by Will Maclean
Abi wouldn’t let me sit with her whilst she made the call, as it would be a subtle act of performance, delicate and easily spoiled. So I waited in the attic, wondering. What little I knew of Janice left me with the impression that she was an unpredictable creature of many depths and shallows. When she learned that she had been fooled, her reaction could go any way. It was simply impossible to tell. The absolute worst-case scenario – the one that kept playing itself out in my mind – was that Janice would explode with petulant anger, and soon her mum would be talking to our mum, and within weeks our lovely dark attic would be repainted into a bland, boring space where nothing would ever happen again. To pass the time, I looked at our bookshelves, and was forced, for the second time since we’d shown Janice the photo, to examine our preoccupations through different eyes.
All our reading material, I saw now, was macabre. Most of the top shelf was older books, many from the 1940s and ’50s, most of it dealing with folklore or the paranormal. Back then, books on strange topics had to be searched for, sought out, retrieved and rescued, and our cache of books had been sourced from jumble sales, bring-and-buy fairs in church halls, and second-hand bookshops visited on holidays in obscure English towns and villages, where we would emerge blinking into the sunlight from some book-lined cave that reeked of pipe tobacco and mould, clutching our treasure.
Books by Lewis Spence and Alfred Watkins. Books by Elliott O’Donnell and Sacheverell Sitwell. Books by Catherine Crowe and Dion Fortune. Delightful books. Strange and eerie books. Macabre books. Wonderful, wonderful books.
At that point, our top three books were as follows:
The End of Borley Rectory by Harry Price
Haunted England by Christina Hole
Here are Ghosts and Witches by J. Wentworth Day.
Here are Ghosts and Witches was illustrated with incredible line drawings of various terrifying phenomena – a demented owl-thing labelled ‘Bird Elemental’, a hooded figure holding up a severed Hand of Glory, the white-eyed ghost of a Viking. Haunted England was no less lavishly illustrated, but in a completely different style, a sort of jazzy modernism-lite, which must have been state-of-the-art for 1940, when the book was published. Here, the ghosts were rendered as restless, energetic shapes that seemed almost to vibrate off the page. These pictures, by the wood engraver John Farleigh, were fascinating to me, and though Abigail didn’t care for them, I thought they summed up the state of being haunted better than any traditional depiction could. Everything in Farleigh’s drawings was haunted, it seemed – buildings, walls and doors were depicted as sharp, angry, and almost aggressively nonsensical, with further shapes and shadows concealed within them. Some of the drawings were comical, but some were so uniquely eerie that I can still recall them now.
Fascinating though both of these books were, they paled when compared to our all-time number one, The End of Borley Rectory by Harry Price. My sister and I knew all about Price – he had been Britain’s most famous ghost hunter a generation earlier – and Borley was his most famous case. An oppressive Victorian warehouse of a place (Price called it ‘a two-storeyed monstrosity in red brick’), the Rectory looked every inch the archetypal haunted house. It was reputedly haunted from the day it was built, in 1863, to the day it burned down in mysterious circumstances in 1939 (and, it was rumoured, long afterward). The End of Borley Rectory was a sensational account of Price’s investigations, illustrated throughout by black-and-white photos that made Borley look even more unwelcoming than Price made it sound. Best of all, there were stories of recovering human remains – part of a skull and a jawbone – from the cellar, and transcriptions of séances held in the Rectory itself. The flyleaf informed us that Price had written an earlier book about Borley, but we were never able to find it.
