I remained constant and it was they that changed; a rotation of children who toddled and then grew and then grew too big for the pleasures of swings and slides and cold hands in mittens. I didn’t mind. It was good to see new chubby faces, flushed red in the cold and screaming for five minutes more when their frozen mothers and nannies and occasionally fathers told them it was time to leave, stamping their feet into the hard concrete path, trying to batter warmth back into them before starting the walk back to their various homes with numb toes.

Paddington Street Gardens is beautiful in the summer. I can see it from the window of my flat above All Bar One. It wasn’t All Bar One when I bought the thousand year lease to the small maisonette, but like the children, the businesses below me come and go, and at the moment it’s the sleek bar filled with grown-ups who rush in against the cold and have forgotten that they too once shrieked for five more minutes of sliding down cold metal with the burn of frost on their tongues. Funny how times change. Or how time changes.

Yes, the gardens are lovely in bloom, but I don’t sit there much after late April. The sun attracts ice-creams and picnics, and then the rubbish bins attract flies no matter how often they’re emptied, and there is nothing tranquil about sitting on a park bench with flies buzzing around and tickling at your nose. Flies like me but I don’t like them. Neither do I like to sweat under my best polyester underskirts, and so a long time ago I decided it was best to save my park days for the cool crisp winter and damp autumn afternoons.

Anyway, I didn’t go every day back then when the bench was my own. Sometimes the arthritis in my knuckles was just too much to handle, especially on the wet afternoons when the chill seeps right into your bones, and so on those days I’d take a seat by the window instead and sip tea and eat bourbon biscuits while watching the children play from a distance. I still thought of the bench as mine though. Occasionally someone might sit there for a while, but never frequently as I had done for so many years. It was my bench.

And then one November day, she was there. And again the next day. And the one after that. After a few weeks I think she was becoming as invisible to the rest of the park inhabitants as I was. Not to me though. Every time I saw her she became a little clearer. More interesting.

But of course, we didn’t speak. Not at first. We were grown ups. And strangers. And more than that, we were very different creatures indeed. Perhaps if she’d been more like me, an elderly woman, well turned out in a winter coat and hat, handbag on her knee, tan tights above sensible brogue shoes, then perhaps we would have spoken sooner. When it would have been politeness rather than curiosity that forced me to break the comfortable, expected silence.
She was not like me, though. She was fat for a start; her pale face doughy as if she’d spent her thirty years or so eating far too many chips and burgers and not nearly enough brussel sprouts, and her dark hair was pulled into a greasy, untidy pony tail, hanging lank down her broad back.

She often wore an anorak that almost covered her shiny tracksuit, the sort with stripes down the legs that come cheap at any market or discount store. I never recognized the labels and logos that adorned her thick legs nor those on her trainers, and although I may be old, I still have eyes. In London, labels are everything and even a dried up invisible woman like me knows their Nike and their Puma. And even if I hadn’t, I’d have known from the shine and the poor stitching that her clothes were cheap. She wore a heavy signet-ring on the middle finger of her right hand and it would flash garishly in the bright afternoon sunlight as she smoked, staring intently at the playing children. She didn’t have any of her own, I realized after her first visit. Like me, she just came to watch.

I decided that she must come from one of the tower blocks half a mile away or so, near Paddington Station. London was sometimes like that. Wealth and poverty placed side by side. Different worlds existing within the space of a few streets. I wasn’t wealthy, not when compared to some London residents, but it would be safe to say that we came from different classes, if it were still politically correct to use such a term.

I came from steely middle-class stock, my grandfather returning from India with jewels and secrets that would create a life of comfort and good education for my father and then for me, but the woman beside me on the bench reeked of the gutter, all working class aspirations coated in cheap perfume and stale smoke. That didn’t bother me. In fact, it made her more interesting.

I’ve often thought that my heart belonged in the gutter. There is honesty to be found there. No pent-up emotions hidden behind a tight-lipped smile. In the gutter, rage is allowed to rage, hate spits foul words in the street, and drunken lustful fumbles make a whole new generation. When working class children go missing their parents wail and shriek their honest grief at the cameras. No stiff upper lip for them. You have to admire that ability for emotional release, don’t you?

So there we were, sitting on the same bench, a polite foot or so between us, the same cold biting at our different noses in the watery sunshine of a November afternoon when a ball rolled across the path, bounced off the edge and landed by my shoe. Ignoring the ache that flared into a sharp stiff pain down my back as I leaned forward, I picked the ball up. There was a cartoon character on the side that I didn’t recognize, bright and garish with wide eyes and big teeth. I didn’t see the appeal. But then it had been a long time since I’d played with childhood things.
A small boy, perhaps six years old, trotted over. I’d watched him playing with his little brother on the slides for maybe a year or so now on and off, but as he smiled shyly I do believe it was the first time he’d really seen me at all. He wiped his nose on his padded sleeve. I despaired of the coat. Why did parents seek to wrap their offspring up in cotton wool, as if by adding layer after layer they could somehow save them from the world? I remembered the blitz and the boys out in the cold in their short trousers and thin jerseys rummaging through the wreckage of houses looking for shrapnel. Times changed. Children couldn’t be saved from the world. Better to prepare them for it.

