Melody Bittersweet and The Girls' Ghostbusting Agency: A laugh out loud romantic comedy of Love, Life and ... Ghosts? (15 page)

Artie watches us, perplexed, but pleased. ‘I’ve never been locked in a cellar before. This is the best job I’ve ever had.’

‘
I
think
these are my favourite yet.’ I reach for a third anginetti cookie despite the fact that the lemon icing is rich enough to dissolve my teeth on contact.

‘They go lovely with tea,’ Artie says, a comment designed purely for the purpose of winding up Marina, who narrows her eyes at him as he dunks one in his mug.

‘Nonna would weep,’ she whispers, slamming the lid down and putting the tin out of his reach. Sadly, it’s out of mine too, so it looks like our break is officially over.

‘Right. Shall we take a look at Lloyd’s diaries?’ I’m dying to see what lies inside those pages.

Marina nods. ‘Do you think we should wear white cotton gloves like on the TV?’

I pause. ‘Because they’re old and precious or because they’re evidence in a murder case?’

She shrugs. ‘Both?’

We don’t have a shred of police procedural knowledge between us that hasn’t been gained from watching CSI. ‘There’s a box of those thin surgical rubber gloves under mum’s sink,’ I say. ‘I’ll go and grab some just in case.’

* * *

I
find
Gran in the kitchen watching an American daytime soap opera she’s addicted to.

‘I thought you’d given up on this after the character you liked went psycho and held the bank up, dressed in his wife’s underwear,’ I say, heading for the sink.

She sips from the teacup on the table that she uses to disguise her champagne during the day. ‘It was all just a misunderstanding, darling.’

I frown, wondering how you explain away robbing a bank in your wife’s red lace basque. Gran looks away from the screen as it cuts to a commercial break and shrugs. ‘It’s America, darling. They do things differently over there.’

I go to say, no, they really don’t, and I then decide not to bother defending our special friends across the Atlantic, because they’re single-handedly responsible for Jeremy Kyle. If there had been no Jerry Springer, Jezza would have never been given air-time to torment the nation on a daily basis. But then they also gave us iPhones and peanut M&Ms and Ironman, so I’m caught by indecision. Gran excuses me from the need to reply by zoning out because her show is back on, so I let the whole debate go in favour of searching under the sink for latex gloves, needed to read a dead man’s diaries. Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up.

‘Gran, you don’t happen to know where those thin rubber gloves have gone, do you?’

‘Shop,’ she says, or at least I think that’s what she says. I retract my head from behind the u-bend and straighten up onto my knees.

‘Did you say they’re in the shop?’

She nods without taking her eyes from the screen.

‘Silvana took them through there a few days back.’

I haul myself to my feet, and as I pass the fridge she holds her teacup out, again without looking at me.

‘This tea needs a little more milk. Would you mind, darling?’

I flip the fridge door open and extract the champagne bottle, wondering if Nonna Malone knocks back the grappa while she bakes cookies or if it’s just my bonkers gran whose blood is twelve percent proof.

I
head around
to the front of the building on the High Street and push open the old shop door, enjoying the familiar, mellow jingle of the old-fashioned bell. It suits my mother’s style to keep Blithe Spirits as traditional as possible, and there is little different about the shop interior to how it might have looked a hundred years previously. The wooden panelling has been carefully maintained, and the small bevelled panes of glass in the curved bay windows are all original. Jugs of fresh flowers fill the deep windowsills and the counter that runs along one side has a deep, subtle shine from decades of beeswax. My mum has added a couple of jewelled velvet armchairs in front of her impressive library of occult books, deeply buttoned and comfortable, and it’s sitting in one of these where I find her now, with the newspaper open on her lap and her glasses balanced on the end of her slender nose. Everything about her is long, lithe and pale; she must look at me and wonder how I wound up being a barely five-foot brunette. Not that she’s ever said anything of the sort; she’s never made me feel anything but perfect for her, because I have my dad’s round brown eyes and, according to her, his wide smile and dimples. We look entirely unrelated, but people who know us well tell us that we are more similar in personality than in looks.

‘Melody.’ She closes the paper and takes her glasses off as she looks up, blinking a few times to adjust her eyes. ‘Have you come to tell me that your gran’s watching that wretched programme again?’

