by Jim Crace
I’ll beat it out as simply as I can. That night just past had been the calmest in my life. I’d found an audience at last. We’d dined on slott beside the romance of a fire. Her dozing baby and her breasts, the dismal meanness of her hut, the dog, the wind, and (more than that) the age of her which made her sweetheart-mother-sister interlaced, a braid, had filled my head with countless expectations. She hadn’t cared about my arm. Or knapping flints. Or stone. She’d said, Do this. Do that. Make sure that pot is safe. Here, take the child. And hold the dog. Can’t you kill a chicken? Could you walk down – take this bag – and pull some samphire roots? Before, I’d only ever idly stared through doors to watch the workers shaping stone, to smell their smells, to watch their lives while waiting for the Scram, Get out, We’ve work to do. And so, you see, the smallest dumpling, cooked with patience, given with a smile, could make a servant out of me, could make me lose my heart.
I had imagined … naturally, who wouldn’t? … that, given time, the pumping buttocks in the grass would be my own. And not for trade in hens. Now once again the simple sum of my ambition was not to kill a horseman but to be a horseman – though shooting arrows of a different kind. Fat chance.
I turned my back. I put the baby on her mat. I tied the dog. I released the chicken from its twine. I set it free. The child began to cry; the dog to whimper, then to bark. The hen took off. And so did I. I walked down to the shore and found the overhang of heath where I had sat and smashed the rocks one day before. I waited there. But she did not come. I searched the skyline for a ship. No ship. I set my face against the wind and almost ran. It was not yet dusk when I reached the bracken path above our village. Had I been missed? The plumes of smoke were lifting from the workshop fires. There was the pant of bellows. The air was prickly with the click of stone on stone. My people were at work. I felt as if my life was cursed with failure and misfortune.’
13
‘ “WHERE HAVE you been?” my uncle shouted. He had become a trader in the spring of that same year. While his sons and daughters laboured in the workshops – and while his mutilated nephew roamed at will – he had found himself a spot in the circle of transaction at the centre of the village. His flints, arranged upon a mat, were crude and cheap and plentiful. His trading pitch was just as rough. His voice was rasping, his chest was full of chalk – flint-knapper’s lung, they called it. Between the spits and coughs, he holla’d and he crowed at any passing farmer with eggs to trade. Or any girl with cloth. Or any craftsman loaded down with pots or baskets. He’d found his talent. He’d been placed on earth to strut and shout. He was the market’s cock.
So, the “Where have you been?” which greeted me on my return was not a question seeking answers, a demonstration of concern. It was a piece of drama for the mongers and the pedlars there. Gather round, it said. We’ll have some fun – and while we’re at it we’ll do a little business, too.
“You see? He has no answers,” uncle said, pulling me to his side so that all of those who looked at me would see his axe-heads too.
“Where has he been? He disappeared like that. No word. No by-your-leave. He spent the night … who knows? Some girl, I think!” They laughed. “Some girl who should be warned. Perhaps, at night, she didn’t notice that his hugs comprised of just one arm. He had to add a leg, maybe. He stroked her with his toes. I promise you these flints, these best stone tools, are not the work of toes …” And he embarked upon his well-rehearsed display.
He tried it once again that night, for the benefit of all my cousins. “Where were you, then?” he said. I had a question unspoken on my lips, too. Did anyone remember a stranger and two boys? A dog? They came with eggs and kale and tasty saltland rabbits. Once – one, two years ago – they had some whale to trade. Did anyone recall three bodies on the outskirts of the village? Were there rumours of that kind? Did anyone recall?
“I met a woman …” I began.
“Ah!” My cousins sniggered as they ate. “I’ll bet she was a beauty … with four hooves and horns!”
“I met a woman …” I repeated.
“Let’s have her name,” said uncle, cheapened by the easy laughs he’d earned that afternoon. “We ought to let her know, poor girl, that those cuddles that you gave her in the night were done with just one hand. You had to lift a leg and stroke her with your toes.” His repetition was worthwhile. It earned him some applause. He rose and left us to it. But my cousins were entrapped.
