On the Theme of Echoes
Key Stage Five Longlist
1
Contents
Baker's Close
Tori Drummond
Paddington Academy
3
Echoes
Erin Gilbey
Lincoln Christ's Hospital School
5
Stella Lumia
Max Gorlov
Mossbourne Academy
6
Why a Duck’s Quack
Doesn’t Echo
Murshelena Hameed
Paddington Academy
8
Summer Wine
Zahra Jama
Mossbourne Academy
10
Measurements
Tarandeep Jhuti
Villiers High School
11
Secrets
Katherine Mahony
Wirral Grammar School
12
Rhya Larkin
Finlay May
King Edward VI Sixth Form College
14
Her Own Voice
Cereza Palmer
Wren Academy
16
Echoes
Shukria Rezaei
Oxford Spires Academy
18
Bedevil
Paul Rimmer
Oldham Sixth Form College
20
Echoes
Catherine Sleeman
The Holy Trinity Church of England School
22
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Baker’s Close
Tori Drummond
Paddington Academy, Key Stage Five
Ever since the chocolate tin fiasco of 2006, when we made a no snitching pact, bound by our
secret handshake, we’ve had each other’s backs. At least I thought we did.
For as long as I can remember, I have loved my brother, idolized him. It drove my mum
crazy.
“Why don’t you wear a dress today, sweetie?” Mum would say, picking through the pinks
and frills. Marcus didn’t have to dress up like I did because he was a boy. And I wanted to
wear black jeans and red converses.
“It’s not lady like,” she would say. She would sigh with exasperation. ‘It’s like I’ve got two
sons.’ Marcus would laugh and throw me his hoody.
But as I got older, it became clear to me that my admiration for my brother became less
adorable and more annoying to him. Now I wasn’t allowed to ride bikes with Marcus and his
friends around the flats. Even going into his room was out of the question.
“Why can’t I come in? I just want to play Fifa with you”.
“It’s boys only,” said Marcus behind his closed door. I was confused. Yesterday I was
allowed in, no problem.
“Go make some friends your own age, Emi.” But he knew the girls in school didn’t like
me. They said I dress weird. They said I copy Marcus.
“I just want to play with you. Why are you being mean to me?” I said on the verge of
tears.
“Because I need my own space,” mumbled Marcus. I thought it was us against the world
but that seemed to be changing.
“I can’t have you shadowing me all the time. You need to grow up.”
But I didn’t go away. I sat outside his door, knocking until he opened it. Eventually he did,
but only to step over me and grab his jacket from behind the front door. When I asked where
he was going, he said “out,” so I said I was coming too.
“Or else I’m telling mum,” I said. Desperate times and all.
“Hurry up or I leave without you.”
We ended up at a party on the next road over, Baker’s Close. I hated this road. It was
littered with run down houses where the dealers and their customers lurked. So many people
- innocent and otherwise - had run into trouble on this road. Like Mia Langsley. Her father
lived at the end of the street and she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some
say her head was blown open, others say it was right through her chest. I just remember
realising it was her screams I’d heard.
We entered door 130, the one with the missing letter box. Marcus greeted his friends –
‘You good?’ I followed him in - ‘You good? It seemed to bug him.
“Jesus, Emi, if I needed an echo I’d ask for one”.
An hour later, I was still sulking on the stairs while the drunken one-night-standers passed
me, heading upstairs to find a flat surface to… you know. I was bored, and ready to go home.
I pushed through the sweaty giants dancing in the living room to find Marcus – I’d punished
him enough. Knowing his dislike of crowded rooms, he’d be on the balcony. Of course I was
right, but he wasn’t alone. Big Stackz was with him, the biggest troublemaker of them all.
“I got this, trust me,” said Marcus, spudding him.
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“If you mess this up, I’m coming for your head,” said Big Stackz, brushing past me on his
way back into the party.
That’s when Marcus saw my face. He turned his back on me. I joined him outside and
tried to stop him. I begged him. I tried to pull him away from the noise, the house, the street,
to change his mind. I cried. I screamed. Nothing worked.
“You want to be just like me, right?’ he said. “This is what I do. If you don’t like it, go copy
someone else.” He pulled his arm free from my grip. One of his hands was buried deep in his
jacket. He thought I couldn’t see it. I didn’t have too. I knew it was there.
As he shoved past me, I tried one more time to get him to listen. I yanked his arm to get
him to face me. And he did, but so did it, barefaced.
There are reasons why Marcus hid it in his pocket. In this house. On this street. It’s every
man for himself on Baker’s Close. It doesn’t take much for a fuse to be ignited in a room like
that. And the fuse was Marcus.
The first shot caused everyone squashed in the living room to duck and panic. The second
shot came from Marcus as he dropped. It must have hit me.
