HOLLY SYKES AND the Weird Shit, Part 1. I was seven years old in 1976. It didn’t rain all summer and the gardens turned brown, and I remember queuing with buckets down the end of Queen Street with Brendan and Mam for water from standpipes, the drought got that bad. My daymares started that summer. I heard voices in my head. Not mad, or drooly, or specially scary, even, not at first … the Radio People, I called them, ’cause at first I thought there was a radio on in the next room. Only there never was a radio on in the next room. They were clearest at night, but I heard them at school, too, if everything was quiet enough, in a test, say. Three or four voices’d chunter away at once, and I never quite made out what they were saying. Brendan had talked ’bout mental hospitals and men in white coats, so I didn’t dare tell anyone. Mam was pregnant with Jacko, Dad rushed off his feet at the pub, Sharon was only three, and Brendan was a plonker, even then. I knew hearing voices wasn’t normal, but they weren’t actually harming me, so maybe it was just one of those secrets people live with.
One night, I had a nightmare about killer bees loose in the Captain Marlow, and woke up in a sweat. A lady was sat at the end of my bed saying, “Don’t worry, Holly, it’s all right,” and I said, “Thanks, Mam,” ’cause who else could it be? Then I heard Mam laughing in the kitchen down the corridor—this was before my bedroom was up in the attic. That was how I knew I’d only dreamt the lady on my bed, and I switched on the light to prove it.
And sure enough nobody was there.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the lady, “but I’m as real as you are.”
I didn’t scream or freak out. Sure, I was shaking, but even in my fear, I felt it was like a puzzle or a test. There was nobody in my room, but someone was speaking to me. So, as calm as I could, I asked the lady if she was a ghost. “Not a ghost,” said the lady who wasn’t there, “but a visitor to your mind. That’s why you can’t see me.” I asked what my visitor’s name was. Miss Constantin, she said. She said she’d sent the Radio People away, because they were a distraction, and hoped I didn’t mind. I said no. Miss Constantin said she had to go but that she’d love to drop by soon because I was “a singular young lady.”
Then she was gone. It took me ages to fall asleep, but by the time I did, I sort of felt I’d made a friend.
WHAT NOW? GO home? I’d rather stick pins in my gums. Mam’ll make me steaming shit pie, dripping in shit gravy, and sit there smug as hell watching me eat every shitty morsel, and from now until the end of time, if ever I’m anything less than yes-sir-no-sir-three-bags-full-sir, she’ll bring up the Vinny Costello Incident. Okay, so I’m not living in Peacock Street but I can still leave home, at least for long enough to prove to Mam that I’m old enough to take care of myself so she can stop treating me like I’m seven years old. I’ve enough money to feed myself for a bit and the hot spell looks set to last, so I’ll think of it as my summer holiday beginning early. Screw my exams, screw school. Stella’ll twist things round so that I was this hysterical pathetic Clinging Ivy who just couldn’t face the fact her boyfriend was tired of her. By nine A.M. on Monday morning, Holly Sykes’ll be the Official Windmill Hill High School Laughing Stock. Guaranteed.
An ambulance siren gets closer, more urgent, echoes round the courtyard and stops, like, in mid-sentence … I rejiggle my duffel bag and get up. Right, where now? Every runaway teenager in England makes a beeline for London, imagining they’ll get picked up by a talent scout or fairy godmother, but I’ll strike out the opposite way, along the river, towards the Kent marshes; if you grow up in a pub you overhear exactly what sort of scouts and fairies pick up runaway teenagers in London. Maybe I could find a barn or an empty holiday chalet to stay in for a bit. That might work. So, off I set round the front of the hospital. The car park’s full of windscreens flashing in the bright sunshine. In the cool shady hospital reception area, I see rows of people smoking and waiting for news.
Funny places, hospitals …
HOLLY SYKES AND the Weird Shit, Part 2. A few weeks went by, I must’ve turned eight, and I began to think I’d only dreamt Miss Constantin, ’cause she’d never come back. ’Cept for the fact I didn’t know that word she’d called me, “singular” … I looked it up and wondered how it’d got into my head if Miss Constantin hadn’t put it there. To this day I still don’t know the answer to that. But then one night in September, after we’d gone back to school, I woke up and knew she was there, and I was more glad than I was scared. I liked being singular. I asked Miss Constantin if she was an angel, and she laughed a little, saying, no, she was human, like me, but she’d learned how to slip out of her own body, and go visiting her friends. I asked if I was one of her friends now, and she asked, “Would you like that?” and I said, Yes, please, more than anything, and she replied, “Then you shall be.” And I asked Miss Constantin where she came from, and she said Switzerland. To show off, I asked if Switzerland was where chocolate was invented, and she said I was one of the brightest buttons she’d ever known. From then on she visited me every night, for a few minutes, and I’d tell her a bit about my day, and she’d listen, and sympathize or cheer me up. She was always on my side, like Mam or Brendan never seemed to be. I asked Miss Constantin questions, too. Sometimes she’d give me direct answers, like when I asked her her hair color and she told me “chromium blond,” but as often as not she’d sidestep my questions with “Let’s not spoil the mystery quite yet, Holly, shall we?”
