Heaven Can Wait Read online

  ‘Claire,’ I shouted as she sprinted off. ‘Stop!’

  The bus whizzed past me and I stared after it.

  Shit.

  There wouldn’t be another one for an hour, if that. Now what was I supposed to do? I watched Claire disappear into the distance and made a decision. I’d have to go after her. She was only a kid really. I cradled my boobs with one arm and started to jog. Hooray, I thought, more running.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Claire hissed as I drew up beside her.

  ‘Can’t,’ I panted, as Claire stopped running and began to walk instead. ‘I missed the bus.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine.’

  We walked on in silence, words sizzling inside my head. I can’t deal with long silences, they make me uncomfortable. The longer they go on, the more I worry I’m about to spit out what I’m thinking in a Tourettes-style word explosion. I glanced at Claire. Selfish-Bitch-Cow-Fat-Bastard-Goth-Twat.

  ‘So,’ I said, forcing a smile, ‘are you going to tell me what happened tonight?’

  ‘Why should I?’ Claire said, speeding up her pace again.

  I jogged along beside her, determined not to give up. ‘Because I tried to help you and you thumped me, that’s why.’

  ‘Nosy, aren’t you,’ she said, raising an eyebrow. ‘If you must know, that blonde bitch slept with Keith. I couldn’t say anything because of the mutism thing so I slapped her instead.’

  ‘Who’s Keith?’

  ‘Jesus, Toga Girl.’ Claire glanced at me. ‘Are you retarded as well as deeply uncool? Keith Krank is the lead singer of the Lu$t Boys. He was on stage tonight, you moron.’

  ‘Why do you care if she slept with Keith?’ I said, letting the moron comment slip.

  ‘Because she slept with him half an hour after I did.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘No, three hours before I died.’

  ‘But you—’

  ‘Killed myself. Yeah.’

  How was I supposed to answer that? I’d never had a conversation with someone who’d committed suicide before. Or anyone else who’d died, for that matter.

  ‘Was Keith your boyfriend?’ I ventured.

  Claire shrugged. ‘Dunno. Does having sex with someone five times count?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘He’s a poet, you know,’ Claire continued, eyeing me suspiciously. ‘He’s really sweet and sensitive and he works in a dogs’ home when he’s not playing with the band.’

  ‘Dogs’ home,’ I repeated. ‘Right. So how did you meet him? Are you a groupie?’

  ‘No!’ She glared at me as though I’d just accused her of being a Westlife fan. ‘I auditioned to be in the band. And don’t look so surprised, Lucy. I’m actually shit-hot at the guitar.’

  ‘So why didn’t they take you on?’

  ‘How many fat girls have you seen in bands?’ she said, rounding the corner.

  I had a think. I needed to say something to make her feel better. I had to come up with someone who’d be an inspirational role model.

  ‘How about Mass Cass from the Mamas and Papas?’ I said. ‘She was fat and talented, but she didn’t commit suicide. She died while she was eating a sandw—’

  ‘Fuck off, Lucy,’ Claire snapped. ‘You’re such a bitch.’

  She didn’t say another word to me all the way home.

  Chapter Eight

  Monday 29th April

  Day Three

  ‘Morning, Lucy,’ the note on the fridge read. ‘Gone round the corner to the café for a late breakfast. Do join us. Brian. PS It’s Monday.’

  I rubbed my eyes and read the note again.

  What?! Monday. How was that possible?

  I’d passed out on my bed on Saturday night after I’d returned to the House of Wannabe Ghosts with Claire and she’d stomped up to her room and played LU$T BOYS at full volume. I couldn’t have slept all the way through Sunday. Could I?

  I switched on the kettle and grabbed a grubby ceramic jar from the window sill. Coffee. Coffee would help me make sense of what was going on.

  I twisted the lid and peered inside. Empty. Damn. If I wanted some caffeine I was going to have to join Brian and Claire in the café. Great, more Claire, just what I needed on a Monday morning. Still, I reasoned as I grabbed my task envelope and let myself out of the house, at least the note proved that Brian had made it home alive (well, technically dead, but you know what I mean).

