Excerpt from Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

One Hundred Miles Short of Heathrow's Second Runway

1977

From here, they descend at speed, her eardrums swelling like corn in a saucepan, pop, pop, pop. The world reappears through the oval of the window: toy cows glued onto Astroturf, a Blue Peter landscape of tinfoil lakes and cereal-carton houses. Her red sandals crush the crayons at their feet, rolling the lashes of wax into a puddle of long-cold gravy.

Not far now, the woman says. She has traveled with them and her face is kind, but she is not their mother. And what about their father? He is on the ground with the lakes and the cows. He is waiting on an oily tarmac. They have done wrong and he is their punishment. Remember this.

Her sister's hand grapples for hers beneath the blanket, the tiny nails scabby and fringed around their cuticles, and although the feeling disgusts her it is the only thing that seems familiar—that will continue to be familiar—for all the years to come. Remember this. Hold it close.

From here, they will descend at speed.

Part One
Beginnings

One
Lily

London 1997
12th Day of Mourning

By the time I was twenty-five, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons; the second was that we were happy.

We'd taken our father's name, of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half existed in that strange hinterland: hushed questions, Chinese whispers, that had faded over the years to silence. And that was the problem. Like a dripping tap or an unpaid bill, Mumma was the squatter at the back of my brain forever waiting for the moment to surprise me.

The beginning of my ending is easy to mark. I was standing at the living room window, watching my neighbor's funeral procession make its third lap around the estate. Brixton rain. The sort that gets nothing clean, only picks up the grime and the stink and drops it somewhere else.

A small crowd had gathered in the car park, pretending not to get wet beneath their Tesco shopping bag rain hats and broken-winged umbrellas, but it seemed dishonest of me to join them. I didn't even know the dead man's name although we'd looked at each other often. Our flats faced onto each other, separated by the scrubby excuse for a square, and sometimes—when I'd wake up in the night—I'd see him propped against the mirror of his glass. Ferret, I used to think: the way his hands were always in motion, his bony fingers plowing troughs through his hair, or stroking gray skin through the fabric of his vest. One day I'll go over there, I told myself. He might have a story, too. We could become friends. But I never did.

The too-long rattle of the letter-box drew me away from the window, accompanied by the postman's tuneless whistle. I waited for him to retreat, listening for the tight wet loop of his footsteps fading across the landing before I wandered into the hallway.

On the mat was a single envelope. I'd never been a person who got excited by the mail; someone who expected flowers or cards from boyfriends, or round robins from girls I'd been at school with. Mostly it was menus or my appointments, perhaps one of those anonymous invitations for self-defense or the local jamboree at which no one awaited my attendance. I kept them all, nonetheless. Positioned right at the entrance to the flat, it demonstrated to the people who came by—my landlord, the pizza delivery boy sopping wet from his piddling little moped—that mine was a busy life, populated with busy people.

I threw the letter on top of the pile and went back to spying on the car park. The funeral procession had moved on but the crowd hung around in their clusters, chatty and reluctant to disperse. Maybe they were waiting for an encore, a second chance to reflect on their mortality. But he looked so well when I saw him. One minute he was here and then ...

Excerpted from Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton. Copyright © 2023 by Wiz Wharton. Excerpted by permission of HarperVia. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.