to throw you over to join him.’
If I close my eyes, I can remember that face, inches from mine, growling, ‘Holl munnen!’ to a grieving infant. ‘Shut your mouth!’ The memory can still make me cold.
And so, six days later, freezing cold, soaking wet and smelling strongly of sheep’s cheese, sealskins and ship’s tar, Mam and I sailed up the Teen and got out of the boat on the long wooden pier by the fishing huts.
She had set off from Denmark as a young wife, and arrived in Teenmooth a widow, with a young, fatherless child.
Little. Old. Me.
Then, more than a thousand years later, a tiny little girl fell into our yard and banged her head. That was when everything changed.
The morning it all happened, Mam said to me, ‘Do you know what day it is today, Alve?’ She still called me by my birth name when we were alone, which was practically always.
I knew but I pretended not to, so that she would have the pleasure of reminding me.
‘Thirty years in Oak Cottage. Thirty years since we moved back into this house,’ and she smiled her gappy smile, and hugged me with her strong arms. ‘I do not want to move again. Not after the last time,’ she said for maybe the hundredth time.
In response, I forced a smile, and nodded, and did not remind her that the world was changing faster than ever.
Mam worried. We both did. Moving house, staying anonymous – living in general – was becoming harder and harder.
It had never been exactly easy. Mam and I, however, had always been quite mobile and we had found that there was always someone willing to rent us a small house, or even just a room; we kept our possessions to a minimum, or stored them elsewhere, especially our books.
But these days? These days, everybody wants to know everything about you. Rental agreements, bank accounts, licences for this, permits for that, forms to fill in, identification documents …
Mam seldom listened to the news on the wireless. It was, she would say, ‘too confusing’. I think she meant ‘too scary’. We had shut ourselves away for so long that Mam no longer understood the wider world of motor cars, jet aeroplanes, computers, mobile telephones.
But sometimes, when Mam was upstairs in bed, I would listen to the news. I would try to understand, and I would long to live in that world: the real world, with all of its wonders.
Mam tutted. ‘She is here again, Alve.’ She wiped her hands and peered out of the scullery window. ‘That is the second time this week. And there is someone with her. Over there on the left. Can you see?’
The ‘little nosy girl’ was what Mam called her. I now know her as Roxy Minto. Mam had initially seen her spying on us nearly a year earlier. At first Mam thought the worst – that it would be a repeat of the last time we had lived here, when the boys had made our lives a misery, and all the questions had started, and we had had to move away.
It turned out not to be that. All the little girl wanted to do was to watch. We would hear her, trying her best to be quiet in the bushes.
Until now she had always been alone. She would approach, and lie in the long grass in front of the gorse bush, and watch us go about our business. Then autumn came, and the leaves dropped, and she stopped coming because – I think – she would not be hidden so well.
It was annoying to be spied on, but better than the fear that we might be attacked, or accused of who knows what.
Witchcraft?
I know that no one is accused of witchcraft in the twenty-first century, but we have feared it for so long that our solitude became our life, and being anonymous our only goal.
And so we let her be. Then the spring came back, and the leaves, and so did the little girl in the bushes.
Mam went to the half-door that led into the backyard and squinted out. Once more she said, ‘I am not moving again, Alve. Not after the last time.’
The last time. I cannot forget the last time. Because the last time involved Jack, and Jack was the last friend I ever had.
I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at the back door of the cottage in the woods where they had taken Roxy inside, but eventually I ran.
I meant to get help: tell Dad, or whoever, what had happened, and it would all be OK, but, in my panic, I got lost.
I know, the woods aren’t even that big, but there were no paths, and I kept criss-crossing my way through, passing the big gorse bush at least twice, and then trying to head uphill because I knew that that, at any rate, would be sort of the right direction.
It must have been nearly an hour later when I emerged, sweating and filthy and panting and scared, at the top of the slope, a little way along from Roxy’s ‘garage’. I began running back to our house, and there she was.
I stared, open-mouthed, at Roxy, looking so chilled, sitting in the doorway of the shed beneath the still-flickering –––AGE sign. Shouldn’t she, I wondered, be a bit more traumatised after her encounter with the witch of the woods? She certainly didn’t look it.
‘Your dad was here,’ said Roxy. ‘Well, there. Looking over the fence. He’s nice. He’s called Ben.’
‘Yeah, Roxy. I know. He’s my dad.’ I was thrown by all this. I wanted to know what had happened to her.
‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘If that’s why you look so weird?’
‘Do I?’
She inspected me, head on one side, really considering the question.
‘Yep. You’re covered in mud, your hair’s full of leaves and your face is red and sweaty. That’s weird to me.’
‘But what about you? What happened?’
‘Well—’ she began but was interrupted.
‘There you are,’ said Dad, peering over the back fence, which came up to his chin. ‘Cor! What happened to you? You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards!’
This was far closer to the truth than I actually wanted to admit.
And why was that? Why, at that very instant, did I not say something like this:
‘Wow, Dad – you’ll never believe what’s just happened! Me and Roxy (Roxy, meet Dad, Dad this is Roxy) have just found this amazing house in the woods. Did you know it was there? It’s, like, really well hidden. And this lady lives there that Roxy reckons is a witch, which obviously she isn’t, although she looks like one! And anyway Roxy fell into their backyard and banged her head, but it looks like she’s OK now. Cool, huh, Dad?’
But I didn’t. And I think I know why.
Apart from the fact that we’d been trespassing – all those signs and barbed wire had ensured that I wasn’t even a tiny bit relaxed about our whole adventure – it was Roxy’s casual behaviour that was freaking me out a bit. I had noticed a thick surgical dressing stuck behind her ear by her hairline.
It all made me think that there was something else going on here. Something that could be spoilt if I said too much.
I also felt bad about not rescuing her. About standing still like a shop dummy while Roxy, bleeding, was carried into a strange house. I don’t think Dad would have