THE TUESDAY AFTERNOON GHOST

ELLA RISBRIDGER

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 through 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 to 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.

“Yes!” Josie said impatiently. Why was Mrs Curtis being so very, very slow?

“She slipped down the slope in the field? Into the lake?”

“Yes!”

“Is she – is she hurt?”

“She’s broken her leg,” said Josie. What on earth was wrong with the woman? “I need you to get help, I need help, come and see.”

But Mrs Curtis was putting her hands back on the handlebars, as if she was about to cycle away.

“What are you doing?” said Josie. “You need to come and see, I need you to help. I can’t do this on my own.”

“Oh.” Mrs Curtis looked very uncomfortable. “I don’t think I can. I’m not very well myself. I need to get home.”

She did not look well, actually. She was almost as white as Mara had been. But Josie could not think about that right now. Mrs Curtis was the grown-up. She had to behave like it.

“Go and get help, Mrs Curtis,” said Josie very firmly. She said it as sternly as she could. She said it like Mara might have said it. Josie never spoke to adults like that. “You must go and fetch an ambulance and Mara’s mum. Do you understand? Do you?”

There was a long pause, and then Mrs Curtis nodded, rather meekly. “I’ll fetch them,” she said.

“Do you promise?”

“I promise,” said Mrs Curtis. A little colour was returning to her face.

“You have to,” Josie said. “You absolutely have to. She’s really hurt, Mrs Curtis. It isn’t a trick, or anything. She really is hurt.”

“I know,” said Mrs Curtis. There was something odd about Mrs Curtis’s voice. It was as if something was stuck in her throat. As if she might cry. “I know she is. I will get help, Josie, I will.”

“And cycle quicker!” Josie called after her. “Cycle quicker than that!”

And miraculously, Mrs Curtis seemed to increase her pace. Josie watched her figure dwindling into the distance and into the village proper, past the sign that said YOU ARE NOW ENTERING…, and out of sight.

Then Josie turned and ran back to Mara.

She was exactly where Josie had left her, but she had managed to pull herself up to a sitting position. She looked dreadful, and she had been crying. When she saw Josie, she bit her lip very hard to stop crying, and said, “Murderer, what do you want?”

In trying to flag down Mrs Curtis Josie had almost forgotten that Mara thought she was a murderer.

“I honestly didn’t touch you,” she said. She sat down in the mud next to Mara.

“I felt your hands,” Mara said. “I felt you shove me. And then I couldn’t keep my balance and I fell off the tussock, and landed on my stupid leg and then I rolled all the way down. Because you pushed me. You pushed me.”

“But I didn’t,” Josie started to say, and Mara said, “I felt it.” And then they both stopped speaking, because there didn’t seem to be any point.

It seemed like a very long time before anybody came, and then everybody came at once: an ambulance, which stopped at the field gate, and two big paramedics, and Mara’s mum, and Josie’s mother too. And there were explanations, and Josie waited for Mara to say: she did it.

But Mara said nothing. Common sense, Josie thought suddenly. She wants them to know we have common sense. Otherwise they’ll stop her doing things even when she’s better.

Mara was the one with all the ideas.

And then the ambulance took Mara and her mother away, and Josie’s mother took Josie home.

Mara was not at school the next day. Josie’s mother picked up Josie at the gate and took her home in the car. After school Josie went to call for Mara, but the door was shut and nobody came to answer it.

Then it was the weekend and Mara did not come to call for Josie. And Josie did not go to call for Mara.

And Mara was still not at school on Monday.

So Josie summoned up all her courage and went to Mara’s house. She hammered on the door with both her fists, until at last someone did open it, and when it swung to she said all in one breath, “Is she dead?”

“Oh, it’s you, Josie Jones. We don’t want you.”

It was the school best friend who had opened the door. She looked at Josie scornfully.

“Is she dead?”

“No thanks to you, Josie Jones. She says you pushed her. Everyone knows.”

“Who knows?”

“I do,” said the school best friend. “And I’m telling everyone. You’re crazy, Josie Jones. You keep away from us. You’re a murderer.”

“But she isn’t dead,” said Josie.

“You pushed her,” said the school best friend.

“I did not,” Josie said with as much dignity as she could muster, but it didn’t matter: she knew it was too late. She could hear it going round already.

