Emma Darwall Smith

Emma Darwall Smith has a degree in Dramatic Arts from the University of Leeds and and trained as an actor at RADA. She worked for eight years in theatre, film, TV and radio. Emma co-wrote and performed Forbidden Dance at the Man In The Moon Theatre in London. She has written a short film, Recycle, and a short story, Soul Witness, which she is developing into a novella.
Contact: emlouiseds [at] gmail [dot] com

Soul Witness

 

Trunk

In the night, I’m woken up by something rustling outside the door. I sit up and scramble to the other end of my bed and peer through the crack in the doorframe. The landing light is low from the pink frill-edged lampshade tucked under a beam. 

Daddy is laying out a patchwork of newspaper in front of the blue trunk. We bought the trunk from the school uniform shop in Bristol and it’s sat outside my bedroom for weeks, empty. 

He is kneeling in front of the trunk on the newspaper surrounded by sellotape, scissors, a ruler, a brush and a small pot of paint. He pulls a long stretch of sellotape from its roller and then cuts it into sections and fixes them onto the corner of the trunk. 

He moves the ruler in position and draws a line, the lead bobbles as it scrapes across the top. Then he attaches the paper and sellotapes it in place. He levers the lid of the paint pot with a teaspoon. The sticky black goo runs around the lid. He dips the brush in and presses it against the sides of the pot and starts to paint. I lean into the doorframe looking extra hard but I can’t see what he’s painting. 

My eyes feel tired. I climb into bed and pull the covers up to my chin. I shuffle the duvet to get it further down and flashes of static crackle up my nightie. 

In the morning, I creep out of bed to look at the trunk. On top of it, painted in black letters is my name, Isobel Farthing.

Dash Tracksuit

Yesterday was my seventh birthday. Mummy, Daddy and my sister, Claudie went to Bristol Hippodrome to see Wayne Sleep in Dash the musical. He was covered in white face paint with eyeliner and red lipstick and wore white tights over his bulging willy and muscles.  

Mummy and Daddy bought me the tracksuit from the display cabinet where they sell goodies. It’s navy blue with multi-coloured puffed out writing that said ‘DASH’ right across the front. It was pinned up next to a box of Liquorice Allsorts. The usher unstuck it and lifted it down on a pole. The letters felt rough and cold to touch.

Our house is an old house in a tiny village in between Bristol and Bath. It has a funny name Stub-cum-wold or Stub for short. 

At the tip of our garden is a barbed wire fence that stretches across like a washing line and it’s under here that I go on my adventures. 

Claudie doesn’t want to play anymore, so I slip down the side path, past the patch of rhubarb (the only thing that grows) wearing my new tracksuit. 

The barbed wire fence has a line of spider’s webs dripping with dew that glint in the sun. I want to lift it without disturbing them but the metal is stiff. I cover my fingers with the sleeve of my tracksuit and pull but my arm shakes under the strain. I step my plimsoll through and bob my head under. My hair wraps itself like seaweed around a spike and my tracksuit catches on a metal finger. I leave a ball of hair on the fence and inspect the damage. There’s a flap on my shoulder in the shape of a triangle. 

They’ll go mad and say ‘You always do this.’  I knew I shouldn’t have worn it for mucking about. 

I lift my arms and edge through the stinging nettles, where once I fell wearing my bikini, and up into the field where the stubby ears of corn crunch beneath my feet like muesli.  The hedgerow is covered in blackberries and bright red buds. I climb over the sty and go through the field and past the cow trough, where I like to moonwalk in my wellies. One time, the water seeped right over the top and they filled with tadpoles. 

I pass the trout farm and over the hump in the road where the water runs beneath it and the knobbly arms of trees twist and scoop low on the surface of the water. 

My Tree

My Tree sits in the middle of a field and makes a dome shape. In the field next to My Tree is a wood with trees like witches’ hands, thin and spiky with needles scattering the ground with fingernails.

I fold myself over the gate in a pillow shape – the bar presses my tummy and a glob of sick arrives. I hang spying the ground with one eye squeezed shut like a wrinkly bumhole, scanning the mud that I have to squelch through to get to My Tree. 

I swing my legs over the gate like vaulting the horsebox at school. I’m good at hurling myself at things, cantering up to the horsebox and shooting my legs out either side. Claudie says I’m like Penelope Pitstop running from the Hooded Claw. Sometimes I catch my bum on the edge. That’s how I bruised my coccyx.

Sitting under My Tree, I can see the pine trees like stalactites and smell the cow pats with flies spinning on their backs in the moats of bright yellow wee. I do most of my thinking here, alone. I think that I am alone and they are at work again. 

When I get home, I make a pudding from the biscuit cupboard, with crunched up ginger biscuits topped with yogurt and covered with silver balls, and I watch the omnibus of Neighbours right through. 

Blunt Shaving

Even though I’m a girl, or a tomboy as some call me, I love pretending to shave with Daddy. I stand as tall as I can next to him looking in the bathroom mirror. 

