Ride a White Swan: A story of Summer, Secrets and The Spaces Between By Nasir Ali Hussain

Introduction

There’s a sycamore that grows in my memory. Its roots twist through the past. Its leaves whisper secrets I’m still learning to understand.

When I wrote Ride a White Swan I thought I was rendering a memory of a woman we called The Witch, a boy who loved football, and a sycamore tree. However, the story had other plans. It became about the things we bury – grief, guilt, the love that outlives death. And how they resurface when we least expect them. In a pond’s reflection. In a child’s face. In a song crackling from a turntable. Its melody a key to rooms we thought we had locked behind us forever.

The sycamore in this story is real. Trees like it stand sentinel, possibly sentient too- in every neighbourhood. They watch on as children become friends, and friends become strangers and strangers become ghosts. 

They remember. They listen. As remembering and listening are one of the forgotten functions of the natural world.

And if you press your palm to their bark, you may just feel the echo of a child’s laughter, a parent’s whispered lullaby, a football arching over a fence like a message no one knew how to read. 

This is a story for anyone who’s ever loved someone too much to let them go. 

For the menders of broken things. For those who forget how to speak until a song reminds them. 

And for the boys- both living and dead- who still kick balls into the sky, hoping someone will toss them back ….  

Ride a White Swan: A story of Summer, Secrets and The Spaces Between

By    Nasir Ali Hussain

1.

Mrs Reilly enjoyed baking cakes. Her son Alastair was my best friend so I got to eat some of  those cakes. He was a wiry feller, with strawberry blonde hair that ran effeminately down his shoulders, apple red cheeks and button brown eyes. My mum told him he looked like a beautiful scarecrow. He had a good chuckle at that.

During the school summer holidays of 1983 Mrs Reilly and I would go to the Library every Friday. His mum had tried in vain to get him to go with her. She hoped he’d develop an interest in the printed word. No luck. Football was his interest. Now with me by her side her attention had been diverted. Alastair was relieved. 

Mrs Reilly normally spoke in a cut glass English accent. This style of speech fell to pieces when she was angry or enthusiastic about something. Her accent became purest Dublin then. 

“Read the Hobbit. That book is made for someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“Yep, someone like you, a boy who likes to go off into his own world. Grab that book, take it to the counter and get it stamped.”

“Next week, I’ve used up my tickets on Anthologies by Aiden Chambers and Ruth Manning Sanders.”

“You had better little man, or the only exceedingly good cakes you’ll be eating will be Kipling cakes.”

“Yes, Mrs Reilly.” 

 This all happened years ago. Reflecting on Mrs Reilly makes me think that one of the three cornerstones of personal fulfilment is having some passion or cause as the pumping heartbeat of your life. Her heartbeat was the ambition to read the works of ‘the great writers of Christendom before I get old, blind and toothless’ as she’d put it. 

I’ll tell you about the other two cornerstones another time. 

On one of these afternoons I had located an old copy of a local newspaper. On the front page was a 1972 article about the Children’s Ward at Northwick Park Hospital. White coated hospital staff and sick children with Beatle haircuts and pale, beautiful faces grinned out at us. One boy in particular held our attention. 

I stood blinking down at the picture. The boy was a bit undersized and angelic looking in a meek kind of way. 

“He looks just like Paul Hamon.” Paul was one of our gang of friends.

“Yes, I know the stunted flamboyant.” She’d nicknamed Paul ‘the stunted flamboyant’ after the small copse of trees in their neighbours garden. “But it feels like I’ve seen this poor little mite somewhere before,” said Mrs Reilly.

“Where?”

“No idea, it just feels like I know that face.”

Not much later, as we both stood looking out of the window, we caught sight of Reilly’s next door neighbour. She was making her way along the street with her shopping trolley. Her centre parted straight black hair lay limp and lifeless along the sides of her thin, angular face. I’d never seen any emotion displayed on that face. Our gang of friends called her The Witch. 

