by Polly Hall
Or did I imagine it? My memory shifts like the light on the wall. It is shadowy and plays tricks on me.
Look. It is silver, bravely piercing the velvet dark that threatens to envelop us. It rises royally over sheets of hardened soil and, myrrh-heavy, it creeps past the empty homes. Starlight seems to emerge from the darkening day, or is it just reflection?
Cross your heart, my beloved. Cross mine too. Let’s make a wish together, then you can open your gift from me.
August
“Penny asked if I’d like to breed Jinx and Rudy with her poodle bitches.”
“So that was the big secret she wouldn’t tell me?”
“What big secret?”
“When she came round with her business proposition last month.”
You didn’t pick up on my sarcasm.
“It’s just money, Scarlett,” you said, “easy money, if they produce a good litter.”
“But Jinx and Rudy are labradors.”
“They’ll produce labradoodles.”
“That’s been done,” I said. Everyone had heard of a labrador crossed with a poodle.
“I know, which is why she wants to do it. People love them; they look pretty and don’t molt. Aren’t you always telling me to keep up with the times?”
“Can we keep one?”
“We’ve not really discussed that far ahead.”
“So you’ve been discussing with her already.” I felt a pang of jealousy although I didn’t know why. She was old enough to be my grandmother. It was the fact that you were creating something with her, I think, and not with me.
“To be honest, I thought you could sort the breeding with her,” you said. “I’m up to my eyeballs with this backlog for the gallery, and I got two more commissions last week.”
“Two more? You didn’t tell me.”
“It was through some of the other clients I’ve worked for. Nothing too difficult, but I’ll have to source some unusual specimens for one of them. The laws are tight even using existing material. There are ways around it, but I like to keep things as genuine as possible. Especially for the ones who like to pay the big bucks.” You were rambling on.
“So when was Penny thinking of doing it?”
“Soon, I think. She has her bitches coming into season, so we just have to drop Jinx and Rudy over.”
“Won’t they have to meet beforehand? What if they don’t like each other?”
“Oh, they’ve met often enough,” you said.
“What? When?” My mind started to backtrack over the days when you walked them or took them out in your truck to go shooting. Were you with her then? I left that thought alone, not wanting it to spoil our evening.
The next day, after I had dropped the dogs at Penny’s, I made my excuses to leave and said I’d be back later. I felt an urge to plan for Christmas even though it was four months away so went in search of inspiration.
I had seen two women enter the book shop and let their inhibitions drop as a girl exited with an umbrella and yellow coat, letting the wind catch the door and bang shut. The shop assistant had disappeared to the store room and I knew those women did not sense me there, so I loitered behind a tall bookshelf and carried on studying the spines of books. The tone of their voices indicated an intimacy kept for those private moments. I thought perhaps I should rustle my jacket or cough politely to alert them of my presence, but instead I found myself holding my breath, poised like a camouflaged leopard, spying on them.
“You could feel sorry for them out there in the sticks,” the taller woman picked up a book on Japanese Flower Art from the low table, not seeming to take much notice of the title as she flicked through and paused at pages with illustrations of lurid bouquets.
The other woman snorted her reply, fingering the edges of books as if testing they were real. “Right in the middle of the flood plain. You’d think they’d have more sense after the floods we’ve had.”
“A friend of Sonya’s said they have wild parties, dance naked when it’s a full moon and swap partners,” the first woman exclaimed, seeming to enjoy the gossip, “You never really know what goes on just under your nose, do you?” She sniffed and I heard her turn the page of a book. “You know who I mean, don’t you. That odd bloke, big fella on that island in the middle of the moor, stuffs animals for a living?”
“The taxidermist? What about him?”
My ears pricked up at the mention of you.
“They say he’s got a new woman. Gets through them, doesn’t he? This one’s at least half his age apparently. Pale—like one of them—what d’you call them?”
“Goths?”
“Yeah—goths. Always wearing black and looking miserable.”
