Magrit

by Lee Battersby

  Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Logo

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Magrit lives in an abandoned cemetery. She is as forgotten as the tiny graveyard that surrounds her.

  One night a passing stork drops a strange bundle into the graveyard. Master Puppet, her friend and advisor, tells her it is an awful, ugly, terrible thing and that she should get rid of it.

  But Magrit has other ideas.

  ONE RAINY SPRING NIGHT WHEN she was nearly ten years old, a girl named Magrit climbed onto the roof of the chapel at the centre of the octagonal cemetery that was her home. She nestled herself against a tall, skeletal figure that gazed out across the grounds like an ancient guardian. Together, they bathed in the light that shimmered through the curtains of the surrounding buildings.

  The skeleton’s name was Master Puppet. Magrit had pieced him together from elements she had found in every corner of the graveyard: a bone here, a stick there, a tin can in one corner and rotten twine from a garbage bag in another. Now he sat at the apex of the roof, with his long arms wrapped around the stone cross, and kept vigil.

  “Look at that sky,” Magrit said to Master Puppet. “It looks sick and old, and fallen to the ground to die.”

  “Yes, it does look lovely, doesn’t it?” said Master Puppet. When he talked, he did so in Magrit’s voice, only deeper and grown-up. Magrit often asked him for advice. Unlike the gargoyles and rats, he usually answered.

  “Will you be all right in the rain?” she asked.

  Master Puppet harrumphed. “I am unconcerned about the likelihood of impending damage.” Master Puppet liked to use words Magrit heard filtering out through the windows around them, even if he did sometimes forget how they were pronounced, or if neither of them knew quite what they meant.

  “The rain waters the dead things below us and keeps them in their place.”

  Magrit looked down at the ground. The gravel paths were thick with weeds and scuttling things that rattled the tiny stones together as if they were bones in the wind. Headstones emerged from the grass: eyeless skulls that peered over the withered stalks. “Why do we need to keep the dead things in place?”

  Master Puppet sighed. “We’ve discussed this before,” he said. “Everything must have its place. The dead stay below. The buildings surround us. The sky remains above. And we stay in between, unseen and undiscovered and safe, as it should be.”

  Magrit knew he was right. The chapel they were perched on was a small structure, surrounded by knee-high yellow grass and dwarfed by the cold grey apartment buildings that circled it like bullies. The paths that ran from the chapel to the edges of the cemetery led to exits that had long ago been blocked off by the rise of the apartments. There was no way to enter, or leave. The cemetery crouched between the high walls, and the darkness of their shadows wrapped Magrit in secrets and safety. It was home, and Magrit loved it with the fierce love that comes with complete possession.

  “What about the stars?” Magrit asked for no particular reason, except that on a night like tonight, with the rain forming a gentle curtain between her and the clouds, it was easy to imagine that the stars had drawn blankets up over themselves and gone to sleep.

  “The stars are of no consequence,” said Master Puppet.

  “What about that one?” she asked, pointing upwards.

  Up above, a white shape flapped laboriously over the rooftops, shaking and shivering in the thin, wet air. Something small dropped from its front end and disappeared onto the roof of the nearest building. The white shape circled it for a minute or two, then raced off over the blackening sky.

  “That was not a star,” Master Puppet said.

  “What was it?”

  “A stork,” he replied. “Filthy beast of a thing.”

  “Why is it filthy?”

  Master Puppet contemplated her with his big black eye sockets. “Because,” he said, his bony jaw hanging loose and yellow under his skull, “storks bring new life to the world, and that sort of thing has no place in a cemetery such as ours.”

  “Oh.”

  A small grey bundle rolled down the slick incline of the roof. It trundled into the gutter, rode the gushing water to the top of the downpipe, then disappeared inside. A moment later it popped out the bottom. A fountain had fallen over so that its bowl lay beneath the pipe opening and was now no more than a concrete dish, sitting on the ragged lawn. The bundle splashed down into it and bobbed to the rim, before the flow of water dropped it, squalling, into the long grass beneath.

