‘No,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Your mum’s been telling my mum that she talks to your sister. She says she comes to her in the night and stands next to the bed and talks to her.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Ghosts aren’t real.’ But even as I said it, I thought about Lorry telling me that he’d heard my mother talking to Petra. I thought about my mother, how she had hugged me and told me that Petra had appeared and said to her that it was alright, that it was fine to have left her in the bath on her own. That my mother had been forgiven for drowning her own daughter.
Mally shrugged, and stopped strumming.
‘It’s what they talk about, when they’re sitting downstairs, drinking my mum’s concoctions. I think my mum’s been trying to help your mum.’
‘What do you mean “concoctions”?’ I sat up. ‘She’s trying to drown her sorrows with gooseberry wine?’
Mally started strumming away at the guitar again.
‘Yeah, and the rest.’ His eyes were focused on his fingers.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked again. ‘The rest of what?’
‘It’s difficult to say,’ he said and looked up at me. ‘She makes…’ He was searching for the right word. ‘Well, she calls them “potions”. They’re just like the gooseberry wine, really, only they’re made from the herbs and flowers and stuff that she grows in the back garden.’
I rolled this idea around in my mind. I could see Janet in her pink stringy bikini, her blonde hair piled up on her head, the blue eyeshadow creasing on her eyelids. She didn’t look the hippy sort, the sort that would make medicines out of herbs and stuff.
Mally must have seen the doubt on my face.
‘It’s something she’s always done. Her mother—my gran—did it as well, and she learnt it from her mother. She goes out and collects all these herbs and flowers and stuff and dries them out. You must have seen all that crap hanging up in our kitchen?’
I nodded, remembering the desiccated foliage brushing against the top of my head.
‘When we moved here earlier in the year, she was planning to make all these potions and sell them at the market in town, but the chapel lot put the word out that they were wrong, somehow—tainted—and nobody would buy them.’
‘So now she’s making these “potions” for my mother and they’re making her feel better?’
He shrugged again. ‘That’s only what I heard them saying. Your mother was thanking my mum for the potions and saying how much better she felt for them. Said they made her feel better than the Valium did.’
‘Well, if it’s stopping her from being a nutjob, I’m all for it,’ I said. ‘Maybe she can give me something to help me remember the dreams.’ I was only half-joking when I said this, but Mally got up and put the guitar down. He came and sat on the bed next to me.
‘Do you ever wonder if maybe you’re trying too hard? If maybe you’re over-thinking it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you’re thinking that the relics and the incantation are going to bring back the memory and let you remember the dream, but what if they’re stopping you from remembering? What if you’re concentrating too hard, and because of that you can’t remember?’
It was my turn to shrug. ‘Perhaps. So, what do you suggest?’
He got to his feet and stood squarely in front of me. ‘I think you need to get rid of the relics. I think you should put them somewhere safe where you can’t dwell on them. Then, when your conscious mind is freed up to think about other things, your unconscious mind will let you remember the dream.’ He looked pleased with himself.
‘OK, Freud.’ I was smiling now. ‘Where do you suggest we put the relics?’
He started moving towards the pine cupboard, then looked back at me over his shoulder. ‘Give me a minute,’ he said. ‘Go and get them. I’ve got a plan.’
When he turned back to the cupboard and started unlocking it, I stood looking at him for a moment. The shaft of light fell directly onto the bare top of his arm, where the skin gleamed, pale and untainted by the sun.
The relics were in their places on the altar. I wrapped each of them carefully: the eggs in the cotton wool and then the egg box; the duckling bill and bone in its handkerchief; the feathers of wren in their silk scarf. I didn’t have anything to wrap the crow’s skull in, so I pulled one of my t-shirts out of the dirty washing pile and gave it a sniff. It was the usual, musky smell that I’d had since we’d arrived in the village. I wrapped it around the skull and put all the relics in the treasure bag.
