by David Mark
I felt the lightning strike rather than saw it. I experienced a sudden moment of light and heat and power at my back, as if somebody had suddenly opened the door of a furnace behind me. I spun and lost my footing, dropping painfully to one knee and my hand was wrenched from Felicity’s. I lay there, twisted and sprawled, watching the deluge beat down upon the tiny church and the ancient tombstones, flattening down the grass and thistles, ragwort and cow parsley. Then came the sound. A noise like the cry of a dying beast; a keening wail that grew to a scream before climaxing in a crack that hurt my ears.
I looked up to see the ancient laurel split in two. It tore down the middle as if somebody were ripping a photograph. For a moment the trunk was two perfect halves. And then they fell. The branches were still tangled together and both halves of the trunk fell in the same direction, collapsing downwards with a dreadful crescendo of splintering wood.
It missed the church. Fell at an angle that would later be seen by the faithful as an act of God. Instead it stamped down into the churchyard with an impact that made the ground shake and one of the stoutest arms smashed into the stone roof of the little crypt that had stood there for three hundred years. The construction was not much bigger than a garden shed. It was surrounded by rusty iron railings and there were ornate carvings above the rotten wooden door. The whole edifice collapsed as if made of cards.
‘Oh,’ said Felicity, in my ear. I will always remember that. That sudden, simple exclamation. She had her hands under my armpits and was dragging me upright while her feet battled for purchase on a path that was already becoming a river.
We both saw it happen. Both watched as the crypt came apart in an explosion of stone and ancient timbers.
We knew there would be bones. Knew that if we did not look away we would see ancient skeletons and grinning skulls.
But the body that tumbled onto the grass was dressed in a dark suit and had a full head of hair. The face that looked at us had staring eyes and the mouth was open as if in surprise. Were it not for the unnatural position in which he lay, folded in on himself and twisted as if dropped from the sky, he may have just as easily been sleeping.
I turned to Felicity and saw the horror on her face. Her mouth was open and I wondered if her scream was lost to the sound of the wind and the rain and the settling stones.
She looked at me, then. An accusing, puzzled glare. Looked at me as if I had done this thing. I had brought this ugliness into our lives. Then she dragged me upright and grabbed my wrist and tugged me through the storm.
I had to look where I was going. Had to try and find my feet as I splashed through the path and felt the earth pull at my boots as if hands were reaching out from the earth.
I took a last glance at the body as I splashed through the lychgate. The pummelling of the rain ceased for an instant. When it slashed back down it was with the precision of a blade. Through the rain I saw a man in blue. Dark hair. Neat brown shoes. A greenish-brown satchel wrapped across the torso. Then he was lost as I tore my gaze away, searching the pock-marked road for patches of ground where I might keep my feet. I ran. Thought of myself first. Thought of my boy’s ashes after that. Felt a wave of something inside me as I pictured the dust of my baby being washed away like sand.
FELICITY
Transcript 0001, recorded October 29, 2010
… Is it working? Is it on? Cordy, is it working? I just speak, do I? I feel silly. I mean, where do I start? And it seems wrong. I mean it was all about the recordings, wasn’t it? That’s what made it all happen. I just, I don’t know. I did one of these for the Oral History Society but they just wanted to know about the village and the nuclear tests and what it was like in the old days. This is private. But I know. I know it needs to be told. Have you got my notes? My reading glasses are over there … All right, that day … I’d been shopping in the morning. Fish. Eggs. Bread. Flowers for Mam. Usual. Some of those chocolate mint balls for the boys. Why do I remember any of it? Then there was the graveyard. You startled me. The church. The storm. The body. All of it … I can’t get my breath. Cordelia, please, can we turn this off? I’ll start again when I’ve got my breath. I feel dizzy. Please. Cordy, please …
Transcript 0002, recorded October 29, 2010
It’s an odd thing, harking back. Half the stuff you remember as you are now and half of it you remember as you were then. You remember being upset with your parents when you were eight and they blamed you for setting fire to the outhouse when you were taking out the hot ashes. But in the memory, it’s you as you are now. So you understand your parents’ point of view, ’cause you’re a grown-up and you’ve had bairns yourself and you know the frustration and the expense and the fear. But you’re still feeling like a bairn at the same time. You remember the feeling of unfairness. Temper. You were being blamed for something that was an accident and could have happened to anybody. You remember the tears on your cheek and the hard hand off your bare backside and the shame that sliced into you like skewers into a side of pork. So you’re both people. You then, and you now. So when I remember ’67; when I remember that time, I always feel a bit bad because the way I used to think, the bad way, is still a part of me. And I feel awful for how I must have appeared in that moment. For looking at her the way I did. As if she’d done it. As if she’d brought the storm and knocked down that tree and made me look at that man, all mangled and twisted like that. How could it be her fault? How could it be anybody’s, ’cept for the nasty bugger who had left him there like a bag of rags and rubbish? Am I making sense? John tells me I’m hard work. Reckons he could bottle me and sell me as a headache.
