Vinyl Diaries XV: C.W. Stoneking

photo by 1981 Adam

C.W. Stoneking
The Factory Theatre
December 15, 2007

Should a white man be singing the blues?

It depends, I think, but however you feel about it C.W. Stoneking certainly throws up a few more issues than your garden variety show.

More over at Mess + Noise

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Seven

Emily put the book down. So this was what Crouch was playing it. After all these years, he had discovered a way to be near her mother again. He had of course explained all this to Emily when first she arrived in the music box, but so overwhelming was the situation she hadn’t been able to understand what was really happening, the full ramifications of what he was saying.

And now, who knew how long later, he had been living in her own house – no doubt sleeping in her own bed – biding his time until he had a chance to do away with her father and... who knows what he planned to do with her mother? Clearly he had to get out of her form at some stage, but from what she had learned of Crouch at that point she would be highly expendable, from his point of view.

She had to act, and quickly. But there still remained the issue of how she could possibly get near the house while she looked like this, and what she could hope to achieve even if she were to try.

By now the day was growing quite warm, while the sea was picking up even more of a swell. Emily knew she had to revisit Crouch’s notes once more, to see what the final section might reveal. There was one more thing she needed to understand – the music box itself. How was it that Crouch had come to place himself in there? How had he learnt to come and go as he pleased, to treat it as a world into which he could pass and make anything he wanted happen – well almost anything, as he had clearly been unable to make her mother his own, even in there.

Loathe to pick the book up again just yet (it had once again grown very hot, threatening to burn her fingers as she touched it), Emily decided to have another look through the spyroscope.

Holding it up to her left eye – Emily was proudly left-handed, fondly wearing her ‘sinistrality’ as she had learned it was sometimes called – she saw her father leading her by the hand down the cobbled road just past Gould’s General Store. With a start she realised that they were only paces from the Pig and Whistle, and here she was, in full sight of anyone who might come around the corner.

Emily did not dare to take any chances and lowered herself over the end of the pier, hanging from its edge while her feet sought out something onto which they could latch. Thankfully her ankle knocked against a cross beam and she was able to gain a foothold and swing down. From here the sea spat angrily at her, white foam surging right up to Crouch’s boots, licking them as their peaks passed in a hissing froth.

Realising with a jolt that she had left the book up on the pier, she reached her hand up and poked about blindly until its cover heated her fingertips. Emily snatched it up, thrust it into her pocket and steadied herself, then looked around to appraise her situation. The beam on which she now stood ran from one side of the pier to the other. Worn from years of pounding by the sea, it featured deep grooves, where the weaker grains had been worn away sooner than the more resilient.

There was really no way to go other than back from where she had come, or down, into the rolling sea. Not enamoured with either scenario, Emily elected to stay put for the moment, at least until her sense of danger cleared.

Over the incessant hubbub of the sea, she began to make out voices. An incomprehensible murmuring to begin with, they grew a little more distinct. Two pairs of legs abruptly appeared from above and just to her left, and Emily almost lost her grip when she realised that the shoes sitting at the end of the smaller pair were hers.

Straining to hear over the fizzing and lapping of the water, the voices soon crystalised for her. Her heart leapt when she realised the man’s voice was irrefutably that of her father Percy. She could picture him as though he were right in front of her, his brow furrowed as he thought a little too hard. Her mother often told him he needn’t worry quite so much, but Emily knew he loved to think about everything there was to think about, to turn his mind to problems that others found too difficult, or never even thought to think about in the first place.

There had never been a question she had asked that he had not put his mind to working out. The simpler ones – why the sky was blue; why one never saw birds fall from the sky like stones, and where they must go to die – he would answer straight away, as though he had been thinking about that very matter when she asked and he was glad that she had taken an interest in where his thoughts were heading.

Others took a little more consideration, a little more thought, but he never shied away from providing some form of an answer. Emily had for some time suspected that these answers weren’t always, technically, the right ones, but she loved to hear him tackle them, cherished that twinkle his blue eyes gave, like the reflection of a campfire blazing back out at her, while he shared the secrets of what a dog was thinking about as it drifted off to sleep, how man grains of sand there were on a beach and what happened to us when, finally, we die.

As high as her heart had leapt when she heard her father’s voice – realised that he was alive and well and so close – is just how low it sunk when she heard her own voice, was reminded that Crouch was in total command of her and spinning his deceitful web.

From gas-filled balloon to lead balloon, she was brought crashing back to earth in an instant; cold and alone, so near to what she wanted back more than anything in the world, yet so far.


*********************

to be continued

*********************

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Six

The water was like ice. The swift-running current grabbed at Isabelle’s body and sucked it into its racing flow. What it was running from, where it was going, neither Isabelle nor the river knew. For a long while it dragged her beneath its surface. Her open eyes knew she was still facing upwards for she could see the way the moonlight fractured on the top of the running water, split into silver shards like a shattered mirror. She lifted her hands towards them, half expecting the shards to slice them open, spill her hot blood into the cool water, but of course it was just a trick of the eyes and mind, an associative conceit.

Isabelle remained resolute in her decision to have plunged into the hungry river and felt, for the first time in as long as she could remember, at peace. A voice at the back of her mind reminded her that she could not stay underneath the water forever, so she calmly set about drawing herself closer to that dancing light above.

When she finally raised her head above its surface and took in air, the sudden rush of sounds reminded Isabelle of where she was. Still she refused to panic – in all her time, her tangled life, apart from Percy and Emily it was water that she most trusted. But it was a strange kind of trust. She knew it would ultimately look after her, but she was uncomfortable admitting just what a hold it had on her, what a pull it had on her heart.

This was the reason she could rarely bring herself to take Emily down to the sea, though they both loved it so. If she was to be honest with herself, it was a form of greed, a jealous protectiveness. She did not want to lose Emily to this love, for it to capture her daughter in the way it had captured her own young heart, filled a spot in her that for others family completed. She knew she was being selfish, but so important to her were Percy and Emily that she could not bear to think that something else could take the place she held for her daughter, could draw Emily in under its unmatchable spell.

The river, Isabelle realised, was starting to lose the edge of its frenetic pace. She had been tumbled this way and that for who knows how long, whereas now she was able to feel part of its rhythm, moving with it rather than it simply tossing her along. Resting on its surface, drawn along on its merry dance but now well and truly in step, Isabelle saw that the river had widened since she jumped in, but that up ahead there was a peninsula of jutting land, slowing the water as it had to squeeze past and around into its next bend.

Near the end of this peninsula, just above the water line, she saw a fire was burning. Shadows played in the treetops as the fire danced and twisted, drawing in new breath as deeply and appreciatively as Isabelle herself was now doing. She felt the loose folds of her dress drawn across her body as a cross-current pulled her towards the side of the river, and is it passed into the small bay that the peninsula had created, she felt her feet touch the stony river bottom. She stood and waded through the water, feeling it tugging her back but this time resisting. She was loathe to disappoint it, but knew she had been brought to this particular place for a reason.

As she reached the river’s edge, water streaming down the hair plastered to her head and dripping off the clumping ends, Isabelle pricked her ears to see if she could hear anything that would alert her as to what she should do next. But apart from the ceaseless, whooshing, rushing of the water and the dry, raspy crackling of the fire, there was no sound at all. The birds had curled up under a warm wing for the night, while the nocturnal army of creatures that came out after dark were perhaps hiding in the trees, eyes drawn in slits so as to not let the whites give them away, but none was uttering a peep.

Isabelle clambered up the river bank and walked slowly towards the fire. It was only small, taking up no more room than a small stool, and was burning quite low. Maybe she was too late? Somebody must have been here recently, but there seemed no sign of anyone at the present. And anyway, why would somebody be waiting for her here? How would they have known she might come by? She certainly had not planned anything of the sort, so there was no way anybody could be expecting her.

“Now that’s where you are wrong!”

Isabelle jumped near out of her skin, her heart racing at the shock of the voice coming from out of thin air. Dropping from a branch that was hanging from the tree just behind her, a small red-headed man gave a low bow to the startled, dripping lady before him. Isabelle’s mind raced, trying to work out whether she had ever seen him before.

“You don’t yet know me, but you will be very glad to have made my acquaintance,” he smiled, replacing a green felt hat upon his head.

“My name is Oscar, you might say I am an acquaintance of Emily’s.”

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Five

Emily pored quickly through more of Crouch’s notes, increasingly frustrated at not being able to find a solution to her dilemma. Muddling her thoughts was the dawning awareness of just how inhuman Crouch had become, the twisted experiments and the wild ideas he was spouting. She learned of how his chamber had been used to achieve all manner of frightful ends, reading with horror of his joy at chancing one day, in a walk through a distant forest, across a wolf that had wandered into a steal trap left by one of the local hunters.

The wolf had been there for days, unable to wrench its leg from the trap. Without food or water it had weakened dramatically, wasting away to skins and bones. It was left so weak that it could do nothing as Crouch dragged it back to his hidden laboratory in the dead of the night, securing it in a special cage he had built. Over the weeks Crouch tended to the wolf, feeding it and nursing it back to health.

Emily was nearly physically sick as she read a passage in which the wolf, nearing full strength, had been fed an old man Crouch had found slumped outside the Pig and Whistle early one morning. With a sadistic glee Crouch went into graphic detail about the way the wolf had picked the man apart piece by piece until nothing remained.

Once he was assured the wolf had returned to rude health, Crouch made his move. He had thought long about how he would be able to safely trade places with the wolf. If he was left in the cage, then Crouch wouldn’t be able to get out once the swap was made. But if he let the wolf out now, he was surely exposing himself to a danger that was too much of a risk. For though he had returned the wolf back to health, he knew (and admired) that the wolf would feel no debt, that there would be no regret or remorse if he did to Crouch what he had done to the old man.