I didn’t have time to think of a moving speech for what I thought were my last breaths. I
just sank to the floor, facing Marcus.
I didn’t want to be like him anymore.
4
Echoes
Erin Gilbey
Lincoln Christ's Hospital School, Key Stage Five
I get up, I conceal my face,
Beneath make-up,
I walk to school.
She gets up, she covers her face,
With a beautiful, controversial cloth,
Her footsteps echo mine.
I speed up,
It’s raining.
She speeds up,
Past a gaggle of men with guns.
Turning the corner,
I text my friend to wait for me outside.
Turning the corner,
She prays that her friend’s house is still standing,
My text is answered.
Her prayers are answered.
We laugh about a teacher.
Their laughter echoes ours.
They continue their journey in silence.
The wall surrounding our school is scarred,
With names in love-hearts.
Theirs has been decorated,
With bullet-holes.
The inside of our school is painted,
With the insides of student’s imaginations,
Unique paintings,
Stories,
Half-finished plans for the future of the planet.
The inside of their school echoes ours,
Paintings and stories.
And the missing half to our future plans.
5
Stella Lumia
Max Gorlov
Mossbourne Academy, Key Stage Five
Ptolemy opened his eyes a few minutes before midnight on the night he was due to eat a star.
Shaking off sleep, he leapt up and to the desk cluttered with old books, sweeping aside a stack
of notes in a white flurry, and grabbed the sheet of coordinates he had been looking for.
Ptolemy rammed his eye up against the cold brass of the telescope in his room, and raked its
sight across the night, and there, just as he had spent the last year calculating, was the streak
of fire.
He cried out in delight. Spurred by a mounting sense of excitement, he sped through the
clinging blackness of the kitchen and stairs and left the door ajar.
The night was damp and the mountains loomed in a wreath of distant mist. Ptolemy raced
across the meadow in his bare feet, his eyes fixed on the sky where the star streaked in a
huge arc.
It came down with a rush of boiling air and majestic light that flattened the grass. Ptolemy
hurled himself forwards and seized it, wrestling its sparking body. Electric blues and globs of
magma-red fizzled on his skin.
“I am Ptolemy and I am thirteen years old,” he screamed, eyes gleaming.
A mouth of hot white opened.
“I am Mephistopheles,” the star hissed back. “And I am many millennia old.”
“Tell me, star! What is it you desire the most?”
“I do not make deals with children.” said Mephistopheles. “You wish to pervert me,
Ptolemy. You have hunger in your eyes.”
“I need your power.”
“Magic does not serve. It will destroy you. But if an experience so rare as this should offer
itself, I cannot say no. My whole life I have been light. I desire shadow.”
“Then you will be my shadow,” Ptolemy announced. “And my echo.”
And before the star could reply he stuffed it into his mouth and swallowed it down like a
burning heart. The night rushed back in on the meadow.
He stood slowly. All was silent; a slightly sulphurous smell lingered in the air.
Ptolemy thought he saw a shape flit away and vanish into the grass.
He smiled.
He thought about his mother in the instances of clarity between his study. To see him
walking through the meadows was to look upon an angel - his hair had turned starlight-silver
and his skin appeared to shine. He spent hours inspecting the flowers that rushed in a great,
bobbing sea across the landscape. The grand shadows of clouds slid over the fields, but he had
no shadow himself. When he gazed into the lake, there was no reflection; when he cried out
in triumph, there was no echo.
Each day saw his power increase. Ptolemy took different elements and passed his hand
over them, and the power of the star glowed. When he took his hand away a fresh flower
unfurled.
He caught a movement in the corner of his vision, but didn’t turn from his creation.
“Mephisto,” he murmured. “How do you like being an echo?”
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“It is a delicious experience. But I can see what you are working towards, boy, and I must
warn you to stop.”
Ptolemy whirled on him. He was glaring at his empty kitchen.
On the thirteenth day it rained and the mountains were almost invisible in the blue haze.
Ptolemy leant over his ingredients, books of arcane symbols opened around him, and
chanted, focusing intensely. His silvery hair floated. Before him the powders knitted together;
colours streamed in ribbons from his body and snaked through the solidifying creation.
He uttered a gasp of horror.
Cracks were appearing in his pure skin and spreading up his arm. He lost sight in one eye
as his face was eaten away, and in the mud of human elements a livid eye opened like a peeled
grape, and it was not his mother, not her at all. He screamed. It didn’t echo.
There was a whispering in his ear.
“I warned you, boy. You cannot create life without equal exchange.”
“I just want my mother,” Ptolemy wailed.
“Then let us break the pact. While you grow too powerful to contain, I am weaker by the
moment. You are a selfish devil, Ptolemy! Give it up!”
Ptolemy looked down at what he was creating. A part of him still clung to the hope that
he could see her again.
