15

Suddenly he wasn’t there. I was sitting in the little room, on my own, and I felt oddly better. I had cried and cried and cried. I’d cried for Mum, and Joe had cried for – well, for everything. It had to be shit to discover that you’d been dead for twenty years. We hadn’t been able to touch, but the fact that we’d both wanted to meant a lot. I often hugged Izzy and Sasha; it was a very long time since I’d wanted to get close to anyone else.

Crying felt good. I had tried so hard to stop doing it, but now I thought maybe I should let it happen a bit more. Catharsis. That was the word, wasn’t it? It meant when something big and emotional happened, and you felt better afterwards, even if it was horrible at the time. I’d met someone who understood me, and I loved Joe for that. I was the only person in all of space and time who could even see him properly: he needed my help.

I ran home, letting the sea air dry my face. I slowed down a bit to reply to text messages, trying to sound normal. At home I went straight to the list on the fridge, feeling more positive than I had for ages, though the absence of Mum hit me, as it always did, the moment I opened the front door.

‘Hey, Mum,’ I said to the empty air. I imagined her saying hello to me, kissing my cheek. I imagined her reaching out to touch me, and our arms passing through each other. I hoped she was there. She’d been gone for a year.

I checked the list. Today I was supposed to be cooking pasta. How hard could that be? It was literally the next easiest thing to getting a takeaway. I put the kettle on and checked the cupboard. There was a bag of twirly pasta. Perfect.

I got out a pan and thought about Joe. No one knew what had happened to him. I googled again until I had the names of his parents, Jasper and Claire Simpson, and then I turned my attention to them.

Were they still in town? That was the main thing. Was his dad here? Had his mum come back from India? Had she even been there in the first place? He seemed confused about his mother, but he knew she wasn’t living with them. I tried not to judge her for leaving, but … who was I kidding? If Joe’s mum had done the same as our dad, then I judged her exactly as harshly as I judged him, which was very harshly indeed.

Whatever had happened, though, she’d paid the ultimate price. I failed to track her to the present day because there were so very, very many people called Claire Simpson in the world, and before I could start to narrow it down I heard a key in the door. I tensed for a second, as I always did just in case it was Dad, even though he’d left his key behind, and then ran at my sister. I hugged her and put my face right down to the bump. ‘Hello, little baby!’ I said. ‘It’s Auntie Ariel!’

Sasha laughed. ‘You’re full of beans! Are you OK? I was worried about you today.’

I’d never kept a secret from Sasha before. Not a proper one. And so I started to tell her. I’d told her about the other ghosts, after all, and she didn’t think I was horrifically mad.

‘I went to Beachview after school,’ I said. ‘You know I said I found that weird little room at the back? On the day Dad left? I went there again and I thought about Mum, considering what day it is, and I cried for ages. Ages, Sash. More than I have since she died.’

‘I thought your face looked a bit puffy,’ she said, touching my cheek. ‘And yeah, today’s the day for it. Me too. But you seem happier.’

‘Yeah. I met …’ I looked at her and stopped. Blue ghosts were one thing. A dead or missing boy, who was living in 1999, but who talked to me here in 2019, was another.

We’d made it through this year, and Sasha had enough going on.

She was looking at me, waiting. ‘You met …?’

‘Well, I didn’t meet anyone.’ I paused. ‘I met some kind of turning point. The end of a shit year. Something changed, you know? I met the point where I just had to confront things, and so I let it all out and, for the first time, it made things seem a bit better. And now I feel, like, isn’t it actually amazing to be alive? To be here, in real life, living in the world? I know there’s loads that’s shit.’ Sasha frowned and put her hand on her bump. ‘I won’t say “shit” once he’s born, don’t worry. But I’ve got you, and we’ve got the baby, and we have this house to live in and enough money. We made it through a year. We’re lucky. We’re on Earth for such a short time. Let’s make the most of it, yeah? That’s what Mum would want.’

‘Well.’ She laughed. ‘Wow. Let me harness that energy, babes. I could do with a bit of that.’

I took her hand and tried to zing positivity into her. She pretended she’d had an electric shock.