While not perfect, he decided the only solution was to put the wolf to sleep, then open the cage. He could make the change while it was still under, then when he came to it would be he, Crouch, who was the wolf, with the wolf confined to one of his boxes.

Mixing up a sleeping draught, Crouch was shaking with anticipation. Emily read how he had never been so excited by the potential of an experiment, thrilling at the chance to finally achieve his ambition of running with the wolves. He mixed the draught into the wolf’s water and waited. It grew drowsy, closed its eyes and came to rest on the floor of the cage. Crouch made his move.

***

Much of the middle section of Crouch’s notes meticulously detailed his time in the forest, his experiences living as a wolf. From what Emily could work out, he spent years with them, and she wondered why, if he was so happy leading such a life, he had decided to return, to take up where he had left off in human form. Then she saw it:

She brought me back. I would, I believe, have never returned otherwise. I went in thinking I would learn their tricks, their ways, grow to think like them and then return to being Aloysius Crouch, with all I had learned. But the longer I lived as a wolf, the more I realised how perfectly their form was suited to this way of life, their sleek dark fur wrapped around pure, taut muscle, powerful jaws from which there was no escape.

Yet, deep within, as much as I was them, as much as I belonged, a trace of something else remained. I would never even have known if I had not seen her there, this beauty of the forest who appeared as though from nowhere one night and was to make the forest as much her home as I had made it mine.

I watched her, day after day. At first it was a balm, a soothing experience to lay my hot, hungry eyes on such a gentle, refreshing creature. But it grew too much – day after day I would draw near, but was unable to make the final step and reveal myself. It tore me up inside, these contradictory feelings when I was here to learn to let such thoughts go entirely.

It was no use. I had to meet her, discover who she was, what she was doing here. I should never have given into the temptation.

Shaking, Emily read on to discover how the wolves had, though Aloysius’ persistent arguing, taken her mother in. She experienced the scene she had witnessed in the music box, the confrontation in the Golden Grove where her mother and father had fled as one, through Aloysius’ eyes. Once he stood up to Jericho, taken him on directly in front of the other wolves, there was no future for him in their company.

Lucky to escape with his life, he fled the forest and resumed life as Aloysius Crouch, to all appearances an ordinary human being. But he burned inside with an uncontrollable fire. He was, as far as such a man could be, dangerously in love.

Vinyl Diaries XIV: Bridezilla

Bridezilla
The Mandarin Club
November 28, 2007

They're not quite there yet, but the kiddies in Bridezilla are on their way...

More such talk at Mess + Noise yonder.

Going feral

A few weeks ago I was roped in by the lovely Angela Stengel as photo monkey for an article she was writing for Cyclic Defrost on Danny Jumpertz and Feral Media.

I was warned that I would be rendered fairly jealous by the Camperdown warehouse that is Feral Media HQ, doubling as a home for Danny and Feral Media co-runner Caroline.

The prediction came true. But putting the green-eyed monster to one side, I managed a few snaps, which can now be found over with Angela's delightful tale.

Farewell

He's gone.

After more than a decade of deceit and divisiveness, Australia can finally emerge from the long dark shadow cast by outgoing Prime Minister John Howard.

Acknowledged even within his own conservative party as a mean and tricky piece of work, Howard missed the perfect opportunity to retire at the top, steering the Coalition not only to utter humiliation across the nation in Saturday's election, but looking like being only the second prime minister in Australian history to also lose his seat.

A master politician, Howard held onto power as long as he did by preying on ignorance and fear and tapping into the worst aspects of Australian culture and parochialism, through dog whistling xenophobia, pork-barelling and cleverly milking any 'anti-' sentiment onto which he could latch.

This, at a time where the resources boom flooded government coffers with cash that they could use to selectively bribe key constituents in their desperate (and largely successful) bids to stay in power.

As with any election in living memory, it was not won by the opposition but lost by the government. The Coalition's extreme workplace laws and the disgraceful stripping of workers' rights - introduced without even the hint of a mandate - appear to have been Howard's undoing, along with his broken promises on interest rates. An ugly, sloppy campaign based on scaremongering and union-bashing failed to win back lagging support.

Pulling rabbit after rabbit out of the hat in previous elections, there was always the fear that Howard could do it again, but thankfully there was nothing left in the bag of tricks this time around.

The starkest reminder of what we have lived through for almost 12 years of his rule comes in the responses given when Howard or his fellow party members are pressed to point to highlights of his time in power. Again and again they raise his response to the Port Arthur massacre (a welcome tightening of gun controls) and the Bali bombings.

Not a single example is put forward of a visionary policy, a uniting moment, a symbolic or practical gesture that suggests he will leave Australia a better place to live for the trust he has been given.

It would be nice to imagine the landslide return of the Labor government from the wilderness was a vote for a return to decency, respect and caring for others - particularly those most in need. That it was to send a message that we will not tolerate a war-mongering, narrow-minded, lying leader who could share no vision for the future beyond preserving his own legacy.

It's far more likely to reflect the government getting a kicking for rising interest rates and costs of living, with the opposition finally putting forward a candidate that the Government wasn't able to undermine.

But for now there's at least a small window of hope. We have a new government that is not helmed by a climate change skeptic and ideologue on a crusade against 'political correctness', that has promised investment in health, education and tackling climate change, as well as a staged withdrawal of troops from Iraq. A party that will work closely with the US, but hopefully not hand over foreign policy for a chance to be considered George Bush's deputy sherriff.

Issues such as the life expectancy and living conditions of Indigenous Australians are still, as ever, likely to take a back seat - and new leader Kevin Rudd has given little hope to those looking for a more humane refugee policy - but at least we can finally look forward to taking one step at a time towards a brighter future and not feel like we're caught in an inexorable slide into a social, cultural and environmental abyss.

To steal Mungo MacCallum's recollection of Gough Whitlam's quotation of the last line of Dante’s Inferno:

E quindi uscimmo a reverder le stelle

And thence we emerged, to see the stars again.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Four

Isabelle felt her soft footfall lightly crunch on fallen twigs and drying pine needles, smelling the cool air of the approaching evening. She would need to be back to the shelter she had made herself fairly soon, the electric smell of an approaching storm was tickling her nose. To her left and right the forest appeared an impenetrable tangle, growing in a calculated disorder intended to discourage wayward wandering. The path along which she travelled would not have appeared to almost anybody else to be that, but Isabelle had been here long enough to recognise the telltale, if slight, signs that others had been this way. Small animals mostly, but occasionally a larger creature; man-sized but not walking on two legs as she was now.

She understood that she was looking for something, but wasn’t sure what that might be. She wasn’t retracing her steps, of that she seemed certain, yet the feeling that she would know what it was when she found it was strong.

Isabelle felt an unnerving sense of being watched. She carefully looked around as she went, trying to appear nonchalant, but nothing caught her eye that betrayed the presence of anyone but herself. She was unable to shake the feeling, but was determined not to let the rising fear take hold. She had lived here before, she reminded herself, was familiar with its risks and dramas, and had met and faced them all.

Reaching a huge grey tree, its gnarled branches twisting to the sky like witch’s fingers, thick, coarse bark cracked like a the mud in a dry creek bed, Isabelle stopped. There appeared to be a fork in the path, the choice of which way to follow weighing surprisingly heavily on her, as though a momentous moment was resting on such a seemingly simple decision.

Once she chose one there was no going back. That much she knew. Unsure of what it was for which she was searching – but increasingly certain that it would be found, for better or for worse – Isabelle took a deep breath and looked up at the tree for any sign it might be trying to send. After a long moment, its uppermost branches began to stir, although there was very little breeze in the cooling air. The stirring grew into a twisting, tangling dance, the uppermost branches waving and turning with enchanting grace.

The few tenacious leaves that hung on to the occasional branch held on for dear life, although one that must have been surprised by the sudden activity, caught napping, fell from its previously stable perch. It began a slow flutter towards the forest floor, tracing a diminishing parabola as it fell. Instinctively, Isabelle put out her hand as it neared. The leaf settled neatly into her small cupped hand, a brittle aged leaf alighting like the ghost trace of an ancient butterfly.

Closing her fingers gently over the top of the leaf, Isabelle felt it tickle her palm. She opened her hand again and jumped as the leaf unfurled – it really was a butterfly! But not like any she had ever seen before – a grey-green colour when it had first landed on her palm, it was now a deep blue, the inky near-purple of twilight after a particularly warm summer’s day. It hovered in front of her, darting in small, dashing sweeps in a vaguely circular arc, then took off past the tree, darting to its left. Isabelle hesitated, but seeing the butterfly loop back towards her and head back down the path again – now a crimson flash in the shadowy late afternoon, she followed.

Isabelle had made up her mind to head the other way, but felt compelled to follow, taking it as a sign – of what, she had no idea, but it was too late to go back now.

She followed into a part of the forest she could not recall ever having seen. She had made it her own during her stay, explored what she had thought at the time was every twist and turn, every nook and cranny, so was surprised to be so disoriented.

It was growing cooler as she went on – the sun had dipped over the horizon some time ago and the brush here was quite thick and damp. Every now and then she lost sight of her guide, but just as soon as she was certain it had gone too far to keep up with, she caught another glimpse. Now that it was quite dark it seemed to have a glow of its own, a gently pulsating yellow light flickering with each beating of the wings.

She followed it until it reached a bend in the path that opened out onto a river. Wide and swift-flowing, there was a silvery-sheen on the surface of the water where the break in the forest canopy allowed the full moon to shine. Isabelle watched as the butterfly travelled halfway across the river, soared vertically, then exploded into a million tiny stars that scattered over the water in a blaze of light and colour, then vanished.