  As it turned out, Claire was surprisingly subdued over breakfast. She glanced up as I walked into the bright if slightly tired-looking café, but looked down again as I approached the table, her scraggy dreads falling over her face as she bit into a sausage.

  ‘Hello, Lucy,’ Brian said brightly as I pulled out a chair and sat down.

  He looked awful. His left eye was purple and as bloated as an egg, and there were several scratches on his cheek.

  ‘My God,’ I said. ‘You look terrible.’

  Claire didn’t have the grace to blush or look the tiniest bit guilty, she just kept forking her breakfast into her mouth.

  Brian shrugged. ‘It looks worse than it is.’

  I ordered a full veggie breakfast and wolfed it down. Thirty-six hours of sleep had given me a huge appetite. Between mouthfuls, I questioned Brian about what had happened when I’d left the club. He was annoyingly non-specific, but it seemed the blonde hadn’t taken well to being manhandled and she’d taken her frustration out on his face before they were unceremoniously thrown out by the bouncers.

  ‘And then I came home,’ Brian said, ‘and went straight to bed.’

  I sipped my coffee, relishing the taste of the warm, bitter liquid. ‘Why did I sleep for so long? I’ve never slept that long before.’

  ‘Wow, call the Guinness Book of Records,’ Claire mumbled.

  I looked across at her. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Fuck off, Lucy.’

  I opened my mouth to reply but Brian held up a hand. ‘I think your overly long lie-in was a result of the transition from limbo to earth. I slept for almost twice that long when I got here. You’d think the saints might factor that into the twenty-one days and give us a bit longer.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m a bit worried about how much time we’ve got. This is day three and I haven’t done anything about finding Archie whatshisname yet.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ Brian said, smearing his toast with a thick layer of butter. ‘You had a bit of a tough first day and an even tougher evening.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘last night was a bit mental.’

  Claire suddenly dropped her knife and fork onto her plate and pushed her chair back so suddenly it squealed on the tiles.

  ‘Why don’t I just go,’ she said, ‘and leave you two alone to bitch about me behind my back. Would that make you happy? Would it, Lucy?’

  ‘I—’ I began, but she was already halfway across the room.

  ‘Looks like I’ll be paying for her breakfast, again,’ Brian said, as the door to the café slammed shut.

  I stared at him. ‘Why does she have such a problem with me?’

  He wiped his thumb across his upper lip and flicked a bit of egg out of his moustache. It curved through the air and landed on a teapot at the table beside us. The old lady who was holding it squealed and dropped it.

  ‘She has a problem with everyone,’ Brian said, completely obvious to the fact that two pensioners were now trying to rescue their scones from a river of hot tea. ‘It’s not just you.’

  I wiped my mouth with a napkin and picked up my envelope.

  ‘I need to read the manual,’ I said, ‘and see if there’s any way I can make Dan recognise me—’

  ‘There isn’t,’ Brian interrupted.

  ‘And then,’ I continued, ignoring Mr Know-It-All-Egg-Tache, ‘I need to find out some more about this Archie guy. Is there a computer and Internet connection in the house?’

  Brian shook his head. ‘No, not that I’d know how to use it, if there was. I’m more of a pen
cil and notebook kind of man. Maybe you could try the library?’

  ‘The library? Right.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it, Lucy,’ he said as he stood up. ‘I should really get on with my own task.’

  ‘Great,’ I smiled, opening the manual. ‘Have fun.’

  The manual was made up of seven different sections:

  1) What you can do

  2) What you can’t do

  3) On arrival – an orientation guide

  4) House of Wannabe Ghosts housekeeping rules

  5) What to do if you complete your task

  6) What to do if you don’t complete your task

  7) What to do if you change your mind about completing your task

  The second section – ‘What you can’t do’ – was the thickest and my eyes immediately flicked to the line saying you cannot contact people who knew you when you were alive. It said: ‘It is forbidden to try and contact anyone who knew you when you were alive. This includes, but is not restricted to: parents, siblings, partners, lovers, cousins, aunts, uncles, employers, employees, friends, acquaintances, business associates, club members, gym members, hobbyists, newsagents, shop owners, postal workers, doctors, police officers …’

  The list was enormous so I skipped on a bit.

