9  

One week later

Another long, noisy day has almost passed and most of the games that Gracey tries to play inside the house make her mommy and daddy say, ‘Don’t’, or ‘Put that down’, or ‘It’s not a toy’, or ‘Be careful’, so she’s going into the garden.

Rattling wheels of Pushy the pushchair bump the floorboards. Sometimes they squish or carve clumps of grey furry dust that continually sprout into being, no matter how many times Mommy sweeps them up. ‘Dust rabbits,’ Mommy says and it makes Gracey think of a huge rabbit under the house shedding old fur that puffs through gaps. Sometimes she imagines big eyes peering through the holes.

Belted in tight, Waddles the penguin sits erect, Gracey’s own baby alert to his new surroundings. A plushy mouse is tucked under his wing. Waddles is her toy, the mouse is Waddles’ toy.

Racing past doorways. The room with the television is filling with bags previously stored inside the cupboard of their flat, with the vacuum, board games and shoes. Yesterday in ‘new house’, she asked Mommy if they could ‘go home’ to the flat and Mommy tried not to cry.

Cardboard boxes with food names printed on the side make her mouth water. Plastic storage boxes are stacked like coloured bricks and surrounded by paint tins and poisons in bottles that she mustn’t touch. She’s made sure that Waddles knows this too. Their settee and two chairs from the flat look as scared and lost as she did when she started school. Daddy’s tools litter bare floors.

Inside this house are spaces and holes and caves and hiding places and mazes in big rooms. But she’s been told not to build tents because everything needs moving again. Daddy wore a plastic suit like a spaceman when he ripped up the stinky carpets, rolled them and carried them into the garden.

She wants to see the mice. They’re the last thing her mommy wants to see. Gracey’s been checking the traps every five minutes. Grey plastic boxes inside kitchen cupboards.

On the first day, Mommy and Daddy were whispering about ‘mice’ and her daddy talked about ‘traps’ when he thought she was out of ‘earshot’. But Gracey heard and got upset. But her daddy says the traps are only for catching the mice before he carries them into the woods so they can find new houses. ‘You don’t want them pooing in your crispies,’ he’d said.

Across the kitchen floor she, Waddles and Pushy go whizzing. The lino is the colour of cream-of-chicken soup but smells of ‘mice piss’. Waddles the penguin stares ahead from his stripy seat and out they go, into the garden, as the sun lowers onto the jungle’s spiky roof.

Above her, a window cracks. The back of the house is even scruffier than the front.

Mommy shouts, ‘Gracey! Stay where I can see you!’ Her face is grimy.

‘Am!’

When Mommy and Daddy have cheeks like tomatoes and Daddy uses rude words, she stays away. They’re struggling to free a wardrobe trapped on the stairs. It’s been stuck there all week since last weekend and you have to squash yourself thinner to get round it. So they’ve been lifting Gracey over the blockage every bedtime. When Mommy caught her finger earlier, she shouted at Daddy.

‘Your side. Your side.’ Now that’s Daddy, telling Mommy what to do again. Their voices punch out of the darkness of the upstairs but sound closer out here in the garden like her parents are inside the kitchen.

Daddy’s still in a bad mood after going to see the neighbours last weekend. When she’s at school and he uses his electric saw they slap the walls on their side. The man with clown hair came round and complained about ivy crawling under the fence and into the garden next door. Next door’s visitors keep parking across the drive and they blocked in a builder who came to the house to quote on the roof, and that was bad news too that made Mommy look like she was going to faint.

Mommy’s mostly busy all the time and tells her to ‘amuse herself’ but today Mommy is still blaming Daddy for her hurt finger. When Daddy’s angry, Mommy gets angry. Gracey gets tearful.

‘I can’t.’

‘Left. Left!’

‘Piss off! Bed’s in the way.’

That’s a rude word. Better to be in the garden.

Gracey snatches up wildflowers and weeds that look like lettuce from around the edge of the patio. It’s like the deck of a ship sinking under green waves of grass.

She places the bouquet in her pushchair for Waddles to look after.

Archie is madly digging a new hole near the fence. A small crater in black soil. Worms twist. Lice scatter. He has dug three holes. No one knows why he digs them. Whenever the back door is opened to let in some fresh air, because the kitchen stinks, Archie bursts through people’s legs to speed into the garden. He’s been outside for ages today. When she catches up with him, Gracey threads yellow flowers under his collar.

At the top of her garden, the fence between her house and the pretty house next door, belonging to ‘the rude bastards’ as her daddy calls them, has broken bits. Through gaps she spies into the neighbours’ garden. From here she might be looking at a page in her book of fairy tales; a scene filled with lights and colours that are brighter because of magic.

There is a statue of a Mr Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but with a nastier face. He towers over a black pond that might have frogs. Maybe they all wear red waistcoats. It’s a shame they’re ‘rude bastards’, or ‘funny old people’, as her mommy says, because she’d like to go into their garden and pick flowers and look at frogs and fish.

For a while Gracey stands still and watches next door’s garden. When she feels the flowers are looking back, she returns to the hole. Archie’s been busy and has pulled out more soil.

‘Treasure, Archie!’ Gracey kneels. Reaches into the hole and uses both hands to pull at the dully glimmering thing in the moist clay.

‘So heavy, Waddles. Help me, Archie.’ Gracey drags out a metal lump that films her palms with slimy mud. It’s as long as a house-brick and as thick as a big chocolate bar. Squatting, she scrapes soil from its surface with her fingers. Under the sticky mud, the surface is bumpy with letters on one side. Writing she can’t read. Archie sniffs it, then breaks away and races to the end of the garden where the woods rise like waves to smash the saggy fence.

Gracey drops the metal tablet and pursues Archie until she arrives where he is winding circles before the gate that tilts. ‘You mustn’t hurt the rabbits, Archie. Only say hello and tell them I live here now.’

A big rusty padlock and an even rustier bracket lie in the long grass.

Gracey unlatches the gate. Hinges squeal and her bones go funny inside. The little door opens. The rotten bottom judders, scrapes weeds. She opens the shaky door wider to see if there are rabbits running among the trees.

Her attention is seized by ornaments instead, screwed to the outside of the garden gate. Like rusty scratches, the metal decorations face trees that remind her of another story in her book of fairytales. The story about a witch. It has a picture of a greenish lady that Mommy covers with a hand, so Gracey won’t think of the horrible face when she’s in bed at night.

Metal crosses are fixed into the gate’s flaking timber. Together they shape one bigger cross like those on churches. Gracey traces her finger over a cross. The metal surface is rough. She touches another. A third. Two more. If Daddy takes them off the gate she can keep them in her jewellery box.

Archie scrabbles into the woods. A fluffy bullet, his stub of tail swiping.

Gracey looks up. So many trees. A wet, leafy smell moistens the air, tasting mushroomy inside her mouth. Old and fruity as her nan’s compost. Not exactly nice. Not horrible either. A smell from winter.

Fading light the colour of tin spikes onto silvery limbs, dark green leaves, crispy brown scrub and pale nettles with fuzzy leaves that sting legs. Other parts of the wood stay in night time. Between the trunks and low boughs, blackberry vines choke either side of the track that Archie trots, nose to ground.

Her tummy prickles. Magic lives in this wood. In the distance there will be dens and clearings and treehouses and narrow paths of golden light guarded by singing birds. Foxes, rabbits, badgers, maybe lions that have escaped from safari parks live here too. She feels small and frightened and excited in the way that makes her want to wee.

Soon she will be able to come here whenever she wants. This is one of the reasons they moved here, for woods she can play inside. She’ll have a den in here, with chairs, for when Ben, Avni, Amaya, Isobelle come over. Her daddy said so.

‘Archie!’

Gracey takes Waddles out of the pram. His big blue eyes look as scared as she feels. Gracey reassures her penguin. ‘The gate is open. We can’t get locked out, Waddles.’

