DWC Short Story: The Torch Who Knew Too Much (and Still Needed New Batteries)

I was born in a cardboard cradle between a bag of cable ties and a pyramid of discount screwdrivers. The sign over my head read: “TORCHES: £4.99 OR TWO FOR A TENNER (BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED, OBVIOUSLY).” Right away I understood my standing in the world: affordable, useful, and destined to be blamed when something else went wrong.

The shop was called Proper Tools in a town called Nettlesham-on-Trent, which is the sort of name that suggests calm rivers and tidy hedges. In truth, the river was moody, the hedges were opinionated, and everybody had a torch in a drawer “just in case”—except when they actually needed one, in which case the drawer contained a tangle of elastic bands, three stale mints, and a torch with the batteries nicked.

My first owner was Dave, a cheerful builder with forearms like rolled rugs and a fondness for calling everyone “mate,” which simplified his life and mine. He plucked me from my cardboard cradle, bought me four AAs from the till, and gave me my first breath—well, charge—outside the shop. The moment my bulb blinked awake, I felt it: the tingle of purpose. I was a beam. A direction. Hope wrapped in aluminium.

Dave tucked me into a toolbox with a dozen heavy cousins. Hammers are loud sleepers, by the way. Each morning, Dave drove me to sites where houses stood half-finished, like polite people caught mid-sneeze. He’d clamp me in his teeth sometimes while he crawled under floors, which is no way to treat an electrical device but does give you a fine view of a man’s dental work. He’d click me on whenever wires sulked in corners or pipes played hide-and-seek. I lit up dust, old coins, and once a family of spiders living behind a skirting board with the same expression people wear at the post office: resigned, mildly interested, hoping it’s over soon.

One night Dave took me home and forgot to bring me back in for tea. The sun went sulky behind the houses and the kitchen light gave a last heroic flicker before the power went out across Nettlesham. The street sang with “Have you got a—?” and “No, the big one’s dead.” Dave opened the boot of the car, found me, and held me up like a tiny lighthouse. Inside the house we lit a parade: the kettle (no good, electric), the fridge (fine, mostly yoghurt), the hall cupboard (two board games missing most of their bits), and then the stairs where his daughter Ruby was meant to be asleep and was not.

Ruby held me and whispered, “Are you magic?” I considered answering. But I was early in my life and hadn’t learned the rules of speech. So I did what I could: I shone. She used me to read under her duvet, which I admit felt like a calling. She read a book about a girl with a dragon, and every time the dragon breathed fire, she tilted me and made me flare at the edges, as if I were in on the plot. When Dave finally reclaimed me—“Oi, bedtime!”—Ruby brushed my end cap like I was a pet. I wanted to tell her I’d look after her in the dark. I wanted to say a lot of things, but I kept them coiled inside my wires.

Weeks later, on a cold morning with breath like steam, Dave left the van unlocked outside a bakery. A man in a hoodie slid past, opened the passenger door with the casual skill of someone who has practised, and lifted the toolbox. He didn’t run. He simply walked with purpose, which is what you do when stealing. People assume anyone moving with speed is up to no good. A calm thief is a sort of optical illusion.

I call him Hoodie Trevor because that’s what he was and what he said he was when his mate asked him later. “Hoodie Trevor, you beauty,” the mate said, opening the toolbox like a Christmas hamper. They took the good stuff and sold it on; I remained, wedged under a box of bits, until Trevor noticed me while looking for loose change.

“Well then,” he said, pressing my button. I flared to life in his stairwell, catching the damp patch on the ceiling and the pair of trainers resting in a tangle like sleepy otters. He turned me off, then on again, testing. Thieves, in my experience, are diligent product testers. He slipped me into his pocket and took me to work.

You may wish to know the precise nature of his work. Let’s call it “redistribution.” He visited sheds, garages, and once a vicarage with a door like a large cake, and relieved them of surplus. I didn’t love it. But I have no brakes. My job is light, not judgement.

On a Thursday, Trevor guided me through a back garden with gnomes set out like a jury. He lifted a small window with a flat bar, slithered inside, and turned me on. I saw a lounge kept too tidy for normal human life. He moved to the dresser, opened drawers with gentle hands, and found a velvet pouch. He loosened the drawstring and out rolled a ring with a stone that looked like a drop of moon. He sucked air between his teeth in appreciation.

