A Shade Too Young Read online

  FIVE

  “Thought I probably was.” Truthfully, Jamie had suspected he might be dead too since last month. He’d just never had the courage to test himself to find out for sure. He moved to Ashlee’s side, and they both folded their arms over their chests and stared at him, coldly. “And, who did you say you were again?”

  “My name’s Kasim.”

  “You say that like it should mean something.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought you’d know – most ghosts do. I’m, for want of a better description, God. Or, the closest thing you’ll ever get.”

  Jamie now understood the doubt that Ashlee had been feeling all night. Maybe this was all about trust too. “You’re God? You expect us to believe that… and not have you locked up?”

  “Yeah.” He saw that both of them were looking very dubiously. Kasim wasn’t just some crazy, old man. He wasn’t deluded. He was the all-powerful Kasim! Okay, that didn’t sound very awe-inspiring, but the principle was the same. “You may not trust me, but trust each other. Look at each other. What does that face tell you? Is there any life left in those eyes.”

  The couple smiled at each other and smiled at each other. When she looked at him, touched his face without feeling his old warmth, she knew. “No, I don’t believe you could lie to me. You want to cry, but you died before you got the chance. And we can’t change it, can we?”

  Jamie ran a finger over her bottom lip, feeling the bumps of scars and scabs. He wanted to kiss it better, heal the bruises on her face with his lips but these injuries would never really heal. “I didn’t mean for this. I’m sorry this had to happen but I couldn’t keep watching the same thing happen to you, over and over again.”

  “I’m glad it did. It’s over now.”

  Things were different now, right? They trusted each other now. So, why did Jamie feel so bad about having to tell her this next bit? It was better to tell the truth, than it was to keep lying, right? “No. It’ll never be over.”

  Ashlee looked at him strangely. “It won’t?”

  “Ghosts like us are doomed to spend eternity replaying the exact same scene in which they died.” There was some kind of strange ghostly sense to that, there had to be. He just didn’t know what the logic was.

  “Kasim, things’ll change now, won’t they? Kasim?”

  Kasim was gone. He must have drifted back out through the door as stealthily as he had come in. On the floor was a square of paper with writing on. If he was insubstantial too, how had he managed to write something? The man was practically God! The question didn’t warrant much thought. Jamie and Ashlee bent down to read it. It read YOU DECIDE.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  He hovered outside the window for a minute, watching as they saw the note and frowned at one another, wondering what it meant. Chuckling to himself was something he was prone to but Kasim reckoned it made him sound like a mad man. His new children were learning, albeit slowly and probably with a lot of mistakes along the way. Yes, it would take some, but they would get there.

  Soon enough they would learn that their nights didn’t always have to end like that. They were ghosts and, as such, had the power to rewrite their endings. Phantoms were beyond all mortal constraints. They could do things in death that they had never been able to do in life.

  He sighed as a pale golden light beam captured him and began to float him towards the night sky. He sighed, slightly resenting the fact that he’d never had a choice in this almost-God thing. But yes, they could decide.

  SPOTLIGHT

  I had that dream again last night.

  The one where I’m on stage in a huge, darkened arena. Thousands of people are watching me in an almost eerie silence. I can’t see their faces – it’s too dark – but I know that they’re out there; I can feel the electricity zinging through the air in powerful, invisible arcs.

  There are two bright, white spotlights on the stage, and these only help blind me to the audience. My audience. One of these spotlights is filled with a commanding and dignified black grand piano. The long-haired man sitting in front of it is effortlessly playing the most beautiful music known to man. The second spotlight is occupied by myself, sitting on a stool and armed with a microphone, singing the most beautiful words in the world – written for me by the long-haired man. I don’t know the song but the right words seem to be coming out.

  My heart is pounding so hard that I think it might break out of my chest and leave me. But I do not fear this possibility. All that matters is that I keep singing. Carry on forming the words I have no recollection of ever hearing before.

  And in the next moment, the arena is empty. It is still pitch black but for the two spotlights and, as before, all is quiet except for my voice and the piano music. Only this time, the arena is silent because the audience has gone. My audience has gone. Even the long-haired man has left me but, I know his music, I am playing his piano. The show is over and seems to have faded even blacker – but I am singing still.

  I had that dream again last night.

  MOMENTS IN TIME

  Yesterday was the last day of my life.

  Today is my birthday.

  Tomorrow I will be reborn.

  Yesterday I wrote my suicide note.

  Today is Judgement Day.

  Tomorrow will be the start of a new life.

  Yesterday I crashed and burned.

  Today I am recovering.

  Tomorrow I will come back.

 

  Today really is my birthday – in fact, everything in that poem is true for me.

