SighKick, Frances Gapper


Frances Gapper
Why do people keep chucking shoes up on the telephone wires? A pair of trainers, hanging by their laces. A baby’s pink bootee. Shoes with nobody in them are a bit like ghosts, I thought. Then an empty crisp packet blew right into my face.
We live near Finsbury Park, in a quiet, small street. There are lots of cats and also foxes, because it’s safe for them, and nobody likes Tony Blair, because he made us go to war in Iraq.
As I unlatched the gate, I noticed a strange woman lurking in our garden, by the hedge.
To think my mum gets annoyed about cats and here it was a woman using our front garden as a toilet. Although it’s not really ours, it belongs to old Mr and Mrs Tomms, who live downstairs. The hedge is quite high and messy. Mrs Tomms tries to clip it with a pair of nail scissors. Good thing she wasn’t peering through her net curtains right at this very moment, or the shock might give her a heart attack.
‘Excuse me!’ I said to the woman, in a way like, what exactly do you think you’re doing here? In fact she wasn’t peeing, I’d made a mistake. But she was crouched down in that position – nearly underneath the hedge, where it’s leggy and the leaves don’t grow. Why? To hide herself or getting ready to spring at me?
Her pale face seemed kind of misty. Like she was peering through a fog, or gazing at me from a long way away. In fact she didn’t have much face. Titchy eyebrows, a very small nose, a mouth that seemed it might swallow itself.
A moment later, she vanished. She was just gone.
There, not there.
I didn’t rub my eyes, like people sometimes do in books, when astonishing things happen. But I couldn’t stop looking all around and about. Where is she? My brain kept telling my eyes to check again, she must be here somewhere. My eyes kept saying, no sorry. She ain’t.
I’d never seen anyone do that before. I mean just disappear. Except my little brother of course.
A lot of spiders were hanging in the hedge. Maybe they’d blown here in the wind. Or hatched from tiny eggs and got big all of a sudden. I don’t actually like spiders very much. They’ve got too many legs. And eyes.
Before going indoors, I happened to glance up at our sitting-room window. My little brother was gazing down at me, his nose pressed against the glass.
You might think it was strange – because my mum wouldn’t have got home yet – to leave a small boy all by himself in a flat. But the truth is, he’s hard to predict. I mean whether he’ll be around or not. He’s not like other people’s normal little brothers. He’s a bit ghostly.
But I don’t like to think, is Bobo real or isn’t he? I love him and he loves me and Mum. I think probably she can’t see him, or feel him being around. I’m not sure myself whether he’s alive or dead, or something in-between. All the same, he’s her little boy and my brother.
Our flat is on the second floor. I have two keys, one for the front door and another for the door before our stairs. ‘Sarah! Sarah!’ Before I even had a chance to put my school bag down, Bobo rushed over and hugged me. His hugs are better even than real people’s, they make you feel so great. He only ever hugs me and my mum, though. And because she can’t see him, she’s always surprised, like asking herself, how come I’m suddenly full of energy and brightness?
‘Hello Bobo, what’ve you been doing?’ I didn’t expect him to answer my question, because he nearly always doesn’t. The words kind of swirl around him. Like I’m just a bird going tweet tweet. In another person that might be irritating, but I never get cross with Bobo. He’s such a strange and puzzling little boy. Anyway, I could see what he’d been doing - rearranging my old doll’s house. He’d stuffed all the little people into the bathroom and put the sofa up in the attic.
Now he squatted down again, to unroll the front lawn. It’s made of stuff that’s really like thousands of tiny blades of grass.
Just then, a little spider lowered itself from the ceiling on to my arm. When they’re very small, they’re OK. My nan would have said, oh a money spider, that’s good luck, it means I’m coming into a fortune.
Still with his back to me, Bobo said: ‘I don’t go to school.’ He set up a mini-deckchair on the lawn. Now whoever sat in that chair, anyone passing by could see them relaxing in their front garden. Privacy is a lucksury dolls-house people can’t afford.
‘No, that’s right, Bobo.’
‘I’m not old enough yet.’
Will he ever be old enough, I wondered. Until a year ago he wasn’t even a person, only a soft golden bobbly light near to my mum. I think that’s why I called him Bobo, or did he already come with that name? Some things are difficult to remember how they started.
Then Mum arrived home, calling ‘Sarah! Can you open the door for me?’ She’d been to Sainsbury’s, the one near Haringay Bridge. Her hair was all shiny and like a conker, because she’d had it done at lunchtime.
Bobo helped her unpack the four bags of shopping. An apple fell on the floor and rolled away, he sent it rolling back to her. Then just as a box of eggs was about to spill, he made it rise on to a work surface. She just blinked and carried on stuffing groceries into the fridge and the cupboards. It’s amazing the things she doesn’t notice, maybe because to her brain they don’t make sense.

Judging the competition, Lynne Hackles said the chapter was full of humour and intrigue: By the end of the chapter I wanted to be Sarah’s friend, wanted to know if Bobo was or ever had been a real baby, and wanted to know where Sarah’s psychic abilities were going to take her.