Jessica's Ghost (8 page)

At ten o’clock the next morning, when Mrs Meredith answered the front door, she found Roland on the step, leaning against the doorframe, breathing heavily and with the sweat dripping from his face. It was some seconds before he was able to speak.

‘Name’s Roland …’ he said, when he eventually caught his breath. ‘Come to see … Francis …’

Mrs Meredith brought him inside and sat him at the bottom of the stairs. She called up to Francis and then went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. By the time she returned, she was relieved to see Roland’s colour was a little closer to normal and she got Francis to wheel his bicycle round the back before returning to her work.

‘Mum’s car had to go in for a service this morning,’ said Roland, when Francis returned. ‘So I had to cycle over.’ He stood up to remove a backpack. ‘Is Jessica here?’

‘She’s upstairs with Andi,’ said Francis. ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’

‘Upstairs?’ Roland lifted his gaze to the long flight stretching up from the hall and paled slightly.

‘My room’s in the attic,’ Francis explained apologetically. ‘I could get them to come down if you’d rather.’

‘No, no.’ Roland was still gazing upwards. ‘Upstairs is good. It’s best if we talk where no one can overhear.’

Francis reached for the backpack. ‘I’ll take that for you.’

‘Thanks,’ said Roland and, with a determined look, he set off.

He made it to the top with only a couple of short stops on the way, and Francis led him into the attic room where Jessica gave him a welcoming smile.

‘And this is Andi,’ said Francis.

‘Hi,’ said Andi. ‘Did you find out?’

‘Sorry?’ Roland blinked at her, nervously.

‘Francis said you were going to talk to someone and find out why Jessica was stuck as a ghost,’ said Andi. ‘Did you?’

‘Oh … yes!’ Roland was still breathing heavily. ‘Well, possibly. Do you mind if I sit down?’ Without waiting for an answer, he sank gratefully on to the sofa.

Francis put the backpack on the floor beside him.

‘So what did she say? Your friend?’

‘Well, several things, really …’ Roland shifted his weight to make himself comfortable. ‘She started by saying what I was telling you yesterday. That all ghosts are spirits that are stuck here for some reason. They’re supposed to have moved on, but they can’t.’

‘Did she say why?’ Jessica had floated round to sit in the air opposite him.

‘Sort of,’ said Roland. ‘She said, when people die, the first thing they have to do is look at all the things they did in their lives – the things they did wrong, the things they did right – everything.’

Jessica frowned. ‘I don’t remember doing that.’

‘No …’ said Roland. ‘And that’s the point, really. You
see, when you look at your life, you have to accept it. Whatever happened, you have to accept it before you can move on. And what happens to some people is, there’s something they can’t accept.’

‘Why not?’ asked Francis.

‘She says it’s usually either because something terrible was done to them – something so awful that they don’t want to see it or think about it …’

‘Or?’

‘Or it’s something terrible they did themselves.’

Nobody looked directly at Jessica, but you could tell what they were thinking. What could she possibly have done, or had done to her, that was so awful she couldn’t even bear to think about it?

Jessica herself looked more puzzled than worried.

‘I don’t remember doing anything terrible,’ she said. ‘Or anyone doing anything terrible to me.’

‘No,’ said Roland, ‘but … you don’t remember everything, do you?’

There was a long pause.

‘You mean how I died?’ said Jessica.

Roland nodded.

‘The last time we tried to find out how Jessica died,’ said Andi, ‘she disappeared.’

‘That was because she didn’t really want to know,’ said Roland. ‘My friend says if she decided – really decided – that she wanted to remember, then she would.’

‘No, I wouldn’t!’ said Jessica, crossly. ‘I can’t choose what I remember! Either you remember something or you don’t. And I don’t. I don’t remember how I died, I’m sorry!’

‘I could tell you,’ said Roland. ‘If you like.’

There was another long pause.

‘You
know
?’ asked Francis. ‘You know how she died?’

