Help the Witch

by Tom Cox

  ‘Who’s “we”?’ asked the young, awkward man.

  ‘Don’t you worry about that. Just take this,’ said the old man with the long white beard, handing the banjo player a pouch of gold and a polythene bag containing some leaves.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said the banjo player. ‘What’s this green stuff in the bag?’

  ‘It’s a magic plant. Eat some of it, and it will help you play more colourfully and interestingly.’

  ‘What about all this snow? Where did that come from?’

  ‘That’s magic snow, not real snow. But it’s not magic in the same way the magic plant is magic. You must never, on any account, lick it or sniff it.’

  ‘Why would I want to lick or sniff snow?’

  ‘I don’t know. But just don’t, OK?’

  The young banjo player and the old bearded man with the raven went their separate ways: the banjo player back along the path towards the village, and the old bearded man through a cavity down into a cave below the cliff edge, which looked for all the world like a shimmering psychedelic portal to a silvery netherworld. The young man’s family were glad to see him back, although it had been a busy week for them, what with it being lambing time, and if they were being frank, it had been only in the last quarter of an hour or so that they’d noticed he was gone. That night he plucked his banjo with renewed enthusiasm and, after a couple of tumblers of mead, decided to ingest some of the magic plant the old man had given him. Very soon, a remarkable change occurred: he began to play his banjo more beautifully and colourfully than ever before. It felt almost as if he wasn’t actually playing it himself, that the tunes were somewhere in the ether above him, and he was simply reaching up and gently grabbing them, as if they were perfect, docile butterflies.

  Over the next few years, the man played his banjo at alehouses and taverns all around the country, drawing larger and larger crowds. Rarely was there a night when a comely young lass did not accompany him to bed and let him ejaculate on or at least around her. Back in his home village, few old friends recognised him as the ungainly lad they’d once called ‘Banjo Boy’. His large, awkward jug ears were now covered by a lush mane of hair that made the maidens of the high street swoon every time he walked down it. One even asked him to sign her cleavage, which left ample room for all of his four names. It was only afterwards that he realised this was Eleanor, the girl who’d once planted a cruelly exciting sarcastic kiss on his lips in the final year of school, purely to distract him while her brother crept up from behind and pinned a note to his back, on which was written an unkind phrase.

  It was generally thought that the man’s first, second, third and fourth albums were among the greatest that had ever been recorded with just a banjo. But, upon recording his fifth banjo-only album, he experienced a bewildering creative block. His magic plant supply – which oddly, perhaps as an intrinsic part of its magic, never seemed to diminish – was not having its usual effect on his songwriting. Taking twice his usual dose seemed, if anything, to exacerbate the hindrance. He possessed so much he’d once dreamed about: his own horse and wagon, seventeen pigs, five banjos, a beautiful girlfriend – plus another, three villages away, in case he got bored – but he felt engulfed by an intangible emptiness.

  In desperation, he wandered to that same clifftop path where he had liked to play his banjo as a youth but, not feeling any more positive, curled into a ball again and, as the snow began to lightly fall and settle, started to weep just as he had all those years ago. This time, though, he didn’t carry on for seven days and seven nights, since that is a long time to curl up in a ball and weep, and as you get older you develop an awareness of the sanctity of time, even if you’re in a jaded period, as the banjo player was. Also, as he sank to the ground, a snowflake landed on his nose and dripped slowly down into his mouth.

  ‘Mmm. That’s kind of nice,’ he thought, tasting the snowflake. Cupping his hands, he scooped up more of the snow, and began to put it in his mouth and nose.

  Then a funny thing happened: the self-doubt he’d been experiencing so acutely recently began to evaporate. Picking up his banjo, he began to pluck furiously, and sing, and the results were phenomenal. Soon he was thrashing around the clifftop furiously, plucking out song after song and frantically stuffing snow into each of his orifices. ‘This could be my best work ever!’ he said aloud to the big white sky, after laying down what felt like another sweet track. ‘I will call the album that will emerge from these sessions … Snow Jesus!’

