The white cloth is stained and stiff. Its wrinkles stick a little to what’s inside, but then come away.
How did I know – because I did know, the way Annie moved, the forest pounding around me, this voice in my head – that I was walking up to a door, that when it opened, what was behind it would knock the head from my shoulders and set it rolling, rolling, all known things turning to flash and shadow before my eyes?
Inside are curled the remains of a tiny, tiny child. Hung in the sacking, high away from the beasts, it died and dried and all smell went out of it, and it fell, this little leather creature. Its skull-face peers out from where ants or some such have nibbled the leather away. Its hands aren’t big enough even to grasp the tip of my finger.
And it lay here – how long, how long? There’ll be a time to apply myself to that question, but for now, that it lay here at all and that I, Arlen Michaels, breathe above it, that I have it in my eyes, is enough and too much for me.
I cover the child with the white cloth, with the sacking, exactly as they were before. When I stand, it’s as if I were the one as lay stiff-dead under the trees all this time; my knees and hips and elbows crack straight, my head is as heavy as rock on my neck, weighted with eyes and thoughts.
Someone else does my walking for me, out of that place, widely around the hill. Take the long way, Arlen, and you’ll not meet anyone. ‘Annie Annie Annie,’ I whisper like some mad person. It seems the only thing I can say or think, for a while.
I walk out onto Clear Top into all the sky. I stride to the edge and look out over town, that mottle-stone place running with gossip and judgment. My heart beats hard, and Annie’s finger prods my chest again. You’ve a good heart, she says. Prod, she goes, prod-prod. How I glowed at that girl’s touching me! But now I see: a good heart’s not that daffy grinning, floating away fresh-kissed across the fields; it isn’t that chestful of passion you bring to her prettiness, all full and flaming.
A good heart is when a girl that you loved, a girl who has pained you and chosen another in your stead – chosen two others! – places in your hands this precious and dreadful thing, the means to her own ruin. And you could tell it abroad, and everyone you know, from the lads up to your own mam and dad, would say you were right to tell, would nod and shake your hand and say, That Lord-son should know what kind of a wife he’s got him, and you could shine all bright and right in their outrage, glamorous in your injuries and your lost love. But you keep silent, because you can do that, too, and a good heart would do that, a fine man, a man who truly loved Annie Stork.
You saw her serious face in the forest, her strong feet wet upon the green-golden river stones. You saw her white hand calming the breath in her throat. Let her be lucky now; let her be a lady; have pity.
My heart’s not pounding no more. It sits instead like a big hard bruise in my chest, paining green in the middle, frilling blood-purple round the edge. It takes a lot of carrying, to get it to the pathway, to keep it moving down the hill in the sunlight. I need my mam; I need her to snap at me and order me about; I need her to shrink this day to something Michaels-sized, that doesn’t hurt so hard and weigh so heavy.
I round the bend. Top Gate stands open and I start to run. I run right through the town and out the other side. All the way down to Lower Feld I go. I slide to a stop at our place, and sit on the step panting, collecting myself, readying myself to go in.
OLLYN LAY AWAKE AMONG the snoring Keller kids. The man goggled in at her through the window.
I will go home, she thought. Somehow. As soon as he’s gone. I will run out of here; I will run home. No matter about the new baby coming; I will sit quiet in a corner. Only, I can’t be here. I can’t be here a moment longer than I have to be. I am just not brave enough.
‘Skinny little thing, aincha?’ Tod Keller had said when she sidled in their kitchen door last evening. ‘I never even noticed you among those rousty-boys, your brothers.’
Ma Keller had laughed, a sudden laugh that made Oll start. ‘Tuck her away in the press,’ she said. ‘Pop her on the mantel for the night, couldn’t we, petal?’ Her finger under Oll’s chin had scraped like splintery wood.
He was too tall a man. He was extraordinarily tall. No one else she knew could look in over the sill of an upstairs window. If it could be called ‘looking’, when a person’s eyes swivvered left and right like that, never meeting up in the same direction – at least as far as Oll had seen. She’d had the good sense, when an eye-beam swung near, to lie limp and asleep-looking. She breathed slowly while her heart banged like a soldiers’ band.
