Morning in Morrison House

  Sunrise, 5:58am. The rose petal sky folds gently over the fields around Morrison House, and the sun reaches its fingers over the hill. Beams of light creep over the red brick façade; but behind hedges, behind trees, behind gargoyles, the night lingers still. Dawn creates stark lines between the rose gold morning and the steel grey night.

  The sun inches higher, and its beam of light shifts, falling upon the “For Sale” sign at the front driveway. A Barbour-clad workman peels the film from a bright red sticker – now the sign proclaims “Sold”.

  The sun continues rising, throwing its lighted shapes on the downstairs windows of Morrison House. There, a sunbeam falls stiffly through a crack in the curtains, hovering over the bed in shadow, alighting finally on the cuckoo clock on the opposite wall. The hands tick over onto the hour and the little wooden door opens – but what comes out, blinking and stretching in the bright sunlight, isn’t a cuckoo: it’s a series of tiny people, with bronze skin and smouldering matchstick hair. Their eyes reflect tiny pinpricks of sunlight. Together, they are a miniature sun, illuminating the whole room and the sleeping woman in the bed.

  There, Betty wakes, throwing her eyes open. Any other day, she might linger in bed, give in to the dragging sensation of sorrow that has been dogging her for months now. Not today. Today, she is a pensioner on a mission. So she flings back the covers and sits up, which puts her head right into the beam of sunlight, and makes her hair glow brilliant white.

  The little people in the cuckoo clock wave, trying to get Betty’s attention like they do every morning, but Betty doesn’t notice them. In her mind, she is already thinking about her mission: because Betty means to escape.

  Not for her, the sterile, stunted care home that her son Philip has picked out for her. Not for her the endless, monotonous hours, days, months, maybe even years of sitting with the other pensioners, who are slow, boring, decrepit, old –

  No, Betty will escape. She has escaped once before, when she was a small girl, when she was sprightly and not fighting against the constant aching and creaking of her own body. Back then, she was running from a parental row, not the slow decline of old age – but she knows that dreamlike land is still waiting for her. She has spent her whole life in Morrison House knowing that the path is there, a gateway through which she can escape into a land of magic and wonder, if ever she really had to.

  She has spent her whole life ignoring the little people in the cuckoo clock because the only magic she knows is inside the wardrobe of the east wing’s spare room.

  The gravelly crunch of the driveway alerts her: the moving vans are arriving. Elsewhere in the house, her son Philip will be waking, too. She must move quickly.  

  She stands up, reaching for her dressing gown. The movement puts her out of the sun’s beam, and the shadows engulf her.

  On the cuckoo clock, the little people wilt and fade, sagging in disappointment. Never again will they have a chance to say good morning to their beloved Betty. The sun’s light shifts again, and now they too must move quickly, quickly – scrambling back inside the cuckoo clock before the light travels past their little house, and the clock is plunged into darkness again.

*

  Betty exits the bedroom into a hallway full of portraits, their faces shadowed. To save on electric, she rarely switches on the hallway lights; she knows Morrison House like the back of her hand, doesn’t need to illuminate her pathway to know where she’s going. But the shadows are so dense that she never sees that the figures in the portraits switch places every morning; nor the Morrison ancestors waving to her, beckoning her to turn left instead of right. She doesn’t see them gesturing excitedly, yet silently, towards the landscapes that crowd around the end of the hallway, or, more specifically, at the painting of the Ross Ice Shelf on the far wall. It was painted by Tom Morrison, her grand-uncle, who went on Royal Navy expeditions with Captain Ross aboard the Erebus before he settled back at Morrison House.

  The painting also hides an entrance to an ice-encrusted land where the people control the seas with their hands. Where there are shoals of deep-sea fishes flying through the air, and albatrosses nesting underwater. Where the sun shines from below the sea, and the sky mirrors it in rippling reflections.

  Betty doesn’t see the portraits trying to lure her towards Tom’s painting, and instead she turns right, towards the entrance hall of Morrison House. She’s in a hurry, after all.

  The entrance hall is wide and splendid, even more so in the morning, when it is steeped in shadows. Everything is dark, except for the five glorious patches of early morning sunshine which melts through the stained glass window above the front door in delightfully vibrant puddles of colour over the parquet floor. Betty moves between them, like stills in a disco, each appearance a flash of green, red, blue, orange as she approaches the grand staircase. As a girl, Betty and her sister, Muriel, would make a game of leaping through the coloured light: that was, until Muriel ran away, eloping with the gardener’s son. Or at least, that’s what Betty had always assumed.

  If she had looked a little harder, or played a little longer, she might have discovered the pool of tangerine light in front of great-grandmother Mary’s bust, where the parquet flooring disappeared and you fell instead into an upside down world of shining gemstones, where even the shadows were full of colour, and found Muriel building her palace there where no one could call her wrong.

  It was shortly after Muriel’s disappearance, though, that Betty first discovered her wardrobe, and so she was quite preoccupied.

  Betty continues now up the grand staircase, climbing through a ladder of light and shadow that the windows create. One step, in darkness; another, blinded by sunbeams. Darkness, blindness. Shadow, light.