She’d been in the area since 1970 or thereabouts.     

Her clothing was dated. It was like she had stopped shopping for new clothes in 1972; faded, flowered patterned shirts and ageing maroon coloured bell bottoms. She never wore any jewellery. 

A sizable parcel of greenery separated the two houses. The land took the place of where a house should have been as the area was large enough for a three bedroom house. I wondered why this space had been spared on that furthermost corner of Corbins Lane. In that space was a large patch of green in which stood an old sycamore tree. Heart shaped barrenworts and brunneras and blue flowers around it.  Alastair and I used to climb up and down that tree a lot.

On the right side to the Reillys was St Paul’s Church. This was a large, solid building that had been built during the time of the Plantagenets. It loomed silent and watchful over the locale like a cold, grey castle. 

Alastair was fascinated by the sycamore and the heartshaped foliage around it. “Do you think this old tree watches us and keeps score when we play football?”

“Don’t know, never thought about it, but now that you say, it does have this sort of watching presence about it. But good watching, not bad. Like a guardian of sorts.”

“My gran says the tree is older than the church. She always calls the church ‘that protestant place of worship’ he scoffed. “Anyway, she told me sycamores are where the dead sometimes go and hide when they’re not ready to leave.”

“That’s right, say something to freak me out just as I’m nearing the top,” I said breathing loudly as I strained to reach a higher branch.

He chuckled. “She’s proper Irish and the Irish love saying stuff like to kids. You fall now and you break an arm or a leg. No more footie for you!”    

We’d sometimes see The Witch sitting outside on the side porch in a rocking chair.  A blue shawl would be around her shoulders. Her mahogany eyes staring melancholically towards the tree.
More often than not her lips would be moving as she rocked back and forth. It made us nervous. 

“There goes your neighbour, Mrs Reilly.” I indicated with a nod as I stared at the passing life outside the library window. “I’ve never seen you talk to her, I’d love to know her name.”

“And so would I, young man, so would I. I think it begins with a V and ends with an A, but it ain’t Veronica, something more posh and vague. That trolley of hers is making more noise than she does in a whole year. Such an asocial person, never met the like before ever in my life” she added with a disapproving shake of her head and Irishly lyrical lilt in her voice.

I nodded, not knowing what ‘asocial’ meant, but deciding to chuck that word into a vocabulary that was lushly borrowing from things she said. 

“I’ve spoken about her to my mum. I told her I’d had a dream in which I saw  her smile. It was like watching a statue blink. My mum was kneading flour for roti and she paused to push her hair back and without even thinking about it said that The Witch sounded like a ‘bebus khatoon.’ 

“You what?”

“That means ‘helpless lady’ in Urdu,” I laughed.

“Well, she doesn’t look helpless to me. Far from it. She just looks like she wants to be left alone. The only thing she seems to care about is that garden of hers. What makes a person like that!’’she said in the tone of an irritated statement as opposed to a question.

“Have you tried talking to her, Mrs Reilly?”

“Yes, more than once. I introduced myself, went round with a hotpot once and a freshly baked Bakewell Tart another time. She doesn’t want to know. I stopped trying as I’m sure she’ll shut the door in my face if I go round again.

  Then with a chuckle and a shrug she was off scouring the bookshelves. I stood watching the object of our conversation grow smaller till she fizzled from my eyes.

2.

The Witch would have stayed that way forever, I think. Had it not been for Alastair’s football mania. There was a time we’d play knock down ginger and ring her bell and scarper. But she never answered the door, so that stopped almost as soon as it started. But when Alastair’s dad put in a goal post at one end of their huge oblong garden a seed was sown. I knew he had a dad somewhere, but I never saw him. He didn’t live with them, that’s for sure. All I remember is Alastair saying he worked abroad in construction and came back home every now and then loaded with presents and loads of money like the lads in Auf Wiedershein Pet.