I bounded down the stairs, curious to find out what Mally’s plan was, but the sound of voices in the kitchen made me stop in the hall. Through the crack in the kitchen door I could see Janet and my mother, sitting at the pine table. As usual, they were leaning close together, whispering, hands clasped together on the tabletop. Lorry was with them, sitting on the floor, twisting the legs of his clown doll over and over each other.
As I listened, Janet’s voice rose in intensity, and she was muttering something I couldn’t fully make out in a language I didn’t understand, like when the priest used to chant the Mass in Latin. It was familiar but foreign at the same time. Lorry was muttering too, making noises that could have been words or maybe weren’t, and the two voices caught in the still air and mingled, together but separate, like oil on water.
I watched as Janet put her hand up to my mother’s face, and my mother closed her eyes, a small smile forming on her lips. She looked beatific. She pressed her cheek against Janet’s fingers, as though she was leaning into an embrace, and that’s when Janet moved her hand down and, very gently, took hold of my mother’s chin.
With her other hand, she picked up a delicate porcelain cup that I hadn’t seen before, and lifted it to my mother’s lips. My mother opened her mouth, greedily, her head thrown back, the tendons in her neck sticking out. Janet placed the cup on my mother’s bottom lip and tipped it gently, and my mother made a gulping sound as some of the clear liquid escaped and cascaded down her chin. She opened her eyes and looked at Janet, and even from where I was standing out in the hall I could see that there was a light in her eyes that I hadn’t seen for months. Her face was aflame with a joy that hadn’t been there since we had last been to church and I’d watched her take Communion.
Mally was waiting for me by the chapel. The windows watched us, sombre in the sunlight.
‘What kept you?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I just needed to pack up the relics properly.’ I lifted the treasure bag to show him. He, in turn, lifted a Tesco bag with a trowel poking through the side. There were some other things in there as well, nestled at the bottom, but I couldn’t make out what they were.
‘Come on then. We’re going up into the field. Behind the chapel.’
‘Why’ve you got a trowel?’ I asked. ‘You’re not thinking of doing any digging in this heat, are you?’
He didn’t answer me, and set off towards the hole in the hedge.
He dragged himself through and I followed, and we both brushed off the dust that clung to our arms and legs. Then we started walking up the slope.
It was almost midday by then, and the sun felt like it was burning a hole in my scalp. Sweat was prickling in my hair, and when I ran my hand through it I knew it would be left sticking up in spikes. Mally walked on ahead, just like that day when I’d first met him. That felt like a lifetime ago. It suddenly occurred to me that all the time we’d been in the village, I’d watched no TV, heard no radio. I hadn’t even seen a newspaper.
Mally reached the top before I did and threw himself down onto the crunchy grass. I’d counted to 274 by the time I dragged myself up next to him, and we sat for a moment, getting our breath back, looking silently across at the sheer patchwork that formed the opposite side of the valley and down at the meagre stream that meandered along its base.
‘It’s a special place, this.’ It was as though Mally could read my thoughts. ‘It’s this tiny village in
the middle of nowhere. You could live here and not have anything to do with the rest of the world, if you wanted.’
‘Apart from Tesco,’ I said, and gave Mally’s plastic bag a nudge with my foot. He picked it up and pulled out a packet of crisps which he tore open and held out to me. I took one. Salt and vinegar.
‘Yeah, but you know what I mean.’ He put some crisps into his mouth and didn’t say anything for a bit while he crunched on them. ‘It’s like it’s on the edge of the world. Did you know that a couple of hundred years ago the border between England and Wales was somewhere around here? It kept changing hands, depending on who won the most recent battle, the Welsh or the English. For centuries, this place didn’t really know where it was, which country it was in.’
‘A place on the edge,’ I agreed. ‘A threshold. It’s like it’s caught in the middle, like it’s sitting between all the things we know about and all the things we don’t.’ And it was true. It was like the space between night and day, that time in the early morning or late at night when you don’t really know which it is. A liminal place. I reached for the crisps and shovelled some into my mouth. The salt stung my lips where they were cracked from the sun, and instead of wiping it away, I let myself enjoy the tingling sensation.
