end on the same side. That means odd numbers on Aunt Maria’s side, doesn’t it? And that makes Aunt Maria’s house Number Thirteen whichever way you count the houses.”
Chris is always thinking about numbers normally. This proved he was back to normal. I said it would be Number Thirteen, and we laughed as we walked down to the sea front. It was very windy and quite deserted there, but very respectable somehow. Chris shouted that even the concrete sheds were tasteful. They were. We went past the kiddies’ bathing pool and the tame little place with swings, and along the front. The tide was in. Waves came spouting up against the sea wall, grey and violent, sending water bashing across the path. Our feet got wet and the noise was so huge that we talked in shouts and licked salt off our mouths afterwards. There was only one other person out that we saw, the whole length of the bay, and he was right at the beginning – an elderly gent huddled in a tweed coat, who tried to raise his tweed hat politely to us; but he only put a hand to it, in case it got blown away.
“Morning!” we shouted. He shouted, “Afternoon!” Very correct. It was after midday. Only I always think afternoon begins when you’ve had lunch, and we hadn’t yet.
When we were near the pier, I shouted to Chris, “The ghost in your room – is it a he or a she?” It was a bad place to ask important things. The sea was crashing and sucking round the iron girders, and the buildings on the pier kept cutting the wind off, so that we were in a nest of quiet one moment, all warm with our ears ringing, and then out again into icy noise.
“A man!” yelled Chris. “And it’s not Dad,” he said, as we went into a nest of quiet. “I saw you thinking it might be and it’s not. It’s ever such a strange-looking fellow, like a cross between a court jester and a parrot.”
The wind howled and I didn’t hear straight. “A pirate? ”I shouted.
“Parrot! ”Chris screamed. And I think what he shouted after that was “Pretty Polly! Long John Silver! I am the ghost of Able Mabel! Parrot cage on table!”
Shouting in the wind makes you shout silly things anyway, and I think Chris was shouting in order not to be scared. Anyway I got in a real muddle and I thought he was trying to tell me the ghost’s name. “Neighbour?” I yelled. “John?”
“What do you mean, Neighbour John?” howled Chris.
“The ghost’s name. Is it Neighbour John?” I screeched.
By the time we got into a pocket of quiet again and sorted out what we both thought we were saying, we were in fits of laughter and Neighbour John seemed a good name for the ghost. So we call him that now. I keep thinking of Chris seeing a large red pirate parrot, and then I remember he said “court jester” too, so I correct the red parrot into one of those white ones with a yellow crest that are really cockatoos. I think their crests look like jester’s caps, and ghosts should be white. But I just can’t imagine a man looking like that.
Chris told me more about the ghost at intervals all through the day. I think he was glad to have someone to tell. But I know there were things he didn’t tell, and I keep wondering why, and what they were.
He said he woke up suddenly the first night, thinking he’d forgotten to blow out the candle. But then he realised it was light coming in from a street light somewhere. He could see a man outlined against the window, bent over with his back to Chris. The man seemed to be hunting for something in one of the bookcases.
“So I called out to him,” said Chris.
“Weren’t you scared?” I said. My heart seemed to be beating in my throat at just the idea. “Yes, but I thought he was a burglar then,” Chris said. “I sat up and thought about people getting killed for surprising burglars and decided I’d pretend I was sleeping with a gun under my pillow. So I said, ‘Put your hands up and turn round.’ And he whirled round and stared at me. He looked absolutely astonished – as if he hadn’t realised there was anyone else there – and we sort of stared at one another for a while. By that time I knew he wasn’t a burglar, somehow. He had the wrong look on his face. I mean, I know he was odd-looking, but it wasn’t a burglar-look. I even almost knew he had lost something that belonged to him and he was looking for it because it was in that room. So I said, ‘What have you lost?’ and he didn’t answer. There was a look on his face as if he was going to speak, but he didn’t.”
Chris said he still didn’t realise the man was a ghost, even then. At first he said he only realised next morning when he snapped at me there was a ghost in his room. Then he said, no, he must have known the moment the man turned round. The room was full of an odd feeling, he said. Then he corrected himself again. I think ghosts must be muddling things to meet. He said he began to be puzzled when he noticed the man was wearing a peculiar dark green robe, all torn and covered with mud.
By the time Chris had told me that far, we had got right along the sea front, past all the little boats pulled up on a concrete slope, almost to Cranbury Head. We looked up the great tall pinkish cliff. It looked almost like a house, because creepers grow up it. We could just see the gap in the creepers and a glimpse of the new fence. And we both went very matter-of-fact, somehow.
Chris said, “You can see some of the rocks at the bottom, even with the tide in.”
“Yes, but it was at night,” I said. “They didn’t see the car till morning.”
Then Chris wondered how they got the car cleared away. He thought they winched it up the cliffs. I said it was easier to put it on a raft and float it to the concrete slope. “Or drag it round the sands at low tide,” Chris agreed. “Poor old car.”
We turned and went back through the town then. I kept thinking of the car. I know it so well. It was our family car until six months ago, when Dad took a lady called Verena Bland to France in it and phoned to say he wasn’t coming back. I wondered if the car still had the messy place on the back seat where I knelt on an egg while I was fighting with Chris. Does sea water wash out egg? And I remembered again that I’d left the story I was writing in that hiding-hole under the dashboard. All washed out with the sea water. I hated to think of that car smelling of sea and rust. It used to have a smell of its own. Dad once got into the wrong car by accident and knew it was wrong by the smell. Chris didn’t get on with Dad. I did, a lot of the time, unless Dad was in a really foul mood.
“When did you know it was a ghost then?” I said.
“Right at the end, I suppose,” Chris said. “He didn’t speak, but he gave a great mischievous sort of smile. And while I was wondering what was so funny, I realised I could see books on the shelf through him and he was sort of fading out.”
That makes four different versions, I thought. “Weren’t you frightened?”
“Not so much as I expected,” Chris said. “I quite liked him.”
“And has he come every night?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Chris. “I keep asking him what he wants, and he always seems to be just going to tell me, but he never does.”
It was windy among the houses too, cream houses, pink houses, tall grey houses with boards saying Bed and Breakfast, creaking in the wind, and sand racing across the roads like running water.
The place had been deserted up to then, but after that we kept meeting Mrs Urs. We saw Benita Wallins first, puffily shaking a rug out of the front door of a Bed and Breakfast house. She shouted, “Hello, dears.” Then there was Corinne West, coming round
