It’s February and it’s a Monday, and although the air is streaming, and although it is terribly cold, there is hope within the drizzling water, hints of the ending of winter. Lorna does not shiver, but her headscarf is wet right through.
At City Hall, the clock shows four, and the pavements shimmer orange with the street lights. Lorna stands on the steps, between two bronze lions, and looks down the curve of the hill, at the market’s coloured hoods. She can feel a death coming.
Lorna’s the last of the wise women: a midwife to feral cats, and neck-wringer of injured things. She will not brush her hair, and her coat is from a jumble sale; it is army-surplus green. A fox comes to greet her, politely flattening her ears, and just as quick, she is off; scuttling along the gutters with her brush streaming behind her. Lorna could not hope to keep up, but the fox knows that she will follow.
During the night, the city breathes out, exhales the grief, the traffic fumes and the missed red lights, and it fills its potholes and pores with cold still air. At night, the little gods creep out from building sites and alleyways, timorous as they sniff at the ground. They lope the streets when they’re empty, and they trust no human alive but Lorna.
At night, Lorna does not need her spectacles. She gazes through the rain, as the vixen moves like a slip of shine on the tarmac, vanishing at last down Goat Lane. Then, smiling, she pulls the hem of her nightie straight and buttons her coat over it. Thus made presentable, she starts to walk.
The god of Pottergate Green is not big and had never been powerful, not even when people believed in it. Now, it’s worshipped only by the foxes, the way that pigeons worship the sky. Tonight, it will die. It guarded the little grassy triangle between the Pottergate Tavern and the chip shop, a wide-eyed witness to shoppers and drunks and pigeons.
Last summer it saw a boy jag a knife at a smelly old man, long after the pubs had emptied. It hid among the bins until the footsteps died away, and then it lay down beside the victim as his life dropped away through a hole in his side.
It comforted him as best it could, nuzzling his face with its great hot tongue, purring anxiously, licking away the sweat and blood, until finally the man’s eyes glazed, unshut. When the heartbeat became quiet, and the sun began to rise, it left the body for the police and the world of men; and its sleep crawled all day with nightmares. It has been a skinny life, and tortuously long, and the timid god of Pottergate is finally, for the first time, not afraid.
Lorna pauses at the lip of the road; the rain is dwindling, and the street is very large when it’s empty. A couple more foxes have joined her now; her motley little entourage grows by twos and ones as they pass the Guildhall.
Down Dove Street, the silence is growing in the air like crystals; the foxes hate it, and they’re straining their huge kite ears, but there’s no sound at all but the slow, slow breathing of the city, and the feet and the drip and pat of raining. They bear left at the joke shop, where a reeking litter bin marks the corner. There’s a dropped five pound note lying in a puddle, folded in the wet like cloth. Lorna does not pick it up, but sees where it has fallen and nods her head.
The little gods have hidden in the back streets, and they’re chewing at their claws, or else worrying at fleas. When there’s one god less, there will be a vacuum to fill, one more territory to stretch between them. They do not want more pavement space, none of them do. They’re outmoded now and nobody needs them. They do not understand tarmac, or fire engines, or empty plastic packets. The intelligence of people and their quick harsh voices confuse them.
Then, suddenly, there’s a car engine, easing its way up Dove Street, slowly because it isn’t meant for cars. It’s the police, off on business of their own, unless Lorna’s daughter has gone to her room to check she’s still in bed. Against the night, the intrusion is brutal, almost blasphemous. When the squad car has gone, Lorna and the foxes step out of a doorway and discover that they’re almost there.
There are dozens of foxes, every one from every street, all come to pay their respects and to mourn; even the yawning, quivering puppies from by the Salvation Army. They are very sad.
The little god of Pottergate is sheltering against the wall of the pub, splayed on its side, toiling away with thousand-year old lungs. When it sees Lorna, it tries to rise, half rolls onto its front paws, unfurls the ragged banner of its wings. Its tongue lolls with the effort.
