The Girl Who Wasn't There

by Karen McCombie

  ’Cause she’s flipping the photo around for me to see.

  A photo of smiling, cheery girls in navy uniforms, posed in descending rows outside the stern façade of Nightingale School.

  Girls with hairstyles that are large and puffy, girls who are wearing just a little too much make-up, since that was the fashion in the 1980s.

  And in the front row, to the left, there’s a face that’s somehow familiar – or maybe it’s the bow in the hair that does it.

  The girl’s face is friendly, the smile warm, the lipgloss shimmery.

  Her expression is full of life … which makes it all the more shocking to see the circle of black pen around her head, and the letters R.I.P. x beside it.

  I flip the photo over, my eyes scanning the names, working out which girl this is.

  And there it is. The matching name.

  I flip the photo back and forth a few times, just to make sure that what my eyes are telling me, what I realize my instincts are screaming at me, is right.

  “Katherine,” I say out loud, looking directly at the girl kneeling in front of me.

  The girl who looks exactly like the person in the picture.

  “Hello,” she says nervously, biting her sheeny-shiny lip…

  “You’re dead.”

  It’s not the nicest thing you can say to a friend, but I can’t think of any other way to phrase it right now.

  “Mmm.” Kat nods, biting her nails, watching me, trying to gauge how I’m going to react.

  Actually, I think I might faint.

  But then again, I think I may throw up before that.

  Kat suddenly sees I’m struggling with this new, shocking situation and touches me gently on the knee. That soft touch does something strange but wonderful … it’s as if the finest, flimsiest puffs of cooling air brush the whole of my skin, and my temperature – and anxiety levels – come down a notch or two, taking me below the point of fainting and throwing up, below the point of my heart beating out of my chest in panic, below normal even, to long-distance swimmer calm.

  Kat … somehow Kat’s making this happen, I know it.

  But at the same time, she’s growing paler, the dark circles more obvious under her eyes, the pink-brown blusher sitting on her cheeks like the paint on the face of an antique porcelain doll.

  And now her huge blue mascara-fringed eyes are staring up into mine, as if she’s begging me to be all right with … with whatever this is.

  I know she’s waiting nervously for me to say something.

  And despite my sudden slow and relaxed heartbeat, I have so many questions ramming and crashing around in my head that I’m finding it hard to figure out which one to ask first.

  I think I just have to open my mouth and take a chance with whatever comes out.

  “What?” I end up saying, pretty stupidly.

  “Huh?” Kat frowns.

  I guess dead-girl ghosts have many, varied and amazing powers which I can barely guess at, but perhaps trying to figure out quite what I’m on about with that one useless word is optimistic, really.

  “I mean … what are you?” I stumble. “Are you an actual, real-life ghost?”

  OK, that sounds dumb too.

  But Kat has seemed really, really real to me since I first met her, since she linked her flesh-and-bone arm in mine that lunchtime in the hall, last Tuesday.

  “I can feel alive, seem totally alive whenever I want to, if I concentrate,” she tells me now, looking half-dead, she’s so very, very pale all of a sudden. “I just can’t do it too often, ’cause it takes all of my energy, and it can take me a long time to get back.”

  “But … what does that mean?” I beg her, desperate to understand. “Get back from where?”

  Wherever it is, I’m guessing it’s where she’s been today.

  “Nowhere,” she shrugs. “I just feel exhausted and it’s like I fade away to … well, nothing. Then I start to feel stronger, and I’m back, hovering around the school again.”

  “How does that work? How do you explain why you’re there one day and not another?”

  “It’s not like that, Maisie. I’ve chosen to appear real to you and your family,” says Kat, her eyes getting bigger and more earnest as her skin grows whiter. “But the girls and the teachers at school don’t really see me – not properly, anyway.”

  “So … so you’re not in class 8G?” I ask, still battling to sort my millions of questions into some sort of sensible order.

