Ghost by Helen Grant

Author:Helen Grant [Grant, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fledgling Press
Published: 2018-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

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Five minutes later I came downstairs again wearing the trousers Tom had given me, and the leather jacket with a woollen jumper underneath; Tom had said it would be cold riding the motorcycle. I also had a pair of leather gloves that I had taken from Grandmother’s room.

Tom unfastened the spare helmet from the back of the motorcycle and helped me to put it on. It was distinctly strange climbing onto the machine.

“Hold onto me,” Tom said as he started the engine.

Riding down the track was unnerving. It hadn’t rained the last few days so the ground was hard, but still the motorcycle seemed to bounce and judder alarmingly, and when we went over the grid at the spot where the track came out of the woods I thought I was going to be shaken to pieces. Once we got onto the proper road, though, it was wonderful – exhilarating and frightening at the same time, and totally different from being boxed inside the car. It felt fast. I could feel the wind rushing by and the vibration of the machine on the road and the delirious sense of skimming across a wide-open space with the sky wheeling above us. Where the road curved the sensation was terrifying. I was dizzy with it, gasping and holding onto Tom for dear life.

At last we came into the town, and as the fields and forest sliding past us turned into houses behind railed-off squares of garden my mood became suddenly sober. I imagined Grandmother driving along this same road into town in the shiny black car I now knew to be hopelessly old-fashioned. I imagined her gloved hands grasping the wheel tightly, her expression one of grim concentration. The places I now saw for the first time must have been as familiar to her as the rooms and corridors of Langlands were to me. Some of them must have had particular significance for her, and I had no way of knowing which. That house, for example, with all the woodwork picked out in a startling shade of crimson – that might have been the home of some great friend of hers, or simply a landmark on the way into town. I would never know. Did she even have friends here? I had no way of knowing that, either.

And of course, she had died here, in this world I hadn’t shared with her.

My head was full of these thoughts as we came into the town centre. It didn’t take long. I suppose the distance from the first house on the edge of the town to the square in the middle was less than from Langlands house to the edge of the estate where the grid lay across the road. Tom parked the motorcycle. I took off my helmet, feeling self-conscious as I did so. It was impossible to shake off nearly eighteen years of hiding myself – and yet who was going to recognise me, when there hadn’t been so much as a

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