He shifted out there in the laneway, and muttered some question to himself. He rapped softly on the window-pane, and it was all Oll could do to not cringe at the sound, which was spongy somehow, as well as bony.
Go away, you horror, she thought, so I can get home from here.
Ple-ease! Why was she like this? She knew her ma hated it, and yet the whining came up from her deeps and she needed, needed to be pressed up against warm Ma; couldn’t see why Ma would not stop a moment what she was doing and hold onto her and make things all right. Just the once would do.
Get her off me, Ma had said through her teeth.
Huvvy had peeled her off claw by claw. Come here you little limpet, you little sticky octopoddle, he laughed as she wailed.
Ollyn had lost her head a moment, thinking she would die of her distress.
And that was when Ma had rounded on her. It’s because of this you must go, silly girl! All this clinging and sooking, you’re sending me mad!
Ollyn had blinked silent at Ma’s vehemence; Huvvy had stopped laughing and held her quite firm and protectingly.
But Ma had kept on. Our baby will not come out with you around! It will not want to see the face that horrible noise comes out of!
She was bent over them; Huvvy and Oll were blown back by the wind of her anger. They all three had leaned like that a moment.
Take her, Huv. Take her to Kellers’. I can’t stand it any longer. And Ma had turned away and spread her hands on the table and gritted her teeth there with a pain.
Get your nightgown, Huvvy had murmured in Oll’s ear, and she had hurried to do so.
The man’s feet, on the cobbles, slid, paused and then slapped. His muttering moved away from the window. Oll waited, because her heart of hearts knew he might well come back to a window he had peered in before. But she could not wait too long, because she must see which direction he went in, so she could avoid him.
Up she got from between fat Anya and bony Sarra Keller, and ran lightly to the window, keeping to the shadows. She pressed her cheek to the window frame.
At first she didn’t see him up the lane. Oh, she thought, maybe I only dreamed him. But I will go home anyway. Ma will protect me from my dreams.
But then a clot of shadow moved low against that door, at the top of those stairs there, and a high cry snaked down the lane, and the thing, the man, unfolded himself, the full kinked lanky height of him, with his shining round head, a few hairs streaked across it, a few others floating out sideways, bright and frizzly in the lamplight.
Watching him crane to see into that house, hearing his cry, Oll was like Mixie Dixon’s doll that her pa brought from Germany, held together with stiff wires. How will I get home, she thought, if I cannot even move?
The man’s nightgown confused her eye. It was made of the oddest shaped patches, all patterned differently. Buttons gleamed here and there. Unhemmed, it stroked his stringy calves with fraying threads. His feet – look how many cobbles his feet covered! Oll was likely to faint with it.
He swayed out from the window, back towards the Kellers’ and called, in a high, reasonable voice borrowed from someone sane, someone real, ‘Well past! So far past their bedtime!’ Then he loped up the steps past Draper Downs’s house where there were no children, and past the House of the Indigent Aged. And around into Spire Street, to the right, turning up the hill.
Oll’s wires turned to workable muscle aga
in, and her mind cleared somewhat. Ma, she thought. Ma. She must put herself near Ma.
She did not dress. She did not take her clothes. She did not even stop for boots. In her nightdress, cool air puffing inside it, she ran noiselessly down the stairs.
The cat by the coals lifted its black head as she passed. The kitchen door was just like the one at home; she knew how to raise the latch, hold it up while she tiptoed through, and lower it silently behind her.
It was a clear, cold night, the sky thick-frosted with stars. A part of Oll quailed and quaked and covered its head inside her, while her body ran stiffly along the house-path, across the back of Kellers’ and down the narrow side way. She peeped around into the lane, and there was the same view as from the upper room, the fine-cut keystone over Draper Downs’s door, the House’s curly-iron sign silhouetted against the lamplit wall – except she was lower in this view now, so much more at the mercy of things, and the night was cold, cold.
She dived down into the shadows to her left, stubbing her toe on a cobble but not stopping, not even missing a step to hop. She gasped out the pain as she ran. Her breath was the only sound, that and the slight shiftings of her nightdress, which was soft and damp with sleep, chilling around her. Her feet made no sound on the cobbles, their soles being smooth and damp too, and Oll being so light. The row houses of Pitcher Street flew past her up the hill.
