Impossible Causes

by Julie Mayhew

  She did try the Anchor, though she’d said she could not. She was seen, her face distorted by the condensation and the bottle-end glass, squinting in, not finding what she was looking for. She took the path up to St Rita’s too, stepping inside the emptiness of the chapel. She was seen rattling the chains that bound the gates of the school.

  On her return to the cobbles, she stood for the longest time in a dim corner by the harbour, one hand on the door of the Customs House, deciding. Within those walls, an officer was carving himself another heart, a smaller one, as if for a child, sitting in front of a window that was no longer sea-filled, but black. This was the trick of the moon on nights like these; it convinced you that the sea was no longer there.

  Onto the cobbled stage stepped the coycrock girl. She was attired as she had been every night that week, her lips redder than her hair, wearing a coat that would have made a marvellous lure for the training of hunting dogs, if cut into many pieces.

  Perhaps that’s why the boy with the gun was with her; he wanted the coat off her back.

  ‘The knickers off her pussy, more like!’ was what was said in the Anchor, laughter echoing out onto the harbourside. At the bar, there were congratulatory slaps on the back at a wisecrack well made, and a call for another round of drinks.

  ‘Oh, quit with the sour face, Eleanor,’ barked the waistcoated landlord to his unsmiling wife. ‘You’ve got to be able to stand a joke if you’re going to be serving here on the weekdays.’

  Then came a roar. The coycrock-turned-harlot was darting for cover.

  ‘I see you! I see you!’ thundered Leah Cedars, out on the cobbles, rounding in on her prey. ‘If you lay so much as one finger on that girl, Luke Signal, I will slit you from throat to belly like you did that goat, like you did those foxes that you left on our doorstep, as God as my witness.’

  God was her witness, and not the only one.

  She spat in his face, said some, who watched from their windows.

  Then she was gone, the boy too.

  In the alley beyond the smokehouse there was a flash of vanishing fur as the headmaster and the doctor stumbled out of the pub, towards the harbourside, pink of cheek, torches swaying. They stopped, they conferred, they continued on – off in the direction of Cable’s Wood.

  They were not the only ones.

  The island would get its production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream after all, with so many bodies moving through the gloom, answering the irrefusable call of the trees and of the stones. They all needed their wits about them on a night like that, when you couldn’t see your hand in front of your own face, let alone a trail of petals on the path. Every one of them had supped on a potion of their choosing – alcohol, disappointment, power, lust – as disorienting as a dose of belladonna in a mid-Lent teacup.

  Intoxicated like this, changed, they entered the gloaming, destined to lose hope, to return home frustrated, not willing to talk of what happened, deciding instead to consider it no better than a dream.

  Except for one.

  One of them would answer the song when it came, lifting up from the north cliff to reorient those who drifted through the night; to gird the loins of those who must act; to cleanse the soul of the sinners before they sinned.

  ‘Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus’, the hymn rang out, ‘Born to set Thy people free.’

  Come, said the girls, come one man to stand for all the rest, one loss that can be accounted for, explained away at the gates of heaven when it is time to beg admittance.

  It cannot be true that the pure souls are drawn skywards to paradise by the moon, and the wicked ones fall in a fit on the ground to be transformed into beasts – the line cannot be drawn as simply as that, because how then would you explain the fishermen who became deer and the girls who became foxes?

  There must be exclusions, exemption clauses, extenuating circumstances – a means to justify doing bad for good reasons, when your judgement day comes.

  Or maybe it is easier to believe that no one watches over us anyway. That when we die, we just end. Perhaps that’s kinder to both the hunter and the hunted.

  So, come, say the girls’ voices, lifted in song. Come one man to set all the women free. Bring forth a fellow who did not listen when Proverbs told him to keep thee from the strange woman. Bring forward the man who thinks himself exempt. Deliver to us a betrayer, a turncoat, a traitor, a man of violence, either of the hand or the mouth. Come a man that would have fallen and writhed upon the ground and become a snake anyway. Come a man like that.

  The branches shift, the ferns whistle at the touch of the wind. Below, the sea rolls in anticipation.

