Walking Through Albert Page 5

‘Is who the same—’ I snap.

  ‘This woman upstairs who calls the mother Mother—see, number 4—and this one who comes downstairs in number 1 and says Thank God.’

  ‘Geez, Lee, why would she be the same—’

  ‘Well, Emma’s put that she heard her “clothes swishing” upstairs and that you said she made a “rustling sound” in the hall.’

  Emma’s eyes narrow. ‘Is it the same voice?’ she asks me. ‘What does she say upstairs, Lee?’

  ‘ “No-don’t-tell-me” and “Only-missing-only-missing-oh-Mother.” ’

  ‘I’m trying to remember. She’s kind of hysterical upstairs, so her voice is a bit funny—’

  ‘She’s hysterical both times,’ I say. ‘Upstairs with fright, downstairs with happiness.’

  ‘So you reckon she is the same person then, Ren?’ says Emma.

  I shrug. ‘Look, you never see anything properly, and half the time you’re guessing about what you’re hearing. The only thing that’s clear, like I said, is the feelings—the temperature, the smells, and people’s feelings inside. And even then, you’re trying so hard to keep yourself together ... anyway, what was the other problem, Emma?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You said there were two reasons why you couldn’t tell your parents.’

  ‘Oh yes, I did, didn’t I?’ She smiles weakly.

  ‘This’s the one you didn’t want to tell me yesterday, right?’

  She smiles a bit apologetically. ‘Yeah. I’m just scared, I guess ...’ She stares off into the distance for a few seconds. ‘I’m just scared that if I do get them to believe something weird’s happening, all they’ll want to do is move out. Just get the place fixed up to sell and move on, super-quick.’ She hunches up tight. ‘And it’s like—’ Then she kind of breaks open, and looks a bit wild, and waves her hands around. ‘We’ll have to put everything in boxes again!’ she says savagely.

  I can tell this is something she can’t sit down and ‘discuss’ with her sensible parents. Maybe all these hauntings are making me better at working out people’s feelings. Whatever: I say softly, ‘So it’s Andy or no one, you reckon.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, not meeting my eyes. ‘I reckon I’ll stick with Andy.’

  10

  Ghost-nest

  I’m over at Glenorchie, drinking lemonade at the table under the jacaranda in the front yard. Funny how much time this family spends outside, considering what a humungous house they’ve got. Mrs Welsh is at the other end of the table, sitting over her wedding lists, her black plait going wispy with stress. Fia’s smoking and leafing through a pile of bridal magazines, spreading them out on Chris’s torn-black-T-shirted back as he dozes on the lawn. Fia’s hair is mostly chopped off now, and bleached white for the wedding. (‘But it’ll grow out by then,’ said Emma when she first saw it, ‘and then you’ll have black hair roots showing.’ Fia just rolled her eyes. ‘What do you think I want, dorkhead?’) I’m just slacking off, recovering from ghost patrol, but Emma’s doing homework—they work her pretty hard at Hilda Street.

  The house is a mess. Half the outer rooms have been ripped away to show the terrible colours people have chosen for the inside walls over the years—mauve, a horrible cacky browny-green, even a rainbow and some daisies. All afternoon Emma’s dad and his mate Neville have been kicking sheets of fibro loose and dropping them off the upstairs balcony—it looks like fun. Passers-by have been stopping to watch—I guess there’s no one alive who’d remember the old Glenorchie that was wrapped up inside this newer layer, so it’s a big surprise for everyone.

  ‘Put Panadol on your shopping-list.’ Mr Welsh strolls towards us across the grass with a bottle of ginger beer in his hand. ‘I’ve just given the last of it to Vince and his electricians.’

  Mrs Welsh shakes her head. ‘Half our wedding budget’s going on painkillers! What’s wrong with these fellows?’

  ‘They must all have the bug we had.’ He sits down and has a big swig of ginger beer.

  ‘I swear, every handyperson and every caterer who’s stepped in our front door has come crying to me for an aspirin within five minutes—or a band-aid; they’re always injuring themselves. But they can’t all have Ross River fever.’

  ‘It’s the house.’ Emma’s colouring in the heading of her ‘Recycling Water’ project—bright blue letters, with light-blue drops flying out. ‘It’s full of ghosts you’re all determined not to see.’ I glance at her in alarm, but she just keeps on colouring.

