‘An adventure!’ Her eyebrows were raised, in a way I hadn’t seen for ages, and she looked at my dad, challenging. She appeared to gain strength from his discomfort, and in the harshness of the strip light the contours of her face were starker, more chiselled, her eyes darker. My dad looked away and kissed the top of Lorry’s head.
I fetched one of the bottles of water from the trailer and soaked pieces of cotton wool and wiped them over Lorry’s knees, picking out the little pieces of gravel from where he had fallen from the car. He began to whimper, burrowing his face into my dad’s neck. I removed his bandages and winced as the crusted blood clung to the fabric, afraid that if I pulled too quickly the scabs would come away whole. I then tended to his other knee, the one that had been undamaged and unharmed, until I’d ground gravel into it. I told myself it wasn’t my fault. The Creed demanded equilibrium.
Eventually, we managed to get him cleaned up, and I put ointment on the sores on his legs, where the psoriasis was really bad, and clean bandages over the top. It was better than nothing and I planned to find somewhere to wash him properly in the morning.
Lorry’s bedroom was next to my parents’ room and my dad had made up a bed for him with sheets and pillows from the car. I carried him up the creaking stairs and put him down gently onto the bed. He looked at me in that drunken way of his, his half-closed eyes slanting up at the sides, and smiled.
‘You’re a good boy, Lorry,’ I said. By now it was gone eleven o’clock and way past his bedtime, but he managed another smile.
‘Lorry love Nif,’ he said, the thick syllables merging together so that anyone else wouldn’t have been able to understand him.
‘And Nif loves Lorry,’ I said, and I kissed him on his cheek.
We sat, that evening—my dad, my mother and me—around the old pine table. We picked at bits of bread and chunks of cheese. I drank the lemonade we’d brought with us and my dad and my mother drank red wine from the glasses we’d found in the cupboard. My mother had loosened her hair and let it hang about her shoulders, and even in the stark glare of the strip light she looked younger, prettier, somehow softer.
‘So, what do you think, Nif?’ my dad said. It was the first time anyone had asked for my opinion of the house.
‘It’s OK,’ I said, and then, seeing his eyes darken, ‘I think we can make it work.’
‘Good girl. That’s the spirit. We’ll all get a good night’s sleep tonight, and in the morning we’ll see it in a new light. A new day always sheds a fresh light on things, I find. We can unpack the rest of our stuff from the trailer and you can go out into the village and make friends and it’ll be just like home.’
Friends. My dad had just broken the unspoken rule in our house that we didn’t talk about friends—or more to the point, my lack of them—but I didn’t say anything. He seemed to be made bolder by the absence of a negative response.
‘And Linda.’ He picked up my mother’s hand and held it. ‘What do you think?’
My mother looked down at her lap, to where her other hand stroked the fabric of her skirt. When she looked up again, I was surprised to see that her face was glowing and her eyes were alive. She took a breath, a breath that seemed to take forever, and then spoke.
‘I think she might be here with us,’ she said. ‘I can’t be sure,’ and her fingers fluttered away on her skirt. ‘But I can feel something…’ She looked down at her lap. I could feel rather than see my dad tense at my side, but before he could say anything my mother spoke again, quietly, as if she was shy, or putting on a child’s pretence at shyness.
‘I can’t quite put my finger on it. There’s a sort of a…presence.’ She gave a small shrug and a half-smile played across her lips. ‘I think she’s here with us and she likes it here.’
My dad inhaled deeply, and then let out a long and carefully-controlled breath. He let go of my mother’s hand and I knew without looking that his eyes would be closed. When my mother spoke again it wasn’t to either of us.
‘Yes, she likes it here,’ said my mother, her voice hanging for a moment in the stillness of the heavy air. ‘It’s perfect. I think Petra will be happy here.’
Ah, yes. Petra.
My dead sister Petra.
Three.
Sunday 1st August 1976
The sun poking around in my bedroom woke me early; the light was already insistent and rude. As usual, there on the periphery of my mind was the remnant of a dream, the vague echo of something peculiar and intangible, teasing me.
