The Afterwards Read online

Graham fell to his knees and hugged her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Oh, love.’

  Her tail was a crazy blur, her eyes glittered with canine adoration, her clawed feet clattered on the concrete of the back step.

  She was, however, like a dog from an old film. That is to say, she was black and white, like the garden, like the house, like the world. And although she was a black and white dog (white with black splotches), this was something different.

  They looked so happy together, Graham and Betty, as if they belonged together like a heart inside a chest. And although she’d always found the dog scary, dribbly and growly, although Betty had always looked at her from the side of her mouth like a gangster worried that someone was after her food, Ember found that the sight of the two of them together, reunited, made her smile. Warmed her.

  It warmed her until she remembered.

  The dog is dead.

  And then she felt cold.

  The dog was knocked down.

  And then she felt sick.

  Dead dogs wag no tails.

  And then a voice spoke.

  ‘This? You really want to do this?’

  It sounded incredulous.

  December spun round.

  Behind her, blocking the way to the alley, was a woman.

  She was tall, wide, muscly, wearing a light summer dress covered with pictures of bright flowers and skulls.

  She was pointing at Ember with one hand, palm up, index finger loosely lolling in her direction.

  ‘You would swap this, for that?’

  She pointed at the dog.

  Graham nodded, his hand on Betty’s head, filled with love.

  He didn’t look at Ember.

  It was almost as if he couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked, first looking at him and then at the woman. Eager to receive an answer from either one.

  ‘Very well,’ said the woman, not talking to Ember.

  She stepped to one side and gestured to the back gate.

  ‘Go. Don’t look back.’

  Her voice was filled with closing doors.

  Graham shooed Betty out into the alley and then followed her, not looking round.

  Ember thought she heard him mumble ‘Sorry’ as he went past, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Before she could move, the tall woman in the summer dress slipped through the gate into the alley too, and closed it behind her.

  Ember was left in the garden. In the black and white, really weird, garden.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ she said, getting control of herself again.

  She grabbed hold of the gate handle and twisted it so the latch lifted, and pulled it open.

  The alley was there, as before, except the colour wasn’t and neither were the people or the dog who had, just seconds before, stepped through it.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  December looked both ways up and down the alley.

  It was grey and silent.

  She stepped out and let the gate swing shut behind her.

  There was no wind and her hair didn’t ruffle in it.

  She wondered which way she should go.

  To the left, where she’d come from, was a dead end that hadn't been there before.

  To the right was, instead of the corner they'd passed two minutes before, an alley-mouth that led out to a grey pavement, out to a grey street. The T-junction had disappeared.

  Seeing no other choice, she heaved her school bag on to her shoulder and walked to the street.

  Although it was grey and although it was silent she recognised the road. It curved round towards her school. A little way down on the other side was a newsagent’s, and further along past that was a little bakery where she and Harry sometimes bought iced buns or doughnuts.

  The buildings were all there and the lamp posts, but there wasn’t a car to be seen, nor a person.

  It was usually quite a busy road, with cars and buses going about their business, and people walking dogs or hurrying along with umbrellas or talking to a postman.

  But now there was nothing. No one.

  It was like Ember had woken up in a dream and everyone else had stayed asleep, as if the world had stopped and only she’d been missed out and was still moving about. She didn’t like it.

  It didn’t make sense.

  Her heart tiptoed in her chest, trying not to worry her.

  Maybe if she just went home, Harry would be able to explain everything. He usually did.

  So she turned in the direction of her school and started walking. Three streets past the school was home. It wouldn’t take ten minutes to get there.

  The two girls had been sleeping at December’s house one night when they’d gone downstairs, while Harry was snoring, and drunk all the custard in the fridge. There’d been two of those big plastic tubs, which he’d bought because they’d been about to go past their sell-by date and so had been cheap.

  They’d raced each other, glugging them down, and it had been a tie.

  They’d crept back to bed, stifling giggles, sticky-faced and feeling swollen.

  December had fallen asleep.

  And she’d slept until Ness woke her up by being sick all over her sleeping bag, and then Harry had got up and dealt with everything, even though it was the middle of the night.

  He might’ve grumbled a bit, but he hadn’t been angry. He’d got the spare sleeping bag out of the airing cupboard and everyone had gone back to bed.

  But when Ness’s mum heard about it in the morning, she wasn’t so happy. She’d shouted and pointed her finger.

  ‘Out-of-date custard!’ she’d said, shaking her head. ‘Out of date! What sort of a father … ?’

  Whose idea had it been to have the custard race?

  December couldn’t remember.

  Had she been a bad influence on Ness or had it been the other way round?

  She knew what Ness’s mum would say, but she reckoned they both took the lead at different times. That was why they were such good friends. They took turns bossing each other around. Being the smart one.

  But why had she thought of custard just then?

  Oh!

