Advent Read Free Page B

over the table.
      ‘Well,’ said his mother carefully, ‘it’s science, I suppose, isn’t it? I mean, we know the world works a certain way. There’s all those ways you can prove that certain things must be true and so you know ghosts can’t be. Like going through walls. Appearing and disappearing. They’re just not possible.’
      ‘Derek says he’s seen one.’
      ‘Lots of people say they’ve seen one,’ his father said.
      ‘So they’re just wrong?’
      ‘They’re just idiots,’ said Dad, at the same time as Mum said, ‘People can think they’ve seen something, but we know they actually can’t have. Not what they think they saw. So perhaps Derek imagined something or, I don’t know, saw something in a weird light or—’
      ‘Or he’s an idiot.’
      ‘Nigel, please. Or maybe he likes telling stories.’
      ‘Oh yes, I forgot that one. He could be a liar instead of an idiot.’
      ‘For God’s sake, Nigel.’
      The crackle got so loud Gavin thought he could actually hear it in his ears, as well as in his fingertips and stomach and the skin of his cheeks.
      ‘Anyway,’ his mother went on, fiddling with the stem of her wine glass, ‘people only believed in things like that because they didn’t know better.’
      ‘So how do they know better?’
      ‘By going to expensive schools,’ said his father. ‘Though it’s obviously not working for Derek.’
      ‘I give up,’ she said.
      Gavin sat and ate until the crackle got so bad it was hurting and then went to his room.
      The next time he saw Miss Grey – it was three or four days later, at school; she was standing holding her drab cloak tight around her, in a far corner of the visitors’ car park, watching him – he tried knowing better. Even though he could see perfectly clearly that she was there, as usual, he decided to know that she wasn’t. It was like trying to know the cars weren’t there, or the trees behind them. It was like persuading himself that he didn’t exist.
      So that was how Gavin began to realise that there was something special about himself.
      At the same time that the real things – home, school, his mother and father, being eleven and then twelve and then thirteen – got worse, the things that weren’t real got worse too. His dreams started to change, in confusing ways. Sometimes he longed for Miss Grey to come back into them, because in dreams he thought she could touch him as well as say things to him, but sometimes he dreaded it because the darkness and loneliness had come closer. He still occasionally had the sensation of dreaming things that were going to happen, but now instead of simple things like a fox in the garden or a hailstorm or Mum losing her glasses, the dreams were full of dark birds with beaks the colour of fire, or smoke hanging over a city, or an Eskimo girl tending a dying whale on a cold beach: things that couldn’t happen, and yet the feeling that they were real and waiting for him was even stronger than in the old come-true-tomorrow dreams. There was a change in Miss Grey too. It was like she knew he was trying to get rid of her and now it was her turn to plead with him not to leave. He found it harder and harder to remember on waking the words she’d spoken in his dreams, but at the same time it felt more and more urgent that he listen. The more he tried to ignore or forget whatever it was that was different about himself, the tighter it pressed in on him.
      ‘Go away,’ he said to Miss Grey, one February afternoon. It was twilight. She was squatting on the concrete coping at the edge of the towpath, trailing her fingers in the river: the tide was very high. He’d planned to just walk past, but instead he marched right up to her. He saw the way the silty water eddied around her hand, making little whorls and troughs, just the way science said it should.
      ‘Just go away. OK? Leave me alone.’
      Without looking at him, she picked up a twig and