Without a second thought Isabelle drew a deep breath and plunged into the river.

Vinyl Diaries XIII: Machine Translations

Machine Translations + The Bank Holidays
The Gaelic Club
November 16, 2007

A handful of words over at Mess + Noise

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Three

Something strange was happening. When Emily opened the book to read, she was met with a jumble of letters and images and sketches that bore no relation to anything about which she could make sense.

What could have possibly happened? She turned to the first page, the passages she had only just read, but was met by the same jagged junkheap, letters used and abandoned, crashing into the corner and jutting nonsensically.

“It knows,” she murmured. “It’s realised I’m not Crouch.”

Emily closed the book again and stared intently at the cover. She placed a hand on its leather front and boomed.

“It is I, Aloysius Crouch. Do you dare to defy me? Reveal yourself, be true to what you are!”

Emily was shocked to hear the cold, fearful voice, not sure where as to where the command had even originated. She had not consciously considered what she would do, yet here she was, bellowing at the book in Crouch’s chilling tone.

While she considered what might have happened, the book started to shake, suddenly so warm she almost dropped it off the edge of the pier, into the lapping waves below. Luckily it caught on one of Crouch’s bony knees and she was able just to keep hold. Tentatively, she reopened the book and saw –with a mix of relief and sickly fear – that the jumble had now rearranged itself back into Crouch’s carefully laid out hand; it was back to how it had been when first she picked it up.

With the same mix of fear and relief, driven by curiosity and urgency, Emily turned to the end of the first section and began to read from where she had left off.

As much as Man fears the wolves, Wolf cannot stand to be around Man. They recognise him for what he is – a weak, pale imitation of what he could be. They have no respect for this, and rightly so!

So how, then, can Man get close enough to Wolf to relearn what he must know?

Until now, there has not been a way. But I, Aloysius Crouch, have discovered a way to become what I need. My many experiments have led to a breakthrough. I have unearthed a process through which I can take the form of any subject of my choosing. At first I was unhappy with the process, unwilling to give my body over to those whose body I was to command. But I have devised a way that this need never occur.

I can keep them, their so-called ‘selves’, in a box as I take control of their form. I need only their body - the rest of them just gets in the way, dilutes my being and makes it difficult to achieve full command.

By sending them into this box, I free the only obstacle that ever stood between me and taking them over entirely. While this has now worked on a number of occasions with various, expendable urchins from around the village, I now need to find an appropriate form by which to get closer to the wolves who can teach me so much.

Which brings me to my greatest challenge of all – finding just such a wolf that I can become.

Emily had to stop again, feeling her tummy turn backflips as though she were going to be sick. This sick, twisted, cruel monster had so casually talked of using and discarding children in the village – she herself had witnessed just how readily he could sacrifice them.

This time, however, he wasn’t going to get away with it. The determination to put an end to Crouch’s evil-doing boiled Emily’s blood. She could almost feel the steam coming from her ears as she experienced anger and bitterness at those lost lives, all in aid of his sick depravities, this idea that we should live our lives as though beasts.

Emily didn’t have anything against wolves. Her experience in the music box showed her they were far from the kinds of creatures with which she would ever wish to associate, but she also knew that they simply were what they were, you couldn’t hold them any more responsible for that than you could blame the wind for blowing, the moon for rising.

She remembered a day when she could have only been three or four, on a forest walk with her mother and father. As her parents were choosing a spot for their lunch, she saw across the clearing what she had first thought was a funny looking dog. Black, long, large, it had met her eye as she watched it. Silently they stared at each other, her parents busy setting up a blanket and setting down their basket. She looked to see whether her parents had seen it but by the time she turned back to where it had been it was gone.

Emily hadn’t thought to say anything to her parents about what she had seen. She didn’t feel any fear – hadn’t known that she was supposed to – but merely believed it was just one of the forest’s many creatures and no different to have come across than a bunny or a deer.

But now she shivered at the thought of it, wondered if it really had been a wolf after all.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Two

Isabelle dropped the brush she had just picked up, hearing only a faint distant sound as it clattered to the floor.

She had never told Emily about her time in the woods, or in fact anything from the time before Seaforth. Often Emily had asked about why the other children had grandparents and she didn’t, and where Percy and Isabelle had come from if they had not grown up in Seaforth, but they had always assured her that they would tell her everything when the time was right.

Her voice, trembling, caught in her throat, but she managed to get it out. “What did you just say?”

Emily gazed up at her with her piercing eyes and Isabelle suddenly felt like she had to close her mind off, that Emily was somehow reaching in there and seeing things without her saying a word.

“I asked about your time in the woods. I would like to hear about them.”

Before Isabelle could say anything, Percy came through the doorway. He had his hat in his hand and was just pulling on his coat, so Isabelle knew he was off to town.

“Percy love, why don’t you take Emily down with you? You know she loves a visit into town.”

“Hmmmm?” asked Percy absentmindedly, patting his coat pocket as though assuring himself that whatever it was he had in there had not mysteriously disappeared as he walked into the room.

“Oh yes, why not? Come along Emily, we’ll not be out too long and then you have the rest of the day.”

Isabelle watched Emily and saw she frowned her brow, before quickly forcing on a false smile. She knew Emily normally jumped at the chance to get down to the main street, so was perplexed at the cloud that passed over her. But if she had blinked she would have missed it, for Emily was now nodding at the idea, though a furtive glance thrown over her shoulder told Isabelle that her daughter seemed quite displeased at the prospect of being out with Percy.

“Go get something warm on Emily, so you don’t catch a chill.”

Emily slipped from her seat, and without further a word slipped out through the doorway.

“Percy?” Isabelle began. “Have you noticed anything at all… strange about Emily?”

“What? Oh no, not really. I mean she seems a little quiet at the moment, but then I daresay that’s not all that unusual, she definitely goes through these patches.”

What neither of them would say, but each must have known the other was thinking, was that Percy wouldn’t really have been able to tell if Emily had grown a second head and was speaking fluent Chinese. Percy knew as well as Isabelle that he could be a little vague and distracted while in one of his writing periods, but Isabelle was so proud of him that she did not dare burst his bubble with too much worry, particularly with him so close to being finished.

“Oh, never mind, I’m sure it’s just something that has happened with one of her little friends or something, I’m sure it will all blow over,” Isabelle said, not sure whether she was trying to convince Percy or herself.

She gave him a quick peck on the cheek just as Emily returned through the doorway, now wearing her scarlet cloak and a woollen hat. Percy patted Isabelle goodbye on the arm, took Emily’s hand and walked through the door.

“Your hat!” Isabelle yelled, seeing he had put it on the table while he pulled on his coat. But the sound of her cry was met with the slamming of the front door - they had already gone.

For the first time since she had returned home, Isabelle felt deeply troubled. Everything had seemed as though it were getting back to normal, and now this. What could Emily have possibly meant? Perhaps she had confused the question, so Isabelle wracked her mind for whether she had been on any recent outings into the nearby woods that Emily may have been confused about. But, hanging over this, was the brightly lit world ‘lived’ – Emily had definitely asked about when she had lived in the woods.

Had she said something to Emily about it after all? During her turn perhaps, and that’s why she didn’t remember? But that didn’t seem right, it was some time now that she had been home and Emily had only just sprung it on her, just like that.

Making it hard to work any of this out was the pull her memories of that time were now having on her. While she valiantly tried to stay in the present, to work out what was going on, and what she could possibly say to Emily when she came back – she was not prepared to lie to her daughter – she was drawn down an increasingly slippery slope to that time, to her forest life.

For the last few days it had been so close, somehow within arm’s reach everywhere she went. She couldn’t put her finger on why, but now felt that there must have been something in this strange proximity that had led to Emily’s probing query.

Absentmindedly, Isabelle fiddled with Percy’s hat. Its soft felt contoured to her fingers, acquiesced as she spun it, feeling its familiar shape in her hand. Without really thinking she placed it on her head, feeling it fall over her ears where Percy’s wider head must meet its band. She thought about how good Percy had been to her, keeping things going while she was away in the hospital, looking after the house, after Emily, still working to keep bread on the table and still finding time to come and see her.

She felt bad for having told him about what she had seen, as though it betrayed a weakness that she couldn’t deal with it herself. But she knew he would have wanted to know, knew that they shared absolutely everything; that they had done so ever since...

It was pointless trying not to think of the forest any more. Isabelle had long tried to bury that part of her life, but there was no way she could pretend it had never happened. Not least because that was where she had met Percy, the love of her life, the man for which she had risked everything, and who had now only recently saved her in return.

For a long time it really had seemed like a dream, or a particularly vivid story – somebody else’s – that she had read. Her parents had never read her any stories as a child, but Isabelle had still been in possession of a strong imagination. At times she could feel that this was the realm to which her time belonged, but now she knew there was something holding her back that was in there. She had to go back if she wished to move on.

Isabelle pulled the brim of Percy’s hat down over her eyes, allowing the curtains to be drawn on her present self and entering the memories that had been banking up and seeking release.

Vinyl Diaries XII: Bill Callahan

Photo by fernando [pixelstains]

Bill Callahan
The Factory Theatre
Wednesday, November 7

If you're in or around Sydney and wondering what that low, humming sound is, you will find one Bill Callahan to blame. Weaving together painterly strokes of life, photographic snapshots taken through windows of strangers left open to catch the breeze, these misleadingly straightforward songs carry deep into the part of our minds that is responsible for our humming cords.

You'll have to excuse the mixed craftaphores above, but Callahan's songs seem to draw heavily on the visual as well as musical arts - subtle gradations of and shifts in colour, light and shading are of utmost importance.

With dark humour and a light touch he deftly opens our eyes to pockets of the world that exist mostly on the periphery of our vision (if at all), leaving traces of these lives indelibly printed on our hearts.

