The Day Everything Changed By Celia Jenkins
“No. Stop. Put it back.” I trudged through the sticky mud to where Agatha stood, holding it. “Please Agatha, put it down. Now.”
“But Granny, I-”
“I said now!” I hardly ever raised my voice at Agatha. She was almost eight, but often seemed much younger, with had fine wisps of candyfloss hair, pale yellow, almost white, just like that Looby Loo character from Watch with Mother. Agatha’s locks never seemed to grow – fine, flyaway tufts that framed her heart-shaped face.
She slowly crouched to the ground and placed the animal back. Straightening, threw me a killer glance with steely eyes.
“Agatha, come here please.” I beckoned her over with a sigh.
She didn’t take her eyes off me and she marched over defiantly.
The creature whimpered as she moved away.
“What were you doing?” I asked as gently as I could. I reached out a hand to place it on her shoulder but dropped it when she shuddered out of my reach.
“It looks sick. Or injured.” She sniffed. “I thought we could take it home and help it.”
Agatha had always been mad on animals. Had wanted a pet since she could say the word – adding it hopefully to her Christmas list each December. Living in London, in the biggest flat they could afford, my son and daughter-in-law just weren’t able to indulge her. Then after poor little Alfie had been born, and all the costs that came from his treatment, they couldn’t have stretched their budget to include a pet even if the landlord had said yes.
With Alfie being so poorly, and Agatha needing so much more than her parents had time for, we’d made it a tradition that she’d spend holidays with me here. The New Forest had always appealed, and when my Kenneth died and there was only myself to please, I made the move. A simple cottage on the edge of the forest, just big enough for one eccentric old lady, a small girl visiting every summer, Easter and half term. We looked forward to our ‘big hike’ every time she came, but today it had turned sour.
“Take it home? Darling, we’ve been walking for an hour and a half. How would we carry it all the way back home?” I didn’t stop myself from sighing – didn’t want her to think there was any chance I’d back down.
“I’ll carry him. I’ll carry him, Granny.” Agatha’s face lit up.
“You wouldn’t even carry your own picnic basket, Agatha.” I chided.
She threw a glance back to where the fox cub lay crumpled on the ground. Its little chest rose and fell rapidly. Agatha’s bottom lip trembled but, as always, she held back her tears.
“Let’s… let’s just take a look at it,” I conceded.
Agatha squeezed my fingers in her hand and practically pulled me over to it.
“Not too close, dear. Please!” I implored as she immediately bent down to touch it. “You don’t know what diseases it could be carrying. If it’s sick, it could make us sick too.”
“No, I don’t think it’s sick Granny. It just looks small and lonely to me.” Agatha cocked her head on one side and scrutinised the cub. “Perhaps it was the runt, do you think?” She asked in that way she does when wanting to show off a new word she learnt in school.
“The runt? I shouldn’t think so,” I said, crouching down closer to the creature. It was a sweet thing, really. I know foxes are much closer related to dogs, but I’ve always found there’s something feline about them. I always wanted a dog – a ‘proper dog’ like a German Shepherd or a Great Dane, not one of these silly little things. Kenneth preferred cats. So we had cats. Right from when we were married, one kitten and one cat, replacing each deceased moggy with a sprightly new kitten within a few weeks. When Kenneth died, I took Flora and Mabel to be rehomed. “With fox cubs, the runt of the litter usually dies within a few weeks – before they’ve even come out from den. This one looks older than that.”
“Oh? He looks very small to me.” Agatha said, showing interest in that way children do when they want you to forget about something.
“Well,” I said as I sat back on my haunches. “I’d say he’s more like six to eight weeks old. He’s starting to moult his short black fur and it’s coming through a sort of red colour at the front. He isn’t such a baby now. But he should still be with his mother.”
I stood up and scanned the area. We hadn’t seen many other walkers today – the past few weeks had been wet and the ground was slushy in places. I couldn’t see anyone now – nor any other signs of life. We’d seen ponies about an hour back, and of course the deer had appeared several times since we set out – but no foxes, not at this time of day.
Agatha stood up too and thrust her hands into the deep pockets of her anorak. I could see her twiddling with some trinket or other in the left pocket – perhaps one of those Sylvanian Family toys she always carries around with her.
“Agatha… you know we can’t keep it.” I sighed. “It isn’t a pet.”
“But why?” Like me, Agatha rarely raised her voice. The creature jumped, and I hoped it would scurry away into the undergrowth, but it didn’t. It probably was sick, being out at this time of day. “I thought you liked animals. Do you want it to die?”
I wondered if my Granddaughter’s resolve not to cry in front of anyone was about to fail.
