The Ghost Read Free Book Online Page B

his age and awareness. Her latest guess, it seemed, was that he was around two or three years younger. Cook heard her enter his own bedroom, pause, then cross the landing. He stayed quiet, knowing it would be interpreted as a game.
    Lily slipped into the room. Cook’s concealment was comically obvious, but she played along, loudly wondering where-oh-where he could have got to. She held back a little, drawing out his barely stifled sniggers. Then, she pounced, digging her fingers into where she thought the boy-shaped lump’s ribs might be, scrabbling and tickling and forcing Cook to clamber out of her reach, up to the top of the bed. She gathered him up, squeezing, plunging her face into his neck. He spluttered on a mouthful of brightly bleached hair and shouted for her (“Mummy!”). His tone was uncertain – excited, irritated, a little scared?
    â€œOoh…” She nuzzled into his cheek. “I could eat him all up!”
    Cook broke away and propped himself against Esther’s mound of pillows where he could get a good look at her and brace for what might be coming next. Lily was long and slender and, despite the cold, wore a short mini-dress patterned with psychedelic swirls. Her waist-length hair whipped and swished as she clicked open a bulky suitcase.
    â€œWhere have you been, mummy?”
    The question carried an awkward ambiguity. In this case, Lily had ‘been’ to Spain. Her normally dry, pale skin was glossed olive, and she was a tottering
Buckaroo
of cases, carrier-bags and oversized souvenirs, most of which were now scattered around the floor. And now she wasn’t there, she was here, materialised and in motion but less familiar than in her usual state – the unpresent, the unarrived. Cook was confused by his yearning for Lily. Did he actually miss her, or was he just rebelling against his natural preference for aloneness? Could you really miss someone who was too rarely present to remind you of the things you were missing?
    â€œIt’s called Lanzarote,” said Lily, fumbling inside the suitcase, “in a country called Spain. It was very hot there, Dorian. I think you’d have liked it. Cold in here!”
    â€œWhy didn’t I go with you?” Cook was now sitting upright, vertically propped on a saddle of pillows.
    â€œYou’re a bit too young, darling. Plenty of time for you to travel the world when you’re a bigger boy.”
    Cook was surprised to hear that his bigness was in doubt, but he had no real interest in travel. His world was tighly compacted – it extended only to the play-park at the top of his street and the oil-works that lay flat and wide and toxic at the bottom. And, uncomfortably close just a few doors down, there was the old butcher’s shop, its front and back doors obscured by crude layerings of heavy planks. Cook always took care to rush past the lonely old house on his way to school, telling himself that he couldn’t look at it because if he did, the world would explode. He knew that the world wouldn’t really explode, but he could never quite bring himself to check.
    â€œHere it is!”
    Lily produced a plush toy from the suitcase. It had dog-like features but was caricatured and stretched tall, with yellowy-white fur. Cook took it suspiciously and squeaked out a thank you.
    â€œIt’s a poodle, Dor! Like Snowy!”
    Snowy was Esther’s previous pet dog. Cook was too young to remember much about him – apart from a warm tongue lapping at his cheek and a sense that the facts about the dog’s fate had been kept vague. Cook shook the toy from side to side, smiling a little at the freely suspended plastic pupils, rattling and rolling inside transparent eyeballs. The gift was another illustration of his mother’s feeble grasp of her son’s development.
    â€œWhy don’t you live with us, mum?”
    The question ambushed Lily. She took a steadying breath, pretending to