THE BOY WHO KEPT Bees
All you could hear was rain, rain, rain. Rain drumming on the slate roof, streaming down the kitchen window, saturating the meadows and the dark woods beyond. Jess waited until her dad had turned away to check his phone, then dropped her half-eaten slice of toast under the table. She heard Amber swallow it in one quick crunch.
‘It always rains when we come to Wales,’ moaned Felix. ‘And there’s nothing to do here. Nothing.’ He shoved his chair back and stood up. ‘I’m going upstairs.’
‘Kick a ball about with you and Mike when it clears up,’ their dad called after him. ‘And tell Mike if he wants something to eat, he’d better be quick about it.’
Jess sighed. She felt Amber rub a wet nose against her legs and leaned down to scratch the dog’s head. Now her dad was scrolling through his text messages. ‘I might as well be invisible,’ she thought. ‘Come on, Amber, let’s go and see what’s new round here.’
a different song, babbling along the open drain that ran outside the row of cottages. Once, these had been the homes of farm labourers on the big estate, but machines did the work these days. Jess trudged up the footpath that led across the meadows to
