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She was just a little girl. Acid yellow, wet leaves whipped against her stockinged legs and whirled in angry flurries amongst the branches of the trees lining the path home from church. She didn’t think of herself as a little girl. Little girls dressed as superheroes and princesses had been demanding her attention all afternoon. Years ago she’d been like them but now she was grown up. Thirteen. She’d been helping at the Pumpkin Heroes Festival in the church hall to where once, everyday; an age ago, she’d trailed in a neon-jacketed-crocodile from her old primary school down the road to the ‘After School Club’ half a mile away. She’d hated ‘After School Club’.
Today’s event had been organised by the new vicar keen to take a stand against the tidal wave of Halloween related incidents ripping through the neighbourhood. Feral children wearing witch masks, ghoul masks, demon masks, vampire masks, ghost masks and costumes festooned with bandages soaked in fake blood and cobwebs had been terrorising people for days. ‘Trick or Treat’. More like ‘Threat or Sweets’. Some hapless folk, out of tune with modern Halloween mania, had lit bangers pushed through their letter boxes and stones thrown at their windows after turning away the little and not so little devils on their doorsteps. This year Halloween had fallen on a Sunday, the Lord’s Day, and the vicar felt compelled to act and organised a party for the children of the After School Club plus The Sunday School plus any of their friends and relatives who wanted to come along. The event had been a success as parents of all religions and none, relieved of the obligation to organise Halloween activities, had packed their children off to the church hall and enjoyed a Sunday afternoon of peace and quiet.
She’d been surprised when the letter came from the vicar appealing for past ‘members’ of the After School Club to help with the party. But she’d said yes. She had nothing else to do. Snapchat and Tik Tok and Instagram had been full for days of teenagers in ever changing post-apocalyptic costumes and rivalry was stirring between the hosts of different Halloween parties. Not that it mattered to her. Not much. She wasn’t part of the cool crowd, her best friend was tied up with a big family reunion and her old friends from primary school seemed to be more interested in boys these days. Even though she wasn’t remotely interested in Halloween she felt left out. Alone.
Every shop front she had passed by was advertising ‘Spooky Offers’, ‘Scary Treats’ and ‘Halloween Horror Cakes’. Plastic carved pumpkins leered out from windows; plastic skeletons jiggled in draughts over doorways; LED hell-fire flickered along windowsills. She couldn’t see the attraction.
The children at the vicar’s party had enjoyed dressing up, getting wet bobbing for apples, setting LED lights shining from the carved pumpkins they’d brought along for the ‘Biggest Smiley Face’ competition and then there had been a bonfire and toasting marshmallows; some songs and some stories. They’d loved it all. Not exactly Halloween but more of a jolly cross between Harvest Festival and Diwali. A festival of light and happiness for the vicar had said that Jesus was the light of the world and Sunday 31st October was His day – but she wasn’t sure about all that.
She shivered. The days were getting colder and the nights were drawing in. The clocks had gone back an hour last night and although it was only five o’clock it was dark and drizzly. She was walking away from the shops and about to take her usual short cut through the park when she heard a long sigh and the wet leaves began gusting around her although there had been no wind when she left the church hall.
She began walking faster. Hood up. Headphones on. She wouldn’t take the short cut through the park which she had used nearly every day of her life. Her spine prickled. She would take the long way around. She wondered whether she should call her parents, but what for? She was so close to home, on streets she knew like the back of her hand. Streets she had grown up on. She passed by the park gates and headed down Mortimer Gardens going around the square. At the end she would branch left into Epping Gardens and then take a right turn into Wyre Gardens and pick up her normal route home. She stared at the pavement in front of her and shadows danced across her way. Strange she had never noticed them before, but she didn’t usually come this way along the park boundary under overhanging branches. She picked up her pace. It wasn’t late but strangely she didn’t pass anyone else. The streets seemed deserted.
Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shivers’ played along her way, ‘You make me dance till the daybreak cracks,’ and she was transported to imagining the parties she hadn’t been invited to, the flickering shadows on the pavement became the disco lights and the gusts of wind her dance partners. She suddenly skipped a few beats and shimmied when she found herself in a pool of light cast by a street lamp. And then she felt silly and stopped and kept her eyes fixed on the ground and hoped that no one had seen her dancing in the emptiness. And the music faded into the background.
