by Polly Hall
We had talked about the day our parents died, but it was all disjointed, as if memory had already distorted the facts: the picnic, the dog attack, the cricket bat, the car, the fire.
“I meant what I said, sis,” he squeezed me hard then turned to you and shook your hand vigorously. “Henry, look after my Scarlett.” His voice took on a manly, gruff tone and you both locked eyes until you nodded your goodbye and he nodded back. Andreea pecked us both on our cheeks and skipped away toward their hired campervan in flipflops, her toes like black and red scurrying beetles. She seemed more enlivened now she was leaving, or it might have just been the excitement of going to the festival. It started to rain again.
“I hope you’ve got rubber boots,” I called after them, hoping for Rhett to look back. “Looks like it’s going to be a mudfest.” But their van disappeared off the driveway past the dogs barking in their pen, the ducks giving them a noisy send-off too, and we were left alone once again.
“We should go next year,” I snuggled up to you as we watched them go. You said I could if I wanted to, but you didn’t fancy all those crowds. Neither would I, come to think of it—others’ thoughts and feelings bombarding me. It would’ve been like an avalanche hitting me full on.
“There’s never enough time to say what you really mean, is there,” I stroked your beard and you kissed my ear then my hand and looked at my wedding ring, then kissed that too. “Why do we wait to say the important things?”
“What important things?”
“The things that matter, Henry—the reasons why we love or hate, stay or leave.”
“I don’t understand what this is about. You didn’t fall out with your brother, did you?”
“No, we never really fall out. He just walks away whenever I want to discuss the past with him.”
“Maybe that’s because he understands you can’t change the past.”
“You’re so bloody wise, aren’t you?” You knew I was only teasing. And that you were probably right. But I knew that the past had a way of creeping back into the present, especially if it sensed unfinished business.
When Rhett had gone, I felt the heaviness seep back into my bones like damp slowly working its way up a wall. I hated to admit it but, for all his failings, Rhett seemed to blaze some cleansing fire through me, as if he could banish my demons by being near me. There was nothing I could do to change his wandering ways though. He would probably just keep moving around the world until his legs gave up. We joked about his ability to keep walking even when he was asleep. His sleep-walking used to wake everyone but himself. We’d have to steer him back toward his bed, and he’d get back in without even waking up or remembering he had even moved. Our parents had even put up a stair gate to prevent him falling at night. I was more of a sleep talker—or mumbler. But you already knew that about me, didn’t you?
We took advantage of the long days and went out onto the moor with the dogs.
“We could pick some elderflower,” you said.
“In the rain?”
“It’ll be romantic. We could get wet together.” What you really meant was that we could strip each other when we got home and warm up in the bath, my legs entwined around you.
Elderflower, that sweet splayed mass of stars that opened out like an explosion in the hedgerows. I inhaled the sweet pollen as we picked the heads of flowers, piling them in a bag still attached to green stalks. A few insects clung to the scented sprays. We moved slowly along the hedge in the field on the way back to our house and picked enough to fill a big plastic bag. The dogs patrolled back and forth across the long grass, sniffing and wandering, then racing back to us. The rain never came to anything, just a short sharp shower, which soon passed over, but the ground was already quite damp underfoot. The evening felt hushed and clammy as we returned home and shook out the elderflower heads to free the bugs and bits of unneeded foliage. We left them in the kitchen overnight, as the tiredness left by Rhett and Andreea’s visit hit us both head on.
The next day I found a recipe and set about boiling the water to infuse the flowers. There was plenty of sugar and lemons in the house but no citric acid.
“Where can I buy citric acid?”
“The chemist,” you offered, “or the supermarket? Supermarkets sell anything these days.”
When I asked the lady at the pharmacy counter, she said they don’t stock it anymore. I was surprised, as everyone seemed to be making elderflower cordial these days but later found out that citric acid was used for more unsavory purposes.
“Drugs?” You said it like you’d never heard of them.
“She said people use it to mix with heroin or cocaine or something like that.”
“What, in cordial?”
“No, not in cordial—in the drugs, silly.”
“The things people do to their bodies.” You shook your head and got up to fetch another glass of whisky.
What about the things we did to our bodies? I mean the visceral, probing things. Delicate explorations with fingers and tongues. There was not an inch of you I did not know, and I know you had mapped all of me too. If only my body would work more effectively; I felt cursed by my headaches and tiredness.
“It doesn’t make you any less of a woman,” you said to me as you held me in bed one night. “I love you for you, not for your body.”
Maybe we couldn’t create another being together, but I wanted you to admire me for being something different. I wanted you to recraft me, to somehow replace those parts of me that didn’t work with new vital organs, or fantastical designs like the ones you had crafted out of mismatched animals. Wings would allow me to fly and be free, and a tail could be my weapon, fast and strong, so I could flick it at those demons trying to claw their way into my mind.
You do understand what I’m talking about don’t you, Peppercorn? Even though I fought against those hybrid creations and changed my mind from one day to the next, what I really wanted was to become one of them, by your hand. I had thought that Felix was the one to change my world, but he could never fulfil me the way you did.
