Published 'Stabat Mater: Multimedia DFL experience - Digital Workshop 1996

Becky's husband seemed full of an uncontainable victory of delight. 

            By backing into the house, he found it easier to carry the huge Christmas present, without it being spotted by prying eyes from the dark landing of the stairs.  The dolls house to beat all dolls houses.

            Becky looked askance, since she thought he must have spent a fortune on such a big present.  However, when he had eventually lugged it into the dining-room and carefully lowered it upon the table, with one of its bottom edges as a pivot, all her inhibitions were useless.  Gurgling at the back of her throat, she wanted to explore room after room within the intricacies of the mighty mansion.

            Becky pointed in childish excitement.  She collapsed into a pile of giggles, pawing vigorously at Jimmy's shoulder as if she wanted him to come to her rescue before she succumbed to complete breathlessness.  The rooms were perfect in every detail, with hot and cold running taps in every bedroom, dimmer light-switches and wirelesses that actually seemed to be making a barely decipherable tinny broadcast.  Also, there appeared to be a cellar literally under the house, into which they could not see, but Becky managed to thread her finger in and wiggle it about ... incredibly somewhere below the surface of the dining-table upon which the house rested.

            Slowly, with a flourish, Becky closed the front of the house which acted as a vertical lid and merely stared at her husband with merry sparkling eyes.  He looked like Santa Claus incarnate.

            "How much did it cost?" she asked with a manufactured frown.

            That was his cue line and, once given, he couldn't seem to stop:

            "I got it cheap, for what it is.  You know the lady I've told you about who usually sits on the steps at the underground station ... she must have sensed that I still had to buy the one Christmas present which mattered.  She had a shine on me and took me to the shop I didn't know existed beyond the park.  You remember, Becky, where we went for a walk once, that year you said the trees were slow to shed their leaves.  Well, there's a little square behind those alleys which you thought led in haywire directions.  I thought that was a funny expression at the time.  But not now.  The square's full of secondhand bookshops, antique dealers, curiosity shops and a community of youthful-looking people with ancient crafts in their fingers.  It was a grey day, but it now became sunny and too humid for the time of year.  But it felt as if it had always been Christmas in the square, for everyone was in a perpetual state of being highly-strung, poised upon a pinnacle of emotions, daily eager for Christmas tomorrow."

            His speech reeled off like a spinning-wheel: an centuries-old process learned only today.  For his part, he did not realise that he had actually thought all those things; the description merely seemed to come naturally, each word fitting into an old-fashioned jigsaw that would take several lifetimes to complete.  If he had been Beyond The Park, then this was not the first time.  A recurrent plot with different characters.

            Becky grew quieter, more serious, as she again opened the front lid of the hinge.  Nothing jumped out on a spring, as she feared.  All the light fittings (except that on the landing) were now brightly sparkling.  This was only right, she thought, as the darkness in the real outside was already settling into the late afternoon.

            It abruptly dawned on her that there were no doll figures inside the house to represent the inhabitants unless, of course, they were in its cellar.  She laughed out loud, barely stifled for the benefit of the intended recipient somewhere else in the house proper.  The dining-table was laden with all manner of soft-coloured cakes, oozing at the edges with what appeared to be fruit jams and honey and coffee or chocolate cream; oval plates of sandwiches, precisely cut to the demands of a set square, in which the fillings were so thinly spread it must have been anchovy paste or Marmite, although a few revealed the manicured edges of cucumber; a steaming samovar of tea (and she imagined she could scent its heady infusions in every corner of the room); bowls of strawberries and green ice, giving the whole array a splash of colour that the rest lacked; and, finally, rice-paper crimped into flowery napkins and arranged neatly by each place-setting. 

            The dining-room's large corner clock tinkled the hour barely above the threshold of audibility.  Her husband's voice was now lower than whispering. 

            "The shops in that square, Becky, had glowing windows chockfull with handmade toys and childish knick-knacks.  That was strange since it made me think that Christmas was perhaps months away, instead of tomorrow.  Also, I wondered why there were no shadows in the square, with the sun so low in the sky."

            The handle on the dining-room door turned surreptitiously.  Becky was perturbed to think that the destined recipient of the dolls house had slipped from her little girl cot and descended those steep wooden hills beyond which she had been sent to spend the frightening hours.  Her pretty face would be a white sheet, just like the giant tablecloth from which Becky and her husband fed their open mouths with High Tea: the Magic Time of Twilight, when even conjurors were tricked.

            "Mummy, Mummy, I'm frightened, cos I can feel something moving about inside me."

            "Don't fret so, my darling," said Becky to the creature encotted in her soul.  And then, almost as an afterthought:  "It's only Daddy's finger in our cellar."