DEAD GOOD (18 page)

The room goes quiet.

Leo takes a deep breath. ‘Crikey,’ he says sighing heavily. ‘I didn’t realise I pissed you off quite so much. Maybe I should just get out of your face and get on with my death and not bother you anymore so you can get on with your life, eh?’

I nod heavily. I’m tired. I just want to get a hot water bottle, some Paracetamol and go and curl up in bed.

‘Madeline?’ Mrs Hale touches my hand on the table and lowers her head so that it’s somewhere near mine. Which is still bowed and still feeling like it could roll off and away out of the room at any minute. ‘It’s a gift, my love,’ she says. ‘Truly it is. It might not feel like it right now, but it’s a rare and wonderful thing this talent that you posses. And because you have this ability to see them, and to hear them, then you’re in a very strong position to help them move on to wherever it is they need to be right now…’ her words sound familiar.

They remind me of some of the crap Amber’s been coming out with. All this moving on shite. Why can’t they say something else for a change? Why should these dead people have to move on anyway? Surely if they wanted to move onto somewhere better, greater, wouldn’t they have done it without resorting to assistance from the living? I mean, wouldn’t there have been a guide or something to help them on their journey through the afterlife?

‘Maybe you’re supposed to be my guide, Mads,’ Leo says sounding really hushed for a change. ‘Maybe that’s why you can see us and maybe that’s why you all moved here – it’s part of the plan. And anyway – where does it say that we want to move ON… maybe we’d much prefer to move back IN. Back here. With you lot…living I mean.’

I raise my head now and imagine he’s teasing me and when I look at his face he’ll be all smiley and jokey … but he’s not. When finally I bring my eyes to meet his, I can tell that he’s deadly serious and has an expression I haven’t seen on his face before. His eyes convey absolute desperation and such terrible unhappiness that I start to cry all over again.

Mrs Hale pats my hand and Mum passes me a tissue.

‘I didn’t think he was malevolent,’ she says, taking one for herself too. ‘I mean, you looked so happy to be with each other that night I saw you, remember?’

I nod, and dab. I dab and nod. And then I blow really loudly and snottily and with very little feminine grace. Leo winces but smiles through his revulsion.

‘Nice,’ he says. ‘Very delicate. Not.’

twenty-three

Dad, bless his unemployed soul, is thankfully and speedily sobering up. Mrs Hale has been making him sweet black coffees for the past half hour and Davey is chatting to Leo, a rapt; frankly gobsmacked mother still staring on wild-eyed and quite plainly peed off that she can’t detect even a whiff of his ghostly presence.

It’s just another normal day in the Preston household. If the postman turned up right now he would have to be taken away on a stretcher with smelling salts or something. Any sane person would be a freaking mess after all the crap we’ve had to endure over the past few days. And as we aren’t messes we must be insane because we’re all managing pretty much to hold ourselves together in the face of this adversity of supernatural proportions. If it weren’t so mad it’d be laughable and I’m actually thinking one day I may write about this. It has all the ingredients for a really good story – but it’d have to be labelled ‘fiction’ ‘cause no one would believe this actually happened, would they?

‘Davey ask Leo if he could try moving something again, will you?’ Mum sits with her chin propped up on her hands at the table. She’s been like this for ages. I think she’s waiting for some kind of silvery ghostly mist to materialise in front of her. She hates not being able to see him. Leo rolls his eyes. She’d hate to have seen that. She’d scowl. So I do it for her.

‘Hey!’ I snip as quietly as possible so Mum doesn’t get upset by his irritation. ‘Just cos she can’t see you is no reason to look so bloody miserable about something she asks you to do, ghost-boy!’

Leo looks suitably scolded and smiles an apology. Davey pushes the tomato ketchup pot over to him and widens his eyes.

‘Go on, Leo,’ he says encouragingly.

Leo slides his hand across the table, his fingers almost touching the container and then his hand fizzes through the thing, until it looks like the ketchup bottle is sitting on the top of his hand. He sighs a big fat sigh and flops his head into his other hand theatrically.

‘Nothing,’ I tell her. ‘Precisely nothing. He can’t move it. He’s tried but his hand just goes straight through. Funny though…’

‘What? What’s funny though?’

‘Well when I was in the bathroom earlier… he knocked on the door. I thought it was you, but –‘

‘I did, didn’t I?!’ Leo leaps to his feet. ‘I banged on the door. I wasn’t really thinking about it – I just had the urge to annoy you –,’

‘Yeah so thanks for that,’ I chuck him a dry smile. ‘And it doesn’t take a detective to work out I have you to thank for the choco-pops hair style the other morning!’

He smiles sarcastically back. ‘But it shows I can do it – I just have to –,’

‘-you would have to want to do it from the pit of your belly,’ Mrs Hale interupts Leo as she hands Dad another cup of steaming coffee. He winces as he stares into it’s dark goodness for what must feel like the hundredth time this afternoon.

‘So what are you saying?’ Mum pleads.

‘Leo must have the natural – almost living urge if you like - of wanting to do something before he can do it –,’ Mrs Hale twists her own mug in her hand. ‘The kind of desire that comes from doing something so spontaneous that it’s almost not even thought about. Too much thought can cloud the originality of that idea – poof! and it’s gone. You see?’ She cocks her head as Mum nods knowledgeably. I don’t know whether to nod or not – it all sounds a bit airy-fairy to me, being the sensible girl that I am. Either Mrs Hale watches far too many re-runs of the X-Files or she’s for real. I’m still undecided. But she can definitely see Leo - that’s a given. She’s talked to him and with him and followed his movements around the kitchen and I must say he’s really nice to her as well. So he might have been right when he said she has a good heart. I’m willing to be swayed anyway. And I’m guessing Amber would totally love her.