A noise in the Square, just before she reached it, made her slide to a stop; her hair swung out, and her nightdress hem, just to the house-corner exactly and no farther. The clank of the lamplighter’s hook, the squeak of the lamp door. The scrape of the lamplighter’s boots. His sweetish pipe-smoke wisped around the corner and tickled her nose.
She ran back up Pitcher Street; it was far to the first lane. She hid, and panting peeped back down. There: he was crossing the street-end, attending to the corner lamp, closing it – and moving on around the Square?
No. Oll swallowed a whimper. The lamplighter was coming up Pitcher Street. She could go to him, perhaps; she could ask him to take her home. He would have to.
But I’m not brave enough, she thought. I can’t go up and talk to a man, not in the middle of the night, not after seeing that other. And she ran away along the lane.
She could have taken the back way behind the row houses, but a dog was barking somewhere down there, and the noise was too much for her all by itself in this huge night. So she ran on to Swale Street – and out into the middle of the street she ran, and down she ran in the full lamplight right alongside the drain there, so that when the tall patched shadow unkinked itself from a doorway uphill, why, there she was, clear as anything, little and live as he could wish for.
‘Ooh, there’s one!’
She skittered aside like a rat, under a jettied upper floor. There was nowhere to run on to, though, however much she searched; and however small she was, no cavity could hide her.
His great feet walked down Swale Street, treading with exaggerated care. His voice fluted up there among the stars. His nightgown – Oll was the wired-together doll again – his gown was made of many nightdresses, she saw now, small ones, unpicked, spread flat, and clumsily sewn together.
His knees came down inside the nightgown-cloth like two great tree-bolls falling from a woodcutter’s cart, and his fists came down like two more, either side of the jutting room.
Ollyn wilted and whimpered and shrank into a ball.
His face came down: his wide mouth with bad teeth saying, ‘Where can she be, my little mousette?’ in that too-high voice; his nose, long and uneven and gristly-looking, with sprays of dark hairs from the nostrils; and eyes, so big and so mismatched, searching, searching, first this one then that.
‘Ah. Ha-ha-ha.’ That was his own voice, that deep one, that rougher one. ‘But you can’t make yourself small enough, can you?’
She looked from eye to eye. Ma, she mouthed, and tears came.
‘That’s what I like to see,’ he said.
He picked her up and brought her out and examined her, laying her flat across the palms of his big hands. She could not identify the bad smell of them.
And then she was too busy trying to breathe, because he had stopped her mouth with soft wax, tied it in with a rag. She was near dead with fright, just as a mouse or bird will die in your hand, from being so enclosed.
He held her tight and carried her out of town the misty, marshy way, the way no one walked – but then, no one had such long legs as these; he gathered up his patch-work nightgown and stepped across the marsh’s lumps and glimmers. Her feet swung out in the cold like bell-clappers, but struck noise from nothing. The man waded in among trees, where it was still misty, and then onto drier ground. He put Oll down, and pinned her with his foot while he lifted a door in the side of a mound of earth. He carried her inside, and the door closed and entombed them.
Dizzy, her eyes full of stars that weren’t there, no voice to scream with and no breath to cry, Ollyn stayed limp where he had laid her, on wood as scratchy as Ma Keller’s fingers. Her eyelids turned dimly red as he made a light. Such a smell!
He frightened her eyes open, speaking close. ‘Let’s look at you.’ He was there with a smutchy lamp. She was on a table, and he sat down by it. The dark parts of his eyes skated about on his eyeballs. He propped her upright, took a tool, cut through the rag around her mouth and hooked the wax out. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Squeak to me. Squeak as loud as you like.’
When she did not, he poked her in the tum. ‘Blink, then. Show me how you can blink.’
This she did, and it delighted him. His delight was all brown teeth and spittle and spongy hands clapping.
Oll blinked some more; blinking was better than being eaten.
‘Yes, that’ll do.’ He smacked her so that she fell sideways on the table. ‘No need to be a smarty-britches.’
He brought his face close to hers, pointed to his own staring eyes with his flat fingers. ‘You see these?’
