Jessica's Ghost (13 page)

Francis did not find it easy, being a celebrity, but he got used to it. He found it much harder to get used to being without Jessica. Andi and Roland missed her as well, but it was hardest for Francis. For the last five months she had been the most important person in his life and, now she was gone, he missed her more than he could say.

Up in his attic room, there were reminders of her wherever he looked. She was there in most of the drawings on the walls. She was there in the half finished shift dress by the sewing machine. She was almost there, sitting on the sofa, when he came up the stairs and walked into the room … except that she wasn’t.
She wasn’t anywhere. Because she’d gone.

At times, the sadness of that thought threatened to overwhelm him, and a part of him was frightened that life might go back to how it had been before she first appeared … but it didn’t. He felt sad, very sad, that his friend was no longer with him, but somehow it was never like being in The Pit. For reasons he did not understand, it was a different sort of sad.

There were two things that helped. The first was that Andi and Roland took no notice when he said that he didn’t want to see anyone and that he wanted to be alone. Andi simply took him by the arm and told him there wasn’t much chance of that.

‘No chance at all,’ Roland agreed. ‘You’re stuck with us, now. Whether you like it or not.’

And Francis found, as the days passed, that he did like it. As the pain lessened, he even began to realise that having friends who stuck was one of the best things that could happen to you.

The second thing that helped, though in a more roundabout way, was the letters. They had started arriving the
day after the story featured on the news and, a month later, were still coming.

A lot of them just wanted to congratulate Francis on what he had done, but a good many asked for his advice. They were from parents worried that their children might be thinking of doing what Lorna had done, and wanting to know how to stop them. Or from teenagers who said they were going through the same things that had happened to Lorna, and asking Francis what they should do.

Francis had no idea how to answer them. Apart from anything else, there were so many. Within a week, there were over a hundred piled up on the table in his attic room and he knew he could never reply to them all. Even if he could, what was he supposed to say? What
could
you say to someone who told you they were thinking of killing themselves? He hadn’t known what to say to Lorna on the roof, so how could he be qualified to give advice now? He showed the letters to his mother, who said she had no idea how to answer them either, but pointed out that there was one person who might.

‘That woman who appeared on the roof of the car
park,’ she said. ‘Mrs Barfield. Didn’t she turn out to be a trained counsellor or something?’

Aunt Jo came over that evening after school, and instantly offered to take the letters away and sort them.

‘I’ll start by grading them for you,’ she said, ‘so you’ll know which are the most important and which you can leave for a bit. Then if you come over at the weekend, we can start working on replies to the ones that are really urgent.’

That weekend, Francis went out to Aunt Jo’s house, and the two of them sat in the room that had once been Jessica’s bedroom and he tapped out replies on the computer, while Mrs Barfield advised him on what to say. In most cases the advice she gave was fairly obvious – the need to talk to someone, and get proper help – but Aunt Jo said that, just because it was obvious, didn’t mean it wasn’t important.

They worked out an order of priority for the letters and Francis found he enjoyed writing his answers. It was a good thing to be doing, the sort of thing Jessica would have approved of, he thought, if she was still around, and
he went out to Aunt Jo’s house most weekends, doing a few more letters each time. In fact, he even turned down the opportunity to go to Canada for a month, so that he could carry on doing it through the summer holidays.

It was Andi’s mother who had organised the trip to Canada. Sitting in the kitchen one evening with Francis and his mother, she announced in her booming voice that she had a brother who lived on a farm near Calgary.

‘Andi loves it out there,’ she said. ‘So we’re going out for four weeks in August.’

Francis wondered if anyone else had noticed that Mrs Campion no longer called her daughter Thug or Thuglette. She had been ‘Andi’ for some time now.

‘But she doesn’t want to go without you.’ Mrs Campion looked across at Francis. ‘So I wondered if you’d come with us. Roland’s already agreed.’

Francis hesitated.

‘You don’t have to worry about the money,’ said his mother. ‘We can afford it. You wouldn’t believe what Frieda is charging for my plates these days!’

‘And there’ll be masses to do out there,’ said Mrs Campion, persuasively. ‘It’s a huge farm, and there’ll be horse-riding, canoeing, white-water rafting, mountain climbing …’

Francis wondered how Roland would cope with canoeing and white-water rafting, and then thought he would probably cope rather well. As long as he was near Andi, Roland would have happily rafted over the Niagara Falls.

