It didn’t help that the wind was howling that November evening, and that storm-clouds were sweeping across the evening sky like the shadows of galloping giants. And it certainly didn’t help that Mum and I were leaving the familiar flowery wallpaper and washing-crowded balcony of our rented apartment to come and live in a nowhere place behind trees and tall grass.
“I think we’ve made a terrible mistake,” said Mum, wiping the condensation with her sleeve and leaving little bits of hairy wool smeared on the windscreen.
“Too late now,” I grunted. “Anyway the neighbours gave us all those going-away presents so we can’t go back.”
“Just think, Lucy, I really own it,” Mum said. “I’ve never owned anything in my life.”
Which was true. Mum didn’t even own herself, she often said. Since my father had died when I was three, she’d been working for a catering company. She was always sloshing things in bowls and stirring yellow mixtures and cleaning the oven. And tired. Always tired.

I remember the expression on Mum’s face when we were excitedly trying to decide what to do with our lottery winnings. Not the big win, of course, but there were just enough noughts to make us hysterical. Her face kind of lit up like a light had gone on inside her head, and and she pressed her hands together.
“I could run a bed and breakfast,” she said. “A country guest-house.”
“Cool, Mum,” I said. “You could cook for yourself instead of a gang of bossyboots.”
We picked this house from the back of the property pages. A bargain, the estate agent had said. The relatives of the old man who’d owned it lived in Australia and just wanted to offload it as soon as possible. So here we were, with all our dreams invested in a rain-washed Victorian pile.
“It’ll be all right, Mum,” I said. “A few licks of paint and we’ll have this place humming. Come on.”
“It’s going to take more than a few licks of paint,” she said. “I knew I should have taken my time, looked around at other places. Look at it now. How will we ever make it respectable enough for people to want to stay here? Anyway, Lucy-light-of-my-life, let’s go inside.”

We held hands as we went from room to room. Big rooms with high ceilings and brown furniture. Brown curtains that sent out clouds of dust in the gloomy light when Mum pulled them back. Brown photos of men with collars like those neck-braces you see on people who hang out in the health centre. Brown wallpaper and old, brown air. Was all the world brown before I was born? Mum oohed and aahed as she went around touching all the fiddly little ornaments on the high mantelpiece and on the dusty shelves.
“Imagine leaving all this stuff,” she said. “You know, some of these things might fetch a good price. I can take them to one of those posh auctioneer places in the city. We could make enough to buy paint, curtains and even wallpaper. We can do this, Lucy! We can make this guest house thing really work.”
“Wicked, Mum,” I laughed. “It nearly looks brighter already.” Which it did. And so did Mum. Sometimes your dreams just need a little nudge to help make them real. Upstairs we picked the biggest bedroom to leave our things.
“All masculine stuff,” Mum said. “Easy known there was no woman in the house. The poor old dear was a bachelor. No wonder the place is a shambles.”
She pulled open a drawer and bent down to look inside. She took something out of the drawer and laughed. “A tortoise-shell mirror!” she exclaimed. “How pretty. Must have belonged to some ancient aunt.”
She pushed back her hair and held up the little hand-mirror to look at herself. It was discoloured, just like everything else in this house, and had little shiny things on the frame.
“A tight corset, Mum, and you’d look like a Victorian lady admiring herself,” I joked.

We lit a fire in the big bedroom, made tea and unrolled our sleeping bags because we weren’t sure about the beds. Mum put some drops of lavender on our pillows to help us sleep. But it didn’t help her because I heard her sighing a lot. So it mustn’t have worked for me either. At least not until the deepest part of the night when I dozed off, thinking about how Mum and I would manage to turn this brown and dusty house into a place where bouncy tourists with big shorts and back-to-front baseball caps would come for sunshine and bacon and eggs. It must have been while I was dozing that Mum disappeared.

I wasn’t frantic at first that morning. Downstairs I pulled back the wooden shutters in the long sitting room and let the morning sun push its rays through all the brown. At least last night’s rain had blown itself out, making the house slightly more cheerful. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and shouted up.
“Mum. Mum!” My voice just echoed back. The dust danced eerie shapes in the sunlight. “Mum, stop playing creepy games and say something.” But the dust simply danced new steps to my voice. She must have gone out. But when I tried the front door and the back door and found them both bolted from the inside, I became frantic. I dashed about, trying the windows, but they were as firmly locked as when we’d checked them last night. I crept back along the passage leading to the kitchen. The faint scrape of a chair on a tiled floor lifted the cloud of worry off my head, and I laughed at myself for being a wimp.
“Where have you been?” I shouted, pushing open the creaky door.
“I beg your pardon?”

