Ways to See a Ghost

out in the field. It was like she’d been filled up with ants, biting and nipping her from the inside. Her skin was itchy, the way her arms moved felt wrong. She picked things up then dropped them, because her hands were suddenly wings, her fingers feathers. And every night she dreamed of flying, only to wake heavy and miserable in the morning. She was sure she’d lost something, something really important, and she couldn’t even remember what it was.
    She felt cross with everyone and everything. Even Angel.
    Cally narrowed her eyes, examining Isis.
    “It’s since we went out that night with Gil and Gray, isn’t it?” she said.
    Isis’s cheeks flashed hot.
Did she know somehow?
    “I know you’re not very keen on me being with Gil…”
    Isis shook her head, relieved, but also irritated. Did Cally ever think about
anything
else?
    “It’s not about him,” Isis said, scornfully.
    Cally winced.
    “Then what is it, Isis? Can’t you tell me?”
    But she couldn’t, that was the problem. Because she didn’t know what was wrong, because even to startexplaining would take her into places she couldn’t go. So she tried to smile, pointing at the Danish pastries in the bakery window. “I’m probably just hungry,” she said.
    Cally frowned at her for another moment, then went into the bakery. She chose a cheap iced bun for Isis, and nothing for herself.

    By 11.30 a.m., Isis was hungry again. She’d spent the morning sitting on a wooden bench with a book in her hand, as far away as Cally would allow her to be, next to a small shrubbery of plastic plants in the middle of the glass-covered atrium. Two weeks ago she could have read for the whole day, but now it was a strange torture. Her legs jittered, she shuffled and shifted on the bench. Her mind was even worse, leaping from each printed word to some random thought and then, inevitably, to the fluttering of wings.
    “Restless?” A voice rasped next to her ear, a dusty whisper.
    She shut her book with a snap, not moving her head but feeling the sudden chill down her side.
    “Go away,” she said through almost-closed lips.
    From the side of her vision, she saw the crossing oftweed trouser legs, a shower of mould spores falling onto the polished floor.
    “I am sure I will, eventually,” said Mandeville. “Even phantoms seem to fade in the end. In the meantime, I enjoy your modern world. Take this covered parade of shops. So vibrant and busy. I remember it was merely a market garden, in my day. Vegetables and so on, no doubt grown by surly and ignorant peasants.” He stopped speaking, but he didn’t leave.
    Isis turned her head, trying to look like nothing was happening.
    “What do you want?” she whispered.
    Mandeville flicked his hand lazily in the air. “Company, my dear. Conversation.”
    “I can’t talk,” Isis said through her closed teeth. “People might see.”
    “Amiable silence then,” said Mandeville, resting one arm on the back of the bench. Where he touched it, the varnish began to crack, green fuzz growing out of the wood. “I see your mother is busy.”
    Cally was in front of the fortune-teller’s tent, sitting on a metal, fold-out chair. A young-looking, dark-haired woman was seated opposite her. Isis couldn’t hear whatthey were saying, but by the tilt of her head she knew Cally was ‘listening with her spirit ear’.
    Mandeville glanced around the shopping centre. “I am afraid news has spread of your mother’s charlatan ways. She no longer attracts spirits to her performances.”
    Isis slapped her book down on the bench, right through Mandeville.
    “Manners, please,” he said.
    “There’s a ghost over
there
,” hissed Isis, flicking her eyes towards a pale figure moving through the mall. A thin, faded woman with a pinched face, wearing a long drab dress of rough brown material, a piece of sack tied around her shoulders as a shawl. She was walking knee deep through the floor, bending to pick up things only she could see. As she reached the shoe shop she faded into the window, a moment later reappearing where she had started, repeating her walk and bending at all the same places as before.
    “The potato picker?” said Mandeville. “She has no interest in seances. She’ll take no more notice of your mother than she would me, even if I were cavorting in front of her. I used to try and engage with her type, but I gave up long ago. They are frozen to their tasks, locked intheir patterns. Memories of a place, or