  Just before the banjo player headed back from the clifftops to the village, he thought he caught sight of a vision from his past, about fifty yards away, through the snow. If he was not mistaken, it was the old man he had met here all those years ago, his beard even longer than ever, the same raven obediently perched on his bare, mottled arm. It was hard to tell, as the snow was falling heavily, and because he really was quite off his face by now, but before the old man turned back to pass through his shimmering psychedelic portal, he seemed to shake his head in a sad way and mouth a sentence which, though indistinct in the noise of the weather, would have been made out by expert lip readers as, ‘Same thing happens every fucking time.’

  After that, and before his moneyed, lonely death in a beach house thirty years later, the banjo player made five more million-selling albums, each steadily more awful than its predecessor, apart from maybe the last one, which some people called ‘a return to form’ but mostly in a wishful way that was entirely down to context.

  OLD MOTHER KILDERKIN

  Deep in the Lincolnshire Fens – a region of the country so unnervingly flat it was said that on a clear day you could see a dog walking towards you from two whole miles away – there lived a youth who worked as a disc jockey. He told people, ‘I work as a disc jockey,’ but what he really did was just play records all day in his bedroom at deafening volume, if you overlook that one time his friend had got him a gig at a chain bar, to which, after thirty-one weeks, he’d still not been invited back.

  Next door to the youth – who was actually twenty-five, and not really a youth at all any more – lived a tiny old lady with nine cats. ‘I wondered if you might turn the music down a little, please,’ the tiny old lady would ask the youth, but he’d never listen. Sometimes, he’d even turn up his favourite song of the time in response, which was usually extremely bass-heavy with greatly monotonous lyrics. ‘Get lost, you old biddy!’ he would shout through the wall. This went on for well over a year until one day the little old lady was suffering from a terrible headache and, driven almost insane by the beats coming from next door and the resultant shaking of her furniture, decided to write a gently worded note and put it through the disc jockey’s door. This was too much for the intolerant disc jockey, who’d managed to go a quarter-century not having the inconvenience of having to try to see life through anybody else’s eyes.

  Having read the note, he stormed to the old lady’s door. ‘Balls to you!’ he shouted, as she opened it, storming straight into her living room, as she could not afford a house with a hall. ‘You don’t know how it makes me feel when the music pulsates through me. You don’t know anything. You don’t know about people, or life! You’re just a shrivelled old crone whose only friends are cats.’

  This was his final mistake, since he had no idea he was talking to Old Mother Kilderkin, who had the strength of forty men and had lived for a thousand years, since before the Fens were drained and were populated only by swamp people. With one casual upward slice of her hand, she broke his neck, then, calmly switching the radio on just in time for her favourite gardening programme, proceeded to cut off his genitals and feed them to her cats in a pie.

  LITTLE GOTH TWAT

  The popular dandy was on an adrenaline high from a comedy show and, all around him, attractive members of the opposite sex fanned and jostled, telling him how much they liked his hair and trousers and jokes. Despite being self-deprecating about his allegedly calamitous love life during the show itself, he did his usual thing of getti
ng his minders to hand out raffle tickets to offer four not quite randomly selected women under the age of twenty-two the chance to have sex with him. But one callow maiden stood out above all the others. Her name was Clematis and she came from a small mining village over the way. Her mother had died from eating pebbles when she was not more than the age Clematis was now, leaving her father to raise Clematis and her brother alone on the paltry wages of a fast-food restaurant employee.

  ‘Ooh yeah, I like you,’ said the popular dandy, evaluating Clematis’ porcelain skin and bob of meadow-soft hair. ‘You can come and live in me big gothic mansion with me in the Southlands. All you have to do is promise to make me trousers for me. As you know, I do like me trousers, ooh.’

  Clematis was a very bright girl, but she was also yet to reach that age that women reach when they become more perceptive about when men are being dickheads. Also, the mining village was very hard to get out of, in a social or financial sense, for those searching for a better life, and, with the popular dandy’s trousers being such a legendary part of his image, she felt honoured to be given the chance to be directly associated with them. So she accepted his offer and set off to live with the popular dandy in his vast gothic mansion in the Southlands, departing by velvet-lined coach, with her father and brother tearfully in the background, waving their handkerchiefs – which were not actually handkerchiefs but single, recycled kitchen towels, as they couldn’t afford real handkerchiefs.

