Conundrum

  Voices from the Frying Pan

  Sometimes it is as though life has suddenly switched into some kind of alternate reality. Where it starts, it is hard to deduce, but everything can change in the blink of an eye.

  It all began on a blissful summer day.

  It was the school holidays and nine-year-old Penny was playing in the garden of their stone-clad cottage at the foot of the North Downs. It was an idyllic spot where you could look up and see the chalk carving of a crown, gazing down over the tranquil village of Wye and the peaceful valley of the River Stour.

  The garden was a maze of paths between the tall runner bean plants, floral bushes and hollyhocks. Susan Morgan glanced out of the kitchen window to see her daughter blissfully running around in the warm sunshine. She thought to herself how lucky they were to be living in such an idyllic spot. How she would have hated bringing her daughter up in some inner city flat where she would be at the mercy of so many bad influences.

  Instead, the little girl wandered freely, as the butterflies darted around the plants and the wood pigeons cooed in the trees that surrounded the garden.

  Susan continued with the washing up, contented even with such a mundane task. Just then Penny darted in through the open door, grabbed the black frying pan from off of the draining board and ran back outside with it, sending a cascade of suds scurrying onto the floor in the process.

  Susan checked her natural inclination to retrieve the frying pan. She was in a positive mood, so what harm could there be in rinsing the pan again later when her daughter’s important business with it had been completed?

  Boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, the kitchen window became obscured by steam. Having made the drink, Susan wiped the window with her sleeve. The sight that she glimpsed was beguiling to say the least.

  Penny was sitting cross-legged on the concrete path, gazing into the frying pan with a look of utmost concentration. Some wisps of air seemed to be rising from the pan. It was like one of those mirages that you often see on the road on a hot day. Just what was so fascinating about an old pan?

  The mother wandered outside and her daughter was completely oblivious to the fact that she was being watched. Penny appeared to be talking to herself as she stared intently into the utensil.

  “Penny, I need to wash up the frying pan now,” called Susan, but it was as though the little girl hadn’t even heard her words. “Penny!” repeated the mother, slightly more forcefully.

  The girl looked up suddenly, as though snapping out of a trance, dropped the pan and ran into the house.

  Susan followed her daughter into the kitchen. “Whatever is the matter?” she asked.

  “I’ve been talking to Granddad Alfred,” retorted the child’s voice innocently.

  Granddad Alfred had been dead for forty years.

  Careful not to stifle her daughter’s over-active imagination, Susan went along with this game, “And what did he tell you then?”

  “I mustn’t say,” said the daughter.

  Susan was slightly miffed by this response, but determined not to rise to the bait, she wandered back out to retrieve the frying pan where a rather large snail had just completed its transition from the handle into the pan itself, leaving a slimy trail behind it. The frying pan would be staying outside from now on!

  Granddad Alfred was actually Susan’s great grandfather. He had lived with his wife on a farm in America during a time of great hardship. His crops were failing year after year due to dust storms and the family were descending into poverty, with no real hope of escape.

  Having heard old stories about the California gold rush, Alfred’s ten-year-old daughter was always pretending to sift for gold in the stream nearby. Her parents had always found this amusing until one day she actually found something valuable in the bottom of her metal bowl. The family’s fortunes were suddenly changed and they managed to board a steamship and travel to England. It sounded like a fairy story, and the only evidence Susan had of her ancestor’s tale was an old sepia photograph of her grandmother as a little girl, staring into her bowl beside a small stream. Susan knew full well that she owed her own idyllic lifestyle more or less entirely to this incident. If it was true of course.

  It was while Susan was chopping up carrots for the evening meal that the little girl came in from the garden, a little more conversant this time.

  Susan looked at her daughter’s expression, with her cheeks slightly puffed out as though she was going to burst if she withheld her tale any longer.

  Sensing the seriousness, the mother took hold of her daughter by the shoulders and said “You must tell me what the matter is.”

  Suddenly, it was as though a dam had just been burst by a great lake, and a torrent of words spewed out.

  “Granddad Alfred told me that nobody remembers him any more and that it is the same for everybody. When you die, everything you do will end up being forgotten and that in hundreds of years it will even be the same for William Churchill and Adrian Lincoln.”

  Unaware of her childlike error with the two names she'd heard, she continued, “He says that when I am at school people will want me to do well, but when I leave I will be on my own and that nobody will be interested in the things I do, and that even if I work hard and pass my exams, my job will be boring and I will end up doing the same as everyone else and get married and have children who will grow up and have boring jobs too.

  He told me that people who get married want to be on their own when they are together, and together when they are apart, and that they are supposed to be happier together but they just end up arguing all the time. He said that everybody wants to have children, but the whole world is heating up because there are just too many people, and nobody stops to think what the world will be like for their children when they grow up because the people just don’t want to change any of the things they do and…”

  Just then the mother interjected, “Where did you really hear these things?”

