One day

Julia Darling

One day, during history, Sir was telling us about chronologies. He was listing dates. He was looking above our heads as if we weren’t there. The room was heavy and hot, like a cake that won’t rise. We were almost delirious with history.

Then we started sinking into the floor. Morris put his hand up and said “Please Sir, I can’t move my feet,” but Sir ignored him, as if he’d farted or something, and carried on talking about dates feverishly. Clare, who gets asthma, was breathing thickly and all the rest of us were giggling like trembling dogs. It was more exciting than normal, and I think we were all thinking about what might be underneath, and how it couldn’t be any worse than this. By now, Sir was up to his waist in floor, but he seemed to be determined to ignore it, as if it wasn’t happening. He was obsessed with keeping us quiet. It was his main aim in life; what he thought about on the way to work, and worried about when he couldn’t sleep. He would toss and turn, thinking, “Why can’t they shut their mouths and listen. Why?”

Now it was happening again. He was up to his neck in floor before he said anything. “Right then!” he screamed, blue faced, “Who is responsible for this? What’s going on with the floor?” We let rip then, like dogs when the keeper rattles the gate. We screeched and roared and barked and hooted.

“You’ll all have to stay behind!” he raged, and so we did, until the floor was smooth as custard, with no ripples at all.

Underneath, it was dark, but gradually light seeped into the cracks of a room, and we realised we were somewhere rather than nowhere.

We were standing in a small room with dusty glass cases and shelves on the walls. It was the kind of room that gets forgotten in a big building. It smelt of blotting paper and chalk. There was a sound of humming, fragments of tunes that didn’t really match with each other. I tried to see where it was coming from, and then Clare pointed at a shabby object in one of the cases. It was labelled ‘The Bad Rabbit Musical Box’. “That’s mine!” she yelled, and ran towards it. “No it’s not, it’s mine,” I said, for I could remember it standing on the mantelpiece in my dying grandmother’s house. Morris said “It’s the one my uncle brought back from France after he lost his leg.” We looked at him. The Bad Rabbit was moving slowly around, playing its improbable tunes. All of us were struggling to prove that it was our musical box, but the more we thought about it, the more it seemed that the musical box was an atmosphere, rather than an actual thing. Being children we had no words for this. Clare just sucked her thumb. The other objects on display were all like that. Things we had felt but not remembered. Important things. There was the horse shell that I had once found on a beach in Hartlepool when I got lost, and the magical fish that flew, which we had all seen once when we were happy. There was an old typewriter with toothy keys. “My mother wrote her first poem on that,” said Morris sadly. But it was the sound of my father’s office that I recalled. The men talking. The cigarettes.

We wanted to take the things with us, but we were too nervous to break the glass. It would have been too frightening to touch the things we partly remembered, so we stared at them, trying to remember the detail, struggling with the feeling that all children have, of wanting to pull the insides out of toys; to really understand them, to realise that they couldn’t harm us.

Sir came banging into the room. He had found a ladder. He was behaving in a nostalgic way, as if it was sad that we were going to grow up, and that we didn’t realise how much we would miss the things we knew when we were little. He didn’t tell us off, instead he said, conversationally, “History is the art of retrieving what you thought you’d forgotten.” Then he blew his nose. I looked forward to climbing up the ladder. When we got back up to the ceiling, it was like putting your head through blancmange.

I suppose none of that really happened I thought, as I stood in the classroom, surrounded by things I knew only too well. It was just a case of overheating, of too much history, and having to be quiet for too long.

“Sir,” I said, “Have you noticed how everything beautiful is far away?”

He looked at me carefully, as if he had never really seen me before.

“Can you give me an example Rupert?” he said in a quite kind way.

“There are never enough sweets. The ends of rainbows disappear. The view is never what you think it is close up.” He nodded. The bell had gone. Everyone else had disappeared. We were just standing there, me and Sir in the middle of the universe, scratching our heads, history fragmenting into tiny particles beneath our feet.

Julia Darling (1956-2005), writer. One day was written in response to seeing some of the work in ‘Vane98’. First published in the Vane98 Journal.