by Emma Carroll
September 9th
I am now on the last stretch of my journey and, barring stray dogs, herds of pigs and plagues of locusts, I reckon I’m gonna reach the finishing line in Chicago almost a fortnight ahead of schedule. I am delighted to be travelling in the company of two fellow cyclists I met on the road. When I say “fellow”, one of them is a fine young gentleman and the other is his fiancée, but Daphne is very much her own woman. She had been followin’ my adventures in the paper and said that because of me, she had been inspired to get on her bike, and thanked me for givin’ women everywhere the courage to not give a bean what the Old Timers thought we shouldn’t and couldn’t do. Modesty forbids me to take all the credit for that – and I do have a little modesty left, even if I do ride in my bloomers. The gumption has to be there in the first place, but if I helped in my own small way to draw it out and change some rusty old attitudes, it gives me real hope for my girls, and makes the whole trip worthwhile.
September 12th
Chicago
I have ridden over the finishin’ line in bright sunshine! The crowds were whoopin’ and cheerin’ and throwin’ their hats in the air like the war was over. I am the first and only woman to cycle round the world and I claim my $10,000! But I haven’t just won the money. I haven’t just won the bet. I’ve won the right to call myself a New Woman. I can do anything that a man can do, and it’s all thanks to one woman, who never once slapped me down for bein’ myself. I did it, Ma!
I expect you already know what a ghost story is like. Everyone does, and it isn’t like this.
For one thing, most ghost stories are made up. This one, as far as I remember, is true.
It didn't happen in history, either. There are no long white nighties or hollow-eyed ghastly faces or rattling chains in this story. It happened, in the grand scheme of things, not very long ago: about fifteen years ago. Which is a long time in some ways, but for ghosts, it’s barely a flicker.
And it happened not very far from here, either: about a hundred miles to the north from the little café in which I am writing this down.
It happened in a village outside a market town in the middle of the country. The town was very ordinary, with shops and a cinema, and the village was ordinary too: it had a little school quite close by, and a post office that sold penny sweets and ice lollies, and some new houses and some old houses. It was just like your town. It was just like your village. It was completely ordinary in every way.
You’ll read the word “graveyard” in this story and you’ll think you’re getting to the ghost, but you’re not. There aren’t any ghosts in the graveyard in this story. The graveyard wasn’t even important. It wasn’t that kind of ghost. If it even was a ghost. Josie was never sure, afterwards, if it counted.
It’s always difficult, when a story happens to you, to see that it counts just as much as the stories in books. Things in books seem to happen in the right way at the right time, and the people in them always know just what to say. Josie never knew what to say. That was why she was friends with Mara, who always did.
You see, the part of the ghost story that happened to Mara was a proper ghost story right away. The way Mara told it, there was blood, and gore, and all the long white nighties and hollow-eyed ghastly faces and rattling chains you could wish for.
But Josie never saw any of that.
She didn’t even see it when it happened to Mara. She didn’t say that it hadn’t happened – Mara was very convincing – but she never saw it, all the same.
And as for the part that happened only to Josie, well – there had been none of that at all. There had only been a sunlit Tuesday afternoon, with orange and red leaves on the trees, and the light on the water, and a kind of feeling… But that was all.
Mara was all for telling everyone about Josie’s part too, but Josie did not know what to say. You remember, she never knew what to say, and she was no good at making things up. Who would believe her anyway? It wasn’t a proper ghost story, after all.
If it had been a ghost, you see, it was only a Tuesday-afternoon sort of ghost.
The first part did not happen on a Tuesday; it was a Thursday. It was a warm afternoon in October, and Mara and Josie were walking home.
They always walked home together.
They were not best friends at school. Mara had a school best friend already. Josie had come to the village when she was six, and that was too late. The village school was a very small one, and there were only eleven children in Josie’s class: four boys and seven girls. Everybody else had chosen their best friend on the very first day of Infants. Besides, even if someone else had wanted to be Josie’s best friend, Josie only wanted to be Mara’s.
Mara was the most interesting girl, Josie thought. She had long black hair like a witch, and her mother never made her tie it up. She had gold hoop earrings, and she was allowed to wear slip-on shoes.
Josie’s shoes had to have laces and thick rubber soles that wouldn’t wear through. Like boys’ shoes, Josie thought bitterly. Honestly, it was no wonder Mara had another best friend for school when Josie’s shoes were so awful.
“They are very practical,” Josie’s mother said placidly. “I want you to be able to run about and jump without consideration as to your sex.” This was the kind of thing Josie’s mother was always saying, and why it was no good arguing with her about anything. Not that Josie would have argued with her mother in any case – she wasn’t brave enough to talk back to adults – but there wasn’t any point. Nothing she said made sense. Mara could run and jump much faster than anyone, faster than the boys, and Mara’s shoes were lovely, like ballet slippers only black. But Josie’s mother would not listen to arguments like this.
That is what Josie’s mother was like: always saying things that made no sense, and half the time she wasn’t even home when Josie got home from school.
