Toby Ibbotson - Mountwood School for Ghosts

But in Markham Street he could sit quietly and watch the big tabby from next door trying to sneak up on an unsuspecting blackbird that was poking about in the flower bed, quite unaware that death was stalking up on it. If he clapped his hands he would startle the bird and save its life, but that would be disturbing the course of nature.

This isn’t the course of nature, though; it’s just unfair, thought Daniel. It wasn’t as though the tabby was a wild animal trying to survive. It was spoiled and overfed and its name was Tompkins, and any minute now Mrs Cranford would come out and call it in for supper.

At that moment Daniel’s mother opened the door behind him and said, ‘It’s time to come in now, Daniel.’

The blackbird flew off in a flurry of dark wings, and Tompkins looked miffed and stalked off.

Daniel sighed deeply and got up to go inside. The best thing about Markham Street was that you could be outside a lot. The houses were all on one side of the street. Opposite them was a strip of grass, and then a wooden fence. Beyond the fence were the grounds of a large building that had once been a brewery and now housed some offices. On the property were tall sycamore and horse chestnut trees. The children of Markham Street weren’t really allowed to be there, but after office hours they often were, kicking balls against the doors of the garages, or looking for conkers. The younger children chalked hopscotch squares right in the middle of the street, and the older ones played football, and when a car did come it drove very slowly and there was plenty of time to get out of the way. Markham Street was a cul-de-sac. At the top of the street was a row of black-painted iron posts, at least a hundred years old, with space between them for people and dogs and bicycles and pushchairs, but not cars. Daniel spent as much time as he possibly could out in the street, or over at some neighbour’s house, usually his best friend Charlotte’s. He liked his own house, and he absolutely loved his mother and his father. But his house contained Great-Aunt Joyce.

There are a lot of great-aunts in the world who are very nice, sending interesting presents at Christmas, and telling stories about what it was like to travel on steam trains and ocean liners and have porters to carry your luggage. Great-Aunt Joyce was not one of those. She was nasty, thoroughly one-hundred-percent horrid. Daniel was grown-up enough to know that nobody is perfect. Some people are a bit greedy, or a bit snobbish, or a bit grumpy. Great-Aunt Joyce was totally greedy and snobbish and grumpy and mean and a lot of other things.

She had come to live with them years ago, when Daniel was very small, because she was in some kind of trouble and had nowhere else to go. Now she was just there, like an incurable disease. She told Daniel off all the time, she complained about everything, she left her used knickers outside her bedroom door for Daniel’s mother to wash and she suffered from varicose veins. That wasn’t her fault. But when she sat in the best chair in the front room she rolled down her stockings, put her feet up on the coffee table and massaged her legs, which was her fault. She made life miserable for Daniel. The most miserable thing was that she was allergic to everything. Not only to dust and pollen, but to everything; this meant that Daniel could never have a pet. Not a dog, not a cat, not a hamster, not a budgerigar. Anything with hair or feathers made her face swell up and her eyes water and brought her out in a rash. That’s what she said, anyway, but Daniel suspected she was just making it up; his mother remembered visiting her as a child, and then she had a cat that used to sit on the sofa and shed hair all over the place.

‘I suppose all her troubles brought it on. That can happen, you know,’ said Mrs Salter.

Daniel had a friend called Mike who lived at number eleven. Mike was often in trouble because he was interested in things. If he saw something interesting on the other side of someone’s fence, he would climb over to take a look, and if it was very interesting he would take it home to look at more closely. Daniel hated to be in trouble, but for Mike it was just something that happened, like rain or grazing your knee. People on the street muttered that his father treated him badly, but he just shrugged his shoulders. Daniel felt a bit sorry for him sometimes, but more often he was jealous. Mike had an aquarium in his bedroom and two or three cages with small animals in them. He had even had a pet jackdaw for a while, which he had found as a fledgling and fed on worms and mince.

‘But Great-Aunt Joyce can’t be allergic to grass snakes,’ Daniel said to his mother one day, after another visit to the pet shop with Mike, who was getting food for his gerbil. ‘Or goldfish. They have aquariums in doctors’ waiting rooms.’

‘Oh, Daniel, you know she has a phobia about snakes. And goldfish food does things to her lungs,’ said his mother. ‘Please don’t make a fuss.’

Daniel tried not to make a fuss, because he knew that his mother suffered almost as much from Great-Aunt Joyce as he did. But he spent a lot of time out of the house, and so did his father, who had an allotment by the railway line at the bottom of the hill where the vegetables were very well looked after indeed, and there was a little shed that had lots of stuff in it that weren’t anything to do with gardening, like books and CDs.

Markham Street was a street of terraced houses, big old houses which had once been homes for quite rich people, so there were lots of rooms on top of each other, and lots of stairs. At the top of the houses were attic rooms that had once been for the servants, and lower down were the big rooms for the doctors and lawyers and businessmen who had owned the houses, and the kitchens were right at the bottom at the back, because making the food wasn’t something well-off people did so people used to have cooks. Food just arrived on the table.

But now things were different, and the big old kitchen was the place where Daniel’s family cooked, and ate, and talked.

‘Broccoli,’ said Great-Aunt Joyce, as Daniel’s mother brought the food to the table. ‘You know I have difficulty with cabbage. Broccoli is no better.’

‘But it’s fresh from the allotment, Aunt Joyce. John brought it in this afternoon.’

‘I’m afraid that makes no difference. I shall probably suffer pangs tonight. You could fill a hot-water bottle for me this evening, and bring me some hot milk. That might ease the pain.’

Daniel ate in silence, as fast as he could.

‘Don’t wolf down your food, Daniel,’ said Great-Aunt Joyce. ‘You are quite spoiling the little appetite I have left.’

Joyce’s appetite was not entirely spoiled. There was rice pudding for afters, and first she said that she could possibly try just a tiny bit, and then she felt she could manage just a tiny bit more. In the end she had three full helpings, and Daniel, who loved rice pudding, hardly got any.

‘Can I leave the table now?’ asked Daniel.

‘Well you can ,’ said Great-Aunt Joyce. ‘The question is whether you may .’ She prided herself on being a bit of a stickler for correct grammar.

‘Off you go, Daniel,’ said his father.

Daniel went up to his room and shut the door. He had an attic room right at the top of the house, with a window that looked out over the street. It was the only place in the whole house which was not a Great-Aunt Joyce danger zone.

Daniel sat on the low windowsill and looked out over the roof slates to the street below. It was getting dark, and soon the street lamps would be lit. To his right he could see down into Mrs Cranford’s well-kept garden, where the delphiniums glowed bright blue in the evening light. On the other side the garden was overgrown, and what had once been a well-tended patch of lawn was full of dandelions and daisies.