Saracen (Saturn's Child Series Book 1)

by R. L. Holmes

  Gran began to withdraw from clients, the locals and from me. Raven-Face did a right number on our household. Nutcase! She became depressed and at times scared to leave the house. Sometimes she’d drive me to places we needed to go, but wouldn’t leave the car. I can see her warmth of touch becoming cold and her glowing complexion failing. She is aging before my eyes and is in constant pain. When that psychotic woman stabbed her, she used the same knife I sliced the cheese with, the first time she was here. I remember her soulless eyes watching me as I slid the knife through the block of cheddar.

  She damaged the nerves in Gran’s arm which will take many months to heal, many months of pain to endure. Even when the tissue of the wound heals, the nerves will take much longer. Gran quickly lost interest in harvesting, drying and macerating of her herbs. It was not her arm that was punctured, but her soul and purpose. It’s almost like the life force has been drained right out of her.

  The horrid Raven-Face has been put away in some institution down south. Her name and the incident are not allowed to be mentioned, so we try to pretend that it never happened. That of course is not easy to do, considering Gran’s arm is scarred forever and the two of us have become paranoid, having sleepless nights and exaggerated reactions every time the house creaks. Much to my disappointment we have become the people that I loathe. Those depressed, self-obsessed creatures that graced our hall, that Gran was so patient and kind with, are now us.

  This October so far has been a dreadful month, one I’d like to forget. I thought September was bad enough, with my loser birthday party and Daniel’s death. I’m looking forward to the end of this windy month and the beginning of November, a fresh start, let’s hope.

  ¥

  A white station-wagon rolls up the drive. It’s 7.14pm on a Saturday.

  ‘What now?’ I bellow. ‘This household does not need any more drama.’ A thin, pale woman steps out of the car, looking weary. The back of the wagon is piled up with clothes and blankets and a green dice hangs in the front window. I cautiously open the front door and step outside to greet her.

  ‘I’ve come to stay a while,’ she says as she stretches out her arms for a hug. I cautiously hug her then quickly pull away.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask.

  ‘Have you run out of money?’ Gran calls from in the lounge window.

  Since the stabbing, Gran has become a double entity; Gran before the stabbing and Gran after. The before-stabbing Gran would never make a comment like that to her face, only after she left. The after-stabbing Gran says whatever she feels like, because she’s angry, in pain, and has lost interest in everything and everyone.

  ‘I’m back to look after you, mum,’ my mother says.

  ‘You can’t even look after the lot you’ve got, let alone me,’ Mary answers, flicking her finger towards me. ‘Besides, there’s no room for you.’

  ‘I can share with Sara.’ She pulls me close to her.

  Gran stretches her neck and peers out the front window. ‘Where’s the rest of you?’

  Mum clears her throat as if she had prepared herself for the question, and rehearsed the answer all the way here. ‘I need a break. He’s looking after the kids up north.’

  Gran raises an eyebrow, an action I only ever saw her do after the stabbing. ‘Are you sure he’s looking after them?’

  Mum drops her head and sighs heavily. ‘The kids are at his mother’s’, she snaps. ‘And he is God knows where.’

  She sits her small frame down on the couch and gazes up at The Hypocrite painting. I watch her as she cocks her head slightly, as if she just discovered something she had not seen before. She looks tired, her skin is spotty and pale and her figure; bony and shapeless. But there is a lump. I detect a lump. Her stomach protrudes slightly, not really fitting in with the rest of her body.

  Gran sighs and shakes her head. ‘Not again Tanny, surely not.’

  ‘I’m not keeping it,’ my mother says, distraught that she has disappointed her mother again.

  ‘What are you going to do with it, then?’ Gran asks.

  ‘I was hoping you had something in there,’ she says, pointing to Gran’s clinic room.

  ‘So, is this the real reason you came?’

  ‘No. I want to stay. I need to change.’

  ‘Don’t change too much; you have children to think about.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. I need to change for them and create some stability and consistency.’