I wanted to enter a new world. I knew it must be possible, as the voices had told me so. Once we were free of this physical body, we could inhabit others. The only condition was that we relinquished the body we were currently using. Of course, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. You know what I mean, don’t you? The cells of our bodies hold memory and until they have decayed, the spirit lingers. Death is not enough. It is not complete like we are led to believe. There are fragments of people scattered all over the place, all over the world. Why do you think ghosts are seen in graveyards and cemeteries or the sites of bloody battles? They are trying to move on. They are asking for help. The attachment to the physical world is keeping them there. There was still a lot I did not understand but I was going to find out. We all were.
Christmas Day—Today
1 p.m.
A mystical menagerie. Did I really suggest that to you?
Mynah bird with lizard tail and feet—a mynizard? It mimics all the other animals’ patterns and calls with a precision I admire greatly. The most adaptable of all your hybrids, made up of a chameleon and a mynah bird. Chameleons adapt visually to their surroundings; mynah birds are auditory. The perfect match. But no, no. There should be no match at all.
It stinks in here. You don’t seem to notice how it has infused the walls, the carpet, the paintwork and even the furniture. I feel as if I have been marinated too, like the pickled specimens you first introduced to me in the museum. The two-headed lizards, the frilly fetus of a bovine calf swimming in mock-amniotic fluid. It is a sense that brings back strong memories. The stronger the smell, the stronger the memory. Cows—walking through the fields where I grew up. A bucketful of eels slipping and sucking like sex on a hot afternoon. Cockatoo—the shake of exotic feathers dusts the insides of my nostrils, precursor to a sneeze. Giraffe—warm toffee-colored hide, like caramel straw with a long, black liquorice slug of a tongue.
But the creatures y
ou have stuffed are not of one species. They have been bastardized by your masterful craftwork. The wallopea is indignant with its showy peacock tail on display like an oriental fan, and muscular short-haired body of a wallaby complete with a large meaty tail to counterbalance its weight, then the legs of an ostrich that seem to slip down from the body in strong, straight trunks of sinew.
We have our family, our menagerie of strange and wonderful creatures. The room is crowded with them, some in glass cases, some set upon wooden plinths or slabs of slate. Others hang from the ceiling among the paper chains and glittery, metallic decorations. Still, I wish for more. The fur on the crabbit has faded slightly where its left side has been facing the south windows all year.
You have left the room and before me appears the last person I expect to see. She is holding something in her hand as if she has scooped a froglet from the grass. She is moving toward me and I feel torn between staring at her face and what she holds in her hand. From the fire my mother emerges.
My mother stands in front of me holding my fetus in her hand. The miniscule blob of red jelly that you buried under the buddleia, so the butterflies would visit and carry its soul away on their wings, is here with her.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her.
“You called me,” she says.
“I call you many times but you never answer.”
“I always answer. You don’t hear me, Scarlett.”
“I miss you.”
She smiles.
“I was angry with you.”
“Yes.”
“I was angry with Father for what he did to the dog.”
“Yes.”
“Mother, do you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve made some mistakes,” I say.
She holds out her hand, and the fetus becomes a butterfly, flaps its wings and flies away. I watch it disappear into the flames.
“You look—different,” I say. Her hair is long and wavy, nearly to her shoulders. She is slim and wearing an orange and brown maxi dress, beads jangling about her neck. Her face seems calmer and glows like sunlight off harvested apples.
“You too,” she says, and we laugh. Each peal of laughter scrapes over me like flint sharpening a bone.
Then you reappear, and she is gone with the flash of fire from the grate. Without saying goodbye. Again.
July
When it rains out here on the Levels, the water from the ground rises up to meet the water falling from the sky. As if we hadn’t been saturated enough by Rhett’s visit, shortly after their departure, Penny arrived in a cloud of Dior. Her short frame did not detract from the huge aura that extended at least three times beyond her body. I knew she was nearby, not only by her expensive perfumed arrival but by a powdery odor that diffused from her like mold spores off an old piece of fruit. It caught in my throat when she moved. Her hair fluffed up and out like a seeding dandelion head. She wore gold hooped earrings and rouge dashed up her cheekbones. A woman with romantic tendencies, she must’ve been nearing seventy yet wore the most inappropriate shoes for the countryside, high heels with stiff leather bows on the back. The visible backs of her ankles were creased like folded towels.
I was in the lounge watching the highlights from the festival on TV, trying to spot Rhett among the crowds, but it was like searching for a poppy seed in a tin full of black pepper. The camera shots swept over heads, obscuring any facial details, and even when I paused the screen it looked blurred, and most faces were shrouded by ponchos against the sheeting rain. There was not a patch of green grass anywhere in the vast expanse of fields. It had been trampled by the masses of moving feet into large peaks of mud and brown pools of slurry. Yet the atmosphere rose up from the site like steam from a freshly baked pie, and the festival goers doffed their plastic beakers full of booze to the cameras or danced as if they were not in a sodden field laced with human effluent. This was the awesome fun that Rhett was craving, although he was probably keeping dry in a tent with Andreea’s limbs wrapped around him.
