by Nicky Singer
He brings matches and a penknife, but everything else, he says, we will find. The last few days have been dry but I still think it will be damp up at the bridge.
“It will be all right,” says Jan.
It is strange and soothing to walk with him to the railway line. Previously we have both made our way here alone. Yet we walk in each other’s prints, as though my path was always his and his mine. I remember how he loped away like a wolf the time of that first kiss, and now that stride is beside me, velvety, powerful.
When we reach the brow of the railway hill, he pauses, scans the wild horizon.
“The elderflower,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Of course. You know, then.”
“Know what?” I have selected the elderflower only because of its position, because in an undergrowth which can be dense, this stunted tree has claimed some ground for itself, has a little space around it. And maybe – perhaps – because this is the place where I sank that day I tried to breathe life into Gerda.
“The Celts,” says Jan, “thought the elder could cure mankind’s ills. They used the wood for pyres, put elder twigs into coffins, planted pieces in the earth around a grave. They believed wherever the elder grew, that was a sacred place, one that could not be despoiled.”
“How do you know that?”
“You knew it,” he says, “before I said a thing. You chose that tree.”
And I’m about to protest when I see there are other spaces, other trees, amongst the undergrowth that I might have chosen, might have sunk against – but didn’t.
“You can understand with your heart,” says Jan, “as well as your eyes. Must understand. Else what’s the point?”
Beneath the tree is a low-lying carpet of green. Moss and fern-like weeds, dock leaves and that loose, stringy, sticky plant that winds itself about your ankles, clings to your clothes. There are also nettles.
“Watch out!” I say to Jan as he begins to clear a space.
“They’re not stingers,” he says. “They’re White Dead Nettles. You can suck the flowers. They taste of honey.”
“How long since you’ve been coming here?”
“A few years. Forever.”
Beneath the green are thin white plant stems, dry as bones.
“Will they burn?” I ask.
“Not well enough.”
I go hunting for more substantial kindling. I find a fallen log, too big and too damp, but also a dead tree, with branches dry enough to snap. I take what twigs I can break easily and then, further on, beyond the broken concrete posts and the sheet of corrugated iron, I spot a packing case.
“Perfect,” Jan says when I return to him. He has cleared and levelled a small oval of earth. He gets out his knife and strips the thinner wood from the sides of the crate.
I make myself watch the flash of the blade, pay attention to how calm I am. Just a knife blade, just stripping an old fruit crate. Jan feels my eyes, stops what he’s doing.
“Did it hurt when you cut yourself?” he asks.
“No.”
“And when your mother cut herself?”
“Yes. Of course.”
He nods, puts away the knife and begins to build the fire. He interlocks an airy tower of black sticks and white pieces of packing crate.
“Do you want to cut a piece of the elder?” he asks.
“OK.”
“You have to ask permission.”
“What?”
“Ask permission. Of the tree.”
I look to see if he’s serious. He’s serious. I imagine how it would be if anyone but Jan asked me to talk to a tree. But then no one has been – or could be – Jan.
“The ancient foresters,” he says, “wouldn’t even touch an elder without asking, let alone cut it. They were afraid of the Elder Mother.”
I am afraid of the knife. But I ask for it.
“Can I borrow the knife?”
He hands it to me. I flip open the blade, hold it close to a branch that seems dead.
“No,” says Jan, “you must take a living piece.”
“It won’t burn,” I say.
“True.”
I move in a branch, take a small, flexible, sappy piece of wood between my finger and thumb. The penknife blade is bright.
“Elder Mother, I ask permission to take a piece of your living tree for the pyre of the mothers who were dead but who now live, who were perfect but who are now imperfect.”
There’s a pause.
“How do I know if she’s given permission?”
“You don’t. You have to take the risk.”
That’s when I know I’m going to giggle. It breaks over me, a great, waving, convulsing giggle. And I can’t stop it, but I can muffle it. I clap my hand over my mouth, for fear of offending the moment, offending Jan. But he’s smiling.