  “And what’s that?”

  Master Puppet was silent for a long time, so that Magrit began to wonder if he had not heard her. She was about to repeat her question when he spoke into her mind, his voice whispery and a bit scared.

  “It’s a horrible thing,” he said over the bundle’s screeches. “An awful, ugly, terrible thing.” His bones rattled in the breeze. “Get rid of it. Throw it away. Kill it.”

  “But what is it?”

  Master Puppet would not answer. Eventually, Magrit grew tired of asking. She slipped down the slimy, moss-heavy roof, dropped to the ground and stomped her way over to the squawking, wriggling bundle.

  “It’s breathing!” she called.

  Master Puppet said nothing. Magrit pursed her lips and crept closer. When she was less than three steps away, she kneeled down, not caring that the hem of her dress, which she had only found in a brand-new, undiscovered vault a few days ago, would get muddied in the wet grass. Cautiously, she reached out a hand and gave the cloth package a poke.

  “It’s squishy!”

  The parcel screamed. Magrit fell backwards in fright. She landed in a puddle and jumped up, patting her wet bum cheeks in disgust.

  Master Puppet’s leathery, whispering voice called out to her. “You see?” he said. “I told you …”

  Magrit grunted and bent over the cotton-wrapped mystery. She turned her body so Master Puppet could not see her fingers tremble, took hold of the edge of the cloth – so very like a shroud, it was – and peeled it back.

  Despite the darkness of night, Margit could see something pink and wriggly and naked inside. Its chubby arms and legs waved back and forth like an overturned beetle. She peered at its scrunched-up eyes and the nose that dribbled a watery line of snot, and its toothless mouth opening and closing and making bubbles of spit on its bobbly chin. As she looked at its shiny pink and white body, it fell still and opened its eyes at her. Magrit gulped. The creature started to wee. Magrit shuffled out of the way.

  “It’s a baby!” she called back to Master Puppet. “A proper living boy baby.”

  “I know what it is, stupid girl.” Master Puppet sounded angry and not at all pleased that she was able to identify the new arrival. “I told you what it was.”

  “No, you didn’t. You said it was horrible and terrible.” The baby had stopped weeing. Magrit studied his tiny little face. “He doesn’t look horrible to me.”

  “Oh, no?” Her friend sounded huffy. Master Puppet didn’t like it when Magrit disagreed with him. She didn’t do it very often. “You just wait until it starts to poo!”

  Magrit ignored him. The baby was making rhythmic squealing noises now, drawing in breath in short, gasping bursts then opening up his mouth so wide she could see his tiny tongue pressed hard against the roof of his mouth. For the first time, she began to worry about the buildings around her, and what might happen if the baby’s noise should cause the people inside to lo
ok out at them.

  “What do I do with it?” she asked.

  “I told you. Kill it.”

  “I’m not going to kill it. That would be …” Actually, Magrit didn’t know what it would be. She was going to say “cruel”, but she didn’t really think death was cruel. The cemetery was full of dead things. Death was normal. It was life she did not understand. She had hardly any experience of it.

  Magrit had been born in one of the apartments overlooking the cemetery, although she could recall nothing beyond the cold concrete floor and the sharp-edged plastic furniture, and the constant smell of cigarette smoke and chip fat. But Magrit did not care to think about it too much. She had spent what life she could remember surrounded by dead people, and their company was just as she wished it to be. They didn’t seem unhappy. Dead people didn’t get cold, or tired, or skin their knees and bleed. They didn’t get thirsty or itchy or get rashes on their bottoms or have sore gums or stub their toes. They didn’t stamp their feet and hit the dried grass with their fists and toss their heads when they didn’t get their own way. They didn’t act like Magrit at all. They simply lay very still and very quiet and let rats use their skulls as homes and every now and again gnaw their bones. Dead people never complained and they never cried. Killing the baby would not be cruel. It would be … what?