Then I felt something. A scuffle outside. The whisper of an engine. A click. The front door opened and shut in a flat, authoritative way. “Police,” said a voice that had been waiting all day to say it. Trevor pulled me off and ducked behind a sofa. He stayed there, breathing like a fax machine. I took in the room—family photos, a certificate for “Best Fruit Cake 2011,” and an umbrella with ducks for a handle—and I thought of Ruby reading under the duvet. The door handle turned. The room filled with a person-shaped shadow.

What happened next was not heroic. Trevor popped up like toast and sprinted through the kitchen, out a back door, over a fence, and away into the night with me bouncing in his pocket. He got three gardens along before his foot found a child’s plastic spade and he went sprawling. I shot from his pocket, rolled along the damp grass, and dropped down a drain like a coin in a charity bucket.

I lay for a long time in that drain. Rats came to sniff me and decided I wasn’t food. A crisp packet embraced me and then moved on to a longer, better relationship with a puddle. Above, the town carried on: school run squeals, bin lorry opera, dog barks translated into fifty shades of “mind your business.” I slept. It’s what we do when untended. Our dreams are beams that never reach anything.

Two days later Mavis found me. She was the sort of person who wears a high-vis jacket to go posting leaflets because you never know. She worked for the council and knew every drain that sulked, every lamppost that flashed, and every resident who had an opinion about both. She used a litter-picker to lift me into the daylight. “You poor thing,” she said, as if I were a damp wren.

At home she dried me on a radiator and opened my back with a butter knife. Water spilled, batteries hissed, and I thought, well, that’s that. But Mavis was stubborn. She fetched new batteries from a drawer that also contained three string balls, a souvenir spoon, and what might have been a fossilised toffee. She clicked me on. I hesitated, then woke with a small gasp.

“Ha!” she said. “Back from the dead.” She shook me gently. “You can live here till you’ve found your feet.”

I didn’t like to correct her about my lack of feet. I liked her. She kept biscuits in a tin marked “buttons” to fool her future self. She smelled faintly of bleach and peppermint. She made lists on the back of envelopes, and halfway through one she wrote “call Gary.” She underlined it twice and didn’t call him.

When Mavis took me out, it was to illuminate the hidden world of municipal life. I saw the underbelly of the park stage where teenagers etched promises they later forgot. I saw the bench where a woman cried into a scarf and then blew her nose with such finality that the pigeons shuffled back. I lit the inside of a clogged litter bin and found: a slice of pizza, a pair of earphones, and a note that read “SORRY” with no further detail. The town lives by such scraps—a civilisation in the margins.

One Saturday she brought me to the charity shop. She volunteered there between lunch and the late-afternoon ache she carried like a bag. The shop was a riot of forgotten stories: wedding hats shaped like ambitions, mugs that proclaimed “WORLD’S BEST GRANDAD,” books explaining how to do life in ten easy steps. She cleaned me with a cloth that used to be a T-shirt and arranged me on a shelf between a desk lamp shaped like a pineapple and a wobbly photo frame.

That’s where Colin found me. He was a fisherman. Not the heroic ocean kind; the truer English kind: patient, damp, philosophical, mildly competitive with weather. He turned me on, liked my beam, turned me off, and paid two pounds without haggling. He put me in his coat pocket with a bag of boiled sweets that smelled of old lady handbags and childhood bribes.

Fishing is a quiet sport full of loud thoughts. The river at Nettlesham was a slow thing with opinions about silt, and at night it spoke in plops. Colin and his mate Barry sat on folding chairs, their rods like raised eyebrows. They didn’t talk much about feelings, but feelings attended anyway, unpacking chairs of their own. Colin clicked me on, scanning the water for movement.

“Do you think,” Colin said, “that she wants the house, or just wants me not to have it?”

Barry fed line to the dark. “Yes.”

