Water Shall Refuse Them

by Lucie McKnight Hardy

‘Leave him alone,’ I said. ‘This is between you and me. Leave him out of it.’

  She was quiet for a moment, as if gathering her thoughts, and when she spoke her voice wasn’t shrill anymore, but quiet and considered.

  ‘You know that night in the pub? When you all came in and tried to listen in on old Lyndon Vaughan’s meeting?’ She didn’t wait for me to answer, but went on talking, her foul breath filling my nostrils. ‘They carried on with their meeting after you left. They were saying stuff about you and your family, about how outsiders shouldn’t just be allowed to arrive in the village like you did. They said that your mother’s a nutter and your father’s a lazy, good-for-nothing waster.’ She leant even closer and the acrid stench was overpowering.

  ‘But mostly they were saying that your brother’s a mong and he should have been drowned at birth.’

  I mustered all the strength I had into pushing myself up off the ground. I was going to punch her in that stupid, fat, doughy face until there was nothing left of it.

  Abruptly, and before I could do anything, the pressure on the back of my head eased and Tracy was sprawled on the ground next to me. I looked up and Mally was there, panting. He had the look of the devil in his eyes. He drew back his foot, as if getting ready to take a penalty kick, and I realised he was going for Tracy. She’d guessed the same thing, and she curled herself up into a ball, foetal, her hands shielding her face. Lorry screamed.

  The noise seemed to make Mally check himself. He took in a deep breath and relaxed his leg, planting his foot back on the ground. Denise let go of Lorry, who stood there, crying and rubbing at his wrist. Tracy struggled to push her bulk up off the ground, and at the same time pull down her skirt that had rucked up around her meaty thighs. Mally was by now bent over, panting. He was out of breath and clutching at his side, like he had a stitch.

  Lorry ran towards me and I sat up and pulled him down onto my lap. He was snivelling, great gobbets of snot hanging from his nose. I grabbed a handful of grass and used it to wipe his face, the dried strands sticking to his nostrils. Then I chucked the grass away and pulled him into my chest and hugged him.

  Tracy and Denise were about twenty feet away, heading back in the direction of the bridge. Denise was still holding the magpie, and it looked as though it was struggling to get free. It had survived. Then Tracy turned back and fired her parting shot.

  ‘You know what? I think Lyndon Vaughan’s lot are right. You’re fuckin’ evil you are. Evil. Doin’ that to a poor bird. You and your mother and your girlfriend here. Fuckin’ evil the lot of you.’

  Mally stood up and watched Tracy and Denise clamber over the gate. He was still panting. Eventually, he managed to find enough breath to speak.

  ‘I can’t believe they took the magpie!’ He was indignant. ‘After all that.’

  ‘Never mind the magpie. They hurt Lorry.’ I held out my brother’s wrist so that Mally could see the red marks, but he didn’t even look. He bent down and picked up the wire from where it lay, only the glint of the metal making it visible in the scratchy grass. Still breathing heavily, he coiled it up, the wire resisting slightly, the tension in it causing it to fight back until he’d got it all wound up and the end tucked in.

  ‘Here, you have this. I think you’ve earned it,’ he said, and he passed it to me.

  Twenty-one.

  Wednesday 11th August 1976

  The altar was bare, except for the wire and the raven’s skull in its glass jar. I held the jar up to the light. The bleach had a very faint yellowish tinge, but the skull itself had become paler, cleaner. Purer. The hairline cracks in the top had faded, and were barely visible now, and I knew in a couple of days I’d be able to take the skull out of the bleach and give it a final wash. I turned the jar round and round in my hand, watching the viscous liquid cling to the bone and slide over the tilt of the beak.

  I still couldn’t get rid of the smell of Tracy’s breath. I hated how I’d felt so powerless, pinned to the ground, and how I hadn’t been able to help Lorry. The red marks had gone from his wrists, but he looked worried all the time, and was nervous and twitchy, as though they might come back for him. I needed to get back at Tracy Powell for what she’d done. The blooming bruise from where she’d pushed my head into the ground was tender under my fingertips.

