Jay, Lizzie and the Tale of the Stairs

by G J Lee

  Chapter 15

  The Farmhouse

  Lizzie didn’t arrive the next night. Or the next. I started to think the whole thing was just another big dream. Those few days were dull and grey and I made my way to school through a drizzle that sort of matched my mood. Dad was constantly worried about Mum. One night I went to visit her and she seemed pleased to see me but she still looked weak and thin and had a faraway look in her eyes. It looked like she was looking beyond me and Dad, searching for someone who she had been told was coming.

  Kyle and Beth still stayed clear of me. The only real thing I looked forward to was Mr Butler’s history lessons where we carried on looking at the First World War and how it affected the whole of Britain. Well, not just Britain, but Europe and the world too.

  According to Mr Butler an age of innocence had been lost and things were never the same again. I found myself chewing those words over and over as I made my weary way around the rest of that particular day - ‘…never the same again…never the same again…never the…same…again…’

  Loitering around the house in the evenings was no fun. Dad was often at the hospital or was busy at work and sometimes I’d find myself cooking beans on toast, looking at the TV (not watching it) and wondering if I was becoming what they call ‘mad’.

  I caught flashes from the small room and the house with the woman and men. And it was just that – flashes. And not just sight and sound, either. For instance, I was slowly chewing on toast one morning and Dad had just gone out the front door to work when I felt a sharp draught. Because of where I was sat it was weird and unusual. All the windows and doors were shut. Dad always makes sure of that before he leaves for work and the air outside was still. I had a ‘flash’ of sitting on the hard bed in the small room looking longingly at the small door. It wasn’t so much ‘seeing.’ It was more like a ‘feeling.’

  Another time I was sat working through shapes in Curly Roots’ Maths class when I had a ‘flash’ of the woman’s face in front of me. It wasn’t horrible. She seemed to be talking to me and was smiling a lot and I found myself smiling down at my exercise book. The boy next to me, Ryan Terry, noticed something was wrong and leant over. He whispered in my ear.

  “Have you just let one go?”

  We both sniggered and Curly Roots, who had sat down to staple more bits of paper to one another, shot us a sharp look.

  A few nights after this I was sat at my computer in my piranhas. Dad was banging and crashing his way through the days' dishes downstairs and I was looking at images taken from photographs during the First World War. The pictures were black and white and grainy and a lot of them were not what I was looking for. I wanted pictures of explosions and men fighting, of tanks and planes and big battleships, not farmhouses from (I looked closer at the monitor, at the explanation underneath) ‘…Bavaria’.

  I clicked ‘previous’ and then I stopped.

  Stopped dead.

  I went cold.

  One of the images I recognised. I clicked to enlarge and peered in at what should have been something unrecognisable.

  In front of me was a photograph of a farmhouse. The picture was, like the others, old and black and white and grainy. It was also slightly blurred and out-of-focus. A low, rickety wall ran along from the left of the image to the weak stone walls of a building that seemed about to collapse. There was one wooden door, front and centre, and the place only seemed to have one floor. There were a couple of wooden windows and a smaller one at the side. The roof was flat with a tube sticking out of it. There were faint wisps of smoke coming from this tube so I assumed it was a chimney. Around the house were bushes and trees of different shapes and sizes and through them you could just make out a grey and flat landscape beyond.

  My attention was drawn to the small window at the side of the house. It was small, nearly at the roof and darker grey blurs seemed to show bars outside. But I couldn’t be sure. And, a few feet away from the barred window, a spindly tree.

  I leaned back in my seat and let the feeling, of seeing something that you had long forgotten, wash over me like a warm shower. The idea of déjà-vu was familiar but this time it was really strong.

  Bavaria? I couldn’t have been there before.

  Could I?

  I stared at the screen for ages trying to sort out of all these weird emotions and strange feelings. I could make no sense of it. In the end I saved the photograph and have looked at it a lot since. I’ve drawn a quick sketch of it here.

  On this same night Lizzie arrived.

  She pocked her head out of my floor and tried to make me jump. She did but I didn’t show it. Secretly I was glad to see her again. It proved that, for now at least, I wasn’t going completely mental. She was wearing a dress with a cardigan that covered her bare shoulders but she still wore white socks pulled up to just below her knees. Her hair was still twisted into pig-tails. I could also see Jesus on the Cross in dull black and white at her neck. Lizzie skipped the last few steps to the foot of my bed.

  “Hello, Jay,” she said happily, taking her handkerchief from the front pocket of her cardigan. She wiped her nose, replaced it, then stood with hands clasped in front of her.

  “Where’ve you been?” I asked her. Lizzie frowned as if hurt. “I thought everything was a dream.”

  “Well, I’m here now,” she replied after a while. Then she smiled. “Fancy coming to my house?”

  I didn’t really want to go. Not now. Not right now. I wasn’t prepared, unlike last time.

  “I don’t know, Lizzie,” I whined, “it’s late and I’ve got school in the morning.”

  “So have I.”

  I thought a bit more.

  “My Dad really needs to see you. He says you’ve seen more.”

  I thought about this. “Yes, I have.”

  I thought about Mum, sad and ill. And I thought about all those families that had lost fathers and sons during the first war. And I thought about the lonely, white haired old woman in the poem left on the green carpet beside my bed. Then I thought about what I’d promised myself in the garden as the smell of Albert’s pipe lingered and left. If it had ever lingered at all. I thought about all these things and when Lizzie looked up and told me that it was important I imagined Albert sat alone on the couch in the front room puffing thoughtfully, hopefully, at his pipe.

  And I saw Albert glance at the nets and the window, literally willing Ernie home.

  And knew that I had to go.