Thicker Than Water

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"There was the usual horseplay as we fanned out to look for hitherto unknown shapes and sizes of offcut. Davey jostled Steven Seddon, pretending to shove him over the foot-high parapet down into the street far below, and Steven went complaining to Kenny who kicked his arse for being so pathetic. John Lunt, who was one of my millions of cousins, stationed himself over the hole in the roof so that he could gob on the stragglers as they came up the ladder. Peter Gore tried to get a game of off-ground tick going, and foundered immediately on the fact that we were all a long way off the ground already.

Peter tried to establish some rules that would work in this anomalous situation, but he was shouted down.

And Kenny’s other brother, Ronnie, started to tell the story of the Tinnie Ghost.

‘It was the watchman, you know. These lads broke in, and the watchman went after them, butereter the they threw him into one of the machines and he got all squashed and ripped apart, like. And that’s why he’s still here. On the roof.

If you look into the puddles you might see his reflection, you know, and if you do then you’re gonna die. Everyone who sees him dies before they get back down to the ground.’

Some of the smaller kids tried not to look at the puddles without being too obvious about it. One of them bleated to his big sister that he wanted to go home, and was coldly ignored.

‘What happened to the lads?’ someone asked.

‘He killed them in their sleep,’ said Ronnie. ‘One by one, like. They dreamed he was throwing them into the machine and they had heart attacks.

And the last one, when they went into the bedroom the next morning, they found him all ripped apart. Bits of him all over the room, like. Blood and bits of bone everywhere.’

This was shite on a heroic scale, and I felt it was down to me to light the beacon of truth.

‘How did anyone know what they dreamed about,’ I asked, sardonically, ‘if they died in their bloody sleep?’

Ronnie didn’t falter. ‘They screamed “Get me out! I’m dying in the machine!”’ he said.

But I was getting into my stride now. ‘Anyway, ghosts don’t have reflections. Ghosts don’t even have shadows. And what’s he doing haunting the frigging roof if he died down in the machines? It’s bollocks.’

Ronnie bridled, and jug-eared Davey jeered from my left. ‘Who asked you, Castor? How many ghosts have you seen?’

I launched into an answer, realised part-way through the sentence that I might be getting myself in too deep and began to stammer.