Today is the Day of the Dead. All doors shut tight. Mr. Jackson, the greengrocer, puts his vegetables into the cold storage room. Tomorrow he will sell them at a generous discount.
*
Jasmine, the teacher, sits in her living room and takes extra care over the children’s copybooks1. Each one is different. Some are messy, some are neat. Some are written as if the child is being constantly distracted with far more interesting things.
*
Mrs. Spade starts the day sorting laundry and mending socks.
In fact, everybody occupies their own time on the Day of the Dead. There are no gatherings around glowing hearths. Stories of ghosts are not told.
Billy is ten and three quarters. He watches his mum as she sifts and sorts, mends, folds and tidies away. He knows not to question her; these jobs are done because that is the way.
Billy picks up his model soldier. The soldier stands one and a half inches high. His uniform is made up of a deep green jacket and burgundy pants, his boots high and gleaming black. The buckles are silver. His right boot has a small chip off the heel, the colour exposed; a flat gunmetal grey. Billy looks at his soldier. Today would be a good day to send him into battle against the monster hordes. They are a nasty bunch, but Billy has other plans.
“Billy,” his mum calls. “Billy, haven’t you got some homework to do? You don’t want to disappoint Miss Beetle, do you?”
His earnest eyes turn from the soldier to his mum, and he thinks of Miss Beetle’s chin. It juts out when she is annoyed and her eyes narrow. She never looks pretty when she does this, but when she smiles the sun floods the classroom. He doesn’t want to disappoint Miss Beetle.
He looks at his mum; she has stopped sifting. She is standing with her right hand on her hip; any moment now she is going to clear her throat.
“Ahem,” she says.
Billy replies, “Yes Mum, no Mum.” He is always very precise when he answers his mum; his mum is a very precise woman.
“Good, hop to it then.”
He puts his soldier back in his box, he swings the lid down – it squeaks with all the effort. His dad always oiled it. No, his dad had always oiled it.
Billy’s mum turns back to her sorting, mending and folding.
“Time you oiled that, Billy.”
Billy looks at the hinges on the box. He runs his fingers over them. They feel sturdy and they are cold. He places the box back in its press. It slots snugly between the box of Connect 4 and the good table linen. Billy stands up; the narrow staircase is just behind him. At the top of the stairs, flanking the landing, there are four doors. Billy’s door is easily identifiable with the brass lettered ‘enter at your peril’ sign. Billy’s room is a bit like a patchwork quilt. The floor is wooden. The boards just inside the door creak, along with a well-worn section at the base of the window.
Billy’s copybook is on the floor, face down. The covers spread out like a pigeon rushing to scoop up errant crumbs. One of the corners curls up. Billy picks up the book and turns it over. His writing is very neat but the doodles of monsters – around the edges – show where his real interest resides. They are alive. He lets it fall back down to the floor. He looks at himself in his long wall-mounted mirror. It has a few black spots that snake up its right-hand side, but other than that it’s a sensible, honest mirror. In spite of the darker spots, Billy can see his reflection clearly. His skin is milky white, his eyes a gentle quiet blue, like the sea on a calm summer’s day. There’s a patch over his left knee, where his mum mended his jeans after that day he fell in the quarry. The patch is bright yellow with a sunflower pattern through it.
Billy looks at the edge of the mirror. He starts at the top right-hand corner and follows the rim the whole way round, counterclockwise. He takes a short sharp breath.
“Dad?” he whispers urgently. Just there, at the edge, a shadow falls over the mirror. “Dad? Are you there?”
Disappointment and sadness cloud Billy’s face; he breathes out a shallow sigh.
Billy’s reflection draws you in to take a closer look; the way his hair spikes just at the top of his head – it’s a dark brown colour, the shade of long-fallen autumn leaves, apart from the spiky bit, which is white blond. His face would not look out of place on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.
He kneels down, stretches and reaches in under his bed. The floorboards are coated in dust. Each time his hand and arm hit them, they leave a clear glossy streak – the varnished wood exposed.
He stretches and stretches. His fingertips find what he is looking for. They grapple and tap until he gathers the strap of a bag into his hand and pulls it out from its hiding place.
It’s a small rucksack, patterned in green camouflage. It has hidden pockets; all of them bulge. It has been packed tightly.