Ghosting Read Online Free PDF Page A

from a tower, speared with arrows, trampled by horses, drowned, poisoned; the princess finally living Happily Ever After Alone.
    Grace carries the box from the bedroom and sits in front of the dead eye of the television screen. She removes the diaries, which date from 1976 to 1978, covering the ages of thirteen and a half to sixteen, and the later journal, that were among Hannah’s things when she died. Looking at them now, Grace conjures the stories they contain, which escape into the room like smoke to form the shape of a girl who tells as best shecan the sum of her time here. Even the diaries themselves seem to map the trajectory of Hannah’s descent, the first two covered in pink and blue floral patterns, each with a small gold lock and little matching boxes; the third grey; the journal a black, unlined exercise book, the entries random but nearly always dated.
    She pictures the blonde beauty of Hannah aged eleven or twelve, and then the vision of her just before she left home for good, her hair dyed bright red and her face ghostly white, black eyes and purple lips, clothed head to toe in black. By that time, all Grace had wanted was for Hannah to like her again, enough to want to spend some time with her, to say ‘I love you, Mum,’ as she had when she was a child. Knowing that was never going to happen cut deep, with a finality that still wounds.
    She opens one of the diaries to find, tucked inside, a batch of a dozen or so photographs of Hannah, a visual representation of her growth, from bonny blonde baby and pretty blue-eyed child to the last picture of her ever taken. It’s a colour photo, though it could be black and white for all the colour it contains. Hannah is dressed in black, with black dyed hair all crimped and spiked; her face white panstick with black eyes and lips. It was taken during a holiday in Malta. Hannah hadn’t wanted to go and it shows. Fifteen years old and all wound up with murderous contempt for a world she didn’t understand, or which she’d measured and found wanting. By then she’d grown to hate having her picture taken, but Grace had insisted. It was almost as if she’d known that sixmonths later Hannah would leave home for good; a year after that, she would be dead.
    She puts the photographs back in the diary and closes it. She doesn’t need or want to read these books again. Instead they read her, in memories of words scratched across some place deep inside, like graffiti on a prison wall. Without opening it, Grace knows that most of the pages in the 1978 diary are blank, representing those final months when Hannah was hardly ever at home. The last entry, on her sixteenth birthday, is the one word
Leave
. With a tightness in her chest, Grace wonders, again, for the millionth time, what made Hannah lock her out; what caused her to hide the agonies she was enduring. ‘Why didn’t you
tell
me?’ she says to the girl sitting opposite her, who says nothing, of course. It breaks Grace’s heart to recall how Hannah went from the happy girl she loved to the angry, damaged teenager she grew scared of, making herself harder and harder to love with each passing day, as she burrowed further away from everyone to a place where no one could reach her. By then, she’d become uncontrollable; there was no reasoning with her. Whenever anyone spoke to her she reacted like a scalded cat. What the hell were you supposed to do?
     
    THEY’D ALWAYS JOKED that Hannah had nine lives, because of the many times they nearly lost her. Five months into the pregnancy Grace had started to bleed,and at the hospital the doctor had said, ‘If you believe in God, start praying. That’s the only thing will save this baby now.’ She didn’t believe in God – never had, beyond the habits of childhood prayer – yet in that noisy ward she said, ‘Dear God, please let me keep this baby.’
    It was a home birth, and when her waters broke the midwife noticed the fluid was green, a sure sign the baby wasn’t