Grinvill's Tin

1: The Little Tower

Moonlight lit up the room and Erica was suddenly wide awake. Her curtains were drawn open and from her bed she could see the dark shadow of her home stamped across the sparkling field. The strange tower which flanked her house cast a narrow black finger over the twinkling frost, its pointed turret transformed into the evil nail of a witch.

Against the edges of the ominous shadow, the grass looked like barbed wire: harsh, spiky in the glare of the moon. Beyond the illuminated field, the sea glittered.

Erica walked over to her window. Bound by the view, her fingers explored the lost items of her pockets, coming across a piece of paper - tightly compacted into an oblong shape - a small conical object (perhaps a toothpaste cap) and a hair elastic. This she pulled out, picking off bits of fluff and scraps of tissue. Scooping her hair away from her face, she twisted the band and pulled her hair into a high pony tail.

She was jittery. She could not stop looking at the field and the sea. She had the heavy feeling that things were about to change. Yet she hesitated by the window, her hands once more  in her pockets. Her brain suddenly registered what the piece of folded paper was and she was back there again, the moment when Noah had come up to her in the corridor between their classrooms and pressed the torn out piece of paper into her hand. He'd folded it as many times as he could before the paper refused to bend more. It was bad news of course. How could anything good come out of such a oppressed creation? He'd written that being in such an intense relationship was making him feel anxious - he needed space.

The moonlit scene continued to glint from beyond her bedroom window. She remembered how empty, how alone, she'd felt when she'd read his words. It was a second betrayal coming within days of her father's abandonment of her. Of her family.

It also hadn't helped that her father had been against Noah from the start. In fact, Noah had been the reason for the distance forming between herself and her dad. She felt a horrible gnawing in her stomach, to think that in the weeks before he'd disappeared, she and her father had argued. Yet he had been proved right: Noah was not to be relied on. Barely a week after her dad had gone missing Noah had ditched her.

But now, from out of nowhere, she felt a rising wave of elation. Good! - she thought – let him have his space. She removed the letter from her pocket. She didn't bother rereading it but instead tore it into long shreds. Without focussing on a single word of the broken writing, she squashed the strips into a ball which she then shoved to the bottom of the bag of her rubbish bin.

The scene outside the window still looked odd, alien even, but by small degrees her feeling of dread was metamorphosing. She still felt a strange scraping, but later, when she thought back on the moment, she found that what she was finally feeling was not fear but excitement.

***

'Hamish, wake up!'

Her brother propped his head up. He dragged a pillow towards him - letting fall a cascade of small objects: provisional driving licence, glasses, mobile and wallet. All landed on the wooden floorboards. Erica wondered how he could he get to sleep with so much clutter on his bed.

She went over to his window and pulled back the curtains.

'Look out of your window. Something strange is happening ...'

'What's going on?'

'Keep looking - you'll see what I mean.'

She kept her eyes on her brother. He was now sitting upright, his shoulders taut.

'There's something strange,' he said.

Then he went quiet.

He was staring out of the window. Erica followed his gaze, and she saw that in the empty landscape, a line of hooded figures had appeared. The one in the lead was the tallest. Behind him ten others followed. They were walking at a good pace, leaving a trail of smudged footprints in the white frost behind them.