My parents are thieves and they stole from the dead.
My father’s greed. He persuaded Mum to help him steal.
His idea, and now, his guilt.
A fog is coming in. The sea is settled, with the tide out, washing on the sand. I wonder who is staring out of the windows in the cottages next to this one, if their parents ever stole, and if it made them feel this kind of angry-sad, when they finally let themselves realise what they’d known all along.
So I was brought with them, made to cook and clean in a house they built themselves – a house no one had died in – a home with no ghosts. My past was denied, along with theirs. So I ended up living inside my storybooks. My favourite story wasn’t in any book. It’s been hidden in my head.
I write it down:
A Story of Love
A young woman is trapped in a house for too many years. One day she begs the sky outside her window to come and take her away. She cries at the sky. It doesn’t listen. She shouts and whispers. The clouds look sorry, make rain, but nothing else happens.
When she tells the sky she loves it, wants to float in it, to love it for exactly what it is – an open expanse of clouds, of rain, of gales and snow, of sound and light and dark – the sky knows that she has seen it for itself, for all of the parts that make up the whole sky: she doesn’t just love it for its sunshine or blue. The sky grants her wish.
The sky blows a gale that sends a witch, steering a pirate ship, to just outside her window. The witch is singing the most heart-rending soaring song the young woman has ever heard. She dances over to the witch’s ship on the notes from her voice and the witch transforms her into a cat.
The witch strokes and fusses and loves her. For years the cat and the witch are content, but later, the witch sees that though the cat is a good rat-catcher and is content on her lap, it always goes into the cabin when it rains, having a dislike of water. The cat seems strangely guilty about disliking the rain. The cat remembers the promise it made when it was a young woman – to love the sky for exactly what it is.
The witch sees the cat looking sadly out of the cabin window at the rain, relents and changes the cat back into the young woman, who by now is no longer young. The witch thinks that the woman, having lost all those years to being a cat, will become angry and leave her. But the woman is not angry with the witch. ‘Those years were not lost: I have experienced purring in my throat, the sweet taste of cream, the euphoria of catching rats, a taste for the warmth of fresh blood and the gentleness of your hands.’
The witch trains the woman as her apprentice. They bargain in conversations made from tumbleweed, throw black and white chess pieces backwards and forwards between their hands and the woman learns enough to become a powerful witch. They rescue one another from melancholia, laugh over the naivety of kissed toads and debate to the conclusion that power should be earned and not claimed.
They travel the skies, landing whenever they feel the desire to do so. They sell poisoned apples to the suicidal to grant them a quick and painless death, and laugh if they decide not to eat them. They offer lovesick maidens potions to cure them of unrealistic visions and then give them telescopes so they can map out the stars.
After many years of travel, when they have learned all they can from responses to both help and hindrance, they see they have become old. They land the pirate ship on a high rooftop in a city full of chimneys. They take in lost children and transform them into cats if their lives are not making them happy. Every night the two witches sing at the sky, their voices rise into the stars, are soaked clean by the rain, scrubbed by the clouds, and dried by the gales.
There they live to this day, in their ship full of purrs.
I wake in the chair by the fire that’s gone out. A wind is blowing in Mary’s parents’ bedroom. I get up and struggle with the door. A gale blows it shut, but I shove, it springs open, and there isn’t any wind.
The window is closed. Embroideries are strewn all over the double bed. On the bedside table there’s a pillowcase embroidered with an albatross, and a bedspread stitched with crows, seagulls and owls hangs from the wardrobe door. A gale has rampaged through this room, scattering embroideries that lie where they’ve fallen.
Beatrice has thrown her embroideries around again, to tell me she’s still here.
Footsteps thud behind me. I turn, and the door clicks shut. There in the middle of the floor is a rolled-up piece of grey fabric, the back criss-crossed with embroidery threads. It wasn’t on the floor when I came in. I can’t stop thinking of her, because she’s making me. Poor, dead Beatrice.