Having toured previously in solo mode as Smog and (Smog), this was the first chance to hear Callahan working with a band, drawing closer to the sounds of his prolific recorded output. The strength of their performance was quite remarkable given they were all local musicians, no doubt fairly hastily cobbled together for a short run of shows. On drums was the ever-more ubiquitous skinman savant Laurence Pike (Triosk/Pivot etc), with Tim Rogers (better known to most as Jack Ladder) on bass. The 'strings' billed for the show were fiddlers three, including Lara Goodridge of Fourplay.

Opening the set with 'Our Anniversary' from Supper, Callahan shares the droll tale of an anniversary night where the car keys have been hidden to keep itchy feet from fleeing:

It's our anniversary and you've hidden my keys
This is one anniversary you're spending with me

'Diamond Dancer' is an odd yet infectious little groove, and you know Callahan's into this ghost of Bowie number because his left leg does a little back kick from the knee - like that in a kiss on a bridge in a film you once saw.

And that's one point to mote about Callahan's music - it's odd. I suggested earlier it's an open window, but perhaps more accurately it's a fractured mirror. We're staring into it and while we may occasionally catch fragments of our own reflection, we're seeing, layered over this into a composite reflection of humanity, the lives of those beyond, the yet-met, the long-forgotten.

'Held' bounces in like the big old baby to which Callahan compares himself, the bass bumbling it along just so. It's a cheerful, smoky, Texas-flavoured chomp on a side of beef with lashings of sticky barbecue sauce.

This showier side warms the night up nicely, but the special moments are those that quieten, and a hush falls as the finger-picked opening to 'Teenage Spaceship' marks the first such moment.

Adept at turns of phrase that lift the corners of our mouths, Callahan lets the shell drop and twilight fall. You realise that while he looks closely at the audience between lines, drawing connections and truly appreciative for the interest, his eyes reflexively close as he sings each line. Though closed the lids remain wide - they're not clenched but veiled, alligator eyelids that he can somehow see through.

This twilight seems a natural fit for Callahan, reflective yet optimistic. The upbeat 'Sycamore' from this year's Woke on a Whaleheart pulls on the going-out boots, which we wear down to the stables for the rather insistent 'Let Me See The Colts'.

Throughout the ste, as those familar with his work would expect, there's something wonderfully soothing about Callahan's voice. He has a warm, mesmerising baritone that can't help but put you at ease. It seems drenched in honey, but even richer - royal jelly perhaps, a bee conspiracy.

Hand in hand with the loping, looping music it evokes autumn time and falling leaves, reds, oranges and browns, golden light under silver skies. He uses it beautifully in 'The Well', in which a foolish act spurred by frustration leads him to chance across an old abandoned well in the woods that demands to be yelled into:

I gave it a couple hoots
A hello
And a fuck all y'all

I guess everybody has their own thing
That they yell into a well

It's these moments in his story-telling that you think about your own life, its pace and direction and whether you are still in touch with enough of the simple things - when did you last let a river carry you in its current, how long since brambles nicked at your knee, what are you doing that can possibly match the joy of swearing down a well?

These questions and images travel with us as we weave down Callahan's river into b-side 'Bowery' and the haunting 'Say Valley Maker'

With the grace of a corpse
In a riptide
I let go

We let go too, feeling currents warm and cool cross paths. They steer us downriver into the splendid 'Bathysphere' where we reach the open mouth, our seven-year-old selves dreaming of life at sea, between coral, silent eel, silver swordfish.

"My home is the sea" we are assured... until, at the very end:

When I was seven
My father said to me
'But you can't swim'
And I've never dreamed of the sea again

That last line always slices like a knife - a twist in the tale that abruptly sends us crashing back to earth. Catpower's wonderful cover of the song on What Will the Community Think is perhaps more driven, hence a heavier crash at the end, but Callahan's near-whimsy in the lead-up makes it a more surprising turn.

We're now well and truly in the palm of his hands, so it's with tingly, overbrimming joy that I realise he has started playing 'River Guard', so minor and delicate a piece I had never dared hope it would make it to a live set.

But here he was, the prison guard with a heart of gold, sitting in the tall grass while his charges gain a rare glimpse of life as it could otherwise have been.

When I take the prisoners swimming
They have the time of their lives
I love to watch them floating
On their backs
Unburdened and relaxed

The gooseflesh he experiences later that night, standing on a cliff, watching wind rip the leaves from the trees, is the same we feel now, and that stays with us as he and the band leave the stage.

This is the Bill Callahan I love - that, if he retains a belief in his craft and his gift, could have him one day wearing the boots of Johnny Cash that no soul has been able to get near. He's got a long way to go and many more roads to travel (he's nudging 40), and may very well toss it all in for a back porch somewhere with lady-friend Joanna Newsom and a horde of shoeless mud-caked little people, but it's worth tagging along for the journey for as long as we're invited.

There is a truth, honesty and integrity to his stories, songwriting and performance that while not necessarily peerless, certainly stands heads and shoulders above the bulk of the singer-songwriter field. Which isn't to say we're privy to the full picture - there's more burbling beneath the surface than we've yet been allowed to discover; but in time...

To some, Callahan comes across as dispassionate, echoing Lou Reed in steadiness of tone and play with meter, but the passion is buried within and well worth scratching around to discover. At heart and adding to its likely longevity is a defiant optimism. It's small-scale and complicated by dreams that are a little beyond our reach, but it avoids all traces of resentment or bitterness. We see this in 'Hit the Ground Running' (not in tonight's set), in which he calls bitterness the lowest sin and paints a gruesome picture of the bitter man who rots within: "I've seen his smile/ Yellow and brown/ The bitterness is rotting down".

Returning to the stage, his foolish heart dives into the glittering 'Rock Bottom Riser', coming up for a breath of fresh country air 'In the Pines'. This gorgeous traditional song has a fragile moonlit beauty and a strange effect - anaesthetisising yet invigorating at the same time.

Closing out the evening, the upbeat near-jauntiness of the slide up the frets that is 'Cold Blooded Old Times' ensured toes would be tapped through the rest of the night, dreams would be hijacked with golden light-painted country cottages and days would be spent humming jewels from the treasure chest.

Having wondered what to expect of Mr Callahan finally stepping out from behind the Smog handle, there need have been no fear. The mask has dropped, the Smog has lifted; we are still in safe hands.

Vinyl Diaries XI: Radiohead - In Rainbows

Rainbows? Not exactly miserabilist material. But then neither, quite, have Radiohead ever comfortably fit the bill as moping marauders.

Posterchildren for the disaffected, perhaps, but those with at least a modicum of interest in the world beyond. While their albums have steered, at times, into near sociopathically paranoid territory, perversely revelling in android tendencies and industrial coldness, there’s always been a heart beating away in there – a tendency towards shedding the replicant’s tear.

Such has been their impact on the musical landscape since emerging from Oxfordshire in the early 1990s, a new Radiohead album can never simply arrive according to its own terms. The past rests heavily on each new outing’s shoulders, recent releases dealing with this by smashing any traces of a link with the past before they have a chance to find a foothold. It’s not a stretch to suggest that their 19997 opus OK Computer irrevocably changed the face of modern music, a multi-faceted monster that simultaneously tore the still beating heart out of the sickening rock beast and breathed new life into the decaying form.

The claustrophobic Kid A and its slow-burning late-born twin Amnesiac took a twist for the darker, while Hail to the Thief put the piano front and centre and ratcheted up the ice quotient, veering into a realm of electronic detachment and giving slightly too much rein to Thom Yorke’s maddened disconnect.

The long-awaited follow up was finally unveiled last week, a commercially courageous (yet ultimately savvy) decision to release it online without record label backing, with fans allowed to decide just how much they wished to pay. But gimmick or musical distribution model of the future, the simple and wonderful fact is 10 new Radiohead tracks are available, and in the context in which the band has always worked best – album form.

Opener 15 Step misleads with the electro-clap impulses of a semi-detached drum-machine, not a million miles from recent Yorke territory in last year’s solo outing The Eraser. But after Yorke drops a few vocal lines, the humans arrive in force. There’s an organic, jazz-flavoured licking from Jonny Greenwood’s crystal clear guitar, Yorke warbles through the next section over the top of Colin Greenwood’s bass murmuring along near-funkily, then, instead of a chorus as such, Yorke shimmers in as Jeff Buckley piped through a church organ.

Phil Selway’s complex beatkeeping breaks, snaps, crackles back into being – and then they’re gone.

Bodysnatchers swaggers in on a fuzzy, looping riff – an old-fashioned rock stomper that cuts through the skin, peels to the core of your being, appeals to emotional fraughtness rather than the intellect. It’s the long-lost missing link between Pablo Honey and The Bends, unapologetically abrasive and squallingly . Yorke’s in typical self-deprecating mode - “I’ve no idea what I’m talking about” - but the music just doesn’t back it up.

It thumps and stonks along on this rollicking rock plane until, suddenly, smack on the halfway mark, it tears headlong over the precipice – a gorgeous, bruising, soaring bridge bringing a quick run of shivers to the spine.

Has the light gone out for you?
Because the light's gone out for me
It is the 21st century
It is the 21st century

It's glorious, an unshackled freefall with the euphoria one experiences in a dream of flying, over far too soon and dropping you back into a squalling shambles of a noise-pit, hungry for more.

Avoiding the comfortable format of verse-chorus-verse, these tracks are being built in ways that seem a natural fit for the idea being expressed. The strongest point in the track is echoed throughout the album – occurring in the bridges, in which the extrapolation of the elementary ideas has taken place, taken hold, and the shackles are off. They, and we, are free to roam in this new place, a new space of imaginative freedom where nobody will laugh at you for falling.

