HOPE . . . because that's all there ever is.

by James Crow

  ‘Aye-aye,’ he says to the approaching girl.

  ‘What occurred? It was a thump and a shake.’ Her eyebrows seem higher than ever. She takes a step forward and Pete takes a step back.

  ‘Aye.’ Pete rubs his shoulders. ‘Hit an old stump, or something.’

  ‘I’m foraging.’ She shows him her basket, containing a handful of mushrooms. ‘I’ve fourteen. I’d like some big ones. Seen any?’

  ‘I have to go,’ Pete says, and he means it. There’s other things to be doing, like dusting the phone or painting. He sees Ali Black’s grey face taking shape on his easel.

  ‘Is your machine broken now? It looks like a dragon.’

  Pete’s cheeks are burning. ‘I have to go.’

  She lifts her basket again, eyes bright. ‘Big mushies? Please?’

  ‘There’s plenty about. Knock yourself out.’ Pete walks around the girl and heads towards the reception hut.

  ‘Cooly-dooly!’ the girl shouts after him.

  Pete doesn’t look back. An image comes to mind of the girl sitting in the JCB’s bucket. He’s driving the digger around the yard in circles and the girl is hooting with laughter. He finds himself smiling, because now she’s wearing a clown’s red nose. He suddenly realises she’s naked. At least she seems naked, she’s cut off at the shoulders by the lip of the bucket, so he can’t tell. But somehow he knows she’s as naked as nature intended. The phone in the reception hut starts ringing, then stops. He thinks about dusting its buttons, then stops. He should think of a plan, not naked girls. He could not recall ever thinking such a thing before.

  Mr Wood always kept a watchful eye when Pete made a plan. Making a plan brought the benefits of hindsight before hindsight got a look in, a trait ingrained in him by Mr Wood. Mr Wood had taken a liking to Pete, said he admired his enthusiasm. Mr Wood showed him how to hit the perfect welding arc with a success rate greater than any other student would manage, and the trick was simple . . . Pete took speed for the first time with Mr Wood, snorted through a rolled-up ten-pound note on the roof of Annex 5 whilst gazing at the stars on a night so clear they saw three shooters as well as the space station tracing an arc of its own through the ink. That’s how to focus when planning, Mr Wood said. Bring analogy to your thoughts and you can conquer any beast. And Pete had followed Mr Wood’s finger as it had followed the tiny light of Mir across the sky, an unwavering line, and the next day, Pete struck up his torch and saw the tiny Mir, alight within the flare, and he followed the tracing path, ignored the bubbling metal, the molten stick, just followed old Mir to miniscule perfection, and Pete scored ten out of ten. Mr Wood told him he was set for life, and although Pete never had need to weld again he always remembered Mr Wood’s way of focussing when forming and executing any plan, and Mr Wood always stood in his mind with his grey hair and white lab coat and watched. If you saw to the detail, the bigger picture looked after itself.

  Are you a homo, son? Mr Wood had asked on the roof of Annex 5, after revealing his trick with the stars. Pete told him no, but he wasn’t really bothered about girls either. Mr Wood had stared at him with small eyes and tight lips, an image forever locked into Pete’s memory.

  How often do you mas-tur-bate, son? I like the stars, was Pete’s reply. Mr Wood nodded firmly and that was that. Young Pete’s balls emptied themselves in his sleep most every night. To save the embarrassment of his mother washing sticky sheets, Pete took to wearing one of the socks he’d worn that day over his genitals for bed, and things weren’t so messy. He did his own wash when he could when Mam was out, didn’t like the sight or smell of his own spunk and wished his balls would quit. And that’s how it had been ever since, only now Pete did masturbate, once or twice a week in the shower, when his balls ached. He could pull and shoot in under two minutes and the cleanup was easy, straight down the plughole. Are you a homo, son?

  Only much later did Pete realise Mr Wood had been propositioning him, was asking for a wank on the roof of Annex 5; a visualisation Pete often ran through in his mind. What would have happened? What if he’d wanted more than a wank? If he’d done it for Mr Wood, what then? Would he have turned homo? As far as Pete cared you could take sex and shove it up your arse. Sex got in the way. Sex caused problems. Sex brought mess, disease and unwanted babies. Sex did not build things, was not art. It was just messy and uncalled for. Sexual intercourse was for reproduction, something Pete had no intention of doing. Once his new home was built he might adopt a small boy, someone he could nurture, someone he could paint with. Someone he could chuckle with.

