Ghosted, page 20
I arrive at half past nine and spot the ghost quickly among the cluster of annoyed passengers. At least I assume the man sitting cross-legged at the end of the platform with his eyes closed is the ghost.
I picture the blue of the sky. There it is: a glow all around him. I’d expected someone who looked a bit crusty from the way Lara described him. In my head he was a Swampy type. This man, however, is wearing a suit. He’s about thirty-five, of Asian appearance, and supremely calm, and he has the glow of the undead. I don’t like to approach him in case I scare him, so I just sit down cross-legged at a distance and wait for him to notice me. I can hear him humming.
‘Hi,’ I say, after waiting a few minutes. I don’t have all day after all.
His eyes snap open. ‘Hey,’ he says.
‘I’m Joe.’ Did Lara tell me his name? I can’t remember.
He jumps up. ‘Oh, what a treat. A new one. How did you find me?’ He holds out a hand and pulls me up.
‘Lara,’ I say. ‘I met her on the train to London.’
He puts out his hand. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Joe. I’m Bodmin Leo.’
‘Bodmin Leo?’
‘That’s how I style myself, so everyone can remember where to find me. It’s not always easy to hold things in our heads, is it? I wait around this station every day because I like to be the hub for the Devon and Cornwall chapter. They can come and see me any time they like. I’ve been doing this for … well, time loses significance, doesn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’ I think about what he said. ‘The Devon and Cornwall chapter? How many of us are there? And are we all from March the eleventh 1999?’
‘We are, Joe, and that means there are very few of us, I’m afraid. Though one more today! Joy. So our chapter is, as you said, people who are glitching on the same day. I wish we could be more expansive than that, but sadly we can’t. There are three of us I’ve met in Cornwall, and a further four, now that you’re here, have visited from Devon, including the lovely Lara. They don’t come to see me as often as I’d like. Tell me your story.’
He jumps up. ‘Let’s walk into the woods. I don’t want you being picked up and taken back to, I’m guessing, school?’
I follow him out of the station, through a car park and on to a stony path.
‘There’s a stately home this way,’ he says, pointing. ‘Lanhydrock House. Victorian. I worked there and I still go to the cafe from time to time. Just for the heck of it. Not today. Today, I think, we’ll go to the den.’
This gives me a little pang of worry. Should I really be following a (very) strange and dead man into his den? On the day I know I get murdered? Is there any way that Leo could be the one who kills me? He surely can’t be because we were both dead long before we met. However, everything is crazy and nothing makes sense.
I overcome it all and follow him along the path.
His den is a tree house accessed by a hidden muddy track. He swings up into it and so I follow. I calculate that I could push him out if he started attacking me. He perches on a flat branch and indicates for me to sit opposite him.
‘So we’re glitching?’ I say straight away.
‘We are,’ he says. ‘Straight to business! I like it. Yes. I call it glitching. My theory is that it’s because time and space are entirely different from everything they tell you at school, and nothing is real. I think the world is computer-generated, or someone’s plaything. Whatever it is, there’s something wrong with the program and one day it’ll be fixed. Or it might be to do with the upcoming millennium. The numbers changing. Everything going wrong before that happens. Though the numbers are artificial, aren’t they? Just a form of order that humans have attempted to impose on time. Which lends credibility to the simulation theory. So, what’s with you, Joe?’
I tell him my story as briefly as I can, but when I get to Ariel he nearly falls out of the tree.
‘Say that again,’ he says, pointing at me.
‘I meet a girl from 2019 every day. She’s trying to solve what happens to me. She’s met my family in her world. My brother and his family. My dad.’
‘Is this true, Joe?’ he says, looking at me in a condescending way. ‘Or do you think you’ve concocted it to comfort yourself?’
‘It’s true!’ I’m annoyed by that. ‘I can tell you what 2019 is like.’
‘Yeah, but you could say anything because I can’t check.’ Leo looks at me suspiciously. ‘I’ve never known anyone meet someone from the future. If this is real could you bring her here? If.’
