Talia
I stand in front of the mirror in my bedroom for a long time, staring at my own face after the girl…after Kitty’s face disappears.
I’m breathing. I’m standing on my own feet, and I’m alive. I can tell because things hurt again. I’m frantic, rushing over to my desk. Everything’s as I always keep it, files in the same order, laptop still battered, still has that sticker on the back that’s scratched to oblivion. My phone’s charging like it always is at night, and I pick it up with trembling hands.
The date reads November twentieth.
I remember the day I died. October twenty-first, weeks after arriving. I’d been wearing my Han Solo jacket and walking like I used to back in Glasgow when things were bad with Ma.
It’ll be like you never died, she said. What have I missed? What’s happened in those five missing weeks? I drop my phone and stumble back onto my bed and scream.
The ghost sitting on my bed screams too.
“What the actual hell?” I yell, standing up again, my blood singing and my hands balled into fists.
“You sat on me!”
“You were on my bed!”
“Well, I didn’t bloody want to be, did I?” he snaps, standing and facing me in a mirror of my own pose.
I clutch at my hair and turn away. “This isn’t happening. You’re a figment of my imagination. This is all some freaky dream.”
The ghost is silent. No, he’s not a ghost. I’m not going to have some breakdown, not now. There is no ghost in my room. I am alone. There is no bloody hallucination, no missing time, no temporary death or whatever. It’s October, I’ve come back from a long walk, and now I’m going to go to bed.
I start stripping off my clothes and pulling on my pyjamas. The not-really-there boy squeaks. “What are you doing?”
“You’re not really here.”
“I am here, and I don’t want to see your skinny butt, thank you.”
“Then leave,” I say, whirling around wildly. “Get out of my room, go back to whatever dimension or repressed memory or wherever you came from.”
“Don’t you think I would if I could?” he demands. “Do you think I’m here by choice? I can’t leave. I can’t!”
“Well then,” I snarl. “I’ll leave.”
I walk out of my room in my pyjamas and march to the shared kitchen. Thump my cupboard door open, slap at the kettle to turn it on, turn around to get the milk, and nearly jump out of my skin.
The ghost is standing in front of the fridge, glaring flatly at me. “I meant,” he says through gritted teeth. “I think I can’t leave you.”
I throw up my hands. “Why? Why are you attached to me? I don’t even know you.”
“I don’t know,” he says, his lip curled up in a snarl. “I can’t go anywhere.”
“Have you tried?”
He snorts and crosses his arms. “Have I tried, she asks. Of course I’ve bloody tried. What do you think I was doing when you were staring gormlessly at your desk? There I was, yelling at you, having my own little breakdown, which, by the way, I think I’m owed seeing as how I’ve just bloody died, and you don’t even hear me until you sit on my lap? Which, by the way, not welcome. I’m gay.”
“What?”
He frowns at me. “What what? Which part of that speech was problematic for you? Swear to God, if I’ve got myself attached to a homophobe—”
I wave him away like the annoying little gnat he is. “I couldn’t hear you until I sat on you?”
“Oh. No.” He glances away. “You’re not homophobic, are you?”
I roll my eyes. “No, idiot, I’m a lesbian.” Strange. It still makes my heart hammer to say it, though I know he won’t react the way Ma did.
“Oh. Well, good. Wow, that would have been horrible.”
I snort at that. “More or less horrible than being dead?”
He slumps his shoulders, and I can’t help a twinge of guilt. I squash it ruthlessly. He started it, after all. But he leans against the counter, the picture of the boy hard done by, with his shoulders sagging and an actual pout on his lips. I sigh and get the milk out of the fridge.
There’s silence for a long moment save for the sound of the spoon against the ceramic. I turn around and sip my tea. “So what’s your name?”
“Matt,” he says. “Matt Wiśniewski.”
“I’m Talia McGregor.”
He huffs a laugh. “You really couldn’t be more Scottish if you tried, could you?”
I narrow my eyes and try to will the blush away, all sympathy evaporating in an instant. “No need to be an arse.” I’m just glad I hadn’t told him my birth name’s Morag.
He cackles. “Oh, say arse again, it sounds brilliant. Nah, say och aye.”
Little shit. I thump the rest of my tea on the counter and go to bed.
* * *
I open my eyes to soft rain on the window and snuggle deeper under my duvet, goose bumps prickling over my skin. Like this, I can almost pretend I’m back in Glasgow, before scholarships and tutorials and snotty English boys who look down on me because Daddy didn’t send me to Eton or wherever it is that snotty English girls go. I can imagine the person shuffling around outside is Ma, making the arduous journey from her bed to the sitting room to watch some shite telly. I can promise myself that soon, Ma will fall asleep again, and I’ll slip out on my bike, cycle down to Shul. Be with my real family.
