Re-Making

I am nothing. I have nothing. Literally nothing. My poor drums. My Yamahas! My clothes, OMG my jeans. My phone. My beautiful, beautiful rose-gold phone.

It’s only stuff though, right? Stuff from the Ghost world. Sticky.

Half the time I think I must be crazy. I know it. Just like they said on the news and everywhere. Brainwashed, loony, tin-foil... all that stuff. I mean, I must have gone crazy to do what I’ve done. But wait, those thoughts are Ghost thoughts. They don’t make me panic now, like they used to, clenching up inside. What’s happening is what has to happen. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t stay there, watching Mum fade, and Trevor - well I don’t actually care about him, so scratch that. And as for Linnet…

‘Look!’ Rachel is pointing at something. A fragment of blue going in little curves down and up over the water. ‘Kingfisher!’

Did I know that’s what it was? I guess I did. I can’t help feeling a leap inside, seeing it. Rachel finds it easiest of all of us. Shy, screwy little Rachel, so calm all the time now when she used to be the one throwing fits at school and making everyone embarrassed. I put my arm around her and squeeze and she looks at me blankly, so I can’t tell if she thinks it’s nice or not. Nori would have said ‘Aww, love you too’ or something.

Nori.

It’s worse than leaving all your stuff, leaving your friends. To be honest, I can’t even think about it. It’s like a dark hole, everything I thought we were gonna do, everything we were gonna share, all the plans we had about what our lives were gonna be.

But caring, clinging on, is just an old habit. It will go. It almost has.

Rachel says, ‘If you wash your hair and comb it out, I can braid it for you if you like. I’m pretty good at braiding. It will help keep it, you know...’ She means it will help keep it from turning into the wild, horrid, ugly mass that is normal now. The ‘new normal’ haha, we still laugh about that stupid phrase, we say it all the time. Any sad, fucked-up thing we say it’s the ‘new normal’

‘Thanks.’ I guess this means she does like affection.

‘Do it now. There’s like two hours of sun left?’

The sun feels so so good after weeks of black rain, but I know that water is icy. Icy water versus the feeling of clean hair. And of course clean hair wins any day. But then when I’m kneeling as carefully as I can on the bank, choosing a little bit where nobody’s trodden it into mud and there are long flat, squashy stalks of some plant I can bend over to kneel on, Tristan comes up behind and shoves me in.

‘Do it properly biatch!’ he yells, ‘Get fucking clean.’

That bastard. If I could even breathe I would do something, but I can’t, I’m gasping and Rachel throws me the little sliver of soap and now I’m in I will get clean. And it’s so good.

These are my friends now. My tribe. None of us would have guessed it, last year. It’s like a drum rhythm started - an odd beat, Ijexa or something, one of those crazy West African ones - and some of us woke up and started dancing to it. We didn’t know until then which ones it would be. We didn’t choose.

*

I sit quiet and still while Rach sorts my hair. All through today I am holding the thought: this is the last time, the last chance. And you know, it is totally a relief and also like stepping into space off a cliff. I can’t let myself hope. One way or another I’m totally relieved that everything will be decided, even if I’m crying out inside.

When night starts to come down, it’s late. I go alone. The others gather round me, touch my shoulder, my hand, they know what it means. I feel held up, special, like when my real Dad carried me on his shoulders.

Bishop’s Woods are almost vibrating with life as I pick my way round the edges. A pair of fat pigeons clatter through some branches, disturbed from their love dance; a little greeny-yellow bird skitters ahead of me. Birds come to visit me all the time now. ‘Don’t go up near those woods when it’s late,’ Mum used to say, when I was out running. Everything used to be about fear. Watch out for this, don’t let that happen, you don’t understand the danger at your age. What a joke.

My braids are awesome. Every part of me is clean, and the way I move and think is kind of clean too. It’s like, I don’t know, all those questions and fears I had when I was that other girl, starting from when I crawled out of bed in the Sugarpuff mornings, churning about school assignments and the horror of the first mirror check - only 48 freaking minutes to look like a human girl! - and all that drama, it’s just wiped away now. Omg I feel so sad for her, that Grace, struggling along, showing one face to the world and always so confused inside. But she had the secret instructions in her. And she made it. She recognised the new beat.