‘Dunno. If she wants to we could try. It would have to be a Saturday because she has school. It’s Saturday for her tomorrow, but she’s going to London to look up the guy who we think might have killed me.’
We stay in the tree for a while, but I soon realize that just because someone is a ghost like you, you don’t have to become instant friends. Leo is spiky and seems put out by the fact that I have more to tell him than he has to tell me. I don’t bond with him like I did with Lara. His glitch theory is just that: a very thin theory. We swap last-day stories: he assumes that he’s going to die on a train or be pushed under one, but his day fades out just before he reaches the station.
‘Want me to get Ariel to look you up?’ I say because it seems only polite. ‘She did it for Lara and found her granddaughter.’
‘Yes! Thank you! Leo Chatterjee. I live in Par and I worked in conservation up at Lanhydrock. I always took the train here and walked up – it’s about half an hour and beautiful. I never bother to go to work any more, since I figured this out. I just wait around the station or walk in the woods. I call in sick first thing. But when I used to live the day normally I’d come here on the train and go to work, and then I’d be heading back to catch the train home, and then, no matter what I’ve been doing, at five forty it all stops. And I wake up again back in my bed at home. Get her to look me up and come back and tell me! Promise?’
I find I like him more. We have to take our allies where we find them.
Leo’s eyes are wild. I wonder what happened to him. It seems unlikely to me that someone pushed him under a train. It would be hard to do that at a station, where the trains move really slowly. A level crossing would be better. A bridge.
I shake myself. That’s not a good way to think.
We mess around in the forest for a bit. I find myself building a fort out of branches, and then sitting inside it. Leo’s nervous energy is infectious. By the time I catch the train back to Exeter I’m feeling quite different. I kind of like him. I like what he does.
‘I’ll come back soon,’ I tell him.
‘Please do.’ For a moment he looks desperate, and I see that everything else he does is to hold that at bay. ‘Please. Don’t give me hope and then never come back. Please don’t. Get her to look me up. If she’s real. Leo Chatterjee. Double “e” on the end.’
33
We found two seats facing forward as Izzy got travel-sick otherwise, and settled in. I’d brought a sensible packed lunch at Sasha’s insistence, even though she thought we were just going to Exeter for the day. Izzy, on the other hand, had a tote bag filled with crisps, sweets and cans of drink. She got it all out on the flip-down table in front of her, even though it was nine in the morning, opened a Twix and handed me one finger.
‘Go on then,’ I said through a mouthful of chocolate. ‘Tell.’
I was relieved to see that it was going to be something good. She was glowing. She turned towards me, bit off some biscuit from the bottom of the Twix and grinned. She was wearing a pink cardigan over a white T-shirt. She looked adorable.
‘I met someone,’ she said.
‘Seriously? Who?’
Izzy had never had a boyfriend. We’d talked about boys, and plenty of them had asked her out over the years, but she’d always said no. She told me that her standards were too high, and I knew that my dramas had distracted me from asking more.
She was so happy that I wanted to bottle it and make it into a perfume, to be used any time you needed to have a brilliant day. There was something else too, though. Underneath it all she was nervous.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘You ready for this?’
For a wild moment I thought that she, too, might have fallen for a ghost.
‘Yep! Tell me!’
‘It’s someone I met online. We chatted for ages and I’ve met them in real life now too and I’m really happy. I’m so happy, Ariel. I know it’s really early days and I’m trying so, so hard to play it cool, but I’ve never felt like this. Finally …’
‘Finally you’ve met someone who meets your high standards?’
‘Exactly. Finally I have.’
I began to realize.
‘Why are you saying they?’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘Because I was a little bit too shy to say she,’ she said through a mouthful of Twix. She looked away and then her eyes darted back to me. I hugged her.
Izzy’s new love interest was called Tally, and we talked about her for ages. She was seventeen and had lovely thick black hair. They’d met online and clicked straight away. While I’d been looking after Zara and Coco they’d been on their first date. They went for tea and cake and then a movie, and Izzy was buzzing and wild with joy.
