The Protection
by Fiona Curnow

I admit--I'd been as guilty as anyone when it came to keeping in touch with Valerie. At the end of her road, I stopped and wondered if I could go through with this.

The little rowan tree in her front garden was a few feet taller than I remembered. From where I was standing I thought I could see something like a dreamcatcher hanging from the lowest branch. Just then a low, throaty proook jolted me out of my dithering. I looked up. Yes, there was a dark bird circling overhead--but too high, too far for me to tell if it had that give-away diamond shape to its tail.

"Come over, you bugger," I muttered. "Let's see you."

But it didn't. It was a long shot to see a representative of Bran, the Celtic Alder god, wheeling over suburban South Manchester as a matter of course. I decided to take it as an omen. Valerie always did have this thing about ravens.

So I walked up to the house. It was the sort of style semi you'd find by the dozen on any number of estate agents' books in this part of Stockport.

Valerie had never been the type to go round with a 'my other car is a broomstick' bumper sticker. But she'd been so…you know…committed. Until two years ago.

She'd called the twins Freya and Cerri. Cerri was short for Cerridwen, of course, but she didn't advertise it on a broad band. Apparently Freya's third word was 'moon'. Someone else told me that, from the age of fifteen months, Cerri had been going up to anyone wearing a pendant and saying, "Ankh? Ankh?" But as for anything more serious . . .

I knocked. Valerie was in. She didn't speak at first.

"Hi," I said. "Blast from your past here."

"Karin . . . Sorry--I mean--come in."

You couldn't see much of the floor for scattered toys. Or much of the kitchen counters for unwashed coffee cups, come to that. The twins were sitting in the middle of this chaos, playing with felt tipped pens. Freya pushed up her sister's trouser leg and very deliberately drew brightly colored stripes all down her shin. Valerie looked the other way.

"I'm sorry about things," she murmured, not quite meeting my eyes, "but you know how it is with babysitters--well no, you probably don't."

"It's okay, Val. I'm not here to get at you. And anyway . . . " I'd just spotted two economy-sized bags of salt lurking behind what might eventually be the washing up. "Hey, what are you up to? Protection ritual for someone's boundaries or something? You never said."

She all but snatched the bags away from me.

"Er, no. That's to make play dough for the twins' playgroup. I'm on the committee," she added sheepishly.

We sat down. Valerie found two almost clean mugs, uncorked a bottle of her own elderberry and tipped in a generous measure. I noticed the label on the bottle: from a time before the twins were born. This was vintage stuff.

"Karin," she said eventually and--because I know her--I also knew she was trying hard to keep the accusation out of her voice, "why are you here?"

"We've got something big on. A protection working. We need everyone we can get hold of. We need you, Val."

"I needed you, too. When they came." She looked back at the twins. Cerri had taken a blue pen and was busy coloring Freya's nose. "You were meant to be my friends."

Yeah, that hurt. And I didn't know what to say to it. We all thought she was coping. I suppose those of us who didn't have kids didn't know what it was like.

"It's the site, isn't it?" she said, saving me from replying.

"You've heard?"

"About the planning permission? Yes. PG Developments or whatever they're called. Forty fucking executive homes."

She took the bottle and sloshed more wine into our coffee cups.

'The site' was our place. Special, you know. An acre or so of wasteland between the down at heel vibrancy of Rusholme and the grim nothingness of Longsight. I think it was bombed in the war and had been left to its own devices since. Not a trendy tract of real estate for any developer. Till now.

It had gone wild. Crack willow can grow pretty big in fifty years. And there were some tumbled-down factory walls or something just to one side of the tree that meant--if you were of a mind to go lighting fires after dark--any local residents that could see you and were actually inclined to care assumed it was just kids mucking about.

"It's still only at the application stage," I insisted.

"And you think there's a hope in hell of stopping it? Get real, Karin. On what grounds? It's what they call a brownfield site. The sort of thing this government encourage building on. The fact that a dozen people love it to death doesn't count for an awful lot."

"Yes it does," I hissed. "Because we've still got us. We've still got this." I reached over to touch the silver pentacle I was glad to see she still wore discreetly round her neck. "Come on, Val. We've done this sort of thing before. It's just this time it matters more than ever. And it would be really good to have you along. Apart from anything else, biologically speaking you're the only mother we've got."

"Yeah, right. So mothers are all warm and nurturing and have some exclusive connection to the earth? Listen Karin, one day you'll be celebrating Lupercalia the good old-fashioned way and you too will quickly find out the Goddess has a bitch of a sense of humor. And anyway, what about Sara? She's got kids."