Another hour later and my throat is getting parched from having to translate everything Leo says to Mum and Dad. It’s exhausting and I don’t see tea being made anywhere, anytime soon either.

‘I take it Leo’s parents don’t know that their deceased family are still residing here?’ she asks… who? Me? Leo? The room?

‘I shouldn’t think so, I certainly haven’t told them. And anyway, I wouldn’t know them from Adam.’ Mum says.

‘They have no idea,’ Leo approaches Mrs Hale for total confirmation. ‘Although I know that Mum used to sit and talk to me and Mia on her own– she never heard our replies though. She just cried into the silence. It’s horrible… even after three years. I hoped she’d kinda move on a bit – even a little bit – but she hasn’t.’

‘Oh God, this is so sad,’ I wail. ‘I don’t think I could bear to see her. I’d want to wrap her in my arms and explain that you’re not so much dead as still virtually living in the house you died in an annoying but enjoying-haunting-me-kinda-way.’

Leo forces a tight smile and continues.

‘Dad still does carpentry work when he gets it - Mum works in an office in town – I don’t know where and I can’t visit her there ‘cause I never went when I was alive. She does help Uncle Vittorio in the restaurant when she can – it takes her mind off of us – and also reminds her too much of us – it’s a bitter-sweet torture for her. I wish I could get through to her. I wish I could go back and do things differently… I wish I hadn’t…’ Leo trails off and covers his eyes with his hands.

I can’t bear seeing anybody suffer. I can’t bear especially seeing a man reduce to tears and so I do the only thing I can under these unnatural circumstances and offer him a Kleenex which he manages to laugh gamely at.

‘Thanks,’ he ignores the tissue and instead swipes his tears away from his face with his misty-manly hands then rubs them on his denimed thighs. My insides perform a hundred different ways of weeping for him. I want badly to hold him and smooth away his hurt. I want to tell him that this will all get better and that it will soon all be over and all the madness will go away and there is a bigger and brighter future to look forward to. But how can you reassure a dead person that things will get better?

I’d forgotten how he can hear everything I think and frankly right now I don’t much mind. So there.

‘Thanks,’ his head nods at me.

‘Perhaps we need to try and find out a bit more about Leo’s parents,’ Mum tries, ‘maybe there’s a connection to them still – apart from the fact their children died, obviously – but maybe there’s something else that’s preventing these people from moving on – from all of them being able to move on?’

Mrs Hale’s eyebrows lift slightly as she listens to Mum’s suggestion and I feel a warm spread of gratitude and love for this wonderful woman I’m lucky to have as a parent. She’s a bit cool, isn’t she? I mean, she’s had to cope with a lot of crap recently, right? Unemployment, poverty, house move, haunted house. it can’t be easy, can it? And all she has as proof that there’re eight of us in this house and not just the four she can see and communicate with – is a slightly angry daughter and a mad old neighbour. Ex neighbour I mean. Actually I mean Penny. She’s alright really.

twenty-four

Mum and Dad stay downstairs to work out with Penny how they’re going to find out about Leo’s parents whilst I run upstairs to get changed out of my school uniform.

A part of me is scared. What happens if we meet Leo’s parents and one of us lets it slip that we’re living with their dead relatives – won’t that make us look like a bunch of crazies? Wouldn’t it just make everything worse – open up old wounds for them and all that stuff? I’m feeling very nervous about this idea. But there really isn’t anything else we can do, is there? I’m running out of ideas anyway – and Amber’s “ideas” thus far have left a great deal to be desired.

No, I decide as I pull on my favourite pair of skinny jeans, this is going to be a positive thing. And my god, but we could all do with a bit of cheering up right now, eh?

Oh - Leo? I asked him to beat it whilst I get changed. Actually, he said I needn’t have asked him - like he’s already said before – he does have a sense of decency about him. He said he was going to hang around downstairs a bit longer to see what everyone said when I wasn’t there. Paranoid? Me? But I must admit I do feel very relieved we now have backup. It’s just strange to imagine backup coming in the shape of Mad old… I mean Mrs Hale and not an army of uniformed officers.

I’m just applying a dab of lipgloss and peering into the bathroom mirror when Leo’s familiar face appears behind me – all vague and ghostly. It doesn’t bother me now. When ‘This’ is all over, I don’t think I’ll be worried about watching another spooky film for as long as I live. I’ve always hated the bathroom mirror sequence – you know, when one of the main characters is doing something so simple and straightforward as brushing their hair or teeth or checking for spots or whatever and then they open the mirrored medicine cabinet door and have a rummage about inside for something and then BAM! The minute they close the cabinet back again there’s some hideous looking creature-person staring wild-eyed and blood-hungry right back at them – behind them in the mirror.

*shiver*.

And the stupid thing is, although I always expect this to happen – I bet it’s called the “Bathroom Mirror Scene” in the world of film making – it still makes me freak when it does happen! Like I’ve said though, I don’t watch too many scary movies. But even some 15’s are scary enough, right? Boo? House of Wax? And I seriously thought Paris Hilton’s death was inspired. No, I did.