Only Ghouls & Corpses
Strange by name, strange by nature. That’s what they say about me at school. I know it shouldn’t bother me. I know I should toughen up, shrug off the whispering when I walk by, laugh away the insults and the name-calling. But guess what, I can’t. I’m not made that way.
They say I’m a weirdo and it hurts, mostly because they’re right. Let’s face it, with my long, albino blonde hair (straight as a broomstick, according to Uncle Silas), gangly figure and eyes as flat and grey as the walls at Mellerack Harbour, I know I look odd. And my name doesn’t exactly help. When you look like me, being called Lamorna Strange is just asking for trouble.
But that’s not all. As if looking weird and having a name to match isn’t bad enough, I have to live with an uncle who runs a creepy shop. Don’t get me wrong, I love Uncle Silas and know I owe him a lot. You see, I’ve lived with him ever since my parents managed to get themselves killed when I was a baby, and he was the only relation prepared to take me in.
He’d been living in a flat above his crazy shop in Henley-on-Thames at the time of The Tragedy (which is how Granny Strange always refers to my parents’ death) but immediately afterwards he moved down to Cornwall to look after me in my parents’ house in Mellerack. While I was still a baby he stayed at home and did everything for me, including changing my yucky nappies. Then, when I was old enough for nursery, he re-opened the business in new premises on a little retail park about a mile from where we live. He’d drop me off in the morning, then pick me up at lunchtime and take me back to the shop for the rest of the day.
Until I started proper school I loved Uncle Silas’s shop but that’s only because I didn’t know any better, I didn’t know it was utterly bizarre. It’s called Only Ghouls & Corpses, a really dumb name if you ask me, and it’s divided into three parts. The first part, which you see when you come in through the front door, is a wide, airy room stocked with lots of jokey-scary stuff like vampire fangs, inflatable bats, glow-in-the-dark skeletons and huge plastic witch noses complete with comedy warts. In other words - Uncle Silas’s words, actually, because I’m quoting from his website – it’s an all-year-round, one-stop shop for all your Halloween needs.
It beats me why anyone would want to buy this junk at any time other than Halloween, and even then I think it’s pretty lame. But Uncle Silas says if you can have specialist Christmas shops that are open throughout the year, why not a specialist Halloween one? He told me he used that line to get a loan from the bank when he opened his first shop in Henley years ago, before I was born. I can tell you, if I’d been the person responsible for handing out the bank’s money he wouldn’t have got so much as a chocolate penny from me. As usual, though, he got lucky – Uncle Silas always seems to get anything he really wants – so he got the loan, opened the shop and by some fluke, miracle or call-it-what-you-like, he made a success of it.
Anyhow, back to the layout of Only Ghouls & Corpses. After the shelves and racks of stupid Halloween stuff, the shop becomes dark and narrow. On the right there is an old-fashioned wooden counter which Uncle Silas sits behind and opposite that is an ancient, massive dresser. This has been over-painted so many times in so many different colours that it’s hard to tell if its dominant shade is mud-streaked green, mustard yellow or chicken tikka orange. It’s like a rainbow vomited all over it.
The shelves of the dresser are divided into lots of little nooks and crannies which are crammed full of the shop’s more expensive and serious stuff. Serious, that is, if you believe in all the mumbo jumbo. There are tarot cards, divining boards, crystal balls, scrying mirrors, mystic runes, gemstones, incense sticks, oils and a whole lot more besides. You can even buy a cauldron if you’re mad or sad enough to want one and if you ask Uncle Silas quietly, he’ll sell you a potion to capture the heart of the one you love, an incantation to help you pass your driving test or a spell to stave off baldness. Yes, really.
Before I started school I used to love sitting with Uncle Silas behind the counter, looking across at all the fantastical merchandise. Sometimes he let me dust the crystal balls with a pink feather duster or play with one of the display packs of tarot cards. I loved the pictures and made up stories in my head about the people in them. I was just a little kid so I didn’t realise that this second part of the shop was considerably weirder than the first, but now I know better. Weirdest of all, though, is the back room which is always kept locked during the day. It’s in here that Uncle Silas hosts all the séances, psychic readings, healings and various other crackpot supernatural happenings that make me the primary target for the most vicious bullies at Mellerack Secondary.
So, about this room. Just behind the shop counter there is a door which opens onto a narrow corridor. Turn sharp right and you find a poky kitchen with a kettle and microwave, and at the back there’s a door that leads to the tiny loo. But if you take a left into the corridor you reach the mysterious locked room. Although it has a small window overlooking the car park, Uncle Silas always keeps the heavy crimson blind pulled down, even during the day, so nobody can see in. In the centre of the room there’s a big round table which is covered with a dark green chenille cloth. This cloth has a bobble fringe that hangs down over the table and almost brushes the floor. Uncle Silas once told me that the cloth was very old. He said it had come from a genuine Romany fortune teller who gave away all her possessions to strangers after reading in the cards that she would be dead within the year.
For a time I was really impressed by this story but when I repeated it to Granny Strange she snorted with laughter. She said she wasn’t going to call her son a liar but that green cloth was identical to one she’d bought from a charity shop in Reading the year my dad was born. So now I don’t know who to believe. What I do know is that Granny Strange often says things to make Uncle Silas look small. I don’t know why she does that, but I think maybe she wishes he’d died instead of my dad.
“Your dear father was a brilliant artist with a glittering future ahead of him until he was taken by The Tragedy,” she often says to me. “So gifted, and so unlike your uncle whose only talent is for hocus pocus.”