‘It’s not just her,’ she said as the train left Devon. ‘Although it is her. It’s very much her. And it’s everything. It’s having the confidence to be myself at last. I tried so hard to like boys because I thought it would be easier, you know?’
I realized that I wasn’t surprised, that it made perfect sense. I was so happy for her.
I was also a bit sad for myself. I hadn’t had any of this, with Joe, and I never would. I couldn’t psyche myself up to tell anyone about him because he’d been dead for twenty years. No one would ever be pleased to hear about this relationship. It could never make sense to anyone but us.
And I didn’t want anyone else. I could have rekindled things with Jack, but I loved Joe. Only Joe. It could only ever be Joe.
We were supposed to be revising the Power and Conflict poems for English lit, but we didn’t even take a book out of a bag. We ate all our food and talked about Izzy and Tally, and then we talked about our mission in London.
‘This is nice,’ Izzy said. ‘Isn’t it? A day trip to London. You know what? You’re mad, but I want to find out what happened to your boy too. Those little girls were so adorable. Their poor dad!’ She shivered. ‘If we can help that family then bring it on. I mean, I can’t have you going to track down a suspect alone, can I?’
Before we knew it we were passing through Reading and I did a namaste hand thing in what I thought might be the direction of the long-defunct Yoga Dojo. Half an hour after that we were in London.
It was warmer than it had been at home, and there were trees with pink cherry blossom at the top of Lucas Ingleby’s road in Haggerston. The sun warmed my cheeks as we walked slowly up to the door of his block of flats. I looked at Izzy, who was clearly regretting the trip now we were actually about to doorstep a strange older man. I could practically see the thought bubble above her head saying, I could be with my girlfriend. I was getting psyched up to find the right buzzer when the front door opened.
He went to walk past without even looking at us, but I stepped into his path.
‘Hi,’ I said, trying to equate this muscular man with the Lucas Joe had told me about, the boy I’d seen in the corridor. His hair was flecked with grey, and that was a jolt, because even though Gus was old too he was Joe’s big brother, while this man was in Joe’s year at school. They were pretty much exactly the same age. If Joe had lived he might have been going grey too. Instead he was younger than me.
Also, I’d seen this man as a boy very recently, and that was enough to freak me right out. I had heard him talk, watched his hurt face when Joe was unthinkingly cutting.
He stopped. ‘Hi?’ he said, neither friendly nor unfriendly. He was just a man who was walking down his own street on a Saturday afternoon. On his way to the gym, judging by his clothes and bag.
‘Lucas?’ I said. ‘This sounds weird, but could we talk to you for a minute? We’re from your old school and we’re writing a thing about Joe Simpson for the school magazine. Because it’s twenty years since he disappeared. His brother, Gus, said you used to be friends with him. Do you have a couple of minutes to talk?’
After working through thousands of more sophisticated ideas than this one we had settled on something as close to the truth as possible. It was important that he shouldn’t think we were interested in him in a sexual way (gross), and this was the best we could manage. Invoking the authority of the school, implying that some teacher was overseeing this, felt like a safety net.
‘Maybe we will even write an article about him,’ Izzy had said.
‘If there was a school magazine,’ I’d added, ‘then they might even have printed it.’
‘So it’s practically true.’
Now I watched Lucas, who was, for lack of any other ideas, our main suspect, to see if anything flickered over his face. All I saw was surprise. He hadn’t expected to be accosted in the street and asked about someone from twenty years ago, which was fair. There didn’t seem to be any panic or guilt, but that didn’t mean anything. If you could kill someone and hide it for twenty years you’d have a good poker face.
Then his expression changed again. He smiled. All of a sudden, he looked nice.
‘Joe Simpson!’ he said. ‘God. Blast from the past. Poor Joe. Have they found out what happened?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re just doing this story because we, the school, want to mark the twenty-year anniversary. I mean, I know it’s technically past, but close enough. I think his family are keen that he shouldn’t be forgotten.’
