The little girl heard the TV playing to itself in another part of the house. She had been sent to bed early, straight after high tea.

Guns on the relatively nearby army practice ranges were still pocking, like someone tearing open the waistcoat of the earth.

The bullace trees at the bottom of the garden held a chattering throng of birds, which had recently been growing in number as the days had lengthened towards mid-summer. The little girl wondered what was behind the fence that divided the garden from the road - although she really knew what was there all along, for she walked that way to school come mornings. But, this early evening, she indeed wondered, for it added a mystery which went some way to quenching the wide-awake boredom of her butterfly mind.

Nobody would yet be watching the TV, despite its incessant chatter somewhere else in the house. She did not dare to leave her bedroom to go and watch its flickering screen, for discipline can be a vicarious pleasure for absent parents - and they will have left others crouched behind the garden fence observing her pale round face at the bedroom window like a fragile white poppy nodding to the birds in the bullace tree.

She left the window to try the bed and cuddle her baby bear. The parents would not have stationed a warden under the bed, too, would they? But she dared not look, in case there was a thing pressed to the floor like a suit of clothes.

The bed was lumpy tonight, as if the mattress was developing tumours in the stuffing ... and she would no doubt find it difficult to find sufficient purchase to pull her young body from the collapsed springs. It smelt faintly of old man’s pants and she wished she had left this to the last possible moment.

The house would soon be crawling with babysitters. You can’t take too much of a chance with a child left alone in a house. Some sitters were probably already in the garden, wandering about in desultory conversation and rooting out the coming night; others in the bathroom to welcome her if she should be cut short; yet others on the landing and in the hall, sucking the daylight into their ballooning cheeks, with the long drawn-out sighs of those as good as dead; and even more in the kitchen, in the broom cupboard, in the coal shed, all footloose and fancy-free.

But she felt that the child minders would be in her dreams too!

The birds had given up their respective ghosts. The peck peck of guns died away with the last dress rehearsal for war - it would no doubt be all right on the night.

And in the night, the little girl’s face of infolded petals only half showed above a neat lip of sheet. She was, she thought, terribly fearful of the eventual silent encroachment of the mindless minders.

An arm curled like a worm with smaller worms as a head from beneath the bed.

She could not take it all in.

And the minders may soon have what they need - another fresh, blooming soul scared out of its skin for their thirsting empty skulls…


(published 'Auguries' 1988)