On The Town

We'll have Manhattan,
The Bronx, and Staten Island too

Richard Rogers & Lorenz Hart

Deirdre was feeling old. Especially so today, although there was no reason she could put her finger on why today should be any different from yesterday or, for that matter, tomorrow. The pain was no different from usual.

Nevertheless, and despite her daily immersion in the metaphysics of cosmic Time and Space, Deirdre felt, when she woke that morning, that Time had tricked her and had not left her as untouched as it had always said it would. She rolled back the candystripe sheets and Witney blankets of her bed, stepped into the woollen slippers that were neatly placed next to it, stood up, stretched her arms and yawned.

‘Ouch!’ There was an unexpected twinge in her left shoulder and an unaccustomed stiffness in her legs. Neither had been there when she had gone to bed the previous night. Nor - she looked down - had her legs had such prominent veins or her belly protruded so.

If you or I were to wake up one morning to discover that we had aged twenty years overnight I should imagine our first reaction would be one of screaming panic, even though such an event is not uncommon with the onset of middle age. We always think of ourselves as being younger than our years, even as the stiffness of our limbs and the progressive fossilisation of our minds give us the lie.

But for Deirdre greying hair, thick legs, sagging breasts and a lined face meant something more.  For her to wake up in a bodily form that was so unwelcome must have a meaning beyond the simple passage of time. She would have to do about it.

‘Ashley. Mitchell. Pay attention now.’ The twins looked up from their high chairs. Ashley was clearly annoyed at being distracted from his porridge. Mitchell simply looked away. ‘I’m going out for an hour or two.’

‘Where?’ asked Ashley.

‘Why?’ asked Mitchell.

‘I’m going to see a friend. An old friend. I won’t be long.’

‘How long?’ asked Ashley.

‘A piece of string long. Do you two want to watch the telly while I’m out? I’ll put a film on if you like. What would you like to watch? Genevieve? Dougal and the Blue Cat? Flubber? Herbie goes Bananas?’

‘Spartacus,’ the twins said in unison.

Deirdre sighed. ‘Again? Really?’ The twins nodded. ‘Oh, all right, you two, if you must. Spartacus it is.’ She waited while the twins finished their breakfast. Then she helped them down from their high chairs, took each of them by the hand and led them up the two flights of stairs to the nursery.

It had recently been redecorated and remodelled. Gone were the kites and balloons on the walls, steam trains and Spitfires on the curtains, cots and changing table on the floor. Deirdre was not the only one in her house who was changing with the passage of time and although neither of the twins appeared to be any older than eighteen months, she knew that they would soon be ready to leave baby things behind them.

Still, it was a pity they had decided they wanted to be Goths. All that black and purple! Not only was it ridiculously, stereotypically… witchy, it made the place so gloomy she kept bumping into things. Never mind. They’d grow out of it - but into what?

Despite her misgivings Deirdre had given way to the twins’ demands for a television of their own. A sixty-inch Fujitsu plasma screen dominated one wall of the nursery and the speakers of a surround-sound system had been fitted to every corner. The noise they made would be quite horrendous, she knew, once the film got into its stride.

She took the DVD out of its box and slotted it into the player. The screen lit up. This was where the fun began. Each twin wanted sole use of the remote control and she was double-dashed if she was going to try to arbitrate between them. Especially today, when she was feeling so old. ‘Goodbye, Ashley. Goodbye, Mitchell,’ she said, closing the nursery door behind her. They paid her no attention whatsoever.

Annie lived a few doors down from Deirdre. Not as mortals count doors, of course. They - you and I, that is - could only gain access to the front door of Deirdre’s house from the pavement of Blackwater High Street in Surrey. Deirdre’s house had many other doors but they did not open out onto our world.

Most of Annie’s visitors believed that she lived on the twelfth floor of a high-rise council block in Liverpool’s Scotland Road. Deirdre rapped twice on the cat-knocker of a door that had once been painted green but was now covered by an unsightly security grille of rusted and graffiti-spattered iron. She stepped back into the lift lobby so that the CCTV cameras could see her clearly. There were footsteps in the stairwell behind the broken firedoor. They seemed to be coming nearer. She hoped that Annie would open up before they got very much closer.

There was no response from behind the grille. Surely Annie was in? Deirdre banged again on the knocker. ‘Anybody home?’ she called, not too loudly. No point in calling unnecessary attention to her exposed position. ‘Hey, Annie!’

‘All right, all right. I’m coming! Can’t you wait?’ A rough voice blared from a speaker fixed high up in the door.

‘Annie, it’s me. Let me in, please. Hurry.’