‘But neither of them wants to go without you,’ said Mrs Campion, ‘so will you think about it, at least?’

Francis agreed that he would, but in the end announced that, though grateful for the offer, he would rather stay at home. He was not really a canoeing, white-water rafting sort of person, he explained, and he preferred to spend the summer working with Aunt Jo on answering his letters.

And this time, not even Andi and Roland could persuade him to change his mind.

On the Tuesday after term ended, Andi and Roland left for Canada. Francis went to wave them off from Gatwick airport and wondered, when he got back, if he had made the right choice. Sitting in his room at the top of the house in Alma Road, he suddenly felt rather lonely.

He did not have the chance to feel lonely for long, however, because Roland’s mother appeared the next morning to drive him out to Aunt Jo’s. She had offered to do this each day, partly because she liked to have someone to talk to about Roland, but also because it meant Francis could help her sort out any problems she was having with her work for her exams.

Francis went out to Aunt Jo’s every morning, Monday
to Friday, and once he was there the two of them would sit in the office and set about answering the next batch of letters.

Some of them were from people who had undergone abuse, or been physically harmed, or had illnesses that left them in constant pain – and when Francis read them it was easy to see why the writer had been driven to the point of despair. And a relief that Aunt Jo always seemed to find something encouraging to say, and to suggest a person or an organisation that she thought might be able to help.

But what struck Francis most forcibly was how many of the letters came from people who were
not
being starved or beaten or living with chronic pain, but who were, nevertheless, desperately unhappy. They were from people like Roland, who thought they were too fat, or like Andi, who thought they weren’t pretty. Or people like himself who knew they were just …
different
. The reasons they gave for this feeling were as numerous as the letters themselves, but that was the one thing they all had in common. All the people who wrote described how they felt separated somehow from the world around them.

Alone.

And
different
.

Why, Francis wondered, should ‘being different’ be so painful? Why did it matter so much when, if you thought about it, everybody was different in one way or another.

‘I think,’ said Aunt Jo, when he asked her, ‘that some people feel these things more than most of us. They’re more sensitive. But I also think the real damage comes when you add in something else. If someone’s already feeling low for some reason and
then
they lose a parent like Jessica did, or get ill, or if you throw a Denise Ritchie and an Angela Wyman into the mix – that’s when it can get serious.’ She passed over the letter she had been reading from a boy who was being bullied because he had taken up knitting.

‘This one’s your department, I think,’ she said.

Francis liked being in what had once been Jessica’s room. He liked looking at the photos of her that hung on the wall. And he liked hearing Aunt Jo talking about her, telling him stories of things she had done while she was alive.

‘I sometimes feel that she’s still here,’ Aunt Jo told him one day. ‘You know … Like she calls in occasionally to check up on what I’m doing. And I’ve always thought she was the one who told me to come out to the hospital that night. Do you think that’s silly?’

And Francis said no, he didn’t think it was silly at all.

Aunt Jo would only allow Francis to work on the letters in the mornings. She said it wasn’t good for him to be doing that sort of thing all day and insisted that after lunch he go off and have some fun with people his own age. Francis wanted to point out that the only friends he had of his own age were on the other side of the Atlantic, but in a short space of time that wasn’t exactly true.

Mrs Parsons phoned him a week into the holidays. ‘I’ve got a problem,’ she said. ‘There’s a youth drama group using the school over the summer – they’re doing
West Side Story
– and they need some help. Are you busy at the moment?’

‘I’m not much good at acting,’ said Francis.

‘No, no, they don’t want you for that!’ Mrs Parsons
chuckled. ‘The last thing they need is another prima donna. But they are a bit stuck on costumes. And I seem to remember that’s something you’re quite good at.’

Francis agreed to take a look at the problem, and that afternoon he walked round to the school where some twenty or thirty teenagers were gathered in the main hall tapping out a dance number which involved a lot of swirling skirts and stamping feet. The woman in charge was called Mrs Wigley, and she told Francis that the person who normally did their costumes was in hospital having a baby.

‘We were hoping she’d hold off until all this was over,’ said Mrs Wigley, ‘but she was caught short yesterday, right in the middle of a rather complicated fight scene.’ She led the way out of the hall and into a classroom that was filled with costumes hanging on racks. ‘We’ve rented most of the stuff, but of course none of it fits. What we need is some whizzo with a needle and thread who can sort it all out.’ She looked hopefully at Francis. ‘Any chance you could help?’

