It may have been absolutely, completely and utterly pitch-black dark in there but it was also quite a bit warmer than it was outside so we shut the door against the wind and started to fumble our way about inside. I could smell coal. ‘See if you can find a candle,’ I said. ‘And some matches.’
But Rosie’s grip on my hand hadn’t loosened so I suggested we swapped hands so that I could get some feeling back. We inched forward, my free hand waving before us. There was a chair; we banged our knees off it, and a wooden box for coal; we banged our knees off that too, and a stove. The stove wasn’t lit and it wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t cold either, not stone cold like when we haven’t had coal for a few days at home, and, given that it was so cold outside now, I wondered perhaps if someone had been there for the weekend and had gone home again. Perfect! There were a few small lumps of coal in the wooden box. I set them in the stove. Matches were what I needed next.
‘Rosie, you’ll have to let go,’ I said. ‘I can’t look for the matches if you have to come with me and I only have one hand. If you look about too we’ll find them twice as quick. Or you could sit in this chair and I could explore a bit.’
‘I can’t see,’ she said.
‘I know that, silly,’ I said. ‘I can’t see either.’
‘No, but I really can’t see,’ she said.
‘I know. I can’t see either,’ I said. ‘What if I kept talking to you and you could sit in the chair.’
‘I don’t like this place,’ she said.
‘I don’t like it much either but it’s all we’ve got and it’s only for tonight.’
‘I don’t like it,’ she said, only in a whisper this time.
I gulped back the panic and I shook my head to get the pictures out of it, but I kept seeing the lady with the leg missing when I was with Mr Chippie in the close in Kilbowie Road, the first time I was supposed to keep my eyes shut. Well, I had my eyes shut now and I could still see her. In fact I had my eyes wide open and I could see her just as clearly.
I shook my head again.
‘What are you doing?’ Rosie whispered.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Yes, you were,’ she said.
‘No, I wasn’t,’ I said.
‘Yes, you were,’ she said.
‘Okay, I was shaking my head,’ I said.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Because . . . ,’ I said, breathlessly, ‘because . . . .’
But I couldn’t tell her why.
‘Because I don’t like it either.’
‘I saw my mum,’ she said.
‘Your mum?’
‘Yes, she’s over there.’
I couldn’t see her arm pointing, and I couldn’t see what she was pointing at. A rush of chilliness crawled up the back of my legs. It felt like dust from a blast so I rubbed it to be sure.
‘Your mum’s not here Rosie,’ I said. ‘In fact, your mum’s not anywhere.’
‘Yes, she is,’ she said.
I could feel her body shake as she pulled on her earlobe with her free hand, and I knew I couldn’t tell her about her mum being dead.
‘I just mean that she’s not here,’ I said.
‘But I saw her,’ she said.
‘Can you see her now? If you look really hard is she there?’
She sniffed and I waited for her. The wind was making a lot of noise in the trees now and a clock was ticking. A branch thwacked suddenly against the side of the hut making us jump and throw our arms around each other. I knew exactly what it was but it made no difference.
‘It’s a tree,’ I told her.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘Only a tree.’
‘I know.’
We stood locked together like that for what seemed like ages, and then somehow it seemed funny and I started to laugh. I don’t know why it was funny, I just know it was. There was a tree outside, lots of trees. I liked trees, and I liked the noise they made. Trees didn’t hit you on purpose in the dark. They didn’t even hit your roof on purpose. They didn’t drop bombs on you. They stood between you and a cold wind, and sometimes bits of them kept you warm in the fire. Trees were good. I don’t know why it seemed so funny.
Rosie pulled back from me when I started to laugh, but she didn’t let go.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said, in a worried little voice.
But I couldn’t speak for laughing, like a different kind of bomb inside, so after a bit she gave up asking and laughed too and we went on like that throwing our heads back and banging them together by mistake and laughing all over again, for ever and ever and ever.
‘The tree!’ I said, uncontrollable now, like my gran said.
But all the time we had one hand linked, still in a vice-like grip, like the vice in my uncle’s hut, as if for dear life, tight and sore, while our other hands flew through the air, slapping our thighs and patting our chests, as we gasped until our tummies hurt.
I don’t know when it happened but somehow we were crying again, sobbing, wailing, and howling into each other, me dripping rivers of tears on her neck, snotters in her hair, and her making wet teary patches on the front of my old dress.
The branch bumped the roof again, and then again, and again, until I started to listen for it, to wait for the next one, guessing when it would come, listening to the gusts of wind blowing around us and through the branches and the grasses.
‘Listen,’ I said.
She was shuddering now, struggling to breathe properly, her little sobs caught in her throat.
‘Listen, Rosie,’ I said. ‘Listen to the trees.’
