Lightning Mary

by Anthea Simmons

  I knew I would understand more when I saw the eel’s bones. I wondered how many teeth it had and how wide it could open its mouth.

  When I got home, Mother was sitting in a chair, mending one of Father’s shirts. She smiled at me and moved to make a space for me to sit next to her.

  I knew what this meant. Mother meant to talk to me about stuff I hate. I stood next to her but ignored her as she patted the chair.

  ‘Come on, my big girl! I’ve got some news for you!’ she said and she tried to pull me close. I wriggled free and watched her to see what she would do next.

  ‘Oh, Mary! A little brother or sister will join us in the spring. A blessing from God!’ she said, patting her stomach.

  So that was her news. Some creature was growing. Yet another mouth to feed.

  I must have pulled a face, because she continued: ‘You’ll have babies of your own one day, Mary, and then you will understand.’

  I ignored this. Babies are such a waste of time and money. I had no time for them nor never would. I determined to speak only of things which interested me.

  ‘I saw an eel have its head chopped off today... a conger eel... and it escaped into the sea... just the body... and I am going to have the skull. Harry said I could.’

  Mother sighed and shook her head. ‘Oh, Mary. Whatever did that lightning do to that poor head of yours? You are a strange creature indeed.’

  I smiled. I like to be strange. Ordinary is what most people are and I am not. I am not ordinary at all. I am a secret scientist.

  That week the weather turned bad. October storms, the like of which had not been seen for many years, lashed the shores. The sea was grey, black, green and black again by turns. It roared and howled and smashed itself against the Cobb. The rain lashed down. The river Lym burst its banks again and thundered down Coombe Street and out to sea.

  Father forbade me to go treasure-hunting with or without him. ‘Especially now you are on your own!’ he said, winking at me. ‘Yes, my little lightning streak! Don’t you think that I don’t know about your accomplice! Still, he’s gone and now it is too dangerous for you to be out there. Far too dangerous. Your mother would never forgive me if I let you go, so be a good girl and make yourself useful sorting these findings for me. I’ll maybe teach you to use my chisels and then you can clean them up properly.’

  He gave me a great pail of rock he had collected that morning after one of the most furious storms.

  ‘Here. I cannot let you go to the cliff but here is a bit of the cliff come to you. See what you can make of this and I’ll bring you more this evening! The storms have been good to us! There are riches aplenty!’

  That meant that the land had moved a great deal and would be as treacherous as it could be.

  Father caught my eye. ‘No, Mary. Do not look to change my mind. You cannot come with me. You must stay here. I have promised your mother and I cannot go back on my word. There’s a good girl.’

  ‘Can I go to Harry and get my eel skull?’ I asked. ‘He might think I don’t want it any more.’

  ‘Tomorrow. If you go today, your mother will think you’re with me and no amount of telling her will persuade her otherwise.’

  ‘But doesn’t she know where you are going anyway?’ I retorted.

  ‘She don’t! And don’t you go telling her, there’s my little flash of lightning! She’ll boil me alive!’

  He ruffled my hair, picked up his sack and went off up towards the church and the cliff path.

  I should have told him to be careful, to stay safe, but I did not and thought nothing of it at that moment.

  I fetched my hammer, filled another pail with water and sat down on the doorstep. I started to pick my way through the lumps and clumps of mud and stone. I made three piles. One to my left – items I felt sure would turn out to be nothing. One to my right: hidden treasures, for sure. One in front of me; they might be treasures or they might be nothing. I tackled them first.

  I washed off the mud and gave each a blow with my hammer. Three crocodile teeth and one of the Devil’s fingers. He must have many hands or very many fingers because Henry and I have found more than one hundred and so that is a scientific reason why I know they are something else entirely. Some people foolishly call them thunderbolts but I am an expert in thunderbolts and I can tell you that they are too small. I also found a scuttle, just like my very first find. I wasn’t excited this time.

