'A Real-Life Ghost' - Draft extract

A Real-Life Ghost

Jackie lay flat in bed, sniffing the air urgently. She had just finished watching a horror film: a young woman called Joan is robbed of each of her five senses, one at a time, by shape-shifting poltergeist with white gnashing teeth. In order to claim Joan's sense of smell for its own, the creature transforms into a tiny red ghost beetle (with white gnashing teeth) and burrows deep into her nostrils without her immediate knowledge. This modus operandi proves so effective that it is recycled later on in the film, when the demon-beetle burrows deep into the Joan's eyeballs (to her full knowledge), and absorbs her facility for sight.
            Jackie was concerned. Szymon, her landlord, had knocked sheepishly on her door earlier that day to issue fair warning about the jellied fish he was planning on cooking for his parents. All day the pungent odour had stuck in the back of her nose and throat. Now she smelt nothing. She pinched her nose hard, just to be sure, and then burst into tears.
           It had been thirteen years since Jackie had watched a scary film. The last time - and every time before that - had been with Lisa, in her boxy teenage bedroom back in Glasgow. They used to lie on their stomachs on Lisa’s bed, bitching languidly about their other friends and various family members, until Lisa deemed the summer air outside her window to be dark and dense enough for the main event.

‘Do we have to ?’ asked Jackie one week, knowing full well the futility of her appeal. Lisa, a force to be reckoned with since birth, had become fixated on the gory, sexy 90s horror films she saw advertised on her cable TV – Scream, The Craft, Se7en, Sleepy Hollow, Scream 2 – and the focus of her adolescent world for the past several months had been to get her underage hands on all of them, by any means necessary.

‘Of course we have to,’ came Lisa’s mumbled tones from under the bed. She was hunting around for her latest acquisition, bare legs and feet waggling around above deck near Jackie’s face. ‘Hit the jackpot this week. Managed to smuggle it out of Oxfam with a dress I bought.’

‘That’s terrible!’ screeched Jackie too loudly, attempting to delay the inevitable. ‘It’s Oxfam!’

‘I put £2 on the video shelf,’ muttered Lisa, emerging red-faced, blinking and victorious from her scrabbling. ‘Look!’

Lisa looked. A shiver prickled on her neck before running, appropriately, down her spine. The video case showed a ghostly white bathtub with a woman’s disembodied hand clutching at the rim. Jackie didn’t like the look of that bathtub, or the hand. They meant trouble. They meant sleepless nights for the next three weeks, or until Lisa’s next score brought fresh nightmares.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Jackie. She turned the case over in her hand. A good-looking middle-aged couple peered fretfully out at her above the blurb.

‘You will like it. It’s Harrison Ford. Look at him.’

‘I am looking at him. I don’t like him.’

‘He’s FIT.'

‘He looks like your dad.’

Lisa laughed very suddenly and very loudly. It made Jackie jump.

‘My mum fucking wishes he looked like my dad.’

‘Who’s the woman?’

‘Who’s the woman!? It’s Michelle Pfeiffer. My mum wishes she looked like her. Now move up. We’re watching it. If you don’t like it, just pretend you’re a reeeally scary ghost yourself. A real bad-ass. That’ll be me soon. A real-life ghost.’

Jackie didn’t like it when Lisa made light of her illness like this; it was morbid and irreverent, and it made Jackie’s chest ache with pain, but she knew what was expected of her.

‘Do you think you’ll be a good ghost or a bad one?’

‘Bad one. Oh yeah, fucking definitely! I’ll get into bed with Harrison Ford when he doesn’t know it.’

‘Gross.’

Jackie giggled, then went quiet. She knew her friend was right. Even in death, she’d be braver than Jackie was.


                                                                                                              TBC...