I thought it was a tailor’s dummy. Honest I did. One of those big dolls you get in the windows of the shops in Carlisle. I thought somebody had dressed one up and put it in the Kinmont crypt for a game. That’s what I tell myself now, anyhow. Maybe I didn’t think that at all. Maybe I knew straight from the off what I was looking at and I’ve made the rest of it up. Maybe not. I’m blathering, I think. Wittering on, John calls it. Pushing my dinner around the plate. He says that too, and I like that description. Acting like I’m eating, but not actually eating. That’s maybe what I’m doing now. Making noise without saying anything. I’m sorry. I’ll try again …
I’d seen her a couple of times before. Cordelia, I mean. Striking lass, she were, though it pains me to say it, given how fond of herself she can be when she’s dolled up to the nines. Weren’t always as slim, mind. She were massive with the baby when she moved in to the old Winslow place. Big enough to be carrying twins. She was a delicate thing underneath, you could tell that at once, but with the baby she were carrying – well, she looked like a house-end. Even so, John had said she was a balm for the eyes and he wasn’t wrong. Looked like somebody from a magazine. Eyes like forget-me-nots and her lipstick were a colour me mam would have called ‘brazen’. Carried herself a bit fancy, if I’m honest. Sniffing the clouds, as me mam used to say. Bit fond of herself, though if I were half so pretty as her it would be a struggle to get me away from the mirror. But I don’t like to judge and you can’t know a book from its cover so I never joined in when anybody made fun or said she were a bit too bloody haughty by half.
Can’t have been easy, I thought. Only young and married to a man twice her age who was never here and who’d left her there to deal with that great old place up on the hill with nowt but her babby for company. She was probably lonely. And you could tell from the clothes she weren’t familiar with our part of the world. I wouldn’t even know how to describe what she was wearing when we spoke that first time. It had me in mind of a monk’s habit from the horror films; like a sack with a hood, except it stopped above the knee, and she was wearing white long socks and boots shiny as a tadpole. Her hair was a city style. Fringe at the front but shoulder-length at the back and sides, and she’d done her eyes so they looked like a cat’s. She was glamorous. That’s the word. The sort that men reckon are flaunting themselves, though they don’t mind enjoying the show. The sort that women do
n’t feel safe around. When John said she were pretty it was no different to him telling me he’d seen some nice flowers or a rare bird, but I’ll admit there were times when I could have slapped her with the frying pan for the ease with which she looked so bloody good, and the way she could just, well, turn it on and off. She could make men go weak at the knees when she tried, though it always seemed to kill a little part of her when she did so.
It were wrong of me to look at her like that. I know that now. But you can’t help it, can you? Instinct, I mean. No different to when I jumped out of my skin after seeing her laying there in the old grave. Looked to me like she were a corpse herself, laying there on top of the spot where those old bones were sunk in deep. What’s the word I’m looking for? Sacra-something? Sacrilegious, that’s it. Seemed sacrilegious, her lying there, though I don’t worry overmuch about going to church. Wouldn’t swear in a church, mind. Wouldn’t laugh at a joke about Jesus. Just because you stop believing in Father Christmas doesn’t mean you go and board up the chimney.
