Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  Not for the first time he wondered whether everything that had happened was really surprising at all.

  The back of a hooded head stuck out on the far side of the peak of the roof. She was looking northward, perching on the slates. They looked too steep and brittle for him. There was a low parapet around the roof line but he still felt queasy, high up and out in the open. He kept his feet on the frame of the midget window and held on to the gable as he stood straight. The cat came marching along the ridge of the roof and nudged at his hands as if it thought it might be funny to try to push him off.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  “Aren’t you cold?”

  “Not really. You always ask that.”

  Now that he was standing, albeit precariously, he could see over the top of the roof. The trees at the edge of the garden screened the house, but she was high enough here to see partly over and partly through their bare tops, across the river valley to the fields around the church on the opposite bank. The clusters of tents stood out against the snow, strips and squares of color. Some of them had collapsed, some blown down to join the spackling of litter pinned against the lower hedges. Through the knotted treetops they could just about see a couple of people moving around the camp.

  “I brought some fresh milk for you. And a few other bits and pieces.”

  “Thank you.” She still hadn’t turned around.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come for the last couple of days.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t it? But I’m sorry anyway.”

  Now she twisted her head around. The baggy hood still hid her face. It was one of the sweaters Gwen had knitted for her, more like a woolly sack than a garment.

  “I’m not,” she said. “I told you, I don’t mind.”

  She turned back northward, to watch her tiny fraction of the larger world.

  “Do you want to come in for a bit?” he suggested, cautiously.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know if I want to do anything.”

  “Oh, Marina.”

  “There are less of them than there used to be. Fewer. Do I mean fewer? They must have finished whatever they were doing.”

  His back was beginning to stiffen. It was still cold—always cold—and he was standing awkwardly. Once upon a time, small imperfections like that had been worth thinking about. Whole lifetimes had been spent mitigating them; millions of people dedicating their existence to pursuing the absence of discomfort.

  “How long have you been coming up here?”

  “I don’t know. Some days.”

  “You’ve been . . . careful, haven’t you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Marina?”

  “No,” she said, “I haven’t.”

  She was well enough hidden where she sat, he thought. Screened by the trees, camouflaged against the slate and stone of the old roof. But still. He ought to try to talk to her about it.

  “Would you look at me? Please?”

  “If you like.”

  She didn’t look any worse, really. She’d always been very thin and she’d never been particularly clean or tidy. A couple of weeks ago (was it?) she’d got annoyed with her hair growing long and cut it herself, with the iron shears. The result—a ridiculous crop halfway between do-it-yourself punk and tufted duck—didn’t help, but if he tried not to get distracted by it, or by the radiant unhappiness of her expression, he had to admit she looked no less healthy than usual, not that healthy was quite the word.

  “You look awful,” she said.

  He had to laugh.

  “I’m not very good with heights.”

  “I only just discovered you could open that window.” Only just could mean the past few hours or the past few years, in Marina’s language. Of course, he thought. For as long as she’s known, any day of each season has been much like another, until . . . this. “Daddy and Gwen always said it was stuck.” She pushed her hands deeper inside their opposite sleeves.

  “I imagine they didn’t want you exploring out here. It could be risky. These tiles aren’t meant for walking on.”

  “It’s just more lies.”

  A helicopter whirred over the horizon, angling west to east. He met her angry look. He’d never had children of his own, but he’d spent plenty of time talking to teenagers in the parish.

  “No one can tell the truth all the time. Especially not to children. It doesn’t mean they didn’t—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  His fingers were beginning to sting from gripping the stone. “All right.”

  “Don’t say that to me again. Ever.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’d never lie.” If he’d had any grief left over after the past three months, he’d have been heartbroken listening to her. She sounded just the same as the girl he’d watched grow up, and yet not the same: her impulsive simplicity had turned into the twisted shadow of itself, a determined bitterness. She seemed ten years older. “I’d never tell anyone anything I knew was wrong. If a child ever comes out of me I’ll always tell her the truth. I’ll promise her as soon as she comes out. ‘I’ll never lie to you and I’ll never go away,’ that’s the first thing I’ll say.”

  “Marina—”

  “Don’t!” It was a tight scream. The ring of trees echoed it for a dull instant.

  The helicopter drifted nearer. Its monotone buzz broke into a chop-chop-chop. He waited as long as he could before speaking again.

  “We ought to go inside.”

  Around the church, a couple more people appeared out of their tents. The church bell began to ring.

  “I know you’re very unhappy.” He spoke as calmly as he could. “But things could get much worse if someone saw you and decided they wanted to find out who lived here.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with them. I’ve been watching. They just go in and out of their little houses.”

  “People have done terrible things.”

  “Where?”

  “Lots of places. You’ll just have to believe me, Marina. I know what could happen.”

  “Are these things worse than what everyone did to me?”

