Every Night

Every night I have this dream. The night is heavy, and the darkness is liquid, caressing inside itself warm, whiskey colours; umbers and ambers and russets, and streaks of blood. It’s summer-hot, no matter the time of year. And as I lay in bed, I can hear them, rising, slowly moving, trekking up from the road, clambering over fence and trellis, into the back garden, amongst the flowers and bushes. I can hear the rustle of their voices out there just beyond the yellow-painted walls.

I wake up.

They’re still out there, I can hear them in the trees, and I can hear the squeak as the swing starts to work. These old bones aren’t meant for such late-night shenanigans, but still, I get up out of bed, pull a cardigan over my nightie, and step out onto the garden path. There’s a sliver of moon, offering a shade of milky light; there are pin-pricks of stars; and there’s the eerie quiet and stillness of a neighbourhood at rest.

Except from around the corner.

I round that corner, each night, knowing what to expect. Finding them always there, these children, running around the expansive garden, crawling around in the stacked-crate playground, crawling along the rope that binds together those two great-grandfather trees, one of them working the swing with tough, mechanical legs; a couple more on the rope-swing; a group of girls sitting in a circle playing those old clapping games I remember from all those decades ago.

It’s hard to believe that I was one of them once. That I was romping and rowdy, all breath-less with life – not just wheezing with so many years behind me. Now look at me, look at these wrinkled old hands, that loose gold ring, these tired, straining ankles.

“Ursula!”

They all remember me.

“Come on. Come over! We need one more!”

These hands, they’re too slow to keep up with the complex patterns, and they look so out of place amongst these small hands, these soft, young, supple hands. And yet they keep up. Muscle memory comes to my rescue, and my hands follow the paths they remember from long ago childhood, they remember the rhymes and the rhythms.

“Look,” Tammy calls out, “I found a four-leaf clover!”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Look, see.” She holds it up. The cloverleaf does have four, neatly spaced petals.

“You’re tricking!”

“No, I’m not, come and see.”

A mix of feet, some shoed, some not, go scampering over to see what she’s holding.

“Come on, Ursula.”

I shake my head. “I know this trick.” I remember when she pulled an extra petal off another cloverleaf and held it against one of its fellows. I remember other girls being impressed, not seeing her do it like I had. Keeping her secret. In 1955, as today.

I know it isn’t real. How can these children be here now? Some of them should have hands just like mind, should have faces all ravaged all over with time. Others, I know, didn’t live to have such faces. Johnny in war; Sheila from cancer; Tammy from that accident; Thuna from a heart that had never been right, not even when she’d been young. These children haven’t existed in some sixty or more years. So how can they come here and find me, and laugh with me, and play with me, now, when they and I are all-but forgotten?

How?

But here they are. Their sound all-real in my ears, their hands soft and solid when they touch mine; the trampled flowers, the footprints, the swaying rope-swing. Even as they scatter for the dawn, these small evidences remain.

As the horizon yellows, I step my way to the letterbox, collecting the paper, waving to Mr Gantry across the road. I wonder about him; does his past come to visit him in the dead of night the way mine does? Maybe I’ll ask him one day.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work