Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  She turned away and smiled.

  The smile was embarrassed and mocking. Jo Ann laughed. The musicians standing by laughed. Pete thought, well, I made them laugh and it’s late and now I should go home before the storm gets here.

  But he knew that he wouldn’t go home. He knew that he had to bring this girl around to his way of seeing himself. He had to stay with her and be with her till she recognised his inner beauty. He had to.

  The rain had begun now. The wind whipped it sideways so that it stung the windows of the bus like a shower of pins.

  Pete’s coffee was cold. His Memphis thoughts had held him so still, he’d forgotten to drink it. Only his heart and his eye were jumping everywhere.

  It was raining in Mary’s room. When the lightning came, the rain had a shine on it.

  Mary lay and stared at it. She thought, this is not meant to happen. Rain in a room is all wrong.

  But it was of no vast significance. She was fifteen and she could see and feel damage all around. It had begun in her. Her flesh had refused to harden as she believed it would. It had disobeyed her mind. In her mind, she was Martin Ward, a lean boy.

  She touched her breasts. The skin of them was very white, their texture indescribable, like no other part of her. They seemed like sacs enveloping the embryos of other things, as if something had laid two eggs under her skin and now these parasites were growing on her.

  She always touched them when she woke, hoping vainly to find them shrunk or burst or sliced away. She touched them under the bedclothes in the dark, where she couldn’t see them. She couldn’t stand to look at them. In the day, she wound a crepe bandage round and round them seven times and fastened it with a safety pin. She was Martin in her mind and she hoped that, with the bandages on, it would be her mind that showed.

  They were still there, hard yet squashy under her pyjamas. It was raining in her room but nothing else extraordinary had occurred, like the disappearance of her breasts. Mary had studied the monsoon in Geography. Rain could bring change. There could be rivers where streets were, with dry goods and silk tassels floating on the water. Some people could be saved from starvation and others ruined. It might be the same in Swaithey, but nothing had happened to her.

  Mary got up and went to the window. The next time the lightning came, she could see something large and metal lying on the grass. It was the television aerial. It had lost its original shape. Now, there would be nothing on the television screen for Estelle except a white storm. She would sit down in front of it and there would be no picture and no voices, so she would get up again and go looking for her pills that she carried round with her and put down anywhere and lost.

  Mary listened for sounds of her family awake, but nobody seemed to be moving about and she thought this typical of them – a tempest comes and they all stay asleep in their own useless dreams and never hear it. Then, in the morning, they’ll be amazed: Oh look, the roof’s blown away, the cows have gone mad with fear and reared up in their stalls like stallions, the chickens are swimming! Sonny will swear and shout. Estelle will sit down with her pills and pull grey hairs from her head. Timmy will dry the chickens, one by one, in a tea towel and they will peck his knees.

  Mary put on her dressing gown and fetched her torch from her night table. She liked her room. She didn’t want it ruined by rain.

  The house was silent. Mary tip-toed like a thief. In the kitchen she found Sonny asleep with his head on the table in a puddle of stout. The room smelled of his stout breath. Mary shone her torch on his face. There were bubbles like spittle in his coral ear. Since he’d bought his combine harvester and gone into debt for it, his drinking had got bad. Mary thought, one day, he will fall over on the earth and his ear will will hit a stone – a stone that was never picked up and put into a starfish pail – and he will die.

  She went to a cupboard and found some bowls. She decided she would set them out in a line under the eaves of her room and watch over them, like a person watching over saucers of spice in a Bombay market. The big monsoon drops would clank into them, making a peculiar kind of music.

  Timmy’s Angle (1)

  Timmy Ward hadn’t passed the Eleven-Plus exam. Long division he saw as a queue of numbers at a gate. You had to open the gate and make them go through, but they would not. And then there was his spelling. He thought the first two letters of ‘world’ were w and r; he thought ‘America’ must have a y in it.