He doubled up suddenly, tears streaming from his eye, and retched up the sparkling body
of the star.
Mephistopheles returned to it instantly. It smashed through the window and went
whooping and crackling up into the sky.
Ptolemy buried the hideous thing in the mud; the moment the spark of life had left it had
died. He cried for a long time and worked his fingers in the dewy grass. But he had an echo
and his body had returned to normal.
It dawned on him that he would have to learn to live alone.
As he sat there, a shooting star crossed the sky, and an echo of light was traced behind
it.
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Why a Duck’s Quack Doesn’t Echo
Murshelena Tahura
Paddington Academy, Key Stage Five
“Did you know that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo?” I ask, stroking Bessie, my tame duck.
“Really?” laughs Jake. “Why?”
“No one knows scientists have tried to find out but, no one knows”
“You should try it with Bessie”
We cycle over to a deserted moor land out the back of town where there is an old well
that’s been empty ever since I remember. We walk over to the well to examine it and I push
Bessie’s head inside my open cross body bag to prevent her from falling inside.
It is a large well with strong concreted wall; an ugly grey shaded well with not a drop of
water inside it. As far as my eyes can reach, there is nothing but complete darkness.
It’s a wishing well; you say your wish into the well and if it echoes back then your wish
comes true. Jake picks up a small rock from the floor and throws into the well. It takes about
five seconds for a faint sound to come from the bottom of the well. I lean in closer to the
edge, wondering why there’s no water.
“Anyway I should leave now. I promised my mum I will be back soon” He waves at me,
gives a small quack at Bessie, takes his bike and cycles away in a hurry.
I watch him leave and then turn to the well and look down it. “I wish that my parents
would get together again,” I say into it.
Silence.
I turn furious and lean further into the well more, tiptoeing. “I wish that my parents would
get together again!” I yell at the top of my lungs.
A sudden angry echo shouts back “Again? Again? Again?” It was more like a question
rather than a statement.
I lose control of my feet in the shock and fall into the well, landing with a thud on the
hard, concreted floor. I groan in pain as my ankle swells red and then I look up. The walls of
the inner well here look much older than the ones above of the outer wall. Bessie gives out
cries of quacks as I’ve partly landed on her.
“Quack! Quack! Quack!” Her voice echoes.
I pick her up exclaiming “Oh Bessie, a duck’s quack does echo!”
“Echo… Echo…Echo!” echoes a voice, not mine.
I freeze and hold Bessie up to my chest.
“Can you help me… me… me…?” it cries as though in pain.
“Who are you?” I whisper.
“I’m something left behind of the dead, an echo. I fell in this well trying to make a wish
years ago, when the water was full… full…full”
“You… you drowned and… died?”
“More than died” The echoes’ voice cracks as though it is about to cry “My voice, my
soul was taken from me and I’m left behind as an echo…echo…echo.”
“How can I help you?” I ask, feeling the pain in its daunting, yet desperate voice.
“You can wish me back, wish my voice back. Please… please… please”
I tilt my head back, and then pause.
“But… what about my wish?”
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“You heard the well; it questioned you ‘again?’” it says sounding exasperated. “It doesn’t
want to grant you that wish.” Then the echo softs its voice, “So please, please free me…
me… me”
I sigh. “I wish to give this echo its voice back” I say, in a loud clear voice.
“Back…Back…Back” echoes the well and the girl’s echo together.
A sudden wind blows as a beautiful girl with bright red hair and sapphire blue eyes appears
in front of me. She smiles.
“Thank you” she says, I immediately recognise her voice, and it is the voice of the left
behind echo.
“You’re welcome… welcome… welcome.” I freeze as my voice echoes. I feel for Bessie,
who is now in the hands of the girl.
She looks at me; apologetically. “I’m sorry” she says. “Now you are an echo, left behind
from the dead”
I stare at her, “What…what…what?” I echo.
“You have given me my voice back by giving the well yours” she says, turning to the walls
on the well and climbing up with Bessie. I try to follow her but; somehow, something pulls me
back down. She reaches the top within minutes and looks down on me.
“And do you know why a duck’s quack doesn’t echo?” she calls down. “It’s because every
time someone discovers that it actually does echo, they turn into an echo themselves”. She
strokes Bessie, who is rested in her arms. “It’s a curse” she adds, and disappears.
“Wait…wait…wait” I echo.
But, she’s already gone…
9
Summer Wine
Zahra Jama
Mossbourne Academy, Key Stage Five
I love you so much,
I love you so much that I could kill you
I still adore you with your hands clasped around my neck, Feverishly shaking me like a blow
up doll,
To have and to hold.
My flesh, a desolate wasteland of blush,
Piercing hails of a widowed Banshee
Till death, do we part.