‘Deirdre! Just a mo.’ There was a slap of carpet slippers on linoleum and a rattling of keys from behind the grille.

‘Dust and Stars!’ Annie said as she opened the door and unbarred the grille and caught her first sight of Deirdre. ‘You’ve let yourself go a bit! Come in, love, come in. Enter of your own free will.’

Deirdre passed through to the hallway and waited while Annie refitted the grille and slotted the door-chains back into their sockets. ‘Come along. Kettle’s on. You look parched.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘There you go, love. Into the lounge. I’ll be round with a cuppa in a jiffy.’

‘Thank you, Annie,’ said Deirdre, giving a sigh of relief.

Annie’s lounge window faced east across New York’s Central Park. Many of her visitors recognised the Dakota Building through the springtime trees. It acted as what Annie called a grounding point; a fixed place where they could attach themselves if the strangeness of the adventure they had found themselves involved with became too much for them. Annie would say, yes that’s where John Lennon lived with Yoko Ono until he was murdered. ‘Murdered?’ some of them would say in astonishment, and Annie would have to bring them up to date with an event that had not yet happened in their lifetimes. Then they’d talk about the Beatles and Annie would tell them about the times George Harrison had been to see her and the places she had taken him. ‘To India, to see the Maharishi?’ they often asked.

‘Yes, sometimes,’ she’d reply, ‘but more often somewhere else.’

‘Where?’

‘That’s for me to know,’ she’d reply and wink and change the subject, often without them noticing.

Annie sat down, poured the tea, and opened a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits. ‘Not that you deserve any, the state you’re in,’ she said with a wink and a smile. They drank their tea and chatted about inconsequential things - people they knew, places they remembered. From time to time there was a rap on the front door and Annie got up and let a visitor in. Deirdre could hear them talking in the hallway. Then a door opened and closed and Annie returned and sat down again with a happy smile on her face.

After the third interruption Annie came back to find Deirdre standing by the picture window looking out over Central Park. It was late in the afternoon now and the buildings around her were casting long shadows across the grass and up to the first floors of the apartment blocks opposite. The westering sun coloured the spaces between the shadows with a warm orange-red haze. Deirdre opened the window and the sounds of the city came into the room; taxis and buses in the avenues below, aircraft in the skies overhead and - blanketing all - a susurration of voices. The voices of trees and grass in the gentle wind, of people in streets, offices and subway stations; the breath of the living city.

Deirdre looked out and drew the city’s air into her lungs. Its air and its life. Annie stood next to her and took hold of her hand.

‘Would you like to go out there for a while?’

Deirdre turned to face the older witch. ‘No, I can’t. My house, my visitors, the twins... I should be going back to them.’

‘Don’t worry about them. They’ll be fine. Especially your two. If anybody can look after themselves, it’s them!’ She laughed and Deirdre joined her.

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘Of course I am. Now come along.’

A fire escape led from a landing next to the window down to second floor level. Deidre followed Annie and waited while she unlatched the ladder at the bottom and dropped it down to the sidewalk below. She climbed down and waited while Annie pulled the ladder back up.

‘Go on!’ said Annie. ‘Take as long as you like!’

‘Thank you.’

Annie had changed Deidre’s form for her on the way down the fire escape and she now appeared to be a tall black woman with a bushy Afro hairstyle wearing smart grey business clothes and an ethnic bracelet rattling against to the gold wristwatch on her wrist. Anyone who saw her would assume that she was a rising young professional; a lawyer or a marketing executive perhaps.

Which way to go? Left? Right? Uptown or down? Harlem or SoHo? The Village? Deirdre didn’t know. This town was strange to her, known only through films and books. So, not wishing to get lost in the financial district on one hand or the wilderness of north Manhattan on the other, she faced forward, crossed the taxi-clogged street and passed through the gates into Central Park.

Immediately a grove of trees closed around her and the streetlights and noise of the city faded into the deep background. The transition from urban bustle to sylvan peace was startlingly abrupt. So startling that Deirdre stopped to look around. Behind her, the park entrance and the busy sidewalks of New York. Ahead and to both sides, the mystery of the wood, swathed in a green so dark that it was almost black. The path beneath her feet was covered in last autumn’s leaves - but this was spring. Surely the Parks Department would have swept them up by now?

Forward, said a voice from between her ears. See what you can find. So Deirdre, who was a good girl, did as she was told. Besides, she had an inkling of what was happening to her. So she followed the path, hardly noticing when its concrete turned to earth and the fallen leaves changed from umber to emerald, from crisp to soft. The midnight air grew warmer and the sky lighter. Every step she took was bringing her closer to summer, it seemed.

