Magrit

by Lee Battersby

  He returned, a dozen or more bones in his arms. Magrit retreated before him as he walked purposefully back to Master Puppet and dropped them at the skeleton’s feet. “But these are …”

  “A donation. Use them wisely,” the girl said.

  “These are your bones.”

  “They are ours,” the girl replied. “To use as we see fit. Now use them and make him whole.”

  “Why?” Magrit asked. “Why are you helping? You don’t even like him.”

  “You don’t have to like somebody to love them.”

  “You … love him?”

  The girl laughed. “YOU do. And I want what’s best for you. So. Use the bones. Reassemble your friend. Then let us see whether it really is what’s best for you.”

  “But … what about you?”

  “I’ll be fine,” the voice replied. “I’ve lost more than this and survived. In my own way.”

  “Your own way?”

  “Just use the bones.”

  Without stopping to think, Magrit began to pick up bones and fit them into the design she had laid out before her. She dispatched her eager assistant to pull up strands of grass for her to twine into cords, and search through the tangled vines that adorned the nearby buildings to tear down exactly the right one to coil and bend and knot, and rummage about in their nests for rags of just the right length to tie everything together.

  The sun rose towards noon and then fell into the afternoon. With lots of mistakes and changes and giggles and tears of frustration and yelps of triumph, with hugs and grunts and concentration and practice, they built themselves a skeleton.

  It didn’t look much like a real skeleton. There weren’t enough ribs and a lot of what it did have were sticks. It had not quite as many toes as it could have and some of its fingers were made from broken cutlery that Magrit bent into shape. There was a tin can in the middle of its spine and most of its teeth were missing. But that was what had made Master Puppet who he was: if Magrit wanted a simple skeleton, she could have picked one from the graves around her. What she needed was Master Puppet.

  Master Puppet, she understood now, had always been more than just bones and advice. He was a frame upon which she hung her deepest thoughts, and now it was a frame for thoughts that she and Bugrat were rebuilding. And the frame they built had a skull, with holes for its eyes and a jaw that opened and shut with the breeze, like Master Puppet’s did. It had two legs, and two arms – more or less – and a sort of lap that reminded her of the bony cradle into which she had crawled when she was smaller and in need of comfort. And it was, for as much as she wished it to be, her Master Puppet, only now it was hers and Bugrat’s and the skeleton girl’s, all wrapped together like a conversation where each of them finished the other’s sentences. And, she hoped, he would be all the better for it. All she needed to do was lean him against the wall of the chapel and wait for him to speak, and they could be a family again.

  With Bugrat helping as much as a one year old could, she picked Master Puppet up and together they propped him just so against the wall, with his hands in his lap and his skull resting gently against the stone. Then they sat down like the quietest, politest children in the world, and waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  After a while Bugrat crawled into her lap and snuggled down. She positioned her hands around him and tried not to think of just how much she looked like Master Puppet.

  The sky was lowering all around them. Shadows were creeping down the bricks towards the grass. Magrit peeked up at the sky and saw the empty roof above them.

  “Of course!” She shook Bugrat awake. “The roof,” she cried. “The roof!”

  Master Puppet lived on the roof, where he could look across the cemetery and make sure everything was in its place, and where he could protect Magrit all day and all night like the guardian she needed him to be. It was his job and his purpose. Until he was at that high point, until he was in his appointed place, he was not Master Puppet. He was just a jigsaw puzzle with ambition.

  It took until the shadows had crept over the whole cemetery for Magrit to climb the chapel wall and drag Master Puppet’s body up with her. Six times he caught on rough stones, or the edge of the gutter, or on vines or branches that grew through the windows and along the walls, and dropped part of himself back down onto the grass. Six times she found a spot to wedge him into and clambered down to recover the rogue bone and fit it back into him before she continued. She stuck to it and, while Bugrat played clapping games with himself, she hauled him to the front of the building. She arranged his legs on either side of the big cross that stood at its apex and draped his arms over the crossbar like she had done once before. Carefully, she took her hands away so that he was, once again, sitting by himself. As the shadows met and the darkness of the night descended, she positioned his skull so he gazed out over the graveyard beneath them. She held her breath, and waited.

  Perhaps it didn’t take as long as it felt, because it felt like forever and ever, but after the longest time there was a sound inside her mind like someone not quite knowing what to say, like her not quite knowing what to say to herself. Then Master Puppet’s voice, tender and scratchy like he had a sore throat, came whispering towards her.

  “And how …” he said, his voice quiet like he was embarrassed and wary and thankful all at the same time. Magrit caught a tiny breath in her throat: it was him, just like she had hoped, only more than that, she heard the high, feathery tendrils of the skeleton girl’s voice, playing around his like a breeze.

  “You can get down if you want to. The dark is no problem for you.”

  Magrit glanced over the edge of the roof. She saw a dim shape in the dark, just about where she imagined Bugrat might be if he grew bored with waiting and snuggled down to sleep. She saw the lights coming on in the windows around her, as the people who lived behind the curtains turned on televisions to keep them company. She felt Master Puppet within her thoughts, warm and quietly happy and, most important of all, there. She squirmed closer to him, wrapped his arm over her shoulder and tucked her head into the bony angles of his lap, settled herself onto the cold tiles and made sure she wouldn’t slip.

