The Secrets Of Ghosts. Sarah Painter

      Gwen was standing with her back to the sink, her face drawn and unhappy. Cam was at the opposite end of the kitchen. He smiled at Katie but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. ‘Mint?’

      ‘Yep. And dulce de leche.’ Katie unloaded her bag onto the table, not looking at Gwen or Cam. After he’d filled a bowl with mint choc chip, Cam kissed Katie on top of her head. ‘I’ll leave you two with your cauldron.’

      ‘Funny,’ Katie said.

      After Cam had gone upstairs and Katie and Gwen had bowls of ice cream and spoons, the odd atmosphere dispersed enough for Katie to relax.

      ‘What do you want to do this week?’ Gwen already had a notebook open on the table. ‘Have you been practising the heart’s ease?’

      Katie wrinkled her nose. No matter how hard she tried, she didn’t seem able to make the remedies. She didn’t seem to be cut out to be a healer like Gwen, which wouldn’t be so bad if only she knew she was cut out for something.

      ‘You’ve got to practise,’ Gwen said. ‘You can’t do this stuff halfway. All or nothing.’

      ‘I know,’ Katie said. She sat down and tried to follow the preparation for Mr Byres’s foot cream. The finished product was the right colour but it was runny where it should be gloopy. Gwen peered at it. ‘I have literally no idea why that didn’t work.’

      ‘I’m useless,’ Katie said, throwing herself backwards in her chair.

      ‘No, you’re not.’ Gwen stretched. ‘Maybe your heart isn’t really in it. Do you want to try something else or call it a night?’

      Katie sat forward. Incensed. ‘But my heart is in it. I promise. I’m trying really hard.’

      ‘I know you’re trying, honeybunch,’ Gwen said. She scooped the failed remedy into a plastic bag and tied the top. ‘But sometimes trying isn’t enough.’

      ‘That’s depressing.’

      ‘Sorry,’ Gwen said. She threw the plastic bag into the bin. ‘It needn’t be. If you want this badly enough then you won’t give up, anyway, and if you don’t want it badly enough then you’ll stop trying and find the thing you really want to be doing and that can only be a good thing.’

      ‘You don’t think I should be doing this?’ There it was, the thought she’d been avoiding. If she wasn’t going to come into a power, a gift, and she was useless at the herbal stuff, then she had no place. No purpose. Katie saw the future closing down like a thick forest growing over a path.

      ‘I have no idea what you should be doing,’ Gwen said, her face a perfect blank.

      ‘I don’t believe you,’ Katie said. Being around a wise woman was hard work. You had the feeling that they knew more than they were saying, and it was hard not to resent that. Sometimes, just sometimes, Katie could see why people were wary of her family.

      ‘Look,’ Gwen put the kettle on, then turned to face Katie. ‘I had the weight of expectation from my mother. She trained me, she told me every day that my destiny was to be just like her and I ran away from that. I’m not going to make the same mistake and tell you what you should be doing with your life. You can’t fix things for other people. It doesn’t work that way.’

      ‘You fix things for people all the time,’ Katie said. ‘That’s why they come to you.’

      ‘That’s different. You can’t tell people what to do with their lives.’

      ‘But Gran was right, wasn’t she? You stopped running and came back and everything got better. You and Cam got together and you have a home and a life and you’re happy. I don’t want to run away.’

      Gwen smiled but she looked sad. ‘It’s not a map. You can’t follow my footsteps, you have to make your own path, make your own decisions. Maybe you should leave town, travel a bit, see the world.’

      Katie felt as if she was going to cry. ‘Why are you pushing me away?’

      ‘I’m not. I swear I’m not. I just want you to be happy.’

      ‘You don’t think I can do it.’ Katie knew that she sounded like a child and her voice wasn’t helping any, cracking like that and making her sound pitiful and teary, but she couldn’t help it.

      ‘It’s not that. I just think that you’ve been pushing on this particular door for a long time and that maybe it’s time to try another one.’

      ‘Fine, point taken,’ Katie said. She stood up and grabbed her bag.

      ‘Don’t go,’ Gwen said. ‘We can watch a film or something.’

      ‘No, I’m tired. I’ll see you later.’

      ‘Katie,’ Gwen said, crossing the room and standing in front of the back door. ‘Please don’t be angry. I’m only trying to help.’

      ‘I know.’ And that made it so much worse. She wasn’t a Harper woman; she was a client to be fixed.

      ‘Stay,’ Gwen said. ‘I’ll even let you choose the film.’

      ‘I’m not in the mood,’ Katie said. She gave Gwen a quick hug and stepped neatly around her to the door.

      Gwen said her name again but Katie was halfway out of the door and she didn’t stop.

      Once outside, Katie let the hurt propel her forwards. She walked at double-speed, not caring that the warm evening air was making her hot and sweaty, that every breath felt like a gulp of soup. Soon, she’d turned off the main road into town and was inside the maze of cobbled streets that made up the tiny town centre. She saw familiar faces of people whose names she didn’t know and several she did. Pendleford was that kind of place. Close-knit. Tiny.

      She was a Harper. One day, she’d be living in a big house like Gwen’s, dispensing wisdom and spells. A man with a dog on a lead nodded to her and she nodded back. Of course, she was going to have to get better at the spells and remedies, first. A lot better. The thing was, she knew she was going to do something brilliant. She knew she was going to rule the world or something equally amazing, but she’d always assumed the route to her something amazing lay in witchcraft. Suddenly, that didn’t seem so likely.

      At her front door, she paused to pet the cat that lived on the ground floor. It hissed and jumped onto a nearby wall. That wasn’t usual. Katie might not have been a brilliant witch, but she knew animals. Katie knocked on the door of the cat’s owner, Mr Davies, but there was no answer. She scribbled a note saying that she was worried the cat wasn’t itself and had it been wormed, de-fleaed and checked by the vet recently, and shoved it under the door.

      Upstairs, it took Katie several attempts to unlock the door as her hand was shaking. She was shivering, too, so violently that her teeth bashed together almost painfully. By the time she’d cooked a pizza from the freezer, Katie no longer felt hungry. Katie had always liked living alone, but now the flat seemed too quiet. She found herself wishing there were someone else around. If Anna were here, she’d make Katie a cup of Lemsip and crack bad jokes to check if she was delirious or not.

      Katie bundled herself in a blanket and lay on the sofa to watch The Lady Eve. There was one plus side to probably having flu. It would explain why she’d screwed up Fred Byres’s foot cream so badly. And why she’d fainted last night and was smelling pipe smoke that wasn’t there. It had been an olfactory hallucination caused by a fever. She’d Google it in the morning. Relieved, Katie fell asleep.

      *

      Gwen put away the glass jars and re-hung the bundle of comfrey and meadowsweet from the wooden drying rack Cam had rigged up in the kitchen. She hesitated over the bowl of foot cream, still unsure how Katie had managed to mess it up so badly. The cream had separated completely, the oil emulsion sitting on top of the other ingredients, as if repulsed by each other. It had never done that for her.

      Gwen emptied the whole mess into the bin