Short stories
Paul is going to meet his girlfriend for the first time today. He has picked out a knitted blue jumper with white stars on it. Colleen, the Nanny, complains that he spends too much time in the bathroom, nearly half an hour longer than usual. Paul has a theory that the house has lent him its smell of death, which is actually just the smell of antibacterial gel.
The iris of the camera is ringed blue. Joan never married and so she never had wedding photos. For some reason, that is what she regrets most. Not having photographs of herself and all her relations while they were alive, in pretty black and white.
We are in this together, he and I. We are the only two people who know that the end time is coming around. What we do together before that time is up to us. We have only to wait until the time strikes.
Under the bed, we play with her vast collection of dolls and make them perform the kind of intense things we have seen on TV. A mother tells her baby (the mother a bear, the baby a pink reptile) that his father has died in a car crash. The mother will have to sell the baby to pay for bread, or let them both starve. The baby is adopted by a huge fascist china doll who makes all her children line up in martial order and solute her with tiny baby hands. The baby fights the china doll tyrant to save its brothers and sisters, and is wounded in the fight.
Fresh love
Paul is going to meet his girlfriend for the first time today. He has picked out a knitted blue jumper with white stars on it. Colleen, the Nanny, complains that he spends too much time in the bathroom, nearly half an hour longer than usual. Paul has a theory that his house has lent him its smell of death, which is actually just the smell of antibacterial gel.
He has picked out a bouquet of bright daffodils. They are seasonal, because the month is March, the season spring, the world pitted with colour. The grimness of the inner city has given way slightly. It’s no longer dark when, at half past four, Paul goes to the church hall to pick up some bread, some milk, and some yellow flowers,
He buys the flowers from an old woman at a stall, who he doesn’t know. She smiles at him as he picks up the bouquet from where it sits in a black bucket of water, perhaps imagining for him a life that he doesn’t lead, a life where he regularly and spontaneously buys flowers for himself and the people he loves.
Paul’s house, which will not be his house for much longer, is part of a square of dark concrete with a green astro courtyard in the middle. His house is one on the west edge of the courtyard. All of the houses face inward, overlooking a security guard’s hut, which stands at the centre of the grounds. The houses are low, mostly one floor, though some have basements. They accommodate between one and four people.
Paul shares number 141 with three others, all young men. With them he makes only small talk, except for Harry, who sometimes has coffee with him in the mornings. The other two rise later, pushing themselves to move about and leave the house under dark, sleeping most of the day away or staring up into the white blank space of their single rooms.
This great square of houses can be entered from the south side from the street, or from the north side, through the carpark.
The entrances are not immediately visible from the outside. There are no security guards barring the passage to and from the square.
There is a window of yellow light on 24 hours a day at the security guard’s hut. When Paul used to get home in the middle of the night after work, there would always be a guard having a cup of coffee in the hut, with the light switched on and the blinds up.
Now the latest Paul gets home is 5pm. He goes to bed at nine, and rises early. He keeps to this routine, as this is one of the few things he feels he owns.
Paul will meet his girlfriend at the intersection between two roads coming from opposite directions. At the intersection there is a cafe and a children’s playground, and beyond that a green field and a pub. Paul sits on a damp bench and watches the children go on the round-about. Here is the beginning of love. Here begins his new life. He hopes she will be pretty.
He waits for half an hour with the bouquet of daffodils in his hands, until his watches says six, by which time the backs of his trousers are wet and he is gloomy and uncomfortable. Dusk comes up to meet him in blue and faint gold begins to shine from the little shops across the field. It is raining suddenly. The children scream and run to their parents, who produce, magically --- umbrellas, hats and coats, pulling them from small rucksacks, tailing their way back to their family-sized silver cars. They drive away.
Paul sits in the rain for a further ten minutes, until his daffodils are soaked. He forgot to bring any waterproofs. He thought that she would meet him at the correct time and that they would quickly go to a coffee shop or perhaps to the pub, if she preferred.
Now he thinks about the walk back to the courtyard and the unremarkable single bedrooms. Part of him is grateful. He will go home and take a shower and put on some thick socks. And maybe eat some porridge.
But then she’s there, in front of him, standing in a translucent bell-shaped raincoat, hood up and dripping over her tightly coiled black hair.
“I’m sorry,” she says to him, and on the way to the bar, the whole journey there, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
They sit, making a pool of water near the front of the bar, where there’s a makeshift stage with two speakers and a microphone set up. From the ceiling hang golden lamps, small and thin on wires, like slim hanging insects. A man with a scaly red face is trying to connect a guitar to the sound system. He keeps coughing and shuffling on his creaky stool, craning his neck over the loud-speaker. They can see the tufts of soft hair on the back of his neck. Every so often the microphone gives a sharp, ecstatic twinge.
Paul orders Evie a drink.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and he shakes his head.
“It’s really okay, really. No worries.”
“I’m really early usually. You know, I’m ten minutes before every meeting -- I’m that person. But this time. . .”
The old man shuffles into a standing position and says throatily, into the mike, “We’ve got a good show lined up for you tonight.”
Then he sits down again, and Paul and Evie wait for him to play something on the guitar, but when that doesn’t seem to be happening, the conversation has to go on.
