Aunt Araminta’s Big Red Book of Tiny Time

A solstice hymn and fable for all children who know that time is of the essence, that doing nothing is not an option, and who are fed up with adults relying on them to save the world.

Juliette Adair studied creative writing at City University, London, winning the Christopher Little Award and longlisted by The Artists and Writers Yearbook. She’s had work published in Mslexia, Common Ground and ‘The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State.’ She is a life coach and hypnotherapist in Dorset, UK. A solstice baby herself, she is intrigued by the play of darkness, phenomena and the reappearance of the light. She also likes cute fluffy dogs.

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Solstice; winter. The last moments of the darkest day. My hasty, do-or-die, eleventh-hour birth. 

Here we are, tiptoeing around these grandiose new roles: Mother, Father, Baby. Paused, though, in our various materialisations as the Homebirth Midwife’s fingers search, trembling, for the newborn’s pulse. 

Perhaps they pray, despite being agnostics.

Perhaps their prayers bring her. Appearing in the faltering torch beam like an angelic hologram and opening her book biblically on the nightstand: Aunt Araminta.

• • •

‘Solstice baby…’ Her finger caresses the greasy columns in her ephemeris, then stops. She glances at my parents before turning to me. ‘You haven’t long in this world, little girl,’ she says. ‘Or perhaps it’s the world that’s ending. It’s not altogether clear.’ She frowns, then shrugs. ‘Either way, better make the most of it.’

It is late already. Out in the woods, the night shift is well underway: bats back in their bunker and owls calling time across the valley. My birthday is nearly over before it has quite started. I vault the sides of my cot and stand for a moment — but only a moment — on fat, wobbly legs.

‘Thanks for the tip, Auntie. I will.’

• • •

 I have to get to London. Where time starts (and stops): the Big Zero. Where everyone goes in search of adventure.

• • •

See, here: under the giant clock, a man wearing the coat of an albino mammoth holds a cigar in his teeth.

‘What can I do for you, little girl?’ The cigar jerks up and down as he speaks.

‘I want to stop time,’ I say, noticing the wildlife crawling in his pelt.

‘Ah,’ he says, billowing darkly. ‘That’s a hard one. But I like a challenge; come with me.’

He has me out on the tilting ledge of the enormous clock-hand in no time at all. It heaves under my feet and the angle increases with a jolt. 

‘I’m not heavy enough to stop it,’ I say. ‘I need your help.’

He shakes his head. ‘I’m only the fixer. Here, take my hand; I’ll help you down.’

A cockroach scuttles back up his sleeve as he stretches towards me.

‘It’s OK, thanks,’ I say. 

‘You’re hardly in a position to refuse.’

‘Nonetheless.’ I duck under his shaggy arm and scramble inside the clock.

He comes in after me but I blend with the dark. I seem to be very good at this.  Utterly invisible. Eventually he goes away grumbling. I understand then that the dark and I might be friends. 

• • •

Down in the square, there’s a flare of light. Flames leaping up and a dark figure circling. It’s a woman with wings on her boots, a live snake around her waist, and breath made of pure fire. When she exhales, the whole square brightens and lights the faces of the watchers. 

‘Wow,’ I say. ‘How do you do that?’

‘It’s a trick,’ she says. ‘I can show you if you like.’

So I become the fire-eater’s apprentice.

I follow her around the circle, holding out her feathered hat for coins. People laugh, seeing a dark baby padding along behind her. They fill her hat so many times, the crown begins to give way.

‘This is the best night of the year,’ she says. ‘The trick doesn’t work in the light.’

• • •

Afterwards, we sit by a brazier and she hands me a bowl of soup. 

‘Bit young to be out at night, aren’t you?’ 

‘I’m trying to stop time.’

‘Ah,’ she says. ‘That.’ 

I stroke a stray feather from her tattered hat across my cheek. 

‘Or make the most of it, anyway,’ I say.

In my mind’s eye, Aunt Araminta twitches a smile.

We eat our soup. Warm and nutty, like clean earth beneath a bonfire. 

‘You need to meet my friend,’ she says then. ‘He can show you wonders: real ones that are no trick.’

• • •

We get to the aquarium as the lights in the tanks switch off and only a dim green glow shows the way to the exits.

‘The fish are sleeping now,’ says a voice without a body. ‘Except for the night sharks. It’s feeding time for them. You can help if you like.

‘The Night Shark is a species of requiem shark,’ he continues. ‘In the family Carcharhinidae. I tell you this because naming things is important, especially when it comes to sharks. You want to know all their habits, what they eat and at what time.  Normally night sharks live at great depth and are rarely a problem for humans. In an aquarium, however, they’ll take what they can. This information is important if you’re ever called on to carry out tank repairs.’

The night sharks are smooth grey shapes in the dark water but they have bright green eyes which glint as they pass the viewing window. ‘They’re looking for food now,’ says my guide. ‘I’ll take you to the top; you can throw some in.’

My eyes adjust; my guide is lean and sleek as a fish. I follow him through the aquaria, the differing temperatures pressing on my skin. The damp concrete smell reminds me that we’re under the city. I have a brief vision of the time before the fish came when men were down here, sitting atop their digging machines, building metal frameworks and pumping cement.