We played a lot of football in the park that summer. When that didn’t happen we played in Alastair’s sizeable back garden. And when that happened the football would inevitably go over the side into the garden of The Witch. At first he would gingerly climb over, pick it up and scramble back over without making a sound. 

One morning his mum found a handwritten letter from The Witch asking them to ‘kindly stop kicking balls into my garden, I have live fish in the pond. Thank you.’ 

Our kick abouts in the back garden stopped- for about a week. Then it was game on again. A Football was kicked over into her fish pond once more. The Witch didn’t write a note this time. She decided to hold on to it. Alastair had to badger his mum to get him a new one from the local Woolworths.

 Some of her goldfish died after Alastair stomped into the pool on another rescue mission. Mrs Reilly got another angry letter through the letterbox the next day telling her to expect action against her by the local council. Alastair got a proper rollicking with raised fingers and raised voices. “I don’t know why mum, I try to keep the ball away from the fence, but it keeps going over. It’s like the wind’s got hands! And I keep getting these urges to play in the garden, it’s like there’s a voice in my ear telling me to play here and we all get a thrill when we do play in the back garden.”

“Voices? Voices? I’ll give you voices!” He was threatened with a total football ban. We decided it would be best if our ball games were confined to the park. 

The summer holidays were coming to an end and we were all at Alastair’s for his birthday party. All his friends and their chattering mothers came. It was fat boy heaven. There was food aplenty. The birthday cake, especially ordered from Supersnacks Bakery on Northolt Road, was a Black Forest Gateau with a football player kicking a tiny ball on the top.

Thoughts of when I would finally be able to get to grips with that chocolate, cream and cherry monster were distracting me from all the other fun on offer. 

At home it was nearly always Pakistani food. This meant lots of rice, roti, curries and kebabs. What so-called English food I did have came out of packets and tins. I was overly familiar with fare like Findus Crispy Pancakes, Ambrosia rice pudding, Birds Eye beef burgers, French Bread Pizza, Arctic Roll and Mr Kipling cakes.  

The Witch wasn’t the only strange lady in town. There was another. A young woman with freckles on her face, a lovely slightly upturned nose and sweet looking red mouth. The colour of her hair was somewhere between red and brown. Her name was Mary. She was older than us, but younger than all the mothers in town.

I’d heard someone describe her as ‘that fey woman’, another word that I  intended to look up in the dictionary. In some ways she deserved being called a witch even more than Alastair’s miserable neighbour. She had this weird way of going up to strangers and telling them things that she could not possibly have known unless they had told her themselves: 

“You forgot it behind the sofa last time you moved the furniture’ or ‘If you keep taking things from Woolworths without paying for them they’ll catch you and you’ll be prosecuted’…. ‘Take that job offer you won’t get anywhere where you are and they won’t offer you a pay rise either’ or ‘Just tell her that you want her to make you an apple pie, no point brooding about it.’ 

Those approached by her would seem to know what she was referring to and either laugh nervously or looked offended- sometimes both. Though she was far from disliked, people understandably kept her at arms length. Mrs Reilly was friends with her though. Had been since the fey Woman had told her she’d find her lost ring ‘where the water laughs’.

It was in the toilet tank. 

She sometimes showed up at our school as a helper during reading sessions. I looked forward to those sessions. She was probably the prettiest person I’d ever seen outside of the T.V. I got a little lightheaded for a smattering of seconds at every afresh sighting.
I was alone in my affliction. The other boys were impervious to her looks. She was a bit of a joke to them and they would laughingly twitter about seeing her ‘talking to the air.’ Some called her ‘Scary Mary’ behind her back.

Miss Mary had these lost looking turquoise eyes that had a way of looking ‘here-but really-there’ a lot of the time. Funny thing was that this was not the case if she were looking at you. Then it felt, so I’ve heard, like someone looking at and through. There was an oddness to her too. It was a kind of aura that came from knowing you were thought different by others. Anyway, she was there that day when Alastair was turning eleven years old. 

3.

