Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

Afterwards, no one could remember what had got us started on ghosts. It wasn't the sort of thing we usually talked about. We all tolerated Daisy's tall stories, but it wasn't as though we egged her on. I'd never found any of that crap remotely interesting; I was aware that Susie always read her horoscope in the Standard, but she knew better than to read me mine.

Normally I might have pinned the blame on Ralph, who still retained a spotty adolescent appetite for the macabre. Ralph had seen all the horror movies ever made and could tell you within nanoseconds whether a picture of Christopher Lee with flashy dentures and red contact lenses had been lifted from Dracula, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, or Dracula Sucks, but he'd learned long ago not to inflict his puerile Gothic fantasies on the rest of us.

But Ralph was recovering from the flu, and on that particular evening fell some way short of being his usual obnoxious self. Not only was he uncharacteristically subdued, but he had sloped off home to an early sickbed long before the conversation took its morbid turn.

I suppose it might have been Luke who set the ball rolling but, with everything that happened later, it's difficult to say for sure. But I remember his face as he spoke; all of a sudden, he was looking like a frightened little boy as he told us how once, as a child, he had been climbing the rickety old staircase in his aunt's farmhouse in Norfolk. He recalled how it had been cold enough for him to see his breath turn to vapour in the air, how he had started to shiver uncontrollably, and how he had looked up at the landing to see a grey lady waiting for him with arms outstretched and an expression on her face that was ineffably sad and, somehow, hungry.

Luke, sensibly recalling his parents' stern directive that he was never ever to talk to strangers, had promptly fled back downstairs to the warmth of the kitchen, and it was only later, when his aunt had strenuously denied the existence of any such person in the house, that he realized he had glimpsed someone who hadn't really been there.

Of course, that started Daisy off, and she launched into the one about the black cat that haunted her kitchen. I'd heard it before, but the story had snowballed. Previously, it had been a glimpse of movement and faint disembodied miaowing. Now, though, it was cartons of milk disappearing from her kitchen table and entire packets of smoked salmon vanishing from the freezer. I told her it was more likely to be a gourmet burglar than a phantom feline, and wondered out loud how any animal, phantom or otherwise, could possibly get into one of those cardboard Tetra Paks when they reduced most humans to a state of gibbering frustration. Daisy accused me of not taking her seriously, which was fair enough, but then I made the mistake of replying that the only person who ever took Daisy seriously was Daisy herself, so then Luke and Susie and Miles jumped in and told us to shut up, but not before I'd got in one last cheap shot about our friend feeling her biological clock tick-tick-ticking away and fixing on her imaginary pet as a baby substitute.

I think it was Miles who steered the conversation back into calmer water by telling us how once, at school, he and his friends had spread a rumour about the science lab being haunted. It had started off as a prank, but before they knew it, boys who hadn't been in on the joke were claiming to have seen things. On three separate occasions, pupils fainted clean away in class. Chemistry experiments went spectacularly wrong test-tubes exploding, acid burns and clouds of poison gas leading to more than one emergency evacuation. The last straw was when one particularly sensitive boy had a screaming fit and insisted the ghost had been trying to remove his trousers.

There were angry rumblings from parents. The Headmaster uttered grim threats in assembly. A Catholic priest was brought in to stalk the corridors and mutter in Latin. As far as Miles could remember, no actual exorcisms were performed, but the priestly presence seemed to do the trick, and there had been no further reports of paranormal activity.

None of us had met Clare before. She was a mousy little thing, altogether too pale and droopy for my taste, though I suppose she might have been quite attractive if she'd shed a couple of pounds, ditched the dowdy specs, and daubed on a bit of lipstick or whatever it is girls do to brighten themselves up. You can never tell with women. Some of them make themselves look drab on purpose.

The rest of us had been knocking around together for years, on and off, though Miles had been out of circulation for a while. We'd all assumed his absence had had something to do with his love life it was a fair assumption with regard to Miles but we were taken aback when he finally introduced us to Clare; she didn't seem his type at all. It must have been tricky for her as the sole stranger in our midst, but it wasn't as though she'd been trying very hard. Up until that point, she'd hardly opened her mouth, except to say please, thank you, and where's the bathroom?

Susie had just finished telling us about some American cousins whose house had been built on the site of a Sioux burial ground, and how, after being driven to distraction by nocturnal banging noises which seemed to be coming from inside the walls, they had torn out the plumbing and found, lodged within one of the pipes, a thick black snake.

'You see,' I said to Susie, 'there's always a logical explanation for everything.'

'Ah,' Susie replied, 'but who do you suppose had persuaded the snake to hide in the pipe in the first place?'

I was just telling her not to be so idiotic when we saw Miles nudge Clare. At any rate, it might have seemed like a nudge to him, but she flinched as though he'd slapped her across the face.

'Come on,' he was saying, 'aren't you going to tell them about Sophie?'

He'd been speaking sotto voce, but everyone heard, and we all looked expectantly at Clare. Her face flushed a gentle pink, and she whispered something into Miles's ear, apparently hoping the conversation would resume without her. We were all curious, but even so it might have stopped there, had it not been for Daisy.

'Sophie?' she piped up. 'Sophie Macallan? Oh, I'd give anything to know what really happened.'

Clare's face stopped being droopy and suddenly took on one or two sharp edges that hadn't been there before.

'This isn't a joke, you know,' she muttered, in a voice so low we all had to strain to hear it. 'I mean, you're all having a whale of a time here, wittering on about your grey ladies, and black cats, and little green men. You think it's funny, don't you? But what happened to Sophie wasn't funny at all. You can't expect me to talk about it as if it was just another of your amusing little anecdotes. I mean, Sophie was my friend. She was my best friend.'

But it was too late. Now we were sitting up and begging for it. Clare was obviously sitting on the ghost story to end all ghost stories.

'Come on, Clare,' urged Susie.

'Yes, come on, Clare,' said Luke. He picked up the bottle of wine and held it out to her. 'Have a top-up.'

'We really want to know,' said Daisy, and then added, rather spitefully, 'We won't let you go home until you've told us. Everyone's done their bit, except you.'