by Ross Welford
“Isn’t it locked, Byron?”
“Well there is another curiosity. The lock was not broken. I can only suppose I forgot to lock it. Now come on, Al – MindGames is about to start.” He moves towards the sitting room when I have a brainwave.
“Can we watch it at yours?”
He looks at me a bit funny. “Why in heaven’s name?”
“It’s just … it’s better there. We … we can drink chai!”
It works. He gives a big smile. “Ha’way then, hurry up. We might miss the start, but that’s just the simple questions. No one cares about that!”
“Hang on – just forgotten something!” I run upstairs and take the spare moped key off the yellow plastic key ring, and replace it with one from my desk drawer that belonged to my old bike D-lock. They don’t really match very well, but at a casual glance it should stop him realising that the spare key has gone, and that way I might be able to borrow the moped again.
When we get to Grandpa Byron’s house, I feel really bad about the damage when I see it: it’s a huge scrape down one side, ruining the paintwork and cracking the plastic leg guard.
Worse, when he wheels the moped up the side alley and takes a big, fat padded chain – brand new – from its top box, and chains it through the wheels to a drainpipe.
He sees me watching and winks. “No chances am I taking!”
I’ve still got to get the fake spare key back on its hook though, and so with Grandpa Byron installed in front of the TV, I’m safe to sneak it back on the rack of hooks in the kitchen while I’m making the chai. Except when I look round he’s standing in the kitchen doorway and I don’t know how long he’s been there.
Did he see me? There’s no way I can know. He’s still in the kitchen doorway and I squeeze past him, and I think I see his eyes flick towards the rack of key hooks, but I can’t be certain. I’m probably just imagining it.
That afternoon, for the first time in ages, he misses loads of questions. I’ve never seen that happen before. He’s rattled, I can tell, and then he asks me a question I’ve been dreading.
“How you gettin’ on with me book?”
I screw up my face in embarrassment. “I’ve been really busy, Grandpa Byron, what with …”
“It’s OK. It wasn’t really written for young lads. Perhaps it’s better if I just tell you?”
And that’s what he does. Thank goodness, actually, because it saved my life, eventually. Well, one of them. In a way.
This is what Grandpa Byron tells me:
The Sri Kalpana was – is – a very little-known book of ancient Hindu scripture and dates back to maybe 1500 BC, which makes it one of the earliest of all written things. That’s over 3,500 years old.
In it are written the secrets that Indian gurus kept to themselves for centuries – among them, the methods used to memorise vast amounts of songs, poetry, family trees and historical tales. Grandpa Byron pours more chai and relaxes a bit when he sees that I am listening.
“Back then,” he continues, “that was pretty much all there was to remember. Hardly anyone could write or read, mind, and there were no football scores. But stories of battles, and who was related to who – these were dead important, and if you couldn’t read or write then someone had to remember it all, and if you wanted to remember so much stuff, you’d need special techniques, and if you knew them then you’d be really important.”
“Techniques like what?”
“Well, rhymes help, and rhythm. Do you know the kings and queens of England in order?”
I look at him, puzzled. “No! There’s loads!”
But then Grandpa Byron begins to sing, to the tune of “The Blaydon Races”.
(You might not know how “The Blaydon Races” goes, but I think everyone in the north-east does. It’s kind of the Geordie national anthem, the one with, “Oh me lads, you should have seen us gannin’…” No? Oh well, it’s a sort of bouncy tune, a dum-de-dum-de-dum tune. Look it up if you want.)
Anyway, Grandpa Byron sings it:
“Willie, Willie, Harry, Steve,
Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three,
One, two three Eds, Richard two,
Harrys four, five, six, then who?”
I interrupt him then by saying, “But there’s no King Harry, or Dick!”
“Harry’s a nickname for Henry, Dick’s short for Richard – so you’ve got William the Conqueror, William the second, Henry the First, King Stephen, Henry the second, Richard the first, King John, Henry the third, Edward the first, second and third, Richard the second, Henry the fourth, fifth and sixth, and so it goes on all the way to the present day.”
He sings it again, all the way through, and by the third time I’m joining in. Grandpa Byron starts giggling.
“See! Hee hee! It’s easy! I even taught that to your dad.”
I give him a sceptical look. “Please tell me that’s not all there is to it. Rhyming stuff.”
“Ah. No. But it’s the start. Rhyme and rhythm make things easier to remember. The ancient Greeks called it mnemonics, and made it world famous, but it was we Indians who invented it all!”
“Hang on – world famous?”
He nods. “Memory systems were taught in schools and universities across Europe. But somehow it was abandoned. Now, no one bothers remembering anything.” Grandpa Byron gets up from the floor where he’s been sitting – “Google will do it all for you. Now – I think there’s some fudge left from your birthday,” and he goes into the kitchen. “Next time, I’ll tell you about Memory Palaces.”
“And how come Dad didn’t do any of this? Didn’t you teach him?”
Grandpa Byron’s eyes move left and right as he chooses his words. “I tried to. But I think I left it a bit late with your dad. He preferred computers to his own imagination.” He looks at me, a bit sadly, I think. “A lot of people do these days.”