I couldn’t tell her about Joe because she wouldn’t be able to believe it. It was our secret, mine and Joe’s. It belonged to me and a boy from 1999 who had vanished this afternoon at quarter past five. Who vanished every afternoon at quarter past five. That had to be when it had happened, at quarter past five, on Thursday 11 March, twenty years ago.

What was it, though? What had happened?

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Sit down and watch the telly, and that’s an order. Dinner’s nearly ready. It’s pasta, but I’ll make a tomato sauce, and maybe a salad? That would be good, wouldn’t it? Lots of your five a day. And we can toast Mum again and be incredibly positive and brave.’

I opened cupboards, looking through the tins, hoping to find tomatoes. There was tomato soup. That would do. ‘I’ll buy fresh vegetables tomorrow.’

Mum had always made sure we knew we had to eat fruit and vegetables as part of every meal and we always did: even when things had been at their worst, we’d totted up the gherkin from the burger, the tomato on the pizza.

Mum had been an anaesthetist and the cleverest person I had ever known. Dad was a doctor too, and I hoped the people of Inverness were appreciating his skills, if nothing else. I bet he had a new girlfriend by now.

I didn’t miss Dad, but it was weird having him just vanishing from our lives. I had no idea why Mum had stayed with him. He was horrible. He had been horrible to her, and to Sasha, and nice to me, mainly, I now suspected, as a way of being meaner to them rather than because he actually liked me. When Mum got ill he didn’t get nicer. He just vanished into himself, and ignored Sasha and me until Sasha told him she was pregnant, at which point he had exploded, punched several walls, and gone out driving dangerously around town for hours.

I put the pasta into the pan and typed out an email on my phone before I had time to decide not to:

Dear Dad,

I wanted to write because it’s been a year since Mum died and I know you’ve been missing her too. I hope you’re doing OK in Scotland. Let us know. We’re doing fine. It would be really great if you’d check in with Sasha at some point as I think she’d really appreciate it. So would I.

Ariel xx

I sent it and instantly regretted it.

I left the pasta cooking and the soup warming up, and went to sit with Sasha. My eyes were drawn to the photo on the wall. It was our favourite picture, the one we’d taken out of the album and had enlarged and framed. We were approximately three and seven years old, and Mum had us squeezed on to her lap, her special Mum-arms somehow long enough to contain us both. I was staring at the camera, pudding-faced and wild-haired, and Sasha (blonde and adorable) was looking at me and laughing, while Mum was clearly the happiest woman in the world. Although I looked stupid in it, I absolutely loved it. I knew that Dad had taken it, but apart from that I loved everything about it.

I wondered whether he’d reply to my message. Surely he would.

‘You know when you were little,’ I said, looking at our young selves.

‘Yeah?’

‘Did you go to nursery?’

‘I went to Bouncers,’ she said, smiling. ‘It was lovely. I’d love to send this little bean there except it closed years ago. It had shut before your time. You went to that hippy place, didn’t you?’

I remembered the hippy place. I remembered singing and dancing and playing with water and playdough. Mostly, though, I remembered crying because I missed Mum. Some things didn’t change.

‘Was there a man in charge there?’ I said. ‘At Bouncers?’

Sasha screwed up her face. ‘There was a guy who used to come in with a guitar. But all the workers I remember were women. Why?’

I tried to speak casually, though my blood was pounding in my ears and my breathing had gone wrong. ‘I was reading a thing online. About a boy who went missing. Years ago, before I was born, but he went to our school. His dad worked at Bouncers. That was all. I stumbled across it and thought it was weird. That a teenager from our school vanished from this town. From the shopping mall. And he was never found. I wondered if his dad used to look after you at nursery. That was all.’

‘Oh, you mean Joe Simpson? Everyone knows about him. So are you saying it was his dad who did it? I don’t remember that at all. But it’s usually the parents, isn’t it?’

I shook my head. ‘Oh God, no. I don’t think it was his dad. I mean, maybe? Who knows? I just saw where his dad worked and I thought you went there. Nothing more than that.’

‘I guess he would have left that job after his son disappeared. Before my time. Joe Simpson probably ran away, you know? That’s what boys do. I’m pretty sure it’s what they decided in the end.’