I told her what to listen for, the big gusts that made the branch hit the roof hard, and the little ones that stroked it, and I told her why I liked trees so much, and she said she thought trees just stood there. But she’d stopped crying by then, or she wasn’t crying so hard. All her strength was gone, except for the hand which held mine.
I noticed that I didn’t see so many things in the dark as long as I was talking. So I kept on talking to Rosie about the trees and how they made nice homes for the birds and the squirrels, (‘What are squirrels?’ she said) and how they make nice homes like this one for people too, and all the time I was talking I was feeling my way around the stove trying to find some matches or a candle or a hurricane lamp like the ones in the La Scala. Then we shuffled past the chair and another box and I found a door, so we edged sideways through it, not because it was narrow but because Rosie was still holding onto my hand which she had in both of hers now.
I thought I would run out of things to say about trees pretty quickly but it seems there was quite a lot I knew about trees that Rosie didn’t, being only four, like there were different kinds of trees with different shaped leaves, trees that went to sleep in winter and others that didn’t.
My hand found some shelves.
‘Miss Weatherbeaten told us that,’ I said. I stopped talking so that I could think about Miss Weatherbeaten. I got the feeling she liked trees too, and I wished she hadn’t slapped me and lost her temper. I was just beginning to worry about not going back to the other hut when Rosie tugged on my hand again.
‘Why have you stopped?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said and went back to searching the shelves I had just found, and telling her about squirrels and field mice.
No matches but two apples, last year’s so they were a bit wrinkly but they were still apples. Further along there were three more and a carrot, then another carrot, then a few potatoes. I passed an apple to Rosie who sunk her teeth into it immediately.
‘There’s a bed,’ she said, through her apple. She pulled away from me but without letting go and I heard the rattle of springs. ‘Very bouncy,’ she said, and after a pause, ‘loads of blankets!’
So we got the apples and the carrots down from the shelf and put them on the bed. It was indeed a very springy bed, though some of the springs went almost through the sheet. I had one last go at the shelves for matches then gave up and we climbed into the bed which was the same size as our bed at home in the alcove, and we ate our booty.
The tartness of the apples made our mouths smart and the carrots were bendy and tasteless but it was a meal even so. The bed smelled funny, like my dad when he’d been working (beer and tobacco) and it was cold and damp but we squirmed down into it anyway, grateful to be there.
Being bedtime I asked Rosie what her favourite bedtime story was, so I could go on talking, and keep my head clear. Rosie didn’t have a favourite so I picked the first one I could think of just so I could keep talking. But there was a problem: all kids stories have scary bits and neither of us felt like scary bits. So we changed the stories. The three little pigs built a sensible brick house, each helping the other, in a town with no wolves. Jack went up the beanstalk and found a friendly giant, and Goldilocks woke up to breakfast in bed, perfect porridge, not too salty, sweet or hot and with honey on top, all made by the cheerful and welcoming bear family. Rosie liked that the best so I told her it again with extra bits like a whole jar of sweets by the bed, a radio with ‘Run, rabbit, run’, and two hot-water bottles with soft knitted covers, one for her feet and one for her tummy. For the third telling she wanted her mum to come and make friends with the bears, and her sister to be in the bed, and her dad to be waiting to take them all home.
‘Go on then,’ she said, eager to hear more, so on I went.
But this seemed like a bad idea and when it was time for Rosie’s mum to make friends with the bears I stopped and wondered if I ought to explain that her family were all dead, but Rosie was snoring quietly beside me, snuffling her way through her dreams, so I carried on in a whisper. There was a golden car outside with leather seats and chocolate bars and my dad was in the driving seat. My mum helped me inside and there was Mavis, cuddled up with a big plump teddy bear. We sat, the three of us, in the wide back seat of the car and watched the people go by the window.
And so I must have fallen asleep.
The next thing I know there’s another boom-crash and my arms are around my head. Rosie’s hanging onto my sides. She thinks she’s hanging onto my dress but she’s got my sides as well. I can feel my heart beating hard against her fists, and I’m listening for the falling of buildings and the crackle of fire and the drone of the killer bees, and for a second I can’t figure out where I am because it’s so dark and I can’t remember how I got to wherever I am. And even though nothing changed whether my eyes were open or closed, I knew it wasn’t a dream. I knew I was awake, but things were missing, the noise especially, only the bumping on the roof that was right above me where the ceiling and the upstairs flat should have been. And then I knew where I was. But I didn’t know what the noise was, so I kept waiting for the bombs to fall again, like at the beginning after the siren had stopped and before the bombers first came.
‘Shhh!’ I said, in case Rosie spoke.
I could feel cold air drifting in from the doorway. I heard a footstep, then a scrape, then the boom of the outside door shutting, then the shuffle of a foot on wooden floorboards.
Rosie and I kept very still. I reached out and pulled the covers over our heads.
