The Facts of Life and Death Page 3

  5

  THE NAKED GIRL sat on the empty beach.

  The tide was so far out that its edge had disappeared in the low grey cloud, and the sand was hard and wet in the persistent drizzle.

  She sat cross-legged and hunched over. Cold and snivelling, with her back to the invisible sea, and her hands trapped under her icy buttocks.

  ‘Call your mother,’ the man said.

  Fresh sobs burst from the girl and the man looked at his watch. He prodded her again with the phone. It was an iPhone. Better than any phone he’d ever had. And the girl was what? Sixteen? Seventeen? Ridiculous.

  ‘Call your mother,’ he repeated slowly.

  The girl was crying so hard now that when she tried to say something, he couldn’t understand it.

  ‘What?’ he said. He frowned in concentration, but her words couldn’t get past her weeping.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! Stop crying and speak clearly!’

  ‘You’re going to kill me!’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he agreed. ‘Call your mother.’

  She only wailed loudly.

  ‘Don’t you want to say goodbye?’ he asked, almost kindly.

  The girl raised her snot-stained face defiantly.

  ‘Shut up!’ she shrieked, and lunged at his legs. She didn’t get her hands from under her bottom fast enough, and toppled forward on to her shoulder and her face.

  He righted her roughly with the toe of his boot. The left side of her face was coated in a gritty tan mask, and she blinked and gasped as though she’d risen from the sea, not the sand.

  He held up the phone so he could take a picture.

  ‘Eight megapixels,’ he observed. ‘On a bloody phone.’ He showed her the photo. ‘Maybe I’ll send that to your mates. What do you think? I’ve got all their numbers in here.’

  Her face slackened in misery.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Please don’t send that to anyone.’

  ‘Then call your mother.’

  The girl started to cry again – hard and steady. She shifted her weight to release one of her hands from under her buttock, and took the phone from him. She was shaking so hard that she took three goes to hit the right number. On the screen a picture of an old-fashioned telephone vibrated in time to the ringtone. Under the buzzing picture were the words Calling Mum.

  ‘It’s ringing,’ she wept.

  ‘Really?’ he said sarcastically.

  ‘What do I say?’

  ‘Say goodbye.’

  ‘Can I tell her I love her?’

  ‘If you do.’

  ‘I do love her!’ cried the girl. ‘Can I speak to my dad too?’

  ‘This isn’t Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.’

  The ringing stopped and a face appeared on the screen.

  ‘Mum?’ said the girl.

  ‘Do I look like Mum, peabrain?’

  ‘Ricky, get Mum.’ The girl was suddenly calm.

  ‘What am I? Your slave?’

  ‘Just get her, Ricky! It’s an emergency.’

  The boy had a stud through his eyebrow. Spoilt brats, the both of them.

  ‘What’s the magic word?’

  ‘The magic word is fucking please you fucking arsehole.’

  ‘I’m gonna tell Mum you said that. You’re in deep shit.’

  ‘I know,’ said the girl, and started to cry again. ‘I know.’

  Ricky turned his head to one side and yelled, ‘Mum! Kelly’s on the phone!’ Then there were some random ceiling shots before a woman’s cheerful face appeared.

  ‘Hi, Kells.’

  ‘Mummy?’ That was all the girl could get out before the crying overtook her completely.

  The woman’s face was instantly washed with panic.

  ‘Kelly, what’s wrong? Where are you?’

  ‘MummyMummyMummyMummy…’ The girl’s snot and spit looped from her lips and on to the phone.

  ‘Say goodbye,’ the man reminded her sharply.

  ‘Kelly, who’s that? Who’s with you? Where are you?’

  ‘He’s going to kill me, Mummy. He made me call you to say goodbye.’

  The woman’s face went loose with horror.

  This was more like it.

  ‘I love you, Mummy!’

  ‘KELLY! Brian! Call the police! BRIAN! Kelly, baby – wait! Who’s there? Who’s with you?’