Daddy inserts a blade into his metal razor and clips it into place. He passes me my razor, without a blade.

The electric heater in the grown up bathroom has hot bars that glow off the silver metal. It makes our hair crispy and leaves our feet cold like the heaters in church. The walls are brown and orange and there’s a brown sink and bath. The tiles in the shower are splattered with chocolate milk-shake. 

Daddy shakes the shaving foam can and squirts it into my flat hand. It expands like a hissing meringue.  

I copy Daddy, smoothing the foam onto his cheeks and under his chin. We dab it across our top lips until our faces are Father Christmas-like with just our noses, eyes and foreheads visible. 

Daddy tilts his head to one side and I follow. The blade makes a frizzing noise as it runs across his cheek. He washes his blade in the sink water rattling it back and forth like an egg whisk. 

“We want to be careful over the Adam’s apple,” Daddy says. 

He draws his chin up and slides the razor over the knobbly bump. I don’t really have one, so I just pretend.

We wrap our top lips over our teeth and Daddy inserts the corner of his razor into his nose. 

 “Press it down gently to catch the most stubborn hairs,” he says.

I try to get my razor in but it doesn’t fit.

Daddy has lines of white foam in diagonals across his face. Mine are more patchy and I’ve still got meringue bits dangling off my chin. We share either end of the towel, which feels hot from the rail, and rub off the leftovers. 

I let out the plug and watch the flecks of black hair stick to the sides of the sink. 

Hammy

Our children’s bathroom has flowered wallpaper that looks bobbly as if water has seeped in somewhere and caused it all to shrivel up. It has an Ali Baba wash basket. We call it the Ali B. It makes crispy noises as you lift the lid and even more when you get into it, which I do quite often. I squish my body inside and wait for someone to come and discover me. Usually no one does and I have to get out again. 

Hammy our hamster likes to roam about on the bathroom carpet, either in his plastic ball or free style. My sister and I are in the bath and we’re about to play Sponges. We run the hot tap really fast with Mr Men bubble foam and lather it up. The taps are huge with green crystals stuck around the rim. Claudie and I are surrounded by rising bubbles like Elizabeth the First with a ruff collar. 

I’m sat at the plug end of the bath and even though I complain it’s never enough for my sister and I to swap ends. 

We have a yellow sponge, which is an oval shape and quite fat and one that’s in the shape of a giant foot. We measured it once and it was 35cm by 20 cm and 8 cm thick. The contest is to see who can stuff the most amount of sponge and hold it in their mouths the longest. We take a sponge each and then swap. 

I start off with the yellow sponge and my sister has the blue foot. This has to be done with almost no sickiness. We stuff the sponges into the back of our mouths until our cheeks are bulging with blue and yellow sponge sticking out. We time ourselves with fingers.

“That’s the third time I’ve done sixty fingers with the blue foot,” Claudie says. 

I get out of the bath and sit on the stool, fed up that she’s won again. Hammy is scampering about but there’s no way for him to escape. There’s a dip in the stool for my bottom and I’m using the radiator rail behind me to rock.  

Suddenly, Claudie shouts “Get off!” 

“What?” 

“Get off the stool!” 

“Why should I?” And I swing myself backwards and forwards on the legs.

Suddenly my heart shoots through my nightie and I land on the stool with a thud. Beneath the front leg is Hammy. All his body has been pressed to one end like a mini orange balloon. I scoop him up and he starts to float back out. His heart is racing. I put him down on the carpet to see if he can move. He unsticks his leg and walks off trailing it like a hankie. 

St Christopher’s School For Girls

I’m wearing a straw boater, a gingham dress and brown sandals that buckle at the side. Everything is two sizes too big. 

Claudie is wearing a grey skirt, white shirt and a blazer with a badge on the pocket. It is a different uniform for a different school for older girls. We’re standing on the gravel drive having a photograph taken by Daddy.

Claudie has already been dropped at her big school, fifty miles in another direction. I watch as the fields whiz along the window, past Crooks Peak and into the windier bit with a single lane where the traffic slows. We’re stuck behind a muck spreader with shit flying off the back splatting the car. 

“Oh, shit!” exclaims Daddy. 

“Darling!” Mummy says.

We drive through Burnham-on-Sea, a seaside town of old people’s housing and into St Christopher’s School for Girl’s. It’s a huge brick building with windows that stick out and a vast tarmac area at the front.

The headmaster ticks my name off on his clipboard, bending his shadow over me. 

“Welcome Isobel! We’re going to get you playing cricket this term,” he says. I look up and see two hairy nostrils that wiggle as he speaks. He looks at his clipboard again. 

“Isobel’s dorm is St Hilda’s. It’s up the main stairs with the carpet.” He stares at me through the corner of his eye. “You won’t be allowed to use those stairs ordinarily.” He shoots up, towering above Daddy. “It’s the quickest way to get to Hilda’s with a trunk, so on this occasion we’ll allow it.” I wonder how long it takes to grow nostrils that big? His hankie must be extra large compared to Daddy’s, which always smells nice.

