Twenties Girl Page 3

  “Have I missed it?” Her pneumatic drill of a voice fills the room as she strides down the aisle. “I just managed to scoot away from Toddler Gym before the twins had a meltdown. Honestly, this au pair is worse than the last one, and that’s saying something…”

  She’s wearing black trousers and a black cardigan trimmed with leopard print, her thick highlighted hair pulled back in a ponytail. Tonya used to be an office manager at Shell and boss people around all day. Now she’s a full-time mum of twin boys, Lorcan and Declan, and bosses her poor au pairs around instead.

  “How are the boys?” asks Mum, but Tonya doesn’t notice. She’s totally focused on Uncle Bill.

  “Uncle Bill, I read your book! It was amazing! It changed my life. I’ve told everyone about it. And the photo is wonderful, although it doesn’t do you justice.”

  “Thanks, sweetheart.” Bill shoots her his standard yes-I-know-I’m-brilliant smile, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Isn’t it a fantastic book?” She appeals around to the rest of us. “Isn’t Uncle Bill a genius? To start with absolutely nothing! Just two coins and a big dream! It’s so inspiring for humanity!”

  She’s such a suck-up, I want to hurl. Mum and Dad obviously feel the same way, as neither of them answers. Uncle Bill isn’t paying her any attention either. Reluctantly, she swivels around on her heel.

  “How are you, Lara? I’ve hardly seen you lately! You’ve been hiding!” Her eyes start focusing in on me with intent as she comes nearer and I shrink away. Uh-oh. I know that look.

  My sister, Tonya, basically has three facial expressions:

  1) Totally blank and bovine.

  2) Loud, showy-offy laughter, as in “Uncle Bill, you kill me!”

  3) Gloating delight masked as sympathy as she picks away at someone else’s misery. She’s addicted to the Real Life channel and books with tragic, scruffy kids on the cover, called things like Please, Grammy, Don’t Hit Me with the Mangle.

  “I haven’t seen you since you split up with Josh. What a shame. You two seemed so perfect together!” Tonya tilts her head sorrowfully. “Didn’t they seem perfect together, Mum?”

  “Well, it didn’t work out.” I try to sound matter-of-fact. “So anyway…”

  “What went wrong?” She gives me that doe-eyed, fake-concerned look she gets when something bad happens to another person and she’s really, really enjoying it.

  “These things happen.” I shrug.

  “But they don’t, though, do they? There’s always a reason.” Tonya is relentless. “Didn’t he say anything?”

  “Tonya,” Dad puts in gently. “Is this the best time?”

  “Dad, I’m just supporting Lara,” Tonya says, in affront. “It’s always best to talk these things through! So, was there someone else?” Her eyes swivel back to me.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Were you getting on OK?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why?” She folds her arms, looking baffled and almost accusing. “Why?”

  I don’t know why! I want to scream. Don’t you think I’ve asked myself that question a bazillion times?

  “It was just one of those things!” I force a smile. “I’m fine about it. I’ve realized that it wasn’t meant to be, and I’ve moved on and I’m in a good place. I’m really happy.”

  “You don’t look happy.” Diamanté observes from across the aisle. “Does she, Mum?”

  Aunt Trudy surveys me for a few moments.

  “No,” she says at last, in definitive tones. “She doesn’t look happy.”

  “Well, I am!” I can feel tears stinging my eyes. “I’m just hiding it! I’m really, really, really happy!”

  God, I hate all my relatives.

  “Tonya, darling, sit down,” Mum says tactfully. “How did the school visit go?”

  Blinking hard, I get out my phone and pretend to be checking my messages so no one bothers me. Then, before I can stop it, my finger scrolls down to photos.

  Don’t look, I tell myself firmly. Do not look.

  But my fingers won’t obey me. It’s an overwhelming compulsion. I have to have one quick look, just to keep me going… my fingers are scrabbling as I summon up my favorite picture. Josh and me. Standing together on a mountain slope, arms around each other, both with ski tans. Josh’s fair hair is curling over the goggles thrust up on his head. He’s smiling at me with that perfect dimple in his cheek, that dimple I used to push my finger into, like a toddler with Play-Doh.