  ‘Should you try and make contact with anyone who knew you while you were alive:

  1) They will not recognise you

  2) They will not understand you (see mutism on page 566)

  3) Any signal or contact you initiate will be misinterpreted and misunderstood

  4) Any attempt you make to try and communicate through writing, symbols, letters or technology will be rendered illegible and will not be understood

  5) Any attempt you make to try and communicate a personal message through any other person will be rendered incomprehensible (see also mediums and psychics on page 673)

  So that was why Dan had been so weird with me. He wasn’t being cruel or brainwashed, he just had no idea who I was.

  Brian was right.

  There was no way I could make Dan recognise me – or understand a word I said. Damn it. If the only way I could be with him was as a ghost, I’d have to complete my task. There was no other way round it.

  I flicked through the manual and sighed. There was no way I could read it all, not unless I spent the next eighteen days studying it. I was just going to have to wing it and see what happened. But first, Mission Find Out More About Archibald Humphreys-Smythe.

  Who knew libraries had Internet connections? And nice men in Simpson’s ties who show you to a free computer and tell you how to log in? Not me but, so far, so easy. Now all I had to do was type Archibald’s full name into Google and press enter and I’d get an email address for him or, if I was really lucky, a phone number and then I’d just …

  Your search – Archibald Humphreys-Smythe – did not match any documents.

  What? Nothing? How could there be nothing at all? Google could find Osama bin Laden if you looked hard enough.

  I tried again, this time typing ‘Computer Bitz’ into the search engine. Please, I begged silently as I hit enter, it’s where he works. It has to have a …

  Computer Bitz (London) – Specialists in Software Design and Development

  Yes!

  Oh, very good, an ‘About us’ link that should tell me who worked …

  No. Nothing about Archie, no mention of any staff at all, just some computer software mumbo-jumbo that went straight over my head. I clicked frantically on all the other links.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  How the hell was I going to meet Archie if:

  a) I didn’t know what he looked like

  b) I didn’t have a phone number for him

  c) I didn’t have an email address for him?

  My only option was to ring the number for Computer Bitz and ask to speak to him, but what would I say – ‘Hi, want to meet girls and find love?’ He’d think I was a cheesy late-night TV ad.

  Oh, wait, there was a link I’d missed. It was in a tiny font, buried in the bottom right-hand corner of the page.

  Careers

  Please let there be a graphic design job, please let there be … oh …

  Web designer wanted. Must be proficient in Photoshop, HTML, Javascript and CSS. Eye for detail essential. Previous experience essential. For more details call Graham Wellington on 0207 437 9854.

  The only web experience I had was buying designer cast-offs on eBay, but my graphic design past meant I had excellent Photoshop skills and an eye for detail. I could get myself some books on web design and blag the other three requirements. I was a fast learner, after all. How hard could it be?

  I borrowed a pen from Simpson’s-Tie-Man and scribbled the number on the back of my manual. Now all I needed to do was fake and print off a CV, buy a couple of CDs and find some websites I could pass off as my work. Then all I had to do was go back to the house and make a phone call to Graham Wellington, whoever he was.

  My stomach gave a little lurch. It was just a phone call. Easy-peasy. Right?

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Brian?’ I shouted as I let myself back into the House of Wannabe Ghosts. Then, more tentatively, ‘Claire?’

  No answer.

  ‘Brian? Claire?’

  No one was home. Thank God. I really didn’t want to make such an important phone call with Claire muttering snide comments in the background and I had the distinct impression Brian wouldn’t approve of the outrageous lies I was about to tell. I didn’t need an audience, I just needed to hurry up and make the call before I lost my bottle.

