Page 39 of Hot Ghost Summer

Leaning against the door jamb, I take a moment to appreciate the silence while the kettle boils. There’s no static buzz, no crackling sockets, no wavering lights, and no one to blow anything up because I’m doing something wrong. My lips press into a thin line at the thought of how much damage Hollis might have caused in my absence.

I finish making my tea and stroll out to the yard with the cup. Brigid is poking her inflatable enrichment ball around the hay trailer, and my lips curve up into a smile.

“You weigh over one tonne, yet you break less stuff than he does,” I joke with her.

She ignores me, of course, and that makes it easier to talk.

“I get it,” I admit. “He’s angry about the whole being dead thing, but he’s taking it out on me. He’s convinced I murdered him.”

Brigid sideswipes her ball, and it bounces off the corner of the trailer and pings toward me. I kick it away before she can charge it and accidentally ram me.

“I apologised. Told him I didn’t do what he thinks I did, but he won’t listen.” I take another sip of tea. Admittedly, it does taste better when made with a kettle. “Even offered t’ help him move on, you know—into the light—’cause I felt so bad for him, but he’s lording it over me now.”

Brigid raises her big bovine head at that, tongue peeking out a little to one side.

“Yeah, I know he’s an actual lord, or whatever, but he doesn’t have t’ treat me like he does. I’m still a person. He blew up my microwave this morning, Bridge. After I’d tried t’ help him.”

She headbutts her ball extra hard, and it almost bounces over the gate and into the field.

“See! I knew you’d understand. That’s why I came here.”

Despite the optimism of my words, my shoulders sag, and I pick at the rim of the cup with my fingernail.

“I live t’ push boundaries—you know all about that, don’t you? And free spirits like us, we need a certain handling. Like how Jayne doesn’t actually try too hard t’ stop you eating the council’s flowers from the high street because she knows you like it, but she cares enough t’ put a collar on you and will come out at any time o’ day or night if you’re in trouble.”

I sigh, and my breath ripples across the surface of my tea.

Brigid folds her front legs under her, and rolls her chest and neck over the giant ball.

“This thing with Hollis… it’s… complicated. Why doesn’t he just leave if he hates me so much? Instead o’ being such an angry jerk.”

Brigid lows contentedly, and the sound draws a smile from me.

“That better, Bridge? No fun being cooped up all the time, is it?” I pause, my mouth still open as my brain catches up.

Is that Hollis’s problem too? He spends all his time inside his phone or laptop, and when I said I was going out yesterday, he was adamant that he join me. Does he need a change of scenery? Or some enrichment?

That’s when Brigid usually breaks out: when she wants to experience new things. But what are enrichment activities for ghosts? If I get it wrong, he might blow up my entire flat. My nose wrinkles while I think.

“Back in a minute, Bridge. I need t’ get my phone t’ look something up.”

Going via the kitchen to rinse my cup, I head through to the visitor’s centre. Jayne’s desk is set under a Perspex-covered information board on the dairy’s history. I collect my phone from her drawer and power it on. While it loads, my gaze drifts over the old maps and photographs that document the Bowen’s Farm site.

The board displays its oldest hand-drawn maps and sketches closest to the entrance, and follows a timeline along the red-brick wall from the seventeenth century until a series of faded photographs dated to the nineteen fifties. Directly above Jayne’s desk is a modern blueprint that shows the reduction in acreage after the last of the Bowens sold off the land to developers in the nineteen nineties.

I must have seen these images a thousand times over the last couple of years, but it’s not until this very moment that the name registers. Bowen’s Farm Animal Rescue Centre, ringed in red on the map and located in the Old Dairy, is at the far south of the original plot of land. Pymmes Brook flanks the farmland all the way north and acts as a natural boundary along its left side, until it culminates in the Borough of Cockfosters.

Shuffling closer, I press my finger to the transparent plastic and trail it from the blueprint over to a computer-drawn image of Bowen’s Plaza. The same one that’s screwed to the security fence around the worksite. I recognise it now, but I’d not paid attention before. Plot 47 is on former Bowen’s land.

A sad chuckle slips out. Small world.

I look down at the phone in my hand with my thoughts firmly back on Hollis. Brigid’s loud and sudden bellow echoes through the empty building, and I snap my neck around toward the open doorway so fast that the longer strands of sweat-soaked hair whip into my eyes.

“Bridge?” I call out, feet already carrying me back through the barn.

Racing out into the yard, my gaze immediately swings left to the hay trailer, which is where she’d last been chilling with her ball. Both are missing.

I cut the most direct route to the metal gate onto the field, squeezing between the wall and the trailer, and come to a dead stop when I emerge on the other side.