Back home Sophie spread the remaining beans on a sheet of newspaper then went into the back porch and found the plant pots. Nothing special. Cheap terracotta with a hole in the base for drainage, but her Dad used them every year, never breaking them even when he himself was broken.
She had no soil to plant them, only realising halfway through. When she returned from the garden centre with a bag of potting compost, she walked back into the kitchen, saw the chaos on the table and expected to smell cigarette smoke coming from the open door. It took her two hours before she was in any state to finish the job.
“Funny isn’t it,” he’d said, before his voice was stolen from him. “Spent all my life looking after plants and a plant is going to kill me. Maybe they’re getting their own back for harvesting them with pinching fingers and knives.” She’d watched him tip the packet of tobacco into the bin. “Seems a waste, but I can’t have anyone else feeling like this.”
She remembered the concern. The sadness. Her memory edited out the coughing and the hollowness within him.
*
The ghosts did not come until the beans sprouted, arriving as the leaves unfurled from the split of skin. Just shadows on the stairs. At the corner of the landing. She never saw enough to know for certain. The scent gave him away. The reek of tobacco and soil and the rich velvet tang of harvest. She carried on planting.
*
Sophie paused for a moment before opening the door, standing aside to let Simon in. He did not say anything about the seedlings lining the stairs and hallway. Not until they were sat down with a cup of tea.
“We don’t mind looking after the boys, but we’re worried about you.”
So many lies in so few words, she thought.
“I’m fine. I just need some time to get back into a routine.”
“He’s not here anymore,” Simon said. “You can’t replace him with this.”
After that first time she’d returned to the greenhouse to collect what seeds she could. Tomatoes, courgettes, potatoes. It did not matter. There were traces of him in all of them.
“I need to keep myself busy.”
“You could keep yourself busy looking after your children.”
Sophie shook her head.
“I don’t think I’m the best person for them to be around right now.”
“So you expect other people to pick up the slack, while you try to do what? Become Dad and ignore the people who are still alive and need you.”
She snapped around to stare at him. What she wanted to say was, “Maybe if you’d helped a little more when he was alive I might have space left for the living.” What she said was, “I think you’d better leave.”
“This can’t go on,” he said on the doorstep. “You need help so you can care for your responsibilities.”
“Good bye,” she said, shutting the door in his face.
Alone in the house, she opened the windows and as the breeze stirred the plants she was sure she heard a tar-coated lung rattle amongst the leaves.
*
After that the ghosts came often, hidden in the branches and stems. Sometimes Sophie thought she caught words in the dance of leaves. Late at night she woke and heard a trowel digging through loose compost. Draping herself in her dressing gown, she walked along the landing. Sat at the top of the stairs with the carpet scraping her calves. She did not venture down. Just stayed there listening to the sound of secateurs that were not there, smelling tobacco smoke floating up from the kitchen.
Every time a ghost appeared the others did not vacate the house. They accumulated like the plants. Anchored to the spot as if roots of ectoplasm spread under the floorboards. She walked through the living room, past half-potted seedlings, and charcoal seeds tipped out of pockets onto unread newspapers. There was no shortage of those. She harvested them from the unopened mail beside the door. The house smelt of burnt bone and soil, and she did not want to erase either.
Once a week she listened to Simon knock on the door, ignoring the sound until he went away, then watching him walk down the path, leaving her to the plants.
There was plenty to eat. Tomatoes. Beans. Sugar-snap peas. Sophie did not bother to cook them anymore. Just tore them from the vine and placed them on her tongue. Crushed them and felt the tiny lumps of grit stick in her throat. Mourned once more with each meal.
*
It was his birthday. She almost missed the day, its significance lessened by the date that bookended his life. Only noticed it by the old calendar still hanging in the kitchen. That last birthday, gathered around his bed. Simon put a party hat on him like he was a dress up doll. Held out a cake knowing he couldn’t blow out the candles or eat the icing. This is what you could have won. She would never forgive her brother for that. She would celebrate her Dad’s birthday for her. For him.
Sophie sat down at the table; soil-covered newspapers all over the stained tablecloth. The salad covered the whole plate, vegetables plump and ripe. Picking up her fork she pinned a tomato in place and cut it in two. The knife was not sharp and the bruised red skin tore. Inside, the finger bones were held in place by damp pith. Taking a piece she chewed while chopping down on the courgette, lifting the knife when the blade scraped against the vertebrae growing inside. She ran her tongue along the tarnished metal, pushing the fine dust against the ridges in the top of her mouth. Still hungry, she bit into the runner beans, stopping only to spit out the half-formed teeth. The noise of them rattling against the plate sounded like rain on glass. She continued to prise and pull the edible from the dead until hunger no longer gnawed at her and the table was covered with too many bones. The ghosts were close. Stood around her as she ate. She continued eating, walking around the house and tearing fruit from plants and forcing them into her mouth. Feeling the bones settle in her bloated stomach. Outside in the yard she scraped away at the potato plants, not bothering to wash off the soil as she chewed, feeling the smooth lengths of ribs stick in her throat. Each plant she stripped, swallowing peas and beans until there was no space left within.
