A Spell in the Country Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – The Three Witches

  Chapter 2 – The Witches of Eastville

  Chapter 3 – Witches Brew

  Chapter 4 – Fire and Water

  Chapter 5 – Sand Witches

  Chapter 6 – Bewitched

  Chapter 7 – The Wicked Witch

  Chapter 8 – What a world! What a world!

  Acknowledgements

  A Spell in the Country

  Heide Goody & Iain Grant

  Pigeon Park Press

  ‘A Spell in the Country’ Copyright © Heide Goody and Iain Grant 2018

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except for personal use, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9957497-4-0

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9957497-3-3

  Published by Pigeon Park Press

  www.pigeonparkpress.com

  [email protected]

  Chapter 1 – The Three Witches

  The Good Witch of Northfield

  Dee Finch didn’t consider herself to be just a good witch. Of course she was a good witch. That kind of thing was in the blood. No, Dee wasn’t just a good witch; she was a good witch, and that meant being good and doing good; whenever and wherever, whatever people might think. So Dee felt compelled to tell the young man in the shopping precinct that his hat was on fire.

  “Your hat is on fire, poppet,” she said.

  Surprisingly, the young man responded with a delighted smile. “Well, that’s the final question answered.”

  Not the reaction Dee expected. It wasn’t as if it was the kind of hat one could set on fire without being instantly aware of it. If, say, he had been wearing a bowler hat, one might imagine a small fire on the crown might go unnoticed for a minute or two. But this was a woolly hat with a minor conflagration where a bobble might be, or where the bobble had recently been.

  Dee imagined that the young man - with his baggy rough-knit jumper in a variety of mud shades, a beard that wasn’t sure if it really wanted to be a beard and had grown in uneven patches, and a general appearance and aroma suggesting his world contained a good many things of a ‘herbal’ nature – had absent-mindedly put a roll-up behind his ear, and forgotten that it was already lit. It was the only immediately obvious explanation.

  “Your hat is on fire,” she said again.

  “Indeed,” he said. “Let me just—” He flipped through the papers on the clipboard in his hand.

  “On fire,” she repeated.

  “Yep.” He clicked his pen and put a tick in a box. “Now, would you have a few minutes to complete the rest of the survey?”

  “Survey?”

  Dee felt she had lost her grip on the situation. The man’s hat was on fire and, on a fundamental level, she wanted it dealt with. But now he was talking about a survey and had a look in his eye which suggested his day had been a long struggle to get people to participate.

  “What kind of survey?” asked Dee. “I can’t be too long, sweetness. I was only popping out for some safety pins and a bottle of linctus for Mrs Binder.”

  “It’s all about trying to become a better you,” said the young man.

  “And you do understand what I mean when I say your hat is on fire?” she said.

  “I do. Now, can I take your name?”

  “Yes. It’s Dee Finch. Miss.”

  Dee returned to the Shelter for Unloved Animals charity shop with a packet of pins, a bottle of cherry linctus, a brochure from the young survey-taker and a great deal to think about.

  “Thank God you’re here,” said Mr Tilbury. “It’s been bedlam since you left.”

  Dee looked up from the brochure. The shop was empty, apart from Mr Tilbury who was manning the till. Clothes hung unregarded on their racks. Books gathered dust on the shelves. The poster of the charity mascot, Terry the Boss-Eyed Tortoise, with the slogan of ‘Ugly Animals Need Love Too’ still hung slightly askew on the wall. It was so quiet that one could almost hear the creak of time passing.

  “Bedlam?” repeated Dee.

  “A man came in and wanted to know if we had a book,” said Mr Tilbury.

  “Yes?” said Dee.

  “And then Mrs Binder had to go and have a sit down out back because she said the dust from those cardigans had got right to her chest and set her cough off again.”

  Dee was polite enough to avoid suggesting that Mrs Binder’s cough might have more to do with her twenty-a-day habit than any amount of second-hand knitwear. “I’ve got her medicine.”

