Zara Read online

  For the library service, and Yateley Library in particular, who always manage to find that elusive book

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  And After…

  Also by Mary Hooper

  Chapter One

  It started as a joke. At least, that’s what I thought it was. Just Zara mucking about.

  It was Friday and she and I were sitting at the back of class when she passed me a note. Nothing new there; we often spent the best part of our last period sending notes to each other. The thing was, this note wasn’t in Zara’s usual writing, all fancy with ballooning tops to the tall letters, but was written in a frail and spidery hand. The words were weird, too. They said: I am from beyond the grave.

  ‘What?’ I screwed up my face and turned to stare at her. Then I wrote underneath, What are you on about? and pushed the note back towards her.

  Zara read what I’d written and just stared back at me, her eyes wide and startled. She had a stunned expression, as if she’d just seen something amazing and frightening. Or was trying to pretend she’d just seen something amazing and frightening.

  I made the same sort of face back. If it was a joke, I was going to go along with it, although I had no idea what she was up to this time. I guess this was why I liked being mates with her. She was very slightly freaky – not enough to be alarming, just enough to be interestingly different.

  The bell went, but as it was home time and we didn’t have another class to go to we stayed in our seats. I gave her a nudge. ‘What did you mean? Why did you write that?’

  She paused. ‘Ella,’ she said finally, ‘have you heard of automatic writing?’

  I shook my head. ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, it’s where you’re holding a pen in your hand and then something – someone – takes possession of you and you just write stuff down without knowing what you’re doing.’

  ‘Right!’ I said. ‘You mean like a ghost or someone writes it for you?’ I made a ghostly moaning sound, just to show willing. I wasn’t going to waste time on this joke, however, because all around us the rest of the class were collecting their things and charging out of the room, practically knocking Miss Stimpson down in their efforts to get out of school and begin the weekend. I began to collect up my stuff. ‘Home time!’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Zara put her hand on my arm. ‘Really, Ella,’ she said earnestly. ‘That’s just what happened. I was sitting here with my pen in my hand not thinking about anything in particular and all of a sudden it started writing on its own.’

  ‘Oh, yeah!’ I scoffed. I so didn’t believe her. ‘And my dog can dance the Highland Fling.’

  ‘You haven’t got a dog,’ Zara said impatiently. ‘No, honest! Cross my heart and hope to die.’

  I groaned and sat down. ‘Do it now, then, while I’m watching you. Pick up the pen and get possessed again.’

  I tried to keep a straight face while Zara grasped the pen and then, her face set with concentration, closed her eyes and lifted her hand so that it hovered above the paper. While she did all this in slow robot mode I studied her face carefully to see if she was peeping or her lips were twitching. She looked different that day, actually, because she’d gone a bit Goth lately and, though we weren’t supposed to put on make-up at school, had drawn black lines around her eyes and was wearing a trace of blue lipstick. She had a new ear piercing, too, but she definitely wasn’t allowed to get away with having jewellery at school so all her piercings just showed as tiny pinpricks around her ear and in her nose. Her hair wasn’t looking great – it was either greasy or very heavily gelled; I wasn’t sure which.

  Not a lot seemed to be happening on the automatic writing front. ‘Just as I thought. It’s not working!’ I said after a moment, picking up my things again.

  ‘Wait!’ Zara’s hand slumped on to the paper, then, with a jerk, began moving. I glanced at her face but her eyes were still closed. Slowly, the pen moved across the paper. It wrote Beware, and then stopped.

  ‘Beware,’ I read out. ‘You’ve written Beware. As if you didn’t know,’ I added.

  She opened her eyes, looked down at the paper and gasped.

  ‘Is that going to be all?’ I asked a bit sarcastically. ‘Just the one word?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ she said. ‘That’s probably all the spirit wants to say.’

  ‘So if it’s quite finished, shall we go before we miss the bus?’

  She nodded, stared at the paper for another moment and then screwed it up and lobbed it into the bin.

  Another mad Zara idea, I thought, as we ran for the bus. I didn’t believe a word of it – she was always doing stuff like that. It had started shortly after we’d first come to this school, because it was only then that we’d all got interested in star signs and our horoscopes, and finding out the signs of boys we fancied and trying to work out if we were compatible with them or not. We did other stuff, too, like games to discover the initial of who we were going to marry, and Zara said she could read tea leaves to see your future. She didn’t do this very often because she and I both hated tea, and if you wanted your future told it had to be from the dregs in a cup of tea made with real leaves – not a bag – that you’d made and drunk yourself.

  Zara had also tried ‘dowsing’, which was what you did when you couldn’t choose between two or three things. You held a crystal on a chain over, say, a colour or a DVD or whatever, to see if it signalled ‘yes’ by swinging backwards and forwards, or ‘no’ by going round and round.

