school photos 33

Our Jo took charge at bedtime. Little Ally could still smell the lingering presence of cigarette smoke from Mum’s cigarettes that haunted the cold air and the sound of canned laughter from the telly in the living room, reminders of a brightly-lit world outside sleep. Wind blew through the gaps in the frame, trapped the crayon-yellow curtains and chimed the lampshade so it gently swayed, spilling light on the worn linoleum the two beds with a narrow corridor between them. These were the life rafts Jo used, jumping from her own bed near the window onto Ally’s bed leaning across to flick the light switch off. Ally’s job was to say the Lord’s Prayer as quickly as she could so that the monsters under the beds didn’t reach their bony fingers up, grab her by the ankle and pull her down underneath the floor to the great pit. It was a weighty responsibility. One time Ally got stuck at ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, her voice fragile and supplicating, but God was waiting. The room light was out and Jo wasn’t safely tucked up in bed and monsters piled out from under the linoleum, jumped out of the clothes cupboard beside her bed and sneaked out of the dressing table drawers to attack her. She had to squeal and fight, kicking them to hell, before bouncing on Ally’s bed to put the light back on. Mum had shouted through a warning to keep the noise down or they’d get what for.  

The only thing worse than that Jo had told her was saying The Lord’s Prayer backwards. Then the devil would swoop down straight away with his big claws and all that would be left would be your cry. Ally didn’t even want to think about saying it backwards, forward was bad enough, but found herself asking, in a small voice, ‘what if you made a mistake, would the devil understand?’

‘As long as you said God kissed it and the devil missed it,’ Jo told her.

Ally snuggled up with her dolly and went straight from praying to sleeping. Jo took a bit longer, blankets drum-tight around her shoulders, the faint light from the streetlight outside enough to see her breath. Sometimes a car would run round the bend of the hill and the headlights would dip and run across the space between the top of the cupboard and along the wall. What if, she asked herself, there was a crash and a husband and wife were flung bleeding from the car and screaming for somebody to save their baby who was trapped inside? A few of their neighbours would be moping about not quite sure what to do. They’d try and hold her back because of the smell of petrol and the flickering flame under the bonnet. But she’d escape their grasping hands. The baby’s mewing would come from the back seat. She’d burn her hand on the locked door. A fire-engine’s siren would be heard in the distance. There would be no time for that kind of malarkey. She’d rip the car door from its hinges and toss it to one side—God was always good for helping with things like that—and she’d pluck the baby from the backseat and, sheltering it in her arms as the car exploded behind her, run towards its mum and dad. She’d be modest about it, of course, and not want any kind of reward or anything.

Jo couldn’t believe it when she was woken from a deep sleep by the light of a flickering Rizzo lighter. Ally was waving it from side to side like a sparkler, illuminating her blond bubble of hair and the deep pit of the corridor between their beds.  The light was killed and Ally giggled, a foreign sound in the growing darkness, in which frosted shadows from the back struts of the dressing-table mirror grew horns.  

Sitting up in bed, eyes gummy, the light sparked again. Jo swiped at her arm, hissing through her teeth, phrases running together, ‘Mum‘ll plum kill you. Gie me that. Get to sleep or I‘ll kill you as well’.

Ally’s head moved left to right with the flame a shield held out in front of her, hair glowing in a nimbus, her face in shadow. ‘I’m cold, so cold.’ Her voice rising and falling and the flame dying again.

The chill in the room caught Jo like a slap, her fingers gripping onto the flounces at the arms of her nightie and her body slipping under the blankets for heat like an ice-pole finding a wrapper. Her sister’s low voice, however, filled her head with worms. She couldn’t think, didn’t want to take her eyes off her, but a gut feeling in her stomach told her not to stare. The lighter flickered on and off. That gave her courage. ‘You better stop that,’ an edge in her voice that threatened a slap or even a kick.

          ‘I’m cold. So cold.’ Ally’s voice see-sawed in a whine. ‘Can I come in beside you?’   

‘We’re too old for that now.’

‘Just tonight. Just once. Big people don’t understand.’

Jo snorted, in a way familiar to both of them, and shuttled over to the other side of the bed, pulling the blankets over her shoulders and facing the window. She rapped three times on the warm side of the bed.

The mattress creaked as the weight of her sister’s body slotted in beside her. Jo recoiled from the casually flung foot resting against her bare leg and the arm flung over her midriff to cuddle in. ‘Ally, you better stop acting it.’ Limbs that were ice-water cold. Jo couldn’t work out how her sister had played this trick on her.

‘It’s not Ally. It’s little Lilly.’     

The breath on the back of Jo’s neck smelt sickly-sour. A gap appeared in which Jo turned her head and sprung out of bed screaming. Ally had a glimmer in the empty eye sockets, the smudged colour of mud.

Running up the hall, smacking the light on in her parent’s room, Mum had already abandoned the parental bed and caught her sobbing body. Da jumped out of the side nearest the back wall, but realizing he was standing naked slid back under the covers.

‘Mum. Mum,’ cried our Jo. ‘Little Ally’s turned into a ghost.’