  ‘Maybe there’s a toxic waste dump under the house or something,’ says Mrs Welsh. ‘Maybe there was a tannery here, or something involving chemicals that seeped into the soil.’

  ‘I could get the environmental people out,’ says Mr Welsh.

  ‘It’s not the soil,’ Emma calmly insists. I’d kick her to shut her up, but she’s too far away. ‘It’s the air. It’s full of ghosts. Some people admit to feeling their presence; other people pretend they don’t. They resist, and get hurt, and get headaches.’ She doesn’t look up from her water drop-lets, even when her parents stare at her. It’s as if she thinks she’s talking to herself. Fia’s face slowly lifts from her magazines.

  ‘Feeling okay, Emma?’ says Mr Welsh.

  ‘I’m fine; I’m used to ghosts. Even the tapping under my bedroom floor doesn’t freak me out any more—I just turn over and go back to sleep.’

  ‘Tapping under your—’

  ‘Knocking, under the floorboards right under my head, at night. I guess it’s just one of the ghosts. I just roll over and go back to—’

  But Mr Welsh is gone, striding off across the grass.

  Fia gives an amazed hoot of laughter.

  ‘Oh, Em!’ Mrs Welsh looks cross. ‘Now he’ll pull the house apart looking for your “ghost”, you silly. Look.’ Mr Welsh has just picked up a crowbar that was lying on the veranda. He goes out of sight around the house.

  ‘Good,’ says Emma. ‘I hope he finds it.’ She still hasn’t looked up from colouring.

  Mrs Welsh frowns at her. Then the phone rings in the front hall and she gets up and takes all her lists inside.

  ‘You dag, Em!’ splutters Fia, and Chris laughs, too.

  When they’ve finished and Fia’s picked up a fresh magazine, I say to Emma under my breath, ‘I thought you weren’t going to tell them!’

  ‘I changed my mind.’ She colours a water-drop so hard she makes a dent in the paper. ‘I just wanted to see what it felt like, telling them the truth.’

  ‘Hey, Em!’ comes a cheerful shout from across the garden. Mr Welsh is standing at the house-corner, hands on hips, a big grin on his face. He beckons her with a wave.

  ‘Come on, Fee.’ Chris scrambles up.

  Halfway to Mr Welsh, we can hear him chuckling to himself. ‘Come and have a look at the nest your ghost built.’

  ‘I’m going to look like a wally, any old minute,’ mutters Emma.

  Emma’s bedroom walls are a now pile of fibro on the side grass. Mr Welsh has jemmied three or four floorboards up. He waves us closer.

  Something’s made a nest down there. Something’s chewed a whole pile of junk mail into strips and made quite a cosy bed in a corner there. Scattered all around it are bones and fragments of bones—I recognise a chicken’s leg-bone, but there are bigger ones, too, all clean and dry-looking.

  ‘What is it?’ says Fia.

  ‘Something big,’ says Emma. She looks as if she’d much rather see a ghost than this.

  ‘By those droppings—’ Mr Welsh points into the shadows, ‘—I’d say we had an almighty big rat here, having a good old chew on those bones in the night.’

  ‘Do rats eat bones?’ says Chris. I know that’s a silly question, but I’m prepared to believe anything, I’m so surprised.

  ‘Well, they have teeth that grow and grow, you see. They actually have to gnaw on something to keep their teeth from over-growing. If they’ve got an easy food source—and this one must have, to grow so big—they have to gnaw on something else to keep their
teeth down.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say weakly. ‘That’s amazing, isn’t it, Em ...’

  ‘Will you set a trap for it?’ she asks her dad politely.

  ‘Probably put down some baits. I wouldn’t want it to die under the floor, though—a rat that size’d make a bi-ig stink, for a lo-ong time.’ He starts loosening another floorboard.

  Fia knocks Emma off-balance. ‘It’d serve you right, for telling porkies.’

  ‘Get knotted,’ says Emma between her teeth.

  ‘Come on, Fee.’ Chris starts to pull her away with a trailing bit of her clothing. ‘Get us a cold drink, hey?’

  ‘Get it yourself, why don’t you?’ she says playfully.

  ‘Oh, co-ome o-on.’ He smooches all over her and she pretends to fight him off. They go around the corner of the house.

  ‘Now, Em,’ says Mr Welsh.