  We liked doing all this. Well, it was something else to think about apart from exams and tests and stuff. I never got quite as interested in it all as Zara, though. She got books from the library about it; books about developing your psychic powers and becoming aware of your spiritual potential, all that sort of thing, whereas I’m not really interested to that extent. I’m more into pop music and animals and stuff. And boys as well, of course (not that I’d had a lot of experience there). Sometimes I wondered if Zara and I were all that compatible; if we were natural best friends. We’d become so mainly because I’d been two weeks late starting at our new school, and so had she, and all the other girls seemed to have formed their friendships by then and had found mates to sit next to, so she and I had rather been thrown together. At the time I was just relieved to have someone, but later I’d begun to wonder what would have happened if I’d started at the proper time: would I have become best friends with one of the top cats? Would I have made it to the in-crowd?

  That afternoon we only just caught the school bus and, because we were late, all the decent seats had been taken and we had to go right to the front, behind the driver. Lolling across the long back seat where they nearly always sat were four girls from our class: Sophie, Sky, Poppy and Lois. Sophie and Sky were best friends and more or less dominated everything – not in a nasty way, they weren’t bullies, but because they were more together, confident, sophisticated and prettier than anyone else in the class. OK, looks aren’t everything, we have that rammed down our throats often enough, but I’ve noticed that when you get dealt the prettiness card, you usually get other stuff along with it. Like, these two, and all the other really attractive girls I know, are nice, confident, funny and likeable as well as being good-looking. How fair is that? If there had been boys at our school they’d all have fancied Sophie and Sky, or The Two, as we sometimes called them, and the rest of us wouldn’t have got a look-in.

  The Two had their hangers-on, of course �
�� but then we were all their hangers-on really, and Poppy and Lois were only slightly down the pecking order as far as looks and personality were concerned. The Four usually went round together, sat in assembly with their arms linked, and had an invisible label saying Most Popular taped to their foreheads. They not only looked good, but when they were together they were like some sort of variety act. They hammed things up, joked and made people laugh. They were the sort of girls who exaggerated; when you listened to them everything was amazing, or unbelievable or hilarious. From where we were sitting in the front we could hear Sky’s shrieks of laughter and Sophie saying, ‘Honestly! It was just so completely incredible!’

  ‘So what was that all about in class?’ I asked Zara as we sat down, puffing slightly. ‘That bit of writing.’ I put on a quavery voice. ‘A message from beyond the grave.’

  She hesitated. ‘What did you think? Did you believe me?’

  ‘Think I’m nuts?’

  ‘What would you say if I told you that it was perfectly true?’

  ‘I’d say you were barking.’

  ‘But it could be true, couldn’t it? I could get messages from the Other Side. Where the dead things are…’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ I said, grinning.

  She was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘I do really think I’m psychic, though.’

  I shrugged. ‘Yeah, maybe. And maybe not.’

  ‘I could be. How would you know? D’you remember me telling you about when I was little, and I saw this man on the landing?’

  I nodded. Ages ago we’d been talking about where we used to live, and Zara had told me that she and her mum used to live in a flat at the top of a big old house. One day she’d seen a man on the landing standing in the shadows, and she’d screamed, and her mum had come out and the man had just completely disappeared. She’d heard later, though, that a man had once lived in their flat and been killed in a fight on that very spot.

  ‘And there was something else,’ she said. ‘Something I’ve never told you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, once I was going by a railway station and I started crying and couldn’t stop and I didn’t know why,’ she said earnestly. ‘The next day I looked in the paper and there had been a rail crash at that station that very night and four people had been killed.’

  ‘That was just a coincidence,’ I said.

  ‘OK, it might have been – but what if it wasn’t? Say I really was psychic.’

  ‘I’d still say you were barking.’

  She slipped her arm through mine. ‘Would you still be friends with me?’

  ‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Not if you were too weird.’

  ‘But we like weird stuff!’ she said immediately. ‘We like reading our star signs and doing make-believe spells at Hallowe’en to find out who we’re going to marry. And we like Buffy and you and I went to a fortune-teller at the fair once to try and find out our futures.’

  ‘OK, then,’ I said grudgingly. ‘But all that’s only mucking about, isn’t it? Like, no one really believes that everything you read in your horoscope is going to come true.’

  ‘But what if someone really was psychic?’

  ‘What if they were?’

  ‘They’d be in touch with the spirit world. Able to foretell the future and do all sorts of other things.’

  I thought about this. ‘I wouldn’t believe them,’ I said. ‘And anyway, reading your stars and going to some gypsy is one thing, but you wouldn’t really want to know about your future, would you, in case it was horrible. Suppose you found out you were going to die in an awful accident or end up in a wheelchair or something?’

  There was a short silence. ‘So you wouldn’t want to be best friends with someone who was psychic?’ Zara said eventually.

  ‘No thanks!’

  Zara didn’t say anything for a moment. The bus was noisy, but over it all could be heard The Four, singing together in the back row. After a couple of moments one of them hit a bum note and they all started laughing. ‘Oh well, I don’t suppose I am really,’ Zara said. After another moment she added, ‘But Ella, I was thinking … it might be a laugh to pretend to be.’

  I didn’t reply straightaway because I was looking at Sophie and wondering why my hair wasn’t all straight and silky like hers.

  ‘I’m talking!’ Zara said. ‘Stop making sheep’s eyes at them all the time!’