Paul notices quickly that Evie speaks with the air of someone trying to take a lot of delicate glass objects into her hands. It’s the speech pattern of someone afraid to speak.
“Are you packing your things yet?” she asks him.
“No. I thought. . . I haven’t really thought about it.”
She clasps her hands tightly together. “I thought -- maybe if I started packing -- because it doesn’t feel real now. But I don’t know what we need.”
“Well, I think they provide everything for us,” Paul says.
“I’ve made a list of things.” Her eyes skip to the stage, where the old man is turning the dials of the speaker. She gives him a little bit of crumpled paper with black writing on it.
On the sheet is a list of items, small, domestic things that they might need, and a lot of other things that Paul wouldn’t have expected - mood boards, needles, biscuit tin, plant(s), knives, rugs, china tea set, wool, rug, cabinets, tracing paper, record player. .
“Do you have any records?” he asks her hopefully.
“No. But I would like to get some.”
“Me too.” He hasn’t never bought anything for his room before. It was only recently that he was allowed money.
The disappearance of an old woman
When she was young she played the romantic lead in a short film by the student cinema society. She sat topless on a pile of sand borrowed from the coast. It seems unimaginable now. But the memory came back to her while she was going through a pile of photos in a white envelope, when found herself glossy and saturated, red on white on sand in a grey university studio.
She must have liked it, the photo, since she had bothered to develop it. Joan doesn’t remember ever looking like that, that happy and excited, even a bit mischievous. It isn’t like her to pose naturally, or to smile well.
She slips the photo into the envelope, puts the envelope in the file, shuts the file in the cabinet with the others.
She is uneasy about how long she spent pouring over it, so she tells herself that she won’t look at it again today. She locks the cabinet door and puts the key on the bedside table next to the alarm clock.
All of Joan’s photos are labeled and sorted into dated files that she keeps in one of the wooden filing cabinets in her bedroom. Joan has a space for everything. She has kept files since she was eighteen years old, on taxes, her accounts, her medical history. They are still there, although she has no reason to hide them now. She hasn’t had a guest in about eight months.
Although she was never a church-goer she has begun to attend services to go to the tea-and-coffee breaks afterwards, to sit with the elderly ladies.
They ask her which church she went to before this one and she always says St Mary’s because that sounds like the name of a church, and they nod knowingly.
Sandy, from work, still calls.
They were meant to see each other last month, but Sandy had to cancel the date because of a hip, and they never got round to arranging another.
“Your house is so perfect,” Sandy said once, when she first moved into 24 Grove road, some years ago. She came round with a traybake and looked at the house with clinical blue eyes.
“Thank you,” she replied. She knew that her house was tidy. She kept it that way.
“And what do you do with all that space?” Sandy pressed her hands to the countertop, like she was trying to suck it up through her palms.
That had been a concern of Joan’s from the very beginning, ever since her parents died. What to do with the rooms. While she was working she never had time to think about it.
Now the space defeats her. The rooms sprawl and make her powerless inside them. She has thought about renting it out to a lodger, but she doesn’t like the thought of someone touching her parents’ things, or walking into the bedroom accidentally and seeing one of her mother’s dresses.
Her parents bought the house with her father’s money in the 1970s, replaced the grass lawn in the front with paving slabs, trained wisteria to climb the redbrick three-storey side and made military lines of beans in the back garden. Her parents had green fingers. Joan let the beans die while she was working, which she later regretted. Tending to the beans had been a favourite activity of her mother’s.
Joan thought about planting some more, in memoriam, but decided against it. Her parents only liked nature when they were the ones who put it there.
Joan no longer prunes the bushes by the garden gate. She doesn’t hoover upstairs. She also doesn’t often wash or comb her hair. These days she sleeps downstairs on the sofa, sometimes without changing her clothes. Her nights are invaded by red lights with grating voices from the TV. Sometimes she wakes in the night and slips through a lurid tele-dreamscape of wide, toothy faces and bright sounds. She hates and fears these periods, but that doesn’t stop her falling asleep without turning the TV off.
Every morning she puts on the blue slippers she keeps by the door and picks up the post stuffed halfway through the letterbox. She goes through it slowly, methodically, looking at each one, each advertisement. Someone must have told the postman that she is about to kick the bucket, because she keeps getting leaflets from will services.
There’s a morning when she’s seventy-one years old when she goes through the post to find a slip advertising a ‘find your family’ service. On it is a man in front of a green background, of indistinguishable age, with very white sharp teeth.
Joan wants to take a shower before bed but the water is running cold. There’s something wrong with her boiler but she doesn’t want to call someone to fix it. She heats a kettle of water and fills the sink. She stands in the dark over the sink and splashes her wrists and her body. Her face is a little black dot in the mirror.
Jeremy is the man on the front of the leaflet. He has a beautiful smile and a natural way about him, something quite genuine.
Instead of falling asleep in front of the TV that night, she makes the trip upstairs. She manages to take her clothes off and put her nightdress on.
Before she goes to bed, she looks between the curtains at the street in the night-time. Across the road, two children standing in raincoats sway in the wind. They are waiting for their mothers, or waiting for a bus to come.
The town where she is supposed to meet them is a middle of nothing place, one that she has heard the name of before. It seems the wrong sort of place for a studio. The terraced houses here are shabby, not distinctive. There is no change from one street to the next. Grey roads part into more grey roads.