  It had been seeing the empty windows in the bakery as she went past. Normally there were trays of cakes and pastries and doughnuts, but in this grey world there’d been nothing in there. Nothing for sale. And Ness was weird. She preferred custard doughnuts to jam doughnuts.

  How silly.

  But maybe it was better to listen to the fluttering of a silly memory like that than the others that were lurking in the shadows and round the corners. She tried not to look at them.

  And then, suddenly, as she walked she heard a noise, a clicking sound, almost a tick-tick-tick, and something in the corner of her eye made her turn.

  There was a low brick wall keeping a front garden from spilling on to the pavement. The clicking sound came from there.

  It was only a small sound, not a scary one, and December was intrigued. It was the first noise she’d heard since the world had turned black and white, since she’d been abandoned in this place.

  There was a smudge in the air, a blur, on top of the wall. Not a shadow, but a brownish-charcoal smear, a hint of colour in the grey world, and it was moving. It was something like the shape of a bird. With every click it tapped at the concrete.

  And then the bird-smudge vanished, blinked away, and something small and grey and wriggling fell to the ground.

  She knelt down and saw, in the now familiar black and white, a little snail.

  The tiny eyeballs rose up on the tiny eyestalks and peered around, examining her and the world, and then, after a few moments of wriggling, a wind (a wind that she didn’t feel) caught hold and the snail became dust and smoke and fell apart and blew away into the air.

  Gone.

  ‘Oh,’ she said,

  standing up. ‘Poor snail.’

  She’d paid enough attention to her dad when they’d been out on Sunday walks to know that the bir
d-shaped smudge in the air must have been a thrush doing what thrushes do, which is cracking open snail shells to get at the snail inside. But why the bird had been a smudge and why it had simply vanished, and why the snail had been in focus and had turned to dust and blown away, she didn’t know. That wasn’t a normal part of the thrush’s behaviour. Or the snail’s. So far as she remembered.

  She shifted the strap of her school bag on her shoulder and straightened herself up.

  ‘OK, Ember,’ she said out loud. ‘Time to get moving.’

  She continued on up the street, towards school and towards home, though what she’d find there in this strange empty world, this strange empty version of her world, she didn’t know and wouldn’t guess.

  ‘No one’s home,’ said Happiness.

  She'd been sitting on her doorstep, when Ember had arrived.

  She looked just like the rest of the world, a girl in a black and white movie.

  ‘I’ve been knocking, Deck,’ she said, ‘but no one answers and I don’t have a key and the doors are locked and I don’t understand.’

  Ness was looking at Ember, but covering her eyes with her hand, as if the sun were shining in them.

  Then she looked away, off to one side.

  December had stopped by the wooden gate.

  She didn’t go into Ness’s front garden but stood thinking on the pavement.

  She knew she should be scared, should be afraid, but instead a big, open, confused emptiness was inside her, and her thoughts echoed.

  ‘Ness?’ she said, after a silence. ‘You’re supposed to be dead.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Happiness, scratching the back of her head.

  Ember wondered if she shouldn’t have said what she just said. What if Ness hadn’t known? What if it wasn’t true? What if … ?

  ‘I thought it must be something like that,’ her friend said, looking at the ground and scuffing her toe against the crazy paving of the path. ‘That’s why it’s so quiet. What happened?’

  ‘You fell off a swing.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said again. The way she said it made it sound like these surprises were only small ones, like finding 2p on the floor. Nothing to get excited about. ‘That’s a bit silly, isn’t it? I’ve fallen off swings loads of times before without dying.’

  ‘This time you hit your head,’ Ember explained. ‘Probably on one of the metal posts, I expect. Mr Dedman didn’t say exactly.’

  ‘Did it hurt?’

  ‘I dunno. You’re asking the wrong person. I should be asking you that.’

  Happiness almost smiled, but it was a grey and hopeless attempt. She didn’t look at Ember.

  ‘I don’t think it hurt. I don’t remember it hurting. But then again I don’t remember falling, so …’

  She let the words trail off into dust.

  December pushed the gate open and took a couple of steps up the path.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For not going to the park with you. For not stopping you from dying. You know … that sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,’ Happiness said. ‘Accidents happen.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  The emptiness in Ember’s inside had become, as they’d talked, a whirlpool that she felt herself being drawn into.

  Happiness was dead. And Betty, the dog, had been dead too. And she’d seen that snail die when the thrush had cracked open its home. And she was in this silent world. Where the dead … lived.

  So the question spun itself around to face her: did that mean she was dead too?

  She looked at her hands.

  They were still the colour of a living person’s hands.

  Her school trousers were grey, but the usual, normal, real grey they'd always been, not the grey of a silent movie. Not the grey of Ness. And her jumper (oh!) was still red, bright like blood.

  December wasn’t dead.

  She didn’t feel dead.

  Nothing had happened to make her die.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Ness said, sitting back down on the doorstep.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ember, and she went and sat next to her friend.

  She put a hand on Ness’s knee.

  It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm either.

  At least it was there; at least Ness wasn’t just a ghost that Ember’s hand passed through.

