“Come on, Julie love,” she said then, ushering the sobbing young woman into the kitchen.
She sat Julie down and set about making tea.
“Stupid Question time,” Philippa said, when the two of them were sitting at the kitchen table with their hands wrapped round steaming hot mugs of tea, extra sugar lumps for Julie because sugar was what Philippa’s nan always said was good for a shock. “How are you feeling?”
Julie shook her head as if in disbelief. “I don’t know,” she said between gulping sobs. “I just don’t know. I can’t believe it.”
“I take it that, erm, you didn’t know that Chris was, um, possibly bisexual?” Philippa’s tone was gentle.
Julie shook her head vigorously, her eyes wide and drenched with tears. “No. How could I? He never mentioned it. I’ve never seen him so much as look at another man like – like that. I didn’t have a clue. We were even talking about getting married and having kids together some day.”
Phillipa personally thought that it was better for Julie to find these things out before the wedding vows were taken but she said nothing. No one, but no one, wanted to hear shit like that at a time like this. Later, much later, she might be glad of it but not now. For now, her world was in ruins and she needed someone to just be there for her and comfort her and (maybe) say what a bastard Chris was to have treated her so shabbily. (She might not be ready for that stage yet, especially if she was still in denial. That usually came a bit later and, when it did, Philippa would be ready with her denunciation of Chris the Bastard. Hell, she was already ready with that one now. She’d never really liked or trusted Chris.)
Philippa pushed the biscuit barrel towards her housemate and urged her to take one. “It’s the good shit too, the custard creams,” she said with a cajoling grin. “Not just the plain digestives, haha!”
Julie managed a watery smile and took one. Philippa took one too (just to be polite, of course), and there was a momentary silence while both women dunked the biscuits in their tea. The silence was broken by the sound of raised voices in the sitting-room.
“I’ll go in to them in a minute,” Philippa said. “See if poor Jamie’s okay. I can’t believe he actually proposed to that little weasel Callum. I’ve never thought Callum was good enough for our Jamie. There’s something sly about him, plus he’s a total user. Look at the way he’s just sat on his lazy arse here for weeks on end while Jamie goes out to work and pays for everything – rent, bills, food, the works. He’s even been paying for Callum’s phone credit and Internet access. He told me so. Paying for Callum to sit at home wanking to porn, drinking tea and eating biscuits. Poor, poor Jamie.”
Julie gulped out another sob. “I blame Callum. He led Chris astray. Chris isn’t gay, or even bisexual. He’s not! I know he’s not. How could he be? He’s been with me for four years. How could he be with me for four years and be gay and not love me?”
Maybe he’s with you because you’re a sweet obliging doormat who lets him wipe his feet on you, Philippa could have said but wisely refrained. It wasn’t really any of her business. It was just something she’d observed since they’d all been living together in the same house. She poured more tea for Julie, waving aside the other woman’s feeble protests. Irish people turn to cups of tea in a crisis, regardless of age or sex. This was one of the oldest crises in the book. More tea than usual would therefore be required.
“When do you suppose it happened?” Philippa asked as she munched enthusiastically on a custard cream. Yummy.
“All those days Chris was supposed to be working from home.” Julie sounded bitter. “The bastard. He’s made a proper fool out of me, hasn’t he?”
“You weren’t to know.” Philippa was firm, hoping to forestall another bout of crying. “How could you have? Poor Julie.” She reached across the table and took the other woman’s hand in hers. “It must have come as a terrible shock to you.”
Julie nodded fervently. “It did. We had literally just walked in the door. We hadn’t even had the chance to take off our coats before Jamie came storming out of the sitting-room with Callum behind him, accusing Chris of all sorts.”
“Did Chris try to deny it at all?” Philippa helped herself to another biccy. Just to keep Julie company, of course. There was nothing worse than feeling like you were the only person chowing down.
Julie shrugged. “At first, but there wasn’t really much point. Jamie had already dragged the whole sorry story out of Callum. There wasn’t any point really in Chris’s denying anything.”
