Once there was a girl who lived at the edge of a great forest with her sister and her mother and father. One day the father sent the sisters off into the woods to pick berries for their supper. ‘Stick to the path,’ their mother said. ‘And keep away from the darkest part of the forest.’ Everyone knew that the place where the trees grew thickest and thorniest, and the shadows grew thicker still, was under the spell of a powerful witch.
The berries the sisters picked at the edge of the forest were so delicious that they ate them all, until their fingers and mouths were stained red and the light was beginning to fade. They knew they ought to go home but didn’t want to return to their mother and father empty-handed.
‘We must pick more berries,’ the older sister said. And she led her sister deeper into the trees, deeper into the shadows. But the path grew more overgrown and difficult to follow, and the only berries to be found in this part of the forest were poisonous nightshade growing among the toadstools and hemlock and all other things that like the dark.
As they rested under a tree, the younger sister saw a flash of colour in the branches above them. It was a dazzling bird with rainbow wings and it sang a song so clear and beautiful that the little girl was enchanted. As the bird took flight, she ran off after it – and her sister followed, forgetting all the warnings she had been given.
But when they reached the tree they’d seen the bird fly towards, it was gone. They could hear its song close by and then spied the flash of its wings as it flew off again, further into the shadowy gloom.
The sisters followed the sound of its song deeper and deeper into the forest and before long they were lost.
‘Clem!’
I’m deep in shadowy dream, too deep to know the voice or understand it, but not too deep to feel panic: I have to reach it, I have to get to where it is.
‘Clem.’ An insistent whisper.
I open my eyes, staring blindly for a second into the familiar dark of the dormitory, a big, high-ceilinged room divided by makeshift screens and curtains to give some privacy.
Billie comes into focus, clutching Luna, her toy owl, shivering. This happens most nights. Before I’m properly awake I always think we’re at home. It’s not that I forget where I am exactly, it’s more when I am that gets confused. I think I’ve gone back. Time and reality blur at night. It’s hard to unpick dreams from memories and shadows.
‘Hey,’ I whisper, reaching out a hand. ‘You okay, B?’
She nods.
‘Something disturb you?’
There are lots of us in the dormitory, maybe twenty, maybe more, all women and girls. The building used to be a school, Polly told me. It was going to be turned into flats but the developer went bust or something. Our beds are separated by screens and curtains but they don’t keep out the night-time noises: phones, whispers, snoring, people crying out in their sleep, almost-silent crying. The darkness is thick with other people’s dreams, with their homesickness.
She shrugs.
‘Did you have a bad dream?’
She doesn’t answer.
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘Nothing to be scared of.’
‘I’m not scared,’ Billie says in a whisper that manages to be scathing. ‘I just want to be with you.’
‘Come on then.’ There’s barely enough room for me in the narrow, sagging bed, let alone Billie as well, but we manage. She snuggles in close and I wrap an arm round her, her hair tickly against my nose.
‘Better?’ I whisper.
I feel her nod.
‘Good. Me too.’
Sometimes she wants to talk, or for me to tell her a story. Sometimes just being close is enough.
‘I was trying to remember the name of that toy you had at home,’ I say. ‘The spinning top thing with the pictures.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I just thought of it.’
‘Dad gave it to me,’ she said. ‘He made pictures to put in it of a bird taking off and flying because that was what I wanted most.’
She’s quiet for a minute and I think maybe she’s fallen asleep.
‘When will we go home?’ she says.
I search for an answer in the dark.
‘I don’t know, B,’ I say at last. ‘As soon as it’s safe.’
Home. Safe. They don’t feel real, as much stories as any of the fairy tales I write for her.
‘Okay,’ she says.
‘I love you,’ I say.
I close my eyes. After a while I feel her breathing slow as she drifts off. I try to drift too, but I can’t. I can’t stop thinking.
About the spinning toy.
About Billie’s gloves.
About Polly and her questions.
Polly thinks if I answer all her questions, if I tell her everything, then that will make it better.
She’s wrong.
I remember the kind concern on her face, her certainty that I will tell her everything if she gives me enough time. Do you think you can do that, Clem?
No. I can’t do it.
I try to breathe slowly, heavily, try to trick myself into calm, into sleep. But my mind isn’t calm, it’s racing off into the dark, away from the questions and their answers, getting tangled up in itself, snagged on memories.
Some of the stories Grandpa told me when I was a kid were about the Knights of the Round Table. Swords in stones, wizards, all that. In one story there was this old king who got wounded, and all he could do was go fishing and watch his land fall into ruin and wait for a knight to come and ask him a certain question that would heal him.
‘What question?’ I asked Grandpa.
‘Nobody knows.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It depends on who’s telling the story.’
