Free Ghosting by Jonathan Kemp Page B

would react to them.
    The unfamiliar room was filled with muted sunshine and sticky heat. Groggy from too much sleep, she looked around in search of something familiar. The skirt and blouse she’d travelled in were hanging on a clothes horse by the window and her suitcase was by the dressing table. She heard a telephone ringing through the walls, her mind a blank exhaustion of shapeless thoughts, a tangle of confused and confusing images. She could remember friends of Pete’s, Norman Bailey and his blonde wife Marilyn, meeting her at the airport. She could remember getting out of the car; could picture Norman standing there holding open the door. After that, nothing but vague fragments of dreams in which Pete chased her through hot, swampy forests. She had awoken in sweats and tears, only to drop back immediately into the warm mud of exhausted sleep. There were also fragments shewasn’t sure were dreams or not: someone – Marilyn? – undressing her and pulling a nightgown over her, and then a man she didn’t recognise – a doctor? – sitting by the bed; Hannah and Paul standing in the doorway of the room, watching her, eyes wide with concern and confusion.
    Then it came back to her, what Norman had said just before she fainted.
    Easing herself into that reality, she stared at her reflection in the dressing table mirror and said, ‘He’s dead.’ She slowly moved her head from side to side and rotated it slightly, hearing the twist and crunch of gristle. She looked at her slim arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing closely, as if seeing it for the first time, the fine, firm quality and texture of her flesh.
    A sudden cry from Jason stirred her, and she walked over to the cot in the corner; lifting him out, she began to rock him gently and sing him to sleep. Then, laying him back down, she went over to the window and drew up the Venetian blinds, just as Hannah and Paul burst into the room.
    ‘Mummy!’ they shrieked, rushing to clutch at her legs.
    ‘Shush, you’ll wake the baby,’ she said, noticing the small, pretty Malay girl who had stepped into the room after them. She said her name was Ayu, and she told Grace that an officer had telephoned to say he’d be over shortly.
    When Grace found out she’d been asleep for three days she could hardly believe it. How could she have left the children with strangers for so long? She asked if she could have some tea, then sat on the bed, calling Hannah and Paul over to join her, one on each side. ‘Come on, give us a cuddle!’ she said, grateful for their warm familiarity. Everything else seemed too unreal. She kissed and stroked their heads, smelt their hair, holding them for as long as they would allow, which was never long enough.
    ‘Selamat pagi,’
said Hannah, the first to break away and climb off the bed, running over to the window.
    ‘What does that mean?’ Grace said.
    ‘Good morning,’ Hannah said, playing with the blind, letting it drop and then pulling it up, repeatedly.
    ‘Ayu has been teaching us,’ said Paul wearily, sliding out of her arms and off the bed to join his sister by the window.
    ‘Terima kasih,’
Hannah said.
    ‘That means thank you,’ said Paul.
    Then he started repeating it in sillier and sillier voices, shredding her nerves until she had to tell him to stop.
    ‘Where’s Daddy?’ Hannah asked, but before Grace could answer Ayu reappeared to tell her the officer had arrived and that she’d shown him into the lounge. Grace asked her to take the children away and serve tea. It felt odd to be telling a complete stranger what to do – wrong, somehow – though she was grateful for the help, she hadto admit. As she hurriedly dressed, she marvelled again at how long she’d been asleep.
    In the lounge, a tall, middle-aged man with grey hair and moustache introduced himself as Officer George Hawkins. And as Ayu poured the tea he said, ‘The day before you came, Pete was on a training