PROLOGUE
20th December 1998.
Children’s singing voices dissolve in the church’s thin air.
‘In the bleak midwinter, frosty …’
My sleeve is wet. They’ll see my red eyes where I crouch. Running out of time; I must stop crying or they’ll see.
‘… wind made moan.’
Tap-tap-tap on wood. A breath of wind.
Tap-tap.
A draught comes through the keyhole, no more than a breath, so cold it burns.
What is it you like more? Crying, or crying outside our door?
‘Who’s that? What are you doing in there?’
In here is far away.
‘Are you a ghost?’
What’s a ghost?
‘A dead person, but sort of … still here, never went to heaven.’
Or hell?
‘No.’
Oh. Maybe I am, then.
‘They say not to believe in ghosts, that there’s no such thing.’
What am I then?
‘I dunno.’
What are you?
‘Just a girl.’
What’s that?
‘I – I’m a person.’
Hehe, and what’s that?
‘A human.’
Oh. But what’s that?
‘A human, ya know. Teacher says we came from monkeys.’
That makes you an animal. You like animals?
‘Yes. We’re drawing picture projects of them in school.’
Then you know some animals eat people.
‘Um, yes.’
So, what am I?
‘If you’re a ghost, are you the ghost of whoever’s buried in there?’
I should say not, he was a bore. Blow your nose.
‘Does that make you a friendly ghost?’
That depends on the friends. Where are yours?
‘They went and sided with them.’
What’s ‘them’?
‘The choir. Bullies.’
Is that what ails our recurring doorkeeper tonight?
‘I didn’t want to be in the church choir. They won’t leave me alone.’
Are they here?
‘Two of them.’
Their names.
‘Definitely Naomi Brennan, she’s over there. Steph–’
Shhhhh.
‘Sorry. Stephanie Loutit. Jason Dawes too, same class as me.’
So if I’m a ghost and a ghost is a person and a person is a human and a human is from monkeys and that makes me an animal, that means I can eat people too if I like, doesn’t it?
‘No.’
But it’s what you said I was! Because you’re wise, aren’t you? Or are you not?
I sense a trap. Budding dread tastes of metal in my saliva.
Are you not clever?
‘I – I hope I am.’
So now I have to, don’t I? Whom do I slice, you or someone else?
‘What? No, don’t! You can’t.’
Ahhh, but you said I was. Plus, if I’m a ghost I can just float on through this door and get you, can’t I?
‘Maybe.’
By your wise analogy I need only be a ‘person’ to qualify. Choose. Or we decide.
I should get up and run away. Somehow I know I can’t; it’ll get me.
‘Don’t, that’s scary. I don’t know.’
Choose or we decide. Does your flesh cut like butter or pop like a pus head?
‘No, you’re fibbing. I want to go away now.’
You can’t, Monkey. We’re faster. And getting bored.
‘Please can I go?’
Choose. Last chance.
(Say something!) ‘The bullies. Take them.’
Those three unwise monkeys. Have you heard of the Three Wise Monkeys?
‘Not sure. I think so.’
There were four – Is that our doorkeeper blubbering again?
Sniffing, snivelling, holding it in for all I’m worth. ‘No.’
And would blabbing to everyone about closet ghosts be wise or unwise?
‘Unwise.’
Why?
‘They’ll laugh and they won’t believe me.’
Is that all?
‘And … and I’ll be a fourth unwise monkey?’
Clever human–person–girl. Is being Number Four what you want?
‘No.’
Let’s see how clever you are.
The icy draught wisps, and goes away.
‘Hello?’
…
‘Hello? Are you there?’
⁓
[Retrieved from The Bronmeg Post news archive]
23rd December 1998:
Bronmeg Police are appealing for witnesses following a vicious attack on eight-year-old Naomi Brennan, found at 8:40 p.m. last night. According to a public statement issued by Detective Inspector Forbes, ‘The attacker severely mauled the child’s face and inflicted fatal injuries. We ask that any eyewitnesses contact their local police authority. We are following various leads …’
27th December 1998:
… state that Jason Dawes is in critical condition. Police reports indicate that the victim’s ears were mutilated. However, due to the nature of the attack they cannot rule out the possibility of an animal attack at this time.
