Authors: Sam Hayes
‘Yes, see to that as well, will you?’ Nina’s shoulders uncurled and her mouth relaxed from the pursed button it had been since she’d arrived. ‘We’re going to need loads of them. And get me some more fake tears. Thank you, Tess. You’re a huge help.’ Nina hung up. ‘Tess,’ she said, holding up her phone. ‘She’s virtually running things at the moment.’
‘Oh?’ Laura asked. She quietly busied about the kitchen, knowing that asking Nina directly what was wrong wouldn’t provide answers.
‘If we get this film right, the work will come pouring in.’ Distracted, Nina thought ahead – she saw herself taking on more make-up artists, renting premises, hiring Tess full-time. But then the sick feeling returned as she remembered.
‘Shall we go on Afterlife?’ Nat said as they thumped up the stairs with their food. Their plans grew more distant until finally the slam of the door marked Laura and Nina alone.
‘Right, kiddo. Tell me what’s going on.’ Laura dragged out a chair and sat down. She spread her palms face down
on the table. ‘Your turn to dump on me. And before you ask, before you change the subject off yourself as you always do, my marriage is still a disaster zone. Tom didn’t come home two nights ago . . .’ She trailed off when she saw the tear crest Nina’s cheek. ‘Oh, Neen. What’s wrong?’
‘Does . . . does Natalie ever say to you that it’s wrong to tell tales at school? That dobbing someone in, snitching, is bad?’ Nina blew her nose.
Laura thought for a moment then said, ‘I know that Nat would never rat on a friend willingly. Kids who snitch have a pretty hard time at school.’
Nina let out a crazed laugh. ‘And what do you think about that?’
‘I think it’s bad news. Kids should be encouraged to tell if something’s happened. From an early age, there’s this pressure to keep quiet and—’
‘Well, you’re wrong, Laura. Just so you know.’ Nina forced a smile, one that told Laura not to argue the matter. ‘If they want to survive in the playground, then they have to keep quiet.’
Laura shrugged, wondering where this was leading, hoping Josie didn’t have problems at school or, worse, that it was something to do with that Afterlife website again. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you think.’
‘No,’ Nina replied. ‘I don’t think it. I
know
it.’
‘What does this have to do with you looking as if the sky’s fallen in?’ She plucked a tissue from a box and swished it at Nina. ‘I’m not budging until you tell me.’
Nina blew again and attempted a laugh. ‘Nothing.
Really. Wrong time of the month. Pressure at work. Maybe I have a virus.’
Laura was shaking her head. ‘I don’t buy a word of it.’
‘Just leave it, will you?’ Nina snapped. ‘I can handle it.’ And her head dropped to the table with thoughts of quite the opposite spinning inside.
‘What on earth’s wrong, Lexi?’
The girl is shaking and her lips are tinged blue. I coil my arm round her shoulders and guide her towards the fire. ‘Come and sit down. You’re freezing.’
Lexi lowers herself on to the chair. Her bones are thin under my hands, her skin papery and cool to touch. Adam takes off his jacket and drapes it around her shoulders. ‘She shouldn’t even be at school,’ I tell him. ‘Her dad got delayed.’
‘There was a face,’ Lexi whispers, terrified. ‘Staring in at my window.’
‘It was probably just a dream,’ Adam says matter-of-factly. ‘Who would be looking in through an upstairs window?’
I recognise the fear in Lexi’s voice, see it sweep across her in waves. Each time she breathes out, her body quivers.
‘There was a man’s face,’ she says. ‘And I wasn’t dreaming. I hadn’t even gone to sleep.’
‘Not an upstairs window, Adam. Lexi was the last one here so I said she could sleep in a sixth-form room. They get the suites on the ground floor, directly beneath the night
matron’s room.’ My voice has thinned and I’m praying the worst isn’t true. ‘Sylvia and I had stripped all the beds upstairs. As a treat, I let Lexi have a room with its own television and en-suite bathroom. It didn’t seem fair she was stuck at school on her own.’ I’m breaking out in a sweat.
‘I was lying on my bed,’ Lexi says, ‘just reading
Cosmo Girl
and half watching the telly. The curtains were still open. When I looked up, I saw his face. He ducked down as soon as he saw me.’ Lexi cups her face in her hands. ‘Then I screamed all the way up here, miss.’ Another shudder. ‘It was horrible.’
‘Should we call the police?’ Adam asks.
‘No,’ I reply immediately. They both stare at me. ‘It’s probably just an old tramp looking for shelter. Maybe he knows it’s the holidays and he thought the building would be empty.’ I smile, trying to make light of it all.