Long-time live fan favourite Nude is the perfect comedown, wandering up a damp and dreary corridor with a ghostly passage of backsucking drums and Bjorky ooh-ooh-oohs, dropping away to reveal a bassline of Mogadon funk and gentle tacka-tacka-tacked drums, before Yorke’s echoing, plaintive, signature angel-whimper:

Don’t get any
big ideas
They’re not
gonna happen

Stripped back to blues-jazz flavoured guitar, vocals, bass and drums, it’s unadorned, warm-blooded, breathing, the human condition adrift in a cavernous darkening. Cue the sample wash, then Yorke’s first real soar skyward of the album – deliciously confusing, as it is with the word ‘sinking’. More oohs follow, then it’s gone.

Counted in on drum sticks, crystalline single guitar notes and then overlayed with handfuls of broken chords, Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien's guitars tangling deliciously, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi is a bottom of the ocean swim through a tangle of lushly fecund reeds.

Again you actually picture a band, musicians playing to each other, for each other, chancing across the magical chemistry that has kept them yearning, stitched together for nigh on two decades. It’s the second track in a row that wouldn’t have found space on any of the last three albums, the mood too open, too natural, and one feels that Yorke’s solo album has freed up the band to explore new territory together, free of the electro-clinical albatross his dabbling was threatening to offer their exposed necks. It's not that the push towards these cold new boundaries wasn't welcome - it was an essential part of the Radiohead experience - but that it was threatening to become something of a new orthodoxy.

As the track progresses we’re sinking into the deepest ocean, drifting to the bottom of the sea. Yorke’s projecting out into the fish, but also drawing us with him. We’d be as crazy not to follow as he felt he would be, so we all weave amidst rocks phantom and real, perhaps searching for the near-mythical coy koi upon which Frank Black once chanced while on holiday from his mind.

This joyous underwater dive gets us three quarters of the way through, before we realise we really should have gone up for a breath much much earlier. It’s far too late now, and carried along by a sudden change in current, bright explosions in our mind as the oxygen entirely depletes in the form of the spangliest guitar undertow since Johnny Marr was but a Smith, we hit the bottom.

The track shimmers and glitters some more, light shattering as we look back through the ocean’s surface, absent-mindedly running our fingers against our scales and so comfortable in our new gills we don’t even wonder about them. Hidden at the very end, buried in the sand like a sunken gold sovereign, we hear Yorke’s chest voice, the rarely offered baritone we nearly never encounter these days, an alter-ego to the alter-ego reserved for a disarming dropping of the guard.

From the sea we travel into space, All I Need an open-sky odyssey that has Yorke waiting in the wings as angelic synths roll in, rippling around the growling, purring bass. It is a stripped back work of breathtaking beauty and heart-rending fragility – it’s Radiohead as the battered, heart-on-sleeve, baffled romantic, laying it all on the table for the world to see. Glistening glockenspiel gives it a bright innocence, until, once more, the safe ground crumbles beneath our feet and we’re thrust, along with handfuls of loose piano chord tumbles, into an Icelandic abyss reflecting a glacier blue hue borrowed from Sigur Ros.

Just as abruptly we’re tipped into Faust Arp, a strange, finger-picked acoustic guitar and string-swept folk-tinged affair. It’s modern folk yet without the psych or the freak, Nick Drake gone Mersyside.

Through headphones or well-spaced speakers the urgent coruscations of Reckoner offer disparate pieces playing in each ear - the left offering a 60s, Byrds inspired pop affair of tambourine and assorted other shakery, the right offering brilliantly broken beats and clangy cymbal stumbles. The two seemingly incompatible halves are allowed to drift in and out of their own parallel universes until the bass burbles in and the drums follow its looping bumble, the whole wonderful mess eventually sutured via plaintive falsetto, Yorke relishing his Dr Frankenstein stitching together of an album highlight.

The strings sweep back in for the bridge, the drums having dropped out to give them room, before all the goodies that have reared their head until now return. Divine melodies and optimistic progressions give it an air of hope, a move from minor keys into a more positive space than they may ever have inhabited.

This mood sticks around for House of Cards, yet there is ultimately something a little flat about the whole affair. It’s worthy enough in its own right, but too easily dealt with by that handful of dangerous tags – ‘pleasant’ perhaps being the most concerning. It drifts past without drawing the usual emotional response – there’s none of the sting in the tail we have come to crave. Perhaps it’s a grower, but I fear it’s a skipper.

A timely save comes with Jigsaw Falling Into Place, a rhythmically driven exhortation to ‘let it out’ and to dance - to dance the dance of the damned perhaps, but at least a dance to remember, a blunt instrument propelling us all gleefully along the road to ruin.

Album closer Videotape is the most pianofied track of the whole journey. Resting on a simple drum tack-boom, there is a pearly gate optimism difficult to recall anywhere in the Radiohead ouvre. Perfection is contemplated and – surprisingly - accepted .

No matter what happens now
I won't be afraid
Because I know today has been
The most perfect day
I’ve ever seen

Doubled piano chords high and low, tight drum rolls and stuttering tacka-tacks keep the space contemplative, the final lines echoing in our minds, a most un-Radiohead-like sentiment metronomically dropped and indelibly imprinted on the psyche as In Rainbows fades to black. The pot at the end of the rainbow reveals not gold as such, but life as it can be, a dream made real because, let’s face it, it’s there for the taking.

Surprising in its lack of grand gestures, histrionic propulsions and dramatic flourishes, there is a refreshing honesty throughout In Rainbows that is in reflection quite exhilarating. It is perhaps most groundbreaking in the sense there’s nothing groundbreaking about it at all. It doesn’t smash its way through, it doesn’t reinvent a wheel. It’s a band, five no-longer-lads from Abingdon, in love with music, perhaps even life, shamelessly, guiltlessly, displaying that love for the world to see.

The feeling is not that they are playing safe, but playing true. Muse can keep the overwrought drama queen territory they’ve carefully mined, Coldplay the syrupy hollowness over the emotional equivalent of a scraped knee. This newfound territory for Radiohead is both more moribund but – because of it – more true to life. It’s British but not the stiff upper lip; it’s the awareness of class, of difference, of struggle – personal and social – but with a newfound celebration of what can exist alongside and within all of that. If someone wants to be fitter, happier, and do so in a way at which they may once have reflexively sneered or despaired, they will, for now, be let be.

It’s not a return to any earlier stage, nor is it a complete exorcising of their last outing. Yet it’s undeniably, quintessentially Radiohead. The most striking thing is they seem comfortable in their own skin, finally happy to accept they are what they are and, as such, they have produced an unapologetic Radiohead album, soaked in the toys with which they love to play, the feints and glancing blows against normality in an unthinking sense, in favour of an aware position, an understanding of self in relation to a wider picture.

We don’t need to stop the fight for what we believe in, but we can occasionally let down our guard, smile at what we love, touch what we cherish, revel in the golden rays of sun peeking from beneath the approaching (or passing) storm.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-One

Emily had to get out. Somewhere in this book, she knew, must lie the answer to how she could get her life back on track, undo the damage she had done by going behind her mother’s back and seeking out the music box from Aloysius Crouch, knowing all along that it wasn’t the right thing to do.

She realised she was getting nowhere by simply being angry at herself for having led them all into this mess. She had to come up with a way forward and dwelling on the past was not going to help.

Placing the book in a pocket inside the coat, she looked around to see if there was anything else that might prove of any use. It was all pretty much as she remembered it, although something further down the bench did catch her eye. She wondered if it had been there the first time – a round, wooden, tubular device that looked like a small telescope.

Emily walked over and gingerly picked it up. It felt quite heavy for its size and as she turned it over in her hands, she saw that it did have an eyepiece – perhaps it was a telescope after all? On closer inspection it seemed more like a kaleidoscope, a glass dome perched at the other end.

Emily raised it to her eye, but couldn’t make anything out. She began to wonder what Crouch used it for and was startled to find his image suddenly appear. She almost dropped it, but realising he wasn’t in fact in the room she managed to keep him in sight. She watched as he picked up the device, placing it to his own eye, twisting it around for a few moments, then making some notes in his book with his quill.

Emily’s mind turned to Minerva, and Crouch’s image slowly faded to be replaced by that of Minerva at home in her subterranean sanctuary, deep in discussion with both Topkinses.

Lastly, Emily pictured her mother. As Minerva disappeared from sight, her mother replaced her. She looked happy and well, working on the garden of their home. Emily knew the image could be coming from any time, that she couldn’t be too certain that all was still okay, yet she felt a reassurance at having at least seen her mother after what felt like so long away.

She placed the ‘spyroscope’ (as she thought of it) in another coat pocket and turned for the door. There was much to be done and Emily had to get somewhere she could think.

***

Emily opened the door and stepped through into the empty shopfront, better able to see it than her first time through, her eyes far better adjusted to the gloom.

She saw now the shop must have once been a toy store. Along the wall there still remained shelves that held a few spinning tops, some books and a few troubled looking dolls. Emily wondered what those dolls must have seen, who they may have witnessed coming and going from this place, what secretive business they were here upon.

Making her way to the front door, Emily turned the handle and was shocked by just how bright it was outside. She lost her footing as she stepped over the threshold, not noticing the street was a little below door level. Her hat tumbled off her head and rolled a little way down the street. Leaning down to pick it up, she was surprised to see Trixie Sopworth, a girl in her year at school.

“Trixie!” she exclaimed before thinking, so pleased to see a familiar face after all this time. She realised her mistake just as she saw the petrified look in Trixie’s face. To be addressed by Mr Crouch would have been bad enough, for him to know your name would be truly terrifying. She knew there was little she could do to allay Trixie’s fears so she quickly dusted of the cap, placed it on her head as she regained full height and stepped quickly down the street.

