Ghost Wall

by Sarah Moss

  I walked ahead of him back to the hut, the rabbits on their string held at arm’s length. Their heads lolled, but the ears were still laid back. If there was a smell, it was faint, more of fur and digested grass than of blood. Hang them up by the fish, he said, you’ll gut them later, you and your friends. Now help your mother with the cooking, I daresay she’s behind again and folk hungry.

  She was ‘behind’, and everyone else was sitting in the shade with cups of water. Well, she said, we don’t want anyone getting sunstroke and you’ve brought us a fair lot of mussels, I’ve had Molly put them in the stream, we’ll eat them later for dinner, the problem with these flatbread things, bannocks or what-have-you, you have to do them one at a time, see, can’t put a whole batch in the oven, folk’ll just have to wait a bit but your father won’t like it, the dough’s there, see, if you can shape a few more I’ll see to these in the pan. Griddle, I mean, or whatever he calls it. OK, I said, what, about this size? Ah Silvie, she said, you’ve upset him again, haven’t you? What, I said, how do you know, what do you mean. I can tell, she said, I am your mum, what was it this time? Nothing, I said, it doesn’t matter, it’s over now, you know what he’s like, it’ll all be fine for a few days now. I just wish you wouldn’t provoke him, she said, if you didn’t wind him up all the time he wouldn’t do it. I know, I said, I didn’t mean to, sometimes I do mean to but this time I didn’t. Well, she said, just don’t do it again, whatever it was, there’s enough here already mithering him.

  Dad made us butcher the rabbits after lunch. Or at least, once we’d eaten; it was probably too late to be lunch. It will be interesting, the Prof said, to see how the flint knives work, they’re certainly sharp enough. Molly, could you bring the basket, please? Molly stood up. Sunburn was beginning to flame across her nose and cheeks. I’ll bring the basket, she said, sure, but I’m not cutting open any rabbits, I’m not even going to watch. Oh, said Dad, but I suppose you’ll eat them when someone else has done the dirty work, I suppose you’re not actually a vegetarian? Fine, she said, I am now, if that’s what it takes. It’s all right, Molly, said the Prof, we don’t need everyone to do everything, why don’t you help Alison, wash the cups or whatever. I’m going to wash some clothes, Molly said, this tunic’s horrible. Mum, I said, would you mind doing mine for me, if I’m cutting up rabbits, I got so hot on the beach, it’s all sandy. All right, she said, give it here, and what about you lads, if we’re doing three we might as well do six, not that I’m expecting much without proper soap but we can freshen them up and it’s a good drying day for sure.

  I went into the hut, knelt on my bunk where no-one could see, and took off the tunic. Even if there had been light, the tender places on my skin were of course at the back, not where I could see, but I ran my fingertips over what I could reach, mapped skin with skin. It was bad. It was a shame, I thought, things hadn’t happened the other way around, the belt before the stream, because the cold water would have helped me now. Although of course if I hadn’t gone into the stream in the first place I probably wouldn’t have needed cold water. Unless he’d found some other reason; some days I just knew he needed to hit me and however carefully I trod, sooner or later I’d give him cause, but this time I thought it really was what I’d done that had made him angry. I should have known, I thought, I should have gone further away, I should have kept my bra on, he wasn’t wrong about that, and what if one of the boys had come along? The flap over the door opened. Mum, outlined against the sky. Are you all right in there, Silvie, only your dad’s asking for you, please don’t keep him waiting now. I’m fine, I said, I’m coming, just a minute.

