Zara

by Mary Hooper

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s where you sit round in a circle and have all the letters of the alphabet on a table in the middle, and then you put your fingers on a glass and –’

  ‘Oh yeah, I’ve seen it on a film,’ I said. I’d seen it and hadn’t much liked what I’d seen, because it had ended with a ghost being unleashed which they hadn’t been able to get rid of ever again.

  ‘You have to ask, “Is there anyone there …”’ Zara said, lowering her voice to a hoarse whisper, ‘and then a spirit enters into the glass and answers all your questions. And sometimes … sometimes you get someone coming through that you actually knew. Like if your uncle or dad had died they might come across with a special message for you. “Don’t catch the train tomorrow because it’s going to crash!” or something.’

  I shivered. I’ve never been a great one for ghost stories or spooky films. It’s not that I don’t like being scared – I can watch quite gory stuff without turning a hair – it’s just that anything about ghosts gives me the creeps. I even find Buffy a bit too much sometimes. I mean, if it was a choice between a week in the lions’ cage at the zoo, or a night in a haunted house, I’d take my chances with the lions any time.

  ‘I wonder if I’ve got a spirit guide,’ Zara said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A guide that comes through from the Other Side. The land where the dead dwell …’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, thinking that I didn’t much like the sound of this.

  ‘A guide acts as a medium and brings people’s dead relatives to talk to them. Sometimes it’s a Native American – you know, a Red Indian.’

  I shivered. It was all getting a bit too weird for me. ‘I thought we were just going to play a couple of games, get the other girls going a bit and get them interested. I thought it was just to make us popular! I didn’t know you’d be calling on Native Americans and contacting the dead.’

  ‘Yeah, but as it’s going so well it seems a shame to stop now. And, besides, I’ve kind of started opening myself up …’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Well, I told you I always thought I could be psychic, but I’d never done anything about it. And then when I read those books about developing that side of you, letting it all out, I started to think more about those sorts of things and it all started to happen.’

  A ghost caught my eye. A sparkly white ghost shimmering in the window of the shop below advertising stuff for Hallowe’en. It was hanging on a wire, moving up and down catching the light.

  ‘But can’t you stop being psychic now?’ I asked Zara after a moment. ‘Suppose you don’t want to know anything else – can’t you just stop?’

  ‘I don’t want to!’ she said. ‘And anyway, I don’t think I can. They say in one book that giving your psychic power free rein is like turning on a tap and then losing the bit at the top. Once it’s started there’s no stopping it.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  She went on excitedly, ‘I’ve been reading about the Victorians. They were mad on spiritualism! They used to have meetings where everyone would get messages from the Other Side. And their psychics used to have special little cabinets built and they’d sit in them and go into trances!’

  ‘Oh yes?’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘And then stuff like smoke or steam would actually come out of their mouths and form itself into the shape of the person who was being contacted – the person who was dead.’

  ‘I’ve never believed that,’ I said. ‘I saw something about it on telly. They said it was very dark in those Victorian parlours so people couldn’t see very well, and the people who were pretending to contact the dead used hidden smoke machines and bales of white floaty material. It wasn’t spirit people at all! But those who came along were so anxious to trace their dead relatives that they believed everything they saw.’

  Zara frowned at me.

  ‘They found out later that the mediums had just been playing tricks. They were frauds.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Zara said quickly. ‘Some of them were really and truly psychic. And OK, some were only a bit psychic and so they got someone else – their maids – to help them along with a smoke machine or whatever they had. And if it got a bit dodgy then the psychic would go back into the cabinet and the maid would pull the curtain across and say to the audience, “Madam is sleeping now,” and they’d all have to go home.’

  ‘That would have been my job, I suppose,’ I said. ‘I’d have been your maid.’

  Zara closed her eyes. ‘I bet I could go into a trance if I tried …’

  ‘Don’t!’ I said, alarmed. ‘You might never come out of it again.’

