Heidi Beck
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An extract from The Fairy Shop
The doll was still there of course, but I didn’t relax until I had retrieved it, labelled it and safely stowed it in a box under the counter. This panic was not normal, I knew. No one could have taken the doll. I had the only key to the shop.
But I felt better, knowing the gift was ready and waiting for the girl, Kayla. While I might not believe that she had seen Olivia, I wanted to keep this connection with her. Just in case.
It was ridiculously early, quarter past six, and the shop felt eerily unfamiliar. I could have blamed it on my lack of sleep, or on the darkness outside, since the sun wouldn’t rise for at least another hour, but in truth I was afraid.
I had never seen a ghost. I professed not to believe in ghosts. Nevertheless the silent fairies on their shelves seemed to be watching me. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, and as I looked around I dreaded that I might catch a movement in the corner, a flash of brown hair. My mind placed her in a jumper she loved, white with bold open flowers in yellow, orange and pink. It was this dash of colour that I was afraid to glimpse through the open shelving, if I looked anywhere but straight ahead.
I forced myself to walk over to the corner where I displayed the garden sculptures, noting the unnaturally loud sound of my own footsteps. I have a water feature on display, and I turned it on, listening to the gurgle as the water began its journey down steps of cupped metal leaves, cascading at last into a pool at the bottom. Fairies were draped artfully over some of the leaves, peering down at one who stood, face upturned into the cascade. The water poured over her body and her sculpted dress, but her wings remained dry.
If Olivia were there she would have found it irresistible. She would have stuck her hand into the water, tracing her fingers over each leaf, following the water to the bottom. Then she would have jumbled the rounded stones in the pool into a haphazard rearrangement, just to feel their smoothness. I would have scolded her, and she would have looked at me nonplussed, not understanding why she shouldn’t play with a fountain in a shop.
But now the water burbled away untouched and it was I who dipped my fingers into the pool, pushing needlessly at the stones covering the pipe mechanism that returned the water to the top, wiping my wet fingers stiffly on the leg of my trousers.
Why is it that we have such a primal fear of ghosts? This terror that I might see a ghost here in my shop—that I would fear to see my own daughter—where did it come from? It wasn’t rational, but it was powerful, the stuff of sleepless childhood nights, lying rigid in my bed with my eyes tightly closed. Tears would drip down onto my pillow sometimes, because I needed to use the toilet but was too petrified to walk across the landing and down the stairs, in case a ghost was there. I can hear my mother’s voice, exasperated, flicking on a light and telling me not to be so foolish, not to pay attention to superstitious nonsense, telling me that if I was afraid I should pray.
Eventually I invented my own rules to comfort myself. I persuaded myself it would not be logical for ghosts to appear before midnight. I decided they would be unlikely to wait around after three in the morning. I don’t know why, but it meant there was only a frightening three-hour window to get through every night, and since my bedtime was at nine, I was very rarely awake to suffer through it.
None of these rules applied now. According to Kayla, Olivia was here in the middle of the day, and I hadn’t seen her at