The Girl Who Wasn't There

by Karen McCombie

  With love to Ms Lovegood ... a.k.a. Sami!

  Contents

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  Also by Karen McCombie

  Title Page

  Dedication

  R.I.P. My Life

  From Me To You - Thoughts from your mum, for my darling girls…

  Always listen to your dad - he has your best interests at heart.

  Look out for each other, all three of you.

  Be confident in yourself - even if you feel shy and nervous.

  Please stay open-minded if Dad meets someone new.

  Always stay curious, never be bored or boring.

  Don't keep secrets from each other.

  Don't break rules - they're usually there for a pretty good reason.

  Telling lies … it's not a good look.

  It's corny but true: a trouble shared is a trouble halved.

  Always trust your instincts.

  Treasure your old friends, and be open to making new ones!

  Always remember, you're smarter than you think. Just give it time.

  It's always nice to be nice!

  You're always braver than you think you are…

  Smile - it could brighten your day, and someone else's too.

  Enjoy life. Enjoy every strange and unexpected twist and turn.

  Sometimes things never quite make sense; you just have to accept that.

  Epilogue: Miss me, but not too much

  Copyright

  R.I.P. MY LIFE

  The room is bare.

  It takes just seconds to see all there is to see.

  Sunlight streaming through the curtainless window.

  Rose-sprigged Cath Kidston wallpaper, with tiny rips caused by the Blu-tack from my torn-down posters.

  Pale laminate on the floor, scuffed where my desk chair once rolled back and forth.

  It’s so weird; all my life was here, but looking round the emptiness of my bedroom, it’s as if it’s been snatched away, or as if none of it ever happened, even.

  All the laughing (with Lilah and Jasneet, and Saffy too – for a while at least).

  All the raging (at Clem, mostly, for pulling those big sister moves, making me feel that small).

  All the crying (of rage at Clem; ’cause of my so-called “friends” flaking out on me; and when Mum died, of course).

  “Maisie…”

  A voice is calling out to me, hazy, faraway.

  “Maisie, it’s time to go…”

  The sunlight is so bright it’s turned the rectangle of sky in the window a dazzling, peaceful white.

  This is the point when I’m meant to feel sad, but strangely, I don’t.

  I lift my face to the warmth of the white light, feeling floaty, full of calm, full of hope.

  It is time; time to close the door on this life and see what happens next.

  “Coming,” I call out…

  Wow, I’m cringing at myself.

  What I wrote in the notebook – “R.I.P. my life” – it makes me sound so pretentious and dramatic.

  Or like I’m dead or something.

  I’m not usually so pretentious and dramatic.

  (And I’m definitely not dead.)

  But leaving your childhood home can rattle you, I guess.

  Packing up thirteen years of yourself into cardboard boxes and removal vans can leave you feeling pretty sentimental.

  Still, it’s been just half an hour since we left 12 Park Close (since I wrote that schmaltzy stuff in the back of the notebook) but I’m giddy as anything, excited as a five-year-old version of myself at Christmas time.

  Clem isn’t.

  “You know, the first time I saw this house, I didn’t like it,” she says, staring at the sturdy red-brick cottage in front of us.

  “Yep, you made that perfectly clear, sweetheart!” Dad answers cheerfully, as he lurches by her carrying a box marked Kitchen Stuff.

  “But now…” she says, leaning unhelpfully on the tall, metal frame of the gate, “now I realize I hate it!”

  I want to shout “Get over it!” or “Stop making Dad feel bad!” but we’ll just get into a fight and then that’ll really bother Dad.

  So I settle for accidentally-on-purpose barging into her with my own box of stuff from the van.

  “Ow!” Clem yells theatrically. “What did you do that for, you little—”

  “Sorry, didn’t see you there,” I lie quickly, cutting her off mid-rant while stepping through the front door and heading into the narrow hallway of our new home.

  Behind me, I hear Clem muttering darkly as she stomps off out of the iron-work gate in the railings and makes for the hired van parked in the road just outside. Seems like she’s finally, reluctantly deciding to lend a hand.

  The thing is, I know what’s going through Clem’s mind.

  The Park Close house is pretty modern – built in the 1990s – with these huge windows and sliding glass doors that flood it with light. It’s surrounded by matching houses, where loads of Clem’s friends live. Park Close is also about a five-minute wander from her sixth-form college.

  This house was built in the 1890s, and has a musty smell, since no one’s lived in it for a while. The windows are small, making it seem quite twilight-ish inside. It’s set in the grounds of Nightingale School, with these old black-painted iron railings separating us from the world beyond. It’s also a thirty-minute bus ride away from Clem’s sixth-form college (“…which I am NOT moving from, by the way!”).

  So, yeah, I get all that.

  And I would sympathize with Clem if she took just one second out of her busy, self-centred schedule to think about how the move affects me and Dad.

  For me, it’s a chance to start all shiny and new. To forget about old friends who morphed into enemies. To go to a new school where people will just know me for myself. Not Maisie Mills, kid sister of spectacularly gorgeous, spectacularly smart, spectacularly sarcastic Clem, or ex-friend of Lilah and Jasneet after spectacularly falling out with them… (Shudder.)