They laughed and let the dark press in. I lit a small patch of riverbank where worms considered the meaning of life. Later, when Colin felt the tug, he forgot himself and dropped me. I rolled, bumped a rock, and slid into the river with the tragic grace of a dropped sandwich. The plunge was quick, the water cold. I don’t panic—what would be the point?—but I did regret. I regretted the books under duvets, the biscuits in the “buttons” tin, the note that said SORRY with no P.S.

The river carried me towards the weir where the water did a permanent shrug. A heron looked down, decided I wasn’t edible, and returned to standing like a philosophy teacher. I spun. I bumped reeds. My light flickered, then failed. I slept again, this time with river weeds in my dreams.

I washed up on a muddy bank at dawn, wedged among sticks like a forgotten thought. A dog found me. He was called Nigel, which he wore like a blazer. He was a spaniel, all ears and mission. He picked me up, proud, and galloped to his owner, a boy with a nose that had known winter. The boy wiped me on his jumper and turned me on. Nothing. He tried again. Still nothing.

“Never mind,” said the boy, who was called Lew, as I would learn. He put me in his pocket anyway because he believed in future usefulness. At home, he unscrewed me, knocked a small universe of grit out of my insides, and held my end cap to the radiator while he googled “is it OK to warm a torch.” Then he scavenged batteries from the TV remote and clicked me.

Reader, I woke.

Lew grinned like a sunrise. “Yes,” he said to nobody and to me. He put my borrowed batteries back in the remote because his mum shouted, “Why is the telly volume stuck on nineteen?” Then he rummaged in a drawer and found four old AAs, shook each near his ear as if they would slosh, and offered them to me with a small ceremony. We were a team.

Lew took me everywhere. Into the attic where cardboard boxes lurked with top hats and skating boots and a board game called BUCCANEER that smelt of dust and children. Into the shed where a broken bike sulked and a slug had written a wet sentence. Under his bed where a lost sock and a comic made friends. He made me into a spaceship, a lighthouse, a dragon’s nose. He taught his little sister to make shadow birds on the wall. When he caught a cold, he coughed into my beam and declared, “I can see the germs,” which isn’t science, but isn’t not science either.

On Halloween he and his friends roamed the estate in capes and face paint. I lit bowls of sweets, suspicious paths, the shoes of teenagers with too much swagger and not enough common sense. A man in a werewolf mask tried to be funny by jumping out from behind a hedge; I lit his house number and the CCTV camera above his door and he retreated to reconsider his life.

I would have been happy to stay with Lew forever, but nothing stays. A week later his mum insisted on a clear-out. “If it doesn’t spark joy,” she said, “it goes.” She looked at the contents of Lew’s drawer: conkers with dreams, ticket stubs, and me. “That torch is a mess,” she said. I wanted to shout: I am joy! I have lit more confessions than a vicar!

Lew hid me behind his books. For a while I lived with pirates and planets. Then came the day of the school sleepover at the museum. Each child could bring one torch “for safety and atmosphere.” Lew fetched me with a conspiratorial wink.

The Nettlesham Museum is small and full of items found in fields by men who shout “Eureka” into thermoses. There’s a Roman coin, a shoelace from 1841, and a badger skull that looks like it might ask you for a light. At night it changes. The glass cases suggest secrets, the corridors gather sighs. The children were thrilled. They pretended to be brave. The teachers pretended not to be terrified of responsibility.

We toured the exhibits while I made everything both scarier and less so. In the Victorian room I lit a cradle with a crack like a yawn. In the wartime display I slid across tin helmets and a ration book with the name “Nora” in careful letters. The guide showed us a torch from 1943 with a big button and heavy family energy. I wanted to wink at my ancestor but restrained myself.

At midnight we unrolled sleeping bags under a papier-mâché mammoth. The teachers threatened dire consequences for “shenanigans.” The children lay whispering anyway. I brightened and dimmed in Lew’s hand as he told ghost stories that were mostly about noises that might be pipes or might be restless spirits. He tilted me so a shadow ran along the ceiling like a cat.

And then, of course, I was stolen.

