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by
Robert Crompton
It
was getting silly. It doesn’t matter when you’re a little kid and there are
lots of people around who believe in fairies and ghosts and giants and things.
But when you get to grammar school and nobody believes in fairies or Santa
Claus or Gulliver’s Travels, that’s
when it can be embarrassing to think of the sorts of things your family
believe.
Okay, lots of
grown-ups believe in God and Jesus and angels and maybe that was all right
though Susan couldn’t think why it was any different from fairies, but her
family believed in other stuff as well like the coming of the Lord and the
Great Climax before next Tuesday and demons and eschewing things and how
terribly wicked other people were, especially those who believed in God but in
the wrong way. And they had these phrases they were always using that made them
sound like they were reciting things from silly Gilead pamphlets, which they
were, of course. Phrases like, ‘in these perilous times’ and ‘the machinations
of the devil.’ If she heard her mother say either of those once more she would
fling her bedroom window wide open and scream all the rudest swear words she
could think of and hope they got picked up by the radio masts on Alvanley Hill
so they could echo round and round the forest for ever and always. And
afterwards, even when she was lots older, when she went walking in the forest
on a windy day she thought they were doing just that.
The demons thing got
to its absolute stupidest when she was thirteen. Some idiots started to put it
around that things, objects, could be demon-possessed. The Wise Old Men of
Gilead started it but there were plenty of others with the right sort of
Gilead-mindedness to fill in the details. The most susceptible objects were
things like antiques or any second-hand goods which could have been owned by
people who dabbled in occult arts. And children were a special target for the
demons so, naturally, toys were the obvious places for evil spirits to lurk.
She might have been
able to cope with this if it had just been other people at Gilead Hall who took
the hunt for hidden demons seriously. But one Friday afternoon when she got
home from school Alan was in the back yard tending a bonfire. When she went up
to her room she saw that Pookie, her teddy bear who always sat on her pillow,
was missing. She went downstairs and into the kitchen where her mother was
preparing vegetables.
‘Where is Pookie?’
she demanded.
Her mother carried
on peeling carrots and replied in a wearied tone, ‘Susan, you are thirteen. You
ought to have grown out of playing with dolls by now.’
‘Mother! I don’t
play with dolls. I never did. Pookie isn’t a doll. He’s a teddy bear and he’s
special. I’ve had him since before I can remember and I want to keep him.’
‘Well it’s too late.
It’s gone on the bonfire. You know very well that these things attract the
attention of demons. We have to be as
cautious as serpents in these perilous times.’
She went back up to
her room and flung the window open and sent the swear words out. ‘Damn, bugger,
piss, bloody hell.’ And in a whisper, she added, ‘fuck.’
She might have
forgotten about the teddy bear ¨C well, eventually she might ¨C but what really
needled her was the pressure to behave as if she was always on the look-out for
lurking demons. They get everywhere in these perilous times.