I skirt round the trees, running my palm over the delicious bark of some, (I can almost hear their quiet excitement, literally) until the dirty orange blur of the city is visible, like a dream. I cross the fields, joining the footpaths. We used to wear black and hug the hedges, hearts going like mad, heading back to steal stuff we needed or try (uselessly) and persuade people we were missing. The more we hugged the hedges, the more police and wardens there were out, looking for us, blaming us for the fear.

‘It’s you lot,’ one half-bald policeman said to me, the terrible day I got caught, ‘you lot causing all this chaos.’ He gripped my arm and shook me so hard that the bruise stayed for days. He was terrified and just wanted to hurt something, even if the something was a fourteen-year-old girl.

Now, I don’t hide. When I get to the first streets, vaulting over the little turnstile gate, I walk down the middle, slow and easy. I’m off their radar, they can’t touch me. There’s like little flashes inside me of this place as all open country, sometime in the past or the future or some other time. In the Ghost story there are burnt out shops, still some barricades and some of them even still have people at them, sipping from steaming mugs or swallowing beer for courage. They hold the hope that something ‘out there’ is coming and can be fought off, but it was never ‘out there’, it’s inside us, it’s in our DNA. I spin round, whirling my arms. I love to dance and move so much now, no sneaked can of cider needed haha. I totally groove round the barriers, over the rubbish. The Ghosts don’t see me. There’s a little squeaking echo inside me of when I wanted to save all of them, wake them up, but their story is already setting itself, nothing I can do.

But at the house, the stickiness hits me with a rush and I’m not prepared, so that I have to be sick by the back door, into the drain. It’s worse than anything. Like all the old voices are calling me, ‘Grace, remember who you were, come back’, and when I’m inside, the stuff, the objects, the things with their memories, the photos up the stairs, it almost swamps me. The worlds are touching here, because of me, because of what I have come to do. And they don’t want to touch any more.

I creep up to her room and, surprisingly, she is not asleep. Did she feel me coming? Her eyes shine faintly in the glow from the little plug-in nitelite.

‘Grace?’ She sounds so confused, bless her. I didn’t think she’d even know me. Suddenly I’m so terrified. What if I decide to stay? Could that happen, even now? I know she won’t come, I know it, oh fuck, why was I fooling myself.

‘Yea it’s me.’ I sit on her bed and stroke her face and she shivers and her eyes go wider. ‘Listen,’ I make myself speak slowly and calmly, ‘This is like, I don't know, just a minute, just a moment, that's all we have. I’m going now. Forever. To... to a kind of magical place. A country like this one. And you can come with me, or you can stay here with Mummy. But whatever you decide, we can’t change later.’

How to explain to a four-year-old?

I didn’t expect it. I thought this was the last goodbye, I really did. But she puts her arms up, round my neck. And suddenly I can’t see for tears. And I’m kissing her all over her hair and face.

So we leave, we leave the old stories, and I know this really is the last time. I can almost feel the final split as we re-cross the fields, Earth sucking itself in two directions and all the ones behind starting those old stories up again, as if it was the beginning of them.

‘Grace, put me down.’

I’ve been carrying her on my back, still sleepy in her nightdress. She stands in bare feet and looks all around, back at the city, at the trees, at me. Her eyes are huge. She shakes herself, like a cat that gets an unexpected drop of water on its nose. She puts her hand on something inside her nightdress and brings it out and I see it is the tiny, heart-shaped locket that Mum got me when Linnet was born. I’m sitting on the hospital bed, gawky in my braces, smiling and holding the new baby and Mum has her arm around me, looking tired and pale from the birth. Trevor is outside on his phone somewhere, smoking.

‘I kept it ‘coz you were gone,’ she says, and then she scowls, ‘It’s itchy.’ She scratches and claws at her chest through the material. ‘What shall I do with it?’

‘I don’t know. Do what you want. I don’t want it.’

‘I don’t want it either. It’s so old.’

So the locket goes into the bushes, spun round her little finger, the last of the stickiness, and she gives a hiccup and takes my hand. ‘Up again!’ She’s one surprise after another. Her little bright self against me is a gift from the gods.

Back in camp we are nine now instead of eight and there’s a fire and dancing and we know that other fires are lit, not far away. Soon the tribes will come together, when the other story has gone completely.

I set Linnet down and she looks round, blinking. ‘What are we going to do?’

I squat down next to her. ‘We are going to start again. Everything.’

And Tristan comes waltzing and picks her up and spins her 'til she shrieks. And Ross catches my eye and I get that warmth I always get.

I am nothing.

Newness.

Joyful creation.