Joan follows the map. She had to stop twice, where there are no places to stop, and put her hand on the fence or wall next to a front garden.
The studio appears after the multi-storey supermarket. It is a black block with double glass doors, not especially big, but new, seemingly. She sits on the bench outside the empty car park and looks at the entrance. She tries to push herself into a standing position and can’t. She looks at herself in the glass double-doors.
Thirty minutes after Joan was meant to arrive, a young woman comes out from the block with a cigarette and a sandwich. Joan waves her over.
“I was meant to have a meeting with Jeremy Trim half an hour ago. I’m sorry but I can’t get up off this bench. My legs don’t work very well.”
“O-oh.” The lips shift around the face. “Oh yes. One moment.”
The young woman moves back into the building. Joans touches her hair, then her wrist. She takes her powder from her handbag and moves the mirror so she can check her lips and teeth for stains. There are none.
They lead her to a white and orange room where they take more of her details. She lets herself breathe in the odd, unfamiliar scents, the harsh light. She is glad to be somewhere she usually is not. An awkward young man assists her. He takes her on his arm to the lift, and then to the filming studio, where the floors are laid with white plastic squares.
There are tall black lights on stilts, like tilting heads, and thick black cables combining to form rough centipedes on the floor.
“Watch your feet,” says the young man, as he leads her over the cables, onto the bright white of the set. He sits her down on a box of exactly the same shade. She thinks she must look like she’s suspended in the air. She lifts her arms slightly and imagines herself hovering.
Somebody takes her picture and the flash makes a noise and a light flashes above the range of indistinct faces.
“Joan Barbara Fox?”
“Yes.”
The iris of the camera is ringed blue. Joan never married and so she never had wedding photos. For some reason, that is what she regrets most. Not having photographs of herself and all her relations while they were alive, in pretty black and white. Some of her cousins were so attractive, but their faces are blurry now, and when she tries to remember them they shrink further away. And to have herself laughing in a white dress with her sister would have been nice.
Jeremy emerges, suited, short, less shiny than on TV. Something about his movements suggests the swagger of a boy in school with his shirt untucked.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “We didn’t know you were waiting out there, all alone! We always try to take care of the people we work with. If you’ll forgive us, I’ll do my best to make sure you’re properly looked after from now on.”
His suit is cheap -- she thinks she can tell by the outline. His watch is expensive, old fashioned analogue gold. His eyes are brown. One of them is brushed with grey and it gives him an off-balance, unsteady look.
“Now,” he says, clapping his hands. “Let’s get started. Tell us about yourself, Joan.”
He is sweating slightly on his forehead. Unfortunately she thinks he may have a receding hairline approaching, from this angle. If he were taller it wouldn’t matter.
“What do you want to know?”
He bears his teeth at her. Like a shark, she thinks. “Everything,” he says. The camera flashes once.
The Bride
We are in this together, he and I. We are the only two people who know that the end time is coming around. What we do together before that time is up to us. We have only to wait until the time strikes.
At dawn, when the red light appears, I see his face, soft as a child’s, his eyes as he watches the light grow through the window. He imagines the end time’s coming from underneath our bed covers, his body half in, half out, hand draped over a knee, the light laying down a line on the side of his waxy face.
I just wait. I know the new world is coming whether we fret or not. In the new world there will be only us two, taking it day by day, gently as we can.
I worry about him at school, when I know that he’s lying in bed in the house, in his attic room that has become my attic room since we married, not moving, not sleeping. Just keeping still.
When I come to the house, I will put my bag by the stairs and walk up the three flights to our room, and he will be there, thinking. Most days I leave him a glass of water and breakfast before I go -- some toast, some fruit and an egg.
More often than not I come home to find it untouched. Then I make him dinner in the microwave or on the hob, and try to get him to eat some. Sometimes he staggers up and goes for a walk. While he’s out, I do my homework and get ready for bed. Sometimes he wonders into our room late at night or early morning, and his footsteps wake me up. He sits on the edge of the bed with his knees pulled, his back a hollow spoon.
Since we married, the school have been whispering about us. I tell Matthew not to worry. I wish some of them were our friends. I imagine their faces burning and crumbling into great, cracked skin flakes, big as butterflies, and I feel nothing. Not much, just slightly ill.
It’s the knowing that is killing us slowly, knowing what will happen. It has sat in our stomachs and lain there so long that we both feel it like a phantom limb, part of ourselves. Sometimes I feel it come awake in me at night and I wake and feel Matt warm beside me and the great unshakeable knowing in my stomach and over my head.
They are talking about us behind our backs and saying things about us because the school loves to talk, and they don’t have anything better to talk about than us. It’s a big school but words spread like wildfire and the day after me and Matt got married, the first day we came into school, we found the corridors full of looks.
What I hadn’t told my father was the real reason we had to marry before the winter solstice, which was the coming tide of the end, hot and thick, which would steal from the world all of its purity and also all of its hatred and evil, and burn it all to hot molten wax, white as snow and white as heat.
Everything would end except for me and Matthew, because we had in us the burning fire of creation which would be reborn again, in us, and in our many generations of children who would populate the world after us.
We hadn’t told anyone that God told us that, and we hadn’t invited anyone to the wedding, not even my parents. We had only done what we knew was best, gone to the church where the Father knew Matthew through the choir, and the Father had married us on an October afternoon, when the light was orange and warm, without asking questions.
