The Winter's Child Read online

  Legend Press Ltd, 107-111 Fleet Street, London EC4A 2AB

  [email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Cassandra Parkin 2017

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-7850790-3-0

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850790-2-3

  Set in Times. Printed by Opolgraf SA.

  Cover design by Anna Morrison www.annamorrison.com

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Cassandra Parkin grew up in Hull, and now lives in East Yorkshire. Her debut novel The Summer We All Ran Away was published by Legend Press in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Amazon Rising Star Award. Her short story collection, New World Fairy Tales (Salt Publishing, 2011) was the winner of the 2011 Scott Prize for Short Stories. The Beach Hut was published in 2015 and Lily’s House in 2016. Cassandra’s work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.

  Visit Cassandra at

  cassandraparkin.wordpress.com

  or follow her @cassandrajaneuk

  For the woman on Scarborough seafront:

  So far it’s all been true

  Chapter One

  Saturday 14th October 2017

  In the warm cigarette dimness of the caravan, the Roma woman’s eyes are shrewd and bright.

  “You’ve lost someone,” she says.

  We gaze watchfully at each other across a table of polished glass, etched with a cornucopia of flowers. Its bevelled edge is sharp to the sight but not to the touch. I’d imagined the inside of a traditional vardo, painted wood and bright patchworks, but instead I’m surrounded by glass and china and crystal, intermittently set ablaze by the lights of the carriages that dip and wheel above our heads. The cabinet behind my opponent is filled with china girls with arms like ballerinas, waists no wider than their necks and frothing, intricate skirts. Do all showmen live in this impossible delicate luxury? How do they take their homes from place to place without breakages?

  The fortune-teller is looking right into my eyes, watching and waiting for a tell. I force myself to sit cool and blank, trying not to be distracted by the fragments of my reflection – blonde hair, blue eyes, slim figure – that appear, startlingly distorted and inverted, in the million reflective surfaces of the caravan.

  If my sister Melanie finds out what I’ve been doing, she’ll be furious. I’m supposed to have given this game up years ago. I shouldn’t be here.

  “A husband, maybe?” The fortune-teller shakes her head. “No, not a husband.”

  I keep my breathing slow and quiet, in and then out, refusing to let her see the satisfaction this gives me. In fact, I have lost a husband, or rather my ex-husband and I have lost each other, torn apart by the brutal tragedy that ripped through our life like a tornado. When we first married, I imagined that losing John would break my heart. When it finally happened, we were both too exhausted to summon more than a weary acceptance.

  “Boyfriend, then.” I imagine I can feel the caress of her eyes as they flick, flick, flick over my face like the smooth dry kiss of a snake’s tongue, looking for the micro-expressions that will tell her if she’s on the right lines. “No, not a boyfriend.”

  Next she’ll change track completely. She’ll go for an easy hit so I’ll forget about the misses.

  “You’ve come to the Fair since you were a child,” she says. “You’ve loved it all your life. I see you in a hat and coat, holding the hand of a tall man and laughing.”

  I try not to snort. She’ll know from my accent that I’m a local girl, and what else does she need to know to guess how deeply Hull Fair is lodged in my heart? Fair Week is the darkest and most beautiful spell our city casts, a residential street and a patch of waste ground suddenly ablaze with the showmen’s last wild gathering before they disperse into a mysterious continental winter, and we all hunker down and wait for the more respectable follow-up of Christmas.

  “I see you coming here as an adult, too,” she continues. “There’s a child with you. I see a little boy in a blue coat, riding on a train. When he gets frightened and cries, you buy him a stick of candy floss.”

  More easy hits. Not half an hour ago I lifted my nephew Thomas out of the ghost-train and held him tight, trying not to laugh at his wild terror of the man who jumped out at us and rocked the carriage on its tracks. “It’s all right,” I told him over and over. “It was just one of the guys from the ride. See? Look there and you’ll see him do it again… now, shall we get some candy floss?” And three minutes later Thomas’s fright is melting stickily on his tongue among the threads of spun sugar. A scene played out thousands of times each night. Perhaps she even watched me, or had one of her fellow showmen watch me, so she’d have something in her pocket to dazzle me with. Perhaps they watch all of us.

  Nonetheless, her words conjure another, more tender memory: washing Joel’s face in the dim light of the bathroom while John put the car back in the garage. I can still hear the high singing in our ears as they rang to the echo of the pounding music. I can still see the tracks of tears on his cheeks, the sweet pink crust around his mouth.

  “A child! That’s it. A child. You’ve lost a child.”

  Her words come so fast I can’t prepare. Stupid Susannah, stupid stupid stupid, walking into the trap like this. She’s seen the truth in my face. There’s no escape from what’s coming.

  “A little boy.” My whole body twitches with the pain, and she nods in satisfaction. “Give me your hand.”