Then one day our school’s most gifted bully, Susan Hillage, got me as I walked home from school. Her dad was a squaddie in Belfast and, ’cause my mam’s Irish, she knelt on my head and wouldn’t let me go unless I admitted we kept our coal in the bathtub and that we loved the IRA. I wouldn’t, so she threw my bag into a tree, and told me she was going to make me pay for her dad’s mates who got killed in Belfast, and that if I told anyone, her dad’s platoon’d set fire to my pub and my family’d all roast and it’d all be my fault. I was no pushover, but I was only little, and Susan Hillage had pulled all the right levers. I didn’t tell Mam or Dad what’d happened, but I was worried sick about going to school the next day and what might happen. But that night, when I woke up in the warm pocket of my bed and Miss Constantin’s voice came, it wasn’t just her voice in my head—she was actually there, in person, sitting in the armchair at the end of my bed saying, “Wakey, wakey, sleepyhead.” She was young, and had white-gold hair, and what must’ve been rose-red lips were purple-black in the moonlight, and she wore a gown thing. She was beautiful, like a painting. Finally I managed to ask if I was dreaming and she replied, “I’m here because my brilliant, singular child was so unhappy tonight, and I want to know why.” So I told her about Susan Hillage. Miss Constantin said nothing until the end, when she told me that she despised bullies of all stripes, and did I want her to remedy the situation? I said, Yes, please, but before I could ask anything else Dad’s footsteps were coming down the corridor and he’d opened the door, and the light from the landing shone in my eyes, dazzling me. How was I going to explain Miss Constantin sitting in my bedroom at, like, one o’clock in the morning? But Dad acted like she wasn’t even there. He just asked me if I was okay, saying he’d heard a voice, and sure enough, Miss Constantin wasn’t there. I told Dad I must’ve been dreaming and talking in my sleep.
Which was what I ended up believing. Voices are one thing, but women in gowns, sitting there? The next morning I went to school as usual, and didn’t see Susan Hillage. Nobody else did, either. Our headmaster hurried late into school assembly and announced that Susan Hillage had been hit by a van while she cycled to school, that it was very serious and we had to pray for her recovery. Hearing all this, I felt numb and cold, and so much blood left my head that the school hall sort of folded up around me, and after, I had no memory even of hitting the floor.
THE THAMES IS riffled and muddy blue today, and I walk and walk and walk away from Gravesend towards the Kent marshes and before I know it, it’s eleven-thirty and the town’s a little model of itself, a long way behind me. The wind unravels clouds from the chimneys of the Blue Circle factory, like streams of hankies out of a conjurer’s pocket. To my right, the A2 roars away over the marshes. Old Mr. Sharkey says it’s built over a road made by the Romans in Roman times, and the A2’s still how you get to Dover, to catch the boat to the Continent, just like the Romans did. Pylons march off in double file. Back at the pub, Dad’ll be hoovering the bar, unless Sharon’s doing it to get my three pounds. The morning’s gone muggy and stretched, like it does in triple maths, and the sun’s giving me eye-ache. I left my sunglasses in Vinny’s kitchen, sat on the draining board. Fourteen ninety-nine they cost me. I bought them with Stella, who said she’d seen the same sunglasses on Carnaby Street for three times the price so I thought I was getting a bargain. Then I imagine myself strangling Stella and my arms and hands go all stiff, like I’m actually doing it.
I’m thirsty. By now Mam will’ve told Dad something ’bout why Holly went off in a teenage strop, but I bet a million quid she will’ve twisted it all. Da’ll be joking ’bout “The Girls’ Bust-up” and PJ and Nipper and Big Dex’ll nod and grin like the shower of tossers they are. PJ’ll pretend to read from the Sun. “It says here, ‘Astronomers at the University of Bullshitshire have just found new evidence that, yes, teenagers really are the center of the universe.’ ” They’ll all cackle, and Good Old Dave Sykes, everyone’s favorite landlord, will join in with his you’re-so-witty-I-could-wet-myself laugh. Let’s see if they’re still laughing by Wednesday when I haven’t shown up.
