Phil Rickman - The Smile of a Ghost

‘Who?’

‘Marion,’ Sam said.

Sandy leaned in, whispered, ‘This is what’s been happening. Be careful.’

Sam looked down at Lol. It was getting quite dark in here now. Her face was white.

‘Tell me about Robbie and Marion,’ Lol said.

Sam sat on the ledge, under the window.

‘We met up one Saturday. After Christmas.’

‘You and Robbie?’

‘He just wanted to come here again. Walk round the town and stuff and then come here. I mean, I liked him, but I couldn’t… I felt…’

‘Did he call you Marion then? While you were with him?’

‘Went home.’

‘You were feeling… bit suffocated?’

‘And then he kept sending me all this stuff from the Net. Pictures that took ages to download. It got… ’Cos this was when she was…’

‘Who was? Jemmie?’

Sam sniffed. ‘Giving me all this grief. How she was going to take an overdose. How she was going to dope herself up and jump in the river. Rings up at night and texting and stuff. I had to switch my phone off, said I’d lost it. And like every time I switched on the computer there’d be like nineteen e-mails and a pile of attachments and stuff.’

‘From Robbie?’

‘Yeah.’ Sam started to cry again. Steve Britton ducked under a low doorway and came in and straightened up, shaking his head – Sandy Gee waving at him to keep quiet.

‘And he’s, like, making plans for the Easter holidays,’ Sam said. ‘How I can get there on the train and what we’ll do, and she’s like, Oh, I’m really depressed, you’re the only friend I’ve ever had, and why don’t we go away together?’

‘That must’ve been… difficult.’

‘Up all night some nights, on the computer. Dear Sam. Dear Marion. It just…’

‘You didn’t tell anybody?’

‘Nnn. I was really tired this night, and I sent Robbie one back, and I’m like, please stop sending me stuff, OK, and no I can’t come to Ludlow at Easter ’cos we’re going to France, and like… I could’ve been nicer about it, you know?’

‘But you were overtired, right?’ Sandy said.

‘Read it back next day, and I thought, like, what’ve I done? So I e-mailed him back and I said I was really, really sorry and how I’d been really tired and I had a headache. But he never replied.’

‘When was this?’ Lol asked.

The kid’s face was moon-pale. ‘Two weeks before he died.’

‘There was no connection,’ Lol said. ‘You’ve got to understand that.’

‘He killed himself!’ Sam breathed in, like a hollow shudder. ‘They said it was an accident, but I knew it wasn’t. He kept writing to me that he could feel her… me… her… with him. He used to come here at weekends, and he said he could… And I was really like—’

‘Sam…’ Lol moved to the foot of the scaffolding, held on to the bars so she could see his hands, know he wasn’t trying anything. ‘What happened after he died?’

She was a long time in replying. Somebody, thank God, had managed to stop the choir. Through the ground-floor window, half-barred, you could see the river, silver and black.

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Sam said. ‘I had these nightmares. There was this one where I switched on the computer and there were all these e-mails and they all said, Dear Marion, and I’d be like scrolling up and scrolling up, and they’d just like go on for ever. Dear Marion, dear Marion, dear—’

She made a noise like a yawn that pitched up into a kind of squeak of distress.

‘Let me get you some hot chocolate,’ Sandy said.

‘Noooo!’

‘All right… it’s OK.’

‘What happened then?’ Lol said.

It was clear that Steve Britton hadn’t found Merrily. Where was she? This was becoming—

‘Told my friend,’ Sam said. ‘At school. Her name’s Bex. I thought she was my friend. I told her – like in confidence, you know? – and she’s like, Wow, this Marion’s ghost’s taken him. And she went and told these other kids, and then everybody’s like, Oh, you killed Robbie Walsh, you killed Robbie Walsh. You’re like a witch, or something.’

Sandy Gee sighed.

‘So I’m getting all this grief at school and I don’t want to go, and I’m faking being ill and stuff, and I’m getting into rows at home, ’cos my mum and dad, they think I’m going to be like a brain surgeon or something.’

Lol glanced at Sandy: We’ve managed to find the parents now… insists she doesn’t want to see them .

‘And then I saw Jemmie Pegler in Ledbury, and she’s telling me how she’s found all these suicide websites about how to kill yourself with a plastic bag and stuff. Copied one of them over.’

‘She copied the suicide site to you?’

‘And like I was sure she’d heard about me and Robbie Walsh and she was just being cruel – ’cos she was like that, you know? And I was like really angry, and I just started sending her all this stuff Robbie had sent me, about Marion and the Hanging Tower and I’m like, why don’t you like try this instead of a poxy plastic bag, and…’

‘Take it easy, Sam,’ Sandy said. ‘This is very important, what you’re telling us.’

‘So she starts phoning me at home on the main phone, and I keep pretending I’m not there, and then somebody tells me at school, like do you know Jemmie’s got a syringe and she’s shooting up, and I thought, like, she’d just told them to tell me that so I’d feel sorry for her again. And then she e-mails and says will you come to Ludlow with me and we’ll throw ourselves off the tower – like together – and become free of our bodies.’

‘What did she mean?’

‘I don’t know. It was all this stuff she’d had off the Net – like somebody got hold of the Robbie story and they’ve twisted it all around. And I couldn’t take any more, and it was late at night, and I sent back, yeah, yeah, we’ll go tomorrow.’

‘Oh God,’ Sandy murmured.

‘And she bloody did. She went. She came here, and I didn’t, and she threw herself—’

Sam let out a wail of despair and spun herself back at the window space, Sandy Gee shouting, ‘Sam!’ but grabbing Lol’s arm as he made a move towards the scaffolding.

He could hear Sam vomiting out of the death-fall window, and then she slumped back down, squatting under the window with her head in her hands.

Sandy hissed, ‘Now, will you do something?’

‘No Merrily?’

‘No sign at all. They’re still looking. You’ll have to do something.’

‘Sandy, listen—’

‘No, you listen to me…’ Sandy pulled him through a doorway he hadn’t noticed, into a chamber the size of a lavatory, steps going up, sealed off with masonry. ‘There was an incident earlier on when we nearly lost her. When she thought Jemmie Pegler was hovering on the other side of the window… as if she’d come rising up again from where she’d fallen – that even spooked me, I can tell you. And it’s what she’s been seeing in dreams, Martin, night after night, and now she’s afraid to go to sleep and she’s keeping herself awake all night. Look at her – she’s overtired, overwrought. We’ll have to bring lamps in soon, or she’ll use the darkness to… Twice she’s started talking to somebody who isn’t there.’

‘What did Nigel Saltash say about that?’

‘He talked about hallucinations and psychological projections. He said there are— Look, it doesn’t matter what he—’

‘Drugs he could give her to sort it out?’

‘Yeah, more or less. We sometimes assume if someone’s a highly qualified psychiatrist they’re also experienced in counselling, and if he’d talked to me the patronizing way he talked to her I’d have jumped two hours ago. I’m not trying to discredit what he does, all I’m saying is, if she’s hallucinating Jemmie Pegler and her fat-girl talk, leave our bodies behind—’