  The girl tilted the phone towards the man and he grinned and waved.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m going to kill your little girl now, while you watch.’

  ‘NO!’ she shrieked. ‘No! Wait! Wait! Stop! Brian! BRIAN! Someone’s got Kelly! BRIAN!’

  He started to laugh. Her hysteria was so tinny and tiny; it was like watching a sea-monkey throw a tantrum in a little glass bowl.

  The woman babbled, ‘Don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her. What do you want? I’ll give you anything. What do you want? Money? Please just talk to me and tell me what you want. Anything you want. PLEASE!’

  He didn’t want anything else, but he couldn’t answer, he was laughing so hard. He doubled over, choked with mirth.

  The girl saw her chance; she got up and ran away.

  Away from the pile of clothes and towards Westward Ho! Back to the slipway, the bingo hall and the Hocking’s ice-cream van.

  The man straightened up and ran a few loose paces after her, but then stopped and just watched her go – arse jiggling, phone waving, and a high, reedy ‘Help!’ squirting from her every few strides.

  It was one of the funniest things he’d ever seen.

  He pulled off the balaclava and laughed until he finally wound down into long sighs of amusement – then he wiped his eyes and looked across the flat brown sand, where he was the tallest thing for miles. It made him think of Gulliver’s Travels. He’d had the book as a child and had never read it – but he’d looked at the pictures again and again and again.

  Now he felt like Gulliver, stomping all over those little people, flicking them off cliffs and picking them up by their heels between his giant thumb and forefinger.

  Making them do whatever he wanted them to.

  It made him feel mighty.

  6

  IT WAS SATURDAY, so Ruby lay on the floor and watched the sea as it swirled far below the overhanging room in the haunted house. The water was slate-grey with white veins, and when it withdrew it hissed and made a deep clicking sound as the big round stones rolled about the beach under the waves.

  It was hypnotic.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been here. Maybe an hour. It was getting dark and she was getting cold, but she kept waiting for one more wave, one more retreat.

  One more.

  One more.

  Ruby shifted a little against the musty floor. Her chest hurt.

  Again.

  She’d first noticed the pain when she’d been reading Pony & Rider on the old rug that was the same colour as the big spiders that marched into The Retreat in the first week of every September, as if they’d booked a room. It was a sharp ache, like lying on a hair bobble. But when she looked there was nothing there.

  Now, as then, Ruby drew her forearms under her sides a bit, to relieve the pressure on her chest.

  Just one more wave.

  ‘Can I look?’

  Ruby took her face from the hole in the floor to see Adam Braund standing beside her.

  He laughed. ‘You have a red ring round your whole eye.’

  She blushed and touched her face, but felt nothing.

  ‘It’s not bad,’ he said. ‘It’ll go.’

  She shifted over, and Adam lay down and put his eye to the hole. Ruby was on her tummy beside him, propped on her elbows, staring at the wall. There had been paper on it once – yellow daffodils and purple crocuses. Now the flowers were faded to brown, just like real ones, and speckled with black damp.

  ‘We should make another hole,’ said Adam. His voice was muffled, because he was speaking into the floorboards. ‘Then we can both watch.’

 
‘OK,’ said Ruby.

  He got to his feet and Ruby trailed around the house behind him, while he picked up scraps and tested window frames. There wasn’t much left that the children hadn’t already dropped into the ocean.

  ‘Shit!’ Adam sucked his thumb, and when he took it out of his mouth blood welled quickly, then leaked away through the tiny canals of his skin. It made Ruby feel a bit sick to see it.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘No,’ said Adam. He wiped the blood on his jeans, and started to tug at a banister spindle. It came free with a surprising jerk, and they both laughed. Then Ruby followed him back through to the overhanging room.

  Adam chose a place twelve inches from the knothole, where two floorboards were parting and daylight already showed through. He inserted the spindle and twisted and levered until the rotting board split and opened into a new hole a few inches wide, then he picked at the edges until the worst of the splinters were gone.