  ‘Or I could pretend to.’ Her eyes flickered open. ‘How would that look, Ella? Everyone could sit round holding hands, and I’d be sitting in the middle of the circle and I could go all woozy … and then I’d start talking in a strange voice. A voice from the Other Side …’

  ‘I don’t think you ought to,’ I said, shivering. ‘It wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘And then you could direct the questions and turn the lights off at the right time, and go round with the bell and everything, and say things like, “Please don’t touch Zara while she’s in a trance.” It’d be great!’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ I said, staring over the balcony at the bouncing ghost below us. I didn’t mind ghosts like that: sparkly, fake ones. I didn’t want any dealings with real ones, though.

  ‘Don’t be such a wimp!’ she said. ‘Anyway, we’ve got to carry on now we’ve started. I mean, they’re all desperate for more. Everyone keeps asking me when I’m going to read the Tarot.’

  ‘And when are you?’

  ‘When I know a bit more about it,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a book out of the library but it’s really complicated.’

  I wanted to ask her – I kept wanting to ask her – more about my dad and his secret, but I thought I’d better get to the question from another angle. ‘Look, I just want to get this straight,’ I said. ‘When you said all that about Sophie having a big secret, were you just making it up?’

  She was silent for a while, then she shrugged. ‘I don’t really know. It’s just words that come into my head. Ideas about people. I could be making them up, or they could be coming from … somewhere else. Who knows?’

  I swallowed. ‘And … and when you said that about my dad?’

  She shrugged again.

  ‘But how can I find out if there is anything?’

  ‘Why don’t you do what I do?’ she said. ‘Keep your eyes open and your ears flapping and perhaps you’ll discover what it is before I do. Perhaps it won’t be anything so bad at all.’

  We’d finished our meal long ago but I pushed a remnant of chip around my plate, thinking. I didn’t really want to find out about any secret of my dad’s. Didn’t they say that ignorance was bliss? But I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to help myself.

  Zara wasn’t thinking about my dad any more. ‘Anyway, people like Sophie sometimes need something to bring them down a bit.’

  I looked at her curiously.

  ‘I mean, just look at her!’ Zara suddenly spat out. ‘How can anyone have that much?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, she’s Miss Gorgeous of the Year, isn’t she – she’s got a perfect model figure, super-white teeth and a metre of glossy hair to flick back from her face.’ Zara made an effort to flick back her own hair, but it was so matted with gel that it didn’t move. I didn’t know what to say. Obviously we all envied Sophie – who wouldn’t want to be tall and slim and gorgeous? – but I hadn’t realised that with Zara it went a bit further than this.

  ‘She’s got the perfect family, too,’ she went on. ‘A mum and a dad, two gorgeous little sisters – they’re all straight off the front of a cornflakes packet. She’s probably got a Golden Labrador puppy as well.’

  I started giggling at this and after a moment Zara did too.

  But in my head I felt uneasy. ‘We don
’t have to go on doing this stuff, do we?’ I said. ‘Can’t we just stop?’

  ‘You’re kidding!’ Zara said. ‘This is our greatest hour, Ella. We’re stars! We’re not going to stop now.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ I asked Mum one evening the following week. Dad was out and we’d been watching a TV documentary on psychic phenomena – on ghosts, in other words – and there had been a whole bunch of people who’d claimed to have seen any amount of them. They’d seen Roman soldiers, cavaliers, monks, headless brides … you name it, they’d seen them.

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ Mum said briskly. ‘No rational person believes in ghosts.’

  ‘But what about all those people we’ve just seen on the telly?’

  ‘Some people will say anything to get themselves on TV,’ she said. ‘And do you notice that when people see these ghosts, they’re always on their own. You never get two people together who’ve seen one.’

  I thought about this. ‘I suppose not.’