But it wasn’t my mother who was sitting at the table. It was a boy with a fat cap and trousers that met his socks at his knees. A boy who looked like he fitted in with all the brown around us.
“Who are you? How did you get in here?” I shouted so that I wouldn’t sound scared. “This is private property. My mum and me own this house. You’d better get lost, sunshine.”
“Where is your mother?” the boy asked, rudely looking at me from head to toe.
“She’s ...” I stammered. “That’s a stupid question. Now you’d better go before she comes down. She’s huge and she’s been on Gladiators loads of times.” That was the sort of fib that appealed to me.
“Your mother has disappeared, hasn’t she?” the boy said, taking a mouthful of milk from the carton we’d left out the night before because the fridge was scummy. He wiped his mouth with his hand and looked at me. “That’s why I’m here.”
I squeezed my fists really hard because my mind went all funny.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Where’s Mum?”

The boy stood up.
“I have to tell you a story,” he said in a funny accent.
“You’re crazy!” I said. “I don’t know who you are, with your stupid clothes and daft cap, but you’d better tell me where my mum is or I’ll punch you one.”
Someone had once told me that if you’re really scared you should act extremely tough and the scariness will go away. That proved to be totally wrong because, even though my face was screwed up and my fists were waving, I was as scared as I could be.
“Hush. Calm down,” said the boy. “My name is Alastair. I was Australian. I’ve come to help you.”
“Was?” I gasped. “Are... are you dead? A dead Australian?”
The boy called Alastair nodded. “Trust me,” he said when I started to gabble and cringe, as you would when you find yourself talking to a dead person from a foreign country. Funnily enough, when he touched my arm I wasn’t so scared any more. He didn’t seem like a ghost. Anyway scary ghosts wouldn’t wear fat caps and silly trousers that meet their socks at their knees. “Listen to my story,” he went on. “It is an Aboriginal legend.”
I frowned. “What’s this got to do with my mother?”
“Patience,” said Alastair. “It’s about a tribe called the Spiny Lizards. One day a man called Wayamba came to their camp and stole a beautiful woman. He took her back to his own camp and his people were angry because the Spiny Lizard tribe would come looking for the woman and there would be trouble.”

I couldn’t see the point in listening to a story like this when my mum was missing, leaving me in a brown house that I would never be able to run as a guesthouse on my own. But I pressed my lips together to stop the words coming out. You have to be polite to people who come all the way from the past to help you.
“That very day,” went on Alastair, “the Spiny Lizard people came for the woman. But Wayamba was ready for them. He came out of his hut, wearing a shield that covered his front, so their spears just bounced off him. Then they tried to attack him from behind, but he was wearing a shield on his back too. When they tried to thump his head which was poking out of the shields, Wayamba ran to the river and swam away. The Spiny Lizard people put a curse on him. He was turned into a creature encased in a shell, with just his head sticking out”
“Serve him right,” I said. “He shouldn’t have nabbed that woman. He should have sent flowers first, or something.”
Alastair smiled. “Well,” he continued, “The shell of that creature became very precious to the Spiny Lizard people. It showed that nobody could interfere with their ways and go unpunished. Everywhere they went they always took some shell with them.”

“Fine,” I said. “Very interesting story. Now I must go and look for my mother, thank you very much.”
“But that’s the whole point of the story,” said Alastair. “It’s because of that shell that your mother is missing.”
“Huh?” I said, sitting down because my knees wobbled.
“That’s the whole point,” said Alastair again. “My father was friendly with some of the Spiny Lizard people. They gave him a piece of the shell. But they warned him it must never leave Australia, that if even a piece of the shell leaves Australia, the first woman to touch it will disappear to avenge the woman Wayamba kidnapped.”
“So?” I said.
Alastair nodded. “My father had it made into some kind of an ornament. Then, a few years later, his cousin, James - the late owner of this house - came to visit. My mother, who didn’t know about the warning, gave him the ornament, said that it might be useful if he ever wanted to give it as a present to a woman. But he never did. It is here, and your mother touched it. Unless we find it and get it back to the Spiny Lizard tribe, she will never come back.”
“Do you know what this ornament thing is?” I asked when I was able to form words again.
“No,” said Alastair. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Well, that’s a big help,” I said. “I would have thought that ghosts would know pretty much everything. What’s the point in coming all the way back from ... from the dead if you don’t know a simple thing like that?”
“Look, I’ve been sent because I’m the same age as yourself,” he said. “They thought I could help you sort things out. We don’t just go around being clever and knowing-all-things out there, you know.”
“Out where?” I asked.
“You don’t need to know,” said Alastair. “Now, do you want my help or not?”
A mind-flash told me to hold onto him. Ghostly help is better than none when your mum is missing.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Where will we begin?”
“We have to look for anything made of shell that your mother might have touched.”
“She touched millions of things,” I groaned. “ Anyway, how will we know it if we find it?”
Alastair smiled. “I’m Australian, remember,” he said. “There’s just one thing,” he added. “We have to find it by dusk or it will be too late.”

