by S Williams
Mary nods thoughtfully, staring at the flames. ‘Love is love,’ she repeats. ‘I never really understood what that meant. Love is… unasked for.’ She watches as the flames grow and change colour, always in motion, never still.
She sighs and licks her lips, not looking at Athene. She’d semi-composed what she was going to say while she’d been making the drinks.
‘When Bella came into my life I was ten, in my last year of primary school. She was so different to all the local kids. She had this tenderness about her, like she’d seen things, done things.’ Mary shrugs, staring into the fire. ‘The way she was curious and kind, but somehow separate…’ She quickly takes a sip of her drink. The hot liquid scalds the roof of her mouth. ‘I don’t know. She was just nice to me, really. Actually saw me instead of around or through me… I guess I fell in love with her almost straight away. She became my best friend and my sister and I suppose even my parent. She seemed so certain of who she was and where she was that I just… let her run me.’
‘Run you?’ Athene’s voice is soft. ‘What an odd phrase.’
Mary smiles at the flames.
‘Yes; it sounds funny, doesn’t it? But my parents were so distant, and the rest of the kids acted like I didn’t exist, that it felt nice to let go of control. Let somebody else make the decisions.’
In her peripheral vision she watches Athene. The girl nods once, like she was agreeing, or maybe just confirming that she has heard.
‘Being a child is like being an island with treasure on it; you have to guard it from pirates,’ Athene says.
Mary turns and fully looks at her, open-mouthed.
‘That’s exactly it! Everybody wants to occupy you. Have I heard that before: is it a saying or something?’
Athene smiles shyly.
‘Probably. It’s something my mum said.’
‘She sounds very wise.’
Mary sees a shadow cross Athene’s face.
Definitely some trouble in the past, she thinks. She doesn’t push it, not wishing to intrude. Instead, she turns back to the fire. Outside, the day has started weeping again, leaving its rain-tears on the cottage windows.
‘I like to think that we were very happy, me and Bella. In our childhood. We would walk over to each other’s houses and go exploring on the moor. In the summer we’d spend hours watching the dragonflies up on the pond. They were so big some years it was like having insect birds buzzing over the water; or mechanical rainbows.’ Mary takes another sip of her cocoa and smiles at Athene. ‘Like your hair.’
Athene self-consciously tucks the wet strands behind her ear. ‘So, did you spend a lot of time in each other’s houses? I bet it was fun having sleepovers at Blea Fell! In the middle of the moor.’
‘No, hardly ever. My parents would get nervous if I stayed away. I guess it was because they were so old. They’d lost their ability to be reassured if I wasn’t near them. And Bella never really liked me sleeping over. I think she struggled with anyone in her private space.’
Mary smiles at a memory.
‘And then as we got older, sleep became less important. We’d stay up by the fire and talk and smoke and just… be.’ Mary shrugs. ‘You know how it is when you enter your teens.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Athene says. ‘Difficult to ever forget.’
Mary nods and smiles, but then feels the smile slip. ‘Anyhow, for three years I had Bella all to myself and she was all that I needed, everything that I wanted.’ Mary takes a shaky breath.
‘And then?’ Athene leans forward slightly.
Mary shrugs. ‘And then Trent came along, and everything was ruined.’
‘He broke up the friendship?’
Oh, you have no idea, Mary whispers inside her head.
‘The first time she saw him was on the school bus. It was like she had been waiting for him all along, and everything that we were, was just passing time,’ Mary mused, the distance between then and now nothing more than a bitter blink of the eye.
I’m sorry.
‘We were thirteen, and he was fifteen.’
‘That’s… wrong,’ Athene says, after a pause.
‘I know, but it didn’t seem so, somehow. Trent was a wild card. New to the area, with a shady history he never told anyone about directly. He was like a movie character. He used to smoke those white-tipped American cigarettes you couldn’t even buy round here then. He looked like a rebel.’
‘Like James Dean?’ Athene asks.
