Got the rest of this drafted, so will post remaining chapters over the next few days as I get them tidied up.
Managed to get Annie to the forefront in this chapter, which is a departure for me, as I'm normally all about JM. Hope you like what I've done with her.
Reviews always appreciated. Thanks.
Annie and Rosie were having a blast. They had been for a walk after the hospital visit and had discovered a playground in a park not far from the house. Rosie was desperate to play on the swings and slides, just like any other eight year old. The trouble was, when they had arrived there had been some local teenagers hanging around, playing truant from school. They had bottles of cider and were puffing their way through packs of cigarettes and trying to look intimidating. To Annie's eyes they just looked stupid – dumb kids trying to look cool – she wished she could give them a piece of her mind. Tell them that they weren't being so smart, wasting their lives hanging around playgrounds, but of course she couldn't. Probably just as well.
Their language was pretty ripe and Annie was uncomfortable with Rosie hearing it – the words she had pulled Mitchell up for using around the child were mild in comparison with some she was hearing now. To add insult to injury, one of the kids was carving his initials into the wood of one of the benches with a pocket knife, and one of the swings was occupied by a teenage couple, the boy with his tongue seemingly half way down the girl's throat.
"Oh now, that's not on!" commented Annie. "A kids' playground is for kids, not for walking ASBOs to hang around in."
The teenagers started to get a bit concerned when the roundabout started mysteriously turning by itself.
They were seriously freaked out when the swing next to the one the couple were snogging on started to move for all the world as if someone was being pushed on it.
And when the chains on the swings that the pair were sitting on started rattling as if invisible hands were shaking them they left in a hurry – one or two wondering if they had had too much cheap supermarket booze.
Annie chuckled in satisfaction as the teenagers left, gathering their bottles of White Lightning and fleeing the park. Normally she would be more careful, but the chances were that they wouldn't tell anyone – who would believe a bunch of kids saying that a playground was haunted. Everyone would just think they'd been smashed or stoned, after all. Anyway, haunting the house had been fun until the boys moved in and her life took a turn for the better, and it had been a laugh to spook someone again.
Annie went back to pushing Rosie on the swing, Rosie's hair flying around her face as she flew higher and higher. They both laughed as they played – giggling at the faces of the youngsters they had scared away from the park and for the sheer joy of being...alive... almost. It was just as well the teens couldn't hear it – the sound of laughter echoing around the playground as the swing at the end of the row went backwards and forwards, higher and higher.
The chimes of an ice cream van jingled along the road: 'a pizza hut, a pizza hut, Kentucky fried chicken and a pizza hut'. "I'd really like an ice cream," said Rosie wistfully, scuffing her feet along the floor to slow the swing down and bring it to a halt. She knew that she couldn't eat, but her face showed that knowledge and acceptance hadn't quite collided in her mind yet.
"Me too. That's one of the things I really miss about being a ghost, is ice cream. And tea, of course. And chocolate. And I used to love sticky toffee pudding. Owen and I used to go to a little pub..." Annie pulled herself up. When was the last time she had thought about Owen? She certainly wasn't going to start again now – she was so over him, the murdering git.
"Come on." Annie grabbed Rosie's arm, hauling her off the swing and dragging her at a run across the park and to where the ice cream van stood parked at the roadside.
"What are you doing?" asked Rosie. "You said we couldn't eat ice cream."
The ice cream man was waiting to see if anyone would emerge from any of the houses along the street. Annie stood by the counter and smiled winsomely up at him. "Two 99s please, with extra chocolate topping." She winked at Rosie. The man took one last look down the road, then went back to the driver's seat and started the chimes playing again. He drove along the side of the park and headed for the nearby estate where there would be more little kids about at this time of the day.
Empty handed, yet clutching an ice cream each, Annie and Rosie went back to the park and sat on the bench with the partially carved initials of the lad with the knife on it. "Mmmmm," said Annie, "this is nice."