Daddy takes one end of the trunk and I take the other, the leather handle pinches at my skin. Mummy follows behind as we wobble into the school entrance. The chill from the marble floor whooshes up my skirt. 

I’m wearing my blue Clothkits skirt with fireworks that explode on the corduroy with white crochet socks and a white cardigan. It feels funny wearing a skirt.

Daddy and I pull the trunk a stair at a time up the mahogany staircase. I grip the bannister but it’s too thick and slippery, so I use both hands to heave the trunk up the last stairs. I can just see Daddy over the top; he’s holding most of the weight and puffs through his cheeks. 

“Can I help?” Mummy says.

“No!” says Daddy.

Finally, we reach the top. Daddy drags the trunk along the carpet past the door that says Headmaster and onto the lino in the corridor. 

St Hilda’s dormitory has four bunk beds and five single beds, and in an annex, two more. There are strip lights dangling from the ceiling.  We rest the trunk in the middle of the room and look at the names and numbers on the head of each bed. 

The same stripy material covers each with a wooden chair and metal waste paper bin next to them. On the farthest bed written on a sticky label is my name with the number 15 next to it. There’s a window with a see-through curtain and an old brown wardrobe. It smells of disinfectant.

“We’ll leave you to get settled in, darling,” Mummy says. “Or would you like us to stay?” 

I think of the courage of the children in the ‘Faraway Tree’ and of Tommy, our cat when he had to be put to sleep after being knocked down by a car. I know that I’m 8, nearly 9 years old now, and I must be brave.

“No. I’ll be fine,” I say. “I’m going to unpack my things.”

I kiss my mother smelling her perfume and hug my father, feeling his cashmere jumper beneath my fingers. 

I watch my parents from the window. Daddy puts his arm around Mummy who’s crying and kisses her. I wave frantically, longing for them to look at up but they don’t see me. 

The Volvo reverse lights flick on, it pulls back and then out into the road and away.

The girl in the bed next to mine hasn’t arrived yet. The label says Annabelle with the number 14. A group of mums arrive with their daughters. They already know each other having met up in the ‘hols’. They’re all wearing sweatshirts with horses on the front and thick velvet headbands. 

I pull on my new Habitat duvet cover and fasten the poppers at one end. It has balloons on the front in red, yellow and blue with green strings dangling in a bunch, as if I might be airlifted by them. 

I spread it over the bed catching my crochet socks on the gold padlock of my trunk. 

At six o’clock, a loud bell rings in every dorm and corridor. 

“Line up in silence, in number order, wearing your overalls,” says Matron. The smell of mince and cabbage swoops into the dorm. We lead out in crocodile, in silence, down the staircase and into the dining hall. 

The stink of mince shoots up my nose as a dinner lady slaps it onto my plate, splashing my cheek. Another lady, with arms like joints of meat, loads cabbage and mash potato at the same time. 

“Hold it steady!” she says, holding the plate.

I turn back to my table and pull the chair out too soon. 

“You wait for grace and teacher before sitting yourself,” says the woman in a polo neck with a brooch of a hunting scene pinned at her throat.

“We all put our hands together to say grace,” the Headmaster says.

I squeeze my hands and scrunch my eyes shut, praying that I can magic myself home. I think of Mummy, Daddy, Claudie and Hammy, and Tommy in heaven, can he see me? 

“Dear Father, for what we are about to receive may the lord make us truly grateful. Amen”. We all repeat “Amen”.

The next line-up is for boiled sweets. We’re allowed one a night and one small pack on Saturdays–only. The sweets are scattered on a large tray, lemon sherbets, mint imperials and chocolate éclairs. I take a lemon sherbet and tuck it into the pocket of my overall feeling the ridges beneath the wrapper. I twist the wrapper open and pop it in. The hard sugar and sharp lemon cut the roof of my mouth. 

Balloon Duvet

It’s still light when I get into bed. I can hear the birds outside the window, which reminds me of home. I curl on my side and pull my new duvet under my chin – the cotton feels hard having never been washed.

The bed opposite me is empty, the girl, Annabelle still hasn’t arrived. I can hear the other girls crying. My tears are silent but a drip runs over my nose and blots onto the pillow making a damp patch on the red balloon. 

I wake in the middle of the night and I try to grip my light cord with the tassel on the end of it and feel my poster of Black Beauty with his soft nose. I listen out for Hammy whizzing in his wheel.  

I begin to see the dormitory walls and my tummy sinks. I need to wee but I’m too scared to find the bathroom. I get out of bed and pull the waste bin under me, hitch up my nightie and pee down its side trying to make as little noise as possible. My heart races and my cheeks flush. I cover the wee with tissues and get back into bed, feeling the wooden slats beneath me.

I think of Mummy and Daddy in their bed. They’ve made a terrible mistake and there’s no one to tell.