How to Seduce a Ghost Read online

  “Where’d you see him?” he yelled over his shoulder. “Come and show me.” He was standing at my bedroom window looking out over the mews at the end of the garden.

  “I didn’t see him. I heard him downstairs in the alley. I saw his shadow.”

  “You didn’t see anyone over there”—he pointed to the back of a tall house rising up above the mews—“someone climbing up that scaffolding?”

  Just then a voice shouted up the stairs.

  “It’s okay, guv. We got the bloke in the alley. It’s only old Alfred, drunk as a skunk, peeing all over the walls but nothing worse than that.”

  The man in the leather jacket slammed his hand down on the windowsill in a fury and I squeaked in shock.

  He turned to me. “Sorry, luv. I’m after a rapist. Woman one street away was assaulted last night. Thought he might be paying you a visit tonight. The uniforms downstairs’ll take your drunk away.”

  Arson, rape, a drunk and disorderly, all in a night’s work to them but I was left to stand at my bedroom window and wonder how much longer it would be before I wound up like Astrid McKenzie or the woman who’d been attacked the night before.

  And that’s when it came to me that the summerhouse would be the perfect place for a lodger. I was staring at it from my bedroom window, standing there bathed in moonlight looking really rather inviting.

  It was a pretty little building, built against the back of a mews house at the end of the garden. This house formed the back wall. Two additional stone walls jutting out formed the sides of the summerhouse and the front was made up of a wood frame and glass doors. It was a proper little house, quite a big area, not at all the garden shed some people dubbed their summerhouse. If anything that was erring on the side of understatement. When I was a child, I always wanted to turn it into the most wonderful playhouse and invite my friends for sleepovers but my mother never got the point of that idea. My parents had long ago had it wired for electricity. All it needed was heat. I could imagine how snug it would be in there if it could be heated. Imagine. That was the key word. Somehow the summerhouse began to fire my imagination so that was why I knew, as I got back into bed and lay wide awake for the next hour, that it would take precedence over the work that needed doing to maintain the house itself.

  The next day I was fidgety. I realized I had inadvertently psyched myself up to start work on another book and now it didn’t look as if anything was going to happen. For about twenty seconds, I pretended I was going to get on with sorting out the repair work on the house. I made a list of what needed doing. The damp appeared to be rising up out of the basement and into the laundry room. I say “laundry room”; in fact it was just an alcove off the kitchen where I kept the washer and dryer. I had a ludicrous habit of embellishing parts of the house to make them sound grander. Tommy said it made me sound like a real estate agent.

  So. Apart from the damp, what was next on the list? The toilet on the first floor was leaking. The windowsills were all rotting. Something needed to be done about the gutters. The first four items on a list that eventually numbered eighteen jobs, and that was just my list. I had yet to unearth my mother’s and remind myself what was on it.

  But making the list was as far as I got because as I was writing it, I remembered my idea about the summerhouse. It was perfect. I’d find a nice friendly soul, someone reliable and quiet, and they’d be far enough away so as not to disturb my routine but I was bound to feel less nervous knowing there was someone within shouting distance of my bedroom window.

  I went mad. I invested in a couple of kerosene heaters and installed them. I dragged a large multicolored shaggy rug across the lawn, shook it free of leaves and laid it on the summerhouse floor. The sun was shining and the sunlight picked out the rug’s swirling patterns through the glass doors, making it seem like a golden tapestry. There was a small queen-size bed in the second guest bedroom on the first floor and I called a couple of men in the market Chris recommended and had it moved into the summerhouse, pushed it against a wall and covered it with cushions. It would serve as a bed/sofa since there wouldn’t be room for an armchair. I went to Ikea and bought shelving, a clothes rail and a bedside locker. Finally, I went round my parents’ house appropriating the other necessities. A small chest of drawers. A mirror in an oval wooden frame. A reading lamp and a standard lamp. A couple of chairs. A small chest on which to stand a television. Then the television itself, swiped from the kitchen, one of four in the house. A tiny fridge that had been sitting unused for years. I switched it on. It still worked. On the shelf beside the fridge I placed an electric kettle, a toaster, a tiny Baby Belling electric cooker, the kind you can boil a pan of soup on, some mugs, plates, glasses, cutlery.