  ‘Yes?’ Emma’s very red. Is she angry or embarrassed? I guess she could be both.

  ‘I want you to watch it with your scare stories, especially in front of your mother, you hear? She’s got enough on her plate at the moment without worrying about you seeing things. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ says Emma in a flat voice.

  ‘I know it seems like your big sister’s getting all the attention, but don’t worry—after the wedding you’ll have us all to yourself.’

  I follow Emma back across the garden. ‘We should’ve worked it out ourselves, that that one wasn’t a ghost, hey? It’s always been just the tapping, not anything about people’s feelings. I mean, it makes us scared, but it’s not about the family’s feelings—Albert and everyone. Their old, leftover feelings—’

  Emma flops into her chair, her eyes glistening with tears. She sees me noticing. ‘He thinks I’m just making it up, to get attention! As if I would! As if I’m that kind of person!’

  ‘Of course you’re not!’ I give her arm a shake. ‘He just doesn’t know how to take it, all your talk about ghosts.’

  ‘Yes he does—he has to prove I’m wrong as quickly as he can. And he has! And now none of them will ever believe a word I say!’

  ‘What—were you still hoping they would?’

  She slumps forward, picks up her light-blue pencil and starts colouring ferociously.

  ‘Nah,’ I say. ‘Face it, Em, we’re in this on our own.’

  11

  What It's all about

  Lee and I start doing ghost patrol with Emma. Okay, it’s her house and her problem, but I can’t just leave her to deal with it alone, and Lee can’t either, it looks like—whenever he catches me going over there he always volunteers to come too.

  It’s really weird. It reminds me of when we went on that farm holiday a couple of years ago, and found an electric fence.

  ‘Oh, that won’t hurt you,’ says Dazza, and lays his finger on the wire. ‘Go ahead, touch it.’

  So we did. Lee and me and even Mum tried it. The jolt didn’t even go up my arm—it just kind of popped inside my finger. And it wasn’t even painful—’It makes your bones jump,’ said Lee, which was about right.

  But what was funny was how hard it was, even when you’d done it before and knew it didn’t hurt, to put your finger back on the wire. You really wanted to, to sort of get to know the feeling better, because the jolt was over so fast—but you really wanted not to, too. It was so hard to screw up your courage to do it again. You could see why animals learned to steer clear of it.

  That’s why we helped Emma, because we were braver in a bunch. If you’re going to plunge into a haunting, it’s just a little bit easier if another person plunges in with you. And Emma reckons she recovers quicker, too. She reckons when she gets haunted on her own, those echoes afterwards stick around, sort of inside her—I remember that dark worm in the kitchen haunting, and shudder.

  One day we’re sitting in the Glenorchie kitchen, Emma and me and Lee. We’re drinking cordial and not saying much—we’ve been ghost-patrolling and sometimes it takes a bit of sitting and waiting to get back to yourself properly.

  I’m feeling almost normal when Mrs Welsh comes in. She sweeps off her sunhat and puts it and a folder full of papers on the table. ‘I’ve been doing a bit of treasure-hunting.’ She flashes her eyes at Emma and goes to the fridge.

  ‘She means research on the house,’ Emma tells me, reaching for the folder. ‘What did you find out?’

  ‘Well, the Whitton papers are in the State Library—all Florence’s correspondence, business and personal. Boy, was that woman ever busy! She was on every committee under the sun—women’s rights, architecture, engineering, encouragement of young people in the arts. It’d take days to read it all—’

  Just then the air caves in all around us. It’s the number 3 ghost, the anxious newspaper-reading one. My left arm’s tangled with his right one and Emma’s is mixed up with his left one. Across the table Mrs Welsh is talking and getting ice out for her cordial. Her voice is very distant and I can hardly make out the words, ‘How she managed ... and two children ...’ Her mouth moves, but her voice mingles with the ghost’s breathing. He looks down a list; I can’t read the list but I get the impression of a very important column of words. Outside it’s early morning, and cold—the man’s warming his hands under his arms.

  I prepare myself, but the stab of horror blows all my preparations away. A cry breaks out of the man’s mouth with the shock, a little scrap of a prayer; then the haunting starts to ease off.

  Mrs Welsh is standing there looking at us nervously.

  ‘Sorry, Mum?’ says Emma.

