by Allyson Bird
Not many people paid attention to Connie on the morning of the wedding. Her hair had been cut to a short, brown bob the day before. Connie’s mini dress was a mass of psychedelic blue and lime-green swirls, to be slightly subdued by a pale-blue coat and blue shoes. Connie retreated to her bedroom, away from the palaver that her older sister and mother were making. They were frantically trying to alter her sister’s Biba wedding dress. Everything had been left to the last minute. Connie’s father, Raymond, had been sent off to take the wedding cake to The Church Inn.
The wedding ceremony itself was a hurried, ushered-in affair; the usual relatives whom Connie hardly knew and would not see until the next family occasion, wedding, christening, or funeral. The turnout was small because it was a winter wedding and a few had made their excuses that it was too cold to attend and stand about for photos, and suchlike.
After the brief ceremony, most got lifts or took a taxi to the pub where the real celebration started. Connie was small enough to dodge most of the relatives but the occasional one would catch sight of the swirl of blue and lime-green and ask her if she liked school or perhaps The Beatles. Connie didn’t bother to tell them that she liked Pink Floyd instead, although she had tried to tell her auntie a few months earlier that she used to like The Beatles, only her auntie had changed the conversation to school again. Connie was beginning to think that school was all adults could talk to children about.
After the meagre buffet, and bored by the fact that she was the only child at the wedding (her sister, Penny, was pregnant but Connie wasn’t interested in that), she looked about for something to do. She looked at the silent jukebox and thought about asking her mother if she could put it on but her mother was deep in discussion with two older women, and Connie knew better than to interrupt those family conversations. Penny’s new husband, Jim, sat next to his young bride. He looked sheepish and was downing pints as if there was no tomorrow.
It grew dark early at that time of year. Connie stared out of The Church Inn window. If she was going to go across to the churchyard to see the gravestones she would have to do it before it was too dark to see anything. She still hadn’t found the oldest one. Shifting quietly through her relatives and avoiding her father, who was leaning against the bar looking absently in the opposite direction, Connie scooted out of the main entrance across some cobbles, and into St. Mary’s churchyard.
St. Mary the Virgin Parish Church was well off the main road and situated in a cul-de-sac. The graveyard had been her playground for most of the summer. The vicar had told her about one coat of arms that was high up inside the church. She had been attracted to it because on it was a carving of a mermaid and the vicar told her that the motto of the Prestwich family to which it belonged was “In God have I put my trust.” Connie didn’t know if she should really trust anyone, including God.
From her house in Clough Walks she could get straight onto the pathway, through the woodland and up to the graveyard. Her mum trusted her out in the Clough and Connie never worried her mother about the bad men.
The gravestones intrigued Connie. She once found what she had thought to be the oldest, but her brother teased her that it wasn’t and so she was still determined to find it. She thought the oldest was 1665. The family of Thomas Collier had died in that plague year and the youngest child was only a few weeks old. Connie was peering closely at another upright stone for dates and causes of death, when a figure suddenly bobbed up before her.
“Boo!” Her brother’s red face loomed in on her.
“Absolute bastard!” Connie shouted as she reached around the stone and tried to swipe at him.
“Mum won’t be happy with that language—even if you got it from me.” Rog smiled his most mischievous smile. “And that dress—you look a right lemon.”
Rog had five years on her but she still chased him around the graves, slipping on the green moss that covered the stones, until she was exhausted. Pointing and laughing, Rog made his way out of the gate across to The Church Inn. Connie recovered her breath and walked down the slippery path to the far side of the Church, to carry on her search for the oldest date, before nightfall.
Totally absorbed in her task, Connie didn’t notice the fading light until it was almost impossible to see the dates on the stones. She thought she saw a shadow, over near the rhododendron bushes that surrounded the churchyard, but she just assumed it was Rog pissing about again.
Connie gave up. She couldn’t see the dates anymore and her neck was aching.