‘Well no, but she is,’ I say, scanning the shelf behind the counter. ‘Have you got those thin rubber gloves in here? The ones that have been under the sink for ages?’

‘Under the counter, left hand side,’ Glenda’s voice drifts through into the shop, and in a second or two she pops her head around from the little office out back. She reaches out as I grab the box and pull out one single solitary glove. I growl with frustration as we both peer down into the now empty box.

‘I’ll make a note to bring in a fresh box in the morning,’ Glenda says. ‘I like to keep some in my desk. You never know what you might need to do around here.’

She catches my mother’s eye tartly, clearly making a point.

‘Your gran asked Glenda if she’d be so kind as to clear up vomit a few days back,’ my mother says, looking sheepish. ‘A customer’s teenage daughter threw up when Gran told her that her dead grandpa saw what she did behind the art block at school.’

Glenda raises her eyebrows. ‘Dicey said she’d have cleared it up herself if it wasn’t for her knees. The woman has practised yoga for longer than I’ve been alive, she has better knees than I do.’

I try not to smile as Glenda disappears into the back office again, leaving me holding one useless latex glove. My mother taps her long fingernail on the newspaper.

‘There’s an article in here about that house you’re working at.’ She slides her glasses back on and flips the pages until she finds the one she wants, then folds it over with a shake and hands it to me. ‘You can have it. I’m done with it.’

I look down as I take the paper and note Fletch’s smug smiling face next to the byline. I might have known. I tuck it under my arm and head out of the shop, already planning to deface Fletch’s photograph when I get back to my desk.

‘
P
lanning on trying
to get away with murder, ghostbuster?’

Ah, shizzleshits. Of all the people to run into on the street with the newspaper under my arm, I have to practically walk into the man whose face I’m currently dreaming about defacing with a bright red sharpie. He looks pointedly at the latex glove I stupidly still have in my hands and then back up to my eyes.

‘Yes, yours,’ I retort, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand. ‘Tell me, do you spend your entire life stalking us or were you just passing?’

‘Someone’s got tickets on themselves today.’ Fletch holds his hand up to show me the brown paper bag from the arty farty sandwich shop a few doors down. ‘Lunch.’

‘Try not to choke on your rocket,’ I grouch and then I pause and wish the ground would swallow me up. Thankfully he swerves the obvious pun about his rocket being more than big enough to choke someone, but the amused spark in his green eyes tells me that he’s thinking it all the same.

Instead, he nods towards the newspaper. ‘Page fifteen. You’ll like it.’

I push it further under my arm so he can’t see that it’s already open on his article. ‘I’m planning to use it to clean up dog poo.’

Alright, yes, I know it was a crap line. It was the worst use I could think of for newspaper at short notice. Don’t judge me.

He laughs under his breath. ‘You don’t even have a dog.’

‘Despite your best efforts to the contrary, you don’t know everything about me,’ I huff.

‘You don’t have a dog, Melody,’ he says again.

‘Yes. Yes, I do. I got one.’ Shit, can someone please wire my jaw together? I lose all reason around this man and his broad shoulders. ‘I’m going now.’

‘To walk your dog?’

I hate him. ‘Yes. I’m going now to walk Parsnip.’

Shoot me. Shoot me now, right between the eyes. I just called my imaginary dog Parsnip. I don’t even like the bloody things.

‘You named your dog after a root vegetable?’

Christ, can he just let it go? He knows I don’t have a sodding dog called Parsnip, or Turnip, or Butternut frickin’ Squash, for that matter. Although, Butternut Bittersweet would be bloody hilarious. If I do ever get a dog, that’s totally going to be its name.

‘I can wait for you if you like,’ Fletch smirks. ‘We can walk Parsnip together.’

There is something about his offer that sounds intimate, despite the fact that we both know there is to be no walk because there is no dog.

He makes no move, so I dodge around him and half run down the cobbled alley to the back of the building and the sanctuary of my office.

‘Go and harass someone else, Fletch,’ I toss over my shoulder.

‘Just making sure you get home safely,’ he calls, still there. ‘And looking at your cute ass.’