  “Well, I was, back in 1987. Now, I just drift in and out of the crowds in the corridors. Sometimes a person will sense me. A girl maybe shivers when I pass, or sees the shift of where I’ve been.”

  “The shift?” I repeat, though my brain is busy trying to compute the fact that neither Mrs Gupta or Patience actually saw Kat in the library that lunchtime last week – and there I was, thinking they were just ignoring her.

  “You know how sometimes think you see a movement out of the corner of your eye, but then you look and nothing’s there?” says Kat.

  “Yeah, sort of,” I say with a nod.

  “Well, that’s the shift.”

  “Right,” I reply, feeling a ripple of goosebumps on my arms. “So when you get that feeling, it usually is something?”

  Kat tilts her head to one side and smiles at me. “Yes, it usually is,” she laughs ruefully.

  I guess that makes sense. Well, as much sense as having a dead best friend can make sense.

  Then a specific question urgently shuffles to the front of the queue, demanding to be asked.

  “What … what happened to you, Kat?”

  I hold up the photo, pointing to her image, to the R.I.P. x beside the circle of black felt pen ringed around her face, in that happy row of long-ago girls.

  “I don’t know,” says Kat, blinking up at me. “All these years I’ve had these jumbled flashes and glimpses of what my life was like. But I’ve never seen anything about my death. And I have to know, Maisie, or I’ll just go on and on like this for ever…”

  At that moment, another specific question shuffles to the front of the queue in my overheating head.

  “You think I can help?” I ask, the truth dawning on me.

  “Yes!” Kat says, nodding enthusiastically. “As soon as I saw you I felt so sure you could.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, that’s a stupid question!” Kat laughs now, sounding like any normal, non-dead teenage girl. “I knew you had to be special. You were looking straight at me. You were the first person ever who could really, clearly see me!”

  “On Tuesday, in the dinner hall, you mean?” I say, visualizing all the girls gathered around me, telling me about the Victorian ghost. Kat came to talk to me as the huddle of girls broke up at the sound of the bell.

  “No … it was before that,” Kat surprises me by saying.

  “Before?”

  “Yeah, it was when I knew that you saw me,” she grins. “It was when you looked out of your bedroom window for the first time. Remember?”

  How could I forget?

  She’s talking about the Saturday before last.

  The day we moved in.

  The art room window.

  Of course; in the muddle of my mind I suddenly get what’s blindingly obvious: there is no Victorian ghost.

  There is no Victorian ghost, because the only ghost is Kat.

  The long-dead, century-old schoolgirl … it’s just been a fairy story all along, a myth that’s drifted like a Mexican wave through year upon year of students here at Nightingale School. Students who sensed, saw or felt Kat’s presence over the decades and imagined and explained her away as some sort of fictional, floating spirit, a ghostly character that wouldn’t look out of place in a Charles Dickens novel…

  So the shape I saw at the art room window, the shape Dad e
xplained away as sunlight hitting the window; a reflection of a cloud or a plane; the outline of a twirling junk sculpture (the vision of “dead” Mr Butterfield, if you were listening to Clem), all along it was this not-so-ordinary girl crouched in front of me now.

  “Kat, when me and my dad came to look around the school that Saturday afternoon … was it you making the junk sculpture twirl when we were leaving the art room?” I ask.

  “Er, yes,” Kat says apologetically. “I was just trying to get your attention.”

  Get my attention? At the time it got me shivering up and down my back, wondering if I was going a tiny bit mad.

  “And then last Monday – it was you waving back to me from the window?” I check, knowing even without asking that it was no cleaner or Miss Carrera that day. (I think I knew already.)

  “Uh-huh.”

  And Miss Carrera on Wednesday lunchtime; she saw only me coming in for Art Club, didn’t she? Same as the rest of the girls there saw only me burst out laughing on my own, while I’d thought I was goofing around with my friend. My friend who wasn’t there.