  And Dad.

  If Clem can’t bring herself to think how things’ve been for me, she could at least take a squint at it from Dad’s point of view. I mean, you’d think someone who’s studying for an A-level in psychology would be able to spot that Dad’s smile the last few months never quite hid the panic in his eyes. That he’s been doing a lot more of the face-rubbing thing with his hands that he always resorts to when he’s stressed.

  And since one of Clem’s other subjects is business studies, you’d reckon she could figure out that big mortgage payments and dwindling redundancy packages don’t add up too well.

  I know that the offer of site manager’s job at Nightingale School got Dad dancing round the living room.

  I know, ’cause after he got the news he whirled me around the living room till I felt travel-sick and knocked half the furniture over with my flip-flops.

  The fact that a rent-free house came with the job made it like every birthday, Christmas and Father’s Day present rolled into one.

  “It’s a miracle, Maisie!” he’d said to me, when he found out that live-in accommodation was part of the deal, and that yes, there was a space in Year 8 for me, if I wanted to take it up (yes, please, as soon as possible). Both of us had pretended not to notice Clem screeching her chair back and stomping up the stairs under a darker-than-usual cloud.

  “Look – feels like home already, doesn’t it?” says Dad now, standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

  He’s tall and skinny and strong, with a chest the perfect height for laying your head on whe
n everything gets too much. Or when you’re happy too.

  Dumping my box down on to the gappy, worn floorboards of the hall, I go to him and wrap my arms around the grey cotton of his T-shirt and he hugs me right back.

  Feeling his chin rest lightly on my head, I turn to see what he wants me to see. Though I can guess.

  And there it is – the first thing to be unpacked – perched on a dusty painted shelf in the empty, old-fashioned kitchen.

  A silver-framed photo of a happy family.

  A dad with fashionably messy dark hair and a wide, white smile, looking totally in love with his girls, big and small.

  In one of his arms he holds a cute, dimpled girl of three, with her brown hair in plaits, gazing straight at the camera.

  A bigger girl of eight, with her hair hanging long and straight down her back, has her arms reaching around his waist. She is staring up at him adoringly. He has his hand protectively on the back of her flowery sundress.

  The dad is looking over his shoulder, his wide, white smile directed at the mum, who is standing slightly apart from her family, her head tilted back as she laughs, sending a shiny waterfall of fair hair tumbling all the way to her waist.

  And how do the current Mills family match up to the ten-year-old version in the picture?

  The main change in the dad is the hair, I guess. He wears it close-cropped now that it’s thinning and grey around the edges, but it suits him.

  The littlest girl is taller, less chubby, and lets her hair flow long and straight, like her sister and mum’s in the photo.

  The big sister is taller too, much more beautiful, a lot less adoring of the dad. Her hair is cut short at the back, long at the sides; an angular bob as sharp as her tongue.

  The mum is gone, long gone, of course. About six months after the photo was taken, she was taken too, by the cancer no one knew was there.

  Is it just coincidence that she’s standing slightly apart from us in our joint pose? I don’t know whether I’m happier thinking it was just coincidence or a premonition of things to come…

  “Mum would’ve liked it here,” Dad says softly, his deep voice vibrating the top of my head.

  “Yep,” I answer, nodding against his chest and hearing his heart boom-boom.

  Mum hadn’t really liked the Park Close house at first, Dad told us; one of his many Stories About Your Mum. But they were newly married at the time, expecting Clem, and it was all they could afford. She’d hoped they’d move on to some place old and full of character down the line. But then little Clem made friends, time passed, I came along and the next move never quite happened.

  Well, not for Mum, at least.

  “Hey, am I going to have to do all the work round here?” comes a grumble, as a girl-shaped black cloud stands silhouetted on the front doorstep.

  She’s only carrying a stool and her make-up box, but I guess it’s better than nothing.

  “Dad stuck the photo up,” I tell her, untangling my arms from around Dad’s waist and pointing into the kitchen.

  Thankfully, Clem gives the stream of sarcasm a rest for a second and walks over to join us, to gaze at our once-upon-a-family.

  “Hmm,” she mumbles after a reflective second or two. “Bet she’d have hated it here.”

  With that, my sister thuds up the stairs, and Dad and I share conspiratorial grins, knowing Clem’s oh-so-wrong. The mum Dad’s described to us would’ve been looking in every cupboard, stroking the mantelpieces of the original fireplaces, planning to paint the neglected Victorian summerhouse in the overgrown garden.

  “Well, better get this done!” Dad says brightly, bounding back out of the house, his good mood not in the least bit dented by Clem’s gloom-fest.

  That’s my cue to get moving too, and I take the stairs two at a time, even though my box is heavy ’cause of the books inside.

  “This place is such a dump,” moans Clem, as I reach the top landing and try to hurry past the door to my sister’s new room. Her back is to me, but I know she likes an audience.

