These are excellent questions, and your guess is as good as mine.
Or maybe not. What’s your guess?
Here’s mine.
A part of me did believe there was a ghost, even though I knew there wasn’t one.
I can be a childish girl. That is honest of me, to say, isn’t it? I know I’m supposed to be an adult, and I guess I’ll be one soon—but I feel like this is my last chance to be a child. So I’m kind of childish on purpose.
I miss being a child. Sometimes I’ll be walking to a class and I’ll feel a powerful need to play dress-ups in Lydia’s recreation room. Or bake a cake in Cass’s kitchen. Or get a ‘secret assignment’ from Lyd in an envelope sealed with wax. I want these things so badly it almost makes me cry. I want to go to a slumber party, hold a torch up to my face, have a seance, tell a ghost story, have Cass creep up behind me and breathe on the back of my neck so I scream like a police siren.
I’m scared of the future and the adult world so I want that childish spookiness to return. Where you make yourself afraid, but all the time you know that it’s just imaginary, and you’re safe.
Maybe the reason I’d been so caught up with the ghost—and written that angry blog about it—was that nobody else was playing along.
I was alone in my childishness. Everyone else was being grown-up.
So when Mr Ludovico accused me of being a child, it was like he had reached inside my heart to my most profound fears: that I am too childish; that I won’t cope in the real world; that I can’t be a lawyer; not without Lyd and Cass by my side.
That is why I lost my mind and declared I could prove there was a non-existent ghost.
Now, if I wanted to study Law, I was going to have to do that.
Maybe I am as stupid as I sound.
13.
I couldn’t tell Lyd and Cass about my dilemma. I had to do it on my own. Like an adult.
Ironically, just as I had acknowledged to myself that there was no ghost, ghostly things kept happening to me.
A faint smell of lilac talcum powder kept drifting by, and no one but a ghost would wear lilac talcum powder.
Once I smelled sausages burning. (Not sure if that was the ghost.)
One day, I was in the upstairs bathroom in the Art Rooms and felt something sting the side of my cheek. I looked up. A slow, steady drip . . . drip . . . drip of ice-cold water was falling from the ceiling above me.
The man at the Maintenance Office looked surprised when I told him about it.
‘Water dripping from up there? But there’s no reason why . . .’ Then he lost interest and went back to studying his books. (The maintenance man plans to be an airline pilot.)
My childish mind exclaimed that all these things were mysterious, inexplicable phenomena, and therefore pointed directly to a ghost!
My realistic mind said, no, they don’t, Em.
None of my minds believed that they would count as proof of a ghost for Mr Ludovico.
I realised I’d have to set up some infrared recording equipment on 24-hour time delay in multiple locations around the Art Rooms and hope to catch some kind of ghostly activity on film.
But who even knows what I mean by that? Not me.
14.
I thought it might help if other people in my year believed in my ghost. Then I could point out to Mr Ludovico that I was not unique in my childishness.
The best way to do this, I decided, was to give the ghost a more menacing image. So far, it had been innocuous—friendly, even. A fruit-eating ghost who reads history books? Why would anybody waste time believing in that?
So, I wrote a new blog entry.
My Journey Home
On my journey home today, I was looking at my shiny black shoes, and they reminded me of cockroaches.
Moving on. More news on the Ashbury ghost. I was washing my hands in the third floor bathrooms today when I felt a thwack on the back of my head. A curious force propelled me across the room to the mirror where red writing began to appear, slowly, and with a dripping effect as if it were blood.
The writing said: HELP ME.
HELP ME . . .
I ran from the room as fast as I could, but when I returned, moments later, with the authorities . . . the writing had disappeared.
Thanks.
Signing off now,
Emily.
1 Comment
Yowta772 said . . . Em, I love ya, but this entry is complete and total bull.
Yowta772 was correct.
It was all lies. Although, to be fair, shiny black shoes do remind me of cockroaches sometimes.
Anyway. So. That didn’t help.
15.
What if I tried a different strategy? Found a list of dead people with compelling reasons to haunt the Art Rooms and went to Mr L with that?
I typed into Google: ‘Ashbury Art Rooms Used to be Old House Who Died in It? Who Might Be Ghost Now?’
I got nothing.
I knew I was destined for that scene in the movies where the hero sits in a dark library, winding the handle on a clunky machine scrolling through old newspapers and then suddenly! what’s this? Report of fire in the Old Ashbury Mansion? Somebody died in the fire? Suspicious circumstances! And so on.
I knew that was my destiny, but I was (and am) a very busy girl.
I had no time for destiny.
Here is a blog entry I wrote around this time.
My Journey Home
My journey home, well, look, I have three assessment tasks, two exams, three essays, one folder of questions, one drama script (to help write), one haircut (to get from a hairdresser), one birthday afternoon tea at my Auntie June’s in five minutes (to go to), one party at Lyd’s place (to go to after that), and if that were not enough, I am consuming all my time trying to persuade my parents to buy me a car.
As for Auntie June’s birthday party, don’t get me started on that. Older people should stop celebrating birthdays. Don’t they realise that they’re already old? All they’re achieving by having more birthdays is making themselves even older. What’s to celebrate?
