In Bloom Read online

  ***

  Dad just made a joke of it when his Mum spoke to him later, and started going, wooooooooh, ghosts, woooooooh, whilst his Mum rolled her eyes and complained he never took things seriously enough, so the moment passed, but Kim knew for certain that he’d been eating Rab’s orange flavoured lollipops for, well, ever. So had Alice.

  Ghosts don’t give you sweets, do they?

  Even Johnny still had the occasional Werther’s (being too old for lollipops apparently).

  Now no-one else in the house remembered him.

  His much idolised older brother shrugged heavily when questioned, despite the obvious rapport he’d with the man since Kim could remember. Certainly there was no hint of recognition from his idiot sister who had accepted lollies with relish as often as he himself.

  Everyone now said that the house had been empty for an age, as long as they could recall, and let’s just hope the new lady is nice.

  No-one but Kim remembered Old Man Rab, but he bet Mrs Hitchcock did.

  Rab’s son, an intermittent visitor, visited no more.

  Time had swallowed him up.

  Or Mrs Hitchcock. Watching her crouched on her path snipping at the edge of the path with a pair of scissors, snipping away at the edge of the grass in an effort to make it perfectly straight, he wondered again how she’d done it. How she’d ripped Old Man Rab from the world and stole his house.

  Kim stared at her and decided that his parent’s contention that monsters were only pretend, and in your head, or actors wearing make-up on the telly, and that there was nothing to be scared of, was being severely put to the test.

  She had not only done something with Rab, to him, but had somehow contrived to make everyone else forget him. Rab told him his ‘Sandy’ would only truly be dead once there was no-one left who remembered them. Only Kim remembered Rab now.

  Rab had been the first to go but was not the last.

  In the weeks and months that followed her arrival there was a spate of disappearances from the village and Kim's little primary school, with, by Kim's reckoning, at least four of the local children gone. But instead of the outcry you would expect for a missing child there was nothing.

  A year or so back an eleven year old disappeared for a couple of days and the nearby fields had been filled with black suited policemen and locals trudging through autumn soaked fields, until it turned out the boy had run away and living on apples in a rundown barn just a couple of miles away near Hunsdon.

  Now four children and one teacher had gone from his little village school, and no mention had been made; the earth covered them and the people who would normally be frantically searching for their loved-ones professed no knowledge of them.

  “Who?” They would say, looking bemused. “Sorry Son, I think you’re confusing us with someone else, we couldn't have kids.”

  Then they walked sadly passed, a mournful glaze covering their eyes. Their loved ones existences were being buried in time, but for some strange reason Kim remembered them all.

  Like the young couple who lived across the road, who laughed when he asked after their baby, who had so often lain on the lush grass in front of their rustic home, on a blue and yellow blanket with ducks and bunnies embroidered into the soft fabric.

  They told him no, they'd never had a baby, but, and they looked hopeful and excited now, and glanced at each other before telling the boy, they were trying now for their first.

  "Can't believe we waited this long," they said, looking lovingly at each other.

  Eventually he stopped telling his family about the disappearances as they began threatening to take him to something his brother called a head-shrinker. He didn’t like the sound of that, although he wasn’t certain what it was.

  They went on for months like this, Kim keeping his distance, and pleading with his sceptical family to do the same.

  “She is a bit of a nutter,” his Dad acknowledged over a cup of tea and crumpets toasted and smothered in cheese spread, “all that bloody sweeping, and the stuff with leaves and the grass. But that doesn’t make her a monster. Just a daft old lady.”

  These were the last words Kim his father ever spoke to him.