2nd January 1998:
At approximately eight o’clock on Thursday 31st December, Stephanie Loutit, aged 8, was found severely lacerated less than a mile from her home. Detective Inspector Nichols informed the Bronmeg Post that ‘The manner of these recent child mutilations may be related.’ In the space of a week, local children Naomi Brennan and Jason Dawes were also fatally attacked in similar circumstances.
⁓
I’m listening.
‘C’mon, Rob, just tell us! Whaddid you hear him say?’
‘I’m not supposed to tell you! I wasn’t supposed to hear him. My daddy says police stuff’s secret.’
‘We won’t tell! Honest!’
‘Teachers aren’t saying anything! Not fair!’
‘Yeah, c’mon Rob! What happened?’
Rob is popular, the best football player in P.E. He used to brag about his policeman dad being James Bond. This is the first time I’ve seen him afraid.
‘I don’t know.’ Rob shrugs.
‘Tell us! G’on Rob, I got extra lunch money this week!’
‘Yeah, I have too! Whaddid ya dad saaaaay?’
They all crowd around Rob at once.
‘C’mon Rob! What he say? What he say? Are any of ‘em comin’ back? What he say? What –’
‘Okaaay! He said Naomi’s eyes were plucked out and Steph’s tongue got bit off. I think they died like Jason. But don’t tell anyone! I’ll get grounded! I’ll get my arse tanned!’
They’re too busy gasping to hear Rob’s guilty appeal.
I was only seven
years old.
Chapter One
Do you find that in the phantasm of memory, places are larger than their physical reality? That a set of walls, columns, ceiling or windows, surface in your mind then tower over you like a Sphinx, contemplating you with entrenched superiority? History grows on places like a fungus until they have eyes of their own; a secret soul, a hidden murmur.
I can still feel the invasive pollen in my nose from the orchids in the chancel. On a bright day, the sun would turn stained glass faces, robes, angels, saints, skies and disciples of every shade and hue into a bewitching seduction. In my mind’s eye, I walk slowly down the nave of my old friend, enemy and companion. As ever my tentative footsteps, light as they are, make the empty church certain to betray me; each step lets the watchful air cry out my presence, from the slow deep thud of my boot heel, to its chorus of echoes rippling like alarm bells off the aisles to the chancel, through the transept arches and back to the nave again. Funny how it always seems louder the slower you walk. It is a comforting sound, but only when you know you are alone …and always loudest when you desperately need to be invisible.
I look up. The old beams are of pale timber, like the revamped floor, thanks or no thanks to council-funded refurbishment rather too garish for a church this age. Authentic in swerving elegance, those beams are insulted by walls of cheap white paint, where the original Renaissance stone claws its way back through the papery layer in grey patches and cracks, glaring at the modern floor as if to spit on it. I take comfort in that, too.
I was a curious sort of girl, I suppose. So long as no one watched me, this building, the stained glass and meditative echoes, were all mine. As a child I was granted the freedom to play solo games, imaginary adventures or hide and seek with myself, running up and down the aisles, finding secluded shadows in and out of the transepts, usually hiding from my elderly aunts behind the arcade pillars, my trusty allies.
Aunts Pam and Alison would spend ages at a time chatting with Minister Falkirk, complimenting his altar flowers, where did he buy them, might they have a cutting, and so on. Incessantly tedious babble. Whereas I, from the age of three onwards, was given free rein; a temporary window of liberty to run around the church on their nagging condition that I stay indoors. I soon found some favourite spots.
The pipe organ always unnerved me. Classical in appearance, oversized for the building, to me it was a gigantic overbearing leviathan. I was afraid to go near it, half-certain it waited, ready to open its mouth in some great gape of baleen pipes and chew me, further, further in, and gulp. I grew bolder with age while the organ comparatively shrank in size, until ultimately, we reached a truce, the company of that loud beast preferable to the two elderly ladies I was obliged to call family.
Family. Related by blood. I found it hard to believe. I saw nothing of myself in them. They raised me on the principle that family is a good thing, where all caring and self-sacrifice comes from. But if I was already at odds with run-of-the-mill normality, I was certainly at odds with them. Their reaction to my perpetual indifference was to try and ‘smooth out the inconsistencies in her character’, all because normality, according topopular opinion, is also supposed to be a good thing.