"I liked the chocolate flake best," replied Rosie. "I always used to eat that first and then have the ice cream afterwards."
"Me too. And I'd always bite the end off the bottom of the cone and suck the ice cream through – it was much more fun that way."
"I'll try that," and Rosie held her pretend cone aloft, bit the bottom off and sucked. "You're right, that's a fun way to eat ice cream. It's sort of melty and slurpy."
"Hurry up and eat it," warned Annie, "it's starting to drip and you don't want to get it all down your top."
"No, that's the best part of ghost ice cream," said Rosie, "It never melts and it never runs out, and the chocolate flake is so long it goes right to the moon." Annie had almost forgotten that her little companion was only eight, but that remark brought her back to reality with a bump. So young to die.
Giggling, the two ghosts sat on the bench eating make-believe ice cream and imagining never-ending chocolate flakes, and it struck Annie that even though she'd only known Rosie for a day or so, she was going to miss her when she went.
oooooooooo
Kieran sat by his wife's bedside, holding her hand gently as their daughter had done such a short time before.
"The nurses say to talk to you – that you'll hear my voice even if you can't understand what I'm saying. I'm not sure you really want to hear my voice, after what I've done, but if it helps I'll do it." He rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. "I'm sorry, Christina, I couldn't stay. I don't know if I can ever explain why, not even to you, but I had good reasons, I promise."
One of the nurses, Vicky she had said her name was, wandered past and checked on Christina, jotting some notes on the clipboard at the foot of her bed. She smiled. "It's OK. Just a routine check, nothing to worry about. They have reduced her sedation again, so you might start noticing her responding to you. If she gets upset or seems in any discomfort at all, come and find me." Her manner was reassuring and Kieran relaxed a little. "I'm sure she's glad you're here."
Kieran wasn't at all convinced she would be. He waited till Vicky was out of earshot and resumed his quiet monologue. "I can't come back you know, not permanently. Maybe not even for visits. It's too risky. Something happened when I got that new job – I haven't even worked it all out myself, but I'm not the same man you married, Christina. I still love you, but I couldn't be with you – you and Rosie. There's no-one else." He pushed the sudden image of Alicia's face firmly to the back of his mind. Mistake, mistake, mistake, his mind screamed at him. "I just need not to be with you any more."
ooooooooo
"Oh my goodness, how long have we been out?" It suddenly struck Annie that the shadows were lengthening and the boys would soon be home again. They would be worried if they were both missing from the house; what time was it, anyway?
"Rosie, stay right here, OK? Don't move. I'll be right back." Annie composed herself a moment, then closed her eyes and concentrated. Rosie gasped when Annie disappeared in front of her very eyes, then reappeared a few moments later in the exact same spot.
"What did you do? How did you do that?"
Annie beamed. She had stayed in the house long enough to establish that the boys weren't back yet, but they still needed to get themselves home quickly. "Mitchell calls it rentaghosting. It's from some TV programme he remembers from years ago. Mitchell is...older than he looks." Ghosts were one thing for the kid to get to grips with, but Annie didn't think she'd hit her with vampires quite yet. "I wonder if you could do it. Can you picture the pink house really clearly in your mind?"
Rosie nodded slowly. "I can see the TV and the sofa and the fireplace. Is that clear enough?"
"I don't know. Can you make it so clear that you feel you could reach out and touch it?"
"I think so."
"Well, you picture it that clearly and then sort of think yourself there. You need to think hard, though, with all of you. It's like your mind goes there and your body follows along."
Rosie closed her eyes, her face screwed up with concentration. With the merest whisper of air she disappeared from sight.
"Well that seems to have worked," commented Annie to the world in general, "assuming that she has gone to the pink house and not somewhere else entirely. And that she can get back from wherever she has popped out to. Maybe teaching her this wasn't such a good idea."
