Little Black Book of Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

it was to do with getting to the centre. Her childhood stories had all been in the third person. “She was not afraid.” “She faced up to the wild beasts. They cowered.” She laddered her tights and muddied her shoes and breathed heavier. The squirrel stopped to clean its face. She crushed bluebells and saw the sinister hoods of arum lilies.
    She had no idea where she was, or how far she had come, but she decided that the clearing where she found herself was the centre. The squirrel had stopped, and was running up and down a single tree. There was a sort of mossy mound which could almost have had a throne-like aspect, if you were being imaginative. So she sat on it. “She came to the centre and sat on the mossy chair.”
    Now what?
    She had not forgotten what they had seen, the blank miserable face, the powerful claws, the raggletaggle train of accumulated decay. She had come neither to look for it nor to confront it, but she had come because it was there. She had known all her life that she, Primrose, had
really
been in a magic forest. She knew that the forest was the source of terror. She had never frightened the littl’uns she entertained at parties, in schools, in crèches, with tales of lost children in forests. She frightened them with slimy things that came up the plughole, or swarmed out of the U-bend in the lavatory, or tapped on windows at night, and were despatched by bravery and magic. There were waiting hobgoblins in urban dumps beyond the street-lights. But the woods in her tales were sources of glamour, of rich colours and unseen hidden life, flower fairies and more magical beings. They were places where you used words like spangles and sequins for real dewdrops on real dock leaves. Primrose knew that glamour and the thing they had seen came from the same place, that brilliance and the ashen stink had the same source. She made them safe for the littl’uns by restricting them to pantomime flats and sweet illustrations. She didn’t look at what she knew, better not, but
she did know she knew,
she recognised confusedly.
    Now what?
    She sat on the moss, and a voice in her head said, “I want to go home.” And she heard herself give a bitter, entirely grown-up little laugh, for what was home? What did she know about home?
    Where she lived was above a Chinese takeaway. She had a dangerous cupboard-corner she cooked in, a bed, a clothes-rail, an armchair deformed by generations of bottoms. She thought of this place in faded browns and beiges, seen through drifting coils of Chinese cooking-steam, scented with stewing pork and a bubbling chicken broth. Home was not real, as all the sturdy twigs and roots in the wood were real, it had neither primrose-honey nor spangles and sequins. The stuffed animals, or some of them, were piled on the bed and the carpet, their fur rubbed, their pristine stare gone from their scratched eyes. She thought about what one thought was
real,
sitting there on the moss-throne at the centre. When Mum had come in, snivelling, to say Dad was dead, she herself had been preoccupied with whether pudding would be tapioca or semolina, whether there would be jam, and subsequently, how ugly Mum’s dripping nose looked, how she looked as though she was
putting it on.
She remembered the semolina and the rather nasty blackberry jam, the taste and the texture, to this day, so was that real, was that home? She had later invented a picture of a cloudy aquamarine sea under a gold sun in which a huge fountain of white curling water rose from a foundering ship. It was very beautiful but not real. She could not remember Dad. She could remember the Thing in the Forest, and she could remember Alys. The fact that the mossy tump had lovely colours—crimson and emerald, she said, maidenhairs, she named something at random—didn’t mean she didn’t remember the Thing. She remembered what Penny had said about “things that are more real than we are.” She had met one. Here at the centre, the spout of