Ten minutes later, Francis was sitting at a table with
a sewing machine, and for the next three weeks found himself altering, cutting, nipping and tucking and sometimes tearing whole costumes apart to make new ones. The experience was something of a revelation.

All the time he was there, not one of the people who came to have their costume fitted, not a single one, ever suggested that it was odd to have Francis doing the work. The only thing that any of them ever worried about was how they were going to look on stage, and once they found Francis was the person who could sort this out for them, he was treated with considerable respect. They would knock on the door to his room and ask apologetically if he could take in the waist on their trousers, or find them a different coloured top. And when he did as they asked, they would tell him in extravagant language how wonderful he was and how grateful they were.

Sometimes, when they weren’t needed on stage, they came into his room simply to talk. They would sit on one of the tables while he was darning a hole or mending a tear and tell him things about themselves that Francis would never have dared to tell his own mother. They behaved
quite differently from anyone he had known before, and the biggest difference was that they seemed to
like
being different. It was not something that made them ashamed or unhappy. It was something they enjoyed.

The show ran for a week and was a huge success. After it was over, Mrs Wigley told Francis that she thought the success was almost entirely due to his wonderful costumes and, even though he heard her tell the man who played the piano that it was mostly due to his music, he didn’t mind. He had loved every moment of it and, as everyone hugged and kissed each other goodbye on the last night, he readily agreed that he would be around next year to do it all again.

Jessica, he couldn’t help thinking, would have loved it.

Two days later, Andi and Roland came back from Canada. Both of them were barely recognisable. It took Francis several seconds to realise that the figure hurtling towards him across the arrivals lounge was Andi. She had dyed her hair blonde, her skin was deeply tanned, and she was
wearing a short flouncy skirt with a halterneck top in colours that were deliberately chosen, she told him later, so that he would have something to criticise. She leaped on him from a distance of several feet and held him in a grip that drove every ounce of breath from his body.

Roland looked even stranger. He was several inches taller, twenty pounds lighter, and exuded the sort of confidence that only comes from hiking through mountains, abseiling down cliffs and canoeing through white-water gorges. He was bigger than ever, but in a different way. Detaching himself from his mother, he came over to say hello.

‘Hi, man …’ His voice was big and deep, as he grinned down at Francis. ‘How’s it been?’

As they drove back to the house, swapping stories of play productions and encounters with grizzly bears, it was clear that one thing at least had not changed. The three were as close friends as ever. Everything else in his life might have altered, Francis thought, but it was good to know that some things had stayed the same.

Quite how much everything else had changed Francis did not fully realise until the start of the autumn term a few days later. It was a lunchtime, and he was sitting on the bench by the playing field, enjoying the heat of the sun and sewing up the hem of a skirt for a girl in year ten.

The girl was Rowena Evans and she had been in the drama group in the summer, singing and dancing as one of the Jets. The skirt was something her grandmother had bought her that didn’t fit properly, so she had asked Francis if he would mind making a few alterations.

Francis had been happy to oblige, and he was already halfway round the hem when a shadow fell across his
work. Looking up, he saw a boy about his own age, standing in front of him.

‘What are you doing?’ asked the boy.

‘I’m sewing,’ said Francis.

The boy stared down at him. ‘Only girls sew,’ he said.

‘Interestingly enough,’ said Francis, ‘the idea that sewing is girls’ work is comparatively recent. My great-great-grandfather was in the navy, and in his day the men never left that sort of thing to a woman. They thought they weren’t neat enough.’

The boy gave a snort of derision. His name was Kevin and he and his family had recently moved down from Sheffield. At his old school, if a boy had been seen sewing a girl’s skirt, they would never have got home alive.

‘You wouldn’t catch me doing it,’ he said.

‘No,’ Francis agreed. ‘Probably not.’

Kevin continued to stare at him for a moment then, shaking his head in disbelief, he wandered away.

‘What did he want?’ Roland had sat himself down on the bench beside Francis.

‘Nothing really,’ said Francis. ‘He thought it was a bit odd to see me sewing.’

