Punkie Night

You can't carve faces. You find this out in Mavis's kitchen, at the long table spread with newspaper. There's a mangelwurzel the size of a child's head lying on its side in front of you, dirty, cold, hard and heavy, and Maisie sits opposite with her chin propped on her fists, waiting for Daddy to get it right. Mavis has given you a thin-bladed knife and a spoon with a sharpened edge, shown you how to slice off the top and scoop the flesh out in circles so the walls stay a finger thick, and gone out to the shed for candles. The flesh comes away in damp pink shavings that smell of soil and something sweet, and Maisie picks one up and sniffs it, wrinkles her nose and laughs. You try an eye, and the eye comes out triangular and crooked, the second one bigger than the first, and Maisie says it's a pirate after a fight. You remember that when you were a boy in Bristol you and your dad carved a pumpkin every year, and your dad could never do faces either, and your mum used to laugh at him. So you suggest a star. The star comes out crooked too, one point longer than the rest and bent downwards, and Maisie announces that it's her star, a special one, and nobody else has one like it.

You came down on Saturday, for half-term. Her mum is three weeks into a stint on a gas rig in the North Sea, out there till the end of the month. At two o'clock on the first of November you're meant to be standing with Maisie on the platform at Bristol when the Aberdeen train pulls in with her mum on it. You got the week off by promising your boss the Christmas shifts. You found the cottage online because the photos showed a fireplace and a staircase with a low ceiling, which you hit your head on twice the first evening. You also wanted to take Maisie somewhere she wouldn't spend every evening by the tablet waiting for the call from the rig, somewhere you could get to know her again. At home it was always her mum who knew her, and you left at seven and got back for tea. Over the summer she grew half a head, started saying "actually" and stopped holding your hand in the street. One good week is all you need, so that afterwards she'll tell them at school that Dad made it fun. The first two days she was bored, leafed through a pony book on the sofa and kept asking when she could ring Mum on the rig. On the third day you went over the road for eggs, and Mavis asked her whether she could sing and invited her to carve a punkie.

Mavis comes back with candles in a paper bag and shows you how to thread a wire handle through the sides of the lantern. She's past seventy, she has the farm across the road and a stall at the gate where she sells eggs and mangels with an honesty box. While you fiddle with the wire she tells you that once, two or three hundred years ago, the men from round here went off to the fair in the next village and still hadn't come back by nightfall, being drunk. So the women carved lanterns out of mangels and went across the fields after them. Ever since, on the last Thursday in October, the children go round the village with punkies, singing and asking for a candle.

"And did they find the husbands?" Maisie asks.

Mavis looks at her for longer than an answer needs and says almost all of them.

By six it's dark. About forty people have gathered by the church, children with lanterns, parents with phones, two men in hi-vis who'll stop the traffic at the crossroads. Everyone's mangel is different: owls and cats, whole villages with roofs and windows, and an eleven-year-old boy has carved a tractor with wheels and an exhaust pipe. The candles burn pink and orange inside, and the walls of the lanterns glow right through, so you can see the flames trembling. Maisie has her crooked star, and she holds the lantern out at arm's length, both hands on the wire, and says nothing, because she doesn't know anyone here and all the children around her are talking broad Somerset, leaning on every r.

Then one of the grown-ups starts the song, and the children take it up. You heard it in the car, on a recording you found online, but live it's something else: it's five or six lines, and they sing it loud, nearly shouting, with no tune, all on one note, stamping. It's Punkie Night tonight, it's Punkie Night tonight, give me a candle, give me a light, if you haven't a candle a penny's all right, Adam and Eve would never believe it's Punkie Night tonight. On the second time round Maisie starts moving her lips, on the third she sings, quietly, getting the words muddled, and instead of "would never believe" she sings "will never believe", and nobody corrects her. Then she sings louder, and by the end of the street, where the houses stop and the hedge begins, she's shouting about Adam and Eve with the rest of them and turning round to check you can hear.

You can. You're walking at the back, a little to one side, hands in your jacket pockets, thinking that this is it, this is the week, this is what the Christmas shifts and the talk with your boss were for. For this street and this pink light.

From the church to the pub they go down a lane, narrow, between two hedges taller than a man, with not a single streetlight, and the mud squelches underfoot. The lights string out into a line, and ahead of you all you can see is bobbing patches of pink at a child's waist height, twenty, thirty identical patches, and the parents' backs, dark and broad. Maisie was right in front of you. You watch where you're stepping, go round a puddle, look up, and in front of you is the boy with the tractor.

You call her, not loudly. Then louder. The lights ahead keep bobbing, the song goes round again, and nobody turns. You overtake two, three, peer into faces lit from below, and they're all strangers, and they've all got mangels, and in the dark of the lane there's no telling star from owl, or from a crooked star with a bent point. You push forward, knock someone's shoulder, say sorry, and you're already drawing breath to shout the way people shout when they've lost a child, when Maisie takes your hand.

She's standing beside you, on your left, lantern in her right hand, calm. You ask where she was, and she says here, she was following the girl with the owls, and asks why you've got that face on. You say "nothing" and squeeze her fingers. She doesn't pull her hand away, and you're so glad of that you don't ask anything else.

