Page 4 of The Fall I Fell

We jogged through the ploughed field and by the time we reached the tree, the mud reached my knees. I’d played in the treehouse before, but on that day it seemed different. The branches were pruned. The tree looked neat and tidy, and the wooden house sitting in the middle of it looked alive. A skull and cross bones had been drawn onto an old pillowcase and flew like a flag from one branch. Chalk sketches decorated the walls like cave paintings depicting stories of castles, beasts and bravery.

‘Wow,’ Callum breathed as he looked at it with an open mouth. He said exactly what I was thinking as my legs trembled with excitement.

‘Stay here and be my look out,’ I ordered my brother. He saluted me with such conviction, I knew no one was getting past him.

Scaling the lowest branch, I hauled myself into the house. A sharp pain stung my foot as I snagged my sole on the raw wood with a hiss.

‘I bet you’ve got a splinter now.’ A quiet voice that I’d never heard before came from the corner. A boy about my age was lurking there, surrounded by piles of books and a collection of rocks and feathers.

I sat down cross-legged to inspect my toe. The stranger was right. A thick splinter was jutting out from the filth of my big toe and I winced at the sight of it.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, pretending that my toe wasn’t throbbing and the tears weren’t threatening to fall.

‘Who are you?’ he parroted. His hair was scruffy and sticking up in so many different directions that I’d swear he was a scarecrow if he weren’t talking to me. His feet looked like mine, though – shoes of mud enveloped them.

‘I asked you first.’ I folded my arms over my chest.

‘You’re in my treehouse.’

‘Well, my grandad said that this is his field. So, this is his treehouse.’

‘So, you’re Farmer Harry’s granddaughter then?’ He smiled as if he’d caught me out. ‘I’m Jacob.’ He got up from his shadowy corner and stretched out an equally dirty hand to shake as he came to sit beside me.

‘I’m Ava.’ I squeezed my foot, hoping that stopping any blood flow to it would also stop the tingling pain of my splinter. I didn’t want this boy to think I was a baby.

Jacob grabbed something from one of the chests and opened it on his lap. ‘Bug collecting kit,’ he said, as though he could see me watching him closely.

‘Cool.’

‘Here, give me your foot.’ He took a pair of tweezers from the kit and I couldn’t hide the way my eyebrows climbed my face. Going to the doctor was always scary, and this felt all too similar. ‘Don’t worry.’ Jacob pressed the ends of the tweezers together and they clicked softly. ‘They’re only plastic. It will hurt more if you leave it in. My brother left one in his thumb and it got all big and yellow and then it started leaking all of this smelly stuff. It was gross.’

Cautiously, I extended my foot out towards him. He gripped my ankle gently, though just firmly enough that I couldn’t squirm away. Like a surgeon, Jacob took his plastic tweezers, positioned them over my splinter and plucked it out in one swift motion.

‘Ow!’ I squealed.

‘Ava?’ Callum’s panicked voice called from outside. ‘What is it? Did the baddies get you?’

I peered out the ‘door’ – more of a hatch in one corner of the treehouse – and found my twin halfway up the same branch I had just used, gripping onto it for dear life.

‘I’m okay, just a splinter,’ I shouted back. ‘Here, take my hand.’ I reached out and dragged him up into the treehouse. ‘This is Jacob—’ But when I turned back to introduce Callum to my new friend, he was gone.

Rushing to the window, I found a rope ladder swinging from its frame. Jacob was nowhere to be seen. Looking back now, I know he ran because he was shy, but back then it felt like I was going crazy. I spent far too long questioning whether he was even real at all. When we were kids, Jacob hated being in a room of more than a few people, he didn’t like having to make conversation, or pretending to listen. I’m sure he’d have run away from me too if I had been any slower climbing that tree, but perhaps it was fate that he stayed.

‘Oh,’ I said, though Callum didn’t seem to notice.

‘Woah, cool!’ He was too busy rooting through lunchboxes filled with chalk and chests filled with all kinds of treasure – trinkets, action figures, seashells and whatever else.

Grabbing a pencil and a notebook from one of the chests, I scrawled a note and hoped that if Jacob was real, he would read it on his next visit.

Thank you

Callum came up behind me, sporting a knight’s helmet, a stick in place of a sword, and a hobby horse thrust between his legs. ‘You’re writing them a note?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘Ask if we can join their club. I can be a knight and you could be a pirate!’

So, I did just that. My handwriting had never been the neatest and it looked particularly scratchy as I pressed the page against the woodgrain as a makeshift table. I signed it off with a questionable drawing of two crossed swords before looking about for somewhere to leave it that wouldn’t get wet, or blown away. Finally, I found a nail by the window that wasn’t hammered fully into the plank and pierced the page with the blunt end. Our note flapped against the treehouse like an old WANTED poster.