As she turned, she felt a hand grab her, and another fall across her mouth. With almost supernatural strength her attacker pulled her rapidly back into the bushes and threw her on her back. Some filthy cloth was thrust into her mouth. She gagged at the taste. Connie was terrified by a cold hand fumbling at her tights, and delving into her knickers.
He whispered in her ear. “You’re my girl now.”
His full weight fell upon her and suddenly she heard Rog’s voice.
“You dirty bastard, get off my sister. GET OFF!”
There was a rustle of leaves and the man threw himself to one side, fending off the blows from her brother. The man clenched a fist and struck at Rog. It was enough to stun him momentarily and Connie could hear more rustling of leaves as the man managed to get away through the dense undergrowth. She then heard the thud of hard boots on cobblestone, as he made his escape.
Rog gently pulled Connie out from under the bushes.
“Are you okay? Did he—”
Connie’s tights were half way down her thighs. With difficulty, and sobbing a little, she pulled them up as far as she could.
“Connie. Did he?” Rog’s voice was more insistent.
It was hard to see her brother’s face above her in the darkness, but she reached up and bent his ear down to her mouth.
“It’s all right Connie, no one can hear.”
“No.” The answer came with the quietest of sobs.
“Come on Connie. Let’s go and tell Dad. He’ll want to ring for the police.”
Connie pulled at his arm. “No Rog, I don’t want them to know. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have been out here alone, in the dark. I know better too. I don’t want to let them down. They won’t trust me anymore. They’ll never let me out.”
“But we can’t let him get away with it. What if he does it to someone else?”
“Rog. Please. I don’t want them to know. There must be another way.”
They could both hear laughter and the jukebox was playing a familiar tune, The Beatles’ “Not a Second Time.”
“Okay Connie. For now I will not.”
Connie was very quiet for the next few days. Rog kept looking at her in a funny way and her parents commented more than once about how silent the house had become. She tried to carry on as if nothing had happened; in her head, it hadn’t. She was careful not to go into the garden. There were no cabbages left in the fields for the patients to gather now, so they wouldn’t be back until spring. She might be safe until then and in spring she would be safe anyway as she would be more careful. Rog had taken to meeting her from school, skiving off after the lunch break for a few days, until the headmaster informed their parents. Anyway, she felt fine now. She was big enough to cope. Both their parents worked full time, so she was on her own until Rog hurried home from the comprehensive school.
She hadn’t seen her assailant’s face but she knew him all right.
Occasionally, May let her go to work with her at the hospital. Her mother cleaned the doctor’s quarters with her Spanish friends, Mercedes, Valbina, and Maria. Connie always wondered where all the women with babies were. The doctors all spoke foreign languages and seemed strange to her. They had strange doctors for strange patients. They didn’t like a child in the hospital. She could sense that.
Doctor Theodore once said to Connie’s mother. “A child shouldn’t be in here, it isn’t right.”
Connie had once walked past a locked ward and peeped through the little window, only to see a
bulky man sitting bolt-upright in bed, with his hands under the bed covers. She had quickly backed away from the door, hoping he couldn’t see her.
After a while, Connie’s mum stopped taking her into the hospital.
Then came the day she couldn’t run fast enough.
She was walking down Gardener Road, after school, when that same man found her again. She had been to Parson’s corner shop, down a side street, almost opposite the uphill path that led to the war memorial. He had been watching her. The road was quiet and it was getting dark. Connie left the comparative safety of Gardener Road and walked into Clough Walks. The route lay between sparse trees, to the small estate on which she lived.
As he grabbed her she screamed. From out of nowhere, her brother and his friends emerged. Two were carrying knives. Immediately the man let go of Connie and backed towards the iron railings.
Rog put a protective arm around her. “Connie, get off home now and not a word to anyone, right?”
She nodded obediently and ran off towards their house.