Philippa shook her head in sympathy. “The bastards,” she said. “Chris and Callum, I mean, not Jamie. Sorry,” she added, realising that she’d just called Chris a bastard in front of Julie.
But Julie only shrugged again. “Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it? Chris is a cruel bastard, for putting me through all this trauma.”
The two women sat and drank their tea in silence for a few minutes. Then they heard the sound of feet in heavy boots running down the stairs, followed by the noise immediately afterwards of the front door slamming so hard that the windows in the kitchen rattled.
Julie looked up from her tea in alarm. “Chris!” she shrieked. Jumping up from her seat, she bolted out into the front hall, stood there staring for a moment, then ran up the stairs and into the bedroom she shared with Chris, a worried Philippa in hot pursuit. Inside the bedroom, Julie looked around wildly, then flew to the wardrobe, flinging it open to reveal that Chris’s half was empty. The same with his drawers in the big old-fashioned dresser and his half of the bedside table. His suitcase was gone from the top of the wardrobe too.
Julie threw herself down on the bed and bawled her eyes out.
“Oh shit,” Philippa said.
“What’s wrong?” came Jamie’s voice from the doorway. He was standing there with Callum’s sly little goblin face peeping out from behind him. (That was who Callum reminded her of, Philippa realised suddenly – the evil goblins from Noddy – Gobbo and Sly!)
“It looks like Chris might have done a runner, the louse.” Philippa spoke quietly but Julie still heard every word and howled all the harder.
“The sneaky, cowardly little fuck!” Jamie shook his head in disbelief. “There’s your big man,” he said then, turning round to face the quivering Callum. “There’s your big lover man for you, running away because he’s too chickenshit to face up to what he’s done. Why don’t you run after him then, if you love him so much?”
“I don’t want to run after him,” Callum said sullenly. “It’s you I love. It’s you I want to be with. I only told you all that stuff about Chris because I didn’t want there to be any secrets between us. I never had any intention of going off with him, I swear to God.”
“Tell it to someone who gives a shit,” Jamie said grimly, turning away from Callum in disgust and sitting down on the bed beside Julie. He stroked her long hair, wet with tears, back off her face and talked to her in soothing, gentle tones until her sobbing ceased.
Then the doorbell went and it was Michael coming to pick up Philippa, unaware that he was walking into a madhouse. Philippa flew down the stairs to let him in and quickly tell him about the situation with their friends. Michael was a decent sort of guy and Philippa had no difficulty in persuading him to cancel their dinner plans, so that she could take care of Julie and keep an eye on Jamie as well. Jamie wasn’t really impulsive, or the type to do anything dodgy like taking his own life, but Philippa wasn’t prepared to take any chances. Jamie had had his dreams of marriage to Callum shattered into a million pieces. She would be up all night on Suicide Watch, and not just for Jamie, either. Poor Julie was utterly crushed by Chris’s cowardly absconding. Naturally, Chris’s phone was switched off when Julie tried to call him. Philippa could just murder him for causing all this fucking upset, she really could.
“But it’s Jamie I feel sorry for really,” she told her sister Nicola now, as she sat at Nicola’s huge scrubbed-pine kitchen table in her big fancy house in Ranelagh.
&nb
sp; It was Saturday lunchtime and they’d just finished eating pizza with Nicola and Shane’s kids, Kimmie-short-for-Kimberley and Little Nicky-short-for-Nicholas. The kids were now out in the massive back garden, swinging on the swings, whooping madly and running in and out of Kimmie’s Wendy House as if they were being chased by demons.
“I mean, Jamie is such a sweet guy,” Philippa went on, nodding in approval as Nicola, also Nicky for short but not Little Nicky, topped up their wineglasses. It was the weekend, Nicola’s husband Shane was away in Cork on business until Sunday evening and Philippa was staying the night. It was wine o’clock in the house, in other words. “He’s had some absolute disasters of relationships before he found Callum, and he really thought that Callum was The One, you know? I mean, Callum was sort of all right when he was working, but since he lost his job, well, he’s been positively horrible to Jamie. Slobbing around all day is bad enough but then he was bitching and griping at Jamie as well for leaving him on his own all day. For Christ’s sake, like, what the fuck was he expecting Jamie to do, pack in his job so he could sit around on his arse all day in the house keeping Callum company? Talk about unreasonable.”
