All That She Can See Read online

  Merely days into her stay, she knew this would be a difficult place to leave. Each morning, she came downstairs from her flat above the bakery, wearing a freshly ironed pair of pyjamas, ready for a busy day ahead. Cherry always wore pyjamas – she didn’t understand why everybody didn’t. When a previous next door neighbour had insisted she get dressed into something a little more appropriate she had replied, ‘They’re the comfiest item of clothing known to man. Why anyone would choose to wear dresses you can’t breathe in and high heels you can’t walk in when pyjamas and slippers are readily available to everyone… well, it’s beyond me!’

  So she tied her hair into two Minnie Mouse-esque bunches, donned a pair of flannel pyjamas, skidded across the shop floor in her matching slippers and unlatched the door. Within moments, her Usuals started to arrive.

  Sally Lightbody, aged seventy-two and retired, was always the first person to show up. She’d breeze in at 8:15 every morning, swathed in layers of floaty silk. Her silver hair was tangled and matted into dreadlocks which she tied tight above her head with a purple and green patchwork scarf, a scarf that perfectly matched the satchel in which she kept a black box of Tarot cards. Sally had been drawn to Cherry’s shop one day not by fate but by a desperate need to relieve her bladder.

  ‘Go on,’ Sally had said, waving her box of cards at Cherry until she nodded. Sally shuffled and drew the first card, and her lips curled at the corners. Immediately, she swept her cards back into their black box and sipped her tea. Sally refused to tell Cherry what the card had revealed, but every day since, she arrived at 8:15 and would sit in her usual spot by the window until closing time. Throughout the day, customers would come to Sally to have their fortunes and futures laid out before them. She never asked for money for her services and she always bought her first slice of cake herself, but it had become customary to buy Sally a slice of something sweet in return for a reading. Her usual treat(ment) was a Will-Power Walnut Whip first thing, and from then on Cherry served her Victoria sponge, Sally’s favourite.

  Sally looked calm but beneath the bundles of silk and crystal necklaces, she had an obsessive streak. She’d had many fixations over the years: food, alcohol, Dickens, Laurel and Hardy, obscure inventions no one ever heard about and now fortune-telling. One by one, each thing had consumed her and she would live, sleep and breathe them until there was nothing more of them to consume. Fortune-telling had kept her obsessed for almost thirty years now, however, and when Cherry asked why she’d stuck with it for so long, Sally had replied, ‘It’s the future, love. It’s always changing.’

  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.

  On this day in particular, however, it seemed that Cherry wasn’t the only one trying to stifle laughter. A ring of Maddison’s cronies had formed around her, penning in a small boy whom Cherry recognised as the new pupil that had joined her year the week before. Cherry hadn’t given much thought to how he was fitting in but given that Maddison was holding him a few inches off the pale-blue hopscotch lines by the scruff of his school shirt, Cherry figured badly.

  ‘What d’you say?!’ Maddison yelled, spraying spit in his face. The troll opened and closed its mouth in time with Maddison’s but if Cherry hadn’t known better she would’ve sworn that this only amused the boy further, and he only half-stifled his laughter. Maddison shook him roughly until his laughter stopped.

  ‘I said, what d’you say?’ she hissed, holding the small boy close to her puce and sweaty face.

  ‘I said,’ the boy giggled, apparently deliriously transfixed by something over Maddison’s shoulder, ‘you look like your troll!’ and he was lost to laughter once more.

  ‘Troll?! You calling me a troll?!’ Maddison dropped him to the playground tarmac and kicked him in his side but before she could cause any more damage, a whistle blew and a teacher ran over to break up the ruckus. Maddison and her posse dispersed, running in several different directions, while the teacher consoled the spluttering boy she’d rescued.

  ‘Ah, here’s a helping hand,’ the teacher said, spotting Cherry standing nearby. ‘Cherry, dear, could you take Peter to the welfare room? There’s a good girl.’ She helped Peter up and wrapped his arm around Cherry’s shoulders so she could take his weight, but as soon as the teacher had disappeared to sort out another playground misdemeanour, Peter snatched his arm away and wiped it on his shirt.

  ‘Did you see it too?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes. Cherry noticed the deep purple semi-circles underneath them and wondered if Maddison had hit him in the face too.

  ‘Did I see what?’ Cherry said slowly.

  Peter’s face fell and he balled up his hands. ‘Why does no one see them?!’ he shouted, his small face furious. ‘Some of them are HUGE!’

  ‘See what?’ Cherry asked cautiously, trying not to look at Frustration who had hold of Peter’s shoulders and was rocking him rapidly back and forth as Peter aimlessly bounced his fists around.

  ‘They’re monsters! Bogeymen! Meddlums!’

  ‘Meddlums?’ Cherry was struck by the word. She’d never heard it before.

  ‘Monsters! You know how girls are made up of sugar and spice and everything nice?’ He started to circle her, his wide eyes never leaving her face.

  ‘Yeah… ’

  ‘Well, Meddlums are made up of…’ His eyes bore into hers and he nodded for her to continue the rhyme.

  ‘… slugs and snails and puppy dog tails?’ she said.

  ‘No-wer!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s what boys are made up of! Meddlums are made up of tears and sad and everything bad!’ He spat when he talked. Cherry wiped her face.

  ‘Oh. Well… I knew that. I just didn’t know the rhyme.’

  ‘That’s because I made it up.’ He hooked his thumbs into his pockets and puffed out his chest, smiling proudly. Then he stopped abruptly. ‘Wait… you know? How do you know?’ Peter took her by the shoulders and started shaking her. Cherry looked into his eyes, so full of frustration, and suddenly all she wanted was to help him.

