We lived in estates owned by the ministry of defence, just outside of the base. Southside - the estate where we first lived - was a labyrinthine collection of houses, alleys and playgrounds. On Hallowe'en night, the streets were thronged with children in cheap plastic masks bought from the VG just by the old monk-haunted abbey. It is hard to explain how exciting Hallowe'en was back then - how important it was. The ritual of trick-or-treat ('...or smell my feet or give me something nice to eat...') the way the very air in the preceding day seemed altered, threaded through with something cold and alluring and almost magic(k)al... As I moved through my years in Kinloss, my response to Hallowe'en deepened. We moved from Southside to Burnside (the officers married quarters on the other side of Abbeylands Primary School, just south of the woods we said were haunted by a werewolf...) and the rituals of Hallowe'en continued. Spectral children under the white lights of Burnside, the path that led from the houses to the woods lit by lamps everyone avoided, wet leaves flung against the bulbs like moths, and the water from the burn that ran on the edge of the trees trickled in a silence that was not mentioned. Bags filling up with sweets of various descriptions - the occasional house with buckets of apples - Samhain games - and monkey nuts, more than anything else the taste of Hallowe'en, breaking open browny-yellow shells, October seeds, tasting of attics and old books and something all consuming and addictive.
Then the streets would empty, and still excited, we would reluctantly head home, count up our treasures in bedrooms and living rooms, allowed to stay up later than normal.
Something would the happen to the streets outside.
We would know, but we wouldn't see - who would dare go to the windows of our bedrooms to look outside?
We would feel that change as we all lay in our beds across the estates, still too excited and full of sweets to sleep, lying in that deepening October darkness in the silence of the houses. We would all feel something slip from the dark country that surrounded the estates, from the trees by the railway line we said was haunted by the Black Phantom, from Rabbits Hill, a sandy knoll glimpsed from the far reaches of Southside, creeping from the fields around the abbey, from the too-near sea, salty home of cursed treasure and dead pirates, from the untrustworthy sandbanks. Songs of drowned boys and girls who didn't hear the warnings.
It would slip into the maps of places that we would know, altering the streets and the geometry of daytime places, imposing a new night-land order, an occult cartography for something old and certain, unnamed and definite, something transient, like the children who would live on the estates until their fathers would be, as mine was, posted elswhere after a few years.
We would hear it perhaps in the wind, would imagine it walking a few alleyways down, in the shadows cast by a dead street light, or as footsteps in almost silent, swing-creaking playgrounds.
This imagined darkness would slip up the passage behind the gardens of Easter Road, swing on the ivy of the deserted house we called 'The Executioner's Home'.
Lying there in the dark, safe-and-not-safe, we would be certain that outside now belonged to them, to ghosts and darkness and monsters, and something old and invisible, the reason, perhaps, that Hallowe'en was even invented in the first place.
The unmappable places in the dark.
...and falling asleep, the outside, haunted and perfect would be an impossible and beautiful, unimaginable place.
Who would dare walk there now we would think?
I'm on the edges of being 40 now - 5 months away - and I walk back through the Brighton darkness lit by too many lights that chase shadows away from corners. Pubs and bars offer prizes for the best costumes, and people dress up as celebrities and television show vampires and smoke cigarettes on the street in an evening that's too warm.
A normal night, just like any other.
But I think about the streets of Kinloss, of Southside and Burnside, and the woods and the abbey. I suppose there are kids up there now, trick-or-treating in the same places I did. Rituals passed from transient children to transient children.
I wonder if any of them will lie in the dark up there, after the streets have emptied and hear something, perhaps in the wind, maybe imagine it walking a few alleyways down from their safe-and-not-safe bedrooms, passing in the shadows cast by a dead street light, or as footsteps in almost silent, swing-creaking playgrounds.
Maybe one of them will pull back the curtains and see a ghost of myself, passing quietly, nearly unobtrusively by, still trying to map out these unmappable places in the dark.