Better to make them just a little bit afraid. I looked at the boy. Harry. His name was Harry and his little bother was Tom.

“Could I have my ball, please?” His voice was small and shy, not the brash yell I’d heard from him so many times as he charged through the rope netting bridge to the slide and frame beyond.

“Of course you can,” I said, but I kept it in my lap. Instead of handing the ball back, I rummaged in my handbag and pulled out some pick n mix. “Have one of these. You’ll need the energy for all that playing.” Looking up, I peered over to where his mother watched carefully from the sidelines. I nodded towards the sweets. After a moment she smiled back. Harry was hesitating. Don’t take things from strangers. He’d been brought up safely, but then I’d known that from the coat that was more like a quilt than a jacket.

“Go on. Your mum says it’s all right.” He glanced over to double check and then with a grin began to rummage in the paper folds for the brightest or the biggest or the tastiest.

“Are you scared of the dark?” The words were so quiet they slipped straight out of me and into him, barely touching the air in between. He looked up and right into me with wide, innocent eyes. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He nodded.
I leaned forward and whispered in his ear. Soft words that went on for no more than twenty seconds. For a moment his hand froze, before it latched onto the nearest sweet and absently put it in his mouth. I smiled.

“Well, run along then.”

He chewed and stared at me for a second before taking his ball and running back across the path and in through the gate in the railings. He didn’t look back. Looking down into the crumpled bag I pulled out a licorice comfit. Those were my favourite after strawberry bonbons. I’ve always had good strong teeth and I could still chew on the hard toffee centres without any problems. Sometimes God smiles.

I looked over to the stranger sharing my bench and found she was looking back at me. She had dark rings under her puffy eyes. I held the bag out. “Pick and mix?”

She smiled a little and shook her head. “I’m on a diet. And sugar’s not good for me.”
 
“Not a lot is these days if you believe the papers.” I chewed on the licorice and wondered if she saw the irony as she pulled a pack of Marlboro lights from her anorak pocket. Lighting one, she inhaled deeply. I watched the smoke drift off to go and play with the pollution on the Marylebone Road
“Children from this park go missing,” she said, eventually.

I felt a little shiver prickle on the base of my spine. We both stared ahead, me chewing on my sweet and her smoking. “Unfortunately, children seem to go missing everywhere these days.” I sighed. “Apparently nowhere is safe.”
“They don’t go from here. They’re not taken.” She emphasized the last word, the t and the k cutting into the air between us. “Something…else…happens to them. At home. Later.” She paused. I took another sweet from the bag. Sugar was good for me and the afternoon was becoming more interesting.

“It happened to my nephew,” she said.

“What happened, dear?” On the other side of the path that separated the observers from those in the midst of the action, I watched Harry’s mother strapping his little baby brother into the pushchair, wheeling it awkwardly round while trying to hold her older son’s hand at the same time. She was flustered in the cold and they hadn’t even left the park yet. I kept my eyes carefully on the boy as he walked away. Eventually, just as they reached the gate, it happened. He looked back, directly at me. I smiled secretly. The words weren’t lost on that one. He’d remember.

“They don’t believe me, but I know what happened.”

I watched the boys until they’d disappeared before turning to look at her. “And what was that?”

She sniffed, and just like Harry had done, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her anorak before staring down at her shoes. The signet-ring flashed as her hand flicked ash on the pavement.

“It was almost two years ago now. I was babysitting Courtney because Jodie wanted to go out. She hadn’t been out, not properly, not in ages and she was only a kid herself really. She was sixteen when he was born and when…” she faltered a little, “when it happened, he was five. Everyone needs to go out and let off steam at twenty-one, don’t they? Especially when they’ve been doing their best to raise a kiddie on their own.”

I nodded sympathetically, although I’m not sure she really saw me. She was lost somewhere in her own story. Trapped in a place and time where it all went wrong.

“And it wasn’t as if our mum was much good for anything. Not anymore. All Jodie had was me and Courtney.” She threw the cigarette butt down and ground it out under her trainer. “I think maybe that’s why she used to like bringing him down here to play. Because our mum brought us here when we were kids. Before the booze really got her. I think Jodie had happy memories of this park.”

She frowned. “I never came with her when she brought Courtney though, as much as I loved him. I used to avoid it. Find other things to do. Something about this place, it... it gave me the shivers. Because of that thing with Jason Arnold’s little brother.”