  We first met at a Guy Fawkes party, standing around a fire in a garden in Clapham that belonged to a girl I knew at university. Josh was handing out sparklers to everyone. He lit one for me and asked me what my name was and wrote Lara in the darkness with his sparkler, and I laughed and asked his name. We wrote each other’s names in the air until the sparklers went dead, then edged closer to the fire and sipped mulled wine and reminisced about fireworks parties of our childhoods. Everything we said chimed. We laughed at the same things. I’d never met anyone so easygoing. Or with such a cute smile. I can’t imagine him being with anyone else. I just can’t…

  “All right, Lara?” Dad is glancing over at me.

  “Yes!” I say brightly, and jab off the phone before he can see the screen. As organ Muzak begins, I sink back in my chair, consumed with misery. I should never have come today. I should have made up an excuse. I hate my family and I hate funerals and there isn’t even any good coffee and-

  “Where’s my necklace?” A girl’s distant voice interrupts my thoughts.

  I glance around to see who it is, but there’s no one behind me. Who was that?

  “Where’s my necklace?” the faint voice comes again. It’s high and imperious and quite posh-sounding. Is it coming from the phone? Didn’t I turn it off properly? I pull my phone out of my bag-but the screen is dead.

  Weird.

  “Where’s my necklace?” Now the voice sounds as though it’s right in my ear. I flinch and look all around in bewilderment.

  What’s even weirder is, no one else seems to have noticed.

  “Mum.” I lean over. “Did you hear something just now? Like… a voice?”

  “A voice?” Mum looks puzzled. “No, darling. What kind of voice?”

  “It was a girl’s voice, just a moment ago…” I stop as I see a familiar look of anxiety coming over Mum’s face. I can almost see her thoughts, in a bubble: Dear God, my daughter’s hearing voices in her head.

  “I must have misheard,” I say hastily, and thrust my phone away, just as the vicar appears.

  “Please rise,” she intones. “And let us all bow our heads. Dear Lord, we commend to you the soul of our sister, Sadie…”

  I’m not being prejudiced, but this vicar has the most monotonous voice in the existence of mankind. We’re five minutes in and I’ve already given up trying to pay attention. It’s like school assembly; your mind just goes numb. I lean back and stare up at the ceiling and tune out. I’m just letting my eyelids close when I hear the voice again, right in my ear.

  “Where’s my necklace?”

  That made me jump. I swivel my head around from side to side-but, again, there’s nothing. What’s wrong with me?

  “Lara!” Mum whispers in alarm. “Are you OK?”

  “I’ve just got a bit of a headache,” I hiss back. “I might go and sit by the window. Get some air.”

  Gesturing apologetically, I get up and head to a chair near the back of the room. The vicar barely notices; she’s too engrossed in her speech.

  “The end of life is the beginning of life… for as we came from earth, so we return to earth…”

  “Where’s my necklace? I need it.”

  Sharply, I turn my head from side to side, hoping to catch the voice this time. And then suddenly I see it. A hand.

  A slim, manicured hand, resting on the chair back in front of me.

  I move my eyes along, incredulously. The hand belongs to a long, pale, sinuous arm. Which belongs to a girl about my age. Who’s
lounging on a chair in front of me, her fingers drumming impatiently. She has dark bobbed hair and a silky sleeveless pale-green dress, and I can just glimpse a pale, jutting chin.

  I’m too astonished to do anything except gape.

  Who the hell is that?

  As I watch, she swings herself off her chair as though she can’t bear to sit still and starts to pace up and down. Her dress falls straight to the knee, with little pleats at the bottom, which swish about as she walks.

  “I need it,” she’s muttering in agitation. “Where is it? Where is it?”

  Her voice has a clipped, pinched accent, just like in old-fashioned black-and-white films. I glance wildly over at the rest of my family-but no one else has noticed her. No one has even heard her voice. Everyone else is sitting quietly.

  Suddenly, as though she senses my gaze on her, the girl wheels around and fixes her eyes on mine. They’re so dark and glittering, I can’t tell what color they are, but they widen incredulously as I stare back.