I pick it up and unroll the fabric. It’s an embroidery of this family’s tree. She’s stitched on all the names, embroidered leaves around them, stitched the trunk in ochre and earth-coloured threads. Shown all the connections with twigs.
There’s another name on this family tree and it links itself to Beatrice’s. Beatrice had a brother or sister. The name of their father is the same but the mother is different. The name of Beatrice’s sibling is embroidered over in thick black stitches, uneven and angry.
Jig jag.
She’s stitched them out of the tree. Mary has an aunt or uncle. She could have gone to them. With a small knife from the kitchen, I cut away the black threads. The name underneath is stitched in crimson thread.
The name of Mary’s aunt is Kelmar.
Annie mentioned her. The woman with white boots I saw at the graveyard. Mary’s brother is here on the tree as well, his name should be next to hers, but it’s been sewn in a little untidily. Barney. The picture of a small rabbit stitched next to him. Only three years old. So little. Mary said he was locked in the Thrashing House, somewhere Annie is scared of. She’s a grown woman. He’s far too little to be frightened.
So I have three reasons to go to the Thrashing House:
1) I want to get Mary’s brother out for her to make up for taking the Thrashing House key.
2) I really want to see what it’s like inside.
3) The Thrashing House beckoned me.
And I have three choices, so when it’s dark, and no one will see me, I’m going to do all of them:
1) Go to the Thrashing House and get Barney out.
2) Find stitched-out Kelmar.
3) Find Mary.
Just three things to do. Then I can come back to this cottage and wait for boats, and when I leave this island, I’ll do so clean and light. Unlike my father, I’ll have no guilt at all.
Mary
I’m sat on one of the twin’s beds, all clean, a damp towel wrapped around me, hiding my bindings what’re drying quick and getting too tight. My hair’s been combed and braided. The twins unravelled the tangles I thought I’d already ripped out. Four vicious hands tugged and twisted, pulled and tweaked. I feel like I’m not really here. A red ribbon pinches the top of my head; them have fixed it so firm that it stings. Them told me, ‘To be pretty, it has to hurt.’ The twins said my hair is too lovely for my dress what I’ve scrubbed clean and left hung to dry over the side of the washtub.
The one in grey – Ash, she said her name were, when yanking my hair – has gone off to get me an old dress of thems Mam’s from a dress-up box. Hazel is standing by the door watching me, kicking one bare foot against the other.
Ash comes back in with a black linen dress. I take it into the washroom where my drawers and vest are nearly dry. I put them on and pull the dress over my head. It’s far too wide but it covers me from neck to ankle.
I come out into thems bedroom and say, ‘Who did the drawing of the boy?’
Ash sits on the bed on one side of me and Hazel on the other.
Hazel says, ‘I’ll give you two answers – you have to guess the right one. My answers are: My sister. And. You did.’
‘Which sister? Ash or Morgan?’ I ask, quick.
Hazel says, ‘We’ve got a question for you, so we’ll tell you, if you answer our question first.’ She goes to the mirror, picks up a pink ribbon and ties it in her hair. Ash foll
ows her and unties her own grey ribbon and hands it to Hazel, who puts it in her hair as well. Both of them are watching me in the mirror. I hear a thump in the room. Them are thinking so loud the air feels thick.
Them stare at me.
I stare back.
No one in this house has spoke to me of Morgan yet. Them tricked me into saying her name. That will be thems question: Where is Morgan? We’re face to mirror to face to face. Not one of us wants to speak the truth.
But I say, ‘Ask me then.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘What?’
Ash says, ‘Outside. Where you saw Morgan. What’s she hearing that we’re not. What’s she looking at. What can she smell.’
‘What’s she eating, who’s she talking to, what can she see that we can’t see—’
‘You’re not asking these like questions. Just saying—’
Ash says, ‘Too many questions stop sounding like questions when we think them a lot.’
