nearly always hidden behind a crowd of boys who ignore you when you say that you’ve booked a session for an hour, and would they please move? As for the library computers, they’re usually broken.
But that’s neither here nor there. I was telling you about Monday. On Monday afternoon, I came home from school to find Mum vacuuming up the talcum powder in Bethan’s room, and I told her what Mrs Procter had said about title deeds, and asked her where ours were.
‘I don’t have all those papers,’ she replied without much enthusiasm.’The solicitor has them.’
‘Could you call the solictor?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘If we don’t do something ,’ I declared, ‘we’ll never get rid of this stupid writing.’
‘I’ll call the solicitor when I finish the vacuuming,’ Mum promised. And she did, too. And he said that he would send over a copy of the old title deeds as soon as he could.
So that was my first job done. My second job was to record and underline all the new lines of text on Bethan’s bedroom wall, which, as I said earlier, took me an hour because there were so many. But as I copied them into my journal, I noticed something. To begin with, I noticed a name: Emilie. For the first time, a name had been used. “Emilie is a good child was written on the back of the door, and it was a sentence that caught my attention, not only because of the name, but because of the opening quotation marks. Quotation marks mean that somebody’s speaking. What’s more, you can’t have one set of quotation marks at the beginning of a line of speech without another set closing the same passage. So I looked around for more quotation marks, and found them – three sets of them, widely scattered, all brand new – and thought, I wonder if these quotation marks match up, somehow? I wonder who’s speaking?
That’s when I settled down with my journal, and began to piece all the lines of text together. It was just like doing a jigsaw puzzle. With a jigsaw puzzle, you always look for the corner pieces first, and attach other pieces to them. With this funny collection of stray sentences and phrases, I used the quotation marks as my corner pieces. I also used the name Emilie, which I tried to match up with all the female references that were starting to appear. ( My great crown would crush her smooth brow , for example.) It wasn’t easy. But I made it easier by cutting out every separate line of text – again, just like a jigsaw puzzle. (I love solving puzzles.) Then I arranged the pieces and rearranged the pieces, and by dinner time I was pretty much convinced of one thing.
Though the lines had been written all over the place, they did fit together. They fitted together into a story. It was even possible that they had been written on the wall in order, and we hadn’t noticed because we had spotted later lines before earlier ones.
Amazing? I thought so. Of course, I didn’t have everything worked out by dinner time. There were more than sixty strips of paper to join up, and I had homework to do. But when I sat down at the kitchen table, I was able to inform everyone that the ghost upstairs was trying to tell us something, and that she wasn’t finished yet.
Three heads turned.
‘What do you mean, tell us something?’ said Mum. ‘What gives you that idea?’
‘I’ve been putting all the sentences together,’ was my response. ‘They do make sense, when they’re not scattered all over the walls. I think the ghost has been writing them out in the proper order, too, because the first few nights she was talking about a king and his kingdom, but last night the king started talking about a daughter. Emilie.’
‘Wait – wait a second.’ Ray lifted his hand. ‘You’re saying that the writing upstairs can actually be joined together? Into a composition of some kind?’
‘Yes,’ I said patiently. ‘That’s what I’ve been doing. Cutting out the lines and sticking them together with sticky tape. Like a
But that’s neither here nor there. I was telling you about Monday. On Monday afternoon, I came home from school to find Mum vacuuming up the talcum powder in Bethan’s room, and I told her what Mrs Procter had said about title deeds, and asked her where ours were.
‘I don’t have all those papers,’ she replied without much enthusiasm.’The solicitor has them.’
‘Could you call the solictor?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘If we don’t do something ,’ I declared, ‘we’ll never get rid of this stupid writing.’
‘I’ll call the solicitor when I finish the vacuuming,’ Mum promised. And she did, too. And he said that he would send over a copy of the old title deeds as soon as he could.
So that was my first job done. My second job was to record and underline all the new lines of text on Bethan’s bedroom wall, which, as I said earlier, took me an hour because there were so many. But as I copied them into my journal, I noticed something. To begin with, I noticed a name: Emilie. For the first time, a name had been used. “Emilie is a good child was written on the back of the door, and it was a sentence that caught my attention, not only because of the name, but because of the opening quotation marks. Quotation marks mean that somebody’s speaking. What’s more, you can’t have one set of quotation marks at the beginning of a line of speech without another set closing the same passage. So I looked around for more quotation marks, and found them – three sets of them, widely scattered, all brand new – and thought, I wonder if these quotation marks match up, somehow? I wonder who’s speaking?
That’s when I settled down with my journal, and began to piece all the lines of text together. It was just like doing a jigsaw puzzle. With a jigsaw puzzle, you always look for the corner pieces first, and attach other pieces to them. With this funny collection of stray sentences and phrases, I used the quotation marks as my corner pieces. I also used the name Emilie, which I tried to match up with all the female references that were starting to appear. ( My great crown would crush her smooth brow , for example.) It wasn’t easy. But I made it easier by cutting out every separate line of text – again, just like a jigsaw puzzle. (I love solving puzzles.) Then I arranged the pieces and rearranged the pieces, and by dinner time I was pretty much convinced of one thing.
Though the lines had been written all over the place, they did fit together. They fitted together into a story. It was even possible that they had been written on the wall in order, and we hadn’t noticed because we had spotted later lines before earlier ones.
Amazing? I thought so. Of course, I didn’t have everything worked out by dinner time. There were more than sixty strips of paper to join up, and I had homework to do. But when I sat down at the kitchen table, I was able to inform everyone that the ghost upstairs was trying to tell us something, and that she wasn’t finished yet.
Three heads turned.
‘What do you mean, tell us something?’ said Mum. ‘What gives you that idea?’
‘I’ve been putting all the sentences together,’ was my response. ‘They do make sense, when they’re not scattered all over the walls. I think the ghost has been writing them out in the proper order, too, because the first few nights she was talking about a king and his kingdom, but last night the king started talking about a daughter. Emilie.’
‘Wait – wait a second.’ Ray lifted his hand. ‘You’re saying that the writing upstairs can actually be joined together? Into a composition of some kind?’
‘Yes,’ I said patiently. ‘That’s what I’ve been doing. Cutting out the lines and sticking them together with sticky tape. Like a
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