Magrit

by Lee Battersby

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.” The voice was quiet for long seconds, then said more quietly, “Deep down. Deep down, you know.”

  “No.” Magrit shook her head, hoping she could knock the stranger loose. “Who are you?”

  “Yes,” a new voice intruded. Master Puppet’s voice: strident, demanding, superior. “Please. Tell me exactly who it is.”

  The voice ignored him. “You have to stop hiding,” it said. “You have to stop pretending that this is all forever.”

  “I insist that I be told who this person is!” Magrit could hear the journey Master Puppet’s voice was taking. She knew where it would end up, in a place where he was screaming at her in rage, and she was in tears and wondering what on earth she had done wrong.

  “She says I have to stop hiding. She says-”

  “She? She? I hear no she!”

  “He can’t really hear me,” the girl’s voice whispered in Magrit’s ear. “He just knows he doesn’t want you talking to anyone else.”

  “Please,” Magrit sobbed. “I just want Bugrat.”

  “He’s over there,” the girl whispered, and then said no more.

  Magrit turned her attention outwards. She was lying full-length inside the forbidden quarter. Something was moving in the scattered clumps of grass to the rear corner. Magrit felt her heart thump against her ribs. Her breath came out in tiny spurts. All she wanted was to throw herself back round the corner of the chapel and run far, far away from whatever terrible thing was causing the grass to shake and shiver. Instead, she forced herself up until she was on her knees. Carefully, one terrified hand after another, she crawled towards the source of her fear.

  It was Bugrat, of course. She had known it, from the rustling movement she could hear through the grass as she approached, and the way the girl in her head had directed her towards him. She didn’t understand how the voice knew where he was, but that didn’t matter. After all, Master Puppet knew things she didn’t, and she had built him with her own hands. But it wasn’t important, not right then, because there was Bugrat, and he was safe and happy.

  Magrit scooted through the grass, ready to smother him in hugs and kisses, and run back with him to where they could both be out of harm’s way, and she could teach him never to come back to this corner of the cemetery ever again.

  “Bugrat!” she called, the joy in her voice causing small, invisible things in the grass to scuttle out of her way. Bugrat looked up, saw her and waved a chubby, dirt-filled fist in greeting. Magrit quickened her step. All she wanted to do was take hold of him and make her escape. She was almost upon him when she looked over his shoulder and saw what he was doing.

  He had cleared away the rubbish bags that littered the space in which he sat. He had trampled the grass until it was flat and empty. He had dug into the dirt with his plump little fingers, burrowing down until he uncovered the ground in a circle perhaps three times his length in diameter. And there he sat, patting his hands against the dirt, tapping out a clumsy rhythm with his fists against the ground. Magrit might have recognised the tunes she sang to him as he fell asleep at night, mixed up together and backwards and upside down and inside out, if she wasn’t gawking with wide eyes at the thing Bugrat had uncovered.

  The cemetery was full of dead people. It had always been that way, since long before Magrit had come to live there. They gave her their clothes to wear. They let her sleep in their buildings. Their graves provided flowers to splash colour through the grass. Their headstones were islands among the rubbish piles. They volunteered their bones to make Master Puppet. Magrit was comfortable with the dead. They did not sadden her, or revolt her, or scare her. She was used to seeing them in every stage of their afterlife. Skin and bones and dirt in the gaps and crevices did not, in her opinion, mean a dead person was a bad person. They were simply part of her world, to be treated with respect.

  Bugrat had found a skeleton, and it scared Magrit silly.

  It was a small skeleton, obviously a child, curled up on its side as if sleeping, with its legs drawn up towards its chest and arms folded up as if hugging a non-existent teddy bear. It wore a grey smock that covered everything but one arm and its skull, which was tucked into its chest as if the child was trying to keep warm on a cold night. It was hard for Magrit to tell, but it might have been about her height and age. A child nearly ten years old: undersized for its age, its bones warped and bent. Magrit knew, without knowing quite how she knew, that it was a girl.

