The Girl Who Wasn't There (11 page)

Actually, you know something?

Comparing her to a bad smell is kind of fitting when I think about it. And what Kat says is true: she isn't around any more, poisoning the atmosphere.

My life is here at Nightingale School now, and the scents of the cherry blossom trees and the lawn Dad just cut are in the air and filling my senses…

“Want to see what's in the box?”

What?

Slightly flustered, I notice that while Kat is still holding one of my hands in hers, in the other she's grasping a slightly rusty-looking shortbread tin, complete with cutesie Scottie and Westie dogs on the front.

Is that it? I've lugged around the pain of what happened at my last school for all these months and now the conversation is closed, just like that?

No more stressing over the unfairness, the lack of loyalty, the finger-pointing, the shunning.

It can't just vanish because I want it to.

Can it?

Can
it?!

A sudden smile plays at my lips.

What are the rules?

Are
there any rules?

Is there a time limit for my misery, or can I just ditch it now, like a rucksack full of bricks, and walk away?

“Yes,” I say to Kat, staring at the tin box, feeling suddenly floatily light, like someone's turned up the brightness inside this shady summerhouse. “Let's open it.”

“It was in there,” says Kat, nodding back at the bench and the hidden compartment in it.

She prises the reluctant tin lid open with a creaky pop, and we see a collection of faded pieces of paper.

Top Ten Singles – 1987
says one that seems to be torn out of a magazine. A list of songs and artists is underneath the heading, but I'm too curious to see what else is in the box to read any more.

“Take a look at all this…” says Kat, passing me the sort of small plastic comb you wear in your hair when it's piled up. “Isn't it great?”

I nod, examining a glass pot of iridescent blue eyeshadow; a pair of lacy, fingerless gloves; a snipped-out picture of a younger version of that old pop star Madonna. Just the sort of stuff my teenage mum and her friends would've been into, back in the eighties.

“It's like a time capsule!” I gasp, spreading out the bits and bobs on the bench next to me. “And look at this – it's a postcard addressed to someone called Lindsey Butterfield. She must've been the old site manager's daughter!”

I'm not sure if Kat is paying any attention to what I'm saying.

She's too busy with what looks like a school photo.

While she stares down at the image of the students, I gently pull the photo up, so I can read the writing I've just spotted on the back.

Names – scribbled names of girls.

Girls' names like Lindsey.

Other names in a row like Joanne, Laura, Sharon and Anne.

Names that aren't so common now, and that's no surprise, since at the top it says
Class 8G, 1987
.

My eyes scan the bottom row of names.

Pamela, Jenny, Suzanne and Katherine…

Kat makes a sound like a little whimper, and I glance up at her.

Uh-oh: she really doesn't look well, and I've forgotten to ask what was wrong with her today.

“Hey, are you feeling OK?”

I might have asked the question, but I don't think I'll hear Kat's answer, even if she gets around to saying it.

'Cause she's flipping the photo around for me to see.

A photo of smiling, cheery girls in navy uniforms, posed in descending rows outside the stern façade of Nightingale School.

Girls with hairstyles that are large and puffy, girls who are wearing just a
little
too much make-up, since that was the fashion in the 1980s.

And in the front row, to the left, there's a face that's somehow familiar – or maybe it's the bow in the hair that does it.

The girl's face is friendly, the smile warm, the lipgloss shimmery.

Her expression is full of life … which makes it all the more shocking to see the circle of black pen around her head, and the letters
R.I.P. x
beside it.

I flip the photo over, my eyes scanning the names, working out which girl this is.

And there it is. The matching name.

I flip the photo back and forth a few times, just to make sure that what my eyes are telling me, what I realize my instincts are
screaming
at me, is right.

“Katherine,” I say out loud, looking directly at the girl kneeling in front of me.

The girl who looks exactly like the person in the picture.

“Hello,” she says nervously, biting her sheeny-shiny lip…

 

“You're dead.”

It's not the nicest thing you can say to a friend, but I can't think of any other way to phrase it right now.

“Mmm.” Kat nods, biting her nails, watching me, trying to gauge how I'm going to react.

Actually, I think I might faint.

But then again, I think I may throw up before that.

Kat suddenly sees I'm struggling with this new, shocking situation and touches me gently on the knee. That soft touch does something strange but wonderful … it's as if the finest, flimsiest puffs of cooling air brush the whole of my skin, and my temperature – and anxiety levels – come down a notch or two, taking me below the point of fainting and throwing up, below the point of my heart beating out of my chest in panic, below
normal
even, to long-distance swimmer calm.