"Er . . . She moved back down South. Things are a bit awkward there."

Valerie got up and fetched the moon phase calendar from her kitchen wall. She hadn't actually said yes. But we found ourselves looking at dates.

"Babysitters are the problem," she sighed. "They want danger money for those two. And why does everything have to be at night? No--it was a rhetorical question. Don't even bother answering it."

She poured herself some more wine. I held my hand over the top of my mug.

"I'll ask Rob," she said--with the kind of assertiveness that's not unusual after the best part of a bottle of Valerie's elderberry. "It's time he pulled his weight. He hardly ever sees his daughters."

"Ah. Could be a reason for that. He moved to Oxford. With Sara."

She didn't say anything. But she took an extra long swallow of her wine.

"Well, Val? Can I count on you?"

"I don't know," she said and it looked as if a light had gone out behind her eyes--like she'd just got going again then this had knocked her back. "You've kind of sprung this on me. Tell you what - I'll be in touch."

After seeing Valerie I went back to the office. What--did you think I didn't have a day job or something? My head was muzzy after all that elderberry and I wasn't in much of a state to work but you need to look busy when an internal auditor can pop their heads round the door any minute so I switched on my computer, angled the screen so no one else could see it and attempted to play Solitaire.

On my machine the program throws up Tarot cards. I don't usually talk about it. Sure, I'm as convinced as anyone that silicone chips are magic sensitive, but I reckon even some of my friends would look at me sideways if I told them the Old Ones were trying to communicate with me via some sad-person game on my computer screen.

On that particular afternoon the program had flicked the Queen of Swords at me about half a dozen times in a row when my phone rang.

"I'm not making any promises," Valerie said. "But meet me at the site. Tomorrow. I want to get the feel of the place again."

I watched Valerie get off the bus. Then she lifted down the two girls and tried to herd them both in the same direction. From the state of their faces I realized felt tip pen doesn't wash off all that well.

"I thought they went to playgroup?" I called as soon as she was in earshot.

"Half term," she said and looked at me as if I were stupid for not knowing that. "Anyway," she added more softly, "I thought they should come and see the place--just in case . . . While there's still time."

"You'd better watch them," I warned--and I caught myself sounding like my own mother for a moment. Shit, that was scary. "The ground's pretty rough. And I'm not sure how safe the willow is. Some bastard--no prizes for guessing who--seems to have ring-barked one section."

"All the better to chop part of it down and build an access road under it," Valerie muttered and we all climbed over a tangle of shopping trolleys and onto the site.

It hurt, you know, being there. It might not have been a really important rainforest or a SSSI ancient woodland, but it was this little bit of wilderness between the main road and the new sports center and two sides of fading grandeur Victorian houses. Our place. Here was where we'd picked the blackberries that had made the wine that, Valerie confided to me once, probably led to Freya and Cerri getting started. Here was where we'd scattered packets of wildflower seeds and some of them had even come up. And here was our crack willow--dividing into three great boughs only a few feet from ground level. A perfect natural altar. Except that a thick strip of bark had been hacked off, right the way round the lowest of those boughs. Its branches weren't coming into leaf like those of the other two.

"Bastard," Valerie agreed with me.

I gave her a few minutes. She touched the deeply grooved willow bark and, though she didn't quite close her eyes, she seemed to be miles--or years--away. I looked out for the girls. They were clambering over fallen masonry and picking up twigs. I made sure they didn't pick up any used hypodermics while they were at it.

When I looked back at Valerie she was standing by some blackthorn bushes and looking thoughtful.

"These are the ones we guerrilla-planted that time, aren't they?" she said after a while.

"Yes."

"Good crop of blossom. Be plenty of sloes this autumn."

"Maybe. If they don't bulldoze the lot of them first."

We looked at each other. Valerie had that curious choked-up expression and I thought it might be just the right time to get her to commit herself when Freya marched up and blinked at her mother through her blonde and uncut fringe.

"Girl done poo," she stated.

Valerie burst out laughing.

"Well if I didn't, I'd scream," she explained, picking up her child.

"Yeah, you stink. Let's get you home and sort you out."

"Wait, Val. Are you in?"

"Course I'm in. On the condition you owe me one hell of a favor."

"Hey, not so fast. A working grasp of folklore doesn't exactly incline me to sign up for favors without knowing what they're likely to be."

"Don't worry. It won't be anything horrible. Well, not that horrible. See you on the twelfth."

I watched her pick her way back towards the road--leading one child, carrying the other. I decided I'd been right to ask her.

