The rambling house rang with the sounds of children. If there were any grown-ups in attendance, the man thought, they certainly did not make their presence felt. In fact, the party was evidently at its height, since two girls in pinafore dresses, of indeterminate ages, leaned from a precarious balcony, holding funny hats tight to their heads in the late afternoon breeze.
A boy blew a squeaky toy from one of the many attic windows - his shouts could not be made out from the distance of the summer pagoda which some ancient folly of a person had seen fit to have erected beside the Green Lake (where the man now sat). The boy who was dressed in a sailor’s tunic seemed an echo of the man when he was twelve. He waved but, surely, he couldn’t be seen.
Eventually, the boy went inside away from the edge of dusk.
The man imagined a sexless creature, with a blackened face, extruding from one of the chimneypots on the vast roof’s staircase stacks. It held up a windmill toy with butterfly sails which the man guessed must be spinning like mad in the picking-up breeze.
Inside, there would no doubt be several other children in party dresses, bibs, tuckers, playing the whole house for its every nook and cranny. Hide and Seek, Pass the Parcel, Musical Chairs, Hunt the Thimble, Postman’s Knock, Forfeits, Dressing-up...
Oh, the man would simply have loved to join in - like a drowner, grabbing his second childhood hook-line-and-sinker.
When a kid, he had discovered great delight in Mother’s dressing-up trunk. She allowed her children to rummage through it of a wet Sunday afternoon.
Just as they had given up any hope of the weather improving, the late sun would suddenly shaft across the loft from the skylight, picking out the man as child in some ancient she-cousin’s coming-out dress, billowing around his ankles in gossamer seas of endless childhood’s dream. By comparison to the nip and tuck of tunic trousers, he had never felt so good, so liberated.
The others would toss about the kaleidoscopic flotsam of fabrics, frills and Fairisle wool.
Mother would laugh upon seeing them all dressed up, their eyes engorged with sunset. His older sister was Lancelot of the Green Lake (done up fittingly in Grandpop’s old fireguard, with see through body tights beneath); the other sister strutting the loft as a Queen, in mink-edged robes of royal blue satin, under a crown of captured sunlight. But he would always earn Mother’s warmest praise, as she tied a pink ribbon in his hair.
Tears at his eyes, the man saw another girl in flowing twilit lace join the other two on the tiny balcony. She waved, as the man waved back simultaneously from the pagoda. She’d been discovered in the unlikeliest of hiding-places, he mused. But nobody knew who’d found her, since a Seeker had not yet been appointed officially, he was sure.
His mind wandered further as the evening drew in and he saw evidence of high-banked fires curling from all the chimney-pots.
***
He shut himself in the broom cupboard as the best possible hiding-place from the Seeker. Best in the sense that he did want her to find him at some stage ... but not too easily.
Some of the other children would probably be now ensconced in outlandish places (it being a very large house), perhaps never to be discovered.
He could hear her counting in the distance, missing out numbers here and there, either as a joke or, maybe, evil. He laughed. The cupboard was stuffy and muffled his noises.
The counting ceased at an unround number. “COMING - READY OR NOT!” He listened to her feet scampering away into the further reaches of the house.
He was surprised to hear an immediate rattling at the broom cupboard door. At first, a gentle teasing of the play in the hinges, gradually becoming more insistent...
His surprise quickly turned to fear. This surely could not be the official Seeker, in body tights. Fear, once formed, quickly hatched the twin fiends Despair and Terror, a dark-derived symbiosis which resolutely took sway.
“Lardy-Dar, Lardy-Dar.” The voice was outlandish, making him think it was a broom or other sweeping implement trying to return to its lair, the cupboard. He laughed ... and cried.
The house was suddenly quiet.
He tried to stop breathing to see if he could hear the intruder breathing. Intruder did not seem the right word, but strange words of which he knew no meaning already passed through his head, pretentious words, silly words. How did you pronounce symbiosis, anyway, let alone spell it or understand it.
The nursery rhyme of which he had just caught a line was not one Mother had read him. It must be another Hider in the darkness, fresh from covering the skin in soot.
“Lardy-Dar, Lardy-Dar.”
A fraught calm before the storm.
***
He was now a man, grown out of such games.
To grow out of things is a strange expression. Most people, if they but knew it, grow from things.
“Lardy-Dar, Lardy-Dar,” he hummed, as he left the pagoda.
The creature inside his body sometimes turned over in its sleep: the child he once was or something far worse?
How do you spell fraught?
(published ‘Chills’ 1992)
