Fancy…

Some say that my head is full of fancy and they mean it in a bad way. Well, what do they know? Besides, what else is there to fill your head with? Lies? Hard-cash-column numbers? Lists of lists of lists? What grey, soggy things to put inside your head. No, give me fancy every time, it will do for me every time. Oh yes, you know where you stand with fancy – anywhere you want, or everywhere, or nowhere at all. No plane to catch, no axe to grind, no piper to pay – well, not unless you want to… and every day can be grey, or sunny, or the night time if you choose, whatever takes your fancy. Mind you, sometimes fancy takes you places that perhaps it would be better not to go, much better not, I fancy.

Let fancy take me away in a spree of seeing.

I think I’ve always been fanciful in that way. I remember spending hours one night, till early dawn-breaking morning, talking to the small dead boy who was standing just out of sight behind my bedroom door. How old was I - two, three? I never saw him again, but he never left either. My nightly flicker of bedroom horserace – flicker, flicker, across my ceiling, a rocking horse winner, without a single rocking horse, too many whips.

Later I fancy I heard voices in the hall below, whispering just low enough so that I couldn’t quite catch their secret words and then in my teens I’d fancy to sometimes see a thing, quick and sharp, dart across the mirror behind me as I feigned to shave – and did I really happen across my grandmother one early morning? Just fancy I expect.

As an adult I’ve fancied that I’ve seen and heard many things; a young girl standing by my bed, a voice on the stairs, a dark man staring up at me from below, my name being called in the empty house, footsteps walking up my stairs, a darting cat, the smell of old perfume, an empty face at an empty window, a shadow crossing where no shadow should be, a figure in the corner, a room I chose not to enter until later when it was gone. All my fancy, I’m fanciful you see.

I fancy that they’re always here, we’ve just unlearnt how to see them - just as they, or most of them, have unlearnt how to see us. But sometimes I fancy that we see each other across a divide wider than the space between us – at least that is my fancy.

Crrrrrk - dong…dong…dong…dong…dong…dong…dong…

dong…dong…dong…dong…dong…midnight…shhhhhhhh.

Fancy, all fancy - throw salt, see light, say spells, tell lies, record hard-cash-column numbers, make lists of lists of lists - anything but fancy.