Children of the Static #2
Dad had twice climbed onto the roof to try and fix the aerial to no avail.
The television always seemed to break at the worst times.
Mum watched boring programmes like Coronation Street and Crossroads, and Dad liked the wrestling and some football show hosted by a man with a bushy grey moustache.
Alfie and I loved cartoons and muppets, shows like Scooby Doo and Fraggle Rock.
And that was when the TV played up most, early on Saturday mornings when our parents were sleeping off the working week and their Friday night wine.
Saturday was the best. It was the day we got comics, sometimes with Highland Toffee or sour-sweet Wham bars taped to the covers. Alfie liked the Beano and Dandy, but he always attempted to peek at my horror comics too, even if they scared him.
“What’s that about?” he asked.
“Vampires!”
“Can you kill vampires?”
“Sure.”
“How?”
“I don’t want to scare you.”
“How?”
“Well, they hate garlic,” I said. “But you can put a stake through their heart, or cut off their heads, and they can’t cross running water.”
“Can’t they swim?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, garlic doesn’t make any sense either, does it?”
“Suppose not.”
“Maybe it’s symbolic. You can’t have life without water. Vampires are dead.”
“Undead, you mean,” said Alfie.
“Yeah. Undead. I guess the water is a barrier.”
“Right.”
Alfie and I always got up early at the weekends. Squashed up on the armchair, we would watch TV and slurp chocolate milk from our breakfast cereal, Alfie spilling his all over my lap and breaking wind. It was the same every weekend:
“You farted!”
“No, I never.”
“Liar.”
At the time, I didn’t connect the two things, and it might have been a coincidence, but looking back, the bad smell often preceded the television breaking. The smell was rancid, but it never put me off my breakfast.
One rainy winter morning, I left Alfie in the chair to watch Bugs Bunny, after reminding him to stop picking at the stuffing from the hole in the old armchair’s armrest. Mum warned him a week before, threatening no comics for either of us if the hole got any bigger.
But Alfie struggled to resist. The habit obviously brought him comfort.
I pulled his hand away and went to the kitchen to get another bowl of cereal, glad to be away from his farts.
When I returned, Alfie was standing inches from the television screen, staring into the static fuzz. His eyes were wide, and white noise blared from the old television, interspersed with distant, inaudible voices.
“Alfie.”
No reply.
“Alfie?”
I picked up the cane and smacked the top of the TV. Alfie jerked back into coherence at the same time the television snapped back into sharp focus, albeit in black and white. The screen displayed a little girl with an unwavering stare, her face pressed close to the camera.
I was still attending primary school, but I knew it was unusual for actors to stare directly at the camera.
Television was pretend and films were make-believe.
I knew instinctively the girl was not an actor.
She broke all the rules. It was as if she was staring into a mirror.
Due to the black and white picture, the colour of the scarf tied around the girl’s neck was unclear, but the image was clear enough to see the little kites stitched along its edge.
Without warning, the girl tilted her head and smiled. There was no sound, only the intermittent fuzz of white noise, but her sudden movement on screen startled me, and I dropped my bowl of Coco Pops, soaking the carpet and my bare feet with ice-cold milk.
It was a terrible grin, her every facial muscle contorting, her head visibly shaking with strain. Then she opened her mouth enough so I could see her black teeth. And I noticed her eyes. Her misshapen pupils were elongated and horizontal. Like a goat’s.
Suddenly the grin receded. She closed her mouth and stared deadpan into the camera, those terrible eyes boring into mine, her breath rapid, her exhalations appearing to fog the TV screen before she darted off camera, exposing the backdrop behind her.
Standing amongst the trunks of evergreens was a small wooden hut.
Around the structure, three other girls stood, aged around six or seven, all dressed in dark-coloured dresses, each spaced evenly apart.
The black and white picture was clear enough, but the girls’ faces were somehow distorted, as if observed through rain-smeared glass.
From behind the hut, a hunched shadow emerged, and the three girls scattered as quickly as tadpoles in a pond. And the TV flickered back to static.
***
“Sally, they’re making loads of rubbish TV these days,” Dad insisted.
“This wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was weird.”