An obnoxious fake cough shatters my dream. “Are you going to get up or not? I’m bored stuck in here.”
I’m in Oxford. I’ve got a tutorial in two days that I don’t know if I’ve prepared for because I’ve died and got better, and all I’ve got to show for it is five weeks’ worth of amnesia and a snippy little ghost attached to me for whatever reason.
I open my eyes only to glare at the wall and count backward from ten.
“I can tell you’re awake,” he calls in a singsong.
I throw my duvet off. It slithers onto the floor and tangles in my feet as I stomp over to the wardrobe to snatch out some clothes.
“Yay, you’re awake,” Matt crows.
I ignore him grimly, pack my satchel, and leave the room.
“Aw, come on, don’t be like that,” he says, skipping sideways alongside me as I murder-stride through the halls and out into the quad. “Jeez,” he yelps. “Did you see that? That girl walked straight through me.” He shakes his head. “Weird.”
I grind my teeth and pick up speed. Hopefully, a lecture on quantum mechanics at nine a.m. will get rid of him.
It does not. Instead, I have to sit in the lecture theatre, my leg jogging furiously and my fingers tangled in her hair, while a teenage boy sits on the floor and whines about how boring this is. I’ve barely managed to take any notes, and I have no idea what the professor’s going on about because I’ve missed a whole month.
By the time everyone’s packing up, I’m ready to cry. I sit with my head in my hands and pray that I still have all the notes and essays on my laptop that I’ve hopefully written while also dead, and how, how is this my life?
Maybe I can still get this week’s work done and catch up on everything I’ve missed. Maybe pigs will turn out to be aerodynamically stable after all.
“Um,” says the ghost. I drop my hands and glare at him. He actually looks quite contrite. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I snap. “I’ve missed so much work, I have no idea how I’ll ever catch up, nobody will believe me because I’ve apparently also been here the whole time, handing in my essays and actually learning stuff, and either I’ve gone insane well before the norm for an Oxford uni student, or I am actually being followed by an obnoxious invisible boy. And honestly, I’m not sure which is worse.”
Matt hunches his shoulders and picks at a loose threat on his trainers. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles.
I sigh and stare into the space of the empty lecture theatre. “It’s fine.”
We sit there for a long time. Then I get to my feet slowly and pack my things away into my bag.
Once we’re out into the drizzle of the morning, which still hasn’t let up, I’m desperate to get back home and check my laptop for hints of what I’ve missed. I kick myself mentally for not doing so last night. I dodge the groups of chattering students and take the long way around to avoid that second year girl who seems to think it’s her life’s work to integrate all of us and make us into a community. It’s always a relief to get into the little bubble of my room. I can hear life going on outside the door as I lean against it and take a moment, but I don’t have to take part. I don’t have to make people like me.
I push everything to one side and start my laptop, my knee jogging impatiently as it spends what seems like hours loading. “When did you get that?” Matt asks. “2003?”
I hold up my middle finger and grit my teeth. So much for leaving judgement and other people on the other side of the door. I concentrate on clicking on my notes folder, my lip clamped between my front teeth and a constant litany of please, please, please let it all be there.
“Yes!” I whoop. I’m not often pleased with myself, but right now I’m appreciating my compulsion to organise all my files just so. This is fine. I can do this. I’ve got notes and references and links to all the papers alive-me has had to read. I’ve got tutorials arranged by date and nearly ten thousand words of essays to read.
This is fine.
I also have another two-thousand-word essay due on Wednesday, and I’m not even sure I understand the title. I fold my arms on the desk and press my forehead down on them.
“Hey, don’t cry,” says Matt.
“I’m not crying,” I grind out. “I’m despairing.”
“Well…don’t despair?”
“Why not?”
“Well, for starters, you’re still alive.”
I lift my head and glare at him, but he’s frowning, looking off to the side, and it’s wasted on him. “You were dead, though,” he asks. “Weren’t you? For a bit?”
I tilt my head to one side. “Yeah.” I hadn’t realised this was new information to him.
He pinches his lip, deep in thought. “It was a grey place, wasn’t it? Where you were?”
“Yeah,” I say again. “I didn’t see you, though.”
He shakes his head. “I was only there for a moment, and then…it was Kitty, wasn’t it?”