  The phone was in the cupboard under the stairs, exactly where Brian had said. The lead was too short to drag it into the hallway so I had to squeeze inside. The cupboard smelt of mothballs and socks and my back ached as I hunched over the phone, but there was a dial tone. Good start.

  ‘Hello,’ said the voice on the other end of the phone. ‘Computer Bitz. Graham Wellington at your service.’

  At my service? What was he – a butler?

  ‘Hello, Mr Wellington,’ I said. ‘My name’s Lucy Brown. I’m phoning about the web design job.’

  There was a pause. A long pause. I could hear Graham Wellington breathing down the phone.

  ‘So,’ I bumbled on, ‘I’ve got a lot of experience and obviously I have all the skills you listed on your website and I was wondering if you need me to send in my CV or if—’

  ‘Are you a nice girl, Lucy Brown?’

  I raised my eyebrows at the inside of the cupboard. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Are you a nice girl or a nasty girl? We only employ nice people at Computer Bitz.’

  Oh my God. Who was this guy?

  ‘I’m a …’ Oh God, I was going to have to say it, wasn’t I? ‘… I’m a very nice girl.’

  ‘Good, good.’ Mr Wellington purred. ‘Can you come in at 3 p.m. this afternoon? We’ll have a little tête-à-tête, a little chat-ette, to get to know each other better.’

  ‘Right, a chat-ette,’ I said, double-checking the number I’d just called. No, it definitely didn’t start 0898. I hadn’t accidentally called a sex chatline. ‘So you’d like to interview me this afternoon for the web designer job?’

  Graham sighed. ‘Oh, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, interview is such an formal word. Do you need directions?’

  ‘No, it’s fine, thanks. I’ve printed out a map, just in case.’

  He made a noise like a steam train hissing. ‘Organised too. Very nice.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Luckily Graham didn’t seem to care. ‘See you at three o’clock, Miss Brown,’ he said. ‘I’ll look forward to getting to know you.’

  ‘Yes, um, me too.’

  The phone line went dead and I stared at the phone. What the hell was that all about? Still, I was one step closer to meeting Archibald Humphreys-Smythe so it had to be good.

  I spent most of the afternoon trying to decide what to wear. You know where you are with a normal interview: smart suit, he
els and tidy hair, but how on earth do you dress for a ‘nice chat-ette’?

  Were jeans casual enough or too sloppy? How about jeans with a jacket? Or a skirt and a jumper? A bikini and a sarong?

  I emptied my wardrobe and most of my drawers onto my bed and tried on dozens of combinations before I finally decided on an outfit; a black polo-neck jumper, a knee-length red skirt and black opaque tights with black boots. Casual but not scruffy. I wrinkled my nose at my reflection. It would have to do.

  But what about jewellery? Should I wear my engagement ring or take it off? I pressed it against my lips and deliberated. On the one hand it made me feel close to Dan but, on the other, I didn’t want to risk Graham Wellington asking any weird questions like, ‘So, Miss Brown, are you going to wear nice lace lingerie for your wedding night or nasty nylon knickers? We only like nice pants here at Computer Bitz.’ I needed the interview to be as straightforward as possible. Particularly as I was about to lie my arse off about my qualifications and experience.

  I twisted the ring from my finger and carefully placed it on my bedside table.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dan,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll put it back on when I’ve passed my task, I promise.’

  OK, time to leave before I changed my mind. I grabbed my coat and hurried down the stairs and out of the front door.

  And smashed straight into Brian.

  ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry,’ I said, patting his arm. ‘Are you OK?’

  He grunted and shuffled past me.

  ‘Brian?’ I raised my voice. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘Huh?’ he said, glancing back at me. ‘Did you say something, Lucy?’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He didn’t look all right. Even his moustache was droopy. I glanced at my watch. Only twenty minutes left.

  ‘I’ve got a job interview,’ I said, ‘but I’ll be back later. We can talk then.’

  ‘If you want,’ he said.

  Sweat dribbled down my back as I charged up Tottenham Court Road and counted shop numbers under my breath. 59 … 61 … 67 … 91 …