My Ghosts Read Online Free Page B

climbed straight back up the stairs, but now she walks through each small room, her eyes taking in clues from the lives going on without her. Ben’s damp trousers are draped over a chair and that means he was home very late the night before, walking through the sudden sleety rain that clattered on the roof over Clare’s head. He used to use the same attic space for his tinkering, his inventions. Drawings in coloured ink tacked up all over the walls. Until once when Kez helped him do something with glass and two wires; there was a loud bang, a singed smell growing stronger as the rest of them ran up the narrow stairs. Ben and Kez were sitting on the floor where they’d landed, laughing so hard. “Are we dead?” Kez said. “Are we dead?” Laughing with a sooty streak on her cheek, a thin trail of blood near her eye.
    Their mother didn’t laugh. She tore all the drawings off the wall, leaving tiny white flags that still flutter, stood with her arms folded while Ben packed everything away. He was already working at the Telegraph Office and had asked for the use of a basement storeroom; that’s where he would have been until late. Barely noticing the slush that soaked his pant legs as he made his way home, his head filled with diagrams, with arrows and letters and possibilities.
    There are more signs in the kitchen; the sugar tin empty and three cakes cooling on wire racks mean that Nan is a little sad about something. And Kez must be having trouble sleeping again, the good silver teapot gleaming on the kitchen table, beside a puddled, blackened cloth. It’s as if they’ve all left messages for her, or not
messages
, exactly, but things set out to tempt her. A plate and fork beside those cooling cakes, a magazine open to an article about sundials, a clipping on the table about distant stars. The intention making her think of that black and white dog Ben tried to tame, years ago, and how patiently he worked at it. Leaving scraps of food in the yard, luring it closer and closer to the back steps, any sudden noise or movement making it bound away. An angry bite on his hand, kept wrapped and hidden, from trying to pat its head too soon. Remembering that, she snaps her teeth together twice, a startling sound.
    In truth she is ready to let herself be coaxed. Sometimes now she can see her breath in the attic room, reminding her what it’s like in deep winter, the need to fall asleep before the last bit of warmth leaves the cloth-wrapped bricks at her feet. She’d claimed the space when Ben’s things were gone, said it was too crowded in bed with her sisters, said that now that she was at the high school she needed a quiet place to do her lessons. She’d forgotten that, how she suffered the cold but wouldn’t complain. Wrapped in blankets, making notes with the pen in her thick, gloved fingers. Her mother holding Clare’s face in her hands, giving it a little shake and saying, “My stubborn girl, where do you get it from.”
    So one evening she comes down to supper, and then every one after that. She doesn’t have much to say at first, but the otherstalk about the usual things, pass her the salt and fill her glass, and no one behaves as if her presence is a thing to be noticed. And maybe it isn’t, but she knows how all of them, especially Nan, are good at playing a part. That time their neighbour came banging and shouting, Nan just smiled her sweet smile and told him that he was mistaken. That Charlie had been home with her all day and couldn’t have broken the window; it must have been a completely different boy he saw, running away.
    After the meal Clare helps with the washing-up, sits for a time with the day-old newspaper her sisters have carried home, climbs the stairs like she used to, after saying good night. She remembers, as she slides toward sleep, how that scruffy dog came to know Ben, sat up with its ears perked when he opened the back door. Let him scratch behind those ears and even let himself be brushed