Anusia Battersby

Things are always stirring, everywhere, but especially in the dark.

Violet nods, and a flower falls from her hair.

She stares at it a moment, curling under the lights.

The ghost nudges her, and though the line is not quite right, she gasps, Roses!

There must be roses!

The ghost chuckles, and later, when she has showered with those very things, it laughs right from its belly.

The ghost holds her hand a week on as she is ferried back across the Atlantic, sipping orange squash in business class.

It sits cross-legged in the aisle, the seat beside her occupied by a man in sunglasses who she thinks might have given her a Rubik's Cube to play with once.

Maybe in Massachusetts, in June, when she was young Cosette, or in Philadelphia, a frigid February, begging Medea to "'Spare me, mother!

Spare me!'

Whoever she was, it does not matter.

She had perched cross-legged on the makeup desk against the finger-pointed warning of the chaperone and listened intently as the ghost told her which ways to spin the colours.

She had hopped off the desk just in time to innocently present the completed puzzle to the chaperone and had received a pursed-lipped hum of appreciation.

She had shared a conspiratorial smile with the ghost, who had shrugged sheepishly and scraped its toe across the floor.

The ghost is restless and excitable when they land, and tries to pull her through the aisle the second the seatbelt light flicks off.

Its fingers just slide through hers, and it yelps at the strange sensation.

Violet rolls her eyes, and uses the braking contact to wrench her belt open, beckoning the ghost back with a small flick of her head.

"'I'm excited too,' she murmurs."

as the now slightly queasy-looking man in sunglasses wiggles his earplugs out with a grimace.

But we can't go anywhere without the grown-ups.