And after we'd done the deed, we all went back to crash at Petey's house. Petey lives in one of those big Victorian places just across from the site; it was he who spotted the planning notices first. It might have been nearly three in the morning, but Valerie and I were both too keyed up to sleep. We sat on the kitchen floor and raided Petey's wine stocks, coming up with a dandelion that we uncorked and passed backwards and forwards between us. It wasn't like Valerie's--no one makes wine like Valerie--but it was good enough. And it was like the last two years or so had never happened.

"How d'you feel?" I asked after a while.

Valerie took a deep breath, leant back against the wall and closed her eyes.

"Calm. Pure. Like I've been put through a filter or something. I'd forgotten that bit."

I hugged her.

"Welcome back."

"You haven't heard the downside yet. Remember that favor? You're babysitting for me--two weeks' time."

So I did. And - though I'd opt to have my toenails extracted without anaesthetic sooner than admit this to Valerie--it was really quite a giggle. No one's ever offered me imaginary worms on toast at quarter past eleven at night before. Of course, I got into trouble with Valerie for keeping the twins up so late. But she was still speaking to me because not long afterwards she rang up and said she'd written to that bastard from PG Developments asking him to meet her at the site and he'd actually bothered replying. Would I come with her?

As usual, Valerie was late. But this time she was on her own. There was an unfamiliar black BMW parked near the entrance to the site and I had a pretty shrewd idea whose it was. So I raked my keys along the side of it.

"Why are we bothering?" I said to Valerie. "What are you trying to do--prick his conscience? Men who get to drive cars like that don't have them."

"Pricks?"

"Consciences."

"So indulge me. No." She stopped me as I made to scramble over the shopping trolleys. "That path round the other side's still open, isn't it? We'll go in that way."

By this time we were almost twenty minutes late. The figure in the suit was kicking his feet impatiently. He was standing underneath our willow.

I almost snapped. I never realized it would affect me at gut level like that. There he was--neat dark gray, self assured and totally incongruous--in our space. There was something so utterly wrong about it. If Valerie hadn't instinctively laid her hand on my arm, I'm not sure what I might have done.

"Hello!" she called, waving to the figure in the suit. "We're over here!"

He ducked under the lowest branch of the willow so he could see us better. Then began the low, ominous creaking just about on the cusp of hearing . . .

We were still some way off when it happened. We broke into a run.

He was lying on the ground. One great bough of the willow tree was pinning him across both his thighs. His face--younger than I'd expected and good looking, I suppose, if you like that sort of thing--was screwed up in agony.

"For Chrissake--get the fire crew--an ambulance--whatever!" He scrabbled inside his jacket and yanked out a mobile phone. "Here--use this."

I suppose until after the ambulance had pulled away--eerily silent but with its blue lights flashing--I was still putting two and two together and making two and a half. Then I noticed the blackthorn. A branch had been cut - just enough for, say, your average stang. Blackthorn--the wood for cursing.

She'd been subtle. You'd have to have known the site really well to spot it. And I remembered the night I'd been conned into babysitting Freya and Cerri. As I'd been walking home afterwards I'd looked up and seen the moon--an almost-crescent tilted towards the left hand side. A waning moon.

"Just what was that supposed to achieve?" I asked. She didn't try to deny it. "I'm not one hundred per cent sure. But he had it coming."

We started walking, not looking at each other, back in the vague direction of Petey's." You've put him out of action," I said, "for a few weeks, months, maybe. But the legal wheels are already rolling. They'll roll on without him."

"Oh, I don't know. Lying there nice and peaceful in his private hospital room that his top-notch medical insurance has paid for, maybe he might start thinking . . . And anyway, we've still got the protection spell."

"I don't get you, Val. You once told me you'd never get involved in cursing anyone. You said you weren't . . . "

" . . . angry enough? Karin, until you've become a mother, believe you me, you don't know what anger is."

I stopped. She carried on towards the bus stop. I thought I heard a raven calling. But I might have been wrong.

Fiona Curnow is a UK-based freelance writer. She has had over one hundred short stories and around a dozen articles published in magazines, both literary and commercial. This year she was a finalist in The Asham awards - the top UK prize for women short story writers. She specializes in women's erotica which she has published under her pen-name Maria Lyonesse in places such as Black Lace, Forum, For Women, The Collective, The Journal of Erotica and The Guild of Erotic Writers. She also writes poetry--her solo collection being I Dreamed that Pigeons Came in Every Colour--and is the poetry editor of the UK literary magazine Cadenza.