Winterling

The sky was alive in its blueness, and the roots of budding plants were pulsating and pushing upwards through the looseness of dry earth on the afternoon that Tabitha died.

Her favourite season had always been spring. She loved the flowers and the way the light breeze touched and tickled the dark hair of her arms; the way the flushed, pale-yellow sunlight deepened towards evening. Most of all she loved the warmth of it. The way that it brought all manner of things back from the dead, things that you had sullenly mourned for and forgotten about through the hardness of winter.

She loved the implacable moment when the season first arrived, when the world no longer felt like a cold, heartless thing kept on life-support, but an expansive ecosystem of breathing, heart-beating creatures who were looking for a lighted home. Each year, I would wait for her to announce this arrival, as if springtime were of an invention all her own. As though she was the one principally responsible for its recurrence.

She and I used to go traipsing through the fields by our house, on days like that, sometimes taking our girlishly over-tasselled bikes and racing through luscious meadow-grass that stung with nettles and sang with the chirps of leaping crickets. We would pack squashed sandwiches into tin foil wrappers, juice cartons with missing straws, maybe some fruit if there was some leftover on our kitchen windowsill, verging on rot, tempting bluebottles. We would gorge ourselves on these wares, breathless and red-cheeked, and lie back on a grassy knoll to watch the distant clouds move.

Sometimes we would bring art supplies, drawing pads and blunt charcoal pencils, erasers in the shapes of woodland animals, whiteboard markers we would slip into our sleeves at school when it was time to pack away our books and bags. We would sit and draw one another in flattering, princess-ified styles, or else fiendishly compete to see who could create the most offensive portrait of one of our numberless enemies — a scolding school teacher, a mummy or daddy who had told us off and called us nasty names, a girl in class we particularly loathed that week because she wouldn’t share her sweets with us in the park.

We would work our fingers through each other’s hair, plaiting the unbrushed tangled strands together and hiding leaves or small flowers inside the braids. At bathtime our mothers would tut and complain about our dirt, the grime that lined the soles of our skinny feet, because we had a habit of discarding shoes and socks to wade through shallow swamps of water instead. The mummies would sometimes be friends too, but not always, and especially not after Tabitha died. After Tabby, I don’t believe they ever spoke again.

On occasion they would sit on the front stoop of one or the other of our houses, sipping tea from cracked floral cups, chattering about the waywardness of their handsy, impenetrable husbands who they feared in a special way they called ‘love’, or about the endless piles of laundry to wash and hang to dry and iron and put away, or about how nobody had ever truly appreciated them. Not really.

They sat with hand-me-down trousers in need of hemming, or crinkled shirts with missing buttons resting in their laps. Sewing needles clenched between teeth and bitten lips as they sifted through envelopes of loose thread, in search of just the right shade of scrap. They would warn us, before we went on our adventures, palms pressed together or arms intertwined, to stay together and away from any strangers. The male kind of stranger was a particularly well-versed threat, the established boogeyman of bygone girlhood days; the shadowy creature that promised to grab us by our pigtails and swallow us whole at the first opportunity. Men, we had been told early on (mostly for fear we might too soon discover it for ourselves), had a concerning appetite for little girls.

We took our jump ropes and picnic blankets, stacks of faded comic books and plastic figurine fairies, out into the wilderness with us. We loved it when it drizzled rain and made the mud wet beneath our wellied feet. We would decorate our fingernails with it, digging down into the moisture to make magical potions or play at baking pies and chocolate cakes. We would sink our dolls, hair matted and patterned dresses askew, deep into the dirt. We would bury those poor women alive, wriggling and squirming, find temporary distraction elsewhere in a fallen log or herd of ants, and then entirely forget the spot where we had chosen to build our graveyards.

When it was Tabitha being lowered into the ground instead, these dolls were all that I could think about. The mummies milled about pathetically whimpering, clutching at the elbows of their still-alive little girls, whilst I suppressed hateful laughter at the sight of them. They didn’t know Tabby. Not the way that I did.

The sun blazed down in the way that she had loved the most on the day she left for good, but I stood shivering with cold, wrapping goose-pimpled arms around myself to try and hold myself steady. To my child-eyes, the world appeared diluted of its colour, drenched in greyscale and monochrome, devoid of warmth or meaning. The world has looked the same ever since.

There is no springtime without her. She invented it after all.