The wooden cross is associated with Christ and criminals. In the early morning light Connie got dressed quickly, ran up the hill to the war memorial and entered the high, green privet enclosure that surrounded the cross. She looked up into the hollow eyes of the pallid man and smiled. Rusty nails had been hammered through his wrists and the man’s head lolled onto his chest. His blood stank.
Her brother knew how to look after her, and she liked that.
Hardly anyone went up to the war memorial in winter. It was two days later, when a woman discovered the crucifixion while looking for her dog. She found the animal sitting on the ground, hanging its head, and whimpering beneath the lifeless corpse.
Rog and his friends had made sure the pallid man was quite dead. They had made sure that what he did to Connie wouldn’t happen to anyone else.
Hunter’s Moon
“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.” Oscar Wilde is first reported as saying this about absinthe, by Ada Leverson, in 1930.
Susan caught the TGV from Paris, a bottle of absinthe in her backpack. In her head, the plan of a novel that refused to be written, at least until she had settled into her friend’s farmhouse near Saint Seurin Sur L’Isle, not far from the town of Montpon Menesterol, which itself was on the edge of Le Foret de la Mole, in the Dordogne. She walked from the small station, her rucksack heavy, the Stone Roses playing over and over again on her iPod. Typically, she had packed too many books. She had a couple of kilometres left to travel, on a windy October afternoon.
The woman who had been looking after the farmhouse left a bottle of Bordeaux on the doorstep, and a spray of late white wild roses and briar thorn, to welcome Susan on her arrival. That cheered Susan as she had just recovered from glandular fever (been kissing too many low-lifers—she suspected). Also, there had been the fire. Although almost six months had passed, the scene surrounding that terrible night was still too fresh in her mind—and she had left her Manchester house feeling some relief.
We were asked to leave the street as they brought the bodies out. Some other neighbours took us in. Whilst the paramedics worked hard, the fireman broke into our house next door to check the property. The cats got out, fleeing into the backwoods. They didn’t want to watch either. We stared out through cold glass, like stricken zombies, mesmerised by the flashing lights of the paramedic’s vehicle. “Why wasn’t it rushing away?” I thought.
The kitchen was in true French style, with huge stone sink and a vast cooking range. Le Creuset was everywhere in orange and the name reminded her of a small, French general or a loaf of bread; Susan could never make her mind up which. She took off her rucksack, reached for the absinthe and thought better of it. Determined to leave the bottle alone for awhile, she took the white bedding from the downstairs bedroom, intending to sleep in the big double bed in the converted loft. Susan buried her nose in the duvet, which smelt of lavender, and struggled with the billowing mass up the old wooden staircase to a large room, where a door (presumably once used when winching something up for storage) opened up to nothing but the foggy fields beyond. Susan left the door slightly open, looking forward to the cold of the morning mist. She would soon be in the warmth of the thick white mass and would not care. A near-full moon hung low above the horizon and the blue-shuttered dwelling of the farmhouse lay beneath it. Her friend was away in America and the farmhouse was Susan’s, and hers alone.
The next day, Susan hired a bicycle with an attached basket to get provisions from the small village of Saint Seurin Sur L’Isle. She wandered around, getting a feel for the place. The afternoon was spent lost in The Wine Dark Sea by Robert Aickman; Susan wished that she had a green ship to sail away on. In the evening she snacked on cheese, meats, half a baguette, and drank wine. She still did not open the absinthe.
Halfway through the bottle of wine she glanced out of the kitchen window, into the misty evening. It was still reasonably light and the hills beyond took on a blue hue. Against the brief streak of reddening sky she could make out the shape of a horse and its rider, standing stock still, staring right at her. On impulse Susan waved. The figure waved back. A few minutes passed before the rider turned the horse and descended into the blue-grey of the evening.
