The Red Thing by Issy Flower

Issy Flower

The Red Thing

I remember the way she dipped her hand into the water. It was curved, like a feather, and the water clung to her skin like diamonds on a necklace. She lifted the water into the air and whispered words over it. They were the same words we all had to whisper, but she made them different. She really did speak magic into them. The rest of us were just play-acting-- ten year olds with nothing better to do-- but she dipped her hand into Sally Robinson’s backyard bucket and cast a spell over everyone. The moment hung over us, enveloped us, and there was a sheet of glass separating us from the world. You could just about see it if you squinted. It flickered and glimmered in the little sun peeking through the rainclouds. Then, she drank the water, shook out her hand, and turned back to us, making a face like she’d eaten something sour. Her face puckered up and her features became as distorted as a peach stone. It broke the languid silence of the moment and shattered the glass, which fell over us and bounced off our skin like snowflakes. But it made us love her. She was one of us, deep down, ethereal as she was. I remember looking at her and willing her to love me too. Then she brought in the bike. No one in the neighbourhood could afford a bike, it was half the thing we cast spells for, so when she wheeled it up the dirt road we all took one full intake of breath. Thirty years later, I still recall every whorl and dip of that bike, even the way it caressed the space around it and made it something new, the same way she did. It was the most beautiful shiny-apple red, the colour of Valentine’s cards and butcher’s viscera, gloriously red, a red that wriggled under your skin and found kinship with the blood vessels inside. It had a real leather seat with a real leather smell and shining silver handlebars. The whole thing shone from the inside, was lit from the inside, glowed in contrast to the dull brick of our post-war houses. That glass hung over it too.

I think we were all allowed to come up and touch it, one by one. Each small girl would place her hand on that red curve and flinch at how cold it was-- colder than it looked-- before embracing its smoothness, the sheer beauty of the curve. Then, with a smile, Kelly would wave them on with her feather-like hand and let the next person touch it, so that to Kelly’s right there started to accumulate a group of girls visibly different to those on her left. A group of small Julians of Norwich: transfixed. Eventually this touching became part of the actual rituals we were meant to conduct as witches. We were part of the Nuneaton Coven, established 1973, and we had to do magic. Mostly we copied what we saw on Catweazle, which meant a lot of turning around on the spot and saying words like ‘whizzle’ in a Cornish accent. But Kelly’s bike brought something new. We had a totem, an idol, something to worship; something that we could take into ourselves, even if we didn’t understand what those things were or what they meant. We loved it to the very depths of our being. We’d draw it, write poems about it, poems that would then be cast over it at school, in the shadow of the elm trees at the edge of the field. We’d take turns to look at it in the bike shed, and place our palms on the plastic that covered it and draw circles in the dust, dioramic protections. There would be a swell of debris as your finger met the plastic, and warmth would spread up your arm, and you’d know the red spectre in front of you had received your gift. Kelly would grin and then you’d spend the rest of the afternoon trying to wipe the dirt on other people. I can’t imagine what it looked like to outsiders, all these small children standing open-mouthed at a bike no more impressive than anything you could find in Woolworth’s. But its power had cast a shield over us, just like Kelly. They both shone. Then, as we grew up, the magic diminished. The coven members discovered boys, and drifted from Sally Robinson’s back garden, one by one, the red of the bike moving to their cheeks, their lips, their skirts. Some of us clung on to the last-- even Kelly, who must have sensed that her power was fading. She was not beautiful, Kelly. We had always found her beautiful, but we were diminished day by day, and her bike, now three years old and scratched from when her brothers had used it, was diminished too. We didn’t even touch it now, when we cast our spells. It was too mud-caked. But I was still there when it was destroyed. It was the last meeting of the Nuneaton Coven. We’d decided to pack it in once and for all: bullies had got wind of it, boys were breathing down our necks; it was all too stressful.

Sally Robinson wasn’t even there, but inside on the telephone to Gerry Furnace from number 63. Kelly raised her hand to her lips again, whispered through them, and then said, in a voice that resounded: ‘Let’s take it to the dump.’ We followed her out neatly in procession, as she wheeled the damp red thing towards the dirt. Finally we reached the dump-- a small patch of barren land covered in old fridges and cookers and household waste. We used to imagine fairies peeping out of there, playing amongst the cans. Never saw one, though. Never stopped looking. Kelly wheeled the bike to the centre of the wasteground and stopped. Then, majestic, she raised her right hand to her mouth and blew. We did the same. We didn’t need to be told-- it was instinctive. Our breath hit the air and crystallised white. There was something in the air that had not been there before, brought about by all of us: a promise, a declaration, a truth. It hung there for a moment like smoke, like that age-old pane of shimmering glass, then dissipated, and we knew what we had to do. Kelly turned sharply away from the bike. We did as well, and filed out, and when we reached Sally Robinson’s house we walked in different directions, towards school and sex and careers and a world where Kelly was just like anyone else. I don’t think I even spoke to her again. But I looked at the bike as we walked away, exiles from paradise. It looked lonely, just sitting there in the mud, an open, festering swell of red, pitted with black and silver and brown. It looked like a strange thing, a voodoo doll, a talisman, a sore. It curved like a feather, and the cold air clung to it like diamonds. I saw Kelly’s face in it, with her red mouth, and her peach-stone face, puckered up. There was too much in that bike. It kept our secrets. I trained my eyes on it, and watched and watched as it pulsed red in the gloom, and did not turn my head away. I can still see it now.