  She peered from left to right in panic. She could see no headstone lying in the grass, no outline of a path or grave boundary to show that the dead child belonged to anybody who cared. It was simply there, with Bugrat sitting next to it. He looked up at Magrit with a proud smile on his muddy face as if he had done something very clever and was waiting for her to tell him how wonderful he was. Magrit couldn’t speak. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the bones.

  It was this skeleton that had made her so afraid to come to this part of the cemetery for so long. She was terrified just looking at it. Her feet had lost all feeling. They refused to turn her around and carry her away. She didn’t know why she was so frightened, didn’t know why this poor child, cold and abandoned and forgotten, could fill her bones with ice and freeze her to the spot. But it did. It did, and Magrit wanted to beg it to stop, to tell it she was sorry, even though she didn’t know what she was sorry for.

  Master Puppet was calling her, asking, “What is it? What have you found? Magrit, what have you found?” in his worried voice, over and over again. His voice was dull, muted, as if she heard it through ears full of clotted dirt. And just when she thought she would never be able to move again, that time and earth and the heaviness of her limbs would keep her rooted to this spot forevermore, she stared down into the skull’s eye sockets, and heard the mystery girl’s voice inside her head again, rising out of the whistling wind of time, loud and clear.

  “Told you I was here,” she said.

  Just like that, fire ran through Magrit’s limbs, warming them into action. She swept Bugrat into her arms and took off, running blindly through the long grass. She slipped past the gap between the corner of the chapel and the wall, scraping her back across the rough stone and crying out as she felt it bite into her skin. Then she was out, into the centre of the cemetery, away, away, away as far as she could get before the strength left her and she fell to her hands and knees. She dropped Bugrat onto a clump of flowers and hugged herself tight as she cried and cried and cried.

  And all the time she did so, the girl’s voice stayed quiet, and so did Bugrat and Master Puppet, so silent and still that it was a long time before Magrit realised that the whole world had fallen silent. The birds no longer twittered and tweeted as they swooped to pluck soundless insects from the air. The murmur and hum that always emanated from the surrounding buildings, so prevalent that she never really noticed, was painful in its absence.

  “Hello?” Magrit cried out. “Hello?” But the only voice inside her head was her own.

  SHE CAME BACK TO HER senses after a long time. In the tiniest portions, the sounds of the world began to leak back into her head. Magrit kneeled with her forehead against the wall of the chapel and let the sound fill her up. Night covered the graveyard. By the time she found the strength to pick Bugrat up and wash him in a nearby font, it was almost completely dark. She carried him inside the crypt farthest from Master Puppet’s perch. There she changed him into a fresh, dry set of clothes that were barely musty at all and watched him curl up into a nest of rags and fall asleep. When she was sure he wasn’t going to wake, she dragged herself outside and shuffled over to confront Master Puppet.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked. He did not look at her.

  “Do what?” he replied. “Point out where your toy was? Let you discover for yourself how dangerous the course you’re taking is? Give you the chance to realise what a mistake this child continues to be?”

&nb
sp; “He’s not a mistake! He’s my–”

  “Your what? Your brother? Your friend? Your baby?” Magrit heard the sneer in his voice. She understood how stupid he thought she was, how utterly stupid and small and incapable.

  “All of them!” she screamed. “He’s all of them!”

  “He is your disaster,” Master Puppet said in a cold, calm voice. “He is your undoing. He is the ruin of everything we have built together, you and I. When it happens, when it goes horribly wrong and there is no way to put things back together again, it will be your fault.”

  “My fault? What about you?”

  “I have had nothing to do with it.”

  “That’s what I mean! You’re supposed to help me. You’re supposed to make things better–”

  “I am supposed to do nothing,” he said. “I choose to offer you guidance …”

  Magrit scrunched her face up. “The girl’s voice is right about you,” she muttered. The air between her and Master Puppet grew very cold.