As for my parents’ excuses for not buying me a car, don’t get me started on THOSE either. Apparently they’re worried that I might not know the value of things. I know exactly how much things cost because I shop all the time. So. There goes that argument.
‘I’m surprised you two are such successful lawyers when you make arguments like this,’ I said.
This caused Mum and Dad’s faces to distort as they tried to imprison their laughter, and I have neither the time nor the inclination for distorted faces, thanks.
What was I talking about?
Yes! My journey home.
Look, there is just no time for journeying.
Thank you and goodnight.
I don’t know if you can sense the anger in that blog entry, but trust me, it was there.
The fact is, Year 12 is stressful enough without the burden of Mr Ludovico and a non-existent ghost.
16.
Then something intriguing happened.
It happened during a party at Lyd’s house.
It was a Wednesday and I remember thinking: this is not much of a party. People were talking and laughing too loudly, trying to force it into partyness. You can’t force a party. I went into the kitchen and somebody had spilled a whole bag of rice onto the floor and just left it there. Someone else was sitting up on the bench, blowing cigarette smoke through an open window, and cold air was blowing back into the room, making the central heating pointless.
Back in the living room, I accidentally started talking to Astrid and had to listen to a very boring story about some injustice to do with the kilt she is making for Textile and Design. I looked around the room—Lyd and Seb were sitting side by side on a couch, their feet up on the coffee table, heads tipped back onto the top of the couch, both laughing. That seemed like a positive step but I wished they could shift it my way.
This was around midnight and I made a decision: as soon as Astrid
reaches the final button on this kilt of hers, I’ll call a taxi and go home.
And then the front door opened.
Amelia and Riley walked in.
The entire party changed. I am not kidding. Before they had even taken off their coats, it became a party.
Someone put on better music. A bunch of people who’d been out on the terrace spilled back inside, filling up the corners and the silences. Cassie wandered in from the games room and headed towards me. Toby Mazzerati (the solid wood boy) also headed towards me. Somebody, somewhere, started telling a story that was making people laugh hysterically. And Astrid’s phone was ringing so she had to stop talking to me.
All this, just because Amelia and Riley arrived.
Well, look, I realise that’s not why.
And yet, I think that it was.
Three hours later, I was trapped in a closet.
I’m not sure exactly how this happened. There was a point where I was talking with a Brookfield boy and thinking about hooking up with him. There was a point where I noticed he had sweat dripping down from his hair to his chin, and I said I had to go now, sorry. (When I got back he was already hitting on somebody else, which confirmed I had made the right decision.) There was a point where someone did a magic trick which involved setting something on fire. Then, right away, there was a point where people started screaming for a fire extinguisher. (Cass put the fire out with water from a vase.)
There was a point where I noticed Seb murmuring something to Lydia, and then Lydia stepped away—always stepping away, she drives me mad—and Seb’s face fell and then turned cold and he walked out of the room. Then I heard Lyd speaking to people, in a voice with its own cold edge, and she was offering a tour of her mother’s closets.
Now that was a surprise.
Lyd’s mother has five interconnected closets. There are display cases for scarves and favourite gowns, and there are specially designed holders for underwear.
Cass raised her eyebrows at me: she was surprised too. One thing that Lyd’s mum gets explosive about is Lyd letting friends into those closets. (We know this because the three of us used to spend a lot of time dressing up in there.)
And yet, next thing you knew, ten of us were in the shoe closet.
This is the smallest of the closets, and the central one.
A light went out, the sliding doors closed—and we were trapped.
It turned out to be strangely wonderful. Sometimes I am claustrophobic but I wasn’t in the mood for hysterics so I decided not to be.
Some of my favourite people were there—Cass and Lyd (though, sadly, not Seb), and Toby Mazzerati, and Amelia and Riley, plus some other friendly nonentities from both Ashbury and Brookfield.
Once we had all tried the two doors (many times) and shouted, knocked, kicked, pounded, etc, then remembered our phones, and SMSed and phoned people at the party (but they’d turned the music so loud they couldn’t hear anything, including their phones) and phoned people who were not at the party (but they just laughed—or got mad for being woken up), and once we had tried more imaginative solutions such as climbing to the top of the shoe shelves and prying the ventilation cover loose, then we all just found places to sit and we relaxed.
One of the Brookfield boys had been wandering around all night with a bottle in each hand—I’d noticed him earlier—almost as if he knew he would soon be trapped in a shoe closet. So now he shared the vodka around, and that helped the mood. It was crowded enough that arms and legs brushed and touched, but I was next to Toby Mazzerati and he is a pleasure to brush.
It was not so crowded that I wanted to scream for personal space. Not at all.
It was dark but people kept splashing us with little bits of light, via their cigarette lighters and their mobile phones.
We talked about Lydia’s mother, and how she had got famous as a soap star and then made some smart investments, and now directs many media entities and has many shoes.
We talked about the fact that Lydia’s parents were not coming back until the end of the term, and imagine if all our phone batteries went dead and we were trapped in the closet until then! Lyd’s mum would get back and say, ‘What’s that terrible smell in my shoe closet? Do I really have such bad foot odour?’ and then she’d open the door and there’d be ten rotting corpses lying by her shoes!! She’d SCREAM and SCREAM and never wear another shoe again.
