All That Lies Beneath

by All That Lies Beneath (retail) (epub)

  She carefully managed to be out of his sight whenever she sensed he was going to take Cassie up onto the mountain or down to the riverbank. She shunned the dog if it came near her, imploring her for a look or a touch whenever she fetched coal from the shed for the middle-room’s fire or the back kitchen’s range. She risked his temper by not feeding the dog when he was not back from the Club on time. And, unlike her indulgence of Tiny and Nigger, both of whom she had sneaked into the house when her grandfather was absent, she obeyed to the strict letter, his injunction not to allow Cassie inside any part of the house. The lurcher always left with him, on any expedition he’d devised, by the back garden gate, and was returned to the shed via the lane.

  It was six-thirty when the girl finished her task of taking through the load of coal, stacking it, and cleaning up the fall-out of small coal and dirt. She was bone-tired. Her arms felt stretched by carrying doubled-up buckets. Her leg muscles were strained. Her calves ached after all the hauling. After the final trip she had rolled up and put away the protective matting before brushing down and washing with more buckets of hot, sudsy water, the pavement. She scrubbed the coal dirt from her hands and forearms with a hard bristled hand brush. She used a nail brush to file the coal slurry from underneath her fingernails. She had long since given up trying to pinch out the particles of coal which had burrowed beneath her skin to make unlikely beauty spots of blue on her temple. She poured fresh water from a kettle into the basin and with carbolic soap and a flannel she cleaned her face and swabbed out her nostrils. She blew her nose and rinsed out her mouth before she brushed her hair. She had changed for the task from her school uniform into old clothes and these, in turn, she discarded in the scullery for a later washing. Upstairs, in the mirror of her single wardrobe, she saw how she had grown, how taut her body seemed and how, amongst all the residue of her fatigue, she felt strong, almost a woman.

  Downstairs, she filled and boiled a kettle on the range. She put out a wickerwork tray and placed on it a white bone-china cup and saucer, ones decorated with entwined roses of crimson and gold. She poured the hot water onto fresh leaves in the china teapot and let the brew steep. She cut four thin slices of home-baked bread, buttered them and put them together on a plate. The tea was poured through a strainer into the cup and onto the milk, and half a spoon of sugar was added and stirred. She carried the tray up the stairs to the front bedroom where her grandmother lay. Carefully she balanced the tray in the left hand and reached down with her right to turn the dented brass knob to open the panelled and varnished door.

  Cassie bounded past her into the room, almost making the girl stumble and drop the tray as the dog ran, in mad circles round and round the bed. The lurcher barked and yelped and jumped up with its hindlegs to put its front paws onto the white counterpane, fully waking up its startled namesake. Cassie’s coal blackened paws studded the snowy cover of the bed and smeared it as she jerked up and down and to and fro. Neither the girl nor her grandmother said anything, either to each other, or to the dog.

  The girl moved quickly. She put the tray down on the floor beside the bed. She grabbed the dog, bunching up the hair and flesh at the back of its neck to hold it still, to move it, as quickly as she could, out of the house, so that she could return to remove and hide the damage the dog had done. The kitchen door was slightly ajar and, as she pulled the startled lurcher back up the garden she saw that she had left the shed door open after her last trip with the laden buckets. Cassie must have sniffed at an unexpected freedom. The dog had yanked her head out of the rope’s noose. The girl tied Cassie tight to the hook this time. She ran back, down the path and the steps and into the kitchen. At the foot of the stairs she heard the voices. He had gone up when he found the doors open. Her grandmother’s voice was a low drone of hopeless pleading, his was slurred but loudly insistent.

  The girl waited at the bottom of the stairs. She heard a drawer being wrenched open. She heard him curse as he dropped something with a clatter to the floor. She heard a drawer being slammed shut, his stuttering footsteps on the lino-covered landing. Her grandfather appeared at the top of the stairs. He half-fell as he staggered down the carpeted runner, almost slipping on the bottom step where she stood in the passage. He was still dressed for the outdoors. His overcoat was buttoned up over an old suit jacket under which was a flannel shirt and a creamy, fringed muffler around his neck. His black woollen dai cap was set at its customary angle on his head. He grasped the girl’s right arm with his left hand, a bony tentacle that pinched hard into her flesh. In his right hand was the Webley pistol. He waved it at his granddaughter who let herself be pulled by the arms as he dragged her through the house to the shed.