  ‘There,’ he said, and lowered the spindle through the new hole. ‘Let’s watch this.’

  They both got on to their tummies again – their elbows tucked in and their hands in fists next to their ears – and counted down together.

  ‘Three.

  ‘Two.

  ‘One!’

  Adam let go of the spindle and it speared the next wave and disappeared. Then they saw it again, briefly, tumbled in the froth, before it was sucked out to sea for ever.

  ‘Cool,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Adam. He shifted to get more comfortable and his leg nudged Ruby’s. She nudged back, and he held firm. Without taking their eyes from their spy-holes, they giggled as they pressed their calves and ankles against each other in a fake tussle, then gave up and subsided into silence.

  They watched the sea for another five minutes, then Ruby remembered how cold she was. She was about to get up and go home when Adam spoke. His lips were so close to the floor that Ruby had to ask him to repeat it, so he lifted his head and looked at her.

  ‘Do you know why this house is haunted?’

  ‘No.’

  He turned his head and looked at her. ‘Do you want to know?’

  Ruby pursed her lips and thought about it. She’d thought Haunted House was just a name they called the dilapidated old building. Sure, it was run-down and creepy and had cobwebs and draughts and drips and weird noises, but until this moment she had never truly considered that it might actually be haunted by real ghosts. That idea was both awful and thrilling. She could already feel the back of her neck prickling just at the thought of it, and it was on the tip of her tongue to say no, when she realized that Adam Braund wanted to tell her, so she said yes instead.

  He rolled on to his side to face her, with his elbow under his ear, so Ruby did the same. Their knees touched, but this time they both ignored it.

  ‘My dad told me this,’ Adam started, thus establishing the truth of it right up front. ‘It was a hundred years ago and there was this pedlar—’

  ‘What’s a pedlar?’ said Ruby.

  ‘Like a sales rep. But in the olden days. He came down the hill with all his stuff that he was selling on the back of a donkey.’

  ‘He can’t have had much stuff.’

  ‘Nobody did in those days,’ said Adam, and Ruby nodded because that was true.

  ‘What kind of stuff?’ she asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Adam. ‘Toilet roll and Pledge and things. Just stuff for the house.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So he came down the hill to sell stuff and there were these two old sisters who lived in this house, and they offered to let him stay over for the night.’

  ‘In this house?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adam.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘ ’Cos it was night and it was raining outside.’

  ‘OK.’

  Ruby wanted to glance around the room, but was starting to feel too nervous to do that, in case she saw something frightening. This was nowhere near a ghost story yet, but she was primed …

  ‘So he tied his donkey up on the cobbles and spent the night here.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ruby warily.

  Adam lowered his voice. ‘And nobody . . . ever . . . saw him again.’

  The words hung in the salt air between them.

  ‘Where did he go?’ whispered Ruby.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ Adam whispered back. ‘His donkey was still there in the morning, but all the pedlar’s stuff was gone, and his money too. Someone stole it all.’

  ‘Who?’ said Ruby.

  Adam shrugged mysteriously, then went on. ‘This is the good bit. Like fifty years later, when the old sisters died, another man bought this house and was going to fix it up, but he started to hear noises from upstairs, when there was nobody there.’

  Ruby glanced nervously at what was left of the ceiling. ‘What kind of noises?’

  ‘Banging. Moaning. Ghost noises, y’know?’ said Adam breezily. ‘And one night he went up to see what was going on, and the bedroom door slammed shut behind him, even though he was alone in the house, and he couldn’t open the door, even though the key was on the inside.’

  Ruby stared at Adam, her mouth suddenly dry.

  ‘And then something in the room attacked him.’

  ‘What thing?’ she breathed.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ said Adam solemnly. ‘He was a grown man, but he screamed so loud that people ran up from the village to see what was happening, but none of them could open the bedroom door, and all they could do was stand there and listen to him screaming and crying until morning.’