Fingers stroked by the hands of Apollo,
I lay immobile by his touch as my IV slithers around my wrist:
In sickness and in health.
Freckles of rouge exhaust my body as its canvas
relishing in its warmth as it nuzzles deep in my skin,
To love and to cherish.
When I lay in a retirement home in the south of France,
When I remember the hue of your golden hair in the summer
Or the way that you smiled at me,
The small recollection of your memory will make me smile,
And not wish I was thirty feet underground.
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Measurements
Tarandeep Jhuti
Villiers High School, Key Stage Five
A person's life is measured in the length and number of tear tracks made when it ends. The
noses blown and tissues tossed. The stutters and choking breaths. That harsh crack in a voice.
The count and beauty of flowers piling up next to an empty corpse. The dozens of regrets in
the form of missed I love yous. Hundreds of phone calls that never happened. Rooms full of
absent minds and hours of squandered time. Missed smiles that don't ring true and fistfuls of
hair ripped out during more frequent fits of rage, when feeling something, anything, is better
than nothing. Ignorance is rife but remains a popular choice through lack of effort required.
It doesn't matter now anyway, because they're gone and it's Too Late. Game Over.
Thank you for playing.
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Secrets
Katherine Mahony
Wirral Grammar School, Key Stage Five
I keep my secrets locked away in a room. They sit there, alone, shut in a chest of drawers, as
they are so bright that if I dared put them anywhere else, they would most certainly blind me.
For the fact I don’t think of them often, I forget the room is there and I am only reminded of
it when I walk past the pool of light that has forced its way through the crack where door
meets ground. In fact, the whole door can be seen as a silhouette if I have not looked at my
secrets for a long time; they become impatient and glow even brighter, and I can hear them
whispering to each other, forcing me to pay attention to them as doing anything else would
be impossible.
I could not say the exact location of the room in which I lock away my secrets, but it is
darker than anywhere I’ve ever experienced, so dark that my secrets become obnoxious and
imposing with their desire to be noticed. They can only be seen when it’s dark, and I find it
odd, that when a bright light is shined upon them, trying to find them is an impossibility.
I rarely enter the room containing only a chest of drawers which holds my secrets. There
is something about the way that the glow seeping from the edges of the drawers that both
enchants and terrifies me; whenever I am close enough to have the beams gaze upon me, I
obstruct the light, causing shadows in the shape of memories to be made on the walls around
me. I struggle to see the memories that emerge, as my secrets are so well illuminated that I
find myself dazzled by them and, thus, unable to differentiate between reality and the past. My
secrets are in the past, though the way they make themselves so easily seen sometimes makes
me believe that I am still living within them. They blind me with the brightness and I become
blind to their danger.
The room hiding my secrets only becomes beautiful when I dare expose them. As I
carefully slide open the drawer, a chill overcomes me smoothly and steadily, similar to the
way the skin on my hand moves over my bones. It is now that I become afraid of looking
directly into the drawer, but, I must remind myself to continue as, otherwise, the light
diminishes and my secrets die, killing a part of me too as I am a person who is made entirely
of secrets. It is only when I hold a secret delicately in my hand, and allow it to whisper its
story to me, that I see how beautiful my secrets truly are. Fragile colours illuminate the room
and I become ethereal when bathing in the colours they emit. I am alive when I am alone with
my secrets.
Some drawers, I never open, but I can hear their contents thrashing and screaming for
the air that I deny them, desperate to make themselves known to those who have never heard
them. Unlike the peaceful hum that my other secrets sing, the violent screams of my darkest
secrets echo all around my head. They give off no light and, so, can never be seen which is
why I am so afraid of revealing them: I can’t risk them escaping and whispering their stories
into the ears of those who have no right to know of them. I try to suffocate them to no avail.
These are the kind of secrets that will never fade away. These secrets are dangerous. These
are the secrets that stay with you forever.
I keep my secrets locked away in a room, a room that I am both scared of entering, yet
addicted to doing so. I have never seen another room like mine; however, I have heard many
other people’s secrets. Whilst I always lock the door when I leave, I know that I emerge from
the room with the secrets glowing all over my body; my eyes glint with mystery, my skin is a
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puzzle, and, when I try to talk, the secrets tumble straight from my mouth. Forgetting my
secrets is something I shall never do and I am as sure of this as I am that I’ll continue to visit
the room where they live, although, every time I leave, part of me wishes that I will never go
back.