She nodded, still dazed from the blows.
‘Do you see blinkers? Do you see any lids?’
Ollyn shook her head.
‘You know what my name is, by those that rule the world, those mums and da’s, those butchers and merchants and clerks and councillors?’
She shook her head again. Maybe if she did not utter, he would not harm her.
‘Wee Will Winkie. “Wee” because I am so big, you see. “Winkie” because I cannot wink. I cannot wink, or blink, or sleep. I can barely see for my dry eyes and their irritations; do you see how red are these eyes?’
Oll nodded.
‘I will show you,’ he said. He darted away, darted back. ‘Cannot wink, or blink, but aahh he can think, this one. And you shall help me.’
He went off and rummaged in the shadows. ‘I have hid them, in case of intruders,’ he said in a muffled voice. ‘Beasts, you know, or thieves.’
The lamplight did not push back much of the darkness. Boxes, she thought, were stacked in a corner. There was a heap of cloths, another heap of scrambled dark shapes – firewood, perhaps, from some twisty kind of tree. A fire snoozed in a filthy, rusted stove; the rotten smell near-smothered her.
‘Here.’ Out of the corner the giant came. He placed – either side of the lamp so that they lit up like lamps themselves – two large finger-smudged flasks made of glass. They were nearly full with clear water. Its rocking stirred the fine white sediment on the bottom, which spiralled up slowly. In each flask something like a mottled pig’s ear hung from grey threads that passed up through a wax-sealed hole in the flask’s broad cork and trailed off across the table.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ said the giant. ‘So much work in them.’
Ollyn examined one pink-and-brown glowing shape. The work was—
‘Stitches,’ she said, surprised into speech. It was clumsy stitches.
‘Yes!’ he said ‘Stitches-stitches, in the softest skin! Many nights’ work. And look along the bottom – what do you see there?’
‘Uh . .
. a – a fringe.’ A fringe of tiny spikes. Of hairs.
‘Of real lashes.’ He breathed the words into her face. ‘Of real lashes! Can you believe it?’
‘It’s. It’s. It’s.’ She waved a hand helplessly at the flasks, thinking she might faint, or be sick, from this smell and this sight, the fleshy patchworks hanging, glowing. She looked away, but the only other thing to see besides the giant’s face was his nightgown, which had so much the same appearance, the different colours, the seams, the shapes of arms and chests, but splayed out, spread out as if flayed from—
‘I want my ma,’ she said to him, trying not to boohoo it, trying to speak as if she were one giant talking to another. Tears weaselled out of her eyes. ‘I want Ma and Pa, and Huvvy and Daff and all my brothers. You must let me go home.’
He seemed startled, but when she was unable to stifle a hiccough and a teary sniff, he relaxed again. ‘How about,’ he sing-songed, ‘a nice hot cup of tea, eh? And a bit of . . . cake. I have a cake.’
‘I don’t want a cake,’ whispered Oll, but he went looking. She pulled her legs up under her nightdress and wept into her knees, as he moved things and dragged things and muttered.
‘Was over here,’ he said. ‘I put the child here, ’cause it was broken, and the cake here. Although, maybe I have mixed that up. Maybe it is among—’
He started to rearrange the pile of twisty firewood. The bad smell was much worse all of a sudden. Oll choked into the knee-cloth of her nightgown, trying to see through her tears.
‘Agh,’ he said. ‘Well, how about – these is good for a snack, after they’ve lain awhile.’ He looked doubtfully at the pile. He had one in his hand, by its little blackened leg. As Oll watched, the leg came out of its rotten hip socket, and the rest of the baby fell back onto the pile.
The sounds of the breaking, of the falling, stayed in the air a moment.
Then, too fast to think, Oll exploded off the table. She could not be faster than him, but she beat him to the door. She was not strong enough, but she lifted the heavy wooden hatch. She was not very clever, but she ran behind the mound and flattened herself to the grass there, and when Will Winkie burst out of the hatch and stood howling towards the town she clawed a stone out of the ground, and she knelt up and threw it high into the mist, so that it splashed down into marshwater far out in front of him.
Singing My Sister Down and other stories Page 12
