Ghost Girl by Helena McEwen

Author:Helena McEwen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

It’s all because of Natalie’s twisted gut, I think to myself as I pass her empty cubicle next door to mine. If it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t be closing the curtain in a hurry, undoing my tie, stepping out of my skirt, and pulling off my horrible knee-length beige socks. I rummage about in my blue canvas bag at the bottom of my cupboard, and shiver in my vest and pants.

I think it was last-minute, and pure luck. She just saw me walking down the corridor on the way to get my cloak, and she was standing next to the school-walk nun with the clipboard.

She said, ‘We have a space on the wooding team. Would you like to join us?’

‘Yes, Sister Campion,’ I said straightaway. ‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Well, change quickly, dear, and catch us up. Well be walking up the road towards Merton.’

As soon as I got round the corner, I belted up the stairs.

I pull on my jeans and my tartan shirt and my blue jersey. They all smell faintly of turpentine. Little fronds seem to unfurl in the air around me when I am standing there in my home clothes. I sit down on the edge of the yellow candlewick bedspread. I can breathe. I pull my hair out of its ponytail and put on my stripy hat pulled over my ears, and my Tottenham Hotspur football scarf that Eddie gave to Very.

I feel as if I am invisible as I walk through the school in my home clothes, an invisible visitor from another time. The rules of the convent don’t touch me because I am in my home clothes.

I skip down the wooden stairs. The school is emptying out – even Upper Six and prefects have to walk those long avenues of identical muddy paths. I run down the corridor, past the classrooms and down the back stairs to the locker rooms. The walls are painted the colour of olives – green olives, which is not olivegreen.

Girls are standing at their lockers, pulling on wellies.

‘Hey, how come you’re in home clothes?’ says Eliza.

‘I’m going wooding.’

‘How come you’re going wooding?’

I shrug.

‘It’s not fair – why should the new girl go?’

‘Oh shut up about new girl. She’s been here practically a whole term,’ says Piggy.

‘Still a bloody new girl.’

‘Toast me a marshmallow,’ says Piggy through her fringe.

I run out the arched door in my wellies and up the road towards Merton.

The favoured ones are in a gang around Sister Campion who is striding up the lane in her wellies with her habit hitched up into her skirt, carrying an oval wooden basket containing a small axe, a packet of firelighters and newspaper.

‘Well done, dear,’ she says. ‘Natalie will be back next Saturday, but this week Catherine is joining us.’

Some of the gang look round and nod. There is Tessa who told on me, and her best friend Mouse, Jenny, and Tina Bell, who’s got her period, and the games captain with her long dark plait.

We take the path through the rhododendrons into the wood.

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