The next day Mara was still not at school, and they made get-well cards instead of art.

Josie was doing careful colouring-in when she heard it, just behind her.

“Did you hear about Josie Jones?” someone whispered. And someone else whispered: Josie Jones pushed her! Josie Jones broke Mara’s leg! Josie Jones is a murderer!

She turned round fast and the whispering stopped. But nobody would sit next to her, and nobody looked at her, and as soon as she went back to colouring it started again: Josie Jones pushed Mara! Josie Jones is a murderer! Even at playtime, and in the next lesson (which was maths), Josie was sure she could hear it. Josie Jones doesn’t have a best friend! Josie Jones is a murderer!

She could not think about maths at all. How could she concentrate on isosceles triangles when she had all this to think about? And she didn’t have a best friend, unless you counted Mara, and everyone thought she had pushed her. But she had not done that. She was not a murderer. She had been behind Mara by two tussocks, distracted by that shadow.

That shadow, Josie thought suddenly. That shadow! Perhaps there had been someone else up there, and someone else had pushed Mara when she wasn’t looking! And perhaps if she could find out who, they would stop saying it! She would just have to explain to Mara and that would be that. She was filled all at once with a kind of hope. She had a plan now. She thought it might be a long time before she got to do it, but she had a plan all the same.

And it was just luck – pure luck – that Josie got her chance the very next day. It was Tuesday.

At breakfast her mother passed Josie the Weetabix, and said, “I’m so sorry, Josie, but I won’t be home by three today. After all that business last week, you’ll have to stay at school until Mrs Curtis can fetch you. Will you tell the teacher? I don’t want you walking home alone.”

Josie nodded. Inside her chest something leapt. Already!

“I can trust you, can’t I, Josie?”

Josie nodded again.

Josie’s mother smiled and ruffled Josie’s hair.

“It’s hard for you with Mara laid up, I know. She’ll be better soon, and then we’ll see about you walking home again. Along the road, if possible! No more fields. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” said Josie. She ate her Weetabix in three quick bites.

“And tonight you’ll wait at school,” Josie’s mother said. “Mrs Curtis will fetch you. Will you go and remind her, please? I asked her last night, and gave her the money.”

“I’ll go now,” Josie said. She slid off her stool and went out. At Mrs Curtis’s door she took a deep breath before she knocked.

When Mrs Curtis answered, Josie said, “Mum says to remind you you’ll need to come and help me with my tea tonight.”

Mrs Curtis frowned. “Aren’t I collecting you from school?”

“No,” Josie said. She had never lied to an adult in her life: another first. “Natalie’s mum is dropping me home. But you can help me with my tea.”

Mrs Curtis shrugged. “It’s all the same to me,” she said. “Anything else?”

“I’ll be home about half past four,” Josie told her. Her heart was pounding in her chest.

“Fine,” said Mrs Curtis. She shut the door briskly and Josie climbed into the car.

“All sorted?”

“All sorted,” Josie told her mother.

She could not sit still at school. The whispers were louder than ever, but she tried not to listen. I didn’t do it, she thought, fiercely. I didn’t do it.

She had a plan. She was going to find out who was in the red shed, and who had pushed Mara. She was going to go and find things out. She was going to go adventuring. She was going to go detecting.

At three thirty they filed out. She stuck close to Natalie’s family until they were out of the gates, and then, carefully, peeled off. She glanced around. Nobody was looking. Good. She ran swiftly across the park and climbed the fence. Down the other field. Over the fence. Over the ditch. Drifts of golden, reddish leaves were everywhere, and the ditch was full of them. She jumped from tussock to tussock, like Mara, and found it was easier than usual; she seemed to be jumping as fast as Mara, as deftly and smartly as Mara.

She came to the part of the field where the red shed came into view and stopped abruptly.

There was somebody else already in the red shed.

She thought it was Mara at first. But that was impossible.

The somebody else was wearing school uniform – a grey pinafore and white socks, pushed down instead of rolled – and had long hair like Mara’s that was loose and wild too. The light shone through it.

Carefully – so carefully – Josie went closer.

It was not Mara. She was like Mara, but not her: the hair was red like the leaves, not black as pitch, and the somebody else was the most freckly person Josie had ever seen. She was about Josie’s age, but Josie did not know her, which meant she did not go to Josie’s school. Josie knew everybody.