  My hands are clenched into fists beneath the table. Perhaps the angle of the glass hides this from her. Perhaps not. I bring them out slowly, forcing my fingers to uncurl. The skin is sticky from the nougat, the chips, the hot dog, the brandy snap, the candy floss for Thomas, which he generously shared with me as we watched Grace twirl solemnly round in a teacup and I held onto the gluey remnants of her toffee-apple. The collective name for these foods is fair junk, as in, Shall we bother with tea or shall we just get fair junk? John’s big scrubbly face and Joel’s little rosy one, side by side on the sofa, already dressed in hats and coats because they’re clever enough to guess my answer. I swallow tears and force myself to meet the Roma woman’s gaze. These memories are sacred. She can’t have them.

  “He was your boy,” she says, almost crooning, as if I’m a fretful child she’s lulling to sleep. Her fingers creep over the table and trace out a thin path across my palm. “Your boy. And you lost him. But he hasn’t left you. Not yet.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  I don’t want to ask this but I can’t stop myself. This is what they do, the charlatan’s terrible gift. They draw you in, they make you believe, and then they cut you open and dabble in your spilled blood with their cold fingers.

  “He hasn’t left this world,” she repeats.

  “So is he still alive? Is he out there somewhere? Or is he - ?”

  “He hasn’t left. That’s all I can say.”

  This is another trick I recognise. When the facts are uncertain, they’ll leave themselves as much room as possible. I wrote another blog post
about this just three weeks ago, prompted by the desperation of a reader and the lies of a medium in Liverpool, titled Open letter to the mother of J.M. I should be back at my computer, dealing with the fall-out, but Thomas begged me as only a ten-year-old can (“Please, please, please come with us, please, Auntie Suze…” and when I looked at him severely, “… annah! I was going to say it! I was!”). His delight at successfully teasing me, and the hopeful trust in Grace’s blue eyes, were too much. I should be with them, not wasting time and money on rediscovering what I already know. I force myself to smile.

  “If I pay you more, will you be able to say more? Is that how it works?”

  She flicks her eyes over my face again, and in spite of myself I wince at the shrewd pitiless light that glitters there. Now she’ll torture me by telling me about the thin veil that separates the living from the not-living, and that because the veil is transparent to her, she cannot always say on which side our loved ones are. I ready myself for the blow.

  “I see him,” the woman repeats, and lets go of my hand to light a cigarette. I try not to watch too greedily as she draws in a long rich lungful, holds it, then lets it go again, the frail smoke coiling seductively around my nostrils. I gave up smoking years ago, in the long desperate vitamin-filled alcohol-free desert before Joel. But every now and then, I’ll catch a breath of smoke and something stirs in my brain and whispers, Go on. You know you want to. Just the one. Just one cigarette. What harm can it do now?

  “What are you doing here, love?” she asks, and takes another draw on her cigarette. “You don’t believe.”

  “If you can really see the future and the… the dead and so on, it shouldn’t matter if I believe or not. Gravity works whether or not people think it’s true.”

  She hold the smoke a moment longer, then lets it go. “So you’re one of them. Think you know how it’s done.”

  Does she know who I am? I write under my real name, my photo is on my website, and while I’m not what anyone could call famous, Life Without Hope contains enough vitriol, written over a long enough period of time, to get me noticed by people in the business. Perhaps they keep lists, as scammers are said to do, so they can separate the sworn enemies from the gullible believers.

  “All I’ve heard so far is misses and guesses,” I say. “Everyone brings kids to the Fair and buys them candy floss. Just about every little boy I know has a blue coat, and if I hadn’t bitten at that one you’d have said No, wait, a green one. You don’t know anything about—”

  With a sudden pounce, she grabs my hand again, pressing it hard against the cold glass table. The ash from her cigarette grows long and pale as the coal burns towards the base.

  “Now you listen to me, my love,” she hisses. “Here are three things that are true from your past. You were born first and grew up the richest and the prettiest, but your sister was still the lucky one. Your husband loved you and he loves you even now, but he still left you. Your son was all you ever wanted, but he still tore your heart in two.”

  Her grip hurts, her hands on mine hurt, and the coal of her cigarette is growing close to my skin. I try to take my hand back but she won’t let go.

  “Now, three things from your present. You haven’t been here since you lost your boy, but this year you let a child… your niece? No, your nephew… talk you into it. You came with them both, a boy and a girl, and the girl pointed at my caravan and asked if she could go in. You told her no because we’re all thieves and liars – oh yes, you did, my love, that’s what you said – but the spirits spoke to you and told you it was time to listen. You lied to your sister and her children, and said you were afraid to ride the Ferris wheel but they should go without you, so you could come back here and see me. Did you wonder if that meant something? You’re right, my love. It meant everything. You’re meant to be here, in my caravan, talking to me. The world’s a bigger place than you know.”

  “You’re hurting me. Let me go.”

  “That’s your penance for not believing. Yes, shout if you like, my love, but no one’s going to hear you. Now, here are three things from your future that will come true before the year turns.”

  “Please. No more. I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me any more. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

  “I see three people waiting for you. I see a woman who’ll hate you on sight because she’s afraid she’ll be just like you, then come to love you like a sister. You’ll let her get close, then you’ll push her away, and the pain will break her heart. I see a man who belongs to someone else, but he’ll come to you anyway. You’ll let him get close, then you’ll push him away, and the pain will break his heart.”

