Ghosting Read Online Free PDF Page B

bringing out the colours of the flowersshe’d taken to put by the headstone. As she sat at the graveside, talking to her dead daughter, the loss, the terrible loss cut through her again, its dimensions so vertiginous she found herself clinging to the grass beside her for fear of falling off the planet, or else being left behind as it plummeted beneath her.
    She’d fled back to the house, and, grabbing a roll of black bin bags from the drawer in the kitchen, she had gone up to Hannah’s room, pausing at the door, hand on handle. Every day for the past year she had come in here and lain on the bed, or walked around touching Hannah’s things. It had been kept just as it was when Hannah left: posters on the walls, the bed made. Now, she knew, it all had to go. She set to work emptying wardrobes and drawers, stuffing their contents into bin liners. Before long she’d unearthed the green canvas bag the police had given her. She had placed it at the top of the wardrobe immediately after they left, and then forgotten about it. She picked it up and tipped its contents on to the bed. A make-up bag, a purse… and the diaries.
    As she read them that afternoon, Grace had discovered a secret account – a fragment – of her daughter’s last four years: from the childish innocence of the early entries to the uncomfortable knowledge of Hannah’s first sexual experiences; from the simplicity of
‘Top of the Pops
was complete rubbish tonight’ to the raw pain of ‘Right now I just want to die’; from sending a birthday card to John Travolta, to her first taste of heroin.
    She discovered that Hannah had been bullied at school by a girl called Jackie Kirby, and this knowledge threw so much light on her behaviour that it saddened Grace to think of it again now, to recall how sullen and withdrawn Hannah became. But, whenever Grace had asked what was wrong, she’d shrugged and walked away saying, ‘Nothing. Just leave me alone.’
    Hannah’s saviour from Jackie’s tyranny had been a new girl, Alicia, who had transferred from another school after being caught sniffing glue, and who’d appeared at the desk next to Hannah one day like an avenging angel, teaching her how to smoke and protecting her from the bullies. Grace recalled a well-spoken, well-mannered girl from Hale Barns, but the diaries told a different story. She was shocked to read about truancy and pot-smoking with Alicia and her older brother Mark.
    The entry for New Year’s Day 1978 read:
    Bad Habits
    Never on time
    Late being born
    Late ret. Libr. Bks.
    Late for sch.
    Smoking
    Drink
    Drugs
    Sex (?)
    Sour milk in tea
    Chocol. biscuits
    Angry
    Moany complain
    Fighting
    Materialistic
    Next to this list were blue doodles of stern angular faces and something that looked like a jellyfish or perhaps a lampshade – Grace couldn’t tell which – along with some shape resembling an iced bun with a cherry on top, or was it a volcano? It put her in mind of both. There were entries in which Hannah berated Grace: vicious attacks full of hatred and disdain, calling her stupid and pathetic.
    To say it destroyed her to read all this would be an understatement. When Gordon came home from work that day he found her naked in the front garden, scraping at the dirt like a dog, digging as if wisdom, like most precious materials, must be ripped from the earth’s entrails. She was cramming soil into her mouth as if there were nothing tastier. Lost to all reality but the mulch beneath her nails and the feral grit in her mouth.
    Gordon managed to get her inside the house and call an ambulance. He wrapped her in a dressing gown and asked her what on earth she’d thought she was doing. She said nothing. She had still said nothing when the men arrived. She panicked at the sight of them and tried to bolt, but they wrestled her into a straitjacket and out to the ambulance. Gordon stayed in the house and signedthe section papers. She screamed his name, screamed for release. She was driven to