  Quite quickly, it became clear that life with the popular dandy would not quite be as Clematis had pictured. The main problem was that, every day, he locked her in a room in the turret of his mansion and would not let her out until she had sewn him a pair of his famous trousers. He was also very hard to please.

  ‘Ooh, these are not me trousers,’ he would say, after Clematis had spent a long day sewing. ‘They don’t have me signature look, guv’nor.’

  His demands became more and more taxing: first four pairs of trousers a week, then five, then seven. One day, having stabbed herself in the cheek with her sewing needle through sheer exhaustion, Clematis broke down and began to cry.

  ‘Oh, why did I agree to this?’ she said out loud to nobody. ‘I miss Father and the village and Jack, and even the old industrial chimney that used to belch black smoke into the air all around.’

  Just then she heard a strange low knocking at the door. Opening it and expecting it to be the popular dandy, asking for yet more trousers, she was amazed to see the oddest little thing she’d ever laid eyes on: not more than two feet high, coal black in appearance, covered in cobwebs, and with a long tail flapping on the floor behind it.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m Little Goth Twat,’ said the thing.

  ‘That’s not a very nice name.’

  ‘No, I know. It’s what him downstairs calls me. I hate it. He bought me from a circus a long time ago and promised me a better life, but it was a lie. One of his rich Satanist friends put a spell on me, which keeps me locked in this place for eternity. He gets me out and makes me dance for his guests sometimes. It’s no kind of life, even for a stunted otherworldly being. I can’t even remember what I used to be called. It was so long ago.’

  ‘He’s a bit of a bastard really, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yep.’ The little thing handed her a handkerchief – an actual one, not a sheet of recycled kitchen towel – which he seemed to produce from a pocket: a curious turn of events, as he wasn’t wearing clothes. ‘I am sorry you have fallen foul of him too. I would like to help you, though.’

  ‘And how do you propose to do that?’

  ‘I’m very good at sewing trousers, and very quick too. I will take over your job.’

  ‘Goodness! Really? And what will be your payment for this?’

  ‘I will give you three attempts to guess my name. If, by the third attempt, you have not guessed correctly, you must take my hand in marriage.’

  ‘But you just told me your name. It’s Little Goth Twat.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. I always do that. I’m such a scatterbrain.’

  And, without further ado, just as he had done with her eleven predecessors, Little Goth Twat led Clematis down the secret escape tunnel, and opened up the great iron door at the end of it, allowing her to run to freedom.

  That night, having finally reached the end of his tether, Little Goth Twat crept into the popular dandy’s chamber and used a tiny hammer to cave in his oppressor’s skull. This also had the effect of breaking the spell cast by the rich Satanists. As he walked to freedom, he felt no remorse, and wondered why he hadn’t done the same thing years ago.

  STEVE WHO WAS JUST A TOMATO

  Penny cared about the world and what people had done to it. She knew she couldn’t save it, but she didn’t see that as any reason to stop trying. She was always the last at the farm and spent hours removing small shards of plastic from the compost heap, long after everyone had gone home. Tomatoes and lettuce were her favourites, and she handled them with no less tenderness than if she was handling one of her own offspring, carefully pricking them out by their fragile cotyledon leaves, sniffing them and letting their aroma overpower her. She was good at what she did, but she also loved the mystery of her craft: you could never quite tell what would or wouldn’t thrive. In the polytunnel, one particular tomato plant shot ahead of the others, reaching for the stars up the taut baler twine that Penny had lovingly knotted a couple of weeks earlier. What was going on deep underground that made one plant give up a dazzling crop but another barely get out of the ground? Penny liked to attempt to answer this question, trying out a variety of self-made comfrey and nettle feeds and organic mulches, but her inability to ever do so comprehensively was also the driving force behind her love of growing.

