Stacey was scanning the ground, her eyes bright, her hair tucked behind her ears. Then, she dropped down, her fingers slipping into the mud and withdrawing just as quickly.
When she straightened up, there was a small gray pebble in her hand. The excitement I had felt when she first dived in died at the sight of it.
“It’s a stone.” I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice. Stacey glanced at me, her eyes glinting in the dark shadows, but kept silent. Pocketing the stone, she continued to look at the ground.
I pulled my feet out of the mud with a slurping sound and, ducking out from under the bridge, made my way up the bank, wiping dust from my face and clinging to the marram grass to help me up.
When I was at the top I sat down to wait for Stacey. I looked about for the person who had walked across the bridge, but the land was flat and empty as far as I could see.
“Stacey,” I called nervously. Her earthy face appeared below me. One strand of hair was slicked with mud.
“What?” she asked, tucking the muddy lock of hair behind her ear and sniffing noisily.
“That person that walked over the bridge just now. There’s no one out here.”
Stacey grinned. She climbed out and joined me on the bank, wiping her shoes on the grass to remove the clumps of mud. “Happens a lot round here. Some say there’s a man who lurks near the river, waiting for little girls to kidnap.” She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out the pebble. “Here,” she said, handing it to me.
I took it. It was lighter than I thought it was going to be. The surface was smooth and greasy. I rubbed it between my hands. It began to crumble. Stacey leaned toward me.
“I wonder who dropped it?” she whispered. I could feel the ends of her hair tickling my ear. I rubbed harder at the pebble. It started to break into pieces, disintegrating beneath my fingers. That same putrid vegetable smell hit my nose. It was made of mud, but there was something hard beneath. My tummy twitched as a flat surface met my thumb. A little brooch, its pin long since lost, fell onto my lap, brown and rusty, but solid and round.
“Buried treasure,” Stacey said.
“It’s like magic,” I said. “Ghost magic.”
Stacey nodded, her face serious, staring out at the flat fields that surrounded us.
“You need to see the shrieking pits. That’s proper ghost magic.” She leaned back on her elbows and raised her eyebrows, waiting for my reply, knowing it was coming.
“What’s the shrieking pits?” I asked obediently in a whisper. The gray sky dropped lower on the landscape as if it were listening too.
She leaned in to me and looked me in the eyes. I noticed her left eye had a dark gray slash across its green iris. “No one knows why they’re there. Some say they’re millions of years old, ancient holes that have filled up with rainwater. Others say they were dug a hundred years ago—people quarrying for rocks and flint. But sometimes, weird noises come from them. Screams and cries for help. And people see things when they’re near them.”
“Things?” I murmured, almost not wanting to hear her answer. I was beginning to regret my trip to the river.
“People. Acting weird. Ladies dressed in old-fashioned clothes.”
“Have you seen them?” I held my breath, my body stiff, waiting for her answer.
“Nah. I don’t even know where they are. We should go looking sometime.”
I scratched at the brooch in my fingers, relieved. Flakes of metallic mud fell away. It was pretty, about the size of a pound coin, with a frilly edge and lots of little decorative holes dotted about it, like a doily.
“I think I’m going to like living here,” I said.
“Where did you live before?”
“Dad and me moved around a lot. Before we moved to Braër we were staying in a B and B. And we camped too.” I had a vague memory of a caravan and strange-smelling tea. “Before all that we used to live with my mum in London.” I scratched my finger into the muddy ground. “But she went away.”
“It must be weird, not living with your mum anymore.”
I hadn’t thought about it before. I rarely thought about Mum. It was years since I last saw her; she was so far back in my past that weeks could go by without me remembering her at all. Now, with Stacey’s question, a guilty feeling opened up inside my chest.
“Why did she go away?” Stacey said.
“I don’t know.” I put my eye to the holes in the brooch. The world was fragmented, like looking through a thousand keyholes, and I could only see a tiny part of everything so that I couldn’t work out what it was I was looking at.
“My dad went away,” said Stacey. “I don’t see him often, maybe five times since I was a baby.”
“That must be strange.” I couldn’t imagine not having a dad.
“It’s okay. I sort of do have a dad sometimes. It depends who Mum brings home. Sometimes, if I don’t want to go home, I go to my gran’s instead, and sometimes I just stay out here.” She gestured to the flat fields that surrounded us.
“What, even at night?”
Stacey shrugged. “Sometimes. Do you still see your mum?”
I shook my head. I tried to picture what she looked like, but all I could see when I screwed my eyes up was a pair of smooth, delicate hands holding on to mine, sharp red nails gripping my skin painfully, a glittering diamond ring crackling with light.
“I haven’t seen her since we left London,” I said, “and that was when I was four.”
“Is she still in London?”
“I’m not sure.” I tried to remember if Dad had ever told me. “I think she might have left to join the circus,” I said, thinking about a painting Dad was working on at the moment: sequins and colorful feathers and soft, wavy chestnut hair. I had glimpsed it earlier, walking past Dad’s study, but he had kicked the door shut before I could see anything more.
“Cool,” said Stacey. “Imagine being with lions and elephants every day.” She pulled at the marram grass. “I’d love to go to the circus,” she said wistfully, “but Mum never goes anywhere. She just sits at home, watching TV.”
“Where do you live?”
“On the other side of the village. You know the long road that leads out toward town?”
I nodded, remembering an ugly line of boxy houses we’d driven past when we moved here.
“I live over that way in a little red brick house.”
It sounded like something out of a fairy tale. I imagined her and her mother, welcoming different dads inside, plying them with mugs of tea and cuddles.