by David Mark
The air temperature drops again and Betsy feels the first droplets of rain spatter on the bare flesh of her legs. She doesn’t make any attempt to move. Nor does Jude. She realizes that he’s asking her a question, even without the words ever finding a shape. It’s there in his eyes, in the lingering scent of elderflower and pondweed; in the song of the birds in the hedgerows and the dark emptiness of the stables; in the spaces between the notes that bleed from the CD player. He wants to know if she will be here, with him. If he can be hers.
‘I’m hard work,’ she says. ‘Whatever I say to you now, I don’t know I’ll still be cool with things next time something triggers me. I’m jealous of her already. Jealous of her, and the rich cow in the big house. You’ve got no pictures of her but I feel like she’s watching us. Like she’s in every corner. I don’t know if I can feel like I’m at home here, but I think I can feel that way as long as you’re always near.’
‘There are pictures,’ he says, softly. ‘I took them down off the walls when I brought you home. Chucked them in the dresser in the hall. I want you to know that the past is just that.’
Silence, then. And the rain. The proposition, still unspoken, between them.
She doesn’t think for long. Whatever doubts she harbours, she will put them aside for another day. He is what she wants. This is what she wants.
‘Why did he give me money?’ she asks, at last.
Jude pulls a face, slightly embarrassed. ‘Candy. I didn’t know she’d go for it. I just told her what had happened and asked her to have a word with her husband.’
Betsy’s face hardens. ‘And anything in return?’
He shakes his head. ‘You never have to doubt me, Betsy. You can trust me all the way through to the bone. I’ll never give you cause to fear me straying, I swear it.’
They’re good words, and Betsy enjoys them. Doesn’t believe a solitary syllable, but enjoys them nonetheless.
The rain begins to fall in earnest now, pitter-pattering down from a grey-blue sky, sending up tiny clouds of vapour as each droplet smacks into sun-baked earth. Betsy raises her face. Enjoys the kiss of the rain against her skin.
‘Betsy …’
She shifts position. Takes his hands. Pulls him forward and raises her damp hands to his wet cheeks and holds his face to hers. Just before she kisses him, she gives a nod of assent.
Yes, it says. This is what I want.
At a little after two a.m., Betsy slips naked from her bed. Jude has joined her in the spare room and sleeps soundly, soundlessly, as if attuned to finding himself in new company. Nothing was said, but they wordlessly agreed it better that he move down the hall to her room, rather than her joining him in the bed where he used to sleep with perfect, pretty, firebrand Maeve, with her fight and her determination and her two degrees and her big brain and her I’ve-got-loads-of-money-why-don’t-you-come-be-my-houseboy smile.
She tiptoes downstairs, bare feet at the edges of the boards so as not to give out a creak. The kitchen reeks of the elderflower champagne, brewing away in two big plastic containers on the table top; stems and dead flowers surround the base like floral tributes at an accident site.
She gives Marshall a stroke. Listens, carefully, for any hint that Jude may have noticed her absence. Smiles to herself as she imagines how she will wake him when she returns to bed. Sends up a silent little wish that she will find him sleeping on his back.
Quickly, noiselessly, she moves through to the Welsh dresser. Opens the cupboards. Rummages through for the photo albums; the moonlight bleeding through the dirty hall window turning the plastic and cellophane pages into so many multi-coloured mirrors. She finds what she’s looking for in moments. It’s there on the third page of the first album, as if it has recently been placed at the top of the stack. It’s a picture of Maeve, impossibly beautiful, sunlight turning her mop of curly hair into a halo of gold ringlets that complements the perfect white smile, the tanned skin and the immaculate swell of her chest. She’s stunning. Sexy, but in a wholesome way – as if she is not averse to being pleasured from behind while rolling out pastry in a farmhouse kitchen.
Betsy doesn’t even register surprise when she sees that Maeve has been photographed wearing the same dress that Jude tore from her today; ripping the fabric away from her as if it were aflame.
She replaces the picture. Goes back to bed. Presses herself against him and hopes he won’t wake. Lies still until morning, hoping that his warmth will bleed through to the place inside her where, suddenly, she feels very, very cold.