Up ahead, in the distance, men are fishing.
WEIRD SHIT, LAST Act. Even as I was half carried to the school nurse’s room, I could hear the Radio People were back. Hundreds of them, all whispering at once. That freaked me out but not as much as the idea that I’d killed Susan Hillage. So I told the nurse about the Radio People and Miss Constantin. The old dear thought I was concussed at best and nuts at worst, so she called Mam, who called our GP, and later that day I was being seen by an ear doctor at Gravesend General Hospital. He couldn’t find anything wrong, but suggested a child psychiatrist he knew from Great Ormond Street Hospital in London who specialized in cases like mine. Mam was all “My daughter’s not mental!” but the doctor scared her with the word “tumor.” After the worst night of my life—I prayed to God to keep Miss Constantin away, had the Bible under my pillow but, thanks to the Radio People, I could hardly sleep a wink—we got a call from the ear doctor saying that his friend the specialist was due in Gravesend in one hour, and could Mam bring me up right now?
Dr. Marinus was the first Chinese person I ever met, apart from the ones at the Thousand Autumns Restaurant, where me and Brendan were sometimes sent for takeaways if Mam was too tired to cook. Dr. Marinus spoke in posh, perfect English, quite softly, so you had to pay close attention to catch everything. He was short and skinny but sort of filled the room anyway. First he asked ’bout school and my family and stuff, then moved on to my voices. Mam was all, “My daughter’s not crazy, if that’s what you’re implying—it’s just concussion.” Dr. Marinus told Mam that he agreed, I wasn’t remotely crazy, but the brain could be an illogical place. To help him rule out a tumor, she had to let me answer his questions on my own. So I told him about the Radio People and Susan Hillage and Miss Constantin. Mam went all jittery again but Dr. Marinus assured her that auditory hallucinations—“daymares”—were not uncommon in girls my age. He told me that Susan Hillage’s accident was a big coincidence, and that coincidences even of this size were happening to people all over the world, right now; my turn had come, that was all. Mam asked if there was any medicine to stop these daymares, and I remember Dr. Marinus saying that, before we went down that route, he’d like to try a simpler technique from “the Old Country.” It worked like acupuncture, he said, but it didn’t use needles. He got Mam to squeeze a point on my middle finger—he marked it with a Biro—then touched a place on my forehead, in the middle, with his thumb. Like an artist putting on a dab of paint. My eyes shut …
… and the Radio People were gone. Not just quiet, but gone-gone. Mam knew from my face what’d happened, and she was as shocked and relieved as me. She was all, “Is that it? No wires, no pills?” Dr. Marinus said, Yes, that ought to do the job.
I asked if Miss Constantin’d gone forever, too.
The doctor said, Yes, for the foreseeable future.
The End. We left, I grew up, and neither the Radio People nor Miss Constantin ever came back. I saw a few documentaries and stuff about how the mind plays tricks on you, and now I know that Miss Constantin was just a sort of imaginary friend—like Sharon’s Bunny Bunny Boing Boing—gone haywire. Susan Hillage’s accident was just a massive coincidence, like Dr. Marinus’d told me. She didn’t die, but moved to Ramsgate, though some people’d say it’s the same difference. Dr. Marinus did some sort of hypnotism thing on me, like those cassettes you can buy to stop yourself smoking. Mam stopped saying “Chink” from that day on, and even today she’s down like a ton of bricks on anyone who does. “It’s ‘Chinese’ not ‘Chink,’ ” she tells them, “and they’re the best doctors in the National Health.”
MY WATCH SAYS it’s one o’clock. Far behind me, stick-men are fishing in the shallows off Shornemead Fort. Up ahead’s a gravel pit, with a big cone of stone and a conveyor belt feeding a barge. I can see Cliffe Fort, too, with windows like empty eye sockets. Old Mr. Sharkey says it used to house antiaircraft batteries in the war, and when people in Gravesend heard the big guns, they knew they had sixty seconds—tops—to get into their air-raid shelters under the stairs or down the garden. Wish a bomb’d fall on a certain house in Peacock Street, right now. Bet they’re scoffing pizza for lunch—Vinny lives on pizza ’cause he can’t be arsed to cook. Bet they’re laughing about me. I wonder if Stella stayed over last night. You just fall in love with each other, I thought, and that’s all there is to it. Stupid. Stupid! I kick a stone but it’s not a stone, it’s a little outcrop of rock that mashes my toe. Pain draws a jagged line up to my brain. And now my eyes are hot and watering—where’s all the water coming from, f’Chrissakes? The only water I’ve drunk today is when I cleaned my teeth and the milk on my Weetabix. My tongue’s like that oasis stuff they use for flower arranging. My duffel bag’s rubbing a sore patch on my shoulder. My heart’s a clubbed baby seal. My stomach must be empty, but I’m too miserable to feel it yet. I’m not turning round and going home, though. No bloody way.