  The girls stand ready, naked as virgins; their weapons are themselves.

  Their horned god steps forward, into the circle – into their house – a path he does not realise leads directly to hell. A mist settles on the earth, in league with the paltry moon, so they see only his silhouette, the shape of his coat, the coils spiralling from his head, no details of the face. This anonymity makes it easier.

  He is an outline. He is a rough idea. He is no one.

  The three-part harmony is joined by a fourth voice to deliver a song familiar from chapel. Oh, it is so very hard for girls to dance with a devil clinging to their backs; they must first shake him off.

  The horned god is told to move closer, to take his pick, have a taste of their bodies, their weapons.

  Though the real weapon, the wooden baton, is concealed behind one back.

  As lips meet lips, wood meets skull with a swinging crack, a method learnt at school, beating against the doorframes.

  Out you go, and stay you out,

  We’re claiming back the day.

  A scream goes up and the other roamers pause among the pines, if only to blame it on the foxes – always the foxes – before beginning their journeys home, discontented.

  The beast thrashes on the ground, it tries to crawl away, and they fumble in the darkness, hold it by the ankles. Still the beast gargles and will not stop.

  Will it ever stop?

  They ask for the spirit of St Jade to come now, to give them the courage to go on, to finish what they have started – and she does.

  It makes no difference which girl finds the strength at the last. As one man will stand for all the others, one girl will stand for all those present at the stones that night, for all those who came before and all those who will come after.

  She moves, this girl, not barefooted, but sturdy-booted, into the ferns, feeling out the shape of him with her toe, searching for his throat – the Adam’s apple. Then she raises her heel and she brings it down, hard.

  A final stamp. The snake is dead.

  EASTERTIDE: FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018

  In the morning, everything is clear, sparklingly so.

  It may as well be December 25th, a different kind of Christmas, because the red-haired coycrock girl cannot sleep, cannot wait.

  In her room at the old Reunyon Farmstead, she sits upright in creased and grubby bedclothes, pulling aside the faded green curtains one more time to check.

  At the first inching of the sun, she tells herself, she can get up, but for now the fingernail moon still rules, glowing gently through the mist.

  So, she changes the rules – why not? She put them there in the first place. Let the day turn at her pace. If she leaves now, the sun will have reached the horizon by the time she gets there, and maybe no rules will be broken after all.

  She swings her feet onto the boards, steps over last night’s discarded clothes – the short, black skirt, the leopard-print coat, the lace-up boots all covered in dirt – and she finds socks and a jumper. She is too impatient to change out of her pyjamas or to clean her teeth.

  She will not stand in front of the bathroom mirror and see her lips stained red from the night before.

  She goes downstairs, pulls tight the drawstring fastenings at the top of two rucksacks that sit in the hall – one for her, one for her mother, just in case – then she runs b
ack upstairs, to fetch the radio from its charging stand at the end of her bed, forgotten in her anticipation.

  This is just a small error, not a portent. It is nothing to do with the date.

  Her mother had come to fear Friday the 13th, to fear all omens – single magpies, a crack in a mirror, speaking proudly of something before it is done. But Viola believes the date is fortuitous. The number thirteen is made up of a one and a three which, when added together, become four – something real, something stable.

  Earth, fire, air, water. North, south, east, west. Black, blonde, brown, red.

  In a world that gives you many reasons to be frightened, every hour of every day, the thirteenth is a mere bagatelle – and Viola believes her mother is starting to realise this. She is beginning to resurface.

  From her hiding place in the kitchen pantry, just weeks ago, Viola observed Deborah Kendrick march that young man, the doctor’s messenger, out of their kitchen, the spikes of a pitchfork trained at his chest, and Viola knows that if last night the headmaster and the doctor came calling, she will have done something equally brave and disobedient.

  As is the mother, so is her daughter.

  Though sometimes the daughter gets there first.