Next day, Susan found a dead fox on the doorstep. The head lay at an odd angle. The neck looked to be snapped in half and a chicken, all bloodied, was wedged inside its mouth. She was both appalled and confused by the spectacle. Finding a spade in the barn, she dug a hole behind a half-crooked tree and buried both of the creatures. Susan shivered. She returned to the main house and made a fire with the wood that was stacked up by the hearth.
All that time, a tiny figure had watched her from behind the bushes, a girl of no more than ten years old.
It was then that Susan locked the kitchen door and decided to open up the absinthe. She took a crystal glass down from the dresser and from her rucksack took out her own little silver spoon with patterned crosses on it, and a bag of sugar cubes. She had a jug of chilled water handy. She placed the spoon across the top of the glass, placed a sugar cube on the spoon and almost reverently poured the cooled water over it. As the sugar dissolved into the green liqueur she watched the swirl of white wind its way into the peridot green like a ghost trailing through a verdant forest.
Just as dawn was breaking the firemen led us back up the once-shared path into our house. It had been relatively untouched. The door had one broken window, which they had put through to get to the door catch. There was smoke damage but the rooms were still intact. My heart was not. The fire chief saw the fear in my eyes and he led me upstairs into the corner of the bedroom, where I could still imagine the mummer-black face of the smoke as it had tried to get to us. The smoke-damaged carpet had been pulled away and a few floorboards ripped up. The fire chief gently took my hand and I crouched next to him, my blackened bare feet picking up splinters which I did not feel. He had some sort of heat-sensor that he stuck down through the gap in the boards, and he showed me its reading. He had to do this three times before he saw the flicker of recognition on my face. He assured me that the house next door was cooling down now, and there was nothing left of the inferno that ravaged it. I shrugged, and simply offered, “Thank you.”
It became colder in the farmhouse so Susan fed the fire, using kindling which caught easily. Fanned by the warmth of the blaze and the absinthe-haze in her head, she poured a second glass, then a third, and looked down at her feet in front of the fire. The flame—shades of red, orange, and yellow—combined into a confusion of gold that seemed to be grabbing for her ankles, but then yanking back as if gasping for air. One tongue flickered up and became an intense orange, the like of which she had never seen before. It spat and danced its way round the hearth: brighter, sharper, snake-like with its spits and snaps; teasing, tormenting before jerking tow
ards her ankles again. Susan had no idea how much time went by.
She sat up, clutching at the arm of her chair, the fire forgotten. Her half-empty glass fell onto the blue rug, spilling its contents—it too forgotten. On the other side of the fireplace she saw a figure sitting in the rocking chair. The person was wearing brown buckskin; a rifle leant against one knee, and there was a bottle of whisky in their right hand.
“No sense in drinking alone,” the figure said in a thick Texas drawl.
“Who the fuck are you?”
The figure was dressed in a man’s clothes but with a bosom straining at the buttons, which suggested that Susan was talking to a woman.
“Purty color. What is it you’re drinking?”
Susan blinked—but the figure was still there. “Absinthe,” she replied, in disbelief.
“Never heard of it. Must have come after my time.”
Susan bent down to pick up the glass, looked up again—and the phantom was gone. Thinking that the visitation had been brought on by the absinthe, she turned to put the bottle away in the cupboard of the dresser. The bottle wasn’t there. The little silver spoon was there, the bag of sugar cubes, the jug of chilled water, but the beautiful bottle of absinthe was not. She looked everywhere, thinking that she’d had a lapse of memory. Unsteady, and equally uneasy, she decided against sleeping in the loft because of the steep stairs, and wandered into the front bedroom of the farmhouse. The evening moon had risen, heralding a restless night for her.
In the morning she lazed about in the kitchen and drank the last of the coffee. There was little food in the fridge. She thought about going again into the village of Saint Seurin Sur L’Isle but decided on venturing further afield, perhaps to the town of Montpon for lunch. As she opened the kitchen door she saw on the doorstep a bunch of weeds, with yellow flower heads, all tied up with string, and a note. On the note, scribbled in green crayon, were the words:
