The White Dove

Arabella blinked.

This was hardly a miracle in itself, although I had sat opposite her, on and off, for days willing her to do just that. The pleasure I felt at this simple act was immeasurable but the deadpan expression on my face gave nothing away. I knew I was not the only person to have witnessed this achievement so I waited motionless, hardly daring to breathe. Who would make the next move? Her or them? It certainly wouldn’t be me.

To be fair on Arabella, she was an unwilling accomplice. She had arrived from Spain unexpectedly two weeks ago and from the moment I first set eyes on her she had taken my breath away. She left me in awe of her foreignness. Her hair, smooth and shiny as a raven’s wing, was threaded with gold and red ribbons, while her full lace underskirt perfectly displayed the ruffles of her red satin dress. Her golden hooped earrings dangled tantalisingly, causing me to tug at my chin-length hair trying in vain to hide my own naked lobes. Her lilting voice with its heavy accent, sing-songed through the rooms in our stuffy house and I could close my eyes and almost hear the clacking of castanets and the clicking of heels as Arabella danced the Flamenco, spinning across our dusty landing and along the corridor, leaving a trail of open doors and a breath of fresh air in her wake.

So it was with some reluctance that she had found herself in this predicament. Having to sit motionless on the shag pile rug in statue mode while I practised my staring technique. I had already learned how to out-stare Snowy, the Albino cat; this was no mean feat as he had one blue eye and one green eye, which was most disconcerting when trying to fix one’s gaze.

“If you stare into a cat’s eye for too long trying to make it blink, it will get spooked and attack you so that you blink first” said Estelle Mackie in her know-it-all voice when she had come round from next door to play. Irritated by her interruption I had shouted – “What? Like this…” and suddenly flailed at Snowy causing him to spring vertically into the air and mewl loudly before landing on Estelle’s head, at which point she had screamed and left the room in a rush. There then followed the sound of hurried footsteps and the distant slamming of the front door, much to my amusement and satisfaction. I needed no further distractions.

It had taken me another couple of hours of intense concentration until my facial features were almost as frozen as Arabella’s; although the upturned corners of her mouth made her appear slightly amused, mine remained expressionless. Everything in my peripheral vision became blurred as I focussed on her face, imagining a bright beam of white light descending upon us, which I could direct into her eyes and push back and forth between us, pupil to pupil. The intensity of this activity reached fever pitch and I could soon feel myself becoming so energised that I would be unable to control it any longer. Something would have to give and I didn’t want it to be me.

“Blink, blink, blink”, I chanted, hoping that she had sufficient grasp of English to obey. “I command you to blink right now!” The effort was becoming impossible to sustain; it was all my seven year old mind could bear, the pressure too great to withstand. Then, just as I was about to admit defeat, it happened. Arabella’s lids, with their fluttery black eyelashes, slowly and almost imperceptibly creaked shut, before springing wide open again.

I felt exhilarated, I had finally done it! But I remained motionless because, in my heightened state of awareness, I knew that someone was standing behind me in the doorway and that they had just witnessed what had occurred. So I waited.

My mother breezed into the room as if nothing had happened.

“Right then, let’s get these toys tidied up,” she said in a very matter-of-fact voice. I slowly untangled my legs, which had been crossed for so long that they had gone to sleep. Pins and needles coursed through my veins at the sudden rush of blood to my feet. I eased onto my knees and leant forward on all fours reaching out towards Arabella. But my mother got there first. Grabbing her by the arm she unceremoniously pulled her from my grasp.

“I think we’ll give this doll back to Aunt Jean, I don’t know what she was thinking of bringing it back from Spain anyway, she was probably just showing off,” she sniffed disapprovingly, as she unwittingly pressed the button on Arabella’s tummy.

“Una paloma blanca, over the mountains I fly, no-one can take my freedom away”, she sang hopefully in a tinny Spanish voice.

I knew that my Aunt Jean and Uncle Victor had won a lot of money from something called Premium Bonds and that they could afford to buy a new car and have holidays abroad. I think my mother was jealous of her sister’s good fortune and the fact that they had no children of their own and chose to bring back expensive presents from sunnier climes to ‘rub it in’. That was how I knew what castanets were, as well as tambourines and maracas, which we had been given as gifts from their last trip. Uncle Victor had a movie camera and projector and every time they returned from holiday they would bring round their white screen and we would close the curtains and turn off the lights and be transported to another world. We saw the snow-topped mountains of Switzerland and Austria as Aunt Jean tested out her skis, Uncle Victor lying like an oily whale on a beach in Greece and Aunt Jean’s head-scarfed visit to a mosque in Turkey. Then, while showing a film of them eating spaghetti in Italy, Uncle Victor would roar with laughter and run it backwards to show the long strands being regurgitated from their mouths like worms wriggling out of their holes.

But now I knew from looking at my mother’s face that there was no use protesting as I had done something very wrong. I watched as she straightened out Arabella’s body and placed her back into her colourful box; she covered her with tissue paper and, jamming the lid on tightly, carried the box out of the room. That was the last time I set eyes on Arabella and neither my mother nor I have ever spoken of her since.

Written by Susan Tompkins