No Need to Explain

It’s not easy to explain living on the outside of a blue globe to something that has always lived inside a brown box, so it’s probably better not to bother. But more about this later.

Gina Thomas walked down her street—an ordinary street with ordinary terraced houses and minuscule front gardens—and walked up the path of her far-from-ordinary end of terrace. A little boy that always kicked a football against her side wall asked her for the umpteenth time if she was a witch. Gina swished up to her door in her long green cardigan and didn’t bother to answer. Let him think that she was. She didn’t owe him an explanation for how she dressed or why her hair was so long. All she cared about was getting inside, even if the outside of her house was just perfect. The tiny space was packed full of decorative toadstools and fairy lights, and if you looked carefully among the long blades of grass you could see tiny porcelain pixies, hard at work. Her favourite was the one pushing a wheelbarrow. 

The neighbour’s curtain twitched as Gina put her key in the door. Mrs Baker and Gina didn’t really get along on the grounds that Gina’s grass was too long. But she had to keep it like that to protect the pixies from being stolen, though Mrs Baker thought this a ludicrous explanation. On the other hand, Gina had to put up with Mrs Baker’s wheelie bin. It was practically butted up to her front-door frame and in summer it smelled horrible. At least her grass had a fresh, fragrant smell.

‘Sort this garden out, Gina,’ her mum had once said. ‘Pave it over or something. Put a little chair and table in it. You’re 33, not a child’. But Gina wanted more of the same, not less. If she could have stood a giant tree in place of the house and carved a home out of it, with tiny windows and a tiny red door, then she would have done. If the tree could have had a thick canopy of multi-coloured leaves that was home to fairies and twinkled in the moonlight, all the better. But her mum wouldn’t have been able to get her head around that explanation so Gina had just shrugged and said ‘maybe’ to the suggestion about the table and chair. 

Waving at Mrs Baker, Gina disappeared inside. Gosh, how she loved coming home. She leaned up against the door, inhaled the familiar smell of incense, and headed for the kitchen. A hot chocolate with marshmallows and cream would warm her against the autumn chill and soften the sharp edges of the day. Then she set to making the fire and lighting a few candles, before slumping into her oversized armchair, pulling a blanket over her knees, and picking up a book. Within ten minutes she was fast asleep.

It was the sound of a firework outside that jolted Gina awake. It wasn’t yet Bonfire Night, but the local kids had already got hold of some bangers and seemed to be letting most of them off outside her door. She fleetingly wished she had been a witch, just to cast some kind of spell to make them stop, but she patiently allowed them to continue. It wasn’t long before Mrs Baker next door went out with a broom and threatened to hit them with it, cackling as she watched them bolt away.

At last, peace restored, Gina went up to bed, the sight of the sumptuous velvet covers on her bed tempting her to skip her usual routine. Bath, teeth, check the wardrobe, set alarm, touch the dream-catcher… 

The wardrobe thing had been going on since was 5 years old. What she was precisely checking for she didn’t know and couldn’t explain. A quick rummage with her hand was all it took, just to make sure there was nothing or no-one hiding in there. She didn’t even look inside. Just the familiar feel of everything was enough to make her feel better.

There was no real explanation either when this particular night she skipped this years-long ritual. Perhaps after another long, unfulfilling day at work she was overtired, or maybe it was because she realised that in her haste to get home she’d forgotten to check her post-box for the new wind-chimes she’d ordered. In any case, Gina had just put her book on the bedside table and touched the dream-catcher dangling from her ceiling when she was overcome with that feeling that something wasn’t quite right. 

It was then that she heard it, the shuffling sound coming from the wardrobe. Gina’s heart almost burst with fear and she sat up in bed and hugged her knees, barely breathing. The noise came again, only just audible. Every explanation she came up with in those fleeting moments was ridiculous and supernatural, and she told herself that perhaps she really did need to heed her mum’s advice and grow up. So, settling on her most grown-up theory, Gina decided it was probably a rat, a punishment for keeping her grass too long, and although Gina wasn’t afraid of rats as such, she didn’t particularly want one in her wardrobe. Nor did she particularly want to try to catch one. 