Father Michael married us in the copse next to the church, at an alter that Matthew made himself at his wood carving studio. Then we walked out of the church yard, past all the graves and the yews.
Matthew has a way of talking sometimes, like we are the only enlightened ones. I know he knows this isn’t true, that there are plenty of people smarter than us, kinder than us. But it just happens that we were chosen to outlive them all, whether or not we deserve it.
We will open up a new world like a nut, and when we do, we will see the world expand outwards, stretch and rear like a living thing, breathing itself back to life.
Matthew says, who said anything about deserving anyway? We are fit to live. The rest are not.
I will not miss the school. Other parts of the town have left their mark on me, and the week before the end, I go round to all the places that I will miss. The first place I go is Miss Annie’s flower shop.
I got my wedding bouquet there, a bunch of white roses and white baby’s breath. She packed it in translucent plastic and ribbon for me, her neat, firm hands making the twists and folds. Annie cried when I told her I was getting married. She didn’t, like almost everyone, exclaim about how young I was.
Her husband died in a fire before I was born. She goes regularly to the churchyard to place new flowers on the grave. I know her husband was a painter, because her shop is full of his pictures, mostly little oval people -- flecked triangles moving or faces in sweeps of irregular dotted colour. He also drew a lot of pictures of their dog, the staffy who outlived him, and a big portrait is hung over the shop counter.
She’s deaf in one ear now, and both of her eyes are black-pink and rheumy. Annie has to crush pain medication into her foot, but she’s remarkably sturdy for something so old and sick.
She and Matt used to get on. Matt would grab her around the belly and hug her.
Matt and his family had a dog, a long time ago now. And Matt doesn’t talk about it -- I just know that they had one because there’s a picture of a little boy who looks a lot like Matt holding a white round thing on his chest of drawers. The boy has a dark bowl cut, like the early Beatles. It makes my heart ache to see Matt like that.
I visit Annie in her shop and drop back the white ribbons she leant me for my wedding. She insists that I keep it. We chat about the weather and how school is going, and then she asks about Matt, and I have to tell her that he isn’t doing well. He is staying in bed all day.
Annie suggests that Matt and I take her staffy for a walk.
The day the end comes, I go to see Annie one last time before school. She is tying her grey curls up with a loose bit of string
“How is your cousin?” she asks, meaning Matt.
“No better,” I tell her, and her faces puckers.
“I’m sorry,” she says, taking my hand in her cool, old one. “It must be a strain on you.”
Annie thinks that Matt is depressed. This might be true. He might simply be bracing himself for the oncoming tide. I wish he wouldn’t turn to stone and leave me to cope. It’s selfish of him, but then he was never the sort of person who went to lengths to help other people, or to mediate himself for others.
“He doesn’t do it to hurt you,” Annie says. “He cares about you a good deal. But when people are ill, they can’t help but be self-centred.”
There’s a scratching at the door on the other side of the counter and Annie opens the door gently. The staffy shuffles in on her belly, her two back legs splayed out behind her like chicken wings. She puts her nose to my leg and buts me with her head.
It’s these pieces of softness that I can’t bear to lose. Dogs’ wet noses and flowers shops, and bouquets in Annie’s shop window, lit by the reels of fairly lights in the glass, and the press of the rain on the street in the dark.
“Why don’t you take the old girl back home for a night?” Annie says. “To cheer Matthew up.”
So I take the staffy home with me to make Matt happy, who for the first time in a week sits up in the bed, and smiles and cradles the soft, cushiony dog in his arms.
“Good girl,” he croons softly, and the corners of his dry lips tilt up. “Good, lovely girl.”
I tell him I should take it back to Annie, but when he doesn’t respond, I don’t have the heart to prise her away from him. Tomorrow’s dawn is creeping in fast. I don’t sleep. I spend the night packing.
It’s Matt’s idea to climb to a high altitude so we can see the town falling. We walk up to Box hill in the faint grey light and tie Annie’s dog to the trunk of an old oak beside a park bench. There we turn our heads north, to watch the trees as they come tumbling down.
The sun is rising when the earth shakes and a flurry of dust comes up in a hot well of earth and matter, particles of living things raining down in a dry volcanic eruption, of stone and wet earth, and organic stuff and urban stuff, brick and dust.
The ground shakes and Matt and I clasp hands. As the wood is struck down before us, we begin to feel the light, as if a great weight that was on top of us has been shattered, and our chests are suddenly free to breath and feel the cold air on our skin. It has arrived already. It is almost over already. We have waited for it and it has come to us.
I wish no one could see me
I am trying to write down everything I see. I would like to be a pair of eyes on the wall.
I have visited Anna’s house and it’s a maze of brilliant colours. Her mum painted the living room bright pink, the hallway orange, the bathroom a gold-speckled brown that I imagine children licking off glazed plastic bags at Christmas. Her room is piled with thick fluffy blankets and mountainous soft toys and curtains with pink tassels penning a small, dark-smelling bed.
Her bed clothes are always rumpled and stained and there are always chocolate wrappers and sweet wrappers stuffed between the sheets.
