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Impossible Causes

Page 32

by Julie Mayhew


  The ring stayed still and I sensed this wasn’t right.

  ‘It’s inconclusive,’ said Margaritte, her voice a dull camouflage for the thing she did not wish to say. The following day I woke in agony, my pyjamas soaked with blood. I staggered to the bathroom and sat, crying, clots sliding down the white slope of the porcelain.

  I couldn’t take this to Dr Bishy, so I returned to Margaritte, and she nodded like she already knew, as if she had dealt with this circumstance time and time again. She gave me a tincture to drink to help the passage of the bleeding, and because I could not get the sheets clean, I took them up to the incinerator behind the Big House where my father and I had disposed of that slaughtered goat.

  ‘There is no baby,’ I told Ben, when we were together on the ship.

  He had boarded too, Saul willing to make a late entry in the ledger, Ben’s swift departure the most important thing, for all.

  We avoided each other until the last night of our journey. So much had been expressed on that final morning on the island, it seemed possible that I would never speak my thoughts or feelings to another person again. Yet there was still a last loose thread connecting me to my old life; I needed to cut it away.

  We ate together in the small canteen with its plastic tables and nailed-down seats, its choice of one dish and its views of an ocean slowly being consumed by the darkness. It was a last supper.

  Out there, on the sea, everything took on a different shade – people too. The man sitting opposite me was not the same person who had made my body come alive in the moonlight, and made the words of ‘I think of thee!’ pierce me like delicious thorns. Only the last line of that poem remained true, though it rang sharp now, different.

  I do not think of thee – I am too near thee.

  ‘You tricked me,’ he said, and I was ready with my denial – There had been a baby! Without it, I would never have entertained the thought of boarding a boat! But I was willing to concede that this was deception of a different kind; it was one of the lies I was telling myself.

  And also, there had been Saul.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I did deceive you.’ I am Leah, it was what I was named to do. ‘But I wonder,’ I told him, ‘if that doesn’t make us even.’

  Margaritte’s cards were accurate; he was my Knight of Cups, my charming fraud. His friendship with the Eldest Girls, his protection of them, was heartfelt certainly. But where did that leave me in his affections? I wasn’t told the truth of his relationship with them in case I was in league with Crane, complicit, delivering hysterical girls who sang too loudly in chapel straight into his grubby hands. To not trust me, I could understand. To want to have sex with me anyway – it was incomprehensible.

  ‘What were you running away from?’ I asked. ‘In the first place, I mean. What did you go to Lark to escape?’

  He pretended not to understand.

  ‘A girl?’ I offered.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Yourself?’ I said – not really a question.

  He changed the subject. He asked me what I was going to do when I reached the mainland – did I need his help to find a job? I shook my head and told him I was going to track down my brother. It was the truth, but I still haven’t managed it. I live within Paul’s telephone area code and though this covers hundreds of square miles, one of my fellow lodgers told me, apropos of a separate matter, that it’s surprising how often you bump into friends and acquaintances in a city of several million. Maybe Paul will find me if it’s meant to be, if he is ready to be found.

  ‘So, were you really going to take the Eldest Girls away on the August ship?’ I asked Ben.

  He took his time to answer, playing with the remnants of a chicken curry, ploughing furrows in the yellow-stained rice. ‘I was going to take their stories,’ he said, as if this equated to a ‘yes’.

  ‘They trusted you,’ I told him.

  ‘And they were right to.’ He believed that. ‘I still have the laptop. I still have their stories.’

  ‘Yeah? And what are you going to do with them?’

  We held one another’s gaze. This was all that united us now, our knowledge, the great burden of carrying it.

  Or else, we could let it go, look away.

  The last night on board, I dreamt, in the sickeningly vivid way the ship’s motion provoked, that I had watched Ben throw his laptop over the side of the ship, the Eldest Girls’ first-person accounts irrevocably gone. The dream stays with me and I can convince myself that it really happened, though I am likely mingling my conjured-up image of that dented computer falling to the waves with the real memory of a phone being swallowed by the blackness of a well.

  I suspect Ben deleted their words and I too should put a match to this book or throw it into the murk of the Thames. What stops me is that the bible lacks a chapter from Leah’s point of view, a woman’s point of view. Ruth’s book, Esther’s – they’re not enough. After looking away for far too long, it is hard now to accept that it is the right thing to do.

  The island will be reborn under the guidance of admirable women, like Mary Ahearn, Margaritte Carruthers, Hannah Pass, my mother. They have the responsibility of taking the events of that night, the consequences of them, and shaping them into a story everyone can live with – and live by. The truth of a situation is always whittled away by history; a person’s virtues and good intentions, the great change they brought about, can be neatly separated from their killing of an innocent young boy. I see a distant future where Viola and the Eldest Girls are considered saints.

  For me though, Friday the 13th April is when I remember St Michael, a boy who led an army against Satan, unwittingly.

  I must believe that the island will come to good, that it will evolve into a place where sympathetic magic is allowed to flourish, where a man will not pay court to the powerful to keep his daughter, his livelihood or his secrets safe, where the word of the Lord is wielded only in the name of love not rule. Only then will those who ran away consider coming back.

  As the April ship set off on its return leg, as I stood at the bow to watch Lark be lost to the horizon, I saw the doctor and the headmaster released from the stocks and led along the dogleg jetty to its very limit beneath the shining cross. I stayed to watch the millstones be tied about their necks, and then I stepped down, beneath deck.

  I looked away.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to the wise and witchy women who shared their knowledge, especially Lissa Berry, and to the warm and welcoming churches who let me loiter on the back pew.

  This book began as a conversation on Twitter between an editor and a writer who didn’t really know each other – thank you, Alison Hennessey, for replying, and for your endless rigour ever since. ‘Rigour’, to be clear, being one of my favourite words.

  Thank you to Louise Lamont, as always, but in this case, for the dead body.

  Early work on this book was supported by a grant from The Authors’ Foundation via the Society of Authors to which I would urge other writers with works-in-progress to apply.

  Verse 4 of ‘I Danced in the Morning (Lord of the Dance)’ by Sydney Carter (1915–2004), ©1963 Stainer & Bell Ltd, 23 Gruneisen Road, London N3 1DZ, England, www.stainer.co.uk, is used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Extract from The World of the Witches by Julio Caro Baroja, translated by O. N. V. Glendinning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964 and London: the Orion Publishing Group, 1964) is used with the kind permission of the publishers.

  NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Julie Mayhew is an actress turned writer. She is the author of four previous novels, including the award-winning The Big Lie, and writes drama for radio and the stage. With support from the BAFTA Crew development scheme, she has started writing and directing for the screen.

  @JulieMayhew

  First published in Great Britain 2019

  This electronic edition published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Julie Mayhew, 2019


  Map © Emily Faccini, 2019

  Tarot card illustrations © Ben Molyneux / Alamy Stock Photos

  Julie Mayhew has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

  For legal purposes the Acknowledgements here constitute an extension of this copyright page

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-9700-3; TPB: 978-1-4088-9702-7; eBook: 978-1-4088-9698-3

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