  It was a calm, sunny afternoon in early June – not too hot, but definitely not cold – when birdsong sweetened the air. Penny had just returned from the post office, where she had been collecting a courier delivery of a parasitic wasp, which she was hoping would destroy the aphids that were attacking some of the tomatoes on the east side of the polytunnel. Law dictated that you had to tell the person at the post-office counter precisely what it was in your package when you were paying for registered delivery, and it made Penny laugh to think of the private seller of the parasitic wasp answering this question with the statement: ‘A wasp.’ She was still chuckling to herself about this as she bent over to do some watering and was surprised to hear a deep male voice behind her.

  ‘You have lovely hair.’

  Penny spun around to see where the voice had come from, assuming that perhaps one of the people staying on the campsite near the farm had wandered into the polytunnel out of curiosity. It happened sometimes, and Penny was always polite and garrulous when it did. But as she stood upright and looked around, there was nobody to be seen. Questioning the solidity of her own mind, she continued watering the plants.

  ‘I’m sorry if that sounds creepy. I mean it in a sincere way. It has a very natural look. What do you use on it? I’m guessing it’s some kind of seaweed mixture. Not that I’d know much about that kind of thing, being almost totally bald!’

  Penny shot bolt upright again. She wondered if the person talking to her was hiding, which, even though nothing he had said to her was actually creepy, made it kind of creepy.

  ‘I’m over here. At the back. Keep walking.’

  Penny followed the voice until she arrived at her prize beefsteak tomato plant, the one that, while still juvenile and unripe, already seemed in danger of ripping through the polytunnel roof.

  ‘Up here. Look above your head.’

  What Penny saw next belied everything she had learned as a student of horticulture. Looking down on her from the top of her most impressive tomato vine was a grinning red face topped with an umbilical cord of green hair.

  ‘I know. It’s odd. I don’t know how it happened, either. I have decided to call myself Steve. It seems as good a name for a tomato as any, and I’m not really a fan of
the more clever names.’

  Over the next few weeks, Penny and Steve slipped into an easy routine on the balmy summer evenings when nobody else on the farm was around: Penny watering and feeding the plants and Steve commenting on the way he saw the world, which was in amazing detail, for a tomato. What was nice is that they could sometimes be silent in each other’s company too, and it was never uncomfortable. Steve was always showering Penny with compliments: not just about her hair, but about her clothes, her dexterity, and her tolerance.

  ‘It was so exemplary how you handled that,’ he said, after watching one of the other growers – a hypochondriac called Fran, whose only two topics of conversation were herself and those who had wronged her – babble at Penny for half an hour. ‘She tends to bludgeon people with conversation. You were patient, and nice, but you also showed her up as the idiot she is.’

  Sometimes Steve opened up to Penny about some of his fears and hopes. He said he had no idea what he was here for, no idea why he’d been made different from the other tomatoes. It was very frightening sometimes, but he tried not to think about it, and to just get on, stay in the present, and enjoy what was turning out to be a brilliant summer. One evening, when Penny was away, listening to a Bulgarian folk band in a field, vandals rode motorbikes over some of the vegetables: many carrots and butternut squash perished. Steve had shouted, but the vandals couldn’t hear him above the engines of their bikes. He used all his strength to bend back his vine, and try to reach a rock lying loose in the corner of the polytunnel, then catapult it through the polytunnel door at one of the riders, but it was no good: he couldn’t get there.

  ‘The important thing is that the intention was there,’ Penny told him the next day after she’d cleared up and heard Steve’s story. ‘You might not be a hero, but you’re a hero of intention. And that’s good enough for me.’

  It had been an unusually wonderful summer on the farm, but it still had the natural, seasonal components of all summers, including harvest time, and around eight weeks after Penny and Steve first met, the inevitable pivotal moment arrived. Steve was looking really fantastic by now: big and shiny and succulent. He was in his prime, but he wouldn’t be for ever. What should they do? Certainly Steve could live a bit longer, but he would soon decline and be a less happy tomato. And he would be dead and rotting into some compost by winter anyway. It was upsetting, but he admitted it would be better to call it quits now and offer some happiness to others in the process. Penny was relieved that he saw it this way because that was her view on the matter too, and she was in charge. In the end, he was her tomato. As they said their final goodbyes and she tenderly picked him, she thought she saw a kind of peace descend over his features, but maybe that was just what she told herself to make herself feel better.