Bull Running For Girlsl

by Allyson Bird

  The face was unrecognisable; the nose torn away as it had been dragged along the cobblestones. The rope around his wrists was still secure, his hands a mockery of common prayer. The man had been tied to the bull and the beast had dragged its grisly burden through the streets of Pamplona long after he was dead. He was naked from the waist down, a torn bloody shirt covering the upper part of him. The most horrifying thing of all, even though most of the body was grazed and covered in blood, was that the man had been castrated.

  The police and a priest were called. The police took statements and cordoned off the area. Finally, after Elise and the boys had told them all they knew the police told them they could go.

  “Shall we go back to the hostel?” Michael asked.

  “No, not yet,” said Elise. “I need another glass of wine.”

  As they left the café the three continued to speculate over the grim incident that had taken place. Elise tried to avoid the trail of blood, which could quite clearly be seen on the street.

  “What on earth had that man done?” added Michael. “Perhaps he fell afoul of some woman’s husband?”

  Frantz shrugged, “I’d rather not talk about it. There’s a bar in the next street. Come on.”

  “Don’t you want to talk about it Elise? Frantz is always like that, avoiding things.”

  “Yes, Michael—I do but let’s find that bar first.”

  The Txoko bar was full of locals, but quiet. The three found a corner where they could discuss what had happened. The unusually silent people in the bar were staring at them, and in a city of a thousand tourists there for the bull running, it made them feel quite vulnerable. Elise wanted more wine and ordered two bottles. She drank a full glass quickly, poured herself another and one each for her friends. A withered old woman sat in a chair opposite her and seemed to challenge Elise to stare at her. Elise wasn’t entirely sure that this was a woman; her legs below the knee-length skirt seemed mannish despite their age, and lipstick didn’t sit well on her lips. Her black wig was slightly askew and Elise thought that she looked like a very poor imitation of Edith Piaf. The woman smiled—strangely—at Elise and shuffled off into the night with a brief glance over her shoulder.

  The next day was the first day of the festival in honour of Saint Fermin. It was the seventh of July. At 8 a.m. a rocket signalled that the corral doors had been opened and a second rocket heralded the entrance of the twelve bulls in the uphill stretch called Santa Domingo. Many of the young men wore white shirts and trousers with the traditional red sash around the waist, but many just wore what they felt they could easily run in. Elise wore a simple white blouse and shorts. She tied a red ribbon in her brown hair as a nod to tradition. The air smelt of sangria and sweat.

  The bulls thundered down to Ayntamiento Square, down Mercaderes and into a street called Estafeta. Elise could smell the bulls long before she saw them. By stretching her neck and pushing the boys to one side, she could just about see between their bobbing heads. Two of the bulls looked tired as if they had been running for days and wanted to give up, but the other two looked lean and excited, like they had a mean streak that stretched back generations.

  Some young men pointed and shouted, “Toro, Toro, Toro.”

  Elise could see four bulls; one turned on the spot, slipped on the cobbles, regained its footing—and came after her and the boys. The other runners shouted at them to run—to get out of the way. Michael and Frantz pulled at her arms, but somehow she got away from them. One of the animals was the largest bull she had ever seen—a giant of a black bull—and it had thundered around the corner with blood on its horns from the last runner who had come across its path. As the other bulls rushed past Elise, this huge bull stopped some distance away, stamped its feet and bellowed. She felt the blood rush to her face as she prepared to run again. From behind the wooden barrier the crowds offered her their hands, to pull her over and to safety. Elise waved her hand, shook her head and prepared to run. The crowd held their breath.

  Elise ran towards the bull as it bellowed at her again. She sprinted the distance with ease despite the heat and with the elegant grace of a true bull-runner she jumped as high as she could over the horns of the bull. Her hands briefly touched its back as she vaulted off and into the dust. The crowd cheered and applauded. All was noise and laughter—a band struck up. As the bulls disappeared down the street Elise could hear the steady thump of the drum and it echoed the beat of her racing heart. She had never felt as alive as she did in that moment. The coursing blood ran as a river in her body, a river as dark as the Styx.