Kat … somehow
Kat's
making this happen, I know it.

But at the same time, she's growing paler, the dark circles more obvious under her eyes, the pink-brown blusher sitting on her cheeks like the paint on the face of an antique porcelain doll.

And now her huge blue mascara-fringed eyes are staring up into mine, as if she's begging me to be all right with … with whatever this is.

I know she's waiting nervously for me to say something.

And despite my sudden slow and relaxed heartbeat, I have
so
many questions ramming and crashing around in my head that I'm finding it hard to figure out which one to ask first.

I think I just have to open my mouth and take a chance with whatever comes out.

“What?” I end up saying, pretty stupidly.

“Huh?” Kat frowns.

I guess dead-girl ghosts have many, varied and
amazing
powers which I can barely guess at, but perhaps trying to figure out quite what I'm on about with that one useless word is optimistic, really.

“I mean … what
are
you?” I stumble. “Are you an actual, real-life ghost?”

OK, that sounds dumb too.

But Kat has seemed really, really
real
to me since I first met her, since she linked her flesh-and-bone arm in mine that lunchtime in the hall, last Tuesday.

“I can feel alive,
seem
totally alive whenever I want to, if I concentrate,” she tells me now, looking half-dead, she's so very, very pale all of a sudden. “I just can't do it too often, 'cause it takes all of my energy, and it can take me a long time to get back.”

“But … what does that
mean
?” I beg her, desperate to understand. “Get back from where?”

Wherever it is, I'm guessing it's where she's been today.

“Nowhere,” she shrugs. “I just feel exhausted and it's like I fade away to … well, nothing. Then I start to feel stronger, and I'm back, hovering around the school again.”

“How does that work? How do you explain why you're there one day and not another?”

“It's not like that, Maisie. I've chosen to appear real to you and your family,” says Kat, her eyes getting bigger and more earnest as her skin grows whiter. “But the girls and the teachers at school don't really see me – not properly, anyway.”

“So … so you're
not
in class 8G?” I ask, still battling to sort my millions of questions into some sort of sensible order.

“Well, I
was
, back in 1987. Now, I just drift in and out of the crowds in the corridors. Sometimes a person will sense me. A girl maybe shivers when I pass, or sees the shift of where I've been.”

“The shift?” I repeat, though my brain is busy trying to compute the fact that neither Mrs Gupta or Patience actually saw Kat in the library that lunchtime last week – and there I was, thinking they were just ignoring her.

“You know how sometimes think you see a movement out of the corner of your eye, but then you look and nothing's there?” says Kat.

“Yeah, sort of,” I say with a nod.

“Well, that's the shift.”

“Right,” I reply, feeling a ripple of goosebumps on my arms. “So when you get that feeling, it usually
is
something?”

Kat tilts her head to one side and smiles at me. “Yes, it usually is,” she laughs ruefully.

I guess that makes sense. Well, as much sense as having a dead best friend
can
make sense.

Then a specific question urgently shuffles to the front of the queue, demanding to be asked.

“What … what happened to you, Kat?”

I hold up the photo, pointing to her image, to the
R.I.P. x
beside the circle of black felt pen ringed around her face, in that happy row of long-ago girls.

“I don't know,” says Kat, blinking up at me. “All these years I've had these jumbled flashes and glimpses of what my life was like. But I've never seen anything about my death. And I
have
to know, Maisie, or I'll just go on and on like this for ever…”

At that moment,
another
specific question shuffles to the front of the queue in my overheating head.

“You think
I
can help?” I ask, the truth dawning on me.

“Yes!” Kat says, nodding enthusiastically. “As soon as I saw you I felt
so
sure you could.”

“But why?”

“Well, that's a stupid question!” Kat laughs now, sounding like any normal, non-dead teenage girl. “I knew you had to be special. You were looking
straight at me
. You were the first person ever who could really, clearly see me!”

“On Tuesday, in the dinner hall, you mean?” I say, visualizing all the girls gathered around me, telling me about the Victorian ghost. Kat came to talk to me as the huddle of girls broke up at the sound of the bell.

“No … it was
before
that,” Kat surprises me by saying.

“Before?”

“Yeah, it was when I knew that
you
saw
me
,” she grins. “It was when you looked out of your bedroom window for the first time. Remember?”

How could I forget?

She's talking about the Saturday before last.

The day we moved in.

The art room window.