Mary pauses and blinks cat-slow at the fire, remembering how Bella would always go on about the actor. ‘Yes, exactly like that,’ Mary says slowly, turning to look at Athene. ‘What made you think of him?’
Athene shrugs. ‘A girl I roomed with at uni; she had a picture of him. The one where he’s standing in a busy street, lighting a cigarette? He’s wearing this big overcoat, in Manhattan or somewhere, and the whole world is moving around him, but he acts like it doesn’t even exist.’
Mary cocks her finger at her, like she’s holding a gun, the gesture almost an exact copy of the one Athene had done to her earlier, in the café. ‘Bingo. That was Trent. That was exactly what he was like, even at fifteen. Like the world was somebody else’s joke.’
‘So he was a bad boy, then?’
‘Not bad,’ Mary says slowly. ‘At least not bad bad. He was…’ Mary shrugged again. ‘It was like his heart was painted black. The first time Bella saw him she said he looked like Heathcliff.’
Athene looks confused for a second. ‘What, from Wuthering Heights?’
‘The very one you mentioned in the café last night,’ Mary says, the memory momentarily creasing her features. She shakes her head. ‘Anyhow, Trent came onto the scene just as our friendship might have…’ Mary paused, unsure how to continue.
‘Become physical?’ Athene suggests.
Mary barks laughter, startling the young woman. ‘It was already physical, love. Or at least from my perspective. Once puberty set in it was nothing but physical. Not sex; just… aching. Deep, right inside the body, aching. Like she was a loose tooth. She was pain itself for me to be around, but I couldn’t help it.’
‘Jesus, I remember what that was like,’ Athene agrees. ‘The lying awake at night smelling them, feeling them like ghosts that have stitched themselves to your skin.’
Mary eyeballs Athene, impressed.
Defo she’s been hurt before.
‘Yes,’ she says gently, ‘to your skin, and through your skin, right down into your DNA. You think you can’t live without them.’
‘What did you do?’ Athene asks, her eyes wide and clear.
Mary looks at her, not smiling. She feels a tear diamonding behind her eye.
‘I lived without them.’
Athene’s gaze clouds, confused, then a shock of understanding flashes across her face.
‘Oh Christ, Mary, I’m sorry, I forgot! I didn’t mean to–’
‘It’s all right. It was a long time ago. After the crash, well… the world just lost its colour.’ Mary juts out her chin, pointing at the small bells lying at her feet. ‘Those brought it all back. Whoever stuck these to my door knows about the nickname.’
‘And you say they were a present you bought? For Bella?’
‘A decoration for her tree, yes. But now the shock has worn off…’ Mary picks up the bells and shakes them between her fingers. ‘It wasn’t these. Someone has tried to make a replica, but the originals made a different sound. These are made of plastic; the ones I got from Woolies were metal. Brass or copper, I think. They cost me all the money I’d saved.’
‘Did she like them? Bella?’
Mary nods, staring at the bells. ‘She did. She loved them. She hung them up on our tree in the ghost wood.’ Seeing the question on Athene’s face she waves a hand toward the door. ‘The juniper wood outside her house. She said that the bells would guide her home if ever she got lost.’
Mary lowers her head, and sees a perfect tear drop down onto her floor.
‘Oh dear,’ sh
e murmurs. ‘I am sorry, I don’t know–’
Another falls to join it, Mary’s vision blurring. She feels Athene’s arm around her, stroking her hair.
‘Shh,’ whispers the girl softly. ‘It’s all right. Don’t be sad.’
‘Except it didn’t fucking work, did it? She never came home again.’
Athene doesn’t say anything.
After a moment, Mary rests her head on the younger girl’s shoulder and closes her eyes.
Then opens them again, feeling a burning in her palm, where Bella scarred her; feeling a clenching in her throat.
As Athene strokes her hair, and tells her it will be all right, Mary can smell her skin, smell the scent coming off her. She smells like Christmas oranges.
Smells like Bella.
26
Bella’s House: 1998
Autumn Before the Winter Fair
Bella stared at the thin blue line. As she sat on the toilet in her empty house, she wondered if she was going to cry. After a minute, she stood up and carefully placed every piece of the pregnancy kit back into her bag.
