Music box

It happened on my birthday. If I could, I would have poured all of my happiness from that morning into a tiny bottle to wear around my neck and sniff whenever I wanted. It would smell like candyfloss and birthday cake and mummy’s perfume. 

‘Shall we brush our teeth then, darling?’ 

I loved when Mummy made her hands swim through my hair, like I was a kitten. She was doing it that morning. 

‘I can do it by myself, Mummy. I’m six now!’

She laughed and twinkly stars flew from her mouth. ‘Yes you are.’ 

While we were having breakfast – jammy toast, my absolute favourite – Daddy left the dining room. I pretended not to see him and Mummy talking with their eyes and eyebrows about secretly bringing my presents in. I guess they didn’t realise how much cleverer you get when you turn six. 

But I was still surprised when he came back, because he was dragging a big bag full of boxes! Six boxes, in fact. 

‘One for each year you’ve been with us, kiddo,’ he said. I was so excited that I danced like a wiggle worm. 

My first present was my favourite. It was a doll with curly black hair that looked just like mine and Mummy’s. Her bright red lips were the same colour as the ring that Grandma gave Mummy, and she was the prettiest doll I have ever seen. The second present was a pair of extremely fluffy socks. I rubbed them on my face and it felt like Aunty Jenny’s little dog, Cloud. 

Mummy laughed twinkles when she saw me with the socks on my face. ‘I thought you’d like them. Just in time for the colder weather, isn’t it, sweetheart?’ 

Daddy said, ‘Yes it is,’ and kissed Mummy, but I knew she meant that I was the sweetheart. 

‘Right,’ Mummy said, shooing Daddy away. ‘One more, and then you can open your other presents in the afternoon.’ 

I looked at the leftover boxes: one, two, three, four. Two were small, one was medium-sized, and one was huge! I picked a small one, so that I could save the bigger ones for later. It felt so fun ripping up all the wrapping paper. I miss that feeling. 

‘It’s… another box?’ It looked very old, like the furniture at Grandma and Grandad’s house. It was a rectangle shape, and even smaller than my pencil case. It was such a small thing: why was it so heavy? I looked up at Mummy and Daddy. 

‘Well,’ Daddy said, ‘I guess you’re going to have to open it!’ 

‘Isn’t it just gorgeous, though,’ Mummy added, getting up from her chair to stand next to me. She leaned over and snaked a finger across the top of the box. Mummy always smelled like flowers. ‘The wood is so rich.’

I thought it just looked old, but I supposed the patterns were kind of pretty. They made a curly golden design near the edges of the lid, and on the sides of the box. 

I took a deep breath in. ‘Open sesame!’ Then I lifted the lid. I was so surprised I almost dropped the box. 

A beautiful song played from inside, one that made me think of bells and a bright blue sky, that made me imagine running in the strawberry fields we visited that summer. It felt tickly on my arms and the back of my neck. But what surprised me the most was the tiny girl inside the box, dancing round and round and round to the music. She wore a long dress the colour of the roses in our garden, her hair all twisted neatly in a bun behind her ears. Her right arm was stretched forward as she danced, like she was showing us something, and her other hand was on her chest. She was so tiny but I could see all the details on her face – her little mouth was open like a Cheerio, singing along to her song. 

‘Isn’t she lovely!’ 

I looked back up at Mummy. Her smile was like the sun. I couldn’t look at it for too long before I started to feel funny. 

‘She is lovely,’ I said, quietly. Another thing about getting bigger and cleverer is knowing that sometimes, you have to tell a teeny tiny lie to make others happy. 

When I took my new presents up to my room I was the most excited about the doll, thinking about how nice it would be to have a new friend. Maybe I could name her Henry, which is short for Henrietta. She went straight on my bed, near my pillow, the most comfortable spot I could think of. Next, the socks went in the right drawer. But I didn’t know what to do with the music box. Even though it was a new present, and Mummy loved it so much, for some reason I didn’t really want it on my desk. 

Daddy always used to give me great advice. One time, the day before my first day at school, it felt like there was a fish trapped in my belly and trying to swim up my throat. He told me that it was just something called nerves, and then he taught me exactly what you should do when you feel nervous. ‘Say what you’re nervous about out loud. See if that makes a difference.’

So I did. 

‘I’m nervous about having the box next to me while I sleep.’ 

