The Time of the Ghost. Diana Wynne Jones

too – looked at the growling, wagging Oliver. “Well, he never did have any brain,” Imogen said.

      “There really is something wrong with him, I think,” Cart said anxiously.

      “I’ll tell you something else wrong,” said Fenella. “The black hen is still missing. I counted all the hens and looked everywhere. It’s gone.”

      “There must be a fox,” said Cart. “I told you.”

      “I didn’t mean that,” Fenella said meaningly.

      “Then what did you mean?” said Cart.

      Imogen said, “Cart, she’s tied her hair in knots. Look.”

      Fenella dismissed this with magnificent scorn. “Of course Cart knows. It’s all part of the Plan.” Imogen, at this, looked surprisingly humble. “I meant the hen and Oliver.”

      “You mean Oliver’s eaten it!” Cart exclaimed. She rushed to Oliver and tried anxiously to open his mouth. This was impossible. Oliver, as well as being very large, very strong and utterly thick, was also rather more obstinate than a donkey. He never did anything he did not want to, and he did not want his mouth open just then.

      “I don’t think you’d be able to see the hen, even down Oliver,” Imogen objected.

      “But he might have feathers on his teeth,” Cart gasped, wrenching at Oliver’s muzzle. It could have held two hens easily. “Think of the row there’ll be!”

      “Then it’s better not to know,” said Imogen.

      “If you’re ready to listen to me – I didn’t mean that,” Fenella said, and, still very portentous, she turned in a swirl of crooked green sack and marched away.

      “Then what was it about?” Cart said to Imogen.

      Imogen spread her hands. “Fenella being Fenella.” She raised her hands to the ceiling. “Oh why am I cursed with sisters?”

      “You’re not the only one!” snarled Cart.

      Sally left them beginning another quarrel and drifted miserably out into the orchard. The hens, like Oliver, seemed to know she was there. They were all gathered pecking at some corn near the gate, which Fenella must have put down so that she could count them, but they ran away chanking and squawking as Sally floated through the bars of the gate. Sally stared after their striding yellow legs and the brown sprays of tail-feathers jerking away from her in the grass. Silly things. But, as far as she could tell, the black one was indeed missing. She felt she ought to have known. She knew those hens as well as she knew her sisters.

      That was the funny thing about being disembodied. Her mind did not seem to know anything properly until she was shown it. Drifting in and out among the trees, where hundreds of little pointed green apples lurked under the broad leaves, Sally tried to recall all the things she had been shown. Somewhere, surely, she must have been given a clue to what had made her like this – an inkling of what had happened at least. Well, she knew she lived in a school. She had three horrible sisters, who thought she was horrible too – or two of them did. Here, Sally broke off to argue passionately with the air.

       I’m not like that! I’m not hysterical and I don’t go on about my career. I’m not like Imogen. They’re just seeing their own faults in me! And I don’t grumble and criticise. I’m ever so meek and lowly really – sort of gentle and dazed and puzzled about life. It’s just that I’ve got standards. And I do think Mother and Himself are perfect. I just know they are. So there!

      But before all that started, hadn’t Cart shown that she and Imogen knew where Sally was supposed to be? They had. Cart had envied Sally – envied! That was rich! They were certainly not worried about her – but that proved nothing. Sally could not see either of those two worrying about anyone but themselves. But if Cart envied her, why should Sally have this feeling that there had been an accident? A mistake – something had gone wrong – there had been an accident—

      Before Sally was aware, the balloon of panic had blown itself up inside her again. She whirled away on it, tumbling and rolling …

      When at last it subsided, she found herself drifting along the paths of a slightly unkempt kitchen garden. She gave a shiver of guilt. This too was a forbidden place. There was, she remembered, a perfectly beastly gardener called Mr McLaggan, who hit you unpleasantly hard if he caught you, and shouted a lot whether he caught you or not. All the same, as she drifted past a hedge of gooseberry bushes, Sally had a firm impression that she and the others often came here, in spite of Mr McLaggan. Those same bushes, where a big red gooseberry or so still lingered among the white spines, had been raided when the gooseberries were apple green and not much larger than peas. And they had picked raspberries too, in a raid with the boys.

      Sally saw Mr McLaggan down the end of a path, hoeing fiercely, and prudently drifted away through a brick wall. There was a wide green playing field on the other side of the wall. Very distantly, small white figures were engaged in the ceremony of cricket.

      I think, Sally said uncertainly, I think I like watching cricket.

      But it made you very shy, she remembered, being one girl out in the middle of a field full of boys. They stared and said to one another, “That’s Slimy Semolina, that girl.” Some said it to your face. And being boys, they were of course quite unable to tell you and your sisters apart, and called all four of you Slimy Semolina impartially. But now, when she was in the ideal state for not being noticed, Sally somehow could not face all that wide green space. She was afraid she would dissolve to nothing in it. There was little enough of her left as it was. She kept along beside the wall and the buildings, past an open cycle shed, across a square of asphalt with nets for basketball at either end, and – quickly – beside a row of tennis courts. Here, the balls sleepily went phut-phut. The ones in white, playing tennis, were all from the top of the school, who looked and spoke exactly like men. It was unnatural, somehow, that they should be schoolboys, when you could not tell them from masters. They alarmed Sally too, when they suddenly broke into bellows of deep laughter. She always thought they were laughing at her. This time when they did it, she imagined them saying, “Look at that girl – got nothing on – not even her body! Ha-ha-ha! Oh ha!”

      Ha-ha to you! Sally said angrily, speeding past. I can’t help it!

      Of course, she thought – it was as if embarrassment had churned up new ideas – this was probably only a dream. But just in case it was real, Mother and Himself would know what to do. Mother had really, very nearly, seen her by the green door. She need only wait until school was over for the day and they would be able to tell her what had happened. Probably everybody knows except me, Sally said, with the pricking of not-real tears in her nonexistent eyes. I’m always left out of things.

      Almost at that moment, school was over for the afternoon. Sally found herself mixed, tumbled and swept back again, in a running grey crowd of boys. She was surrounded by laughing – “Did you listen to what Triggs said to Masham in Geography?” – and arguing – “No it isn’t! They have four-wheel drive!” – jeering – “Don’t give up, Peters! Just hit me and see what you get!” – and wordless fighting. BANG.

      Ow! said Sally. I felt that!

      It was very curious. She began to wonder if she had some kind of body after all. She had definitely been caught just then, between somebody’s fist and somebody else’s body. And it was as difficult to go forward against the crowd as it would have been in the ordinary way. Though Sally pushed and shoved, and expected with every push that she would go right through one of the chattering, running boys, she found that this was one thing she could not do. Each boy seemed to have, around his solid body, a warm elastic quivering field of life, which held Sally off. It was as thin as tissue paper, but it was there. Sally could feel it crackling faintly, every time she bumped against a boy.

      That’s peculiar, she said. I wonder if all living things are like this. I must remember to try walking through a hen sometime. Oliver would have made a bigger target, but the idea