Friends for Life Read online

  Being dead, as she had told Francis earlier, did not worry her particularly. She was not in any pain or discomfort and the predominant feeling was a general sensation of calm and quiet. When the nurses came to take away the body, she had felt no inclination to follow them. It was, after all, only a body.

  What did puzzle her, though, was what she was supposed to do, now that she was dead. After standing by the window for what felt like several hours, she had, for lack of anything better to do, drifted out into the corridor and then explored other parts of the hospital. She had quickly discovered that she could move through walls and doors, float up through ceilings and sink down through floors as easily as if they did not exist, and such freedom of movement might have been rather enjoyable if …

  … if she had not had the nagging feeling that she had missed something.

  “Missed what?” asked Francis.

  “I don’t know.” Jessica’s forehead wrinkled as she searched for the best words to describe how she had felt. “It was like I knew I was supposed to do something, only I didn’t know what. And there wasn’t anyone who could tell me.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, I thought maybe whoever was supposed to tell me hadn’t been able to because I’d been wandering around the hospital, so I went back to the room on the third floor and waited.”

  “Waited?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “In a way, I suppose I’m still waiting.” Jessica sighed. “Not all the time, obviously. During the day I go out and do stuff. But I always go back to the hospital in the evening. It’s not like I have to, but … well, it is a bit like that, I suppose.”

  “And you think one day someone will turn up and tell you what to do?” asked Francis.

  “Who knows?” Jessica gave a little shrug. “I just have this feeling that, if anything’s going to happen, it’ll be there. In that room.”

  “And you’ve been going back there every night … for a year?”

  “Yes.”

  Francis gave a sympathetic whistle. “A year’s a long time.”

  “I know.”

  For a while, neither of them spoke, and then Jessica pointed around her to the dolls and the drawings on the walls.

  “Anyway, your turn. When did all this start?”

  Francis was about to answer when he was interrupted by the sound of the front door opening and someone calling from downstairs.

  “That’s Mum,” he said. “Hang on. I’ll be right back.”

  Francis got down to the landing on the second floor in time to see his mother, a tall, untidy-looking woman, taking off her coat in the hallway and hanging it up on the stand.

  “How did it go?” asked Francis, leaning over the banister.

  “Could have been worse. Sold two plates!” His mother looked up at him and smiled. “How was your day?”

  “It was okay.”

  “No … trouble or anything?”

  “No. No trouble.”

  “Good.” Francis’s mother was heading toward the kitchen. “I think there’s a pizza left in the freezer. I’ll call you when it’s ready, okay?”

  Francis went back upstairs to the attic, where he found Jessica dressed as she had been when they arrived, in the puffer coat, Ugg boots, and knitted hat.

  “I’d better be going,” she said.

  “You don’t have to,” Francis assured her. “I’ll need to go and eat at some point, but—”

  “It’s getting late,” Jessica interrupted him. “I ought to get back to the hospital.” She hesitated before adding. “But I could see you tomorrow. If you like.”

  “Definitely,” said Francis. “Lunchtime? Same place?”

  “Okay.”

  Francis moved to the stairway—he had some vague idea of walking Jessica to the front door—but she made no attempt to follow. Instead, she stared down at the carpet, seemingly lost in thought.

  “Do you have any idea,” she said eventually, “why you can see me, when no one else can?”

  “No,” said Francis. “Do you?”

  “Not really.” Jessica looked up. “But I did wonder if maybe you were the one who could tell me what I was meant to do next.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Francis. “I wish I could, but I don’t know anything about … ghosts. I don’t know anything about anything, really. Except clothes.”

  “No … well, never mind.” Jessica smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  And she disappeared.

  When Francis walked across the playing field at lunch break the next day, Jessica was sitting on the bench waiting for him, dressed in a salmon-pink party dress.

  “It’s what a woman was wearing when she came into the hospital last night,” she said, standing up to give him a twirl that revealed half a dozen petticoats. “Do you like it?”

  “I do,” said Francis admiringly. “Most impressive.”

  “It’s a Sarah Burton.”

  “Even more impressive,” said Francis. Sarah Burton was one of his favorite designers, though this was not an outfit he recognized. “How do you know?”

  “I checked the label when they were undressing her.” Jessica sat down, patting the dress over her legs. “I really ought to be wearing jewelry with it, like she was, but I can’t do jewelry. I don’t know why. I can do shoes and hair, no problem, but when I try and imagine jewelry … nothing happens.”

  Francis sat down beside her.

  “So that’s what ghosts do in the evenings, is it? Hang around in the emergency room and check out what the patients are wearing?”

  “It’s not the only thing,” said Jessica. “I like watching the operations and stuff as well. But I like seeing what people wear. I’ve always liked clothes. Even when I was little, I preferred watching Tim Gunn on TV to Peppa Pig. That’s what my gran said, anyway. And my favorite toy was always the dress-up box.”