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you laugh,” he says.
I stop laughing.
“Tilly …” he says. And I know he’s going to kiss me. But he pauses, of course, and the waiting is a hammering of sparks on my spine. In his own time, he puts his mouth on mine and his hand over my hand. We kiss and cut the branch together.
“You didn’t ask permission,” I say, pulling away. Why do I always have to pull away?
“Of the elder?” he asks.
“No,” I say, suddenly reckless. “Of me. For the kiss.”
“You have to take the risk,” he says.
If I hadn’t loved him before I think I would do now.
“Or of the elder,” I say.
“You asked for both of us. Anyway, this is a funeral. Have some respect.”
And then we both laugh and I think I’ve never felt so comfortable with another human being as I do with him.
“Knife.”
And I haven’t even realised I still have the knife in my hand. The knife is a nothing. I give it to him. He cuts the elder into a piece about the size of his thumb and positions it on a strip of packing crate right in the middle of the pyre.
A train goes past then. I see it in his eyes before I hear it. We turn together, we both need to know which track it will be on, though we are both quite safe today. It’s making the whining noise, the moan of the circular saw, but also the plush sound. A twelve-coach passenger train. It speeds past us on the inside track. A killer train. We watch in silence as its smoking tail disappears over the horizon.
“Why did you do it?” Jan asks then. “Why did you run that day?”
“Because …because nothing seemed that important any more, I suppose.” He looks at me, waits, so I add: “It was the day after …she did it. And I think I’d just stopped caring. And also, maybe, some part of me wanted to feel what she felt. Wanted to know what it would be like to put your life in the balance. Will I die, or won’t I?”
Again he nods.
“And because she asked me to come here. Gerda.” From beneath my jacket I take the pouch which contains the dismembered parts of my once beloved. I lay her out on the earth beside the pyre, reassemble her, fit her arms and legs back on to their wires, place her head so close to her trunk that she might be whole again. But she isn’t whole. She’s missing her eyes.
“My mother made dolls,” I tell Jan. “Did it for a living. But she never once made me a doll. Not even when I was a baby.”
“Until Gerda,” Jan says.
“No,” I say. “She didn’t make Gerda. I did that.”
He expels a short breath, which at first I think is surprise, but then I think, no, it’s realisation, as if this information suddenly makes plain something that’s been troubling him. But I don’t stop to enquire, because I want to say it now, want to tell him.
“The night my mother died …” I continue, then I pause, have to rephrase my mind, “… the night she made the suicide attempt, I went back to her room. Gran had left, gone to A&E. She’d asked me specifically not to return to the room, told me to go to bed. But how could I go to bed? I went back, took the knife, which was just lyi
ng on the floor, the Sabatier carving knife with my mother’s blood on it, and I slashed her clothes. Put the point of the knife through every single dress my mother owned. I ribboned them. I kept thinking how they’d write it in the papers, ‘It was a frenzied attack’. Pathetic. Laughable. Only I wasn’t laughing.
“Then I came to her leathers. At first I didn’t think I could cut those. They were like her second skin, the biking leathers. But the point of the knife was so sharp, and I put it through, I dragged it down the thigh of her trousers. It felt like killing and it made me feel good, so I did it again and again and again. I don’t sweat a lot, but I was sweating. Not just angry any more but excited. It frightened me.
“And I knew I needed to calm down, needed something to focus on, something difficult to make me concentrate. It came to me like a vision. Make a doll, make the doll she never made you. And I’ve never been very good at sewing, but it became so obvious. I found the kid gloves in a drawer. They were the only things I took from the drawers. They had been my mother’s hands when she came to kiss me goodnight, in those long-ago days when she didn’t smell of alcohol. I made them Gerda’s hands, her arms, her legs, her face. Then I sewed the black leather on to the white with black thread. How would my mother have done it? Would she have used white thread? Black? The stitches were ugly, but I didn’t really care. I pretended that my mother was ill. That she’d died of an illness. So, of course her hands would have been feeble, the stitching poor.
