The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 15

Ramsey Campbell Fear the Dead

Someone else he didn’t think he’d ever seen before leaned down as if to let him count all her wrinkles. “I wish I’d had the chance to say goodbye to my grandmama, Jonathan.”

Another lady dressed in at least as much black and holding her wineglass askew parted her pale lips, which looked as though they had once been stitched together. “Now you know she’s at peace.”

As he remembered how his grandmother’s cheek had felt like a cold crumpled wad of paper he had to kiss, the winner of the wrinkle competition said “What a brave little soul. He’s a credit to his mother.”

“And his father.”

“Careful or you’ll drip.”

The stitched lady straightened up her glass. “We don’t want stains on your lovely carpet, do we, Jonathan? They don’t make them like that any more.”

He thought the elaborate carpet felt like the rest of the house — furtively chill and damp. “I can just hear her saying that, old Ire,” his father joined him to remark.

“Her friends never called Iris that,” the stitched mouth objected. “Oh, whatever’s wrong, you poor little fellow?”

While Jonathan struggled to think of a reply that wouldn’t be the truth, his mother hurried over to confront his father. “Are you upsetting him, Lawrence?”

“Only saying I could hear your mother pricing the contents of the house. Half of it Jonno wasn’t supposed to touch,” he confided to the wrinkled ladies. “You must have felt like you were living in a museum, did you, Jonno?”

Jonathan was yet more afraid to speak. The wineglass slouched again as its lady crooked her other thin arm around his shoulders and murmured “Don’t worry, your daddy wasn’t really hearing her. She’s gone to Jesus and she’ll be talking to him.”

The mention of Jesus appeared to draw the priest, who smelled rather like an unlit candle wrapped in linen. He hoisted his tumbler of orange juice to acknowledge Jonathan’s. “That’s the right road. That’s what real men drink.”

“Is my grandma really talking to Jesus now?”

“I shouldn’t be at all surprised, but it won’t do any harm to pray she is.”

“How long do you think she’ll be?” Jonathan pleaded.

“That’s one of the things God’s keeping as a surprise for us. We won’t know till we see her again.”

“The father means till we’re with Jesus too,” Jonathan’s mother made haste to say.

“Isn’t she supposed to be there for ever?”

“If you keep your faith up,” the priest said with a smile that was less than wholly aimed at Jonathan, “I’m sure she will be. You know Jesus has time for everyone.”

How could Jesus deal with all the dead? God was meant to be able to see everyone at once, and perhaps his son had inherited the trick, but that wasn’t the same as talking to them. If Jonathan’s grandmother thought she didn’t have Jesus’s full attention, Jonathan could imagine her stalking off in search of someone who would have to notice her. He might have put some of this into words if the priest hadn’t moved away, leaving Jonathan’s parents to argue. “What are you trying to make Jonathan think of my mother?”

“Whatever’s the truth, Essie.”

“You didn’t stay around to see it.”

“Jonno knows why, don’t you, Jonno? It’s nobody’s fault Ire and I didn’t get on. I expect there are people you don’t with.”

“Maybe it was up to you to make the effort, Lawrence, considering it was her house.”

“Well, now it’s yours, and I don’t feel any more welcome.”

“I don’t know how you’d expect me to change that.”

“It’s sounding like time I absented myself.”

Jonathan thought he might leave it at that, having loaded his voice with dignity, but then his father swayed at him as though its weight had unbalanced him. “I’m sorry this had to be our day this week, Jonno. I’ll take you somewhere better next weekend.”

Jonathan watched his father’s untypically sombre back view merge with the blackness of the crowd, and then he had to undergo a succession of pats on the head and kisses that felt like dried fruit brushing his cheek as mourners took their leave of his mother. Before long there was only Trudy, who also taught at the college. She ran her small hand several times up and down his mother’s hefty arm. “You need to talk, I can tell.”

“I could bear to,” his mother admitted, and gave him a smile beneath a frown. “Don’t bother helping clear up, Jonathan. You’ve had a long day and made us proud of you. I should go to bed.”

He never understood why people said they should do things when they meant him. “I’m hungry,” he said, not least in case he might be, and covered a plate with some of the remains of the buffet before sitting on a chair that protested like all his grandmother’s furniture. When he’d managed to clear almost half of the plate, his mother intervened. “Don’t stuff yourself for the sake of it or you won’t be able to sleep.”

That was something else to dread. He could only climb the stairs that were wider than his arms could stretch, and too dim under the yellowish chandelier, and creaked one by one as if they were playing a funeral tune. Until now he hadn’t minded that the bathroom, which was almost big enough to be public and just as whitely tiled, echoed all his noises as if someone thinner than himself was hiding in it. He rushed through a token version of everything he had to do and fled next door to his bedroom.

