Jessica's Ghost (2 page)

Francis led the way through a door at the top of the stairs into a room that ran the entire length of the house.

The first thing Jessica noticed were the drawings taped to the wall in front of her. They were fashion designs, done mostly in pen and ink, for a series of coats, dresses and gowns. Beneath them was a workbench with a sewing machine and, stacked beneath that, were rolls of material in a kaleidoscope of patterns and colours. To the left, under a skylight, was a table covered in a length of off-white cotton with parts of a paper pattern laid out on top. To the right, a dressmaker’s dummy stood at one end of a battered leather sofa.

They were not the sort of things you might expect
to find in a boy’s room but, most surprising of all, and only visible when she stepped into the room and looked behind her, was a set of shelves on which were displayed several rows of dolls. There were at least fifty of them, each dressed in a different outfit.

‘What is this place?’ she asked.

‘I told you.’ Francis’s voice was studiedly neutral, but he was watching Jessica carefully as he spoke. ‘It’s mine. It’s where I do stuff.’

Jessica walked over to the shelves with the dolls.

‘So all these are yours?’

‘Yes.’ Francis came over to join her. ‘I was trying to make a sort of illustrated history of fashion in the last fifty years.’ He picked up one of the dolls. It was dressed in a studded leather jacket and had its hair cropped and dyed in the pattern of the American flag. ‘Each doll represents a particular style, you see? Fly-girl, punk, grunge …’

Jessica pointed to a doll dressed in a suit of what looked like moulded pink plastic. ‘What’s that one?’

‘It’s a Miyake,’ said Francis. ‘Japanese designer.’

Jessica turned away from the dolls for a moment and
gestured to the drawings pinned on the wall opposite. ‘And those are all yours as well?’

Francis nodded. ‘I’m interested in fashion. Always have been.’

Jessica stared about her, and then her face broke into a smile. ‘I would have killed to have a place like this when I was alive!’ she said.

Francis did not reply directly, but something in his shoulders and his face seemed to relax for the first time since they had entered the room.

‘Let’s talk about fashion later,’ he said. ‘First, I need to know more about being a ghost.’

He put the doll with the cropped hair back on the shelf and walked over to the sofa.

‘So tell me,’ he said, as he sat down. ‘How did it start?’

It had started, as far as Jessica could remember, with finding herself standing at the window of a small room on the third floor of the hospital, looking out through the darkness at a multi-storey car park on the other side of the road.

Although she could not remember how it had happened, she had known at once that she was dead. She knew it in the same way that she knew that the body under the sheet on the bed beside her had once been hers. She did not need to see the face, or read the messages on the little cards attached to the bunches of flowers. She just knew.

Being dead, as she had told Francis earlier, did not worry her particularly. She was not in any pain or discomfort and the predominant feeling was a general sensation of calm and quiet. When the nurses came to take away the body, she had felt no inclination to follow them. It was, after all, only a body.

What did puzzle her though was what she was supposed to
do
, now that she was dead. After standing by the window for what felt like several hours, she had, for lack of anything better to do, drifted out into the corridor and then explored other parts of the hospital. She had quickly discovered that she could move through walls and doors, float up through ceilings and sink down through floors as easily as if they did not exist, and such
freedom of movement might have been rather enjoyable if …

… if she had not had the nagging feeling that she had
missed
something.

‘Missed what?’ asked Francis.

‘I don’t know.’ Jessica’s forehead wrinkled as she searched for the best words to describe how she had felt. ‘It was like I knew I was supposed to do
something
, only I didn’t know what. And there wasn’t anyone who could tell me.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Well, I thought maybe whoever was supposed to tell me hadn’t been able to because I’d been wandering round the hospital, so I went back to the room on the third floor and waited.’

‘Waited?’

‘Yes.’

‘For how long?’

‘In a way, I suppose I’m still waiting.’ Jessica sighed. ‘Not all the time, obviously. During the day I go out and do stuff. But I always go back to the hospital in the
evening. It’s not like I
have
to, but … well, it
is
a bit like that I suppose.’

‘And you think one day someone will turn up and tell you what to do?’ asked Francis.

‘Who knows?’ Jessica gave a little shrug. ‘I just have this feeling that, if anything’s going to happen, it’ll be there. In that room.’

‘And you’ve been going back there every night … for a year?’

‘Yes.’

Francis gave a sympathetic whistle. ‘A year’s a long time.’

‘I know.’