  You start by peeling off the rabbit’s skin. Cut off the paws, Dad said, like this, and run the blade around here. Slice along the leg. Bring this cut to join it. Up the middle of the belly, usually you’d go around the neck but since we’re planning to use the skins we’ll go up like this. Do the forelegs. Then it’s easy, peel it like a banana. Might have to tug a bit, mind. Then you can cut the head off at the end, easier with a metal blade for that, see, to get through the spine. I’d seen him do it before, albeit with kitchen shears and what he called his ‘hunting knife’, as if we lived somewhere where men were regularly dismembering animals in the course of daily life, like the American frontier in the nineteenth century or, I suppose, Iron Age Northumberland, but the boys were visibly shaken. What was that, Dan? said Dad. Dan shook his head but I’d heard him: I’m not gonna puke, I’m not gonna puke, think about Gran’s roses. There was blood now, all right, and the smell of it. You’d think that dismembering something would get easier as the creature becomes less like itself, but with rabbits that’s not the case: a skinned rabbit looks disturbingly similar to a decapitated baby. Or so I imagine. OK, said Dad, then you just slit up the belly and pull out the guts. Intestines, see, lungs and heart, think that one’s the liver.

  I watched Dad’s hands. Skin, I thought, his skin and my skin, the tanned skin of his belt, the soft furred skin of the rabbit, our surfaces, our barrier between blood and air. Water can’t get further than skin, unless it’s bog water in which case it will permeate skin and preserve it like leather forever, so that the surface outlasts brain and blood by two thousand years. Leather shoes, to protect living skin. Leather belts, to make it sore. Dad’s fingers, dark with blood, dropped the rabbit’s innards on the grass.

  Dan puked.

  Oh dear, said Dad, it’s usually the ladies being squeamish, isn’t it, you’d think a lad’d have more guts. So to speak. Right, so that’s how you do it. We can joint them later if that’s what Alison wants, have to see how she’s going to cook them. OK, you lot get to work on those. Silvie, don’t forget to pick up the lights.

  Dad left. Dan tried to scrabble leaves over where he’d been sick. The smell rose in the sunshine. It’s all right, said Pete, sit down a bit. Jesus. Nearly vommed myself. He glanced at me. Is he always like that, Silvie? I mean, sorry, I know he’s your dad and all but. Like what, I said, a show-off and given to brutality, yes, actually, mostly he is, sorry. I could see Dan and Pete exchanging glances, almost see the words cross the air between us: what is he like to live with then, how is your home and your life? So’ve you done this before, Dan asked, with the rabbits? I’ve helped him do it, I said, though not with stone tools. I think it gets easier but anyway we’re going to have to do it, aren’t we, so we might as well get started. I picked up a blade and a rabbit. It was only the heat of the day, of course, that made the rabbit still warm, that gave the impression that I was hacking at the paws of a living being. It was not flinching, only springing back as I cut through nerves, scraped on bone. The eyes were beginning to dull. I still didn’t know how the men had killed them.

  Inevitably it was hard to sleep that night. Without a proper pillow I couldn’t lie on my front without twisting my neck too hard, and Dad must have done some backhand or changed hands so the belt had wrapped around both sides; the tree thoughts had worked and I hadn’t noticed at the time, but he always liked symmetry. It hurt to lie on either side as well as on my back. I thought of the tree, the smooth pale bark under my palms, warm to my forehead. Rowans were often planted at doorways and boundaries, meant to deter evil spirits or maybe to invite good ones, I couldn’t recall. You find them often by the ruins of old cottages up on the moors. I pushed up onto my hands and knees on my straw sack, let my head hang down to ease my neck. Evil spirits, I thought, ghosts, like the bog people Dad loved who could now exist only as victims, as the objects of violence. There had been a new book out the previous year, one with colour photographs. She was a young teenager, Dad had said, about your age they think, though she was small and she’d have walked funny, she was crippled. Looks as if she’d had rough treatment for a good while, when they X-rayed her they found all sorts of old fractures that had healed up before death. How do you think she died, Silvie? He’d pushed the photo in front of me, the bones of arms and legs coming through the skin, leathered torso fallen over ribcage and pelvis, but an expression still, just
about, on her bog-tanned face, long hair still braided as she must have braided it that last morning. Eyelids, still, eyelashes, over empty sockets. The rope around her neck, I said, she was strangled, but of course I knew that the bog people rarely had only one way to die. Aye, he said, mebbe, at the end, but could be she was still alive when she went in, this one was staked, look, through the upper arms, those holes are where the sticks went, seems they cut off that foot too though no knowing if that were before or after death, also there was a proper blow to the head, look, here on the next page. And these cuts here, they were before death. He looked up at me, touched my forearm in its school uniform shirt and my shoulder. They’d be about there and there, see, not enough to kill, just done for the pain like, and this one on her face, there, for the shame of it maybe, folk watching. My forehead, along the hairline. Yes, I said, I see. Her hands had been bound for two thousand years.