The girl had unthinkingly danced her way into Wyre Gardens. She was on automatic pilot now. Almost home with the park behind her. She wondered why the Victorian planners who had laid out these city suburbs had chosen forests and gardens to name every road. Perhaps they had realised that people still needed to feel part of nature, still needed trees. The shadows were still flickering across her path but she didn’t think to wonder why. The park trees with their overhanging branches were behind her and the lime trees which originally lined every street had long since been cut down to allow for more street parking.
The forest thought stayed with the girl and she thought of ‘The Green Man’ festival her granny had once taken her to see one long ago Spring bank holiday. Ancient customs. Pagan gods. Did the vicar know his bonfire was just the way the ancients had kept darkness and the spirits of the night at bay as the year sank into winter and the world waited for the Green Man to return next Spring? Probably. She had learned all about those ideas at school when her English teacher played them Robert Burns’ poem last week and then told them to write about Halloween. Most people enjoyed playing with the idea of the worlds of the living and the dead overlapping at this time of the year. Spooky. Supernatural. However most people’s poems and stories owed more to whatever Netflix teenage witch series they had last binge watched than the imaginings of Robert Burns and ancient spirits.
Almost home. The girl suddenly stopped. She flicked off ‘Shivers’ and Ed Sheeran’s cheerful song cut into silence. She caught a strange whiff of rotten eggs and the street lights cast long jerky shadows across her way. She wavered before walking on. Number 21. Number 23. Number 25 and home! It was odd. There was a new iron front gate. Dad had said he wanted to improve the front entrance. But this was quick work, especially by Dad’s normal standards.
She ran up the steps to the front door. The house was very quiet but through the stained-glass panels of the old door – the original Dad had said - she could see light shining in the kitchen at the end of the passage. She went to punch in her entrance code, but the keypad to open the door wasn’t there anymore. Dad had been busy! He’d been saying for months about getting a more secure system fitted. Maybe that was going to happen tomorrow.
The girl reached for the old brass knocker. Someone had polished it to shine like new. She rapped loudly to be let in. A shadow appeared through the glass and the door opened. The young woman who opened it was dressed like a character out of the play the girl had been part of in primary school: Oliver Twist.
“Yes?” the young woman asked.
The young girl just stared.
“What? Can I help you?”
The young girl was speechless.
“Who is it?” An older woman’s voice sounded from the kitchen, “Just shut the door Mary if it’s another of those tinker urchins from the park.”
The young woman looked the young girl up and down from her seemingly bare legs to her hoody shaded face.
“Yes ma’am,” she replied and shut the door in the young girl’s face.
The young girl was stunned beyond responding. Then she stared through the green, glass ivy trails of the window into her home. No-one appeared. Then she turned around, her back to the closed door. The street she had explored every inch of in the thirteen years of her life; the street she had been born in, had changed.
There were no parked cars, no wheelie bins, the road was a muddy track and gas lamps quietly fizzed, spluttered and cast flickering shadows over the slabs of a newly laid pavement.
After a few minutes of looking at the unfamiliar, yet oh so familiar street view from her front door, the young girl did what she had always done when she was in trouble as a little girl. She descended the four steps from the closed front door and took the four steps down to the old cellar and there under the front-door steps and besides another less elegant, closed basement door she curled up and fell asleep.
She slept through the noise of car doors slamming, the cries from the search parties out on that cold Halloween night. She slept through the flashing blue lights that filled every cranny of the garden at Number 25. She slept through being sniffed from head to toe by Darcy, her beloved labradoodle who for reasons no one could work out refused to leave the empty cubby-hole under the steps. She slept through when her phone battery died and the music stopped never to be around when Ed Sheeran’s ‘day-break cracked’. She shivered and slept on, oblivious of the furore erupting all around her one hundred and fifty years away.
First published October 2021
Reprinted 'Write On' 2024 p132-4
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Copies of Write On are available from Bridgnorth Library - price £8
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1 comment:
I may have commented on this before Liz.;It's the kind of thing I used to imagine happening to me but it never did - I very much enjoyed reading it again
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