You’d think it would be me missing, but it was the mammoth’s tusk. One of them. Not a real tusk—papier-mâché—but it had been on a poster, and posters create desire in the strangest souls. The night security guard, who had been given twelve safety videos and a flask of coffee with a lid that didn’t quite fit, had drifted into a dream about a beach where the sand was made of bread. A figure slipped through a service door, walked on the balls of their feet, and approached the mammoth with the respect one gives a celebrity’s bin. They unscrewed the tusk with a deliberate twist, the way you remove a lightbulb. They carried it off under an overcoat. The alarm did not sound because the alarm had been set to “test” since 2013 due to ongoing discussions with a contractor called Keith.

The next morning there was uproar. A teacher fainted into a beanbag. The curator, a nervous man who owned three jumpers and one expression, said, “This is an outrage.” A local journalist appeared like fog and took photos of the empty socket where tusk had met mammoth.

“Right,” said the police constable, who was small and powerful like a stapler. “We’ll need statements.” He took the children into a side room one by one. When it was Lew’s turn, he took me too, because I had become an extension of his arm.

“Did you see anyone near the mammoth?” said the constable. “Anyone behaving oddly?”

This was a museum full of nine-year-olds pretending to be spies. Odd behaviour was the baseline.

“I heard someone sneeze at two in the morning,” said Lew.

“Could you tell which direction the sneeze came from?”

“From the left of my face.”

The constable wrote something and sighed like a tyre. He looked at me. “Cracking torch,” he said. “Mind if I borrow it?”

He meant during the investigation. But “borrow” is a word with a wide range, and mine extended. He used me to examine door frames and air vents and a tiny hole in a window the size of a pea. “Air pistol,” he said, with the tone of someone who has watched the appropriate television. He dusted for prints with a kit that smelt of talc and optimism. I lit a faint spiral on the glass, like a smudged galaxy. He took me along when he followed footprints in a patch of flower bed soil out the back, across a lane, and into the yard of a pub called The Sleeping Otter.

The Sleeping Otter is the sort of pub where the carpet has a personality and the fruit machine is a mentor figure. In the shed behind the bins, tucked under a tarpaulin with the grace of a parked canoe, was the mammoth tusk. The constable smirked in a way he would later be ashamed of and radioed his success. He was not a smirker by nature, but a recovered tusk can change a person.

In the pub garden a group of locals clapped. A man in a scarf said, “Justice.” The constable posed for a photo with the tusk propped like a fishing prize. He forgot to return me to Lew. It happens more often than you think. Adults are large children with more pockets.

I found myself in a desk drawer at the station between a stapler that clicked in its sleep and a box of rubber bands that smelt like elastic and despair. I lit statements about lost bicycles and a handwritten list of “ideas for morale” that included “toast morning” and “different biscuits.” I went into a locker, then into a bag, then into a cupboard in the evidence room where I stared at bags of plant material and pipes with a philosophical air.

Eventually I returned to daylight during a safety demonstration at the primary school. The constable held me up as an example of “being prepared.”

“You’ll want one of these in the car,” he said, “for breakdowns and night-time emergencies.” He pressed my button. Nothing. He frowned, shook me, and pressed again. A reluctant glow. The children nodded. He moved on to cycle helmets and reflective stickers shaped like stars.

Afterwards he put me down on a table and went to shepherd a boy away from licking a cone. I was still on the table when Mavis walked past with a bag of leaflets and a face like a weather forecast. She paused, frowned, and picked me up.

“You get everywhere,” she said, as if I were a teenager’s favourite song.

She swapped my batteries with the school’s microphone (nobody noticed; the speech was livelier for the interruptions). I brightened like a revelation. “There you are,” she said, and slipped me into her bag, which is theft of a sort, but also a rescue.

We went back to the charity shop because things tend to return to their starting points, like dogs and certain exes. She cleaned me again, tsk-ed at a dent, and placed me with purpose. On my shelf sat a hairdryer that whined about its past and a toaster with delusions of grandeur. People came and went, fingering jumpers, buying teapots that would never pour without dribbling.

In the afternoon a young woman came in with a look like she’d been rearranging her future and wasn’t sure about the new furniture. She drifted past travel guides to countries she couldn’t afford, picked up a scarf and put it down, and then saw me. She turned me on. I shone steady.

“You’ll do,” she said, and paid fifty pence, which was insulting, but I’m not proud.

