Well. I don't know who to focus on. I have two characters to choose from. I bet some of you would shout, "The goblin, the goblin!" because with a name like that you begin to feel hungry already.
However, I'll be traditional and begin with Sonia, who was a little girl, of course. Nowadays she would have the label of 'preteen' affixed to her, along with a host of foolish expectations.
My story is set back a bit in time, when there was less of all that, thank you very much: no internet, no cell-phones no calculators (Argh! Urgh Aw!) - which brings us back to the psychedelic seventies, when though no dinosaurs walked the earth, plenty of people thought they saw them regularly, and what's more, had conversations with them, from time to time.
Now settle down. Nibble some choclate, sip some tipple as I turn that big page.
Sonia had moved from the countryside, just where new suburbia meets the farmlands, to a city terrace with an itty-bitty back garden and an even smaller vestigial front one, just to hold the road and pedestrians at double bay.
Inside was spacious enough for a terraced house, with tall Victorian ceilings, and four floors (the back garden was a level down from the road). She slept in a big attic bedroom; and the smaller other one was hers as well, unless, as unlikely as it seemed by now, sufficient sisters or brothers should be born, and grow big enough to claim it.
Oh no! But, of course she would be gone by then, flown away into the wide world. Mighty Sonia... 'Snow-bird take me with you..'
Maybe her room would be kept, her thought reassured her. Perhaps she would always be able to come back home. She would ask her mother about that one.
No. It wasn't a thing to be absorbed in uncertainty, or the quiet light-patterns on the wall would hear her thoughts and cavern inside her. The city would be yawning and stretching with its restless bigness and the panes of glass would be trembling with its enormity.
She would throw her window open and lean out and look at the sunset over her slate roof beyond the park plane trees. But then she could hear inane chatter from transistor radios and louder animation from three doors down, where the university students effervesced.
So she closed her window again, sat on her bed cross-legged, in her jeans, and remembered her old locale and Josh.
They'd started in a little gang of friends, but come the summer holidays and when her move across the country became lurchingly imminent, Josh and herself had become a pair, walking across the pipe that bridged a stream, swaying in strung-up rubber tires launching far on stick handled rope swings over that stream, sauntering through meadows, sitting talking, racing to a kissing gate; and the first one there, which was always herself (tomboy that she was) requiring the toll payment - initially it was on her clearly proffered cheek but then, in the final days, on her lips.
"Will we write to each other, Josh?"
"We'll try, Sonia. But. I'll not forget this, ever."
"Please write," she had implored as she felt her mind being sucked out of her old home in the tea-chests and boxes and skips that accumulated so quickly, her father working into the early hours - and of course quarreling with him when it came to her room disappearing into a cuboid.
More or less exactly half way through the school holidays they moved, so her father could take up his headmastership of St. Luke's Cof E Primary school in Fenbridge. She did see the sea once or twice - cold grey shingles spotted with rain and gulls picking at a dead fish, tatty, second-rate coin arcades on the way back to the car - but somehow the air got into her the wrong way altogether and that was when she began to feel ill.