Emily knew she was heading the wrong way, but catching a fresh waft of the harbour, she knew this was the place to go to clear her head and work out her next step. Passing the last of the street’s shops, she stepped out into the cobbled road, passed the whitewashed Pig and Whistle inn with its gently swinging sign and turned the corner, a blast of sea breeze stinging her eyes as she stepped onto the rickety pier.

Sea birds hovering nearby took off as she neared, their soft white feathers fleeing from the black coated intruder, circling warily and keeping a safe distance. Their harsh throaty cries layered and built with neither rhyme nor reason; a messy noise far from that of the tuneful twittering of those living further up the hill in the glens and dales she would occasionally wander when given free rein to disappear for the day.

She had often wondered at the life of the sea birds and how different it was to their cousins up the hill. They were separated by only a mile or two, but their worlds could not have been more disparate. The sparrows and starlings seemed to Emily very much home bodies. They may dart and dash here and there and poke about for bugs and worms when hungry, singing out their lovelorn whistling at others, but she knew they spent much of their time attending to fairly domestic duties, improving their nests, picking for it choice twigs and preparing it for laying.

Their colouring was complex – mottled, speckled, browns and blacks and reds and yellows and blues, while no two of their songs ever seemed the same.

These sea birds, on the other hand, the gulls and terns and cormorants, were almost uniformly black, white or grey. While they would hover in the same places, it never seemed to Emily that this was home. It was certainly their territory – Emily had seen some quite territorial behaviour by certain characters – but it seemed more like a marriage of convenience to a location that supplied them with enough fish scraps to fight over than any true link with the place.

Their cries seemed so base, greedy, always warnings rather than greetings, spiteful rather than playful.

She wondered at how little interaction there was between the two worlds, how rare it had been to see these sea birds up in the hills. Occasionally she would see them soaring high above them, but never landing and exploring, showing any curiosity about this green and brown world so differently textured and populated than their own grey and blue.

Once she had seen a lone sparrow hopping along the shoreline, as though looking for something it had lost – little sparrow spectacles or such. As the waves crashed into the beach and the suddsy wake washed up the shore, the sparrow looked so out of place, so dwarfed by the sea, she suddenly feared for its safety. It must have been innocent to the sea’s power, her ability to spring a fatal surprise as easily and thoughtlessly as a person might sneeze.

She watched it travel further and further up the beach, losing sight of it before she could be certain it would be able to return home safely. She wanted to follow it, to make sure it was okay, but knew she had to let it be, do its own thing regardless of the consequences.

Before this she had thought the sea birds somewhat simple and lacking in the charm of the hill birds, but seeing the sparrow up against the sea she realised she had been looking at the sea birds through unfair eyes. Now she saw their inner grace, the way they danced and tussled with the sea, the manner in which they were effortlessly at ease with her, in tune with her rhythms and pulses. She would watch them glide along invisible currents and soar with the updrafts, now almost disdainful of the hill birds and their nervous, stuttering flights that seemed in contrast so random, at odds with nature rather than one with her.

She never failed to thrill at that moment, that brave flash of courage and certainty, when they would soar up, up, up, and then plunge – a vertical missile ploughing through the sea’s barrier at break-neck speed, a precision dive that penetrated the unknown.

Emily had by now reached the end of the pier. She sat with her side resting against a white painted pylon, dangling Crouch’s long, thin legs from under the coat over the edge of the drop. The wind was a quite solid gale, lifting spray into her face as she kept her eyes open, smelling deeply of its freshening promise. There really was no better way to clear the mind, scour the jumble of thoughts and fears, except perhaps to plunge into her depths, feeling the buffeting waves tumble and toss you, all your thoughts spent on breath and survival and leaving no room for day-to-day trivialities.

While she longed painfully to run up to her home, throw open the door and confront Crouch for his wrongdoings, Emily knew this approach was impossible. She could try explaining to her mother what had happened, but how would she even get her to listen, let alone have any chance of convincing her?

And even if she did, what of it? She was still trapped in Crouch’s body, Crouch in full control of hers. There was no way she could ever hope to have her old life back if she lost her chance of drawing Crouch back to his chamber, finding a way to swap their bodies back. Emily closed her eyes, letting the sound envelope her. There was a guilty pleasure in all this, knowing her mother rarely brought her down to the sea.

She loved it here and she would often wonder at why they didn’t spend more time down by the harbour, or further along the coast where the village tapered out and only a few rough shacks, inhabited by silent, bearded men, shirtless, linen pants held up by a rough twist of rope around the waist, seemingly forever drunk on salt and sun.

Emily took a deep, salty breath, reached into her pocket, took out Crouch’s book and began to read.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty

A slanting diamond of sunlight framed by the window rested on the kitchen floor. Isabelle wondered what would happen if one stood in it for too long; if the floor might open up and whisk you away, closing behind as if you had never been.

Going back over her dream of last night, a dream that hung in the air this morning like her own personal rain cloud hovering over her own head, she wondered at what it all meant.

It was true that she hadn’t had as much time to spend with Emily lately. While Percy worked by day and finished his book by night, a study on bird life that had received interest from a publisher he had met quite by chance passing through Seaforth, she had been working overtime to keep the house in order.

Percy, meanwhile, had been distant for some weeks. It wasn’t that he was deliberately avoiding them or anything like that, but even when he was there, at the dinner table or on their evening walks, you knew his mind was really in his papers, worrying over a wingspan or a flight pattern or a nesting habit.

Isabelle was immensely proud of Percy and his work, but she nevertheless felt a terrible loneliness when he was in his writing and sketching frame of mind, detached from her and impossible to form a connection. Emily always seemed to take it quite well, seemingly understanding that what he was doing was quite important to him.

The creaking door brought Isabelle back to her senses. Stepping carefully through the doorway, Emily shuffled through into the kitchen. In one hand she was holding a boar-bristled hair brush, in the other a length of buttercup-yellow ribbon. The way she held them out towards her mother seemed almost a peace offering, which Isabelle took it to be since Emily hadn’t come to her to have her hair brushed for a long time.

Wordlessly, she took the proffered brush and began stroking it through Emily’s hair. A pang of tenderness made her heart flutter. All her anger of last night began to dissipate. Isabelle thought back to when she was Emily’s age, the impossibility of relating with her parents, the troubled childhood that their chilly indifference to her existence entailed.

She wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to that fierce, independent spirit. Her family life was in many ways ideal – Percy was a loving, considerate, caring man; Emily was a bright, intelligent and generous daughter. They made ends meet and lived in relative comfort, certainly more so than she had ever imagined possible as a child.

Yet somewhere along the way, with all her needs met and a comfortable, untroubled life, something of her essence, her fire, has been snuffed out.

When the wolf had appeared at the window, everything changed. What had scared Isabelle most, what had terrified her more than the prospect that the wolf would enter the house and devour her, was the frisson of excitement that she felt, the sense that, finally, something was happening in her life again.

She did not dare admit anything like that to poor old Percy, particularly because she was unsure herself what it even meant. Spying Aloysius that night – for she knew it could be no other – she was given a glimpse into a world that could have been hers. She knew, of course, it was not a world for her, that she had followed her heart and that she loved Percy and Emily more than anything in the world, but it was nevertheless a shock to discover in herself these strange feelings of ambivalence to this life and an uncomfortable attraction to the danger of the unknown.

This had all messed with her fragile mind terribly and she put up little resistance to some time away to regather herself, relieved to be away from the scene of her encounter.

“Mother?”

“Yes Emily dear?”

“Tell me what you are thinking.”

Isabelle realised she had been brushing Emily’s hair in the same place over and over, quite absentmindedly. She reached for the ribbon and looped it underneath, crossed the ends and formed a quick bow.

“Oh, nothing particular,” Isabelle said in what she hoped was an off-hand fashion.
“Just thinking about what we might get up to today.”

Emily put her hand up to her hair, felt the ribbon in place and turned around.
“Mother?”

“Yes dear?”

“I’ll help you with anything you like today. But can I ask you one thing?”

“And what’s that?”

“Tell me about your time living in the woods.”

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Nine

Emily sneezed. She was shocked to hear the sound it made, a rough, deep noise far from the dainty ‘atchoo’ to which she was accustomed. It reminded her of the task at hand. Alone, her thoughts twisted and tumbled and she found it difficult to put them into order. She looked around, her eyes now accustomed to the gloom, settling on the bench across the room. Striding over, Crouch’s coat billowing behind her with each step, she reached the bench before knowing quite what drew her. There, lying closed once again, was the book she had earlier spied:

Metaphysical Marvels and Unlocking the Unknown:
A study by Aloysius Crouch

Reaching out, her fingers softly traced the hard leather cover. She lifted it, her nose catching its musty, inky, bookish smell. Opening to the first page, her finger tracing the curve of Crouch’s neat looping script, she began to read.

It is here that I begin. Until now, there is nothing. After now – everything. The past is already forgotten. It never happened. It belongs in the dustbin of history, so much rotting horse-flesh, a broken vase that cannot hope to hold even a semblance of life, for the decay of its own demise has already overtaken the living, already stamped on each and every one of us the foul stench of defeat. Defeat at the hands of time, of the unswerving march of the flesh’s weakening.

I will not allow this to happen to me. I have too much to do to allow this pre-ordained defeat to diminish my grand plan.

There is, in this life, one chance given to us all. Most never truly grasp the moment when it arrives. But not me. My moment has arrived and I have taken it. I have the will, the need, and now the means to reshape this seemingly unbendable trajectory.

I will bend time to my own will. I will dictate how it moves, where it goes, what it allows to happen. No longer will it shape me, tell me what I am. I am in command. I will prevail. It is here that I begin.

