All writers have a witch story which often involves a young boy, a small town, a faithful dog and an old woman. I ain’t saying all of this story is true because I’m old now. When I look in the mirror, I see my grandfather but the giggling boy is still there, spinning his outlandish tales. The flaws are in memory and in the telling.

I was only seven when the crone and her dolls got their hooks in to me. I lived with a Greek family during the week because Mum worked long hours as a nurse and couldn’t look after me. Dad had shot through. The Deatrakis family had two boys about my age and a girl a little younger: Niko, Paul and Chloe. They were beautiful with jet black hair, olive skin and green eyes. I was blonde, tanned, with a freckled nose and buck teeth. Niko was a year older than me and ran like the wind. Kallos, the family German Shepherd, slept in the sunroom with me. I could speak some Greek and was fluent when hungry. I roamed Goodwood, a working class suburb full of migrants with impunity, armed with an insatiable curiosity. God helps those who help themselves and I did.

My world squirmed and wriggled with tadpoles and worms. Tigers prowled through the bamboo in the vacant block behind the house. I was an explorer like the great Captain Cook or an Australian solider on the Kokoda Trail firing his machine gun into waves Japanese soldiers. I’d pick cumquats and water cress for Mrs Deatrakis. My night dreams were as vivid as noonday play.

This was the time of the child murders. Three children about my age – all girls – were kidnapped from a beach and never found. Two young girls went missing from Adelaide Oval. A headless boy was fished out of a river behind the orphanage. Two boys were kidnapped off the street and buried in shallow graves in wasteland, north of the city. They’d been scalped.

That summer was so hot, Mr Deatrakis cracked an egg on the bonnet of the car and the edges bubbled and fried. We threw buckets of water over Kallos and hosed the chooks. The thermometer in the back yard read 104 degrees. A blow-torch northerly wind blew from the desert sending leaves and dust spiralling in to mini tornados, to rise and then quickly die.

The January school holidays stretched to infinity. Boredom drove us down Goodwood road where we stood in front of the ivy covered Catholic Church. A life-size crucified Christ hung above the door, complete with nails and crown of thorns. Next door was the immunisation centre, where on Monday mornings, babies and young kids would scream and howl as the hypodermic syringes punctured pink, tender flesh.

Between the church and the immunisation centre ran a small path, cloaked in shadow. The older neighbourhood kids said a witch lived down there and she ate children’s feet and noses. The shadow was cool and smelt of piss and cooked cabbage. The red brick of the church stood on one side and ivy of the immunisation centre on the other.

“Niko you go first, I’ll follow,” I said, pushing him towards the path.

“No, we all go. Can’t leave Chloe here”

“I can look after myself,” she said. “I’m going with you”

Paul hung back and leant against the ivy. “What about the witch?”

“No such thing,” Niko said with little conviction.

“You chicken, Paul?” I said and made chook noises.

“Ain’t chicken. Lets go”

At night Mrs Deatrakis read us stories from The Odyssey as we lay on the lounge room floor and ate Baklava soaked in rosewater. Kallos lay his head on my lap. She told of Circe the enchantress with witchy powers and how she tried to seduce Ulysses and get him to stay on the island and how she changed his crew into a pigs. We sat there and looked at our hands and saw pig trotters.

We walked slowly single file down the path. I was behind Niko and Paul and Chloe were behind me. The sounds of the suburb fell away until we were enveloped in silence and shadow, like in an eclipse. As long as Niko held his ground, I wasn’t going anywhere. I hated ivy because two years ago, a massive thunder storm woke me in the middle of the night. Mum was out on a date and I was alone in the flat. I crawled up on her bed and stared out the window. The thunder cracked overhead and I was afraid. In the lightening flashes I saw on the neighbour’s fence, large snakes twisting and turning through the ivy. Their diamond-shaped heads rose and flicked their fork tongues in the charged air. I pulled Mum’s bed sheets over my head and that’s how she found me.

“Did you hear that?” Paul said.

“Ain’t nothin’,” Niko said. “There’s no witch here. Nothing but piss and dog shit”

A window flew open above our heads an old woman with white hair and a soothing, almost melodic voice, like the Sirens in the Odyssey, asked what we were doing. Niko pushed me in to the ivy as he belted past, making for the road. Paul and Chloe followed him, screaming witch, witch, witch. My legs were concrete.

She raised her finger and pointed at me.

“You! Bucktooth boy, why don’t you run? You can’t move your legs. That happened to me everyday many years ago. You are braver than your friends. Well, would you like to come up stairs?”

A large blowfly the size of a 20 cent piece hit the back of my head as I slowly climbed the broken stairs. A garbage bin below the steps rattled and buzzed, full of flies. A dog barked in the distance setting off a pack of mongrels up the road.

The hag opened the back door and ushered me in to the darkness. I was in a small room with a single bed made with tight hospital corners. A Star of David hung above the bed head. Candles burned in a candelabra on a small table with two chairs. The sun struggled to pour through a high and dirty window. Classical music played on the radio. I could tell it was classical because it sounded like cats having sex.

“It has been a long long time since I had a visitor. Father MacDonald lets me live here as I clean the church. I’m Dina”

A black shawl hung over a grey, shapeless dress. A lion’s head broach clung to her sagging left breast. Her hair was a white as flour with grey eyes set deep into the skull, surrounded by dark circles, painted by a thousand sleepless nights. While the skin on her jowls sagged and her nails were chipped and chewed, she had been a beauty once. In a clean corner, below a poorly framed picture of a young family smiling at the camera, sat two life-size dolls about my age, a boy and a girl. The boy’s bald head made him look like a cancer patient.

“Would you like some tea or cake?”

“No thanks. What’s with the dolls?”