  ‘What happened then?’ said Ruby, her voice cracking with dread.

  ‘In the morning the door suddenly swung open all by itself, and they found the man inside, all bloody and stuff, shaking under the bed. He’d been beaten up, but there was nobody else in the room with him.’

  ‘Sssshhh-it,’ Ruby said, even though she wasn’t allowed to.

  ‘He’d screamed so hard he couldn’t even speak any more. And then,’ said Adam, propping himself up to better effect, ‘and then he runs out of the room past them, and down the stairs, and starts digging in the fireplace with his bare hands, all through the ashes that were still hot from the night before, but he didn’t care and he dug until his hands were all bloody and his nails fell off.’

  Ruby was cold with fear. She couldn’t encourage Adam any more; she only stared, unable to look away from his sombre face.

  ‘And under the ashes and the flagstones he found a hiding place dug out of the earth, and in there was the skeleton of the pedlar.’

  Adam left room for her to gasp, and Ruby did.

  ‘Those old ladies had murdered him and stolen all his money and stuff, and it was his ghost that was so angry that he, like, lured the man up there and sort of put it into his head where to look for his bones, so that his body could be found and given a Christian burial.’

  Ruby shivered and Adam did too, even though he knew the story already.

  ‘Wicked, hey?’ He grinned.

  But Ruby only looked over his shoulder and said slowly, ‘That fireplace?’

  Adam rolled over to follow her gaze.

  The fireplace stared silently back at them, squat and square and grey, with ashes in its middle, and blackened all around by centuries of scorching.

  All cold now.

  The waves crashed and hissed below, and the stones rumbled, and Ruby was suddenly very aware that the only thing between them and the sea was an inch of rotten wood and a one-hundred-foot drop.

  She scrambled to her feet. ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ said Adam. ‘It’s only a story.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Ruby. ‘I’m not scared. I have to do my homework.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Adam, and got up.

  Both of them avoided looking at the fireplace, and Ruby knew for sure that if they weren’t scared, they would even now be sifting through the ashes and lifting the flagstones to find the secret hiding place t
hat was big enough to hold the body of a murdered man.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ said Adam.

  ‘I’m cold,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Do you want to wear my hoodie?’ It was thick and red with BIDEFORD COLLEGE on the back.

  Ruby nodded, and Adam took it off and Ruby put it on. She didn’t try to zip it up in case it wouldn’t fit and Adam saw how fat she was. Still, its fleece lining was cosy, and it smelled like detergent and warm boy.

  They went less cautiously than usual down the brambly, muddy steps into the village. At the steepest part, Adam reached up and took her hand.

  When they got to the gate of The Retreat, she gave his top back to him and said thank you.

  ‘No problem,’ he said. He didn’t turn and leave though. He lingered.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone I told you that story, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Bye then.’

  ‘Bye,’ he said.

  When she shut the door, Ruby noticed he was still standing at the gate.

  7

  MUMMY HAD GONE to work and left a chicken pie and a note about how to heat it up. Ruby looked up at a noise from her parents’ room. She’d thought Daddy was fishing, but when she went upstairs, there he was.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Cleaning the house,’ he said. ‘Want to help?’

  ‘OK,’ said Ruby, and went in and sat on the bed and watched him take stuff out of the wardrobe, look at it, then put it back exactly where he found it. He only threw away about three things, and that was all make-up that Mummy didn’t need.

  Ruby saw a little book with ‘Diary’ on it.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I have a diary!’ She opened the diary to see what kinds of things Mummy wrote in hers, but there was only boring stuff like ‘School, 4.40. Double shift Thurs/Fri. Knickers for R.’

  She was R. She remembered getting the knickers from the market in Bideford – they had the days of the week on them and Friday was spelled ‘Fiday’. She always hoped she didn’t get hit by a bus on a Friday.

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Daddy.