Girl in the Sky

Welcome to Clacksbridge

Welcome to Clacksbridge – voted the safest town in England four years in a row! It would've been five if it weren't for 2015. We don't talk about 2015. But what we do talk about is the wonderful bread that Sophie the baker makes and sells at the market every Sunday!

Sighing to herself, Rue hit the backspace key until she was left once again with a blank page. As part of her final year in school, she had been told to write up a few paragraphs about the village to be used by the visitor centre. It was harder to lie about the place than she thought it would be. Even the name sounded ugly – nice at first, but then when you say it a few more times it just sounds nasty. Too many hard sounds. Brookbridge would've probably been nicer. It was a perfect little English village – a bubbling river trickling through the middle of it, thatched houses surrounding the town square, and a friendly farmer's market every Sunday where Gerald would sell his finest bacon and Martha would try to give people her latest bizarre wooden trinkets and talismans. Sometimes she thought that the town had gone unchecked for far too long and that's why everyone had lost their minds that one night five years ago. Like grass growing too tall and needing to be cut down, because otherwise the air would start to get thin up there. Up there. She turned and looked out of the window, down at the garden below and away from her laptop. It was a square plot of land with an old climbing frame at the back of it which had been slowly growing rusty over the course of the last nine years after she'd stopped using it when she was ten. Things were so much simpler when she was ten – but then again, of course they were. She was nineteen now, and the world seemed so much bigger but crushingly smaller at the same time. The world felt more real, that was it.

Welcome to Clacksbridge! It might rain almost all the time but at least we sometimes get rainbows. Sometimes we have farmer's markets on Sundays when it's not raining. But—

Ditch the farmer's market.

Welcome to Clacksbridge! Our little town is steeped in history – all of which you can learn about in our museum. It might not look like much from the outside, but when you ask around you'll hear all sorts of stories. We have people here who have somehow lived through both World Wars!

Not the best selling point. Hey, we're old! It was true, though – the whole town, and everyone in it, felt about four hundred years old. Of course, the town itself was much older than that – and Rue wasn't even twenty yet, but she definitely felt much older. She had seen things that nobody else in the town had seen, as well as one particular thing which almost everyone in the town had seen a few years ago but almost nobody wanted to talk about. It was very British of them. Getting up from her desk and walking across the room, Rue stared at the calendar above her bed. The last week at school was next week – and it was Sunday evening. She needed to have these paragraphs done in the next few hours before she blacked out from exhaustion. There had been a sense of monotony all through her school years – probably normal – but it wasn't even beginning to show signs of receding now that that chapter of her life was coming to a close – probably not normal. She turned the pages of the calendar quickly, flicking ahead until the marked date when she would pack her stuff and go travelling across the world. Finally get out of this town on her own. Family holidays had been tragic affairs throughout which nobody really talked or unwound – her family seemed to far prefer competing with one another about who was the least stressed. The entire village felt like it was a powder-keg to her sometimes. Each and every movement. Every teacup dropped on the floor in the pristine tea-room. Anything might set it off, and nobody thought about what would happen when it finally went boom. Rue thought about it all the time. She had fictionalised a scenario at night in which the entire town came crashing down and all the airs and pretences vanished in a puff of smoke. It would be like a whole new start for a town that seemed chronically repressed in all senses of the word. Imagine Mrs. Millward when she was young and sexy. No, don't.

The museum she had mentioned in her third draft of the paragraphs did actually have some interesting things in it. Apparently, there had been a fire at the fire station in 89. It was the sort of thing that made her smile not because of the irony or because she was an arsonist – no, it made her smile because she could imagine Mrs. Millward's mother running about in her curly-wigs and flowery dressing gown trying to amass enough sleepy townsfolk to put out the blaze. She could imagine tweed-clad old men with red faces exclaiming things like 'Golly' and 'Blast it' as they looked at the deliciously ironic flames licking and biting at the tiled roof of the old fire station. The fire station hasn't survived the blaze, and the new fire station – which looked almost exactly the same judging from the photographs – had been built in its place just a few months later, still in 89. It was perhaps the most exciting thing that had happened in Clacksbridge since its founding in 1502 by some guy named Bishop Henry Harris. He had later been executed when Henry VIII decided to establish the Church of England in 1531, but he must've had a good run judging from the truly wonderful job he had done with Clacksbridge. People politely expressed their frustrations at the foxes stealing their chickens and politely complained to the manager of one of the various tea-rooms about how their soup was just a bit too cold. One thing the museum didn't mention, however, was what would perhaps be the biggest tourist attraction in the town if the townsfolk actually let it attract any tourists. They didn't need the Government to step in and cover it up for them.

Welcome to Clacksbridge – voted the safest town in England four years in a row! It would've been five if it weren't for 2015. It had all started at precisely nine thirty on the 18th of November that year, when Rosie Banks told her boss that she saw a meteor overhead. It wasn't a meteor, though, because meteors don't hover over small English towns. Light beams came out of it and stopped cars all around the town, and people came out of their pyjamas to look at the flying saucer overhead. I stayed in my room and looked out of the window. It was beautiful – and I think they took me on board.