Why did it need to be so big? It was at least twice the size of his room in the house where he’d lived with his parents until his grandmother had to be looked after at night — sometimes she’d prayed without seeming to breathe, and sometimes she’d wanted his mother to remember everything they’d done together and agree there had never been any bad times. Jonathan tried to feel grateful for the room, though it shrank his bed to a cot and his desk to a toddler’s surrounded at a distance by furniture so gloomy — dressing-table, wardrobe, chest of drawers — he imagined it was waiting for him to misbehave. The books his grandmother had given him because she’d thought them suitable failed to welcome him; they just helped darken the room. The only one he could bring to mind concerned some children who made everyone believe an old lady was a witch, and it was too late for them to be sorry when she killed herself and couldn’t go to heaven. He struggled to forget it as he inched under the bedclothes without pulling them free of the mattress, but already knew what the story brought back to him.

“Never speak ill of the dead,” his grandmother used to warn him, “or they’ll come back and haunt you.” She’d gone into worse detail, especially during her last weeks. He would never say anything hurtful about her, and surely he needn’t be afraid his mother had wanted him out of the way so that she could. She and Trudy were climbing the stairs now and saying nothing at all.

Trudy placed a moist kiss on top of the one his mother left on his forehead. The women moved to either side of the bed to tighten the sheets over him, then retreated to the door. “Sweet dreams or none at all,” Trudy said, resting one black-varnished nail on the light switch. “Do we have the light out, Esther? I expect a big boy like Jonathan must.”

“We won’t be long. Trudy’s staying over. I know,” his mother said. “You have the light off and we’ll come up and talk in my room.”

He was afraid to aggravate her concern for him. “All right,” he mumbled and turned his back.

The dark fell on him at once. He made himself wait until their footsteps began imitating one another on the stairs, then he twisted face up and jabbed his fingers together on his chest. What was he expected to say? He’d only started praying when his grandmother had assumed he did and asked him to on her behalf. Every night before he went to sleep he’d implored God not to take her away, but the idea of pleading for her to return terrified him. “Please God take care of my grandma,” he muttered as he thought of it. “Please tell her she was the best grandma ever. And the best mum too,” he felt compelled to blurt.

Surely that would make up for any criticisms his mother might let drop. She and Trudy were laughing in the kitchen, but that could hardly be about his grandmother. He was unable to think how long it was since he’d heard his mother laugh. He remembered the night his grandmother had emitted a snore so loud it had made him giggle in bed. “Mother?” his mother had called, though she was beside her, and more loudly “Mother?” suggesting that his grandmother had been retreating into the distance of the room. Then there was silence until she’d said “Oh” as if what she was seeing had almost robbed her of breath.

She and Trudy had finished laughing, perhaps because the house made them sound too small and shrill. Now they were lowering their voices as they came upstairs. They weren’t scared to be overheard by anyone who’d been up here with him, he told himself: they were showing respect for his grandmother or trying not to waken him. Creaks marked their progress to his mother’s room. Her door hadn’t quite closed when he heard Trudy murmur “You say whatever you need to, Esther. It’s part of dealing with your loss.”

He couldn’t distinguish what his mother said, even once he dragged himself free of the, bedclothes and crouched against the headboard. When he lowered one reluctant foot, it was greeted with a creak by the floor, which felt as chill as his grandmother’s face had last time he’d touched her. More than a dozen hasty paces took him through the dimness thick as the musty curtains, past the audience of hulking half-seen furniture, to the door. He inched it ajar and was confronted by his grandmother’s room.

Her door was shut. That managed to seem reassuring until he thought of the darkness beyond it, even vaster than the dark behind him. Suppose that as he’d ventured to his door, his grandmother had reached hers with far longer strides of her spidery legs and was pressing her face against an upper panel? He was trying to find his next breath when he heard his mother say “I hate to admit it, but Lawrence was right. She was never happy till you knew how much everything she had was worth.”

Jonathan sucked in air so that he could whisper “You were just proud of it, weren’t you, grandma? I expect you still are. You should be, because it’s so nice.”

He was frightened to raise his voice, but equally frightened by the possibility that she was close enough to hear his whisper. He didn’t realise he’d flinched from the prospect that her door might jerk open until the floor creaked beneath him. “Is that you, Jonathan?” his mother called.