Emily had to stop reading. The forcefulness of the passage had left her winded, a powerful blow that stopped her breathing. She wasn’t really sure what Crouch was on about, but more unsettling than the content was the sheer, naked vociferousness of its thrust, a brutal and unflinching hunger that felt distinctly at odds with nature.

Crouch was clearly determined to go to any lengths to pursue whatever twisted plans he had in mind and Emily was unsure as to how she could possibly hope to have any chance of coming up against such a man, of triumphing in the face of such a single-minded and calculating foe.

Forcing a deep breath, she read on.

I deny history but I hold on to what I have learned. That is this: Man is the greatest contradiction. So powerful. So weak. So capable. So inadequate. King of the jungle. At the mercy of all beasts.

It needn’t be this way. This weakness can be stripped away, this inadequacy banished to the pyre. Man can learn much from the beasts that show no mercy. Mercy is for the weak, the foolish, the misguided. To do so, Man must turn to the beasts that hold the secret of what he can be. There is much to admire in the lion, the jackal, the panther. But there is one beast above all that can open the door to understanding for Man, that can unlock the answer of how to be everything he intends to be.

Emily knew what must come next. She cast her mind back to what she had seen in the forest, the encounter between her parents and the wolves, the way her mother had saved her father all that time ago. An image of Aloysius burned brightly in her mind, quite literally – rimmed with fire, his very fur glowed with the intense heat of unbridled passion, aflame with his hunger.

She saw now what she had not seen the first time, the way he looked at her mother, the way the whole show seemed to be for her benefit. If he had thought she would be impressed he was severely mistaken – this brutality and blatant flaunting of power against the prone figure of her father had instilled in her mother an icy regard for Aloysius, while further cementing her love, care and affection for Percy.

Forced to risk everything to protect him, their hearts held so close to each other against a common threat, they began to beat as one. From that moment forward, there was no question of their separation. To be apart was to attempt the impossible – to be without their own heart.

Though she knew what was to come, Emily returned to the book. She hoped to glean at least some idea of how Crouch’s mind worked, to draw from his writing a hint of the man beneath the mask. The more she read, the more worried she became, but she knew she must go on.

The wolf has no contradiction. It is only what it is. It is power, hunger, need. It can be trusted for it holds no store in trying to be anything but what it is. The fox will wile, the hyena wait. The wolf will be itself, at all times, acting in its own immediate interests and answerable to nothing but its own hunger.

There is much to admire here, much to learn. Man, so distracted by notions of morality and social acceptability, has buried his true self. He is much closer to the wolf than he is prepared to admit. Man and wolf are born almost the same, yet from there everything is done to change Man from what he truly is. The wolf has no such shackles put on him and is free to be what he was born to be. Man, meanwhile, is made weak, compliant, shaped to believe that he is no better than his fellow, need want nothing more than what it is decided he should have.

I will change this. I will make Man everything he can be. I will learn to be Man from his closest cousin, I will run with the wolf and relearn how to be what I know, deep inside, I already I am. I will be reborn as myself, as who I was always supposed to be.

Robbed of this self for so long, stripped of my true being, I denounce all that has come before. History is dead. It is here that I begin.

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Eight

Isabelle woke with a start. Her unsettled sleep had been even more fatiguing than having been awake, suffering under the weight of exhausting, messy dreams. She didn’t want to remember them, but they were too fresh, too clear to avoid.

She was out on the sea in a small wooden rowboat with Percy and Emily. It was a calm day, the three of them sharing in the peace and tranquillity that can only be felt without the distracting influence of landscape. Gently bobbing on the slightest of swells, the sun was shining, the sky a deep blue perched atop the emerald ocean and a restful spirit hung lightly in the air.

Without a word, Emily stood up. She smiled at her parents, waved her fingers in a gentle farewell and stepped delicately over the edge of the boat. Isabelle watch in frozen terror as her daughter plunged into the sea, disappearing below the green surface. After a few moments passed she caught sight of Emily’s white dress billowing on the current and was relieved to see she was coming back to the surface. Emily broke through and reappeared where Isabelle could see her, her hair plastered to her head. She opened her eyes and looked into her mother’s, peaceful and free of the anxiety that one might have expected.

A trace of a smile played on the upturned corners of her mouth. She kept her eyes on her mother as she slowly began to drift away. Isabelle was unable to act as she wanted. She was prepared to leap into the sea and wrap her arms around her daughter, paddle her back to the safety of the boat, or sink quietly with her if need be, but for some reason she was simply unable to move. Emily had been quite near at first, but now drifted further and further away. Girl and boat seemed to be answering to two separate flows, cross-currents that tore the daughter from her mother’s life.

Isabelle turned to Percy to prevail upon his fatherly love to save Emily, but the same near-smile danced upon his lips as it had on the daughter’s. Isabelle was confused as to why he wasn’t helping, hating his indifference to his daughter’s fate, but also curious as to whether perhaps he knew something about what was happening that she didn’t realise.

Snapping out of her frozen state, Isabelle took to the oars. She rowed and rowed as fast as her slight form could, Emily drifting tantalisingly close, yet also too far for her to seriously believe she could reach out and draw her back in.

Long into the afternoon she rowed, while twilight soon smeared the sky with pastels stolen brazenly from the orchard. She rowed through until the stars in the sky seemed to outnumber the drops in the ocean. She let them guide her, for now she could not see Emily at all. She knew she was still nearby, but had to take the whispered word of the stars for it.

It was from this starlit striving that Isabelle woke, in naked despair that she had not reached her daughter before waking. It felt like a terrible omen, despite being only a dream. If only she had slept long enough to get Emily back in the boat.

Isabelle wondered at what had woken her. The wind was howling, but that wasn’t it, there was nothing unusual about that at this time of year. As though her question had summoned an answer then and there, she heard it again – the footfall in the hall that must have woken her from her uneasy passage through the night.

It sounded like someone was very carefully making their way down the creaking hall. She heard more footsteps, and one final creak just outside her bedroom door.

Isabelle waited for the crack of light to appear, for the door to swing open and reassure her that her daughter was indeed safe and well. But there was no light, the door remained closed. Isabelle realised she was holding her breath – the covers were pulled up to her chin, but her ears remained attuned to hear the faintest trace of sound.

An interminable time passed, then she heard the creak of the hall again. The footsteps were in retreat, heading towards Emily’s room. The mother pictured her child returning to her own bed, having decided in some internal struggle against turning to the comfort of her parents. Isabelle turned to the window, but shut her eyes tightly when they saw the stars, a painful reminder of her draining, horrible dream.

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Seven

“Are you sure you can’t come with me?”

Oscar shook his head sadly, just managing to catch his hat as it fell off his head.

“I’m sorry Miss Emily, but I really shouldn’t be here at all. If I don’t get back now, I won’t have time to say goodbye to everybody.”

“Goodbye? But where are you going?”

Oscar bit his lip and stayed very quiet, suddenly finding the back of his hands very interesting.

“I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Oscar, tell me what’s going on.”

Oscar looked up at Emily, then looked around behind him as though he expected somebody must be there, listening. Although the room was empty, he dropped his voice and leant in.

“Don’t let Bernard know I’m telling you this, he wouldn’t approve,” he whispered.

“I promise,” Emily assured.

“Well, as you would know by now, we live inside that music box.”

“Yes, but...”

“Well surely you’ve worked out by now what you have to do?”

“I have to get home. Get Crouch away from my family.”

“Yes, but that’s not quite all. You need to stop him once and for all.”

“And how will I do that?”

“You must destroy the music box.”

Emily was horrified. How could she even consider destroying that world, so rich, so wonderful - so full of enchantment?

“But Minerva never...”

“She told me to tell you once we were back. She though if she told you while you were in there, there was a risk you would make a big deal about it.”

“But it is a big deal!”

Emily couldn’t believe what she was hearing. There had to be another way.

“There’s no point thinking that way, there’s simply no other way,” Oscar said firmly.

“If you don’t stop Crouch now, who knows what more harm he might be capable of? We always knew he was a dark horse, but what he has done to you completely crosses all the lines. We need to find a way to get him back in the box, then you have to destroy it so he cannot destroy any more innocent lives.”

Emily’s lip trembled. She realised Crouch’s stern face wasn’t used to showing emotion, so it must have looked quite strange. She was tempted to push Oscar on the issue, but saw that he wasn’t about to budge. There was nothing to be done about it for now anyway, there were too many other things to consider. What was she going to do next to get home and protect her family? There had to be a way to get her mother to realise that the Emily who was with them was not what she seemed. But how?

“Miss Emily, if you will excuse me, I really best be off.” Oscar was avoiding looking at her. She didn’t blame him – she was beginning to wonder how long she could stand being in this body. It was giving her the creeps.

“Okay Oscar. Thanks for everything. And tell Bernard thank you too.”

“You take care too Miss Emily – it was a true pleasure.”

Oscar turned around and walked towards the wall. Emily saw Bernard open his eyes and give her a wink.

“Look after yourself Emily.”

“I will Bernard, thank you.” She watched as they stepped through the wall as though it wasn’t even there. Then there was quiet.

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Six

The three of them sat around the table in stony silence. Percy was lost in his stew, or perhaps still mulling over some problem or other he had not been able to solve before coming downstairs.

Isabelle was not very hungry, having worried her tummy into a tight little knot.

Emily seemed to her mother strangely eager to eat every last morsel before her. Normally there was a bit of a struggle to convince her to pay attention, but tonight she seemed to be eating with a hunger Isabelle could never really recall having seen before.

She was about to say something, but thought better of it. If Emily was eating without a fuss, without getting lost in some story or dramatic re-enactment of something that had happened that day, she wasn’t going to interfere.