  I lay down again in my bunk. She had had a life before that, the bog-girl. She had slept and woken, had sleepless nights, felt sun and wind and rain. She had learnt to read the sky, learnt the impossible dance of fingers plaiting her own hair behind her head, the movements just the same as the ones I’d been watching Molly make. There are few bog-children and so far as I know no bog-babies, so the people who come to us now out of the bogs must have been cared for, fed, must have been part of their families and villages until one day they found that they were no longer like everyone else, that sometime in the night something had changed. No-one knows how far before death that day might have been, whether one morning someone came to wake you carrying a rope, the blades already sharpened and waiting in the heather, or whether you had weeks or months to say your farewells, to get used to your status as a ghost. It would have been necessary not to think about it, I thought, to have tree-thoughts right to the end of thinking, and I found myself hoping they had something to hold, some talisman against the pain.

  I knew they did not.

  As the birdsong outside got louder I gave up, stifled a squeak as I rolled out of bed and trod cautiously towards the doorway. If he woke, I thought, if he caught me, he would either be pleased by my early rising, maybe even offer a moment of dawn companionship of the sort we had often shared when I was little and sometimes already up and playing quietly downstairs when he came in from a night-shift, or he would accuse me of sneaking around at night and get angry again. I ducked under the flap in the doorway and waited a moment – I could, after all, be going into the wood to pee, or getting a drink of water. Without a house, it occurred to me, it is much harder to restrict a person’s movement. Harder for a man to restrain a woman.

  There was a light mist tangled in the trees and the sun still too low for shadows. The sky was pale, branches vague against it. I stepped into cold grass wet with dew and my sunburnt feet liked it. I wrapped my arms around myself and took a deep breath of cool air that smelt of green things growing. Birdsong, something high and excitable in a nearby bush and the blackbird I’d heard yesterday in the oak tree. No wind, the dawn still. I thought briefly, lightly, of going back to the water, but I knew I wouldn’t. Up onto the moor, I thought, sunrise, why not, although I knew that there’s nowhere to hide up there, that if he woke and came that way, after more rabbits perhaps, he would see me anywhere within a five-mile radius, even if that also meant he would see that I was alone and not consorting with men. Albeit in my pyjamas. Pyjamas might be half-naked. I shouldn’t be out here. My thoughts were beginning to flicker, my mind a bird against the window. It was often like that, the day after. Hush, I thought, go pee in the woods and then go back to bed, easy.

  I passed the rabbits, hanging as if after a medieval execution, and the eviscerated fish. The soles of my feet were already hardening to the sticks underfoot. I went further than usual, checked repeatedly for witnesses, paused to listen for footsteps, for snapping twigs, before I pulled down my pyjamas and squatted. Flaunting yourself naked in the woods for anyone to see. You can’t see the colour when you pee on the ground but there was a strong smell, I needed to drink more. No paper; I shook myself and did an inadequate job with a leaf before waddling over the warm puddle and covering myself again. The brushed cotton hurt my skin. I looked away from the rabbits as I passed again, didn’t want to see the blue-white gleam of their severed spines. Mum did want them jointed, said a stew would be a whole lot easier than setting up a spit and also, she added quickly, surely more authentic, wouldn’t they have wanted to stretch the meat with veg just like people today? You could see Dad wanting to see small pink bodies skewered over the flames but the Prof said yes, almost certainly, not that the middens offer much of a clue about cooking methods but common sense has its place. Fine then, Dad said, Silvie can joint them tomorrow, show the lads how it’s done.