He hung onto the door while he closed it as swiftly as he could without making a sound, then had to let go and turn to the glimmering slab of his bed. “I didn’t hear anything. Have a top up so you sleep as well,” he heard Trudy say, and a clink of glass. The creaks of his retreat obscured what the women said next, and once he was huddled in bed he couldn’t understand them. “Please God don’t let my grandma hear anything bad about her,” he began to whisper, interspersed with words to her. “Mum thinks you were the best mum. She’s just talking because she’s upset like her friend said.”

Soon the only word he was aware of uttering was mum. It must have lulled him to sleep, because he was awakened by his name creeping like a draught into his ear. A face was looming almost into his. He shrank across the mattress, dragging the bedclothes free, before he realised that daylight was showing him Trudy. “Shush now,” she murmured. “We’ll have to do something about those nerves of yours. Get up quietly and get ready and I’ll run you to school. Esther’s catching up on her sleep.”

Once dressed, he found that Trudy had readied a bowl of cereal and some bread and jam, presumably because cookery might rouse his mother. Trudy watched with tentative fondness as he did his duty by the breakfast, then stopped just short of touching him while ushering him out to her car, which had front seats but no rear. Its smallness was a relief from the house, but drew the amusement of dozens of boys on the way to his school. The massive houses split amoeba-like along the route, and the school had undergone even more fission, separating into six unequal buildings that felt like a test the place was setting him. He was halfway through his first term, but the school still overwhelmed him. When Trudy left him at the gates with a wave of her fingertips that bore a kiss, he would have lost himself in the enormous crowded schoolyard if two boys a head taller than himself hadn’t stopped him. “She your girlfriend?” said the one with a moustache or grime occupying sections of his upper lip.

“Could be his new ma,” said his crony, the left side of whose chin boasted a single black curly hair.

“Gently now, gentlemen.” This was Mr Foster, the long-faced English teacher who wore his greying hair in a ponytail. He pinched or massaged the backs of their necks until he’d finished saying “We don’t harass our new fellows, do we? Especially when they’ve just lost a member of the family.”

“Never mind touching us,” one boy muttered as Mr Foster steered Jonathan away by an elbow to enquire “Are you fit to come back to school, Hastings?”

Being addressed by his surname was yet another aspect of the place Jonathan had still to accept. “I think so, sir,” he said.

He’d hoped school would take his mind off his grandmother, but now he felt that anybody there might bring her up. Suppose she proved to be the theme of the morning assembly? Once the pupils had been herded into the main building, however, and the staff had taken their seats onstage in the assembly hall, the headmaster lectured about the football team and how their performance should inspire the other pupils to try harder. Jonathan was trying to keep that in mind when Mr Foster singled him out at the beginning of the English lesson. “Is there anything you’d like to share with us, Hastings?”

“Like what, sir?”

“Such as, I believe you mean. About your bereavement.”

“Such as what, sir?” Jonathan wished he didn’t feel bound to ask.

“Forgive me if you think I’m prying.” The teacher’s face had managed to lengthen itself, and looked capable of pouting when Jonathan failed to answer. “Recollect in tranquillity,” Mr Foster told himself, and seemed inspired. “That can be your subject for homework, all of you. Write about a loss, whatever it may be.”

Could Jonathan’s grandmother read what he wrote about her? In at least one way writing was different from talking — it was even harder — but surely it would give him more to say aloud about her. The trouble was that the prospect of writing drove all his thoughts for it out of his head. His skull felt emptied throughout the English lesson and the other classes, interrupted by lunch and larking in the schoolyard, activities that came no nearer reaching him than the questions teachers aimed at him. He assumed they toned down their responses to his uselessness because they knew about his grandmother.

None of the boys he’d made any kind of friends with lived near him. Soon his route home left him alone with the November dark, which he could have imagined the houses were hauling down from the sky. The dark had moved into his grandmother’s house. The faltering light of the streetlamp beyond the unreasonably long drive showed him the key in his hand. The jerky shadow of a branch of the tree that hid the house from passers-by clawed at his wrist as he unlocked the front door.

Like his grandmother, it was half as tall again as Jonathan. The dimmest stretch of the glow from the streetlamp twitched underfoot as he sprinted to turn on the jangling chandelier. Its grudging illumination lent him the courage to shut himself in before dashing to switch on the kitchen light. He dropped his schoolbag on the table with a thump that seemed both too loud and dwarfed by the room, and hauled open the refrigerator to pour himself a drink. At once he knew what he could write.

He spread his books across the table and sat on the least creaky chair. “I’m going to say some nice things about you, grandma,” he murmured. “I’ll read you them when I’ve finished.”