As a child, I would have been weeping like an onion farmer by now.
I had wept, just like that, many years ago.
My Grandmother had been the kind of grandmother that I decided never to turn into. No hugs, no baking chocolate chip cookies or singing lullabies. A practical woman with little to no emotion. Granddaughter’s should be seen and not heard, in her opinion – even granddaughter’s like me, the first little girl after baby boys in the family. I had thought I would be cherished, doted upon.
Just like Agatha, I’d had a big heart for small things. Grandmother didn’t like country walking, but she had a well-kept garden that put food on the table year-round – potatoes with great clods of dirt sticking to them, bruised windfalls, rosy red tomatoes without blemish. I took an interest in the garden, for a while – just to impress her. I never took to it.
One spring, I could only have been about five years old, I found an injured bird at the bottom of the garden. I was too frightened to touch it, calling out to my Grandmother. I thought that seeing the poor little creature would soften her heart of stone – we could tend it together, something changing between us.
Everything did change that day, but not as I’d expected.
She narrowed her eyes at the creature on the ground. It was still alive, but with a broken wing, twitching. Everything about it looked wrong. The bird twisted on the ground in a way I’d never seen a creature move before.
Without a word, Grandmother reached down and grasped the bird in her capable hands. The crunch as she broke its neck was sickening, ringing in my ears for days afterwards. The thing was limp in her hands. She threw it into the hedge. I thought I might scream, but the noise was caught in my throat, stuck like a gobstopper. Grandmother went back to her crops without saying anything to me – I guess she thought I knew it already. Knew that the bird wouldn’t have survived anyway, that it was the kinder thing to do, that sometimes things were unfair and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I gave up on gardening after that.
It was early April, and a crisp wind rustled through the trees, reaching out icy fingers that whipped across our faces. Agatha’s hair bristled in the breeze and goosepimples rose on her milky legs. I pulled my scarf tighter around me, breathing in the sharp, fresh smells of the air.
My granddaughter stared up at me. “Do you? Do you want it to die?”
“No, sweetie.” I pulled her in for a hug, squeezing tightly when she resisted. “Of course I don’t want it to die. But sometimes, sometimes when a creature like this is small and weak, it’s the kinder thing to let them… you know… pass on. It can be for the best if something is the runt or has something wrong with it.”
“Like Alfie?” Agatha whispered.
Her words hung between us in the air.
“No,” I said sternly. “Not like Alfie. Not at all.”
Agatha turned wistfully to look at the cub. I thought I saw the twinkle of a tear in the corner of her eye. I watched her chest swell as she took a long, slow breath in and slowly let it out, her mouth forming a little ‘o’. My darling granddaughter. Before she was born I knew that I would cherish her, dote upon her. But she wasn’t that kind of girl. She wasn’t a cuddles and cookies, princess dresses and fairy tales kind of child. Agatha had a big, brave heart. Sometimes she hardly seemed like a child at all.
“Granny?” her voice was small, a vulnerable look on her face.
My darling child. I knew that this could be a day when everything changed for her.
I unwound my woollen scarf and handed to her. “Ok. Gently, now.”
Judges Comments
Celia Jenkins guides her readers with inredible skill through The Day Everything Changed, the runner-up story in our First Line Competition. She plays on our emotions, of course, in the story of a child who finds a sick fox cub during a walk through the woods: it's beautifully done, being moving but not overtly sentimental, and offering the suggestion that the animal will be cared for in an ending that is tentatively hopeful.
But Celia's done much more than show her readers how Agatha talked her grandmother round – which would, in itself, have made a perfectly acceptable piece of short fiction. There are two more layers of story. The largely unspoken tale of Agatha's younger brother Alfie, whose illness and death are mentioned, rather than foregrounded, hovers over this incident like a shadow, and Celia has woven it in so neatly and delicately that it's like the note of contrasting colour in a piece of tapestry that makes all the other colours stand out. Here, it illuminates our understanding of everything we read, making us see the parallels between the sick cub and Alfie without ever hammering the point.
The next layer is so well added that it's almost invisible: the parallels between Agatha and her grandmother, the narrator. In telling her own, shocking account of the day when everything changed for her, the narrator is showing us the ways in which she is like her brave, loving grandchild, for whom the urge to care for injured creatures is given an even greater imperative by the loss of her brother. By the time we read its carefully understated ending that suggests it's a day everything changed for all three protagonists, animal and human, we've been given an understanding of the interior lives of both human characters in a story that really does tug at the heartstrings, not in a hearts-and-flowers way but because Celia's writing contains a deep, true emotional resonance.