“But the doll’s left wrist, where the wound was. I kept seeing it. On the white white kid, I kept seeing the blood, I couldn’t make it go away. That’s why I assembled the bracelet, to cover it up, so I couldn’t see. But, of course, I could see. The beads were red. I chose them. Red. So I could always see. Sharp red blood pricks all round her wrist. But she was as ready as she would ever be. Gerda the talisman. Gerda the mother who loved me. Who couldn’t have tried to commit suicide, because you can’t love someone and think to die on them.”
“And the doll – Gerda – she spoke to you?”
“I spoke to me. I heard her voice. My mother’s voice. And she was good, to begin with she was good. She loved me, Gerda. I made her love me, care for me, be on my side. I made her the mother I wanted, needed. I want to say deserved. But I suppose I never deserved a good mother, does anyone deserve a good mother, Jan?”
“Yes,” says Jan. “Yes.”
“But she turned. Gerda turned. It was like I didn’t control her, even in my own mind. She started saying real things, the sort of blaming, difficult things my mother would have said … does say. Even my own doll stopped loving me.”
“Put her on the pyre,” says Jan.
“But the sticks are too far apart,” I cry, “she’ll fall through!”
“Put her on,” says Jan.
“You know,” I say, “the time I went to her, my mother, after Celeb Night, do you know what I was going to say? I was going to say ‘No! Stop! Be quiet!’ I’d torn Gerda limb from limb and I was going to do it to her. Make her understand. And do you know what I actually said? I said ‘I love you’.”
He looks at my face, shrugs. He knows.
He knows!
“Don’t you think we should light the pyre first,” I say after a pause, “before we put on … the bodies? I mean, it might not catch.”
“Yes,” he says. “OK.” From his pocket he produces two boxes, a matchbox and a tiny brightly painted box of woven wood.
“Can I see?”
He passes me the woven box. Inside is the doll he showed me briefly at the hospital. It’s tiny, only half a thumb high with a face of orange paper and a left arm that’s just a broken piece of wire.
“Did your mother give you this?”
“No,” he says. “Though I used to pretend that she did. Violeta Veron, my Chilean birth mother. I pretended that when she gave me away she packed with me some things to protect me, some things for me to know her by. A cut coin, of which she kept one half, a blanket she’d stitched herself, a doll. But actually I came with an institutional nightie and a pair of bootees. I used to imagine Violeta knitting the bootees. They’re pale green, with a piece of blue wool around the ankle, to tie them with. But actually I think they came from the organisation that effected the adoption. Someone else’s cast-offs.”
“And the doll?”
“Mum gave me that. Part of a set of Worry Dolls. You can get them in any high-street ethnic store. I’m not saying I wasn’t grateful. I was. Mum respecting my past, my roots, even though the dolls actually come from Guatemala. When I looked at them, and there were seven of them, they were all brightly coloured except this one. All made of matchwood except Violeta. And all of them had perfectly normal arms, except her. Except the mother who gave up holding me.”
“She’s too small to burn,” I say.
He takes her from me. “I want to start again,” he says. “I want to accept that I may look but I will never find her.”
He lights a match, puts it to a wafer of packing case. The strip blackens and smokes. He lights another and another. One of the dead sticks catches, but there is still only smoulder. Jan bends down and blows softly. In his breath the first flame comes, intense and vivid orange. He sits back. The fire will burn.
He unknots and unwinds the paltry piece of yellow thread that does for Violeta’s breast covering.
“This,” he says, “is for the mother who gave me birth and whose blood runs in my veins.” He drops the thread into the fire. It catches immediately, a wisp of sudden soot.
I have not thought what to say, but the words come easily.
“This is for Big.” I drop Gerda’s trunk into the fire. “For the mother who was always larger than life, the woman who filled my universe.” The velvet bodice smokes and the plastic around the protruding wires melts and stinks.