For a while, neither of them spoke, and then Jessica pointed around her to the dolls and the drawings on the walls.

‘Anyway, your turn. When did all this start?’

Francis was about to answer, when he was interrupted by the sound of the front door opening and someone calling from downstairs.

‘That’s Mum,’ he said. ‘Hang on. I’ll be right back.’

Francis got down to the landing on the first floor in time to see his mother, a tall, untidy looking woman, taking off her coat in the hallway and hanging it up on the stand.

‘How did it go?’ asked Francis, leaning over the banister.

‘Could have been worse. Sold two plates!’ His mother looked up at him and smiled. ‘How was your day?’

‘It was OK.’

‘No … trouble or anything?’

‘No. No trouble.’

‘Good.’ Francis’s mother was heading towards the kitchen. ‘I think there’s a pizza left in the freezer. I’ll give you a shout when it’s ready, OK?’

Francis went back upstairs to the attic, where he found Jessica dressed, as she had been when they arrived, in the puffa coat, Ugg boots and knitted hat.

‘I’d better be going,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to,’ Francis assured her. ‘I’ll need to go and eat at some point, but—’

‘It’s getting late,’ Jessica interrupted him. ‘I ought to
get back to the hospital.’ She hesitated before adding. ‘But I could see you tomorrow. If you like.’

‘Definitely,’ said Francis. ‘Lunchtime? Same place?’

‘OK.’

Francis moved to the stairway – he had some vague idea of walking Jessica down to the front door – but she made no attempt to follow. Instead, she stared down at the carpet, seemingly lost in thought.

‘Do you have any idea,’ she said eventually, ‘why you can see me, when no one else can?’

‘No,’ said Francis. ‘Do you?’

‘Not really.’ Jessica looked up. ‘But I did wonder if maybe you were the one who could tell me what I was meant to do next.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Francis. ‘I wish I could, but I don’t know anything about … ghosts. I don’t know anything about anything really. Except clothes.’

‘No … well, never mind.’ Jessica smiled. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

And she disappeared.

When Francis walked across the playing field at lunch break the next day, Jessica was sitting on the bench waiting for him, dressed in a salmon pink party frock.

‘It’s what a woman was wearing when she came into hospital last night,’ she said, standing up to give him a twirl that revealed half a dozen petticoats. ‘Do you like it?’

‘I do,’ said Francis admiringly. ‘Most impressive.’

‘It’s a Sarah Burton.’

‘Even more impressive,’ said Francis. Sarah Burton was one of his favourite designers, though this was not an outfit he recognised. ‘How do you know?’

‘I checked the label when they were undressing her.’
Jessica sat down, patting the dress down over her legs. ‘I really ought to be wearing jewellery with it, like she was, but I can’t do jewellery. I don’t know why. I can do shoes and hair, no problem, but when I try and imagine jewellery … nothing happens.’

Francis sat down beside her.

‘So that’s what ghosts do in the evenings, is it? Hang around in A&E and check out what the patients are wearing?’

‘It’s not the
only
thing,’ said Jessica. ‘I like watching the operations and stuff as well. But I like seeing what people wear. I’ve always liked clothes. Even when I was little, I preferred watching Gok Wan on the television to Peppa Pig. That’s what my gran said, anyway. And my favourite toy was always the dressing-up box.’

Francis said that he had never had a dressing-up box, but that he could still remember the excitement of finding his mother’s copies of
Vogue
, and how he had carried them away to his room and looked at nothing else for days. That was when he was four. When he was eight, he had asked for a sewing machine for his birthday so that
he could begin making his own versions of the designs he copied from magazines or had seen in shop windows.

Sitting on the bench in the wintery sunshine, while Francis ate his sandwiches and drank his thermos of tea, they discovered that an interest in clothes was not the only thing they had in common. They were, for a start, almost exactly the same age – not counting Jessica’s year as a ghost – with birthdays only a week apart. They were both ‘only’ children. They had both been brought up by single mothers, and both had had to move house unexpectedly, when they were twelve, and not enjoyed it at all.

‘I wonder,’ said Jessica, ‘if that’s why you can see me. Because we’re so alike.’

‘Not that alike,’ said Francis. ‘One of us is dead, remember?’

‘You know what I mean!’ Jessica poked him with a ghostly elbow that disappeared several inches into his coat. ‘Having all those things in common … it can’t just be coincidence, can it?’

