Three steps ahead of her lay an adventure. It just needed a shape. She set off down the lane towards the sea, pleased with her boots. Bees and wasps attacked the blackberries on either side of her and she stopped to move a field mouse, perfectly dead with both eyes wide open. Death looked like a surpise he had not intended to miss.
Rose passed no one and no one passed her until she got to Simon’s stile. A thin boy with an earring and a dog was bouncing a ball, whistling in the direction of the sea. He laughed as he watched the bay waves. ‘Good day?’ A question she supposed because of the wide smile and his eyebrows lifting into his uneven fringe.
‘Why not a good day? ‘
‘You visited me yesterday’ said the boy. ‘And here you are, even wearing that hat! Your eyes are stranger though,’ he admitted and smiled again.
‘…Visited you? I stayed in all day. I’m starved of boats!’
‘When I shut my eyes sometimes’ continued the boy, as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘sometimes there is this tapestry. And as I wait and look, face begin to sew themselves into my head, stitch by stitch. Slowly. You were a pair of eyes to begin with. Two people too. Each from different times. Feelings coming in from somewhere else, travelling. I sewed you together all afternoon!’
And then the boy threw a bright red ball over the stile and the dog leapt through a gap and chased it, pouncing on the ball with a grow that sounded just like her owner’s laughter.
Dr Janet Lewison