The Ghost in the Garden

The ghosts had dragged themselves home. Alby sat by the gold-dusted roses, drinking the orange rays of a sun that wasn't quite ready to give up the day. The bees rose up and down over the hedgerows as if drifting on a warm current. If this was heaven, he thought that would be okay. He liked it here, far more than he liked the church. It was cold in there and outside, gravestones cast long shadows on the grass and when he drifted through he felt as if he could slip into the dark shapes and never leave. The thought scared him. Here, he wasn’t scared. The house was too far away— he enjoyed losing himself amongst the first and the bluebells and the far smell of a dying bonfire. And Ethan. He liked to watch him tend the leaves that were beginning to seep into the grass. Ethan was trimming one of the small trees, closer to the house. Alby let himself rise and he drifted through the nats and the dust and the sun and sank again next to the fountain. The water was dangerously low in the basin and what was left was a strange shade of cool green. The same green had crept up the sides, infecting the surrounding concrete with patches of wet moss. Alby didn’t mind—he'd overhead Ethan telling the lady of the house that he'd like to clean it up, fix the pump, and make it shiny and new again. “It will do a hell of a job at keepin' them nats away, ma'am,” he'd said. “They like still water, you see. You get that fountain going and they soon clear off.”

The nats didn’t bother Alby nearly as much as they did Ethan, but he found no pleasure in that truth. He found his comfort in looking at Ethan because Ethan always looked back. His eyes always found Alby’s face and stared half in awe and half in a quiet nervousness—Ethan was too old for fear, too curious about the thought of the grey boy. Alby was sure that Ethan couldn’t actually see him—he fancied that maybe some part of his curious existence was catching the drowsy afternoon light and sending out glimmers across the green pool and the streams of dust and it was those flecks that Ethan could see.

Alby also liked how Ethan would talk out loud as if he was talking to someone because he found amusement in trying to fill in the gaps. He would sit and send unheard utterances for so long sometimes that he would forget that they weren’t actually talking.

“You’ll never guess what happened to me today, Tommy,” Ethan said one day in the attic. Tommy was Ethan’s brother—Alby had put the pieces of broken conversations together to work that one out. Ethan often fancied he was talking to Tommy, but his brother was in London working as an officer on the home front.

“What did you do today, Ethan?” Alby said, his smooth and brittle words falling on no ears.

“Only went and found me some white spirit, didn’t I?” Ethan was looking down as he spoke, concentrating on the job that hung from his thick, white gloves. “Now I can get that ruddy paint off the stable door and give it some lacquer.” Ethan didn’t often mumble on about much else other than paint and bees. Alby enjoyed it nonetheless.

“Mind you do a good job,” he chimed in quickly because Ethan spoke again and confused the flow of their interactions.

“I will do a bloody good job, mind you, Tommy. You know I will.” Alby smiled to himself.

Later that evening Ethan had routinely collected his permission to wander down to the nearest local. The radio there was clearer than the one at the house and he found his comfort in tuning in each evening so that he could at least pretend like he knew what was going on.

Alby drifted slowly behind him. The evening was still warm and a new fire had plumed the smell of an early autumn into the air. The roses in the hedgerows, on either side of the road, were purple now under a wine-colored sky. Ethan took the second of his two usual routes—Ethan didn’t like this one—it meant they had to pass the graveyard, but still he followed him, breathing in the occasional butterfly and closing his eyes as it passed through his chalk hair.

The church was simmering in the last intense rays on the evening. They gripped the horizon, stretching through the churchyard.

There were no shadows. Just a boy, standing by the gate. Ethan took no notice. He wandered along the road and began whistling a tune that Alby often heard, but the gap between them was stretching out. Alby had stopped. He watched reluctantly as Ethan turned the corner towards the main bulk of the village. Then he turned to the boy.

“You alright?” he called. The boy looked around bewildered.

“Me?” he called back as Alby drifted closer.

“Yeah, you.”

“By God, you can see me. There ain’t been one soul who's given me so much as a rotten look. I can’t understand it.”

Alby thought for a moment about the response that lingered on his tongue. But Alby was just a young lad and lads don’t often hold their tongues the way men do.

“It 'cause you ain’t alive.”

A 'what?' fell out of the boy’s mouth. “Yeah I know, it’s awful rotten luck, but it’s not so bad if you know where to be.”

“Where to be?” the boy had grown paler than his death.

“That’s right. I sit in me aunt’s garden an' her house sometimes. It nice there—nicer than here anyway.” He gestured to the shadows that had crept back whilst they were talking.

The dust and the bees in the hedgerows took a breath and then stood still for a long, long moment.

-Charlotte Humphrey-