Seeing the adults, all females, were locked tight in conversation Alaistair looked at me and the other boys, pointed to the garden and mouthed the word ‘football.’ We didn’t need to be given any further signals and we trooped out to the back with our heads down.  About ten minutes into our kick around the ball went over the fence. We watched it glide in the air drop into the little goldfish pond with a tame splash.

“Here we go again,” Alastair said with frustration. “I can’t explain, but sometimes it’s like the ball is curving in the air, like something is pushing it over the fence!”

Paul Hamon, due to his compact size, was tasked to get it back.

The Witch’s garden was a thing of beauty. It was quite large with a couple of stunted flamboyant trees, also known as flame trees. And a bed of fragrant flowers.

 I wondered whether she had inherited the garden. It looked like Mrs Reilly was right when she said it was the only thing she cared for now. That, and her solitude. And gardening is the friend of solitude.

I think there would have been no problem, except that Paul seemed to have been overcome by the aesthetics of the place. He stood looking lost, turning and looking about in wonder. He only snapped out of his reverie because we started shouting at him to get on with it. He looked at us, gave a thumbs up sign and scrambled over to the pool. He knelt, leant forward and tried to grab the ball and toppled right into the water.

That’s when we heard the creak of her backdoor. We turned to see tithe Witch stood on the steps outside her back door. She was barefoot. Her eyes tightened and tiny in an angry squint as her body was heaving with outrage. Then she rushed at him, her face twisted in a soundless scream. A twinge of pity swished through me for little Paul.  

She reached down to get at him. Her hands swished like eager claws. He had leant back in a survival reflex, so that the back of His head and sides of his face were fully immersed in the grey, green water. One of her hands raised like she was going to give him a tight slap across the face. And then without warning she paused, blinking uncertainly and looking around herself. It was like whatever had uncoiled and snapped in her had slid back into place. Her hands softened and she gently pulled him back, tousled his hair and got the ball and pushed it into Paul’s hands.     

We stood there staring at her as she retreated back inside. Paul then slowly walked back over to the fence and climbed over. We rushed indoors slamming the door behind us. Paul and I spoke at the same time as we tried to explain what had happened. He was wet, ashen faced and a bit lost in himself. Mrs Reilly gave him a change of clothes.

 Music had been playing for most of the party. Mostly from Now That’s What I Call Music 1. We’d gigglingly moved about to songs like  ‘The Boxerbeat’ by Jo Boxers- to which we threw mock punches when the chorus came- and ‘New Song’ by Howard Jones. 

These singers and such songs would vanish out of our lives a year or so later as we entered the hinterlands teenage years between childhood and young adulthood. Pop would be replaced by Rock and Rap. These artists themselves would vanish from the charts before the 80’s were over and Joboxers were never heard from again.

The party kicked into gear for us when a funky clavinet accompanied by handclaps came on.The first rap song in history started playing on the cassette recorder. It was ‘The Funky Gibbon’ by The Goodies. Alastair, myself and the rest of the gang went a bit wild. We joyously danced along to the urging vocals of Bill Oddie, Tim Brooke Taylor and Graham Garden.

‘‘Let your wrists go limp like a bent balloon … 

Do do do the funky Gibbon  we are here to show you how! 

Oo! Oo! Oo! The funky Gibbon! Oo! Oo! Oo! The funky Gibbon …’ 

It was fantastic. 

The hilarious mood continued as we gyrated with comic abandon to the jaunty rhythm of ‘The Crunch’ by The Rah Band. 

We had completely forgotten what happened earlier in The Witch’s garden and even little Paul seemed to have gotten over his shaky ordeal.

4.

Just as the song began to fade, The Witch, as if on cue, made a grand entrance. The front door had been open, and she must have let herself in. That lost, almost kindly mood, that our gang had witnessed in the garden looked like it had worn off. She marched up to Mrs Reilly, dressed as usual like a refugee from the 70’s, and let loose an almost unintelligible fusillade of words. 