“What do you know about her?” I ask, my attention sharpening. “Is she, like, famous around dead people?”
“No, well, I don’t know. But I know her because she’s my best friend. And I know what she can do.”
“What exactly can she do?”
He rolls his eyes and focuses on me rather than staring off into the middle distance. “Duh. She brings people back from the dead. Well, as long as there’s someone willing to take their place.”
I squirm around on my chair to face him properly. “But that’s just the thing, how can she do that? How come we’ve never heard about things like this happening? How does it happen? It’s physically and biologically impossible, you’re talking time travel and…and—”
“Magic, obviously.”
I shake my head. “I’m a scientist. That doesn’t cut it.”
“A scientist who’s also religious, though, aren’t you?”
I narrow my eyes but stay quiet.
He points at my necklace. “Star of David. I know Judaism is a culture as well, but you’ve also got a book in…is that Hebrew?”
I glance at the siddur he’s pointing at and nod, surprised. “Yeah, it is.” I turn back to him. “It’s my prayer book. It’s in Hebrew and English. I’m not fluent yet.” I force myself to stop talking. I don’t owe him an explanation.
Matt shrugs, oblivious. “Surely, you can find some room between your science and faith to believe in a bit of magic? Especially now you’ve witnessed it too.”
I think for a moment. If there’s anyone who would be able to navigate this no-man’s land, it’s Morgan. But there’s a little part of me that worries as I scroll through my emails, a little niggling guilt that knows me too well. What if I didn’t bother replying to his first email while I was dead? Not-dead? Temporarily un-alive? What even am I anymore? I know the other-me was as diligent about work as I am, but what if she was just a placeholder? A robot that filled in the space in the past where I should have been, that didn’t know what was important to me? The only thing that’s important to me.
I can’t help but let out a triumphant little ha when I find the email thread. There. She—or I, or whatever term is correct when thinking about a time-travelling alternative version of oneself—had emailed him, and he’d emailed back.
I feel my heart warm as I read his words. In the quietest part of my mind, I wonder if this is what some people feel like when they speak to their parent. Having him write to me with such kindness, the same affection always as clear in his written voice as it is in his spoken voice, means more to me than I want to admit.
Dear Talia,
I’m glad to hear that your studies are going well and that you were able to find the information you were so worried about a couple of weeks ago. You are such a clever lass. I can’t understand what you’re telling me about, and googling it only seems to confuse me more. But you seem to be diving into this difficult subject in another country with such energy and drive, it exhausts me even to think about it.
I do hope that you’re getting enough rest and looking after yourself as well. We are all very proud of you. Mrs. Jacobs and Mrs. Sadowitz both want me to tell you that they hope you’ll be home for the holidays so they can have the pleasure of your company for Hanukah, especially after your near miss with that drunk driver last month. You can’t blame them for wanting to look after you after such a scare.
I wonder if you’ve considered going to meet Rabbi Daniel again? I know it’s difficult to put your faith in other people, and I know that you’ve been let down in the past, but I believe wholeheartedly that not everyone is going to hurt you. Open your heart if you can manage it. It’s such a big, kind heart. I’m not sure even you realise how much love is in there to share with the world.
I don’t mean to nag you, but I want to make sure you’ve got someone looking out for you in a non-academic way. There’s more to life than quantum physics, I promise!
Yours affectionately,
Morgan
Rabbi Daniel. I remember the first time Morgan mentioned him, and with a chill down my spine, I realise it was back on the twenty-first, the day I died. Or for all they know, the day I had a near miss with a drunk driver. I think of the man—the teacher, Kitty had said—begging me to take his place, and I shudder, closing my eyes a moment.
I click on the link in Morgan’s email, for a lack of anything better to do, which opens up the Oxford Synagogue contact page. There’s a picture of a thin man with dark black skin and kind eyes. He has a smile that looks both gentle and mischievous, and I wish I’d never looked at the picture because I’m only getting my hopes up. Nobody could ever fill the gap that Morgan and the others had left, and it’s unfair to get my hopes up like this.
“Are you going to go?”
I jump violently. I’d forgotten Matt was there. “Don’t read over my shoulder.”
He snorts and steps back. “As if I can read any other way. Intangible, remember? I can’t turn pages or click on emails.”
“That’s no excuse to be nosey.”
He shrugs, unrepentant. “So are you going to go? I could do with some fresh air.”
“You don’t have lungs, what do you care?”
He rolls his eyes and makes a blah-blah-blah gesture with his fingers and thumbs. “Your rabbi told you to go. Aren’t you, like, meant to do what he says?”
