‘Yes? He’s not here. Gone out. Who? Well, I’ll . . . is it? Never! Still doing the conjuring tricks, are you? Haven’t seen you about the town much lately. No. Right. That’s right. I don’t get out much myself these days. How are you, in yourself? Dead. I see. But you’ve got out to use the telephone. It’s wonderful, what they can do with science. You sound a long way off. Right. You are a long way off. I remember that trick you used to do with the handcuffs and the chains and – well, nearly did. Yes. Yes. Right. I’ll tell him. Nice to hear from you. Goodbye.’

He went back and settled down in front of the TV again.

After a few minutes a small worried frown crossed his face. He got up and went and glared at the telephone for a while.

*

It wasn’t that Sunshine Acres was a bad place. As far as Johnny could see, it was clean enough and the staff seemed OK. There were bright murals on the walls and a big tank of goldfish in the TV room.

But it was more gloomy than the cemetery. It was the way everyone shuffled around quietly, and sat waiting at the table for the next meal hours before it was due, because there wasn’t anything else to do. It was as if life had stopped and being dead hadn’t started, so all there was to do was hang around.

His grandmother spent a lot of time watching TV in the main lounge, or watching her begonias in her room. At least, his grandmother’s body did.

He was never certain where her mind was, except that it was often far away and long ago.

After a while he got even more depressed at the conversation between his mother and his grandmother, which was exactly the same as the one last week and the week before that, and did what he always did, which was wander out into the corridor.

He mooched towards the door that led out into the garden, staring vaguely at nothing.

They never told you about this ghost stuff at school. Sometimes the world was so weird you didn’t know where to start, and Social Education and GCSE Maths weren’t a lot of help.

Why didn’t this sort of thing happen to anyone else? It wasn’t as if he went looking for it. He just tried to keep his head down, he just tried to be someone at the back of the crowd. But somehow everything was more complicated than it was for anyone else.

The thing was . . .

Mr T. Atkins.

He probably wouldn’t have noticed it, except that the name was in the back of his mind.

It was written on a little curling piece of paper stuck in a frame on one of the doors.

He stared at it.

It filled the whole world, just for a second or two.

Well, there could be lots of Atkinses . . .