Under the bed, we play with her vast collection of dolls and make them perform the kind of intense things we have seen on TV. A mother tells her baby (the mother a bear, the baby a pink reptile) that his father has died in a car crash. The mother will have to sell the baby to pay for bread, or let them both starve. The baby is adopted by a huge fascist china doll who makes all her children line up in martial order and solute her with tiny baby hands. The baby fights the china doll tyrant to save its brothers and sisters, and is wounded in the fight.
We make fake blood out of cake-mix and red paint, and bandage the baby up in toilet roll. The bandaging and nursing takes a long time. We think that she may not be saved.
We bear her to the bathroom and let her float face-down in the sink as part of a last-ditch attempt at a ritual healing ceremony. Anna pushes the doll deeper into the water and its plastic hands fly up to make orange flower-cups, little victory fists.
Anna tells me about the dream she had where she could move knives with her mind but one of them got loose and cut her across the face and when she woke up there was blood running down her lip because her tooth had fallen out.
In return, I tell her about a dream I had of my grandma, ninety eight years old when she died, and still walking around, although sometimes my parents wished she couldn’t, because her dementia walks had them out on the streets looking for her every morning.
In the dream my grandmother walked down a curved dirt path bordered either side by a line of white star flowers.
In the deep blue twilight, while the moon was still up, she walked until she found the corner of apple trees owned by the council near the train station, and there she climbed the tallest, quickly, her small frog legs moving easily over the thick trunk. And in the dream I was following her, calling out and running.
I knew that my parents were also looking for her, but in the moments before I reached the tree in the dream I knew that I was the only one who would make it in time.
I ran, and felt sick, and the stench of the apples that had fallen and rotten in the past month came up suddenly through the grass.
And there she was -- in the dream, and really in the tree, because her body was inside the trunk, and her arms were sticking out either side of the tree like frail branches.
Her eyes were wide and dark below the scaled leaves, the pupils tilted up to where her brow, yellow like the yellow in her hair and the yellow in the branches, beaded up with sweat. And in that moment I wasn’t sure if she had died and then the tree had grown into her, or if --- the tree had grown into her and then she had died.
I told Anna that life had copied down my dream. In my dreams I prophesise.
That was how they found my grandmother dead in the apple tree one Sunday, at the end of a torturous three-day period of searching.
The first day she went, my dad sent word around our neighbours and some of them came to help us. Mrs D and her scottie dog came along. The dog went sniffing and scampering over the narrow path between our house and the allotments. On the third day they found her body in the apple tree.
I tell this to Anna under the bed covers, and then my dad comes to bring me home.
The bodies of the children that were stolen by the river are memorialised in the sixteen little crosses beside the old church. My grandmother told me -- this was while she was still alive -- that they were taken from good families.
Around the crosses are piles and piles of flowers, some of them old and dead, but most of them freshly placed.
There are dozens of little photographs, some in frames, others printed out and taped to dissolving bouquets. The bouquets are mostly brown and in pieces now. Bits have flown away and lie scattered in the street. There is an untied yellow ribbons draped over bushes, and fake flowers washed up to the curb against dead leaves.
Anna’s family isn’t a good family. I know this because I hear my parents talking about them. One day Anna invites me to stay at hers for the whole weekend and my dad says no. I cry and storm until he threatens to take me to their house and leave me there for good.
I like Anna’s house, which is bigger than ours, but I don’t like her mum. Sometimes she runs her hand through my hair without asking, as if moved involuntarily by the desire.
I keep completely still when she does this and try not to look like I notice anything. Her hand is long. It goes through the air like a cold wind and comes to rest on my head with the settling action of a bird. .
Anna takes me to the top of the hill in a park near her house. She has a hideaway up there, with a couple of wooden planks propped against a thick tree branch, making a kind of door.
In the hideaway she has a plastic tea set, and a stash of sugary drinks buried in the earth. We pour lemon pop for ourselves and share a pack of foamy sweets that Anna produces from a crate.
Before my grandma died, she taught me how to avoid being one of the children who die before they are old enough to escape the temptor.
He will come again, she said. You must watch out for yourselves, if you don’t want to end up as a little bouquet and a cross. You and your young friend -- and here she narrowed her eyes and looked at me, then Anna directly.
A devil feeds off this town. And those vile things in the river won’t hesitate before gobbling down a couple of little ones. Grandma wiggled her toes inside her open slippers and laughed.
The day Anna was tempted by him, I was wearing my summer dress for school, one with a yellow and white checked pattern.
I felt beautiful that day. For maybe the first time. I sat in the school field with my white socks flashing under the sun, kicking my shoes into the air and moving my toes free into the grass. I remember the buckle on my black shoes shining gold as I tore them off.
A good day, such a good day that I didn’t mind when mum was late picking me up. I stood waiting in the playground as parents and children filter out of the school gates. I smiled at mum as she walked to meet me. When she didn’t smile back, I knew something was wrong, but still in my blue dream, I didn’t want to know why she grabbed me so firmly by the arm and went marching with me past the hopscotch court and out of the gates.
These are dangerous times. I have to be careful. I will leave something behind for my parents to pick up. They always try to read my diaries. I don’t think they will understand that it’s not my fault that I’ve left, that I haven’t left just to try to trick and hurt them. When something bad happens they always think that I must be guilty in some way. But if the temptor takes me, it won’t be because I want him to. I’m going to try to avoid it as long as possible.