  Francis said that he had never had a dress-up box, but that he could still remember the excitement of finding his mother’s copies of Vogue, and how he had carried them away to his room and looked at nothing else for days. That was when he was four. When he was eight, he had asked for a sewing machine for his birthday so that he could begin making his own versions of the designs he copied from magazines or had seen in shopwindows.

  Sitting on the bench in the wintry sunshine, while Francis ate his sandwiches and drank his thermos of tea, they discovered that an interest in clothes was not the only thing they had in common. They were, for a start, almost exactly the same age—not counting Jessica’s year as a ghost—with birthdays only a week apart. They were both “only” children. They had both been brought up by single mothers, and both had had to move house unexpectedly, when they were twelve, and had not enjoyed it at all.

  “I wonder,” said Jessica, “if that’s why you can see me. Because we’re so alike.”

  “Not that alike,” said Francis. “One of us is dead, remember?”

  “You know what I mean!” Jessica poked him with a ghostly elbow that disappeared several inches into his coat. “Having all those things in common … it can’t just be a coincidence, can it?”

  They were still debating the possibility when the bell rang for the start of class, and it seemed only natural that, when Francis went to his class, Jessica should go with him.

  She sat in a chair beside him, and although conversation was limited—at least for Francis, who had to be careful how and when he spoke to someone no one else could see—they both rather enjoyed it.

  Jessica was useful, too. In the pop quiz in Mrs. Archer’s history class, Jessica was able to check around the class to see what everyone else was writing. And in Mr. Williams’s math class that followed, she was able to give Francis a wonderfully clear explanation of integer inequalities. The fact that she did it while wearing an exact copy of Mr. Williams’s shiny blue suit with all the pens in his top pocket made even that lesson … kind of fun.

  Later, back at the attic room on
Alma Road, Jessica asked what he was working on at the moment, and Francis showed her the table covered in a length of off-white cotton cloth with part of a paper pattern pinned to the top.

  “It’s some cotton pinpoint I was given,” he explained, “and I thought I’d try and make a top.” He reached for a sketchbook and flipped it open. “That’s the design.”

  “Neat,” said Jessica. “Who’s it for?”

  “Betty.” Francis pointed to the dressmaker’s dummy standing by the sofa. “It’s just an exercise, really. Practice, you know.”

  Privately, Jessica thought it was a shame that a dummy would be the only person ever to wear the clothes Francis made, but she said nothing. Instead she talked—mostly about fashion and the styles she liked and the ones she didn’t—while Francis draped the pieces of a paper pattern over the dressmaker’s dummy to check the size, and then pinned the result to the material spread out on the table before cutting them out.

  He worked with an easy confidence that Jessica could not help but admire, and it was an hour or so later, seeing him hunched over the sewing machine running down a seam, that she noticed him pause for a moment to stretch his shoulders in a different direction. He’s getting a cramp, she thought, like Gran used to do. Forgetting for a moment that she was a ghost, she reached out to massage the muscles at the bottom of his neck.

  Immediately, Francis stopped and turned around. “Was that you?” he asked.

  “Um … yes …” Even without a body, Jessica could feel herself blushing. “I was going to rub your shoulders. It’s what I used to do for my gran.”

  “But I could feel you!” Francis was puzzled. “How could I feel you touching me if you’re a ghost?”

  “I don’t know.” Jessica reached forward, put her hands on his shoulders, and pushed her thumbs along the muscles of his neck. They disappeared beneath his skin. “You can feel that?”

  “Oh, yes …” Francis leaned back so that the thumbs went even deeper, and closed his eyes. It was a strange but definitely pleasant sensation, relaxing and yet somehow invigorating at the same time. As if he were sitting out in the sun on a summer’s day, and the warmth was soaking through to his bones.

  “Wow …” he said. “You are just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

  The next day, they met in the morning rather than at lunchtime. Francis came out of the house at quarter to nine and found Jessica waiting for him on the sidewalk, and they walked in to school together, went to class together, hung out together at recess, and returned, when school had finished, to the room at the top of the house on Alma Road.

  After almost twelve hours in each other’s company, neither of them showed any signs of being bored. In that curious way these things happen sometimes, they seemed to fit together.

  Which was why they did the same thing the day after …

  And the day after …

  And the day after that.

  If someone had asked Francis if he didn’t think spending most of his waking hours with a ghost was a bit … odd, he would probably have agreed that it was. But he didn’t care. As the days passed, he hardly thought of Jessica as a ghost. She was simply … his friend. She was also the only person his own age he had ever met who could talk about synthetic fabrics as easily as most people talk about the weather, who knew the difference between a pleat and a dart, and who could recognize a Sarah Burton design when its owner was brought into the emergency room.

  Compared to all that, the fact that she was dead seemed unimportant.

  As for Jessica, you would probably have to have been dead for a year yourself—with no one able to see or hear you—to understand how much it meant to her to have Francis to talk to. She had not properly realized how lonely her life—or rather, her death—had been, and now she had found someone who was not only able to talk to her but was clever and funny and interesting …

  Her only worry was that, at some point, he might want to go back to being with people who were alive—though fortunately Francis showed no signs of that at present. When she asked him once if being with her was keeping him away from his other friends, he replied, simply, that there was no one else he wanted to be with.