  “It would be … wrong,” she finished. Before Master Puppet could ask what was so wrong about it she picked up the baby and held him to her chest.

  “You touched it!” Master Puppet cried in outrage. “You went and touched it! Now you’ll have its smell on you! You’ll … you’ll … smell like a person!”

  Magrit stared into the baby’s eyes. The baby peered back. “I don’t care,” she whispered. She had never defied Master Puppet before. She risked a glance at him. “I think he’s hungry.”

  Master Puppet refused to answer. Magrit leaned over the baby, protecting him from the rain.

  “And he needs a name.”

  “Dead things,” Master Puppet’s voice dripped with anger and scorn, “do not require names.”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “He will be. Then what good will a name do him?”

  “You have one.”

  After that, Master Puppet didn’t talk to her for hours.

  MAGRIT WAS RIGHT, OF COURSE. The baby was hungry. Magrit stepped away from the shelter of the chapel and carried him around. He shrieked with a voice so shrill, it had her dreading the idea of lights going on in windows all around the cemetery. Magrit rocked him as gently as she could, her eyes flitting from window to window in panic. All her life she had feared the cold, blank faces of glass. It was a lesson she held deep within her bones: do not disturb those who live behind the curtains. Do not draw their attention. To be discovered was to be ruined, to have her world crash down upon her and all her special places and secrets and thoughts stripped from her. But the baby would not stop crying, and now, as she had feared, the unseen strangers behind the windows were shouting at each other.

  “Shut that damn baby up! People are trying to sleep!”

  “Shut your own baby up!”

  “You shut up!”

  “You shut up!”

  “Shut that ruddy baby up!”

  Magrit gawked at the surrounding walls. The world she lived in was a fragile one. Nobody visited her. Nobody from the surrounding buildings saw her. The lonely graves only ever felt a human touch when someone threw a garbage bag out of their window, to split and spray rubbish across the layers and layers of trash that had come before.

  A single white face at the glass, one hidden resident discovering just what occupied the land between the tall brick buildings; one sight of the willowy almost-ten-year-old girl clutching the screaming infant to her chest, and Magrit’s happy life would come to an end. All it needed was for someone to stop shouting and look out of the window. She had to feed the baby something, to quieten him. But she didn’t know what babies ate. Master Puppet was her only teacher, and when it came to subjects outside the immediate world of gravel paths and fallen headstones, he tended to be vague and evasive.

  The only education she received that did not come from Master Puppet was from watching television through the partly open curtains of the surrounding tenements and, even then, she often had to make sense of the images alone if the volume was low.

  And none of it helped her to work out what to do with the baby. All she could go on were dim memories of her early life and the food she gathered as she rummaged desperately through the piles of refuse between the gravestones. Magrit had always been able to feed herself. There was plenty of food on the ground, even if some of it was stale or a bit rotten around the edges. Occasionally, rats fought hard for their share of scraps, so she regularly retreated to the chapel with half the food she wanted and her arms covered in scratches and bites. With time, she had learned to avoid the nastier ones and grew used to the feel of their feet on her face as she slept.

  As she had grown older and more capable, she learned to bend her world to her needs. When she was dirty she found that rain was very much like a shower, and the sun was a lot better than a stiff rub with a towel. The crypts gave her clothes to wear, even if she had to give them a good shaking first, just to make sure all the bones were out of them. If she was cold, she wrapped herself up in a nest she made from shrouds. If she was thirsty, she drank from rainwater that splashed into the fountains and fonts scattered throughout the grounds.

  She had almost a whole life of hard-won knowledge at her disposal. But none of it was proving useful. The baby didn’t seem to want to eat. Holding him out of the rain as best she could, she crawled from rubbish bag to rubbish bag, rummaging through them in the dark. She found bread crusts to tempt him with, but he showed no interest. He cried when she tried to put an apple core in his mouth. He refused to consider the half a fish finger with cold egg yolk on it. Magrit ate that one herself. She wasn’t going to miss out on a treat like that if she didn’t have to.