Of course; in the muddle of my mind I suddenly get what's blindingly obvious: there
is
no Victorian ghost.

There is no Victorian ghost, because the only ghost is Kat.

The long-dead, century-old schoolgirl … it's just been a fairy story all along, a myth that's drifted like a Mexican wave through year upon year of students here at Nightingale School. Students who sensed, saw or felt Kat's presence over the decades and imagined and explained her away as some sort of fictional, floating spirit, a ghostly character that wouldn't look out of place in a Charles Dickens novel…

So the shape I saw at the art room window, the shape Dad explained away as sunlight hitting the window; a reflection of a cloud or a plane; the outline of a twirling junk sculpture (the vision of “dead” Mr Butterfield, if you were listening to Clem), all along it was this not-so-ordinary girl crouched in front of me now.

“Kat, when me and my dad came to look around the school that Saturday afternoon … was it
you
making the junk sculpture twirl when we were leaving the art room?” I ask.

“Er, yes,” Kat says apologetically. “I was just trying to get your attention.”

Get my attention? At the time it got me shivering up and down my back, wondering if I was going a tiny bit mad.

“And then last Monday – it was
you
waving back to me from the window?” I check, knowing even without asking that it was no cleaner or Miss Carrera that day. (I think I knew already.)

“Uh-huh.”

And Miss Carrera on Wednesday lunchtime; she saw only
me
coming in for Art Club, didn't she? Same as the rest of the girls there saw only
me
burst out laughing on my own, while I'd thought I was goofing around with my friend. My friend who wasn't there.

“On Thursday … was that
you
opening the window and stepping out on to the terrace?” I ask, thinking of Dad grabbing the flyaway white art apron belonging to Miss Carrera.

“I
think
so,” says Kat, frowning now, looking unsure, looking like her skin is becoming semi-transparent (the veins in her forehead are very, very visible; very, very blue).

“Why do you only
think
so?” I push her.

“I don't understand it all, Maisie. Sometimes I can control what's happening to me, and sometimes everything is …
hazy
and hard to remember,” says Kat, her big blue eyes darting to one side and the other as she struggles to explain herself. “Same as I don't understand what happened to me when I … when I stopped living. I just know I
have
to find out – and I can't do it on my own.”

“You don't have to do it on your own,” I tell Kat, covering her hand with mine. “I'll help. Of course I'll help.”

“Thank you, Maisie!” she says, smiling gratefully at me. “Thank you
so
much!”

I don't know if Kat is going blurry because I'm crying now, or if she's just going blurry.

“So what's your
actual
name, Kat?” I ask, sniffing, blinking the sudden, salty tears from my eyes, keen to be properly introduced to my very special friend.

“Katherine Mary Jessop,” she answers me, letting her gaze fall on the school photo that's now on my lap.

“And you were friends with Lindsey Butterfield, who lived here?”

“I
think
so,” says Kat unsurely, her touch feeling lighter, her image fading in and out, like a malfunctioning projection.

I have a sudden memory of the other night, of hearing girls' laughter in Clem's empty, silent room.

One of the voices was Kat's, I now feel certain.

She knew this house.

She knew it way back in the 1980s, when Lindsey Butterfield lived here.

“Don't worry, we'll figure this out,” I whisper, bending closer to her so that our two foreheads – one cold, one hot to the touch – press lightly together.

And in that still, lovely moment of wonder, I remember another page from the notebook, some words doodled in Mum's comforting handwriting:
Treasure your old friends, and be open to making new ones!

Well, I am more freaked out than I have ever been, but – seeing as I have no old friends – I'm definitely planning on treasuring this new one, however strange she is.
Especially
if she needs my help.

“Ahem.”

The “ahem” comes from a couple of metres away.

It comes from my big sister, standing on the back doorstep, staring at me.

“What?” I say sharply, heart thumping, automatically straightening up.

“Why were you hunched over like that just now, like you were constipated or something?” she calls out coolly, cattily.

I blink, and see that I'm holding hands with no one, whispering comforting words to thin air.

“None of your business,” I bark back at Clem.

“Ooo-OOO-ooo!
Someone's
touchy!” my sister teases. “I only came to tell you Dad's back. He asked me to ask you if your friend wanted to stay for tea. But I guess there's no point, if she's left already.”

Kat.

Katherine Mary Jessop.

Yes, she
has
left.

In some ways, she left in 1987.

But in some ways, as I've found out to my complete and utter, slap-in-the-face shock, she's never left at all…