Skunk:
Okay. I think we should swear a solemn… oath, or vow, or ehm, we should really…
promise ourselves we’ll make more of an effort next year.
Sitting
side by side on his bed with their backs to the wall, their costumes might be
charitably described as rudimentary; complementing his uniform Levi’s clothing
Brother Skunk wears a black mask over his eyes, his neck circled by a red
bandanna knotted at the throat. Already in her pyjamas, ache1 has
only the eyemask, which at this late hour is pushed up high onto her forehead.
ache1:
Says you. God, hey! There’ll be three of us next year. It’ll be antler’s first
Hallowe’en.
Skunk
(suddenly surprised): Jesus so it will. How weird.
Each
holds a shotglass, but while Skunk is sinking whiskies, ache1 is
matching him shot for shot with Moosehead, an involuntary temperance dictated
by pregnancy. She holds her beer bottle up in the room’s dim light.
ache1:
Skunk I’m damn near half emp’y.
Leering
at them from its position atop the desk against the opposite wall is their
jack-o’-lantern, and the room’s habitual scent absorbs and accommodates that
from this hollowed-out turnip singed by the candle burning inside. Above its
open top the ceiling breathes with strange bright shapes.
ache1
fishes a lumpy little Reese’s Piece from the bowlful on her lap and flips it
over at the turnip; it bounces from off the wall, joining dozens of others
scattered all over the room’s floor and furnishings, random arrangements of
tiny beans colourless in the murk.
Distracted,
she grabs E.T. and in attempt at raising froth makes his flat little hand flap
at the surface of beer in her tiny glass.
ache1:
Are you going to see your mum next week?
Skunk:
Tell us a spooky story.
ache1:
I don’t know any spooky stories ahm, I ah, hum, like a ghost story you
mean? I don’t know, I don’t know any ghost stories. I’ve got a Hallowe’en
story, if you want to hear that.
Skunk:
Proceed.
ache1:
Said Elvis.
Skunk
(impatient): Proceed.
She
aims yet another sweet at the turnip lantern across the room, become now an unwitting
and indicative tic she will absent-mindedly continue to repeat throughout her
monolgue.
ache1:
Ahm, when I was… I couldn’t even tell you what age I was, maybe ten or eleven,
something like that, ahm, I went to a Hallowe’en party this girl, who lived not
too far from me, they had a, they, ahm, there was a Hallowe’en party, she had a
Hallowe’en party in in ah, in her house, they had this big extension built on,
and so, I went round there, my sister and I both went round… for
Hallowe’en. I was dressed as Pippi Longstocking, and
Skunk:
Who the hell’s Pippi Longstocking?
ache1:
What? Seriously, you’ve never heard of Pippi Longstocking?
Skunk:
Nopes.
ache1:
She’s, oh God, she’s… she’s like a kind of… weird little girl who’s
Skunk:
Oh, I get it.
provoking
her to flick one of the sweets up into the air above them with hopes it might
plummet directly down onto the top of his skull, but it lands wide enough to
miss even the bed.
ache1:
She wears a kind of patchwork dress and she has ah, braids that kind of stick
right out from her head, and my mum had, I had really long hair then, so Mum
had braided my hair and threaded a length of wire through so’s they’d
stick out, but ahm, yeah, it’s a really popular kids’ book.
Skunk:
I’ve never heard of it. Who’s the author?
ache1
(pauses, her mouth open): Hmm, now you’re asking. I have no idea.
Anyway… So I went as Pippi Longstocking and ahm… I couldn’t tell you what my
sister went as, but we went to this party okay, and ah, there was all typical
Hallowe’en fare and stuff, and ahm, at one point, one of the older, they
organised this game and ah, what it was was ah, they laid out two, down the
length of the, down the length of the room they laid out these two rows of
plastic basins, I guess like… and each of them was filled with water, maybe,
and the idea was, like, and then she asked for two, and then they got two kids
to volunteer, okay? And so two girls, two girls got blindfolded and they were
told they were going to have to jump over these basins of water, but of course ‘cause
they couldn’t see what they were doing, okay? So they had to be guided by us,
like everybody else there, we had to guide them them to jump over these basins
so they didn’t get wet, and so that the water didn’t spill all over the carpet.
But to make it funnier, after they were blindfolded, the basins were all taken
away, okay, so we had these two girls who
While
she is talking Brother Skunk pulls his bandanna around and then up over his
mouth and nose to wear it bandit-style. ache1 watches this with a
deal of bewilderment.
ache1:
Excellent. So. Basically, there was this situation where these two girls were
kind of shuffling a little bit and then ah, jumping, and then jumping over
these, well, I mean, they weren’t even there, they were just jumping over
nothing, and we were all wetting ourselves laughing at them, and screaming at
them to jump and stuff, and ah, one of the girls must have twigged to what was
going on ‘cause I remember it got to the point where there was only one girl
left. You know… I have no idea who she was. I don’t even know, I can’t even
remember if I knew who she was then. But ahm, so we’d all been laughing and
everything and ah, but this girl still obviously thought she was jumping over,
jumping over these basins of water, which she clearly wasn’t, and ahm… And then,
and so what happened was, and it was one of those things you know, you couldn’t
even imagine this happening, but what happened was it ended up where she was
standing just a couple of feet away from the wall, from the wall, from this
solid wall and ah, and of course, we were all screaming at her to jump jump,
and ahm, and she did. She actually leapt straight into the wall
clapping
her hands hard together before letting one drop back to the bed
ache1:
and she sort of bounced off a bit and fell straight to the floor, absolutely
out cold. And she just lay there, and as she lay there, we could see her forehead
come up in this huge lump. And, kind of, nobody even thought, immediately, to
call an ambulance, we were all just so like… Nobody could really believe what
they’d just seen. It was absolutely fantastic.
Watching
as Skunk refills his shotglass, and sitting up to refill her own from the
Moosehead bottle.
ache1:
It’s not like I woke up that morning thinking I wanted to see a kid jump into a
wall, but ah, when… you know, when it’s right there, or when the possibility of
it’s right there in front of you there’s absolutely nothing you want more.
Skunk:
That’s not a ghost story.
ache1
(indignant): I didn’t say it was, I said it was a Hallowe’en story.
The
next flipped Reese’s Piece successfully ricochets from off the wall right into
the turnip, extinguishing the candle to eclipse the room in absolute.
ache1
(shouting inside the sudden dark): Hi-yo Silver, AWAY!