  I put the jar back on the altar and looked out of the window, wondering if Mally’s curtains would be open. They weren’t.

  When I went downstairs I was surprised to see that the front door was open, and the door to the kitchen had been propped wide. A wall of heat stopped me as I walked in. My mother was sitting at the pine table, with Lorry next to her. She’d washed her hair and it hung in a heavy, burnished curtain around her shoulders. She had on a dress, an orange-flowered one I hadn’t seen her wear for months, and I thought she was even wearing lipstick. She was eating a boiled egg carefully, dipping the spoon into the shell and hooking out the white, and then a smear of the yolk, and putting it into her mouth with precision. Then she looked up at me and licked her lips and smiled, and I noticed again how her posture had changed: she seemed lighter, as if her grief had shifted slightly. She was sitting up straighter in her chair, as if the weight of Petra’s death had literally been lifted from her shoulders.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she said. ‘Fancy some breakfast? We’ve got boiled eggs and I even made some fresh bread.’

  My dad caught my eye and I thought he made a tiny shrugging motion. He looked both confused and pleased. ‘Your mother was up at the crack of dawn, kneading away. She even got me to light that bloody great big hunk of metal so she could bake it properly.’ He nodded at the range cooker, which was still radiating waves of heat. The sweat was starting to prickle on my back.

  I watched as my mother put down her own spoon and picked up Lorry’s. He looked up at her and opened his mouth obediently, pushing his head back on his neck and sticking his tongue out. My mother scooped up some egg and put it in his mouth. He clamped his lips shut around it and started chewing. When he’d swallowed, he immediately opened his mouth again and held his face up for more. A baby bird waiting to be fed. My mother obliged, and all the time the same self-satisfied smile rested on her lips.

  I grabbed an orange from the fruit bowl, peeled it, and chucked the peel in the bin. Then I sat down at the table opposite my mother and sunk my teeth into the orange and enjoyed feeling the juice drip down my chin. I watched in silence for a few minutes, chewing on the flesh of the fruit, as my mother carried on feeding herself and Lorry alternately. Then she turned to me and opened her mouth to say something, but abruptly she stopped, her mouth open. She was frowning.

  ‘What happened there?’ she asked, her hand moving up to her forehead. My hand mirrored hers and I touched my temple gently, feeling the faint spring of the budding bruise. I shrugged and chucked the orange peel into the bin. I reached for an apple.

  ‘Must have been yesterday. I ran into a branch.’ I looked at Lorry to see if he was going to contradict me, but he just sat there, waiting for his next spoonful of egg. My dad put down the plate he was wiping and peered at my forehead, frowning.

  ‘It doesn’t look too bad,’ he said, and he held up two fingers in front of my face. ‘How many fingers?’ he asked.

  ‘Just the two,’ I said.

  ‘I think she’s OK, Linda. She’ll survive.’ He was smiling.

  My mother didn’t say anything for a moment, just carried on feeding Lorry. Then she cleared her throat.

  ‘Janet’s coming round in a bit,’ she said, and her voice had a new softness to it.

  I bit into the apple, and the flesh was mushy and too sweet in my mouth. It was bruised, a great brown arch of decay spreading through it. I spat it into my hand and chucked it in the bin.

  ‘She’s going to dowse for water.’

  In the fruit bowl, there was only one apple left: it too was brown and decomposing. The rot had spread from one fruit to the other.

  ‘What are you doing today, Nif?’ My mother had lost her
frown and was obviously trying to be pleasant. She had her eyebrows raised and there was a little tight smile on her lips. She looked stupid.

  ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll probably just hang around here. There’s not much to do, is there?’ I remembered what Mally had said about teaching himself from books and the TV. ‘We should have brought the telly with us.’

  ‘There’s no aerial,’ my dad pointed out. ‘So even if we’d brought it we wouldn’t be able to get any signal. You can’t even get any radio signal down here in the valley, and there’s nowhere in this village to buy a newspaper. There could be anything going on in the big, wide world and we’d be none the wiser.’ He turned back to the sink.

  ‘You could stay here and watch Janet,’ my mother said, ignoring my dad and talking directly to me. ‘I think she has quite a skill for things like that.’ She dug another gobbet of egg out for Lorry. ‘She has a way about her.’