  “It’s not so bad,” I try to placate her. “Not with your furniture in.”

  The general house stuff (beds, drawers, sofa, fridge, etc.); all of that got delivered an hour or so ago by a removal company, leaving the three of us behind at Park Close to pack the smaller stuff in the hire van, clean up, and say our goodbyes.

  “Yeah, right!” says Clem, scuffing a toe at the threadbare patterned carpet. “It’s a proper palace!”

  I try to move on to my room, but she’s got me trapped in her moaning force field.

  “And it smells!”

  “The air’s just a bit stale,” I say, my shoulders sagging with the weight of the box and Clem’s negativity. “Every house or flat smells like this when no one’s lived in it for a while.”

  The previous site manager had worked at Nightingale School and lived here for something crazy like thirty or forty years, Dad said.

  He left about six months ago, and the school hadn’t found the right candidate to fill his shoes, not till Dad came along.

  “They smell like this when someone’s died in them, Maisie!” says Clem, as if I am unspeakably naïve.

  But no one did die here, did they? Dad made out that the old site manager just retired. Was that true? Or had Dad fluffed a white lie to keep me from stressing about the place?

  “Did you hear what I said?” Clem calls out as I move away along the corridor.

  “Nobody died, Clem,” I reply flatly, hoping she doesn’t hear the edge of uncertainty in my voice, or she’ll think she’s scored a point with me.

  Instead I clatter into my room and kick the door closed with my heel.

  Dropping the box and myself on the bed, I take a few deep, hopefully calming breaths.

  I went through a phase when I was little, muddling fast-asleep dreams of Mum with half-awake sightings of her. Of course I know the difference now. I know there’s no such thing as ghosts. But the very idea of them can make my grown-up, sensible heart race, just as madly as it did when the four-year-old me clung tight as a baby sloth to Dad during all those middle-of-the-night terrors.

  What I need right now is the calm, reassuring voice of a mother to tell me it’ll be OK. That moving here was the right thing to do. That Dad made the best choice for us.

  Luckily, I can make it happen – sort of.

  Scrabbling open the cardboard flaps of the box, I reach in and pull out the faded, well-thumbed notebook.

  The hard-backed cover is of a blue sky, a rainbow arching across it, a green meadow splatted with flowers.

  Flip it open and the title page reads:

  From Me To You

  Thoughts from your mum, for my darling girls…

  Mum’s notebook wasn’t a secret; she’d pat her bed and me and Clem would clamber on, squishing right up to her, as she told us the latest words of wisdom she’d written down for us.

  “This is for the two of you to look at together over the years, to share,” she’d said with a smile, looking just a bit tired and not horribly ill, though that’s what she was. “Promise?”

  “Promise!” me and Clem had trilled together, linking pinkies with Mum, linking pinkies with each other, a little circle of love and trust.

  My beloved Clem had smiled at me, a wide gap in the middle of her mouth where her two baby front teeth were missing. My heart went ping, knowing I was lucky enough to have the best big sister anyone could have: one who played tickle fights, pretended to be dogs with me, sang me silly songs in bed, held my hand tight, tight as we crossed roads, covered me with enthusiastic kisses.

  But what a difference a decade makes.

  Eighteen-year-old Clem spends most of her time being cross with me now. If I stay in the shower a minute too long, she’s barking at me. If I drink the last of the orange juice in the fridge, she’s ready to tear me apart.
>
  And she’d absolutely freak out if she knew I’d written in the back of Mum’s notebook, even though she never looks in it, ever.

  She’d have a point. I shouldn’t have done it – it’s just that I’d really wanted Mum to “know” how I felt leaving our family home, of losing the view of the blue of the sky out of my bedroom window, of missing the flowery wallpaper Mum had chosen for me, of letting go of the feeling that she was somehow still in the walls…

  My fingers have found the page I was looking for, and before I read the words, I glance up to see how blue the sky looks out of my new bedroom window.

  Hmm … I can’t see that much of it; the view of Nightingale School is in the way.

  All I can make out are clouds scudding over the top of the building, which towers three storeys high – four, if you count the tiny windows of the turrets at either end.

  I let my gaze drop slightly and lazily notice that above the grand front entrance with its double doors is a sort of terrace, though it must just be ornamental; the low brickwork along the edge is pretty (in a gothic way) rather than practical.

  Then again, the three windows overlooking the terrace are extra long, as if you could step out there and escape the classroom if you felt like it.

  Wonder which classroom that is? Will it be one I use when I start school on Monday?

  My tummy twists itself into a squidgy knot of excitement and nerves at the very thought. What will the other girls be like, I won—

  That thought stops dead.

  The knot suddenly tightens, like iron.

  It’s Saturday.

  The school is all locked up and empty.

  But there is someone standing in the left-hand window of the three overlooking the terrace.

  The person is dressed in white.

  Their hand is on the glass.

  They are looking straight at me…

  “But what was it?” I say, staring at the big, blank window to the left, directly above the terrace.

  We’ve been staring at it for ages now – there’s no one and nothing there.