  “What,” he said in a low, dangerous tone, “girl’s voice?”

  Magrit narrowed her eyes. “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “You must!” Master Puppet was angry now, as angry as she had ever seen him. “You must tell me now!”

  “No, I don’t think I will.”

  “Don’t be so stupid–”

  There was a rock in Magrit’s hand. She did not know how it got there or where it came from. But there it was and, without a second thought, she threw it at Master Puppet. It struck him on the head and whirled away. Master Puppet’s face swung towards her. She saw his wide eye sockets and his jaw dropping agape, as if he was shocked to his empty heart at what she had done. Then, before she could open her mouth to speak, to apologise or tell him it was what he deserved for being so mean, before she could even make up her mind which one was the right thing to say and which one she meant, he fell backwards. She watched in horror as he slid down the angled roof away from her and disappeared over the edge. She heard him fall to the ground at the far side of the building, a clatter of bones like dry rain that went on for far too long and then was far, far too silent.

  “Master Puppet?” she whispered, and again, when he did not answer, “Master Puppet?”

  But Master Puppet had nothing to say and, for the first time since she had built him, Magrit could not see his hunched body outlined against the surrounding apartments. She could not bear to look at the hole in the air where he had been. She ran to the corner of the chapel in a panic, and found a tangle of bones and sticks in the middle of the grass.

  “Master Puppet?”

  Somewhere, in the back of her heart, Magrit had always been afraid that Master Puppet’s voice was only her voice, bouncing back to her off the inside of his round, empty skull; that all she heard when he spoke was the girl she might grow up to be, talking at her through his mouth and her imagination. She had become accustomed to pretending that Master Puppet was a real person, with real feelings and thoughts and words and opinions. When she glanced through the door of the crypt and saw him perched atop his chapel like a scarecrow made from spare parts and cobwebs, rattling in the wind, it was easy to think of him as something she had invented to stop her feeling quite so lonely. At those times, Magrit had to close her eyes against the fear that he was nothing more than a yellowed, jangling mirror that showed the inside of her mind to her. No. Master Puppet was real, and so his questions were real. And his questions made her cold and scared and lonely all over again.

  Now the mound of bones was silent. Magrit spied his skull away to the left, upside down and separated from his spine. Scraps of cloth that once tied arms and legs together fluttered in the breeze, and sticks that had held ribs apart, or had taken the place of bones she could not find or could not fit together properly, now lay broken and snapped like an overturned bird’s nest.

  “Master Puppet?”

  She snuck to within arm’s reach of the pile that had once been her friend, expecting to hear his voice boom inside her head, scolding her for breaking him and demanding he be put back together. There was a space in her mind where he should be, and all she could sense was the emptiness of him not being there.

  Magrit reached a shaking hand towards his skull. His jaw was not attached, she could see, now she was close. It had bounced away somewhere and she could not spy it. Perhaps that was why he did not speak. Maybe he was trying to call to her, and the wind that rushed through her mind was the sound of him not being able to form words properly. Her fingers brushed the round cold curve of his skull and she knew her lie for what it was.

  Master Puppet only existed because she had made him, with her hands and her determination and her mind. These cold, yellowed bones were not the sum of his existence. That sum existed inside her, along with his voice and his knowledge and his guidance. Without him she was just a lost child. Without her, without her need for him to exist as a real, solid thing, he was nothing at all.

  “My voice,” she breathed, as the skull’s empty eye sockets looked at her with no trace of emotion. “My voice all along.”

  And then there was a sound inside her head. But it was not Master Puppet. It was the other voice: the new one, the smirking, superior girl from the place beyond the chapel walls.

  “You’ve done it now,” she said. “You’ve broken him well and proper.”

  “Shut up.” Magrit cradled the skull in her arms. “Shut up.”

  “You’ll never put him back together.”