Everybody was frozen in confusion at the abrupt change of mood. Mrs Reilly was talking to her in a soothing voice with her palms raised in a plea for calm. For a moment it seemed to do the trick as The Witch went quiet, but I think that was because her eye caught Paul for a moment and the sight of him seemed to have another momentary effect of pacification paralysis.

 Then Mrs Reilly made the mistake of putting a hand on her shoulder and that set her off again. 

“Get your hands off of me!” She said, flicking her hand off of her shoulder . 

The Witch stood there sort of shaking with rage, her eyes narrowed into two enraged slits, as she paused to get her breath back. The extended silence finally made us alive to the fact that Mary had all the while been stood like an apparition behind her shoulder. She had been trying to get her attention: ‘I would like to say something …. Verena, excuse me I have something to tell you, Verena, listen to me …I…we … need to speak to you …”

 Then, as if by its own volition, the tape recorder clicked into life. ‘Ride a White Swan’ by T-Rex started to play. The song stopped The Witch in her tracks. She stood frozen, her finger still pointing in accusation at Mrs Reilly. Her mouth was moving, but mutely. It was then that she turned and took notice of the person  at her shoulder. The only sounds were of a jangly guitar and Marc Bolan in his silky, shaky voice wistfully urging the listener to: 

‘Ride it on out like a bird in the skyways, ride it on out like you were a bird…

 ….Catch a bright star and a place it on your forehead… Say a few spells and baby, there you go …’ 

The song began to fade away with Marc Bolan singing ‘Da da dee dee daah’ a number of times. The tape clicked to a stop. There was silence again.

 “That was his favourite song. You and Sam held hands and laughed as you danced to that song in the Christmas of 1971, Verena…” Mary said ripping open the curtain of silence in the room.

The two of them stared at each other like gunfighters waiting for the next move. Mary’s turquoise eyes were in that rare fugue state again. ‘’The light of day gives no relief, because I see you in everything.’’ That’s what you said to him this morning isn’t it?’’

If there could be an image that defined angry confusion then the Witch’s face at that moment was it. ‘’How? Who’s told you all this!” She demanded.

“He did,’’ Mary said matter of factly.

“Who did?”

“Sam.”

Something was happening. But neither I nor anyone else in that happily decorated room was able to grasp what it was.

Though Mary’s words sounded innocuous enough to me they had a tremendous impact on our normally mute neighbour.

‘Oh dearie me, scary Mary’s at it again’ I heard an anonymous voice say.

Mary put her hands up to her temples and closed her eyes, “He is here. I feel pressure in my head. He is trying to show me what happened and he is speaking, speaking so fast Verena. He is telling me that you tried your hardest to save him-”

The Witch took several involuntary steps back till the back of her legs found a chair. She slowly slumped down into it and stared. It was like she really wanted to, even needed to hear what Mary had to say, but equally detested being put into this situation. The look on her face was stranded somewhere between shock, horror and hope. It was like watching someone suspended in mid air.  

She started whispering the name “Sam, Sam, Sam,” over and over. Her face strained and pleading.

 Mary looked distinctly to the side of the woman she had addressed as Verena as she spoke to her. 

“I see…  Christmas 1971. You laughed, both of you. He’s showing me…. the hospital… you hiding under the stairs to take whispered phone calls… The way you’d hum to him and play with his hair after he’d had another injection… He’s showing me everything…He has your eyes.”

The Witch sat shaking in the chair. She finally gathered herself enough to say,“Shut your mouth! Stop speaking!” But her voice had no conviction in it.

Mary was on a roll now and oblivious to the effect she was having. Her turquoise eyes looked more lost and ‘fey’ than ever. 

“Sam says it wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could, taking him near and far for treatment, you only had one care in the world- to make your son better. Do you understand that?”

The Witch blinked rapidly a few times. Then she sighed and slowly nodded her head in recognition. It was like she was finally surrendering to the inquisition. ‘’Yes, a tumour that he had caused a blood clot to move up and rush to his brain.”