Percy smacked his lips together and gave a satisfied sigh. Rubbing his belly he winked at Emily. “Not bad hey ‘Ly? Your mother certainly has a way with cooking, that’s for sure.”

Isabelle watched as Emily looked up over her spoon. She though she caught a dark flash in Emily’s eyes as they fell on her father, but it was gone so quickly she was convinced it was a trick of the light.

Emily looked from her father to Isabelle, but her eyes quickly dropped back down to her spoon as though it suddenly required all her concentration to eat the next mouthful.

“It is very good mother, very good indeed.”

The clock that sat on the wall near the doorway was ticking more slowly than she could ever recall, dragging on as though under sufferance. Each tick seemed to require an incredible force of will and Isabelle realised she felt dreadfully tired. Her whole body seemed to ache with a fatigue that she felt a week of sleep would only begin to help lift.

She excused herself from the table and began clearing the now empty dishes. Percy declared that he was off to the garden for his final pipe of the evening, planting a kiss on Emily’s hairline and wishing her a good night’s rest. Isabelle watched as he reached for the handle on the door that passed from the kitchen to the garden, his other hand absentmindedly rummaging through his jacket pocket to retrieve his pipe and tobacco.

“It’s time we got you off to bed little missy,” she said to Emily, whose eyes she felt boring into her back as she washed the dishes clean.

“I still haven’t forgotten about today, but I think tomorrow would be the best time to discuss what we’re going to do with you.”

Emily nodded but didn’t leave the table. Isabelle sensed something about her was different, had changed in some almost imperceptible way since she had left that morning, but she was too tired to be able to devote the necessary thought power to it to untangle what it might be.

“Well off you go and brush those teeth. I’ll be up in a moment to tuck you in.”

Emily gave a wry smile and pushed out her chair. She pushed on the table so the legs scraped back across the room, then slipped down over the front of the chair. She seemed as though she were on the verge of approaching her mother, but instead turned around quickly and disappeared up the stairs.

Standing where she was, Isabelle could again hear the sea quite clearly. She realised it still had that unsettled and unsettling quality to its voice, its troubled faltering giving way to a reckless wildness. The wind was back up again and she could hear it whistling through the many-fingered trees at the end of the garden, even reaching in under the eaves and sneaking into the house, dancing around the rafters. It was going to be a rough old night, with a high likelihood of a storm hitting before it was through.

Isabelle went to the window and saw the faint glowing ember of Percy’s pipe, willing him to be done and come back into the house. She dried her hands on a small towel hanging from a nail next to the oven, placed her apron back onto its hook and took a deep breath. Emily would be in bed by now, she thought, and I best go and wish her good night.

The glow had dies from Percy’s pipe and she could no longer make out where he was. She knew he shouldn’t be too far behind so, leaving the door unlatched for his return, Isabelle set off for the stairs. Reaching the bottom, she was startled when she raised her eyes and saw Emily standing on the landing, watching her intently with that steady gaze.

“I’m ready for bed now mother,” she said levelly. “It’s been a big day.”

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Five

Emily couldn’t see a thing. All was black as can be, an all-consuming darkness that allowed no sense of anything beyond the self. She realised that even the self wasn’t all that conceivable – she struggled to grasp any idea of where she was, what she was.

“I’ll start by touching my nose,” Emily thought, but there was no sensation of having done so, no matter how she tried. Trying not to panic, she thought through what might have happened. The last thing she recalled was the intensely white light that enveloped her inside the music box. She had heard the choir reach incredible heights of song, an incomprehensible cascading of the most beautiful sounds with which her ears had ever been caressed.

This black was as deep and dark as the white was rich and bright and although she was disconcerted at her inability to make head or tail of it, Emily felt she had at the very least escaped the confines of the music box, which was, she knew, the first step to getting home. A sudden thought struck her – her weightlessness and the ‘foggy’ feel, the lack of a sense of her own corporeality, suggested she had arrived back in the chamber in which she had been thrust into the box in the first place, the one in which Crouch first trapped her and then stole her body.

Now it was all coming back to her. Bernard or Oscar (she couldn’t remember which had agreed) were to arrive separately, and – using whatever technique it was with which they passed through from one side to the other, she had never really found out - with their bodies intact. They would then make sure Crouch’s body was still in the chair where he had left it and still unoccupied, then start the chamber up and get Emily fed from the chamber into his form.

With everything so quiet, Emily began to fear the worst. Who knew whether they were going to arrive as they should? Despite developing a bit of a soft spot for them, Emily was not so deluded that she credited them with any great deal of competence. For all she knew, they had got distracted along the way by a chance passerby, or perhaps came across a morning tea that they simply couldn’t resist.

She did not have to worry long, however, for she soon heard the sound of the chamber coming back to life. Although she still had no feeling of limbs or body parts as such, Emily still felt a surge throw her across the chamber, before squeezing her through a narrow opening. She was tossed about in a looping passage before coming to a sudden halt.

Everything was bright again - Emily could finally see. She looked at her hands to make sure, and almost fell over backwards when she saw the long, pale, slender fingers, the pale half moons at the base of each of the fingernails. Turning them over, the smooth palms were no less a surprise, but somehow less confronting. She looked past them and saw Oscar trying to hide on the stairway – failing miserably, as the railings really didn’t hide all that much and he was a most rotund little man.

“Oscar – you made it!”

Another shock as her voice came out in Crouch’s unmistakeable baritone, the rich tones that had put her at ease sounding decidedly out of place carrying her cry. Oscar seemed to be willing the ground to swallow him then and there, shying a little further back into the shadows. Emily realised he would be scared out of his wits, being addressed so by Crouch.

“Oscar, don’t be afraid – it’s me, Emily!”

Still he held his ground, although he did seem to be poking his head a little higher over the banister.

“Prove it,” he challenged, clearly ready to run (he would never get very far mind you) if need be.

“How?”

He thought about it for a little while.

“Tell me what riddle I asked when I met you in the forest.”

So much had passed since then, Emily was sure she wouldn’t remember. But she had been so annoyed once she realised the riddle was useless to her that it had somehow stuck. She first remembered the fawn, and the rest soon followed.

“What sleeps through a storm, rises afore dawn, shares thoughts with a fawn, is already torn and has never been born?”

Emily was relieved to see Oscar break into a smile.

“I don’t know – tell me.”

“Oscar! You know I don’t know.”

“Oh I know you didn’t, but I wondered if as Crouch you might have been able to tell me.”

Emily felt her temper rise, but then realised what Oscar had said. Perhaps he had a point. Although Crouch had left his body here seemingly empty, surely there was some way of accessing his mind. Whether it was getting into his memory or tapping into the part of his brain that calculated his dastardly little plans, there must be some way of making use of this opportunity to find out what Crouch was up to – and how she could thwart his evil intentions. She had been unable to do so from her dreams, but this was different, this was him, his body she was in.

Yet this was no time for sitting around – Emily had to get going and find out just where Crouch was and what on earth he had been up to since he crammed her in that box, mistakenly believing she would never get out.

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Four

“And where, pray tell, have you been young lady?”

Isabelle allowed into her voice a note of disappointment, one of anger, one of near despair, let them jangle uncomfortably and wash over Emily. She was her daughter and she loved her dearly, but she had to know there were rules and responsibilities and that they meant something.

“I was at Tabitha’s, helping Mrs Tibbits with her garden,” Emily said. Her stance was one of remorse, hands clasped behind her back, a pointed toe swivelling on the kitchen floor, her eyes downcast. She raised them briefly to gauge the look on Isabelle’s face, but the mother remained inscrutable. She didn’t want to draw this out too long, but felt Emily had to feel the weight of her disappointment if she was to lean that she could not simply come and go at any hour she pleased.

“I hadn’t realised it had gotten so late, we were very close to having all the planting done and the time just flew by.”

Isabelle loved her time in the garden, so knew how easily this could happen. One minute you’re there with a row of seedlings that need some attention and a few weeds peeking through to deal with, the next thing you know you have worked your way around the entire garden bed and the afternoon has turned to evening. But the fact was, Emily must learn to take responsibility for her actions and for their consequences.

“Well that’s all very well, but your father and I have been worried about you,” Isabelle said, looking right at Emily who still avoided her mother’s eye.

“What if something had happened? And out at this time of night in such a thin dress and no woollens – I will be most surprised of you don’t come down with a cold.” Isabelle realised her own hands were shaking. To steady herself, she went over to the stove, removed the lid from the pot of the stew and began to stir. This simple domestic ritual helped calm her nerves, which were more frayed than she had realised.

“Anyway, we’ll talk more about this later. Your dinner is growing cold and I don’t want you going to bed with an empty stomach, though you should know we are quite unimpressed at you being out so late, you’ve let your father and me down.”

Isabelle knew, and suspected Emily knew, that this talk of Percy being disappointed and unimpressed was a bit of a stretch. He was unlikely to be impressed if he had realised she had been out so late and walked home by herself in the near-dark, but it’s unlikely that he had even realised. He was a good father, it’s not that he didn’t care, but when he got involved in his writings, there was little that could distract him.

Feeling she had been about as stern as she could be and still be in a state where she could face dinner, Isabelle allowed some of her usual softness to return to her voice.

“Speaking of your father, how about you go and let him know that dinner is ready?”

“Okay mother.” Emily slowly turned and began to walk to the stairs. She stopped after just a step and turned back around.

“Mother?”

“Yes Emily?”

“Please don’t stay mad at me.”

Isabelle’s heart melted, and she caught herself about to tell Emily it was all okay. But she bit her tongue and regathered her composure.

“Let’s just get dinner happening shall we, we can discuss this more once we’ve all eaten.”