*
She woke surrounded by bones. Different sizes. Different ages. Some were bare and fresh, the rounded ends not yet fused, others raked and scored by disease. Teeth freshly erupted. Still more yellowed with nicotine.
She arranged them all around her. Grouping them by size and rot. Twenty individual collections. All the same person.
The younger ones smelt of baby powder and sour milk, the older ones, the ones most twisted and damaged by the rot of cancer, those smelt of hospital disinfectant. The ones in-between? The partial skeletons. Fragments of skulls and finger bones. Those reeked of tobacco.
*
The knocking came as she knew it would, and when it did, the sound was so loud she thought the glass would shatter.
“Open this fucking door, Sophie.”
She heard Simon pressing the doorbell over and over. There was no longer any electricity to power it and he started hammering on the door once more.
“I’m coming back tomorrow. With Police. With doctors. We’re not looking after the children any more. That’s your job.”
He didn’t know if she was actually in the house. Neither did Sophie. She did not move or respond. Just laid there amongst the ghosts and bones and her own regurgitated food.
The house would not flesh the bones. The carpets and wallpaper, brick and cement. None of these would cord muscle or spin nerves. The house was not the place for these remains.
*
The bag had carried his tools. Not the bag he took when he was working on other people’s gardens. The one he used in his own plot. All the bone just fitted, and only with the zip unfastened. Every femur and finger bone. The newborn and the dying man. Sophie did not question this. It was a time of miracles. A time for magic that was clay-dry and knotted as any root.
The greenhouse was barely standing. The summer growth shattered the remaining panels. Everywhere, plants filled frames where once glass magnified the sun. She rested her head against th
e door and closed her eyes. Whispered a liturgy, whether for the greenhouse, her Dad, or herself she could not say.
By the time she cleared enough space upon the floor Sophie needed to rest, and when she woke the only light was secondhand, gifted from the sun to the moon.
She laid the bones out around her. Her knowledge of anatomy was less than her knowledge of plants but the bones themselves knew where to be placed. When she finished she lay face down in the dirt, her eyes turned from the light. From the memories she tasted on the air. From what was about to return.
When she woke, Sophie smelt them standing around her. Smelt the reek of unburnt amber leaf. Knew the greenhouse had clothed the bones in skin of leaves and nerves of vines. Knew to look up for her Dad to be returned to her once more. Gaze on him and not lose him again. She opened her eyes.
From where she lay on the floor she saw their legs. Their calves of bone and plant. The decay of heat and humidity rotting the vegetation as it clasped muscle and tendons, and in that moment Sophie knew her Dad would not return to her. The only thing to come back would be decay and the slow sliding apart of memories. Without looking up she crawled across the floor of the greenhouse. Behind her the figures walked in her trail. They did not speak. Did not try to convince her. Just followed. Remained out of sight but present as her Dad always would be now. At the door she crawled through, pushed it closed against the press of plants.
Climbing to her feet she stared across the field. It would be a long way back, but the ghosts would not follow her any more, just the memories she chose to take with her. She opened her hand. In her palm was a single piece of burnt bone. It was enough.
Lacunae
V. H. Leslie
• • ∞ • •
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs
- The Tempest
Malcolm heard Mendelssohn as the island came into view. It was hard not to think of his Hebridean overture amid the rocking of the waves, the dark hollow of the cave in the distance. It was not quite Fingal’s; the rocky façade lacked the distinctive neat, angular arrangement, though it too had been formed by a volcanic deluge many millions of years ago. His daughter, Miranda sat at the prow, dwarfed in her bright orange lifejacket, glancing back at her parents as the boat sliced through the water, salt-sprayed and smiling. Dinah shouted something out to her, something cautionary Malcolm supposed, but the sound was taken by the wind and silenced by the churn of the engine. Just along from the cave, Malcolm viewed the white stone house and he let the coin he held drop into the water, just as he had always done when crossing the strait, in payment to the Blue Men—the kelpies that resided in the deep—for safe passage.
With the engine chugging to a stop, the sounds of the sea took precedence, the pounding of the waves against the hull, the screech of gulls overhead. Malcolm had rolled up his trouser-legs in preparation for stepping from the boat into the surf, but as he did so, a wave broke and he felt the shock of cold, an involuntary re-baptism, as the water seeped through his clothes. He waved away Dinah’s attempts to steady him and she turned her attention instead to instructing the ferrymen about their luggage. Malcolm didn’t offer to help; it was a job for younger men. Miranda was already up ahead, running excited lengths along the beach, stopping occasionally to examine driftage, or to collect something from the shore that had caught her eye. She greeted her father as he stepped out of the sea with palms outstretched, full of limpet and mussel shells, the coiled remains of periwinkles.
“Look.”