  It had been an interesting programme, though – even though I’d been so spooked that I’d had to watch it mostly from behind a cushion. After they’d spoken to people in the studio, the TV company had gone to a haunted house – one of the most haunted in Britain, they said – and talked to the people who lived there, asking them about the things they saw and heard on a regular basis. These were horses’ hooves on the drive outside, ghostly moaning noises, lights going on and off, things being moved from room to room and a full-blown ghost seen swooping across the landing.

  The TV people had set up ghost traps inside the house with sound recorders, special meters to measure temperature drop and a camera which would go off automatically if as much as a wisp passed it by. The people who lived there had then gone away, and the machines and meters left in place for a month. When checks were made at the end of this time, though, nothing had been recorded at all. Not a whisper; not a shadow. The only noise which had been taped was found to have been caused by a mouse chewing at a sound lead.

  The woman in charge of the TV show said that this proved that really there was no such thing as ghosts or psychic phenomena. That it was just not possible to contact the spirit world. A man, though, another expert, said that the noises had resumed once the people were back in the house, and this went to show that it wasn’t the house so much as the people who were haunted. He said it was a combination of the right people and the right house which led to psychic phenomena occurring.

  ‘To be fair, I suppose the real answer is that no one knows whether there are any ghosts or not,’ Mum said. ‘But unless I actually come face to face with one, I’m not going to believe in them.’

  I shivered. ‘Well if you do see one, don’t tell me about it.’

  We switched over to another channel and I glanced at Mum, not knowing whether to say anything about Zara or not. It seemed an ideal opportunity, though, as Dad was out of the way.

  ‘Zara says she’s psychic,’ I said. ‘She saw a ghost where they used to live.’

  ‘Oh, did she now,’ Mum said, disbelief in her voice.

  ‘No. Really. She told me ages ago about the ghost. And she keeps having feelings about things.’

  Mum laughed.

  ‘Honestly she does. I’ve heard her tell the girls at school stuff that no one could possibly know. They’re amazed!’

  Mum looked at me and shook her head. ‘Ella,’ she said, ‘you’re so gullible sometimes! Surely you can tell truth from storytelling? She’s having you on!’

  ‘Well, I thought she was at first,’ I said. ‘Now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure!’ Mum said. ‘Just take my word for it. There are no such things as ghosts and people who say they’ve seen them are disturbed in some way.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ I said earnestly. ‘Some people – psychics – help the police find dead bodies, don’t they? At the beginning of that programme there was a woman telling the police where to find a body in the middle of the woods, and they found it just where she said.’

  ‘Coincidence!’ Mum said promptly. ‘Pure luck. For every case you hear about there are probably twenty where the psychic person – the so-called psychic person – doesn’t find the body they’re supposed to be looking for.’

  I didn’t say anything else. I was confused; not sure about anything any more. I reached into the pocket of my jeans where my tiger’s eye crystal was and held on to it. It would protect me, Zara had said. From what, though, I didn’t know.

  We didn’t go shopping on Saturday because Zara said she wanted to use that day to read up more about Tarot cards and really get into them. Apparently they were terribly complicated: so many suites, so many pictures, so many different ways of interpreting them. If you were psychic, though, Zara told me, then the correct way to read them became clear. You turned over a card with a question in your mind and then whatever was on the card would mean something to you. Like if it was a card showing a man standing with a horse, this could either mean someone was about to arrive with a message, someone was about to depart on a long journey, or someone was going to make you a gift of something valuable. It was up to you to make the right interpretation according to what was going on in your life and how you sensed things.

  On Sunday Mum and Dad went out to visit one of my aunts and I was left alone in the house. I’d been making beaded wire bracelets in my room but as soon as the front door closed I put these to one side and went downstairs. I’d said to myself that I wasn’t going to worry about what Zara had said, nor was I going to hunt for my dad’s secret … but nevertheless I found myself in the sitting room making for the big wooden desk where Mum and Dad kept all their bills and papers.