She was interrupted by the tumultuous arrival in the kitchen of Kimmie and Little Nicky, each as black as soot from head to foot after their turn around the garden.
“Aunty Pip, will you come and chase us?” begged seven-year-old Kimmie. She and her little brother, aged six, adored a good game of chasing.
“In a minute, sweetie. I’m just telling your mummy a story.”
“Is there a pwincess in it?” Kimmie asked with keen interest.
Philippa thought for a minute. “Not really. Not as such. But it does have a nasty ogre in it called Callum, with lots of big sharp pointy black teeth for eating bad children with!” She roared and made as if to grab them both.
The two kids ran back out into the garden, screeching in terror mixed with appreciation. They also enjoyed a good scare. Philippa laughed and took another swig of her wine.
“Very nice wine, this is.” She licked her lips appreciatively.
“You’ll give the kids nightmares,” Nicola said in tones of mild reproof.
“Ah, nonsense. Scary stories are all part of the fun of growing up. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Jamie. Well, I really, really hope that he kicks that Callum fella to the kerb and isn’t daft enough to take the little user back. And the same goes for Julie, to be honest. Chris is super-controlling in subtle ways, so subtle that people on the outside wouldn’t necessarily be able to see it but it was always there. I know that this hurts like hell for poor Julie now, but it might actually end up being the best thing that ever happened to her. I would have been afraid to leave her on her own for the weekend, only for the fact that she texted her sister and the sister’s coming over this afternoon to stay the weekend with her. Jamie and Callum are still in the house too, but I don’t mind telling you that I hope Callum will have packed his bags and be gone by the time I get back tomorrow. Either of his own accord or because Jamie’s got the spleen to actually get rid of him. He’s an excuse for a human being, that Callum.”
“Good to know you’re so impartial, Philly dear,” Nicola said dryly.
“Haha,” said Philippa sarcastically. She studied her older sister more carefully then and said: “Nicky, are you okay? You’ve hardly said a word since I got here. You’ve just let me prattle on for ages without saying anything, and that’s not like you at all. Usually I’m trying to get words in edgeways. Is everything okay with you and Shane?”
“Me and Shane are fine. It’s not that.”
“Oh-ho!” exclaimed Philippa triumphantly. “So there is something. I knew it! Come on then, out with it, girl. What is it?”
“You’re not to make a big huge deal out of this, Pip,” warned Nicola. “I know you. That’s what you always do. That’s what you’re like. But I really don’t want you to do that this time. And you can’t tell anyone either, not even Michael.”
“Not even Michael? But I tell Michael everything!”
“Not this time, Pip. You’ve got to promise me, otherwise I’m not saying a word, okay?”
“Fine.” Philippa heaved a huge dramatic sigh. “I swear, cross my heart and hope to die. So, what is it then?” She stared at her sister expectantly.
Nicola bit her lip for a moment, then she said: “This is kind of hard to talk about, Pip. I mean, it’s really not me at all, all this.”
“All what?” Philippa was greatly intrigued now.
“It’s just . . . I think . . . I think there’s someone else in the house with us.”
Philippa’s eyes widened. “What, you mean like a squatter or someone?”
The house was certainly big enough for a squatter to hide in unnoticed, indefinitely in fact. It was a huge old sprawling red-brick house, built late in the nineteenth century. Set well back from the road in an acre of wild garden, it had been unlived-in for several years before Shane and Nicola had come along six months ago and declared it the perfect place to bring up children. The acre of garden gave the impression of its being in the countryside, but the fact that the house was actually situated in busy little Ranelagh meant that they weren’t isolated, as they might have been in the countryside. It was the perfect compromise between city and country, both Shane and Nicola had decided, and it had turned up at exactly the right time, too, just as Shane had been made a full partner in the architectural practice where he worked and so they had a little extra money to play about with. The house had cost them slightly less than they would have expected too, which was a marvellous bonus. Now, Nicola shook her head and bit her lip again.
