1.

Mondays at St. Isaacs were considered by the school population, that is to say both students and staff, as generally shitty. For the administration Mondays, particularly those following the school holidays, were an nightmare - which kids, or staff members, were absent and was that down to sickness, or playing hooky. A further possibility was that the parents had taken their children away, strictly against the rules, of course, but these parents were paying school fees and had the sense of entitlement that goes with it.

For Lucy Warwick, Mondays were to be endured rather than experienced. If she was entirely honest she’d probably admit all five school days each week fell into that same category. At fifteen and preparing for her GCSEs Lucy had reached a strange point of concern about the future and boredom with the present. For her the bright spot of each and every day was the presence of Korrey Amari, her closest friend and sounding board. He was also her fellow-traveller into the realms of the unusual and unexplained.

This lunchtime the pair were sat behind the gym, a popular hangout for the nerdier tribes at Isaacs and the most recent addition to the school. The gym’s pebble-dashed brutality stood in stark contrast to the Edwardian lines of the main building. Korrey, universally known as Pig for being the skinniest boy in their year and having the largest appetite, had folded his thin legs beneath him as he tucked into a sub, crisp and Coke combo. Lucy gave an envious glance and wondered as she so often did at the metabolism of the boy.

Pig had just finished telling her about a documentary he’d watched at the weekend. The subject, the Langham Hotel - a luxury hostelry in the West End, just a few miles and a world away from the hardstanding on which they sat. More specifically the programme had been on the less luxurious elements of the hotel. ’Haunted as all fuck!’, Pig had explained with widened eyes. ’One of the most haunted places in the city, they think. So anyway, there have been confirmed sightings of at least five spirits at this hotel. Five! What a total mind-fuck. One of the sightings was by a BBC journalist, so that makes it totally real from where I’m standing. He was in one of the rooms, I remember it exactly because it was 333, and saw a ghost right there in front of him, clear as you are. They explained it all on the programme - the ghost didn’t seem to have legs and was just floating there, as real as you and me!’.

’Oh right’, Lucy said, keeping it cool, ’so what happened next, did they get a photograph or film it or anything?’

’You won’t believe it Luce’, Pig said rolling his eyes, ’the journalist ran off, shit scared! Seriously, it was his job to get the proof, for fucks sake, literally his career. Other people have seen it too though. Not to mention other manifestations in different areas of the hotel’.

Lucy’s interest was, of course, well and truly piqued and she resolved to both download the programme and see if she could persuade her parents to take her and Pig for dinner at the Langham. She’d have to box clever, though, and present it as an idea for a special occasion. Her mum, being something of a god-botherer, would go grey if she knew the real reason for the teens’ interest in the place. Lucy thought for the millionth time how illogical her mother could be, believing as she did in the ’holy’ spirit but refusing to consider any other kind.

That thought led her to the news she’d been burning to discuss - the arrival of Mr Waverly in her street. She and Pig had shared some breathless and hyperbolic WhatsApp messages during the half-term break, but they hadn’t had a chance to discuss it face to face due to Pig being away visiting his grandparents in the sticks somewhere.

The remainder of Monday’s lunch break was spent sharing a bag of Haribo that Pig had liberated from the deeper recesses of his rucksack, while engaged in a serious debate about the merits of a teacher living a few doors down from your home. The consensus, there were no merits in such a situation and only disadvantages. Lucy liked Mr Waverly well enough, or at least she didn’t actively dislike him but she certainly had zero interest of bumping into him on either his or her downtime.

Lucy and Pig were tidying up after themselves when the bell tolled for afternoon classes (Lucy, English Lit, Pig, Maths). En route to the main building it was agreed that Lucy would order a ouija board using her dad’s Amazon account.

 2.

That same afternoon, Sanjay Mistry was staring out of the window in the front lounge of his home, the ground floor flat at number 43. He was idly thinking about the tofu curry that Mummy served as dinner each and every Monday. Anita, Sanjay’s mother, ran the household with the precision of a Swiss watch. Dust, if it had a chance to get settled, would soon find itself banished, floors were scrubbed and meals served in rotation. There was a blackboard in the kitchen which set out the daily meal schedule with tofu curry next to the legend: MONDAY. Sanjay would never give voice to such a thing, but he found tofu curry to be a bit like poo. What he really wanted was fish fingers with chips and beans but that, his favourite meal in the whole wide world and one which he’d happily enjoy every day. Sadly it wasn’t next to MONDAY on the blackboard, instead it was next to FRIDAY.

What Sanjay couldn’t be aware of was that Anita also harboured a strong dislike for tofu curry. The fuss of cooking it compounded by a texture that felt, to her, like eating pencil erasers, albeit with added spices but, critically it scored points for health benefits. As for her husband, she’d been lucky insofar as Chetan would happily eat anything placed in front of him, truth be told, he wouldn’t dare not. Anita, as it happened had many dislikes which ranged widely beyond the existence of tofu. Among other things she disliked dogs, particularly small ones such as Mollie down the street, white van men and cold weather. Cool on the surface, Anita was, in fact, a cauldron of annoyance and distaste. One thing she loved, fiercely, was her little boy. The depth of that love had come as something of a surprise to her.

