Beneath the Rainbow

by Lisa Shambrook

  Freya’s face dropped and Jake put his arm round her shoulder. “Did it help?”

  “No, yes…I don’t know.”

  They sat quietly among the willow fronds and it seemed like an age before Freya spoke again. “Yes, it helped, I was with them. I was there.”

  “Will you do it again?”

  “Probably.”

  Silence.

  “Do you ever go back?” she asked Jake.

  After another long pause Jake replied. “Not now.”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course I did, maybe that’s why I didn’t want you to go.”

  “Why?” Freya turned toward him.

  “I didn’t want you to feel like I did.” He dipped his head to hide his expression.

  Freya considered his reply for a moment then asked. “How did you die?”

  “Drowned,”

  “Where?”

  “In our pool.”

  “In your pool? Swimming pool?” She raised her eyebrows.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I thought you meant in a pond or something, your swimming pool? Were you rich?”

  He shrugged.

  Freya continued. “Did you go back after? Did you see your parents?”

  He nodded.

  “And?”

  “And what?” He turned back to her with a strangled voice. “And what?”

  She watched him pensively. “You said you didn’t want me to feel like you did.”

  “I don’t.”

  “So what happened?” she asked softly.

  “When I died, I slipped, hit my head and knew nothing about it.”

  “An accident too,” she said, “just like me.”

  “No!” The violence in his voice made her jump. “Not like yours.” His face darkened. “Nothing like yours. I watched you run out in front of that car…there wasn’t anything you or anyone else could do about it. Yours was an accident.”

  “Did someone push you?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Then it was an accident.”

  “But I wasn’t meant to be there,” his voice wavered. “Mum wasn’t well, I should’ve been indoors. I ignored her, wanted to play in the pool...”

  “And you slipped.”

  “Yes, I slipped, but that wasn’t the end of it.”

  Freya met his eyes. “Go on.”

  “I drowned, I don’t remember how, not even now.” He brushed his fringe from his eyes and paused. “You know you asked if we were rich?” She nodded. “Well, we were. We were rich in all the things that didn’t matter. After I’d gone, Dad tried to help Mum cope. He did everything he could, bought her everything, but he couldn’t buy her out of this one. A year to the day I drowned, she followed me into the water.”

  Freya drew in her breath.

  “She never got out again.”

  “Is she here?” Freya was wide-eyed.

  “No.”

  “Where then?”

  “She’s still there.”

  “Where?”

  “By the pool, she’s dead and she sits by the pool, trapped by it. Dad remarried. It’s funny really, he and his new wife still live there, with her!”

  “Why is she still down there?”

  He shrugged. “I did go back once, when she was alive, but her guilt was too painful. She felt guilty, so guilty, and I did too and it tore me up, broke my heart.” Jake shook his head. “So I didn’t go back again, not even after she died. I watched all the time, I watched Dad at her funeral and the months after, I had to. I couldn’t do anything, but if anything happened to him as well, it was bad enough I was the reason she died, but for him too…” Jake paused. “She didn’t go back until after the funeral, so like you, she probably wanted to see him again, only she never left. She’s still there.”

  “How old were you when you died?” asked Freya.

  “Same as you, seven.”

  “Was that long ago?”

  “She’s been there for about five years.”

  “That long!” Freya was surprised. “You still look seven, the same as me, but you should be a teenager by now!”

  “I’ll stay seven until I’m ready.” He didn’t look at her.

  “Jake, that’s too long not to be ready,” she began and reached towards him. She gently touched his chin and brought him round to face her. “Jake, surely you should be ready by now?”

  “Probably.”

  “How long do we stay here?”

  “Like I said, until we’re ready.” He stared into her eyes. “Some are ready right away, especially the babies. For some it only takes a short while, and for others it takes longer. You probably won’t be here long,” he added.

  “You should go back and see her,” said Freya.

  “I can’t.”

  “You should.”

  Jake rocked onto his knees and stood up. “I can’t.” He shook his head and walked away. Freya made a move to stand but he was gone and she was left alone staring into her bluebell wood.

  There was somewhere she needed to be.

  One thought was all it needed.

  One thought and there she was standing on the edge of an oval swimming pool. Freya looked around her and smiled to herself. He’d been wrong, there was no one here. Then Freya looked again and on the far side of the pool was a woman. She sat with her feet in the water, kicking lazily, but no splash accompanied her kicks. The water was still across the whole pool, as still as it was beneath her feet.

  Jake’s mum, Jake’s ghost of a mother, sat peering into the water, her arms stretched by her sides and her hands flat on the tiled poolside. She wore a simple white dress, not unlike the one Freya had worn only it was more elegant. With her head bent and wavy fair hair framing her face, she looked like a woman with no care in the world.

  No care, that was, until she raised her face to the sun. Freya whistled between her teeth. Haunted wasn’t even the right word to describe the pain etched into her young and beautiful features.

  Freya raised a hesitant hand, but knew that the woman would never respond. Instead she wandered slowly around the pool until she reached Jake’s mother. She stood beside the woman and crouched, then sat on the edge with her.