“Did you push my friend?” Josie said, as boldly as she could muster.

The somebody else looked up.

“Who are you?”

“I asked you a question,” Josie said.

“Why should I answer you?” said the somebody else.

“I don’t know you,” Josie said.

“I don’t know you,” said the stranger.

“You’re not from here,” said Josie.

“You don’t have to go on about it,” said the stranger. Her voice was cross and rude, as if she’d said this a lot.

The stranger was putting the broken red bricks neatly on to Josie’s pile by the door of the little red shed. Then she said, “I do know, you know. I do know I’m from somewhere else.”

“Well, you are,” said Josie, and then, on an impulse, added, “I’m not from here either.”

The stranger looked at her in surprise, considering her all over. “Aren’t you?”

“No,” Josie said. “I was born somewhere else. I don’t really remember it. Then I lived in other places, and then I came here.”

“I didn’t know,” said the girl. Her voice was less cross now. “Sometimes, it seems like everyone else is from here.”

“Yes,” Josie said with feeling. It did seem like that. Especially now.

“Is that why that girl said you had no friends?”

“Which girl?”

“With the black hair.”

“Maybe,” Josie said. “I don’t know exactly.”

The girl shrugged. “How long have you been here?”

“Ages,” Josie said. “Since I was six.”

“That is ages,” said the girl. “I’ve been here ages too.” She straightened the edges of her heap of bricks. “Did you know these bricks weren’t here originally?”

“Yes. It’s got all straw and mud on the inside.”

“It’s called wattle and daub actually,” said the girl. She was quite like Mara, Josie thought, but nicer. “Did you know?”

“No,” said Josie truthfully. She liked learning new things.

“Was it you who started putting the bricks in a pile?”

“Yes.” She decided it was her turn to ask a question. “What’s your name?”

The girl seemed to consider this before she answered. Then she said, “Sorrel. What’s yours?”

“Josie,” Josie said. “I’ve never met anyone called Sorrel before.”

Sorrel only shrugged. “I’ve met lots of Josies,” she said. “Come and help with these bricks. I think we ought to start putting them back around the outside, to protect the wattle and daub. What d’you think?”

Josie looked at it, and saw that she was right; the boys had knocked the red bricks from the outside, and the soft, old, mud-straw bricks were vulnerable and raw, like a wound.

“They need looking after,” Sorrel said. “They are very old.”

They worked together in silence for a while, stacking the bricks around the soft mud.

“Did you do it?” Josie said after a while.

“Do what?”

“Push my friend.”

“Maybe,” said Sorrel.

“You really hurt her,” Josie said.

“So?”

“You can’t just hurt people.”

“She said you were tagging along. That was rude.”

“You can’t just hurt people because they are rude,” said Josie.

Sorrel hesitated. Then she said, “Well, I didn’t mean to. I thought she’d just fall a bit. I didn’t think she’d slip all the way down the slope. It was an accident.”

“They think I did it,” said Josie.

“Do they?” Sorrel looked quite shocked. “I’m sorry about that. And – and I’m sorry I hurt her. I didn’t actually mean to. I didn’t mean to at all. I just – I just lost my temper. It’s my fault.” Sorrel looked as if she might cry. “I honestly didn’t mean to,” she said. “I wanted her to learn a lesson. I thought about saying sorry but I was scared. I was really scared.”

“You should have said sorry,” said Josie sternly. “You should have told people it was you.”

“She knew it was me,” Sorrel said.

“She thought it was me!”

“She knew it was me,” Sorrel said again. “She knew it was me and she didn’t tell, she didn’t tell.”

“How do you know she didn’t tell?” Josie said. “You didn’t come out and see.”

“She didn’t tell on me,” Sorrel said. “She didn’t tell, and I didn’t say sorry. She didn’t tell, and I didn’t say sorry. I didn’t say sorry, and she didn’t tell. She didn’t tell, I didn’t say sorry, I didn’t say sorry, I didn’t say sorry…”

Josie looked up, and the low sun was in her eyes again. She was blinded for half a second, and she blinked hard against the light.

And she was alone.

“Sorrel!” she called loudly. There was nobody there. “Sorrel! Sorrel!”

