Chapter Eight
I know I shouldn’t take The Witchlore of Bodies with me on Friday night.
But I do. I feel better when it’s close to me, when I can reach into my bag and touch its leather cover, which never seems to be cold, whatever the temperature.
I sit on the tram, reading it as I ignore the group of fourteen-year-old lads farther down the train taking turns throwing empty cans of Coke past my head.
There’s something about the way the words on the page sound in my head that’s comfortingly familiar, like listening to my own voice:
I’m going to the protest today. I want to support the women.
Father says that if I care so much about suffrage for women then I should settle into a female form, but why should only women care that women are underrepresented?
So I shall go to the demonstration and I shall stand with the women in a female form beside them.
I enjoy the female form and the male. Why should I choose a path when I am made of both?
I tuck the book carefully deep down in my backpack and trudge along in the darkening evening, through the quiet suburban backstreets with red-brick houses and cars parked on the pavement.
Bastian is standing under a streetlight near the edge of the woods reading his book, the green lawn of the Boggart Hole Clough Park spread out behind him.
He’s wearing dark colors again. I wonder if it’s a calculated choice so he blends into the shaded woods or if he simply has a bit of a goth streak (which would frankly explain a lot).
However, it feels weird to open a conversation with an interrogation of his fashion choices so instead, I say, “I brought cheese.”
A dog walker passing us stares at me with a ludicrous expression and I wince with embarrassment, my cheeks flaring with humiliation as I castigate myself: Normal people say hello, you plonker.
I stare at Bastian, biting my tongue to stop more awkwardness spilling out, desperate for him to say something, anything.
“Good.” He’s putting his book away and, mercifully, seems like he wants this to be all business. The fire in my cheeks dies down. Bastian jerks his head toward the entrance to the woods. “Let’s go.”
“Why did I bring cheese?” I fall into step beside him.
We stride along the tarmac path that cuts through the fields, the new trees in their plastic sleeves rustling their turning leaves on either side.
The grass has been cut recently and the smell of it, combined with the rain we’ve had today, is pungently sweet in my nostrils.
“Because boggarts love cheese, obviously.” Bastian is easily clambering over the chained fence at the entrance to the woods, the last light of the day entirely lost in the thick press of the trees.
“I don’t think that’s obvious,” I say, struggling to follow him, the rip on my jeans catching on the wire.
“Do you not know where boggarts come from?” Bastian watches impassively as I tumble over the fence and fall into a mush of churned-up mud and leaves.
“I’d assumed it was, like, hell, or something.” I brush dirt off my hands. Since I am nearly 95 percent sure there absolutely won’t be a boggart hanging out in a Manchester park, I’ve not really looked into their provenance. “Am I wrong?”
“Yeah, you are, actually.” We start walking into the darkness of the woods, both of us holding up our phone lights.
It’s nearly nine and there are no dog walkers in here, the distant sounds of kids circling their bikes around the football nets getting lost in the dense bushes and bark.
“I guess you didn’t take any modules on magical creatures? ”
I get one of those horrible pangs of grief that threatens to strangle me because I wasn’t thinking about her and that was stupid of me, really stupid, because the remembering pain is so much worse than the knowing-it-all-the-time pain. They were her favorite modules.
“Elizabeth liked all that kind of stuff, she wanted to teach witchlore at a college one day.”
“Ah.” There’s a long, awkward pause and I can think of nothing to say to make it better. “Do you want me to tell you about boggarts?”
“Yes, please.”
“Boggarts aren’t demons, not really,” Bastian says, guiding us down the wood-chipped path. I hear rustles on either side and hope to god it’s just squirrels. “They’re silkies, that’s what my mum calls them, but they have other names, like brownies in Scotland.”
I frown, trying to think of everything Elizabeth ever mentioned about silkies.
There are so many different types of magical creatures—some that might have gone extinct and some that witches know still exist. I’ve never really been the kind of person to memorize them.
Some parents buy their kids those cardboard baby books with flaps of cute boggarts and gnomes on them.
My parents were not those kinds of parents.
“That little goblin that keeps fires lit and all of that?” I say, dragging that fact up from memory.