  Freya dipped her feet into the pool too and allowed herself a smile. She couldn’t feel the water, but again memories made up for the lack of a sense of touch. Her feet kicked the water and she could feel water splashing up her legs as she closed her eyes. When she opened them again she half expected the woman to have disappeared, but she hadn’t. She still sat, sunlight glinting in her glossy hair, staring into the pool.

  “Jake…” the woman murmured, “My Jake…”

  Freya tilted her head. She didn’t need to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun, as her eyes no longer had need for such sensitivities. “He’s not here,” she said.

  “Jake…” his mother repeated.

  This woman did not exist, Freya could not imagine where she really was, but she was not in her world, neither was she among the living. Freya moved her hand to cover the pale hand on the poolside, but there was nothing there. Jake’s mother faded and was gone.

  The only ripple was not of water but her words as they faded with her. “Jake…my Jake…”

  Freya wandered through her bluebells searching for Jake. She discovered him sitting hunched beneath her willow. Melancholy hung in a veil of mist as she approached. She waved it away and tugged Jake’s arm. He offered a watery smile, but couldn’t hide the delight in his eyes when she grinned back. He held out his hand and Freya pulled him to his feet, dragging him out from under the long, green fronds.

  “So when can I make a rainbow?” She needed to draw him out of his depression and that’s what rainbows were for.

  “Anytime you like,” he replied.

  Freya swung her arms over her head and drew a rainbow in the sky.

  “It’s as easy as that…up here,” he told her.

  Freya smiled at her rainbow, it was just the right shape, a
perfect arc, and the colours were, well, perfect. Its scarlet outer bow was just the right pillar-box red and the orange was joyful as was its sunshine-yellow. Green the colour of grass, then the blue, like Daddy’s t-shirt, gave way to dark indigo and it all faded into the most beautiful violet to finish.

  She glanced over at Jake. “What d’you mean ‘easy, up here’?”

  “Just that, it’s easy up here, but not so easy down there.”

  “Huh, I make perfect rainbows, look!”

  “Yes, up here.”

  Freya continued to glare at him with her arms folded tight across her chest.

  “Up here, you don’t need anything, down there you need the right conditions,” he began to explain.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “It needs to be rainy and sunny.”

  “So, I just choose the right day then.”

  Jake shrugged. “I s’pose.”

  But the right day did not appear.

  For a while Freya gave up on rainbows, they appeared in the sky regularly, but none of them belonged to her.

  Her attempt at a birthday rainbow for her mother was almost non-existent, because the sun shone with such intensity that all she produced was a pale arc in a vapoury sky that amounted to nothing.

  The science of rainbows left her somewhat defeated. She knew she had to influence the light and she knew she contained enough inherent celestial light to create a small rainbow, but it was the rain that had her beaten. It had to be in the right place and she had to use the existing sunlight to enhance her own fragile light. Dawn and dusk were optimum, just after sunrise for a few hours and another couple of hours before sunset. Midday and the sun was too high, and likewise the wrong time of year and the sun wouldn’t be in the right place either.

  She couldn’t make it rain, and she couldn’t tell the sun when to shine, and she believed she’d never match the timings to the conditions.

  There was one morning when Daisy, next door, stood alone in her dew-drenched garden, her elderly face upturned to catch the fresh morning rays, and Freya grabbed her opportunity. The sun was low and the air was misty. Freya spun in the sky and flung out her arms and screwed up her face in concentration.

  The sun filtered through the pale mist and rested warm between Freya’s fingers. The rays played around Freya before they reached Daisy’s wrinkled skin and Daisy opened her eyes. The bright light played a trick on her before she blinked and turned away with blue/black spots dancing before her eyes. She glanced over the fence at her neighbour’s garden and drank in the beautiful fragrance of the summer freesias and lavender, and she remembered watching Freya picking bunches of freesias with her mother just the year before.

  Freya’s image remained in her mind for much of that morning, but she missed the feint, very feint colours that had pervaded the morning dew.

  Freya tried again just a few weeks later, this time for the Hillmans who lived a few streets away.

  She watched the Hillmans a lot and her heart ached for old Thomas. His face betrayed his tortured emotions, but not a trace of pain or remorse was ever found when his beloved Joan turned her face to his.

  The couple, both well into their eighties, were inseparable. Thomas had retired almost thirty years ago, and they had settled quickly into a comfortable and easy retirement. She was a seamstress, or had been at least until a few years ago. Her embroideries and tapestries decorated the walls of their cosy home and patchwork quilts covered each bed. She had given up knitting and lace making when her fingers had become too painful with arthritis, but it was the embroidery that she refused to let go. She had a small hoop that sat on a velvet cushion in their living room, beside the white Persian cat. The piece of cloth held tight within it contained the image of another cat and was at present half embroidered. Joan would spend just a few minutes each day threading the needle through the pattern, just a few stitches, but she refused to give up.

  Thomas was just as stubborn; his vegetable patch was one to be envied.

  There he was every day, hoeing, digging, weeding, planting and watering and no one would have any idea of the pain that coursed through his frail body.

  Disease riddled his body and the only other person who knew was his doctor. Even Freya had no idea, but she knew something was wrong as she watched him watch his wife.