  I go to take a big, busy drink from my glass, discover it’s empty just as it hits my teeth, and pretend to be trying to get the last tiny dribble of cordial from right down the bottom.

  ‘You’re all looking at me as if there’s some very important piece of news I ought to know. Don’t tell me—Fia’s broken it off with Chris.’

  ‘No, no.’ Emma’s trying too hard to sound casual. ‘Go on, Mum—what about Florence’s family?’

  Mrs Welsh looks from me to Lee to Emma, then sits down. ‘Well, it’s a bit sad, really. Dulcie—that’s Florence’s daughter—she married a young man she was very keen on called George, and George went off to the war with Dulcie’s brother Albert, on the same boat—what a scene, to be waving off your brother and your new husband, and the band playing and the streamers flying, and not knowing if you’d ever see either of them again!’

  I’m still trying to shake my head clear of the newspaper ghost. ‘Awful,’ agrees Emma, though she can’t know any better than I do what her mum’s talking about, except that Albert is the ghost-man at the front door: Master Albert, says that bloke in the hall, is it really you?

  ‘And then George goes off to the front and is killed almost straight away, and then six months later Albert goes missing, so that on top of all her war work Florence has to cope with not knowing whether her son’s even alive, plus a daughter who’s ill with grief.’

  ‘And is he? Albert? Alive?’ Or is he a ghost even to those ghost-people, to that bloke, to that lady, appearing in a blast of ghost light at their door?

  ‘Oh yes, but his own side doesn’t know. In the same week Florence gets the telegram that he’s presumed dead and the first letter from him at the prison camp, complaining that the food’s “pretty dire”. So.’ She takes a drink. ‘And we think we’ve got drama, with this wedding.’

  ‘So he comes back?’ says Lee.

  ‘Years later. Three and a half years, he’s away. Dulcie gets married again, and has a couple of children. And Albert comes back, “quite broken in health”, Florence says—she wrote about it to her sister. She can hardly believe it’s the same “golden boy” they all knew. Look—’ Mrs Welsh opens the folder. ‘I got a printout of the photo of their welcome-back celebrations. You can see the fuss they made of him. See the poor chap in the middle of it all!’

  She pushes the picture across the table. There’s a big bunch of old-fashioned people gathered around long tables in the back garden: white-whiskered
old men, women with huge hats, kids in bonnets and frilly dresses—and in the middle of it all, under a banner reading WELCOME HOME CAPT. WHITTON, a man in an over-sized suit, his skin strangely dark, his thin face lit up by a smile that somehow out-smiles all the other joyful faces in the picture.

  ‘Oh man,’ I breathe. ‘So that’s Albert.’ I’ve never actually seen his face, I realise—he’s always been just a blur of light, a blur of joy and surprise in the eyes of that man in the hall.

  Emma’s silence is full of things she can’t say in front of her mum.

  ‘And that must be Florence,’ Lee’s grubby finger pokes onto the printout, at the white-haired lady on Albert’s right.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ says Emma. ‘I’ve seen other photos of her.’

  ‘And here’s Albert,’ says Mrs Welsh, pushing another printout across the table. ‘And Albert and George together. And Dulcie and George’s wedding photo. All done in the same session, just before the boys went away to war.’

  Florence Whitton was right; you wouldn’t know it was the same man, or that Dulcie was the same woman. Both of them have young, round faces in the studio photos. It’s almost the same face, quite a plain one, even a bit pudding-y, with smiling, light-coloured eyes—Albert’s under a slouch hat, Dulcie’s framed by her bridal veil. The puddingy-ness, the ... it’s not smugness, it’s just that they don’t know what they’re going to have to go through. Their smiles are sort of innocent, sort of half-asleep. And then at the party after the war, they’re fully awake; they know. I guess that’s what life does to you, a life with war and death in it.

  ‘Man.’ I shiver. ‘That’s truly spooky.’ It’s a dumb thing to say, but I have to say something to push away this feeling of just having too much on my plate, too much in my brain. We’ve been inside these people, but we’ve never seen them, and putting the two together ... the strongest thought I have is: ghost patrol is not a game. I mean, I did know that, but acting as if it was a game is how we’ve been managing, how we’ve been doing it without going raving mad.

  There’s a hush in the room—I realise there’s a bit of an awkward feeling. I look across at Lee and Emma. She’s breathing very carefully and concentrating on the details of Dulcie’s wedding dress.