“Jason Arnold?” I asked.

“Yeah. Jason Arnold used to play with us here when we was kids, and his little brother used to tag along. He was even younger than Jodie, a real toddler. After a while, they moved out of the flats and to somewhere up by Baker Street and didn’t come here to play anymore, but we still all went to the same school. About a year after they moved, Jason Arnold’s little brother disappeared. He was taken out of their house in the middle of the night. There was a lot of the usual talk but no one ever really figured out what had happened.

“When Jason came back to school he was different. Once I asked him if he was okay and he got all shaky and whispered that it was what we’d heard in the park that did it. And I don’t know why because it made no sense but something about that totally freaked me out. I was only nine. I didn’t understand then.” She lit another cigarette. “I never spoke to Jason Arnold again after that the whole time we were in that school.”

More children were leaving and but I didn’t pay them, or the encroaching twilight, any attention. This was far more interesting, even if my brogues weren’t doing much to keep the cold away from my still feet. “And what does this have to do with little Courtney?” I asked, pulling a couple of milk bottles out of the bag.

“Courtney was manic,” she continued. “Like me, sugar wasn’t good for him. Sent him hyper. But that didn’t stop Jodie letting him have sweets and coke. She found it hard to say no to him. And he was a good kid, not mean or angry like some, but he wasn’t the kind of kid that would sit still for long. Not even in front of the telly. He needed to be running around, chasing things, playing loudly right up until he’d collapse into sleep.

“But that night, two years ago, he was quiet. Really, really quiet. I didn’t notice until Jodie had gone, ‘cause we’d been giggling and having a glass of wine and picking her outfit and laughing about the men she was going to pull, all that kind of stuff. But once she’d gone, I realized that all that time he’d been sitting on the sofa, totally still like a little statue, just staring at the telly. And it was Eastenders or something else grown up, not cartoons.

“I asked him if he was feeling sick or anything but he said no and eventually it was time for his bed. He wanted the small light left on. I remember that. But I said no. I said he was a big boy and he shouldn’t be afraid of the dark, but that I’d leave the hall light on for him in case he needed to go to the loo. I thought I was doing the right thing. I’d forgotten what it was like being a kid. I was at the door when he called my name. His voice was soft, I remember that. And I remember how small he looked in the bed, his wide eyes peering over the top of the duvet.
“‘Monsters have shadows,’ he said and the words stopped me. I hadn’t realised that his stillness, his quiet, was because he was terrified. But I knew it then. I could hear it in the terrible sadness of his little voice.
“‘Sometimes the shadows are more dangerous than the monsters. That’s what they say.’ He didn’t sound like a five year old. Not like our Jodie’s little Courtney.

“I remember staring at him, one foot in the brightness of the hall, and one in his small dark tatty bedroom covered with Buzz Lightyear wallpaper left over from whoever’d had the flat before Jodie.
“‘Don’t be silly.’ I said to him. ‘There’s no such thing as monsters.’ I remember that my throat was tight, even under the wine buzz I had. I remember he was scaring me and I wasn’t sure why but I knew I wanted him to shut up. I wanted him to be Courtney again. Not this scared kid that was making me feel like a scared kid. But he didn’t shut up.

“‘Shadows are real though.’ He said. ‘If you say words at them they’ll show you the monster.’

“I told him that was enough. I told him to go to sleep.”

She let out a long sigh.

 “And those were the last words I ever said to him. I didn’t tell him I loved him or anything. Just ‘Go to sleep’.
 
“I was closing the door when he spoke again, and the volume gone from his voice, as if he’d already given up. ‘I wish I didn’t know them. Those words.’ That’s what he said.”

She paused, taking a long pull on her cigarette, which I found slightly over-dramatic. Sometimes there was something to be said for stiff upper lip. “Children are so fanciful,” I said.

She looked over at me and smiled and for a moment I could almost see the pretty person she would have been had her life run along a different route. The edges of her eyes twinkled brightly and I wondered if she ever slept or just survived on nicotine and coffee. I stared right back at her.

“I don’t think he made it up. Because later that night the monster got him.” She sighed again. “I drank the rest of the bottle of wine dead fast once Courtney was in bed. I’m not much of a drinker really, because of Mum, so it wasn’t long before my eyes were closing and my head spinning a little. I was glad about that. I just wanted to go to sleep or pass out. I didn’t check on Courtney. I didn’t want to go into his bedroom. I kept thinking about Jason Arnold’s little brother James, you see. I kept thinking about him and something kept niggling me, something that I knew deep inside, something that I’d once heard and worked so hard to forget, and I kept thinking about how all those things were linked, but how the most important thing was for me not to remember. Not remembering would keep me safe.

