GRISELDA OWNS THE NIGHT

Two jet fighters have been sent to intercept an unidentified threat...

“Charlie Echo, is that you?” The distorted voice sounded rather like one of those children’s home-made tin-can-and-string toys that entertained the minds of youngsters before the silicon chip was invented.

“Affirmative,” came the equally distorted reply.

“Do you see anything?”

“The skies clear. Yet they said there was something weird going on up here, something that needs looking at and shooting down.”

“So it’s all a hoax?”

“Looks like it. Keep your eyes peeled and we’ll give it ten.”

“Received, Charlie Delta.” Then, after a pause, “Wait a minute, though...”

“You see something?”

“I think … affirmative, I say affirmative...”

“They suggested a missile…? Detected terrorists, maybe a new cell that sprung up when our eyes weren’t watching, it’s what they do, the devils, spring up from nowhere when they’re least expected...”

“But it’s not a missile! I say, no missile! Negative. I say, negative. There’s a … I daren’t say...”

“Speak up, man! There’s a what?”

“You won’t believe me, Charlie Delta, you simply won’t believe me...”

“Report, Charlie Echo!”

“Looks like … I can’t say….”

“Say, or I’ll put you on a charge that’ll see you impounded for the rest of your natural!”

“It’s a woman on a broomstick … repeat, a woman on a broomstick, with a passenger behind her, can’t quite make him out, but she looks to be a right bossy b***h!”

“I’ll shoot her from the skies, Charlie Echo. I’m on target, easy now, that’s it, nice and easy, nice and cool… level up, don’t miss, automatic seeking, and fire!”

There was the sound of a burst of fire, angry against the night sky, vicious, unquestioning, dedicated to death, and a dazzling line of tracer fire which was making directly for the woman on her broomstick as she looped the loop against the backdrop of a full moon.

Then, poignantly, a heroic cackle as the besom broom spiralled until it was closer to Charlie Delta than was comfortable. He turned his head and gazed in horror at what he could see just the other side of his cockpit.

For it was his nightmare wrought in flesh.

Oh, he’d had nightmares over the years, many, many nightmares that he’d kept sectioned in a part of his brain he pretended wasn’t there, a place where the worst memories were frozen and cleansed by time itself. Occasionally, when he was feeling either brave or foolish, he’d sneak into that cranial compartment and check it was still there. It always was.

And there had been a time, long ago in the wild lands of his broken childhood when he’d been sitting at his crotchety school desk in the ramshackle hut they called school, and had failed to make any sense when Miss Armitage had tried to hammer seven plus seven is fourteen into his head with a rolling pin that bloody hurt.

Miss Armitage had believe in hammering stuff into heads. It was her method and the sole reason she had so many dribbling, lunatic children in her classes.

And there she was, or her likeness, perched on a fairy-story broomstick and hurtling along next to his cockpit at close on Mach 1. And worse, much worse, sitting behind her and hanging on for all he was worth was the shadowy figure of the grim reaper.

He had met that grim reaper once before, after he had slashed at Miss Armitage with a blade until the b***h had bled out, all of her blood, so much of it, and lay there in the spinney behind the school, devoid of anything like the beauty of life. Not that she’d ever had anything beautiful about her. The Miss Armitages of this world were, to a hen, ugly as sin. And that grim reaper, that figure clutching the stick between his legs as though the world might end if he loosened his grip, had been the one who had grabbed him and marched him, aged twelve and covered in the red juices of murder, towards the cops and punishment and maybe even the chair. Or so he’d thought in that heart-numbing moment that had never gone away.

Now run, fella, and don’t look back, the grim reaper had said in his ears, and he’d done just that. Run like nobody had ever run before, and that grim reaper joined Miss Armitage in the secret compartment inside his head where his worst nightmares lived, locked away from memory forever.

Now they were both here. In open air, speeding along at the best part of Mach 1 like broomsticks never did.

Fear gripped his heart, closed around it like a fist, and he suddenly felt sick.

“What are you doing, Charlie Delta?” rasped tin-can sound inside his cockpit like a dozen furious wasps all spelling the words out as they battered their heads against glass and aluminium and carbon fibre.

“She’s here, next to me?” wailed Charlie Echo, “the b***h is back!”

“You’re breaking up, man,” replied Charlie Delta, and he meant both that his buddy’s voice was breaking up, and that the man was.

Most certainly that the man was.

“She wants me! She’s shouting at me from outside and, I don’t know how, I can hear her,” wailed Charlie Echo.

“Then patch her through,” suggested Charlie Delta practically. “I’ll see if I can make any sense of the situation.” He didn’t think it likely, but a man has to make sure before he uses a loony situation like old women on broomsticks appearing from nowhere against a fellow officer, and use it thoroughly down all the years that were to come. A man needs to have a wrench, something with which to bash his partner’s ego, but it’s got to have at least one foot in reality.

“Now who’s a naughty boy?” wheezed a tinny voice from outside.

From outside a soundproof cockpit!

“And why were you firing those nasty bullets at me, an old woman with no protection? That’s not very nice, is it? But I suppose that’s how you Americans treat everything you don’t understand … is that right? Blast it out of the skies and report that all is well?”

I can’t hear this! It’s plain impossible!

“I heard that,” commented Charlie Delta, contradicting logic, “who’s talking to you? Who’s calling you a naughty boy? Have you got a bird in there with you? Eh? Someone to play with during a tough exercise?”

“I’m under orders,” Charlie Echo told the woman on the broomstick, “there’s talk of terrorists about, explosions in the Whitehouse, enemies at our gates ready to destroy the noble American way!”

“Now who’re you talking to?” demanded Charlie Delta.

“He’s talking to me-ee,” giggled Griselda, “and he’s going to take me down to meet his nice plump President, and we’re going to talk UFOs!”

“Go away!” blabbered Charlie Echo.

“That’s no way to talk to your partner,” countered Charlie Delta.

“I wasn’t talking to you!” Tears were pricking his eyes, salt tears of frustration, fear and a horrible memory from too long ago, “I was talking to the old woman outside!”

Charlie Delta was suddenly silent. He was going to lay down the footings for an eternity of torments and fun, but quite suddenly, and too close for comfort, there was an old woman just outside his cockpit too.

He didn’t know her, but he was sure of one thing: she sure put the s***s up him if only because she shouldn’t be there!

© Peter Rogerson 16.02.18