‘While I was online last night …’ Roland reached for his backpack and pulled it on to his lap, ‘… I thought I’d put Jessica’s name into a couple of search engines and see what came up.’ He pulled out an expensive looking laptop. ‘There’s two newspaper articles about her, and quite a lot of stuff on a website made by her aunt.’ He looked at Jessica. ‘If you want, I could show them to you. But only if you want, obviously.’

There was a silence while everyone waited for Jessica to say whether or not she wanted to see the pages on Roland’s computer. But she didn’t. She didn’t say anything at all.

After what seemed like a very long time, she stood up.

‘I need to think about this,’ she said. ‘I’m not disappearing or anything, but I need to think about this on my own.’

And she disappeared.

Roland turned to Francis. ‘I’m sorry if all that was a bit sudden,’ he said, ‘but my friend said I had to do it. She said Jessica has to remember sometime, or she’ll just stay as a ghost for ever.’ He leaned back and looked around the room, taking in for the first time the drawings on the wall, the piles of material, and the rows of dolls.

‘What’s with all the dress designs and the dolls?’ he asked.

‘They’re mine,’ said Francis. ‘It’s a hobby.’

‘You make dresses? As a hobby?’

‘Do you have a problem with that?’ There was a steely look in Andi’s eye as she spoke.

‘No, no,’ said Roland, hastily. ‘I just thought …’ He leaned across to Francis. ‘Don’t they give you a bit of a hard time about it at school?’

When Jessica reappeared, twenty minutes later, she was wearing a hospital gown. Twice in the time Francis had known her, his friend had appeared in the gown, and on both occasions it had been because her mind was concentrating on something else. The hospital gown, he knew, was like the default setting on a computer. It was what she wore if her mind was too busy to ‘think’ herself into ordinary clothes.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ve decided.’

Roland looked at her, carefully. ‘And …?’

‘And I want to know.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Francis.

‘Positive.’ Jessica looked very determined. ‘If Roland’s
right, I’ve got to know sometime anyway, haven’t I?’

‘It doesn’t have to be now …’

‘It might as well be.’ Jessica turned to face Roland and took a deep breath. ‘OK. You can tell me. How did I die?’

‘You killed yourself,’ said Roland. ‘You committed suicide.’

Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The silence in the room was so thick that it was difficult to breathe. For a moment Jessica’s ghost body shimmered and dimmed, but then flickered back to normal.

‘Is that true?’ asked Francis quietly. ‘Is that what happened?’

‘Mm?’ Jessica turned to him. ‘Oh … yes … Yes, it is.’

‘And you remember it?’

Jessica nodded. She remembered everything now. All the days of preparation and planning, the weeks it had taken to get together enough pills, then the waiting for a time when both her aunt and uncle would be out, and the walking out into the woods at the back of the house …

‘Why?’ It was Andi who asked the question. ‘Why would you want to kill yourself?’

Jessica didn’t answer. She was staring into the distance, lost in thought.

‘Was it your aunt and uncle?’ asked Francis. ‘Were they … doing something to you?’

‘No, no, it wasn’t anything like that,’ said Jessica. ‘They were nice. Everyone was always … very nice.’

She could remember how nice everyone had been that day her mother had collapsed and died in the kitchen from a brain tumour. Her grandmother had been particularly nice. She had taken Jessica in and looked after her and then, when she had died of cancer a year later, everyone had been nice all over again.

Aunt Jo and Uncle George had been nice enough to say she could come and live with them and they had come to collect her and packed up all her things and been as nice as they knew how … But by then, of course, she was in The Pit, and when you were in The Pit, people being nice to you didn’t mean anything. Nothing did.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ said Roland, ‘how people being
nice doesn’t help when you feel like that. You know they
want
to help, you know they’re
trying
to help, but it’s like they’re in another world. They have no idea how you’re really feeling. Or what to do about it.’

Yes, thought Jessica. Yes, that was pretty much how it had been.

‘And you can try and pretend that everything’s OK.’ Roland was still talking. ‘You can act as if you think it matters whether you’ve done any school work or what you eat or what you wear, but in the end … the pretending is such an effort, and you get so tired, that all you really want is for it to stop. For everything to stop.’