We begged our parents to take us to Borley, where we were sure to see a ghost, either on the patch of land where the rectory had stood, or in the local church, but both Mum and Dad, in their different but equally emphatic ways, refused, and so we had to be content with our one volume on the subject. Which was, in a way, more than enough; even the word Borley was terrifying to us, with its suggestions of borstal and ordeal, abhor, even abortion. The very sound of the word seemed to imply something endlessly anti-social and untameable. In a similar way, that phrase, human remains, I always found extraordinarily disturbing and unsettling. It implied something more intimate and terrible than mere bones: the ruins of a person. Skin and hair, fingernails. Mouldering clothes, jewellery dulling as it tarnished. A belt buckle, the belt rotted away. Playing hide and seek with Abigail, years earlier, I was always terrified of stumbling across something I would for ever regret seeing, stuffed into the bottom of a hedgerow like so much rubbish, the litter of some murder or other, long forgotten. What could be worse than that?
I looked at the spines of these books now. How would all this look to anyone else? I took Haunted England from the shelf and sat staring at one of the modernist ghosts until I heard footsteps jounce on the ladder and saw Abigail’s head appear through the trapdoor.
‘Well?’ I could see from her face that whatever had transpired had not been as straightforward as she’d hoped.
‘Erm,’ said Abigail thoughtfully, hoisting herself up into the attic. ‘So I tried to tell her that it was all pretend, that we faked it.’
‘Tried to?’
‘Yeah.’ Abigail looked exhausted. She slumped into her favoured armchair and I saw something on her face I couldn’t quite read.
‘And?’
‘She didn’t believe me.’
I stared at her in disbelief. ‘Sorry?’
‘I told her we faked the picture, in our attic. She didn’t believe me.’
I couldn’t absorb this information at all. ‘Did you tell her how we did it?’
‘Of course.’
‘That it’s just chalk and low light?’
‘I told her, Tim.’
‘And not drawing specific features so that the observer—’
‘Yes! Bloody hell, Tim. I told her all of that. She said she didn’t believe me.’
‘Why would we lie?’
She shrugged. ‘Why would we fake a ghost photograph?’
I had no answer to this. We sat for a long moment, thinking, looking through each other.
‘Has she told her mum?’ I said at last.
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ That was something. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘Well,’ said Abigail, ‘that’s just it. She wants to come over and see it for herself.’
‘See what?’
‘The attic. She says that it’s haunted and we took a real ghost photograph whether we know it or not.’
I pinched the bridge of my nose as – I realised in later life – I often do when something makes no sense to me.
‘So what do we do now?’ I repeated.
Abigail shrugged. ‘She comes over and sees.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘I am. Mum and Dad won’t mind. In fact, they’ll be relieved that we finally want to have a friend over.’
‘But there’s no ghost here!’
‘But don’t you see, Tim? This is the best thing that can possibly happen, from our point of view. We have Janice over, she sees there’s no ghost and that we faked it, and that’s the end of the matter.’
‘How can that be the end of the matter? She’ll tell her mum, her mum will tell our mum …’
‘By that point it will be next week. Everyone will have forgotten about Janice fainting and if she starts talking about ghosts and photos, people will ask why she didn’t bring it up sooner. She’ll just make herself look bonkers.’
I considered this. ‘I still think it’s asking for trouble.’
Very often in conversations between us I would offer the emotional, instinctive side of a given issue, and this would force Abi to respond analytically. She was conscious of this and would play up to it, as she was doing now. She steepled her fingers like Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holm
es.
‘Trust me. It’s the best course of action.’
I looked about me at our attic – the library, the horrible bits of Victorian taxidermy we’d picked up from junk shops, the dust-furred oil paintings of bleak landscapes, the interesting and peculiar objects that inevitably gathered on any horizontal surface in the vicinity of either of us. The only significant thing we hadn’t added to the place was a large home-made doll’s house, which we had discovered in the attic the first time we ever went up there, and had deemed both creepy enough to keep and too heavy to move.
‘We’ll have to tidy up a bit.’
‘Yes. Get some extra lights, hide the books, that sort of thing. Make it look respectable.’
Abigail must have read some element of doubt in my face. She leaned forward in her armchair and fixed me with her dark eyes.
‘All we have to do is make out that it’s all fine. We take her up here, she sees how absolutely un-haunted our attic and indeed our entire house is, and that’s that.’ Abi touched her fingertips to her lips. ‘All we have to do is be normal for a while.’