Mary sort of swooned side to side as if she would teeter and fall to the floor at any second. The Witch rushed out of her seat, steadied Mary and then gently lowered her down onto a chair. They sat facing one another. We all watched on. 

Mrs Reilly pushed a glass of water into the fey woman’s hand. “Here Mary, drink this.”

Mary sipped at the water as The Witch stared at her with desperate, darting eyes.

“Yes, that was it. The tumour…’’ Mary continued. ‘’He says that this was something that you had been reading and researching up on for years. You did not tell your son anything about his treatment. You didn’t want him to know that he was sick and you didn’t want him to know what was wrong. So you tried to hide things from him, doing what you could behind the scenes. Because more than anything you wanted him to be able to live like a normal child, and for the longest time he did. He had a normal life as normal as any boy his age. He didn’t know any of this till he got to the other side, or through the clouds as he is telling me. He is showing me everything…. I see you hiding under the stairs to take phone calls from the doctors and saying it was someone else…. Visits to the library…. Appointments with specialists…. I see you comparing hospitals and packing up and moving to Rooks Heath because Northwick Park Hospital was the best children’s hospital in Europe.”

Her eyes had begun to well up. She was looking less like a witch and more like someone whose name could indeed be Verena. 

“Yes, the tumour had become wrapped around his vena cava and there was a very serious risk of bleeding out. It was such a struggle because there was so much planning from the surgeons; because if they were to operate as normal he would not have survived-”

“So they were trying to treat him in other ways.”

“Yes, they were trying to shrink it down and trying all these other innovations at the time,” said Verena.

Mary nodded like something had been confirmed. “But he never made it to that point, did he?” 

“No. he never made it to that point,” Verena said, holding a tissue to her nose. Her voice sounded strained. I felt I was witnessing the tears of someone who had not cried in years.

“He had this condition for quite some time-”

The Witch interrupted her. “He had the condition from birth… It was there from the start.

Mary Driscoll reached out and touched her for the first time. “In the beginning you didn’t understand how bad it was. Do you agree?”

“Yes I do.”

“But other than that he says he was like any other boy his age. It wasn’t until he started maturing that it started to affect his growth, that you understood how serious this was.” Mary added.

“In the early years it didn’t really affect him at all, except that he was perhaps a little shorter than other kids his age, like that boy there,” She pointed at Paul Hamon. 

Paul blushed and retreated behind the crisps and cakes. 

Mary stood up and started pacing backwards and forwards. ‘’But I’m also going to tell you something else, Verena. This wasn’t something that could be fixed overnight. It could only be fought and contained at best. Sam says that he had a very slight chance of getting older with the health condition he had. One wrong move would have cost your son’s life….. You lived in fear of that every single day… of making the wrong decision. But he is here to tell me to tell you that what happened, happened naturally. You did everything you could. You made all the right decisions …. but it was inoperable.”

Verena was looking down and gently breathing. Her fists clenching and unclenching as she listened. I saw a tear fall to the flowered red and amber carpet from her downturned face. She looked up and asked in a composed manner. “What’s your name?” 

“Mary, my name is Mary.”

“Thank you Mary.”

Mary’s body gave a sudden jolt. The following sentences that came from her mouth were far too childlike to be her voice. She was in that ‘fugue’ state again.

“I thank the forces that caused me to come into this world and for allowing you to be my mum, because you gave me the life that any child would have dreamed of  … I didn’t even realize I was unwell, mum. You taught me how to make friends … You were great with people, so funny, so full of life! Sometimes I couldn’t go to school and we’d read at home, take trips to the natural history museum, picnics in the park… I remember how we slurped Fanta at the cinema when we went to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang…. The way you’d hum Ride a White Swan to me after the injections.”

There was another bodily judder from Mary and her voice went back to normal.

‘’That song was an anthem of hope to you and Sam. You’d hold each other and happily dance to it. You two had a connection that isn’t seen very much because of the fact that you were there with him through every single thing in life. 