  He untied the length of rope which had tethered the dog to the hook and he gave it to the girl to hold Cassie whilst he unlocked the back gate of the garden. He pushed her down the lane in the half-dark towards the woods and the river. It had rained heavily the previous day and the river, usually not much more than a wide, sluggish stream, was swollen with the water which had poured into it from the tributary veins which gashed the surrounding hills. The river was unusually full, and it ran by swiftly now in its urgency to empty itself in the distant sea. The rain had stopped overnight but, in the dusk, a prickly chill of washed-out air came down the valley to hang over the rush of the river beside them and drift over the water-filled holes of mud and coal slurry, viscous pools through which they splashed as they went.

  The girl felt nothing this time. Not fear nor danger, nor even the cold and the damp amongst the snapping twigs and bare branches of the trees. She and the dog moved faster than him, though they could hear him behind them, warning and threatening them through the gloom. When they reached the mine shaft she held Cassie close to her legs and waited for him. He came on, a little drunk and swaying as he walked towards them. He took Cassie’s makeshift lead in his left hand and fumbled in his overcoat pocket for the Webley he’d stuffed in there. It came out the wrong way and it fell to the ground as he dropped it. His daicap slipped off his head as he bent to pick up the gun. He swore and let go of the dog’s lead so that he could sink to his knees to retrieve both his gun and his flat cap. His hand clutched at the cap but her foot was firmly on the Webley and she swooped quickly to pick it up herself. Her grandfather looked up, trying to focus on the girl above him, his hand stretching out for her to give him the gun she was holding above his head. She shot him, just once, between his eyes, and he flopped face down in the wet coal waste around the shaft. Cassie sounded a low, whimpering, pathetic noise, and the girl dropped the gun so that she could comfort the dog, her dog now, “her Cassie”.

  * * * * *

  When the dog was safely tied up again in the shed she returned, with night falling, to the disused mine shaft in the woods and to the body she had covered over with fallen leaves. She had taken his wheelbarrow with her, and she used her muscular young arms to lift him and throw his body across it. Once safely back inside the shed, the girl made a hollow space in the middle of the coal pile she had stacked and tiered. She smeared his daicap with his blood and put the Webley in the cap. She shoved his body into the coal pile and closed the hole again. She picked up the cap with the gun inside and walked again through the woods to the river, to a steep bank a mile or so downstream of the shaft. She threw them, close but separate, down the steep and slippery embankment, where he’d shot himself, drunk but grieving over his wife’s incurable cancer, fell into the river and been swept away. He was never to be found. He had stayed out overnight before, carousing with his friends, so she had had no reason to be alarmed, or to have woken her ill grandmother. It was why she could wait until the next day, late afternoon, to tell a neighbour her grandfather was still not home. They would tell the police. She had felt elated, not tired at all, as she walked home again to the shed where she knew she needed to finish matters so that her own story could begin. So she pulled his shrunken body from its black hole and she took off his clothes.

  On the butcher’s block he kept
against a side wall, she spread out his limbs. She balanced the cleaver for its weight and then she brought it down as cleanly and as forcefully as she could. The edge he had honed did the rest and whatever, arms and legs and hands and feet, which she did not sever with a single blow she hatcheted and chopped and sawed and sliced so that he came to bits, piece by piece, as chest and breastbone and knobbly knees and ganglions and sinews. She gouged out his eyes with a curved blade and some skewers and fed them to the dog along with his internal organs. Cassie gobbled and slurped. Her mistress placed the bits and pieces into two hessian sacks and weighted them down with the heaviest lumps of coal she could handle. She waited until it was pitch black outside to take her parcels to a deep quarry pool, green and glacially cold, where he had often drowned kittens and puppies, for himself and for others, in earlier years. She had put the clothes she had cut away into the coal-burning kitchen range’s furnace where they would burn to a cinder, and to the ash she would rake away in the morning. Into the early hours she scrubbed and washed and washed and scrubbed as she had been so well taught to do. The head, which she had cut off at the neck with an executioner’s practised chop, she had decided to keep. It was put back into the hold she had made amongst the coal. The rain was falling heavily again.