But Malcolm was looking past her towards the cave. It could well have featured in the legends of Ossian, the supposed fragments of ancient balladry James Macpherson had discovered and translated in the Romantic era, before he was discredited as a forger. Whether the stories of Fingal and his exploits had come from a third century Highland bard as Macpherson had professed or from Macpherson himself, had never mattered to Malcolm. He saw the landscape of his youth, the crags and gullies where he played through Ossian’s lens, charged with heroic energy. But he had been away from home for a long time; like so many of his forbears, he had settled across the Atlantic, not driven out as they had been in those bygone times by the greed of landowners, but lured by bright lights, whilst the brave old world had persisted and endured. Now the songs of home would occupy his twilight years. No mere tone poem like Mendelssohn’s would suffice, but a song cycle, a fittingly epic undertaking in homage to Ossian. It would be his magnum opus.
Miranda hadn’t waited for a reply and was busy jumping the waves, so he made his way past her, up the beach beyond the machair, toward the steps of the stone house. It was just as he remembered it, sand on the flagstones, the embroidery sampler on the wall. He made his way through the warren of rooms, nooks providing vistas out toward the grey Atlantic, until he found himself on a familiar threshold. It was simply furnished, as it had always been, the desk arranged against the window, overlooking the expanse of beach, the rocky foreshore at the entrance of the cave just visible. He had composed here every summer for nine years—the duration of his first marriage—where, some would say, he had produced his best work.
He wondered if it was true, that the last four decades had amounted to nothing more than playacting the role of composer. The Edinburgh Review critic had certainly thought so, fancifully comparing him to a “shipwrecked Prospero,” exiled from the operatic vanguard, because—in words he now knew by rote—“…he had bartered his baton for a magic wand, invoking the Disneyfication of his early oeuvre.” He remembered pushing the paper across the kitchen table for Dinah to read, the words too potent to be said out loud. The article ended with the assertion that he had produced nothing of value since The Silence of Amaterasu. She had ripped out the page, screwing it into a ball.
“Well, fuck him!”
He watched Dinah now, helping the ferrymen carry their bags through the shallows, battling the swell and spray, while Miranda orbited their belongings on the beach, piled high like a haul of treasure, or the mound of a bonfire.
*
He’d expected to be instantly inspired, the music welling up from a long dormant place inside, just by virtue of being back on the island, but he could hear only the words of the Edinburgh Review critic, on a loop like a steady incantation. It struck him as ironic that words he had never voiced could become so resounding in his head. He’d had bad reviews before, especially at the start of his career, when his work was regarded as experimental, but he’d never really paid them much heed. Dinah had said that the Scots were just bitter that he’d been co-opted by the Americans, that they’d lost a national icon. He didn’t see it like that; he’d retained his dual citizenship and heeded the siren-call of home, his feet now firmly set on bleached sand, but he did wonder if he was in fact, lost. Not in the sense Dinah supposed, of being cloven between two nation states but lost to a different time and place, akin to the misty void where Fingal and his warrior-ghosts lingered.
He stared at the blank page, trying to summon a melody but fixated instead on the sounds of the house, the animated laughter of cartoons from Miranda’s tablet, Dinah clanging in the kitchen, putting away their groceries. When the house settled into silence, he found himself gravitating towards the interior, seeking sound. He found Dinah in the bedroom unpacking their bags.
“Looking for this,” she asked, handing him a grey dressing gown, threadbare in parts, his charm against writer’s block.
“I didn’t think I’d need it,” he said, though he put it on anyway.
An oft-repeated dinner party story, before the Edinburgh Review critic had styled him a modern-day sorcerer, centred on Miranda’s childish confusion between the words musician and magician and her steadfast conviction that her father only made music with the aid of potions and spells. He did, after all, conduct himself in secret, working from his locked study, and he donned a magician’s cape, albeit a rather old and grey flannel robe. Dinah had found it too endearing to correct and they kept the pretence going well into Miran
da’s first few years of kindergarten, where the family pictures she drew all featured Malcolm shrouded in grey, the messy crayon marks making him appear more animal than human. As her drawing became more controlled, she would add symbols to his cloak, stars, a moon, sometimes even adding a magician’s hat to the ensemble, so there could be no doubt of his profession. The dinner party guests would laugh imagining the kindergarten teacher’s disappointment when Malcolm declined the offer of putting on a magic show for the class.
“Such a cliché,” Dinah said, taking in his appearance, “the creatives in bathrobes while the rest of us have to wear real clothes.”
He smiled back, rubbed her shoulders, “What do you think of the house?”
“Quaint. Drafty.”
The theme-tune of one of Miranda’s cartoons started up again and Dinah sighed. Miranda had clearly exhausted her allocation of screen-time for the day.
“Why don’t you have an explore with her?”
“I’m here to work.”
She began to fold the garment in front of her with slow, careful creases. Malcolm noted the tightness of her lips, the silence that would ensue.
“Ok, ok.”
“And we need to talk about Ayoko,” she said as he left the room, though he pretended not to hear.
*
Miranda skirted the rock pools along the shoreline, testing their depths with a shard of driftwood. She’d beckon to Malcolm to follow but as soon as he caught up, her attention would be diverted elsewhere, and he found himself trailing behind her again. This new world under her feet absorbed her to such an extent that she missed the seals further out in the bay who had come to observe the new arrivals. They seemed to nod at Malcolm but by the time he pointed them out to Miranda they had swum away.
Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8 Page 18