  He was sent to the Secondary Modern School in Leiston. He struggled to understand what a cross-section was. He set his hair alight with the flame from a Bunsen burner. He thought, the air they give you to breathe here in this school is old. It’s been breathed before. You can’t see anything clearly in it.

  On Friday afternoons, his class went swimming at the Leiston baths. Pale, greenish light fell on the water and on the white limbs of the children. Those who couldn’t swim were towed up and down, like barges by their horses, held by a strap on a long pole. Some of them were afraid of the water but Timmy wasn’t. Here, at the baths, the air was luminous and when Timmy’s feet kicked off from the slippery tiles to launch him, weightless, on a width of breaststroke, he felt as happy as a frog.

  From widths, he progressed to lengths. The swimming master was surprised by his speed. He was small for his age and a dreamy-seeming boy. He would look peculiar in a team. The swimming master told his wife: ‘We’ve got this little lad from Leiston Secondary and I’ve never seen a boy swim quite like that.’

  The only other time Timmy felt anything like his swimming-happiness was on Sundays in church. He still sang in the choir. He knew grown-ups cried at the sound of his high voice. The air above the choir stalls did not smell as if it had been breathed before and the light from the stained glass had the clarity of water.

  When he swam, his body followed an imaginary horizontal line that pulled him on. Singing the Psalms, he sent his voice up an invisible vertical wire.

  These two lines made a 90o angle in his mind. A 90o angle was a simple thing and this gave him hope that all the other more complicated sums he couldn’t understand at school would, in some future time, turn out to be superfluous. But he wondered where the two arms of his 90o angle were going. Did they stop in blank space or go on until they collided with something?

  He began to search, while lessons went on around him – while meals at home were eaten in silence in front of Estelle’s television – for the thing with which they might collide, but he couldn’t see anything at all, only the two lines going on and on and up and up.

  He wanted to tell Estelle about his angle. He asked her to come and sit down in his room. He closed the door. Estelle couldn’t bear to be told important things. She wanted nothing to be important and nothing to matter. She stood up and walked around Timmy’s room, looking at the things he’d pinned up on the walls, one of which was a list of the winners in the men’s swimming events in the Olympics of 1960 and Estelle began to read out: ‘J. Devitt (Australia) 100 metres freestyle, 55.2 sec. M. Rose (Australia) 400 metres freestyle, 4 min. 18.3 sec …’

  ‘Please sit down,’ said Timmy.

  ‘Yes, Tim,’ she said. But she didn’t sit. She examined a dusty palm cross, a set of instructions for life-saving with drawings of a drowning person who could have been boy or girl, child or man, it was hard to say, and a photograph of herself and Sonny standing in front of the combine, neither of them smiling.

  She said: ‘I’m no good at secrets. I always forget to keep them. Better not to tell me one.’

  So Timmy changed his mind about the angle. He said: ‘It isn’t a secret. I wanted to ask you, can you come to the swimming gala at Ipswich?’

  She laughed. ‘Gala!’ she said. ‘What a word!’

  ‘Can you?’

  She looked amazed. ‘Will there be diving?’ she enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ said Timmy.

  ‘High diving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I like to watch that.’

  ‘So will you come? I might win the
under-13s boys’ butterfly.’

  Of course,’ she said, ‘if it’s not too grand, as long as no one has to pretend it’s grand.’

  And then she told Timmy that she had to go, that it was time for Hancock’s Half-Hour and that she didn’t like to miss any of her favourite shows.

  Timmy knew that his father wouldn’t understand about the horizontal and vertical lines, but he needed someone else to think about where they were going and whether they were likely to end. So he went into Mary’s room late at night and shone his Woolworth’s torch onto her sleeping head. She didn’t move, but just opened her eyes and looked at the light. Her pillow was bunched up. Underneath it Timmy saw a pile of bandages. Still not moving, Mary said: ‘Timmy, fuck off out of my room.’

