Miss Ambrose asked us all to be in reception for three o’clock. We walked down the stairs at five past, but half of us was still missing. Ronnie was there, of course, leaning against the telephone table, talking to Mrs Honeyman, and Handy Simon stood on a little velvet stool with his clipboard, but he kept losing count and having to start again. Miss Bissell had gone for a lie-down with one of her stomachs. As soon as I spotted Ronnie, I reached for Elsie’s hand. Jack arrived a few minutes after we did, and Miss Ambrose clapped and coughed, and tried her best to lure people away from the television lounge.
‘We can watch the television at Cherry Tree, can’t we? No need to put ourselves through four hours on a motorway.’ She did a little laugh in the middle but no one joined in. We were told what to do if there was a fire or if anyone had a gluten allergy. I did start to ask a question about that, but Elsie put her finger against her lips, and so I decided to save it until later. Miss Ambrose told us what time the front door was locked, and how to request extra pillows, and then she handed us all an itinerary, which Jack used to clean his glasses, and I think I put mine in a plant pot for safekeeping.
‘And now we’re going on a ghost walk!’ Miss Ambrose said.
We all stared at her.
‘Ghosts are very popular in Whitby,’ she said. ‘The place is riddled with them.’
Our tour guide was called Barry. He had a bowler hat and very melodramatic arms. In fact, everything about him was melodramatic. He carried a silver-topped cane, which he held aloft as we followed him down the street. Jack copied with his walking stick, until Miss Ambrose told him off outside the Army & Navy. She was right, though. Whitby is full of ghosts. There are crinolined ladies tumbling from cliffs, several runaway coaches, and endless women running down cobbled yards with their hair on fire. We found ourselves standing on a street corner, listening to a story about a screaming cat, but my mind kept wandering. I was trying to keep one eye on Ronnie, but he would insist on moving around and I was always having to turn and check whereabouts he was. I had to ask Barry to repeat what he’d said a few times. Elsie reassured me she’d go through it later, but I said to her, what’s the point in going on a ghost walk, if you have to have it all explained to you afterwards?
When we walked on to the main street, Jack nudged me in the ribs and nodded across the road.
‘There’s your music shop,’ he said.
Barry was being very theatrical about a vampire, and we crossed over unnoticed. It wasn’t what I expected. Although we’d seen a picture on a computer screen, it seemed different in real life. It was sandwiched between a charity shop and an estate agent, and it sat there as though someone had lifted it out of the past and forgotten to put it back again. The window was filled with clarinets and trombones, and giant saxophones tilted towards the ceiling. There were polished violin bows, ready to be tightened, and a row of guitars waiting to be tuned. There were instruments I didn’t even know the name of.
‘Look at all the sheet music,’ said Jack.
There was far more than we’d been able to see in the photograph. It stretched across the window. It crept from behind the violin cases and made a lake of crotchets and quavers on the floor. Songs from the past, all waiting to be played again, and right in the middle, looking down at us from a wartime dancehall, was Al Bowlly.
‘“Midnight, the Stars and You”,’ I said. ‘Of course.’
‘There he is again.’ Jack pointed to the other side of the display. ‘Goodnight Sweetheart.’
‘My father used to sing that every evening,’ I said. ‘Goodnight sweetheart, I’ll be watching o’er you.’ Then I sang the next line: ‘Sleep will banish sorrow.’
I looked at Elsie. ‘If only that were true,’ I said.
‘Let’s go inside.’ Jack reached for the door.
‘What, now?’ I looked over at the ghost walk, which had moved a little down the pavement. Barry was pointing to a church spire, and everyone was looking up with their mouths open.
‘Won’t they miss us?’ said Elsie.
‘No time like the present,’ Jack said.
I linked my arm through his. ‘Isn’t there?’
HANDY SIMON
Handy Simon had never been big on ghosts. He couldn’t understand the point of them. His parents had been firm believers, ever since they’d gone to see a medium in the town hall one Saturday afternoon, and she told them someone called John was trying to speak to them from the other side.
‘It must be your granddad’s cousin,’ said his mother.
‘Once removed,’ said his father, and no matter how much Simon tried to reason with them, they wouldn’t be persuaded on the matter. The medium told them dead people are so keen on making contact, they insist on leaving things for you to find all over the place. Feathers, leaves, very small pebbles.
‘They make you hear noises too. Bells ring and music plays,’ his mother said, ‘and sometimes, you can even smell them.’
Simon sighed. ‘Why do they bother?’
‘It’s their way of communicating.’ His mother breathed in very deeply. She had taken to sniffing the air several times a day, just in case there was anyone around who had something to say to her.
‘Why?’ Simon asked her. ‘Why didn’t they just communicate when they were alive?’
‘It’s not that straightforward, Simon. You think you’ve got all the time in the world to speak up. It’s only when you’re dead you realise there was something you forgot to mention.’
‘Could it really be that important?’ he said.
‘To the person left behind it could,’ she said. ‘It could make all the difference in the world.’
After his mother died, his father saw an empty crisp packet in Sainsbury’s car park.
‘Cheese and onion,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s favourite.’ He pointed to the packet. ‘That’ll be Barbara, telling us to move on with our lives.’
Simon looked up at the church spire. Barry was saying something about a witch and several people were fanning themselves with their itineraries. Miss Ambrose was looking up too, and biting into her bottom lip.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ he said to her.
She didn’t answer, and then after a while she said, ‘I’m not entirely sure.’
He told her about the feathers and the pebbles, and the crisp packet.
‘It would be nice to think so, wouldn’t it?’ she said. ‘It would be nice to think you could affect things, even from the grave. That your roll of the dice went on for a little longer than you imagined.’
‘I suppose.’ Simon stopped looking up at the church tower. It was making him light-headed. ‘Although I don’t think I’m important enough to affect anything when I’m alive, let alone when I’m dead and buried.’
‘Are any of us, when you think about it?’ They watched a crowd emerge from one of the pubs, and the street filled with a spill of lager and shouting. ‘Most of us are just secondary characters. We take up all the space between the few people who manage to make a mark.’
‘Like who?’
‘I don’t know.’ The men disappeared into another pub doorway, and for a moment, Simon felt the warmth of a Friday-night bar. ‘Politicians? World leaders? The Pope?’
‘If we’re going to start judging ourselves by the Pope, everyone’s going to fall a bit short, aren’t they?’
‘Your dad, then,’ said Miss Ambrose. ‘Look at all the lives he saved. He’s made a difference.’
‘Except he only ever thinks about the life he let go. The one he missed.’
‘But that’s human nature.’ Miss Ambrose tightened the belt on her coat. ‘We only ever think about the differences we didn’t make, the chances we allowed to drift past, until you start asking yourself, what was the bloody point of it all in the first place?’
And Simon realised she had stopped talking to him and had begun having a conversation with herself. Barry lifted his cane and started to walk up the hill to a set of park gates, where he told them they would be hearing a ghost story so terrifying, no one would be able to sleep that night. He was right, as it happened, but the reason they all lost sleep would be nothing to do with the afterlife.
‘Perhaps that’s why we like to believe in spirits,’ said Miss Ambrose, as she started walking. ‘Perhaps it reassures us to think we’ll have a second chance at being somebody significant.’
‘Or at least send everyone a crisp packet to let them know we’re still thinking of them.’
Miss Ambrose turned to him. ‘What would you send?’ she said.
‘How do you mean?’