He wished he hadn’t thought of that — it made him nervous of the silence around him and behind him. Having ceased its mousy scurrying across the page, the nib emitted a blot like an emphatic full stop. He crossed out the sentence that seemed eager to complete itself. Mr Foster said you had to show your first draft as well as your finished work, though Jonathan’s grandmother had kept saying it looked untidy. The idea of her prowling soundlessly behind him to crane over his shoulder made him feel steeped in the lurking chill of the house. “I’ll read you what I’ve written,” he said as loudly as he dared.

He wanted to believe she was at least as distant as her room. He raised his voice so that it would be audible up there, and didn’t realise it was deafening him to any sounds until he was asked “Have you brought someone home, Jonathan?”

“Just doing my homework,” he found the breath to tell his mother as she and Trudy marched along the hall.

“Why, do you have to read it to your class?” She kissed his forehead before stooping to examine his homework while Trudy looked uncertain whether to do either. Eventually his mother straightened up and blinked at his forehead as though she had a mind to take back the kiss. “Well, if that’s how you remember it, Jonathan.”

“That’s how grandma was.”

“No need to shout. We’re only here.” He was hoping she would leave it at that when she said “I’d like to be home when you come in, you know, even if I mightn’t give you snacks so close to dinner. Unfortunately I have to earn a living, particularly since my mother’s attitudes got to be too much for your father. And by the way, I don’t think you need to upset yourself over the fridge. If you can open it she could. Most of the time she wasn’t quite as feeble as she liked to pretend.”

“Go on, Esther, let it all come out.” To Jonathan Trudy said “People have different ways of grieving, and this is how your mother has to. Are you finding yours?”

“I’ve got to go upstairs now.”

“You can work better there, I expect,” his mother said. “We’ll call you when it’s dinner.”

He could tell she wanted to believe she hadn’t distressed him, while Trudy thought he was off to grieve. Neither was the case. He loaded his schoolbag and climbed into the dimness that hung around the chandelier. Even when he switched on the upstairs light, gloom seemed to cling to the landing and the corridor. He felt as if his grandmother’s disapproval had been roused: she used to say you shouldn’t have more than one light on at a time. She’d just been trying to save money for her family, he told himself. “Mum only meant she wished she could be more like you, grandma,” he muttered. “I expect that means she will be.”

His voice faltered as he saw his blurred shadow growing smaller on a lower panel of his grandmother’s door. Either he was unaware of shrinking from the notion that she was within arm’s reach of the other side or the door was creeping open. The voice that made him see it lurch backwards because he had was his mother’s. “Is that Jonathan talking to himself? What’s wrong with him?”

“Will it be his way of coping, do you think?”

He should have closed the kitchen door. He shut himself in his room and moved his desk away from the wall so that he could sit facing the room with surely no space for anyone, no matter how thin, to sidle behind him. He didn’t need to finish his English homework until the weekend. Instead he applied himself to sums that he was supposed to call arithmetic now that he’d changed schools. He was feeling sure enough of his pencilled answers to commit ink to them when Trudy called “It’s waiting for you, Jonathan.”

He left his bedroom light on so that it would be there for him, his mother’s phrase that finally conveyed some meaning, and hurried to the dining-room. His mother was ladling out a lamb casserole as Trudy filled glasses with wine and his with juice while the sideboard and dresser kept their distance from the table yet helped it aggravate the disapproving sombreness. “Did you get much done?” his mother asked him.

“I won’t do it about grandma after all.”

“I hope that’s not because of me.” When he failed to think of a safe reply she said “What does your subject have to be?”

“Losing something.”

“What else can you say you’ve lost beside your grandmother? Unless you’re intending to tell your teacher how your father absconded.”

Jonathan wasn’t sure of the last word, but otherwise his thoughts seemed not to be hidden from anyone. “Are you still unhappy about him, Jonathan?” Trudy said, stroking his arm.

“Sometimes.”

“Doesn’t seeing him every week help?” Having watched until Jonathan repeated his nod, she said “Give it time and maybe there’ll be someone extra in your life if that’s what you’d like.”

Just now he felt he had to concentrate all his liking on his grandmother. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

Rather less than a look passed between Trudy and his mother. He could have done without the impression that another secret was at large in the house. Once dinner was finished he would have watched the Tuesday quiz shows with his mother, but their guest had to see a programme she’d told her history students to watch. The documentary about people being tortured by the Inquisition until they believed they were as bad as they were told only sharpened his unease. As soon as the credits began to crawl up the screen he retreated upstairs to talk to God and his grandmother.

He hadn’t been in bed long when his mother came to give his forehead a lingering kiss, which she used to say was putting good dreams in. “Not asleep yet? I expect having the light off will help,” she said. “Don’t be surprised if you hear someone else upstairs.”

“Who?” Jonathan gasped, scarcely a word.

“Trudy, of course. She’ll be staying.”