“I don’t know, though,” said the smaller woman, “I bet he’s good with his hands!”
They really laughed at this, great snorting guffaws. Then the shorter woman with the mousy hair loudly blew her nose and made me jump. It was harsh, listening to strangers mock us just because we were different. I wanted to tell them how good it felt when your hands smoothed over my skin and delved into the crevices of my body. I wanted to tell them how they would never know the depth of our passion. I wanted to tell them how you stoked me like a furnace and that they’d be lucky to feel this heat in their lifetimes. I wanted to dare them to sink to the depths we had. What did they know, with their sensible shoes and buttoned up coats?
I looked down at my clothes. Perhaps I didn’t pay enough attention to my appearance. That day, my colors coincided with the dreary weather. Maybe I did wear too much black. I did not have the energy to confront them, so I silently opened a book in case they moved around the corner and somehow recognized me. I pretended I was engrossed in the intricacies of needlepoint techniques used on Victorian bodices but really my mind was ticking over what they had said about us.
The shorter woman blew her nose again, breaking the silence like a trumpeter tuning up for a concert, then screwed up her used tissue with one hand, sniffed and said, “Come on, I’ll treat you to a coffee. You’ll never guess what I heard . . .”
I realized my fingers had gone numb. I felt like I’d not breathed for those few minutes. Had I even blinked? My fingers were cold, and pins and needles prickled up my arm as if the subject of the book fused with real life. I thrust it back on the shelf and it met with resistance, not quite fitting into the gap. Pulling it back out I saw a small paper manual was lodged at the back of the shelf so squeezing my hand between the two books I teased it out with the tips of my fingers. It looked old and foxed with age. The title was in dark red ink:
Taxidermic Suppression:
Exploring the mystical through
the preserved specimen.
by R. H. Wensley.
A cold flush traveled through my veins. I flicked through the wispy pages, thin as tracing paper. They were almost see-through and the typeface looked as if it had been handwritten with a quill. I don’t know what made me do it, but I slipped it inside my coat and left the shop with my stolen treasure rustling against my body. Who else would have use for such a thing?
The clouds were gathering, and a breeze flicked the back of my head so my hair fell forward in front of my face. As I started the truck, the radio tuned in on the presenter’s voice mid-sentence—“. . . only one hundred and thirty-three days until Christmas!” The first recognizable notes of Wham’s Last Christmas made me feel instantly nostalgic. It seemed out of place to hear such a Christmassy tune in the height of summer, like eating Christmas pudding on a beach. “Last Christmas I gave you my heart . . .” I was looking forward to spending Christmas with you. “This year, to save me from tears, I’ll give it to someone special . . .”
With the taxidermy booklet on the passenger seat beside me, I found myself turning left, not right, and continued out of town. There was a new estate of houses crushed together on one of the fields where I used to pick cornflowers and cowslips as a child, yet the tarmac was potholed and rough on the main road. I slowed down as I reached the
bend by the pub and pulled up on the verge by the row of old willow trees. I remembered those willows; they had been there for years, eternal, woeful, hardened trees that grew straight branches like spikes from their nugget-like trunks.
The pub sign swung a lonely, creaking lament in the breeze, waving a faded painting of a man ploughing a field the old-fashioned way with a horse, furrowing up the soil in straight, deep lines. Letters promoting The Plough Inn were faded and ghostly. Its windows were boarded up with pale chipboard, making the dark walls stand out as if pieces of a jigsaw puzzle were missing. A family of house martins had used the eaves of the roof to build their nest, and droppings spread down the wall into a thick white mound below. It must have been uninhabited for some time, as the paint on the door was peeling and the “To Let” sign had been cracked in half. It hung from the wall like two broken wings of a bird. Someone had spray-painted an “i” between the two words so it read, “Toilet,” and a badly sketched outline of an ejaculating penis angled across the wall.
