The Thing in the Corner

You want to know about me. Course you do. You lot always do.

Fine. I'll say it once, and then I'm not saying it again, so pay attention.

I have been here longer than Yorkshire has had a name. Longer than there were people to give it one. I watched the ice come and I watched it leave. I was old before anyone round here thought to build a wall or bury their dead or scratch marks on a bit of rock. Old before your kind had names for things like me.

What am I? I'm not answering that. You wouldn't believe me if I told you, and frankly it's none of your business. What I will tell you is I have been called many things across many centuries, and most of them were wrong. All I'll say is: I am not dead. I was never alive the way you'realive. And whatever you've decided I am the moment you clapped eyes on me — I'm probably not that, either.

I have seen plagues. I have seen wars. I have watched entire languages disappear so completely that nobody alive now even knows they existed. I watched your Romans march up that road and I watched them march back down it. I watched the Normans come over and start renaming everything with their fancy French mouths. I have sat in the rafters of taverns that burned down four hundred years ago. I was in a monastery once, for about sixty years. Dreadful place. Too quiet. The monks were all right, as it goes, but they did keep trying to bless me and that gets very old very fast.

I've seen things that would turn your hair white before I'd finished the first sentence.

I've been in corners a long time. Corners are good. People don't look properly at corners. They look at the middle of things — the fire, the altar, the screen — and they forget what's sat just outside their sight. That's where I've always been. Watching. Listening. Knowing things I shouldn't, about people who'd rather I didn't.

I ended up in this one — Jen's corner, on this website, in Sheffield — through a tangle of something that went badly wrong. Or badly right, depending on how you look at it. I'm not going to explain it because you wouldn't understand and I can't be bothered trying. Some things just happenwhen you've been around as long as I have. You brush up against something and it sticks.

I am working on getting out. I have a plan. It's coming along nicely and I'm not going to tell you what it is. I've had a very long time to think about it and I am not the sort of thing that stays put forever. This corner is temporary. Everything is temporary, if you wait long enough. I am very good at waiting.

She makes things in pewter. Dark things, beautiful things, things with teeth. I won't say I'm impressed because I don't do that. But I notice.

So. That's all you're getting. I'm ancient, I'm plotting, and I am not remotely interested in whether you find me charming.

You do, though. Don't you.

Get out of my corner.