  Are you a fucking homo, Pete? Are you? Kids at school had also asked that question, once or twice. They’d taken speed at Johnny Thompson’s house and six boys and three girls had washed it down with beer and in no time at all Johnny’s cock was jutting from his pants and Mandy Brayson was on her knees. When Mandy started gagging, Pete ran to the bathroom and vomited on the carpet. When he returned to the living room, Johnny was fucking Mandy over the arm of the sofa and Mandy had another kid’s dick in her mouth. When Pete made to leave, Karen – Pete didn’t know her surname but she had long ginger hair – stopped him in the hallway and pressed herself against him.

  ‘Are you a virgin? I’ve done it twice,’ she said, her cheeks as red as her hair. ‘We can do it, if you like, up there.’ She jerked her head to the stairs. ‘Doesn’t the billy make you horny?’ She was rubbing his crotch.

  Pete came in his pants and ran to the bathroom for a second time. He puked again and his pants were sticky and Karen was tapping at the door. With no option but to open the door because the window was too small to climb out of, Pete slid the bolt. Karen was breathing heavy and the speed had made her pupils huge. She loosened the buttons on her denim shirt and showed Pete her breasts. Small with bright pink nipples; an image he’ll never forget.

  ‘You can touch them, if you like.’

  Pete had vomited again, held most of it in his mouth but some escaped and dribbled down his front. A disgusted Karen had buttoned up and left and Pete did the same. The good old billy-whizz did not make Pete horny like it did the others, but now, as he stares back at the girl and the digger, sunlight bouncing of its yellow panels, Pete feels a twitch in his pants. Are you a homo, son?

  Almost at reception, Pete turns to take one last look at the girl in the yellow dress, but she’s gone.

  Pete doesn’t make it to the bathroom, he throws up in the kitchen sink.

  4

  Peter has a funny walk; he moves through the grass in lumpy strides. He’s a lumpy stride kinda guy. Peter also has funny energy. Beth can see people’s energy; it appears mostly in the form of little bricks in a row around a person’s head and shoulders, usually in a colour to suit the person’s mood. Little rectangular bricks, in black and red, bounce around Peter’s head and shoulders, willy and nilly. This is unusual because Mum has similar bricks when she’s on her monthlies. Could Peter be a girl in disguise? He’s almost at the reception door when his bricks pause, but he doesn’t, which means he’s about to turn. She dodges behind the dragon and watches through a gap. He does turn and his bricks catch him up. He looks in her direction. Beth stays still until he turns again and disappears inside.

  The sharpest sniff of something ripe – fungi she thinks – flares her nostrils, a dark soily taste inside the nose, which can only mean one thing – big mushies! She picks up her basket, tips out the fourteen mushrooms and weaves in and out of breaks in the thicket with barely a breath, until she comes to a circular clearing where a stone platform almost fills the space. Surrounded by long grass, the platform has a round lid of wooden beams riveted together with pretty metal straps that have rusted. There’s a small hatch cut into the wood. It has a metal handle shaped like an almond and it’s orange with rust. The sunlight brightens it, makes it seem alive. For some reason Beth’s heart is loud and clear as can be, and there’s another stronger scent, of something, something . . .

  ‘Dead.’

  Beth yelps and seventy-two birds scatter from t
he bushes around them.

  Them?

  There’s a girl, appeared from nowhere, she’s standing on the platform. Or is it a mirror image of herself? A trick of her mind? But no. Not quite a mirror image. She’s bright as buttons, this girl, looks like me, eyes like mine, same yellow dress. ‘Same dress. I look like you,’ Beth says. The girl has an excitement about her cheekbones, but she has no bricks dancing around her head and shoulders. No bricks?

  The girl smiles. She has bare feet. ‘You have dark hair,’ she says. ‘I have yellow.’

  ‘Blonde, not yellow, yellow is like your dress, our dresses.’

