plastic lock. I had no illusions that the locked door would hold out against even a couple of serious blows, but at least I had given myself a second to breathe and think.
I leaned against the door and closed my eyes, breathing deeply, taking in the blandly unpleasant smell of a well-maintained public toilet, the scent of cheap cleaning products overpowering anything nastier. Compared to the rank stench I’d just experienced, the low-level chemical stink was reassuringly normal.
But nothing was normal, nothing at all. Not even by the standards of my stupid life.
B Y THE TIME autumn term came around, I was faking normal quite well.
Looking back, at that age the average teenager is pretending to know so much they blatantly don’t—about sex, booze, drugs, all that adult stuff you’re painfully aware of but so far away from—that throwing in one more self-conscious distortion isn’t that much of a stress.
So along with all the other things I was pretending about, I pretended I wasn’t seeing ghosts.
Again, I was blessed by the gods of shitty cheap post-war building programmes. The comp I attended was less than two decades old, and hadn’t been around long enough to accumulate too many ghosts. I’d had a summer of slowly exploring my limits, learning the places to avoid—cemeteries, obviously, but also hospitals or very old buildings—and dealing with encounters with the odd wandering spirit. I could handle the ghost of the kid who died of an asthma attack seven years ago (who I’d heard of from teachers as a cautionary tale about mislaying inhalers, but had never realised was a real kid), and even the mumbling muddy medieval guy who drifted around the playing fields. The latter was a bit tough to avoid when on the football field, but I was shit at sports anyway and never got picked, so the problem rarely arose.
I was twelve going on thirteen, and I treated the dead like any other problem I had at that age.
I ignored them as much as possible and avoided looking them in the eye.
It worked, for a while. It was nothing but denial, but for a couple of years it worked.
W INDOWS, ESPECIALLY WINDOWS which open out on to the deserted lots behind commercial properties, are generally designed to allow air in and out without also allowing people to go through them. Property owners kind of like it that way. Like ventilation ducts the size of a subway tunnel, toilet windows that can easily be hopped in and out of are just something you see in the movies.
Thankfully, I wasn’t a burglar, and I didn’t have to be quiet about effecting an exit, which is why I found myself standing precariously on a toilet, using the porcelain lid of the cistern to smash bits of wooden window frame. The open window hadn’t been nearly wide enough to slip out of, but if the whole window and frame were knocked out of the wall, then I’d be able to squeeze through the hole.
‘Don’t drop down when you get out there,’ said Melissa. ‘Grab the gutter and get onto the roof as fast as you can.’
‘Zombies?’ I asked.
Melissa gave a little shrug.
‘A few,’ she said. ‘But not as near as that one.’
She nodded to the door, where the blackboard-squeak of fingernails scraping restlessly against cheap wood could be heard. That door wasn’t going to hold for long.
‘I’ll get out there and shout when they’re furthest away,’ said Melissa. ‘I don’t think they can see or hear me.’
Don’t think , she had said.
Well that filled me with confidence. Thinking and knowing had always been miles apart, in my experience of the undead.
B Y MY MID-TEENS I thought that my condition, as I’d come to think of it, was under control. I believed that the ghosts were some form of hallucination, a symptom of mental illness, but I was too shit scared of being locked in a hospital for the rest of my life to admit what I was seeing to anyone. I continued to ignore the ghosts I saw. It was a simple tactic, but it
I leaned against the door and closed my eyes, breathing deeply, taking in the blandly unpleasant smell of a well-maintained public toilet, the scent of cheap cleaning products overpowering anything nastier. Compared to the rank stench I’d just experienced, the low-level chemical stink was reassuringly normal.
But nothing was normal, nothing at all. Not even by the standards of my stupid life.
B Y THE TIME autumn term came around, I was faking normal quite well.
Looking back, at that age the average teenager is pretending to know so much they blatantly don’t—about sex, booze, drugs, all that adult stuff you’re painfully aware of but so far away from—that throwing in one more self-conscious distortion isn’t that much of a stress.
So along with all the other things I was pretending about, I pretended I wasn’t seeing ghosts.
Again, I was blessed by the gods of shitty cheap post-war building programmes. The comp I attended was less than two decades old, and hadn’t been around long enough to accumulate too many ghosts. I’d had a summer of slowly exploring my limits, learning the places to avoid—cemeteries, obviously, but also hospitals or very old buildings—and dealing with encounters with the odd wandering spirit. I could handle the ghost of the kid who died of an asthma attack seven years ago (who I’d heard of from teachers as a cautionary tale about mislaying inhalers, but had never realised was a real kid), and even the mumbling muddy medieval guy who drifted around the playing fields. The latter was a bit tough to avoid when on the football field, but I was shit at sports anyway and never got picked, so the problem rarely arose.
I was twelve going on thirteen, and I treated the dead like any other problem I had at that age.
I ignored them as much as possible and avoided looking them in the eye.
It worked, for a while. It was nothing but denial, but for a couple of years it worked.
W INDOWS, ESPECIALLY WINDOWS which open out on to the deserted lots behind commercial properties, are generally designed to allow air in and out without also allowing people to go through them. Property owners kind of like it that way. Like ventilation ducts the size of a subway tunnel, toilet windows that can easily be hopped in and out of are just something you see in the movies.
Thankfully, I wasn’t a burglar, and I didn’t have to be quiet about effecting an exit, which is why I found myself standing precariously on a toilet, using the porcelain lid of the cistern to smash bits of wooden window frame. The open window hadn’t been nearly wide enough to slip out of, but if the whole window and frame were knocked out of the wall, then I’d be able to squeeze through the hole.
‘Don’t drop down when you get out there,’ said Melissa. ‘Grab the gutter and get onto the roof as fast as you can.’
‘Zombies?’ I asked.
Melissa gave a little shrug.
‘A few,’ she said. ‘But not as near as that one.’
She nodded to the door, where the blackboard-squeak of fingernails scraping restlessly against cheap wood could be heard. That door wasn’t going to hold for long.
‘I’ll get out there and shout when they’re furthest away,’ said Melissa. ‘I don’t think they can see or hear me.’
Don’t think , she had said.
Well that filled me with confidence. Thinking and knowing had always been miles apart, in my experience of the undead.
B Y MY MID-TEENS I thought that my condition, as I’d come to think of it, was under control. I believed that the ghosts were some form of hallucination, a symptom of mental illness, but I was too shit scared of being locked in a hospital for the rest of my life to admit what I was seeing to anyone. I continued to ignore the ghosts I saw. It was a simple tactic, but it
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