  The bell in the church tower kept ringing, though it didn’t look like many of them were left to answer it; as she’d said, they were mostly gone now. The helicopter veered in their direction.

  “If you don’t come in soon,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to try and fetch you myself.” A useless threat, he suspected, looking at the age-smoothed slates, but just as he was wondering whether he’d have to give it a go anyway she hitched herself back and swung her legs over the top of the roof. She had thick green socks on. They must have been her father’s.

  “You sound like you’re talking to Grey Mouser. My bottom’s getting sore anyway.”

  Downstairs, he began laying a fire in the living room. Its chimney was the likeliest to spread at least a suggestion of warmth through parts of the floor above. She followed him unenthusiastically. Everything in the house was out of place. She’d dropped things wherever she’d tired of them. When she peeled off the hooded sweater she looked like a mournful scarecrow.

  And yet—he noticed it as she stood behind him, watching his efforts with matches and kindling—and yet for a painful moment he felt the tug of her. His heart thumped in warning and his hands trembled. The pyramid of twigs he’d been working on collapsed.

  “You needn’t bother,” she said. “It’ll just go out.”

  He forced himself to concentrate on his hands. “Not if you keep an eye on it. A couple of logs every few hours and it could go on forever. There’s stacks of wood.”

  “I’ll just leave it after you go.”

  “Well then.” He propped the last sliver of wood up and struck
a match, cradling the flame. One of the lasting benefits of his training in the priesthood, it turned out, was that he’d become good at patience. The terrifying irrelevance of everything else he’d spent so much time learning and thinking about was largely balanced out by the fact that patience, his only surviving asset, had turned out to be the one thing he and everyone else needed most. He remembered learning that at root it was the same word as suffering. They meant the same thing. “How about keeping it going for Grey Mouser? She must like it.”

  “She doesn’t need us to look after her. Anyway, it’s getting warmer. The snow’s beginning to melt.”

  The wood caught quickly, as it always did. Magic. The fireplaces drew and the walls stayed sound, the well was always sweet, the teenage girl standing behind him was a siren’s child. That was the world now. He’d had years to try to get used to it and never managed. What must it be like for everyone else?

  He stood up and faced her. The little sting inside him pricked again. A siren’s child, and she was growing up, growing into herself. Don’t touch her, he told himself. He clasped his hands behind his back to make sure.

  “There. That’s done. I’ll put a pot over it, shall I? I brought some things you can boil up. They’re all in the kitchen. And you’ll have hot water.”

  She crouched down and scratched the cat’s head as it rubbed around her legs.

  “I’ll eat it,” she said, sounding all at once much more like the Marina he remembered, hesitant and eager to please, “if you stay and make it.”

  His heart sank. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I would if I could.”

  The glimmer of eagerness flickered out. “Never mind.”

  “Honestly. I wish I could stay all day. I come as often as I can.”

  “You needn’t come at all.”

  “Please don’t be like that, Marina.”

  “That’s a stupid thing to say. Gwen always said how stupid it was.” She’d finally started talking about Gwen in the past tense. “‘Don’t be like that.’ You only have to think about it and you can see it’s stupid.”

  Patience. Suffering. “It’s quite difficult getting food at the moment. If I stayed here, I wouldn’t be able to get to other people.”

  “Yes, I know. All those other people.”

  “You understand. I’m sure you do.”

  “Just go away, Owen.”

  “Marina, please.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “You can be as rude as you like. I just wish you’d stop being so unhappy.”

  “I don’t mean to be unhappy either. I’m not doing it deliberately.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I’m not being deliberately lonely. I didn’t choose for Daddy to drown. I didn’t ask everyone to go away.” The urge to step forward and hold her hand was like a gale blowing at his back. “I never decided to be here all on my own.”

  He waited a moment before saying, very gently, “He’ll come back.” She spun away from him. “I promise.”

  “ ‘Promise,’ ” she repeated, savagely.

  “He will. You know he will.”

  “Horace hasn’t come back. Gwen’s not coming back. Daddy’s never coming back. Why should I think Gawain’s coming back either? Because he promised ?”

  She was framed by the light of the window. Her shoulders were quivering. Outside, past the thawing field and the black woods below, the wreck at the mouth of the river was an ugly silhouette, the radio mast leaning high over the water like a gibbet.

  “I can’t say anything to make it better. But it doesn’t mean that everything will always be this way. He’ll come back when he can. We just have to try and wait.”

  She went over to the window and stared out for a long while, as if looking through the bars of a cage.

  “Why won’t Horace come?”

  Owen was glad she wasn’t looking at him. “It must be the weather.” He wasn’t much of a liar, but Marina wasn’t sophisticated enough to hear the strained lightness in his tone. “This winter’s driven almost everyone away.” He’d never had the heart to tell her that Horace had vanished too, believed lost in the snow. “He probably had to go with his mother.”

  “Go where?”

  “Wherever they could. Somewhere it didn’t snow and people can still get around, get things they need.”