  My dad’s back straightened slightly, but he didn’t say anything and he didn’t turn around. He carried on washing up.

  We were all quiet for a while, just the barely audible scrape of the teaspoon against the inside of the eggshell and the slosh of water in the sink to break the silence. My dad cleared his throat. Then he seemed to think that he’d better say something.

  ‘So, Nif. School in a couple of weeks. Bet you can’t wait, eh?’

  My mother spooned some more egg into Lorry’s mouth, but all the time her eyes were on me.

  Just the thought of going back to school made me feel sick.

  ‘I’m not going back.’ I said it very quietly.

  ‘Now, come on, love. Let’s just talk about this.’ My dad was drying his hands on a tea towel, and I forced myself to focus on the cloth in his hands, how the edges were ragged and the fabric had faded to the colour of porridge.

  ‘I’ve decided I’m going to get a job,’ I said, conscious of the waver in my voice. My mother snorted. My dad carried on rubbing the grey cloth over and over his hands.

  ‘What sort of job?’ he asked, and his voice was gentle enough, but there was a small hint of annoyance. ‘You don’t have any qualifications. You don’t have any O-Levels—not through any fault of your own—but it’s the truth. And there are already more than one-and-a-half million unemployed people in this country, despite Jim Callaghan’s best efforts, so you really need to consider your options.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll work in a shop or something. Or I’ll go to night classes and get O-Levels, but I’m not going back to school.’

  ‘I really think—’

  My voice came out louder than I’d intended: ‘I’m not going back to school. I’m sick of it and I’m not going back, no matter what you and Mr McPherson and all the rest of the fucking teachers have to say.’

  Even Lorry looked shocked, and his mouth hung open, the pale yellow egg clagged around his teeth. My mother’s pallid face was turning crimson from the blush that was edging its way up her cheeks. But it was my dad’s reaction that was strangest. He just looked at me, his mouth turned down at the edges, for all the world like Lorry’s clown doll. His eyes filled up with tears and he tried to blink them away. Then he turned away from me and pretended to wipe the sink.

  If it hadn’t been for the phone ringing, I think we could have stayed like that forever, frozen in a tableau. But as soon as the jangling rang out from the hall, my dad and my mother both jumped in their skins, and my mother got quickly to her feet.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ she said and went towards the door. My dad hadn’t turned around and he just stood there with his hands clutching onto the edge of the sink. The way my mother moved across the kitchen floor was timid, and she seemed to have become strangely compliant, as though my dad was a wild creature to be both feared and appeased. She went into the hall and closed the door softly behind her.

  I strained to hear what she was saying, but all I could make out was a muffled buzz of one-sided conversation.

  ‘That was Mally,’ she said when she came back in, and my stomach flipped. My dad still didn’t move.

  ‘He was phoning to say that Janet can’t come today, she’s sick, but she’ll try and come at the weekend instead.’

  My dad turned around and passed his hand over his eyes. He and my mother looked at each other for an age before he finally spoke.

  ‘Probably for the best,’ he said, and went down to this studio.

  After breakfast Lorry and I lay on our backs on the patchy lawn and counted swallows. Where the patch of concrete had been, there was now bare, loamy earth, but I knew that it wouldn’t take long for it to be baked to dust. Lorry eventually dozed off and I closed my eyes and thought about getting revenge on Tracy Powell. Even though it was Fat Denise who’d hurt Lorry, Tracy was the one in charge; Fat Denise was just her sidekick. They’d done something bad to Lorry, and that had to be corrected, balanced out. It was what the Creed wanted. I wondered if somehow, by burying the relics, I’d managed to diminish the power of the Creed. I needed to give it something back. Something to let it know I was still its disciple.

  I fingered the tender area on my forehead and then I had a thought. I sat up and scrabbled around in the grass until my fingers found a stone. It was about the size of a plum, with good, jagged edges.