“Sounds like you tuned into Channel Four,” said Dad. “The stuff they show! I’ve got a mind to complain. In fact, I will. I’ll write a letter this afternoon.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I think I do, love,” he said. “It’s not as if I haven’t got enough to do in this bloody house. But I know. Bloke at work brings in tapes. All sorts of rubbish. Video nasties, he calls them. And other stuff I won’t mention. Probably all taped off that blasted channel.”
Mum made everyone toast, and that was the last we spoke of it. At least until Bruce went missing again.
Months passed after the strange incident with the television set.
Dad managed to convince us the TV had somehow switched channels, insisting we’d tuned it to some foreign station not intended for children.
He’d posted the letter to Channel Four too, said the station made enough rubbish to deserve a complaint.
The weather was changing as spring arrived and then summer.
The forest canopy was thick, and there were pockets of shade where the sun’s rays never touched.
But the woods grew warmer by degrees, and wildflowers bloomed, cornflower and foxglove adding vibrant shades of blue and pink to the lush greenery.
Alfie and I arose early that morning. We’d left the television off since the weird TV station had terrified us.
Not to say we didn’t watch it with Mum and Dad.
We did. But our early morning pre-comic cartoon marathons had ceased.
Alfie refused to speak of the incident. I felt too some aspect of my little brother had changed, yet it was impossible to pinpoint exactly what.
The previous night had been hot, and our old home absorbed the heat.
Bruce had spent the evening pacing up and down the hall and landing, which, with the warm weather, further irritated Dad.
In the end, Dad had given in and let our dog sleep outside.
He insisted Bruce was old and well past wandering off.
What good would that do him? He had everything he needed at home.
Occasionally he would chase the odd squirrel, but he always returned.
That morning, though, we woke to find Bruce missing.
“He won’t have gone far,” said Dad.
“He’s probably just gone… sniffing,” added Mum.
I doubted it.
“He’ll be back for lunch,” insisted Dad.
He wasn’t.
Despite admitting his disappearance was unusual, Mum and Dad were still unconcerned, but Alfie and I refused to wait around. We packed a rucksack with cans of Cola, a couple of Marathon bars, and some crisps and went looking.
It was another uncomfortably warm day. Bugs swarmed in the air, clouds of insects swirling within the golden sunbeams penetrating the woodland’s thick canopy.
Above us, birds tweeted, and squirrels leapt from branch to branch.
The forest was even home to deer. Spotting one was unusual, but you knew they were around, often lingering at the furthest edges of our peripheral vision.
I thought of Bruce and how exciting the woods must be with his heightened sense of smell and hearing.
I’d learned at school dogs had around fifty times the number of scent receptors than humans did.
Perhaps Bruce had caught the musky whiff of a badger or heard the thumping feet of a tasty rabbit.
He was a happy dog. But I think I understood.
There was so much to explore. Maybe Mum was right: he’d just gone sniffing.
We walked for an hour, calling Bruce’s name intermittently. A response never came, though, and the woods seemed vaster the further we ventured. If only Bruce had barked or yelped, we would have at least known he was OK.
“What if Bruce is dead?” said Alfie, wiping sweat from his forehead.
“He’ll be fine.”
“Why can’t we find him?”
“Because these woods are big. Really big,” I said, trying to assure myself as much as Alfie. “We’ll find him.”
It was so hot, though, that after a while we were forced to stop for a breather. We shared one of the cans of Cola and a packet of Hedgehog flavoured crisps whilst resting on a rock. Once we were replenished, we repacked the rucksack and went on our way.
“You do know where we are, don’t you?” asked Alfie.
“Course.”
“Where?”
“We’ve not come far, not really.”
But the trees were now looming pines. Even at my young age, I knew pine forests grew more quickly than deciduous trees, but I wondered how old this forest really was. It felt old.
I knew the way back, though, I was sure, and I always remembered Dad’s advice.
If we ever got lost, we were to follow the river.
Rivers always led somewhere, and as it happened, this river led home, and you could always hear its flow in the forest. Like Alfie said, it sounded like a distant road, or like the white noise that sometimes played on our old TV.
We reached a point in the woods where the light changed.
The forest climbed the lower slopes of a mountain range that cast its long shadow on its eastern side, cloaking the landscape in eternal dusk.
The trees here were taller, as if every towering evergreen competed with its neighbour for the sun, choking any existing light at ground level.