A jackdaw landed on the roof tiles and hopped up onto the chimney stack. It disappeared headfirst then, like a rabbit from a magician’s hat, it reappeared and flew off. A few cars passed me by, splashing the summer puddles onto the verge. On the other side of the pub was a field left for pasture. A few new farmhouses were built on the land here, as if competing with the old rambling houses that had stood for centuries, passed down through the generations. Most of the people who lived in the area wouldn’t remember my family now. Nor would they remember me. Rhett and I had been buffeted from foster home to foster home when our parents died, and all the old folk we had known had passed on. The towns and villages seemed to merge together like spreading ivy.
I turned down by the pub and followed the narrow dirt track to the end of the lane, stopping the truck in a layby. I killed the engine and waited, looking in my wing mirrors and rear-view mirror, but all I could see were hedges and the occasional sparrow alighting then flying off. As I stepped out of the truck, a sheep let out a noise like an old man complaining and then continued ripping the grass noisily, its jaw rotating and grinding in circles. The rain had stopped and the smell of fresh earth greeted me like an old friend. I breathed in deeply and leaned on the rusted metal gate to look out over the fields toward the blue house.
The rain had dampened down the grain, ripe and ready, with heads of corn dipping heavily with water like they were woefully ashamed. A pair of swallows dived over the field, and the blue sky was dotted with puffball white clouds. A cloud passed over the blue house, and for a moment it was in shadow while the fields all around were lit up. This was the last house where Rhett and I and our mother and father lived as a family. It was the house where I felt most at home, where the badger came to visit me in my sleep and the slow worms meandered silently in the compost heap. It was also the place where I met death head on.
Rhett and I had therapy sessions after the death of our parents, a relatively new concept offered to us as bereaved children. I think they sort of used us as guinea pigs. I remember one particular session when the therapist was perched informally on the edge of her table as Rhett and I sat on the floor on beanbag cushions. We were talking about our feelings—all part of the process to explore our reaction to our parents’ death. It was quite revolutionary back then. Normally people swallowed death down like a piece of gristle with a pat on the back and a sympathetic smile. Then it was a case of count your blessings and get on with it.
“If your feelings were a color, what would they be?” Tina the Therapist asked. This was not her actual name but she had quite shiny cheeks like my Tiny Tina doll with eyes that rarely blinked and synthetic spiky blonde hair, so I remember her as Tina.
“Red,” Rhett answered without hesitation and I nodded in agreement.
“Scarlett, how about you,” she said.
“Yes, mine are red too.”
“And do they have a shape?”
“They are blob-like,” Rhett again answered first, keen to grab her attention.
“Liquid,” I said, “like skin that’s just been burnt off.” Rhett looked at me and sort of winced.
“How do you mean, Scarlett?” She was getting interested in me now. Rhett was fidgeting with his Rubik’s Cube, trying to beat his personal best time. He was really good at lining up all the colored squares. I could only ever complete one side and that took me ages.
“Well, one moment I feel fine and I think they are ok and that they’ll be alive again. Then some days I feel like I’m drowning.”
“You said something about skin being burnt,” I knew what she was getting at. Rhett had a history of setting fire to things, and no one actually found out how the fire had started that night.
“It gets better but it doesn’t actually disappear,” I looked at Rhett, who had completed the blue and the yellow sides and had his tongue poking out while he considered the next moves to complete the whole cube.
“Yeah, like my scar,” he said. I thought about Rhett’s leg, where the smooth skin arced like someone had tried to remold him. He didn’t seem to worry about it. Or if he did, he had buried it so deep, his feelings no longer showed.
“And how can we heal scars?” The therapist leaned forwards with her elbows on her knees as if I was about to prophecy an answer to all the world’s suffering.
Rhett tossed the toy up in the air and caught it, “Ta da! Done!” He grinned. I grinned back at him and the therapist sighed. He always did that. Swerved off course when we were getting to the nitty gritty. But I had heard him screaming when they changed his dressings. I’d smelled his wounds healing from the inside out as the sticky, gelatinous mess that was his leg formed new skin. Our scars were a permanent reminder of our inevitable pursuit of renewal.
