The Claw  by Mark Czanik

Everyone was scared of it, although it was just a hand I found in the gutter. Not even a gripping one. ‘The Claw! Beware the Claw! Son of Claw!’ I cried as I chased them up and down the garages.

Pamela and Trudy ran screaming into the sanctuary of Trudy’s back garden. Harry flapped his arms like a wounded bird. Windy somehow heaved himself up by the drainpipe onto the asbestos garage roof and sat there hunched like a gargoyle, while Pods was so terrified he ran into Ted’s empty garage and pulled both doors shut on himself. I couldn’t catch any of them.

‘Revenge of the Claw!’

Angela was the only one who wasn’t afraid. She didn’t even flinch. ‘It looks pretty armless to me,’ she said, plucking it from my fingers and hiding it behind her back. Switching hands every time I tried to prize it from her nail-varnished grip. Soon, breathing hard and alone under the lamppost’s amber spotlight, with only her blue barred gate to keep us safely separate and an audience of backlit curtains, we weren’t playing the same game anymore.

‘The Claw is dangerous in the wrong hands,’ I tried to warn her, making a lame attempt to get back into character.

‘Well see about that,’ she said.

Her silver star earrings quivered like spiders in a web.

We went to the long passage wedged in between the top garages and the high gardens where I searched her for what was rightfully mine, my hand feeling so strangely disembodied on each of its perilous quests I was surprised to see its return. Was it in this pocket? Or this one back here, perhaps? Just where had it vanished to?

Angela said nothing.

We were interrupted by a light going on behind us – Harry’s dad, Mr Sorrel, suspended in a yellow rectangle in the darkness. Mr Sorrel had won the jackpot a few years ago on Spot the Ball and bought their council house at the top of Horseshoe Walk with his winnings, but he hadn’t given up his job at the plastics factory, and still carried the shopping home several times a week because he didn’t drive. We watched him run the tap and leave a mug on the draining board.

Then the light went off, untethering us again, and I turned back to Angela, still leaning against the wall.

For several nights I went in search of the Claw in the mouldy fragrant shadows of that passage, hoping never to find it. Her silence was a challenge. The many pockets of her denim dungarees as snug and velvety as the inside of a broad bean pod, until her mother always called to break the spell.

I took to watching her bedroom window from my own directly opposite on the other side of the garages. Her lopsided lawn hemmed in between Mrs Dusk’s forbidden garden, and the Cropper’s hidden behind its towery walls of light-sucking fir trees. Waiting for the signalling crash of her gate springing shut whenever she left or returned.

Her parents were splitting up at the time because her dad was having an affair, I discovered many years later. Years I’ve often spent, like a drowning Houdini, dragged under by the memory of those unwavering blue eyes. Wishing I could locate and claw back some of the cruel words I tried to curse her with that night outside her gate. This was after I found out she’d accepted Max’s invitation into his garden. Max, who was lucky enough to share the same May birthday as her, and had just joined the cadets, and went fishing down the Lugg with his dad for dace or perch or chub or grayling that summer, but came back carrying a tortoise someone had abandoned in the flood meadows instead.

I buried my Action-Man in the raised flowerbeds of our back garden when we left that place for someone else to find.

Mark Czanik

Image: A Line up of action man figures from wikimedia commons share alike. Five little mannikins in uniform in a case.