  “On Thursday … was that you opening the window and stepping out on to the terrace?” I ask, thinking of Dad grabbing the flyaway white art apron belonging to Miss Carrera.

  “I think so,” says Kat, frowning now, looking unsure, looking like her skin is becoming semi-transparent (the veins in her forehead are very, very visible; very, very blue).

  “Why do you only think so?” I push her.

  “I don’t understand it all, Maisie. Sometimes I can control what’s happening to me, and sometimes everything is … hazy and hard to remember,” says Kat, her big blue eyes darting to one side and the other as she struggles to explain herself. “Same as I don’t understand what happened to me when I … when I stopped living. I just know I have to find out – and I can’t do it on my own.”

  “You don’t have to do it on your own,” I tell Kat, covering her hand with mine. “I’ll help. Of course I’ll help.”

  “Thank you, Maisie!” she says, smiling gratefully at me. “Thank you so much!”

  I don’t know if Kat is going blurry because I’m crying now, or if she’s just going blurry.

  “So what’s your actual name, Kat?” I ask, sniffing, blinking the sudden, salty tears from my eyes, keen to be properly introduced to my very special friend.

  “Katherine Mary Jessop,” she answers me, letting her gaze fall on the school photo that’s now on my lap.

  “And you were friends with Lindsey Butterfield, who lived here?”

  “I think so,” says Kat unsurely, her touch feeling lighter, her image fading in and out, like a malfunctioning projection.

  I have a sudden memory of the other night, of hearing girls’ laughter in Clem’s empty, silent room.

  One of the voices was Kat’s, I now feel certain.

  She knew this house.

  She knew it way back in the 1980s, when Lindsey Butterfield lived here.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll figure this out,” I whisper, bending closer to her so that our two foreheads – one cold, one hot to the touch – press lightly together.

  And in that still, lovely moment of wonder, I remember another page from the notebook, some words doodled in Mum’s comforting handwriting: Treasure your old friends, and be open to making new ones!

  Well, I am more freaked out than I have ever been, but – seeing as I have no old friends – I’m definitely planning on treasuring this new one, however strange she is. Especially if she needs my help.

  “Ahem.”

  The “ahem” comes from a couple of metres away.

  It comes from my big sister, standing on the back doorstep, staring at me.

  “What?” I say sharply, heart thumping, automatically straightening up.

  “Why were you hunched over like that just now, like you were constipated or something?” she calls out coolly, cattily.

  I blink, and see that I’m holding hands with no one, whispering comforting words to thin air.

  “None of your business,” I bark back at Clem.

  “Ooo-OOO-ooo! Someone’s touchy!” my sister teases. “I only came to tell you Dad’s back. He asked me to ask you if your friend wanted to stay for tea. But I guess there’s no point, if she’s left already.”

  Kat.

  Katherine Mary Jessop.

  Yes, she has left.

  In some ways, she left in 1987.

  But in some ways, as I’ve found out to my complete and utter, slap-in-the-face shock, she’s never left at all…

  “Knock, knock, knock!”

  Someone really is saying that, as well as doing it.

  “Maisie?”

  I try and drag myself out of the soft sludge of sleep and figure out where I am.

  For a second I blink and wonder why the furniture is this way round, let my fingers touch the plain wallpaper and frown over where my Cath Kidson flowers have gone.

  Then the pieces of my scrambled brain slot into place and I remember I’m not at 12 Park Close any more.

  I’m in Nightingale Cottage.

  I go to Nightingale School.

  And my best friend is a ghost.

  “Are you all right, honey?” Dad asks, sticking his head around the door.

  Er, no, not really, I think.

  Or then again, maybe I am surprisingly all right, considering.

  Considering I just realized I’ve been hanging out with a dead person all week.

  Wouldn’t that blow Dad’s mind? If I casually said, “Hey, you know Kat, the girl you met last Friday night? Well, she wasn’t really there, if you see what I mean.”

  Of course he wouldn’t see what I meant.

  Of course he’d think I was ill.