Her hand went to her bump. We would make sure this boy never had any reason to run away.

‘Maybe,’ I said, because I couldn’t add any more than that. I couldn’t tell her that I knew he hadn’t.

It turned out that tinned tomato soup didn’t make good pasta sauce.

When Sasha went to bed, I looked up Gus Simpson, Joe’s brother, who was surprisingly easy to find. He lived in our town, and when I saw his photo I gasped. It was so bizarre to see someone who looked a lot like Joe, but who was nearly forty. If he wasn’t so old he would have been quite fit. Not as much as Joe, but almost. The whole thing made me feel extremely strange.

And then I saw his family. Gus had two daughters.

I needed to meet him, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I could hardly send him a message explaining that I’d met his brother’s ghost and needed to talk. I read everything I could on his Facebook, but he didn’t say much (or if he did his settings stopped me seeing it): he put up pictures of his family and tagged his workplace, a legal firm in town. Maybe that would work. Could Sasha and I need a lawyer?

I clicked on his partner’s profile. She was called Abby Fielding, and she looked nice. Friendly. The children were maybe about eight and five.

I thought about it for ages, and then made a flyer advertising my brand-new, just-invented services. It said:

Hi! I’m Ariel (like the mermaid). I’m sixteen and I’m an experienced, reliable babysitter. If you need any babysitting or childminding I’d be happy to help at evenings and weekends. Ages two and up, reasonable rates. References available. I love kids and love hanging out with them.

It sounded crap (and contained lies), but, from what I’d read in Abby’s profile, she might go for that kind of thing. Mums probably loved friendly girls who’d play with their kids and had Disney names. I would print it at school tomorrow, just one copy, and then I’d find their address and put it through their letterbox.

On Saturday morning I woke late and scrolled further and further back through Abby’s Insta until I found that, back when Mum was still alive, she had posted a photograph with the caption: I’ll never take this view for granted .

The picture looked as if it had been taken from an upstairs window. There was a distant sea horizon, a leafy tree in the garden, and between the two, I was almost sure, was the park with the cricket pitch. The whole thing was framed by pink curtains.

I was looking at the view from Gus and Abby’s window.

Game on. If they still lived in that house I was coming for them. My visit to Joe was a fluster of plans and possibilities, and I promised to report straight back on Sunday.

Early on Sunday morning I crept out of the house, leaving a note to say I’d gone for a walk to clear my head. I narrowed it down to five houses by walking along the road next to the cricket pitch twice. Then I sat on a bench across the field, wrapped in my warmest coat and scarf, and pretended to play on my phone until I saw actual Gus coming out of number five and setting off for a run.

I tried to get my head round the fact that this man was two years older than Joe, who was a year younger than me, but that at the same time he was approximately twenty-one years older than I was. He was middle-aged. He had lived without his brother for twenty years, which was five years longer than he’d lived with him. I was older now than Joe had ever been, would ever be, and I was moving away from him every second.

Joe should have been thirty-five. The reality hit me properly for the first time. The boy I liked, the boy who was in Year Ten, was thirty-five. That was all kinds of icky.

I rearranged my hair and made a pouty face, while holding up my phone and taking a photo of Gus. It wasn’t a good picture, but it was recognizable.

As soon as he was out of sight I pulled together all my brave atoms and walked up the garden path to number five. I saw one of those red-and-yellow plastic cars that little kids play in, on its side in the gravelly front garden. It looked old. Maybe it had once been Joe’s.

I looked up and saw pink curtains at the upstairs window.

I pushed the flyer through the blue door and walked away fast, trembling. I went home via the supermarket, bought lots of fresh vegetables and cooked a huge soup for Sasha and the baby and me.

Then I realized that I couldn’t meet Joe today, even though I’d promised I would. It was Sunday, and the mall closed at four. I hated knowing that I couldn’t chat to him. I missed him. I hated, most of all, the fact that he would be waiting for me, that the only person he could really talk to wasn’t going to show up.

I sent him silent apologies, and hoped he wouldn’t think I’d abandoned him forever.