  And it was true that he made very little effort to speak to anyone else while he was in school. For that matter, no one else seemed to make any particular effort to speak to him.

  Except for Quentin, of course.

  But he was not someone you could describe as a friend.

  The first time Jessica saw Quentin Howard was when she and Francis were waiting in the corridor before going into a science lesson.

  Jessica was floating six feet in the air to avoid the crowd—it made her slightly queasy to have too many people walking through her—when a thickset boy with glasses came up to Francis, holding out a battered-looking doll with one leg and no hair.

  “Present for you, Francis,” he said. “Found her in the road outside. She’ll need some new clothes, but you’re the man for that, aren’t you!” And he tucked the doll into the top pocket of Francis’s blazer, while everyone around him laughed.

  Francis took the doll out of his pocket and was about to throw it in the trash when Mr. Nicholls, the science teacher, appeared and told him to put it away and get into the classroom. Everyone laughed again.

  “What was all that about?” asked Jessica, floating down to join Francis as he made his way to a bench.

  “That was Quentin,” said Francis. “It’s nothing. It’s what he always does.”

  And Quentin always did. He would make a point, whenever he saw Francis, of asking if he’d bought any new dolls recently, or made any little dresses for them, or knitted them some nice underwear. Francis didn’t seem to mind too much, but Jessica did.

  “He’s being horrid,” she said, after Quentin had asked Francis at the start of a geography lesson if he ever had little tea parties with his dolls. “You should do something.”

  Francis only smiled. “Like what?”

  “Well, for a start, you could tell him to stop.”

  “He’s not going to stop just because I tell him to. He’s enjoying himself too much for that.” Francis gave a little shrug. “And anyway … it’s partly my fault.”

  “Your fault? How?”

  “I brought some sewing into school once. And Quentin found a doll in my bag.”

  “One of the costume dolls?”

  Francis nodded. “If it had been one of the punks or something, I might have gotten away with it … but it was the Moschino.”

  “Ah.” Jessica winced. Moschino was a designer who liked to put little rosettes and lace edging on the clothes he made.

  “I thought of trying to tell him who Moschino was and why I liked him,” said Francis, “but I had a feeling it wouldn’t really help. Mum says if I take no notice, he’ll give up with the teasing, eventually.”

  There was, Jessica thought, little sign of Quentin giving up any time soon. As Francis said, he was enjoying himself too much for that. But she still thought something should be done. Quentin’s teasing—if that’s what you could call it—might not worry Francis particularly, but for some reason it left her feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Francis might be one of those lucky people who never worry much about anything—the sort of person who could meet a ghost one lunchtime and simply offer them a mug of tea—but she was not made like that herself.

  That, at least, was what she thought, and it was something of a shock to discover how far it was from the truth.

  They had walked into town together after school on Wednesday. Francis needed some buttons for the cotton top he was making, and he bought them in the haberdasher’s section of Dummer’s department store. While he was paying, Jessica floated off to look at a display of skirts and dresses on the other side of the aisle.

  Although it was February, the first of the summer fashions were already making an appearance and, as Francis came out with his bag of buttons, Jessica called him over to look at a halter-neck dress priced at an ambitious £800.


  Francis joined her, looked at the dress, and then reached up a hand to feel the fabric between his finger and thumb.

  As he did so, a sales assistant appeared in front of him.

  “Aren’t you Francis Meredith?” she asked.

  Francis let go of the material with a start.

  “We haven’t met,” said the woman, “but I’m Lorna Gilchrist’s mother.”

  Lorna was a girl in Francis’s study group at school.

  “I thought I recognized you from the class photo,” the woman continued. “You’re the boy who’s interested in fashion, right?”

  Francis did not reply.

  “I’m expecting Lorna to be here soon,” the woman went on. “I don’t know if the two of you would like to …”

  “I’m sorry.” Francis had begun backing toward the exit. “I have to go. I’m late for … I’m late.”

  He broke into a run as he headed for the stairs and Jessica followed him out of the store, into the precinct, and watched as he slumped down on a bench, his head in his hands.

  Puzzled, she sat down beside him.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

  Francis briefly lifted his head to look at her. “That was Lorna’s mother.”

  “I know it was. I heard her telling you. But I still don’t understand why you ran away. What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on,” said Francis wearily, “is that Lorna’s mother will tell Lorna what she saw, won’t she? And then tomorrow Lorna will tell her friends at school and everyone will know that I was seen hanging around the women’s section of a department store.”

  “That’s what’s bothering you?” Jessica stared at him. “That Lorna might tell everyone tomorrow that you were seen looking at a dress?”

  “Not just looking,” said Francis. “Touching it as well. And yes. That is what’s bothering me.”

  And it clearly was. His face was pale and there were little red spots in his cheeks. He looked … frightened.