  There was nothing of much value in that pile but I washed it all off and set it aside.

  I considered for a long time which pile to do next. Which would bring more satisfaction? To find treasures where I thought there would be none or to find nothing where I thought to find something special? Both were bad. Both meant that the feeling in my bones could not be trusted. I felt a little fizzle of fear and then everything suddenly went very dark as a black cloud took over the sky.

  I felt strange. Mother sometimes shuddered and said a goose had walked on her grave, which was a very silly thing to say as she was not in her grave and why should it matter if a goose walked over it if she was, anyway? That moment, though, I felt very strange and thought immediately of that goose. It came into my head as clearly as if it stood before me and it looked straight at me with its yellow eyes before it vanished.

  The rain started. The Devil’s fingers glistened. They looked as if they might creep away. I quickly gathered them up in my skirt and went inside.

  Mother was standing at the table as if frozen to the spot.

  ‘Mother?’ I said, for she was staring straight ahead, looking right through me.

  ‘Mary!’ She seemed to see me at last. ‘A goose just walked over my grave!’

  I do not believe in ghoulies and ghosties or people who say they can see the future or anything stupid like that, but it gave me a fright to hear her say that. It gave me a fright and made me feel sick too.

  Mother must have seen my face change at her words for she rushed towards me and nearly smothered me in a hug which is, as you know, not something I enjoy. This time, though, I did not struggle free but let her hold me, even though my face was squashed against her so that I could barely breathe and my hands, holding the treasures in my skirts, were pinned tight to me. She smelled of onions and a rather nasty cheesy smell very like Joseph’s stockings so I just didn’t sniff again and, after a minute or two, she let me go. I lost my balance and dropped the Devil’s fingers and the scuttle on the floor. But before I could pick them up, she took hold of my shoulders, the better to stare into my eyes.

  ‘Where is your father, Mary?’ she demanded.

  ‘Will you boil him alive if I tell you?’ I asked. I was trying so hard to please them both, you see.

  Her eyes narrowed as she let go of me. ‘He’s on that blasted beach, isn’t he? He’s on that blasted beach fossicking about with nary a care in the world for us as must bide here and wait for him, afear’d for him. That man! I could murder him!’

  I nearly said that he was safer on the cliffs if she wanted to murder him there in the kitchen but I held my tongue.

  She tore off her apron and flung it to the ground so hard that a cloud of dust blew up and then she kicked the curiosities across the room. I watched them closely to see where they ended up. With luck they would not be chipped or broken.

  Then she started to sob. She shook. Her shoulders went up and down with each great cry. Finally she turned to me again. Her face was blotchy; her eyes had all but disappeared. ‘I have a bad feeling, Mary. A bad feeling. And you do too. I saw it in your face.’

  ‘Bad feelings cannot make bad things happen!’ I said.

  ‘Maybe not. But what if the bad thing has already happened? What then?’

  ‘Well, if it has happened, it has happened and there’s nothing to be done about it,’ said I. But these were brave words which hid my fears. I calmed myself by fixing my eyes on the treasures but I didn’t pick them up. ‘Besides, you said you could murder him, which would be a very
bad thing indeed.’

  She growled with annoyance. ‘As if I meant that. You do deliberately misunderstand a body, Mary.’

  But I was not really listening and she caught me staring at the scuttle wedged under the dresser.

  Her face reddened with anger. ‘Get those blasted things out of my sight!’

  I gathered them and took them upstairs to hide under the blanket on my side of the bed and then went back down to wait.

  Mother had calmed down quite a bit. Leastways, she had stopped crying. She was preparing a stew of potatoes and the last of the leeks, but she was distracted. I could see that she’d cut a finger off if she did not give the knife more of her attention. That’d be all the meat there’d be in that stew. I thought of asking if I could go and find Harry and see if his wife Christa had boiled my eel skull clean yet, but thought I had better stay and watch over Mother after all.