She takes a few steps along the track between the giant trees who peer at her. Maybe they are all holding their breath and about to speak. When she imagines being up in the top branches she feels sick.

She can’t see the dog but can hear him rooting ahead. ‘Archie! Archie!’

Archie barks but doesn’t return. Gracey worries about getting in trouble for opening the gate and losing the dog. She stamps further along the path.

The smell of cold earth tints her mind, colouring her thoughts darker as if her head is a jam jar filled with water for cleaning bristles and a paintbrush has been dipped inside. Tunnels burrow between the trees in all directions. She believes the rabbits use these routes to hop about and visit each other, sharing food, seeing each other’s babies. She’s tempted to find a burrow and look inside to judge how tame the rabbits are. She wants them coming into the garden freely but doesn’t want to get too mucky on her hands and knees.

A rustle and clack clack from above her head. She looks up and at the glossy ivy crawling up white trunks and limbs to tailor green trousers and sleeves onto the trees. Where the ivy stops, bony branches spider-leg at the clouds. The tops are fuzzy like hair blown by wind and sticking up. As many new leaves as there are stars in the sky grow and shush with sea sounds. Dimming light hangs mist over the world.

She looks over her shoulder in the direction of the garden and sees the house through a criss-cross of sticks. Until Daddy fixes the new house it’ll be scarier than the woods. She can still hear her mommy, so she’s not gone far. And now she’s actually inside the trees she’s not so nervous. Nothing skitters or flaps nearby. All is still. The cool air is shivery good and the smell of the woods makes her think of fireworks, roasted pork on a bun and helping her granddaddy collect slippery leaves inside a wheelbarrow.

There are no wolves or bears in England and Archie will detect anything as big as a mouse that comes near. Night time is not far away but there is only one path and that’s easy to follow out. She’ll just go round this bend and if Archie isn’t there, then she’ll fetch her daddy so Archie doesn’t get lost.

Her breath catches when she sees the snow.

On either side of the track, the scrub and nettles thin and give way to waxy leaves the colour of limes and more white spots than she could count before her tenth birthday. The white spots carpet the ground all the way into the shadowy distance. Shaggy trunks of trees pull upwards from this green and white frothy sea and lean like the legs of wading people losing their balance.

As she gets closer to this white wonder, the patches of snow become lots and lots of flowers. She bends over and her head fills with the clean scent of onions and leeks. When the filigree of minute petals grows into focus, each flower is as beautiful as anything she has ever seen.

She picks flowers until distracted by a blue fog hovering where a tree has fallen. The path will take her closer to this odd blue-purple smoke.

It’s not fog but more flowers, blue flowers. Amidst waves of blue flowers, the white flowers still grow too. The ivy-furred legs of the trees now stride an ocean of teeny blue and white flowers so startling she feels dizzy. She imagines so many tiny people wearing white or blue hats, crowding the big feet of giants who are trying not to step on them.

Every little blue flower is a fairy hat. She picks some for her mommy. Then remembers Archie but is in such a big, strange space she doesn’t want to raise her voice.

When the blue flowers dwindle into sprinkles of odd bunches here and there, the track gets walled again by low-hanging branches, bearded by nettles and blackberry vines. Some plump red berries look delicious on bushes with prickly Christmas leaves but must be poisonous because the birds don’t eat them. The birds that live this far inside are noisier too. They yodel fire-alarm songs around the tops of trees, telling each other that she and the dog have come inside.

Not being able to see the house anymore makes her tummy busy with the fizz of drinks in cans. Around her bum there’s tingling like before a poo she really needs. But she’ll only go a bit further. One more corner.

She goes that far and sees a light and airy space glaring ahead. And there’s Archie! Mooching round a clear bit of the woods that appears so suddenly she’s confused and wonders if she has come to the end of the trees. But no, the woods are even thicker after the glade and only stop here for this moat of lawn that surrounds the perfect green dome of the hill, as big as a caravan, onto which the last of the light pours.