The wood, which had been silent when she first entered it, was coming to noisy life. Although Deirdre’s footsteps were muffled by the soft ground underneath, that only served to bring into clearer focus the rustle, patter and scrape of the creatures which lived there. Deirdre looked from side to side as she slowly walked along and now and then she caught sight of a flashing eye or the flick of a tail in the undergrowth. The moon was up and shining brightly through the overhanging branches. She held out her hands and marvelled to see them so fabulously lit, silver on black.

Deirdre walked. She was content to do so, because of the peace that surrounded her and the way that peace was seeping into her soul. She knew that the animal sounds which enveloped her were not the sound of hunters and hunted. There were no squeals of fear, no hurried scurries to the safety of underground dens, only purposeful gathering, nurturing and mating. And because of this knowledge, and the fact that she understood its nature as many others would have not, she felt a little separated from herself. She was enjoying the nighttime magic of the wood, but she could not completely believe in it, despite the fact that her city clothes had melted away and she was clad in a long dress of white muslin, clasped at the neck with gold.

And so, when a man sprang out from behind a beech tree and stood before her with his arms outstretched and a wide smile on her face she did not start, for she was not particularly surprised, even though he wore nothing but a breechclout and a necklace of green acorns.

Deirdre put her hands on her hips. ‘Hello, Annie,’ she said.

The man smiled wider. ‘Annie? What are you talking about?’ he said, and his voice was as rich and warm as his ebony skin. ‘I’m Andrew. Who’s Annie?’

‘You are. Come on, don’t you think I know what this is? The Enchanted Wood? Where you will lead me to a well, beneath which lies a princess who has been sleeping under a spell for five hundred years, and whom we will awaken with a kiss, and who will take us on a ship with hull made all of cedar logs and sails woven of young girls’ dreams to the Isle of Sage where our destiny lies. And there we will conquer a fiery monster, and afterwards there will be a tapestried, firelit room with a richly hung bed of damask silk and you will embrace me and I will yield to you and we, who have earned one another by feat of arms, will make strong passionate dragon-love all night and part forever in the morning!’

She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘I know this world,’ she said. ‘You get to it from the first landing of my house, through the linen press. It’s beautiful, it’s one of my favourites, but it’s not what I want right now.’

The man shrugged. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

‘This,’ said Deirdre, and clicked her fingers twice.

She was standing in Battery Park. Her companion from the wood was next to her. He was dressed in a sharp suit and Italian shoes. She was wearing a cocktail frock under a light coat. Her dark glossy hair was swept back from her face and tightly knotted at the nape of her neck. He was dashing and handsome, she lively and very pretty.

‘We have two choices,’ Deirdre said. ‘Back to your apartment right now…’

‘Or?’

‘Hit the town!’

‘And then?’

Deirdre grinned. ‘Then we go back to your apartment!’

‘You’re on, baby!’

‘Baby? Oh, pulease!’

‘Taxi!’

They saw a Broadway show and danced in the aisles to the music and nobody stopped them. They found a little subterranean bar, where a young man stood with his back pressed hard against the nicotine-stained wall and an electric guitar in his hand and sang torch songs from Ethiopia and Paris in the voice of a disturbed angel. They drank Old Fashioneds and listened intently. The men in the bar looked at Deirdre, until their women slapped their faces or took them away from temptation. The girls behind the bar looked at Deirdre’s friend and rehearsed what they would say about him to their friends the next day.

They walked the streets unmolested, laughing, happy. They rode the subway uptown. They stood under a marquee and kissed invisibly.

There was a cocktail party, somewhere so far above the ground that it was not overlooked by even the highest towers, where you could walk thorough the windows onto a roof terrace and float above the city as if airborne. The 3am city, still threaded with red and white car lights, where the sounds from below reverberated from glass walls and asphalt streets to the stars above. Deirdre stood with her hands on the railing, chatting to the rising actress to her left, praising her performance, drinking in the view, feeling Andrew’s strong arm on her slender waist. Feeling young. They should go soon, she knew. This evening, this wonderful evening of warmth and people should end, as all things end. But not until… She looked at Andrew.

‘Can we…?’

‘Yes.’ He clicked his fingers twice. And he was gone.

She was sitting on a leatherette chair by the window in Annie’s lounge in Annie’s flat in Liverpool’s Scotland Road. Annie was on the sofa, smiling. Nobody spoke. Then Deirdre, as if a signal had flashed in the room, got up from her chair and fell to her knees in front of Annie. She bowed her head. ‘Mistress…’ she said. She could not express her feelings. The night – that wonderful night – had evaporated away, like dew on a summer’s morning. And nothing had changed. It had not been enough. She was still too tired, too scarred. She could still not face going back to Blackwater where men came out of the treacherous daylight to inflict pain on her.

