Page 3 of Crazy Spooky Love
“But that’s my stockroom,” Mother says, pausing with the frying pan in her hand.
I shoot her a sarcastic look. “You don’t keep any stock.”
She can’t argue with me. We deal in the dead. They don’t need shelf space.
“I’ve been known to hold a séance in there once or twice,” Gran throws in airily.
“Yes, and last time you said you would never do it again because the room has ‘negative energy.’ ”
I rather suspect it was more the fact that the séance was conducted at the behest of the local bridge club and Gran was bored stupid by both the living participants and the dull-as-dishwater spirits they attracted. No matter; her negative-energy claims suit my purposes today.
“I’m twenty-seven,” I reason. “It’s time I stood on my own two feet.”
My mother looks pointedly under the table at my black and white polka-dot painted toes and my ankle chain adorned withsilver stars, clearly doubting that my feet are appropriate for, or capable of, business.
“What will you do?” Gran asks, wrinkling her nose at the waffles my mother offers her and delicately piercing a blueberry with the tips of her fork instead. She’s whippet-thin and eats like a bird, preferring to save her calories for the champagne she’s rarely seen without. When she dies,if she ever dies,“It’s always five o’clock somewhere” will be engraved on her tombstone.
Here goes nothing.
“Ghost busting,” I mumble, shoving a mouthful of waffle into my face as I study my plate.
“What was that, Melody?” Gran says, leaning in across the table.
My mother, whose hearing is pin-sharp, narrows her suddenly suspicious eyes atme.
“Yes,” she says, silkily. “Say it again, Melody, only LOUDER.” She barks the last word out to demonstrate.
I sigh heavily and clear my throat. “I’m going to open an agency to help people get rid of unwanted ghosts.”
Gran clutches the lapels of her purple kimono in wide-eyed shock.
“Get rid of them?” She looks to my mother for support. “Silvana, are you hearing this?”
“It’s not all that different to what we already do,” I explain, trying to put a positive spin onit.
“Our family represent the interests of the deceased, not the living, Melody.That’swhat we do,” Mum says with a frown.
She makes it sound like an advert for a family law firm for the recently departed, and I bite back the obvious response. Which is that, actually, Blithe Spirits makes a handsome profit from representing the needs of the living far more than the dead, namely in acting as the conduit between the two. We keep the lines of communication open, sort of like an astral telephone exchange, and therefore we need the ghosts to stick around. So yeah…I kind of expected my plans to go down like a cup of cold sick. “I know that,”I say, keeping my voice deliberately steady and calm. “But you both know that I’m not like you, or like most of our ancestors either.”
“You’re a Bittersweet, Melody. You see them, just like the rest of us,” Gran says, chewing another blueberry.
“Yes, I do see them.I do.But the difference between you and me is that I don’t particularlywantto see them. I find it bloody inconvenient that they pop up everywhere I go. I don’t want to spend my time finding out what Great-aunt Alice meant by that weird thing she said on her deathbed or passing messages from disgruntled wives about housekeeping money missing from green teapots.”
My mother looks at me pithily. I know it was a cheap shot, but she deserved it after that stunt she pulled on my coffee table last night.
“Belittling the valuable service we offer isn’t big or clever, Melody.”
“All right, maybe I shouldn’t have said the thing about the teapot. Mum, I know you provide an important service and that’s great, but it’s not for me.”
I turn to Gran. “But you’re right too.” I cover her bony, bejeweled hand with my own in an attempt to win her over. “I see them. I see them everywhere, so much so that there’s no point in even trying to get a normal job anymore.”
They can’t argue with this, because any job I’ve held down outside of the family business has always gone spectacularly wrong. My stint as a solicitor’s assistant ended abruptly because the solicitor in question’s dead mother was in residence and wouldn’t give me a minute’s peace to get any work done. She badgered him relentlessly with messages, mostly to do with the fact that she didn’t approve of his torrid affair with his secretary. I can’t say I did either, but unlike his mother I preferred to keep my opinion to myself. It came to a head when I found myself loudly telling her to knob off, and that the solicitor’s affair with his secretary was neither my business nor hers, which would probably have been okay had it not been for the fact that his wife had just turned up to take him to lunch as a surprise andheard every word. Suffice to say the solicitor soon needed a solicitor of his own. Then there was the time I landed a job as a dental nurse and found myself accompanied by the long-deceased dentist who’d opened the practice decades before and couldn’t seem to let go. He was constantly in my way as I worked, and wholly responsible for the fact that I prepped the wrong set of new enamels for Chapelwick’s MP and inadvertently turned him into a Kardashian. He still blames me for the fact that he lost his seat in the next election.
“This way I’ll be providing a service to the dead too, just not in the same way you do. Can’t you see that, Gran? You and Mum, you’re like a ghost telephone exchange. What I’m going to be is more of a…” I cast around for a suitable definition.
“Ghost dispatcher?” My mum is not one to be easily won over.
I shrug, exasperated. “If you like, yes. It’s not how I’d choose to put it, but we all know that ghosts get stuck sometimes and need help to move on.”
