The Girl Who Wasn't There

by Karen McCombie

  Now I’m right beside her, I can hear she’s humming something to herself, but I can’t make out what it is. Whatever, she stops to answer my question.

  “I share with my little sister. I’m on the top bunk and she’s on the bottom – singing or shouting, usually!” Kat laughs.

  I laugh too. Then I notice a twinkle of tears in her eyes… Something definitely isn’t right. I don’t really know what to say or do, so I just suggest the first thing that pops into my mind.

  “Er, my room’s right next door. Want to see it?”

  “Yes, please,” Kat replies, quickly (and gratefully?) following me through.

  “Ta-da!” I call out, throwing the door open.

  “Wow, it’s great,” says Kat, glancing, nodding.

  But weirdly, I can tell she’s less taken with my room, even though – compared with my sister’s – it looks more loved, with books on shelves, posters on the walls, clothes safely stored away instead of tossed on a clothes rail or on the ground.

  Without taking much notice of my stuff, Kat walks straight over to the window.

  Of course; she wants to look over at the art room from here. To imagine what I saw from this angle.

  “So? See anything?” I ask, walking to Kat’s side and staring out over the locked-tight long windows and the terrace in front.

  “Nope, no sign of ghosts, or flapping aprons, even!” she jokes.

  “Well, it IS Friday evening. Maybe the ghost has better things to do!” I say, and we both get a fit of the sniggers, as usual.

  “Hey,” Kat says suddenly, “are you here on your own?”

  She’s only just noticed?

  “Yeah, my dad’s on a date and my sister’s hanging out with her friends somewhere, even though she’s supposed to be home right now, looking after me!”

  “And your mum?” she asks, opening her mouth to breathe on the windowpane and idly doodling a stick-man figure in the steam.

  “Oh, she died when I was little,” I say, shrugging.

  “Oops, sorry,” she says, wincing a little.

  “Don’t be. It happened a long time ago.”

  I’m sounding too casual, I know, but I tend to feel kind of self-conscious talking about Mum for the first time to people. It’s like I’m more worried about making them feel OK with it or something. Like that matters more than the fact that it’s mega-weird for me.

  “So, what about you?” I charge on.

  “What do you mean?” Kat asks, dotting eyes, nose and mouth on to her stick man.

  Oops; that came out a little clunky. I sounded as if I was wondering if her mum had died too, rather than simply trying to change the subject and not doing it very well.

  “It’s just, I mean, how come you’re here?” I say, with a nod to what Kat’s wearing.

  “Oh, that,” she says, gazing down and realizing I’m wondering about her uniform, since school finished hours ago. “I had stuff to do after school. And I’m not in the mood to go home just yet.”

  “Why?” I ask, staring at her profile, her face suddenly pale and drawn and little-girlish in spite of the blusher and mascara and shiny lipgloss.

  “I’m not exactly my mum’s favourite person right now…” she says, marking what looks like the shape of a star round her stick figure as the steamy breath begins to fade away.

  “Oh. I—”

  Before I can take my turn saying sorry, before I get the chance to ask her what’s happened, my mobile jangles into life in my back pocket.

  “Hello?” I say to Clem, amazed and honoured that she broke her own rule of refusing to use her mobile to communicate with us.

  “Before you give me a hard time, yes, I forgot. OK?” Clem snaps, as if I’m the one who’s messed up.

  “OK,” I say, rolling my eyes, though neither Clem or Kat realizes. Kat is currently mooching around my room, checking out my stuff. She pauses and examines the photo of Mum and her teenage buddies in all their early Madonna-type finery that I took out of the album on a whim yesterday and propped up on my desk. It makes her smile, same as it does me.

  “The thing is, I’m at Bea’s,” Clem rattles on, “so it’ll be about half an hour till I can get back. Well, probably forty-five minutes; Bea’s just trying out her new straighteners on my hair. But anyway, I’ll be there way before Dad gets home. And no telling him – promise, Maisie?”

  “Promise,” I say, but she’s already hung up on me.