  A few feet in front of Elise lay the body of Franz, covered in blood. She felt no emotion. Perhaps another bull had come along and attacked him whilst he was trying to attract the attention of the bull that charged her. She tried to get to him but the jubilant crowd swept her up as their sudden hero and placed her on the shoulders of two of the other runners. Frantz was forgotten as she felt the rush of excitement once more, giving herself over to the spontaneity and joy of the moment. She felt stronger than ever. Michael and Frantz were nothing to her now: too weak, all too malleable. Too human.

  Elise was ready for anything and wasn’t the slightest bit surprised when the withered woman came into her hostel room that night and asked her to get dressed. The woman then turned and left, expecting Elise to follow.

  Elise did follow, down dark streets to even darker alleys, where young boys lay drunk and sleeping from the earlier celebrations. She saw the shadow of a church before her and was led down some steep, stone steps into The Taurobolium, her way illuminated by torchlight. Once within the underground temple she looked up to the ceiling. She was in a grotto. Shafts of light fell from holes in the wooden canopy, a hundred tiny stars. The walls were lined with stone benches and decorated with paintings and several carved reliefs. One statue was of Mithras killing the sacred bull; he knelt on the back of the animal, pulling its head back in submission. A stone serpent and a dog drank from the open wound.

  The women were waiting for her. Two undressed Elise and gave her a soft full-length white gown to wear. She put it on in silence. When a glass of wine was given to her she took it and drank without hesitation. Within a minute she felt the effect, stronger than she had expected but not unpleasant, and she did not surprise herself when she took another willingly.

  “Let us rejoice in the company of the Gods,” said one woman wearing a similar gown.

  “Let us rejoice,” replied the women.

  Without fear Elise took one step forwards and swayed a little. She felt giddy, her head full of images of the bull and the ritual—which she knew would soon take place. A bull was to be sacrificed; she knew enough about the cult of Mithras to know that. Elise was lowered into a pit. No woman had ever been an initiate, but she wasn’t afraid. As the warm blood swilled over her face and dropped onto the cold stone she felt a surge of power within her and it was then that she understood. She wasn’t to be a follower of Mithras.

  Men, women and children could be heard calling incantations, and the chanting grew louder. Elise could hear flutes, drums, and cymbals, all building to a strange crescendo, then some power took full possession of her—she felt it surge through her body; she embraced new knowledge of every creature that had ever walked the earth and beyond, within the supernatural lands. She had become the manifestation of the goddess on earth—she who moved the universe—the goddess of judgement in human, female form. For years she had waited in doubt and fear for some feeling of purpose. Now Elise joined with the goddess in jubilation. As she looked up and cupped her hands to the slowing stream of blood, she stared without pity into the terrified—dying—eyes of Michael.

  To her followers, who eagerly pushed forwards to anoint their foreheads with the blood of the boy, she spoke the words:

  “I am Cybele, Damkina, Gaia, and Isis. I am the Magna Mater and you will all follow me. I accept this sacrifice, which will be one amongst many.”

  In The Hall of the Mountain King

  “J
ust you wait, it won’t be long.

  The man in black will soon be here.

  With his cleaver’s blade so true.

  He’ll make mincemeat out of you.”

  German nursery rhyme.

  Connie couldn’t remember what age she was when she learnt that men could be bad to children. She was young enough not to know the sexual details but old enough to know to run when a male patient of Prestwich Asylum asked her to go into the bushes with him. There were a few such men. She always believed that she could run faster than them and had carried on with that expectation.