With another breath Rosie reappeared, cheeks flushed and eyes wild with excitement. "I did it! That was soooo cool! I imagined the TV and then I was right there! I can rentaghost too."
The pair popped home, Rosie appearing in front of the TV and Annie in the kitchen among her beloved mugs, but it did occur to Annie to wonder whether George and Mitchell would be as thrilled at this latest turn of events as Rosie was.
ooooooooo
During their next nocturnal chats, Rosie opened up yet further to Annie.
Her dad was a lawyer. He had got a new job in Brussels – an important job, her mum had said – and mum and dad had both been thrilled. They had talked about them all moving there and mum had even started checking out English schools in Brussels in case Rosie needed to change school in a hurry.
At first her dad had come home every weekend, excited about his job, but exhausted from the work and the travelling and too tired to do anything much, apart from a drink or two in the pub with his friends or the occasional round of golf. One weekend he'd gone out with his friends on the Saturday and staggered in bedraggled on the Sunday. Her mum had been almost hysterical – her dad was apologetic and upset, but hadn't been able to offer any reasonable explanation for where he had been. He'd started staying away two or three weeks at a time after that and then he had stayed away permanently.
He'd even missed Rosie's birthday, she confided miserably to Annie. Oh, he had phoned her and sent a present, but it had been mum who had arranged the party for her school friends at the local swimming pool, mum who had accepted the condolences of her friends' parents that he was away for her special day and mum who had assured them that he was only away because he was so busy building a better life for them abroad.
That night she had heard mum shouting at him on the phone, accusing him of having a girlfriend in Brussels. Why else, she had asked, would he miss his only child's birthday? It had sounded like dad had tried to protest, but mum had been upset, sobbing down the phone at him, and when she finally hung up she had poured herself a large glass of wine and sat and stared miserably at the muted television set. Rosie had crept downstairs and sat with her arms round her mum.
"It's OK mum. We've still got each other," Rosie had said.
Mum had ruffled her hair and said "My darling girl, always so wise. Whatever would I do without you?"
Rosie had been upset about dad not coming home and often crept into her mum's room at night, crawling into her bed and curling up next to her, wretchedly wishing that everything could be back to normal: that her dad had never got this horrid job that had wrenched them apart.
"I just wanted us all to be a family," she whispered to Annie, "but then something happened." The child fell silent, the cheeky gleam in her eyes that had faded as she told the story finally extinguished.
"What happened, Rosie?" Annie prompted gently.
"He hurt me. He grabbed me by the arm, there." She rolled up her sleeve. "You can't see anything now, but it was a big bruise, this big. You could see the marks of his fingers." She rolled her sleeve down and raised watery eyes to Annie's. "I wore long sleeves for a while and made sure mum didn't see me in the bath till the marks had gone. He scared me, Annie – the look on his face when he did it, it was really scary." She took a long shuddering breath. "When my mum dies, will she come through a door and be with me?"
"Yes, I'm sure she will."
"And when my dad dies, if I don't want to see him I don't have to, right? He's turned creepy."
"I don't think they'd make you see him, honey." A picture of the men with sticks and ropes suddenly appeared in Annie's mind and she shivered. Someone just walked over my grave, she thought absently.
"Just as long as mum and I can be together. That's all I want." Rosie's face was thoughtful.
ooooooooo
When Annie returned to the sofa from the kitchen, Rosie wasn't there. She hunted through the house, calling softly so as not to wake George and Mitchell. She even poked her head round the door of George's room; she was sure Rosie wouldn't be in Mitchell's room – the two had reached an uneasy truce, but Rosie was still wary of the tall vampire.
Eventually, with a sense of foreboding, Annie had to admit to herself that Rosie was nowhere in the house. Panic rising, she decided that she had to wake the others and call an emergency house meeting. Mitchell first – he'd know what to do, for sure.
"Mitchell!" She pounded on his bedroom door, then let herself in. "Mitchell, wake up! She's gone! Rosie's gone!"