Molly

Bright as a daisy and fast as a river, Molly Atherton was an imaginative child. She saw monsters in shadows and aliens in shower curtains, whether by the sunshine of the mid-afternoon, or the shooting stars of the deepest night.

Her world was inhabited not by the everyday of adults and other children, of going to school and learning her lessons, of walking the dog to the park and returning in time for chicken nugget dinner, but of heroes and heroines, dastardly villains and cunning plots, of battles and adventures, tragedy and excitement. Her inner world would make Jim Henson weep with jealousy.

Molly was such an original child she didn’t need things like computer games or TV to fill her day. She hardly needed toys. From the minute she woke, her inquisitive eyes were searching the room for things that could be turned into other things. A bath mat became a cape. A bar of soap became a poisonous cake. A twig became an arrow, and a tree branch the crossbow.

Molly’s imagination didn’t please everyone. Her insistence on checking every apple for signs of poison before choosing one for lunch caused her mother considerable irritation. That she would turn out all the lights in the house and run around with a sheet over her head often caught her father off guard, no matter how many times he proclaimed he was a rational man who did not believe in things like ghosts. That she would always take map, compass, magnifying glass and full backpack on journeys to her grandmother, who lived only a block away, consistently mystified her nanna and bemused the neighbours.

‘The girl has different eyes in her head, that’s the long and the short of the matter,’ her grandmother would say as she shook her head. ‘Different eyes see different things.’

At school, Molly’s imagination made concentrating in class difficult. She was often staring out the window, instead of using her abacus to finish her maths, or drawing pictures on her book instead of reading the information and answering the questions. Some days, Molly would get so involved in the story inside her head, that she would suddenly leap out of her chair, and make loud exclamations, which inevitably shocked her classmates, and distracted them from their science experiments with magnets, or the memorising of French conjunctive adverbs, or whatever it was they were trying to do at the time.

Monday the 1^st of July was a day like any other, no matter how many times Molly’s mother would later go over the events and try to identify some missing clue, that might explain the subsequent tragedy. Molly had chosen to wake up by commando-rolling out of her bed to avoid enemy fire, instead of, as her mother yelled after smashing two plates in shock, ‘PULLING OFF THE COVERS AND PUTTING YOUR TWO FEET ON THE GROUND LIKE A NORMAL HUMAN BEING’. Molly snuck down stairs, pressed close to the wall, eyes peeled for snipers, and crawled to the kitchen, where she insisted she needed to eat her breakfast under the table, in case, as she hissed up to her mother, ‘they were watching.’ Molly’s mother had driven her daughter to school, insisted she couldn’t wear a wig and black sunglasses into class, despite her daughter’s protestations that ‘someone might see her.’ But this was all quite ordinary behaviour. If anything, it was not the worst Mrs. Atherton had ever seen, recalling, with a shudder, the day that Molly had been convinced her father had accidently added nuclear waste to her usual bubble bath, and had collapsed, writhing and screaming in front of the school building as, in her words, she ‘transformed into her mutant alter-ego with super-super strength and fantastic-amazing-supersonic speed ability.’ That had taken some serious conversation at the school nurse’s office, and many, many promises to book Molly in for a session with the school counsellor as soon as possible.

So, when Molly’s mother got a call on her mobile at work from Molly’s school, she wasn’t surprised. She presumed that her daughter had somehow managed to sneak the wig into class and was refusing to take it off, and Molly’s mother would need to reason with her over the phone.

‘Mrs. Atherton?’ It was the principal. She had only ever heard the principal’s voice on a few previous phone calls and it had always meant some kind of disaster. Molly had climbed the school building with homemade wings, telling her classmates she was going to ‘put on a show for them’, or had decided that the school was just inviting trouble by not having it’s own moat, and had proceeded to dig a large hole on one side of the building with one of the gardener’s shovels, eventually cracking a water pipe, requiring some very expensive plumbing work to be done. But, the principal was panicked, not stern.  

‘We’ve been looking for her all afternoon Mrs. Atherton! We’ve checked all her usual hiding spots, we’ve checked all her unusual hiding spots! We’ve gone all over the school, every child, teacher and staff member has tried to find her! The fact is, she’s gone! Just… disappeared! The children are telling very strange stories. I can’t imagine what it all means. We’ve called the police. Will you come down at once?’  

The school was in uproar. Teachers were panicking, the police were searching the grounds, and the children wouldn’t settle, no matter what the adults said or did. They had seen something, they had, they had, and it was no good the teachers or the principal or the police searching for Molly, because the fact of the matter was she had vanished into thin air.