But nobody answered. And Josie was still alone in the little red shed and it was very cold, in spite of the sun. She was very, very frightened.

And Josie ran. She ran without stopping, all the way home, and she found when she got there she was crying.

She burst through the door.

Mrs Curtis was sitting by the stove with her hands folded in her lap.

“What on earth’s the matter?” she said in her stern voice, and Josie discovered to her surprise that she did not know what to say. Mrs Curtis passed her some kitchen towel and told her to dry her eyes, and she did. When she had stopped crying, it seemed to Josie for a moment that Mrs Curtis was about to say something special, but she only said, “Well, Josie, there’s spaghetti hoops for your tea.”

It sounded, in the way she said it, like something more important than hoops. It was comforting, Josie thought, and that was not something anyone had ever thought about Mrs Curtis before.

Josie made the toast and Mrs Curtis opened the tin and heated up the spaghetti. Josie slid into her place at the table.

“Juice?” said Mrs Curtis. Josie was surprised – she did not have juice in the week, Mrs Curtis knew that. But she nodded, and Mrs Curtis poured her some just the same.

“I wanted you to know,” Mrs Curtis said, when Josie was eating her spaghetti hoops, “why I didn’t want to help. To come and see your friend. Young Mara.”

“But you did help,” Josie said. She did not want Mrs Curtis to feel bad when it was Mrs Curtis who had got the ambulance and the paramedics and the mothers.

“I should have gone faster,” Mrs Curtis said. “I should have come to see your friend. But you see, I don’t like to go to that field. And it seemed to me that – well, that history was repeating itself.”

“What do you mean?”

“I did something very naughty,” said Mrs Curtis. “We used to play in that field – probably all children in this village have done, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. It’s a good place to play.”

Josie nodded vigorously. It was a good place to play. The best place, she thought protectively. The very best place. It was strange to think of Mrs Curtis playing in it too.

“Was the red shed there then?” she asked Mrs Curtis.

“It’s much older than me,” said Mrs Curtis. “It was there long before I came to the village.”

“But you’ve lived here forever,” said Josie.

“Forever now,” Mrs Curtis said. “Ages now. But when I was ten I hadn’t lived here very long at all. I came from the town, you see. There was a war on. We were sent here to live, my brother and I, to get us out of the city. I loved it here.”

She paused, as if she didn’t want to say the next part. But Josie said, “Go on,” and she did.

“My friend and I were playing out,” said Mrs Curtis. Her mouth was almost closed, as if she was having to push the words out hard through her teeth. “And I did a terrible thing. We were playing at the top of the slope. And I pushed my friend. She was always bossing me about, always faster than me, always better than me. She was always the one with all the ideas. I was jealous, I suppose. She had a best friend. I was always the one tagging behind. I wanted her to be the one to fall for once. And she fell – and she was quite badly hurt, and her family moved away. I pushed her, and she fell.”

And suddenly Josie knew. Probably you (the one reading this story) have known for a long time, but remember, Josie didn’t know that this was a story. It was just her life, and it was all happening in a muddle of spaghetti hoops and isosceles triangles.

And Josie said, very daringly, “Was her name Sorrel?”

And Mrs Curtis looked very surprised. “Where did you get that from?” she asked Josie.

“I – I—” Josie didn’t exactly know what to say. You remember, she never did. “Did she die?” she said, all in a rush. “Did Sorrel die?”

But Mrs Curtis said, “But I’m Sorrel. Sorrel was me. Is me.”

And Josie looked at Mrs Curtis, and Mrs Curtis looked at Josie, and Josie saw that underneath the wrinkles you could see her skin was very fair, and very freckled.

“She didn’t die,” said Mrs Curtis. “But she didn’t come back to the village. I never saw her again. Never got to say I was sorry. She lives in the town now. I wish—” And then she stopped, as if she didn’t know how to go on.

“I know,” Josie said gently.

She finished her tea.

“Thank you,” she said to Mrs Curtis, and she did not mean for the spaghetti hoops.

“I wish,” said Mrs Curtis again, and went on slowly, “I wish I could tell her I was sorry. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to feel easy about it, you know. I did a terrible thing, and I’ve been sorry ever since. I really have.”

“I know,” said Josie. She did know.