  Connie lived on a small council estate called Clough Walks, of some twenty or fewer properties, at the end of the long stretch of Gardener Road in Prestwich, which was on the main northern route into Manchester. The beginning of Clough Walks was near Spion Kop where an enormous wooden cross had been placed to commemorate the dead of the Boer War. Not far from the gates to the war memorial lay a small, cobbled road that led to a tiny farm. It was called a farm but was really an old, detached Victorian house. Here, the owners grew quite a lot of their own food and kept a few chickens. Connie lived close by in a three-bed semi that backed onto the asylum fields, and unlike the Elysium fields they were not where the good and the great went to rest. The inmates of the large psychiatric hospital worked in the asylum fields, grew their own cabbages, turnips, and wheat in summer. Occasionally they would throw a few cabbages over the fence for Connie to give to her mother.

  On one cold, frosty morning, when the windows were green-glaze frozen on the inside, Connie opened the curtains and started to scratch away. She scratched away at the frost, forming small stick figures on the pane and then she looked down on the asylum field, at the little men who mimicked her own tiny creations. The men in the field chipped painfully at the soil, with no chance whatsoever of getting to whatever was buried in the frozen ground. She got back into bed.

  The night before, she had imagined the sharp features of Jack Frost at her window, tap-tapping on the glass, his cold, foul breath seeking small cracks to get to her. He was searching, probing and picking at the frame. Connie hid under the covers and sang to herself in an attempt to keep him out. But, she saw him in her mind—his crystal claws, harder than any diamond, and sharpened to needle points.

  Realising that it was breakfast time, she got out of bed again but quickly withdrew her foot from the floor. The linoleum was cold to her bare feet. Her mother had promised her a new carpet in the spring, so Connie hopped around on each foot for a few seconds until she found her red slippers. She rubbed her feet against the back of each leg in turn; her long, lemon nightie with tiny orange paisley swirls on it, although usually warm, kept out little of the cold.

  She tried to make more little patterns in the corners of her window, where the frost was thickest. As she did so Connie became aware of a long, pallid face staring up at her from the frozen field. The other patients had given up trying to harvest from the winter’s graveyard, and sloped off—to the treatments that now awaited them. This one, pale figure stood alone, features nipped and gaunt, with hollow eyes. Connie jumped back from the window—but the man had seen her. He removed his hat and tipped his head a little, the bony peak of his bald dome looked unusual to her, as if it had borne the brunt of an unnatural birth. Connie’s sister, Penny, had told her all about birth and how a baby was squished to within an inch of its life, and back again. Connie thought that this man must have started with a disadvantage because of the shape of his head, but she knew enough not to feel too sorry for him.

  The man fumbled at his trousers and pulled something white and thin from within. It was then that Connie pulled the edges of the red curtains closer together and backed quickly away from the window.

  Wanting to dismiss the image from her head Connie ran down the stairs, swung around the banister, straight into her older brother.

  “Clumsy clod—watch it!”

  “Watch yourself you fat banana!”

  Rog had the same brown hair as Connie but his was longer than hers. He had kept his Beatles hairstyle of a few years earlier and refused to give it up, along with narrow winklepicker shoes. He was a tall fifteen-year-old and hung out with three mates of the same age from Gardener Road.

  The kitchen door opened and Aunt Doreen came into view. “Quit it you two. Connie, come and give your auntie a big kiss.”

  Connie’s eyes widened in horror as she stared at the red lipstick and caught a whiff of secondhand Avon perfume. She dodged past her auntie to give her mother a good morning kiss; Mother never wore lipstick and she always smelt of chamomile soap and fresh washing.

  “Give your auntie a kiss, Connie.”

  She looked warily at the red lips again but relented, remembering that her auntie had given her an enormous Easter egg, the box a colourful, cardboard gypsy caravan. She hoped that her mother wasn’t going to spit on her handkerchief and wipe lipstick off Connie’s face like she usually did.

  She did.

  “Eat your toast Connie.”

  Wiping her cheek, and very much annoyed with her mother, she parked herself on the white wooden kitchen chair. The seat was padded with a sort of plastic covering; on it there was a pattern of pale blue circles and red triangles with black lines darting through each shape. Her mother had said that the kitchen table and chairs were modern, the in-thing, and that it would be a welcome replacement to the old utility furniture that had been taken off to the dump.