“I fell asleep on the sofa. I think I woke up once when he screamed. I think I did. I remember seeing a huge shadow out in the hall and then squeezing my drunken eyes shut again. I definitely woke up when Jodie came home and started screaming. She must have seen me sleeping in the lounge and gone to check on him before waking me up.

“He was gone, you see. There was just a bloody mess left in his bed. His sheets were ripped and the mattress was soaked in red, but all the damage was contained there. No trail on the carpet or out in the hall, but only one smeared handprint on the wall as if maybe he’d been grabbing at something there when the monster took him. And that was it. Nothing left of the little boy at all.

“Of course the police never caught anyone for it. They questioned me for a long time but in the end they had to let me go. I hadn’t done anything to Courtney. There was no trace of blood on me, or in fact anywhere else other than that bed and the wall. Still, that didn’t stop people looking at me sideways, my own family amongst them, and I haven’t seen Jodie in over a year now.

“I tried to tell her about what Courtney had said before he went to sleep, about the monsters and their shadows, but she wasn’t having any of it. She hated me. I could tell and I couldn’t blame her. I hated myself.”

Around us, the park lights were slowly coming alive as the gloom turned to a deep blue, grabbing each corner and slowly possessing it. As the bulbs glowed, shadows appeared and hovered in the bushes. The cold was becoming bitter and I thought it was probably time I got home and had a nice cup of tea. It didn’t do for a woman of my age to sit out too late.

“So what brings you back here now, Melanie?” I asked her, scrunching up what was left of the sweets and putting them back in my handbag.

“Jason Arnold,” she replied, without a second’s hesitation. “You see, after what happened, I kept thinking about him and his little brother and Courtney and I tracked him down. It took a couple of months, but I eventually found him in a flat over at Willesden Green. He had a job working the night shift at Tesco and then used to go home and smoke weed until he passed out. He said he was scared of the dark.

“I told him about Courtney and what had happened. I told him I thought there was something in my head that would make it clearer. He laughed a lot then. And then cried. And then pulled a massive folder out of the cupboard under the sink. We shared a joint as he talked me through all the children that he’d researched that had gone missing in London like Courtney and James. Lots of them had spent time here, in these gardens. And lots of them had talked about shadows and monsters and special words.

 “I asked him if he knew what the words that brought the monster were because, I said, high on skunk, if we could bring the monster, maybe we could kill it. He cried some more then and said he couldn’t remember. He’d known the words once. He said we’d been together when we were told them, right here in the park when we were little. But when he shared them with James, just to scare him a little, just to dare him to use them, it was like they went out of his head. And then little James used the words. Just like Courtney did, and the monster’s shadow came for him.
“I let myself in to Jason’s flat yesterday ‘cause his phone was just ringing out. He wasn’t there. There was just a huge red sprawl on his sofa.” She paused. “I guess he remember the words in the end. I just wish he’d waited for me before he used them.”

“Did you call the police?” I asked. The evening wind bent the trees as if they were leaning in to listen with me, their thin worn branches jostling for position in the thin light.

“No,” she said, her husky voice empty. “I just took his folder of children and left. They wouldn’t have believed me anyway. Or they’d have arrested me again. Either way wouldn’t help.”

As the lamp above us slowly brightened, I pushed myself to my feet. My hips roared with stiffness, my joints clicking angrily straight. I slid my handbag up to my elbow and clasped my hands across my waist. “Well thank you for such an interesting story.” I smiled at her. She didn’t look as if she was planning to move. I wondered what she thought she could gain by sitting on that cold bench all night. Other than a nasty chill. “I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for, dear.” I almost added, Before it finds you, but managed to resist the melodrama. I was, at the end of the day, far too middle class for that.

Leaving her there, I turned and headed back to the lights of Paddington Street and All Bar One. I was at the exit when she called after me.

“Wait! Wait!”

I turned. Her huge shape was black in the darkness, her face a blur.

“How did you know my name? I didn’t tell you my name?”

I smiled, even though she probably couldn’t see it. “It was nice seeing you again, Melanie. It’s been a long time.”
I crossed the road and didn’t look back.

Back in the warmth of my flat, I put the kettle on before taking my overcoat off and hanging it on the old-fashioned coat stand in the small hallway. I rested my hands on the radiator for a moment, enjoying the heat in my old bones. Back in the lounge, a shadow slipped away from the wall and out under the windowsill and into the night. I wondered where it would go tonight. I could feel the monster purring inside me, its excitement rising. I thought of Harry and his brother, the Arnold boys, and Melanie and Courtney. Children never really changed. Not deep down inside, in the places where fear and superstition lived.
 
 I’d have a nice cup of tea by the fire to warm up, and then I’d file my teeth, just in case.

Because they all remembered the words in the end, no matter how long it had been since I whispered to them.