  “Shut up.” She was crying now, big tears that burned her eyes and made her nose itch. “You’re not real,” she snapped, aflame with her new knowledge. “You’re just a voice inside my head, like … like …” Try as she might, she still could not say his name, could not acknowledge out loud what she knew in her heart.

  “Oh, that I am,” the girl’s voice admitted. “That and more.”

  “Oh, be quiet, you stupid girl!” And with those words, the spell of the girl’s voice was broken. Because it was Magrit who had barked the words, but it was Master Puppet’s voice she had used. The girl fell silent, and Magrit rocked back and forth, clutching the bony globe to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she told his absence. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “You can’t do it,” the girl’s voice said softly, almost apologetically. “You can’t do it on your own.”

  “I can so,” Magrit whispered. “I can … I can …”

  She stopped, her attention drawn into the gap between the chapel and the wall, as if finally listening to what the voice was saying, not with her words, but with the spaces in between them, where a different meaning was revealed.

  “Thank you,” Magrit said at last. There was a pause, and the dead girl replied.

  “You’re welcome.”

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, MAGRIT WAS up before the sun, ready to go back to the chapel and rebuild her friend. Perhaps she could do it by herself, given enough time and a large slice of luck, but the skeleton girl had told her something important. That she didn’t have to do it alone. She had Bugrat. And she had the skeleton girl and the skeleton girl’s voice. If she could build a friend who loved her and looked after her, no matter how mean and superior he might behave, then what would he be like if Bugrat helped? And the girl? Would the new Master Puppet love and look after Bugrat as well, once there was a part of his skeleton that would always carry his touch? Would he be inside the little boy’s head, like he was in hers, mirroring Bugrat’s dreams and fears and need for protection. Or would that remain Magrit’s role alone? Magrit did not know. All she could do was try, and hope some of the boy’s happiness and laughter might be caught up inside the nest of bones and twigs as they worked.

  Bugrat was still sleeping. She shook him awake and, as he rubbed his eyes and tried to turn over, she pulled him out of his nest and bundled him through the door and into the open air. He began to complain, his face scrunched up in annoyance. Magrit fretted that he would stay like this and infect Master Puppet with his baby-like cra
nkiness. She calmed him with a fresh tomato and a short dance together, then whisked him away to where Master Puppet lay. She located Master Puppet’s skull first, where she had laid it carefully the night before. She picked it up and, stroking it like she did Bugrat’s face when he was struggling for sleep, set her companion the task of gathering the scattered bones.

  Bugrat took to it with glee, rummaging through the grass like the most determined of treasure hunters. He picked out finger bones and toe bones and knee bones and arm bones. Soon enough he found the missing jaw, which he held above his head like a flag while he marched round and round in circles. They ran out of bones to find, and sat next to each other with the pile before them, placing them in the rough semblance of a person.

  Then they set to work. Bugrat chose each bone in its turn. Magrit sorted and placed them, arranging and rearranging, checking the pattern against her own skinny frame to make sure she could twist and turn and click them into each other like a real body.

  “It’s not enough,” she said, eyeing the tattered remains. “There’s so much missing. He’ll fall apart again.” She sank to her knees and put her head in her hands. “I’ve killed him.”

  “Not yet,” the girl’s voice sounded in her mind. “You’ve got one source of bones you haven’t considered.”

  “Where?”

  “Bugrat.”

  “No! You can’t have his bones.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Don’t call me that!” Magrit stood up, fists clenched. “You’re just like … just like …” She glanced down at Master Puppet’s inanimate skeleton.

  “Oh, I’m better than him,” the voice replied. “I know Bugrat’s going to work it out before you, and I give my bones up because I want to.”

  “What? No!”

  Before Magrit could react, Bugrat was on his way, toddling past her and disappearing into the corner behind the chapel.

  “No!” She ran after him, then stopped at the fence line. She couldn’t bring herself to go further. Instead, she swayed on the spot, hopping from one foot to the other in unbearable tension, hissing, “Please, please, please …” like a prayer, over and over and over.