Jan unwraps the tiny piece of dun-coloured cloth that is Violeta’s dress. “This is for the mother who thinks of me in the night or who never thinks of me at all.” The cloth, borne on the faintest gust of wind, falls through the lit arc of sticks to land beside the green piece of elder, where it rests and waits to burn.
I take Gerda’s arms. “This is for Small. For the mother I saw at Sanctuary. For whatever the empty space inside her is.” The arms fall and burn separately.
Jan slips a nail behind Violeta’s head and peels the paper face from her wire body. Small bits of tarmac hair stick to her forehead.
“This is for the mother who loved me enough to give me to Susan Spark but who didn’t love me enough to keep me.” He puts the paper face, which has no mouth, so close to the flame that he burns his hand, but if it pains him, he says nothing.
“This is for the mother I love.” I drop on Gerda’s biking-leather legs. There is a faint whiff of burning flesh.
Jan untwists Violeta’s wire legs from her arms. “For the mother I love.”
The pieces of wire fall untouched on to the ash.
Jan has only the stump arm of Violeta left. And I have only Gerda’s blinded face. Together we suspend these last things over the fire.
“And,” we say together, “for the mother I…” And I know what he’s going to say and I say it with him.
“For the mother I hate.”
17
Jan sits beside her in silence. The fire, which was never a great conflagration, has begun to sputter and die. But there is a warmth in just being near Tilly, in knowing that, for the moment at least, she is not going anywhere. He feels cleansed by the burning, tranquil. But Tilly is edgy still, she’s fiddling with a stick, peeling back its thin grey bark to reveal white, sappy innards. She rubs her fingers on the wet.
“She was drunk,” Tilly says, “the day she went to register me. I was six weeks old. She couldn’t remember what they’d agreed to call me. So she told the registrar, just put M. Tilly M. Weaver.”
He absorbs this information slowly. Wants to tell her about Veron, how he had twice his mother’s name and they still stole it from him. But when he says �
�Veron” to himself, even in his mind, he finds himself less angry. Because of his mother, Susan Spark, how she came to him with her gift, said: “I never knew,” and then returned his name to him, “Jan Veron.” And he realises, sitting up at the bridge, that he could now be Jan Veron-Spark, that this is the door his mother has left open. But will he walk through now that the choice is his? Perhaps not. Perhaps he will chose to remain Spark, elect to be Susan Spark’s son? He turns the idea around in his mind.
“You’re lucky,” he says softly. “Can make yourself lucky. You can take a name of your own choosing.” And he does tell her about Veron and as he talks he remembers reading about a tribe of Aboriginal Australians who constantly rename themselves as they change and develop through life. “They don’t believe,” he tells Tilly, “that any name, given you at birth, could be adequate to all things you might dream or be. So, after many years of composing music around the camp fire, a tribesman might announce, ‘Now I have become Great Singer of Songs.’ And the tribe welcome and honour and use that name. So take a name, Tilly, create yourself anew.”
And who am I now? he thinks in her silence. How do I dream myself today? Juan Veron? Jan Spark? Jan Veron-Spark? Player of Pipes? Seeker of Stars? Dreamer of Dreams? Then it comes to him, sitting by Tilly and the dampening fire, and it’s just one word: happy.
“Make-Believe,” says Tilly. “That’s what they called me. What Mercy called me.”
“Forget that,” says Jan. “Forget her.”
Tilly pauses, and he thinks she too is dreaming a name, but when she speaks it is to say: “Do you forget her? Have you forgotten Mercy?”
“No.” It is the truth. Should he say otherwise?
Tilly fixes him with still, dark eyes, but her words are headlong: “Did you love her? Do you love her?”
This is more complicated. As he frames his answer, he sees his pausing is making her fearful, and he wants so much for her not to be fearful. “I loved her,” he says, and watches Tilly jerk, stiffen, “as you loved her. Because you did love her once, didn’t you? You were friends. You saw something in her? Wanted it for yourself?”