  Penny answered shyly “I told you. Granddad Alfred told me,” and then to qualify her answer she added, “He talks to me from out of the frying pan.”

  Susan didn’t believe that her great grandfather’s spirit was filling her daughter’s head with these gloomy philosophies, but where on earth could she have suddenly grasped such concepts of overpopulation, global warming and nihilism, perhaps not even knowing what she was saying?

  “Now listen, Penny. Your friend Storm is coming round in a little while, so I want you to forget about all this and have a nice time.”

  The little girl nodded her consent, and Susan poured her a glass of orange juice to take back outside. Perhaps she was a bit dehydrated.

  Penny’s father Malcolm arrived home from work, slightly tired from another lengthy train ride back from London. It was perhaps fifteen minutes before the hustle and bustle of the day had finally dissipated, and as he sat on the settee relaxing with a cup of tea and The Times crossword, Susan noticed the evening sunshine forming an oblong shaft of golden light from the window, down the wall, across the floor, over the table and onto the bowl of apples. Her feelings of contentment were restored. It was much easier to feel lucky in the sunshine.

  “Storm is coming round for Penny again shortly,” she announced, breaking the silence.

  “Oh, that boy with the silly name,” said Malcolm. He had always maintained that the child’s parents must have been hippies or something to name a baby after a meteorological phenomenon!

  There was a ring at the door and Susan called her daughter who was now back in the garden.

  “Penny, your friend is here.”

  Opening the front door she let the little boy in, but Penny was nowhere to be seen.

  The boy stood in the hallway while the mother hurried back through the living room and the kitchen and out into the garden. “Penny,” she cried.

  The small girl was again crouched down over the frying pan. She looked up in a slow and ghostly manner and stared at her mother without so much as a movement.
r />   “Storm is here!”

  The girl slowly looked back down at the frying pan and said something to herself very quietly. Or so it seemed. She then put the old frying pan down and walked over to her mother; “OK, I can see him now.”

  The young friends did as they usually did and spent most of their time together in the hallway with the door to the lounge closed behind them. Storm quickly located the miniature cars in the toy box and became engrossed in moving them around on the floor, with accompanying sound effects. Picking up the tiny model of a BMW estate car, he turned to her and said, “My dad says that when I grow up I can drive one of these if I become an important businessman or politician.”

  The little girl, who had been contentedly watching her friend play suddenly had that ‘full to burst’ look in her eyes again and launched into another uncharacteristic tirade:

  “Granddad Alfred says that politicians are all the same, and that it makes no difference what party they are from, as they are told what to do by businessmen, and if they don’t do what the businessmen want, then the businessmen move away and people lose their jobs, and so all the people have to think that they are voting for different things when they are not.

  He said that’s why nothing ever changes and there are still people starving, and if we just feed them it won’t solve the problem, as they will all have lots of children and then there will be ten times as many people starving as before. And he says that if people are kept busy thinking about cars and things they can buy, they will forget about the starving people and not be angry that nobody sorts out all the problems.”

  Storm however had been completely oblivious to this rant. He picked up another toy car. “This one’s a Lamborghini,” he announced.

  A whole week passed and these outbursts had become quite a regular thing. Due to being out all day, the girl’s father had yet to experience this, but one evening, as they were relaxing by lamplight in front of the television news, Susan decided to calmly introduce the topic.

  “Have you noticed anything strange about Penny lately?” she began.

  “Not really. She always seems to be outside these days,” came the reply. And after some thought Malcolm added, “Much better than being stuck in her room on that games console.”

  “Yes, she spends all day staring into our old frying pan,” said Susan more harshly.

  “She’s just playing,” responded the father, as another explosion in the Middle East filled the TV screen.

  Susan began to elaborate on the kind of things the nine-year-old had been saying and concluded with, “I really think we should take her to see somebody.”

  “You mean a psychologist?” asked Malcolm, “I really don’t like the idea of people messing around with kids’ heads. It’s just a phase. She’ll grow out of it.”

  Just then there was a scream from upstairs. Susan rushed up and opened the little girl’s bedroom door to find her sitting upright in bed, bathed in an almost supernatural white light. Wind was billowing the net curtains in from the open window. Attempting to restore some normality, Susan tried turning the light on, but nothing happened. The room was still dark and Penny still had this strange aura about her. Looking up at the lampshade, the bulb hadn’t just blown; it had been removed.

  Susan walked past the bed, and lifting the net curtains over her head she closed the window. As she turned around, Penny looked more normal and not like the ghost she had seen a few seconds ago. The light bulb was sitting on the bedside table.