  “But then Melissa Sacks came in. I think it was Melissa Sacks.”

  “How could you not know?”

  Mr Tilbury pulled a pained expression and gestured uneasily at his face. Dee understood instantly.

  “Where is she now, poppet?”

  “I put her in the fitting room.”

  Dee crossed to the tiny curtained off corner of the shop which passed for a changing room and slipped inside. Melissa Sacks sat on the stool, her face like a pink balloon stuffed with ping pong balls. Tears sat on her cheeks; or maybe not her cheeks. It was hard to tell.

  “What did you do?” asked Dee, not unkindly.

  Melissa Sacks made a flesh-smothered mumble that sounded something like, “Munshumfin pfpf muh fush” and ran a hand in front of her face.

  “Yes,” said Dee. “But I told you it was just for your lips—”

  “Ma moh.”

  “—Instead of getting those awful, and expensive, filler injections you were talking about.”

  “Buh ma momad muh ibs a muck-muck Amjamima Momie.”

  “And they do,” Dee agreed. “Unfortunately, Melissa, the rest of your face now looks like Angelina Jolie’s lips too.”

  Melissa Sacks put her hands to her swollen, malformed face, and sobbed.

  “There, there, sweetness,” said Dee. “We can sort this out.”

  Dee bit the tips of her thumbs, smeared blood across the woman’s brow, cheeks and chin, and intoned a single word. Melissa gasped as her face rapidly settled down into a far more human shape.

  “Now, have you got the cream on you?” said Dee.

  Melissa Sacks handed over a squeezy tube.

  “Is this all that’s left?” said Dee. “It’s a wonder your face didn’t explode.”

  Melissa Sacks patted her cheeks and prodded her back-to-normal nose. “How did you do it?” she asked.

  “Psychosomatics,” said Dee and waved away any further questions. “I think I’ll be looking after this cream from now on.”

  “But my lips—”

  “—Look lovely,” said Dee, propelling the woman from the changing room.

  Dee put the half squeezed tube on the till counter, picked up the bottle of cherry cough medicine and went into the back room. Mrs Binder, an octogenarian with the sinewy forearms of a lifelong washerwoman, the lungs of a kipper smokehouse and the bloody minded attitude of a woman who had lived through the Birmingham Blitz without a word of complaint, sat by the open back door. She braced hands against her knees and wheezed, “Is that for me?”

  “Something for your throat.”

  “All I need is five minutes breather.”

  “I’ll just get a spoon.” Dee wove through the black bags of donated goods littering the floor and stepped into the kitchenette.

  Checking that Mrs Binder wasn’t looking her way, Dee unscrewed the lid and poured all but an inch of the linctus down the sink. She opened the herb cupboard in which she kept her emergency supplies and took out few leaves of adders tongue and a vial of turnsole s
ap. Dee stuffed the leaves in the linctus bottle, added a dash of sap and then topped up the whole thing with Ribena and water.

  “I don’t need a spoon,” called Mrs Binder, and immediately set off on a prolonged and noisy coughing fit.

  “You’re the boss,” said Dee. She gave the bottle thirteen firm shakes before taking it to Mrs Binder. “I couldn’t find one anyway.”

  “Youth of today,” tutted the old woman.

  In the kitchenette, Dee put the kettle on and washed the incriminating dregs of linctus down the plughole.

  Youth of today, thought Dee. It was a compliment of sorts, she supposed. She had no illusions about herself. She was racing towards middle age, propelled by the momentum of a personal life featuring more early nights curled up with a good book and a sticky bun than late ones fired by wild dancing and a hot date. She had no one to blame but herself and, truth be told, she wasn’t unhappy with her life choices but…

  It was that brochure the young man with the fiery hat had given her.

  Three weeks to a better you, it had said. Develop your true potential, it had said.