BY THREE O’CLOCK, my whole head’s parched, not just my mouth. I’ve never walked so far in my life, I reckon. There’s no sign of a shop or even a house where I can ask for a glass of water. Then I notice a small woman fishing off the end of a jetty thing, like she’s sort of sketched into the corner where nobody’ll spot her. She’s a long stone-throw away, but I see her fill a cup from a flask. I’d never normally do this but I’m so thirsty that I walk down the embankment and along the jetty up to her, clomping my feet on the old wooden planks so as not to scare her. “ ’Scuse me, but could you spare a drop of water? Please?”
She doesn’t even look round. “Cold tea do you?” Her croaky voice sounds from somewhere hot.
“That’d be great, thanks. I’m not fussy.”
“Help yourself, then, if you’re not fussy.”
So I fill the cup, not thinking about germs or anything. It’s not normal tea but it’s the most refreshing thing I’ve ever drunk, and I let the liquid swoosh all round my mouth. Now I look at her properly for the first time. Sort of elephanty eyes in a wrinkled old face, with short gray hair, a grubby safari shirt, and a leathery wide-brimmed hat that looks a hundred years old. “Good?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It was. Tastes like grass.”
“Green tea. Lucky you’re not fussy.”
I ask, “Since when’s tea been green?”
“Since bushes made their leaves that color.”
There’s a splish of a fish. I see where it was, but not where it is. “Caught much today?”
A pause. “Five perch. One trout. A slow afternoon.”
I don’t see a bucket or anything. “Where are they?”
A bee lands on the brim of her hat. “I let them go.”
“If you don’t want the fish, why do you catch them?”
A few seconds pass. “For the quality of the conversation.”
I look around: the footpath, a brambly field, a scrubby wood, and a choked-up track. She must be taking the piss. “There’s nobody here.”
The bee’s happy where it is, even when the woman stirs herself to reel in the line. I stand off to one side as she checks the bait’s still secure on the hook. Drips of water splash the thirsty planks of the jetty. The river slurps at the shore and sloshes round the wooden pillar things. Still seated, and with an expert flick of the wrist, the old woman sends the lead weight loopy-looping away, the reel makes its zithery noise, and the weight lands in the water where it was before. Circles float outwards. Dead calm …
Then she does something really weird. She takes out a stick of chalk from her pocket and writes on a plank by her foot, MY. On the next plank along she writes, LONG. Then on the next plank, it’s the word NAME. Then the old woman puts the chalk away and goes back to her fishing.
I wait for her to explain, but she doesn’t. “What’s all that about?”
“What’s what about?”
“What you just wrote.”
“They’re instructions.”
“Instructions for who?”
“For someone many years from now.”
“But it’s chalk. It’ll wash off.”
“From the jetty, yes. Not from your memory.”
Okay, so she’s mad as a sack of ferrets. Only I don’t tell her so ’cause I’d like more of that green tea.
“Finish the tea, if you want,” she says. “You won’t find a shop until you and the boy arrive at Allhallows-on-Sea …”
“Thanks a lot.” I fill the cup. “Are you sure? This is the last of it.”
“One good turn deserves another.” She turns a crafty sniper’s eye on me. “I may need asylum.”
Asylum? She needs a mental asylum? “How d’you mean?”
“Refuge. A bolt-hole. If the First Mission fails, as I fear it must.”
Crazy people are hard work. “I’m fifteen. I don’t have an asylum, or a, uh, bolt-hole. Sorry.”
“You’re ideal. You’re unexpected. My tea for your asylum. Do we have a deal?”
Dad says the best way to handle drunks is to humor them, then dump them, and maybe the doo-lally are like drunks who never sober up. “Deal.” She nods and I drink until the sun’s a pale glow through the thin bottom of the plastic.
The old bat’s gazing away again. “Thank you, Holly.”
So I thank her back, and return to dry land. Then I turn around and go back to her. “How do you know my name?”
She doesn’t turn round. “By what name was I baptized?”
What a stupid game this is. “Esther Little.”
“And how do you know my name?”
“ ’Cause … you just told me.” Did she? Must’ve.
“That’s that settled, then.” And that was Esther Little’s final word.
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