“Fuck you. No. Jewish people are allowed to think for themselves, unlike some people.”
He makes a pensive face and still looks distressingly unoffended. “Nice. Catholics could use a bit of that. I’m atheist, though, for what it’s worth, so I don’t have any, like, central authority figures to drone at me. Anymore.”
My lips twitch against my will, and I look back at the picture on the screen. “Yeah. I used to be Catholic too. In name, anyway, never went to anything more than Midnight Mass.”
He jumps onto the desk next to me. It doesn’t shift under his weight at all. “Come on, let’s go meet your new rabbi,” he wheedles. “I’m bored, and you need, like, spiritual guidance.”
“I do not.” I sigh. I blatantly do. But I also have an essay due in two days and an absolute busload of work to read through and understand even before I start writing it. I shake my head. “Maybe later,” I say and leave it at that. Matt groans dramatically and leans back against the wall, and I do not think about the fact that he seems to be able to select what walls he passes through. I can’t exactly write an essay on that, can I?
I push everything else out of my mind, box it up, and keep it safe and hidden and open the first file of notes.
v
“I’ve been thinking,” Matt says the moment I open my eyes, and I groan and stuff my head under my pillow. “Don’t give me that.” He’s pouting, I know he is. I can hear it in his voice.
“You thinking is dangerous,” I mumble into my bed. My beloved bed. Sleep, why hast thou forsaken me?
“Har har,” he says flatly. “I was thinking, we should go and see Kitty.”
Kitty with her sweet smile and her amazing magical power that makes no sense and her warm brown eyes? “No.”
“Hear me out. She brings people back from the dead, right? She could bring me back, right?”
A part of me perks up, but I shove my head deeper under the pillow. “Why hasn’t she done it already?”
He’s quiet for a moment longer than usual. “I don’t know,” he says flippantly. “There’s probably a waiting list.”
“Right, of course,” I say and succumb to the day, throwing off the duvet and slouching to the bathroom. “There’s a waiting list for people who want to come back from the dead, aye, of course there is. There’s also a postcode lottery, and if you’ve died in a particular way, you’re more likely to get seen ahead of time because there’s also a dead-person triage, isn’t there? I bet there’s a right outcry when a famous person gets brought back to life because he was all on drugs, and that when he was alive.”
A girl with frizzy brown hair looks at me nervously. I give her my best fake smile, and she scurries away. Matt smirks at me in the mirror. “Talking to yourself again, Talia?” He says my name in an annoying way, drawing out the first a into an aah. I bare my teeth at him.
“I’m serious,” he says when I’m out in the sharp sunlight, throwing my bag over my shoulder and wondering if I’ve got time for a quick coffee on the way. I glance at my watch. Time, yes; money, no. I need a job.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“No,” I say. “I thought that was obvious by now.”
He sticks his tongue out. “Come on,” he whines. “We live really close. Well. Kitty lives really close.” He frowns for a moment, breaking his stride. “There’s a bus from Oxford to Leithfield every two hours, and it only takes twenty minutes to get there. Come on, Talia, what have you got to lose?”
“I’m not having this conversation with a ghost,” I snap. “Or a hallucination or whatever you are. Look, going crazy is a staple of the Oxford experience. I’m just doing it early. Now shut up because I need to study.”
He narrows his eyes ever so slightly, and perhaps I should take the warning. But I don’t. I push the door of the library open and enter the solid hush of it, the cushioned floors, the great stacks that allow no echo. I have a plan. I have my laptop and a notepad, and I’m going to work through all I’ve missed because I’m not wasting this opportunity. I am not.
“What are you going to do if I don’t shut up?” Matt yells, and I turn like a startled wolf, hissing at him.
The students nearest me look up and frown. At me. Because, of course, they can’t see him, he’s not real. He smirks, and I should not be this angry, but I am. I glare at him and picture him bursting into flames. If he’s a product of my warped imagination, he really ought to be bursting into flames right now.
“What are you looking at?” Matt asks me loudly. “Talia, what are you looking at? I’m not really here am I, Taahlia, just a hallucination, aren’t I?” I glare at him. My teeth ache from how hard I’m gritting them. “Well? Go on, then. Do your work,” he says with a shit-eating grin, gesturing to the stacks. “I’ll be over here, doing hallucination stuff.”
I’m so angry I could burst into flames myself, and I can feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins like acid. I practically throw my bag onto the table and then panic because my laptop’s in there. A girl glances up at me, a frown between her eyebrows, but she quirks a smile and goes back to her work.