  Viola grasped it early on: fears grow tall and prosper when you run and hide from them, and no matter where you go, they find you. Instead she has walked towards the things that scare her on Lark, talked to them, seduced them, sung to them, stolen from them, loved them, deceived them. She is still frightened, still capable of being harmed, but how much lighter she feels this morning, despite the violence of the night, how full of positivity she is, knowing that in the face of her fears, she has been daring.

  The same horse that delivered death to town carries on its back a new hope.

  Viola lifts Dot’s bright red lead from the hook by the kitchen door and snaps it onto the dog’s collar. She pulls on the maroon coat and drops the radio into her pocket.

  When the incident happened, she was told to sit down to receive the awful news – her father and brother were dead. Viola did not allow death to creep up on her this time, tap her on the shoulder and make her jump; it did not find her hiding in the obvious place. Viola commanded death; she bent it to her will. She and the Eldest Girls harnessed their power within the protection of the Sisters’ Stones, and they brought about their own terrible and necessary fury.

  Maybe someone does watch over us, after all, Viola thinks, as she steps out of the front door, closing it quietly behind her, ready to be the dog walker, the first voice in the story. Maybe everything we think and do is seen and judged. Maybe someone is keeping accurate scores. Perhaps the umpire is wise and fair.

  The idea buoys her into the day and down the splintered wooden steps of the veranda, Dot gambolling at her heels, and for the first time in a long time, Viola feels that almost forgotten weightlessness of just being a child.

  FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018

  She is too late to save the hair on their heads.

  Viola runs, and behind her Hannah runs too, pushing the Earl, still in his dressing gown, jaw juddering as the wheelchair does battle with the cobbles.

  The harbourside is chaos.

  Teachers seesaw left and right, arms outstretched, desperately corralling their runaway pupils, battling the mothers who want possession of them too. Boatmen drop their nets and cluster – edgy, on guard – while the Provisions Store women gather at the shopfront, aproned and afraid.

  Except for Britta Sayers’ mother.

  She is at the window of the Counting House, beating at the glass, screaming, ‘You bastards! You bastards!’

  The Eldest Girls are in there.

  Viola sprints for the grand blue door, which does not yield, her hands smacking painfully against the wood. She joins in with the thumping; kicking at the panels, demanding to be let in, getting no answer. She skitters left, to the window where Britta’s mother wails, desperate for a view inside, but the velvet drapes are pulled tight. She skitters right, and sees Council women and their hangers-on huddling in the kitchen. At the sight of Viola, they promptly, viciously, drop the blind.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Viola hollers, scattering her question into the crowd that builds behind her. ‘What’s going on?’ she begs.

  They shake their heads; they cannot say, or will not.

  ‘Crane and Bishy dragged them down the hill by their hair!’ Britta’s mother is on her knees now beneath the window, her sobs as violent as coughs. ‘Find Mary! Get Ingrid!’ she demands, though the mustering of people only stare. ‘Somebody! Please!’ she yells.

  A clunk comes – a lock being turned. The crowd murmurs anxiously as the Counting House door swings open to reveal… Diana Crane, chin high, lady of the manor. She thrusts forward the hairdresser, who trips on the sill, a vanity case in one hand; in the other – a head.

  A head!

  The harbourside cries out in dismay, but Diana Crane can only tut and sigh. She reaches for the hairdresser’s wrist, thrusting it into the air, shaking it roughly. Not a head – just a handful of brown curls, long ropes of black and amongst them the shorter blonde strands of Anna Duchamp’s under-ear bob.

  ‘What are you doing to them?’ screams Britta’s mother. ‘What have you done!’ The sobs submerge her; they drag her down.

  Diana Crane is visibly appalled by the woman, as if her hysterics are more repulsive than what is going on inside.

  ‘Stripping them of their ornaments,’ Diana says, her voice heavy with entitlement, spooning out blame, ‘taking away their filth. Something we should have done a long time ago.’

  The hairdresser scurries away across the cobbles, sheepish, and as she flees, she lets her bounty drop, the hair tumbling with the wind, making people skip and yelp as it snags against their feet.

  ‘Shave me too!’ cries Viola, propelling herself forward, snatching at clumps of her own red tangles, trying to yank them ceremonially free.