  ‘Well, you are leaving it too late. Austin’s a teenager now and Lu’s getting up there too.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. He’s not like his father. He got a job doing a milk run. He’s earning his own wage.’

  The room falls to an uncomfortable silence. My mother gazes around the lounge, avoiding eye contact with Gran. Gran heaves another sigh, and tries to get up out of the chair. I race over to help her. She waves me away, and growls about how annoying it is not to have the use of her left arm anymore. She winces in pain and we feel it, my mother and me, we feel her pain.

  Holding her arm in a protective manner, she walks over to the clinic room and opens the door. This room has not been entered, since the stabbing. She turns everyone away now, even Mr Leonard. It’s as if the room and what it contains reminds her too much of the awful event. Once inside, she places three large bottles of liquid herbs on her desk and calls my mum into the room.

  My Mother’s name is Tansy, named after a herb. This herb has a sunny, yellow flower and grows wildly in wastelands. It’s in the daisy family or Asteraceae and is used for various digestive complaints. Just like my name Saracen, Gran named her daughter Tansy, just because she liked it. But she gets called Tanny by most.

  Mum gets up, with hand on belly and smiles warmly to me. Matchbox 20 are playing on the radio and I can tell she’s not well, so I follow her in. The names on the three bottles of herbs are Blue Cohosh, Ladies Mantel and Pulsatilla.

  ‘I’m not normally in the business of killing foetuses,’ Gran says coldly. ‘But you may as well try these.’

  She gives mum the ratio of herbs that she says she must take between six and seven in the morning, and six and seven in the evening. She instructs my mother to pour the herbs into a brown glass bottle, measuring each one out - the strongest being the Blue Cohosh. Mum breathes deeply, her hand still placed on her belly.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

  Tanny nods.

  After taking the herbs, which apparently taste like bitter flowers, mum moves her things into my room. I don’t know how to feel about this; in fact I feel rather numb and empty inside. So much has happened in such a short space of time. Life just seems to be taking me along with it, like I have no choices. I like that my mother has come back home, but she seems a little distant, her mind is elsewhere.

  As she’s pulling underwear and socks from her suitcase, she says, she wants to get to know me better, and then asks who Seth is. I don’t think she’s genuinely interested in Seth, so I say he’s a friend who lives in the City. She doesn’t respond. I guess her mind is on a million other things such as her abortion, my siblings, Gran’s arm and my father.

  Together we drag the fold-up bed out from the shed. It smells a little of cat urine, but mum assures me it’s probably just the damp. We move my dresser over, and squeeze the bed in between that and the wall. The room looks like a tip with my mother in it. I had it fairly neat and organised and my precious books and projects in a particular order of preference in the bookcase. It annoys me she is here in my bedroom disturbing my peace, but I want her here at home, so I say nothing.

  She discovers some of my drawings and curiously goes through them, commenting on how good they are. She pulls out a couple of projects I did, one on whales and the other on bears and says that I am a fantastic artist just like my grandfather.

  The positive to being a lonely child is that you can escape into a hobby or a book or game. I often do projects on animals, get books from the City library, research each breed and then draw t
hem. And because I read and researched so much, I acquired a huge amount of knowledge that to be honest, most kids my age aren’t massively interested in.

  At this moment though, it occurs to me that this woman, my mother, knows very little about me, only what I or Gran has told her through letters and short phone calls. They visit two or three times a year, depending on finances and I’m always so keen to see the back of my brother and sister. I am nothing like them. I have thick blonde hair; they both have thin brown hair like my mother. My skin is fairly nice, whereas they’re spotty like my mother. Our eye colour is different, even our body shapes. I look like Gran, they look like mum and, luckily for us, no one looks like dad, at this point.

  To me they are like distant cousins who visit out of duty to the family, more than a desire to see us. I have nothing in common with either of them, and my mother also.

  But as the night falls and we climb into our beds, my mother says to me, ‘I’m here for the long haul, Sara. I would like to help your Gran, I owe it to her.’