Anna didn’t want to go. I know because if she did, she would have told me first.
Mum says that Anna ran away from her parents because she is selfish and wants to punish them for not looking after her well enough. When Anna came round to my house the first time, Mum said that she smelt of sweets and left greasy handprints all over the walls.
Anna is a beautiful dream. She makes me feel like I’m flying. When I start a pretend game, she plays along so well that I’m almost worried that she thinks that the game is real, that we really are going to be sucked down through the carpet, or smothered by clothes demons, or whatever it is that I’m telling her.
Her eyes grow wide and she cries until I feel like it’s real, until I’m scared of myself, of the words I’m saying. But as soon as she wants the game to end she is suddenly herself again, laughing.
Mum and dad blame her, but it isn’t her fault. It’s none of our faults. When the temptor comes for you, it’s hard to say no. He has his fingers in the soil of the town.
His arms run like currents or bloodstreams underneath. He has a whole system under the earth, pulsing out his scent.
Grandma told me before she died how she planned to defend me with her every breath, but since she’s gone I don’t know who will save me from it.
In the street they have put up a little bouquet for Anna, some white roses wrapped around with silver. I want to tear it down and put a hole in the photograph of her that they have taped to the church gates.
Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of her as a reflection in a shop window or walking with her head down in a crowd. She might think we’re ignoring her, but really she’s just trapped on the other side of a screen.
They pulled grandmother’s body down from the apple tree on Wind Acre road. It was October, and the last apples lay heavy and scented in the grass. We had the funeral on Friday. On Saturday, the children in the town held a memorial for those of us who have been disappeared.
I hear her calling from far away, calling out my name, as we stand with the sunset, watching the candles glow. Then the night comes and I am walking in the vigil candlelight with the other children. I see her again in the dark, across the meadow.
Hell Dog
Characters
Adam. About eleven - just over the age where pretend games become less acceptable. A good story-teller.
His mother/ Sawston boy
Aunt Parry.
His sister Carol. About eight.
Voices - teacher, boy 1, boy 2, boy 3
***
Scene 1
Adam. (narrating) He approaches with his fist out. Unafraid. Unflinching.
The great beast recoils. Drops its head. Slinks back into its hole in the ground, moistening its lips with its heavy purple tongue. Its teeth are yellow. Not fully. Only the bottom of them, where the plaque meets the purple gum. Strings of saliva coil around its mouth. Gleaming in between its ears are two red eyes. Like drops of blood. Its face droops. All the lesh hangs off its jowls. It wants to take me. I know it wants to take me. But it won’t.
I show it my fist. It sniffs it. It bows his head. I look down at the monster and I have no fear.
Air raid sirens.
Mother. Adam!
Adam. I have no fear.
Mother. Adam, come in!
Adam. (breathing deeply) I have no fear. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid.
Electrifying music as bombs fall over London.
Adam. (still telling himself the story) Ever since he was a child, the boy knew that the dog was there. And at the same time he didn’t know. Wherever he went, it followed him.
He follows his mother into an air raid shelter. A bomb explodes.
Ready to take his life. Ready to take him back to its hole. A part of him knew it was there. Part of him didn’t.
Tight, white light.
Now it stalks you. Now it lags behind. Now you think you see it -- now it’s gone.
He clenches his fists and puts them either side of his head, ritualistically.
I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m not guilty. I’ve done nothing wrong.
Mother. Adam, will you stop telling your sister stories, please.
Adam. I don’t tell her stories.
Emily. He doesn’t tell me stories.
Mother. Well, then, why does she keep waking me up in the night with her knickers all wet screaming about ghoulies?
Emily. (nibbling her mum) Bitey bitey.
Mother. (smacking her with a dish cloth) It’s not nice.
Adam. I don’t tell her the worst ones. I don’t tell her about the stuff I’m really afraid of.
Mother. D’you not? Well, that’s nice. I’m glad you’re not afraid. Your sister is afraid of the ghoulie in the toilet.
Emily. I am not.
Mother. Fine, I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the toilet. I wish I could tell the bleeding coppers to take me away from my terrifying eleven-year-old.
Emily. I’m a ghoulie - rah! (Grabs her mother by the waist.)
Mother. All right, you.
Adam. There are no ghoulies here.
Mother. I’m glad.
Adam. They’re all gone away. (Looks up. A pause.) They got scared of the noise.
His mother looks up.
Sirens wail again.
Sounds of a plane crashing. Then the whistle and heavy thunder of a bomb, miles away --
Scene 2
Adam alone. Centre stage. Red light.
Voice of teacher. You are a vile young man!
Adam. (sobbing) I’m sorry sir.
Voice. You are a disgusting, worthless little slob!
Adam. I know, sir.
Voice. What are you?
Adam. Disgusting, sir.
Voice. What are you?
Adam. Disgusting, disgusting.
Voice. What -- a -- slippery -- mess. All over the privy floor!
A chorus of boys’ laughter. Rising together with the sounds of seagulls, deafening, wings flapping. A great mass of sound.
The boys yell over the hubbub jubilantly.
Voice of boy 1. Get him to clean up the shit, sir!
Voice of boy 2. How big was his shit?
Voice of boy 3. Put him in the can!
Voice of the teacher. (sonorous) Clean it up, Adam.