  ‘Step back!’ orders Diana Crane.

  Viola does not; she puffs up her chest.

  ‘Viola!’ calls Hannah, the crowd slowly parting to allow the wheelchair through. Hannah works one-handed, her other arm wrapped around a tearful girl in St Rita’s uniform – her daughter, the resemblance clear. ‘Tell them that the Earl is here to sit on the Council. Tell them!’

  Viola turns back to see Saul Cooper emerge from the Counting House, moving Diana Crane aside with more urgency than respect.

  ‘Go!’ he instructs Viola, pointing in the direction of the farmstead. ‘Go home. Don’t get yourself involved.’

  This is a kindness, but it is too meagre, too late.

  ‘How could you!’ Viola launches herself at him, kicking, scratching, biting. Gasps go up from the now not insubstantial crowd as the drama escalates. ‘You were supposed to call the mainland!’ She spits; she claws. ‘Not them!’

  ‘Someone has died, Viola!’ he shouts in his own defence, peeling her grip from his clothes and his skin. ‘How was I supposed to say nothing? They killed someone!’

  A deep oh reverberates across the harbourside – confirmation: the rumours are true – and Britta’s mother sinks lower, her face pressed against the stone. Someone dares to crouch down and soothe her – Anna’s mother, Ingrid, newly arrived.

  ‘Fetch Abe Powell to sit in Council,’ Saul urges Viola. ‘Father Daniel too. That’s how you can best help those girls.’

  ‘Abe Powell won’t speak for them,’ she cries, ‘and nor will you! You think they’re devil-worshippers!’ She tries for another swipe, but Saul holds her fists fast.

  ‘Fetch Abe Powell! Fetch Father Daniel!’ he calls over her head, instructing the crowd. ‘They’re needed at Council!’

  A jostling of bodies follows, the elected ones dispersing on their hunt for the men. Viola is forced backwards then as the Earl is pushed through, Hannah lifting the wheels of the chair over the threshold, Saul Cooper taking command of the handles as she is told to step away. The Earl twists his head, keeping his
bright eyes fixed on Hannah – a reluctant child on his first day of school.

  He is not enough. It is not enough. Viola can see how the day will slide inexorably towards disaster. This death will not bring the authorities to Lark. Jacob Crane will show no mercy.

  So, she leaps.

  Viola is not strong but she is small; Diana Crane is not so quick and wide as Hannah on the stairs. The girl slips through, feeling Diana fruitlessly grasp at the sleeve of her coat. She pushes past Saul, past the Earl, and bursts into the men’s meeting room.

  She is in.

  There is no Council set-up, no white tablecloth. The space is curtained, dim. Three men, jackets off, sleeves rolled up, huddle as if readying themselves for combat: Jed Springer, Dr Tobiah Bishy, Jacob Crane. Up on the stage, between the red drapes, below the carving of the Union Jack – the Eldest Girls.

  Their dead eyes come alive at the sight of Viola but they do not move. They sit on chairs, hands clutched in laps. They are shivering, barefoot, in white smocks not dissimilar to the nightdresses they wear at the stones.

  The sight of their scalps – brutalised, visible, raw – the remnants of their hair swirling at their feet, is too much. What next? screams Viola’s mind. What comes next? And she knows she must answer this question herself, or else the Council will.

  ‘These girls are innocent!’ Denial is her first instinct. Viola’s voice bounces off the high, white ceiling as hands seize her, pulling her back. Deception comes next. ‘Leah Cedars did it!’ she yells. ‘You all heard her in the harbour last night, threatening to kill. She did it! She did it!’

  ‘Leah had nothing to do with it!’ Saul speaks loudly. His is one of the pairs of hands that restrains Viola; Diana Crane is the other. The Earl sits abandoned by the doorway.

  ‘Don’t listen to him!’ Viola exclaims. ‘He probably helped her do it!’

  The three men of the Council watch this protest as if beholding a strange and gratuitous invention.

  ‘You stop this!’ Saul demands, pushing his face close to Viola’s.