  “Problem?” Kat asks.

  She may have been studying Mum’s picture but her fingers, I notice, are resting on the rainbow-covered notebook right beside it. Kat has no idea how important that small, girly notebook is to me; those few stapled pages and the blue-inked words on them are my strongest connection to Mum.

  (From what she said a minute ago, it doesn’t sound like Kat has all that strong a connection to her own mum at the moment…)

  “No – it’s fine. Clem will be back in an hour,” I say, recalculating my sister’s promise to a more realistic time frame. When she’s with her friends, minutes have a funny habit of becoming elastic.

  “An hour, yeah?” says Kat, her eyes lighting up. “So … do you fancy doing something?”

  She has a particular something in mind, I can tell. She’s got a Cheshire Cat grin, only with added shimmer.

  “Like what?” I ask, wondering why she’s glancing outside at the playground, with its lengthening shadows and the warm, sepia glow of the evening sun.

  “Like, exploring,” says Kat, her face breaking into a wide daredevil grin.

  I picture the silent playgrounds and sprawling empty lawn, dotted with clusters of cherry blossoms.

  I picture the main school building, squat and waiting.

  I picture the walk-in cupboard in the kitchen, where my dad’s giant ring of keys is hanging up.

  I picture opening Mum’s notebook at a page that reads: Don’t break rules – they’re usually there for a good reason.

  I picture snapping the notebook shut.

  “Yes,” I say to Kat, a matching grin spreading on my face…

  “Wait!” I say, just as soon as my shaking hand has let us in the small side door of the school – the final door Dad shuts once he knows the building’s secure.

  The door happens to be right next to Dad’s tiny office, which, I can’t help noticing, still has Mr Butterfield’s funny, old-fashioned name up on it. Maybe he hasn’t got around to mentioning it to the ladies in the main school office yet. Or maybe Mahalia and June aren’t as efficient as they like to make out. (Hey, they couldn’t find my transition plan that first day.)

  “What?” asks Kat, already halfway up the corridor.

  “Listen – is there any bleeping?”

  “What would be bleeping?” asks Kat, shining the torch we took from the kitchen drawer into my eyes.

  “An alarm!” I say urgently, blinking and protectively holding my hand up to mask the glare. “What I mean is, is there an alarm? Or, like, a keypad for one somewhere?”

  I glance frantically around, and see nothing but a light switch on the cream-coloured wall. A switch that I’m not going to put on, since we don’t want the nearby residents spotting the brightness and suspecting a burglar.

  “Hey, I just remembered, there’s a box in the front entrance,” says Kat. “It’s right by the office!”

  We look at each other, frantically reading each other’s minds.

  “Run! Quick!” I yell, but Kat’s already taken off, more sure of the twists and turns of the school halls and corridors than I am, since she’s been here a lot longer than me.

  The slap of our shoes on the tiled floors sounds incredibly loud, like it’s being pumped through a sound system, with reverb added. It’s so loud that I can’t believe half the neighbourhood won’t be able to hear it.

  “Look – this is it!” pants
Kat, as we hurtle out of the gloom of the corridors into slightly brighter space of the main entrance hall, with its panels of glass around and above the double doors.

  “Where?” I ask, panic and flying swathes of long hair temporarily blinding me.

  “There,” she insists, pointing to a wooden box to the left of the doors, to the right of the school office.

  I kneel down beside it, looking for a way to open it, terrified of doing just that and seeing a neat row of numbered buttons, all flashing red for intruder.

  Why am I so stupid? Even if this is the alarm panel, it’s hardly going to have a great big idiot-proof “off” switch, is it?

  “We won’t know the code to disable it!” I splutter, my fingers still fiddling for a way to prise the cabinet open.

  “We have to try, though,” says Kat. “Look – a tiny keyhole. Is there a really small key on the ring to match?”

  I fumble, but easily, almost magically, manage to find an Alice in Wonderland small key in amongst the larger ones.