The rasp of a match fizzed and was gone.
‘Candles, candles, where . . . tsk . . . tsk . . . ? Damn.’ It was a woman’s voice.
She was in the room now and fumbling, as I had, at the shelves. I held Rosie tight so she couldn’t move. No light came through the covers, so the match had died.
A dish wobbled in a slow hollow murmur. The woman’s feet scratched along the floor. It was a witch, I was sure of it, like the one in Hansel and Gretel, looking for a match to light the fire to boil the cauldron to cook us up for dinner.
She started humming to herself, like my mum does when she’s happy and busy at the same time, only the witch was quieter and her tune unhurried, dawdling along. I began to wish she’d hurry up. We couldn’t keep still under the smelly covers forever. But what if she undressed right there at the bedside and climbed in beside us! She probably had a stick for naughty kids like me too, a broomstick, and I told you I didn’t like brooms.
I could feel bombs fizzing up inside me, fizz, fizz, fizz, and Rosie’s fingers were fiddling about trying to get to her earlobe. The witch was fiddling too, fiddling about at the shelves to get to a match. There was another ‘Tsk’ followed by a long silence, then she sighed a sigh that would have emptied a room, and the floorboards creaked with her footsteps as she went back through to the stove without closing the door.
I made an air tunnel in the blankets for us to breath and we listened to the footsteps in the next room. Something heavy was dragged across the floor.
‘Damn,’ she muttered again.
I wondered if it was a body. It sounded like a body, and now my head was full of all those things I shouldn’t have looked at, and I wondered whether she had been to Clydebank and brought back something to add to the stew. I knew she wasn’t a witch really but it got stuck in there, inside my head and I couldn’t get it out. A leg, like a bone for a dog, a hand, a foot with purple toes like my gran’s, or a whole person, the whole lot in one, and if it was small, what if it was – and this hit me like a fist in my tummy (like a certain boy at school) – what if it was Mavis?
I had to see. I had to brave the witch and make sure it wasn’t Mavis.
But Rosie wouldn’t let go. I fought to free myself.
‘Don’t!’ she whispered. ‘Don’t!’
And then the shifting about next door stopped and we were stuck half-upright out of the blankets like statues, mid-tussle on a bed with creaky springs, on a freezing winter’s night with no fire. We waited for the dragging noise to start again, but there was only the wind in the branches shooshing, as if we didn’t already know to be quiet.
‘I’ve got to see!’ I whispered.
‘Please don’t!’ Rosie said. ‘What if she gets you?’
‘Don’t be silly, it’s not a . . . .’ But I didn’t know what to tell her. ‘Lie down,’ I said. ‘Let’s lie down. Slowly!’
We set about lowering ourselves back into the bed and suddenly there was a gigantic ‘BOING’ of a spring and I knew we were in trouble. The noise seemed to bounce off every unseen corner of the room and come back to us twice as loud. We dived back under the covers in double-quick time.
‘Your nails are digging into me,’ I told Rosie. She didn’t let go. ‘Rosie!’
We waited for the witch to fling back the covers, my tiny moment of bravery gone. I lay there, the cowardly jelly I didn’t want to be, reasoning with myself that it couldn’t possibly be Mavis through there, and this witch wasn’t a witch, and that she must be deaf or she’d have heard the spring and us whispering. But me, I wasn’t deaf. My ears were working so hard my brain hurt and I couldn’t tell what was real and what I had made up.
Then a new shooshing began, the gentle breathy sound of sleep, like my mum’s sleep before she snored and I wondered if it wasn’t a witch at all but my mum, not in a hospital but out looking for me and Mavis, and here she’d found me at least and didn’t even know. And every time I moved Rosie grabbed me tight again, though she was half-sleeping, and I ached with longing for Mavis and my mum. I tried to pretend it was my mum having a quiet cup of tea before bed, the teapot on the hob and the cup tapping on the wooden arm of my dad’s chair, the tick-tock of the clock, Mavis flinging her arm over my chest and rolling in beside me.
And so I must have drifted off again.
The rain against the window was like the birds that sometimes tapped when we left crumbs for them on the ledge, and I wondered why my mum didn’t laugh and lift Mavis to see them, and then I realised it was the fanlight and the crackling of a great fire that was waiting to gobble us all up and then BANG, the fanlight burst and I woke up.
A branch was battering on the roof and so was the rain, but I listened extra hard again to make sure that was all it was and wished there was some light to take away the things in my head, things I didn’t want to see and it was all my own fault were there. But the rain was like a blanket covering all the other sounds so I told myself some stories and I thought about Mr Tulloch with his horse and cart and I tried to remember what he’d said. Something about planning, so I began to plan what I was going to do in the morning but it all got too complicated and finally I fell asleep.