The Snow Globe (3 page)

“I’ve found the plates and cutlery!” I yell and Mum comes upstairs to join me in the attic.

“It’s cold up here but at least it’s good and dry,” she says, looking round in the gloom at what is stored and hidden up here. Suddenly she spots the old couch and footstool.

“Look at these, Cass!” she says, excited. “They must have been left behind when the house was sold.

“They used to be in the drawing room,” I blurt out, recognising the plum-coloured couch.

“Imagine that,” says Mum, smiling. “Hidden away up here, they’re worn and threadbare but otherwise perfect. When we get some money we’ll get them reupholstered and covered and use them back in the drawing room.”

Mum and I carry the heavy box downstairs and unpack it and wash all our good plates and bowls for Christmas dinner tomorrow. Robbie and Ted and I spend the rest of the day helping Mum and Dad. I wrap my presents and put them under the tree. We stay up late watching Christmas movies and Dad makes popcorn.

There is a full moon when I am going to bed, which makes the street and the river outside my window look like silver. Without thinking, I pick up my snow globe and ever so slowly turn it upside down, watching the snow gently fall, covering the tree and the deer and the girl … There is something so weird and strange and special about it. I give it a really good shake and the snow falls faster as the tree is iced with white and the girl’s fingers try to grasp it and the deer has snowflakes on his nose.

I look at the girl.
She’s just a girl in a glass bubble
, I tell myself over and over again. I wish that I could stop missing my friends and our old house so much.

The snow falls … and the room gets colder and colder.

When I open my eyes the girl in the red dress is standing near my window looking at the moon, the robin perched beside her.

“Don’t be scared,” she says. “I’m your friend.”

I watch as the room fills with snow.

“You will not be lonely here in this house!” she says and laughs, her breath cold as ice.

When I wake she is gone.

*

On Christmas morning there is a new bike for me, a phone for Robbie, and Ted gets a huge Lego castle with a dungeon and dragons and soldiers. Then, after a big breakfast, we all walk to church.

“What a beautiful old house,” says Granny, when she and Granddad arrive later on, laden down with presents and wine and a big plum pudding. “It must be full of history and memories.”

Granddad admires the bay windows and the stairs and the fireplace, and Granny loves their bedroom with its tall windows and high ceilings, and the old-fashioned bathroom with the long flush toilet chain.

We all gather round the tree to open our presents. The fairy lights sparkle, the fire is blazing and the house is warm at last as the plumber came late last night and fixed the heating. Robbie and I cut down branches of holly and ivy from our garden to decorate the hall and stairs and the mantelpiece and dining room.

Robbie gives me the cute pink hat from the market, and a set of biscuit cutters. Dad puts on his new tie and Mum loves the scarf I gave her and Ted calls his dragon puppet Max! Granny and Granddad have got presents for us too, with a really big one for Mum and Dad. It’s a pair of silver candelabras.

“They’ve been in the family for years,” confesses Granddad, “but we thought with an old house like this they would be perfect.”

“Thank you,” says Mum, “they are beautiful. I’ll put them on the table.”

Ted’s given a remote-control car and Robbie a really cool pair of earphones that he has wanted for ages.

Then Granny passes me a box.

Curious, I open it. Inside there are six perfect glass Christmas ornaments. I lift them out carefully – two robins, a rabbit and a deer, and a star and moon, each threaded with a loop of red ribbon. I can’t believe it!

“Granny, they are beautiful! Where did you get them?”

“I saw them in a shop window and thought they were so pretty I couldn’t resist them.”

It’s like some kind of strange magic is happening as Ted helps me to hang each one on our tree.

Mum is busy getting the dinner ready and Robbie and I set the oak dining table with our Christmas tablecloth and the china serving dishes and Dad puts the tall white candles in the candelabras in the centre. The room looks just the way I saw it before …

Sitting down to Christmas dinner the candles flicker and are reflected in our big mirror as we eat plates of turkey and ham and stuffing followed by mince pies and some of Granny’s pudding.

Afterwards we play charades and watch TV as Granddad dozes in the armchair. I can’t believe that we have had our first Christmas in the new house … I almost phone Alanna and Sophie but decide to wait until tomorrow.

“It’s snowing!” Dad calls and we all run to the window to watch.

It’s coming down really heavily, covering the path and the street outside.

“The weather forecast says it could last for days,” he tells us, and it does, lasting all week.

Everything looks so different, icy and white – our house and the garden and the street and the town. We make snowmen and have snowball fights with some of the neighbours. Granny and Granddad stay until after the New Year, our house crowded and noisy, beginning to feel like home.

Now I am getting ready for bed, the night before I go to my new school. I’m really nervous about it.

I shake the snow globe hard so the snow is almost like a snowstorm, watching it swirl and move so I can barely see the girl in the red dress and the deer and the rabbit.

“I wish that school will be OK.”