  Thomas worried about his wife.

  Freya worried about Thomas.

  So she made him a rainbow.

  He sat outside taking a well-deserved rest from an afternoon’s hard labour. The shower earlier pleased him, because it meant he would no longer need to water the patch. His asters, chrysanthemums, coneflowers and rudbeckia all drank up the late afternoon’s summer sun and he lazed contentedly in his dark-green deckchair. His eyes closed as the warmth danced across his skin and he allowed himself a little nap. When he woke he saw what he thought was the last fading moments of a rainbow.

  The palest red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet tinged the sky before disappearing into the ether, and Freya’s momentary, but most successful yet, rainbow brightened his day.

  Freya wasn’t the only one worried about old Thomas. Jen, from the Post office, remembered how he held his wife’s hand at the funeral, and she noticed the sad and earnest looks he gave her when she wasn’t watching. She saw how he’d reach for Joan’s hand as they stood in the queue in the shop. There was a weary air to his gait and a solemn look in his eyes that only truly softened when he gazed at his wife.

  But Jen didn’t know what was wrong, and neither did Freya.

  Freya didn’t find out until her mum took Jasmine for her Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccination. She meant to stay with Jasmine and try to offer supernatural support but her attention was diverted when Thomas Hillman entered the surgery and sat down with a tired sigh.

  Joan wasn’t with him and that surprised Freya, who had seriously thought they were coupled by an invisible thread. Today that thread stretched as Joan went shopping and Freya accompanied Thomas into the doctor’s room.

  She didn’t understand cancer, it was just a word that made people sad, but the pleading by the doctor, something unusual in itself, was enough to demonstrate the seriousness of what was wrong with Thomas. Freya reached into the vastness of her expanded mind and understood the depths of his disease.

  Thomas still refused to allow his doctor to treat him. Hospital and clinic appointments were ignored, he only accepted prescriptions for stronger painkillers, and…his wife was not to know.

  Freya sat in ghostly silence on the examination bed, allowing tears that would never actually drip onto the green-carpeted floor stream down her cheeks.

  Jasmine’s cry interrupted Freya’s mind from the other side of the surgery, but her momentary pain was nothing to the pain, both physical and mental, that seeped through Thomas.

  Freya became adept at reading expressions. She could not read thoughts, but her mind’s growth had given her access to understanding psychology, which is what lead her to the Post Office.

  Mrs French, the Post Mistress, momentarily glanced over at her daughter and wondered, for the tenth time that day, what she was thinking. For a few days now Jen had been preoccupied, but she hadn’t shared her worries with her mother.

  She smiled as Jen released a long, unconscious sigh and then shook her head, as if ridding herself of the webs of thought entrapping her mind. Jen sighed again and rubbed her eyes, it had been a long day and retiring upstairs for a long, hot bath would be just the thing she needed.

  “Why don’t you finish now,” Mrs French said as if reading her daughter’s wishes. “I’ve shut down over here. We’re closing in half an hour. I’ll finish everything off.”

  Jen stretched her arms up high above her head and yawned. She nodded and replied. “That would be lovely, thanks Mum, I’ll return the favour.”

  Mrs French watched as her daughter disappeared and listened to her fading footsteps as she went upstairs.

  Mrs French sighed. Jen hadn’t had it easy, who do
es these days? But Jen really hadn’t. It would be lovely if she could just find herself a nice, young man…but it was easier said than done. She smiled as she heard the hot water pipes start to clank and shudder. A hot bath would do her daughter good.

  It had been a difficult few months for the whole community, something that up in her bath, Jen contemplated.

  Jen was convinced something was wrong with old Mr Hillman, and it troubled her. There was a look in his eyes that she recognised but could not quite put her finger on…

  Then she did.

  Jen had lost her husband of seven years a few years ago herself. He’d had leukaemia, and had gone downhill very fast. It was quite treatable these days, but his strain, if that was the right word, had been aggressive and it was the look in his eyes that she now recalled. A stubborn look that told her he was fighting, but always behind his eyes there was pain, an expression that told her his fight would be futile. He would look at her tenderly and earnestly and his hand would reach for hers with an insistence she now understood only too well.

  With a lump in her throat, she recognised the look that Thomas Hillman gave his beloved wife.

  Freya saw the recognition and knew that finally someone other than Mr Hillman’s doctor knew the truth.

  Why is everybody so sad?” Freya could hardly put her thoughts into words. “Down there, why are they all so sad?”

  Freya sat beneath her willow with a small group of friends and they watched as she wrung her hands. Ben spoke first. “Because they’re not here?”

  “Because we’re not there anymore,” said Keira pushing back her long, black curls. “They miss us!”

  Ben sighed and Sophie curled her arm around his small shoulders.

  “But we’re happy up here.” Freya’s arms flew out as she encompassed her heaven. “This, all we’ve got here is amazing!”

  “But they don’t know that,” said Carlos.

  Freya slumped again. “…and we can’t tell them…” She shook her head.

  “Wouldn’t make any difference if we could,” said Carlos, shrugging his shoulders.