She’s Not There. Tamsin Grey

       13

      They tried knocking on the front door again, but not for long.

      ‘What, then?’ said Raff.

      ‘It’s fine,’ said Jonah. ‘The back door is definitely open. We can go through the Broken House.’

      Around the corner, he trailed his fingers along the splintery fence, as he had that morning, but Raff kept to the kerb because he was scared of the passionflowers. Just as they reached the loose board, they heard a shout from across the road. It was Leonie, leaning out of her doorway.

      ‘Where’s your ma?’ she shouted.

      ‘Let’s run, fam!’ whispered Raff.

      ‘At the shops!’ Jonah called back.

      Leonie shook her head, tutting and muttering, and came out onto the pavement, tossing her hair and clip-clopping in her high-heeled mules. She stood with her feet apart and her hands on her hips.

      Raff snorted. ‘Hench!’ he whispered.

      ‘You’re not going in there, it’s too dangerous, you hear me,’ she shouted. The Kebab Shop Man came to lean in his own doorway, and she turned to him. ‘Some child is going to get themselves killed in there!’

      The Kebab Shop Man nodded, and lit a smoke.

      ‘Come here!’ Leonie shouted, beckoning them. Ignoring Raff’s mutterings, Jonah took hold of his hand, looked right and left, and crossed them over. Leonie’s bosoms were straining out of her pink lace dress. Her fingernails were pink too, pink and incredibly long, and her black braids tumbled out of the top of her head like a waterfall.

      ‘I know you two boys got your heads screwed on,’ she said. ‘So I’m surprised at you, even thinking of going in that place. It’s dirty in there, you hear me?’ Like Miss Swan, she had beads of sweat in the groove between her upper lip and her nose. ‘There’s nasty things, poison, make you really sick.’

      They both nodded.

      ‘Or, failing that, the place will topple over, smash them little bodies of yours into a pulp.’

      Jonah nodded again, squeezing Raff’s hand. He looked over at the Kebab Shop Man, who shook his head, flicked his smoke away and disappeared back inside.

      ‘OK, come,’ said Leonie. ‘You can sit with me and Pat until your ma pulls her head out the clouds and remembers her responsibilities.’

      ‘No way,’ whispered Raff, as she clopped back in. ‘She is hench, and her sweets are rank.’

      ‘You coming or what?’ Leonie was holding open the door for them. Jonah took a firmer hold of Raff’s hand.

      It was lovely and cool inside, from the many electric fans. The lady from the betting shop was having her hair done. She was a tiny little woman, very old and very white, and she was so low in the hairdresser’s chair she could only just see into the mirror. Pat was standing behind her, putting bright blue curlers in her thin white hair. In the mirror, the old woman’s broken-egg eyes slid to meet Jonah’s. She used to let Roland bring him and Raff into her shop on Saturdays, but she didn’t seem to recognise him. He reckoned she must be over a hundred years old.

      ‘Look who I found,’ said Leonie.

      ‘The young gentlemen! Such a nice afternoon, why ain’t they playing football in the park?’

      ‘That dumb-arse mother of theirs gone off to the shops, left them to fend for themselves in the street, can you believe it? No disrespect, boys,’ said Leonie.

      She led them to the back of the shop, her pink lace bottom swinging, and sat them on the squishy white sofa. In front of them, on the glass coffee table, stood a bowl of sweets and a pile of magazines.

      ‘Someone needs to phone the council to come and mend that fence, before a child dies in there,’ said Leonie, lowering herself into the swivel chair behind the desk.

      ‘Go on, then,’ said Pat.

      Leonie sucked her teeth. ‘And be hanging on the phone all afternoon and night. Got better things to do with my time. Help yourselves to sweets, boys.’

      Jonah said, ‘Thank you,’ but he didn’t like Leonie’s sweets either. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a tall, pink shape appear outside the shop window, and he stiffened, because it was the Raggedy Man again. He was peering in, or maybe peering at his own reflection, his arms long and loose by his sides. It was a girl’s tracksuit, Jonah realised. That was why it was pink, and why it was so short on his arms and legs.

      ‘What’s he want?’ Pat moved forwards, waving her arms at him, and he stepped back from the glass.

      ‘Leave him be, poor soul,’ said Leonie.

      ‘Leave him be! I don’t want him staring in at me like a Peeping Peter!’

      ‘Tom,’ Leonie corrected her, gazing at the Raggedy Man, who was shuffling backwards and forwards now, like a car trying to park in a small space. ‘Something got to him today.’

      The Raggedy Man moved out of sight, and Leonie sat forward and looked at the computer screen, clattering her fingernails on the desk. Then her hand became still, and a deep silence fell. Jonah and Raff sat upright, watching Pat’s hands wrapping strands of hair around the blue rollers. The old woman’s messy eyes were now closed. Maybe she was dead. Jonah heard Lucy giggle in his head. But her ghost would be here, until they burnt her body. He glanced around him. Was a ghost the same as a soul? He tried to remember what Miss Swann had said. That a ghost was a soul that was stuck, waiting to go to Heaven, or be reborn? ‘Leave him be, poor soul.’ But the Raggedy Man seemed more of a ghost than a soul, a sad, lost, waiting thing. Leonie pulled a tissue out of the box on the desk, and pressed it under her nose, leaning back in her chair. The loud electric buzz made the boys jump and the old lady’s eyes fly open. Leonie put the tissue down and said, ‘That’s my 4 o’clock.’

      ‘Bit early, ain’t he?’ said Pat. The old woman’s eyes closed again.

      Leonie swung round in her chair. Her legs splayed and her hands rested on her belly as she and the boys surveyed the man on the tiny screen above the doorway that led out to the back. He was a fat white man, in shorts and a vest and flipflops. As they watched him he looked edgily around Leonie’s little backyard.

      ‘Better get him over with. He won’t take long,’ said Leonie, and with a groan she got back to her feet. They watched as she disappeared through the doorway, and then as the back of her head appeared on the screen. The man moved towards her, and then they were both gone, and the yard was empty again.

      Jonah sank deep into the squishy sofa. The noise of the fans was making him feel sleepy, and he closed his eyes. Where have you gone, Lucy? He got a flash of her face, but then Bad Granny came looming at him, and he opened his eyes and sat up. He felt Raff’s elbow in his ribs, and looked down at the magazine open in his brother’s lap. Pictures of naked men and women, sexing each other. Raff was giggling silently, full of shocked delight, but Jonah took the magazine off him and put it down on the coffee table. ‘Let’s go,’ he mouthed.

      Pat’s hands were busy with the old woman’s hair. They walked very softly past her, and to the front door. As Jonah pulled the handle, the old woman’s eyes opened and slid to them again. Pat said, ‘Off now, gentlemen, my regards to your ma.’