I wish I could say she was wrong about Uncle Silas and his ‘hocus pocus’ but I can’t because I’m aware that some seriously bizarre stuff goes on in that locked room. Every ten days or so he stays late at the shop for one of his special evenings. He’s never allowed me to sit in on one of them so I don’t actually know what goes on; who knows, perhaps he just hosts a poker game, but somehow I doubt it. Some kids from my school have spied on his guests as they arrive and they say that most of them are even weirder looking than me. I’ve asked Uncle Silas to stop these special evenings but he says he can’t afford to and that using the back room for special events is a good way of maximising the shop’s profit potential. That may be, but it’s also a good way of maximising my bullying potential.
The truth is that since I started at Mellerack Secondary four years ago my life has been pretty unbearable. I’m mocked for my name, the way I look, my uncle’s shop - everything about me, in fact. My friends from Junior School stuck by me at first but they ditched me once it dawned on them that it’s not cool to be a friend of The Freak. I can’t really blame them; I mean, why would any sane person make themselves a target for Jess Richards and her gang of bullies?
Jess is the meanest girl at school and you could easily be fooled into thinking she’s also the most popular. She and her sickening crew swan around like they own the place and everyone sucks up to them but I don’t think many people really like them. I mean, who could? They are vile. No, I honestly believe most people just suck up to Jess because it’s safer that way. Not for me, though. She wouldn’t stop tormenting me even if I was pathetic enough to join in with the adulation. I reckon invisibility is the only thing that would make the bullying stop.
It’s not just verbal bullying, either. I’m used to that by now and can handle it, more or less. But Jess and her clique have become expert at dreaming up new ways to torment me. I’ve had glue put in my hair during Art, dog poo squashed into my PE kit, homework chucked down the loo – you name it, it’s been done to me. And just recently it’s been getting worse. Much worse. Walking home from school I’ve been waylaid by Jess, Phoebe, Seb and the others in the little public garden that acts as a shortcut to my estate. They’ve pushed and kicked me, yanked my hair so hard that great clumps have come out and I’ve even been punched in the gut a couple of times. So now I go home by a different route. It takes twice as long but I don’t care, it keeps me safe.
I’ll be honest, though, I don’t think I can take much more. Okay, that sounds pathetically melodramatic but I can’t help it, it’s the truth. In fact, I’m going to be totally truthful here and say I really hate my life. I’m a weird girl living with a weird uncle. I have no friends. Why would I? I’m not pretty or clever or cool and although people call me funny they don’t mean it as a compliment. They mean funny as in laughing at, not laughing with. I’m not even ordinary. What wouldn’t I give to be ordinary!
So anyway, since being me hasn’t turned out all that great, I’ve decided I’d quite like to die. A bit drastic, perhaps, but looking on the bright side, at least I’ll be able to keep in touch with Uncle Silas. I mean, everyone says he and his cronies talk to the dead.
Now that my mind is made up, I just have to wait for the right moment. You see, I don’t want Uncle Silas to know how miserable I am since it’s really not his fault my life sucks so much. For his sake I need to make my death look like an accident. That’s why I’m waiting for a really bad storm; I’m going to let the waves wash me off the wall at Mellerack Harbour. It’ll be exactly the same way my parents died, except that for them it genuinely was an accident.
My father was Tempest Strange, ‘the most promising Cornish artist of his generation’ to quote from the article in the Cornish Times immediately after his death.
“Actually, he wasn’t Cornish at all,” my Aunt Astrid told me. She’s my dead mum’s identical twin sister.
“He was from up country, only moved here when he married your mother. We Treveans, on the other hand, can trace our Cornish ancestry back to the fifteenth century and beyond. And your mother was just as good an artist as Tempest, probably better. She just didn’t promote herself as much as he did.”
I’ve grown up in the middle of this argument. If you listen to Granny Strange, you’d believe Tempest was JMW Turner reborn whereas Aunt Astrid insists that Sylvia, my mum, was an undiscovered genius who had just entered her most brilliant phase when motherhood intervened and put things on hold. She’s not the only one to imply that I got in the way of my parents’ creativity.
“Poor Tempest,” Granny Strange wails when she’s knocked back a few too many Baileys, “poor dear Tempest! He came to Cornwall for the atmospherics and ended up saddled with a wife and baby. Family life was holding back his genius! Small wonder he was driven to risk everything in search of the perfect storm.”
According to the newspaper, although he was only thirty when he died, my father’s storm-tossed Cornish seascapes had already been exhibited to great acclaim in Cornwall, London and throughout the UK. Everyone said he was guaranteed a magnificent future. I guess fate decided otherwise.
Actually, I can’t help thinking that he and Mum can’t have been very bright. I mean, everyone in Mellerack knows you should never walk along the harbour wall when there’s a gale raging below. It’s just common sense, because if the waves are coming up over the wall it’s fairly obvious you’re going to wind up in the sea. Then the lifeboat is launched and the volunteer crew has to try to save you. So then these people you’ve probably never met put their own lives at risk just because you were too dumb to stay at home. And most likely you die anyway.
Apparently none of this occurred to my parents when they took their sketchbooks onto Mellerack harbour wall while it was being lashed by the most violent storm the town had known for decades. So yeah, they died. And soon I’m going to join them, although annoyingly I’m going to have to wait a few months.
That’s because, statistically speaking, winter is the best time for an accidental drowning in Mellerack. It’s when the sea gets all churned up and angry; in a really bad winter storm, Atlantic rollers higher than my house can batter the harbour with the unstoppable force of a thousand demented Little Mix fans surging towards the stage. This is inconvenient for my plan because it’s only July now, meaning I won’t have the right weather conditions for ages. Of course I could give up on the drowning idea and think of another way to die that will look convincingly accidental but I’d rather wait. Call me weird – why not, everyone else does – but I kind of like the idea of going the same way my parents did. In the meantime, I’m just going to have to be patient.