‘My child,’ said Annie and leaned forward to the younger witch. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. ‘My child.’

‘Oh Annie!’ sobbed Deirdre. ‘They hurt me so badly. And I could have… I could have hit back. I still don’t know if I should have or not. I could have saved them so easily. I didn’t know. I didn’t know it had got so bad, until… until…’

‘Until you found out how it used to be. When those men came to your door. I know, my sweet. It can be most dreadfully sudden, when it happens. The irons, the stake, the fire. They haven’t gone away, those men. The witchfinders. They still want to hunt us down. They still want to torture and rape us. They are our adversaries and they come when we don’t expect them to and they turn our hospitality against us. They want misery and pain as much as we want happiness and joy. They are cruel and ugly and they want to make the world in their image and its people their slaves. They wanted to blight you with anger. They wanted you to hit back at them, to legitimise their own hate. They wanted you to be as foul as them. And you such a pretty one...’

‘Pretty? Me?’ said Deirdre, looking up. Her cheeks were blotched red and white and streaked with salt trails. Her hair hung in lank rat’s-tails.

‘The prettiest of my children. Come to me.’ She patted her lap and Deirdre got up from the ground and sat on the older witch’s lap. She put her head on Annie’s shoulder.

‘You are tired,’ said Annie. ‘Aren’t you, my lovely?’

‘Yes, Mistress. I didn’t realise…’

‘Not Mistress. Don’t call me that. Not here. Not today.’ The air in the room had become warm and sweet-scented. The light had faded to an amber dimness.

‘Mother…’

‘Yes,’ said Annie soothingly. She undid the top buttons of her floral housecoat and lifted up her cotton blouse. ‘Here, my beautiful one. Here you are.’

‘Oh, Mummy,’ said Deirdre in a soft voice, ‘Oh, Mummy…’ She leaned forward and took Annie’s proffered breast in her mouth, rolling the nipple between her lips and sucking gently on it until the milk flowed freely. Its taste was sweet on her tongue, its warmth comforting and satisfying in her throat and belly. She sighed in profound happiness and Annie echoed her. It was all very quiet and still and private and joyful. The two witches lay together, naked now, arms wrapped around one another in the dim twilight of the room while Deirdre drew sustenance first from Annie’s right breast and then from her left. It may be that at one point suckling gave way to love-making, or it may not.

Later, Annie made a casserole of bacon and celery. Deirdre stood next to her in the kitchen and helped with cutting up the vegetables and laying the table. At one point the doorbell rang and Annie let in a boy of no more than 14 years old. He was silent, thin and wiry, and his eyes spoke of dealing and street-corner fights and the belt-buckle his stepfather wore. Annie showed him into the broom-cupboard off the kitchen and he, seeing not mops and bristles but a long beach of soft white sand under a moonlit sky, cried out in delight and ran forward until his feet raised phosphorescent trails in the quiet waves and he fell forward into the creamy waters of the bay.

‘It is worth it, isn’t it?’ said Deirdre with a smile, closing the cupboard door behind him. ‘When it’s like that. When they love it so much, when it’s so easy to help them. It does them so much good and it takes so little out of us in return.’

‘It’s always worth it,’ Annie replied. ‘But especially…’

‘When it’s hard. I know. But what about when it’s hard and it doesn’t work? What about that? Oh Annie, I’ve been so hurt!’

It still wasn’t enough. For all its delight, this brief stay at Annie’s had only named her wounds. It hadn’t cured them. More drastic measures would be necessary. She made her mind up even as she wished Annie goodbye.

A day or two later, Deirdre knocked again at Annie’s door. The elder witch answered and seeing the wicked grin on Deirdre’s face, looked down. Oh, she thought.

‘Now then Ashley, Mitchell,’ said Deirdre. ‘This is your Auntie Annie and you’re going to be staying with her for a week or two. Promise you’ll be good.’

‘Yes, Mummy.’

‘Yes, Mummy.’

‘Good boys. There you are, Annie. Everything’s going to be just fine.’

‘But… but why have you brought them here?’

Deirdre pushed the toddlers through the door and into Annie’s hallway. ‘Because I’m going to do what I really need to do. Take a break. Go away for a while. Go on… you’ll enjoy it as much as they will. You’ll have fun.’

The twins looked at Annie. Annie regarded the twins. ‘Oh yes,’ she gulped. ‘I’m sure we will.’

I’m sure we will. Annie, get your gun!