NINETEEN
Days slide by. Nights too. They eat when they remember to. Get dressed only to walk Marshall or to take slow, meandering strolls upon the moor. Jude points out abandoned buildings, interesting trees, old mine shafts and crumbling bridges; his hand never unlaced from hers. They become an island, for a time. Betsy does not miss contact with the world beyond their boundary wall. She feels drunk. Mesmerized. High on pleasure and contentment and the sensation that every cell in her body is exploding and re-forming each time he looks at her in that way of his: as if she is a rare bird that has fluttered into the woodland – multi-coloured feathers dazzlingly conspicuous against the green-brown foliage. She feels safe. Feels good. She waits until he is asleep to tell him that she loves him but she does so with absolute conviction; whispering in the dark, staring into him as if trying to see the bottom of a well. She longs for always. For the first time in her life, she wants only this. Only now, in perpetuity.
One morning she wakes to coffee and poetry. He has written her a verse; black ink on a scrap of card, torn from a cereal box. The words leave grooves in the card, the nib pressed in so hard that his fingers must have been white as he wrote.
Days that Laze.
Days that drift, reeds upon water: lilies falling upon gathered rain.
Such evenings are damp eyes and violet stones.
Lilac poppies, spinning as Dutch sails.
Fields of canary yellow, crying beneath the weight of sky.
Such evenings my chest softly splinters.
Aged oak, paint as old parchment, piled with skull upon skull of ancient rock.
Ribs a creaking cage: screeching hinge atop whispering tomb.
I feel.
I who searches for dock leaves before the nettle kisses flesh. I. Wrapped tight in muslin.
I breathe. Breathe as if emerging from ice.
Gasping kiss, drunk deep.
Cleansed. Risen. Effervescent.
A sky of tender lightning.
You. Did this. Built this.
Breathed upon Dead embers. Folded brown paper into a bruised rose.
You.
Rain and flame upon dry earth.
A kiss of shattered glass.
You.
My immaculate sky.
She holds the card against her chest and pushes herself against it, as if trying to push it inside her skin; to brand it upon herself. Nobody has written her a poem before. Nobody has told her that she is rain and flame. She is unaccustomed to being deemed responsible for another’s effervescence.
She tucks it inside her pillow, like a rosary. Hopes it will keep her safe from bad dreams.
Asks herself, just once, whether it has been written for her, or whether he first used it to woo Maeve.
Weeps for the ugliness inside her, even as she lingers upon the beauty of the words.
TWENTY
The serpent slithers into her Eden in the first week of July.
The day has been bright and blue and the darkness that blankets the land at one a.m. is as impermeable as a closed eye.
Betsy, sitting up in bed, is making her night-time vows to the curve of Jude’s back and shoulder. He doesn’t snore, but she has already come to know the patterns of his breathing. She knows he is sleeping deeply, and she is glad. Here, now, he is untroubled by the dreams that sometimes cause him upset when he is in a shallower sleep. On such nights he wakes afraid, his skin gooseflesh, as if he has dreamt of pale hands reachi
ng out for him through dark glass. He never cries out. Never speaks of what has frightened him. But he reaches out to Betsy and hugs her to him; an infant clutching a favourite toy. He sucks the warmth from her; fills himself up with it, then sleeps undisturbed until a little before sunrise. He is never there when she wakes, though there has not been a morning when he has not left her some tiny offering; a pretty feather; a plucked wildflower; a speckled eggshell or an acorn cup. A poem, like the one she traces with her finger each morning.