Adam. (to us) I have seen things. I have seen things and I am afraid. The boys and the master don’t know that I’m not like them. There’s something coming for me. And it’s bigger than they are. They would be scared shitless, if they knew what I know.
Voice of the teacher. Stand up.
Adam. I think I’ve done something wrong. Or I’m doing something wrong. I don’t know -- I -- I don’t know what it is. I just haven’t been able, t -
Voice of the teacher. He’s crying, boys.
Adam. To work how to. How to get through it.
Seagulls.
Sounds of a cane hitting something hard.
Sounds of waves breaking.
Scene 3
Brighton beach. Adam stares out at the water.
Adam. Out on the beach, I feel the breath of the merpeople. They sing like birds. They cry out to each other. It’s not beautiful to us, but that’s because it’s not for us. It’s just for them.
Picking up a shell.
You whisper into their shells and they can hear you. The secret slips through the shell and appears in the water as a little golden bubble.
Emily. (appearing behind him) Mermaids aren’t real.
Pause. Adam turns.
Adam. Who told you that?
Emily. People at school.
Adam. Who?
Emily. Sally, Lindsay, Ethel.
Adam. You shouldn’t listen to stupid little girls.
Emily. You’re weird.
Adam. Fine. If you don’t believe me, I won’t tell you whether mermaids are good or bad.
Emily. I don’t care. (Beat.) Are they bad?
Adam. Can’t tell you.
Emily. Are they bad?
Adam. Can’t tell you.
Emily lets out a war cry. She kicks and punches him. He holds her back.
Adam. Listen! Listen to me. Mermaids are good. That’s why you shouldn’t steal their shells.
Emily. I take shells.
Adam. You should give them back.
Emily. NO!
Adam whispers into the shell.
Emily. What did you say?
Adam. A secret.
He puts the shell back on the sand, carefully.
Emily. Are ghoulies bad?
Adam. Not all of them. It depends whether they were a good person when they were alive.
Emily. I told Sally they would eat her face off.
Adam. They don’t eat faces.
Emily. They eat Sally’s face. (Pause.) Aunt Parry is a bad ghoulie.
Adam. Aunt Parry isn’t dead yet.
Emily. She smells funny.
Adam. That’s because she’s a witch.
Emily. I miss Mum.
Adam. Do you want me to tell you the secret I whispered in the shell?
Emily nods.
He moves closer to her and lowers his voice.
Adam. There is a creature. A big creature. So big that it can only move around in the dead of night when no one’s out. If men saw it, they would try to catch it and kill it. But they can’t. It is stronger than ten men. It has teeth longer than your arm.
It doesn’t kill often. It stalks its victims for years. It chooses them when they are very young -- some say as soon as the child comes out the womb. Once the victim is chosen, they are the victim forever. Wherever you go, the dog follows. Always a step behind. In the corner of your eye. (Swinging around suddenly. Emily starts.) Sometimes you think you spot it! But you can never be sure. And because no one else sees it, you think it can’t be there. You think you’re just making it up.
The only thing that you can prove is that you’re scared. It lays fear in you like eggs. But fear can’t prove anything. Even if it’s always there.
Beat.
Emily is unimpressed.
Emily. If it followed you here, how did it get from London to Brighton?
Adam. It went underground.
Emily. How can a dog go underground --?
Adam. It digs tunnels. Obviously. There’s a whole system under there.
He kneels down and puts his hand to the earth.
He looks at Emily.
Catacombs.
He presses his ear to the ground and closes his eyes.
Adam. Sometimes you can hear it breathing.
Emily places her ear against the ground and closes her eyes.
Pause.
Adam. AGH! (hitting Emily’s shoulders suddenly. She screams. Adam laughs. She pummels him.)
He puts Emily on his back.
Adam. See out there? That patch of sea where the blue turns into green?
Emily. Yes!
Adam. That’s where they live.
Emily. Mermaids?
Adam.Yep. (He spins around. Emily screams and laughs.) There’s sea monsters. Sea snakes -- down by London bridge -- lots and lots of shit -- dead bodies, poo, rubbish, treasure.
Emily. Do sea snakes eat merpeople?
Adam. They try. (Drops her.) But they don’t win. The merpeople are too clever. (Play-fighting with her.) They catch them in traps and tie them in knots and skewer them with tridents!
You be the sea snake!
He pretends to skewer her.
Emily. AGH!
She lies ‘dead’ in his arms and he picks her up.
Scene 4
Black out. Lights up. Emily is no longer on stage.
Adam. One day, the boy discovers the dog in the daytime. The sunlight shines on its broad, black back. He runs, heart beating so hard he feels sick. He conceals himself. But the dog doesn’t chase him. It doesn’t even notice he’s there.
In its mouth is a child. It holds the child into the air and shakes it -- right, left. The child is alive and screaming, but not hurt. Not yet.
The boy could jump from his hiding place. He could run and cry for help down in the village, and lead a charge of people with pitchforks to the monster’s den.
But he doesn’t run. He doesn’t move. His hands begin to shake. He feels a weight in his stomach. He watches. He waits. He doesn’t help the child. It takes a long time. There are a thousand moments when the boy could try to help, but he doesn’t. He waits. He watches. The child goes into the mouth of the dog.
