Page 2 of Crazy Spooky Love

“Why is Silvana entertaining a man half her age in your flat?” Gran glances from me to my mother.

“You should have said you were expecting company, darling. I’d have taken myself out for dinner.

” She touches her hand lightly against her hair.

“Aren’t you supposed to drape a towel over the doorknob or something, isn’t that the modern way to signal these things? ”

She looks spectacularly amused with herself, and one glance at Lenny tells me that he knows he’s way out of his depth with these two and is in the process of writing me off as the worst date he’s ever had.

His eyes slide from me to the door, and I can almost hear him begging me to let him leave unharmed.

“He’s not Mum’s date, he’s mine. Or else, he was,” I mutter, and then I’m distracted as a beer-bellied pensioner in a soup-stained shirt slowly materializes through the ceiling, his flannel trousers not quite meeting his hairy ankles.

Stay with me; I see dead people, remember?

As do my mother and my grandmother, who also watch him descend with matching expressions of distaste.

“Finally,” my mother spits, dropping Lenny’s hand so she can round on the new arrival.

“Two hours I’ve been chasing you around this bloody building.

Your wife wants to know what you’ve done with the housekeeping money she’d hidden in the green teapot.

She says you better not have lost it on the horses or she’s had it with you. ”

My gran rolls her eyes. “I rather think she’s had it with him anyway. He’s been dead for six weeks.”

“You’re a fine one to talk, given that you still sleep with your husband twenty years after he died.” Mother flicks her silver hair sharply. Touché.

Lenny whimpers and bolts for my front door, turning back to me just long enough to splutter “Something’s come up, gotta go,” before he hoofs it out and down the stairs two at a time.

I hear his car door slam and wonder what came up. Probably his dinner.

“Breakfast, darling?”

My mother acts as if nothing untoward happened last night when I stomp barefoot into the warm, farmhouse-style kitchen she shares with Gran.

It’s a double standard, I know. I moan about them letting themselves into my flat and then breeze into theirs as if I own the place, but in my defense it’s totally my mother’s fault.

She props their door open and then lures me down the stairs with the smell of home cooking; usually something sweet and irresistible.

I think she’s actually found a way to pump the smell of freshly made waffles through the ancient heating system, a siren she knows I cannot ignore.

Sugar alert! Sugar alert! Melody Bittersweet, report to your mother’s kitchen for culinary fabulousness and a grilling on your love life, immediately!

“You can’t get round me with waffles this time,” I grouch. I spent most of last night tossing and turning, thinking about the fact that my life is heading precisely nowhere. “Where’s Gran?”

“She’s behind you.” I turn at the sound of Gran’s stage-school growl and find her standing right behind me making Big-Bad-Wolf claw hands in the air for her own amusement.

Resplendent once more in embroidered purple silk, she pours herself a strong black coffee and takes a seat at the scrubbed pine kitchen table.

“I’m glad you’re both here,” I say, pulling up one of the mismatched chairs and squirting a lake of syrup onto the waffles I said I didn’t want. I heap on a few fresh blueberries to stave off my guilt. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“You’re pregnant?” Gran clasps her hands in shiny-eyed anticipation.

“Given the fact that you two terrify any prospective boyfriends, it’s hardly likely, is it?”

Mother looks sanguine beside the cherry-red Aga she had installed to complete her farmhouse-kitchen fantasy. “Marry a woman, marry her family.”

I grit my teeth as thoughts of my own Miss Havisham–style fate strengthen my resolve.

“I’m starting my own business.”

The pair of them swivel their heads and stare at me with widened eyes. I suddenly feel very on-the-spot.

“In the empty room beneath my flat,” I press on.

Blithe Spirits is so big that several rooms have fallen into disuse, and the big one at the back on the ground floor is perfect for my new enterprise.

It has its own door out onto the cobbled alleyway, which can serve as public access, and there’s an open fireplace in there to keep it warm through the chilly months.

Technically, it’s in my bit of the building anyway, so I don’t expect to have to put up much of a fight forit.

“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 with silver 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’s what 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 particularly want to 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.”