  He turned round and went back to his bed. He thought about the bandages and how the sight of them had been revolting. He had gone to talk about a secret thing, his angle, and instead he had seen the bandages, which he knew from the way they’d been pushed under the pillow, were part of some awful secret of Mary’s.

  He said a God Bless prayer and left her out of it. He thought how stupid he’d been to imagine that his sister, who cared for nothing and no one except herself and her school and Cord and the Harker family, would tell him anything helpful about an imaginary thing with a measurement of 90o.

  And he decided that when he went out with Sonny after school to feed the hens he would tell him what he’d seen in Mary’s room in the night. Then, Sonny would do something about it. He would do something about Mary.

  The Forest of Long Ago

  Sonny did something.

  He crooked his left arm round Mary’s neck and pinioned her against his chest. With his right hand he pulled off her school tie and opened her shirt. She screamed. She tried to push his hand away. She kicked his shin.

  The crepe bandages were exposed. They were grey by now. They could have been secretly washed and hung to dry out of Mary’s window, but part of her had refused to believe that she would keep on needing them.

  Sonny pushed her in front of him towards the kitchen table. She clawed at his arm. He pulled open a drawer and took out the kitchen scissors. His wrist was against her windpipe, beginning to choke her. She felt blood go streaming to her eyes. She felt her legs weaken.

  Sonny cut into the wad of bandage in the cleft between Mary’s breasts. The scissors were blunt and the bandages wound round her seven times. One arm of the scissors dug into her breast bone, bruising her.

  She hauled her neck free of the choking wrist, pushing her head against Sonny’s chest. His breath began to mist up her glasses. He was breathing hard from his exertions. She could smell his body which had never touched hers since she was a little girl in his arms. She felt a sickly sorrow, like a dose of poison going into her and spreading all through her.

  She started to cry. This was a thing she never wanted to do and never wanted him to see as long as she lived. Not crying was what had given her hope. Now she was sobbing and she couldn’t stop. She begged him to let go of her. Screamed and begged.

  When he’d cut through the wedge of bandage, he pulled back her shirt. He held her breasts in his hands. He pushed them up, showing them to her. He said: ‘Look at them. Go on. You look at them!’

  She had her eyes closed. The tears came out and ran down her face and fell onto Sonny’s hands. She thought, this is the worst moment of my life. This is worse than my mother at Mountview.

  Sonny pushed her away and she fell onto the gritty paments of the kitchen floor. She struggled to find the two sides of her shirt and close it. Sonny kicked her thigh. ‘You’re an abomination,’ he said. ‘That’s what you are.’

  He kicked out again with his boot, then Mary heard him walk out of the kitchen and slam the door behind him.

  She thought, now it’s over. Except that it isn’t. It’s now that it all begins.

  She packed her suitcase.

  She had more to put in it than the time she’d gone to live at Cord’s. She had books on the English Civil War and a copy of King Lear. She had her magic props and her favourite sheets of marbling. She had a hockey stick and a Baby Ben alarm clock and a box camera.

  She trembled. She took out her photographs of Lindsey. She wanted Lindsey to walk out of the little black and white snaps wearing an angora jersey and to put her arms round her.

  She washed her face. Her cheek was grazed and her eyes stung. She threw away the cut bandages. They stank of fear. She threw away the shirt that Sonny had torn. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and a smell of Irish stew came up into her room. She thought, I will never sit round the kitchen table with them again and eat what they’re eating. There will be just the three of them for always.

  The suitcase was a cheap thing. Grandmother Livia had owned bottle-green luggage trimmed with pigskin and with her initials, L.C., engraved between the clasps, but this case seemed made of metal and board. Mary thought, if you know who you are, if you have a name you love, you can travel with green luggage and shout for a porter over the heads of other people. If you are Martin Ward and you have white breasts, you pack your life up in cardboard and carry it away, always away, always on and never knowing where.