‘That’s stupid,’ I said. ‘And how could a question heal you anyway?’
‘The way I see it,’ Grandpa replied, ‘everyone’s got answers inside them that they don’t know till the right question is asked. Or maybe they do know the answers, but they aren’t brave enough to say them out loud until someone asks them the right question. Either way, the question works like a key.’
‘A key to unlock a person?’
Grandpa had nodded then. ‘And in this story, only a true knight would be the kind of person to know the right question.’
I think Polly is that sort of person. And she will keep asking me questions until she gets to the one she knows will unlock me and let out everything that’s hidden inside.
But I don’t want to be unlocked.
I close my eyes but I know I won’t sleep now.
From the locker next to my bed I take out socks, a sweater and my rucksack. I tiptoe across to the window, which has a ledge below it just wide enough for me to sit on. It’s got one of those blinds with the plastic slats, but stripes of light shine through from a street lamp outside. From a pocket in the rucksack I take out a bird folded from gold paper, a small round mirror with mother-of-pearl roses on the back, a photograph, a blue feather. Finally, I take out the notebook. I lay them all in a row, these precious things from long ago and far away that washed up with me on the shore of this new life. I hold them one by one in the orange glow of the street lamp, like a ritual. I don’t wish or pray or anything. I just hold them. Then carefully I put them away. All except the notebook.
You’re good at stories, Billie told me that day, my perfect, golden birthday, when she gave me the notebook.
Yes.
I like telling stories.
I turn back through the dog-eared pages of the notebook now, right to the first page. Time bends and twists and collapses in on itself.
Written there in childish writing are the words:
Once there was a girl who
Maybe I can do it after all. Maybe I can tell Polly my story. The story of how Billie and I came to be here.
Perhaps I’ll even give it a happy ending.
‘Happy birthday!’
I started into semi-consciousness, forcing open an eye, and saw Billie’s face millimetres from mine in the grey half-light. Her breath was warm on my cheek.
‘Here’s your present,’ she said.
‘Mmmhh…’
Something I couldn’t see, but which had sharp corners, was pressed hard against my chest and neck so that my head was wedged back against the pillow.
‘You’re not asleep, are you?’ she said, belatedly.
‘I mean…?’ I squinted at the blur of her. ‘I guess not any more.’
‘Yessss,’ she hissed. ‘Mum said I had to wait till you were awake to give you my present and now you are.’
’I said I wasn’t asleep,’ I croaked. ‘I didn’t say I was awake.’
‘Openitopenitopenitop—’
I closed my eyes. ‘Just gimme a minute, B.’
She sighed theatrically and removed her elbows from my ribcage. ‘One second two second three second four—’
‘Okay, okay.’ I wriggled myself into a more upright position and blinked till the world began to sharpen.
‘I can help you open it if you like,’ Billie said, holding out the present, which was wrapped in paper covered with kittens wearing sunglasses. She was breathless with excitement, hopping from foot to foot in her mermaid pyjamas.
‘Come on then,’ I pulled the duvet back. ‘Get in. Oww! How are your feet so freezing?’
I tore back the paper at one end and Billie did the same at the other. Inside was an expensive-looking hardback notebook, with a green cover made to look old, and a design of birds flying across it embossed in gold.
‘Wow, B! It’s beautiful.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘I love it.’ I put my arm round her and kissed the top of her head.
‘I saved up my own money for it,’ she said.
‘No way.’
‘I chose it specially because of the birds.’
‘Of course.’
‘And because you like green. And because it looks really old, like a book from a haunted-house library.’
I smiled. ‘It looks exactly like that. Do you think the book might be haunted?’ I did a woooo spooky ghost noise and waved it at her.
She looked up at me seriously. ‘I actually think it might be magic.’
‘I think you might be right.’ I turned the heavy cream pages of the book. Lined on one side, blank on the other. ‘How I am I going to think of anything special enough to write in there though?’
‘It doesn’t have to be special,’ Billie said. ‘You can write anything. Anyway, you’re good at stories.’
‘If it’s magic, the stories might come true.’
Billie’s eyes went round. ‘You better make them have happy endings then.’
‘Happy endings are boring.’
‘No they’re not. Happy stories are the best stories.’
‘Okay. Well, you better help me write the first one then, or I’ll make all the wrong things happen.’
There was a yawn from the doorway. I looked up and saw Claudia there in her dressing gown.
‘Mama!’ Billie shouted. ‘Say happy birthday to Clem.’
‘Happy birthday, Clem. Sorry you didn’t get a birthday lie-in.’ She walked over and kissed me on the cheek, ever so slightly self-conscious, in the way that affection between Claudia and me always was, even after nine years. It wasn’t that we didn’t mean it, just that, somehow, we always felt aware of it, like the steps of a dance we were still practising till we could do it without thinking. ‘Billie, you do realize it’s not even morning yet?’