A painful squealing sound of metal on metal. Adam claps his hands over his ears and kneels, screwing his eyes shut. He waits for it to pass.
Aunt Parry enters, indifferent to the noise.
She watches him.
The noise passes. Adam looks up.
Aunt Parry. I had a letter home from Sawston’s yesterday. They say you have not been seen at school.
Pause.
What do you have to say for yourself?
Adam. Nothing.
Aunt Parry. Nothing? Your mother sends money back to me so I can feed you and clothe you and send you to school and buy you sweeties from the shops and presents at Christmas and you say nothing. You are spoiled to death.
Pause.
Aunt Parry. What were you doing? Instead of going to school. (Beat.) Perhaps you went to the pier and wasted all her pennies on the split machines.
Adam. No!
Aunt Parry. Your mother works hard. All alone. In that cold, empty house.
Adam. I know.
Aunt Parry. What were you doing?
Adam. Just walking.
Aunt Parry. Just walking!
Adam. It’s true!
Aunt Parry. Where were you walking?
Adam. Along the coast. Not far. Just up and down.
Aunt Parry. You know, I think I believe you. I was imagining you in all sorts of places, but really you were just going up and down the beach. And that’s so much worse than fighting or drinking. That would make you stupid and selfish, but not cowardly. You are a coward.
Adam goes limp.
It is unfortunate that the generation does not have the industrial spirit of generations prior. Young people today are lazy, complaining, and self-righteous. They whinge and whine about the state of the world and then when the government gives them a chance to prove themselves as honest, patriotic citizens, they cower like children.
I don’t expect you read the papers. If you did, you would know that there have been reports of desertions. Five in three weeks. And these are not men of the Commonwealth, no. These are educated English men.
In the last three months, a thousand men are arrested for desertion of the British.
Do you know where we put them? Detention barracks. Malta, Jamaica, Singapore, Gibraltar, Hong Kong.
All that playground rough and tumble is preparation for the wider world. If you can’t stomach it, you can’t stomach the world.
Adam. I’m glad you’re not my mother.
Aunt Parry. She will be ashamed.
Adam. I hate you!
Aunt Parry. Good. A little hatred is good for a weak boy. Now stand up straight. Shoulders back.
Adam does nothing.
Did they hit you?
Silence.
Did they laugh at you?
Silence.
Worse things happen at sea. What do you think you should do when the boys hit you next time?
Pause.
Adam. Hit them back.
Aunt Parry. What was that?
Adam. (snapping) Hit them back, hit them back!
Aunt Parry. And what if they keep hitting?
Adam. Then I’ll keep hitting.
A rumbling sound begins, quietly.
Aunt Parry. And what if they knock you down?
Adam. I spit in their faces!
Aunt Parry. Do you cower and whimper?
Adam. No!
Rumbling grows louder.
Aunt Parry. Never! You let the bad dog bite you. That’s the way to do it. You can’t run from the dog. So you give him your hands and you let him bite them.
Adam. You know about the dog?
Aunt Parry. I know him well.
Adam. You’ve seen it too?
She steps towards him. He shrinks back.
Aunt Parry. Why do you look at me like that?
Adam. Everyone says I made him up.
Aunt Parry. Of course they do.
Adam. Did you fight it?
Aunt Parry. I faced him.
Adam. And it bit you?
Aunt Parry. I let him.
If you hide now, it will be on your tail forever. Fears are much harder to face when you’re old.
Face it like a soldier.
Adam. Did you win?
Aunt Parry. (laughs) You can’t win, my dear. Let him bite you. I will be there to pick up the pieces.
Scene 5
Adam alone, packing.
Emily. Adam?
He starts.
Adam. (furious whisper) What are you doing up? Go back to bed!
Emily. What are you doing? Are you leaving?
Adam looks guilty.
Adam. I’m not talking to you.
Emily. You’re leaving me with her.
Adam. I’m going back to find Mum.
Emily. Adam! (She runs and throws her arms around his waist.)
Sound of a dog barking. They break apart.
Adam. It’s here.
Emily. What’s here?
Adam. You can’t hear it.
Howling.
Emily. Hear what?
Adam. I have to go.
Emily. Adam --
Adam. You stay!
Emily. No, no, you can’t leave me! I’m coming!
Adam. No, you’re not.
Emily. (crying) Why are you leaving me?
Adam. You don’t understand. No one understands. You’re fine here.
Emily. No, no!
Howling.
Adam takes a pocket-knife out from under his mattress and brandishes it.
Emily screams.
Adam. Shut up! It’s not for you!
Emily. I don’t understand!
Adam. I have to get out of here.
Howling. Growling.
Adam. It’s outside!
Emily. What? What?
He snatches her hand and leads her to the bed.
Adam. Hide here! Don’t come out until I tell you to! Promise?
Emily. No.
Adam. Emily, do this for me.
Emily. Why?
Adam. (crying) It’s not after you. It’s after me. I have to run now otherwise it’ll catch me.
Something is scratching at the door.
Stay!
Adam picks up his bag.
Emily. Adam!
Adam. Stay here!
Emily. Adam!
He exits, leaving her hiding.
Barking. Adam screaming.
She claps her hands over her ears and shuts her eyes.
Adam. I won’t fight it. I’ll run. I’ll run and I’ll run and one day I’ll be so far away that it will never find me again.