Thin. Blue. Line.
She repeated the words over and over in her head, like loading bullets into a gun.
27
The Ghost Forest: Blea Fell House
Winter, 1997
‘Shh!’
‘How can I be “Shh”, when every step sounds like I’m walking through polystyrene! I feel like I’m in an episode of some shitty old sci-fi!’
Bella giggled, then slammed her hand to her mouth, smothering the sound.
‘Okay, well, be as shh as you can! And wrap yourself up, It’s about to snow!’
Mouse looked up. Bella was right; flakes of white crystal were floating down through the blue-black sky. Mouse pulled the overcoat tighter around her pyjamas, and followed her friend over the wall.
Bella and Mouse were visiting the ghost forest in the field at the front of Blea Fell. Mouse was staying for a rare sleepover, and once everyone was in bed they had snuck out to be in the woods. Mouse watched Bella as she stroked the trees, pressing her face against the bark and caressing them. Mouse pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and tapped one out. She held it up to the moonlight. The smoke was crumpled and slightly bent. She smiled to herself as she watched the snow fall around it.
Crumpled and slightly bent. Like her. She looked up at the snow, squinting her eyes against the cold flakes. The bell she had given Bella the previous Christmas tinkled in the night, making the trees appear even more eldritch.
‘I think we should do it on this one,’ said Bella.
Mouse stayed staring into the sky. The snow was falling like kisses in the moonlight. She creased her brow.
‘How does it work that it’s snowing, but I can see the stars and the moon?’ she whispered. ‘I mean I should just be able to see clouds, no?’ She stuck out her tongue, and stayed still until a fleck landed on it, melting and leaving a taste of the sea.
‘It’s because we’re in a snow globe,’ Bella whispered back. Her voice was like her body; full of static, disrupted and scattered by the falling snow. Mouse turned away from the sky and looked at her. Bella was kneeling by one of the trees. She had a Swiss army knife in her hand, and was hacking at its bark.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Tattooing my name onto the sailor’s arm.’
Mouse watched her for a few moments, then walked over and lay down next to her, staring up at the sky. The moon was full, and as the snowflakes spiralled down they seemed to be lit from within. They are what angels would look like, if they were weather, thought Mouse, stroking the snow beneath the tree. In the branch above her the bell chimed a gentle note.
‘What do you mean, we’re in a snow globe?’ Mouse said.
The sound of Bella’s knife was like an insect gnawing at the tree as she cut.
‘I mean you and me, Mouse. I know you think it’s all changed because of Trent, but it really hasn’t. Deep down the only ones who count are you and me.’
Mouse’s breath was smoke as it came out of her, the hot air from inside crystallising as it hit the cold; the smoke from the cigarette only making it thicker. She closed her eyes. She so much wanted what Bella said to be true. As she lay there she felt the snow caress her. Like the last bed before dying, she thought. She imagined being found in the morning. Her and Bella next to each other, just indistinct shapes under the snow, holding hands. She took a final drag on her smoke, then flicked it into the night.
‘There!’ said Bella, triumphantly, stepping back and admiring her work. ‘Now it’s your turn!’
Mouse sat up and looked. Bella had carved her name into the trunk of the tree. In the moonlight, the white of the flesh beneath the bark looked like bone.
‘You and me, I get,’ Mouse said, taking the knife. ‘Will always get. But I don’t understand about the snow globe.’
The girls exchanged places; Bella laying down in the snow whilst Mouse began to carve her name. She took off her fingerless gloves to grip the handle of the knife better; the blade was sharp and she didn’t want to cut herself. The soft smell of tobacco filled the air as Bella fired up a cigarette.
‘What I mean is everything in the world is for you and me, Mouse. Maybe not all the time; but when we’re together. Trent and school and all the shit that happens around us, that’s just the skin of life. It doesn’t matter. It happens to the sky and the birds and to everything that lives. It’s what our imagination does that really matters.’