‘After midnight is morning. Because it’s the next day.’
Claudia gave her a look.
‘She was awake,’ Billie added quickly.
‘I bet she really appreciated that, B.’
‘She really did,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Claudia. You didn’t have to get up.’
‘I needed to anyway. I’ve got to go to work. It’s a clinic morning.’ Claudia was always busy, working as a GP, volunteering, mentoring, being on committees. ‘I‘ll be back for the birthday picnic though. Your dad made me promise on pain of death.’
‘What am I being accused of now?’ Dad appeared in the doorway in his dressing gown, bleary, hair sticking up. He came over and wrapped me in a bear hug. He’d always made such a big thing of my birthday when I was a little kid, to try and make up for Mum not being there I realized later. He’d never outgrown the habit and I loved him for it.
‘Happy birthday, sweetheart,’ he said.
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘But you need to stop growing up now. No more. Okay?’
I rolled my eyes at him. ‘Dad!’
‘Fifteen!’ he said. ‘Where did my little girl go?’
I knew he was joking but I also knew he really was a little bit sad too and I didn’t want him to be. I kissed him on the cheek.
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘And I think you should go and make me some coffee.’
He smiled. ‘Your wish is my command, birthday girl.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Claudia said, resting her hand briefly on Dad’s shoulder as she passed. ‘Got to get moving anyway. Come and help me, Billie? Give Clem five minutes’ peace on her birthday.’
‘Sorry, can’t.’ Billie climbed back under the duvet and picked up the notebook. ‘Me and Clem are writing a story in the magic notebook.’
We didn’t end up writing our story that day, Billie and I.
On the first page of my notebook, Billie wrote:
Once there was a girl who
But there were so many possibilities back then that we couldn’t decide what came next. And then there were more presents to open and pancakes to eat before Claudia went to work. And then cards arrived and yet more presents, and then Mischa turned up with massive helium balloons in the shape of a 1 and an 8. ‘They’d run out of fives,’ she told Dad, wide-eyed and innocent, whispering to me later that we might get served in the pub if they thought it was my eighteenth. And then there was the cake to decorate and the sandwiches to make and then and then and then…
‘Leave a page,’ Billie had said. ‘Two pages. So we can write the story later.’
But, somehow, we never did.
We can’t tell the story now that we could have told then. Those people don’t exist any more. They were us, but we are not them.
That story won’t be written now.
I must tell a different story instead.
‘You’re looking well today,’ Polly says encouragingly as I walk into her office.
In my head, Mischa snorts. She’s just being nice. You look like you have some olden-days disease. Scurvy. Or rickets. Oh, no – wait! Consumption. Actually, maybe all of them.
Polly smiles and fetches me some water, but I don’t drink it because my throat feels so tight I’m not sure I could. I focus on acting normal. My nails dig into my palms.
‘So,’ Polly says. ‘Why don’t you tell me a bit about your home?’
This wasn’t a question I’d been expecting.
‘How do you mean?’
She smiles. ‘I mean, just about your family… friends maybe. Whatever you want to share. What life was like, before all this. If you’d like to?’
I wouldn’t like to, but it’s easier than talking about what came after.
And once I start I find it’s hard to stop.
I tell her how we were just pretty normal, me, Dad, Claudia and Billie, even though I know there’s no such thing as normal, and some people would probably think we weren’t normal at all. But what I mean is that we were just pretty boring.
I tell her about how it had just been Dad and me for a few years, before Dad and Claudia got together. How they had this mutual friend who was a journalist like Dad and who’d been at university with Claudia, and he set them up on a date. And Dad thought Claudia wouldn’t be interested in him because she was some high-flying doctor and beautiful and idealistic, and he was, in his words, a ‘cynical old political hack with terrible dress sense’, but it turned out they had loads in common – they were both only children, had both lost their parents in their twenties, both liked the same (terrible) music, which meant Billie and I later had to listen to it on every car journey, blah blah. They’d tell the story of how they met a lot. It was kind of cute, but kind of nauseating.
And I tell Polly about how Claudia was soon expecting Billie and they’d worried that I might feel jealous or anxious when Billie came along, so Claudia had got me to talk to Billie even before she was born so that she’d know my voice when she came out, and how I used to tell her stories even then. And I tell Polly how when I visited tiny newborn Billie in hospital and she gripped my finger like she was never going to let go of it, I felt like I remembered her even though it was the first time we’d ever met; like I’d known her all along, all my life, maybe even before that.