Back in the truck, I reached in my pocket for a tissue but instead pulled out the taxidermy booklet and the swatch of Parker’s fur I’d managed to cut off the swoodle. I had to try and redeploy it without Penny noticing.
I flicked through the pages. Wensley said that if the body parts of hybridized creatures were reunited, then soul harmony would be easier to promote. There were hand-etched drawings of the specimens he had researched, including strange mythical hybrids that had been the result of experimentation in soul diversification. It was the distribution of parts that made the transition to the afterlife more difficult. Wensley had described in detail the assimilation of the material and the spiritual in the case of disparate body parts. There was a process whereby the initial reintroduction may be troublesome, even though it came from the original.
The separation would have tainted it somehow, but I would try anything to get these damn hybrids to stop harassing me. I knew I was rushing it, but there was no other way without Penny knowing about Parker’s missing fur. I left the blue house without a backward glance and headed toward Penny’s to pick up our dogs. This was an ideal chance to try.
When I arrived at Penny’s, the door was wide open and I could hear her talking. I stepped into her porch and listened. She was on the phone.
“. . . no darling, I won’t mention a thing . . .”
I strained to hear without her registering my presence. She was speaking in this hushed, secretive tone, and prickles ran up the back of my neck.
“. . . it’s for the best . . . no need for her to know . . .”
I’m not normally the snooping type, but something in her voice made me think she was talking about me. You can imagine the jealousy rising up in me like acidic sap in a volcanic tree. What did I not need to know?
I walked down her hallway and stood at the living room door. Penny was perched on the edge of her orange chaise longue holding the phone, letting its curly cord stretch from the large, Bakelite handset that rested on a mahogany side table. The phone cable sort of crossed over her chest like a thin, coiled sash. She saw me and held up her finger in acknowledgement, but she didn’t bat an eyelid or act in any way as if I’d caught her out. A practiced liar, a true deceiver, I thought.
“. .
. no problem, darling. Got to go. Scarlett’s just arrived . . .” and she replaced the ancient handset back on to the phone and smoothed down her skirt.
“It’s all gone well,” she said with no reference to the caller on the phone. I knew it was you.
“Great,” I stuck my hands in my pocket and fumbled around for the piece of Parker’s fur. And as if in answer to my question of his whereabouts, there he was, pride of place, sitting erect as if waiting for instructions to stand or lie down. His perfect little stuffed body was positioned near the patio doors, head slightly tilted with an expression of distaste much like Virgil’s when Penny visited and encountered the swoodle. I had no idea how I would attach the missing fur without Penny seeing me. I certainly didn’t have a plan, but some things just work out better without a plan. You’d know about that, wouldn’t you?
“Would it be possible to have a drink?” I asked Penny, moving closer to the patio doors, closer to Parker.
“Of course, darling, would you like to try some jasmine green tea with goji berries?”
I didn’t want to try it but said yes to get her out of the room for a while. She left me standing in the crowded room bulging with trinkets and cushions and chairs and piles of Country House magazines and paintings in mismatched ornate gilt frames all jostling for space; it was like an antique furniture emporium mixed with plastic tat.
Parker was waiting patiently in the corner. As soon as I heard Penny rattling spoons and cups in the kitchen, I kneeled down next to him and began to inspect his fur. You had made a good job of making the fur complete, but as I tilted his stiff little body I could see a patch just underneath his rear leg that didn’t quite match the other side; it had a slight curve from where you must have stenciled the heart shape. I retrieved the missing fur from my pocket, dabbed it with some superglue and pressed it firmly underneath his leg.
“Lost something?” A man’s voice startled me and I dropped the tube of glue onto the thick cream carpet. I was on all fours and had to crane my neck to see a man about my age wearing a black silk kimono.