On those days Mrs Curtis from next door had to come round and make dinner out of a tin. (“As if,” Mara said scornfully, “we were babies who couldn’t work a tin opener!”)
Mrs Curtis was rude, and had a moustache; she cycled everywhere on a tall thin bicycle, and never smiled. She never lost her temper, but she never smiled either. If you were to draw a picture of the village, you would have drawn Mrs Curtis on her bicycle right in the middle of it. Josie did not like Mrs Curtis.
But then, Mara did not like Josie’s mother. Josie could tell that Mara was one day going to say something horrible about Josie’s mother, and then Josie would have to decide if she was going to be friends with Mara or rude about her mother. She expected she was probably going to choose being friends with Mara.
This was the trouble with Mara. You knew, whatever else you tried to do, you would end up choosing Mara. There was not any point trying to be anybody else’s friend when there was a chance of being Mara’s friend. Mara was the cleverest, the sharpest, the most fun. And she had all the ideas.
Josie, for example, would never have spent all summer in the graveyard without Mara. She would never have found the grave of the admiral who conquered Ibiza, or the little Victorian baby, or the one with the skull and crossbones, or the one with the huge engraving of the motorbike. She would never have known about any of it. She was simply not that kind of person on her own.
The graveyard was Mara’s idea, and so was the little red shed. The little red shed plan was the most audacious idea of all. “Audacious” was Mara’s new word, and she and Josie were saying it a lot that summer. It meant brave and daring and bold, and those were Mara’s favourite things.
The little red shed – and the graveyard – were both home plans, which meant that Josie and Mara did them together. At home they did everything together, and that was why they walked home together. They were home best friends, and that started when the bell rang, and the girl from the other village, Mara’s school best friend, got on her bus and went back to her own place.
It was not a very long way home, less than a mile, but it was quite an interesting less than a mile. You went t
hrough the playground into the park, and climbed over the fence from the park into the field, and then over another fence and a ditch into the field they called Bodfish.
Bodfish – nobody knew where the name came from – was a tussocky, hillocky field, with ripples in it where the ancient peasants had each had their own ditches to look after. You could jump from ridge to ridge, from tussock to tussock, hillock to hillock.
And it was the best field, partly because of this, but partly because it had two things in it: it had an accidental lake, and a small, tumbledown red shed. (There were also sometimes cows in it, but you could mostly keep out of their way.)
The accidental lake was because Bodfish had a hollow in it. It was a deep hollow, as if a giant had thumped his fist down into the middle of the field. It was about the size of a smallish house, and in summer the hollow was dry, and in autumn and winter the hollow was a lake. All the rainwater (and there was a lot of rain then) collected in it, and did not drain away. It was green and thick and sludgy, and not very deep. Sometimes there were ducks on it.
The little red shed was on the edge of the hollow, at the top of the slope. There was a path from the water’s edge to the open front of the shed. It was very old, you could tell: the inside of the walls were made of mud and straw all packed down into bricks. Then someone had put red bricks around the outside, to make it stronger. It was meant for the cows to live in, and for hay to be kept dry.
But some big boys from the other village had come and smashed up the roof. They did this for no reason; it had been perfectly good before that. And the farmer had not fixed up the roof, only moved his hay out, and the cows did not want to go in when there was no hay. So the little red shed was abandoned. It was shadowy and damp, and sometimes even on very sunny days there was kind of a creepy feeling Josie didn’t like to talk about. This was, she thought, because it was so far away from anything else; there was nobody about. Only Mara and Josie and the little red shed.
The farmer did not seem to want it any more. It was empty, and nobody went there. Even the big boys had given up going there now they had smashed the roof all in. That was just like the big boys. They stopped caring about a thing once they had broken it.
But Mara and Josie didn’t mind. It was because of the big boys smashing up the shed, after all, that it had become abandoned in the first place. And if the shed had not become abandoned, they would never have been able to make the plan.
These were the reasons that Bodfish was the best field, and that was why even though it was not a long way home, it sometimes took a long time getting there. If you stopped to see what was going on in the lake, or how you might fix up the red shed to live in, you could easily be more than an hour.
This was something Josie and Mara were planning together, and this was what they were talking about as they walked. They had their PE kits on their backs, and their lunchboxes tied to the PE kits, and their book bags tied to the lunchboxes, to keep their hands free.
They were going to fix up the red shed and live in it. They never played at Mara’s house, because Mara’s mum was very tidy, but Josie was sick of Mrs Curtis, and so they had decided: they needed somewhere else. And the somewhere else was going to be the red shed.
Josie had thought, briefly, of telling her mother about this plan. But Mara had stepped on her foot under the table (they had been having tea).
“If you tell adults anything, they think you don’t understand and don’t have common sense and then they stop you doing it,” she had hissed at Josie, once Josie’s mother had left the room. “It’s them that don’t understand, but they’ll never leave us alone if they know.”
And Mara was right, of course. It was because they were sensible girls with plenty of common sense that they were allowed to go to and from school alone with just each other, that nobody minded if they were late. It was because of the common sense that nobody said anything about them walking home through Bodfish, past the accidental lake, and past the tumbledown red shed.