I wonder if the fish know how they came to be here and whether they yearn for more.

‘They’re endangered in the wild,’ says the man. ‘People want their fins for soup but mercury accumulated in their flesh makes them toxic. Soon it will be critical. They don’t have long.’

I’m not the only one then. Above us, Big Zero winds up for the chime. The water shivers. 

We pass a vertical tank surrounded by monitors with blinking lights. Hanging, unmoving, in the water is a man in a diving suit, two air cylinders strapped to his back. The green light of the exit catches on a trail of thin bubbles. There are wires coming out of his head.

‘From the sleep lab,’ says my guide. ‘Monitoring his brain waves while he sleeps in water.’ He shrugs. ‘All sorts of bonkers, that one.’

‘What would you do if you had just minutes to live?’ I ask suddenly.

My guide looks down at me thoughtfully, then shakes his head. ‘I only know about fish. Do you want to feed them?’

‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘but I’m not long for this world.’ 

The water is something and the sharks are true wonders. But the tanks are unnerving; no help at all. 

He leads me to the exit. ‘Good luck, kid.’ He pats my head. ‘We’re all counting on you.’ 

The door clicks shut on my questions. The clock chimes again.

• • •

Outside, a man with a clipboard is calling out orders and checking people off. 

‘Here you are!’ he says, ticking his form. ‘We’re up against it tonight. Not a minute to lose.’ 

Immediately, I’m grabbed by the hand; pulled, running, across the floodlit street. ‘Hurry,’ says my new guide, a long-legged woman in police clothing, ‘as if your life depended–.’ As if it didn’t. The edges of the street are crowded yet strangely hushed. We rush into the centre, stopping in front of an old wooden phone box. She slaps the door hard with her spare hand. ‘Open up!’

‘Cut!’ shouts a voice from the shadows. Suddenly those who were running go slack; those on the periphery spring to attention. More orders from the clipboard. People shin up the lighting rigs, adjust the spots. Someone tinkers with the microphone.

‘Now you have to look amazed,’ the woman tells me.  As if I’m not. ‘When the door opens, let your mouth hang open like it’s so extraordinary you have no words to –.’ She must see my confusion. ‘Time and Relative Dimension in Space: bigger on the inside than it looks from the –.’ Pauses. ‘You’ve never heard of the TARDIS?’

Excitement jumps within me. The ultimate remedy for my too-short life! 

‘Action!’

Perhaps my jaw really has come loose from the rest of my face.

‘Cut!’

But it’s all a game. Another trick. Another box, going nowhere. 

The clock chimes again.

• • •

I’m relieved to see the fire-eater emerging from the crowd and beckoning me forward. 

‘How’s it going?’ she asks.

I shrug. My feet are tired. I could do with some food.

 ‘There isn’t much time, I’m afraid.’ 

She hustles me into a big glass bubble. 

‘Another tank,’ I say. ‘Really?’ 

The door slides shut and up goes the bubble into the night. I press my face against the glass and it mists with my breath. 

‘Please don’t give up,’ she says, wiping the glass with her sleeve. Below us the floodlit crew and actors are already tiny and the river a swathe of darkness through the blazing city. ‘We’re counting on you.’ 

‘Me?’ But my voice is drowned by Big Zero’s chiming. I’m just a baby on her way out, I want to say. I should be in my cot or nuzzled at my mother’s breast. You were right: I’m much too young to be out at night. I have no influence over time. 

Up, up, and all the towns are webs of light, sending their orange glow halfway out to space. Even the ocean is tracked and floodlit.

‘Not much dark left these days,’ she says, sadly. ‘Even on the solstice.’

• • •

Back in the birthing room, the torch has given out. Father holds Mother’s hand. The midwife is on hold for the helpline. The baby rests on her mother’s chest, inert; mind lighter than a dust mote floating up from the open page of Aunt Araminta’s book.

In the slack before the tide turns, poised, exhausted, they wait. For something — a change; a decision — not theirs to make — an end, or a beginning?

From the oak outside, a tawny owl chips a piece off the night and blows it across the valley. Whoo? Whooo?

• • •

Up, still up. Sweeping northwards. Clearing the coast of Scotland, the islands, the Pole. The absolute dark of the Winter Solstice. My element. My truth. The planet curves away from us. Ice beads the outside of the bubble. Crystalline fractals, each atom a cosmos, glittering in the fire-woman’s glow.

‘Almost midnight,’ she says. The flames have escaped from her mouth and are flickering in her hair, along her arms. ‘Time to choose, kid.’

She opens the door and the whole world comes in.

The dark and the stars and a sweeping iridescence of green light, engulfing us both in its veils, curling and swooping, lifting our feet from the floor. We’re floating, swimming. The green is the exact shade of the night sharks’ eyes. 

• • •

In the darkness, the midwife gets ready to say something practical and kind.

A sudden whomp of displaced air and a flare of light brings the three of them to attention. Something is on fire. 

Aunt Araminta is on fire. Perhaps it started in her book, the greasy ephemeris, its tinder of dry predictions and sealed fates. 

As, far away, Big Zero completes its chiming and joins its hands in prayer, Aunt Araminta and her book have vanished. I shudder once and draw my first breath.

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