  Within a week it had all come together. My final contribution came from Portobello Market. An eighteenth century china washing bowl and pitcher. I put it on a table in the corner with a pile of bright blue towels beside it. A bit cold but maybe some hot water could be added from the electric kettle.

  There were forty-five replies to my ad in the Standard and indeed most of them were from women. Women who seemed totally bewildered as to why they were being marched to the end of my garden. Women who took one look at the little nest I had created and stared at me as if I was mad.

  “The ad said ‘enchanting garden pied-à-terre’” one woman told me accusingly.

  “Well, there you are,” I replied.

  “But where’s the bathroom? The kitchen? The loo?”

  “There,” I said, pointing across the garden to the wrought iron steps leading up to my back door. “There’s a bathroom just to the right. And your kitchen’s right here.” I gestured to the Baby Belling, the electric kettle.

  “If you’re offering a shed at the end of your garden, I think you ought to say so,” I was told.

  But before I could word a new ad, Angel arrived on my doorstep.

  The doorbell rang and there stood a short buxom creature with peroxide hair. Her face was very pretty. I took in that much before she announced.

  “Hi. I’m Angelina O’Leary but you can call me Angel.”

  “I’m Nathalie Bartholomew but you can call me Lee,” I said automatically.

  “Can I? That’s great. So how much is it then? It never said.”

  “How much is what?”

  “The room? How much is it? Can I come in? It’s nippy out here.”

  I was stupified. I had never envisaged having a five foot two mini-Marilyn as tenant and nighttime backup. I toyed with the idea of telling her the room had gone but then I thought, What the hell? She wouldn’t want it anyway if she was anything like the other viewers.

  She wasn’t and she loved it.

  “Ooh, it’d be like living in a summer’ouse.”

  That was one way of putting it.

  “You like it then.”

  “Oh yeah. It’s all so cozy. Makes you want to curl up and hug yerself.”

  That was exactly the way I saw it.

  “Don’t you want to see where the bathroom is? And the toilet? The kitchen?”

  “Oh, there’s more?” She seemed astonished. “I mean, you put that jug and bowl there and them towels. And what with an electric kettle and that, you could boil water and you’d be laughing.” She looked around. “But I see what you mean about the toilet.”

  “And wouldn’t you want to have a bath or take a shower now and again?”

  “Oh, I could run round to me mum’s for that. But I do need to go to the toilet, don’t I?”

  I led her back across the garden and showed her the bathroom. She said “Ooh lovely,” about four times but when she saw the kitchen, her mouth dropped open.

  “It’s like what you see in films. You don’t ever think you’re going to be in one of these fancy kitchens yerself, do you?” She seemed to be appealing to me as if I were standing in my own kitchen for the first time. My mother had fancied herself as a bit of a cook and her ambition had manifested itself by the transformation of our comfortable family room
with the cooker, fridge, and sink at one end into a minimalist designer kitchen with bare counters and everything hidden away, even the fridge. You pressed a cupboard at thigh level and out popped the dishwasher. You hit another with your knee and there was the garbage disposal. Sometimes if you accidentally leaned against something without thinking, you got the fright of your life by exposing revolving shelves of saucepans that clattered into your shins.

  But if Angel liked it, she could have it. I wouldn’t show her the pantry where I made my suppers of an evening. “Pantry?” said Tommy predictably when I referred to it as such in his presence. “Oh, please. It’s a larder with a cooker in it.”

  “Bit of a cook, are you, Angel?”

  “Me? Never. Takeaway girl, me. So how much was you thinking of for the room?”

  “You say your mother lives in the area?”

  “Yeah. Portobello Court Estate. Council flat. Five minutes from here.”

  “You live there now?”