“Who was this woman? Where …? Come on. Speak up.”
That was an invitation far too good to miss. I’d tell them all about the old reed hut behind the sea, about the woman and her family and her child, the damp, her poverty, her food. Perhaps – at night, before the dancing flames it didn’t seem unlikely – they’d share my sense of sorrow at what went on in the world beyond the hill, the world that had no stone.
But, first, I had to tell them all about the cliff, the beach, the ship upon the sea.
“What would you have done,” I asked, “if I had come to you and said, Put down your tools, I’ve seen a ship? You’d tell me, Scram. You’d call me Little Liar!” They laughed at that. They recognized the truth. “And, anyway, that ship would soon be out of sight. Unless, of course, I followed it. Why shouldn’t I? I had no work to do. I simply filled my chest with air and took off down the coast.”
My cousins had stopped eating. Their eyes were turned on me. Those phrases – “filled my chest” and “took off down the coast” – had made them hopeful in a way they could not understand. Those phrases were like perfume. They had dramatic odours. They promised more. I knew at once the truth could not be told to them. It was too dull and disappointing. No love, poor food, a woman – thin and naked, with breasts like barnacles – who sold herself for chickens. What could I say to make it sound attractive? They wanted something crafted and well turned. I wanted their applause. The truth would never do. It was too fragile and too glum. It offered no escape.
“The sea seen from the clifftop is a world that’s upside down,” I began. I stood and spread my long arm and my short to demonstrate the view I had. I pointed down.
“The gulls have backs. You’re looking down on wind. The shallows, from above, are flat and patterned, green with arcs of white where the water runs to phlegm. My ship threw up an arc of its own phlegm as it dipped and bounced before the wind. I bounced and dipped myself. We were a pair.”
This is my moment of betrayal, both of the woman and the truth. Hear how it comes to life. See my cousins, sitting there, their chins aglow with grease, their eyes on fire, their expectations high, their dreams and nightmares on display.
“I caught the ship,” I said. “It came ashore.”
I told them all about the coastline, how the cliffs died out and sank so that the heathland and the beach were clasped like fingers of two hands. I told them how the white sail of the ship was forced to labour against the tide, of how I waited hidden in a cove where the rocks were elderberry red and elderberry soft. They looked delighted when I said I’d meant to bring some red stone back for them to see, but had forgot. I’d bring some for them in a day or two. They laughed out loud. They loved – and feared – the nerve and challenge of the storyteller.’
14
WE BEGGED my father to repeat for us the story that he told that night to his audience of cousins. What happened when the ship reached shore? Were there men on board or what? What was the cargo that they brought? He claimed he was not sure, that stories were like dreams, like dragonflies. They came and went. They only gave one show. His cousins might remember. But he could not. Besides, he’d told a hundred versions since – and no two were quite the same.
We have heard my father talking – and we know the way he worked. We know that when he spoke he shaped the truth, he trimmed, he stretched, he decorated. He was to truth what every stoney was to untouched flint, a fashioner, a god. We know that when he said, ‘I’ll keep it simple too, I won’t tell lies,’ that this was just another arrow from his shaft by w
hich we were transfixed. And so, again, we should beware when father claimed forgetfulness and said ‘Who knows what story I dished up for them that night? Who cares?’ He knew, for sure. It was a turning-point for him – though, here again, his version was much tidier than truth. His version said that that one tale, told late at night to cousins, had kicked the anthill once again. He’d startled everyone; he’d surprised himself. It was as if the village fool had, unannounced, stood up and juggled perfectly – or the stammerer had sung a faultless song. It was a revelation and a shock that in the village, hidden, uncultivated all these years, there had been this amputee, who now could hold a household silent with the magic of his words.
The truth for what it’s worth is this … and now I’m guessing, so can you see the value of my truth? … my father’s talent for inflating and for telling lies was always there, from birth. But no one guessed its power – until, that is, my father transformed his defect into craft. As the bully becomes soldier, and the meany becomes merchant, so the liar becomes bard. Where is the shock in that? But father had it thus: that one good story from his mouth transformed him in that village, overnight, from the wild plant, not much use, into their raconteur.