‘He wasn’t bothering you, was he?’ Andi sat herself the other side of him and pulled open the lid of her lunch box. ‘Because if he was, Rollie and I would be very happy to have a word with him.’

‘It’s OK,’ said Francis. ‘He wasn’t any bother.’

And it was true. The encounter with Kevin hadn’t bothered him in the least, which was odd if you thought how much it would have mattered at the start of the year. He wondered what it was, exactly, that had changed.

Roland was unpacking his lunch.

‘It’s sliced avocado and brie in wholemeal baguettes,’ he said, when Andi asked, ‘with green peppers, sliced tomatoes, and a drizzle of olive oil.’ The lunches Mrs Boyle made for her son were rather different these days, but they were still mouth-wateringly delicious.

Quite a few things had changed in the last eight months, thought Francis, and it wasn’t easy to say which had made the most difference. It certainly helped to have friends – particularly friends as dauntingly large as
Roland or as scary as Andi – but it wasn’t just that …

The school itself felt different these days. Ever since Lorna had tried to jump off the top of the hospital car park, the staff took any form of bullying very seriously, and these days, Francis knew if he was ever bothered by jokes from someone like Quentin and reported the fact, it would be taken very seriously. Mrs Parsons had made it abundantly clear that the right to feel safe at school was one of her top priorities, and there were several initiatives to help make sure that it happened.

But it wasn’t just that either …

‘Let’s swap,’ Andi told Roland. ‘You can have some of my lunch and I’ll have some of yours.’

‘What’s in it?’ Roland asked, peering inside the sandwich Andi had given him.

‘Jam,’ said Andi. ‘Red jam. Come on, hand it over …’

The biggest change, Francis thought, wasn’t in either his friends or in the school, but in himself. The real reason that it didn’t bother him when someone laughed at him for sewing a skirt wasn’t that he knew he could tell Mrs Parsons, or that Andi would come to his rescue. It was
because it didn’t
matter
what other people thought any more. If they said that what he was doing was funny and wanted to laugh … then let them. After all, it
was
a bit funny. And different. But that was how he was, and the people around him would have to live with it.

And the strange thing was that, now he didn’t really care what other people thought, most of them seemed quite happy to let him be as different as he liked. They might see what he was doing, as Kevin had done, and make the odd remark, but because he didn’t mind they tended, as Kevin had done, to drift away. If anyone made a habit of making remarks like that, he might have to do something about it, but it hadn’t happened yet, and Francis had a feeling it probably never would.

‘I suppose you want some as well?’ Beside him, Roland was holding out a twelve inch chunk of bread with soft cheese dripping from the edges.

‘Oh, thanks …’ Francis took it absent-mindedly. They always wound up eating Roland’s lunch. Mrs Boyle made healthier food for him these days, but had never quite
conquered the habit of making three times more than was needed.

So many changes and they had all, when you looked back on it, happened so fast. It was something he often talked about in the letters he still wrote at Aunt Jo’s house to the people who emailed her website – the speed with which life could change. How it could appear so impossible at one moment, and so full of hope and possibilities the next.

And you never knew how or when that change might happen, thought Francis. You never knew what was round the corner in life and what it might throw up next. You never knew when someone like Jessica was about to walk over and sit herself down on the bench beside you …

That was how the change had happened in his own life, of course. It had all started on the day Jessica joined him on the bench. Meeting Andi and Roland, sorting out Quentin, saving Lorna – it had all begun with Jessica. She was the one who had set the change in motion. She was the one who had taught him how much fun there was to be had in life, how full of opportunities it was, how many chances it gave for enjoyment …

It was an odd lesson to have learned from someone who was dead.

And it was a shame she wasn’t here to see the results of the changes she had caused. Francis often thought how much she would have enjoyed seeing Roland these days as he strode, big and confident, through the school. How she would have loved to see Andi, with a huge smile covering her face, firmly telling them both what they would be doing at the weekend …

Though if you believed Aunt Jo, of course, maybe she
could
see them. Maybe she checked in on them once in a while, to see how they were doing. Maybe she had been watching through that little exchange with Kevin. Maybe … maybe she was there right now.

The sun shone warm on his back and he could feel the heat of it spreading through his jacket into his shoulders. It was a gentle, relaxing warmth and he sat back on the bench and took a big bite of the sandwich Roland had given him.

It was, like so many things in life these days, absolutely delicious.