I wake in the middle of the night feeling cold. It’s like I am in a blizzard and I can see inside a big building with corridors and classrooms. I see desks and a whiteboard and rows and rows of students. I feel scared. Then I hear voices floating up in the air, singing …

I hold my breath. She is there again – the snow at her feet, the deer standing nervously beside her. I knew she would come …

“Don’t be afraid,” she whispers slowly. “I am always here …”

In the morning I get dressed and put on my new school uniform. I wish that I didn’t have to go to school but Ted is starting too. Mum is taking him as she wants to settle him in with his new teacher and class.

I am standing at the front door waiting for them when I see a girl coming out of the house a few doors away from us. She is wearing the same navy-and-grey uniform as me. She smiles at me and walks over.

“You starting at St Paul’s?” she asks.

I nod.

“I’m in class six; which class are you in?”

“Six.”

“You just move into the house? I knew the old lady who lived there – she died last year.”

“We moved in a few days before Christmas. My dad’s got a new job here.”

“We went to my nan’s in Scotland for Christmas but with the bad weather we only got home three days ago,” she explains. “By the way, my name is Ella.”

“And I’m Cass.”

“Are you ready to go now?”

“I have to wait for my little brother.”

“Well I’d better go but I’ll see you later.” She smiles. Ella’s got braces and has short curly hair and I immediately like her.

Ted is taking ages and Mum has his lunch box in her hand as she locks the front door.

“You OK?” I ask him. He must be scared too.

“I couldn’t find him,” sighs Mum. “Do you know where he was? Upstairs in your bedroom playing with your snow globe thing.”

“I just wanted to shake the snow,” he protests. “I didn’t break it, Cass – I just wanted to see the rabbit again.”

“The little rabbit in the snow is cute!” I agree.

“I just needed to see him again before school so he’d make everything be all right.”

“See the rabbit?”

He’s walking beside me with his Transformers schoolbag.

“When you shake the glass it’s magic,” he whispers, so Mum can’t hear. “I see him sometimes when my room is snowy. The rabbit hides under my bed so I won’t be scared in the new house. He showed me our garden with a big swing and said he’ll be there when I get home to tell him all about school.”

I can feel my heart beat fast … thinking of the snow globe, thinking of the swirling snowflakes and the girl in the red dress … waiting for me …

We opened a creative writing centre in Dublin’s inner city in January 2009. We called it
Fighting Words
– a temporary name that immediately felt like a good idea. We didn’t conduct extensive market research to see if it was wanted. Nor did we seek to align it with the formal education system. We took our belief in the enterprise from ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, in
Field of Dreams
: “If you build it, they will come.”

We wanted to address the absence of outlets for children and young adults in Dublin to engage with creative writing, and the lack of time allowed for it in the school curriculum. It seemed daft, in a country that prides itself in being a land of writers, that there was so little space for writing.

From the very beginning, the interest has been colossal. We host 10,000 students each year – mainly children and young adults – at creative-writing workshops and programmes. They are all free. Most of the students come with their schools, but we also host sessions outside of school time attended by a wide range of special-needs groups, as well as individual children and teenagers. Our tutors and mentors are volunteers. We have more than 400 of them.

We had our own inspiration: we’d visited
826 Valencia
in San Francisco, a creative-writing centre established by the author Dave Eggers. We’d loved what we’d seen being done there – the way little kids were invited to put pen to paper, and the way monosyllabic teenagers were persuaded to write thousands of their own words. Since that project launched, similar creative-writing centres have opened all over the world: as well as our own
Fighting Words
here in Dublin, there are centres in Milan, Stockholm, London, Barcelona, Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Sydney, with plans for ones in Belfast, Vienna and Buenos Aires. All of these creative-writing centres are linked together informally. They communicate regularly, sharing ideas and experience.

Writing is a solitary occupation – eventually. But having witnessed it again and again over the last five years, we know that if it begins as a collective exercise, as a bit of fun, then by the time the children start to write by themselves, they produce better, more confident work. They’ve seen what they can do, the simple things that can make a good line brilliant, and they’re keen to give it a go themselves.

Quite soon after we opened, often at the suggestion of artists from other disciplines who wanted to get involved, we started to run programmes tailored towards other types of writing, including film scripts, plays, graphic novels, radio drama, journalism, songwriting and film animation. As with those we run for creative writing, the demand by children to participate is consistently staggering, and their creativity is extraordinary.

We think creative writing is an essential part of every child’s education. We want to give as many children as possible the opportunity to engage with their imaginations and see what possibilities are then opened up for them.
Fighting Words
is not state-funded, and our existence is dependent on people who believe passionately in what we do – like the writers and artists who have written and illustrated these brilliant stories. We are especially grateful to a great friend of
Fighting Words
, Sarah Webb – the creative- and driving force behind this wonderful collection.

Roddy Doyle & Seán Love

All profits made from the sale of this book go to
Fighting Words
, a registered charity.