His cousins spread the news. Their Little Liar had a tale to tell, they said. He’d chased a boat and caught it too! And then – guess what! – the sailors all were women. And their cargo? Perfume, stored in jars the shape of birds with necks for spouts. And then they’d come ashore, and then and then … And so the story was passed on. Of course, next day, the stoneys and the mongers in the village called out to him, What’s this we hear? And father was obliged to stop and tell his story once again.
He could not, he said, have invented a more workable device for telling tales than the ship upon the sea. Each time it came ashore it could offload a new and untried plot; a different set of characters with untold loves and enmities could disembark. The ship had formed a rough and tidy core from which my father could detach at will his patterned blades of fable, romance, lies.
Come on, they said. What’s this about the women? My father soon became adept at shaping what he said to match the shining eyes of listeners. The groups of men who hung around the market green, far from their wives and children, were keen to hear a tale which flirted and which teased, which offered sex and trade. You know the appetites of men. My father could oblige. For them his ship offloaded girls with one thing on their minds. They were like sirens – and the perfume that they came to trade was like a drug that stupefied all men. He’d hidden in the rocks and watched as merchants and their sons from the villages around came down to the beach. They laid their merchandise among the wracks and urchins, between the salt heath and the sea. They made high claims for the cloth, the charcoal, and the pots which they offered for exchange. The sailors had no need to speak. They dabbed some perfume on their wrists, their necks, their breasts and offered one sniff to the noses of the men. Those men – the youngest and the fittest – who did not faint and drop like overhoneyed bees were offered more than sniffs. The sailors led them to the longer grass beyond the beach …
And then? my father’s audience enquired. What then? Of course he would not say. The power of a tale is in the gaps and pauses. I hear his voice. I know his tricks. And there is a phrase that comes to mind which father often used. ‘We’ll never know,’ he’d say. ‘We can but guess. A young man and a woman in the grass. What could they do but hunt out insects in the soil, or teach each other songs, or sleep? I couldn’t say. I didn’t creep up close enough to see. And anyway they pulled a screen of grass to block my view.’
His audience applauded. He had delighted them. Their minds – so used to earthbound things – had flown, danced, like larks, like gnats, with father’s tale. They knew full well – if there were ships and women sailors armed with odours of that kind – what would have happened in the grass. They knew, imagined, what they’d have done … if only life was like a story, simpler, freer, less ordained.
My father paused for larks and gnats to settle, and then he held a finger up and halved his voice to double their attention. ‘Be warned,’ he said, ‘if ever that ship puts to shore near us.’ His story had not ended with the transactions in the grass. There was more to tell. The old men of his story were unconscious on the beach like washed-up seals – the young and fit were stunned and sated in the grass. What then? The snare. The sailor-women – chuckling at their power over men – gathered up the charcoal, cloth and pots that were on offer there and stowed them in their boat. They took to sea. What had their cargo cost them? What had the merchants and their sons to show for their endeavours? Who had been gulled by whom? My father did not need to say. He had his hearers spellbound with the questions.
Here was a story custom-made for men. But father took a chance and told it to the women, too. They loved it even more. They laughed and held their sides at father’s picture of the slack, defenceless menfolk on the beach and the scheming women out at sea. He had them nodding at his final words that ‘There is a place, between the navel and the knees, where the wisest men are fools’.
For children, gathered in a ring for father to amuse, his ship contained less physical distractions. The women came ashore from a craft whose sail and hogging line were stiff and white with ice. They saw my father hiding in the rocks. They beckoned him. He went. He had no choice. They were honey; he was bee. There is no need to fear, they said. We’ve lost our way. He asked: Where is your destination? The sun, they said. We’re sailing to the sun. He said: You’ll fry. But they displayed no fear of heat. It’s cold we fear, they said, and snow and frost and ice. Already we are cold. Our fingertips are dead. Our toes. Our ears. If we can reach the sun then we’ll be free of fear. Show us where to sail to reach the sun, and we will heap on you rewards that have no name, that are magic, that are as old as time.