On the way home, I sing the Kings and Queens song to myself, all the way to the present day. I can’t forget it now, even if I tried. It has stuck in my head like chewing gum to my shoe.
‘Willie, Willie, Harry, Steve
Harry, Dick, John, Harry three
One, two, three Eds, Richard Two
Harrys four, five, six, then who?
Edwards four, five, Dick the bad,
Harrys twain (that means two) and Ed the Lad (Edward VI was only nine!)
Mary, Bessie, James the vain,
Charlie, Charlie, James again
William and Mary, Anna Gloria,
Geordie, Geordie, Geordie, Geordie, William and Victoria’
(‘Geordie’ is a nickname for people called George, although the only George I know at school – George Pelling, brother of Katie, she of the sick-down-the-back fame – was just called George. It’s probably an old-fashioned thing.)
‘Edward seven’s next, and then
George the fifth in 1910
Ed the eighth, then George, Liz Second
Charlie, Wills and George, it’s reckoned!’
I like it, knowing the order of the kings and queens like this. Not that it’ll ever come in useful for anything, apart from maybe the odd test at school.
And so I’m lying on my bed, reading, and working out how I’m going to get back over to the old house now that Grandpa Byron’s chained up his moped, when Carly walks in.
Let me tell you about The Stepsister From Hell, because she’s about to feature a bit more significantly in this story.
To say I hate her would be unfair, but I think she hates me. I think she hates Mum, as well, and Grandpa Byron. And so far as I can tell, she hates her dad too, but because he gives her money she isn’t so open about it. With him, she just tuts a lot, rolls her eyes and curls her lip behind his back.
Mum reckons she just hates the world because it took her mum away, and she’s angry and resentful, and that instead of disliking her I should feel sorry for her, and that I should remember she almost certainly thinks we are invading her space. I try to remember that, I really do. But s
ometimes she makes it quite hard.
Take the going-to-school thing. She’s a year ahead of me at St Eddie’s, but apart from once in my first week – once! – she has not travelled with me to school. (And that one time, as soon as she got on the bus she sat away from me with Noa Menko and the girl with the harelip.)
So now I usually get taken in by Grandpa Byron.
I think Carly is actually, probably, quite pretty, at least when she doesn’t do her emo stuff. She’s got shiny black hair which she makes even blacker with artificial colour, and then puts loads of stuff on her eyes, but when I once said she looked emo, she sneered at me and said she was a goth not an emo, but I don’t think she’s either really, not that I’m an expert. I think she just likes wearing black because she reckons it makes her look thinner.
When she walks into my room, I am stunned. She has never – and I really think it is never – come into my bedroom, and in she walks without knocking, of course.
“Hi,” I say.
She doesn’t reply, but sort of half-nods at me with half-closed eyes, like she’s been practising in the mirror how to look mysterious and threatening.
To give her her due, it’s working.
She wanders over to my desk and picks up a clay model of Yoda that I made years ago but I still really like. She turns it over in her hands, then puts it back.
She pulls out the desk chair and turns it round. She starts to try and sit down on it backwards, facing the back, like they do in movies, but she’s got a skirt on which makes the move difficult, and besides, it would expose her knickers, so she opts for sitting sideways instead, and then she looks at me with her head on one side.
I know I’m not going to like this. I mean, people don’t behave this way if they’re about to say, “Guess what, I’ve bought you a present,” or, “Congratulations, you’ve won first prize.”
“Al?” she says.
“Yes?”
“Where did you go last night?”
Ages ago, in the time of sadness after Dad had died but before we’d kind of got a bit used to him not being around, Mum went through this weird phase when she kept saying, out loud, “Pye – is that you? Are you there?”
The first time it happened was when we were watching TV. It was November-ish and windy outside, and I heard the front gate rattle and a tin can clatter along the road outside, and that’s when she did it. She sat up straight and looked towards the living room door, which was open.
“Pye?” she said. “Who’s there? Is that you, Pye?”
Now this freaked me out. I stared at Mum. “What’s up, Mum? Why do you say that?”
She had got up and gone to the front door, but soon came back.
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “It was … it was just the wind.”
I gave her a look that meant to say, “Well, duh.”
She didn’t mention it again, but there was this faraway look to her for the rest of the evening. She wasn’t really watching the TV, but I didn’t say anything.
She did it again, a week or so later. Same thing: sitting up, this time she was at the kitchen table. “Pye? It’s you, isn’t it? Are you there?”
“Mum,” I said, quite gently I think, “there’s nobody there. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine, darling,” she said. “Just very tired.” She rubbed her forehead with her hand and sighed.
That night I came downstairs because I couldn’t sleep again, and saw her sitting at the table with her eyes closed in the dark with a candle in front of her, very, very still, and I crept back upstairs.
A couple of days later, I was round at Grandpa Byron’s and I asked him, “Do you believe in ghosts, Grandpa Byron?”
“What sort of ghosts?”
“Well, you know – spooky ghosts, ghosts of dead people, you know … ghosts. Spirits.”