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Rhya Larkin
Finlay May
King Edward VI Sixth Form College, Key Stage Five
The sea-breeze over the dock would’ve been refreshing if it wasn’t for the fact that most of
the ‘recruits’ had been rudely awakened and frogmarched over. A ruggedly handsome man,
standing in naval regalia was handed a small list of names, their skills and background noted in
a handful of words. He looked over the list, barking out in his commanding, echoing, drill
sergeant voice: “RHYA LARKIN!” A young girl came out, no older than fourteen, approaching
him confidently, almost defiantly, giving a salute that could only be described as mocking, her
smug grin making it apparent that she didn’t care much for the badge he wore. “Y’know how
to moor a ship, Larkin?” The captain said, unwavering, taking rope tied from the ship docked
beside them, offering it to her. She snatched it from him, tying it around one post, tying it,
before giving him a disappointed, almost condescending look, as if that was too easy.
He answered it by sporting a wide, childish grin. “We’ll make a sailor out of you yet.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Rhya was born in the slum of the Old Town. A pickpocket by trade, and good at it, too.
She disassociated herself with the school of thought that crimes were something to run from,
and be uninvolved with. She believed that by involving yourself, your little distraction would
become something more, a fantasy to some, something to leave them wanting. She’d whisper
sweet nothings to a noble-lad, pretending to be a girl from a far off country while she robbed
him blind. She turned the trick on a particularly charismatic boy, almost prince-like, though,
she didn’t realize his wife was just five paces behind.
She was given a choice; join the ‘Silver Sails’, a military band of misfits and lawbreakers
who were often used up for cannon-fodder jobs that most other people were too privileged
or sane to do, or lose the hand. Rhya liked her hands, she’d had them her entire life, so she
chose the former. It was already four years later, and they’d survived a lot more than she
thought they would. She was his first mate, and she’d vowed to serve the crown same as he
did, even though her hands were a bit more forced than his were.
They made port, a routine docking. Rhya tied the ship up, and noticed him talking to a
messenger, with a naval pin on his jacket. He handed him some notes, and a hurried salute
before he broke into a sprint in the opposite direction. She wished she had his sort of
excitement for the job. She stamped across the boardwalk, settling back into her bunk on the
ship. Her eyes shut and she slept easily, no second-guessing her home. She woke up, the soft
sloshing of waves against wood, the soft creaking of the ship complaining and straining enough
to break her dreams away. She saw him by candlelight, re-reading the note he was given, over
and over. She stepped over wordlessly, taking the document from his hands.
“We both know you can’t read.” The captain sighed out, rubbing his eyes with his hands
in exasperation.
“Humour me.” Came her reply, eyes still fixed on the paper, mock reading.
“Shadow Waters. We’re to head for the Shadow Waters, Ordo Rex [Order of the King].
Get…Get some sleep, Rhya, we won’t get another chance like this for a while.” He nodded
to her, silently giving her command to leave. She didn’t bother with the salute, and he didn’t
bother correcting her.
She went back when it was night. The captain lay, asleep on his bed, an empty bottle of
cheap alcohol next to his bed. She was shaking. Her knuckles were cold-white as she gripped
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her dagger, the blade dragging ever so slightly against her thigh. She started sobbing as she
approached, but he didn’t stir. She wished he did. She wished he noticed. She pushed the knife
into his throat, the soft gurgling echoing across the wooden walls as she cried, the soft sobbing
drowning out the sound of death that filled the room and bounced off of the walls, and through
her head a thousand times. As long as he was alive, they would rally behind him. She wanted
to be free again, she wanted to live. She relieved the man of his pistol, firing it into the starlit
sky as she stepped out of the cabin turned coffin. The men roused and darted up to the deck,
where she was, blood-stained, holding his sabre. She shouted her speech, serve as a deserter,
or go overboard. Her ultimatum was met with steady silence, for a few seconds. One stepped
forward, then another, she held the sabre up, heart in her throat as she cheered, and they
cheered with her.
“LARK, LARK, LARK!” The reply was loud, and roared across the empty sea. The ship
was hers, the crew was hers.
She heard the gurgling every time the waves splashed against the hull, the sound of his
death-throes with each creak of the ship.
She’d never felt more like crying.
15
Her Own Voice
Cereza Palmer
Wren Academy, Key Stage Five
The sun peeked its head over the horizon and greeted the morning like a friend.
Everywhere was bathed in a warm honey glow and made this Monday morning much
smoother.
A calmness washed over all within the apartment complex; curtains fluttered with gentle
sincerity at the approach of a new day.
Students poured from the innards of the complex, handling their doors with care as the
hinges moaned from rust and age. The carpets peeled with a perfect curl from the
floor of each room, and magnolia flakes clung precariously on rotten walls. The building
stood tall in the sky. It barely balanced, but it got by.
Tranquillity instantly became past. The curtains shrieked. The windows seized up. A
cacophony of outrage tore through the sunlight, boiling and burning the honey glow.
The source was the queen bee. The Landlady. Any notion of peace was evicted with her
controversial verdict, served by her idea of order. She prided herself on her
punctuality and class, but everyone within the apartment complex wanted to be without
her looming interference. A pay cheque was not enough for the 60-something
hermit.