I feel it necessary to explain to you my connection with this church, so let’s just clear up something important first, shall we?: God, religion, prayers, Moses, the Ten so-called Commandments? It did not occur to me to care. I was taken to sermons and told to sing hymns because that is what little girls are expected to do – what they’re told. While heads bowed in prayer, and Falkirk, astute and gloomy in his ministerial garb, prattled on from his lectern, I lost myself in the stained glass.
I knew every inch of these kaleidoscopic windows.
The splashes of luscious purple were my favourite – such a juicy tint that always made me thirsty – and I loved the crusading figures in armour, straining hard to see every detail on their weaponry and the haloed beings to which they played martyr, fashioning my own stories for them a thousand times over. Sadly, with age I became jaded. The windows never changed. No new stories. In the disheartening wisdom that comes with maturity, their faces became tired, their gestures lazy, their stories and adventures fading to be replaced by something blandly biblical. I could not help feeling, like a sharp snag in my side, that the glass figures had let me down; they had sided with the very normality I once used them to escape from. I grew bitter towards the glass effigies and forgot their stories; they blended into a meaningless population, like everyone else.
I achieved independent thought by way of solitude, and through this established my tolerant non-belief. From puberty onwards, my attendance at sermons became less and less, and yet you would still find me there alone on random days of the week, daydreaming or reading Dickens, Carl Sagan, the Brontës and Oscar Wilde in the pews or my habitual hideaways. There was no hypocrisy in my private detours there after school or on weekends, the church and I had a relationship: I loved the building. It was a simple pleasure compared to living in my aunts’ house, the Christianity, hymns and psalmsbeing immaterial.
I also had an addiction. The smell. Not the obtrusive reek of orchids, daffodils or lilies on the altar. The real smell of the church. My favourite features were those small, unnoticed fingerprints of the past: old nails in the wall, so rusted and bent they appeared melted; shafts of wood in the mortar, worn down to stumps; a crooked hook, once smooth and round, now a jagged talon. I would find them in overlooked corners and then seek out more. I would touch them, running my finger slowly, almost lovingly, over the texture, taking care to do no harm, thinking all the time, This is a piece of time travel. When hammered into the wall, this world was so different. The man standing here, the clothes he wore, the masons, the scents, the things he heard. What did the worker look like, sound like? I’m touching a piece of life from a world nobody remembers. In this hypnotic bliss, I let the earthen scent transcend me. Old stone, like a quiet old man, immune to the fast track of unwary humanity, humbled and wizened with age – this was the building I knew and loved. Time leaves its breath on places, if you know where to look.
This young girl’s fancy envisaged that the heart and soul of a place known to her for so long, that had absorbed revolutions, sickness, poverty and the smoke of wars, could warmly look upon her and whisper, You and I, friend. Let them stay numb. We can smell the true essence beneath conventional niceties and flowers on Sunday. We know each other’s secrets, don’t we, Rona?
Secrets.
Well, it did. It looked at me. Looked me up and down. And as if the hideousness of that organ served as a premonitory warning, indeed it came to pass that I was chewed, gulped and swallowed. By the time I’d reached adulthood, I still knew less of my old church than I know of you, Stranger.
⁓
Instances from this early phase of my life bear mentioning. I have explained that there were nooks and crannies, and though to a small child that is a playground, by church standards St Patrick’s was not particularly big.
You enter the front portal through a large pair of arched doors, the ceiling of a narthex passes over you. The other entrance is for staff only, an uninteresting single door hidden under the arcade in the south aisle to your right. Don’t bother trying it, it is always locked. You walk east into the nave between a small sea of church benches; above you are the timber beams and badly-painted walls we have already met; far left and right, the transepts. Approaching you from both sides, the aisles are lined with stone pillars.
Look right. The south aisle houses an old vestry, since partitioned into a unisex toilet and miniaturised vestry for Falkirk to hoard his teabags and biscuit tins. Further along is the pipe organ, do you see the heavy curtain by it, the burgundy one? Good. Now, turn around and look up.