The adults thought that the excitement was doing something funny to the children’s heads, but after the 23^rd student had grasped her hand, looked earnestly into her eyes, and assured her that it was the strangest thing, but Molly absolutely had vanished, Mrs. Atherton began to think differently. She allowed herself to be pulled along by the hand of an unimaginably small boy named Nigel. He brought her to a shady corner of the playground where a group of children had gathered furtively. They stood in a circle, around the outside of a ring of small stones, just large enough for one child to stand in at a time.

‘This is where it happened,’ a child whispered.

‘Just as the bell rang.’

‘Ding, ding, and then it happened.’ 

‘In there.’

‘Right in the middle.’

They pointed to the centre of the circle of stones.

‘That’s where she vanished,’ they breathed together.

Mrs. Atherton inspected the stones. They seemed to be perfectly ordinary. Perhaps a little smoother than your average stone, but otherwise unremarkable. To the collective gasps of the children, Mrs. Atherton leaned in and touched the grass in the centre of the circle. Nothing happened. The ground was perhaps a little softer, but Mrs. Atherton thought she might also be imagining it.

She turned to the children.

‘What did you see?’

There was a cacophony of voices.

‘She made the circle…’

‘Stepped inside…’

‘Did a dance…’

‘No, she was spinning…’

‘She turned around 2 times…’

‘3 times…’

‘There was a funny sound…’

‘Like when you slurp your milk…’

‘And she was gone!’ They finished.

Mrs. Atherton sighed. Molly had clearly told them some story before she went… well, before whatever happened, happened. They were running away with Molly’s imagination, once again. She smiled at the children kindly.

‘And, where do you think she could have gone when she… disappeared?’

The children paused. They had not considered this.

‘China?’ suggested one boy. There were sniggers.

‘Wonderland!’ Cried a very excited girl.

‘She fell into her daydreams,’ said a quiet voice on Mrs. Atherton’s right. She looked down. There was Nigel staring at the stones with all the seriousness of a 40 year old. The other children gaped at him.

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘She did! That’s where she went.’

‘Got sucked into her dreams! Like a vacuum cleaner – shuck! Off she went!’

‘She did it too much,’ Nigel nodded, sagely, ‘So the dreams got more true than the true things and they gobbled her up.’ The children nodded with Nigel, hanging on his every word, as if he were a tiny prophet. Mrs. Atherton shook her head trying to break the spell, reminding herself that this was nonsense.

But after months of no leads and no evidence and no clues, Mrs. Atherton began to see the children’s story as her only hope. ‘Different eyes see different things,’ she muttered to herself over the dishes, as she fixed her hair, as she drove off to work. ‘Different eyes see different things,’ she said over and over to her husband, as he tried to eat his dinner, as he was talking to the detectives on the phone, as he sat sadly in Molly’s room, looking at her cold, empty bed and the dust collecting on the shelves.

Six months to the day since her daughter disappeared, Mrs. Atherton returned to the school playground and the circle of stones. The children had been too scared to remove the stones, had been too scared to even go near them. She had come at midnight, which seemed appropriate somehow, and the playground was dark. Not entirely certain what she was doing, Mrs. Atherton stroked the stones one at a time. When she had stroked them all, it only seemed right to keep going, so she did that too. Under her breath, she started saying her daughter’s name over and over again, picking up a rhythm, speaking the name to each stone, like it was a precious secret, like it was the most important thing in the world. Around and around the circle she went, picking up speed and intensity, until she was shouting, screaming as loud as her throat would let her. The stones seemed to grow hot under her fingertips, seemed to glow a dull orange colour, there was a sudden sound, and Mrs. Atherton jumped back. There, in the centre of the circle, looking a little dazed and tired, a bit thin and pale, was her own daughter, her own Molly back again.

The other mothers look at Mrs. Atherton strangely now, she knows, and no-one stops to talk to her in the supermarket aisles. It’s true that Molly hasn’t been quite right since she came back. There’s no creative use of ordinary objects, no attempted flights off the roof of the school, no checking and double-checking of wardrobes for monsters before heading to bed. In some ways, Mrs. Atherton is grateful. It makes for a much more peaceful home life. It’s possible to get through dinner these days without plates being broken, or food ending up on the floor, or Molly under the table. Though, on some days, Mrs. Atherton finds herself missing the old Molly. Its just an idle thought, because Mrs. Atherton knows, of course, that this is her Molly, even if she does spend most of her day sitting on the couch and staring at the wall. Mrs. Atherton knows what the others think. Her husband gets very angry every time she sets a third plate for dinner. So, to be honest with you, sometimes there are broken plates.

But, what can you do? ‘Different eyes see different things, that’s the truth of the matter,’ Mrs. Atherton says every week to her therapist.