“That’s Karl and Marion. They keep me company”

She put a plate with a thin slice of stale cake and butter on my lap. A tattoo with five numbers ran up the left side of her wrist. She hovered over me for moment and ran her long fingers through my hair. Women were always doing that.

“You have beautiful blonde hair. So thick and soft.”

The cake smelt of almonds and Broom Hilda and the dolls gave me the yips. I put the cake aside and made to leave.

“Would you like to hear a story? It’s a true story although sometimes I think it happened to someone else. It was long time ago in a land far away. It involved women, children and monsters”

She’d thrown a lure to hook my attention. Mrs Deatrakis did that. Give a juicy precis and then stop. I sat back in the chair. The dolls were staring at me.

“I was put in a camp with my two children…”

“Like a holiday camp?”

“Not quite. The camp was run by men with guns. The fence was patrolled by German Shepherds. First I worked in the kitchen. This was good because there wasn’t very much food. I could steal some for my children. We lived in a big barracks and in winter, it was very cold. We had to work such long hours”

“Sounds like shit”

“It was, as you say, unpleasant. Every morning we stood outside the barracks while they did a head count. My children clung to my legs. Remember how frightened you were when you saw me? That’s how I felt. A tall man in a black uniform examined us. Those who were sick were taken away. We never saw them again”

A mote danced high in front of the dirty window. It rose and fell, disappeared and appeared again. The dolls were giving me the willies and her story bored a hole in one ear and out the other. In the distance thunder rumbled. The storms raced across the desert and spat lightening and rain. Time to go but it was hard to find a break in her droning monologue.

“An officer saw I played the flute. A woman’s orchestra played classical music when the trains disgorged new people and to welcome the skeletons back from the work parties. The next day, I stood at the front of the orchestra while my children stayed in the barracks. We played Mozart, Lizst, anything lively and with a melody.”

The crone kept looking at my hair. The problem with old people and their stories, is that they go on and on. They want to describe everything. I could never be a writer. Pages of describing this and that. The weather. The rose colour of the kids cheeks as the pure white snow fell. Just give me the gist and I’ll fill in the rest in my head. The thunder was getting closer. Kallos didn’t like thunder. He’d hide under my bed.

“I got privileges in the orchestra. Marionetta and Carlo got toys. Old battered things, cuddle-keeps of other children, who disappeared like smoke. They were a touchstone to the world outside. It was winter and we were playing Mozart’s Flute Sonata in B-Flat Major”

“I gotta be going…”

“The cold iced one’s bones. The women and children from the trains walked like cattle to the parade ground. The mothers kept their children close to their skirts. Light snow was falling and I was in the middle of a difficult passage. I won’t bore you with the technicalities…”

“You couldn’t bore me more if you tried”

“I turned and saw the tall man in the black uniform take Marionette and Carlo from the barracks and lead them to where the old and sick were corralled. I could say and do nothing. If I stopped playing I was dead. So I played through the tears, my heart breaking. I wanted to run to them and plead with the man but the conductor heard me miss two notes and yelled at me and the women and children from the train were smiling as they were told hot food and blankets were coming. So I played for my children. I played as if they were in the front seats of a majestic hall and I was on stage with the spotlight hard in my eyes and the snow fell heavily and when I stopped playing, they were gone. In the barracks Carlo’s black jacket was folded on my bed with a couple of blonde hairs on the collar. Such beautiful hair”

She got up, put the kettle on and cut herself a slice of cake and sat in front me, cutting the cake into little squares, then stabbing the squares with the knife and raising each square to her mouth. She ate like a cow. If she was expecting a reaction, she’d spilled her guts out to the wrong boy. Mrs Deatrakis impersonated the Hydra using her hands to do its heads swaying before Ulysses’ boat. Scary. If you’re going to tell a story, give it some edge. Really sell it.

She wiped cake crumbs from the corner of her wrinkled mouth, walked behind me and ran her fingers through my hair again. Then she pressed the knife against my throat.

“I’ve almost finished Karl. All he needs is some hair. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is getting the right colour and texture. I’m sorry you didn’t like my story but that makes it easier to do what I have to do”

Dina yanked my hair back, exposing the throat. Her smiling face above me. The motes danced, the cake fell to the floor, soft classical music played on the radio as lightening flashed. She waited for the thunder to crack before drawing the knife back to slash the windpipe. She cocked her head towards the door like a bird and muffled a scream and ran to the dolls as Kallos placed one tentative paw in the room, his ears flattened by the thunder, his lip in a well practiced snarl. The hag dropped the knife and shielded the dolls with her skirt.

“Get it away! Bitte. Get it away!”

I leapt down the rickety stairs with Kallos barking in delight behind me and hurtled along the thin path, the ivy dripping with rain. The smell of water on hot concrete filled the air as dead brown leaves whirl pooled over blocked drains. I sprinted past the Immunisation centre, the small used car lot, the hairdressers and the civic hall. I turned down Victoria street as Kallos ran in to the yard and through the backdoor.

“Put dry clothes on,” Mrs Deatrakis said, “you’re soaked”

“You’ll never believe what happened”

I stood dripping on her newly mopped floor. Kallos made his way to my bedroom and hid under the bed.

“There’s a witch, she tried to kill me, at the Church”

“A Church going witch,” she threw a towel at me. “How unusual”

“No, no she is Jewish and lives there”

“A Jewish Church witch. Did she turn people into pigs?”

“She turned her children into dolls”

Mrs Deatrakis gave me a small slice of Turkish Delight coated in powdered sugar and hung the laundry in the sun room.

“It’s a good story but too short. To tell a very good story, give more description, use more words to describe the witch and her dolls. Take the reader by the hand and show them the church and the storm. Tell Kallos your story. It will take his mind off the storm.”