Free A Place for Us by Harriet Evans Page B

wasn’t nice, she laughed at me for being new and having a pinafore on, and she was nasty to other girls, but she started being nice when she saw my house was big. She deserved it.
    When Wilbur’s with me, though, it’s all all right. They are saying they might put poison down for the rats, and if Wilbur ate it it would kill him, so he has to get used to sleeping in here, then. I like him being in here. I feel safe. We are friends. I draw him while he’s lying there. I can’t draw like Daddy but I try to match the way his back swishes in a curl, and how his legs fold under him so neatly. Wilbur is very clever as well as being a bit silly sometimes. Mrs. Goody says my drawings of him are very good, and I should hang them up in the classroom, but I don’t want other people to see them and ooh and aah so I put them up in my room.
    Daddy likes the drawings. “Well done, Daze,” he says, looking at the picture of Wilbur in the games cupboard hiding from a rat. “Lovely idea, that. Very funny.” But it’s not funny at all, it’s serious.

Joe
    T EN DAYS AFTER his accident, Joe Thorne left the Oak Tree and, carefully carrying his package wrapped in brown paper under one arm, walked up to Winterfold. He couldn’t help but be nervous. He’d mentioned he was doing this catering gig to a couple of people. “Ooh, up at the Winters’, are you? That’s good,” Sheila had said. “Listen here, Bob, Joe’s going up to Winterfold.”
    Bob, their one regular, had raised his eyebrows.
    “Right, then,” he’d said. And he’d almost looked impressed.
    The early autumn sunshine was like misty gold, flooding the quiet streets as he strode past the war memorial and the post office. Susan Talbot, the postmistress, was standing in the doorway talking to her mother, Joan. Joe raised his bandaged hand at her and Susan smiled widely at him, waving enthusiastically. Joe felt bad about Susan. He wasn’t sure why, just that she was always on at him. Last time she’d wanted him to lug some boxes around, then stay for a cup of tea, then the rest of it, and she’d gone a bit funny when, in the course of conversation (in truth, when she’d asked him outright), he’d said he wasn’t really looking for a relationship. Not at the moment.
    “No time for love?” Susan had said. “All work and no play . . .” She’d smiled brightly at him and he’d frowned, because he hated that look on her face like she was making the best of it. “You want to be careful, Joe, my dear. A good-looking chap like you, those lovely blue eyes and those cheekbones to die for, all going to waste! Someone should enjoy them. You can’t just coop yourself up in that flat night after night on your own.”
    It had freaked him out, more than a little bit. The way she’d stared at him, as though she knew something.
    Now he nodded at her in a friendly way and carried on, clutching the brown paper package under his arm so tightly that he gave a tiny moan as his finger throbbed once more.
    Bill Winter was a good doctor. The nurse at the hospital in Bath where Joe had ended up that day told him Bill had saved his finger and maybe his whole hand—Joe thought that was a bit dramatic, but they’d said if blood poisoning had set in it’d have been serious. Who’d want a chef who couldn’t use a knife, whisk a sauce, knead dough? What would he have done? He’d have lost his job here, that was for sure. He’d have had to do something else, become a bartender, maybe. Besides, he wanted to help Jemma out with money, even if she said she didn’t need it, didn’t need anything, as she kept telling him. Not now she was with Ian.
    Jemma had canceled Jamie’s last visit, a couple of weeks ago; something about The Gruffalo onstage and how he couldn’t miss it, everyone in his class was going. Joe hadn’t seen his son for two months. Jamie had been down to stay in late July, just after school holidays had started. It had been brilliant. They’d gone swimming in