  She was finally exhausted by all her labour. She slept soundly, her dog nestled alongside her at the foot of her bed. When they woke she took the lurcher back to the shed, and left her loose. Her grandmother was still asleep in the early dawn. The girl decided she would have a treat later, as a surprise. She would make her some brawn, the meat her grandmother had loved as much as her husband. Perhaps it was a generation thing. In the larder was a pig’s head he’d prepared the previous day. The girl knew whenever she had been given the brawn made from the eyeless and earless and hairless head that the texture and savour of it would never be for her but, for those older others, it was a memory food, a re-call as much as a sustenance. It was how, it seemed, in these simple recurrent moments of smell and touch and sensation that they measured the repetitive downward tick of their lives.

  In the kitchen the girl found the large aluminium stock pot her grandmother had habitually used and filled it with cold water. When it had bubbled long enough she added several handfuls of cooking salt and took the pot off the heat to cool down. She made toast and tea for breakfast and took her grandmother’s upstairs. His absence caused no comment, only a shrug of the sick woman’s frail shoulders. She presumed the dog had been punished and her husband to be drunk. No surprises there. The girl went back to the kitchen. She dropped the pig’s head she took from the larder into the stock pot and she took the discarded ears for Cassie to eat. She heard her dog whimper, with delight now, whenever she approached.

  In the shed she reached into the hole for her grandfather’s head. She set its mangled shape squarely on the block. His thin wispy hair was matted in places with his dried blood and elsewhere was still slicked down with the vaseline he had spread from the palms of his hands to his scalp so that he could part it neatly on one side. He was, as ever, closely and cleanly shaven by his cut-throat razor, so she could ignore that aspect. She took down his blow lamp from the shelf. She pumped the hand piston to make the paraffin flow. She used a Swan’s Vesta match to light it and she adjusted the flame, in the way she had seen him do, so that it would burn the hair of his head off without singeing it. She worked swiftly on his hair, as he had done with the pig’s bristle. The lurcher had eaten the old man’s wrinkled ears she had sliced off the night before. The tang of paraffin was heavy in the shed, and she felt warm.

  In the kitchen she washed his head – the false teeth had burned in the furnace with his clothes – under a fast-running tap before it was plunged into the brine alongside that of the pig’s he had already made ready. She put a plate over the pot and replaced it on its shelf in the cold larder. She calculated the twenty four hours she would need to wait for it to be ready for the next stage. The police would be searching for him by then: on the mountain, at the riverbank, in the river. Everywhere. But not in the pot. She kissed her grandmother goodbye and went to school. When she came home she waited until after six to wonder about his whereabouts with her grandmother and the next door neighbour.

  The following day, all agreed, she did not need to go to school. She could stay at home to make cups of tea for whoever called and to see to her grandmother’s needs. In any case, she was up early to walk Cassie. She had drained the heads well before dawn. She quartered them now with his sharpest butcher’s knife and covered them again with cold water and yet more salt. She added to the water some roughly chopped carrots and four halved onions from his allotment, and whole peppercorns and a few cloves and lots of fresh thyme from his garden. She boiled the pot until it simmered. Periodically, she skimmed off flecks of beige and brown scum from its surface. It had to bubble away quietly for four hours, her grandmother’s exact recipe time, being topped up with water whenever the meat was not covered. Callers to the house, upstairs with her grandmother or sat in the best front room with cups of tea and digestive biscuits, remarked on the evoking smell from the kitchen and how she was such a good girl to be so busy making brawn for her grandmother, whose favourite it also was. A piece or two would be sure to do her some good at this worrying time.