   Each step through the shadow is a sinkhole, where Betty might find herself sinking into foreign lands if only she paused. Quicksand darkness pulling her into other worlds. There was no time for that, though, not when the wardrobe is waiting.

  Finally upstairs, she turns into the east wing, and encounters her least favourite part of Morrison House. Here is the knights’ corridor, where there are no windows and the suits of armour loom out of the gloom. Betty hurries through this corridor every time, her slippered feet often tripping over the Persian carpet. When she senses the knights reach out to help her, she feels only the terror of darkness clawing at her. So she runs, as much as her arthritic joints will let her, because the knights terrify her. It was here she broke her hip two years ago, the first time Philip made intimations about taking her out of Morrison House. In a way, the knights are to blame for everything.

  Even if she knew the souls that inhabited the polished, shining armour, Betty would never give them the chance to whisk her away to worlds unknown. She has no desire to be rescued by the monsters that put her in need of rescue in the first place.

  Once running, Betty can’t stop. So even when she’s past the suits of armour, when she’s turned the corner and she’s running through the zoetropic flashing light corridor with the narrow windows that look out over the gardens, she doesn’t stop, she doesn’t pause, she pushes herself further and further until –

  The spare room door.

  Betty pauses in front of it, her heart hammering. Not just from the exertion, but from the sudden fear – the fear that it was all a dream. That the certainty with which she has believed in the wardrobe all this time was misplaced. That there is no escape waiting for her.

  But she shakes her head and forces herself to reach for the doorknob. The door, stiff with disuse, creaks open.

*

  The spare room does not hold much furniture: a desk, a solitary chair, a couple of shelves already cleared of books in Philip’s rush to clear the house. It’s dusty, musky. The place is dingy, except for a single ray of sunlight through the window which illuminates, of course, the wardrobe.

  Betty’s eyes aren’t as good as they used to be at picking out the details within the light, or within the dark, so instead she sees only the chiaroscuro of light and dark, the sharp contrast between sunlight and lack of. All details are extinguished.

  It’s now or never.

  Betty shakes off every last trace of doubt, stubborn to the last. There is no time for doubt.

  Under the floorboards, in the shadows, hundreds of tremulous eyes watch her. The eyes belong to small, dark, smudges of creatures, who have grown bold over the years of living with Betty, the girl who never looked down because she was too busy looking ahead. Now the creatures even dare to venture forth from the floorboards to get a better look as Betty steps forward towards the wardrobe. Where her feet fall, they startle and scatter, only to gather again a few floorboards away. A silent, hushed audience.

  The wardrobe looms in front of Betty, as vast as she remembers it. She reaches out a hand, which passes into the beam of light, burning bright. It’s so bright that the sun spots on her hand pale; the wrinkles blur, and her hand is ten years old again. She is a child once more – or maybe she never stopped being one, always hanging onto her belief in magic, in worlds within wardrobes; always ignoring reality, wondrous reality, in her ignorance.

  Her fingers close around the doorknob, smooth and polished and soaked in the sun’s heat. The catch clicks as she opens the wardrobe door.

  Musty, unused, the wardrobe smells ancient. Inside is an eclectic collection of old tweeds, knitted jumpers, and unmatched hats.

  The crowd under the floorboards chitter in concern as Betty steps one foot into the wardrobe. She is almost lost to their sight. Some of them come even further out of hiding, making a move almost as if to stop her, but what can they do? After all, Betty has spent a lifetime so focussed on her wardrobe that she has never noticed the cosmos of friends beneath her feet.

  Under the floorboards, the smudge-like creatures are in distress. They wish they had tried harder to get her attention over the years. Too late for that, they now wish they could stop her from entering the wardrobe, to at least maintain her belief, to keep her hope alive –

  But the sunlit island of light is a whole universe away, and they can only watch as Betty steps into the wardrobe, disappearing through the light and into the smothering, unfriendly darkness on the other side.

  They hear the hard knock on wood as Betty comes up against the back of the wardrobe.

  They hear her confused calls as she tries to call for the friends she believed would still be waiting for her.

  They shiver at her broken sobbing when the realisation breaks that the light was hiding nothing but a wardrobe all along.

  A sudden cloud outside blots out the sunlight, and the path is cleared for the smudges to approach the wardrobe. They gather there, in silent companionship, trying to send Betty their telepathic comfort.

  “Where are you?” Betty finally breaks her sobbing, choking silence. “Why won’t you let me in? Let me in, please! Please!”

  But the wardrobe is inert, nothing but a block of wood, and nothing happens. Betty cries and cries until Philip finds her, hours later, his arrival scattering the smudge-creatures back to where they came from.

  He gathers her into his arms, and takes his mother away from the wardrobe, from the disappointment, and from the shadows of Morrison House. He puts her in his modern car, takes her somewhere the lights are stark and clinical and no shadows exist, for safety reasons, to minimise falls amongst the elderly.

  The sun keeps shining, now and then, trapping Morrison House in its play of light and shadow. And the creatures and worlds of Morrison House keep telling their own stories, waiting for a new start – a new friend, who knows that there is no light without shadow, and doesn’t forget to look where the light doesn’t go for the things the sunshine can’t see.