Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

“I didn’t ask to come here,” I said. “I mean, here, to this apartment. Today.”

“Oh, I know.” Callum stretched lazily and turned to watch the door where the conversation was going on. Last time, I had taken in the basics about Callum—he was black, he was shorter than Stephen, he was extremely well built, and he wasn’t thrilled about my presence. All of those things remained true today. In the daylight and in slightly less shock, I could take in some more. Like Boo, Callum had an athlete’s build—he wasn’t huge, just well developed in what looked like a very deliberate way. His face was round, with wide, appraising eyes and a mouth that always seemed to be cocked in a half smirk. He had very thick, very straight eyebrows, one of which was sliced through by a scar.

“What’s the thing on your arm?” I asked, pointing at his tattoo. “Is that some kind of monster?”

“It’s a Chelsea lion,” he said patiently. “For the football club.”

“Oh.”

I wasn’t being stupid. It didn’t look like a lion. It looked like a skinny dragon with no wings.

“So how do you like England so far?” he asked.

“It’s kind of weird. You know. Ghosts. Jack the Ripper.”

He nodded.

“Where are you from?” he said. “That accent?”

“Louisiana.”

“Where’s that again?”

“In the South,” I said.

The conversation in the other room had gone down in volume.

“I don’t even know why he bothered,” he said, stretching again. “Boo was always going to win. Better get dressed.”

He got up and went out of the room, leaving me alone. The apartment, I noticed, looked very much like Boo’s part of the room—stuff everywhere. Maybe seeing ghosts made you give up on cleaning. I could see that certain parts of the room were reserved for certain activities. The coffee table was for eating—it was covered in tinfoil takeout dishes and mugs. The table by the window had a computer and lots of files, with boxes full of more files on the floor. The walls around the table were covered in notes. I had a look at them. They all seemed to relate to the Ripper—dates, locations. I recognized some of the names and photographs of suspects from 1888 from the constant news coverage. What was unusual, though, is that there were comments about these people—places of burial, locations of death, home addresses. It looked like Stephen and Callum and Boo had gone to these places and checked them out, adding notes like “uninhabited” or “no evidence of presence.”

I moved away from the wall of notes when I heard someone returning. Stephen and Boo came back in, followed by Callum, who was now wearing jeans.

“Perhaps we should do an hour or two of ghost-spotting,” Stephen said, not sounding very enthusiastic. Boo was beaming and doing some hamstring stretches.

“We should take her underground,” Callum said. “It’s easier there. It’ll take five minutes, tops.”

“Maybe in the train tunnels,” Boo said. “But not on the platforms.”

“I work there. I should know. I saw about fifty once.”

“You never!”

“I did. Not all in one place, but all around one station.”

“Around one station? So in the tunnels, then.”

“ Some of them were in the tunnels. But I’m telling you. Fifty.”

“You’re such a liar,” Boo said with a laugh.

“There’s one hanging around Charing Cross,” Callum said. “I’ve seen her loads of times. Let’s just take her there and get this over with.”

“Fine,” Stephen cut in. “Charing Cross.”

My approval was not needed on the idea.

It was a cool day. The sun was out, and the leaves were just changing. The other three, being English and used to colder weather, wore no coats. I did, and I pulled it tight around me as we walked down the busy streets, past some West End theaters and pubs, around a church and through Trafalgar Square. There were loads of tourists on the square, taking pictures of each other climbing on the huge lions at the base of Nelson’s Column, screaming as legions of pigeons swooped down at their heads. I didn’t really feel like a tourist anymore. I wasn’t sure what I was. I was definitely feeling increasingly self-conscious about being with these three, since I was a clear disruption to the routine and probably an annoyance, but feeling self-conscious was better than feeling crazy. They were ignoring me anyway and having a debate about paperwork.

“So then we fill out a G1 form . . . ,” Stephen was saying.

“What I don’t understand,” Callum replied, “is why we call it G1, since we only have one form. Can’t we just call it the form ?”

“We only have one form now,” Stephen said, not looking up. “We might have other forms in the future. Also, G1 is actually shorter than the form .”

“Here’s a better question,” Callum replied. “Why have a form at all? Who’s going to check? Who’s going to care? No one knows we exist. No one wants to know we exist. We’re not taking people to court.”

“’Cause,” Boo said. “We need a record. We need to know what we did. We need it to train other people to do this job. And ghosts are still people. They were someone. Just because they’re not alive—”

“You know what? I think being alive should be a primary way of figuring out who is and who isn’t a person. I think that should be question number one. Are you alive? If yes, go on to question two. If no, you should not be reading this —”

“Oh, that’s such rubbish. One of my best friends happens to be a dead person.”

“All I’m saying is,” Callum said calmly, “since we can do this any way we want—and how often do you get that chance in life?—why did we choose to do this in a way that involves paperwork?”

“I can make a G2 if you want,” Stephen said magnanimously. “Just for you. Special form for interdepartmental incidents involving both the police and the transport system. We’ll call it Callum’s Form. A Callum 2A could be for the Underground. You’d get a Callum 2B for any incidents on buses. Maybe a Callum 2B-2 is any incident that takes place at a bus shelter.”

“I will kill you, you know.”

“And if you do,” Stephen said with a hint of a smile, “and I come back, I am going to haunt the hell out of you.”

We’d reached the steps of the Charing Cross Underground station, and Stephen turned to me and re-included me in the conversation.

“Here’s what you need to understand,” he said in a slightly lecturing tone. “London is one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities. We’ve had multiple wars, plagues, fires . . . and we keep building on top of old grave sites. Loads of buildings are built on old plague pits. The Tube system alone was responsible for disturbing thousands of graves. As far as we know, most ghosts tend to stay around the places they died, places that had some major significance in their lives, or, occasionally, the place where their body is buried. Their range varies. But the Tube has lots.”

“Lots and lots and lots,” Callum added as we reached the turnstiles.

Callum waved a pass that got him in for free. The rest of us tapped our Oyster cards, and the gates opened to admit us. I followed them to the escalators.

“The thing you have to remember,” Boo said, “is that ghosts are just people. That’s it. They aren’t scary. They aren’t out to get you”—Callum made a strange noise—“they aren’t spooky or weird, and they don’t fly around with sheets on their heads. They are just dead people who’ve gotten stuck here for a bit. They’re usually quite nice, if a little shy. Normally, they’re lonely and they like to talk, if they can.”