I flip him the Vs. When I reach the agency door I finally turn back and risk a glance back towards the street. He’s gone, and I don’t like the fact that a teeny bit of me is disappointed. I’m definitely going to town with that sharpie. I might even post it to him at the newspaper office for my own amusement.

B
ack inside the office
, I chuck the newspaper and the solitary glove down onto the coffee table and flop dramatically into the tweed armchair.

‘No gloves and I need to buy a sodding dog.’

‘You don’t sound very pleased about it.’ Marina looks up from behind the desk where she’s engrossed in
Twenty Years’ Experience as a Ghost-Hunter
by Elliott O’ Donnell. ‘You should read this, it’s interesting,’ she says, evidently not taking me seriously.

Artie stops midway through wiping down the whiteboard and his eyes light up at the idea. ‘Can I help you pick it?’

I groan. ‘I don’t think I’m serious, Artie.’

‘You sound as if you are to me,’ he says, nodding fast. ‘Very serious. You said
I need to buy a sodding dog
.’

‘Yes, I know I did.’

The truth is that I always wanted a dog and my mother wouldn’t let me have one. Now that I’m all grown up it’s on my bucket list. The thing is though, that it’s quite a long way down my bucket list, behind train as a movie make-up artist in order to be the person placed in sole charge of applying Robert Downey Jr.’s mascara. It’s that sort of bucket list, i.e. things I’d like to happen but that very likely won’t. But a dog w . . . well, that could happen if I wanted it to, couldn’t it? Now that it’s out there, the idea doesn’t seem too bad at all.

‘Dogs need walking every day. You hate walking.’ Marina makes a fair point as she turns the page of the book, still not taking me seriously.

‘I can do that,’ Artie jumps in.

‘Hmmm. Maybe you could get a dog and I can pretend he’s mine sometimes? I only really need him to fool Fletcher Gunn.’

That snags Marina’s attention. ‘You want to get a dog to impress Fletcher Gunn?’

‘Not to impress him, no,’ I protest too hotly, looking at her as if she’s the village idiot for daring to even suggest such a thing. ‘But I just sort of told him that I have a dog and he doesn’t believe me so I need to have an actual dog so I can prove him wrong.’

I don’t tell them that I have to call the dog Parsnip too. That’s not going to happen in a million years. But a dog . . . maybe. Just maybe. The idea is already growing on me at a frankly alarming rate.

Marina laughs, still not taking me seriously. ‘A dog’s for life, Melody, not just to land a shag with the local reporter.’

Artie’s jaw hits the floor. I angrily spring up out of the chair.

‘That is so not what is happening here!’

She doesn’t speak, and after a second I drop back down and fling my arm across my eyes like an emo teenager.

‘Oh God, Marina, why him? I can’t stand the sight of him but I can’t seem to stop thinking about him ripping my clothes off, either.’

Marina looks at Artie. ‘Close your ears and make coffee, Artie, this is girl stuff.’

She comes and sits next to me on the sofa and pats my knee for solidarity.

‘Come on, Bittersweet. Remember when I had that short-lived and totally inappropriate crush on Bazza in sixth form? From here up,’ she slashes her hand across her slender neck to demonstrate from where up, ‘I hated him, but from here down, every time he was within three feet of me all I wanted to do was play hide the saveloy. It’s just one of those things.’ She pulls a face. ‘Sadly for both Bazza and me it was more a case of hide the cocktail sausage, which just goes to prove my point. Some fantasies are best kept between you and your battery-operated boyfriend.’

‘You had sex with Bazza?’ I say, distracted by her revelation. ‘You never told me that.’

‘I try not to think about it,’ she says quickly, rolling her shoulders and shuddering so hard that her high, dark ponytail quivers. ‘It only happened once in the store room behind his dad’s butchers shop.’

For a brief spell in our late teens Marina worked a weekend job for Bazza’s dad, and it now becomes clear to me why. ‘Hence the pork-product-related sex references,’ I murmur with fresh understanding.

‘I’m not saying I think Fletch would be a cocktail sausage,’ she says, holding up her crooked little finger like a diplomatic sex advisor. ‘More that you should never meet your heroes. That sort of thing.’

I cover her hand with my own and start to laugh. ‘I think that saying applies to people like the Dalai Lama or Michelle Obama. Or Thor.’

