The Girl in the Nightdress

(This post is part of a series exploring the synaesthesia of written word and music. Please press play before reading. If you're on a phone, select 'listen in browser' first.)

I am seven years and I've just finished a book. The book is wide and thick so I can hold it in my tiny hands, and it's full of colourful illustrations.

In the book, there's a girl. She wakes up at dawn and skips out into the morning. She's joined by the frogs and the rabbits and the deers, skipping through fields and over rivers through the glorious golden light. Waving hello to the farmer's wife, she gambols on, wearing only her cotton white nightdress.

I have a nightdress, I think to myself. The village is surrounded by fields. They can't be more than a 20 minutes fast skip from here. (Distance to me is only measured in walking, running and skipping. Or when I'm driven in someone's car, and suddenly distance stretches into oblivion).

I could go and find some animal friends. I could meet the deer and the foxes and the badgers that I've never seen, and we can all be friends.

I live in the middle of a council estate, but that's no bother to me.

I consider my options. To the right, there's lots of pretty fields. I can see them from my bedroom window. However, because I have never been past the horizon, I naturally assume the edge of the world falls away after about two fields, and I'll have to come back. There will be no friendly farmer's wife that way.

So I decide to go left, and at dawn, instead of sitting and watching The Lion King for the two hundredth time on repeat, I get out of bed and quietly slip out of the front door. Barefoot, of course.

The morning light is golden. Just like in the pictures. I start to skip. The gravel is rough, but no worries. I am the girl in the book! I look around eagerly, expecting a deer to prance out from a neighbour's garden at any moment.

I skip all the way from my house down the road, and straight into my brother's best friend. He's five years older than me, so he's practically a Full Grown Adult.

He stares at me. It's 7 AM, I'm wearing only a nightdress, and my feet are bare. "Where are you off to?" he asks.

I don't answer. Instead I skip all the way back home, crawl back into bed and hide under the bedclothes, feet covered in tiny speckles of gravel.