‘It’s never been like this,’ she whispers, in the voice a nun might use for prayer. ‘Please don’t let me spoil it, Jude. I know myself. I know that I’ll try and ruin it all with horrible thoughts. It’s all too good right now, isn’t it? We don’t fight. Nobody comes near us. I don’t think about anything real. But can it stay like this? What happens if I wake up and something’s triggered me? I know there will be a time when I think I hate you. It’s so ugly to imagine it now but something in my head delights in flipping switches on me. I don’t know how you’ll react. I told you about the BPD but maybe you were just all caught up in the good feeling. We were so intense, weren’t we? Nothing, then everything. I have things I want to tell you and things I want you to say to me but I just know that one wrong word and all my barriers will come up. It all works when you’re near me but what happens when you need to go away for work or something? I don’t want to be some needy, nagging wife. I looked after myself for a long time – people don’t ever give me credit for that. Yeah, there were foster homes and care homes but you’re on your own, really. It’s duty, not love. I made myself strong enough that nothing could harm me. Not betrayal, not abandonment, not rejection. But I hardened myself against all the other stuff too. People said I was a cold fish; that I couldn’t love properly, hug properly, live properly. And then just when I think I’ve found what a normal life looks like I crash down inside myself and they’re telling me I’ve got this syndrome and that syndrome and that I’ve got too many emotions. How can I have too many emotions? I hope you understand. I really think you do but how can I trust you? I don’t know what this is to you. Why you chose me. What you really feel …’
She realizes that her voice is getting louder. She doesn’t want to wake him. She stops talking and winces as she hears Marshall release a low growl from the kitchen. At first she thinks she may have roused him, but when he repeats the sound she realizes that it is not a gruff bark of irritation, but a low snarl of warning. He’s heard something.
Betsy sits perfectly still. Should she wake Jude? Tell him that the dog has scented an intruder? She considers it and registers a sudden, fierce desire to be seen as capable, independent. She slithers out of bed, the floorboards pleasantly cool against the soles of her bed-warmed feet. Naked, she crosses to the window, tip-toeing around the edges of the floorboards. There is only one small window in the bedroom, set back in a thick recess and half-obscured by curiosities and little objet d’art. She has added pretty stones and a small bird skull to the old bottles and Victorian knick-knacks scavenged by Jude and his wife. In such ways she is taking possession of the house in tiny increments; shuffling, inch by inch, into its embrace. She took delight the first time she swept away the dust from the corners of each room, as if she were scooping up the microscopic skin cells and hair fibres of her predecessor and casting them, joyously, on to the breeze.
She leans forward, her skin scraping against the rough brick. Peers out into the earthy darkness; the silver scythe of moon and the dusting of stars serving more as a painting than a source of illumination.
Downstairs, Marshall growls again. She squints, screwing up her eyes so tightly that her cheeks almost touch her eyebrows.
Slowly, achingly, the night gives up its secrets. The courtyard and stables come into focus: the planters; the beer crates; the abandoned machinery, all delineating into eerie blocks and right-angles sketched in perfect black.
There are two shadows near the stables. A tall, willowy figure leads the way; great orangutan arms and a stooped gait, as if his bulbous head were too great a burden for his frame. The other is stocky. Muscular. He moves with purpose, unafraid to be seen.
Betsy knows she should feel afraid. These are the bad men. These are the people who want to make Jude pay. If she wakes him, he will go out there. He will challenge them. There will be violence. Blood.
Something catches her eye; a shape that she cannot make sense of. She feels as though she is staring into a fire and among the faces and dancing faeries has glimpsed something wholly unfamiliar. There are trees just before the stone wall that marks the courtyard. Plum, greengage, cherry. She already knows the shape of their branches; their distinctive silhouette. Tonight, in the raven blackness, something has been strung within the branches.
She slithers back from the window. Jude is standing directly behind her. He is wide awake. Naked. In his hand, the silver gleam of the shotgun. Where had he hidden that? she asks herself, panic rising. Was it under her bed? What sort of man sleeps with a gun?
‘Go back to bed,’ he says, softly. ‘I’ll go see.’
‘They’re gone,’ says Betsy, forcing some joviality into her voice. ‘Slipped over the wall. Tall man and a stocky chap. Campion’s, do you think? They had nothing with them so there’s nothing stolen. Maybe they were just lost. Trespassers, eh? I’d leave it, Jude. Come back to bed, pull the covers over, forget they were there …’
He reaches out and strokes her forearm. She shivers. His hands are cold as the grave.