Her name was Nora—the very same from the ration book, but younger, because life plays that sort of trick. She was moving into her first flat. First flats are part celebration, part negotiation with pipes. She carried me up three floors to a door painted a hopeful blue. Inside: bare floorboards, one plant with confidence, a pile of kitchenware donated by aunties, and a view of the river that would always beat the rent by a tenner in Nora’s mind.

That night the bulb in the hall outside her door popped with a sound like a polite cough, and the corridor became a tunnel to the underworld. Nora stood at the threshold with a bin bag and the sort of fear you can’t justify, and I understood that this is when a torch earns its keep. She thumbed my button and I warmed her hand with light. She walked the corridor like a queen returning from exile. Later she used me to check the odd smell under the sink (onions, as it turned out, a species that reproduces in shopping bags).

Our early weeks were domestic epics. I joined a coalition with the mop and the plunger. I lit the back of the cupboard where the saucepan lids breed. I lay on the windowsill to catch the last sun when she read. I watched her compose texts, erase them, and stare at the screen with the tightness of someone learning a new word for alone.

One night she invited friends. They brought cushions and olives and opinions. One friend asked to borrow me to pop down to the bins. She left me in the lift, which is how I found myself at three in the morning on the ground floor listening to a neighbour argue with a man called Todd about the whereabouts of a cactus. I waited. The lift doors opened and closed like blinking. Nobody pressed my button until dawn, when the postman, who had a face that deserved a poem, picked me up, saluted me with two fingers, and placed me on the radiator in the lobby like a kitten rescued from a puddle. Mavis walked past later, spotted me, and made a note to tell the building manager to fix the corridor light “before someone breaks their neck and sues the council and I have to fill in twelve forms.”

I returned to Nora at ten, hand-delivered by a neighbour with a moustache that resembled a sleeping hedgehog. “Your torch,” he said. “Excellent throw.”

She thanked him and apologised for existing. The moustache nodded, as if he too suffered from existence, and moved on.

In time I became part of Nora’s rituals. On Sundays she tested smoke alarms and me. On Wednesdays she looked under the bed for imaginary burglars and very real dust, and I obliged. She kept me in a bowl with keys and a lanyard, and sometimes she patted my head as she left like I was a house spirit. One day she carried me to a cupboard and pulled down a shoebox full of letters, bunched with ribbon, and read them with a soft expression. “Gary,” she said once, and put the box back with the air of someone who has put something heavy down but not far.

A year later I attend a crisis. Not mine; Nora’s. The river overflowed its banks after rain like a telegram. The town shrugged as it always does—sandbags, wellies, volunteers called Dave—and the water found new conversations to have with cellars. In the early morning there was a hum, then a clunk, and the power went for a holiday. Nora woke in a room that had become a shade darker than comfortable. The corridor was a throat. People opened doors and said “Hello?” the way ships hoot.

Nora found me in the bowl. Her hand shook. I lit the floor, then her face, then the door handle, which is a way to say: here, here, here.

On the stairs a neighbour panicked about her cat; someone else worried about their freezer; someone else joked about the apocalypse, badly. Nora said, “We’ll knock on every door,” and we did. I saw faces I’d met only as footsteps. We found the old man on the second floor who pretended not to need help but watched us leave with bright eyes. We fetched blankets, torches, tea made on camping stoves, and stories. I told mine as best I could by doing my job: a circle of light, passed hand to hand, travelling.

We found the cat under a bed; we found a child crying into her pillow; we found a woman who said, “I’m fine,” and then wasn’t. In the stairwell someone started singing something that might have been a hymn and might have been a chart hit and nobody could tell in the dark. By midday the water had decided it had made its point and began to retreat.

When the power returned, there was a cheer with the lingering fear of people who know it doesn’t always. Someone brought cake from the corner shop because crisis equals cake in this country. A little girl who had not spoken all morning took me from Nora and shone me up the stairwell and said, “You’re brave,” and I thought, well, I suppose that’s one way to see it.