He thought for a long time. At this time, he had started to grow a beard and he looked a bit wild. Eventually, he said, “I believe wholeheartedly in the human spirit. In fact, in the spirit of all living things. And I think that spirit inhabits us while we are alive, and departs from us when our physical bodies die, and rejoins the timeless universal spirit, until such a time that it will be part of life once more, possibly in human form, possibly not.”
I thought about this, I really did. But I didn’t get it. “Is that what Hindus believe, then?”
He gave a little bark of laughter. “No, son. Not exactly.”
“Buddhists?”
He shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
So I asked him again. “Do you believe in ghosts, then?”
“Oh, aye,” he said. “Indubitably.” And then he added, “But ghosts as you’re thinking of them? No.”
“So you do and you don’t?”
He wobbled his head and smiled. “How accurately you put it, Al. Spot on!”
I had been thinking about this recently, which I guess is how what happened next came about.
And how I dragged Carly into all of this.
So Carly is standing in front of me, one hand on her hip, at the end of my bed, waiting for an answer, and all I can do is stare and sort of puff my cheeks out and go phoo as I exhale, trying to look thoughtful. This goes on for several seconds.
“Well? Where did you go? I heard you. I heard you on the stairs, and I heard the front door, and I saw you going down the street. You’re rubbish at being secret.”
My eyes flick from her to the door, to the window, and back to her face. I can feel myself going red.
“Look, Al, I’ll make this simple for you. Either you tell me where you went last night, or I tell your mum that her darling liddle baba is prowling the streets in the dead of night, OK?”
I’m still dumbstruck. But I’m forming an idea.
“And, just to be clear. I’m not even guaranteeing that when you do tell me I won’t tell your mum. Just that, well, it’s your only chance. All right?”
“It’s my dad,” I say.
“Your dad?”
And that’s how it starts, the lie that ends up changing both our lives.
The story seems to just form itself in my mouth without going via my brain.
I nod at her to close the door, mainly in order to give myself more thinking time.
“I … I’m trying to contact his spirit.”
“His spirit? You mean, like a séance-type thing?”
“Uh … yeah?” I’ve got no idea what she means, but it doesn’t matter, because – brilliantly – she goes on to fill in the details herself.
“Oh. My. God. That is, like, so totally freaky-cool. So, like, you’re going to some graveyard? To your dad’s grave, yeah? To commune with his spirit?”
“Well, he was cremated, actually, so technically there’s no grave, but a graveyard is the, um, best place. I think. Yeah.”
“Oh, like, totally the best. God, Al, you have got to let me come. I’d be like so good at it. I’ve read loads of books about stuff like this.”
I’ll bet you have, I think to myself.
“Y’know, Carly … it’s the sort of thing that’s best done in private, I think I should …”
“Oh please, oh please, oh please, Al …” And I realise with some satisfaction that for the first time ever since knowing Carly, I have the upper hand. She wants something from me. She is begging me. “Let me come or I’ll tell your mum,” she says, but she’s bluffing. Because if Mum or Steve found out, they would prevent both of us going. And Carly knows that. And she knows I know. And she knows that I know that she knows, and so I still have the upper hand.
“I’ll let you know when the time is right,” I say mysteriously. “I think I’m close to a breakthrough to the spirit world.”
“Cool. That’s, like, just, awesome!” She shakes her head slowly in what looks a little bit like admiration for me.
It’s a new feeling.
They say that once you have broken the law once, then doing it a second time is much, much easier, and I can now say the same is true for u
ndertaking crazy schemes involving midnight moped rides and garage break-ins. Now that I know how I’m going to get back there, I’m itching to continue what I have started. Terrified as well, obviously, but super-keen not to lose the momentum and the courage that got me started. Now that Carly’s involved, though, things have just got tricky. Tricky squared, in fact.
Assuming what my dad wrote in his letter is true, then I have the chance of preventing him from dying and everything will be back to how it was. Otherwise, I’ll forever be trapped in this goldfish bowl, with Mum, Burping Steve, and The Stepsister From Hell.
Talking of Carly, she intercepts me as I come back from Grandpa Byron’s after school the next day and starts walking along the road with me, like it’s the most normal thing in the world for her. I know what’s coming.
“Well? How about it?”
“How about what?” I feel I have to say. I do not want her to start taking this for granted, thinking that we are co-conspirators in this ridiculous séance thing, or for her to forget that she has blackmailed me into allowing her to participate in it, even though it’s completely made-up.
“You know,” she says wearily.
“Look, its not the right time.” This time, I have thought about it and am better prepared. “There needs to be a full moon.”
“I see.” She’s buying it. Brilliant.
“But I have to do some … preparation first. Alone.”
She looks at me out the side of her eyes, suspiciously. “Don’t try to shut me out of this, Al, because …”
“I’m not! I just need to do something alone.” I pause for effect, and then say something that I think is very clever. “I really need you for this, Carly. The spell requires, um …”
“What?”
“You are a virgin, aren’t you, Carly?”
“A what?”
“You know, someone who hasn’t …”
“I know what a virgin is, Al. And, as it happens, yes, if it’s any of your business, of course I am. Jesus.” She chews her gum furiously.
“Well, I just had to double-check, you know. A full moon, and the presence of a virgin are two of the things I need.”