With a heavy boot in her hand (just in case) she padded over to the wardrobe. The shuffling noise was quite insistent now. She opened the door just a crack, shining a tiny torch through the gap and holding her breath. It was so quiet now, both inside the house and out, that for those few seconds Gina felt lonelier than she had ever felt in her life.

‘Can you turn that off please? It hurts my eyes.’ 

Gina screamed and jumped backwards, dropping the torch and the boot. She felt embarrassed about that afterwards, as the voice had been little more than a child-like whisper, and the request not unreasonable. 

Gina sat on the edge of her bed, turning round to check she wasn’t actually asleep in it and that this wasn’t a weird dream. After a few seconds, despite her desire to bolt for the front door, she went back to the wardrobe, cursing herself for being so brave.

‘Hello?,’ she whispered. Her voice sounded loud against the silence. Then came the shuffling again.

‘Hello,’ said the voice. 

Gina swallowed. Was she going mad? ‘Is everything ok?,’ she asked. It was the first question that tumbled out of her mouth.

‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ came back the voice. ‘Because I didn’t see you tonight.’ 

Gina’s mind started turning. Of course! That’s why she’d felt slightly unsettled as she’d hunkered down into bed. She hadn’t checked the wardrobe. 

‘Oh… Sorry,’ she said. ‘I forgot, for the first time since I was 5.’ 

There was a yawn from inside the wardrobe. 

‘Well, as long as you’re ok… I can go to sleep now. See you tomorrow.’

The was a bit of rustling, then silence.

‘No! Wait!,’ said Gina. ‘I can’t just go to sleep now. What are you? Why are you in my wardrobe?’

‘It’s my wardrobe,’ said the creature. ‘I’ve always been in here. Every wardrobe has one of me, even new ones. But I don’t know what I am.’

Gina had bought the old wooden wardrobe second-hand from John, an old man who used to live down the road.

‘Did you know John?’, Gina asked. 

‘Yes. He wasn’t like you, though. He was rougher and he had a shiny thing. You are smoother and you have some red things at the top and no shiny thing.’ Gina looked at her red finger-nails and stifled a giggle as she realised the creature had only ever seen up to her wrist. And the shiny thing must have been John’s gold wedding ring.

‘What do you look like?’, asked Gina. 

‘I don’t know what that means,’ said the creature. 

‘Oh, ok. Well then what do you do all the time?,’ she asked.

There was a pause, and Gina was afraid she’d fired out too many questions.

‘When it’s quiet I sleep in my bed. It’s fluffy and warm.’

My slipper, thought Gina. No wonder one of them always feels warmer than the other. ‘And when it’s not quiet?’

The creature yawned. ‘I listen. That’s all. I like sounds, I don’t know why. Can I go to sleep now?’

Gina pondered for a moment. 

‘Can I ask one more question?’ 

‘Ok, just one.’ There were a million questions going through her mind, and a million more things she wanted to talk to the creature about. But if the creature didn’t even know what it looked like, or know that Gina was more than just a disembodied arm, or know a life outside of a dark wooden box, then it seemed pointless to try to explain all about life on a blue globe, especially when half the time Gina didn’t understand it herself. So she settled for a simple question.

‘Would I see you if I emptied the wardrobe?’ 

‘No.’ 

Gina opened up the door and ran her hand through the clothes, without looking, just as she did every night. She thought she heard a faint sigh.

‘Goodnight then,’ she whispered. 

She crept back into bed, shivering as she slipped underneath her velvet covers and pulled them over her head. She replayed the past few minutes back in her mind, struggling to find an explanation. All she knew was that the creature could speak, that it was warm, that it could fit in her slipper, and that it got as much comfort from her checking the wardrobe as Gina did. And that was probably explanation enough.