  “Here we go,” I say, as the lock turns, the cabinet door opens, and we see…

  “A letter box!” Kat giggles in relief. “It’s just a fancy letter box!”

  She’s right; there are only a couple of hand-written envelopes in there, probably from parents, with cheques for lunch money or forms requesting holiday absences.

  How dumb do I feel?

  And if I hadn’t been panicking so much the last few minutes, I’d have figured something else out. There wouldn’t have been an alarm here in the front hall anyway, not if Dad – who’s last to lock up – always leaves by the side door at the end of the day.

  There is no bleeping, there is no alarm; the only sound is my heart thundering. Oh, and Kat’s sniggers too.

  “Come on – let’s get on with the ghost hunt!” she says, taking the steps of the grand staircase two at a time.

  Quickly getting my balance, I hurry after her, since a ghost hunt is what we gigglingly decide to call our “explore”, and anyway, I definitely don’t want to be left alone in the duskiness of the hall while the beam of our one torch disappears above me.

  “Wait, Kat!” I hiss softly, though no one – except any elusive Victorian ghosts – can hear me.

  “Hurry up!” Kat calls down to me, and I hear her wrestle with the brass door handle of the art room. “We’ll need a key for this!”

  And now here I am, panting at her side, fiddling for the right key under the spotlight of the torch that Kat’s holding over my hands.

  There it is; marked “A.R.”

  Job done.

  We’re in.

  “SURPRISE!” Kat calls out, bursting into the room, her navy-blazered arms spread wide. “Aww, nobody here…”

  “Yeah, well, if I was a lonely, dead schoolgirl wandering the corridors, I might just vanish at a noise like that!” I say, half jokily, half annoyed with Kat for potentially frightening away whoever might be here.

  But hey, maybe she’s just giddy and wild after the scare we had with the non-existent alarm.

  (Non-existent alarms, non-existent ghosts… ?)

  “Excuse me; may I have this dance?” Kat suddenly asks, rushing over to the dangling junk sculpture and grabbing it.

  She starts singing a Spanish-sounding song I don’t know and whirls the clinking, clanking artwork round as if it’s her salsa partner.

  “Careful!” I say, though I’m smiling at her silliness. “You might break it.”

  “It’s all right; the ghost’ll get the blame,” Kat jokes. “Will you join us?”

  “No,” I laugh at her, instead aiming for the window sill just beyond, where I can park myself down and watch the sun begin its slow set over our cottage and the grounds and—

  No!

  It can’t be!!

  “Kat! We have to get out of here, NOW!!” I yelp, jumping off the window sill and lunging for the torch that’s still in her hand, swirling a solo disco light on the ceiling as she dances.

  “Why? What’s wrong?” she asks, stepping away from her salsa partner, though it keeps jerking madly.

  “It’s Dad – he’s just driving up to the house!”

  I can recognize our car in the dusk, just by its sidelights alone; the right-hand-side bulb is faulty and always flickers.

  Kat says nothing but follows me fast, wordlessly taking the torch back when we get to the door so that my shaking hands can find the key and lock the art room door behind us.

  Then we’re off, trembling, baby-deer legs barely supporting us as we tumble down the grand staircase, along the zigzag of corridors, all the while hoping Dad’s still too busy trying to find a parking space in the road to hear the echoing slap of our shoes as we try and beat him back to the house.

  In a blur of unguessable seconds, we find ourselves in the cool of the evening, the door next to Dad’s office closed, if not yet locked.

  “Is it that one?” asks Kat, pointing to a key under the glare of the torchlight.

  “No – that’s not it. But here … here it is!”

  Thunk.

  The building is safely shut up; now we just need to get ourselves quickly to the cottage.

  I left the side door open when we went out twenty minutes ago, and now the warm light just beyond it is like a beacon, welcoming us safely home.

  Except a tall man-shaped silhouette is now standing in that same comforting pool of light, and my anxiety levels rocket skywards.

  “Here,” says Kat, grabbing the bunch of keys from me with both hands cupped to muffle the noise.