  She nodded. “Bloody nightmare it is. Five of us in a two-

  bedroom flat. I’m the eldest. I’ve got three little brothers and they’re all in the one room. Me and me mum share the other room. The other bed. Me dad was Spanish but he run off when I was five.” She said it as if his nationality and his departure were connected. “Mum went back to her old name. I don’t even think they were married. My brothers are all O’Learys. I mean, we’ve all got fathers somewhere but we’re not bothered who they are or whether they’re the same guy. I know mine was Spanish because Mum always said he chose the name Angelina and he used to call me his little Angel. Well, till he run off. There’s always been Spanish people up Golborne Road way. I went to a Spanish restaurant up there once, kept looking at all the waiters thinking maybe one of them was my dad. Anyway, time I moved out. Mum saw your ad. She was looking for a cleaning job. You wasn’t looking for a cleaner by any chance, was you?”

  “Not at the moment, thank you. Now, would you like a cup of tea?”

  “I’ll make it. Where’s your teapot? How do you open these doors?” She was running round the kitchen trying to find handles.

  “Like this.” I showed her, reached in, and retrieved a teapot.

  “Shall I get the kettle from outside?”

  “No, it’s all right.” I smiled. “I’ve got another one. So you don’t want to live with your mum. How old are you? If you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Nineteen,” she said, with enough defiance to make me think she was probably younger. “And I’ve got a good job so you don’t have to worry about the rent.”

  How do you know? I wondered. I haven’t said what it is yet. The truth was I hadn’t really worked out what it would be. The other people who had come round had been so instantly dismissive, it had never come up.

  “Milk and sugar?” I asked, stalling. “Where do you work?”

  “Tesco,” she said proudly. “In Portobello. On the checkout. One day I’ll make duty manager.”

  Her face did look familiar. Or was I just imagining it? I went to Sainsbury’s for my big shops and popped round to Tesco for the odd top-up during the week but I generally ran in and out so fast, I barely noticed the checkout girls.

  “So how much is it? I could manage a hundred a week. Will it be as much as that?”

  A hundred pounds a week in one of the most fashionable areas of London? She’d be lucky to get a room for less than three hundred. But then it looked like I’d be lucky to find someone who didn’t mind running across the garden at two A.M. in their nightie if they wanted a pee.

  “Tell you what,” I said wondering if I’d regret it for the rest of my life, “why don’t we say you give me eighty pounds a week and you give your mum the other twenty for her to give the place a good clean every now and then.”

  She looked at me for a second. She knew what I meant. If she kept the place clean herself, then she could pocket the extra twenty. But if she wanted to help her mum out, well then it was up to her.

  I wasn’t renting the summerhouse out because I needed the money. I was doing it so I wouldn’t be totally alone at night while there was an arsonist running round the area. Plus it helped me procrastinate about the chores in the house yet again, which was par for the course, and it gave me a certain amount of satisfaction. It was something I’d feel good about doing and how often did that happen these days?

  “There’s no phone.” I said, suddenly remembering the one thing I’d forgotten.

  “No worries.” She fished a mobile out of a little purple crochet bag. “My boyfriend give it to me for Christmas.”

  “You’ve got a boyfriend?”

  “Did have. We broke up.”

  The doorbell rang and she jumped down off the stool, spilling her tea.

  “Shall I get that?”

  “Will it be for you?”

  “Oh, no, I was just trying to help.”

  I felt bad. She was a nice girl. No side to her. She genuinely wanted to help.

  “It’s all right. You sit tight.”

  It was Tommy, back at the worst possible time.

  “Mum said you wanted to see me,” he said casually, giving me a peck on the cheek. He made it sound as if he’d just been in the next room instead of totally out of my life for the last ten days. He rarely turned up unannounced because he knew it infuriated me. I could see him preparing himself for what he called “one of your telling-offs.” He perked up considerably at the sight of Angel.

  “Pleased to meet you. We’ve just made a cup of tea,” she told him before I could get a word in. “What’s your favorite color?”