Once again my knees wobbled, but as I was sitting down I didn’t fall in a heap on the floor. “Oh cripes,” I whispered, trying to picture my Mum’s face in case I never saw it again. “What exactly will happen at dusk if we don’t find that shell ornament?”
He bit his ghostly lip which didn’t look at all ghostly. “I’m afraid they’ll come for you too,” he said.
“What?” I tried to swallow, but my throat wouldn’t work. “Why me?”
“It’s all to do with the legend,” he said. “First they take the woman who touched the shell. Then they'll take her nearest loved one.”
The blood in the top of my head drained right down to my shoes.
“Come on then,” I said, leading the way to the sitting room where Mum had been looking at all the fiddly ornaments. We had about four hours before the winter dusk. There were dozens of things that Mum could have touched. They could have been made from shell or play-dough for all I knew.
“We’re only looking for things made of shell,” said Alastair, as if he read my mind. Which was extra scary because your head should be a very private place.
“This is hopeless,” I said.
“I’m getting tired” said Alastair. “I need food.”
I remembered that he’d been drinking milk when I first saw him, but a ghost looking for grub?
“I never heard of a ghost wanting food,” I said.
“How many ghosts have you met?” asked Alastair. “The thing is, when we come back across we’re just like we were. We get hungry just like you. Now, let’s make a sandwich or something. I haven’t had a sandwich since 1941. And that’s the one I choked on.”

We went back to the kitchen and made thick sandwiches from the bread and cheese that Mum and I had brought. I sliced the cheese really small so that Alastair wouldn’t choke again. I wasn’t sure if people could die twice or not.
Alastair leaned over and touched my arm again. “We’ll find that shell,” he said. “It’s here and we’ll find it.”
But we didn’t find it. We rummaged in every room, but there seemed to be nothing made of shell. By the time we got back to try the sitting room again, the sun was beginning to sink, just like me. When the clock began to chime a quarter to five, we heard the distant babble of voices. I looked at Alastair and I was horrified to see that he was beginning to fade.
“They’re coming,” he said.
“Who?” I cried. “Who’s coming?”
“The ancient spirits,” he said. His voice sounded like it was coming from far away. “The ancient spirits of the Spiny Lizard people. They’re coming for you, Lucy.”
“For heaven’s sake, Alastair, don’t go fading away on me,” I cried.
“I can’t help it,” he said. “When they come, my time is up.”
I pulled out every crummy ornament within reach. But it was no use. Those voices were getting closer. “Are you sure it was shell?” I screeched.
“A shield of shell,” his voice was almost an echo. “Shell in front and shell at the back, with only his head poking out. Wayamba turned into a creature covered in shell.”

A creature covered in shell. And then it dawned on me.
“A creature covered in shell,” I shouted. “With just his head sticking out. A tortoise! We’ve been looking for the wrong bloomin’ shell, Alastair. We should have been looking for tortoise shell. And that’s the last thing Mum did. She found a tortoiseshell mirror and she was dancing around with it!”
I dashed up the stairs two at a time to the big bedroom where Mum and I had spent the night. I could hear Alastair’s boots behind me, but I didn’t stop to see if the rest of him was coming too. I pulled back Mum’s sleeping bag.
“It’s not there!” I cried.
“Try inside it,” said Alastair. “It might have slipped down inside.”
I reached in frantically, conscious of the babbling voices that seemed to be on the stairs.
“I have it!” I shouted. “The tortoise-shell mirror.”
With one sweeping movement Alastair grabbed it and went out the door. All this stuff was very bad for my health. I sat on Mum’s sleeping bag and hugged my knees. The sudden silence was heavy with expectation.
“Alastair?” I called softly. Still no sound - that is until a loud knocking sound from downstairs.Surely ancient spirits don’t usually knock on doors, I told myself. Could it be that my dead friend had forgotten how to pass through closed doors? What to do? I couldn’t just go on sitting on my mum’s sleeping bag forever, so I crept down the stairs, squinting my eyes in case there might be an ancient one left over and lurking.
“Alastair,” I called again.
“Lucy!” a muffled voice came from a door under the stairs.
Mum’s voice? I was almost afraid to open the door in case she wouldn’t be there and I’d start to blubber.
“Mum!” I yelled, tugging at the stiff door. “You’re back. Oh, you’re back!”

Mum looked at me in amazement as I threw myself at her, squeezing her waist really hard to check that she was solid.
“Easy on there,” she laughed. “I must have fallen asleep in this airing cupboard. I came in here to look for some extra blankets and must have fallen asleep. Then I discovered that the lock is broken. Thank goodness you heard me, I was getting quite claustrophobic. Look at the time,” she went on. “I’ve slept for the whole day. I can’t imagine what came over me to be so exhausted. I’m still so tired.” She took a deep breath and put her hand to her head. I hadn’t the heart to tell her that she’d been trekking to Australia with a bunch of ancient ones. I didn’t want to leave her alone in case she might disappear again, but I told myself that was silly. All the disappearing business was over, now that the ancient spirits of the Spiny Lizards had got their tortoise-shell mirror.

I ran back upstairs to find Alastair. I searched every room. There was no sign of Alastair. I missed him and felt very sad. That is until I found the small boomerang that had been left on my sleeping bag. Boomerangs come back, I thought. Some day, perhaps, Alastair would come back too.