  How old am I? That’s the question, isn’t it? Sometimes I feel so tired and exhausted that I think I’m fifty or so. A lot of the time I’m so messed up that I can only be a teenager. I’ve never told anyone my age recently, but I am old enough to know what love is… and what real despair is.

  I was all ready to finish it. I had written my suicide note, climbed onto the roof of the flats, was standing right on the edge with my arms out. But, when it came to it, I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t scared or anything, I was ready, but I couldn’t go through with it. How could I leave my daughter without a mother? Not when she would never know anything about her father. People were starting to gather below me, looking up at me with morbid interest, telling me not to jump but secretly hoping I would. I closed my eyes, remembering how all this had started, and stepped back away from the edge. In my mind I heard my daughter cry, a mini version of me, and I knew I couldn’t leave her without a mother.

  I still want this all to be over but I know I can’t let it be over. I have to keep going for the people who need me to. Some-one once told me that we have to fight on because sometimes that’s all we have. I think it means that there doesn’t have to be a reason for everything, that sometimes we just do things because there’s no alternative. I think I understand why people scream when no-one can hear them. I think I know why people cry when no-one cares, because I’ve been there. You do it because there’s nothing else to do.

  I never wanted any of this to happen… but it did anyway.

  FREEZE FRAME

  Our girl, Maria, does not step back into safety, but back in time to the moment she gave birth to a tiny life in the school bathrooms. At first, she leaves the baby on the floor and walks off, but she cannot leave the child to die alone. The baby is part of Maria, and though she is still a child herself, she knows she must take care of it.

  But she is too scared to hold her baby in case she cannot let go again. She feels too young to be a mother, too young for any of this to have happened, but it did all happen and she cannot forget about it. Maria longs for her old life of clothes and boys – the life her friends still enjoy – but she must adjust to her new role as mother. She refuses to hold the baby at all, still rejecting her too-early motherhood, even when the ambulance comes and pulls up outside with siren blaring and lights flashing.

  FREEZE FRAME

  Th
e lights are still flashing outside the window when she awakes from her sedated sleep. For a moment, Maria fools herself into believing that her baby was all a bad dream that she has now woken up from. But then she hears a baby cry along the corridor and just knows it is her own. Maria is fourteen – how can anyone allow her to be a mother at this age? Why can’t she be a child for a little longer?

  Children were not part of the plan for another two decades, but it seemed that life did not care about the plan. A nurse brings the baby in and picks her up; Maria looks away, not ready to touch her; but the nurse places the tiny wriggling baby in her arms. Maria is silently crying, wondering why fate would be so cruel to her, but even though she knows the carefree child has died in her, something else has come alive. And as soon as she looks at her tiny, innocent, helpless daughter, everything changes.

  FREEZE FRAME

  Yes, things have changed. When she left home at sixteen, she was placed in a tower block to bring up her daughter alone. But she is working two jobs just to make ends meet, she is never able to leave the house except for work as no-one has the compassion to baby-sit, and she is exhausted. Maria feels older than all her old friends put together, and she does not know how much longer she can keep going. But she must keep going – for her daughter. What else can she do?

  At night, when the stars shine so brightly against the dark sky, she tries to imagine how her life might have turned out if she had not had a child. It always seems empty in her imagination. Maria believes that every dead child’s spirit is a star, and she cries when she remembers how she almost let her daughter join them.

  There is a knock at the door and, barefoot, Maria makes sure her daughter is safely asleep in her playpen and goes to answer it.

  FREEZE FRAME

  She opens the door to the roof and slowly steps over to the edge. Her hair is so long that it brushes against the small of her back as she walks and there are morsels of food stuck in her locks. The gravel bites into her feet as she crosses the roof but she does not care. It is a long way to the bottom, a painfully long way. How can she be doing this? Maria lost her innocence in one brutal moment, how can she be taking it away from a desperate child? Maria is desperate too, but nobody seems to care very much. She is fed up of being ignored, of holding it all together, of just surviving.

  Maria is so tired and exhausted that she just wants somebody to come and sort out the mess she has made of two lives. But Maria is the only one her daughter has, and she is her world, her everything. Maria looks straight out at the sky and takes a deep breath.

  “I can’t do it.”

  About the author

  Wendy Maddocks lives in Birmingham, England, with her slightly crazy family. She blames them for her twisted imagination. Sanity is not her friend. She enjoys reading and studying, working out and eating cake, which makes her fat and in need of yet another gym session. (Yes, I’m a masochist!) She also has a fear thing about sheep. After graduating from university, Wendy began publishing her own work online and is always working on new writing projects. What will happen when she runs out of ideas?

  No, let’s not wonder that.

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