saying, ‘If you’re not going to take this seriously, I’m going home.’ There had been pouting and umbrage taken.
Amy had reassured her that she was deadly serious and they had tried again, watching as the glass propelled itself under their fingers. The first few words it spelled out were nonsense, not even real words. Only when Kayleigh asked for Patsy to communicate with them did anything significant happen.
‘Are you Patsy?’ Kayleigh asked the air.
Amy had shuddered as the glass moved towards the slip of paper bearing the word yes.
‘Were you murdered?’ was the next question. Again the glass moved to yes.
Kayleigh had stared at Amy, eyes wide. ‘Who murdered you?’
Amy had been barely able to breathe as the glass had moved around the circle in undecided moves, finally spelling out the words: ‘not him’.
‘See,’ Kayleigh had said, pleased with herself.
Scared and unconvinced, Amy had asked the question again, but nothing happened. The glass hesitated and quivered under their fingers. ‘Did my father kill you?’ she demanded, desperate for a reiteration that it wasn’t him.
The glass moved again, sweeping around the circle again and again in dramatic arcs, then stopping abruptly in front of the slip of paper, which said ‘goodbye’.
Unnerved by the experience, they had scooped the letters back into their little bag and shoved them back in the Scrabble box. They screwed up the notes Kayleigh had written and threw them into the bin. Kayleigh was convinced that Amy had conclusive proof that Charlie was not a murderer. Amy wanted to believe it but wasn’t sure. Her logical mind refused to allow her to accept that they had just communicated with a dead woman. But what else could it have been?
‘What’s up? You scared?’ Kayleigh had asked.
‘No,’ she’d lied. ‘I was just wondering, if we could do it again, see if we can talk to my mum?’
They had agreed to try it again the next time they had Gran’s house to themselves, probably Tuesday when Delia would be out at bingo again. They did, but absolutely nothing had happened at all. The glass hadn’t even attempted to move. Kayleigh had explained that it was because Rachel’s spirit was at rest. She had passed peacefully and wasn’t earthbound like Patsy.
Delia had put an end to any further forays into the paranormal. She had found the screwed-up words in her bedroom bin and had instantly worked out what they had been up to. Her attitude towards dabbling with the unknown had been expressed with enough fear and anger to dissuade Amy from trying it again for a very long time, especially when she had insisted that she couldn’t sleep soundly in that room afterwards.
Amy would never tell Delia whose spirit they had been trying to talk to, and suspected that her gran’s insistence that the bedroom was tainted by their activities was just an excuse to get Charlie to redecorate the other, larger room and move her things in there. Delia had even gone so far as to burn the Scrabble game – just in case it was tainted too. Her gran could be strange sometimes.
Amy hadn’t kept in touch with Kayleigh, not since they had left school and gone their separate ways. She missed her. There was no one else she could be as open with, or who knew so many of her secrets. However, given her experience with Nick Gribble, maybe that was a good thing. The less people knew about her, the better.
***
The bus finally arrived and she climbed aboard behind the iTunes idiot and found a seat at the back. She tried her dad’s number again, just to let him know she was on her way home. The call went straight to voicemail.
When she finally made it home she found the house quiet, dark and empty. Her first task was to turn on all the downstairs lights, then switch on the TV and crank up the heating, if only to drive the shadows and dark thoughts away.
She had half hoped to find a note from her father explaining where he was, but he hadn’t been expecting her home until the weekend. It was an irrational desire on her part, yet she was disappointed. ‘You are not the centre of the universe, Amy,’ she said, speaking out loud as if the sound of the words would have a greater chance of admonishing her selfishness than if she’d merely thought them.
For one lonely moment, she thought about ringing Gran but would have to explain why she’d been sent home in disgrace. It wasn’t worth the hassle. Instead, she wandered out into the kitchen and began to rummage in the cupboards for something to eat. She found a pot noodle lurking at the back of the cupboard, but rejected it on the grounds that appealing as it was in principle, it would taste of reconstituted cardboard. They always did. Eventually she settled for a microwave pizza.
She picked at it, nibbling at bits of the topping as she watched TV mindlessly, trying to decide whether to have a bath, or ring round to see if anyone wanted company. In the end, she decided to work on an essay, a case study on one of the patients at Tynings – the elderly care unit where she had her placement. Bill had been the wrong patient to choose in a way. She couldn’t examine his past as nobody knew about it.
He had been a street drinker until the police sectioned him and he was admitted to the unit. Then he had been diagnosed with Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, an alcohol-induced dementia. Because it was a rare diagnosis, he had seemed like an interesting case to study at the time; now that she had to produce fifteen thousand words on the man it was her worst choice ever. Bill wasn’t even a pleasant character – he was dirty, rude and he gave her the creeps. But it was too late to change now. The essay was due in a week and she would just have to make the best of it.
***
The doorbell rang, jolting her out of her reverie with the subtlety of a brick. A plump woman with a vaguely familiar face stood on the doorstep.
‘Sorry to bother you, love. Is Charlie in?’
‘He’s not in at the moment. I can get him to ring you when he gets back,’ she said politely. If your dad was a builder it wasn’t unusual to have neighbours you didn’t know banging on the door because they’d locked themselves out and wanted to borrow a ladder, or they had a leak, a blockage or some emergency they couldn’t fix themselves.
‘Oh no, don’t worry, I only wanted to drop this off to him – only I thought it might be important.’ She reached into her pocket and handed a broken SOS bracelet to Amy. ‘I think your mum must have dropped it when she had that fit in the café today, poor woman. I hope she’s feeling better now. Quite a thing to see when you’re having a quiet coffee of a morning and minding your own business!’ she said with a laugh. ‘I didn’t find it until after they’d gone or I would have given it to her then, but I remembered seeing your dad’s van parked on the drive so I thought I would drop it off on my way home. It’s lucky really – I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with it if I hadn’t recognised your dad. He did a lovely job on my sister’s extension. Anyway, I must be off. Hope your mum is better, love,’ she said as she waddled off down the drive.
‘Thanks,’ Amy said.
The word was so quiet, it wafted into the night unheard.
She shut the door and stared at the bracelet, puzzled. Perhaps the woman had the wrong Charlie Jones. But she couldn’t have – she’d said she recognised him. It dawned on her that maybe he did have a girlfriend, one he hadn’t told her about, one who had a habit of having fits in public places. Perhaps that was where he was now, in hospital with this
