I understand that not that many people have, it is about a guy called Peter Dickinson who makes up a board game with characters that he has crafted based on what he knows about fantasy. There are four wizards who represent different shit, a bunch of dragons, a princess, a knight, and all of that kind of gubbins. He ends up in the game with the characters he’s created and at the end fights the evil red wizard Omadon by using science against Omadon’s magic. It is fucking amazing.
In the film Peter is writing a book about dragons, he’s fucking fascinated by them, but he doesn’t know where the book is going or if he’s good enough to finish it, but when he goes into the game and lives amongst the characters he’s made, Carolinus the green wizard takes him to his library of unfinished books, where Peter’s book The Flight of Dragons is nestling in amongst classic and well known and loved books of today.
So we watched this film and my brother and I were hooked. We watched it almost every day for fucking ages, and I used to ask my Dad questions about it. The only question that I really wanted an answer to, though, was whether that book that this animated character Peter Dickinson had written was real or not.
Dad didn’t know, and told me that. He said that he wasn’t sure whether it could be real or if it was even finished, because we didn’t see the inside of the book in the film, did we, Carolinus had snapped it shut before we got chance.
Oh well, I could just continue to watch the film and to think about dragons. Maybe one day I could even write a book about dragons myself.
Months later I was rummaging through the shelves in the spare bedroom to pass the time and hidden away, on the second layer of the double layer of books on the shelves I found it.
I ran through to Dad, who was outside in the greenhouse and thrust it in his face.
‘Dad! Look! We’ve got it! He did finish it!’ Dad put down his watering can and looked puzzled.
‘Where did you find that?’ he asked.
‘On the shelves! It was hidden on the shelves!’
He took it in his hands and turned it over and told me that he it wasn’t his. And it wasn’t Mum’s or my brother’s either, it must be there by magic.
He handed it back to me and told me to look after it, that someone must have put it there for me, maybe even the green wizard Carolinus himself! And then he went back to watering the tomatoes.
For years that book was what magic meant to me. And now that I’m older and have spoken to Dad about it I know that he left it there for me, knowing that he couldn’t give it to me himself because that would ruin everything that I believed, it would take that magic away.
And that is why although my Dad has never read a book in his life, he is the best storyteller that I know. Because he made me believe in magic.
Goosebumps
About a year before my Mum left, a couple moved in next door. This was really exciting because where we lived no one ever really moved house, and the other houses had old people in them, and when they died their sons or daughters would come and do up their house and live in it themselves, and that wasn’t really exciting because you’d see them around all the time anyway and it wasn’t new or interesting.
But the people who had lived next door had gone, and in their place was a youngish couple. The man had two children from his previous marriage. This was exciting too, there were never any other kids around for us to play with. The children were a fair bit older than my brother and me, but we all became friends and we used to play in the garden when they’d visit every other weekend.
The girl had Down’s Syndrome, so although she was about seven years older than me, she kind of had roughly the same mental age and we liked the same games and books and things like that. She had all of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books, and she let me borrow them whenever I liked. She was lovely. Once she knocked on the door with a present for me. It was a frog that she’d caught in the pond in her garden. We put it in a bucket and called it Froggy. We were both really upset when it managed to hop out of the bucket and escape the next day.
On New Year’s Eve, in whatever year it was that they moved in, they invited us all round. The kids were there, and while our parents sat in the kitchen drinking and smoking we were all playing in one of the bedrooms. After a lengthy game of ‘turn the lights off and chase each other round the room’ we decided to play hide and seek. Brilliant. I was fucking excellent at hide and seek because I was so small and skinny I could fit into the tiniest of nooks without being discovered, because the other kids would look and think to themselves ‘no one could possibly fit into that tiny gap.’ But I could.
The grown-ups were all outside in the garden when we started hiding. The girl was going to search for us all, so as she counted to one hundred, I snuck quietly into the kitchen and squeezed myself into a gap that I’d spotted earlier between the washing machine and the wall. Best. Hiding. Place. Ever. I was so pleased. No cunt would find me in there.
As the girl began to look for us all, my mum and our neighbour, the man, came back inside and sat at the kitchen table. The woman and my Dad had gone back to our house to find a record or some more wine or something, and after a bit of small talk my Mum started talking about stuff that was a bit weird.
‘So,’ she asked the man neighbour. ‘Your divorce, in total, how long did it take to have everything, you know, sorted out. All the loose ends tied up and so on?’
‘Probably a year,’ replied the man, ‘a bit longer maybe, because of custody of the kids, but roughly a year.’
I could see them at the table. My Mum took a sip of her wine and a drag of her fag and looked thoughtful.
‘So if I were to pack up and leave tomorrow, a year from now everything would probably be okay,’ she said. She wasn’t asking a question, she was thinking out loud.
The man laughed. ‘Well, yeah. I suppose.’
My Mum turned to the man. ‘The truth is,’ she said, ‘I don’t want my husband and I don’t want my kids. I just want my freedom.’
The man looked at her but didn’t say anything. My Mum didn’t say anything. I sat in the gap between the washing machine and the door wondering if this was a joke, and she’d seen me on the way in and was trying to get me to reveal my hiding place. Could they hear me breathing? My heart beating out of my chest? They didn’t seem to know I was there.
The man continued to look at my Mum. He looked very serious.
‘I’m going outside for some air,’ he said.
‘Yeah, yeah I’ll come with you,’ she said, finishing her wine and grinding her fag out in the ashtray on the table.
And they both walked out of the patio doors and went through the garden into our garden next door to go and find my Dad and the woman.
The girl stumbled into the kitchen looking for me. I wriggled out of the gap.
‘You’re supposed to HIDE!’ she screamed at me. ‘You’ve ruined my go!’
I apologised. I didn’t feel much like playing anymore. I went and got my brother and took him back to our house. Dad tucked us into bed and I wanted to tell him what I’d heard but I didn’t really