Since she would hardly be sleeping in his grandmother’s old bed, presumably she would share his mother’s — had shared it last night too. He wished he’d asked to sleep there instead of alone in the dark. Once his mother left him in it he found a solitary sentence to repeat. “Please God let my grandmother hear just nice things about her.”

Shouldn’t that settle everything? At last it let him sleep. He lurched awake, anxious not to be confronted by Trudy’s face again, but only daylight had stolen into his room. While he was in the bathroom Trudy and his mother collaborated on breakfast before running him to school in his mother’s car, which had space for all of them. Outside the school gates, as he leaned forward from the back seat to deliver a kiss he hoped would be too swift for his schoolfellows to see, both women turned to him. Their cheeks brushed together, and they exchanged smiles not unlike shy kisses, magnifying his awkwardness as he stumbled into the yard.

Yesterday’s tormentors converged on him. “Found them yet?” said the boy with the tidemarked upper lip.

“What?” Jonathan was distracted enough to wonder.

“They’re a what now, are they?” said the boy whose chin flourished a lone hair. “Thought it was a who you lost.”

“She died,” Jonathan said, hoping that would silence them. “My grandma.”

“Was she old?” That sounded sympathetic until the greyish-lipped boy added “Did she smell?”

“Bet she does now,” his friend said.

“He was right after all. She’ll be a what by now.”

“Like the dead cat we found with maggots for eyes.”

“Looked like he was laughing about it.”

“Those girls didn’t laugh much when we threw-”

That was the last Jonathan heard as he dodged almost blindly through the crowd in search of somewhere he could be alone to talk to his grandmother. A smell of something like tobacco drifted out of the toilets, but even if they’d been deserted, how could he have invited her to follow him in there? He sneaked into the main school building by a side door and dashed along the overheated corridor to sit on the hard seat attached to his desk. “They don’t know anything about you, grandma,” he murmured urgently. “You’ll never be like that. They were just making it up.”

He couldn’t hear her voice, he reassured himself, but remembering was close to hearing. “Never speak ill of the dead or they’ll come back and haunt you. They’ll come back and show you how ugly you’ve made them.” When the bell shrilled he bruised his knees on the underside of the desk. He reached the hall in time to mingle with the others so that the staff wouldn’t realise he’d skulked into the school rather than being healthy in the yard. Throughout the headmaster’s address, and intermittently in all the lessons, he kept hearing his grandmother’s words and could only respond with last night’s prayer. More boys giggled each time he had to mutter. The teachers must be restraining themselves because of his grandmother — he had no idea how he might have responded if they’d spoken rather than merely frowning at him.

Tattered clouds like cobwebs laden with grime raced to meet him as he hurried home. They left the sky behind them no less dark. He let himself into the house and switched on the dimness before venturing upstairs. “You didn’t hear anything bad today, did you, grandma?” he whispered at her door. “God wouldn’t let you. Please God don’t.”

There was no sound from her room. If she’d been listening, the floorboards would surely have made her presence as apparent as they were making his. He was suddenly convinced he had been talking to nobody at all — for how long, he didn’t know. He grabbed the chilly scalloped brass knob and threw open the door.

The room looked yet more enormous for its emptiness. He could have imagined all the heavy mournful furniture was huddling against the walls. A wedge of murky twilight had managed to slip between the ponderous sombre curtains to emphasise the isolation of the bed, on which a fat faded patchwork quilt was drawn over a flattened stack of pillows. “Aren’t you there, grandma?” Jonathan barely said.

Perhaps he glimpsed the shadow of a cloud that was drifting unseen past the window, but the quilt appeared to stir as if something it concealed was trying to take shape and draw breath. He peered into the dimness until he grasped how terrified he was to see. Flinging himself backwards, he dragged the door shut and fled downstairs. “I’m sorry, grandma. I didn’t mean to-” he cried, and interrupted himself. “Please God don’t let her,” he repeated while he spread his schoolbooks across the kitchen table and attempted to work.

He didn’t know how his mother might react to his writing about his father. It could wait until the weekend, when Jonathan would be staying with him. The boy chanted his prayer as an accompaniment to copying a map of the world, and fell silent only when he heard Trudy and his mother at the front door.

Their wide smiles were virtually identical. “So how was your day?” Trudy asked.

It seemed safest not to be specific. “Just stuff.”

“What did you learn, then?” said his mother.

All he could remember was praying. “More stuff.”

“Never mind if you’d rather not tell us.” Her smile drained into her face as she remarked to Trudy “I expect we’d hear it all if my mother was doing the asking.”

