Diana Jones - The Time of the Ghost

Ha-ha to you! Sally said angrily, speeding past. I can’t help it!

Of course, she thought – it was as if embarrassment had churned up new ideas – this was probably only a dream. But just in case it was real, Mother and Himself would know what to do. Mother had really, very nearly, seen her by the green door. She need only wait until school was over for the day and they would be able to tell her what had happened. Probably everybody knows except me , Sally said, with the pricking of not-real tears in her nonexistent eyes. I’m always left out of things.

Almost at that moment, school was over for the afternoon. Sally found herself mixed, tumbled and swept back again, in a running grey crowd of boys. She was surrounded by laughing – “Did you listen to what Triggs said to Masham in Geography?” – and arguing – “No it isn’t! They have four-wheel drive!” – jeering – “Don’t give up, Peters! Just hit me and see what you get!” – and wordless fighting. BANG.

Ow! said Sally. I felt that!

It was very curious. She began to wonder if she had some kind of body after all. She had definitely been caught just then, between somebody’s fist and somebody else’s body. And it was as difficult to go forward against the crowd as it would have been in the ordinary way. Though Sally pushed and shoved, and expected with every push that she would go right through one of the chattering, running boys, she found that this was one thing she could not do. Each boy seemed to have, around his solid body, a warm elastic quivering field of life, which held Sally off. It was as thin as tissue paper, but it was there. Sally could feel it crackling faintly, every time she bumped against a boy.

That’s peculiar , she said. I wonder if all living things are like this. I must remember to try walking through a hen sometime. Oliver would have made a bigger target, but the idea of walking through Oliver was too alarming.

While Sally said this, the crowd of boys surged off past her and left her on her own, feeling strange and shaken. It was like being breathless – except that she had no breath to start with. She went on, round into the school garden beside the lime trees. More boys were coming out from under the lime trees and wandering about there. Sally hovered above the trampled earth, watching them. It was strange how few of them walked like human beings should. They went shambling, or knock-kneed, or with one shoulder up and the other down, and it almost seemed they did it deliberately. One boy was going up and down a space twenty feet long, walking with his toes digging into the earthy lawn and his knees giving gently. His jaw was hanging and he was muttering to himself. Every few steps, one of his knees bent sharply, as if he had no control over it.

“Ministry of Silly Walks,” Sally heard him mutter. “Ministry of Silly Walks.” It was Howard, the boy whose splinters were not catching.

Near him, another boy with gingery hair was going about with one arm bent like a cripple’s and jerking about. At each step he made a different hideous face. “Quiet, please, gentlemen!” he muttered from his contorted mouth. This one was Ned Jenkins, Sally remembered, and she did not think there was anything wrong with his arm usually.

Honestly! You’d think they were all mad, to look at them! she said wonderingly. She could not believe boys usually behaved like this. The boys at this school were clean-limbed young Englishmen. Yet, as she watched the stumbling, muttering, jerking figures, she knew that they often did this – or something equally peculiar. Cart had once told her that all boys were mad. Sally had protested at the time, but she now thought Cart was right. And she went on watching, trying to fix all of their bizarre antics in her strange, nebulous mind, hoping that something – anything – might give her a clue to how she came to be like this. Because I can’t stay like this for the rest of my life , she said. I shall go as mad as Jenkins.

Panic began bulging again. The idea hovered – just behind the name Jenkins – that it was nonsense to say the rest of my life. It was quite possible Sally was a ghost, and her life was over already. Sally fought to keep this idea behind Jenkins’ name, safely hidden, and the idea fought to come out. In the battle, Sally herself was tumbled off again, through the thick hedge, back into the orchard where the hens fled cackling, and then whirled towards the house. There she stopped, hanging stiffly against the branches of the last apple tree. A new idea had been let out in the fight.

Suppose , Sally said, I left a letter – or made a note – or keep a diary.

The notion was a magnificent relief. Somewhere there would be a few lines of writing which explained everything. Sally did not quite see herself doing anything so methodical as keeping a diary, but, right at the back of her transparent, swirling mind, she found a dim, dim notion that she might have written a letter. Alongside this notion was a fainter one: if there was a letter, it was to do with the Plan Fenella had talked about.

The house quivered with Sally’s excitement as she whirled inside it.

In the kitchen, Cart was actually doing the washing-up. She was standing at the sink with her heavy feet planted at a suffering angle, slowly clattering thick white cups. Her face had a large expression of righteous misery.

“Penance,” Cart said, as Sally hovered by the kitchen table, wondering where to look for a letter. “Utter boredom. I do think the rest of you might help sometimes.”

Now you know how I feel , Sally said. I always do it. Letters were more likely to be in the sitting room. She was on her way there when she realised that the only other being in the kitchen was Oliver. Oliver was asleep in his favourite place – vastly heaped in the middle of the floor – with three feet stretched out and the fourth – the one with only three toes – laid alongside his boar’s muzzle. Oliver was snoring like a small motorbike, jerking and twitching all over. That means Cart was speaking to me! Sally said, and hovered to a halt in the doorway. Cart? she said.

Cart plunged a pile of thick plates under the water and broke into a song. “I leaned my back up against an oak, thinking he was a trusty tree—” It sounded as if there was a cow in the kitchen, in considerable pain.

CART! said Sally.

“First he bended and then he broke!” howled Cart. Oliver began to stir.

Sally realised it was no good and went on into the sitting room, just as Fenella shut its door to keep out the sound of Cart singing. She brushed right by Fenella, feeling again the tingle of the field of life round a human body. But Fenella seemed to feel nothing. She turned away from Sally and went to crouch like a gnome in an old armchair. Imogen was still lying on the sofa. The room was hot and fuggy and dusty.

You both ought to go outside , Sally said disgustedly. Or at least open a window.

There was a desk and a coffee table and a bookcase in the room, each covered and crowded with papers. There were rings from coffee cups on all the papers, and dust on top of that. Sally could tell simply by hovering near that it was several months since any of the papers had been moved. That meant there was no point looking at them. The notion was very firm – though dim – in Sally’s mind that, if there was a letter, it had not been written very long ago. She went over to try the papers on the piano.

It was the same story there. Dust lay, even and undisturbed, over each magazine and each old letter, and only slightly less thickly over a school report. This last term’s, Sally saw from the date. “Name of pupil: Imogen Melford.” A for English – A for almost everything except Maths. Imogen was disgustingly brilliant, Sally thought resentfully. A for Art too, which made a change. Only B for Music – which made a change also, a surprising one, considering Imogen’s career. Underneath: “An excellent term’s work. Imogen has worked well but still seems acutely unhappy. I would be grateful for an opportunity to discuss Imogen’s future with Imogen’s parents. B.A. Form Mistress.”