‘Or maybe it’s an intruder looking to nick a few computers. I think I should call the police to be on the safe side.’
I stand up. ‘Really, you’ll be wasting your time. They’re so busy these days, it’ll be ages before anyone—’
‘Frankie, I don’t think that’s what Lexi wants to hear.’ Adam crouches down in front of the girl. I glance out of the big dining room and sweep a glance around the great hall, half convinced I’ll see someone scuttle past. ‘Can you describe the person you saw, Lexi?’
She shrugs. ‘He was ugly. Kind of old, I think.’
‘What about hair?’ Adam asks.
Lexi shrugs again. ‘Maybe,’ she answers vaguely.
‘I’m going to make you some hot chocolate,’ I tell her.
‘Then you can spend the night with me. I bet all you saw was a reflection of someone on the television, right?’ My words are jagged and clipped, virtually giving Lexi no choice but to agree with me.
‘Probably,’ she says, following me into the kitchen.
‘No more of this nonsense,’ I tell her, as the milk begins to simmer in the pan. ‘There was no intruder.’ After a second or two, after she has seen how serious I am by the lock of our eyes, Lexi nods in agreement.
When the milk has come to the boil, when I have sloshed it on to the chocolate, when I have stirred it so hard it spins over the top of the mug, I march Lexi back through the dining room. We say goodnight to Adam, who says he’ll make sure the fire’s out, and I escort Lexi up to my room. There’s a camp bed beneath my bed and, between us, we haul it out and sheet it up. She sits cross-legged on it and sips her hot chocolate.
Fifteen silent minutes later, punctuated only by her snuffling into her drink, Lexi is hiding from what she saw at the window, curled up like a cat beneath the blankets, locked safe in sleep away from the man’s staring face. When I know there’s no chance she’ll wake, I creep downstairs and go into the sixth-formers’ bedroom.
The television is still on – some talent show with a tuneless singer strutting about the stage. I flick it off. Lexi’s magazine lies on the bed, along with her robe and a wet towel. I cast a glance around. Nothing is out of the ordinary – the curtains are open, as Lexi said. The bed has been lain on, but not slept in. A chocolate bar wrapper brushes my
foot and a hairbrush slides off the sag of the mattress when I sit down.
Only then, when the angle of light is changed, do I notice the distinct handprints on the windowpane. Squinting at the spread-out shapes, I step over to the window, knees bent to keep the view, and hold my own hands up to the print. I know the greasy shapes are on the outside of the window because when I try to rub one of them away, nothing happens. They are a mirror image of my own sweating hands, only larger, more masculine and . . . and . . . I stare hard at what I’m seeing.
The left hand is clearly missing a thumb.
‘An hour?’ It doesn’t make sense.
Adam is leaning over me, dabbing at my head with a ball of wet cotton wool. I swat his hand away. ‘I drank the rest of the wine, made myself some soup, checked the fire had died down enough to leave it safely. I even watched the first part of the news on the staffroom television.’
‘A whole hour?’ I say again. I’m spinning in circles, mind and body.
‘I saw the lights on down the sixth-form corridor. Based on what happened earlier, I thought I ought to check things out. That’s when I found you on the floor. I carried you up to sick bay.’ He does the cotton wool again.
‘Ow!’ I yelp. ‘That hurts.’
‘You should have seen the chest of drawers,’ he says. Then he lightly touches a finger down the maroon scar on my cheek.
‘Don’t,’ I say, flinching.
Adam shrugs and gets back to bathing my new wound. ‘You might be concussed. I should take you to accident and emergency.’
‘I’m fine,’ I tell him.
‘Do you feel sick, dizzy, have a headache?’
‘Nope,’ I lie.
Adam sighs impatiently. ‘If you’re sure,’ he says, already knowing better than to argue with me. ‘Can you remember what happened before you passed out?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I saw handprints on the windowpane. One was missing a thumb. They were probably the prints of the man who frightened—’
‘Do you think you can walk?’ he asks. I nod that I can. ‘Then let’s go and take a look.’
Back in Lexi’s bedroom, I see that the pale blue curtains are now drawn. The bed, the magazine, the television, everything else looks just the same. I pull away from Adam’s guiding arm and snap open the curtains. ‘Right here,’ I say. ‘But you have to crouch to see them.’ I bend my knees. My head throbs. I frown. I don’t understand. ‘They were here before,’ I tell him. ‘Can you see them?’ I glance up at Adam, who is not crouching.