Could his grandmother take that as a criticism? “I’m just…” Jonathan mumbled, and ran upstairs. “See, I said mum wants to be like you,” he whispered from the top stair, and repeated his plea to God several times before descending to the kitchen.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” his mother assured him. “Eat up your dinner and forget what I said.”

He was able to achieve the first requirement and pretend the second was accomplished. Might she refrain from talking about his grandmother for fear of upsetting him? After dinner he finished his geography homework in the kitchen and then watched some of a television programme about how men were the cause of all conflict. He didn’t mind if his mother and Trudy thought that included him so long as it drew blame away from his grandmother.

He still had to pray with every breath so as to fall asleep. He wakened in daylight to hear laughter downstairs — the night seemed to have renewed the women somehow. His tormentors didn’t come to find him in the schoolyard, and his classmates had tired of giggling when he felt compelled to pray. He couldn’t have predicted the question with which his mother greeted him that night. “Jonathan,” she said, sitting down at the table to clasp his hands. “Aren’t you happy at this school?”

“Why?” he blurted in case that gave him time to think.

“Just tell me. Tell us, Trudy’s your friend too. What’s disturbing you?”

He could think of nothing his grandmother mightn’t be blamed for. It was Trudy who said “Shouldn’t you explain…”

“You’re right, I’ve missed a step. Jonathan, your headmaster rang me. He says you keep talking to yourself in class.”

Barely in time he saw how to tell something like the truth. “I was just trying to get things right.”

“So that’s why you were reading out your essay the other night. You’ll have to stop doing it at school, though, or you’ll have people thinking you’re-You’ll put them off their own work.”

He thought he’d convinced her all was well. He was on his way to bed when he overheard her saying “It’s my mother again. Living with her, that’s what’s made him so nervy, and no wonder.”

He dashed into his room and huddled in the bed to pray. He had to stop when he heard Trudy and his mother on the stairs: if his mother overheard him she would think he was mad — she’d almost said so — while explaining his behaviour seemed capable of making the situation even worse. At last his prayers under the bedclothes gave way to sleep and then to muddy daylight that smelled of hot food.

His mother and Trudy insisted on kissing him before he could escape from the car. He hastened through the gates to find his tormentors awaiting him. “How many mothers have you got?” enquired the boy with the grubby upper lip.

His singularly hairy crony imitated his disgusted grin. “Do they both live at your house?”

“Why shouldn’t they?” Jonathan was confused enough to ask.

“Bet your grandma wouldn’t like it.”

“Bet they’re glad she’s dead.”

“Bet they wouldn’t want to smell her now, though.”

All Jonathan’s dismay and bewilderment surged like bile into his mouth. “Maybe you will.”

The boys looked as if he’d shocked them by going further than they dared. “What do you reckon you’ll do?” the boy with the sole hair spluttered.

“Nothing. You’ve done it,” Jonathan told them and hid in the crowd.

He wasn’t going to pray to protect them. He didn’t mutter once in class. He mustn’t ask his mother about Trudy in case his grandmother might indeed have disapproved of her — in case that made his mother say things he would have to rectify. Instead he could tell her about his day} except that when she and Trudy came home, holding hands just long enough for him to see, she surprised him by asking “Would you like Lawrence to pick you up from school tomorrow?”

“Don’t you mind?”

“Why would anyone mind? That way you can spend a long weekend with him to make up for the last one and Trudy and I will sort out the house.”

Would that include his grandmother’s room? Tonight he had no sense of her presence. If the room was cleared out, mightn’t that mean she would stay with Jesus, since she would have nowhere to return to? He thought it best to continue praying once he was in bed. “Please God don’t let her hear us saying anything bad about her,” he repeated on the way to sleep.

He felt as if he’d hidden the implications of his words from himself until he was back at school. He couldn’t see his tormentors when he braved the yard. He left his suitcase full of clothes and other weekend items in the secretary’s office and hurried out to search, only to be found by Mr Foster, who was on yard duty. “There’s a pensive young face.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“No need to apologise for thinking.” As Jonathan wondered if that was necessarily true, the teacher said “Feeling more at home now?”

“I think so, sir.”

“You can expect a respite from the comedy, at any rate.”

Jonathan had noticed none. “Which is that, sir?”

“The comedians. The young teasers you encountered earlier in the week. The school will have to do without their routines for a while.”

That almost robbed Jonathan of the breath it took to demand “Why?”

“They appear to have taken up slapstick.” Mr Foster frowned at himself or at Jonathan’s terseness. “They climbed up on a roof they should have known wouldn’t support them, not that they ought to have been anywhere near it.”