  This is nothing, it means nothing, an empty performance from an angry show-woman. Despite this, tears come to my eyes. What if I’ve been wrong all these years? What if she’s right? What if it really does mean something that I was drawn to her caravan? Hot flecks of ash drop onto my skin and I flinch.

  “I see your boy,” she says.

  I forget the prickles of pain in my hands.

  “I see your boy. He had many who loved him, but he loved you best of all, you were the centre of his world. You let him get close. Then you pushed him away. You turned away from him. You listened to false advice. And the pain broke his heart.”

  “Stop it, please, stop it—”

  “But he’s coming back to you. For better or worse, your boy’s coming back to you, my love, and this will be the last Christmas Eve you’ll spend without him. The road won’t be easy. But if you’re strong enough to walk it, then when the snow falls on Christmas Eve you’ll see his face again, and you’ll know where he’s been, and why he’s been there.” Her face is so close to mine I can see the tiny millimetres of silver at the roots of her lustrous black hair, scented with grease and hairspray. “And then, my love, you’ll never be apart again.”

  She lets go of my hands, but I can’t move. I feel as if she’s stabbed me through my heart with a silver knife, pinning me to the chair.

  “That’s all, my love. You’ve had your fifty quid’s worth.” She laughs. “Was it good enough, darling? Good enough to believe in? You going to write me up on your website?”

  So she does know who I am. It was all a performance. Everything she said was pieced together from the information that’s available to anyone with an internet connection. She doesn’t know anything about what happened to Joel. I stumble out of the caravan, her mocking words clinging to my back, my head spinning, my knees weak, my hands clumsy, and fall into the crowd, letting the tide carry me down Walton Street. If I was alone, I could simply get lost in the dubious comfort of the company of strangers, but I’m not alone, there’s no time, no time, I’m expected elsewhere and I have to pretend everything is normal. So I stop and catch my breath by the greasy metallic warmth of the chip van, breathing deep draughts of fried food and diesel, wishing I had a cigarette, trying to compose myself enough to return to the Ferris wheel where Grace, Thomas and Melanie will be waiting for me.

  I plunge back into the Fair, drowning my heartbreak in lights and screams and fumes and thumping music. A long rotary arm skims over the top of the Hook-a-Duck booth and the pounding Europop is overwhelmed by the shrieks of the riders. I pause to watch the Cyclone, forcing myself not to flinch as the carriage hurtles towards me through space, then shoots away again. For those in pain, the Fair is like an anaesthetic, its insistent assault on the senses wiping out all possibility of focused thought or feeling. My phone vibrates in my back pocket.

  We’re off the wheel but can’t see you. You okay?

  Sorry, massive queue for the toilets. On my way now.

  It’s hard to hurry but I do my best, squeezing between slow-moving families, skittering over metallic walkways. Dotted among the bright faces of the riders, watchful showmen balance effortlessly on whirling, uneven floors, their faces so blank and unaffected they might be statues. One man stands beneath the Octopus as it flings its carriages in a perilous vertical spin, so close it looks as if the
y’ll take his head off; but he scrolls through his phone without even looking up. Another spins the cars on the Waltzer, indifferent to pleas and shrieks. His face is serene and empty, as if he’s meditating in a green field.

  In the puddles beneath the Ferris wheel, Melanie does her best to wrangle Thomas and Grace into standing still and waiting nicely. She’s just about got them within bounds, but they won’t hold out much longer. When she sees me, and before she gets her face under control, I see exasperation, swiftly suppressed. It’s not her fault. I’d feel the same. Grace is telling me something, but the music’s so loud I can’t make it out. I kneel down so I can press my ear closer to her perfect little mouth.

  “Auntie Susannah!” Grace can hardly speak for excitement. “I went all the way up there, look! All the way to the top!” As five-year-olds will, she performs each word, arms windmilling wildly. Beside her, Thomas smiles tolerantly. “And I saw you from the top, and I waved!”

  “Grace, you do know you didn’t actually see Auntie Susannah,” Thomas tells her. Melanie looks at him sharply, but doesn’t reprimand him. I suspect he’s had to hear this story several times already. Grace looks hurt.

  “Did you see me?”

  “I think I saw someone,” I say, and kiss her plump cheek. She smells of toffee-apple. “Someone waving right at the top of the wheel?”

  “Yes! That’s what I did! I waved!” She beams. “See, Thomas, I told you Auntie Susannah would see me.”

  Now it’s Thomas’s turn to look hurt. I pat his shoulder and give him a wink, letting him in on the deception, and he smiles at me. I’d always imagined my life would be filled with moments like this, effortlessly navigating the tricky waterways of parenting multiple children. Instead…

  “Are you okay?” Melanie has always been hyper-attuned to my moods. Now she slips one arm through mine and squeezes gently.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Not too tired yet?”

  “Course not.”