Artie brings a tray of steaming mugs over and sets it down on the coffee table in front of us.

‘About that dog . . .’

* * *

W
ho knew
you could get a dog so quickly? Anyone would think the shelter wanted to see the back of the ball of blond fur that I’ve just manhandled into my mother’s kitchen and deposited on the floor.

My mother looks at the newest member of the Bittersweet family with blatant distaste.

‘Only you could go to the dogs’ home and come back with a one-eared pug.’

The dog regards her balefully from his position on my foot.

‘I had no choice, he followed me round and practically clung to my leg. Even the Magic 8 Ball said he was the one. He’ll grow on you. And he doesn’t have one ear, it’s just been bitten or something. They said he can still hear perfectly well.’

‘What have you named him again?’ Gran peers over the edge of their dining table.

‘I didn’t get to pick his name, Gran. He’s three years old so he already has a name. They advised against changing it because it’ll confuse him too much.’

Lucky for the pug, you might think. He doesn’t have to be saddled with Parsnip. Hold that thought.

I flip open the rehoming pack and read out his details. ‘His previous owner was an American film and literature student who got him while he was at uni. His folks wouldn’t let him take it back there when he finished studying so the dog wound up at the dogs’ home.’

Even I’m struggling to say his name without feeling like a fool. Who in their right mind calls a pug Lestat?

‘There’s a note from his previous owner,’ I say, pulling it out of the back flap of the pack.

‘Dear Lucky New Pug-Lover, please take the best care of my dark lord and good buddy, Lestat. Sorry about the name, I’m a Tom Cruise fan and vampires rock my world. What can I say? I can assure you that the dog doesn’t go on nightly murderous rampages, if that helps. I wish I could have taken him back to the States with me, but he’d have hated quarantine and my folks would have like, killed me. He’s one cool dude, but watch him because he’ll swallow pretty much anything, and he isn’t a big fan of cold weather, or rain, or wind. He’s a bit of a couch potato, truth told, but he has a naughty sense of humour and he snores like a freight train. You’ve been warned. Just buy earplugs, know what I’m sayin’? Man, you’re gonna love him, and I’m gonna miss him. Yours sincerely, Tom Jones.’

There is silence in the kitchen while we all contemplate the new arrival, and then my mother finally speaks.

‘You bought a one-eared pug called Lestat from Tom Jones.’

‘Not the actual Tom Jones,’ I say. ‘And I didn’t have to buy him, just make a donation to the shelter.’

‘I’d call him Plug,’ Gran says, picking a prawn from her salad and tossing it down to Lestat, who hoofs it up noisily.

‘Plug the pug?’

‘Easier to remember than Lestamp,’ she says, trying him with a tomato. It follows the prawn, and I start to see what Tom Jones meant about his appetite. I don’t correct her mistake, because I know full well she’ll never remember his name anyway. She’ll probably just ply him with food from her plate and call him Plug forever, and from the way he’s just laid his head on her knee I don’t think he’ll mind a bit.

‘I think we should probably stick to the food the dogs’ home gave me,’ I say doubtfully.

Gran bats her hand at me. ‘Your grandpa never fed Beefcake on anything different to our food and look how well he turned out.’

What I really want to say at this point is that Beefcake, my grandpa’s bulldog, was spectacularly fat and lazy, as evidenced by his body, which my grandpa had had preserved by one of London’s leading taxidermists because he couldn’t bear to part with him. When it transpired that Grandpa Duke’s ghost was to be tethered for eternity to Gran’s bed, it took four men to haul the glass display case up two flights of stairs to ensure that one man wasn’t parted from his dog, even by death and taxidermy.

‘Right, I think I’ll take him up to my flat and get him settled in.’

O
h my God
. I now know why Tom Jones called him Lestat. He might be a couch potato by day, but at night this dog goes bat-shit crazy. It’s just after 11.00 p.m. and so far he’s crapped on the living room rug, stolen and eaten a family-sized bag of cheese and onion Walkers crisps, and he keeps chasing his tiny, curled up tail as if it’s a thistle stuck to his ass. He’s thoroughly disinterested in the lush new bed I’ve bought him, preferring the comfort of the sofa or me. He’s run the pair of us ragged, and now he’s lolling on his back with his legs akimbo on the opposite end of the sofa. He tried his luck at my end but I’ve banished him on account of his manky crisp breath. I wouldn’t be surprised if he picks up the remote control in a minute and turns off the movie I’m half-watching. It’s like I’m suddenly in a relationship with the dog equivalent of Homer Simpson. I don’t want to be his Marge.