  Dee was a good witch, but surely her goodness could extend further than operating a down-at-heel charity shop, brewing up cough mixture for the terminally bronchial, and providing magical cosmetic enhancements for women who really just needed a dash of self-confidence?

  Dee took those thoughts home with her. She let them percolate at the back of her mind while she cooked dinner (Friday was macaroni cheese with arctic roll for afters). They footled around in her subconscious while she distilled extract of Jude’s Wort in her bathroom laboratory following a recipe by Zosimos of Panopolis. They skulked almost invisibly while she watched a DVD movie double-bill of Legally Blonde and Disney’s Frozen – during which she belted out her own rendition of Let It Go whilst simultaneously eating a whole box of After Eight mints. The thoughts slipped with her, onesie-clad, into bed and went to work on her sleeping mind.

  When she woke on Saturday morning, she had come to a decision.

  She double-checked her thoughts and reasons as she parked the car before cutting through the Northfield indoor shopping centre on her way to work. Three weeks to a better you. Three weeks wasn’t long, but it would mean leaving Unloved Animals in the hands of Mr Tilbury and his painfully passive ilk. Nonetheless, it was a price worth paying.

  Dee opened the shutters and took advantage of the hour in which she would have the place to herself to sort things out. She spent a good while in the back room, packing some travelling clothes for herself and casting the few repair incantations she knew over the racks of recently sorted clothes: instantly darning holes and reattaching a number of loose buttons. She threw a protective ward over the shop till, did a full cash count and wrote out a list of instructions for the other volunteers.

  Some of the instructions were practical – the locations of keys, the importance of getting donors to sign up for Gift Aid – but most of them were exhortations to use their initiative. Greet the customers, create new window displays, put up some new posters or at least rehang the existing ones so they were straight. She finished with the words Give it a go. Good things will happen if you open yourself up to the opportunity.

  As she put the final full stop on the page, two women barrelled into the shop, almost taking the door from its hinges and the glass from its frame. The taller and older of the two slammed the door closed behind them and stared nervously out at the high street through the miraculously intact glass.

  “We’re not open yet,” said Dee automatically.

  The younger one – an olive-skinned teenager who looked like she had skipped too many meals – stared at Dee. “She needs shoes,” she said.

  The taller woman bundled her companion over to the till. The wonky poster of Terry the Boss-Eyed Tortoise fell off the wall for no reason.

  “Can I help you?” sighed Dee.

  “Is there a back exit to this shop?” asked the woman. There was a wild, slightly panicked look in her eyes. Both woman and girl were breathing heavily. They had been running, Dee guessed. She realised that the woman was barefoot and her feet injured.

  Dee wasn’t a fan of obvious questions but couldn’t help herself. “Are you in trouble, poppet?”

  A man with a shaved head peered in the shop window, eyes shaded by hands pressed against the glass. Dee knew that this had to be the trouble the pair of them were in. Before Dee could speak, the man threw the door open and stalked inside. It was only then that Dee saw his face was divided equally in two, along the line of his nose: one side perfectly normal, the other a painful and shiny pink, as though he had fallen asleep under a sun lamp.

  The taller woman swore.

  Dee opened her mouth, dismayed to realise her mouth’s chosen sentence was going to be: “He should put something on that.”

  The younger woman snatched up the tube of lip-enhancement cream, still lying on the counter since yesterday. She turned and squirted its contents directly into the man’s eyes.

  The Good Witch of Southside

  Caroline Black didn’t consider herself to be just a good witch; she was a fricking awesome witch. However, being fricking awesome didn’t pay the bills. Witchcraft, unfortunately, was all about the little stuff, the personal stuff, the one-to-one stuff. Magic invocations didn’t bring vocational success. Hedge-magic couldn’t make you a hedge-fund manager. Having a witch’s cat did not make one a fat cat. Witchcraft lent itself to careers like nursing, social work, residential care, customer service and all those other fields of work which paid a pittance.