Her cry of frustration was ignored; she yelled with blood-curdling passion at what she
just discovered. Fatigue overcame her and the commotion settled in minutes. She
threw a deep breath out, blowing aside her unbrushed morning locks as she collapsed in
her arm chair. Most days, she would rotate her head to see the students half
heartedly hop to classes, but today she felt different. The dust hadn't settled. Something
wasn't right.
The queen of the hive had piles, on piles, of paperwork and others were pinned across
imperfections. She sighed, picked up a maintenance form, and began to call local
companies. Her rotary dial clicked with each turn; the repetition of a comfortable
routine lowered the Landlady's guard. In wait, she gazed at her fireplace, adorned
with memories of people she had worked with years ago. When the call was picked up,
she hissed of their lacking commitment, but met the sighs and empty promises from
the obstructive receptionists. She put the phone down. The room was silent once more.
The night sky tucked the apartment complex in with a blanket of cold. Drones walked
around draped in their duvets like heroes on their night shift. As they settled,
the pipes rattled another howling message. Pent up frustration and fear drives a student
to risk a visit to the Landlady and venture into the dark upper floor of the
building. After a sonorous knock against the door, the drone reflects the injustice of her
environment, challenging the Landlady enough to make the pictures on the
walls jitter in fear. Concluding their argument with a dramatic final door slam, the
Landlady stands listening to the fading echoes as they fled down the stairs and
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through the plumbing. The bee rejoined the group and they huddled together; their TVs
cancelling out any noisy repercussions made by the Landlady. A new warmth of the
atmosphere radiated throughout the apartment complex with the Landlady clashing
against the ambiance.
She was overwhelmed with disaster, and haunted by the dissonant past. She shook and
staggered throughout her room. She felt her chest tighten and sweat poured from her
face. She hummed with whatever energy she had. The windows reverberated from her
passionate plea. The students in the floors below groaned in chorus, raising the
volume of their shows and dimming the lights, trying harder to engage with their shows.
The Landlady launched herself at her desk as her last resort: she had to get
her medication. Her hands ceased function. The contents of her pockets spilled to the
floor. The keys slid away. She started gurgling as the colour drained from her
face. She grabbed at the drawers in hopes it would open, but the room was silent once
more.
The following morning, the smell of coffee and home made breakfast wafted through the
rooms and invited their guests. The sun shone through the windows and cracks in
the walls, highlighting moist patches which had a stench masked by bitter caffeine. The
students packed their bags after exchanging polite greetings and barged past
the doors to start their new day. The phone buzzed angrily in its cradle, waiting for the
new queen to receive it.
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Echoes
Shukria Rezaei
Oxford Spires Academy, Key Stage Five
You can still hear them:
The sharp trot of a sheep’s hooves past your window in the early morning, their gentle
bleats; the voice of the shepherd calling your flock to the mountains to find pasture. But not
even his famous shepherd’s yell which could scare wolves, which echoed back and forth across
the rock sides of the valley clear as a struck bell, can truly reach you now.
For you have left those mud houses with their berry trees. You will never again hear the
birds singing calmly all the dull yellow summer days, nor the cluck cluck cluck of the chickens
when you rushed out to feed them grains, nor the calm and pleasant snoring of the sheep at
night and the rats scampering and running, across the roof, stealing the dried apricots and
berries.
The path has gone. You will never dig it out again through the snow in a tunnel that
wiggles all the way to the street, or walk it down the valley in the spring with a pocket full of
nuts and raisins, a bribe from your mum to go and give a message to grandma. You can never
skip back along it past your fields and climb the heavy-fruited apricot and mulberry trees with
bare feet, ignoring your mum shouting: Don’t eat too much, and don’t moan when you get
stomach ache; never beg your uncle to take you wandering high in the mountains to pick
rhubarb, nor steal nibbles from the pack as he piggy-backs you down.
You can never slide down to the spring on your backside with clouds of dust puffing up
behind you and your bucket bouncing beside you, and sit on the big stone with your feet
dangling and your little bony arms holding out your shiny tiny bucket to the flow. Or hide
there in the cool from your mum, certain she will never find you. Or take a shower in the
water fall and be stung by a fat bee in the toe. And you never did dare swim in the deep tarn,
or make a float from your wet shirt, and now you never will.
You can never again walk on the silent snow, leaving no foot print, or watch nervously,
breathing little clouds into the blue sky, as the naughty brave kids slide past you, clutching
their dad’s spade, from the peak of the mountain to the foot.
You can never march in single file up and down the two rocky mountains at dawn with
bossy prefects sweating behind telling you to walk with your arms folded, neatly, to keep up
the school’s reputation. You will never again line up outside the school under the boiling sun,
singing the national anthem in one voice together that echoes around the school, classroom
to classroom and heart to heart.