  Ness pulled her knee away. Brushed at it.

  ‘It stings,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  For the first time in their friendship December wasn’t sure what to say.

  They sat in silence for a bit, looking out at the street, out at the houses opposite.

  Over their roofs a black circle was sinking.

  It was the sun.

  Shadows stretched towards them across the road.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Ember. She’d just remembered something important.

  She pulled her bag up and got her lunchbox out.

  Something rattled inside it.

  She held the chocolate biscuit up and snapped it in two.

  ‘Halves?’ she asked.

  She hadn’t eaten it at lunchtime because she’d not felt hungry then.

  ‘Thanks, Deck,’ said Ness, ‘but I’m not hungry.’

  December was hungry, so she ate the whole biscuit. Both halves.

  And then, as she licked the last crumbs from her fingers, something happened in front of them.

  On the top of the wall that separated the front garden from the street another smudge appeared in the air. A smudge like she’d seen when that thrush had killed the snail, but bigger.

  It wasn’t bird-shaped this time, but cat-shaped.

  In the blurred jaws the distinct shape of a struggling small bird appeared.

  It was a robin, Ember could tell, and it slumped, suddenly still, in the mouth of the cat – a scruffy, battered old alley cat, the sort you wouldn’t want coming through your cat flap while you were having your breakfast.

  It dropped the bird, shook itself, and sat up, looking at the two girls, looking solid and as real as anything.

  At its feet the black and white robin fluttered, hobbled up, fit and unbroken, hopped away, leapt into the air, and flew up to perch on a telegraph wire, from where, after a few seconds, it vanished, blown away in a streaming cloud of dust, just like the snail had been.

  But the cat remained.

  Ember noticed its eyes. They were different colours. One was red and one was blue.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ it said to her. ‘Not yet. I’ve come to take you back.’

  With everything else that had happened this afternoon she felt she shouldn’t have been too surprised by a talking cat, but she was.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a cat,’ said Ness.

  ‘Yes,’ Ember said. And then she said, ‘I saw you before,’ to the cat.

  ‘I saw you too,’ said the cat. ‘I didn’t like that man. So I followed.’

  ‘He left me here,’ Ember said. ‘Wherever here is. Is this heaven?’

  The cat looked at her. And blinked.

  ‘It’s just a place that happens to the dead,’ it said after a pause.

  ‘Are you dead?’ Ember asked.

  ‘I’m a cat,’ the cat said.

  ‘Am I dead?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ it replied.

  Happiness didn’t say anything. That wasn’t like her.

  There was a whistling out in the street and the woman in the bright dress, its colours a startling fresh tang in the grey world, was walking towards them.

  ‘You,’ she said, ‘shoo.’

  She waved her hands and the cat jumped down from the wall, on the opposite side to the girls, so they never saw where it went.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ the woman said, walking up the path and looking at December. ‘I’ve thought about it and I’ve made a decision. The deal is off. I’m going to give you back.’

  ‘Back?’

  ‘
To where you belong. Not here. Back to your own people.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ember.

  ‘Just come with me. It won’t take a second. We’ll go the short way.’

  She held her hand out for December to take.

  ‘But what about …’ Ember said, looking at Ness, who was still sat on the doorstep.

  ‘It stays here,’ the woman said.

  ‘I won’t go without her,’ Ember said.

  Happiness looked at her, blinking as if she was staring at a bright light, and then she looked down, having said nothing.

  ‘It won’t be here for long,’ said the woman. ‘Dust on the wind soon.’

  ‘No,’ shouted Ember. She hated hearing people talk like this, talk as if nothing could be changed, as if bad things were just things that happened, as if her friend didn’t count for anything, as if she were an ‘it’ and not a ‘she’. She hated this woman, whose dress was so colourful and whose smile was so warm, in this world of grey and shadow and silence.

  She spun round and pointed at the woman, fire in her veins.

  ‘No! I won’t leave her behind. I won’t leave her on her own in this horrible place. Bring her with us. Take her home. You’ve got to –’

  ‘I have to do nothing,’ the woman snapped, her voice become thunder. ‘You cannot command me.’ Then she softened.

  Shook her head. Breathed. ‘Don’t you realise, girl, I’m doing something good for you?’ She laid her hand on Ember’s upper arm. Her touch was ice cold and iron strong. ‘People have offered me fortunes and lives and empires to do this for them. But you get this one for free because I’m Just.’

  Before Ember could say,

  ‘Just what?’

  Ness's front garden, except birds were singing and the grass was green and the sky was a hundred shades of red where a fat, dull orange sun was sinking.

  And Ness was gone.

  The doorstep was empty.

  ‘Ember? Ember!’

  It was her dad’s voice.

  He was in the front garden next door, in their own front garden.

  ‘Where have you been? We’ve been worried sick. We’ve phoned everyone and no one knew where you were. I’ve been out looking. Penny’s out on her bike, trawling the streets right now.’