Huts55

I silently trailed a step behind Gillian Ambrose, like her fat shadow, but only because we were both going in the same direction, and I didn’t want her thinking she’d got the better of me, even although she had. If it was a fair fight, using only words, she’d punched me in the stomach, cut my nose and torn my goolies off. But it was a mismatch, because she was a girl and they were always better at talking, because they practiced more.

I didn’t really care, because I didn’t really fancy ‘Ms James Munn’s a perfect gentleman’. And it was all her fault for wanting to go to a toilet with a seat on it. If she was that desperate, for my company, then she should just have kept it in, until we got back to her place.

‘Look,’ said Gillian, stopping suddenly in front of me, and addressing me in a conciliatory tone. ‘I’m sorry if I said anything mean, or nasty to you, back there. And I don’t mean this in a bad way, but you’re spooking me, following me like that, so can you not just fuck off somewhere else?’

‘Ok,’ I said, carefully measuring my words, like a miser with half pennies, ‘but I live up that way.’ I pointed to the dirt path that bent off to the left, like a banana, away from the Old Folk’s Home bit of the hospital, which also led to the staff quarters.

‘Right,’ Gillian said, snorting the word through her nose, looking like the female equivalent of a bull.

I put my arm out, but any attempt at a slow motion cuddle, rebounded off the look she gave me. My arm slumped down by my side, as if traumatised.

‘Pals?’ I said, sticking my hand cautiously out, for her to shake my hand.

But Gillian Ambrose didn’t look at my hand. She looked at my eyes. And there was a lightening in the hard muscles of her jaw.

‘Pals,’ Gillian said, taking my hand and giving it a perfunctory shake.

I took this as a good sign, so started gibbering the first thing that came into my head. ‘You know the Old Folk’s Home is haunted?’

‘Is it?’ said Gillian Ambrose, the hardness creeping back up into her voice and eyes.

I clawed at words, trying to bring back the softness in her, ‘But it’s ok,’ I said, ‘you’re part isn’t haunted.’

‘I don’t stay in the Old Folk’s Home,’ she said, in a whisper of calmness.

‘I know,’ I said, showing off my local-insider-knowledge, ‘but’s all the one building, the Old Folk’s Home and the staff quarters, they’re all part of the old Glendevon Castle.’

‘Righttttt,’ said Gillian.

She started rooting through her bag, for a gun to put me out of my misery, or her fags, I wasn’t sure which. ‘And these ghosts,’ she said, putting one scowl on top of another, until her face was worn and woven into a mask of distaste, ‘they come to some kind of side door and say I can’t go through that into the staff quarters? Is that the way it works?’

Once more, her words slapped against my face. Gillian looked up, briefly, to see them hitting home.

But that was of a secondary consideration. Gillian put her bag down on the path and desperately pulled out her purse and fags; two lighters, and three boxes of matches; a packet of Rizzla papers; perfume; and magazines; and pens; and makeup kits; and a diary; and pencils and a rubber and ruler; a map of Glasgow; and for some reason a pair of pink ear muffs, so that I thought it would never end, and it’d go on and on, and the countryside would be covered with an explosion of her stuff.

‘My keys?’ Gillian said, ‘Have you seen my keys?’

‘No,’ I said, wondering why she’d asked me. But she sounded as if she was going to start crying. So I added cheerily. ‘I’m sure you’ll find them.’

I knew from the look she gave me that it was the wrong thing to say.

‘Shit,’ Gillian said, sitting down on the path.

I crouched down cautiously beside her. ‘What you goin’ to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Gillian said, ‘I could get the spare off the janitor and get another one cut, but he won’t be on until 7am. I don’t know what I’ll do.’

She looked at me, as if I was the kind of person that would have the answer. ‘It’s ok,’ I said, ‘it’s not really that cold and you’ve got on a thick warm jacket.’ I pulled at the lapel of her woollen coat, fingering it for thickness, as if I was some kind of expert in the heat retention properties of warp and weft.

‘Or,’ Gillian said, ‘I could stay with you?’

‘No. No. I’ll stay out with you. It’s not that bad.’ I quickly countered, shrugging my shoulders and tried to sound suitably upbeat.

‘Never mind,’ said Gillian Ambrose.

Gillian looked through me, as if I was the ghost, I’d been telling her about. The ugly black night sky, sounded out the rising winds, in the weeping of birch bows; the creeping creaking of oak boughs as thick as a drowning man’s torso. She lit a fag, waving me away with her hands, dispelling me like mist, just as it began to rain more heavily.

‘Ok,’ I sighed. ‘You can stay with me. But you’ll need to be really quiet.’