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Matt is dancing in the aisles between the shelves, singing “New York, New York,” of all things. I open my laptop and tell myself I can ignore him.
It’s not like I’ve never blocked out noise to work before. Ma’s always got the telly blaring, and there’s a couple next door who scream at each other most nights. Sometimes, a plate hits the wall adjoining mine and makes me jump out of my skin, but I’ve learned to focus through it. The siren call of Oxford and freedom and success dragged me through, and now the new song of graduation and a job, maybe in the ESA or Boeing, something to do with fluid dynamics, will call me through this.
I’ve got a good page and a half of notes when my pen slips, scratching across the page and off onto the table. I freeze and stare at the paper now marked with a deep gouge that has torn through at points. Matt gets in my face. “Hey, Talia, guess what? I can move pens.”
I can feel my heart pounding in my throat. I squeeze my fist around the pen, then pick up the thread of my last thought. My writing is shaky. Matt pokes my hair, curls the longest strand around to tickle my ear, and I twitch, but I can ignore him. He’s not here.
And then he pokes at the mole at the back of my neck, the one right on my hairline, and he’s Sharon Mulvey back in school, trying to distract me when I’m doing the extra work, and I’ve always wanted to stab her in the eye with my pen, and I’m on my feet, screaming and swearing, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” And my arms are flailing and not connecting, and I’m tearing at my hair, and I can’t breathe, everyone’s looking at me, the shocked gasps because I’m the one causing a fuss, can’t you see, Morag, you’re the one making the noise here, Sharon was quietly getting on with her work.
The library is silent, every face pale and staring at me. Some of them have grabbed their stuff and are backing away toward the door. My heart beats so fast I can’t hear through it, and I run.
There’s a gap between some of the shelves right at the back of the periodicals section, between Plant Sciences and Zoology reprints, and I cram my way into it, pressing my back to the wall and putting my hands up by my ears so maybe I won’t hear the terrible gasping, whimpering sound of my own breathing. All it does is intensify it, trap me in there with only the mocking noises of my own weakness, and I squeeze my eyes shut, rock back and forth and cry.
There’s a sensation more than a sound, a knowledge that someone else is nearby, a witness to my breaking. I wrap my arms right around over my face and the back of my head, hiding. I can’t see you, therefore, you can’t see me. But of course, I’ve brought my own hallucination with me, and how long before he torments me more?
Someone clears their throat, and it’s not Matt at all. I flinch and peer out at them, her. The girl with the dark hair. I think I’ve seen her before, before the library, I mean. She smiles and holds out my bag, and I take it like a squirrel, all quick movements and darting back into my safe place.
“You do physics as well, don’t you?” she asks.
I nod.
“Third year,” she says, pointing to herself. “Are you okay?”
I don’t know what to say, and she huffs a laugh and sits cross-legged, pushing her glasses up her nose. “None of us are, really. Part of the environment, you know?”
“‘We’re all mad here,’” I quote, and sniffle.
She laughs. “Exactly. Hey, look, don’t worry about that out there.”
“I made a fool of myself.”
“Yeah, and? Not much you can do about it now, is there? Everyone has moments like that here, and anyone who says they don’t is either a rich Tory boy who already survived Eton, or they haven’t got there yet. Or both.” She shrugs. “It’s Oxford. You either come out of this as suicidal or a member of the government.”
I laugh, and it’s wet and disgusting, but it’s a laugh. She smiles like she’s won a prize, then stands and holds out her hand. “Now, do you want to stay there a bit longer, or do you want a hug?”
I know I look suspicious. My masks are shot all to hell right now. I can’t hide it. I don’t know what it is that makes me put my hand out and let her tug me up before she wraps her arms around me and is rubbing my back. It feels…alien. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a hug from a person my own age before. The only people who ever hugged me have been Morgan and the old ladies back at Shul. I want to hold her closer, and I want to push her away, and I’m relieved when it’s obvious that she’s pulling back so I don’t make even more of a fool of myself.
“Thanks,” I say, hunching my shoulders and looking at the thick carpet.
“Pay it forward.” She shrugs, pats my arm, and goes.
“I’m sorry,” Matt says from behind her, and of course he’s here. Of bloody course. I wipe my eyes. Matt bites his fingernails. Why? Why bother? “I really am sorry, Talia.” He looks on the verge of tears. I’m so damn tired. “I promise I won’t do it again,” he says, and I swear his lower lip is wobbling.
I need help, I think. I don’t think I can do this alone.