They were still debating the possibility when the bell rang for the start of lessons, and it seemed only natural
that, when Francis went to his class, Jessica should go with him.

She sat in a chair beside him and although conversation was limited – at least for Francis, who had to be careful how and when he spoke to someone no one else could see – they both rather enjoyed it.

Jessica was useful, too. In the spot test in Mrs Archer’s history lesson, Jessica was able to check round the class to see what everyone else was writing. And in Mr Williams’s maths lesson that followed, she was able to give him a wonderfully clear explanation of integer inequalities. The fact that she did it while wearing an exact copy of Mr Williams’s shiny blue suit with all the biros in his top pocket, made even that lesson … kind of fun.

Later, back at the attic room in Alma Road, Jessica asked what he was working on at the moment, and Francis showed her the table covered in a length of off-white cotton with part of a paper pattern pinned to the top.

‘It’s some cotton pinpoint I was given,’ he explained,
‘and I thought I’d try and make a top.’ He reached for a sketch book and flipped it open. ‘That’s the design.’

‘Neat,’ said Jessica. ‘Who’s it for?’

‘Betty.’ Francis pointed to the dressmaker’s dummy standing by the sofa. ‘It’s just an exercise, really. Practice, you know.’

Privately, Jessica thought it was a shame that a dummy would be the only person ever to wear the clothes Francis made, but she said nothing. Instead she talked – mostly about fashion and the styles she liked and the ones she didn’t – while Francis draped the pieces of a paper pattern over the dressmaker’s dummy to check the size, and then pinned the result to the material spread out on the table, before cutting them out.

He worked with an easy confidence that Jessica could not help but admire and it was an hour or so later, seeing him hunched over the sewing machine running down a seam, that she noticed him pause for a moment to stretch his shoulders in a different direction. He’s getting cramp, she thought, like Gran used to do. Forgetting for a moment that she was a ghost, she reached
out to massage the muscles at the bottom of his neck.

Immediately, Francis stopped and turned round. ‘Was that you?’ he asked.

‘Um … yes …’ Even without a body, Jessica could feel herself blushing. ‘I was going to rub your shoulders. It’s what I used to do for my gran.’

‘But I could feel you!’ Francis was puzzled. ‘How could I feel you touching me if you’re a ghost?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jessica reached forward, put her hands on his shoulders and pushed her thumbs along the muscles of his neck. They disappeared beneath his skin. ‘You can feel that?’

‘Oh, yes …’ Francis leaned back so that the thumbs went even deeper, and closed his eyes. It was a strange but definitely pleasant sensation, relaxing and yet somehow invigorating at the same time. As if he were sitting out in the sun on a summer’s day, and the warmth was soaking through to his bones.

‘Wow …’ he said. ‘You are just full of surprises, aren’t you …’

The next day, they met in the morning rather than at lunch time. Francis came out of the house at quarter to nine and found Jessica waiting for him on the pavement, and they walked in to school together, went to lessons together, hung out together at break times and returned, when school had finished, to the room at the top of the house in Alma Road.

After almost twelve hours in each other’s company, neither of them showed any signs of being bored. In that curious way these things happen sometimes, they seemed to ‘fit’ together.

Which was why they did the same thing the day after …

And the day after …

And the day after that.

If someone had asked Francis if he didn’t think spending most of his waking hours with a ghost was a bit … odd, he would probably have agreed that it was. But he didn’t care. As the days passed, he hardly thought of Jessica as a ghost. She was simply … his friend. She was also the
only person his own age he had ever met who could talk about synthetic fabrics as easily as most people talk about the weather, who knew the difference between a pleat and a dart, and who could recognise a Sarah Burton design when its owner was brought into casualty.

Compared to all that, the fact that she was dead seemed unimportant.

As for Jessica, you would probably have to have been dead for a year yourself – with no one able to see or hear you – to understand how much it meant to her to have Francis to talk to. She had not properly realised how lonely her life – or rather, her death – had been, and now she had found someone who was not only able to talk to her, but was clever and funny and interesting …

Her only worry was that, at some point, he might want to go back to being with people who were alive – though fortunately Francis showed no signs of that at present. When she asked him once if being with her was keeping him away from his other friends, he replied, simply, that there was no one else he wanted to be with.

And it was true that he made very little effort to speak
to anyone else while he was in school. For that matter, no one else seemed to make any particular effort to speak to him.

Except for Quentin, of course.

But he was not someone you could describe as a friend.