  OK. I’m starting to panic here. I’m having a hallucination. A full-on, walking, talking hallucination. And it’s coming toward me.

  “You can see me.” She points a white finger at me, and I shrink back in my seat. “You can see me!”

  I shake my head quickly. “I can’t.”

  “And you can hear me!”

  “No, I can’t.”

  I’m aware of Mum at the front of the room, turning to frown at me. Quickly, I cough and gesture at my chest. When I turn back, the girl has gone. Vanished.

  Thank God for that. I thought I was going crazy. I mean, I know I’ve been stressed out recently, but to have an actual vision-

  “Who are you?” I nearly jump out of my skin as the girl’s voice punctuates my thoughts again. Now suddenly she’s striding down the aisle toward me.

  “Who are you?” she demands. “Where is this? Who are these people?”

  Do not reply to the hallucination, I tell myself firmly. It’ll only encourage it. I swivel my head away, and try to pay attention to the vicar.

  “Who are you?” The girl has suddenly appeared right in front of me. “Are you real?” She raises a hand as though to prod my shoulder, and I cringe away, but her hand swishes straight through me and comes out the other side.

  I gasp in shock. The girl stares in bewilderment at her hand, then at me.

  “What are you?” she demands. “Are you a dream?”

  “Me?” I can’t help retorting in an indignant undertone. “Of course I’m not a dream! You’re the dream!”

  “I’m not a dream!” She sounds equally indignant.

  “Who are you, then?” I can’t help shooting back.

  Immediately I regret it, as Mum and Dad both glance back at me. If I told them I was talking to a hallucination, they’d flip. I’d be incarcerated in the Priory tomorrow.

  The girl juts her chin out. “I’m Sadie. Sadie Lancaster.”

  Sadie…?

  No. No way.

  I can’t quite move. My eyes are flicking madly from the girl in front of me… to the wizened, candy-floss-haired old woman in the Polaroid… and then back again to the girl. I’m hallucinating my dead 105-year-old great-aunt?

  The hallucination girl looks fairly freaked out too. She turns and starts looking around the room as though taking it in for the first time. For a dizzying few seconds, she appears and reappears all over the room, examining every corner, every window, like an insect buzzing around a glass tank.

  I’ve never had an imaginary friend. I’ve never taken drugs. What is up with me? I tell myself to ignore the girl, to blank her out, to pay attention to the vicar. But it’s no good; I can’t help following her progress.

  “What is this place?” She’s hovering by me now, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. She’s focusing on the coffin at the front. “What’s that?”

  Oh God.

  “That’s… nothing,” I say hastily. “Nothing at all! It’s just… I mean… I wouldn’t look too closely if I were you…”

  Too late. She’s appeared at the coffin, staring down at it. I can see her reading the name SADIE LANCASTER on the plastic notice board. I can see her face jolt in shock. After a few moments she turns toward the vicar, who is still droning on in her monotone:

  “Sadie found contentment in marriage, which can be an inspiration to us all…”

  The girl puts her face right up close to the vicar’s and regards her with disdain.

  “You fool,” she says scathingly.

  “She was a woman who lived to a great age,” the vicar carries on, totally oblivious. “I look at this picture”-she gestures at the photo with an understanding smile-“and I see a woman who, despite her infirmity, led a beautiful life. Who found solace in small things. Knitting, for example.”

  “Knitting?” the girl echoes incredulously.

  “So.” The vicar has obviously finished her speech. “Let us all bow our heads for a final moment of silence before we say farewell.” She steps down from the podium, and some organ Muzak begins.

  “What happens now?” The girl looks around, suddenly alert. A moment later she’s by my side. “What happens now? Tell me! Tell me!”

  “Well, the coffin goes behind that curtain,” I murmur in an undertone. “And then… er…” I trail off, consumed by embarrassment. How do I put it tactfully? “We’re at a crematorium, you see. So that would mean…” I wheel my hands vaguely.

  The girl’s face blanches with shock, and I watch in discomfiture as she starts fading to a weird, pale, translucent state. It almost seems as if she’s fainting-but even more so. For a moment I can almost see right through her. Then, as though making some inner resolution, she comes back.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “That can’t happen. I need my necklace. I need it.”