What you see is a balcony, directly above the narthex. Its decorated stone balustrade is appealing, is it not? As dated as the church itself. If you want to sneak a peek, go and draw the burgundy curtain. A narrow, helical staircase spirals upwards, its metal railing and steps painted black. It winds, round and round like the skeleton of an upturned python. Ugly, isn’t it? Climb it.
You find yourself on a small landing. Face west and keep walking, it is not far.
Turn right. You’re there, you can now wave down at me from the balcony, or Haunted Balcony, as Little Rona dubbed it. If there ever was a ghost up there I only saw it once and too briefly, barely more than an outline. You see, I thought it was my mother. It certainly resembled her photograph, but myaunts kept so few after she died and I knew her face from nowhere else.
I have introduced you to an integral element in this story: the gallery.
The gallery was shady, charming in its way. The stair was marked ‘Private’, for boring reasons, I assumed, because, unless they were hiding a bomb up there, sensible reasons are pathetic to a ghost-hunting seven-year-old. I, who otherwise knew every yard of the church, was magnetised to this unexplored zone, leaving me ravenous. I had to see it. You see, I was adventurous but shy, and unknown territory made me wary, so I would stand by the narthex, staring longingly upward, hungrier with curiosity every day, awaiting a feminine spectre that never reappeared, drawn nearer and nearer.
I remember my aunts nagging Falkirk to fill that disused space with their local choir group, perhaps the only occasion when I sighed along with him. A pair of busybodies they were, with their choirs, church meetings and charity events, and their clique stank of perfume, worse than the overbearing altar flowers.
During one such church meeting, I gave in and stole away under the burgundy curtain. More, I thought, placing my small hand on the railing. Come on, just one more step. I placed my small hand on the black railing, daring myself, excited and nervous with a child’s instinct that I was not supposed to be there, it was naughty. I could get in trouble. They might shout.
I was over halfway there, growing confident, feeling triumphant already …
‘Rona! Where are you? C’mon, Button, we’ve got the bakery and market before dinner.’ Cue the clogging of Aunt Alison’s Sunday heels in my direction.
I ground my teeth with frustration. ‘We’? They always said that, ‘We’re going there’, ‘We’re doing this’, ‘We’re having that’, as if I was ever given any say in the matter. I hated their endless shopping excursions worst of all. Hell, I hated them, especially for the interruption. I took one last miserable look at my unreachable destination and descended, furious with myself. If I’d had more guts and climbed faster … Dammit!
Next Sunday evening I tried again.
November 1998.
Due to bust pipes at the community centre, my aunts begged a reluctant Falkirk to grant them the church space for a charity meeting after the evening service, ten or eleven fellow churchgoers in attendance. Falkirk hovered over the proceedings, pacing and pacing the chancel, constantly checking his watch, colour rising. I saw him, his jowls were getting redder than clown rouge. By eight o’clock he declared they had ten minutes left, no more.
I was an equally reluctant witness. Earning my pivate time meant first playing puppet to my aunts’ scripted instructions in front of their friends: Mrs Mc-Something and Mrs Et Cetera saying oh what a lovely dress I had (I never picked the damn thing) and oh what a big girl I was becoming. After my dutiful ‘How are you, Mrs Wotsit?’ and ‘Thank you, Mrs Thingy,’ I was freed and skipped off to my usual haunts.
Aunt Alison called after me, ‘Be sure you don’t knock Minister Falkirk’s nice lilies over!’ I wanted to shove them down her perfumed throat.
From behind a pillar in the south aisle, I made sure the coast was clear and padded towards the burgundy curtain. The leviathan pipe organ gleamed its savage smile, my inanimate spy. I moved precariously, fearing the instrument would snitch on me in a storm of trumpeting keys, ducked behind the curtain, and released my breath.
The python’s black skeleton hadn’t run away since last week. There it waited, daring me again.
Step, step, step … I paused. Can’t see where it goes. Icouldn’t gauge my distance. Without daylight, the stair simply disappeared into greyness, the way Mrs Aldridge taught us to draw shadow with the edge of our pencils in school. Its tenebrous landing might not even be there, it might just climb on and on forever. Where had my confidence gone? Tonight, this once adventurous platform was the shaky plank of a pirate ship. The railing was clammier, I felt misplaced and all I could do was cling to the logic that if I made it so far last Sunday, I could tonight, and more. Probably boring up there anyway, I reassured myself, and went. Step, step, step, step, step … I paused, this didn’t feel right, but I was losing time.
