ANOTHER'S CHOICE
I was twelve when the knock came on the door from the strange man in a dress. My mother thought he was a mad transvestite at first sight and refused to let him in the house but he kept coming back, day after day, until she invited him in to hear what he had to say and hopefully get rid of him. He didn't talk like a madman.
She shut me and my sister upstairs while she talked to him but we listened at the door at the bottom of the stairs. This man in a dress was talking about me. He wanted me to go to his school. He said it was a school of magic and nobody had ever heard of it because it was kept a big secret. He said I had special powers.
My daughter has no 'special powers', my mother said firmly. I don't know what could have given you that idea.
He told her that she really shouldn't put herself into denial, to look at the evidence in from of her. He told her to remember the time I'd leapt from the top of the village chapel and landed without even a bruise.
She got very angry then. She told him to get out of her house, that he was a raving madman and she would never, ever, in a million years give me to him. He begged her to reconsider, to at least let him speak to me in person. She had none of it and finally he gave up and left. We never saw him again and my mother never spoke of it.
I thought about the strange man in a dress for a few weeks, then forgot about him. My life was far too distracting to think too much about one little thing that happened when I was twelve.
Strange things did happen around me, though. When I was fifteen, for example, in my Maths GCSE exam. I was stuck on this one question and wished I could look at paper of the boy in front of me. Just as I was thinking this his paper blew up, off his desk, over his head and came to rest directly in front of me. I was nearly disqualified from the exam, but they could hardly say I had deliberately used a freak gust of wind to cheat.
A couple of years later a boy I had been going out with broke up with me. It wasn't a mutual descision. I felt like I'd lost the love of my life. Only a few weeks later he started seeing this other girl. I was in her Chemistry group at sixth form and her hair set on fire. I watched it ignite. Half of it burned away before the tutor grabbed her head and shoved it under the tap, her screaming shrilly. She was scolded afterwards for not being more careful with her bunsen burner. I was watching her. She didn't even have it lit.
There were other things. Things I needed somehow appearing near me. Salespeople getting confused and selling me things at a third of the price they were meant to be. Little things.
I met my future husband when I was twenty five. His name is John. He calls my strange incidences 'quirks' and finds them more funny than a cause for alarm. I adopted his outlook and found they grew less and less. I was glad.
We had two children. A boy, Nathan and then a girl, Adele. They are the best children I could have asked for, and I'm not just saying that because I'm their mother. We make a great family, trusting and loving and respecting.
I'd grown completely used to my occasional 'quirks' by that point, so when more than usual started happening I wasn't too worried. They happened when I was under stress. I'd just started a new job, so I supposed it was that.
Nathan's eleven now, and Adele's nine. They're happy watching CBBC in the living room. I'm in the kitchen making the lasagne for tea. John's upstairs writing. He writes travel journals.
There comes a knock at the door. I sigh, set down the cheese I'm grating to go to answer it. I open the door and that afternoon twenty three years ago comes hurtling back.
The man in the dress is standing outside my door. He looks no different than he did back then.
"Mrs Adamson, I presume? I've come to talk to you about your son, Nathaniel."
Behind me, I hear the opening credits for Blue Peter on the television. The man waits for a reply. I don't know what to do.