  Or going through some hugely delayed reaction to Mum dying or something, if he wanted to go all psychological on me. (Though that’s more Clem’s territory, since psychology is one of her A-levels. But I am definitely not going to tell her about this.)

  “You’ve slept for nearly twelve hours!” Dad says with a laugh.

  “Have I?” I mumble, propping myself up on my elbows and reading seven-fifty a.m. on the clock. I’ll have to hurry to get myself ready for school.

  “I’ll stick some toast on for you, if you’re hungry,” he adds.

  “Yeah, I’m starving.”

  Dad seems pleased to hear that, and disappears with a stomp, stomp, stomp down the stairs. I guess he was a bit worried I was sick or coming down with something last night, since I didn’t eat any of my tea and went straight up to bed.

  Of course I wasn’t sick; I was just too numb and bewildered to think about food. All I’d wanted was time on my own, to sit in my room and try to make sense of the conversation I’d just had with Kat. To get it fixed in my head who she was and what she was. To figure out exactly how I was going to help Kat. (Always remember, Mum wrote in the notebook, you’re smarter than you think. Just give it time. I wish…)

  As I lay my head down on the pillow last night, I’d fretted over what Kat had whispered to me that first lunchtime we’d met, when she’d come up to me in the dinner hall. “I’d love to find out her story!” she’d said, entwining her arm in mine. I’d thought she was talking about the supposed Victorian ghost, but of course she was really talking about herself…

  “Peanut butter? Marmite?” Dad offers as I join him in the kitchen a few minutes later, slouching on to a chair.

  “Both, please,” I yawn, dragging my fingers through my hair.

  “What did your last servant die of, Maisie?” says Clem, breezing into the room in a hazy fug of perfume and the smell of warm hair-straightening serum. “Dad’s working, remember – he’s only dropped in for a second, you know!”

  I can’t think of a smart response; I’m too tired after my epic sleep, when my brain shut dow
n from information overload. But then again, I can generally never think of a smart response to Clem’s snippy remarks.

  Luckily, I don’t have to this morning; Dad leaps to my defence.

  “Leave her alone, Clem; I offered,” Dad tells my sister, happy to pass me my breakfast bits while he waits for the kettle to boil so he can fill his flask mug with coffee.

  I expect Clem to go huffing off with a half-heard, petulant grumble, but she doesn’t.

  In fact, she’s strangely quiet.

  I glance up from the toast I’m buttering and see that my sister’s eyes are narrowed, closely observing Dad as he plonks down the jars beside my plate with a cheery whistle.

  “What? Have I got toast crumbs on my chin or something?” Dad asks, suddenly registering Clem’s forensic gaze and brushing his face with his hands.

  “You look very happy,” she says, accusingly.

  “I’m a happy sort of person! What can I tell you?” he replies, but he’s grinning, as if he’s in on a joke we’re not part of.

  “You can tell us what you’re smiling about, for a start,” Clem demands.

  “What is it?” I join in and ask, feeling very awake now, even if I probably don’t look it, with my scruffy PJs and bedhead hair.

  “Well, I took my youngest daughter’s advice…” he begins, reserving his smile for me.

  “Whoa – tell me you didn’t listen to anything she had to say,” Clem interrupts, reserving her lazy sarcasm for me. “You know that’s about as sensible as paddling through a piranha-infested river.”

  “OK, Clem, if you don’t want to hear what your sister’s advice was, and how it worked out, then fine,” Dad says with a maddening shrug.

  Maddening for Clem, since I know what I said. What I said when I kept Dad company as he cleaned the art room windows yesterday afternoon.

  “Dad! Don’t be so childish!” she accuses him, as if she’s the most grown-up of us all. Yeah, so grown-up she’s looking like she might just have a tantrum if he doesn’t spill his story in the next ten seconds or less.

  If I wasn’t so keen to find out what was going on, I’d’ve happily sat munching my toast, watching Dad wind her up some more…