Mally nodded, slowly. I swallowed and carried on.
‘Or like that space between being asleep and being awake. When you’re dreaming but you know you’re also waking up and then when you wake up you can’t remember the dream. This village is caught in the middle of real life and something else, a bit like that.’
‘Ah. The dreams,’ he said. ‘That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’ Without waiting for an answer, he sprang to his feet. He grabbed the crisp packet from me and upended the last of the crumbs into his mouth and then he jammed it into the back pocket of his jeans. He walked directly over to the log that lay about twenty feet from where we’d been sitting. It was where we’d seen the two crows the day before. He crouched down on his haunches and took the trowel from the Tesco bag. He put the bag down and it lay on the ground next to him, not even a breeze to make it twitch. Angling the trowel at the ground, he started making small stabbing motions, attempting to break up the hard surface.
‘You’ll be lucky,’ I said, crouching down next to him ‘The ground up here’s going to be baked solid. It’ll be like cutting into a brick.’
He didn’t say anything, didn’t even look up at me, just carried on jabbing away, and as I watched, little clods of earth sprang up. The dirt wasn’t as dry as I’d been expecting, and looked darker, and moister. As he dug, the trowel turned up bigger and bigger lumps of soil, the earth getting richer and more loamy the deeper he dug. His hand movements started to get slower, gentler. Finally he put the trowel down and looked up at me, triumphant.
‘And this, my dear, is one I prepared earlier.’
He reached into the hole he’d just dug and pulled out something that fitted neatly into his hand. It was brown and encased in soil. He cradled the object in his palm and, very gently, smoothed his thumb against the surface, smearing away the mud. Then he held it out to me. Here and there were tiny patches of creamy-beige against the brown, but mostly it was just earth.
Then I saw the beak.
As soon as I saw it I could also make out the smooth arc of the cranium, swelling back from the huge nostrils, and the eye sockets, clagged with mud.
‘Of course, these conditions aren’t perfect for the decomposition process,’ he said, and I thought I could hear a swell of pride in his voice. He was back in teacher mode. ‘Usually, flesh decomposes best under conditions of warmth and humidity.’ He rolled the skull into my palm, where it sat, blank-eyed and impassive. ‘The bacteria function better that way. But sometimes, one just doesn’t have the choice.’ He looked up at me briefly and smirked.
I thought about how I’d buried the duckling, not really planning to dig it up again, and then how I’d gone back to it and all the flesh had disappeared, leaving only the bill and bones. I snuck a look at the treasure bag on the ground next to me.
Mally reached into the Tesco bag and pulled out a toothbrush. He picked the skull out of my palm and set to work on it, using the fibres of the brush very gently to ease the soil away from the skull. Then he took out a little round-headed brush, the sort that my dad used to clean out his home-brew bottles, and inserted it into the skull, into the cavity where the brain would have been, and carefully eased it around the inside to remove all the soil. He produced pipe cleaners next, and angled them carefully into the rest of the skull’s crevices—the eye sockets and the nostrils.
When he finished, he held the skull up to me. It shone dully in the sunlight, a muddied yellow colour.
‘Is that the only one,’ I asked. ‘Or are there others?’
‘What do you think?’ When he looked at me, his pupils had shrunk to tiny dots, the irises flaming their peculiar orange-brown. He gestured with his hand, a lazy wave that took in the entirety of the field, from the top of the bank all the way down to the chapel and the well at the bottom of the hill. ‘There are dozens. Perhaps a hundred or so. All dotted about.’
I looked around the field, thinking that perhaps the divots I could make out were in fact burial sites.
‘We’ll take this one and wash it in the water from the well,’ he said, and I jumped to my feet and started walking, keen to examine the well again, already anticipating the cold water I’d throw on my face and my shoulders.
‘But not just yet.’ His voice was a reprimand, and I turned around and shielded my eyes with my hand. ‘You can’t just take something without giving something back,’ he said, and gestured to the treasure bag I was swinging by my side.