And you will never again walk across the fields on the fallen golden leaves whose rustle is
music to the fields, valley and your ear. You will never feel the breezy winter winds, or beg
your mum to let you play snow fight and come back crying because the other child hit you
with a snowball in the face.
You can never smell the watering of the trees and plants in your allotments; the raw and
wet smell of the soil and feel the trees come back to life. You will never again watch the light
wind gently ripple the wheat fields like waves at the sea shore. You will never again lie on the
hot rock staring into the navy blue sky and feel the roasting sun on your burning skin and
watch the leaves dance on the cold gushing water of the stream below. You will never hear
the quiet lurking snake under the dusty rock and see the shadow of its tongue beside you.
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And you can never again stumble on the shed skin of a snake, like a sleeve on the path, and
feel its emptiness.
But you hear these echoes always- the sheep, the chickens, your mother, and the
shepherd’s call.
What can you do now, exile?
You can dig a hole deep in your heart and bury these memories until your epitaph is put
on your grave stone as your father always says.
Or you can walk on and let them echo in every vein of your body.
The echo of your heart.
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Bedevil
Paul Rimmer
Oldham Sixth Form College, Key Stage Five
I stand there, alone, before the gaping mouth, the darkness stretching out to meet me. Behind
me, birds chirp their autumnal songs, leaves tumble their autumnal falls, winds breeze their
autumnal paths. A stream slices through the marsh-turned forest and collects into a pool
before slipping into the tunnel.
My feet as firmly planted onto the mercurial mud at the tunnel’s opening as possible, I call
out the obligatory, “Hello!”
As expected, no reply sounds except my own: my voice calls out “Hello!” again and again,
bouncing off the circular wall of the tunnel, and eventually quiets.
I still don’t understand that.
My friends had been too afraid to venture into this secluded underpass, even when there
were four of us with as many torches, but adrenaline dulled the fear. Scared is good. Scared
is exciting.
We knew exactly where the tunnel ended: it passed below a section of a main road, the
exit poking out a ways away on the other side. I could hear the many cars passing overhead
now. Charleine, Edward, Gabriel and myself had managed to get quite a distance into the
tunnel; so far that the entrance we had passed through had shrunk to the size of a mint
imperial. One girl and three boys. And Charleine had been the bravest of us all – which was
still pretty scared.
I had been the most afraid, in truth. The light from our four torches danced along the
mossed walls, hitting off tiny spots of reflection and throwing trick shadows down the tunnel
like smoke and mirrors. One such shadow manifested in the form of a small child – a boy, it
seemed. Instead of endeavouring to help the boy, fright sent me into panic-mode. I rounded
on my heels, my feet dipping into the water between our legs briefly, and charged out of the
tunnel as fast as a person can with their feet half a metre apart on the edges of water. I thanked
God in that moment for being at the back of the walking train.
I waited outside for a few moments as Charleine, Edward and Gabriel made their way
out.
Finally, they emerged from the darkness. I heard their laughter bounding through the
tunnel before I saw them.
“What was that?” Charleine cackled.
“I know, right?” I said, exasperated. I still hadn’t convinced my heart that we were safe
now; it insisted on threatening to leap out of my chest. “What was that?”
“No,” Gabriel said between chortles, “not the shadows – you!”
“What?” My heart finally slowed, but only because it had turned to ice. Were they . . .
laughing at me?
“Overreact much?” Edward asked rhetorically.
Their laughs persisted for a time more, until they at last ceased and decided not to go
back in with me, from fear of inducing my heart to arrest. We left the forest then.
And I returned the next day.
Armed with a torch and my phone, the in-built camera set to record, I clambered down
to the tunnel’s inviting mouth and waddled in.
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After some very reluctant steps, I reached the same point my friends and I had arrived at
the day before – the spot where I saw the boy. I stood there, utterly vulnerable, and shone
my torch all around me, my eyes cutting through the dark. No boy was seen. I sighed with a
breath I had been holding, and took another step forward. More followed, and soon I found
myself at a bend. I didn’t know that the tunnel bent: it seemed quite unnecessary – but then,
the entire tunnel was now unused, so it was all rather redundant, bar for, I supposed, rites of
passage.
I sent the light down the corner, but the beam was swallowed by the dominant emptiness.
With a gulp, I made my way down the curve.
The tunnel’s aesthetic remained consistent here: moss clinging to the walls, strange white
patches of something plastered against portions of brick, and thankfully the radius of the tunnel
persevered. Drips of water unnerved me; hundreds of cars passing above my head every day
surely could not be good for a section of hollow path below, could it? And I doubted I would
survive a cave in.