After a few seconds, I giggled. It sounded a little silly when I said it out loud. I placed the music box on my desk and remembered what it was like when I started school. Everything felt so much better when I made friends with Amelia and Pia. Maybe I could make friends with the dancing girl, too. 

I opened the box, and once again the tinkly music played. The girl carried on her dance, round and round and round. I wondered if she ever got dizzy. 

‘What’s your name?’ I asked her. She just kept dancing. So I told her mine, in case that would make her less shy. Knowing she was nervous too made me feel much braver. 

‘Don’t you get dizzy going round and round all the time?’ 

Was I imagining it, or did her dancing slow down a little? I tried one more question. 

‘Do you want to be my friend?’

The music, and her spinning, slowed to a stop. She was facing me. I leaned a little closer, wondering if the song always stopped after a certain amount of time. She was looking straight at me. Then she blinked. 

The pain in my bottom told me I had fallen back and onto the floor in shock. I remember just how fast my breathing was, like I had been running around the playground with my friends. But I was still like a statue, almost stuck to the floor. My eyes didn’t move from the dancing girl. And hers hadn’t moved from mine. 

I don’t know how long we stayed like that, looking at each other, but my feet started to feel tingly and funny. I wiggled my toes and slowly stood up, taking a small step to the music box on the desk. The dancing lady’s mouth was no longer a round ‘O’ anymore, but a small line, and both of her arms were now down by her sides. She looked so sad. 

When I spoke again, my voice was as tiny as a mouse’s squeak. ‘Are you okay?’ 

Her head bowed down, but started spinning again. Slowly, slowly, like she was being pushed round by the wind. After a few seconds, I heard music coming from the box – but the song was different. It was low and sad, like someone crying. 

‘You must be so lonely.’ 

She kept going, but her hands lifted and went to her chest. 

‘I get lonely too, sometimes. But it’s okay. We can be friends now!’ 

Her head lifted up and she was looking at me again. And her music got a little faster. I was so proud of myself for cheering her up and smiled at her. I wondered why she wasn’t smiling back, but then I guessed that she couldn’t smile at all. 

As her dancing and her song became a little fast, she stretched her right arm forward again. I took a couple of steps back to give myself room, then I copied her. 

‘I’ll dance with you. Then you won’t have to feel lonely again!’ 

She sped up a little, then a little more. She must have been so happy to finally have a friend! I started twirling round too, trying to keep up with her pace, and giggled when I started to get dizzy and lose my balance. We’re having such fun, I thought. Together we spun round and round and round, until I totally lost my balance, and fell. 

I was standing when I woke up. Wearing a beautiful long dress. My bedroom stretched out in front of me, and there was a girl on the floor who looked like she was sleeping. Who was she? And why was she in my room? Her curly black hair was all over her face so I couldn’t see who she was, but somehow the fish was back, trapped in my body, trying to swim out and away. 

Slowly, slowly, the girl moved. First she sat up, her head bowed forward so her hair still covered her face. She stretched her arms to the ceiling like she had just woken from a very deep sleep. Then she wiggled her toes and got to her feet, rubbing her legs all over. When she stood up straight I could finally see her face. She turned to the desk and looked at me. Then she smiled. 

*

I missed Mummy and Daddy, and I even missed school, but at least I had a new best friend. In the early days she spent a lot of time talking to me, practicing her faces and her speaking, and I helped her as best as I could. The girl just needed my help for a while, she told me, and then everything would be okay again. She helped me, too, practicing my new dance. We’d spin and spin, but she would always stop before she got too dizzy. 

As time went on, the girl spent less time with me in our room, but in the evenings she would always tell me what she had been getting up to. She stopped being friends with Pia because ‘she asked too many questions’. Her favourite snack was olives, which surprised me because I thought they were far too salty, and Aunty Jenny told me people only like them when they grow up. She enjoyed days out with Mummy and Daddy – the duck park, pumpkin picking, trick-or-treating. I missed doing those kinds of things. I really did. But it was okay because the girl always described them to me so well, and if I closed my eyes and imagined really hard, it felt like I was there too. 

One morning, she hummed a beautiful and happy song while she got ready for school. It made me happy too, because she could finally sing happy songs now instead of the sad one I heard her singing the day we met. I practiced that song all day and all evening so I could surprise her with it, like a present. I thought we could even dance to it together. But when I sang it to her she suddenly became very still and quiet. 

I was confused. Did I get the tune wrong? 