I was not even halfway. Step, step –
‘Oi! YOU!’
He leapt out at me from the top: an oily, grimy, pug-nosed face of stubble. What happened next came too fast, I wouldn’t clearly recall who did what until hours later when I sat, hunched on my bed, still shaking, trying not to cry in case my aunts saw fit to tell me off again. I still hear his nasty voice to this day.
‘Oi, little bitch! Whaddafuck you think you’re doing? You can’t come up here. Get out of it! Get!’
Heavy trainers thumping, he lunged and proceeded to wrench a healthy clump of hair, roots and all, from my tender young scalp.
I tumbled.
Stinging fire shot through my palms as I landed at the bottom of the stairs, twisting an ankle, a flush burning my forehead scarlet, my first experience of true panic, it was surreal.
The pug-nosed sentry was coming down, so rabid I thought he meant to beat me lifeless. He appeared middle-aged, wiry in a tatty shirt and combat trousers, sickly bags hung beneath his eyes and a repulsive line of fluid dribbled from his nostril, but his most sinister feature was an uncontrollable twitchiness as if ill, too innocent was I to recognise a drug addict when I saw one.
I couldn’t get up.
Can’t move, something has me pinned flat, the killing weight of a massive log – no, the leathered sole of a giant, holding my neck down. Must be a giant, for no person is this strong!
Prostrate on the floor, the use of my neck disabled, my entire view consisted solely of the helical stair and pug-nosed man, tipped ninety degrees. He had stopped shouting, pale and mute.
‘Feeling skittish, Daniels?’
A man’s voice. Not the booming I expected of giants, and not Falkirk.
I watched the pug-nosed sentry. My forgotten hair glided down from his fist. This ‘Daniels’ had magically transformed from barking farmyard pig into a jittering guinea pig, stunned by this out-of-view Goliath, in fact he was now twitching so badly I thought he might trip and fall on me.
Of course, my aunts and their clones had heard the uproar. Anxious footsteps and various utterances of ‘My goodness!’ were travelling down the nave.
‘Here they come,’ said the unseen giant above me. ‘Or did you plan on howling any louder before she does?’
Without a word Daniels bolted up the stairs, and a magician somewhere must have waved their magic wand, for the weight lifted and I could move again.
Nobody there. No giant. No Goliath. I was stupefied.
I tottered from the curtain into a crowd of Sunday winter dresses encircling me, Falkirk amongst them, and it was he who incriminated me. ‘She … she must have tried wandering to the gallery,’ he said, glancing upward, eerily tranquil. ‘It’s private, love. No access.’ He said no more.
As to my pulled hair and damaged ankle, an abused kid knows no better with an army of adult fingers waggling at them as if they agreed with my punishment. Off I was trotted, due a day’s scolding from my aunts, ‘Did you go bothering the man?’ and ‘Well that’s what happens when you’re a bad girl!’ and‘Big girls don’t cry!’
On our way out, the shiny jaws of the pipe organ winked over its wicked grin, guarding the burgundy curtain, an oily bully somewhere beyond. So that was the ghostly trick of the gallery, another bully. I felt I had lost all right to even glance at the balcony, to think such a nice thing had a ‘Daniels’ living in it! Is that how it works? I thought. Why are the nicest things given to horrible people? Or is something beautiful a lie in itself that only likes cruelty for company?
I was dragged out, limping and shaken.
20th December 1998.
The cosiness of St Patrick’s made it a favourite for Bronmeg Primary School’s Junior Christmas Choir Recital, not that I joined the choir by choice; my dipped toe was an inconvenience of my pushy aunt’s contriving. Closer to the event, our choir rehearsed there three times a week after school.
A child’s year is a lifetime, and when the winter sun sets early you feel a pang of liberation to be outdoors past your bedtime. But this rebellion limited me to the church, where the presence of gormless classmates violated my private bond with the place. Children can be cruel, girls crueller, and matriarch Naomi Brennan was a ticking time bomb waiting to disembowel me, the school runt. She hated me in class, she hated me in the playground and she hated me here, joining the choir merely lit the fuse; spitting on my sheet music, stealing from my school bag, putting gum in my hair, getting everyone to laugh at me.