It is albino, like a little panther with pinkish, mouseish eyes, and its wings were once long and sharp as a seagull’s. It’s the size of a dog or a half-grown sheep, and its paws are huge and dirty and soft. Its pelt’s like an old white carpet, threaded and ruined and left out for the dustmen.
And Lorna, midwife to feral cats, kneels stiffly on the sodden ground, and she draws her legs to the side until she is sitting next to the creature. She lifts its head, and rests it with care upon her lap. Taking the scarf from her head, and twisting out a handful of water from it, she dabs at the crusts around the little god’s eyes, and cleans the foam from its mouth.
After that, she just sits there, stroking the god behind its ears, where the fur’s as soft as suede, watching over the little god of Pottergate for hours, until at last it dies in her arms, gently, the way that the darkness slips into dawn on February nights.
Bride
MISS LIDDELL WAS riding on the bus. The one that came past her flat had been full of kids headed for their schools in the city; they’d jeered at her from the long seat at the back, called her names. Rude names. Miss Liddell endured this patiently, day after day; she sat calmly behind the driver’s booth, with her hands folded upon her lap, and her back perfectly straight.
The sun was vague, and the morning was pale, greyly opalescent and blessed with light drizzle. This very morning, this one, was the perfect morning for a marriage, as was every morning before it. Miss Liddell was a lady most favoured among women. She smiled like an angel until the bus arrived at her stop.
Miss Liddell stood still at the kerbside, smoothing her nightdress straight, adjusting the lace at collar and cuff, and gazing with love upon the people of the earth. She swept precisely through the shoppers, past Monsoon and onto Gentleman’s Walk. She stopped at a shop window, and knelt before it to consider her reflection.
Miss Liddell’s hair was long and straight and thin, and the ivory-white of bones. A plastic Alice band kept it off her face; with her slender fingers, she plaited it all the way down her back, leaving the end untied. Her eyes were clear but brown; the Creator’s gift of imperfection, that she might retain humility.
The people on the market knew her by sight; the man on the haberdasher’s called out a rough Good Morning. He beckoned her over and placed an off-cut of net curtain upon her head. The woman at the meat stall shouted at him; with foul language, she called him cruel. The butcher woman was jealous. Miss Liddell secured her veil with her alice-band, and curtsied gravely. The man on the haberdasher’s was destined for Heaven, but it wasn’t her place to tell him so.
Instead, she turned right and began her beautiful journey through the city, gathering occasional scattered feathers from the tarmac. These were left for her by night by the Groom and His entourage; the bouquet, renewed every dawn, that the Bride might be ever more exquisite than the day before.
She arranged them as they came, slate-blue and white, and held them by their pointed stems in her left hand. The right contained her Bible, with a ribbon for its bookmark, held forever at the Book of Revelations. A white satin purse was looped over the crook of her elbow. Two hours later, Miss Liddell had a lavish swathe of feathers; a fan behind which she might coyly hide.
Miss Liddell processed the length of Magdalen Street in memory of the purified whore; Miss Liddell, too, broke perfume jars, but her soul was already quite, quite pure. She wept a little as she walked, shedding great round rolling tears of pity and compassion for the world. Miss Liddell made no attempt to wipe them; she simply let them fa
ll upon the pearl buttons of her wedding dress. At the flyover, she turned again and retraced the way that she had come.
Between the river and the playground, the Groom had left His wedding ring for the Bride to find. Miss Liddell placed her bouquet on the ground with care, and sat with her Bible upon her lap. It was flattish, and not a comfortable fit; the ring for this day was from a Coke can. It still bore the leaf-shaped piece that once had sealed the drink; Miss Liddell twisted the metal leaf in her hands until it came away. The ring was a little sharp, and had drawn blood from Miss Liddell’s fingertip; this was as it should be.
It was almost noon before Miss Liddell returned to the city centre to meet her Beloved. They didn’t let her in anymore at St Peter Mancroft, but even so, she stole inside the gate and placed a kiss upon the front door. It was of no matter; she knew that her Groom was not within the church anyway. He was waiting for her now, calling her to Him.