  And so it was that Caroline Black, after royally screwing up her last job, found herself the most fricking awesome witch to be waiting tables at a city centre cafe. Angelo’s was a busy little space directly across the road from the Hippodrome, catering mostly to theatre types and, to a lesser degree, the girls from the local lap-dancing clubs. Most days she found herself reflecting that, with some skilfully applied glamours, she could make a minor fortune as a dancer. However, she always dismissed those thoughts, not out of any moral squeamishness, but because even though she knew she could make it work – she was fricking awesome after all – she also knew in her heart that her days of parading flesh for cash were a decade or more behind her.

  Instead she’d scrape by on waitress pay, using subtle charms to extract bigger tips, and stoically putting up with minor customer crappiness; like this woman who wasn’t happy with her knife and fork.

  “I’m sorry?” said Caroline.

  “I just wondered if you had some non-metallic cutlery,” said the customer.

  “Non-metallic.”

  “Maybe plastic. I have this allergy thing with iron.”

  The woman gestured helplessly at her three cheese salad. Her lunch companion, a handsome suit, had a suitably embarrassed look on his face.

  “I’ll go check,” said Caroline, giving the suit a playful smile. He’d be the one picking up the cheque. He’d be the one to press for a tip.

  She pushed through into the kitchen. “Angelo, do we have any plastic knives and forks? I’ve got Magneto out front says she can’t use metal ones.”

  Caroline didn’t hear his reply. A badly stacked pile of cups and plates chose that moment to slide off the clear-away counter and smash on the floor. Shards of crockery and uneaten food spun across the floor.

  “Are you trying to destroy my kitchen?” yelled Angelo> His real name was Anwar but Caroline was happy to play along with the fiction.

  “I touched nothing. This should be cleared.”

  “May is on her break.”

  “May’s always on her break,” muttered Caroline.

  She rummaged through the utensils and went back to the customer with the one plastic baby fork she had found. By the time she had cleaned up the mess, binned the debris, helped a woman deal with her tearful toddler and caught up with the waiting food orders, Jess on the till had taken payment from the suit and the no-metal woman – no tip – and an hour had passed.
r />   She was wiping down a table when a voice behind her said, “Can I get a coffee to go? Black, two sugars.”

  She turned to tell the man that he needed to order at the counter. She stopped herself when she saw who it was. “Ex-Detective Sergeant Bowman.” Caroline was both surprised and pleased.

  He grinned. Bowman, his head shaved to sidestep male pattern baldness, had a caveman physique and a wide mouth. When he grinned it was like an egg splitting in half. “Ex-Detective Constable Black,” he said. “How are you doing, Caz?”

  She tilted her head to one side. “Waiting tables, Doug. You?”

  “Getting by,” he said, with a self-deprecating glance.

  In the months since they’d both been fired, Caroline had forgotten how much she liked Doug Bowman. He was a laugh, flirty but not sleazy, and the most straight-talking bent copper she had known.

  “So, is this a chance meeting or have I got myself a new stalker?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Just passing on the way to work and saw you in here. Um…”

  “Um, what?”

  “Is this job—” he drew little circles with a finger to indicate the café “—a permanent thing?”

  “Permanent enough. Why?”

  “There’s an opening in our company.”

  “A job?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “The job?”

  “The situation.”

  “So, dodgy?”

  He grinned again. “We could discuss it over a drink later.”

  It sounded like a pick up line but Caroline knew Bowman better than that. Frankly, the day was shaping up to be a shitty one; she reckoned she’d need a drink by the end of it. “The Proofing House?”

  “At eight?” said Bowman.

  She didn’t care what the job was. It didn’t matter.

  The Proofing House, five minutes’ walk from Digbeth police station had been their local when the two of them had been on the job together. Located on an underlit street between the canal and the railway arches, it had minimal charm, a meagre selection of beers and a clientele that cut a swathe across Birmingham’s social and cultural strata.