  “Hello, hello, what’s going on here, then?” asks Dad, peering out at us, two figures bounding towards him in the softening light. “Been having fun, girls? Oh!”

  I get what the “oh!” is. We’ve just come into view, our faces illuminated by the lamp on the hall table behind him, and he’s expecting to see me and Clem, not me and a girl he doesn’t know, her arms folded tight across her chest, as if she’s terribly shy.

  (Please don’t let those keys jangle!)

  “Dad, this is Kat.”

  And this is complicated, I fret silently to myself.

  “Er, pleased to meet you, Kat,” says Dad. “Didn’t know Maisie was having you around tonight!”

  “I just popped by,” says Kat. “We’ve been sitting on the lawn, collecting fallen cherry blossoms.”

  Nice lie there, Kat, I think, though I realize it has to lead to another one.

  “We, uh, dropped them … when I thought I heard the car,” I quickly say.

  “Well, fine, I suppose,” says Dad, rubbing at his face a little, as he walks backwards in the hall, with us following. “Though technically, you’re not really supposed to be using the premises without me, as a member of staff, being with you. It invalidates the insurance on the place, apparently. But, hey, I’ll turn a blind eye to my daughter and her buddy sitting making daisy chains or whatever, just this once!”

  “Thanks, Dad!” I smile at him, wondering what he’d think if he knew where we’d actually been, what we’d actually been doing.

  Which I’m never, ever going to do again, by the way – my heart and my conscience couldn’t take it.

  The shock of how reckless I’ve – we’ve – been is sinking in and I’m shaking from the inside out.

  And forget about the shock (I deserve that); telling Dad lies is the pits, mainly ’cause he’s lovely and also because in Mum’s notebook, she wrote, Telling lies … it’s not a good look.

  I’m probably not looking so good right now, with guilt-ridden eyes and a fake smile plastered on my face.

  That’s it; the lying stops now.

  “Anyway, where’s your sister?” asks Dad, stepping back to glance upstairs, for signs of life coming from her bedroom.

  “She went to get ice cream for us,” says Kat, epically saving the
day with a pulled-out-of-thin-air fib.

  Though lying doesn’t suit her either – Kat’s all of a sudden paler than pale, her blusher sitting on her white cheeks like pink puddles on snow.

  Before Dad can respond, the front door is flung open and Clem is there, surprise etched in her eyes as she finds herself being stared at by three people, one of whom she’s never met.

  “Hey, Clem,” I jump in fast. “Didn’t you manage to get the ice cream for us, then?”

  Clem is super-sharp.

  Clem can see I’m giving her a way out, a lie to cover her non-appearance as the babysitter.

  She seamlessly joins in with us.

  “Uh, no – the freezer in the shop was busted, so they’d all melted. Sorry!”

  “No worries,” I say with a shrug, my mouth so dry with lying that I can’t say any more.

  “Yeah, thanks for trying,” Kat adds, as if she and Clem are old buddies.

  “Whatever,” Clem says back, acting ultra-friendly to this total stranger.

  This is surreal…

  “Well, that was a nice thought,” says Dad, wrapping an arm around Clem, obviously shocked and touched at her attempt at a big-sisterly good deed. “Still, if you dumb girls of mine had remembered, I picked up some ice cream yesterday, when I popped to Tesco. You even unpacked it, Maisie!”

  Me, Clem and Kat all burst into slightly hysterical giggles at that, which bemuses Dad.

  “Well, while you calm yourselves down, I’ll go and get some ice cream for us all…”

  “Not for me, thanks,” says Kat, gathering herself together. “I have to go. I’ll just grab something I left on your bed, Maisie.”

  She says it with a wink only I can see, which I figure is code for “I’ll drop something key-shaped on your bed, Maisie”. Great, and then I can smuggle them back on to their hook in the kitchen cupboard later.

  “So, where do you live, Kat?” Dad asks as she comes tripping back downstairs again, her arms now by her side (with nothing to hide). “I could give you a lift.”

  “No, I’m fine, thanks,” says Kat, continuing on towards the front door.