News of small heroics spread like butter. The next week the council held a “Community Thanks” event on the green. A man in a chain gave a speech. “We have faced water and worry,” he said, “and found neighbours.” There was a raffle. The prize was a hamper with chutney that will outlive us all. Mavis wore her high-vis jacket and ate two sausage rolls with radical joy. The constable who recovered the tusk shook hands until his fingers learned diplomacy. Dave walked by carrying a length of pipe. Ruby, taller now, spotted me in Nora’s hand and grinned. “That’s our old torch,” she said to her dad, who squinted and then said, “Blimey, maybe.” He shrugged the way good men do when the world is both smaller and larger than they thought.

Nora met Dave and Mavis and the constable and Barry and the moustache and the postman. They all said, “Oh, the torch,” like I was a minor celebrity, which is the very best kind. Hoodie Trevor skulked at the edges with a new baby and a face that suggested he was learning about the price of things.

In the afternoon a boy ran screaming because a wasp had ideas. I lit a path that avoided a fallen ice cream. People went home with cheeks that had seen sun and talking. That night, when the town exhaled and turned off its lamps one by one, Nora sat on the floor with me and the shoebox. She opened it and took out a card.

“Dear Gary,” she read, and then she laughed at herself. “No. Not today.” She put the card back, tied the ribbon, and lifted me.

“Do you talk?” she said. “I sometimes think you do.”

I considered it. I had seen drains and rings and rivers and tusks. I had been stolen twice, lost thrice, and rescued as often. I had learned that people are torches pretending to be lamps. Lamps are rooted; they sit in one place, reliable, solid, useful to those who come to them. Torches move. They go where the dark is, changing hands, alive only when called upon, always ready to become something else: a dragon, a lighthouse, a brave little spear.

I told her the truth in the only way I can: I shone. I shone on the card, on the ribbon, on her hands, and up at the ceiling where the paint flaked like a small weather report. I shone until she smiled.

The next morning Nora took me to a stall on the high street where a boy was selling cakes for scouts. “Do you need a torch?” she asked the boy’s mum, who wore a face like a calendar. “I’ve got one too many.”

The mum turned me on. Solid. “Yes,” she said. “We’re going camping.” She paid a pound and said, “You’re a star.” I refrained from pointing out the astronomical inaccuracy and went with it.

Camping meant a field, a circle of tents, and dads who insisted they knew which pole went where while the poles conducted their own unions. Children ran with plastic swords; someone burned sausages in a way that made them crowd-pleasers. At night the sky showed off and the small torches answered in their insect way. The scout leader gave a talk about safety and leaving no trace except the good kind. He said, “A torch can save your life,” and I felt taller.

A boy called Arjun became my keeper. He was small and organised, a rare child who knows where his socks live. He used me to find his friend’s lost tooth in the grass (we found it; the Tooth Fairy is real in the same way that rain is—practical money, complicated origin). He used me to write in his notebook when the stories wouldn’t wait till morning. He used me to propose a midnight expedition to the loo that became a midnight conversation with a hedgehog. He used me to make the smaller children brave by letting them hold me.

And there, in the middle of the field, with the town breathing in the distance and the river behaving for once, I understood my job fully. I am not a hero. I am a witness who helps other people do the brave bits. I am the pause between a stubbed toe and a plan. I am the small certainty in a cupboard of doubts. I am “this way,” made portable.

I have been in many hands and will be in many more. I will ride in glove compartments that smell of old crisps, in rucksacks lined with biscuits, in handbags that carry the weight of three centuries’ worth of preparation. I will be borrowed and not returned, given and regifted, lost and found, accused and thanked. I will click on and off until my switch grows smooth and my scratches tell a story. And when, at last, my bulb goes and my batteries sulk and my wiring decides it has had enough of transformation, I hope I end in a drawer where a child finds me and asks, “Does this still work?” and an adult says, “Maybe,” and the child presses my button anyway, and in that moment, whether I light or not, I do my job. I invite a finger towards the dark and say: try.

For now, I sit in Arjun’s palm as he writes by my beam a letter that begins, “Dear future me,” and I have never felt more useful. He pauses, thinks, and presses me off to consider. The field becomes night again. Far away, the town turns a page. The river whispers. The hedges gossip. A dog named Nigel dreams of retrieving the moon.

“Right,” Arjun says, and presses me on. “Where was I?”

And I, torch of Nettlesham, friend to duvets and drains, lover of drains and blankets and all the places between, throw my little sun onto the paper and wait for the words to catch