs, and looked down at the magazine open in his brother’s lap. Pictures of naked men and women, sexing each other. Raff was giggling silently, full of shocked delight, but Jonah took the magazine off him and put it down on the coffee table. ‘Let’s go,’ he mouthed.
Pat’s hands were busy with the old woman’s hair. They walked very softly past her, and to the front door. As Jonah pulled the handle, the old woman’s eyes opened and slid to them again. Pat said, ‘Off now, gentlemen, my regards to your ma.’
Raff was looking edgy, like the man in Leonie’s backyard. ‘They’re just flowers,’ said Jonah. There were hundreds of them, all over the Broken House fence, staring silently, with their purple spiky eyelashes and their downturned yellow mouths.
‘I don’t like them. They look like Bad Granny.’
Jonah snorted, but Raff’s face was strained.
‘It won’t really fall on us, you know, Raff. It’s been standing up this long, it’s not going to suddenly collapse, just because we’re in there.’
Raff nodded.
‘You can wait for me round the front, if you don’t want to come.’
Raff shook his head. ‘Don’t want to be on my own.’
‘Well, OK, come, then.’
Jonah went first, picking his way carefully along the faint and narrow path that led through the rubbish-strewn vegetation. He looked up at the house, and its boarded-up windows were like blank, daydreaming eyes, and the doorless back doorway was mouthing a silent ‘Oh’. It had been here, all alone, for a very long time now, he found himself thinking, and he tried to remember which fairy tale it was when the prince hacks through the forest to get to the sleeping castle.
Inside it was dark and cool, and it smelt of dust and bird poo. They could hear the pigeons, hundreds of them, bustling and burbling in the rafters. The back doorway led straight into the kitchen, which was reasonably solid, with a floor and a ceiling. There was a hulk of an oven, and two halves of a filthy ceramic sink lying on the floor beneath two taps. The light leaking through the entrance fell on the table in the middle of the room, and Jonah saw that there was an old camping stove on it, along with a metal teapot, a plastic lemon and a cluster of bottles and jars. By the table were two chairs, or frames of chairs, their seats missing, which made him think of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò poem. Two old chairs, and half a candle. One old jug without a handle. These were all his worldly goods: in the middle of the woods. He looked at the huge, square, robot face which had been spray-painted onto the far wall. There was a hatch right in the middle of the face, and he went and peered through it, into the mouldy smelling darkness which had been the dining room. When he turned, Raff was at the table, examining one of the jars.
‘Honey,’ he whispered. ‘Does someone live here?’
These were all his worldly goods: in the middle of the woods. Jonah joined him at the table. ‘Maybe,’ he said. There was a smoke lighter, and half a candle, and a sticky-looking teaspoon. The bottles were empty, apart from one, which was about a third full of a dark liquid. He picked up another jar and opened it, and sniffed. A spice. He couldn’t think of the name. He put the jar down.
‘Come on,’ he said.
The hallway was more hazardous, because most of the floorboards were gone. There was more graffiti, pictures and symbols, and some words, mainly names. To their left rose the staircase, still grand-looking, though one of the banisters had been broken by a fallen chunk of ceiling. Light fell through the hole left by the chunk, and they could hear the pigeons more clearly. To their right, the hallway led to the front door, which would have given onto the street, if it hadn’t been boarded up, and the fence erected in front of it. The door was intact, with its stained-glass window, and there were pegs, still, running along the wall next to the door. There was even a coat hanging from one of them. Opposite the pegs was a side table, with a bowl in it, a china one, and Raff, his fear overcome by wonder, went and dipped his hand in. He pulled out a pair of gloves, but then dropped them quickly, with a quiet screech, brushing a spider off his arm. He ran back to Jonah, and they both looked into the sitting room.
It was huge, much bigger than the kitchen. Jonah knew there had originally been two rooms, but that the wall between them had been taken down. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it would have been in the 1970s, when the house was a children’s home. He pictured it as the children’s playroom, with beanbags, and a ping pong table, and the Wendy house for the little ones. Now it was more like a cave than a room. The ceiling had fallen in, and the ceiling above it, so you could look up through the remaining beams and see the outlines of the upstairs rooms: the boarded windows, the doorways, the fireplaces, and even some patches of wallpaper. The floorboards were gone too, fallen down into the basement, along with lots of bricks and rubble from the upper floors.
Jonah jumped down onto the rubble, and a group of pigeons flapped hastily upwards. It wasn’t too big a drop, but it was easy to hurt yourself, because what you landed on tended to move. It was dark too, apart from the pool of light under the hole in the roof. He turned to help Raff down, and they crunched forwards a little way, until they reached the shaft of light. Jonah looked up.
‘It’s like a swimming pool! We could dive into it!’ That’s what Lucy had said, the day they’d crept in together and taken the photographs. As he gazed up through the remaining beams into the lopsided rectangle of blue, a tiny silver aeroplane appeared. Watching it crawl its way across to the other side, he remembered a film they’d watched on TV one afternoon, a really old film, called Jason and the Argonauts. While Jason tried to find the Golden Fleece, the gods watched him from an airy white palace, in their swishing togas, through a blue rectangle of water.
There was a tiny plop, and Raff said, ‘Yuk!’ Jonah looked down. The gob of poo had spattered just in front of them. He looked up again, to the beam that formed one edge of the rectangle. It was covered