Miss Liddell’s heart was white and playful as a lamb as she skipped into the memorial garden. The Holy Spirit burst around her in the form of pigeons as she danced in a circle between their perfect wings, singing, as there was no organ music.
Loud
IT’S QUIETER IN the smoke room. The carpet’s thin and filthy with fag ash, and the emulsion above the skirting board is scuffed where it’s been kicked. The radiators are both on high and the curtains are shut. Madeleine creeps inside the door, and then stands there, holding her hands out in front of her, poised like birds.
A pair of shoes clatters down the corridor, and then more slowly there’s the pat of bare feet. Someone’s laughing. Madeleine turns carefully, looks behind her. The door is propped open with a fire extinguisher, and the escape sign is half picked off and faded yellow.
There’s nobody else in here; it’s suppertime, but the tinny scraping and the voices and the brittle air all cut with forks were just too violent, and so she tiptoed away. She folds her hands across her throat and sinks her chin to the space behind her thumb, considering her next move. Madeleine’s neck is soft and loose as kidskin, and her wedding ring bites a circle into the flesh of her finger. She is wearing a cardie in girlish pink; the meds have made her fat, so it pinches underneath the arms and the buttons gape.
There’s a chair close by. Madeleine places her slippers forward, one at a time, silent and wary, and then she sinks into it, wincing at the shade of orange and the noisy whispers of creasing fabric and chair-springs. She tucks herself into a neat square, feet together, cotton dress spread evenly over her knees.
The clock’s gone wrong; it’s flicking its second hand against a single point with a tiny and insistent battering. It’s like somebody punching a door from very far away, heard through the wrong end of a telescope. There’s a shout from the dining room, someone’s yelling, just for a moment, and then it all goes quiet. Madeleine closes her eyes and shudders. There’s a ten-second pause, awful and howling, and then the scrape of spoons.
There’s a dog-end on top of the television, poised there like a clue, balanced on its tip. The burned out fur of ash is perfectly fragile, and the gold band where the filter begins has just charred through. The walls flicker with the coloured lights of a gameshow, but the sound, thank god, is turned right down.
When Madeleine has spread her fingers over her face, and brushed her skin all over, just to check, and when she’s sure that the ponytail is keeping her hair tied back, she looks over to the coffee table, sees the remote. For a minute she looks about to reach out, but the distance is perilously huge and she daren’t.
Her palm is curled around a single fag: she puts it to her lips and moves her fingers until they’re level with the pocket of her cardigan, eases out a box of matches. It is lit without mishap. She smokes with her hand at her face, not moving the cigarette, hearing the sigh and fizz of the tobacco as the end glows red hot with every drag. Someone comes into the room; Madeleine hears the sound of their heels, but she daren’t look round. They leave without speaking.
Madeleine’s cigarette tumbles ash down her front, and the final draw on it tastes of the filter. For a moment, she’s panicked, holding the filthy smoke-leaking thing away from her, and she leans forward all in a rush, and crushes it out in the ashtray, reckless. Then, she stands up with her heels against the front of her chair, so the ash drops to the floor without her having to touch it.
Now she’s vulnerable to outside forces, standing all by herself in the smoke room. Madeleine lowers her body into the chair, rocking herself gently like a baby. It is at this moment that the television gets her. She can hear the pulsing of electricity through its umbilical cable, and the alien whiz of its brain. There’s a flat, high keening coming from it, loud enough to tear things, audible only to Madeleine and to bats.
Madeleine knows she’s lost now. For ten minutes at least, she resists, flicking her eyes around its heartless casing, concentrating on knobs or the reflections of adverts on the varnished coffee table. Eventually it’s all too much, and she’s pinned there, nailed by the eyes to the shifting faces and chaos of the screen. The ringing in her ears is amplified by the muzzy noise of static and the light bulb. She tries to think of something, something else, but there isn’t anything; she’s just a poor disconnected ear with nothing in its middle.