Gracey runs to it, then stops.

Waddles drooping from one hand, she gapes with astonishment at what exists inside this strange clearing ringed by trees. She thinks that maybe she’s seen it before. But can’t have.

She also wonders if someone lives inside the hill. This must be a garden inside a fence of trees. The mound has a pelt of grass like the smooth circles with flags on the golf course where she was forbidden to do handstands. And the hill is just like the ‘barrow’ in the story she’s been read by her dad, about fairies and the boy who goes to live with them. He doesn’t get any older and when he comes out, his family are in graves.

A circular track in the grass, trodden down by feet, runs round the bottom of the hill. Archie snuffles round the groove like someone has scattered dog treats.

Astonished by the hush that reminds her of the church they went in for granddaddy’s funeral, Gracey steps inside the circle.

Mossy pillars of rock stand around the edge like people turned to stone just inside the trees. One, two, three, four, five … ten!

She and Archie circle the glade like they are hands on the face of a strange old clock made of earth and rocks. Round and round they go, like the little hill makes you do it without knowing why.

After three full rotations, Gracey places Waddles on the nearest stone. Then sits on the neighbouring rock, the shortest one. ‘This is our wood house. These are our chairs.’

Between each stone about the miniature hill, shiny pots sprout red flowers. Gracey peers inside the nearest container and spies a small skull. She picks it out and slips it inside her pocket.

One stone, larger than the others, stands at the top of the hushy glade that is so open to the sky. The big stone reminds her of the table-thing the priest stands behind in church. The altar. Cut flowers mop the surface like a colourful wig.

Attracted by so many flowers, Gracey pads over to investigate.

The rock is flat on top and must stand here to remember someone. ‘Waddles, somebody dieded here.’

Archie whines and won’t follow her to the stone.

Gracey scatters flower stems and discovers that this big boulder has a bowl inside the top. Noisy flies move about the hollow like slugs after eating too much. They’re crawling over black stains inside the hole.

Gracey ruffles her nose and as she steps away, she hears a voice and jumps as if someone has just crept up behind her and shouted ‘Boo!’

Voice. Or her thinking? A voice, or just her thoughts?

Like a cold flannel wiped down the inside of her face, she feels the blood drain and she’s dizzy as if she’s just stood up after sitting cross-legged for ages.

For a while she’s all shaky until the shock of hearing the voice subsides. The voice now feels like it was more inside her head than outside it. Gradually her fear switches to wanting to know who spoke, because it wasn’t a bad voice.

There it is again, and it sounds like a lady whispering words from inside the trees. Or maybe from behind the stone, or even from inside the small hill. There might be a window or door.

She answers the lady’s query; or what might be no more than an urgent feeling that she should introduce herself. ‘Gracey.’ And as usual she gives out the information she expects all strangers to be interested in. She gives her address. She goes on. ‘I’m in foundation. My class is called Minnows. My teacher is Miss Collins.’

There’s no one here and she wonders again if the voice of the lady might not be in the trees after all but inside her head and she’s only imagining the words. As she tries to understand if new voices can just happen inside your head, the speaker moves further away – not drifting away through the trees but going deeper inside her ears.

Questions then come rushing to her in a babbly fountain and Gracey feels as if someone is looking at her face from inside. She knows exactly what to say because of the look in their eyes that she can sense without seeing their eyes.

Is she lost?

‘No. We come to live here now. I live in the house down there with my mommy and my daddy.’

Might the little dog bite?

‘He’s okay. He don’t bite no one.’

No brothers or sisters inside the house?

‘Just my mommy and my daddy and me.’

Who makes the noise?

‘My daddy. He’s fixing things. He’s clever.’

Another voice, from behind the small hill. This voice has no music or whispery loveliness. It is harsh and louder and rushes close. ‘No. No. No.’

Gracey sucks in her breath and turns about.

And sees the old lady from next door with hair cut into a red helmet for a motorbike, creeping towards her with her hands outstretched. An old witch with a weird head.

