Ghost

by Helen Grant

  I stare at her. It’s too late. She’s halfway through it. She keeps going, struggling a bit because the plait is so thick it’s hard to get the blades of the scissors around it. Then she’s through it, and the whole lot slides to the floor like a snake. She’s standing there with the scissors in her hand, breathing hard like she’s been running.

  She puts down the scissors on the table and combs out her hair with her fingers. It’s still long, below her shoulders, but the ends are all uneven where she’s hacked at them.

  “You can close your mouth, Tom,” she says, and I realise it’s hanging open.

  She looks down at the jagged ends for a moment or two and then she says, “I can’t finish it myself. You’ll have to do it.”

  “What?” I say. “I don’t know how to.”

  “You have to do a better job than I would. I can’t see the ends properly to do it, not at the back.”

  She brings me the scissors and holds them out. “Go on.”

  If the day was getting strange, now it’s completely unreal. I have a girl asking me to cut her hair for her with kitchen scissors. I can’t imagine any other girl I’ve met asking me to do that.

  I take the scissors, reluctantly.

  “Turn round, then,” I say, and she turns her back to me.

  I look at her hair. There’s still a lot of it despite what she chopped off. I touch it gently, trying to smooth the ends so that everything lies flat before I cut it.

  “I’ve never cut hair before,” I say to her.

  “Neither had I,” she says.

  She waits. The ends of her hair look as though someone cut it with garden shears. It’d be hard to make it any worse. I line up the blades of the scissors and make the first cut, gently.

  She moves slightly.

  “Stay still,” I tell her. I go along the bottom of the hair, doing my best to cut in a straight line. This is probably all wrong. A real hairdresser would do that thing where they hold the ends in their fingers and cut along them, but I don’t know how to do that.

  I go along the hair once, and then I go back and try to trim any uneven bits. I lean back and look at my work. Not as bad as I thought it would be. I put down the scissors, and then I put my fingers into her hair and comb it gently. My fingertips graze the back of her neck and she shivers. And that is when I think about kissing her.

  Suddenly I’m clumsy and my hands snag in her hair, which has to hurt.

  “Sorry,” I say awkwardly. I free my fingers carefully. “I think it’s finished.”

  She turns to face me, putting up her hands and running them through her hair.

  “It feels light,” she says.

  I don’t say anything. With her shorter hair she looks more like a normal girl, less like the ghost of Langlands. She looks like a normal, very pretty girl.

  She turns her head from side to side, feeling the hair move.

  “It looks good,” I say eventually.

  “It’s better,” she says. For the first time I see a smile on her face. Then it’s gone, as quickly as it came. Her face is serious again. “I’m sorry,” she says. “About just now. I just...I lost my temper.”

  I shrug. “No harm done – except your teapot and cup.”

  She thinks about that. “I’ll have to look and see if we have another pot.”

  “You could just get teabags,” I tell her. “If it’s only you you’re making it for, you might as well.”

  “Will you get me some, Tom? As well as the sugar?”

  I’d forgotten about that. “Yeah,” I say.

  “When will you come back?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t always get the car. It’s not mine, it’s Mum’s.”

  As it happens, I’ve got a back-up, but I don’t mention that. I want to think a bit first, about that feeling of wanting to kiss her. I’m thinking it might be wrong to do that, even if she wanted me to, kind of like stealing something from someone without them even knowing. Does she even understand what her grandmother has done to her? I think about her losing it, smashing things in the kitchen. That was after looking at a few magazines. What about when she gets outside and sees the real world? She’s going to need help, not kisses, and maybe more help than one person can give.

  I tell Ghost I’ll try to come back some time in the next few days, keeping it vague. I guess she gets the message, because she comes with me to the front door of the house and just as I am about to get in the car she says, “Tom, I’m sorry I lost my temper. You will come back, won’t you?”

  I nod. “Of course I will.”

  As I drive off, I look back, and she’s standing there by the stone porch, with the new shorter hair blowing back in the wind, watching me go.

  And I think: Will I?

  The next day, Tom didn’t come, nor the one after that. I told myself that I couldn’t really expect him to come back so soon. He had his own life, one I could hardly begin to imagine. But there was a persistent worry at the back of my mind that he wouldn’t ever come back again, because of what had happened in the kitchen. I had torn the magazines he gave me to shreds right in front of him. I’d screamed like a banshee. What he thought of having to help me cut my hair I couldn’t imagine, but I had no regrets about that.

  And then there was the question of what I thought about Tom. What should I believe about him – what should I feel?

  After he had gone, and I had gone back to the kitchen, I saw the chocolates he had brought me. I’d forgotten about them because I had been focussing on the magazines; I hadn’t even thanked him. I opened the box, and they were all set out in a little tray. I meant to try one and save the rest for later, but once I had put the first into my mouth and felt the explosion of sweetness on my tongue, I realised how badly I missed having sugar. I couldn’t stop myself after that. I ate all but two, and the only reason I left those was that I was beginning to feel queasy. After that I felt guilty, and somehow uneasy, wondering whether everything in Tom’s world was as irresistible as that, whether it would drag me into itself like a craving for laudanum. In spite of that, perhaps because of it, I longed to see him again.

