Anusia Battersby

Roses by Abbey Kinsella Violet Steele, eleven years old, bright under Fresnel, and cradled in a thousand strong gaze, holds hands with a ghost.

She had landed in Chicago seventeen hours previously, and slept six since then.

curled under Othello's cloak like a sparrow in a nest.

Othello had not been performed since the previous November, and the cloak smelt stale, but the man who had swaddled her in it had sad, kind eyes that shone like a hazy moon and had glinted at the prospect of offering her a place to rest.

So she had not complained, and had dreamt bleeding watercolour dreams of being high up in the treetops.

She is Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, and an unconventional choice.

The antiquated Englishness she carries isn't soft and rosy-cheeked, not teapotted nor gingham.

She has instead the Englishness of nursery rhymes, those things sung softly and unscrutinised to dozing babes.

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye.

Four and twenty blackbirds.

Oh.

Oh, that's actually rather dark.

She has large brown eyes and hair that oil spill black of corvids.

She's clever like them, too, calculated in her blocked forays through plastic and canvas-built foliage.

She needs, after all, to be careful in her movements, light-footed and mindful of obstacles, and not just for the audience.

The ghost does not like passing through objects.

In the outstretched palm of her free hand, a tiny polystyrene robin perches daintily.

It is suspended from the ceiling by transparent twine, pulled taut so it bounces and quivers and does not fall.

A thing stirring down below, in the dark in that garden where he lives, she asks, with wide-eyed, solemn reverence.

Yes, whispers the ghost, louder somehow than the scripted gruntings of her weather-staff, a native New Yorker wrestling nobly with the Yorkshire accent.