  What an odd question, I thought, but Tommy didn’t seem in the least put out.

  “Beige,” he said, “red second. What’s yours?”

  “Blue. And golden. Because of my name. Angel.”

  “Blimey. What’s your last name? Gabriel? I’m Tommy.” He held out his hand.

  I had never seen Tommy hold out his hand before and what was all this rubbish about favorite colors?

  “So what’s your porno name?”

  Weird question but God help me, Tommy had an answer.

  “Fluffy Marriot.”

  “Kitten?”

  “Rabbit. Yours?”

  “Frisky O’Leary. Hamster.”

  “Suits you.”

  Angel giggled. It was like they were talking a foreign language. I felt totally excluded.

  “Will one of you please explain what is going on?”

  “Which bit didn’t you understand?”

  “Well, for a start why did she need to know your favorite color?”

  “It’s just a thing you ask someone when you first meet them, a way of getting to know them,” said Angel.

  I had never asked anyone what their favorite color was.

  “And the porno name? Getting to know them better?”

  “Oh, it’s just a game you play.” Everyone but me obviously. “You take the name of the first pet you ever had and you add your mother’s maiden name and that’s your porno name. You know, on the Internet. So what would yours be, Lee?”

  I thought for a moment. “Moby Dick Pilkington-Scott. Goldfish.”

  “Don’t think you’d get very far with that,” said Tommy.

  “Angel’s moving into the summerhouse,” I said to change the subject.

  The joy on her face made my day. I’d obviously enabled some kind of dream to come true. “We’d better discuss dates,” I said, Lady Bountiful personified. “It’d have to be next week at the earliest, I’m afraid. Here’s my number. Give me a ring and we’ll sort something out.”

  She took the hint and stood up. “Well, better be getting along.”

  “Do you live far from here?” Tommy asked.

  “Five minutes. Portobello Court Estate. Just past the mews. I’m going to walk back past her house and take a good look. Ever so sad, wasn’t it? She was the last person anyone would want to kill. She was such a sweetheart. Everyone loved her. She was successful. She was happy.”

&n
bsp; I noticed we didn’t even have to say Astrid McKenzie’s name anymore.

  “How do you know she was happy?”

  “I read it in the Sun,” said Angel cheerfully. “I’ll let you know if I see anything juicy.”

  “Would you like me to walk you home?” said Tommy. “It’s dark outside.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, smiling. I understood why he asked. She was such a dainty little creature if you looked beyond the breasts. “I’ll run all the way except when I stop at hers.”

  She left, kissing us both rather embarrassingly on both cheeks before she went.

  “So, Tommy, this is an unexpected pleasure. Shall I put the kettle on again?”

  “It was a slow day so I came round to see if you wanted me to help clear out your office. You said the other day you’d been meaning to do it for a while and I thought you could use a hand. I got off early. Just a thought.”

  This was often the way we approached our reunions after a row. We didn’t address the reason we hadn’t seen each other in a while, just found an excuse to get us back together and carry on as if nothing had happened. Tommy would invariably redeem himself by offering to help at exactly the right time. His actual assistance was a bit perfunctory and he wasn’t much use if I was really worried about something. He had a small selection of soothing stock responses like “Take your time” and “Don’t worry about it” while I rattled on about what had upset me and then I’d glance at him and see he wasn’t even looking at me.

  But I let him help clear my desk and lug a lot of rubbish downstairs to the bins.

  As he was preparing to take the last load he looked out of the window of the room I use as an office.

  “You’ll be able to see her coming and going,” he commented. “You’ll be a right concierge, I’ll bet.”

  “Who?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

  “Angel,” he sighed. “Bit of all right, that Angel.”

  I was relieved to see him again but nevertheless once we’d finished clearing out my office, I pretended I was going out, just to get him to leave. It was the first time I’d seen him since I’d kissed Buzz and it felt weird. When we parted at the corner of Portobello Road, I gave him an unusually passionate farewell kiss fueled no doubt by my feeling of extreme guilt.