  ‘What?’ I turned back from looking at The Four. ‘Sorry. Didn’t realise I was.’ I tried to put my mind to what she was saying. ‘But why would we pretend to be psychic?’

  ‘Just for fun. We could be special. Like those.’ She jerked her thumb towards The Four. ‘We could tell all the girls’ fortunes and everyone would make a fuss of us and always want us around.’

  I thought about it. Put like that, it sounded good. Who wouldn’t want to be as popular as them? To be a girl the others looked up to, wanted to sit next to and whose name always popped up when it came to choosing names for anything. To be in demand all the time.

  ‘We’d be special,’ Zara said. ‘You and I could do a double act.’

  ‘What d’you mean? Do magic or something?’

  ‘Not magic!’ she said. ‘Not getting rabbits out of hats. Look, I was reading this book by a magician – one of the modern sort of magicians. They call him psychic but he’s not really. What he is, though, is he’s very, very perceptive. He’s alert to things like body language and eye movements, and sensitive to the things people don’t say.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  She looked at me earnestly. ‘You have to listen between the lines.’

  I frowned. ‘I don’t get it.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Well, suppose I asked you how you did in your exams, and you replied that you had a job anyway, or that exams didn’t really matter in the great scheme of things, then I’d take it from that that you’d bombed out and got all Es or something.’

  I nodded. ‘OK, I see. So if I asked you where you were going on holiday this year and you said you thought holidays were boring and a waste of time then I’d know you couldn’t afford one.’

  ‘Exactly. I mean – look at this automatic writing business! I saw someone on the telly who said he’d had letters from all sorts of people: Elvis, Princess Di, Shakespeare and so on. People make a fortune out of it! And who’s to say if they’re genuine or not?’

  ‘Search me,’ I said.

  When the bus reached my stop, Zara said goodbye and that she’d see me the next day, because we always went shopping on a Saturday morning. She added, ‘And Ella, when you go to bed, think about me, and think about what I’ve said. I’m going to send you a special psychic message …’

  ‘Right!’ I said, and I rolled my eyes at her and grinned.

  As I got off, I shouted goodbye down the bus. A few voices shouted back – enough to enable me to pretend, as I usually did, that The Four had noticed that I was getting off, had shouted their goodbyes and were now talking about me. ‘Nice girl, that Ella,’ they were saying. ‘Yeah, I really like her.’

  OK, I knew they weren’t really, but it didn’t do any harm, did it?

  I walked home. I live in a newish, biggish house on the edge of an estate containing lots of similar houses – all quite boxy and ordinary. The best thing about ours, so Mum reckons, is that because it’s a corner plot it has a really long garden that merges into woods and fields at the end.

  There are four of us. My brother Toby is seven years older than me and in the last year of university. He’s OK, but because of the big age gap between us, we’d never been particularly close, and he probably regarded me as a silly little kid and thought I was still playing with Barbies. It was a bit of a dead loss having that many years between us, because I knew I’d never be able to go round with him and his mates like girls did whose brothers were about the same age. Anyway, Toby’s mates all seemed to be boffin types and I wouldn’t have dared fancy any of them.

  My dad works for a computer firm a
nd my mum works as a manager in an old people’s home. Both of them are fairly OK most of the time, although Dad has his moments: he’s quite bossy and a bit of a snob, which means he’s always criticising my friends and picking me up on how I pronounce words. He’s got a thing at the moment about words ending in two ‘l’s – words like ‘tell’, ‘well’ and ‘smell’ – he says I pronounce them ‘tewl’ and ‘wewl’ and ‘smewl’ and he drives me absolutely mad repeating those words after me, properly, whenever I say them. Mum is much more easygoing and doesn’t do stuff like that. She doesn’t like any sort of an argument; anything for a quiet life, her motto is.

  They’re quite reasonable as families go; we do have rows but they aren’t those stupendous ones that you hear about when everyone throws plates and stuff. Once I reached about thirteen I started getting on quite well with my mum, so much so that she even paid for the two of us to have a weekend away together at a health farm. I mean, I wouldn’t go so far as to say my mum is my best friend or anything sloppy like that, and I certainly don’t tell her about boys I fancy, but we do get on fairly OK.

  That evening passed, as boring as usual: meal, bit of homework, TV, couple of CDs on headphones in my room, and then into bed. Just when I was on the point of falling asleep, though, I did one of those frightening starts that wake you up with your heart pounding away like mad. I felt – or thought I felt – someone breathing right close to me, and when I opened my eyes and looked into almost total darkness, I seemed to see Zara’s face there in the air in front of me. I let out a stifled gasp, became fully awake and struggled into a sitting position, but as my eyes got accustomed to the dark I saw, of course, that there was nothing there. No Zara at all.

  It was then that I remembered what she’d said about thinking about her as I went to sleep. Surely she hadn’t somehow spirited herself to appear? No, of course not. That was ridiculous.

  I slid back under my duvet and gradually my heart slowed down. It was OK, it had been nothing. I’d just somehow remembered Zara’s words and had dreamt about her, that was all.