He says that you sought answers after his passing and got none and grew cold and angry. You shut yourself away from the world. And when you are not working on your crafts you just sit in your rocking chair for hours, just thinking. Sometimes talking to your lost boy. He knows that you’ve kept his clothes, his shoes, his toys and how you press his shirts close to your nose. Fear of purgatory is what stops you from ending it all. Not because you are religious, but because if there is a heaven you may not be able to see him there. Seeing him again is your one hope.

 Sam has somehow orchestrated things so that those footballs would keep falling into your garden. He was the one who got Paul to climb over into your garden. Paul looks just like Sam did at that age doesn’t he?”

The woman we had once called The Witch was holding a hanky up to her face and talking in a voice that though choked up, was easier to understand than anything we had ever heard her say before. 

She closed her eyes and shook her head up and down as she spoke. A solitary tear wound down her left cheek. “I have signs and dreams every day. I just want to know that I will see him one day.”

“You will…. You were used to compassing your life around him, and then one day he was taken away and that’s something that nobody should have to go through… And what you’ve been going through all these years… the anger, the cynicism, the questioning of everything … That isn’t anger or cynicism…” She then stepped forward and took both of Verena’s hands in hers and said.

‘’It’s grief. Because the grief of losing the ones you love more than yourself is the one thing that questions and destroys everything a person holds true.
You can have all the indications that your boy is present in your life- but grief can be a blow to the heart that shatters the mind. You wonder whether you will see him again and whether the signs you see and feel are real or just your emotions playing tricks with your mind. You have been getting these signs because Sam’s been reaching out. He wants to thank you and he wants you to change. To come out of this limbo and end your silence.”

There was a stubborn shake of the head and she half cried and half spoke her next words. “I don’t want to change.”

“You’re gonna have to.”

“Why?”

“Because grief has devoured you; and he’s asking you to- as much for his sake as yours.’’

 “I don’t know how to … change … Would not know even know where to start.’’ She murmured.

Her voice changed again, for the last time: ‘Tomorrow is the most important thing in life; comes into us at midnight very clean and perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands, quietly hoping we have learned something from yesterday.’  He wants you to be like the person in those words of that song that you both loved so much. He wants you to ride a white swan.” 

“First of all, start talking to people again. End the silence. Because silence is the enemy of change. Let go of your anger and become part of life again. Know that this thing we’ve named ‘love’ is the mountain peak of intellectual and emotional alignment. He wants you to know that he’s ok and that he’s been working through these children to get to you, that football falling into your garden, you coming here today has been no accident. He’s been working through these children.” 

5.

There was a kind of gust of wind felt, but not mentioned then or ever, by those who were in that room that day. Then Mary Drsicoll slumped into a chair and looked to fall asleep for a few moments. Then, like a narcoleptic, she got up and as if nothing had happened excused herself.

A week later we found a whole load of forgotten footballs of Alastair’s in the garden. We looked up and saw Verena watching from the window, and for the first time we saw her crack open a smile and wave. We waved back and smiled too. A change came over The Witch after that day. She was seen out and about more often and her appearance improved. She looked something like a beautiful woman; and for the first time we saw her in new clothes and make up. 

I spoke to my mum about what had happened and she spoke about how in the Urdu language grief and the dealing of it is known as ‘sabar’ and she spoke about how Verena’s ‘sabar’ had been a wild thing. I wondered if her son had ever tasted the Pakistani food we ate at home like Keer, Rasmalai, Samosas and Jalebi. I guessed not.

The Fey woman left not too long after, I heard she went back to the west of Ireland. I was heartbroken. 

What happened that day stayed in my mind for ages. Oddly enough everyone else who had been there seemed to either experience a collective amnesia or just found what they saw so unexplainable that their minds had decided it was better to just not think or talk about the exchange between those two women. 

I found myself unable to talk about it with anybody. Except my mum, and then only briefly.