  I opened the drop-down flap and started rummaging through the pigeon holes, but I had no idea what I was looking for. Besides, I thought, if Dad had a secret, was it really likely that he’d keep details of it all to hand in his desk?

  I looked aimlessly through gas and electricity bills, then found some receipts for meals out and looked through them, too, all the time knowing that if it was a secret that Mum didn’t know about, like an affair, then there was no way he’d keep the receipts for meals where she could find them.

  In the little cupboard in the footwell of the desk there was a locked door, but this had a key in so it was hardly going to contain anything top secret. I looked in, though, just in case, and found a long brown envelope with Last Will and Testament written on it, which scared me so utterly that I quickly shoved everything back in and locked the little door again. I was just about to investigate a wooden box containing – as far as I could remember – a lot of broken watches, when the phone rang, making me jump out of my skin as if it was a view-phone and the caller could see what I was up to.

  ‘Ella?’ said the voice when I answered. ‘It’s Sky here.’

  I was amazed and secretly thrilled. Sky had never rung me before; I hadn’t known that she had my number.

  ‘Hi!’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, I wanted to talk to Zara, really,’ she said, sounding anxious. ‘But I can’t get through on her number and I wondered if she was round at your house.’

  ‘No, she’s not here,’ I said. So she’d only rung me because she wanted Zara. ‘Is there anything in particular you want her for?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Oh, I just …’ she hesitated and it sounded as if she was putting her hand over the phone so that no one around could hear her speak, ‘… just wanted to talk to her about something. You know she’s good at finding out things; doing that psychic bit. I mean, it probably sounds a bit daft, but I want to see if she knows something.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, hoping she’d open up a bit more.

  ‘Maybe I’ll just pop round to her house. Where does she live?’

  I told her.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘It’s on the Crowmarsh estate. I’ll take you, if you like,’ I offered, and of course it wasn’t that I was being especially
helpful, more that I wanted to be included in whatever was going on.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I know where you live. I’ll be round in ten minutes.’

  It was more like twenty minutes, actually, which gave me time to make my hair look a bit better and try and make my room more interesting in case she came up. Looking round, I realised how extremely childish it was, how pink and flouncy, with half a dozen stuffed animals on a shelf and a toy-lion nightdress case on the bed. Zara, of course, had banished things like stuffed animals and nightdress cases from her room long ago.

  I hid the toys and made a half-hearted effort to find a duvet cover that wasn’t so flowery, but in the end gave up and went downstairs. I tried to ring Zara to say we were coming, but, as Sky had said, the number was unobtainable. Zara still didn’t have a mobile and I thought, actually, that her mum might be in some sort of money trouble – perhaps out of work. Once, ages ago, she’d been a nurse, but then she’d got the sack and become a ward orderly and the last I’d heard she’d been a hospital cleaner. She was at home all sorts of odd hours now, though, and I hadn’t liked to ask Zara if she still had a job.

  When I answered the door to Sky she told me that she didn’t want to come in. ‘If you don’t mind, can we just get round to Zara’s?’ she said. She seemed downcast; not her normal glowing self.

  ‘Is it anything I can know about?’ I asked as we set off walking, because I didn’t want to just deposit her on Zara’s doorstep and go home again.

  She hesitated, then she said, ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter if you know or not. It’s about Anton.’

  ‘The DJ?’

  She sighed. ‘I really love him. I’m mad about him! He won’t believe me, though. I think he’s going off me.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said sympathetically. ‘Why d’you think that?’

  ‘He’s gone all cold on me. Like, you know I told him I couldn’t go to Paris?’

  I nodded. ‘I heard you weren’t going.’

  ‘Since then, everything’s been a mess.’ She sighed again. ‘It was my own fault: first I was going, then I wasn’t – I just couldn’t decide and he was getting more and more annoyed about it. In the end I knew my mum and dad wouldn’t let me go and I couldn’t lie to them. Not about something like that.’