We all agreed that this would be a harsh but important lesson for Lydia’s mum—she had valued her shoes so highly that she’d locked them up out of fear of losing them and, ironically, had ended up losing her most valuable possession, her daughter.
The closet would always be haunted, we said, by ten dead students, lost on the brink of our beautiful lives.
So then, of course, in the context of haunting, somebody mentioned my ghost.
There was some laughter at my expense.
I laughed too, but then I pointed out, forcefully, that every time I had English in Room 27B I ended up covered in goosebumps because it was so ghostly, icily cold in there and how did they explain that?
This was the point when Riley spoke.
He said, ‘You get goosebumps?’
Now, here I should say that both Riley and Amelia had joined in the earlier conversations—about Lyd’s mum, and designer shoes, and starving corpses—now and then. Not much, but enough so they did not seem like silent presences. However, when Riley said, ‘You get goosebumps?’ he said it in his Riley voice.
Amelia also has an Amelia voice.
These are the voices they use in certain conversations. It’s a voice that seems to tip from their mouths at an angle like a children’s slide. A voice that has a strange sort of suspense in it so that people turn towards them quickly.
Often, the voice begins as here—with Riley or Amelia asking a simple question of the person talking. This makes the person feel strangely special. The person feels as if Riley or Amelia has caught onto something extraordinary about them. The person’s heart stops for a moment, and the person thinks: Yes, actually, I do get goosebumps! I do! Um. Doesn’t everyone?
And then the person thinks: How do I answer this question?
In the closet, the only answer I could think of was: ‘Yes.’
But it didn’t matter. Riley and Amelia were interested in my goosebumps. They wanted to know how often I got them, what they feel like, what they look like, where on my body they are.
Amelia, or maybe Riley, talked about why we get goosebumps. Not in a lecturing voice, just as an aside as if we probably already knew this. It turns out that in the very olden days people used to be covered in long hair like orangutans. When it was cold, all the tiny muscles on their skin would make the hair stand up, so they’d get warm.
These days, as you may know, we don’t have long hair on our bodies—if we did, we’d be spending a fortune on waxing—but our bodies still think that we do. So all the little muscles still stand up when it’s cold, and that’s goosebumps.
The way they talked about this made me feel strangely excited. As if getting goosebumps was a kind of time travel.
From there, Amelia and Riley navigated the conversation until we were talking about coldness itself. People told stories about being very cold—not just skiing in Canada (like I have, and trust me, it’s COLD), but also about the coldness of fevers, and a sudden splash of water on the back of your neck. And the coldness you feel towards people you used to care about when they hurt you. And the cold things people do. Somebody remembered a story about a man whose wife was dying, and he got the funeral director to measure her up for her coffin even though she was still alive. That was cold.
This was not just Amelia and Riley talking, by the way—it was everybody—but Amelia and Riley make people more amazing. People remember things they never knew they knew. If you get what I mean. Stories they’d forgotten. And all the time, Amelia and Riley listen so intently and ask questions like they really care. Everybody starts to feel intriguing.
And then, Amelia
(or maybe Riley) asked questions about my ghost. They did not laugh. Their questions were serious. I admit they didn’t seem very interested in the mandarin peels and feathers, but they were fascinated by the coldness.
Amelia said she never gets cold in Room 27B, but this didn’t seem to make her doubt me. It seemed to make her believe.
Riley wondered why ghosts are cold.
‘Maybe ghosts are shadows,’ he said. ‘Shadows are cold.’
And then we talked about shadows.
I cannot remember what we said about shadows, although I do remember Toby Mazzerati being very intense about fetching, starving, black holes and ships.
In his mind this was all connected to shadows. It made absolutely no sense, but at the time, with all that alcoholic beverage in my bloodstream, Toby’s words seemed profound. I remember I hugged him and promised that there is no such thing as black holes. (I don’t think there is. Is there? Hmm. I might be wrong about that. Never mind.) Anyway, my friend Toby, sometimes he seems so sad. I wanted to cheer him up.
And then suddenly there was a knock on the closet door. It was Astrid—she must have finally got my text—and Lydia was calling out instructions on how to release us—and then we were free!
I went home feeling beautiful, in love with every person in the closet, and with a head that was brimful of shadows.
17.
After that, things began to change.
I didn’t notice right away, but over the next few days I began to overhear people talking, quite seriously, about the Ashbury ghost. Once, two girls asked me if I’d felt the ghost lately.
They weren’t being funny.
It was the strangest thing.
It was as if Amelia and Riley had made the ghost real. The way they had talked about it in the closet had been so serious and respectful, so now that respect was billowing out across the school.
It was not enough to go to Mr Ludovico with, but it sure was soothing.
18.
One day, near the end of a drama rehearsal, somebody suggested that a plant would look good in a particular scene. The actor could water the plant as she talked, and this would be symbolic of her taking a shower or something else equally ridiculous. Anyway, I remembered the potplant outside the lower photography lab and ran to get it.
Dreaming of Amelia Page 18