Josie had an uncomfortable feeling that the red shed was only not out of bounds because nobody thought they would go in it, but there was no point having those feelings around Mara. Mara simply bashed them down like a lawnmower in a meadow.
“It will be completely fine,” said Mara. She had done a good kind of knot in her PE kit bag that kept her lunchbox from dragging in the mud. Josie wished that she had copied it. “It will all be completely fine, so shut up worrying, because it’s boring when you worry at me.”
Mara jumped neatly from one hillock to the next. She was like a goat, Josie thought. She never slipped, never stumbled. It was quite a steep slope down to the water, and Josie always lost her nerve at this bit. Mara never did.
“Aren’t you coming?” Mara was two hillocks in front of Josie by now. “Come on, slowcoach. I want to get up to the red shed. Come on!” She jumped again and Josie followed, three hillocks behind and well away from the slope. The sun was in Josie’s eyes. Mara, quicker and bolder, was right on the edge.
“Come on, you baby. Can’t you jump faster?”
Josie jumped faster, slipped and her lunchbox dipped briefly into the muddy part between two ridges. She winced.
“Don’t bother about your stupid lunchbox,” Mara called. “It’s only mud.” Mara’s own lunchbox, held aloft by the clever knot, was pristine. Something moved in the corner of Josie’s vision. A shadow, she thought. A girl’s shadow? She stopped jumping and looked. But there was nobody there, of course. There was never anybody there. Just her, and Mara, and the red shed.
“Why are you so slow, Josie? I’m going to do this all on my own, I swear. I always have to think of everything. It’s lucky you’ve got me, or you’d have no friends. You should be pleased I let you tag along, Josie Jones—”
And that was when it happened.
The shadow was there again, and Josie turned to look, determined to see what it was. And then, when Josie wasn’t looking, it happened very fast.
Like the shadow: Mara was there, and then – she wasn’t.
There was a high, thin, short scream, and then a heavy thud like a dropped bag of shopping, and then, horribly, silence.
Josie dropped her PE bag and inched her way to the top of the slope.
At the bottom of the slope was Mara, and she was lying very still, face down at the edge of the water.
She’s dead, Josie thought, she’s dead, she’s dead…
And Mara rolled over. She rolled slowly, away from the water’s edge, and she rolled as if she was hurt. But she was alive.
Josie sat down on her bottom and slid down carefully. There was mud all over her legs but she didn’t care.
Mara’s face was very white, and she was covered in thick green slime and black, brackish mud.
“I thought you were dead,” Josie said breathlessly, when she got down. She was about to say, “Are you hurt?”
But Mara said, “You pushed me.”
“I— What?”
They looked at each other, Josie’s face baffled, Mara’s crumpled with fury and pain all mixed up.
“You pushed me, Josie Jones. You tried to kill me. You’re a murderer.”
“But you’re not dead,” Josie said. There was a ringing in her ears as if she was in outer space and looking at this all happening from very far away.
“No thanks to you!”
“But I didn’t push you,” Josie said. “I wasn’t anywhere near you.”
“I felt your hands,” Mara said. “I felt your hands on my back and then I fell. Who else pushed me, Josie Jones? Who else could it have been? You’ve broken my leg and almost drowned me.”
“You’ve broken your leg?” Josie said.
She stooped down to pull Mara out of the mud, but Mara hissed, “Don’t come near me. And don’t just stand there, go and get help!”
Josie did not know where to go.
“Do I have to tell you everything? I’m the one you tried to murder, and now you don’t even know how to go and get help? Run up t
o the school, you idiot, and go along the road in case you see someone we know!”
Josie felt very helpless.
Mara swore at her, words Josie knew she wasn’t supposed to know. “Go and get me some help, murderer! Go on the road, not on the field! Run!”
Bewildered and astonished, Josie ran. It seemed a very long way back up to the school, and the road was empty both ways. There was nobody.
And then, up the road from the direction of the school, came Mrs Curtis, cycling very slowly on her upright bicycle. Josie let out a little sigh of relief. She shouted desperately, “Mrs Curtis! Mrs Curtis! Come quick! Help!”
Mrs Curtis pedalled just as slowly as before towards Josie, and Josie ran up the hill to meet her, waving frantically.
“Goodness me, it’s Josie Jones,” said Mrs Curtis acidly, when they drew level. She put one foot on the ground to stop her bicycle next to Josie.
She did not give Josie a chance to even open her mouth. “Your mother says she’s going to be out again tonight and could I help you to your tea again.”
She paused, and Josie seized her chance. Before Mrs Curtis could start talking again, Josie gabbled, “Mara slipped – broken leg – in the field…”
“What?” said Mrs Curtis, frowning.
How can she not understand? Josie thought. Why do adults never listen to anything properly?
“Mara slipped in the field,” Josie said, slower this time. She tried to make sure it was very clear. “Mara slipped down the slope in Bodfish and I think she’s broken her leg.”
Mrs Curtis made a funny small noise in the back of her throat. “In the field there?” she said.