At the age of eight Sanjay, with the help of his parents, had developed a strong internal sense of ’Good’ and ’Bad’ a subject about which he could prattle on about at length given half a chance. He knew, for example, that his form tutor Miss Woolgar was Good because she was kind and gave him extra special help with his reading. Ms Fletcher, the classroom assistant was, to Sanjay, Bad because he’d seen her outside the shops, smoking a cigarette. Smoking was very Bad therefore Ms Fletcher was tainted by her habit. Sanjay’s best friend Jacquie was very Good of course, while Peter Eames was Bad because he picked his nose in the playground and flicked his bogies at the girls.

On this particular Monday Sanjay was staring outside with a pensive expression etched across his babyish features. He’d come to the conclusion that autumn was Bad because everything was dying, his father had countered that it was in fact Good because things were really settling in to be revived. There wasn’t much sign of revival on this particular day - the clouds were skimming the terraced rooftops and the brown leaves underfoot had turned into a slippery mush.

The bulk of the little boy’s attention was focussed across the street, number 56 to be precise. The new home of teacher Tim Waverly, although Sanjay wasn’t to know this of course. 56 Oldfield Street could be seen quite clearly now the trees had shed their leaves. He pressed a little closer to the window, breath fogging the glass. Sanjay had complex feelings about the house, not least because he didn’t really understand why he had any opinion about it at all. Of course, he loved his own home even if he sometimes heard the couple next door playing loudly in the night (Bad), but he thought nothing about any of the other homes in the street. Well nothing beyond 56.

Bad, he thought to himself while glaring unblinkingly across the street. Very Bad. And yet, it wasn’t. Not exactly. In some corner of his mind Sanjay understood the house wasn’t itself Bad anymore than it was Good - it was simply a house like any other, a bit scuzzy looking perhaps. What he was really entranced by, although he didn’t have the words, was an atmosphere emanating from the place that was Bad as if there was a space filled with perpetual twilight between numbers 54 and 58. It would be a long time before Sanjay would be able to articulate such feelings, however. He was, after all, just an eight year old boy.

3.

A short time later, Lucy walked past the very window where Sanjay had been considering the view (and the weighty issues of Good and Bad). She’d left Pig at school as he’d taken himself off to the library for what he referred to as ’panic study’. As for herself, she was only too aware of her impending exams and entirely relaxed about the whole thing. Pig, himself in a state of anxiety about his future, was concerned he might lose his appetite. Given her experience of the boy’s eating habits, Lucy thought this unlikely.

As she’d turned into the street she’d been struck by how dismal it looked in the half-light of late afternoon. Her friend Amanda had left St. Isaac’s the previous year when her newly-single mum had taken the plunge and escaped to the country. Amanda had taken to sending regular messages on WhatsApp detailing just how dull life in ’the sticks’ was in comparison to London. Gazing at the street ahead of her, dank and dirty with dead leaves and detritus, Lucy had decided the countryside might be more pleasant to spend time in.

Now, drawing level with 56, she thought again of Mr W. In her estimation he was one of the better teachers at St I’s, young enough to make a connection with the students and, she would never voice this, not entirely bad looking either. All this considered, though, the thought of living just a few yards away gave her the ick. Pig was going to enjoy taking the piss, she knew, as well as suspecting he’d try and corral her into spying on the poor man’s comings and goings. She was only too aware that inside knowledge (however vague) about a member of staff, and a teacher no less, would be considered strong currency among some cohorts of her fellow students, however she liked to imagine herself above such banal gossip.

Glancing up Lucy had a disconcerting feeling. It was how she imagined a fish might feel as it bit down onto the hook. Gazing at the house’s dark facade she was struck by how rundown it seemed, she’d never really noticed it before - her usual mode of walking home being to look down while immersed in her music. Although the place was virtually identical to its neighbours, strong front door, deep bay window, it seemed to wear the passage of its years. Tear-stains ran down the front of the house from the first floor windows, a crust of white against blood red brick and, in the fading light, the space itself seemed more like an absence of a building than a building itself, more darkness than light. In some ways Lucy’s thoughts mirrored those of the little boy in the flat opposite - that the space in which the house was standing was wrong, sour somehow, rather than the physical building itself. As she stared at the house in front of her Lucy lost track of everything else, nothing in the world at that moment mattered to her more than 56 Oldfield Street. Somewhere, at the edge of her perception, she dimly heard the cries of a baby and, behind that, something that sounded like music from a TV advert.

’And Earth calling Lucy Warwick!’ Snapped from her focus on the house she was intensely relieved that Pig wasn’t here to see her jump out of her skin. Turning round she was greeted by Mr Waverly, face yellow, eyes dark pools in the dismal light of the street lamps.

Hoping the conditions meant he couldn’t discern her colour, which she imagined as bloodless with fright, Lucy uttered a garbled hello and smiled in what felt in the moment like a really unconvincing way. Before her teacher could attempt to engage her in conversation, Lucy stuffed her hands into the pocket of her coat and moved at speed towards the comforts of home.

Next Chapter: Chapter Four