Ghost 1 by Stephanie Scofield
Kate was bored. At 16 she was ready to spread her wings, to go on holiday with her friends, to have adventures in the “real world”. Instead, here she was stuck with her parents and little brother in a holiday cottage in France, miles from anywhere, for two whole weeks. To make it worse, whilst her friends sizzled under the Mediterranean sun, Kate had sat indoors staring out at slate grey, rain sodden skies.
Today was the first day it hadn’t rained and when her parents suggested a visit to the WWI trenches, her little brother could barely contain his excitement, reckoning he might find a skeleton or unexploded bomb. For Kate though, the trip offered the opportunity for some time on her own.
“I’ll stay here and do some painting. I don’t want to go traipsing round graveyards and battlefields!” Art was the one thing that truly inspired her. Her friends teased her, but nothing could dissuade her from painting whenever she got the chance and there was something special about the pale grey light dusted across muddy fields.
She set up her easel and paints behind an old crumbling barn to the back of the cottage, keen to get started before the light changed. But as she pulled out some loose sheets of paper, a painting she had done just two weeks earlier slipped out. She smiled as she picked it up – Brook Farm – her home. She hadn’t meant to bring it with her. It was good. It captured perfectly the early summer sunlight slanting through the leaves of the apple tree beside the old farmhouse.
“It’s beautiful!”
She dropped the painting in shock and swung round to find a scruffy looking boy with sticking out ears standing behind her.
“What are you doing?” Her heart was pounding.
“Your picture. It’s perfect.”
Kate recovered her composure. “Er..thanks...”
There was an awkward silence.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“You didn’t. You just... You shouldn’t creep up on people like that. What are you doing here anyway? You’re English, aren’t you? Are you staying round here?”
“Yes... I’m English.” He picked up the painting.
“That’s my house ... in Somerset.”
“I’m from there too.” He was staring at her painting.
“Are you? From Somerset? Really?”
The boy nodded. “Just like that. Like your painting. Our farm.... There’s the orchard beside it, just here.” He pointed to the right, just off the edge of the paper, “and my mother’s flower garden is in front here and along here,” he pointed to the left, “the cow sheds and the hay barn. The window frames are wrong though. You’ve done them wrong. They should be blue, pale blue.”
Kate frowned. “No, I haven’t. How do you know what...?” She stopped. He wasn’t listening.
“And there’s a little stream running right through the middle of the farmyard. It’s the most beautiful place in the world.” He turned defiantly to Kate as if challenging her to disagree.
“Sounds nice....” She wasn’t sure what else to say.
“My room’s round the back. You can see the woods from my window. There’s a fox comes up each morning after our hens... She’s a clever one, keeps close to the trees where she can hide. The light comes in through my window and runs up the crack in the wall. It looks like a lightning flash. And just above my bed, between the beams, there’s a funny, lumpy bit of ceiling like uncooked dough.” He closed his eyes for a moment, his brow creased in concentration. “It smells of polish and lavender, my room. I love that smell, clean, cheerful...lavender.”
“Right.” Kate glanced back towards the safety of the house. He was definitely a bit odd.
“I thought you’d understand. You drew it all so perfectly.” He sounded hurt.
“Have you been away a long time?” Looking at his filthy clothes, she suddenly guessed the truth.
He nodded. “I thought when I left...I thought it would be fun, an adventure like in books. I thought it would be the best game ever and I’d go home like Richard the Lionheart and they’d all be proud of me.”
“Proud? Of you running away?” That’s what he had done, she was sure of it, run away from home.
“You did run away, didn’t you?”
“No!” He shook his head violently. “I had to … I couldn’t...” His hand was trembling as he held up the painting.
“I go out of the gate there.” He was calm again. “It squeaks, because I didn’t oil it. That was my job and I didn’t do it. That week when I left I should have oiled the gate so it probably still squeaks. My dog, Jimbo, he jumps over the gate. You can’t keep him in. If I go out, Jimbo jumps over the gate to follow me. He follows me to school. There’s a path.” Again he pointed off the top of the painting. “It goes along by the stream, through the woods, through Mr. Evans’ field and down to the village. Me and Jimbo, every day I go to school that way and he follows me.” He looked up with a mischievous grin, suddenly a little boy again. “I don’t always go. What use is school to me? I’m going to take over the farm from Dad. I learn everything from him. What do I care about history and scripture? What good’s that going to do the farm? I mean what happened to those flocks of sheep when the shepherds came to see the Baby Jesus? A wolf ate them probably. School is for idiots. So me and Jimbo we go fishing and swim up in the Devil’s Drinking Bowl and camp under the holly bushes in Long Bottom Wood... and if I bring back blackberries, mushrooms or a rabbit, Mum doesn’t really mind that I wasn’t in school and Dad’s happy I’m not away all day and can help him turn the hay or pick the fruit. Do you think he’ll have been all right without me?”
He turned to Kate, a panicked expression on his face. “My sister.. she’s only little. She can’t really help. Maybe old Alf or Robbie – he’s a bit soft in the head but he’s strong as an ox......” He tailed off.
“Why don’t you go home?” Kate was out of her depth. She didn’t understand any of this. He ignored her.
“Do you think Jimbo’s all right? He sleeps on my bed. My Dad thought I was soft, that he should be outside working but Mum lets me keep him inside. There’s a big oak table in the kitchen and he sits on my feet and I drop bits of food for him. He’s always getting in trouble. Once he chased a rabbit into the dairy, knocked over all the churns... When I left I told him I was coming back soon...” The boy’s face was thin and taut. “I told him I’d only be gone a month or so, that we’d chase the spring rabbits when I was back. I told him to be good and wait for me and we’d soon be together again and he licked my face...”
He reached into his shirt and pulled out a wooden object.
“Here.” He handed it to Kate. “This is Jimbo.” In her hand lay a perfect little sheepdog.
“I made it here. I found this wood in an old farm we went through, wedging an empty cider barrel and it reminded me of our farm. It made everything seem real. You know what I heard someone say? ‘The world has grown up.” I wish it hadn’t. Why couldn’t it stay as it was? Me and Jimbo were happy. It was perfect.”
He dropped Kate’s painting and began to walk away.
“Wait! Your dog.”
“Keep it. Take him home. Take him back home.” He disappeared round the back of the barn.
“Hey! You never told me your name.” Kate ran after him, but he had gone.
A week later she was back home at Brook Farm. She hadn’t seen the strange boy again and when the weather brightened up a bit had decided that she should make the most of what might be their last family holiday.
She sat the little dog on her window sill looking out across the back garden to the woods and tucked the painting away in a drawer. Since meeting the boy, she had had an inexplicable feeling that there was something wrong with it, that something vital was missing.
3 months had passed when she went out to the back field to paint the autumn trees. The pale grey autumn light poured down on to the muddy brown fields and glanced across the top of a small moss covered stone almost buried in the corner by the wood. Kate made her way across the field puzzled. She had lived here all her life and never before noticed this strange stone. Gently she pulled back the grass and bindweed and scraped off the moss. It was a crudely made gravestone carved in a rough hand,
‘Jimbo. 1901-1916 R.I.P.’
She dropped her sketch pad, autumn trees forgotten and ran back across the field, back to her room where the summer painting of the farm lay at the bottom of the drawer. Half an hour later it was done. The painting was complete. Leaning against the apple tree in the left of the painting was a boy with sticking out ears, his hand resting lightly on the back of his old, faithful sheepdog.
