Free Five Things They Never Told Me by Rebecca Westcott

tracks.
    I turn, but the only things I can see are hedges. Perhaps I was mistaken? But then I hear it again – a faint cry in the distance. It’s quiet and frail and unmistakably human. And it’s coming from the direction of the water fountain.
    Shoving my phone into my pocket I start to run, dodging small bushes and rounding hedges as fast as I can. As I burst out on to the gravel area round the fountain I see three things. The first is Martha’s notepad, lying on the ground. The second is her wheelchair, tipped over on its side with one wheel still slowly turning and the third is Martha, sprawled next to it and making a sound unlike any I’ve ever heard before.
    I freeze, my feet skidding and making the gravel spray up over my trainers. For a second I lock eyes with Martha, her cheek pressed against the ground. The look in her eyes makes me feel something new. Something unwelcome. I did this. I left her on her own when I was supposed to be looking out for her.
    I blink and start to take a step forward but before I can move I’m shoved to one side as somebody blurs past me.
    ‘Hey!’ he shouts, sprinting over to her and kneeling down on the ground. ‘Are you OK? What happened?’
    My brain seems to have entered a planet all of its own because I am making no sense of the scene in front of me. It’s him. The boy I met in town the day that I bought the iPad. I have no idea why he’s here and I don’t know what to do about Martha but my feet are doing the thinking for themselves and suddenly I’m standing over the pair of them.
    The boy looks up at me. ‘Go and get some help,’ he tells me and while he’s speaking quietly I can hear the fear in his voice. ‘And be quick.’
    I stand for another moment, looking at Martha lying on the ground. She doesn’t seem so formidable now – just small and vulnerable. Guilt is churning around my stomach and I don’t think I can leave her again – but then the boy glances back up at me.
    ‘Go!’ he orders and I go, running away from the fountain and down the path towards the house.
    When I think about it later, I can see that logically, it only took a few minutes to track down Beatrice
and tell her what had happened. It didn’t feel like just a few minutes, though. It felt like hours. When I followed the care workers back to the fountain my heart felt as if it was going to bang right out of my chest. What if Martha died? That happened to old people, right? They couldn’t cope with falling over – something to do with their bones being really weak or something. If Martha died it’d be all my fault because I left her alone.
    But she wasn’t dead. Beatrice and the other care workers got her upright and then slowly, carefully lifted her into the wheelchair. The boy had moved off to the other side of the bench and I was too ashamed to look at him – scared about what I’d see on his face. As the quiet, solemn procession headed down the path I shrank back under the trees. This wasn’t the place for me, not now.

Martha
    I tend to believe that old worn-out clichés are genuinely a complete load of bunkum and today has proved me right, yet again.
With experience comes wisdom
. I’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life. I have lived for eighty-five years and had a great many experiences but I am no closer to being wise than I was as a girl of twelve.
    Erin is self-centred, self-absorbed and only interested in her own needs. Normally I would applaud those characteristics but she has overstepped the mark today. She failed to keep her word and that is a trait I refuse to accept in even my closest friends. I suppose, here, I must acknowledge that I no longer have any close friends, but that’s not the point. There are rules and while I, possibly more than the next person,
believe that rules were made to be broken, there is no excuse for breaking a promise. She agreed to stay with me in the garden and she wandered off at the first opportunity. No backbone,