“Yes, well, sort of, they’re not goblins, they’re little domestic creatures that are connected to the land.” Bastian’s voice gets quieter the deeper we walk into the woods. “When they are fed and kept happy, they help keep the land safe and look after domestic dwellings.”
“Yeah, but that’s not what boggarts are today.” I remember everything that Elizabeth told me. “I mean, boggarts now are mean and make nests and collect the bones of kids—”
“Yes, because when a brownie or a silkie isn’t looked after properly they become a boggart,” Bastian explains. “They become resentful and nasty and if you name them, then they can never leave.”
“So that’s why people say never name a boggart.” It’s an idiom that pops up with witches all the time, a way of saying you did something that led to an unlucky series of events: and then I named the boggart. I give him a sideways glance.
“And you really believe we’re going to find one?”
“We’d better, otherwise the spell will be a dud.”
“And we’ll just be weirdos wandering around a forest with cheese.”
“Exactly,” Bastian says. I check quickly to see if he’s making fun of me, but it doesn’t look like it, despite me being the most awkward person on the planet. I quirk my lips into a tentative smile.
“But if it is here…” It won’t be, I tell myself. “We don’t just have to find it, we have to get its name?”
“Yep.” Bastian doesn’t sound bothered at all. Does anything ever faze him?
“So how are we going to do that?” I press him.
“Show me the cheese.”
I dig into my bag and hand it to him. He stares at the net of round cheeses that he’s holding.
“These are Babybels,” he says, shaking them slightly.
“Yeah, it’s cheese.”
“Are you eight?”
I flush and snatch them back.
“You asked for cheese!” I protest.
“It’s not even cheese, those are vegan Babybels—”
“Like the boggart will care! What did you bring?” I snatch at his satchel, opening it up and then stepping back, overwhelmed by the smell coming from it. “Christ, that is rough.”
I cover my mouth with my hand. It smells like a pair of really old football socks died.
“It’s blue cheese,” Bastian says stiffly, pulling out a package wrapped in beige cloth. It smells rank but it looks very posh. “It’s what my dad had in the fridge.”
“It’s so nasty!” I cough. “I’d definitely rather eat a vegan Babybel.”
“Well, let’s see which one the boggart likes best.” Bastian starts unwrapping it and then crumbling bits of it and dropping them onto the forest floor. “Come on, leave a trail.”
I follow his lead and start unwrapping Babybels and breaking them into pieces that I drop behind me as Bastian steps off the path and starts to make another one through the dense trees, stamping down stinging nettles, the wet leaves slipping past my cheek and twigs catching on the shoulders of my coat.
I think of the lucky dog or squirrel that is going to be feasting on my Babybels later.
“Lights off,” Bastian mutters. “Don’t want to scare it.”
Now that we’re off the path and there’s no open sky above us, no moonlight or starlight, I’m very aware of the crunch of branches under my feet and the sound of Bastian’s breathing beside me in the dark.
Unhelpful questions chase around my mind: What am I doing here with this person?
What kind of impulsive prat am I that I’m doing this?
Even if there’s no boggart to be found, willingly taking a stroll in a dark wood with a strange man is hardly peak decision-making for someone like me.
“So your dad’s into stinky cheese?” I ask, mainly to stop the worries in my head that I am, like Counselor Cooper says, “behaving recklessly with my own existence.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe that’s why your mum left,” I quip. Bastian whips his head around to stare at me as I wince. Elizabeth used to say my mouth works faster than my brain. Classic case in point.
“That … was incredibly insensitive,” he says, stopping. My face reddens. I don’t know what it is about him that makes me so awkward I spew inappropriate nonsense, but it’s definitely becoming a pattern.
“Oh, come on, it was just a joke,” I say weakly, so distracted by my own thoughtlessness that I trip over a tree root and step in dog poo, an entirely deserved karmic turn.
“Do you feel better when people say that afterward?” Bastian demands.
“No, sorry,” I mutter. I feel like I’m being told off by a teacher and I’m suddenly sweaty with humiliation. Twat. I repeat inside my head, I am a total twat.