And so it was agreed between us that Janice Tupp would come over to our house after school next Thursday, in order to not see a ghost.
5
We spent all of the following Wednesday night preparing the attic for our visitor. Abigail even skipped chess club to make sure we had enough time to do the job properly. It would have been easier to transform the attic at the weekend, but we didn’t want Mum becoming accustomed to the way it looked and insisting we keep it that way. It would be ironic indeed to save our attic from one line of attack only to have it succumb to another. After dinner, we set about removing and boxing away anything that could be construed as eerie, disquieting or unsettling.
It was a long evening.
One thing that became obvious as the work of sanitising the attic progressed was that my sister and I had very little idea of the sort of things ‘normal’ almost-fourteen-year-olds liked. My sister had a record player, but used it primarily to play BBC sound-effects records and Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, which she seemed never to tire of. Similarly, I liked painting, but mostly enjoyed painting historical methods of execution. We both enjoyed watching television, but I could tell that the sort of things we liked to watch would not be in Janice Tupp’s cultural orbit. Books were completely out. We had some board games, but most of them had been customised by us in some way to make them more interesting, which of course meant it was best they stayed in their boxes. The only other distraction in the attic was the Edwardian doll’s house, which, whilst possessed of a certain desolate charm, was not enough to occupy the mind of a thirteen-year-old, even one as immature as Janice Tupp seemed to be, for longer than five minutes.
What did other people our age do? We had no idea. Their behaviour had always been incomprehensible and uninteresting to us. And now, like some Dante-esque punishment, we were being forced to emulate that behaviour in order to preserve our way of life.
It was decided, eventually, that we’d drink coffee, and talk. Coffee was Abigail’s idea – it was the most adult non-alcoholic drink we could get our hands on, and it projected (we hoped) an air of bohemian sophistication. The three of us would drink instant coffee and chat, and Abigail and I would do our best to have a grown-up conversation with Janice, discussing current affairs and pressing issues of the day, as if we were Malcolm Muggeridge and Germaine Greer on some late-night cultural analysis programme on BBC 2. It was a lousy plan, and threatened to be an extremely dreary evening, but we had absolutely nothing in the way of better ideas. It was vital that we kept the evening as dry and sensible and boring as possible, as far away from talk of the supernatural as we could (we agreed beforehand that, when the topic came up, we were to be sceptical and dismissive, and would move the conversation on as quickly as possible). We were confident that we could, between us, create an atmosphere whereby anything ghostly would shrivel and flee.
And so, all of our strange paraphernalia – two small lifetimes’ worth of trophies of the extraordinary – were packed away into empty fabric softener boxes I had scrounged up from the local Co-op, and the boxes stacked into a corner and covered with an orange sheet. We then rolled up the dark carpet and stashed it in a corner behind the boxes, replacing it with a rush mat from Abi’s bedroom, which seemed more grown-up, somehow. We put a tablecloth over the coffee table and on top of that we placed a vase stuffed with lavender cut from the garden. The severe dark brown walls were still a problem, but after we taped up a map of the world and a few other boring educational posters, which had previously been gathering dust under my bed, the attic looked almost light. The wall where we’d chalked the ghost we left as it was, so we could show Janice exactly what we’d done, and how.
Finally, Abigail and I stood, gazing upon what we had wrought. There was something extremely unsettling about the temporary room we had made. It was a room where two versions of us I didn’t like or trust lived. Our attic had been an entirely unselfconscious expression of who we were, individually and as a pair. Peculiar it may have been, but there was nothing in the way of pretension or artifice in it. The room now was a deception, at odds with itself, the fixed grin of the guilty. In seeking to exorcise it we had made it somehow untrustworthy, strange to ourselves. We knew without saying it out loud that we wouldn’t tolerate the place like this for a minute longer than the duration of Janice’s visit.