In my reverie, I had continued with my passage, but the light had dipped down. I tossed it
back up to shine before me.
I still don’t know what killed me. Since dying in that spot two weeks ago, I have traversed
the tunnel wholly at least twenty times, and have found no culprit. The first time, though, I
found myself. Not in a spiritual way: I found my body. My torso was slashed to ribbons, one
of my legs was gone, a chunk of my ear appeared to have been bitten off, and both my arms
were cut open from my wrists to my shoulders. My head was untouched.
I am stood at the tunnel’s mouth again now – I can’t leave. Instead, I am doomed to bedevil
this place, an echo of who I was.
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Echoes
Catherine Sleeman
The Holy Trinity Church of England School, Key Stage Five
There’s a tunnel down below the railway lines where people go to hear their footsteps
recounted; thick, melodious and fogged at the corners.
“It’s a great place for echoes,” my grandma used to say we walked that way, and now all
I hear is her voice reverberating out from the damp and the singing stones. She’s kind of right
because her bloated words float back on waves – breaching through the years – until I almost
believe she’s stood there, pouring out the repetitions that her dementia-riddled brain doesn’t
realise it’s constructing. She’s just a bunch of echoes, cobbled together beneath the commuter
trains, but each echo resounds and draws out another.
We shelter below the railway lines while Grandma catches her breath and her footsteps.
The rain slithers in and drips around the arc of ceiling – viscous with the slime of the bridge’s
underbelly. I throw a volley of claps into the darkness simply for the satisfaction of the walls
sending applause back in return. Over us and over us the trains cross and re-cross like fingers
on a misted window pane. We sit beneath their growl and try to guess how many carriages
have run us down. I don’t tell her how much I fear the buckling of the concrete above our
heads; I am afraid of being buried by the weight of stones that normally bury me in sound.
I am evicted from my primary school classroom, ill. I sit in the medical room in a
suffocating mist of concern and infection control until Grandma arrives to lead me away by
the hand. I no longer feel the flush of nausea down my arms but school wants me like a
headache. I don’t mind. There is something irreverent about the way we allow the day to
swell; too shapeless for its title of Wednesday. We draw the blinds even though the sky is a
mixing bowl of blue and ivory and, from among the sofa cushions, I watch old video tapes.
They’re all fictitious and twee as little girls’ petticoats but I still find I’m choking myself over
approaching steam engines. Terror gets stuck in my teeth.
Same sofa, new film. Caught in childhood pretentions, I sing along until Grandma forgets
my name. “Claire?” she asks, searching me for the first of her children’s children. Claire:
twelve years my senior. Grandma’s quick to hide the holes in her disjointed thinking and
pretends that it’s just because I look so grown up these days. I wonder why growing into my
life detaches me from who I am.
We’re all recycling ourselves in the town hall; filling up on echoes. A wedding dress that’s
seen sixty years of dust and cupboards is blessed once more with daylight and flowers and
dancers draining into the night. It’s hard to squeeze the memory of Grandma into the white
dress her granddaughter’s wearing but my imagination is still just about alive enough. “It was
very sweet of her, don’t you think, to actually wear it” she tells us as many times as the bride
comes up in conversation. I’m all nervy because my bridesmaids’ dress is low at the front and
because the rest of my family is round a hospital bed while I’m round a banquet table eating
spicy poppadums. When the formality gets lost inside the wine bottles, someone gets a
wooden spoon and sifts the guests around onto the dance floor. Grandma takes half an hour
to inch her way to a taxi; someone says she’s amazing for making it to eighty and for making
it to her granddaughter’s weeding. Someone else says she’ll be lucky to make the next one. I
wriggle into the adjacent room and walk a tightrope along the carpet with a phone pressed
to my ear, wondering if my brother is still breathing.
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Summer swills like weak tea; sunshine runs in watercolours down the porch. Grandma’s
house shrinks when she stops being able to climb stairs and then again when she can’t make
the step that leads to the kitchen. In the garden we prop her up with sofa cushions and try to
ignore the way that the talk is as circular as the table between us. She’s the child but I’m not
good enough to play the adult – teenagers are allowed to find the elderly boring aren’t they?
My thoughts grouch in a corner and deplore her broken clockwork. Even as I sigh I know I’m
squandering the things we’ve got left. Frail fingers, walking sticks, veins like tree roots; she
speaks of the fickle weather with every shift of the wind and the troughs in-between are
scattered with kettles, her clawed hand and not understanding modernity. She’s the only
person in town not to be living in fast forward. Talk turns, turns in my hands and I struggle to
place my Grandma in the haze of her own echoes.
Echoes made of impulses redirecting old links around my skull. Sometimes I think my
head’s a seashell and, when I listen to its contents, I fail to remember that it does not contain
oceans.
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