Lucas nodded. ‘And you’ve spoken to Gus? How’s he doing?’
‘He’s OK. He’s got a lovely partner and two daughters.’
We seemed to be walking down the road with him. I couldn’t help noticing that Lucas hadn’t agreed to an interview, but at the same time he hadn’t told us to go away either, so it was probably best to keep talking.
‘How did you find me?’ he said. ‘This doorstepping thing. It makes me feel quite famous and all, but … couldn’t we have done this over email?’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘We could have emailed,’ said Izzy, ‘but we were in London anyway, on a day out, and when we looked you up and your address was right there we thought we’d try popping over to see you. Haggerston’s cool and we wanted to come here anyway, to walk the canal path.’
I hadn’t even known there was a canal path. This new confident Izzy was amazing.
‘You looked me up how?’
‘Electoral roll,’ I said, and he laughed.
‘I knew I should have ticked the box that keeps it secret,’ he said. ‘Look, I don’t want to be a buzzkill, but what are you, fifteen? Sixteen? You might not want to go turning up at strange men’s houses miles from home on a Saturday afternoon. Email is safer.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But we’re here now. Could we go for a coffee or something? We’ll pay.’
Lucas sighed. He had one of those strange body shapes that I thought meant he went to the gym every day. He was very tall and very broad, but the muscles on his upper body were so developed that he looked as if he was going to tip over, while his legs were quite small. His hair was cut very short, but although all those things added up to quite a scary figure I didn’t feel that he was dangerous, particularly not if we were going for a coffee in a public place.
‘OK, girls,’ he said. ‘For Joe – of course. I’m off to the gym and I’m all psyched for it now, so I don’t want to bail. I’ll meet you in in an hour, OK? Since you want to see the canal, let’s meet at the cafe down there. Turn right here and then left on to the path and you’ll see it in front of you. Hour and twenty maybe?’
‘I don’t think it was him.’
Izzy nodded her agreement. We were waiting at the cafe, at a table in a corner, watching people cycling and running and walking their dogs and children down the path. We were meant to be revising, but really we were people-watching and talking about Lucas.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He didn’t look guilty, did he? He didn’t have an air of …’ She made swirly patterns in the air with her fingers. ‘Oh no! My past has finally caught up!’
‘He was pleased to talk about Joe, if anything.’
I looked at our list of questions. We were prepared for this. Lucas would probably be ages at the gym. We had exams coming up. I pushed the list aside reluctantly and picked up the revision guide.
‘So,’ I said. ‘Themes of power and guilt, right?’
An hour and a half later he joined us at our table, holding some kind of herbal tea in a china cup, and we pulled our attention away from ‘Ozymandias’.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Joe Simpson. Here’s what I’ve been thinking while I pumped iron: why me? I only knew him for, what, a year and a half? Devon must be full of people who hung out with him from when they were babies. And we weren’t even very close. Why doorstep me, girls? Or are you going after everyone?’
‘Weren’t you close really?’ I said. I tried to look innocent. ‘Gus said you were one of his friends. He thought Joe spoke to you on the day he disappeared?’
‘Seriously? I guess he’s right about that, but we weren’t best mates. You need Troy for that. Have you contacted him?’
‘Trying to,’ I said. ‘He lives in France, I think? He’s not on social media at all as far as I can see. It’s really hard to find him.’
‘I could message him for you. Pretty sure I’ve got him on something. Yes! I have. He’s on LinkedIn.’
Izzy laughed. ‘We obviously didn’t think of LinkedIn.’
‘Yes, please!’ I said to Lucas. ‘That would be amazing. So. Do you mind if we record this?’ He shook his head, looking amused, and Izzy carefully switched on the voice recorder on her phone. ‘Lucas Ingleby, thanks for talking to us. Can you tell us your memories of Joe Simpson first of all? What was he like?’