  “He never came to say good-bye. I think he just forgot all about me.”

  “It’s a hard journey when you can’t cross the river.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” She pressed her nose to the glass. Her tone was as cold, as brittle. “My mother would have killed him.”

  He thought it best not to try answering.

  “That’s what she does, isn’t it. She drowns people.”

  The fire simmered, hissed, popped. He knew silence was probably best, but he couldn’t stay much longer and he hated the thought of leaving her like this. Whatever she was, half of it was just a thirteen-year-old child alone in a huge cold house.

  “Marina. Please listen to me quietly for a moment. You could walk down to the river anytime you like—”

  She rounded on him, eyes wet with desperate rage. “Shurrup!”

  Who’d taught her to say shut up? It could only have been Horace. “Maybe you wouldn’t feel so lonely if you just went to talk to her once. Even if you shouted at her, showed her how you’re—”

  “Shurrup! Shurrup!”

  Patience, patience. “She loves you.”

  “I don’t care!” The house echoed back her shouts in the form of a miserable, fading whine. “I don’t care, I don’t care!”

  “All right. I’m sorry.”

  “No you aren’t! You just want to make me do what you want.” Her eyes were shining. Water-eyes, whirlpool eyes. “That’s all anyone ever cared about. No, shurrup. I don’t want you to talk to me anymore. I know what you’ll say. Lock the doors. Stay inside. Eat hot food. Go to your mother. I won’t do it anymore.” She banged her little fists on the back of a chair. “I won’t! I want you to stop coming. Go away!”

  Let her vent, he thought. If anyone had a right to grief and anger this winter, it was she.

  She flopped down into the big chair and covered her face with her hands. He knew he’d have to go, very soon. The impulse to go and touch her hair in comfort was almost unendurable. It might only be months before he’d have to do as she said and stop coming altogether. Misery was stripping childhood from her shockingly fast.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled, picking at her sleeves.

  “Poor old Marina. It’s all of us who ought to apologize to you. It’ll be all right once Gavin comes back.”

  “Gawain,” she corrected, in a miserable whisper.

  • • •

  The thaw was bringing floods. Meltwater coursed off the moors and the heathland. Frozen deep by months of unremitting winter, the ground was too hard to soak it up. It crammed into the valleys and became a rampant brown froth, tearing at bridges and pylons, covering roads with upended trees. Southwest winds lifted moisture from the ocean and emptied it over the peninsula. Stunned into life by the violent spring, clumps of blackthorn bloomed like a white rash.

  • • •

  “Here again, child?”

  She climbed down from the bars of the gate at the sound of the voice behind her, placing her feet carefully on the cattle grid. It had been buried in snow so long, she’d forgotten it was there. A hint of the evening sun glinted from under hanging western clouds, making the wet world shine. She squelched across the slush-topped snowpack to the bizarre sculpture standing alone near the gate. There was a kind of hollow at its base where her back fitted neatly. She pulled her father’s old coat down far enough to sit on and wriggled herself in, tugging her knees up.

  “Sing to me,” she said.

  “Not now,” the green face abov
e her said.

  “Why not?”

  “I should speak solemnly this evening. I watch you at the gate and would ask why you stand there so, but I fear your answer.”

  She curled up a little more tightly and listened to the dripping and the birdsong.

  “Is it true you can’t lie?” she said, after a while.

  “Am I myself, or another?” Holly answered, imitating the pitch of her voice. “Are you the daughter of earth or water?”

  Again Marina was quiet a long time. She loved the smell of wet bark and the music of Holly’s voice, but it always surprised her how cold she was.

  “So tell me why I have to stay here. If you can’t lie.”

  The voice above her ahhhhed, a long sliding tone.

  “I cannot,” it said, softly.

  “I knew it.”

  “You know so little. The world is wide, child.”

  “I can’t stand it any longer. Just waiting. On my own. I’d rather something bad happened to me.”

  “You will not wait long, then.”

  “I don’t mind. At least it would be . . . something.” She’d raised her voice resentfully, expecting contradiction, but when Holly finally answered it was in a tone almost rueful.

  “You are free,” it said.

  Marina peered up and saw the face bent over her, its red unblinking eyes.

  “I wish I knew how to let you free too,” she said.

  “Ah, child. You were better to stay bound as I am. The world is as wicked as wide.”

  “Don’t you get lonely?”

  “I am not as you are, half-girl. Holly is not half made of wishes and regrets.”

  “Then you don’t know what it’s like. You don’t understand what it’s like for me here.”

  “You are water as well as flesh, child. You can choose peace, if you wish. You may sit by my roots and hear me sing and no harm will come to you. I cannot be other than I am, but you are free to choose.”

  “That’s right,” Marina said, eyes on the gate. Owen had chained it shut and nailed plywood over its bars. “I can do what I want.”

  “And have done to you what you do not want.”