What might they have been fleeing? Jonathan’s grandmother would have said they’d brought it on themselves. Having thanked Mr Foster, who seemed to wonder why, he found a gap between two school buildings to hide in. “Please God look after my grandma now. Don’t let her hear anything else bad,” he added, and “I expect those boys have learned their lesson.”

He wouldn’t have minded if they had returned to school in time to see his father collect him in the Land Rover. His father had finished work early, having designed enough houses for one week. He’d once said Jonathan’s grandmother’s house was too big for today and itself, which she’d taken as an insult. “We’ll have a lively weekend, shall we?” he said, shaking Jonathan’s hand.

Jonathan tried as hard as he could tell his father’s lady did. She was called but not spelled Zoh, and kept attempting to make her face even smaller and prettier while she acted girlish with his father or motherly with Jonathan. She and his father took him to restaurants and films and a museum and a game where they had to dodge through a maze and shoot one another with lasers, Zoh emitting a coy reproachful squeal whenever she was hit. Between some of these events he spent time in their apartment, where the rooms were uncluttered and elegantly plain and unobtrusively warm. He was sure they were just the right size, not least his bedroom, but he felt as if the place wasn’t quite reaching him. Perhaps it was the other way round, since he couldn’t stop wondering what was happening at his grandmother’s house.

Wondering overwhelmed his English homework. The harder he struggled to resolve his uncertainty or to write, the more the page and his brain competed at blankness. He had to welcome the sight of half a car on Sunday, though it was only Trudy who had come for him. He even wished he hadn’t greeted her with “Where’s mum?”

“Making a welcome-home dinner.”

Given the looks Trudy was exchanging with Zoh and his father, Jonathan felt all the more anxious to return to his grandmother’s. “See you next weekend,” he said, dealing his father’s hand a shake and disappointing Zoh with one before scrambling into the car.

The fairground neon of the city centre had faded beyond the old and in some cases unbroken lamps standing guard throughout the suburb when Trudy said “Had a good break?”

“What from? I don’t need a break from my mum.”

“Nor from me either, I hope.”

He felt bound to be polite while he tried to think. “No,” he mumbled.

“That’s good. Esther and I have had a chance to get a few things clearer.”

All at once he was certain he knew why they’d wanted him out of the way — knew what he’d failed to realise. “You’ve been talking about my grandma.”

“Among other issues.”

“What did you say about her?”

“Me, nothing to speak of.”

“What did mum?”

“Quite a flood. Everything she had to. It wasn’t all bad.”

“How much was?”

“Best if you discuss it together. I expect she’d like to share your memories now.”

She mustn’t until he’d remembered enough to counteract hers. Why hadn’t he written about his grandmother while he’d had the chance? As the car turned along her street he felt like a small animal trapped inside his own head, darting about in search of a way of escape. He would have to flee upstairs and pray his hardest without being heard by his mother, but how long would she leave before coming to find him?

His suitcase dragged his arm down as he followed Trudy to the house. The shadow of a branch clutched at her wrist when she inserted his grandmother’s key in the lock. He wished he were seeing his grandmother catch hold of her as the door swung inwards, revealing the dark.

Why was the house unlit if his mother was home? It didn’t feel deserted, and her car was in the drive. He hung back until Trudy switched on the chandelier, illuminating a note in his mother’s handwriting on the third stair. Just run down the road for ingredients, it said.

So it wasn’t his mother he sensed waiting in the house. At once he was sure what to do. His grandmother’s condition was Trudy’s fault — she’d encouraged his mother to say all she could. Had his mother even finished? Perhaps she might have more and worse to say if Trudy stayed. He used his luggage to push the front door shut and dumped his suitcase in the hall. “Come and see something,” he said.

“Is it a surprise?” Trudy said, widening her eyes and raising half her mouth.

“You’ll have to say,” he told her and turned hastily to the stairs.

The house felt as breathless with anticipation as he was. The creak of stairs counted the seconds and confirmed Trudy was following. The chandelier seemed to lower itself like a huge murkily luminous spider while the door of his grandmother’s room held itself still as a trap. On the landing he halted, uncertain whether he’d heard the faintest sound beyond her door — a shuffling that grew thinner, increasingly less suggestive of feet, as it approached. “What is it, Jonathan?” Trudy said.

“Your surprise. Come and look.”

On the whole she seemed pleased he’d grabbed her hand. She accompanied him willingly enough, even when he seized the icy knob and flung open his grandmother’s door. “You put the light on,” he said.

“Of course, if you want me to.” Making it clear that she was puzzled but determined, she stepped through the doorway and pressed down the switch with a fingertip. “What am I meant to be seeing, Jonathan? It’s just a room.”