  When there were no more visitors and no further police enquiries being made at the house she took out the broad wooden board on which pastry was rolled, and on it she put the drained heads from which the meat was now falling. She pulled it away further by hand. With a small pointed knife she cut roundels of meat from the cheek bones and when all the meat was off the heads she mixed it all up and chopped it finely, all together, with a small mountain of fresh parsley he had bought for his own purpose, now to be hers. The girl filled a big, white pudding bowl right to its rim and with her hands again, pressed the meats firmly down into the bowl. Earlier she had strained the cooled cooking liquor which she slowly poured over the shredded meat mixture. When it was swamped by the slick liquid she rammed a small plate within the rim of the bowl so that the liquor was displaced around the edges of the plate. She weighted the plate down even further with the round iron weights of the old balance weighing machine they still used. She knew it would need a further twelve hours to settle and be finished in the dark larder. At the back, on the stone, where it was coldest. The bones and all the rest sizzled in the fire.

  Her grandfather’s friend, the one who had found the gun for him, came to see them a couple of days later after he’d been to the Legion where, he said, her grandfather’s memory would be forever sacred. He said that the police had found the Webley and his bloodied cap. The rain had washed the bank further away and they were at the river’s edge. That, he was sorry to say, it really did look like he’d killed himself, worried sick, no doubt, about his dear wife, poor Cassie. He had had a load of drink that day, too, sad to say, but there you are, and all that, and didn’t we all sometime. Anyway, also, at the Club they’d decided there’d be a Collection. In due course. Oh, and one more thing, best not to mention, say anything about, the gun, where it might have come from, and all that, origins, see? And he winked, and looked at her, and gave her a dusty pink ten bob note. The first money she’d earned.

  The girl gave him a cup of tea. He had asked for milk and two sugars. She had sat him in the kitchen in her grandfather’s old chair. She told him her grandmother was asleep, again, upstairs. Not long now, the Doctor had said. He nodded twice and stirred the sugar in his tea. On the table she had inverted the deep, white pudding basin onto a plate, and removed the bowl. On the plate was the mound of pink and brown gelatinous brawn. It was marbled through by the parsley like the floating moss green strands adrift after the rains in the slow-moving river. He asked her if she’d made that, looked lovely it did, bet it tasted good, too. The girl smiled. She said her grandmother had managed a mouthful or two but that she didn’t like brawn herself, and there was far too much for the two of them, so would he like to try some? The girl cut two
pieces of bread from a white loaf, and buttered them. She carved a generous slice of the home-made brawn and put it, with the bread, onto a plate of the best china.

  Her grandfather’s drinking companion, the gun-supplier, took the fork she gave him and put it into the meat. He raised the portion to his mouth. He ate, and swallowed. He ate some more. He opened his bleary eyes wider. That, he told her, was the tastiest bit of brawn he’d eaten since before the war. It was the bloody real thing, that was, and she must give him the recipe so that his old woman could make some. Perfect it was. He’d have some more, if he may. He might. The girl smiled, grateful for the praise, and cut him off a further slice. She slid it onto his place and, underneath the table, she fed a more delicate piece of the brawn to Cassie, “her Cassie”, who licked the girl’s capable hands and rubbed herself against the girl’s strong and steady legs.

  Socratic Dialogue

  “So tell me the backstory,” he said.

  “There is no backstory,” I said.

  “Whaddya mean there’s no backstory, you schmuck. There’s always a backstory,” he said.

  “Not this time. Not so far as I know,” I said.

  “So far as you know? So far as you know? That’s a fuckin’ comfort, then,” he said.

  “Look,” I said. “The point is that where I’m concerned this is the beginning. And the end, too. Sorry. End of story.”

  “You think it’s an end for you? It may be an end for me, all right, you creep,” he said. “For you, it’s another story. A backstory in the making. A personal one to you,” he said. “D’you think you can file this away under Contract Fulfilled, Fees Paid, or something? D’you think you won’t store this in the shallow recess of your peanut sized brain pan? Where it will, I assure you, fester my dear friend. Guaranteed. You hear? You have my personal guarantee on that.”