That night the taunts came to a humiliating head. With tears. During the interval I sneaked off, hid in a shady corner of the north transept and snivelled, as formal a resignation from the choir as I cared to give, bullied in and forthwith bullied out.
In the transept, my small size was well concealed by the chunky memorial tablet of a certain Lord William Menzies, a Renaissance patron of St Patrick’s interred in the wall beyond. By this memorial and coat of arms stood a large oak cupboard, older than Queen Victoria, younger than the church, embedded in the outline of a doorway in the wall, fitting like a glove. Its double doors were always bolted and it never occurred to me to wonder why the keyhole sometimes emitted a draught, like breath. Banishing myself there, wiping my nose on my sleeve and feeling sorry for myself, this deserter would be lying to you if she denied a furtive pride in making an unearthly new acquaintance that evening. The draught spoke to me.
Three nights later, after having painstakingly gone out of my way to avoid any future collisions with the odious Daniels, to my utter bewilderment he approached me.
The choir recital, attended by parents, locals and teachers, commenced in the late afternoon, the eve of Naomi’s reckoning. I had no more premonition than anyone else.
The church was packed. Candles tinted the holly, nativity scene and Christmas tree with appetising splendour while the ruddy cheeks of proud parents lined the front pews. Aunt Alison did her best to rattle my conscience for quitting the cute vocal mania; water off a duck’s back when this safe distance from the choir was, for me, a reprieve. I had spared myself the torture for a change, no matter what Alison said.
The recital ended, applause ensued. Parents and children lingered, buttoned their coats, shook hands with Falkirk, with other parents and with teachers and exchanged mince pies. My aunts joined in the polite anarchy.
I stayed in the pew. I had been a reader from a young age and I was attempting to wade through A Christmas Carol, a toilsome mission for my tender years. I remember the page I was at, too, easily distracted by the gritty elegance of John Leech’s Dickensian illustrations. It should have been comical:
‘… the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried “I knowhim! Marley’s Ghost!” ’
Here was the illustration, inky and moody, the flame transformed into a momentary beacon complete with funny little facial wail, illuminating the spectre of Jacob in chains, horrible, lanky, bloodless and wide-eyed – just like the figure standing over you, Rona?
I gave such a start that my book fell.
Daniels stood there like a zombie, gaunt and unhealthy, glaring at me with irises like pebbles, his unblinking whites so wide you would think the eyelids were snipped off. A deadened beat of silence stamped between us and the recital attendees, footsteps, candles and voices became a dense hum like water in my ears. Finally, Daniels spoke, tonelessly, without any reaction to my reaction.
‘I was told to give you this.’
He gave it.
Chore completed, he crossed the nave, as unnoticed as any ghost should be. As he withdrew behind the curtain, sounds of the living returned; families jingled car keys and pulled rambling classmates apart while my aunts talked to too many people as usual. The pews were vacant but for me.
On my lap sat a new addition. A soft toy. A monkey. Made in China for all I knew, you could find thousands similar in any cheap toy shop across the British Isles. Its arms and legs were hacked off, coarse fluffy stuffing hung out in tufts. Have you heard of the Three Wise Monkeys? Wise or unwise? I hid it under my coat.
As we walked home, my reasonably sensitive Aunt Pam tried to cheer me up. ‘Thought of all you want from Santa, Button?’ she asked.
‘Are there books on the Four Wise Monkeys, Auntie?’
‘Another book!’ exclaimed Aunt Alison, a veteran Eastenders fan who only liked her Dickens with ketchup. ‘Well, you can’t be getting that!’
‘No, dear,’ Aunt Pam agreed. ‘There are only three wise monkeys.’
‘There’s four,’ I mumbled.
None of it made any sense until word spread through school about the news headlines a fortnight later.
10th January, 1999. Happy New Year.
Was I a good girl? Did I not always do as I was told? I did what my aunts told me. I did what the closet ghosts told me.
