All That She Can See(4)
At 10:30 Margie would pop in for a chunk of marble cake to keep her going in her empty shop, and then at 12:45 George Partridge, the thirty-four-year-old miserable librarian, would show up for a coffee. George’s mother had been the town’s librarian; her mother in turn had been a librarian, and her mother before her had also been a librarian, but George hated reading. Growing up with books shoved into his hands, being forced to recite prose and quizzed on great writers had instilled in George a resentment for all kinds of literature.
And then at five o’clock on the dot, Cherry’s final Usual of the day would arrive.
‘The usual please, Miss Redgrave,’ said a voice.
Cherry couldn’t see its owner but she knew exactly who it belonged to. ‘And which usual would that be today, Bruce?’ she said, wiping her hands on a tea towel as Bruce clambered onto a tall stool at the counter. His hands grasped the brown leather seat and as he heaved himself up, his size-four feet came off the ground. He swung his legs around like a gymnast on a pommel horse and with a breath of relief he replied, ‘Whatever you say it is.’
Cherry gave him a smile but as she ducked to reach for his treat in the display counter, her eyes welled with tears. Her gaze drifted past the cakes to the large front windows of the shop and there, standing with its forehead slumped against the glass, peering in with its long drooping eyes and gangly limbs hanging lifeless by its sides… was Worthlessness.
Cherry looked around the tables, at all her usual customers sitting in their usual spots with their usual orders on their usual plates, wearing their usual masks in an attempt to hide what Cherry could plainly see: their bad feelings. The feelings formed a disorderly queue outside the bakery when their souls were inside, grumbling and gurgling, writhing and wrestling: Sally’s Obsessiveness, Margie’s Loneliness, George’s Depression, Orla’s Exhaustion and Bruce’s Worthlessness.
They howled and moaned to be let inside, to take control of their humans once more, but Cherry’s bakery was a safe place for her Usuals. She didn’t know why but she had realised a long time ago that no matter where she opened up her bakeries, some kind of line was always drawn at the doorway, a line that no bad feeling could cross. Maybe it was because of all the good feeling she’d contained inside her shop. But they would still thump against the woodwork and bang on the windows, unheard by the townspeople and desperate to get in.
Cherry’s bakery was a safe haven, a place where people could forget their troubles for an hour or two. And when their bad feelings latched back onto them as they left, Cherry noticed that their troubles seemed a little smaller than before.
2
Meddlums
From the moment she was born, Cherry Redgrave saw things other children didn’t. She spoke of frightening figures that were swathed in scales, of gaunt goblins with shiny skin, and of ferocious faces with jabbering jaws. And most frighteningly of all, for every adult she saw she also saw a monster, a shadow, standing close by. As a child she thought this was a normal part of life, and she wasn’t aware that no one else could see all that she could see, so when she was caught staring curiously over people’s shoulders and babbled about invisible shadowed figures, adults thought she was mad and taught their children to stay away from her. Parents wondered when she would grow out of imaginary friends but Cherry wondered when parents would admit to seeing what was clearly right behind them. And then, on one ordinary day at primary school, tiny four-year-old Cherry finally realised the truth – that she was the only one who could see them.
The teacher had asked all the children in Cherry’s class to form a line, starting with the shortest. Cherry had pointed to the creature at her teacher’s shoulder and asked, ‘What about him?’
‘Who?’ Mr Harrison asked, looking behind him and seeing nothing at all.
‘Your monster! He’s taller than all of us! He should stand at the end of the line.’
Cherry had tried to explain how the creature often waved at the class and that his smile was so wide it wrapped around his entire face and met in the middle at the back of his head. Cherry soon found herself in the headmistress’s office trying to explain herself. While her teachers were terrified that the school had been infiltrated by an odd man trying to lure children away, what Cherry had actually seen was far more worthy of their concern – but nobody believed it to be real.
‘It was a monster! Like that one in the corner!’ Cherry had insisted. Her continued disturbing behaviour resulted in a change of schools and several trips to a nice lady with a comfy couch who had puppets whom she made ask Cherry questions about what she saw. And all the while Cherry couldn’t stop watching the gremlin on the therapist’s shoulder who kept pulling at her hair.
Cherry’s new school was much nicer, she thought. She’d learnt not to talk about what she saw and only pulled faces at the monsters occasionally when she knew there weren’t any adults looking. She muddled through the school years, keeping herself to herself and it was only when there was a commotion in the playground one day that seven-year-old Cherry realised she wasn’t alone after all.
Kids are usually carefree and too busy spilling jam down their fronts or spinning in circles to adopt the heavy troubles of the world that manifest themselves into these beings. However, one child, a bully by the name of Maddison Flint, had developed a squat troll called Neglect that mimicked her every movement, which often made Cherry laugh out loud. Maddison was not a slender or elegant girl. She had more muscles than most weightlifters, a neck that puffed like a bullfrog when she shouted and two long brown plaits that looked as though they hadn’t been unravelled since she had hair long enough to braid. To Cherry, Maddison and her troll looked one and the same.