And if I cannot? father asked. What then? Then we will turn you into ice, they said. To demonstrate their panic and their power, one of the women sailors lightly touched a tress of oarweed which hung from rock into a pool. One touch and it was ice. A frozen shore-crab toppled free and skated, slid, ten limbs brittle, on the crisp and glinting surface of the rock-hard pool. An anemone which had been red and sinuous became a snout of ice. Its thousand snakes shivered one last time.
‘What could I, should I do?’ my father asked his audience, enacting every shiver. ‘I was too cold with fear at what I’d seen and heard to help them on their journey. Does anybody know? What is the best way to the sun?’ The children did not know. Up, up, they said. The sky. But father shook his head, for ships don’t fly. The routeway must be sea. The children shook their heads as well.
‘Come on,’ my father said. ‘Speak up! The sailors are impatient. They have to reach the sun. Their fingers are stretched and ready for the task of touching me and turning me to ice. Come on. Come on. I’m going to catch a chill!’
He beckoned with his arm and made the children gather close. He whispered the solution. ‘The sun was going down upon the sea,’ he said. ‘My time was running out.’ And then … of course! The sun … Was going down … Upon the sea … And soon the two would meet! The answer was so simple. He told the sailors to be patient. Stand upon the beach, he said. Each night the sun must sleep. It rests inside the sea. The fishes are its dreams, the tide its breaths. You’ll see it fade. And drop. And settle on the water. Sink. You then set sail until you reach the point where you saw the sun go down. You’ll find a gaping hole with steaming water all around. Put down your anchor. Wait. And, when the sun goes down that second night, your journey’s at an end. Your boat is anchored at the spot where once there was a steaming hole. The sun comes down upon your deck. I promise that you’ll never freeze again.
The women watched the sun go down, they watched it bathe and wallow in the sea and throw a cloth across the sky. They thanked my father for his help. We give to you the gift of turning life to ice, they said. And this we give you, too. They tipped a little perfume from a jar into a scallop shell. He sme
lled it – but the skin upon his nose touched the arc of liquid. It froze. Dissolve it in your mouth, they said, and make a wish. My father sucked. My father wished. He wished he had a healthy arm, four fingers and a thumb. It will come true, the women said.
The children in the ring looked at my father’s elbow stump. They saw no magic there. My father looked at it and them, intently, as if he expected the frowning tucks and scars to burst apart and a new arm to emerge. When nothing happened, my father shrugged. ‘I got it wrong,’ he said. ‘Look here.’ He held his good hand out. ‘You see? I already have one healthy arm, four fingers and a thumb. I should have asked for two!’ The children laughed, but they’d been fooled. They wanted proof that father’s tale was true. ‘I have the proof,’ my father said. ‘I have the gift of ice. Which boy, which girl, will step out here and touch me on the hand? Come on. Be brave. If anyone is turned to ice, we’ll melt them on the fire.’ He made as if to pick a child from amongst the crowd. They backed away. They screamed and giggled. They hid. There wasn’t one who’d take the chance of proving father’s lies were lies.
We do not need to hear my father’s other variations, the bespoke stories that he told to tease and stimulate his aunt, his neighbours, his enemies, the old. He was never lost for words. He had a name for everything – or invented one. He’d out-hoot an owl, they said.
And so it was that father became – not liked exactly, or respected – but useful in the village, and admired by some. He could be seen – the irony is rich – inside the sanctum of Leaf’s yard reworking folktales for the family as the master sat at anvils and his daughter pumped the fire. You’d meet him, too, at any great occasion, celebrating with a tale the naming of a child or marking death and burial with some fitting yarn. And there were hardly any feasts or meetings of the village which did not feature father fantasizing at the higher table in the hall. Imagine, too, the usefulness of such a skill on market days. His uncle was not slow to make the most of that.