  But still the baby cried. More and more windows were lighting up. Magrit cradled the baby in the crook of her stomach. She had to feed him something. Anything would do, as long as she could persuade him to eat it. She headed back towards the cracked concrete path that ran in a rough circle between the fields of graves. Her foot came down on something soft and wriggling. She pressed down, and it squished up between her toes as her weight crushed it flat against the stone. A goopy grey mass was bubbling up between her toes. The rain had brought out a writhing blanket of worms, and she had stepped onto a whole bed of them, squelching them to paste.

  She looked at the mushed-up worms. She looked at the baby. She looked at the worms again. She began to smile.

  Magrit shuffled across to a nearby headstone and sat cross-legged upon it. She arranged the baby in her lap and carefully scooped the tiniest bit of worm paste onto the end of her finger. Then she pressed it against the baby’s mouth, and held her breath as he sucked at it. She took her finger out slowly. The baby kept sucking for a few seconds before he realised the finger wasn’t there. He screwed up his little face. Magrit scraped up some more worm paste. The baby gulped it down, and again and again, until all of the squelched-up worms were gone and he finally, quietly, fell asleep.

  Magrit felt a warm stirring of pride deep within her chest. She could feed a baby. She could do it all by herself, with no help or advice from Master Puppet or anybody else. She glanced towards her friend at the top of the church building. She could see the rain threading through the gaps in his skeleton and tiny rivulets flowing down from his eye sockets like tears. She wanted to call out to him, to tell him that he was her best and only friend, and nothing would ever change that, not even a baby. He was still ignoring her, so she said nothing.

  Magrit blew Master Puppet a tiny raspberry. He was just stroppy because he had thought she couldn’t feed the baby, and she had. There was something else Master Puppet had said, something else he thought she couldn’t do. Magrit looked down at the sleeping baby’s fac
e. What was it?

  A name. That was it. She couldn’t keep thinking of the baby as “him” or “the baby”. Magrit frowned. She didn’t know any names. She knew how Master Puppet got his and hers was a half-remembered scrap of a name she would no longer recognise if it was given to her.

  Magrit decided to do what she always did when she was in search of an answer. The night was well advanced, but she could hear the murmur of televisions from the nearby windows. She could climb the slippery roofs of the crypts, one by one, and peer through the minute gaps in the curtains. Perhaps she might find a show about babies. Perhaps the sound would be turned up loud enough for her to hear a name or two. But the baby was sleeping and she didn’t want to risk waking him up.

  Magrit wriggled her bum about to get comfortable. There didn’t seem anything nearby that lent itself to a baby name. She didn’t want to call him “grass” or “rubbish” or “plastic bag”. That would be confusing when she wanted to talk about real grass or rubbish or plastic bags. Master Puppet might have some great ideas – he certainly knew a lot of words she didn’t, and liked to use them when he wanted to appear particularly clever – but she’d get no help out of him while he was in this mood. She wrinkled her nose and whisked away a mosquito from the baby’s face. The mosquito zipped off and, in that instant, she knew what she would do.

  “That’s it!”

  Somewhere at the edge of her mind she heard a quiet “Harrumph” in Master Puppet’s voice. Magrit ignored him. She had her solution. At least, she had the beginning of one. If the baby had to have a name, he should be the one to choose it.

  How, though? She didn’t think he could speak. Not in words. She’d seen him wave his arms about but it didn’t look like he could point very well. So, if the baby had no way of telling her what he had chosen, perhaps she could see whether something might choose him instead. She knew he would cry if he was unhappy, so if he didn’t cry, then surely that must mean he was happy. If the world gave him a name and he didn’t howl about it, she would know it was the right one. Magrit grinned. That was clever, grown-up thinking, the kind that Master Puppet kept all to himself.