Page 96 of Deep Blue Lies

At the end of the school day Gale Martin waited for his name to be called out by his teacher.

When she did, he stood and went to collect his bag, and then made his way outside to where his mother was waiting for him, a little way apart from the other parents.

He avoided her gaze as she squeezed him to her.

“How was your day?”

“Fine.” Gale gave the same answer that most of his classmates gave to their parents, but with notably less expression. It never occurred to him to say how it had really been, without even Mrs Gibbons to offer a few moments of warmth.

And then his mother had put her hand behind his back and propelled him out of the school gates towards the car, the two a little bubble of unhappiness amid the end-of-day release and excitement of his classmates and their parents.

“We’ve got pizza for dinner,” his mother told him as they came in the front door. He’d been silent in the car.

“OK.”

“Do you have any homework?”

“No.”

“OK, well would you like to watch some TV? Or play some Minecraft?”

“No. I just want to go to my room.”

It was the longest sentence Gale had said for hours – possibly the whole day – and the words felt strange in his mouth. He swallowed, while his mother nodded sadly. And then he went upstairs. He closed the door to his bedroom behind him and sat down on his bed. He took a deep breath. Then another.

“Hello,” he said.

The room fell silent, but Gale looked around, first to the left where his wardrobe stood next to the door, then the right, towards the window.

“Hello?” he said again. This time there was an answer, of sorts.

In the air by the wardrobe there was a kind of disturbance.

Had Gale been observing closely, he might have described it as a silvery shimmer, that deepened and darkened, and then slowly resolved itself into a near-human shape.

But he wasn’t watching closely, he was just waiting, until the disturbance-in-the-air became something recognisable, a semi-transparent, floating image of his sister Layla.

She hovered a while in front of him, then she sat down next to him.

They stayed like that for a long while, perhaps half an hour, neither moving, nor speaking.

And then Gale, feeling a little better now, lay down on his tummy on the carpet and began playing with his Lego bricks.

Layla moved with him, laying facing him.

The room wasn’t large enough to give room for her legs, but it wasn’t a problem – they just disappeared where they met the wall.

Gale focussed a while, constructing and de-constructing a crane that he’d got for his last birthday, and then robbing the wheels to make a car.

Every now and then he glanced up to check that Layla was still there.

And she was. Silent. Watching him. Exactly as he knew her in life, except that her eyes were now filled with sadness.

It had been like that for months now, and had come to seem quite normal.

Gale first became aware of Layla’s – he didn’t know what word to use, but perhaps ‘presence’ covered it best – just a few weeks after her body had been found.

In the beginning, it had been barely noticeable amid the pain and sheer bewilderment of everything that was happening.

He had caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror, but when he looked again to check, there was nothing.

He’d seen her from the corner of his eye when he moved through the house, but when he turned, she wasn’t there.

But there was something that only he could see.

A flash of colour that brought to mind one of her dresses, or the things she used to wear in her hair.

And a wobbly patch in the air that somehow seemed to blur whatever was behind it.

It happened infrequently at first, and was easy enough to ignore, or put down to him being tired, and sad.

But gradually the glimpses became more common, more vivid.

Longer lasting. He would turn to see whatever caught his attention, and there she would be, her outline in the air, hanging for a moment, before dissolving away.

Each time the vision would last longer, grow stronger, and settle into what was unmistakably her shape.

Eventually he had found himself able to stare right at her.

Through her. Look into her face and feel her looking back.

For months now she had been stable, a near-lifelike apparition he could conjure almost at will, when he was in the house.

And he did so; whenever he could be alone he would look for her, and more often than not she would come.

Yet no matter how realistic this see-through version of his dead sister appeared, there was one thing she had never done. She had never spoken a single word.

She had simply watched him. Been with him. Waited.

Early on, he had told his mother, though he’d been scared she might be angry, such was the unpredictability of her grief.

But she had been understanding, and encouraged him to also tell his counsellor, Karen, whom he saw every Saturday.

Karen had explained that it was quite natural and quite normal and nothing at all to worry about.

He wasn’t really seeing Layla, she explained, but a part of his brain called the subconscious was creating her.

She gave an example. Imagine sitting in a cinema and watching Evil Knievel jumping his motorcycle over the Grand Canyon.

It would be very dramatic and exciting, but he wouldn’t really be doing it in the cinema – it would simply be an image created by a projector, hidden in the darkness.

The analogy had almost fallen flat, since she’d had to explain who Evil Knievel was, and for a while they’d sat watching YouTube videos of this crazy American jumping over all sorts of things on his motorbike. But Gale got the idea.

The way Karen explained it, seeing Layla was something that would happen for a little while, and would gradually stop happening as he began to feel less sad and less lonely – and that this would be a good thing.

As he healed from the trauma of his sister’s death, she would cease to appear.

But that part never made much sense to Gale, because he actually felt less sad and less lonely when Layla was there with him.

And so, despite the visitations continuing to grow in strength and frequency, he stopped reporting them to Karen or to his mother.

When they asked if they still occurred, he lied, and told them they didn’t happen anymore.

And then a year passed, without him even mentioning her, and it felt as if both Karen and his mother had forgotten he had ever seen anything at all.

But secretly, the silent vision of Layla he saw, nearly every time he went to his bedroom, looked almost as clear as a real person.

And no one but Gale knew she was there.

From downstairs Gale heard the sound of his mother’s voice calling out that dinner was ready. Carefully, and a little reluctantly, he set down the Lego he had been working on.

“I have to go for dinner now,” he told her automatically and he pushed himself to his feet. But then something quite new happened.

“OK,” Layla said.

*

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