  The first time I hit my head with it, it didn’t really hurt, so I guessed I hadn’t done it hard enough. The second time I made sure to hit it really hard, and felt the lump rise almost instantly. I’d look ridiculous with two bruises on my forehead, one on either side, but I had to do it to balance out the bad luck. Two wrongs could make a right. I knew it wasn’t enough to get back at Tracy and Fat Denise for what they’d done to Lorry, but it was a start; it showed willing. If I could appease the Creed, if I could demonstrate that I was still its disciple, I knew that I could make things alright for Lorry.

  I looked over at my brother and was surprised to see that he had his eyes open, watching me.

  ‘What’s up, little feller?’ I said, and reached my hand out to take his.

  He was quiet for a moment, as if working himself up to being able to speak.

  ‘They hurt me, Nif. Girls hurt me.’ He lifted his wrist to show me the place where Fat Denise had grabbed him the day before.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lorry,’ I said, and shuffled over the grass to sit next to him. ‘I should have been a better sister. I should have looked after you better.’

  His eyes narrowed against the sun when he looked up at me.

  ‘Mummy says Petra’s looking after me. She says Petra’s always watching over me and one day I can see her.’

  ‘What?’ Despite the still air, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck lift. ‘You know Petra’s dead, Lorry, right? You know that she’s dead and she’s never coming back?’

  ‘Mummy says she is. She says she can feel her and that maybe she can see her if she keeps taking medicine.’

  ‘What medicine, Lorry? The pills the doctor gave her? The little blue pills?’

  He pulled away from me, and wrapped his arms around his legs. He shook his head.

  ‘Medicine from lady,’ was all he would say, and then he lay on his back and shut his eyes.

  Twenty-two.

  Sunday 15th August 1976

  The long days wore on, with the same insolent weather, the same uninterrupted heat. Neither of my parents had mentioned our argument about school, and I was glad. There was a new tension between them, the air almost crackling when they were in the same room. I did my best to stay out of their way.

  My dad gave up on the odd jobs he was doing around the cottage. He’d stripped and repainted the kitchen window, but with the other window frames he’d just painted on top of the old paint, and not too carefully either, so that some of it had encroached onto the glass. He removed some of the slipping tiles from the roof of the porch, but he hadn’t bothered replacing them, and they sat in a stack next to the front door, giving the porch the look of a middle-aged man with a receding hairline. He hadn’t bothered cleaning the gutt
ers either, so the moss and weeds that grew there remained, although yellower and more withered than when we’d first arrived.

  Mostly, my dad stayed in his studio, occasionally coming out to make a cup of tea or grab a scrap of bread. He didn’t bother removing the clay from his hands anymore, but would appear in the kitchen with orange smears up to his elbows, layer upon layer building up, until eventually he’d have to wash.

  The only time my parents seemed to have anything to do with each other was when they washed. My dad would heat up water on the camping stove. Pan after pan would be boiled and taken upstairs and poured into the bath, then cold water would be added until there were a few inches of tepid water in the bottom. My mother would go first, and I’d stand outside the bathroom door and listen to her washing herself, the strangely hypnotic sound of liquid being sloshed over skin. Then it would be my dad’s turn, and he’d use the same water. It struck me that this sharing of bathwater, brought on by necessity, was the most intimate of exchanges I’d witnessed between them in a long time. This fusion of skin cells, of sweat and dust and clay, was the closest they’d been for months.

  I’d forgotten it was a Sunday until I saw the people milling on the grass in front of the chapel. From my vantage point in the attic, I could see Lyndon Vaughan, his little dog running in circles, sniffing at ankles and scurrying from one person to the next. They all ignored it, talking among themselves, taking it in turns to be presented to Mr Beynon, who shook hands with all the men, just as I’d seen him do on that first Sunday.

  There seemed to be a discussion going on between several of the men and Lyndon Vaughan, and it must have ended in an agreement, because one of them stepped forward towards Mally’s house, with something in his hand. I couldn’t quite see what he was doing, but he bent down in front of one of the wooden gateposts and reached out a hand, and he seemed to be marking it or drawing on it. He did this for a couple of minutes, then stepped back, as if surveying his work. The other men nodded their approval, and the first man moved back into the crowd again. I couldn’t see what he’d done to the gatepost.