  I still felt sick. For all my brave talk and not believing silly stories about geese and graves, I knew in my bones that something bad had happened, but I wouldn’t give in and cry. I just sat tight and thought about the eel skull.

  Henry suddenly came into my mind, pushing the eel out. I recalled his words: ‘I hope, for your sake, that you never have to lose your father.’ I’d scoffed at him. Of course Father would die one day. Everything living dies one day... or night.

  Just not tonight.

  Please.

  It was as black as pitch by the time Joseph came home from his labours. He went straight back out again to see if Father was in his workshop but I knew he would not find him there.

  I was thinking terrible thoughts. I could not stop myself.

  Father buried in mud, his eyes and ears and nose and mouth full of the black ooze. Not able to see. Not able to breathe. Not able to scream.

  Or Father snatched by the sea and swallowed up.

  Or snatched by the sea and then thrown back against the rocks, smashed like a toy.

  Try as I might, I could not drive these images from my mind.

  Then my waking nightmares were broken by a knock at the door.

  Two men. Only one I recognised: Harry, the strong white-haired beheader of eels, his face as tanned as a bit of leather. I’ve always liked his twinkly blue eyes but they were not twinkly that night. He looked pale and anxious. He had not come to give me my eel skull, that was certain.

  ‘Hello, little Mary. Is Molly there?’

  I could feel Mother suddenly behind me. She laid her hands on my shoulders for the second time that day and pulled me close again. I held my breath.

  ‘Is it Richard, Harry? Is he... ? Is he... ?’

  She couldn’t say the word, the terrible word which would end all hope of happiness at a stroke.

  ‘No. Not...’ Seemed Harry could not say it, either. And I was more glad than I could say that he had no need to. But there was a ‘but’ – I could hear it in his voice.

  ‘There’s been an accident. Seems Richard was up on the top path on Black Ven. He must have thought to take a short cut home. Anyways, the long and the short of it, is that he fell. He fell a long way, Molly. There’s men out there now carrying him back. You need to be ready for what you will see, you and your children, for he is not a well man. Not... dead, praise be, but not well neither.’

  My mother gripped my shoulders so tightly that I could feel a scream rising in my throat. I bit my lip to stop from crying out. I despised crying. I would not cry. Not again.

  I could see some shapes emerging from the dark beyond Harry. Four men held the corners of a canvas sail which sagged from the weight of the man it carried.

  Father!

  They brought him into the house and set him on the table. The lantern’s pale light showed him to be near enough covered top to toe in mud but, running in little rivers from his head and down his cheek, was the bright, bright red of his life’s blood.

  Mother took hold of the nearest thing to hand to clean his face. It was my pinny for Sunday School, but I did not mind. She stroked his face with a tenderness I had not marked before.

  ‘That’s a girt big gash on his forehead, Molly,’ said one of the men. ‘He’s knocked himself senseless, seemingly.’

  ‘Senseless,’ sighed my mother. ‘He was senseless the day he got it into his head to walk on Black Ven. A treacherous place if ever there was one. I warned him, and nobody can say I did not. I told him t’would be the death of him one day or of the children. But he wouldn’t listen. Always a headstrong man. Well, he’s paid for it now and that’s a fact. I always said, there’s nothing but dead creatures as comes off Black Ven and here he is, near enough a dead creature himself.’

  She had bathed away the mud and now I could see the deep cut beneath the matted hair.

  ‘Must it be sewn up, Mother?’ asked Joseph, who had come to join us at the table.

  ‘No money for surgeons, Joe,’ said my mother sadly. ‘He shall have to do with Nurse Molly.’ She turned to the men. ‘I thank you, friends and neighbours, for bringing him back. You had better leave me to clean him as best I can. Joe will call you back to help us get him to his bed.’

  ‘We’ll wait in the alehouse,’ said Harry and, catching her eye, ‘but only so as to be close. We’ll not let a drop pass our lips afore we get Richard to his bed.’