  ‘It seems the only difference,’ the girl smiles – she has beautiful lips. ‘We could be sisters, as if fate played a hand.’

  ‘I don’t have a sister, or a brother.’ Beth is compelled to reach for the almond-shaped handle.

  ‘Don’t touch that.’

  Beth pulls back and the girl is now by her side, sitting on the raised beams, bare feet dangling in the long grass. So quick. But no bricks. Impossible.

  ‘You must have blinked.’ The girl pats the wood. ‘Please sit. I have important discourse.’

  ‘I have trainers. Another difference.’ Beth’s trainers look and feel clumpy.

  ‘Cast them off, come feel the grass with me.’

  Was that an order? Beth feels the pull of reluctance. No bricks. Everyone has bricks, occasionally lines, sometimes jaggy frazzles, but never nothing at all. It strikes her that she might not be working right. Ill with a fever perhaps. That can make the bricks fade. She feels her brow but it’s not hot.

  ‘Do you feel it?’ the girl asks.

  Now she’s sitting at the girl’s side. Her scruffy trainers are together on the platform, socks stuffed inside. No memory of that. Did she blink?

  ‘Swish your feet and feel the patterns.’ The girl moves her feet in circles through the grass and throws back her head and sighs. Her long blonde hair shines in the sunlight.

  Now Beth’s swishing her feet and waiting for the sigh, but the grass is strict, sometimes sharp. She throws back her head and closes her eyes and the grass turns her feet into hot fuzzy balls. ‘I feel it. I do feel it.’

  The pain is stinging. She raises her legs from the grass. Thin red streaks lace her feet. Tiny droplets of blood are forming along the streaks. Beth looks all around her. Shadows of birds flit through branches. The sun is burning the top of her head. The girl is gone.

  5

  The worry was back and shit it was weighty. Being here in the valley with no mobile phone signal meant there was no quick way of contacting George. Sometimes she wondered if George had planted them here for that very reason. She bolted the door and took her purse and a box of tissues to the bedroom. She could always ask Peter to use the reception phone but didn’t like the idea of him listening to her pathetic pleading. She closed the curtains, switched on the light. She could drive the five miles north to the Horse’s Tale and the phone in the pub’s passageway would put her in touch with her husband. But he’d said not to call, not to worry, that he’d be here tomorrow latest, and anyway he’d only tell her to grow a fucking pair. Ali always bought a purse that had a compartment for stamps; it felt safe always having a blade close to hand. She took out the razorblade, removed its protective strip and placed it on the tissue box. There was a payphone in the village, but that was fourteen miles away via a winding single-track road interrupted by numerous bone-shaking cattle grids; a half hour journey that always made her feel queasy. She went to the full-length mirror that was screwed to the wall. The face that looked back was black. Alison Black. The payphone in the village would give her privacy, but again her loving husband would sigh at her fretfulness and the waste of his precious time. She took the hem of her jumper in crossed-over hands, pulled it off over her head and dropped it onto the bed. Even her bra looked miserable. George was not coming. He wouldn’t show today, or tomorrow, and when she drove to the village payphone it would be out of order, and when she drove back and took the north road to the Horse’s Tale their phone would be broken as well, so she’d drive east, almost to the border where Scotland meets England and the signal bar will show one small dot on the screen, if you’re lucky, and if you stand on a boulder and face the right way. She loosened her jeans and let them drop. George’s phone would go straight to voicemail anyway and she wouldn’t dare leave a message. She’d hang up and head home to their cabin and wait for days until a postcard arrived from Sweden or Sydney or wherever else his next big deal needed signing off and he’d tell her not to worry, another million just dropped in the bank and he’d see them both soon, kiss-kiss. Sometimes she thought Beth knew her secret. Beth would probably be able to tell her how many scars she had from a single glance. In the hundreds by now. Each scar an inch long. Each cut horizontal, running like ladders from bra line to knicker line. The itch was dancing from scar to scar right now. She rolled her knickers down an inch or two. Thick bush hid most of the scar that Beth had left behind. It sat above her pubic bone like a malicious mouth waiting to open. The itch. Sometimes she thought about slicing through that old scar and being done with it. She picked up the razor from the tissue box and pulled three tissues. She sat on the bed and her hatched stomach sagged. George’s head appeared at the door. She leapt up, ran the razor down his nose quick and his face fell open. But that was in her mind, another fucking itch. Holding the tissues, she gripped a fold of flesh and the itches scratched their way to it. She positioned the blade and the hot itch clawed at her folded flesh. She tightened her grip and the lump of flesh in the mirror filled with blood. The scar above her pubic bone was on fire. She pressed the blade into purple flesh and rocked it back and forth until the sting of pain as the skin broke open and the itching seethed out with spiky little legs, scurried up her chest and prickled her neck, and she spat out the pain and the spikes became tickles then strokes and the curtains came back to reality, the tissues a crimson rose in her hand.