His words jolted another memory in Jessica. It was the exact moment, walking back from school one Friday, when it had first occurred to her that there was a way to make it stop. A very simple way to finish with all the pain and the pretending and The Pit. And once the idea was in her mind it had held a strange fascination. She had tried to push it away, but that only seemed to make it stronger. It was such a warm and comforting idea, such a reassurance when she was feeling so bad …

‘And then once you’ve had the idea,’ said Roland, ‘it won’t go away. You find yourself coming back to it again and again.’

Jessica looked at him. ‘Did your friend tell you all this?’

Roland shook his head. ‘I didn’t need anyone to tell me stuff like that,’ he said.

It was a moment before Jessica understood what he meant.

‘You?’ She stared at him. ‘Seriously?’

Roland gave a little snort. ‘Have you any idea how it feels to be like this?’ He gestured down to the bulging mass of his body. ‘To have everyone looking at you wherever you go, staring, laughing, calling you names when they think you can’t hear, calling you names when they know you can …’ There was a bitterness in his voice as he continued. ‘You look round, and everyone else seems to be able to get up in the morning and smile and laugh and enjoy themselves … and you think, why can’t I do that? Why can’t I be
ordinary
? Why do I have to be different from everyone else?’

‘And that’s what gets to you in the end, isn’t it?’ It was Francis who was speaking now. ‘The being different. You want so much to be like everyone else but …’ He looked sympathetically across at Roland as he spoke. ‘… you know it’s never going to happen. You’re
always
going to be different. With you it’s your weight, with me it was all this.’ He gestured to the drawings on the walls and the dolls on the shelves, then turned to Jessica with an odd, lopsided smile. ‘You remember that first day, when you came and sat on the bench? That’s what I’d gone there to think about. I don’t know if I’d have actually done anything, but … that’s what I was thinking about.’

‘So …’ said Roland, ‘that means all three of us were …’

‘Four.’

The voice was Andi’s, and she spoke with her gaze fixed firmly on the floor in front of her, her fingers picking aggressively at tufts in the carpet. ‘If you’re talking about what it’s like to be different, try being short and ugly when everyone else is tall and pretty. Try beating the living daylights out of anyone who dares to laugh at you … and
then realising that means there’s no one left to talk to.’

She looked up and stared defiantly at the faces around her. ‘I was all set to do it, before Mum brought me round to meet Francis that day. And I’d have done it, too. I know I would, because things had got so bad that …’ her gaze returned to the carpet ‘… that it felt like the only way out.’

For almost a minute, nobody spoke, and it was Francis who finally broke the silence.

‘You know you thought we were all here to help Jessica?’ he said, looking across at Roland. ‘Seems to me it’s more like she’s here to help us.’

Neither Francis, nor Andi nor Roland, had ever told anyone they had been thinking about ‘ending it all’, and to find they could share these thoughts and talk about them with others who had felt the same way, was curiously liberating. It might sound strange, but they spent the rest of that morning talking – and sometimes even laughing – about how the idea had first occurred to them, how they had thought they might do it, and wondering whether any of them would really have gone through with it.

They looked at the newspaper articles that Roland had downloaded about Jessica’s death – though there wasn’t much to laugh at in them. The first was a description of how Jessica’s body had been found by a woman walking
her dog, and taken to the hospital, and the other was a description of the funeral which, to Jessica’s surprise, had been attended by several hundred people from the village and from her school. Reading about it was, she found, slightly embarrassing.

Jessica had never really considered that killing herself might have an effect on the lives of the people around her. She had thought, if she had thought about it at all, that her absence would probably make things easier for the people she knew. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as a look at the website her aunt had set up made clear.

On the site’s home page was a big picture of Jessica – the same as the one that hung in the hall of the house in Bannock Lane – with a piece beneath it by Aunt Jo explaining how, after what had happened to her niece, she had given up her job and now spent her time trying to prevent something similar from happening to anyone else. She had trained as a counsellor, set up the website, and if you wanted to get in touch with her you could email her or call the number that was given at the top.