  Hi Silvie.

  Molly. Loo-roll in one hand, trowel in the other. Buttoned pyjamas with blue tulips on them, plaits undoing themselves in a haze of blonde. I glanced towards the hut. Shh, I whispered. Hello. I was just – I was in the wood. I know, she said, I get up early so I can poo in private, isn’t it horrible, I’m amazed it’s even legal. Shh, I said, yes, you’re allowed to poo in the woods, people’ve been doing it for millennia, you just make sure you dig a hole and fill it in afterwards. Yeah, she said, and people have been dying of cholera and dysentery for centuries, yay for nature’s way. Cholera was in cities, I said, it happens when sewage gets into the water supply, they’d have had more sense out here. Great, she said, they could die another day of infected hunting injuries and childbirth. Shh, I said. I’m going back in, enjoy the woods. Wait, she said, Silvie, what happened to your back, there? I pulled my pyjama top back up over my shoulder. Sunburn, I said, you’ve got it too. She touched my shoulder and I flinched. Not like that I haven’t, she said. It’s nothing, I said, it’s fine, I should get back, I don’t want him to – I’m still tired, should get some more sleep if I can, see you later.

  I could hear him snoring from outside the door. I ducked back in and stood there waiting for my eyes to adjust, and then stepped cautiously, trailing my fingers along the splintery wall, until I could kneel on my bunk and ease myself down onto my front. This is not going to work, I thought, I can’t get through today, not like this, it’s too sore, it’s never been this bad before, but I knew that I could and would. It was not as if there was an alternative.

  The day was bright again, as if England had forgotten how to rain. The bracken is always the first to turn, bronze already coming through at midsummer, but it was still a steadfast deep green. It seemed as if all the flowers were out at once, purple and yellow vetch, foxgloves, of course the heather on the uplands. Even the harebells in the woods and honeysuckle which should have been over by now were still deliriously blooming. I kept my mind on the flora as I moved around stiffly, shoulders held back trying to stop the tunic grazing my skin, avoided sitting down until Dad told me to. You’ll spill your breakfast, he said, show some respect for your mother’s cooking, I won’t have you wandering about like that. I dropped my gaze and did as I was told. It hurt. I’m not very hungry today, said Moll, sorry Alison.

  Silvie’s to joint those rabbits this morning, my dad said. Alison, you two make sure they’re ready when folk are wanting them this time, hear me? In company, I risked it, wanted him to know I still had a mind and a voice: yeah, but it’s hard, Dad, to have the lunch on the table at one sharp for seven people who are being guided by their bellies not the clock. Mum drew her breath. So what, I thought, hit me again, I dare you, in front of all these people, let’s have a public beating, an Iron-Age ritual of pain, go on, try it. Don’t be thicker than you can help, Silvie, he said, that’s why you have it ready in good time, so there’s food when folk are wanting it. Get to work now. He met my gaze. You can sit on that rock by the rack, should be comfortable there, hm? Dan stood up. I’ll do it, he said, me and Pete. We need to know how. Silvie can go with Moll, she did most of the butchering yesterday. Happen you’ll need her to show you how, said Dad. I’ll do that, said the Prof, keep
my hand in, my wife likes her meat in cubes on plastic trays, haven’t had the chance to do this for years. Go on, girls. Pick some more of those garlic greens, take the foraging book and see what else you can find, we should be getting more roots and leaves at this time of year. There was wild thyme, I said, up on the moor. Aye, said Dad, but the man said roots and leaves, didn’t he, not herbs, it’s not an excuse to go ramping off over the moors, you girls stay local if you’ve no-one with you, hear me? Yes, Dad, I said. We will. Mum, I guessed, was staying home doing the washing up again, and that was her problem.