“Have a better look,” he said, though he was tempted to believe her: the room was emptier than last time he’d seen it — the bed had been stripped to its stale piebald mattress. His grandmother wouldn’t want to lie on that; perhaps she was hiding in one of the massive wardrobes, though she’d disliked games she considered to be childish. He urged himself into the room and swung around to catch Trudy’s hand again. “Let’s look in-”

His voice froze in his throat as he saw what was crouched behind her in the dimmest corner of the room. It could almost have been a swollen bunch of sticks, except that it was patched with rags of clothes or skin. Lolling on top of it was an object that looked pinched with chill and peeling with damp and distorted by worse than either. It hadn’t much he would have liked to call a mouth or a nose, and was crowned with lumps of dust or hair. He might not have recognised it if his grandmother’s eyes hadn’t been glaring out of a section like an irregular piece of old toadstool. He hung onto Trudy and nodded at the corner. “There,” he whispered.

She kept her gaze on him. “What now, Jonathan?”

“What you wanted. It’s behind you, look.”

“You mustn’t do things like that. Even if you’re still upset it isn’t very pleasant, is it? You can tell me what’s wrong. I’d like you to, it’d make me feel more like family. Just talk.”

He saw his grandmother’s eyes bulge in the remnant of a face while the rest of her crouched smaller and lower as if she was about to spring. He tried to drag Trudy to confront this — he was growing desperate enough to reach up for her head to twist it round. “I will if you look.”

He felt her grow tense and make herself relax. She was beginning to turn her head when the shape in the corner unfolded itself and tottered to its full height. It jerked out a hand with little in the way of fingers, and he thought it was going to fasten on Trudy’s shoulder. The next moment the light was gone, and Trudy clutched at him. “Did you-”

He wriggled free and dodged out of the room, snatching the door shut. If Trudy switched the light on she would come face to face with the thing she’d made of his grandmother, and otherwise she would be alone with it in the dark. It was suddenly apparent to him that his grandmother didn’t want anyone to see her as she was now, and he wondered what she might do to gain control of the light-switch. He was hanging onto the doorknob with both hands when the front door slammed. “I’m back again,” his mother called. “Where’s everyone?”

“Could you come up?” Trudy responded rather less than steadily. “I’m shut in and I can’t seem to find…”

“Where are you? Hold on.” Jonathan’s mother ran upstairs and halted at the top. “Where’s Trudy?” she asked him. “What are you-”

“I’m in here, Esther.”

“What on earth do you think you’re doing, Jonathan? Let go at once.”

He was afraid that if she opened the door she would see his grandmother. She had to prise his fingers off the knob in order to let Trudy out. As Trudy fled onto the landing, he saw that the room was still unlit. “Trudy, I’m sorry,” his mother cried. “Tell me what happened.”

“Just an attempt to scare me off,” Trudy said more or less evenly. “I’m afraid someone doesn’t want me here.”

“My grandma doesn’t. She doesn’t like you making mum say bad things about her.”

“I think you’d better get ready for bed and stay in it,” his mother told him.

The women followed him into the hall and watched him trudge, weighed down by injustice and luggage, to his room. Was Trudy staying? His grandmother wouldn’t have to go far to find her, then. The thought failed to lessen his dismay at his grandmother’s state. He raced through preparing for bed and took as much refuge in it as he could. Trudy and his mother were murmuring downstairs, largely incomprehensibly. “He’ll have to get used to it,” he heard his mother say.

Did she mean Trudy or her own criticisms of his grandmother? How much would he have to pray to compensate for whatever she’d said over the weekend? He set about chanting his plea, only to wonder if it was too late. He couldn’t bring any other prayers to mind. Before long his mind gave up being awake.

He dreamed Trudy was inciting his mother to say worse and worse — at least, he hoped it was a dream. “That’s right, keep pulling me to bits,” he seemed to hear his grandmother complain. “Pull some more off me.” She’d go to Trudy in the night, he thought, hoping she would. The idea transfixed him with panic. At first he couldn’t understand why, even when he floundered awake — and then he realised how much of the fault was his. He’d willed his grandmother to look her worst for Trudy and his tormentors in the schoolyard.

He couldn’t deny he was glad that Trudy had crept into his room and was stooping to rouse him. When he blinked his eyes wide, however, it wasn’t Trudy’s face he saw looming closer in the dimness. What the boys had said about his grandmother had overtaken her. Even if she couldn’t see him, she could grope in search of him. He cowered under the bedclothes and tried to pray but could think of no words. Surely the noise he was making would bring his mother, or Trudy would do. Perhaps they were punishing him, because all it attracted was the sensation of less than hands plucking at the bedclothes. The time until dawn felt like for ever, and dawn might only show him what was waiting to be seen.