  The sight of her room made her pause as she was about to leave it. It was the only thing she didn’t want to abandon. She felt sorry for the room. Nobody would go into it to turn on a light or draw the curtains against the dark. When it rained through the holes in the lath and plaster roof no one would set out a line of bowls.

  It was an autumn evening, full of the scent of fires. From the sitting room came the sound of television laughter. ‘Laughter,’ Edward Harker once said, ‘is our postponement of death.’

  When Mary walked out into the yard, two shadows went in front of her – her own shadow and the shadow of the suitcase. They kept on going and Mary followed them and they did not look behind and no one called to them to stop.

  She had no plan.

  The money she possessed was five shillings and eight pence.

  She remembered when she’d run away to Irene’s and told Pearl stories about Montgolfier and the universe. She didn’t think there would be any time for her in Harker’s house at the moment. And this was what she wanted, for somebody to give her time.

  Her first thought was that somehow, by changing buses, she would get to Gresham Tears. Cord wouldn’t comment on her heavy suitcase. The Albertine roses round the door would still be in bloom. Cord would say: ‘Room’s ready. Bed’s made up. Ginger beer’s in the larder.’ But then what? They would sit by the wireless. She would try to tell Cord things that he would not be able to believe. She would do him harm. He would blow his nose to conceal his shock and his sadness. He would murmur: ‘Damn rum show,’ into his hankie.

  She reached the end of the lane. She put the case down and took out the hockey stick, which was making it heavier than she could bear. She carried the stick like a rifle over her left shoulder. She thought how comforting it must be to be a soldier and to have a regiment you could be proud of and which was proud of you.

  She abandoned the idea of going to Gresham Tears. She knew that before it was dark, and before the suitcase got too heavy to be borne, she would arrive somewhere else, and she did.

  She arrived at Miss McRae’s.

  Miss McRae was eating a lone supper of kippers. She had retired from teaching. She was growing old in the brown darkness of her cottage. When she saw Mary with her suitcase, she thought, now I can be of use again. Good.

  She removed her half-eaten kippers and made a pot of tea. She handed Mary a fine china cup and saucer and Mary asked: ‘Did you have this china in the lighthouse?’

  ‘I don’t remember, dear,’ said Miss McRae, ‘and that is the most vexing thing about getting old – not remembering.’

  Mary found it difficult to drink the tea. She wondered if Sonny had made a dent in her gullet.

  Miss McRae said: ‘Take your time, Mary. Take your time.’

  Mary said: ‘Now that I’m here, I�
�m afraid to tell you. I’m afraid to tell anyone.’

  Miss McRae said: ‘Well, I see from the stick that you’ve been playing hockey. Would you like to talk about that? What position on the field do you take?’

  ‘I’m a winger,’ said Mary. ‘I can run very fast.’

  ‘You always could. That I can remember.’

  Mary looked round the room. The ceiling was very low, too low for Miss McRae, who didn’t diminish like some elderly people, but kept on being upright and tall like a fir. And she looked, now, as if she were unable to bend, as if she were petrified inside her clothes. When she sat, her body made a stiff but perfect right-angle in the chair.

  After a while, when she’d drunk a little of the tea, Mary said: ‘I’m never going home again.’

  ‘No,’ said Miss McRae.

  Then Mary said: ‘Someone has to help me.’

  There was a long silence. Mary took off her glasses and cleaned them on the sleeve of her blazer. Miss McRae sat perfectly still and straight, waiting.

  Mary thought, perhaps after all it was Lindsey I should have told. That night in my room, or after that. Perhaps, after all, she wouldn’t have hated me and would have helped me somehow. But now here she was face to face with Miss McRae, in a low space that smelled of kippers.

  A sense of such shame began to grow in her that she could feel herself aching to disappear, to be dead and forgotten.

  The silence went on. Mary replaced her glasses on her nose. She thought, in a minute I’ll get up and leave and go nowhere, just sleep out in a beanfield or under a stack.

  ‘Mary,’ said Miss McRae, ‘do you know what my name is?’