There were some interesting pages on the site describing the feelings that Jessica had privately called Being In The Pit – the feeling that nothing meant anything or ever could, of being different, of being completely alone.

There were a lot more pages on what caused people to feel this way and what they might do about it, with pieces by doctors on the medical causes and the drugs that can sometimes help you feel better, with descriptions by psychologists of techniques that some people had found helpful, phone numbers you could call, books you could read, websites you could visit, and – perhaps most interesting of all – pages of letters from people describing what it had been like for them, and what they had done to get themselves out of The Pit. Or to stop themselves falling back into it.

It was one of these letters that described something Jessica remembered and that the others instantly recognised as well. It talked about the extraordinary speed with which the feeling that ‘life had no meaning’ could disappear on certain occasions and everything become ‘normal’ again – for a while at least. How one day you
could be in the depths of despair and the next you could wake up feeling … OK. How little things like something someone said, or a scene from a film, or even a piece of music could change your mood in the blink of an eye. And how, when you were in one mood, the other seemed so silly. When the sun was out you could hardly remember the clouds and, when you were in The Pit, it was difficult to believe that sunshine had ever existed.

‘Like me, yesterday morning,’ said Roland. ‘I was feeling really bad before you two came round.’ He nodded at Francis and Jessica. ‘But then, when I started talking to you, suddenly everything was different. I don’t know why … It just was.’

‘I think it’s the shock of seeing Jessica as a ghost that does that,’ said Andi. ‘It sort of snaps you out of yourself. I remember when Francis took me up to his room and Jessica walked through the middle of the bed … It was just so
interesting
. Much more interesting than being angry or miserable.’

Francis did not think it was the shock of Jessica being a ghost that had caused his own mood to change. He
thought Jessica had done that simply by … being Jessica. He had never really been interested in the fact that she was a ghost. It was Jessica as a friend that had made the difference.

Whatever the reason, however, the one thing they all agreed was that everything
had
changed since Jessica appeared. None of them had been in The Pit since they had met her. Which made Francis’s idea – that the reason they could all see Jessica was so that she could stop them doing what she had done – particularly convincing.

Jessica herself was less sure.

‘If it’s true,’ she said, ‘that I’m here to stop you all making the same mistake I did, and I’ve done it … Why am I
still
here?’

Everyone looked at Roland. He was the one who’d read the books and seemed to have all the answers.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘the obvious answer is that there’s someone else.’

‘Someone else?’ Jessica frowned.

‘Well, you were a ghost for almost a year before you met Francis,’ said Roland. ‘Then it was another month
before you met Andi. Then me yesterday. Why should it stop at three? Maybe there’s someone else you still have to help.’

They were still discussing this possibility when Francis glanced at his watch, saw it was lunchtime, and said that if anyone was hungry there was probably some bread and cheese in the kitchen.

‘Oh, yes …’ Roland gave a little cough. ‘I meant to say. Mum said I was to invite you all back for lunch at my house. If you want.’ He blushed slightly. ‘But it’s all right. You don’t have to come if …’

‘Francis told me about the food your mum cooks,’ interrupted Andi. ‘And you have a pool as well, don’t you? Can we go for a swim after?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, that settles it.’ Andi stood up. ‘Come on, you lot! Let’s go!’

Francis watched as she and Roland headed for the stairs.

So that’s it, he thought. You spend the morning talking about suicide with two other people who have been
thinking about it and the ghost of someone who’s already done it … and then you push off for lunch and a swim.

He glanced across at Jessica who was thinking herself into a coat.

‘Funny sort of morning,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘I think so.’ Jessica floated over to join him. ‘That first day, when I came and sat beside you on the bench … You said you were wondering about it then?’

‘Yes.’

‘You never said anything.’

‘No.’

‘Not to anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Nor did I,’ said Jessica. ‘And, looking back on it, that was definitely a mistake.’