  Susan comforted her daughter, and it became apparent that she had had a dream and in it she was watching her own life as a film on the small, portable television in her room. The movie had made her so sad that she felt an uncontrollable urge to cry, and as the credits began to roll she noticed that all of her deceased ancestors had been sitting on the bed watching it with her. They were smartly dressed and sat in a line down each side.

  Hugging her daughter Susan then asked, “But why did you take the light bulb out?”

  “I didn’t,” said the little girl, “Granddad Alfred did.”

  This whole business had to stop. Susan would ring the child psychologist tomorrow morning at nine.

  There were several children waiting in the psychologist’s reception area on the day. Penny had painstakingly constructed a house of cards on the old mahogany magazine table in the middle of the room during the wait.

  Her mother then emerged from the consultation room, having explained the problem to Dr Emily Taylor. The female psychologist stood in the doorway and smiled at the little girl, “I’d like to see you now Penny.” The child jumped up with a jerk that sent the house of cards fluttering silently to the dark, wooden tabletop.

  Settled in the consultation room, the psychologist posed random questions as the little girl doodled on a notepad. The first two questions had solicited no response. “Come on now Penny, your mum tells me that you are a very clever girl, so you must be able to answer me.”

  “Well,” began the young girl, “There isn’t any point being clever, because most people don’t think the same things as you, so you can’t really talk about what you think.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think that the mad people are the lucky ones because they don’t have to think about all the horrible things any more, and nobody expects them to do anything they don’t want to do.”

  “If there weren’t any unpleasant things, then we wouldn’t be able to tell when we are happy,” replied the psychologist.

  “But you can’t say that about soldiers getting killed in wars or people doing nasty things to children. God wouldn’t want these things to happen just so other people could feel happy.”

  Dr Taylor hated it when religious ideas were brought into a discussion and decided to change tack; “Your mum tells me that Granddad Alfred tells you some of these things. Is that true?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Perhaps he has been in a bad mood recently. I’m sure there are good things he can tell you too.”

  The psychologist had found an opening, so she worked on convincing Penny that her great great grandfather would speak to her one more time and that he would tell her something very different and that this would change how she saw things forever.

  It was a few days before this happened. Susan and Malcolm were having an argument, so the girl decided to escape to the garden and seek the comfort of the frying pan. As she stared into its mottled black surface, the now familiar voice in her head began its final conversation.

  “My little girl was just like you,” the spirit began, “She would spend all her time staring into a metal bowl and one day she found gold. It changed our lives, but because of this she grew up with a rose-tinted view of things, thinking she would always be lucky. Then when things didn’t turn out the way she expected, she took her own life…” [Penny was not entirely sure what this phrase meant] “…You reminded me of her and I don’t want you to be like her. That’s why I’ve told you what I see when I look at the world today. I have to say goodbye now. Be good.”

  And with that, it was as though the wisps of air that had been rising steam-like from the pan were sucked back into it and out of existence. He was gone.

  Whilst the intentions of both the psychologist and the spirit were clearly good, the combined result was not. And now that Granddad Alfred had gone for good, was there any way of helping this little girl?

  Penny dropped the frying pan and a chill wind swept across the yard, making her shiver. She looked at the plants and flowers around her and although essentially the same, they had taken on a greyish appearance and looked thorny and threatening, like a tangled weave of dead branches, with the summer flowers looking hideously unnatural.

  The stunning green hillside that overlooked the house now looked much different too – like a huge precipice towering above the little cottage and its garden. Blocking out the sunlight, it had an air of menace, as though at any moment it might come crashing down upon them. It was as though the groun
d was moving and the hill was becoming deliriously higher and higher.

  Penny was gripped with fear, but nothing could have prepared her for what was to come.

  Her friend Storm had popped round to see her and was leaning over the back gate at the side of the garden. As she ran hoping to find some comfort in the familiar sight of her young friend, she stopped in her tracks. His face was contorted like dripping wax, and as he became more alarmed by her reaction his face seemed to distort further.

  Penny ran into the house but there was no relief here either. The grey, flagstone floor in the kitchen appeared as though covered in a haze of cobwebs; the wooden legs of the kitchen table looked strangely alive, with the grains of the wood seeming to move like a dizzying sea of sinews. Penny had to look away.

  The white painted door frame leading into the lounge looked crooked, and as the little girl stepped through, the final horror became apparent. Her parents were facing the TV screen but as they turned around, startled by her entrance, they both had the same contorted faces as the young boy.

  It was then that Penny noticed the television between her parents’ two eerie-looking forms. The news was on, and its pictures of war and suffering were spilling out of the screen in a stream of white light and onto the floor, like a river of supernatural brightness oozing its images of a world in distress across the carpet, appearing like a giant crack in the floor running right across the room.

  She had discovered the source of her views at last.