  Being alone at Langlands was harder now than it had been before. Every part of the house was haunted by the invisible presence of Grandmother, but now I did not know whether to mourn her or rage at her. I would go into a room to find something I wanted and see something of hers: a book that would never be read to the end or a set of glass jars that would never hold the jam they were intended for. A terrible sense of loss would wash over me, and then I would remember the shock of hearing Tom say seventy-two years and grief would dissolve into a hard, bitter anger that felt as though it would poison me. The worst of it was, I didn’t know why Grandmother had done this to me. Grandmother was gone; much as I longed to seize her by the lapels of her coat and shake the truth out of her, I was never, ever going to be able to do that. She had made me a stranger to the rest of the world, and perhaps I would never know why. And yet there had to be a reason. What was she so afraid of? What did she think would happen if I came into contact with the outside world?

  There were times when that world I had glimpsed in the magazines Tom had showed me seemed unreal. Langlands was there, just as it had always been, full of familiar things and requiring me to carry out the same tasks I always had: chopping wood, heating water to wash clothes. Believing in Tom’s world of brilliantly-lit cities and labour-saving domestic machines while continuing to live at Langlands was like trying to believe in Heaven while going through the grind of daily life. It was very hard not to believe in what was in front of me instead.

  By the third day, I had made up my mind that Tom would never return to Langlands. It was now a matter of when the lack of supplies would drive me out by myself, to take my chances in the outside world. When I heard the pre-arranged signal of three blasts on the car horn and came out of the house to find Tom getting out
of the car, I was so pleased to see him that I ran to him across the gravel, and he was either pleased too or taken unawares because he opened his arms and I ran into them.

  I had thought it was bad doing without sugar; it was far worse doing without human company. I was so thrilled to see Tom that I didn’t think about the rightness or wrongness of embracing him. I just did it. He folded his arms around me and I leaned in to him, resting my head against his shoulder. He smelled good; he had some kind of cologne on and it smelled as intoxicating as the chocolates had tasted.

  Tom held me as long as I clung to him, but there was a kind of stillness about him; I felt it and assumed he was stunned by my boldness. Perhaps he was actually shocked. I made myself pull away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to smile at him to show it wasn’t such a big thing. “I was just so pleased to see you. I thought maybe you weren’t coming back.”

  Did some shadow of an expression flicker across his face when I said that? I wasn’t sure. Then he gave a half-smile.

  “I brought sugar and tea. And this.”

  He reached into the car for something and held it out to me.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a drink. No, don’t shake it.”

  I held the thing doubtfully. The brightly-coloured metal container was very cold in my hand. I thought it looked strange, more like a can of paint or Brasso than something you would drink.

  Tom had brought other things too: grapes, a loaf of bread, a carton of milk. He carried everything into the house and through to the kitchen, where he set it all down on the table.

  I watched him doing this, turning the metal can over in my hands.

  “Here,” he said. “You open it like this.”

  He handed it back to me.

  “Should I put it in a glass?”

  He shrugged. “Just drink it out of the can.” He watched me, and then he laughed. It was the first time he had done that, and it was a good sound. I smiled back, tentatively.

  “It’s strange.”

  “It’s fizzy,” he said. “Don’t drink it too fast.”

  There was no danger of that. I thought the drink was interesting but I couldn’t make up my mind whether I actually liked it or not.

  Tom had a can of it too, so I supposed he did like it. He began to wander around the kitchen with it in his hand, looking at everything: the dresser with the plates, the range, the pans hanging on the wall. I couldn’t help it, I followed him with my eyes. He looked at everything except me.

  Then he said, “I nearly didn’t come back.”

  “Oh.” I could think of nothing else to say. A moment before, I had been feeling thrilled that he had come back again; now I was filled with a cold feeling of disappointment. He hadn’t wanted to.

  He turned to face me and now he did look me in the eyes, but his expression was deadly serious.

  “Look, Ghost, I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing. I’m not the best person...” He sighed. “You don’t know what it’s going to be like when it gets out, you know, that you’ve been living up here for years thinking it’s World War Two. You probably won’t even be able to stay here.”

  “Why not?” I demanded, with more indignation than I felt. The cold feeling was worse; it was a terrible numbing dread unfurling inside me. “This is my home.”

  “Because people are going to be interested. Too interested. And even without them, there are all sorts of official people who are going to want to get involved. Your grandmother keeping you here like that, not letting you go to school, that was probably child abuse or something. They’ll want to investigate. You need someone better than me to see you through all that. I’m not even sure I can. I mean, I’m not a relative. You probably ought to be with your family, if you have any anywhere.”

  “I don’t have any,” I said. “And even if I do have relatives somewhere, I don’t want to go and live with them. I live here. At Langlands.”

  “You don’t understand. When people find out, you won’t be left in peace.”

  “Well, why do we have to tell anyone?” I said.

  Tom gaped at me.

  “Because...you can’t stay here on your own forever.”