Then I tell her about Mischa and how I’d known her since my first day at nursery and how when she argued with her mum she could change from speaking English to Polish in the middle of a sentence, which seemed like a kind of superpower to me. How she bought all her clothes in charity shops and wore crazy eye make-up and always looked amazing. And how she loved horror movies but also cute kitten videos, and was the funniest person I knew.
And I tell her about Danny and how his mum was sick from when we were little kids and he had to look after her, and sometimes he’d get in trouble at school for being late or not doing homework, even though we knew it was because he had to do stuff at home and it wasn’t fair. But he never complained about it because he just wasn’t a complaining kind of person. And sometimes Mischa and I felt bad because we complained about stupid stuff all the time, but not so bad that we didn’t do it.
I tell her how on Sundays Dad always made us pancakes with bacon and maple syrup, and how he’s a massive geek and knows all about comics and Dungeons and Dragons, and drinks about five hundred cups of black coffee a day.
And how Claudia is good at everything except cartwheels, which really annoyed her, and how I used to do them all the time because it was the one thing I knew I could do better than her. And how she was always doing things for other people, like taking meals to our housebound neighbour or volunteering at the foodbank.
And how Billie nagged Claudia till she put up a bird table in the garden and Billie used to watch the birds on it and look them up on this app I got on my phone and draw pictures of them that we stuck on the fridge.
And how we were happy.
Until—
‘Until…?’ Polly prompts.
It wasn’t until two weeks after my birthday that I found out what had been wrong with Claudia that golden day, that cloud in the blue sky, that pinprick of wrongness.
It was this:
When Claudia had popped home to change before coming to the park she’d found an official-looking letter lying on the doormat with the birthday cards and pizza flyers. She read it sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen with the sun slanting in through the glass doors, catching in its glow the smeared line of fingerprints. These had first begun to appear, she remembered, when Billie started walking – yesterday it seemed – and always reappeared no matter how fiercely Claudia resisted them with Windolene and J cloths, their progress climbing higher each year, a rising river. And ghost messages too that Billie and her friend Sakura had written with fingertips in the mist of their breath: smileys and hearts, Billie!! and Sakura!!, and HELLO STINKYPANTS.
I really must clean those windows, Claudia had thought, because it was something she could do, something normal she could cling to when everything else seemed to have shifted around her and come loose. But she didn’t move, because in another bit of her mind those messages seemed unimaginably precious suddenly, mystical, ancient marks from a long-distant past like cave paintings or runes carved in stone. Stupid, I know, she said when she told me all this, much later. Which it wasn’t, but it wasn’t a very rational, let’s-make-a-list Claudia thing to think either.
The letter, which said that because Claudia’s grandparents hadn’t been born in this country her citizenship was judged to be discretionary, see Section II (‘Immigrants and Inherited Citizenship’) of the enclosed booklet, slipped from her hand onto the porcelain floor tiles she’d chosen last year. She didn’t move to pick it up. She didn’t need to reread it. She remembered every word. How the Office of Homeland Protection had evidence to show she did not meet the requirements, as outlined in Section VI (‘Good Character and Upholding British Values’) of the enclosed booklet. How she’d be required to attend an interview in due course to determine her eligibility for citizenship. If it was determined she did not meet the criteria for citizenship, she would no longer be entitled to remain in the country. If she remained illegally, she would be arrested and deported. And how she could appeal the decision but should be advised that the chances of a successful appeal were low (see fig. d, Appendix 2, of the enclosed booklet).
She had a sudden urge to set the enclosed booklet on fire using the fancy wok burner on the gleaming range cooker. But she knew that would only set off the smoke alarm. And anyway, she found her legs were shaking and she couldn’t move.
So instead she sat and looked out onto our garden, which she’d transformed from the scrubby rectangle of weeds and snails and feral cats into a wildflower haven for bees, with a swing and a wooden playhouse for Billie, and raised beds that had produced never-ending courgettes last summer, which we’d all had to pretend to be pleased about. At the far end was the patio that got the sun all day, where Claudia did yoga at sunrise on summer mornings and she and Dad drank wine with friends on lazy weekend evenings. She’d planned, next year, a small office in the corner so that she could work a day a week from home, pick Billie up from school, take her to the park or for hot chocolate on the way home.
When she looked at the clock, she realized almost an hour had passed.
So that was why she was late to the picnic.
Why she looked at Dad and Billie that way.
It was because she knew. Not what would happen, but what could.
She’d understood it long ago, I think, before Toby Knight even became Prime Minister. She understood that he might and what it could mean if he did.
She understood how fragile it all was, and how all of it – the gardens, the family dinners, the plans, the friends, the small, smeary fingerprints on windows and the fingers that made them – all of it can be taken away, can become memories that scarcely seem possible. Can become a handful of possessions – a small mirror, a piece of paper folded into the shape of a bird, a blue feather.
Can become a story.