Looking back, I can understand well enough. Her baby were there. Scattered on the wind. It was somewhere she could feel close to him and who was I to deny her that? She might have been a snooty sort but nobody deserves to lose a bairn. Not like that. When she lost him it were the first time I’d heard anybody in Gilsland say a kind word about her. Up ’til then she were pegged as a snotty cow. Nose in the air trying not to breathe us in. That were the story, any road. Stayed up there on a farm she couldn’t work, playing with a baby who looked nowt like his father. And the father were no sort of man. Great walrus of a man. Something in London, so we were told. Worked for the government doing one of those jobs they do in the films. A bowler-hat-and-umbrella kind of job. Not short of cash and happy to spend it. No great brains on him, according to our John. Said you could charge him whatever you liked and he’d pay. Reckoned people up here were honest and decent and wouldn’t try and charge more than they thought was fair. Daft apeth learned he were wrong, in time. Lads fleeced him down to the bone. But they did the work he paid them for. Made the old place habitable. Decorated inside and out. Tidied the garden and the pasture and hacked back the apple trees so she could see the view across the river. She didn’t even offer them a cup of tea. Just sat with her baby on her knee, reading to the little lad from a book, as if he had the first blooming clue what she was saying. When he died, story changed. After that people were saying how lonely it must be up there on her own. Saying how she idolized the little man. How they’d seen her in the post office and her eyes were so dark it was like she’d been working down a mine. I should have gone up there then, I suppose. But you don’t like to, do you? Don’t like to put yourself forward.
It half stopped my heart when that tree came down. I was never good with my nerves. Flighty, Dad always said. Neurotic, according to John. I didn’t need a name for it. I just suffered with my nerves. Didn’t like heights, or the dark, or being too long on my own. That didn’t make me a pushover. I still had a tongue like an adder when my blood was up. Always made sure I put myself on the side of the road where the cars were coming from if I was out with the bairns. Looking back, I’m flabbergasted at myself. Anybody who knew me would have expected me to scream like a trumpeting elephant and then go into spasm. But I didn’t. Maybe it was the water running over my shoes or the leaves that were slapping me in the face and tangling in my hair but it just seemed a lot more important to me to be doing something useful than standing there and being an extra problem. We couldn’t stay there. Had to get indoors. Church was closed and the barn and garage back up towards the railway tracks were so flimsy we used to joke that a big bad wolf could blow them down. We had to get home. Up a muddy road that was turning into a river; the water chuckling over rocks and the ruts left by Fairfax’s tractor.
‘There’s a man,’ she said, looking up at me. Her eyes were wide. She looked young and frightened and no matter who she’s turned into in the years since, there’ll always be a part of me that remembers what she was in that moment. Always be a part of me that knows how soft she is inside the shell.
‘We have to go,’ I said, and dragged her onto the track. Weren’t like me to be bossy like that. I were a follower by nature.
And she starts on at me. ‘The man … the man …’
I knew she wouldn’t move if I didn’t say something so I promised her we wouldn’t just leave him there. ‘We’ll tell somebody,’ I said, all calm, like she were a toddler needed soothing. ‘Please. It’s getting worse.’
I had to hold my hand in front of my face. The air was full of flying twigs and stones and leaves. They felt like bullets as they hit my hand. Pushed me back like a man.
‘That house,’ shouted Cordelia, and she had to repeat it so I could hear her over the wind. She was looking at the grey cottage that stood outside the churchyard. ‘Let’s go there …’
‘No,’ I said, and I swear it felt like my insides were just ice and gravel. There was no bloody way I was going in there. I’d rather have been naked in the storm.
‘Keep going,’ I said. ‘My house is just up there.’
I couldn’t explain it. Not then. Not over the sound of the storm. However bad the rain got, we wouldn’t be going in Pike’s house. He was more dangerous than the lightning. His house looked like he did. Damaged. Battered. Moody. If a house could be a bastard, that’d be the one. I can see it in my mind’s eye, clear as what I’m looking at now. The rusty bones of a tractor and plough stood in the overgrown front garden and there were tattered bedsheets hanging in the windows instead of curtains.