  ‘Because I can see them too,’ she whispered.

  ‘You can?’

  Cherry nodded.

  ‘Prove it.’ Peter let her go with a little shove. ‘Who’s that behind Maddison?’

  ‘Neglect,’ Cherry replied without skipping a beat.

  ‘And behind her?’ Peter pointed to a little girl playing hopscotch with Grief holding onto her ankle.

  ‘Grief. She lost her auntie a couple of weeks ago,’ Cherry said.

  Peter’s face broke into a smile and suddenly Frustration didn’t have quite so tight a hold on him. He stepped forward and stood very close to Cherry as he asked, ‘We’re best friends now, right?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Cherry shrugged, stepping back. ‘But that means you have to tell me why you call them —’

  ‘Meddlums,’ Peter finished.

  ‘Meddlums,’ Cherry repeated, enjoying the taste of the word.

  ‘D’ya know why?’

  Peter was standing very close to Cherry again. She wanted to run away but he knew something that she didn’t and she needed to find out what it was. Cherry wondered if anyone was watching them but a quick glance around the playground showed her that even if they were looking, no one cared what they were up to.

  ‘Why?’ she whispered.

  ‘You know your good feelings?’ Peter asked, and Cherry nodded. ‘They meddle ’em all up until you feel horrible inside and they keep you feeling that way for ever and ever until you die.’ Peter made a horrible squelching noise as he drove a make-believe dagger into his stomach.

  ‘Meddlums.’ Cherry repeated, rolling the name around her mouth. Yes, that felt like the right thing to call them.

  ‘Meddlums,’ Peter said with a final nod.

  Cherry would always remember that day. The day she put a name to the grotesque faces that had haunted her and the people she loved since she could remember. The day she made a friend. Having someone to finally share her secret with, someone to make faces at the Meddlums with, someone to cry to when one was particularly frightening, was comforting. It was the kind of comfort Cherry hadn’t realised she needed until it was there. Other children thought Cherry and Peter were odd but other children had always thought they were odd so the fact they were suddenly sitting next to each other at lunch and playing together in the playground didn’t make them any more odd than they were before. If anything, it made sense.

  ‘What do your parents think about what you can see?’ Peter asked her during lunchtime one day.

  ‘My dads say I’m special,’ Cherry said, smiling.

  Samuel Redgrave knew his daughter could see things others couldn’t and whether it was in her mind or whether it was real, he loved and accepted her for the child she was – nothing more, nothing less. Her other father, Lucas, loved her too, of course, but he was also scared of their adopted daughter, especially since she’d described his own Meddlum to him: a foaming, gnashing wolf-like creature, with a large tongue that lolled from its mouth and roaming eyes that rolled in their sockets. Lucas worried what the future may hold for his child who had either an all-consuming imagination or a mental defect that caused constant hallucinations. Samuel pulled Cherry closer when she started to talk about what she could see, but Lucas couldn’t help taking a subtle step away.

  ‘What do your parents think?’ Cherry asked Peter now.

  ‘Mum left. Dad hates me,’ he said matter-of-factly, between bites of his ham sandwich.

  Cherry was speechless. Knowing this about Peter’s parents now, she found it odd that he didn’t have more Meddlums tormenting him. Frustration had melted away, little by little, since Cherry and Peter’s friendship had begun. At first it’d left muddy slush over Peter’s homework but after a couple of weeks, Frustration had become a mere puddle in the bottom of his schoolbag. At that moment, Cherry swore a playground oath to always be there for Peter and to do her best to fend off Frustration should it ever appear behind Peter’s shoulders again.

  Cherry thought her friendship with Peter was lifelong, that they’d always have one another to lean on, but there was one other day Cherry would remember that put paid to that.

  That day, Peter came to school looking like a Meddlum himself. His skin was deathly pale, making the hand-shaped bruises on his arms look even angrier than they would have otherwise. The purple semi-circles under his eyes were darker than ever before.


  ‘Did… did a Meddlum do that to you?’ Cherry asked, nodding towards his arm. She so wanted to hug him – she knew they’d be the talk of the playground if she did, but holding back caused her eyes to sting and water. She couldn’t bear to see her friend in such a state. She peered over Peter’s shoulder and there, clutching the back of his collar, was a lump of coal, burning red under its black surface. It turned its face towards Cherry and grinned, flames in its mouth where there should have been teeth. Cherry gasped. She’d never seen Hatred before.

  ‘No. Not a Meddlum. Just a monster,’ Peter said quietly, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand before he cried in front of everyone.

  That was the last time Cherry spoke to Peter. When the bell rang, they went their separate ways to their separate classes. Weeks passed and she tried to get Peter’s attention but he looked through her like he didn’t know her, like they hadn’t been the closest of friends all this time. She left notes in his backpack when he wasn’t looking. She even went as far as sneaking out of her own classroom and banging on the window of his to try to get his attention but his teacher noticed first and it only landed her in trouble.

  The final time she saw Peter was from a distance. He was being dragged from school, kicking and screaming, by a man whom Cherry assumed was his father. Teachers and pupils followed them to the school gates, only to watch helplessly as a couple of other men Cherry didn’t recognise wrangled Peter into an odd cream jacket that was covered in buckles and with sleeves too long for his scrawny arms. They bundled him into the back of a blue van that Cherry didn’t think belonged to Peter’s father, who was now standing motionless on the pavement, the expression on his face unreadable. He didn’t wave or cry as the van drove off with his son in the back. Cherry couldn’t read the black writing on the side of the windowless van but she knew for certain that she wouldn’t ever see Peter again.