Classroom mutters surrounded the absence of my school enemies until the dawning awareness brewed over me like a rain cloud, chasing me from school, all the way home, all the way to bed. Nightmares clustered in my sleep: I was in the corner of the transept, sliding towards the cupboard, I tried stopping myself but the ground was a belligerent downward slope, wouldn’t let me stop, sliding into the keyhole, kicking fruitlessly. Tap-tap. Feeling skittish?
I woke in the safety of my bedroom.
Giants.
This Sunday morning my aunts were shaking their heads, gasping over their boiled eggs and pristine teacups as they passed each other the newspaper while the radio reported news of murdered innocents.
During church service that day I made my aunts angry. Despite threats of a smack and no dessert after Sunday roast, I refused to be dragged anywhere near the north aisle, the transept was too easy to see. A globule of guilty sickness had grown in the pit of my stomach and now squirmed there like a fat worm, getting bigger. The news headlines. Rumours in the playground. I’ve done something bad. Noise on wood. My fertile imagination saw the antique cupboard fly open and swallow me.
I buried myself under my coat, huddling up on the pew.
‘What’s wrong, Button?’ Aunt Pam was shaking me.
‘What’s all this silliness now?’ interjected her boisteroussister, approaching with her hero Falkirk in tow.
‘She’s scared of the cupboard,’ Pam answered, uncurling me.
‘Can’t do anything with this niece today!’ Alison brayed. ‘Imagine! A clever girl like that scared of a poor old wardrobe. And get your feet off the benches, Rona, you know better!’
‘Oh?’ Falkirk said coolly. ‘The cupboard in the corner? Why is that?’
‘She woke us up crying last night,’ said Pam, trying to put my coat on. ‘Said she had a bad dream.’
‘Did you?’ he asked me.
I was too put on the spot to respond. Falkirk expressed no interest in children and habitually refrained from interacting with me, why should I learn how to talk to him now? In any case he smiled, treating me to a rare view of his yellow teeth, the only thing worse than his glower.
‘Oh, I can nip those bad dreams in the bud,’ he sang. ‘We can solve that!’
He vanished beyond the burgundy curtain. I heard voices. A minute later he returned, striding towards the item of furniture itself. A key clicked in that big keyhole, the doors opened. There. Falkirk proudly presented a rectangular space: wooden base and sides, the basic dimensions of any cupboard, stupendously uninteresting, fabulously tamed – and completely featureless. Emptier than Mother Hubbard’s, not a brush, not a shovel, a cheerless bit of carpentry.
‘See?’ he happily declared. ‘Better? No spooky nightmares. Just a cupboard!’ For emphasis, he innocently tapped! the wooden base.
I ran from the building, a loose coat sleeve dangling inside out.
⁓
New school term. My classmates constantly harangued Rob for any leaked news of Naomi, Jason and Stephanie, while the teachers were sworn to zip-lipped discretion, as if children are incapable of concocting their own nasty conclusions.
The snow was reduced to slush, meaning dirty puddles and wet socks. I spent lunchtime in the school library and fished out an encyclopaedia.
The Three Wise Monkeys:
A proverb of Japanese folklore dating from the 17th century which teaches the means of living well by ignoring wicked thoughts or deeds, signified by three symbolic monkeys in specific postures. The monkey Mizaru covers its eyes for ‘See No Evil’, Kikazaru covers its ears for ‘Hear No Evil’, with Iwazaru covering its mouth to symbolise ‘Speak No Evil’. Lesser known is a fourth monkey, Shizaru, possibly originating from ancient Chinese texts, often depicted as folding its limbs or covering itself between the legs, to symbolise ‘Do No Evil’.
Is being Number Four what you want?
After school, I went straight home to my room and sought out my gift from the closet ghosts. Its synthetic insides were spilling out from the four hacked limbs, leaving small mounds of sandy particulates in my mahogany drawer like artificial snow, a repugnant texture offensive to the touch. I got rid of it at the bottom of our kitchen bin under as many food tins, junk mail envelopes, ready meal packages, used teabags, biscuit wrappers and hollow milk cartons as I could cram on top.
I made no connection between monkeys and giants, it was years before I forgot to avoid the north transept, and Shizaru did no evil by forever holding her peace. They would have dismembered my body.