‘I won’t be a moment,’ he says. ‘Marshall’s downstairs.’
‘Great guard dog,’ laughs Betsy, nervously. ‘Shouldn’t he have been barking the place down?’
‘They’re hunters, Betsy. They’re good at this. No noise. No scent. They get up close. They can be standing over you before you even know they’re there.’ He stops himself, aware of the effect his words may have. He gives a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. Hands her the gun. She takes it as casually as if he had asked her to hold his shopping. It’s as cold as his touch.
‘I don’t want this! Jude, I don’t like it, let’s just imagine I didn’t see …’
He turns away from her. Gathers up a shirt and shorts from the chaos on the bedroom floor, and makes his way through the dark arch and down the stairs. Betsy stands still, unsure what is expected of her. Eventually she follows him. Pads silently down the wooden stairs and steps through the open door; the chill of the dark air feeling delicious against her bare skin.
She sees Jude standing in front of the trees. He turns back, as if to tell her to move back, but seems to change his mind. He just gives a sad little shake of his head.
‘What is it?’ whispers Betsy, standing beside him. He puts an arm around her. Takes off his shirt and wraps it around her like a blanket. Rubs her arms like a dad trying to warm up a child on a snowy day.
The dead thing hangs between the boughs of the two sturdiest trees. Lengths of twine have been used to tether the branches to the gory celebration of bone and ragged flesh. Thick wet ropes of gut hang down like gruesome bunting from a splayed ribcage. The pelt has been stretched out like sails; holed in places but stretched taut across the branches, as if in flight. Amid the carnage of pulverized meat, Betsy sees the gleaming white of tooth, of eyeball, of jawbone. She stares. Sees lightning flashes of white amid the branches. Antlers. Huge, like so many axe heads – a great spray of curving spikes.
Suddenly she knows what she is looking at.
She feels bile rise up her throat as the scent hits her; a rotten, carnal scent.
‘Oh, Jude … Jesus …’
She narrows her eyes. Something is dangling from the sagging hammock of entrails. She moves towards it and feels Jude pull her back.
‘Is that …?’
‘A stag,’ he says, quietly. ‘Somebody trying to be funny.’
She looks at him. His eyes are sunken; the irises black, like a shark’s. ‘No,’ she says. ‘That’s a puppet. A puppet attached to its guts …’
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This time she shrugs him off. Marches toward the monstrosity and peers into its depths. Raises her hand to her nose and inspects the gruesome, hook-nosed manikin which had been tied, hands splayed, to the looping intestine of the dead stag.
‘That’s Punch. From Punch and Judy.’ She looks back at him, horrified. ‘Jude, why would somebody do this?’
‘A silly joke, like I said.’
‘No. No, people don’t do this!’ Her voice is rising, her skin itching with icy sweat. ‘Jude, this is something else. This isn’t a dead sheep in the river, this is …’ She searches for the right word. Finds it and wishes it were different. ‘This is something evil.’
Jude turns away as Marshall pads, loyally, to his side. Settles down at his feet as if this were the most normal thing in the word. Jude tuts as he looks at the tree. ‘Peeled the bark, too,’ he grumbles. ‘Tacitus was bloody right.’
‘Who the hell is Tacitus?’ asks Betsy, wanting to stamp her foot.
‘Roman senator. Historian. We’ve got a copy of his Annals somewhere …’
‘Jude!’ yells Betsy. ‘Why are you talking about Roman anal?’
He gives her a smile, like she’s joking. Pulls a face when he realizes she’s not. ‘Sorry,’ he says, quickly. ‘Just something he wrote about the Germanic tribes. Any man found to have stripped the bark of a living tree would have his navel sliced and the skin nailed to the bark. Then he’d be marched backwards around the tree until he unwound himself. Don’t know why I thought saying that out loud would help the situation. Forgive me – I have my idiot moments.’
Betsy rubs her arms, feeling frightened and angry and endless shades in-between. Jude sees the change in her and comes back to where she stands, lifting her face so he can meet her gaze.
‘You have to trust me,’ he says, quietly. ‘For this to work, you have to.’