Lying there, with the sunlight streaming into my bedroom, I wished I hadn’t taken down the curtains, but I allowed myself to savour the early-morning sunshine before the temperature rose to an unbearable level. I lay there for a bit until the clamminess of the sleeping bag got too much and I swung myself out of bed.
The relics sat on the mantelpiece in the correct order: Robin’s egg, magpie’s egg, duckling bill and bone. Blackbird’s egg, feathers of wren…and then the space where the incantation should have continued. It niggled at me, the vacuum at the end of the rhyme an itch to be scratched. I picked up the robin’s egg, the first one I’d found, the first item in my collection. It was tiny, no bigger than my thumbnail, and still the startling blue colour it had been when I’d first found it. I ran a finger over the surface, enjoying its familiar chalky texture.
I had found the nest a couple of weeks after Petra died. It was April Fool’s day. My mother had been having a particularly bad day. She was bed-ridden, as she usually was in those early days. Long periods of silence would be punctuated by the sound of her voice seeping out under her bedroom door, a wail that rose in a tremor and then died out. The nuns who tended to her during the first few days after the accident had given up and returned to the convent, offended by her loud and obscene denouncements of their religion. One of them had even gone so far as to imply that my mother had ‘let the devil in’ and suggested that my dad call the priest. He’d frowned at me to stop me from laughing, and had then resigned himself to caring for her himself.
I had let myself out through the back door, into the garden. Spring had come in with a whimper and we’d become used to the tepid, clammy hand of fog that wafted perpetually over the vegetable patch and the scratchy grass that masqueraded as a lawn. In the distance was the hum of traffic on the ring road.
I was kicking at what remained of the potato mounds, enjoying making the dusty soil fly around, when I saw the flash of blue from the corner of my eye.
The nest was in the most unlikely of places—in one of my dad’s old wellies that had been left outside the shed. It was a tangle of grass, moss and dead leaves tucked down inside the boot, and if it hadn’t been for the startling colour of the eggs inside I wouldn’t have noticed it at all. Gently, barely daring to touch it, I picked up one of the eggs and held it in my palm, marvelling at the weightlessness of it. It was both there and not there.
That was when my dad appeared from the house, dishevelled and broken-looking, and told me to come in and that I wasn’t allowed to play outside by myself anymore. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to tell him about the nest, and I didn’t want him to see that I’d picked up the egg. I’d held it loosely in my hand, behind my back, and he hadn’t noticed. He only really noticed my mother in those days, and the empty shell she had become.
That night I went into my dad’s studio and took down his book about birds. I’d leafed through the pages until I spotted the picture that looked like my egg. A robin. I’d held the egg up to my bedside lamp, and I’d wondered if there was a baby robin in it. If I cracked it open, would there be a little egg yolk and white, like a chicken’s egg but tiny? I couldn’t see anything through the blue shell. If there was a life in there I wasn’t going to witness it.
For weeks, I kept the egg wrapped up in cotton wool in my sock drawer, and each morning and evening I would check to see if it had hatched, but it never did. I decided not long after I’d found it that it was never going to hatch, but I kept it still—and soon after
I started to collect the other relics. I still didn’t know then that the Creed was coming to find me.
Standing there in the tiny bedroom in the attic of the cottage, I thought about how much had changed since Petra died. It had only been four months, but in that time, I had become an adult.
I put the robin’s egg back in its eggcup and pulled on my clothes—shorts and a t-shirt from the day before, even though they were grubby and smelt a bit. I didn’t care what I looked or smelt like; I quite liked the slightly musky animal smell that would rise off me by the end of the day. It was a scent that was all mine and like no-one else’s, not even Lorry’s, which was warm and sweet like biscuits.
I used the toilet in the dingy bathroom, remembering not to flush but instead closing the lid softly. I crept down the stairs from my little attic room, trying to remember which ones creaked. My parents’ door was firmly shut, as it always was at home. I peeked into Lorry’s room.