Hazel says, ‘We can stop being friendly. Because we’re—’
‘You dun have any friends.’
‘We’ve got an axe,’ says Ash.
‘Good for you. So?’
‘We can get out whenever we want. We need to plan it—’
‘—make sure outside is better. In case Mum hammers a plank over the hole we axe out of the fence, so we can’t get home.’
I smooth my hand over the soft bedspread. ‘If I tell you what it’s like outside, will you tell me about the picture?’
‘Are there any places we can have?’
‘Houses just for us. Without a fence—’
‘—for us together.’
‘No parents—’
‘—no sisters. Only for twins.’
‘No, the cottages are all lived in. You dun want an old rotten barn, not after living here.’
‘We might.’
‘Are there mice in it?’
‘Aye, I’d have thought so.’
‘That sounds perfect.’
‘It’d be cold in a barn. No toys. No food. You wouldn’t like it. Smells of cow shit. You’d be dirty all the time. And the mice dun do being friendly. Them’d chew off your fingers when you were asleep. Tell me the truth about the picture.’
Hazel frowns at me. ‘Why haven’t you had your fingers chewed off?’
‘I dun live in a barn.’
‘Can we have your house then, since you’re not in it?’
‘There’s a ghost in it.’
‘Morgan will love that.’
‘Never said she were there, did I?’
Ash says, ‘You thought it.’
I glare at her. ‘What do you mean, she’ll love it?’
‘She likes ghosts. More than she likes us.’
‘Come on, she dun.’
‘Does. Wants to live with the little girl one.’
I look round the room. ‘She see any ghosts in this house then?’
‘No, she says it won’t have any, not till someone dies.’
I say, ‘Well, you’d best keep that axe of yours safe then.’
Them glance at the wall-hanging in the corner.
I cross the room to the corner. ‘Can Morgan talk to ghosts – hear what them say?’ I stroke the fabric wall-hanging, run my fingertip over one of the silver-painted trees.
Hazel nods.
‘So if Morgan were in my cottage, and I’m not saying she is, mind, if there were a ghost there, she could ask it a question for me?’
‘Of course she could.’
‘Now, in case your Mam or Da ask, we dun talk about Morgan. And if you tell me about the picture of the boy, I won’t tell your Mam where you’ve got your axe hid.’
The twins come rushing at me, as I find the axe leaning in the corner behind the wall-hanging.
I say, ‘So the picture – who drew it?’
‘It wasn’t me, or Hazel or Morgan,’ mutters Ash. ‘It was you.’
I tell them not to lie to me, and at least tell me something I can believe in.
Hazel says, ‘No, Mum draws the picture, but you draw on top of it. With your eyes.’
‘Load of skank,’ I mutter.
Hazel sighs.
I say, ‘All right. How do my eyes draw the boy?’
Hazel says, ‘Because that’s what you want to see the most.’
Ash poses, her face rests on her hand like she’s in a drawing. ‘Mum draws what she thinks she’s drawing. When someone else looks at it, they see what they really want to see. You saw a boy you love.’
Hazel nudges her, ‘Not what she really drew.’
I slump back on the bed. I thought someone here’d seen him. I thought … I just want to be little like this pair, and I can’t. I curl up on the bed and can hardly breathe, for the bindings are tight round my chest, and them feel like them’re coming loose as I sob. The stain from my tears spreads across the bedspread. Tears come out of my eyes, nose, mouth. I’m brimming with sea.
Morgan
She crawls across the sand towards the quiet waves as I approach her. Her white hands and feet shine underneath the decaying animal pelt. Underneath the pelt, her hair is tangled and thick, the colour of ink. The crying naked woman. Still naked beneath the pelt. Still crying.
I stop next to her and ask, ‘What are you doing?’ My voice is shaking.
She twists her face towards me and hisses, ‘Get. Gone.’ The pelt slips from her shoulder, her pale skin is almost blue. She pulls the pelt around herself and old dead fur sticks to her damp hands.