  “I’m not going to leave,” she said.

  MASTER PUPPET WAS BACK AND all was as it should be. Or, if it wasn’t exactly as it should be, it was as close as it was likely to get. His voice wasn’t quite as Magrit remembered. It was scratchier and less certain. The skeleton girl’s bones chimed differently in the wind, so that he sounded smaller and higher pitched. And he no longer surveyed the cemetery with the same air of confidence as he once had, but rather more as if he was afraid of what he might view and was bracing himself against it. He was back on his perch where he belonged, to reassure Magrit with the shape of his silhouette against the blank red bricks any time she wished to glance up. And Magrit glanced up a lot, to make sure he was there, and that all the pieces she and Bugrat had used to rebuild him were attached, and he was looking out for her. But mostly just to make sure he was still there.

  He spoke less often and what he did say was tinged with sadness, or at least a kind of softness, as if he was delivering bad news but did not want to hurt anybody while he did so. He often trailed away in mid-sentence and, when Bugrat came into his vision, he occasionally fell silent, as if losing interest in Magrit altogether.

  “What are you doing?” she asked him once, when she saw him regarding Bugrat as he played in front of the chapel.

  “I’m talking to him,” Master Puppet replied.

  “What do you talk to him about?”

  “Oh, just bits and bobs,” he said, his voice like the touch of grass against her face. “Just bits and bobs.”

  “What sort of bits?”

  Master Puppet said nothing, but Magrit had the feeling that he was contemplating Bugrat, measuring him with much less fierceness than he had once done.

  “I talk to him of the future,” he said at last. “You can see a lot of it from up here.”
<
br />   “What …” Suddenly, Magrit was unsure which question to ask, and which answer she hoped for. “What can you see?”

  “Growth,” he replied. “Growth and death and cycles of life.”

  Magrit looked around her, at the grass and the graves, and the insects that flickered and fluttered about them. “You can see all that down here, if you look at it,” she said.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m sure you can.”

  At her feet, Bugrat pulled at her dress. She stooped and picked him up, hugging him tight.

  “Does he …” She licked her lips. “Does he ever ask you anything?”

  Inside her head, Master Puppet smiled a slow, sad smile. “No,” he said. “Never. I’m afraid I’m never certain if he even hears me.”

  “I hear you. I always hear you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes!”

  “That’s good.” Magrit had the sensation of Master Puppet nodding. “That’s very good.”

  The days rolled on and Bugrat spent hours exploring while Magrit hovered at a safe distance, letting him meander where he wished and always wondering just how much help he might require, or whether she would hear him should he ever find his voice and cry out, or if he really needed her at all now he could walk from wall to wall without falling.

  And he grew into his second year and into his third and, finally, into his fourth year. Magrit, who had been nearly ten years old throughout his years of growth and who now, still nearly ten, fretted more often than she ought, and found herself talking to him more and more in a voice that sounded a little like Master Puppet and a lot like the skeleton in the grass.

  Everybody was talking except Bugrat. No matter what Magrit tried, she could not persuade him to speak, to respond to her pleas with anything but burbling and silence.

  “What is this?” she would ask hopefully, pointing to a familiar plant and “What’s that called?” and “What is this for?” and “Why?” and “Why?” and “Why?” over and over again, but the only thing she received in reply were hugs and kisses and silent giggles.

  Magrit had never taught anybody before. She didn’t know how to make someone sit and listen and believe that she was the only one who knew the real truth about things.

  “Why are they called headstones?” she would ask, pointing to the slabs of stone that lay facedown among the grass. Bugrat had no words to tell her “Because they are.” And, because jumping from stone to stone was what Magrit and Bugrat used them for, she changed their name to jumpstones, and jumpstones they became.

  “What are they?” she asked of the stars that flickered beyond the edges of the surrounding roofs when the night sky cleared and the smog dissipated. And because he would not answer, she filled his silence with explanations.

  “Windows,” she said. “Windows in the sky. And that blackness, all around them? It’s a garden, where little boys and girls can play safely.” She gazed up at the infinite night and her voice took on a wistful tone. “No walls to hold them in, no walls at all. Nothing to stop them from playing wherever they want. No need to fear the stars and worry about who might look out of them.” And then she turned him away and left the stars and the open sky to their business.

  The real windows, on the other hand, were her business. Bugrat was fascinated by the shining squares of light, and she spent far too often warning him away from them. No sooner did Magrit take her eyes off him than he was scooting through the grass, running from the centre of the cemetery to the walls of the building with his arms outstretched.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, pulling on his arm yet again, relying on her greater weight to drag him away. Bugrat struggled, then fell back and allowed her to carry him away, back into the safety of the brambles and the deep, comfortable shadows.

  “You must never touch them,” she cautioned him as she deposited him on the flattened grass in front of the chapel, bending down so that she could hold his face in her hands while she spoke. “Never, ever, ever.”