At the pub the procession stops, the landlord brings out a bag of sweets for the children, and you watch Maisie reach into the bag without letting go of her lantern. The landlord asks whose crooked star this is, and Maisie says it's hers, it's special, and gets an extra sweet. You stand by the pub door with a pint someone's put in your hand and take a picture of her, and in the picture she's laughing, and you send it out to the rig, to her mum, with no caption. The reply comes forty minutes later, when there's signal out there: "Haven't seen her that happy since the summer."

They go back the same way. At the last house the lane bends, and there the hedge on the left breaks off and the field opens up behind it. It's black, without a single light all the way to the horizon, where a faint glow from the dual carriageway hangs over the hills, and it gives off the smell of wet earth, the same earth that smelled of pink shavings in the kitchen. The children are singing about the candle and the light. Maisie is singing too, you can hear her voice at your elbow, thin and a bit hoarse by the end of the evening.

On the line about Adam and Eve the song breaks off. Every voice stops at once, on the same syllable, all the children and all the parents, and the lane goes so quiet that you can hear the candles crackling in the mangels and the drip from the hedge. The lights stop bobbing. You see that everyone is standing still and looking the same way, at the field, and the ones up front have turned their candlelit pink faces back towards you and say nothing.

And in that silence, from the dark beyond the gap in the hedge, from the black field, Maisie's voice finishes the line. Thin, a bit hoarse, with the same mistake she made on the third time round, "will never believe" instead of "would never believe". The girl beside you is silent. You can feel her fingers in your palm, dry and cold, and she isn't singing, her mouth is shut, you're looking down at her and you can see it.

Then someone up front laughs, one of the grown-ups says "right, come on then, come on", the song starts again from the first line, and the lights bob off round the bend. None of the neighbours looks at you. Mavis is standing by the last house, without a lantern, looking at the girl whose hand you're holding, and says nothing.

You don't go into the field. You hold the hand tighter and go home.

At the cottage you put the kettle on and switch on every lamp. Maisie sits on the sofa under a throw eating the sweets from the pub, one at a time, carefully unwrapping each one and folding the wrappers into little squares. You wash her hands at the sink, and her hands are dry, completely dry, though she's been holding a wet mangel all evening. They smell of cold and earth, and they still smell of it when you go over them a second time with the lavender soap. She puts up with it and watches you.

You ask her about Bristol, carefully, in passing, and she remembers everything: her teacher's name, the code for the gate at home, that next door's cat is scared of the hoover. You ask if she remembers carving the star with you. She thinks and says she doesn't. She says the star was already there.

The punkie stands on the windowsill. You blow the candle out at eleven. At midnight, when you come down for a glass of water, the candle is burning, straight and tall, the same length it was in the kitchen that evening.

In the morning she eats porridge, which she has always hated, eats the whole bowl and says thank you, and you stand at the hob with the spoon and don't know what to say. Twice in the night you went in to her, and both times she was asleep on her back, straight, hands on top of the duvet. At home, as long as you can remember, she slept curled up with her face in the pillow and kicked the duvet onto the floor.

On the thirtieth, in the afternoon, you go over the road to Mavis on your own. Maisie stays drawing at the table, and you lock her in, though you've never locked her in before. Mavis is at the egg stall, and when you ask her what "almost all of them" means, she spends a long time rearranging the boxes. Then she says that the ones they went looking for in the field before dawn were found, and the ones nobody went after, the wives fetched home off the road, and they made very good husbands, quiet, never touched a drop again. "While there's singing out there, you can still go," she says, and hands you a box of eggs you haven't paid for.

On the thirty-first Maisie asks first thing whether you're going out again tonight. Halloween, she says, everyone in the village goes round the houses, and you have to take the punkie and give the light. You ask who you give it to. She shrugs and says that's what you do, she's been told.

You say no. You say you'll stay in, watch a film, light the fire and get pizza from Yeovil, and she agrees at once, without an argument, with the same smooth obedience with which she let you wash her hands. All evening children in costumes knock at the door, and you don't answer, you turn off the hall light and sit with her on the sofa watching a cartoon she's already seen. She laughs in the right places. You look at her and realise you can't remember how she used to laugh, you never paid attention. On your phone there's a video from August, the beach at Weston-super-Mare, her running from a wave and shrieking. You play it with the sound off, then with the sound on, very low, your palm over the speaker. Maisie turns her head at the shriek and looks at the screen, calm and interested.

"Is that me?" she asks.

Around midnight there's singing in the field beyond the village. Far off, thin, a single voice, no stamping, that same song, with "will never believe". You get up, go to the door and check the lock, though you locked it at nine. Mavis said: while there's singing out there, you can still go. You stand in the hall with your hand on the handle and don't open it. You tell yourself it's the wind, and somebody else's girl who hasn't been put to bed, that all children's voices sound alike at eight. You think about the one asleep upstairs, how she takes your hand in the street, doesn't argue, eats her porridge and laughs in the right places. You also think that tomorrow at two you'll be standing with her on the platform, and her mother, who for three weeks has only seen her on a tablet, will step off the train, crouch down in front of her and look into her face. You let go of the handle when the song ends. Maisie is asleep upstairs. The candle on the windowsill is burning.

On the morning of the first of November you open the door to fetch in the milk the farmer leaves, and on the step beside the bottle stands a second punkie. The same mangel, dark pink, with soil on its side, and carved into it is the same star, crooked, with the long point bent downwards, the point you bent yourself with a clumsy stroke of the knife in Mavis's kitchen. Inside it smells of candle wax and cold. You pick it up by the wire and look in through the star.

The candle in it has burned right down.