  “Why not?” I was feeling nettled now. “I don’t know anything about your electromagnetic cooking machines, but I know how to run everything here at Langlands.”

  “Yes, but you can’t grow everything yourself. You’d need things from the town, and if you go there...” His voice tailed off.

  “They’d notice me, wouldn’t they, because of these stupid clothes?”

  Tom sighed again. “They do...stick out.”

  I knew he was right, and I’d practically forced him to say it, but still I felt stung.

  “Look, you could help me with that. You could get me some different clothes, so I look the same as everyone else.” He didn’t say anything to that, so I pursued the point. “Please, Tom. Please.”

  He looked at me and I saw the ghost of a smile. “Yeah, I can just see myself going into Primark and buying girls’ clothes.” Then he shook his head. “I have to think about this, Ghost.”

  I remembered Grandmother talking about keeping me here at Langlands, whether she had done the right thing or not.

  In two months’ time you will be eighteen years old and no longer a child in anyone’s eyes. A great many things will change then, Augusta, she had told me.

  “Tom, you said they might think Grandmother not sending me to school was child abuse. Well, I’m eighteen in April. I’m not a child any more. So how can it matter?”

  Tom was silent for a time after that but he looked unhappy.

  “I’ll be an adult,” I said. “And then I can live here on my own if I like, can’t I?” I looked at him pleadingly. “You just have to keep it secret until then. It’s not even two months. Please.”

  And Tom nodded.

  Bad news. I know this is bad news even while I’m nodding and Ghost is saying Thank you, Tom, thank you so much.

  She does have a point, I guess. She is nearly eighteen. There’s no point anyone screaming about the fact she isn’t at school. All that’ll happen if the whole thing gets out is that Ghost’s life won’t be her own any more.

  It’s not just about keeping my mouth shut though. She’s going to need things – sugar, bread, milk, I don’t know what else. That means borrowing Mum’s car, and she’s bound to ask questions. It’s not going to end there, either. There’s nothing magic about a birthday. Ghost is not suddenly going to be able to cope with twenty-first century life. She’d never even seen a can of Irn Bru before today. She’s never seen a microwave. Is it even possible for someone to catch up on seventy-two years they’ve missed? I don’t know.

  I know this, though. I want to help her. Partly to spite the old lady, because whatever her reasons, she’s done something bad here; she’s fucked up someone’s life. Mainly though, I’m going to do it for her. For Ghost.

  I have to admire her. It’s not long since she found out everything she’s been told her entire life is a pack of lies, and it hasn’t crushed her. And she had guts, coming down the stairs like that, that afternoon, thinking she was going to hold off soldiers with an ancient rifle.

  It’s more than that, though. She isn’t like anyone I’ve ever known. Even with the shorter hair, she’s different, different in a way that makes me want to keep on looking at her. That moment when I thought about kissing her comes back into my mind, more often than it should, considering that I’ve already told myself I’m not going to do it. And now she’s asking me to do something for her, I want to say yes. Even if it is probably a bad idea.

  Anyway, I promise to keep her secret, and then she says, “But what about the clothes, Tom? Will you help me get them?”

  I think about that. “It depends what you want, Ghost. Buying sugar and tea, stuff like that, that�
��s no problem, but I don’t have enough to buy a whole new wardrobe. I’m supposed to be saving for when I go to university.”

  She looks at me calmly and says, “I have money.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, Grandmother does. I mean, she did. I know where she keeps it.”

  I stare at her. I open my mouth to tell her that she really shouldn’t be telling me this and that she definitely shouldn’t tell it to anyone else who turns up at Langlands, but then it occurs to me that maybe she means a load of old coins like that 1944 penny I found on the windowsill.

  “Okay,” I say cautiously. “Maybe you should show me.”

  “Come with me,” she says.

  We go back down the passage to the hallway with the stuffed stag and then up the stairs to the landing where that room is, the one Dad and I worked on in the autumn. We go right past that, to a room I’ve never been into before, at the far end of the corridor.

  Ghost grabs the door handle, and from the way she turns it, I guess that she thinks it may be locked. It isn’t, though; it opens easily. The room inside is a bedroom, and you can tell right away whose it is – or was. It’s an old lady room. There’s even a trace of some kind of old lady perfume on the air, something a bit sweet and powdery.

  It’s full of stuff, but it’s very neat and tidy. The bed has been made and there are cushions on it. The books in the little bookcase are lined up, with none of them sticking out or laid on the top. There are a lot of ornaments, china and glass ones, and all of them are carefully spaced along the shelves and the mantelpiece. Even the dressing gown on the back of the door is on a hanger.

  Ghost goes straight for a desk under the window and starts pulling out drawers. There’s a lot of paper in there, and she quickly loses patience and starts pulling it all out and dumping it on top of the desk. When it’s all out she starts going through it. Pieces of paper flutter to the floor but she doesn’t seem to care. Why should she? Old Mrs. McAndrew isn’t going to come home and complain about the mess.

  Whatever she’s looking for, it isn’t there, so next she tries the dressing table, and after that the bedside cabinet. There, she finally finds what she’s after. She shows it to me. A notebook.