‘You’re freezing.’ I squat down next to her, the pelt smells of soil and decay. I cover my nose.
The head of a seal hangs over her shoulder. Its collapsed eyehole has a fly buzzing at it.
I flick it away and say again, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing to do with you.’
‘Don’t—’
‘You’ve no right to care. Never seen you before. Won’t see you again.’
‘Someone has to.’
‘Someone does. It’s not enough. Leave me.’
‘Why isn’t it enough?’
‘Care is selfish.’
‘Don’t do this—’
‘You think … well, I’m not. Drowning myself. I’m releasing myself. Get. Gone.’ She rolls onto her front and crawls towards the waves.
I walk beside her.
She stops, frozen, one white arm outstretched. ‘I said—’
‘Releasing what?’
‘None of your concern. Go.’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Don’t. Do. Anything.’
‘Do you need—’
‘I need to get into the sea.’
My chest aches as I walk backwards away from her. She crawls, her shoulders heave her towards the incoming tide. The pelt shifts and sways on her back, sheds dry fur and soil. The claws trail from the back of the pelt and leave scratches in the wet sand.
There’s no wind. Far out at sea, underneath the waves, the currents twist and surge. I turn away. On a distant cliff, a lone woman stands watching.
I look back at the sea. The woman crawls into the waves. I go back into Mary’s cottage, kick the door shut behind me and lock it. In Mary and Barney’s bedroom I plunge myself down on Mary’s bed.
I punch at the mattress, because the crying naked woman says it’s selfish to care and I want to stop caring but I can’t … and it might be that my mother was right and all the people here are mad, so I shouldn’t care about any of them, but maybe it’s all right to care about mad people, but maybe she’s right and it isn’t, and there might be boats coming soon but I want to stop caring so I can just stay here and watch for them, and not think about someone choosing to die, and not wanting help or care when that’s all I’m able to give … and she doesn’t want these things, so I feel like I’ve got no choices because she’s making the biggest choice of all, and I feel as if I’ve been punched by her choice, but I haven’t, but this is a punch, a thud, she’s going to drown …
I thump and bang my fists at the mattress till the dust clouds make me sneeze.
My heart pulses in my throat as I lean on the table and look out at the beach. A thick fog is coming in fast. A seal’s head bobs in the small waves and is caught in the ripples of the windowpane, magnified and shrunk.
The crying naked woman has drowned.
A feeling in my chest, of loss, of grief, of something I don’t have words for. Something that could drown me if I let it. I pick up the bottle of forgetting herb that I took from her house, and read the label:
One spoonful for every day that needs forgetting.
Amend dosage as required. Do not overuse.
I put just one drop of the bitter liquid on my tongue.
Through the window, the empty sea. A beach is covered in fog. I’ve been standing here at this window … how long … I stare and stare and stare out at the fog. What’s this bottle? Forgetting herb … a herb to forget … and I’ve … forgotten I have it in my hand.
Faces come out of the fog.
Two women in shawls, their cheeks pressed against the windowpanes. Eyes uneven, cheeks twisted, lips askew. An enormous hand taps on the glass.
I shake myself, back away from the faces and bundle myself into a brown musty coat. On the table are … Annie’s letter and the Thrashing House key. I was going to do something … before … the fog came in.
The Thrashing House.
I shove the key and letter in the coat pocket. At the window, one face disappears. The front door handle rattles, so I leave the cottage through the door at the back.
Mary
Morgan’s Mam’s eyes are puffed up. Her lips narrow as she looks down at the dress I’m wearing. If her teeth all fell out, she’d look like some kind of frog. She dun speak, just turns away from me, walks along the black and white squares on the corridor floorboards. I can see from the tall windows it’s getting fogged up outside. She looks hunched and squat, solid.
I follow her into a room with a small bed, a table and a chair by a window with flouncy curtains. On the bed is a folded piece of lilac linen.
Snake Ropes Page 19