‘Frankie,’ he says soothingly. ‘You had a nasty bump on the head. You had wine.’
‘But the handprints were here before I fainted. A pair of them on the outside of the glass. The left hand was definitely missing a thumb.’ I sway from side to side, angling the light differently in case the prints magically reappear.
‘Maybe when you hit your head you—’
‘No!’ I say. ‘I’m not dreaming this up. Someone must have wiped them off.’ I shiver. ‘Does that mean that whoever stared in at the window came back?’
‘I doubt it.’ Adam’s strong arm is round my shoulder, forcefully pulling me back from the window. ‘You’re tired,’ he says. ‘Let me take you up to your room. See how you feel in the morning.’
I stare up at him. He’s a good six inches taller than me. He’s not going to take no for an answer. His strong hands grip my wrists.
‘I don’t want you falling again,’ he says, guiding me to the door. I don’t argue when he leads me up to my top-floor room. Neither do I argue when he turns his back so that I can change and slip between the sheets. Lexi huffs through irregular snores, and Adam casts a glance at us both before flicking out the light.
‘I’ll leave the door open,’ he says, staring at me, frowning, offering a forced smile that I catch in the half-light.
‘Thank you,’ I say, unsure if I’m grateful for the care he’s shown me or that he could actually be right – that I probably just imagined it all.
Michael was very ill, Miss Maddocks said. Contagious, she told us. Needs to rest, she insisted. Leave him alone, she grumbled, shaking her head as we gathered outside the room where Michael had been sealed off. Every so often, we heard a crash or bang coming from inside.
‘I heard him crying in the night,’ one boy said.
‘Did he puke?’ asked another.
‘Scoot, the lot of you,’ Miss Maddocks said. ‘Before the gremlins come for you, too.’
‘Was it the gremlins that made him sick, Miss Maddocks?’ I held back as the others scattered, knowing I wouldn’t get told off. Betsy clung to my hand, coughing up the nagging tickle that had plagued her for the last couple of days.
Miss Maddocks stared at me, perhaps thinking that at nearly thirteen, I was too old and too smart to be fobbed off with gremlin stories. I was hoping she was going to let me in on an adult secret, be party to the workings of their grown-up minds, finally discover what the night-time goings-on really meant. But she just stared at me, settling her hands on my shoulders. Betsy whimpered at my side.
‘There are some things,’ Miss Maddocks said, ‘that you or I don’t need to know about.’ Close up, she reminded me of a witch. Her breath smelled musty and her wrinkles sagged from her bones. I half expected her to reach for her broomstick and fly away. ‘Best keep your nose out if you don’t want to find out for yourself.’
I pulled Betsy close. Miss Maddocks was scaring me. ‘Find what out?’ I asked.
It was in my nature to discover. I’d been doing it ever since I gave up waiting for my dad to come back. If something was going on, I wanted to know about it. Occasionally I would tell the carers if one of the other kids was being bad – hurting or stealing or breaking. They gave me sweets in return, told me to keep watch for them. They patted my head with a fond palm, nodding approval, giving me the attention I craved.
Other times I would spy on the cooks, see them pick up food from the floor, slap it back on the baking tray. Or I’d sneak around the grounds, watching when the council men came to chop down trees or ride the great big mower around. They didn’t know I’d seen Letitia, the cleaner girl, sneak into a hedge with one of the men, come out all rosy-faced and with a skip in her step when she later circuited the floors with her bucket.
Once, I ventured down the corridor that was most strictly out of bounds – the same place that I’d been taken to years ago and been dazzled by that light. The carers were playing cards, the telly was on loud, most of the other kids were watching a movie. I was bored; it was the holidays. No
school. Nothing to do. I wasn’t naughty – far from it. Just eager to please. Keen to spin a tale or two; keen to be loved. So I went exploring.
Down that corridor, there were many doors. Some were ajar so I peeked inside. The desks, filing cabinets, dying pot plants, old cabinets were dull as ditchwater. Nothing to discover there. I ventured further down the corridor, and jumped out of my skin when a floorboard creaked, froze against the wall when I heard voices, held my breath until they faded away.
I tiptoed deeper into the forbidden zone, reaching out my hand to the knob of a door that appeared locked. But when I wrapped my small fingers round it, twisted it as carefully as I could in case there was someone the other side waiting to pounce, it turned and gave, allowing me to swing it inwards. I held my breath in case it made a noise. When it was six inches clear of the frame, just enough for me to get my face through, I peered inside.