  Connie’s auntie sometimes called in for a cup of tea after she had finished her night shift at the asylum. She never seemed tired and hardly paused for breath when she related her stories.

  “Rotten trick it is—seen it done before. Some patient dies an hour before the end of the shift—the nurses put them in a warm bath for a bit, then dry them off and slip them back between the sheets to look like they had just died on shift change-over. Dirty trick and they think we don’t know—won’t tell on them though. You never know when you’ll need a favour in return.”

  The toast became suddenly all too interesting and Connie thought about what she had learnt when in the presence of adults; that if a child was looking at something intently, adults tended to think the child wasn’t listening and talked about all sorts of things in front of them. Her auntie and her mother were no different.

  Connie took her time eating. That’s what ten-year-olds did during the Christmas holidays when they couldn’t get out of the house. Six days until Christmas Day and, hopefully, her new bicycle and some smaller presents. Connie had not found the hiding place for the latter and she had checked the usual places—bottoms of wardrobes, tops of wardrobes and under her mother’s bed.

  The previous summer, Connie had wandered the perimeter of the hospital grounds. The boundary of the hospital, or at least part of it, was at the back of her house and skirted the edge of the Clough. She used to try and find ways into the place—unlike the inmates who wanted to get out. Some had been there all their lives because they had a baby out of wedlock, as Connie’s mum called it, and the baby put into care. Ways to get in. Connie wanted to see these women and perhaps get them out.

  The day before her sister’s wedding Connie left her house, number thirteen, and ran down the wide pathway into the woods. A little way along, set against overgrown rhododendrons and brambles, were the old toilets. The roof was completely missing and the old concrete framework stood stark against the greenery. Graffiti covered the exposed walls; there were crude drawings of big-breasted women, perched on massive cocks, whilst flat men with goggle eyes looked up. No one used those toilets anymore, the block being as rundown as the Clough with its overgrown pathways and dark, impenetrable bushes. The toilets were boarded up—except someone had prised off a few of the boards. From a distance she watched as a man, one of the hospital patients, ducked underneath the broken boards.

  Connie knew that she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help herself; she crept up to the toilets and climbed the tree that overhung the gent’s side. The old man was crouched
low on the ground, for the toilet bowls had been smashed ages ago, and he squatted amid last year’s dead leaves and old newspapers. Connie suddenly felt ashamed and backed away slowly, quietly down the branch. A snap, a snarl, and instantly the same hollow-eyed man looked up at her, a sick smile on his wasted face.

  “Do you want to see? Do you want to see?”

  Connie didn’t want to see. She scrambled down the tree, legged it up to number thirteen with her heart thumping to the sound of her feet.

  “Connie! Connie! Is that you? Tea is ready.”

  “I’m not hungry, Mum.”

  “Not hungry? Of course you’re hungry. I’ve never known you not to be.”

  May felt her daughter’s face but couldn’t decide whether she had a fever or not.

  “Can I watch some telly before bed?”

  “I suppose, but only a little, then bed.”

  The siren-sound of Dr.Who met her ears as she switched on the telly and Connie lost herself in another world of monsters. Only these monsters she could deal with; they were safely behind a glass screen, and—unlike the male patients of Prestwich Asylum—they couldn’t get out. Connie couldn’t believe that she was making plans to get in—but that would have to wait until after Penny’s wedding, which was the very next day.

  The wedding day, a Saturday, was a flurry of activity. Her sister was to be married at Jackson Row in Manchester, the ceremony to be conducted by a registrar, and then back to The Church Inn for the wedding breakfast. The Church Inn was an old seventeenth-century pub where Connie’s family had been christened, married and buried for seventy years. Her granddad had rung the bells there at the end of the Second World War, and her mother had practically given birth there; she had gone into labour over half a pint of Guinness and then been rushed off to hospital to give birth to Connie. The present owner of The Church Inn had a glass display case full of tiny sculptures of animals and little dolls, and he said that Prestwich had something to do with actual witches. Connie knew this to be untrue because she had written about Prestwich at school, and it was named after a priest’s dairy farm.