Ever Dundas - Goblin

‘Ha!’ she said.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘I was born blue and dead and they had to slap me alive. I was so ugly, ma said, that the midwife died of fright. “Goblin!” was the last thing she said. The first thing I did when I was born was commit murder.’

‘It wasn’t your fault you were so ugly.’

‘No.’

‘But you’re not ugly now.’

I shrugged, still not really sure if I was ugly or not and I hadn’t looked in a mirror since that time I’d sneaked into ma and da’s room.

‘I grew out of being blue. David said I was only blue because the umbilical cord had tangled round my neck. Ma said she wished my da hadn’t slapped me to life because she thinks I would have been better off dead.’

‘Why would she say that? Why would your ma say that?’

‘Because I’m a monster, a demon, a goblin.’

‘A goblin isn’t a demon and I think your ma is a monster.’

I smiled at her, my heart aching as I watched the way the warm glow of the fire turned her skin golden. Her eyes looked like black pools, her pupils a flickering flame.

‘Your ma’s an idiot. Just like John. You’re handsome and goblins are magic.’

She showed me all the sea creatures. We didn’t know what they were called so we made up names. We didn’t know if they were a he or a she so we called the creatures ‘em’. It was that day I showed her Monsta and we three lay in the sun.

‘This is Monsta.’

‘It’s good to meet you, Monsta.’

‘Monsta, this is Angel.’

She reached out and held a tentacle arm. Monsta swayed and hummed before kerlumpscratching, up up up, crawling across my arm, tentacle worms wrapped round my neck.

Angel stared, and circled, hovering behind us. She stroked the pigeon spine, and Monsta hummed in my ear.

‘This is beautiful. Did you make it?’

‘Not an it, not a she, not a he. A Monsta.’

‘An ‘em’,’ she said, ‘like the sea creatures.’

Monsta crawled down and sat in the sun with us. Monsta’s bear body was wearing away, bald patches spreading across the torso like a rash.

‘You’re still pretty,’ I said, ‘pretty Monsta dead thing.’

The black shrew eyes rolled in their sockets, the nose twitched. I watched the wings unfurl and stretch, beating for a moment; Monsta hovered, the crow foot flexing. The tentacles swayed on the breeze, the doll foot stuck out, a little squint, inert. The wings neatly folded across Monsta’s back.

I swam to the surface and saw Angel disappear. A wave pushed me back under and she was beneath me, glinting white skin, a flurry of hair. She was sea serpent supreme. I flailed and panicked as I gulped down water. I was engulfed by a mess of bubbles, sand and seaweed. Angel took my arm and pulled me up, swimming to the shore, dragging me behind her, vomiting up the sea.

It was a stormy day. I’d insisted we swim, convinced I knew the sea so well that it couldn’t surprise me but it had pulled me under. Angel didn’t even say anything. We just lay on the sand. I knew what she was thinking, and Queen Isabella, I knew what she would say. ‘Trying to impress a girl by drowning, are we?’ and Amelia, with that cruelty, ‘trying to impress a brother who isn’t even here.’

I lay there and I was glad Angel didn’t say anything. She knew I’d learned my lesson. She was never cocky like the Idiot, there were no I-told-you-so chants.

The next day was calm and warm, even early in the morning when I got up to do my chores and go hunting. I met her in the evening and it was still hot. Before the sun disappeared behind the woods we lay on the sand basking like lizards.

We swam to cool off, but even the sea was warm. I swam with my shorts on. Angel swam in her skin. She said to me later, before all the trouble, ‘I knew you were a girl. It didn’t matter either way.’

Before the trouble there was just me and her and the ocean. There was CP snoring in the sand, and the summer sun on Angel’s white skin, turning her gold. We lay on the beach and I watched the sea water dribbling over her ribs and the mound between her legs. I held her hand. I held Monsta’s tentacles.

She was my first kiss.

‘You’re handsome,’ she said. ‘You’re like a film star.’

‘Do my teeth shine?’

I grinned at her, a wide, manic grin. I gnashed my teeth.

She held my hand firmly and said, ‘You’re beautiful and you’re mad.’

We swam and we kissed and we made up names.

We made a fire on the beach. We roasted fish, their eyes popping. We watched the sun sink beneath the sea.

‘The kraken is pulling it down,’ I said. ‘Its tentacles reach up and drag the sun into its mouth and it glows in its belly. It keeps it safe until morning. When it wakes up it spits the sun into the sky.’

The sky was like velvet, layers of yellow, emerald, deep blue dotted with fuzzy twinkling stars. The sea turned to blood. The sea turned black. The sky was a mottled blanket of shimmering lights. We listened to the crackle of the sandhoppers as they threw themselves into the flames. They hopped and popped, like disembodied fish eyes. We sat for hours, poking at the glowing branches, encouraging their angry fizzing, drifting off to the sound of the waves. We lay side by side, pressed in against each other to keep warm. I said a lizard prayer for the troops at Dunkirk. I didn’t know it then, but my dad was one of them. Not my current da, or my pretend one, but my dad-to-be. If I’d known it then, I would have prayed harder to the lizards below, but instead we stared at the stars and I told Angel stories. I told her about The War of the Worlds and the Martians, The Time Machine and the Morlocks, The Island of Doctor Moreau and the Beast Folk. I told her about the secrets beneath the streets of London.

‘Underground is where the lizard people live.’

Angel shooed a sandhopper away from the flames and we heard the pop of a dozen more.

‘The Lizard King shoots poison from his eyes. There was one time, in human form, that he cried, and his skin peeled away as if burned by acid.’

I dragged my fingers down my face.

‘When it healed, he had silver scars from his eyes to the corners of his mouth, to his chin. Half of his lower lip was burned away.’

‘What made the Lizard King cry?’

‘The Lizard Queen, she’d become trapped in human form and she couldn’t descend to the lizard realm. When people saw her they thought her eyes and skin were made of jewels and they turned mad with greed. They wanted to possess her, and they did. They ripped her to pieces and they each took a part of her body to keep for themselves. The next morning they awoke, as if from a spell, and they remembered their frenzy. That was the one time the Lizard King cried. He hunted down every person responsible for the Lizard Queen’s death and he tore them apart the way they’d torn her apart. From each person he kept a token, just as they had, and he strung the body parts in his palace and lived the rest of his days in mourning.’

I told her the story of Queen Isabella, of Scholler, and Amelia. She told me stories of Cornwall, ghost stories her pretend parents had read to her.

‘Did you hear about Scotland?’ I said, poking at our beach fire with a stick.

Angel didn’t answer.

‘Well, I heard from old Bob who heard from Elspeth who heard on the wireless that Germans have landed. Parachutes were found. Then dead bodies were found in villages and towns nearby, all charred to a crisp. The Germans have landed,’ I said, pausing for dramatic effect, ‘and they have electro-magnetic death rays.’

I stopped and looked over at Angel. There was no response. She just sat hunched over, staring at her hands.