I popped open a new jar of gherkins and plucked one from the watery vinegar; my cravings for salt had increased over the past few weeks. The taste reminded me of your fingers after you had thrust them inside me, then shoved them into my mouth. I sucked at the firm, ridged surface then bit it in half.
“Darling—only a flying visit,” Penny was clutching Virgil, one of her startled-looking poodles under one arm. Today he was sporting a blue bow, not dissimilar to the bows on her shoes, and I’m sure he sneered in distaste as he took in his surroundings. I thought of Parker and the little heart-shaped patch missing from his fur.
“Henry’s in his workshop,” I told her, “would you like a cup of coffee?”
“Given it up, darling—St. John’s raving about green tea. It’s got antioxidants. He says it makes you live longer.”
St. John—it sounded like ‘singe-on” when she pronounced it, as if her latest beau had charred himself. I wondered how old she really was; I’d seen her around the village with a manicured young man, arm in arm, like they owned the place. He was almost half her age but with the placid, compliant look of a man-servant who knows how to service an ageing woman. I had no idea where he’d materialized from, but at least it kept her away from you. Or so I hoped.
“Ooh cornichons! How very continental.” She was staring at the jar of gherkins, so I twisted off the lid and offered it to her, but she waved her hand away as if I’d presented her with a gangrenous finger. I bit another and crunched it loudly in her face. She looked away from me, out the window toward your workshop.
“A little proposition I’d like to discuss.” She petted Virgil as she spoke, whose lip curled in a snooty expression. In a stage whisper she said, “It’s about my bitches.” She feigned a sickly smile and I wasn’t entirely sure if she was making a joke. Her face always seemed to swim about as if it were made of boiling gravy.
“Want them stuffed as well, do you?” I couldn’t help myself.
“Scarlett, please! You know how sensitive poochie poo is.” Penny didn’t know how right she was. She may have been more attuned to life and death than most, especially as a breeder, but after life and after death was another matter entirely.
“Actually, it’s something Henry might be interested in,” she sniffed as if inventing a story.
“Go on.”
“All these things Henry’s created. You know the mixed-up creatures with wings and fur and horns in the wrong places . . .”
“What about them?”
“It’s sparked off an idea.”
“What sort of idea?”
“Just a little business venture. By the way, I wanted to congratulate Henry on such a spectacular show.”
Oh, I bet she did. I saw her stroking your arm and simpering whenever she managed to position herself near you: the village shop, the wassail ceremony, any given moment when she happened to be within flirting distance.
She peered toward the lounge where I had left the TV blaring—a band at the festival was playing loud tribal beats, and a woman sounded like she was giving birth on stage.
“He does so inspire me . . .” She was harping on about how she’d visited your exhibition with St. John, who apparently dabbled in contemporary art. “That crocodile was magnificent . . .”
“The crocodile was made by Felix,” I said flippantly.
“Of course, yes—I mean—those cows on a merry-go-round.”
“Those were Felix too.” As I said his name, I felt my belly flip, the way he looked at me, the way he looked at you.
“Of course, silly old me.” She cast me a probing glance, as if she’d been testing me. Or my loyalty, perhaps?
“Well—it’s all wonderful art. Wonderful!” She went on to say how lucky I was to have such a creative man at my fingertips. I wondered how she’d known about you exhibiting. Did you mention it to her? She seemed to know a lot about it.
“We didn’t see you there,” I said. Not that I was looking, but P
enny was not a woman who faded into the background at any event. I can’t see how I could have missed her.
“We popped by later, after the crowds,” she exhaled loudly from her nose as if a bad smell had reached her nostrils and she was trying to expel it. “I do need to speak to Henry—it is quite urgent.”
“Well, I’ll give him a message.”
“I’m not sure—well—no, it can wait. When can I catch him?”
“I thought you said it was urgent?”
“No, no. It’s fine. I’ll pop back later.” She pursed her lips and flared her nostrils. More boiling gravy.
“We might be busy later.”
“Then I’ll call him. Remind me of his mobile number?”
“He never turns his mobile on.”
“Email?”
“He doesn’t even use the computer.”
“Oh dear—still the same old Henry,” she hoisted Virgil up onto her hip and he started growling. “Poochie Poo, darling, whatever’s the matter. It’s only little Scarlett.”
But I could tell he wasn’t growling at me. He had spotted the stuffed creatures in the lounge and was looking directly at the swoodle. Penny peered through the kitchen door into the lounge to see what he was craning to have a look at. “Gosh,” she said, “is that a two-headed swan?”
“Yes,” I moved across her line of vision, not wanting her to look any closer at its orb-like body; the same body that had a swatch of Parker’s fur on it. We had decided not to exhibit the swoodle; it felt too personal, as if we were reading our love letters in public.
Virgil leapt from her arms and scampered toward the lounge, his hard claws tapping like stilettos on the kitchen floor. I knew what he was sensing. I had felt it myself. Parker was trying to communicate with his brother, pleading for his soul to be released from the swans. He needed to get free of the flapping and honking. The swans too, were not enjoying the confinements of their limbo state.