He was lying with the sheets tangled around his legs, his arms thrown back above his head. He’d taken his pyjamas off in the night and they lay in a tangle at the foot of the bed. He looked thin and vulnerable lying there in only his pants, and the bandages added an incongruous bulk to his skinny legs. He’d been scratching in the night and the sheets and the clean bandages I’d put on the night before were already stained with blood. His clown doll sat on the pillow next to him, eyeing me vacantly, mouth downturned.
As soon as I got downstairs I noticed again the telephone that was attached to the wall, the cream plastic and the round dial incongruously modern in this dark old house.
In the kitchen, there were still a few boxes piled around where we’d started unpacking the night before. I thought my dad had wanted to make this place into a home for us, for the month we’d be staying there, and had packed a few familiar things from our house in an attempt to settle us in. But our teapot—the red apples on the side faded and the end of the spout made brown with tannin—looked out of place in this bare room. The wooden chopping board with the carved wheat sheaves; the majolica pot that held the wooden spoons by the cooker; the Formica placemats with their pictures of the Hay Wain: all looked alien against the emptiness of the kitchen.
I put a few things away in a cupboard—canisters of tea, a bag of sugar, some flour—but I couldn’t really be bothered. It was a Sunday and there was no telly in the cottage. I pulled on my plimsolls that I’d abandoned the night before in the hall and unlocked the door. I stood on the threshold for a few moments, taking in the empty sky and filling my lungs with the thin air that I knew would be gone in a couple of hours. Already the stillness hinted at the heat to come, and the dreadful sultry swelter that was on its way.
The rusting gate squeaked when I pulled it open, and I winced, waiting for something to happen. Nothing. There was no-one on the lane and the dust lay still. From the verge on the opposite side, a couple of rabbits lolloped out. They were leaner, rangier than the ones I’d seen in the park at home, and they hopped closer, within a couple of feet of me. I remembered my dad telling me that the heatwave had caused a lot of animals to change their behaviour, that they had to adapt to an environment where there was very little water, and that they took greater risks around humans because they were thirsty. I went down on my haunches and held out a hand to them, encouraging them to come to me. They just looked at me glassily, so I kicked out at them and they scampered back into the hedge next to the little cottage on the other side of the lane.
It was set back from the road with nothing but a patch of scorched grass and a dilapidated wooden fence in front of it. The two houses mirrored each other, as though they were whispering together in collusion against the chapel. All the curtains were closed, except for those at the little attic window.
The chapel was painted a dirty white and a coppery discharge was weeping from the walls. The windows reflected the morning sunlight, blank as cataracts. The gates were still padlocked shut and there was a fence running along either side, black-painted railings with curling, fleur-de-lys spikes across the top.
I wanted to see the war memorial in daylight, where I’d seen the girls the night before. The cows in the field stared at me with insolent indifference as I walked along the lane. There were half a dozen or so of the scraggy creatures, and they were suffering from the heat. Emaciated, their ribs bulged rudely through the sandpaper-like skin on their flanks. Their tails twitched at the flies that clustered around them, and which settled on the rims of their eyes and the pale flesh of their noses. Pathetic animals.
I came to a little bridge that I hadn’t noticed the night before. There was a low stone wall that ran along the side of the lane where it crossed the stream, that only came up as far as my thighs. I leant over it to inspect the brown water below. There was barely any left, maybe a couple of feet. Further down the stream, where it dragged itself along the valley, a tree trunk swelled out, hanging over the water. There the stream looked deeper, welcoming, somewhere to bring Lorry later, to get him washed. I looked around to see how we would be able to get down there and I spotted a gate which I thought might open into the field that banked the stream. That would do. Sweat was already starting to prickle on my back; I would need a wash later, too.