  I rub my weary eyes, and say nothing.

  ¥

  Late October 1998: Stranger

  ¥

  Damn! Saracen’s mother has returned. I’m hoping she won’t stay long. This was not part of the plan, not at all. I’m going to have to re-think this.

  Tansy is her name. And she looks nothing like her mother or her daughter. She’s lean and dark, with a long spotty face, hardly attractive. How dare she come back after all this time! What is she playing at? I guess she plays the role of mother to Saracen only when she feels like it.

  I saw them walking to the bus stop together. Saracen seems awkward as if she is not comfortable with her own mother’s attentions. But she is a smart girl, she’ll know the difference between genuine motherly love and Tansy’s guilt ridden attempts to become close. She shouldn’t have abandoned her in the first place. What kind of mother does that to their own flesh and blood? Even a pea-brained chicken cares for its offspring better than she does.

  But this only fuels the fire. This is merely a small obstacle, nothing to be concerned about at all. She won’t stay. She never does. I will sit and watch the performance before me as the twiggy, drab Tansy tries her best to step back into her mothering role, while my Saracen pulls away. And I know she will pull away. Why would she be open to a woman who chose to reject her several years ago?

  Yes! It was a choice, it always is a choice. Don’t try to make excuses, drab one. Don’t try to justify your leaving of her behind. You snubbed your own daughter to feed the other two leeches. Oh well, she’s in my hands now. Wait and watch.

  ¥

  November 1998: Saracen

  ¥

  It’s Monday morning again. The scouring in my belly tells me it’s time to go back to that dreaded school! As I gather my books and shove them into my bag, Constable Lewis turns up. Gran blushes and says she doesn’t feel like seeing him. Mum takes over and invites him in. He says he has a couple of matters to discuss with Gran, one being to see if she is okay from the stabbing. He was sent back to the City to follow up on something, so he wasn’t in town when it happened. I notice Gran cringe as his tall, handsome body moves through the door way. I sense she feels helpless, and due to the incredible pain she’s in, feels unattractive and somewhat contorted.

  The before-stabbing-Gran was the perfect host with pots of tea or coffee and homemade biscuits at the ready. Now, the biscuits are eaten and haven’t been replaced and she’s in too much pain to get up out of the chair. She said to me, she doesn’t sleep well and the lines on her face have deepened.

  He smiles warmly and sits next to her. I can tell he’s fond of her and seems angered by this violent act. Mum watches curiously on as they talk like old friends, until he asks again about the ethanol in the shed. Gran’s face drops. He’s making it clear he’s really here on business, not just because he wants to see if she is okay. He had contacted customs about the license and was told that her yearly allowance is 12 litres. Gran nods. He then asks how much she has used. She says that she keeps the unopened tanks in the cupboard in the shed. He asks if he can go and have a look. She nods nervously.

  A few moments later he returns, his face carrying a look of mature seriousness.

  ‘There seems to be about four litres missing,’ he says. ‘Do you know where they are?’

  Gran shrugs, and clambers up.

  He asks again, ‘How much have you used this year?’

  Mum grabs me by the hand to take me to the bus stop. I don’t get to see how this conversation ends, but going by the constable’s tone of voice, and Gran’s look of fear, it’s not going to end in Gran’s favour.

  ‘What’s going on there?’ Mum asks, as we slowly walk along the footpath. She has one hand rested on her belly and the other holding my hand. Every step she takes, she winces from pain. I shrug off the question, and for a few moments remain silent. Yes, she is my mother, but she is still in many ways a stranger. Someone I wasn’t sure I could trust. But I did decide to say just one thing. ‘He came here before, asking Gran about the ethanol.’

  ‘Why would that be?’ she asks.

  I shrug again and look down the road to see my school bus inching closer to the stop.

  ‘You better run for it, or you might miss it,’ she says, feeling my tension.