  “Sorry,” I say helplessly. “Nothing I can do.”

  “You have to stop the funeral.” She suddenly looks up, her eyes dark and glittering.

  “What?” I stare at her. “I can’t!”

  “You can! Tell them to stop!” As I turn away, trying to tune her out, she appears at my other side. “Stand up! Say something!”

  Her voice is as insistent and piercing as a toddler’s. I’m frantically ducking my head in all directions, trying to avoid her.

  “Stop the funeral! Stop it! I must have my necklace!” She’s an inch away from my face; her fists are banging on my chest. I can’t feel them, but I still flinch. In desperation, I get to my feet and move back a row, knocking over a chair with a clatter.

  “Lara, are you all right?” Mum looks back in alarm.

  “Fine,” I manage, trying to ignore the yelling in my ear as I sink down into another seat.

  “I’ll order the car,” Uncle Bill is saying to Aunt Trudy. “This should be over in five.”

  “Stop it! Stop-it-stop-it-stop-it!” The girl’s voice rises to the most penetrating shriek, like feedback in my ear. I’m going schizophrenic. Now I know why people assassinate presidents. There’s no way I can ignore her. She’s like a banshee. I can’t stand this any longer. I’m clutching my head, trying to block her out, but it’s no good. “Stop! Stop! You have to stop-”

  “OK! OK! Just… shut up!” In desperation, I get to my feet. “Wait!” I shout. “Stop, everybody! You have to stop the funeral! STOP THE FUNERAL!”

  To my relief, the girl stops shrieking.

  On the downside, my entire family has turned to gape at me as if I’m a lunatic. The vicar presses a button in a wooden panel set in the wall, and the organ Muzak abruptly stops.

  “Stop the funeral?” says Mum at last.

  I nod silently. I don’t feel quite in control of my faculties, to be honest.

  “But why?”

  “I… um…” I clear my throat. “I don’t think it’s the right time. For her to go.”

  “Lara.” Dad sighs. “I know you’re under strain at the moment, but really…” He turns to the vicar. “I do apologize. My daughter hasn’t been quite herself lately.
Boyfriend trouble” he mouths.

  “This is nothing to do with that!” I protest indignantly, but everyone ignores me.

  “Ah. I understand.” The vicar nods sympathetically. “Lara, we’ll finish the funeral now,” she says, as though I’m a three-year-old. “And then perhaps you and I will have a cup of tea together and a little talk, how about that?”

  She presses the button again and the organ Muzak resumes. A moment later, the coffin starts moving creakily away on its plinth, disappearing behind the curtain. Behind me I hear a sharp gasp, then-

  “Noooo!” comes a howl of anguish. “Nooo! Stop! You have to stop!”

  To my horror, the girl runs up onto the plinth and starts trying to push the coffin back. But her arms don’t work; they keep sinking through.

  “Please!” She looks up and addresses me desperately. “Don’t let them!”

  I’m starting to feel a genuine panic here. I don’t know why I’m hallucinating this or what it means. But it feels real. Her torment looks real. I can’t just sit back and witness this.

  “No!” I shout. “Stop!”

  “Lara-” Mum begins.

  “I mean it! There’s a just cause and impediment why this coffin cannot be… fried. You have to stop! Now!” I hurry down the aisle. “Press that button or I’ll do it myself!”

  Looking flustered, the vicar presses the button again, and the coffin comes to a standstill.

  “Dear, perhaps you should wait outside.”

  “She’s showing off, as usual!” says Tonya impatiently. “‘Just cause and impediment.’ I mean, how on earth could there be? Just get on with it!” she bossily addresses the vicar, who bristles slightly.

  “Lara.” She ignores Tonya and turns to me. “Do you have a reason for wanting to stop your great-aunt’s funeral?”

  “Yes!”

  “And that is…” She pauses questioningly.

  Oh God. What am I supposed to say? Because a hallucination told me to?

  “It’s because… er…”

  “Say I was murdered!” I look up in shock, to see the girl right in front of me. “Say it! Then they’ll have to put off the funeral. Say it!” She’s beside me, shouting in my ear again. “Say it! Say-it-say-it-say-it-”