  I stroked my father’s poor head, willing him with all my might to open his eyes just like he had willed me to do when the lightning struck me. ‘Come on, Father! Open your eyes for your Mary!’

  For one moment, his lids fluttered like a butterfly’s wings, and then he slept again.

  12

  A STRUGGLE BETWEEN

  LIFE AND DEATH

  Henry told me that his father was alive one day and dead the next. He said he wished he had known he was going to die so that he could say goodbye to him before he went.

  Father seemed like to die for weeks, but he didn’t, not even when he seemed almost gone, when his eyes were open but he seemed to be seeing nothing, when he ate nothing, said nothing, did not move. Mother would lift his head and tip a little water in between his lips and he would swallow some but let most of it run out of his mouth and down his beard.

  I thought about Henry and his father, taken from him with no warning. Was this my chance to say goodbye? It seemed to me that if I said goodbye, I should be excusing him and letting him go when we needed him to get better. So I did not say it. I held his hand, mopped his brow, showed him my finds and talked to him as if he was listening. I had even thought to share a letter from Henry with him, but none came.

  Joseph and I shared Mother and Father’s bed so that we might all help to keep Father warm. Winter was upon us and nights were long and cold. Days were scarce different – short and cold. We were all exhausted but we got little sleep. Father moaned and cried out and passed water in the bed for he could not rise to use the pot, so we lay there awake, feeling the hot wetness of his piss turn cold beneath our bodies and listening to his wails and Mother’s sobs.

  I was sickened to see him brought so low. He was once so strong. He could swing me up onto his shoulders with no effort at all. He could heave half a tree trunk onto a cart by himself. He could move a slab of mud and rock on the beach as easily as if it were a pebble. Now he could not lift his own head, with its mess of dirty, greying hair, all tangled and stiff with sweat and tears, and his arms were thin and wasted, the skin yellowed and slack. You could near enough count every bone in his hands and feet and sometimes I tried, tracing their whiteness beneath the skin.

  I thought he might wake up enough to pay attention to the eel’s skull. Harry had tied the two parts of the skull together with a piece of string and I amused myself making the jaws snap together as if the eel were still alive. The teeth! Front ones long and sharp and curved towards its throat. I put one hand into its maw and pretended to be a fish, trying to wriggle free. Once behind those teeth, there was no escape, I could see – and feel. I had little cuts on my knuckles to prove their sharpne
ss. Behind these daggers, a row of needles for chewing the flesh to a pulp ran all the way to the back of its throat, beyond the great holes where its eyes had been. I ran my finger over them and drew blood again.

  I sat by Father, snapping and unsnapping those jaws, imagining if the eel were twice the size, three times the size. What a monster it would be! A dragon, fierce as any fought by St George!

  I wished Henry was there with me. I would like to have shown him that eel. He could have made a drawing of it for me. I could have talked to him about Father. Maybe he would have known what to do for the best.

  I would not have told him everything. I wouldn’t have told him about the pissing in the bed or the way Father dribbled or that he was getting very thin and nearly see-through or that he smelled disgusting, even though Mother washed him down on the days that were not freezing, and I was sure that he would not have asked about all that, but he would have helped me to believe that Father would get well again. I was sure of that. Perhaps, though, the plain truth was that I would never hear from him again. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ went the saying. No doubt it was true.

  The good news was that the people of Lyme Regis were, for the most part, kinder than they’d ever been when Father was well. We discovered who our true friends were. Some righteous folk helped out of a wish to turn us all from chapel back to church, going on about their Christian duty and making it very plain that they helped for no other reason. It was very hard to take their coin or bread when they felt obliged to add that ‘he brought it on himself’ and that ‘God punishes the wicked’, meaning we Dissenters, and that we were ‘the poor innocents suffering as a consequence of Father’s wilfulness’. Joseph ordered me to bite my lip and hold my tongue and I did, though my face told the truth... or so the horrid woman from St Michael’s said as she thrust a wizened turnip and two carrots in my hands.