  “Why not?” someone always asked. Not Bugrat. Bugrat never asked why. Instead it was the girl’s voice, slipping in between the gaps in Magrit’s concentration like a snake between stones in a wall. “What harm is there?”

  “You know why,” Magrit would tell her. “You know what it would mean.”

  “I do. I do,” the girl’s voice agreed.

  And Magrit would ignore her, then, and turn her attention back to her ward. Because Bugrat never asked why and so she never had to tell him: they never touched the window because it was the rule. That was all. It was the rule. It kept them safe. It must simply never be done.

  So the days passed. Magrit was happy. The slow, temporary warmth of summer drew the chill from the stones and made the dry grass hiss as they pushed through it, and warmed the water they splashed on their faces in the morning. Magrit knew that this was the best, the happiest, the most complete, that she had felt in her entire life.

  And then, one cooling autumn day, when Bugrat was nearly four and a half and Magrit was still nearly ten, she woke and realised that, for the first time since she discovered the skeleton in the grass, the world around her was completely soundless. She blinked and raised her hands to rub at her ears in surprise. There was always some background noise, even in the heart of the cemetery, even buried under her nest of rags in the great stone crypt in which she slept. Insects ticked and chirruped. Rats scuttled. Breezes swished the grass and rattled the wires in Master Puppet’s bones. Stone walls heated and cooled and whispered stories to her about the lives they contained within their depths. Now, again, she was surrounded by true silence, as if everything in the entire world was holding its breath all at the same time.

  Magrit sat up, suddenly scared.

  “Hello?” she called, listening to her voice bounce back off the walls, distorted and tiny. “Hello?”

  Nobody answered. Not even Master Puppet.

  “Oh,” she said, her voice echoing inside the vacant spaces. “Oh, no, no, no.”

  Since her discovery of the skeleton girl, the forbidden quarter of the cemetery had gradually lost its terror for her. Even so, she saw no reason to visit it and had done her best to distract Bugrat away from it. He seemed to love the place, as if it had been carved out of the cemetery for him alone. Magrit did not trust it and they had long since reached a mute understanding. He did not visit it and she did not dwell on the danger she felt still lay within it. But it was his discovery of the skeleton there that had first drawn the world into silence. And now …

  “What has he found? What has he found?”

  There were no sounds in Magrit’s head but the ones she made as she scrambled out of the crypt and ran to the broken gate at the chapel’s side. She stopped and called his name.

  “Bugrat! Bugrat!”

  There was no answer. There was no sound at all. Magrit could feel her breath coming in short, sharp, whimpering bursts. She took one step onto the forbidden ground, then another. When her strength gave way she fell to her hands and knees and crawled, deep into the corner, still calling his name in the hope that she would see a tubby hand waving at her, or the top of his head bobbing above the grass. Only the dry, brown stalks met her gaze, and when she finally managed to drag herself to lie, gasping, next to the skeleton, not even the skeleton girl’s voice could be heard.

  All Magrit could do was stumble, weeping and terrified, back to the gate and roll onto the welcome grass outside the corner’s boundary. But still the sounds of the world would not come. She dried her tears and staggered from one corner of the cemetery to the other, searching for her lost companion. The pile of rags, just behind hers, where they could lie head to head while she whispered silly stories and nonsense rhymes to him as he fell asleep at night, was empty. The broken tomb where he liked to snuggle sometimes, pretending he was dead, lay still and silent. Even the pile of old bones and small rocks he had collected and placed in a corner near the door, which he liked to arrange into patterns and make tiny buildings when it was raining and they had
to play inside, sat by itself, with no clue as to his whereabouts. Bugrat wasn’t anywhere inside their cold stone home. He had simply disappeared. And still nothing interrupted Magrit’s frantic calling.

  “Bugrat?” she called again and “Master Puppet?” But not even the voices inside her head were answering and Magrit suddenly missed them very much. She ran outside and looked up at the roof where Master Puppet sat, quiet and unmoving.

  “Master Puppet?” she asked, but he did not reply. Instead, he seemed to focus on something off to the side, his eyes wide with horror and his jaw open as if caught in the act of shouting in dismay. Magrit saw the object of his fear, and all the life in her body drained out of her like it had never existed.

  Bugrat had dressed and washed himself. He had moistened his hair so it lay flat and neat against his head. He had found a new smock, and brushed the dust and cobwebs from it as best he could. Then he had snuck out of the crypt while Magrit still slept. Now he stood at the edge of the cemetery, on the seat of a plastic tricycle with two broken wheels, which he had placed underneath a window. His face, clean and fresh in the morning light, was pressed up against the glass. One hand was open next to his face. The other was balled up into a fist. Bugrat knocked on the pane: once, twice, three times.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  Like bombs going off in the silence.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  Magrit screamed.

  And just like that, the sounds of the world came crashing back. The frenzied chittering of crickets, the rustle of rats in the grass, the deep, mournful moan of the wind as it caressed the walls of the crypts and the chapel and the surrounding buildings.

  And Master Puppet yelling at her, “Don’t just stand there, you stupid girl, do something!” And the skeleton girl’s voice, screaming back, telling him to shut up, that it was time, that this had to happen, to let her go, damn you, let me go!