The war memorial stood erect but sullen in the middle of a patch of faded grass, facing me as soon as I turned a bend in the lane. It was supported by a stone plinth and the steps around the base were littered with empty lager cans and cigarette ends. I looked to see if anything could be salvaged. There were a few fag ends that could be reused so I pocketed them. That was when I noticed the dips all around the base of the war memorial, little concave holes that were about two inches wide and regularly spaced. The stone the monument had been carved from was darker than that used for the houses in the village. It was the same grey, mottled stone, but it looked more worn, and older, as if it had been standing here forever.
Looking up, I saw that instead of forming a pyramid-shaped peak at the top, or a sharp-pointed cross like all the other war memorials I had seen, this one ended in a small, delicate cross, curled at the three ends, like the ace of clubs. The stone was battered and had obviously been eroded over time, and it looked as if it might crumble away at any moment. It looked older than it was possible for a war memorial to be. I placed the tips of my fingers in one of the little dips at the base of the monument and the stone felt smooth against my skin.
In the corner of my eye there was a flash of movement and I heard a clicking sound. I jerked round, expecting to see someone. Nothing, only the relentless stillness and the flat colours of a depleted landscape. Already, I could see the familiar shimmer of heat that rose from the lane, making the grass verge tremble and threaten to disappear.
Time to head back.
We cooked bacon for breakfast on the little camping stove we’d brought with us and ate it sitting round the kitchen table. We drank tea and nobody said very much. My mother came down while we were eating, her dressing gown wrapped tightly around her and held closed against her throat. Her hair was pulled up tightly into her usual bun, and I thought about how she’d looked the night before when we’d sat at this table and she’d drunk red wine and talked about Petra and she’d looked ten years younger. Now she looked ancient. She toyed with the bacon rinds on her plate, pushing them round with her fork. Worms in grease.
After breakfast, I took Lorry outside and we lay on the patch of concrete at the front of the house. It was covered in a web of cracks and frail tufts of dandelions sprouted half-heartedly here and there, the petals wilted and thin. I pulled them up in tufts and threw them onto the scorched grass. I watched as Lorry picked his nose, as he eased out the thick gobbets of dust and snot that accumulated there before depositing them in his mouth. Occasionally, a red ant would scurry past, sometimes carrying a trophy above its head, and I’d use my thumb to grind it into the concrete, causing a pathetic smear of rusty brown to appear against the grey. The heatwave instilled a lethargy in us that was difficult to shake off. We lay torpid in
the sun, limbs stretched, lizards soaking up the heat.
Lorry’s face was turned up to the sun, his eyes closed. He hadn’t said much that morning, but that wasn’t unusual. He only really talked to say what he needed, to ask for food and water and the other things that had to be done for him to keep him alive. His hair curled against the grass, the soft blond strands mingling with the starchy yellow hay that encroached onto the edge of the concrete from the lawn around it.
I lay flat on my belly, enjoying the mid-morning warmth on my back, and put my chin on my arm. A grasshopper landed on the concrete in front of me, an inch of green-brown legs and torso. Its feelers twitched and I waited for it to start clicking, anticipating it rubbing its legs together and calling out for a mate, but it stayed silent. I put a hand out to it, but before I could grab it, it hopped away.
It was still early enough for the sun to be quite benign. I turned over onto my back and closed my eyes. An imprint of a bright circle remained in my vision, and little lights danced, bright green against orange. I knew that when I opened my eyes they would still be there for a few moments, temporarily scorched onto my retinas.
To my left the grasshopper started to make its rasping sound, and I turned my head and eased my eyes open, cautious of the sun’s glare. The sound stopped abruptly and I couldn’t see the insect at all. As my eyes adjusted back to the brightness, my focus shifted and I spotted something glinting on the railings at the front of the parking area, suspended and skewered by the spike at the top of one post, something gleaming white. I lay very still and looked at it. It hadn’t been there when I’d got back from my walk earlier that morning.
I pushed myself to my feet, all the time looking at the object, afraid that it might disappear if I let it out of my sight. I never once took my eyes off it as I walked towards it, climbed the steps and squeaked open the little gate. Only when I was within a couple of feet of it could I see what it was.
Water Shall Refuse Them Page 3