Gracey stumbles about as if her legs are half asleep.

Thin cold fingers close on her shoulders. The old woman is not looking at her but over her shoulder, as if she’s seen a ghost standing upon the grassy mound.

The angry blue eyes lower to Gracey.

And there is the man from next door too, with his strange clown hair. He’s at the edge of the clearing, pacing nervously like Archie does by the front door when he needs to do ‘his business’.

The man is trying to smile at Gracey. He has a small, dark mouth inside a Santa beard. His mouth looks like it’s been sucking liquorice.

Gracey tears up. The strangers scared away the lady in the trees with the soft voice that she could have listened to all day. These next-door people make her feel like she’s in trouble. And now she’s so scared she feels sick and dizzy and airy in the head. She might just blow away like a balloon in a breeze.

‘Didn’t do nothing. Didn’t take nothing,’ she whimpers. The skull in her pocket weighs heavy as a brick. ‘My mommy and my daddy,’ she adds to build a little defence around her tottery feet.

The witch isn’t listening. She’s peering about the glade, looking for someone else.

‘Not in the circle. Never go inside the circle, my dear,’ says the old man with the head of the minstrel in a picture inside her fairytale book. He’s wearing yellow trousers and she’s never seen a man wear lemon trousers before. They distract her from her distress enough to wonder if they are girls’ trousers. She has yellow trousers. Maybe he doesn’t know these trousers are for ladies and has put them on by mistake. The old lady might have made a similar mistake because she is wearing a man’s clothes.

The ruddy hood of the lady leans in. Her eyes are the colour of a cracked blue teacup marbled with angry red worms. Her face is as wrinkled as a wet bedsheet that’s just been pulled out of the washing machine. She is as angry as Gracey’s ever seen a teacher up her school.

‘Come. Come. Away!’ the lady says. She pulls Gracey away from the altar, along the path that goes round the mound and out of the circle.

The yanky hands and the mean face are too much and now Gracey is crying and all she can think of is Mommy and her whole skin is full of a violent need for Mommy. She can’t breathe properly around sobs and she feels like the ground has disappeared and she’s falling away from everything that makes her happy.

She remembers pictures and bits from the film they showed at school about talking to strangers who have sweets in their cars and men who come into your ‘private spaces’. And it all feels too late now to go remembering them things and her thoughts are going everywhere like scared birds.

The man leans down, his whiskery ham-face too close and thrusting inside her panic and confusion to stir it up more. His breath smells like a pond and his teeth are brown rice, sloping backwards like a shark’s. How does anyone chew with them teeth? He is smiling and has very twinkly eyes that might be kind.

He touches her cheek with a soft finger. ‘You mustn’t come into these woods, my little button.’

‘They belong to someone else,’ the lady says and lets go of her shoulder.

‘She’s very old and needs to sleep.’

Archie whimpers beside Gracey’s feet and the witch-lady peers at the dog as if she’s just put her foot squelching into one of Archie’s curly poos that are the colour of mustard.

The man looks at the spaniel and pulls a face like he’s eaten garlic by mistake, hidden in a spaghetti sauce when her daddy promised not to put it in the food.

‘And I’ll tell you a secret,’ the lady with the bulb-hair says. ‘She doesn’t like dogs. This is her home and she doesn’t want to be disturbed. You understand?’

Gracey nods. She’ll agree to anything just so they’ll let her go. It’s like the time the boys on bikes came into the playground and fighted each other, knocking over some little ones.

From the distance, Mommy calls her name and her voice is all high and screechy with worry.

The old man smiles again. ‘Go on. Take the dog.’

Gracey needs no further prompt, neither does Archie. They flee, racing from the grass circle, the hill and strange voice and the horrible witch people with snatchy hands, weird hair and stinky breath. Only the toy penguin, Waddles, remains by the hill and the stones and the red flowers.

Later, Gracey imagines how he must have watched her go, sat all on his own upon the stone chair, left behind.