They sat together in silence for a long time: a comfortable silence. They understood each other, Josie thought.

“What was your friend’s name?” she asked, and Mrs Curtis told her.

I told you Josie did not tell this story before she was a grown-up, and that was not quite true. She told Mara. She thought Mara should probably know. She went to her house the next day, and the other best friend was not there. Mara’s mum let her in and did not seem cross with her.

When Josie had told it to Mara, Mara was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “I see.” And Josie knew that she did see.

“I’m sorry I said you pushed me,” Mara said.

Josie said, “You weren’t to know.”

Mara sighed. “No. If I had,” she said thoughtfully. “I’d never have said it. Pushed by a ghost is a much better story.”

“Is it even a ghost?” Josie said.

“Probably not,” said Mara. “But it will be when I tell it. You’ll see. That’s the thing about stories. It doesn’t matter what actually happened so long as you tell it right.”

She brightened. “I’ve got a brilliant cast though – look at it. You can write your name if you want. Pushed by a ghost, time off school and a brilliant cast. I owe her, really.”

They thought about this for a while.

And then together they found a telephone directory, and searched for a certain telephone number. It took them quite a long time – days and days – to get the right one, because they could not ask anyone for help. They did not want to tell anyone the story.

And when they had found the telephone number, they rang it. It was quite complicated to explain, but they managed it.

And when they had managed it, they explained, sort of, to their parents, and to Mrs Curtis. There was an awful lot of fuss but they managed that too, and somehow it ended up (a week or two later) as a kind of party in Josie’s kitchen, with everybody there.

And a car pulled up outside, and an old lady got out of the car, and she walked straight to Mrs Curtis, and then – and nobody saw exactly how it happened – the two old ladies were hugging and crying. Tall, stiff Mrs Curtis actually crying!

“I’m so sorry,” said Mrs Curtis, crying and laughing at the same time.

“It was so long ago,” said the other old lady, laughing and crying too. “It’s been so long, it’s been so long!”

“Too long,” said Mrs Curtis. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry!”

“You’re forgiven,” said the other old lady. “Of course you’re forgiven! You were just a little girl! Only ten! A baby, really!”

And Mara and Josie looked at each other, because ten did not feel at all like being a baby to them. And Josie knew that it had not felt like being a baby to Sorrel either. It had felt just as important as being a grown-up person. They were still not best friends – not in any way the grown-ups would have understood – but it didn’t really matter. It was complicated. Lots of things were.

And without speaking Josie and Mara linked little fingers and promised not to forget: not to forget any of it, and not to forget how it felt to be ten, and not to think – not now, not ever, ever, thought Josie – that the things that happened to you when you were ten weren’t just as important as the things that happened to you when you were twenty or forty or sixty or a hundred. More important, maybe, Josie thought, because hadn’t Mrs Curtis been thinking about being ten the whole time? Hadn’t part of Mrs Curtis been ten this whole time?

But she did not say anything. It was not the time, with Mrs Curtis and her old lady friend crying and hugging each other, and everyone saying how lucky it was that Mara and Josie had developed such an interest in history, and Mara telling all the grown-ups there that she had read about it in an old newspaper.

That was what they had decided to say to the adults.

But to everyone else? To everyone else Mara told the whole story. Or a whole story, anyway.

Mara was right: it didn’t matter what had really happened. It was the story that mattered. Mara’s story had a white waily figure in a long nightie, and screams, and blood. They are telling it still, in the little village, as far as I know.

That’s how you know it was a good one: it went on telling itself, long after Mara and Josie had grown up and gone away.

This is not such a good story. Nobody is going to tell this one in the little village. Nobody tells a ghost story without a ghost, and how could there be a ghost in this story, when nobody died?

Josie was never sure, herself. Like I told you, she didn’t think it counted.

And then, one evening a long time later when she was quite grown up, somebody asked her to tell a ghost story.

And she thought about all the ghost stories she had ever known, and Mara who could tell better stories than anybody, and she thought too about a Tuesday afternoon in October, not really so very long ago, not really so very far from here, and a girl with hair the colour of autumn leaves, and the low sun in her eyes, and Josie opened her mouth, and said:

I expect you already know what a ghost story is like. Everyone does, and it isn’t like this…

She changed the names around a bit, but it was true, all the same.