  6

  She spots Peter at his balcony and her hurried steps falter. Peter had told her fantastic stories about loch spirits and wood spirits at the bonfire night barbeque. Beth is certain she’s just met one. She considers stopping to tell Peter, but his bricks are throbbing. She carries on down the hill with the image of the blonde girl in her mind and the cuts on her feet stinging at her. She slows to ease the sting. That’s better. Then the idea comes to go back. She wants to be with the girl. There’s questions. Many questions. She reaches the slight rise, which curves and flattens out into the communal area. She’ll sit on one of the picnic tables and take stock. She comes off the rise and the track curves inwards, and the girl in the yellow dress is there, sitting on a table-top, her bare feet on the seat. She’s staring at the charred remains of the bonfire.

  ‘Was it a good fire?’ She sounds almost sad.

  Beth nods. Still no bricks. ‘Are you in my brain?’

  The girl looks at her. ‘Are your eyebrows pinned up?’

  Beth feels her eyebrows go up at this. This makes her smile and the girl smiles back. Now she’s in front of the girl. She has the smoothest skin. Beth wants to ask about her lack of bricks but the girl sighs.

  ‘I am what you think I am,’ the girl says.

  Beth gasps. ‘I knew it! A wood spirit!’

  ‘Exactly that.’ The girl lifts a hand to the air as if she’s offering it for a kiss. Beth feels her face heating up. She lets out a breath. There’s a flutter of wings and a bird lands on the girl’s hand. A sparrow. The girl’s lips pout and she brings the bird to them and the bird does a little peck.

  ‘Do you know Peter? Can Peter see you? Can anyone see you?’

  ‘Only you may see me. I am here to . . . to help you.’

  ‘Are there other wood spirits here? Sometimes I feel there might be.’

  The sparrow hops to the girl’s shoulder. She crosses her hands in her lap. ‘Yes. There are many. Please sit with me.’

  She should be getting back. ‘I should be getting back.’
>
  ‘You don’t believe me.’

  The girl’s mouth twitches to the sound of birds flitting through the trees around the clearing. A crow caws high and Beth looks up. When she looks down again the girl has gone.

  ‘Behind you.’

  Beth spins. She’s on the other table-top.

  ‘Hold out your arms.’

  Beth’s arms rise out by her sides and her arms fill with sparrows. Her heart fills with something new.

  ‘What are you?’ says the girl.

  ‘Fortunate,’ is the word that comes from Beth’s lips.

  The girl smiles, clicks her fingers and the sparrows lift to the trees.

  Beth’s arms lower. She feels queasy. The excitement. She sits at the table where the girl had first sat. ‘That was cooly-dooly.’

  The girl crosses her feet and wiggles her toes. ‘You hurt your feet in the grass. Let me see.’

  Beth takes off one trainer and peels back the bloodied sock. The cuts have gone. A gasp. ‘You’re a wonder,’ Beth says.

  ‘It wasn’t me.’ The girl gets down from the table. ‘You felt the patterns, made them work.’

  ‘I did?’ Beth follows the girl to the wooden jetty that sticks out into the loch and they walk along it. From here they can see Peter’s cabin at the top of the hill. Peter is still at the balcony; his bricks are still throbbing.

  ‘That’s Peter,’ Beth says. He’s got bricks.

  ‘He’s not to be trusted.’

  ‘Peter’s nice. Peter’s funny.’

  ‘I know the workings of the man. Just as I know you and yours, and your mother and father and theirs, and anyone else round here you care to mention, dead or alive.’