Thursday at school passed slowly, as it always did for me, subjecting me to the familiar barrage of subjects I neither liked nor enjoyed, nor could see any use for. None of us would ever make our living singing or playing an instrument, so why teach us music? None of us had the skill to be a professional footballer, so why teach us PE? Thursday was to be ground through, hacked through, with no short cuts, a day where time was hard as granite and the clock gave grudgingly.
At the final bell, I went straight home, and straight upstairs when I got there, hollering a hello to Mum, who was clattering about in the kitchen. My intention was to go to the attic and spend an hour preparing for the ordeal of entertaining Janice, and I was halfway up there before I remembered that it didn’t currently exist. My head poked through the trapdoor into unfamiliarity, a bland, tidy zone where creativity was banished and ideas couldn’t survive. I was reminded of the room that Dave Bowman finds himself in at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, built for humans but not by them, where all the books and furnishings are fake, an attempt to comfort that misses by a mile and ends up simply being eerie. It smelled pungently of lavender now; I hoped the smell wasn’t permanent. I shivered and retreated to my room, there to await the visitation of Janice Tupp.
I fell asleep on my bed. When I awoke, Mum was calling me and Janice was already downstairs with Abigail. I splashed cold water on my face at the bathroom sink and set about trying to look serious. Part of me had forgotten what the advantage was of even doing any of this, and I headed downstairs in a bad mood.
Abigail was in the kitchen, chatting animatedly to Janice Tupp, who sat at the table drinking orange squash. Janice wore her school uniform, almost lost inside a gigantic grey jumper, which I guessed was a cast-off from the older Tupp sister. There was a large pink fabric plaster on her left temple, where her head had struck the desk. She gave me a sour, efficient smile when I came in, and I gave her as warm a smile as I could in return. Janice’s mean smile was enough to jolt me out of my complacency and remind me what was at stake. I could live with our sterile attic, and Janice as a guest in it, for one night, if it meant keeping things as they were.
As Mum came back in, I realised what my sister was doing with her incessant chatter. She was controlling Janice’s presence in the house, herding Janice’s conversation like a vigilant sheepdog. As Abigail turned away, to pile custard creams onto a plate and stir three mugs of instant coffee, she signalled with her eyes that it was now my turn to keep watch. And so I dutifully monitored the interaction between Janice and my mum, as Mum asked Janice the kind of quest
ions parents always ask visiting children – how’s your mum, how are your siblings, did I see your Gary in the shopping arcade? I thought he was away at college – interjecting only when I thought the conversation might veer towards the one topic we had no real answer for: Janice, what are you doing here?
Only once did we almost come unstuck. Mum began to take grapefruit and canned spaghetti and other groceries out of a bag, and, as she turned, she said, ‘Well, I must say, it’s very nice of you to come round, Janice.’
Janice smiled the unpleasant smile again. ‘It’s not like they left me any choice, Mrs Smith.’
Mum half-turned, looking briefly puzzled, and was about to ask a question when I, in a voice that sounded terribly fake to me, said, ‘Yes, we certainly wouldn’t take no for an answer!’ Janice said something else, but Abigail and I both talked over her. Shortly afterwards, we ascended the stairs. I went first, Janice Tupp second, and Abigail, carrying the coffee and biscuits on a tray, brought up the rear. Janice ascended the ladder every bit as gingerly and wetly as I had imagined she might do. Abigail passed the tray to me whilst Janice looked around our bowdlerized attic.
‘Is this your room?’ she said, looking about her.
‘Tim and I both have our own rooms, but, yes, this place is ours,’ said Abigail. ‘We can do whatever we like here, really. Mum and Dad pretty much leave us alone.’
‘I don’t much like it,’ said Janice, running a finger down one of the dark walls. ‘It’s very hot, for a start.’
‘The tops of houses often are.’ Abigail was smiling. I knew how little capacity she had for suffering fools, and I suddenly realised just how much of an effort she was making.