“I don’t mean a squatter. Not the human kind anyway.”
Philippa’s eyes widened even more. “No way,” she breathed, awestruck. “You don’t mean, like, a supernatural entity or something like that?”
Nicola shrugged. “Maybe. I can’t think what else can be happening, anyway.”
“Tell. Me. Everything.” Philippa pulled her chair up closer to her sister’s and poured them each more wine.
“There’s not that much to tell,” Nicola said quietly. “It’s more . . . like, sort of feelings I have, like feeling that there’s someone standing right beside me looking over my shoulder or there’s someone brushing past me, but when I go to look, there’s no one there.”
“Go on,” Philippa urged, spellbound.
“Once or twice over the summer, not long after we’d first moved in, I actually felt a light touch on my arm when I was on my own in the house and Shane was out with the kids, but there was nobody there. Nothing but the smell of a woman’s perfume, something old-fashioned and flowery and light but heavenly, really heavenly, not unpleasant at all.”
“Wow.” Philippa gazed in wonder at her sister. “Was there anything else?”
“Well,” Nicola said slowly, “when I walk through the rooms, there’s always this feeling of someone else being there with me, watching me. I feel like I hear someone else breathing, or sighing heavily even, as if they were sad. I see shadows where there shouldn’t be any shadows and once . . . once I thought I heard someone whispering my name, but there was no one in the house but me at the time.”
“Holy fuck, Sis!” Philippa nearly choked on her wine. “That’s freakin’ unbelievable. Have you told Shane?”
“No!” Nicola said fiercely. “And you mustn’t breathe a word of it to him or to anyone else – you promised, remember?”
“I won’t tell a soul, I swear! But why don’t you want Shane to know? He’s your husband.”
“I know who my husband is, thanks,” Nicola said dryly. ‘But he’d only worry about my mental health, let alone my mental competence levels, if I told him. He’d think I was overdoing it with the kids and trying to get the house all straight and fixed up in time for Christmas and everything. It’s only a few weeks away now. And now that he’s been made a partner in the business, he needs to be able to concentrate on that for a bit while I do the house-and-kids-and-C
hristmas thing. We both agreed on that when he got the promotion.”
“I get your point. Don’t worry. I won’t breathe a word to him. But what are you going to do? About your ghost, I mean?”
“So, you do think we’ve got a ghost then?”
“Without a doubt.” Philippa could hardly contain her excitement. “I’ve seen enough horror movies to know how these things work, thank you very much.”
“Oh yes,” Nicky said with mock-sarcasm. “I forgot how you pretend to like horror films now, specifically to make Michael think you’re a big fan of the ‘genre’, just like him.”
“Excuse me, sister dear, but I was only pretending in the beginning,” Philippa defended herself hotly. “I’m genuinely into them now, I’ll have you know. I watch everything that’s going. I actually watch more horror than Michael does these days.”
“Oh, I just think it’s a bit demeaning, that’s all,” teased Nicola, “pretending to be something you’re not, just to get some guy to go out with you.”
“Says the woman who faked an interest in architecture to get Shane to propose,” countered Philippa. “And anyway, it worked, didn’t it? For both of us.”
She giggled and, seconds later, both sisters were in hysterics laughing.
When the laughing eventually stopped, Philippa said: “Right, we’d better get back to business, I suppose. What do we do about this ghost?”
“So, you’ll help me then?”
“Of course I will. That’s what sisters are for.” On impulse, Philippa leaned over and gave Nicola a hug.
“You don’t know how happy that makes me, Pip. I’ve felt so alone, carrying all this around with me for the last few months. I was too afraid to tell anyone in case they thought I was a mental case and packed me off to the funny farm or something.”
Thirteen Stops Page 21