Then all at once someone flushes the loo outside, and people go past talking about food, and two big women with untidy hair invade Madeleine’s dissolving nest. One of them, cruel as a goddess, strides past and snatches the remote control from the table as if it were nothing at all. They throw their backsides into chairs and turn the sound up high, and Madeleine begins, very quietly, to whimper.
Mending
THE OTHER DAY, I went to a jumble sale at the ambulance station. You could buy jam jars full of marbles, and balls of knotty wool, and patent-leather handbags, and shoes that were worn down on one side of their soles. It was three o’clock; they were starting to stack the folding tables in the corner. The last one still up held all the useless things that were left and impossible to sell: unpairs of gloves and busted alarm clocks; pointless things, things only half-alive. They were so sad. I handed over three pound coins and took away a raggled heap of broken things in a shopping trolley.
At the top of the hill, I was out of puff, but the trolley stopped fighting me, and it was downhill from there to my house. The Tesco cart wouldn’t go through the front door, so I opened the sash and shoved the broken things in armfuls through the window. Then I went in and stood in the living room gazing at my haul.
It was overwhelming; everything was so broken, and so many, that I couldn’t bear to look at it all at once. I fled and sat at my kitchen table, gulping tea, while the broken things stayed silent in the living room, breathing evenly. I have made a mistake, I thought to myself; I have bitten off more than I can chew. There was so much to rescue in that drift of stuff; so many crippled things. When it got dark, I edged past the living room door and crept up the stairs. Then I sipped the dusty water in the glass beside my bed and slept; in my dreams there was the quiet sound of waiting.
I got up before the sun rose, and went to the broken things. I filled a mixing bowl with fragments and took them away to the kitchen table. With tweezers and superglue, I made myself a little mouse, with felty paws and a flickety wiry tail. She quivered in my hand whilst I threaded her fishing-line whiskers; I set her down on the mantelpiece to watch me.
After the mouse, I made three dozen others, out of bobs and bits of broken things, until the kitchen was alive with their tiny singing. The sun rose and fell again, and I went to bed.
The following day was shrill with the voices of mice; they had been at the pile of broken things during the night, and made themselves a whole tribe out of silver plate jewellery and shoelaces and spoons. When I looked in at the living room door, the heap was reduced by half. They sang all day and most of the night; the man who lived next door took to thumping on the walls. Their music was perfect a
nd pointed as needles, like the nickel comb in a musical box. When I held out my arms, they came to me, and sat by the dozens in my lap. I whispered my life to the mice, and they listened.
By Wednesday there were mice and mice and mice; we spent weeks in the living room among the broken things, and we made a city from lampshades and a mildewy raincoat. The mice fashioned chairs and beds and baby mice, and the mantelpiece became a pedestrian thoroughfare. On the nesting tables we made a shopping mall, and they hollowed out the shelf of encyclopaedias for a hospital. The man next door shouted at me sometimes, through the walls.
The doorbell rang once at 4 a.m., and all the mice froze stiff with fright. The man next door was jealous; he held his face and snarled at us through the window, so we stapled old school uniforms over the glass. The mice made skirts and waistcoats from a flower-print bedspread, and paraded along the picture rail whilst their friends all clapped.
In the meantime, I became more mouse-like myself: every day I weighed a little less. I was pleased; soon I would be light as a cobweb. Whilst I awaited my transformation, I learned the dogwhistle language of mice.
It was not long until the pile of broken things was no longer there. Everything had now been used. The mice crowded around me with their questions: what was there now to rescue; with what should they make their young? For a moment, I was silent, cold with panic, but then the answer came to me like the voice of a rodent god.
When I started to break things for the mice, they all jumped in the air and cheered. I began in the kitchen; I held the knife handles over the end of the table and whacked them with the steam iron until I divided blade from wood. When I smashed up the radio there were a million bits inside, and the plates and cups crazed and snapped like bones.
Broken Things (Salt Modern Fiction) Page 10