Eventually, she spoke. ‘How did you do that?’ Her voice was so quiet I almost couldn’t hear it. ‘My mother used to sing that to me when I was a child. Years and years ago.’ The girl took a step closer to me, then another. She lowered her face to the desk so we were looking straight into each other’s eyes. Hers were as dark as the night sky. ‘What gives you the right?’

I wanted to tell her everything – that the song sounded so lovely when she hummed it, that I just wanted to make her happy because we were the best of friends. But all that came out of my mouth were some high-pitched tinkly noises. The last thing I saw was her hand coming towards me before she closed the lid of my box and I was swallowed up by the dark. 

I’m not sure how long I was left there, by myself. Before, at least, the view from the window when I saw it during my spins, or getting a glimpse of what the girl was up to, gave me an idea of whether it was morning, afternoon, evening or bedtime. But with the box closed, it was a forever night. I didn’t sleep, but I wasn’t awake, either. Instead it felt like I was a leaf falling from the world’s tallest tree, floating in the air but never reaching the ground, in a forest that nobody knew about. 

When the night finally ended, my body rose up like the ground was pushing me. Immediately I was spinning, round and round. It took a few seconds for my mind to fully wake up, and after a full spin I caught sight of the girl. Her hair lay in front of her left shoulder and it was long, reaching her elbows now in dark, shiny waves. I continued to spin and took in the rest of the bedroom: my animal bedsheets were gone, and the bed was covered in a plain, dark blue instead; Henry was nowhere to be seen. There was a notebook open on the desk near me, and I saw some scribbles before I spun past but couldn’t make out what it said – I was still learning to read full sentences and it had been a long time since I practiced. The curtains were closed, so it was probably in the evening, but it looked like there was still light peeking through the edges. 

When I got back to the girl, she pressed a tiny button in the box near where I stood, and I stopped singing and dancing. Her mouth was a small line again. We stared at each other for a while. 

‘I wanted to tell you that from tomorrow, you’re going to live somewhere else.’ 

Live somewhere else? Does that mean I’ll finally be able to get out of this box and things could go back to normal? I tried to ask her but I could only make a noise like a bell. She chewed on her lip. 

‘Don’t take it personally. It’s just a bit of late spring cleaning.’

Spring cleaning? I tried really hard to think back to the song we learned in reception about the seasons, but after so much time singing the same song over and over again, it was really difficult. 

‘Just so you know, I’m not sorry.’

How did it go again? Summer, winter…

‘You’ll understand eventually. One day.’

Summer, winter, autumn, spring – that was it! My birthday was near the end of summer, so that meant… 

I’d been like this for almost a year. 

In all that time I had never wanted to shout or scream, but in that moment, my mouth worked like it had a mind of its own. Messy noises came bursting out of me, like when Cloud the dog ran into a table and knocked glasses onto the floor. 

The girl folded her arms. Then she spoke in a quiet voice, like she was telling me a secret. 

‘My advice? Don’t make that noise again. They’ll think you’re broken. And then no-one will want you.’ 

The only thing I could do then was lower my head. That’s when the darkness came back for me. 

* 

I’ve spent a lot of time in this shop. It’s not a normal shop, like I used to visit with Mummy and Daddy, where you collect what you want in a basket and pay at the till. Here, there are lots of old things, all crowded together and sometimes stacked like Lego blocks. But the nice lady keeps me at the front most of the time, not too far from the window. I see loads from here. It doesn’t happen very often, but it’s so exciting when we get visitors with young children. We usually dance together and when they laugh and try to copy my song, it makes me so happy I could burst. 

I hear a lot, too. Like how the little bell at the top of the door jingles when we get visitors. The conversations the nice lady has with the old men and women who seem just as lonely as I am. And, sometimes, when there aren’t any visitors, the radio. 

The nice lady listens to the news a lot. I used to find it boring, back at home, and always begged Daddy to put on some cartoons instead, but here it gives me new information. 

There’s been a lot of bad news lately. Scary things, like people getting hurt in horrible ways. And we’ve had more donations – fancy things that people don’t use anymore. When the nice lady lays them out in the shop, I always wonder who used to own them. 

Yesterday she laid out a couple of new donations on the jewellery counter opposite me. There was a chain, some earrings and a few rings. One of the rings has a big red stone and I swear it smells like flowers. For the first time since I’ve been in this shop, I finally feel at home.