By Holly Gibbs
A rustling tree is not a rustling tree, it’s a knife wielding man creeping in through the backdoor that someone forgot to lock. The torturous cry of a fox isn’t a mating call, it’s a brutal killing taking place in my garden, and I’m next. I’ve had a routine to ease the perpetual terror of my death playing out like a scene from a budget horror film since I was little, but this was when my bedtime was at 6pm, and my surely too acute awareness of murder at seven years old taught me that rush hour wasn’t when people got chopped up. But to prevent the bogey man’s arrival during my slumber as best I could, I would perform a nightly safe-guarding of my house, climbing out of bed, turning on every light, locking every window, three times. Finding comfort in completing this checklist while reading Peter Rabbit until my eyelids developed separation anxiety.
Now I sleep with the door closed, I’ve traded my bunk bed for a double with responsible storage underneath, and I can stay up as late as I want. At four am, no creak in a floorboard or thud through a wall can ever just be what it is, these noises are naturally, a soundtrack of clues for how I’m going to be taken out. Any sound is followed by the glaciating of my body, I don’t move for a minimum of ten minutes, my ears searching for sanity and eyes plotting an escape plan. The urge to investigate once I’ve let myself thaw is prompted by an uninvited internal spiralling about what if I don’t. Visions of waking up in a house filled with my dead family , or a machete in my face, if I blink I could miss it, so sleep is out of the question.
I’ve traded the Beatrix Potter in my once fun-sized palms for futile weapons clutched in my capable adult hands: sometimes a deodorant can, car keys, or a vase, always my phone with 999 pre-dialled. Lurching with quiet toes through the house, I swoop into dark corners surprising myself with my shadow and stand barefoot on the stone of my garden floor waiting for a clumsy hitman’s ringtone to echo through the bushes.
When the silence starts to swallow my irrationality, and the kitchen knife I’ve been eyeing up to grab if needed looks at me with raised eyebrows, I know it’s time for bed. That today won’t be the day, and as the sun leaks through the blind-less window that I’ve left bare to make daylight last longer, and the birds start to roar, I know it’s time for sleep. Their chirping is my opposite alarm, my signal that it’s okay to close my eyes, the bogey man isn’t turning up, because, really, who’s going to kill me when it’s light out?