‘Look, Lestat,’ I say, and he rolls his eyes back in his head. ‘You and I need to establish some ground rules. The first one being you stay on the ground, not the sofa.’

The sofa already has a fine new coat of Lestat-coloured hair and he’s only been here for six hours. Predictably, he makes no effort to budge.

‘And the weeing and crapping thing. We don’t do that in the house. It’s not polite.’

Then, amazingly, he seems to understand what I want, because he huffs and dutifully climbs down from the sofa. I pat him on the head, and then watch as he shuffles over towards his bed. I almost feel sorry for him, right up to the moment where he lowers his pudgy little backside down and squats on the oak floorboards. I squawk, and lunge for the nearest thing to shove under his bum that I can find, which just happens to be Mum’s newspaper that I’ve brought up from the office to read.

There is undeniable satisfaction from watching Lestat’s pee seep slowly into Fletch’s smug-faced snapshot. I can’t help it. I grab my phone and snap a little video, apologising to Lestat for catching him whilst he’s indisposed. Though, I don’t feel that bad about it, to be honest.

It takes me precisely three minutes to find the
Shropshire Express
website on the iPad, locate Fletch’s page, and to text him the video on the number he handily mentions about five-million times in case anyone has a scoop for him. The only scoop he’ll be thinking about when he watches this is a pooper-scooper. It’s Fletcher Gunn’s fault I have this dog. The least he can do is watch it wee on his face.

L
estat doesn’t snore
like a freight train. He snores like a goddamn euro-fighter is hovering over my bed where, of course, he is, sleeping right beside me flat on his back. He has his head on the pillow and his balls are swinging low and free over my Ikea comforter.

‘Melody?’ someone says, and for the first time in forever I’m actually glad to be interrupted by a ghost. I flick the lamp on and sit up. There’s a woman in my bedroom, standing close to the bed and looking anxious. I’d put her age at mid-fifties or thereabouts, and I’d say she probably died around the 1920s if her clothes are anything to go by. She looks quite well-to-do; I’d hazard a guess that her wartime stocking seams would have been real silk rather than drawn on with eye pencil.

‘Your dog is terribly loud,’ she remarks, as if he’s inconveniencing her. I mean, to be fair he probably is, but no more than she is inconveniencing me. In fact, they’re both inconveniencing me hugely; it’s 4.30 a.m. and I want to be sleeping like a baby, not trying to make myself heard above Lestat the thunder pug.

‘I’m Agnes,’ she says. ‘Agnes Scarborough. You’re investigating the death of Douglas, my son.’

‘Mrs Scarborough.’ I sit bolt upright and wish I was less tired.

‘This is really quite difficult,’ she says. I don’t know if she means she’s finding it hard to concentrate because of Lestat or that she’s finding it tricky to say whatever it is that’s brought her here.

‘It’s about the diaries,’ she says, sounding anguished. ‘I made a terrible mistake.’

Then, in the most frustratingly ghostly manner, she vanishes, as if she’d never even been there in the first place. It happens like that sometimes when a ghost makes the effort to visit me, they can find it hard to hold themselves together for long enough to actually communicate. They usually come through most strongly if they died recently and really need to get a message through, such as Artie Elliott Senior. He couldn’t leave until he’d taken care of his boy. But Agnes Scarborough must have died more than eighty years ago, and if this is her first time trying to communicate with the living then I don’t hold out much hope of seeing her again in the near future. What could she have meant about Lloyd’s diaries? ‘I made a terrible mistake,’ she said. What did she mean?

I look over at Lestat and decide that there’s little point in trying to get to sleep again right now. I can’t wait a moment longer to make a start on those diaries. We’d reluctantly resolved to hold off until tomorrow when Glenda arrived with the new supply of latex gloves, but I’m itching to know what secrets lie between those pages. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a pair of marigolds under the sink somewhere.