  Like my mother, I hate being late and feel nervous when my over- active imagination kicks in, bringing up loads of scenarios of what might go wrong if I were. Letting go of my mother’s bony cold hand, I run as fast as I can, and out of breath, make it to the stop in time. I feel my mother’s eyes watching me as classmates laugh at the way I run, and ridicule my dress. How embarrassing? I don’t want her to see how unpopular I am and that every moment at that horrible prison is a struggle.

  ¥

  My teacher is Mrs Windermere, a kindly plump woman, whose husband is in the army and is away a lot. She was coming to see Gran for a while as she had anxiety whenever he’s away, being alone in an empty house. I remember Gran saying that she is a passion flower type person, one who is well covered and is very giving of her time and energy. It’s no wonder then that she sometimes looks completely exhausted. Her husband is quite high up in the army, so he is required to go overseas to lead troops. I heard her saying to Gran once that her husband is married to the army, and she is married to someone the army moulded. Who her real husband is, she’s yet to find out.

  I like Mrs Windermere when she’s in a good mood. She has a nice tone to her voice and a warm smile. I noticed early on that her moods improve the closer to the weekend we get. So as you can imagine Mondays aren’t that much fun. Often I dread them so much I feel like vomiting, my sensitive stomach churns, and butterflies play havoc on my bowel movements. Tuesdays are a little better, but on Fridays I have no problems at all.

  One of my rowdy classmates is a boy called Luke Beasley, a distant cousin to Daniel Parker. He is fat and smelly, and is always unclean. He doesn’t have the same charm and good looks as Daniel, but he is very clever at cracking jokes. He was the first one to start calling Mrs Windermere, Windy behind her back and made farting noises. I didn’t think it was overly imaginative to call her this, in fact rather obvious. But he started a craze and whenever she walks by chuckles and farting noises can be heard for miles. And just for that moment, they’re leaving me alone.

  The week everyone found out about Daniel Parker, Luke was taken out of school to mourn. It was a quiet time in the classroom then, and I really enjoyed it. But when he returned, he was filled with anger and revenge as if this event gave him an excuse to play havoc on everyone’s conscious. He came out with all these stories, all of which were completely exaggerated, but at the time we kids fell silent every time he spoke and believed every word.

  He told us about the state the bodies were in when they were found; that Daniel’s skin was peeling off and his head exploded from the intense heat. He said Daniel’s hand was found down the pants of the mysterious female body and that he had a load of gi
rls he visited, but she was his favourite.

  When I asked who she was, Luke swore at me and told me to mind my own business. Every day he came out with a new story, a new killer, and a new reason to kill him. He said once that it was really his father that killed Daniel, because Daniel owed him some money and that you never dare cross his father. Another time he said it was the police who killed him because they couldn’t get enough evidence against him for the drug ring he was running, so they just knocked him off and tried to blame someone else.

  Today though, as the bus drives up to my house, is different. Everyone notices the police car parked out front. The bus filled with normally chatty, giggly children fall silent, and all eyes land on me. We have yet to pick up Luke Beasley, so for that I am grateful. I’m hoping that his friends have not viewed the parked police car as a big deal and forgotten about it by the time we reach Luke’s bus stop. After all, we are kids with minds brimming with silly things. They surely will move on to something else by the time we get there. But I am wrong.

  As soon as the bus pulls up and the scruffy kid jumps on board, his mate yells out, ‘The pigs were at Sara-snot’s house again.’

  Sara-snot is one of the names Luke gave me. Once again pretty unimaginative, and I’m not sure why snot was attached to the first part of my name, as I have much control over my bodily fluids. So I’m guessing this name was given simply because it started with s. I’m also called queer, weirdo, ugly, fat-arse, no-friends and various other sooty-mouthed terms. These names sting only the first few hundred times, and after distancing myself from anyone with a voice, I have become immune.

  Upon hearing this news, the scruffy, stinky kid glares at me as he walks past. It’s only when he finds his seat do I hear a discussion going on between several of them. They somehow discovered Constable Lewis had been to our house to question Gran before.