It was like climbing a mountain. The road to my house were never that steep but the wind was pushing us back and every step made my knees hurt and my breath catch in my throat. I hadn’t even realized I was holding her hand! It felt strange, looking back to check on her and seeing her fighting along behind me like she was a child and I was her mam and I was taking her somewhere she didn’t want to go. She looked really small like that. Huddled into herself, her arm in front of her head, clinging onto me for dear life. Maybe that’s what made me strong. It got us up the hill anyways. I’ve never been so pleased to see my own front door. The thing nearly came off its hinges when I opened it, slamming open like it had been kicked by a giant. We fell into the house like we’d survived a shipwreck, soggy clothes and muddy boots and all. It was like we’d been thrown into the hallway by the sea.
We just stood there for a moment, once I’d slammed the door behind. Just leant against the bannister and the wall and got our breath back. I don’t know if I was crying or if my eyes were just wet from the wind but when I think back I remember her all sort of fuzzy, as if I was looking at her through somebody else’s glasses. She looked every bit as bedraggled as I did. Looked like she’d swum to my door through a river and a hedge.
‘I thought I was going to be blown away,’ I said, tearing off my coat. I wanted it all to be normal. Wanted to close my eyes so tight I could wipe out what had just happened. Water was running down my neck and I was soaked to my vest. I had fears of a chill. They always went to my chest. Spent half my childhood slathered in goose grease and wrapped in brown paper in front of the fire. Weak lungs, the doctors said. Strong heart, said Mam.
She pushed her hair back from her face. Wrung out her ponytail onto my carpet. I almost told her off for that. Almost asked who she thought she was. But she was already speaking.
‘There was a man,’ she said. ‘In that crypt. The stone building under the purple tree. The laurel went right through it. There was a man. A body.’
I shook my head. Can’t really say what for. It just felt that one of us should be saying something different. If one of us disagreed it would be more likely it wasn’t true.
‘That’s the Kinmont Mausoleum. Been there for centuries. Of course there’s bodies.’
‘That was a man!’ she said, and even as the rain and the wind battered the house it was the screech in her voice that went through me. ‘He was … fresh!’
‘He couldn’t be. Who would put him there?’ It was a daft question but it summed up my head in that moment. The idea was madness.
‘We have to go back,’ she said, and I saw her move towards the door.
‘In this?’ I goes. ‘Are you mad?’
Her face twisted into something I didn’t like. Her smile was like a gargoyle’s, all leering and boggle-eyed. ‘Mad? They think so. Some do. Maybe all. But I know what I saw. We can’t just leave him there.’ She stopped herself and I saw something else on her face, as if a fish had come to the surface to feed and then disappeared again without leaving much more than a ripple on the surface. ‘That’s his place. Stefan’s. My boy. He liked it there. We played …’
I don’t think it was in her to cry. She never did seem the type. That’s maybe the closest I saw her to squeezing out a tear. She held onto them like they were gold.
‘Come on, we’ll get dry, wait out the storm and then go and tell someone. Whatever we saw will be easier to get a gander at when the rain stops.’
She seemed like she wanted to protest but then her teeth started chattering and she gave in to a shiver and suddenly the idea of tea and a fireside didn’t seem so awful. She took her coat off in the hall but carried it with her to the sitting room, dripping water all the way. When she pulled her boots off she wasn’t wearing socks. Her feet were pale, swollen things. They made me think of the eggs we made at Easter; hard-boiled in ferns and leaves and onion skins with mottled patterns all over their shells.
It always felt nice opening the door to the sitting room. We kept it warm. There was always a fire going in the big, old, wrought-iron cooker that had been there since they built the house a hundred years before. The heat would hit you like a wall. And I’d usually have baked. It would smell of pastry, or apple cake, or warm scones, mixed with whatever I was stewing for John’s tea. It was all meat and pastry and crumbs and warm air; all laundry powder and starch.