Finally, in mid July 1984, my last week of primary school, I approached my drama teacher about it. She had known Mary from when she helped at the school and looked to have a good relationship with her. Mrs Blackman patiently listened to my account and said nothing. The next day she took me to one side and referred to Mary as someone her mother would have called a ‘Go’el’. 

“What’s that?”

“It’s Yiddish”, Mrs Blackman said. “For someone who mends broken things.” 

It was not long before Verena met someone nobody had ever seen before. She started to dress better, and look better. And then in less than a few months she had put her home up for sale and was gone. None of us ever saw her or the ‘Go’el again. However a couple of weeks after she left, drawn by the looming silence of the empty house. Alastair, Paul and I sneaked inside via the side porch. The house hummed with silence as we made our way through the empty rooms. In one room, with the cartoon character wallpaper peeling at the corners, we found a single bed. It was small as if made for a child never destined to grow. We were about to leave when we noticed an old shoebox. Inside were some odds and ends and old photos. Right at the bottom was an official looking piece of paper from Northwick Park Hospital with the words “Sam Lingard born 7th May 1960 died July 10th 1972.” 

Alastair looked at me, his jaw slack and eyes wide in surprise. “That’s the day I was born.” Under this was a picture of a boy sitting on a hospital chair with a football in his lap. He looked just like Paul Hamon.

Outside the leaves on the sycamore tree rustled and a few of them gently spun down. 

My mother had said to me, “In Pakistan the name for a sycamore is ‘sheesham.’ You find them growing where rivers dry up. The strongest trees are born from loss. In Urdu we say trees remember.”

“Mrs Reilly says that in Ireland they say ‘trees listen.’ I told her.

“Yes, that too,” my mum answered.

 I put my hands in my pocket and my hands touched the photo I had slipped inside it, not to steal but to bear witness. I pressed my hands to the tree’s trunk, as did Alastair and Paul. We stared at the old bark on the tree, peeled away in places. Pale skin was exposed beneath and I came to the realisation that trees, just like people also shed their scars to survive. 

My library visits and literary education with Mrs Reilly continued on into the winter and following spring right to the end of Primary School. They did not however continue into the summer of 1984. Alaister and I moved on to different High Schools and with astonishing speed we exited each other’s lives.The same went for Mrs Reilly and her cakes. 

I went to Gayton High Boys School and he went to Rooks Heath High. It was like we’d migrated to different continents. High school carved new tribes for us both. Our gang disbanded. Alaister vanished into football trials and a crowd of older boys who wore baggy jackets with their collars upturned like the immaculate young men in Duran Duran. I don’t know what became of Paul Hamon and the boys either. I only caught periodic sights of them in the following years. Each time they looked more and more different to the kids I’d known. Those sightings stopped by the early 1990’s. They must have moved away.

Alongside the process of building new friendships at my new school I discovered new books.

Without Mrs Reilly’s guidance I went from chasing the ghosts of Aiden Chambers and Ruth Manning- Sanders to more mature fare like All Quiet on The Western Front and The Godfather. Our library alliance, like the leaves of the sycamore, had been something governed by the seasons. And like Sam’s life, shining golden for an all too brief moment before the wind took them. 

The Reilly’s moved from Rooks Heath sometime in 1986. It was only then that it occurred to me that I didn’t even have a photograph of my time with them. I never saw or heard from Alastair, his mum, Verena or Fey Mary again. I was a child then and a middle aged man now. I struggle to remember what all four of them looked like. 

Now, decades later, when I put on an old crackly 7 inch copy of Ride a White Swan on the turntable I’m briefly teleported back. I see the faces of all four- Alastair, Mrs Reilly, Verena, Fey Mary- flash before me, as vivid as sycamore leaves caught in the sunlight. Then the song ends, the needle lifts and the faces dissolve- like goldfish darting in the depths of Verena’s pond.

By Nasir Ali Hussain 

Copyright 03/08/2025