CC 59: Magic Baby

I took to the benches at the square to roll up a cigarette and let the day slouch a little closer to its end.  It’s true what they said about these holidays and how they liked to fuck with the heads of the sad and unwanted, sending them hurling into tailspin, and sometimes reaching for the noose.  They framed pictures in the brain forever and you were more likely to look at those pictures when there was nothing else to do in the brain.  You were just stuck with them.  The brain is one of those museums you get dragged into often against your will like when you were on the school tour and the teacher wanted you to see a cloth rag that was worn by somebody in the 18^th Century when all you wanted to do was get to the swimming pool with the big slides.  Now I was in a museum of old Halloween’s as I watched the modern gallery from a distance and tried to keep the tobacco papers from blowing away.  In the museum, there were stuffed and mounted neighbourhood Cujo’s, and tapestries telling stories of old men in vests chasing kids off their backyard walls; rusted coins once concealed in barnbrack with toothmarks on them where children had met with pain in the past, and chalices that once bobbed apples for revelling college students; spellbooks used by witches during Bingo, and a collection of Emer’s fancy dress costumes hanging – Carmilla the vampire, Ripley from Alien, and Snow White (big fight the night she wore that one – loved her in it though – so scary and sexy).  Boo fucking hoo fucking hoo. 

‘Maybe we should go round to that witch on Legion Avenue you’re always talking about,’ Emer said to me on one of those vintage Halloween’s.  ‘I wouldn’t mind meeting her.’

‘Be my guest,’ I said, with a laugh.  ‘That woman’s long gone, I’m sure.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, maybe we should give it a go.’

‘Are you joking?  What the hell for anyway?’

‘Get into the Halloween spirit, you know.  Nothing like meeting a real witch.’

‘Come on, she was just a lonely old woman who freaked us all out when we were kids.’

‘That’s what you say now.  But how are you to know that there wasn’t some dark secret there behind it?  You’d be surprised how many of these stories we hear as kids actually bear out in reality – sometimes it’s worse than you thought as a kid.’ 

I always considered myself the fantasist between us, and Emer the realist, but we took turns in the roles most times.  Though, if I’m honest, when she got her crazy head on, Emer took the biscuit; its tin, and all the crumbs left on the table as well.

‘You’ve flipped your lid,’ I said.

‘We should do it now.  We should go to her.  Maybe she could help us.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Maybe she has a spell for making a baby.’

‘Why would we need a spell to do that?  I’m packed full of the proper stuff to make a baby.’

‘Well, your stuff hasn’t worked yet, in case you haven’t noticed.  Maybe a bit of witchcraft wouldn’t go astray.’ 

We did actually go to the house later that evening, egged on by a few drinks and some of the adventurous spirit we had in abundance before wedlock.  I held some details to myself about what the ‘witch’ actually was for me – some secrets are better kept sealed away from your other half, especially the filthy fantasies that heralded pubescence. 

Emer said we could pretend we were kids going from door to door if we put some children’s masks on.  ‘We’re both small enough,’ she said.  ‘The witch’ll never know.’

‘What if someone else lives there?’

‘Come on, it’s Halloween.  Get with the program.’

‘HALLOWEEN IS COMING

AND THE GEESE ARE GETTING FAT

WOULD YOU PLEASE PUT A PENNY

IN THE OLD MAN’S HAT

IF YA HAVEN’T GOT A PENNY

A HALFPENNY WILL DO

IF YA HAVEN’T GOT A HALFPENNY

WELL….FUCK YOU’

Emer practiced the old Halloween song as we made our way to the Legion Avenue Witch’s house. 

‘It doesn’t end that way,’ I told her.  ‘It’s GOD BLESS YOU.’

‘Ah, bless this,’ she said, with the finger.

I was surprised by the gorgeous spread of the ‘witch’’s front garden when we got there.  All I’d known as a boy was the back garden, and what I remembered of that was a horny marsh with warty reeds and cobwebby trees hanging at the back, and murk and mist all over it like in a Halloween tale about witches for children.  I didn’t expect snapdragons and emerald mushroom clouds, flowerbeds and shrubbery so lush and painterly, it looked like it had all been modelled after the gardens in heaven.  It didn’t fit the ‘witch’.  What interest would she have in the gardens of heaven?  Except to poison the fruit. 

‘I don’t think she’s here anymore,’ I said to Emer, fixing the Frankenstein mask I had on (the elastic was slipping over my ears). ‘There must be someone else living here now.  Look at this garden.  It’s too well-kept.’

‘Ah, will you give over,’ she said.  She’d gone mad in her quest for the witch.

Emer rang the doorbell.  There was no sound, so she took her knuckles to it.

‘I hope the witch isn’t afraid of ninja turtles,’ she said.  (That’s the mask she was wearing.  The blue ninja turtle.) 

Nobody came to the door.  Emer knocked again.  Still nothing.  Some actual trick-or-treaters, really small ones, passed by on the street and noticed the pair of us standing there like gobshites.  I think that’s when Emer wised up.

‘What the fucking hell are we doing?’ she asked.

‘No idea,’ I replied. 

We laughed and ran off home like mad kids after no good deed, buzzing past the actual trick-or-treaters who trembled in our wake.  Wasps and ladybirds.  (I made sure to close the gate of the pretty garden behind us, so you know.)  At home, we laughed about the whole thing, and drank some more, and cuddled.  Another wild adventure in the bag. 

That year turned out to be a good one.  Even though we never met the witch, and we never got our hands on the spell to make a baby.  But we had a good laugh all the same. 

I wondered about the Legion Avenue Witch and how she came to feature inside my head.  How much of that childhood sex dream had I embellished?  Had she ever even existed at all?  The museum in the brain wasn’t always mapped out perfectly; some artefacts could be misleading if they were placed in the wrong section, and some were obscured as more and more artefacts went in.  I was the caretaker of that museum, but a careless one, and it was no wonder I didn’t have a job.