‘And you’re imagining a snow globe, are you?’ Mouse whispered, smiling.
‘Of course; one in which only you and me live, forever. Even after we’re dead.’
Bella sat up, took a drag from the cigarette, and held it out to Mouse, the end reversed so she could put it between her lips. Mouse stared into her eyes, willing her to notice how much she loved her, then leant forward and took the cigarette, her lips gently pressing against the filter. For the briefest of moments she felt Bella’s cold fingers on her lips, and then they were gone.
‘I’d like that,’ Mouse whispered.
‘Just me and you, in this prehistoric forest, surrounded by snow that happens every time our world is turned upside down.’
‘And what’s turned our world upside down, Bella?’
Mouse was looking as deep into Bella’s eyes as she dared. Bella’s eyes were grey, and Mouse was fairly sure that they had no end to them; that if she were to fall into them she would just spin down forever and ever and never come out.
‘I’ll tell you after we’ve finished,’ Bella said, smiling.
‘Finished what, carving our names? It’s done, look.’
Mouse pointed at the tree with the knife; at the names glowing on the bark, like stories trying to be born.
‘That’s only part of it,’ Bella whispered, the snow sticking to her long hair, making her look pixelated. ‘Now we’ve got to seal it. Give me the knife.’
A question in her eyes, Mouse handed Bella the knife. Before Mouse could do anything, Bella grabbed her wrist and squeezed, causing her hand to open, exposing the palm. Bella slid the blade of the knife quickly across her skin. Mouse watched in disbelief as a line of red appeared. There was no pain. Part of Mouse’s brain supposed that her hand was too cold, or the knife was too sharp.
‘What…’ she began.
‘Shh,’ Bella said, tugging at her own glove, and handing the knife to Mouse. ‘It’s not deep, and it’s important. Now you do me.’
Bella held her hand up, like she was making a stop sign. ‘Then once you’ve done it, we need to hold our hands together, and let the blood mingle. That way we can always come back here. It will be like a magical portal or something.’
Bella’s eyes were on fire, the full moon replacing each of the pupils. Mouse felt dizzy and floating at the same time. She looked from Bella’s eyes to her upturned palm. The cut on her own hand felt full, like the blood.
Slowly, as if her actions were somebody else’s, she brou
ght the knife up to Bella’s palm. Bella nodded sharply, and closed her eyes. Mouse watched as the tip of the blade pressed into Bella’s skin. The silver of the blade shone in the moonlight, but Mouse couldn’t tell how hard to press; Bella’s hand was white with cold, the blood retreated deep inside.
‘Bella, I can’t…’ Mouse began, but then stopped as Bella pushed her hand forward, causing the tip of the knife to disappear into her. Bella opened her eyes and stared at Mouse.
Thank you, she mouthed, then pulled her hand down. Mouse watched, mute and immobile, as the knife appeared to slide upward, creating a slit in Bella’s palm. Blood, slow and unbelievably red, seeped out. Bella let out a sigh.
‘Right, put the knife down and hold my hand.’ Bella lowered her hand and held it out, like she wanted Mouse to shake it.
Mouse shook her head. ‘This is so surreal! Why are you even doing this?’
The snow stopped falling and Mouse looked around in confusion. The snow hadn’t petered out, or thinned in its descent, but just… stopped.
‘See,’ Bella whispered, her face a bear pit of emotions. ‘That’s what happens in a snow globe; all the flakes settle on the ground and the snowing stops, until the next time it’s shaken.’
Mouse stared at her. Bella grinned, wiggled her eyebrows, then edged her bleeding hand nearer. Mouse didn’t know what else to do; she laughed softly.
‘You’re bloody nuts, you know that, Bells?’
Bella solemnly nodded in agreement. ‘Just exactly the amount I need to be. Now are you going to do the blood-sisters thing with me or what?’
Mouse nodded, and clasped Bella’s hand. Her hand was so cold that she couldn’t feel her friend’s skin against hers, but she felt her heartbeat, pulsing their blood together.