‘You want one of the relics?’ I said, torn between my desire to please him and a protectiveness over my hoard. ‘You want to bury one of the relics?’ He was walking towards me down the slope.
‘Not just one of them.’ He stopped in front of me. ‘All of them. That’s the only way you’re going to remember your dream: if we swap them for the skull—it’s a raven, by the way—and bury them. You want to remember who phoned the night that Petra drowned, right? This way you’ll stop obsessing about the relics and free your mind up to remember the dream.’
I thought about it. The relics were valuable, potentially powerful. They were the cornerstones of the Creed. But if Mally was right, and that by hiding them away and forgetting about them for a little while, I might stand a chance of remembering the dream, then it might be worth a try.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘We’ll bury them in the raven’s hole. That way we’ll remember where they are and we can come and dig them up at any time.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘It also means we won’t have to dig another hole in this.’ He stamped on the hard ground with his heel and smiled at me. ‘Two birds, one stone, eh?’
After the burial, we hauled up water from the well using the blue bucket. We drank deeply from it, using our hands to cup the water to our faces—again, the distinctive taste of ancient landscapes and loam, like decaying leaf-matter. We washed the raven’s skull until it was free of earth. It was still dirty though, little cracks running in a brown web across the dome of the cranium. From the Tesco bag, Mally pulled out a glass jar with a clear, viscous liquid inside. He carefully unscrewed the lid and dropped the skull in, before screwing the lid back on and swilling the contents around so the skull was fully immersed.
‘Neat bleach,’ he said. ‘Gets rid of the last few bits of dirt. A couple of days and it’ll be good as new.’
He dropped the jar into the plastic bag and handed it over to me.
‘You have that,’ he said. ‘A swap for the relics.’
I took the jar and nestled it carefully into the bottom of the treasure bag, along with the empty egg box and the handkerchief and the silk scarf. Then I had a thought and took the jar out again, wrapped it in my old smelly t-shirt—the one I’d wrapped the crow’s skull in—and put them both at the bottom of the treasure bag. Snug.
When I got back to the cottage Janet had gone. There was no-one in the kitchen. I went out to the back hall and saw that my dad’s studio door was open.
Lorry was with him, sitting on a stool and watching him work, the clown doll sitting on his lap. My dad was silent, working intently on the bust in front of him. He didn’t see me straight away, and I watched quietly as his hands moved over the form in front of him, smoothing, caressing, gently pinching.
He’d once explained to me, as I sat watching him working on my mother’s sculpture one winter afternoon, that there were two main techniques involved in sculpting. The first was additive, where materials such as clay were added to the model and used to build up a resemblance of the subject, bit by bit, layer upon layer, adding to the detail. The second was called subtractive, where the clay was carved away to create the intricate details. My dad used both methods in a long process of building up and removing, adding and subtracting, that resulted in a striking facsimile of his subject.
Lorry saw me first. He clambered down from the stool and came over to me, his thumb jammed into his mouth. He looked tired. I picked him up and rested him on my hip. My dad was engrossed in what he was doing. He jumped when he saw me, and grabbed the hessian sheet that he used to wrap the sculpture. He draped it over the bust, making sure the edges were smoothed down around the wheel. Then he took off his glasses and looked at me.
‘Hi Nif. How are you?’
‘OK.’
His eyes flashed to the potter’s wheel in front of him. ‘I think it’s nearly ready.’
‘Good.’
‘I think I’m going to carve the eyes soon.’
I was glad about that. I liked watching him carve out the eyes, watching the hooked wire work its way into the head and drag out a tiny nugget of clay. I liked how this one tiny act gave expression to the bust, made it seem real somehow. Brought it to life.
Lorry started whimpering, and I shifted him on my hip, but he held his arms out for my dad. I realised I’d been neglecting my brother over the last week or so. My dad yawned.
Water Shall Refuse Them Page 15
