by David Almond
“Just tell me, Bianca.”
She gathered her thoughts, her memories, then began.
“It was just me and Crystal. We hitchhiked. Dead easy. There was one bloke, all slimy and creepy in a shirt and tie that started getting ideas but Crystal give him one of her looks and he shut up. Dead easy. One lift then another, one lift then another. We weren’t even sure where we were headin’ and neither of us said what we were lookin’ for. We were just shovin’ off from school, from Krakatoa, from all of you lot. Couple of hours and there we were, early afternoon, walkin’ through Alnmouth to the beach, eatin’ ice-cream and giggling about what we’d left behind, but we both know we’re lookin’ out for him all the time. The beach is lovely, perfect warm white sand. Sea goin’ on forever and the dunes stretchin’ on forever. The castles on their rocks and the islands on the sea. I know you think I’m stupid and mebbe I am, but I’m clever enough to know we’re blessed to be here, in this world. We don’t need poets to tell us that. We walk. We hoy our shoes off and walk on the sand and in the water. Freedom. We’ve got a little tent and we’ve got scran and booze and fags, everything we need. Bliddy freedom! We dance and splash and yell about school and damn exams and the seagulls whoop above our heads. Ha! Then there he is.”
She took another swig of vodka. She sat up straight, as if she was strengthening herself for what she had to say. I sat apart from her again.
“Orpheus?” I said.
“Aye. It was crazy. Like he’d put himself exactly where we’d find him, like he was waitin’ or something, like we couldn’t have come to any other place but this. There he is, singin’, playin’. He’s round that curve in the beach where them ancient timber shacks are. You know the ones? Must’ve been there since the year dot or before. He looks the same, mebbe a bit more haggard, a bit more frail. Crystal gasps. The teaser! she says. He was so damn gorgeous, Claire. And the voice. We couldn’t move. Come and get me, Orpheus, I was beggin’ inside myself. Fat chance. There was others with him. All lads, it’s right. They turn to us when we appear. I remember what James said about the blokes but I think sod them and I keep on walking closer. He stops singin’. He looks at us, like he’s wary, like he’s scared. One bloke plants hisself in front of us. ‘You know us, Orpheus,’ I go. ‘We knew Ella. We know Claire.’ Like a stupid thing I put me hands on me tits, like that’ll help him to remember. ‘Let them through,’ he says, so mebbe the tit thing did work, eh? They let us sit with them. The blokes have got fruit and bread and stuff. They don’t want our drink, don’t want our fags. ‘Where you been?’ I ask, and Orpheus laughs. ‘You should be at school,’ he says, and it sounds so bliddy weird to be there with him and to hear that. ‘We’re havin’ a few days of freedom,’ says Crystal. ‘Like you,’ she says, and he just laughs at her, and plays again, and nobody wants to talk, and it’s like there’s nowt happenin’, just the sun startin’ to fall and the tide goin’ out, and if it was anybody but him we’d have nicked off straight away, but we sat there and we watched him and we listened to him and all the time that thing inside is beggin’, ‘Take me, Orpheus. Take me now.’ We should’ve left. Should’ve got out of it. It’s the late afternoon when they arrive.”
She swigged again.
“Who?” I said.
She looked away.
“Hell, Claire,” she whispered. “Who knows? Was like they come out of the sea, out of the bliddy earth itself, out of the bliddy air, the light. One minute there’s nobody, next minute they’re dead close, already heading from the edge of the sea at us, already bliddy at us. Jesus Christ I think I’m hard. You should have had a look at them. Devils, maniacs. They’re women, you know that from the hips and tits. Scars on them, tattoos, and wide wild eyes, like they’ve been snortin’ something, like they’re manic. And there’s knives and hatchets and bliddy saws. And the nails on them, like claws, needles, daggers. Claire, he touches me. Orpheus touches me. ‘Go away, Bianca,’ he says. Bianca. ‘Please run away,’ he says. They hear him. ‘He’s right!’ one screams. ‘This is nowt to do with you.’ Weird screamy voice, weird bliddy accent. Crystal’s draggin’ me. ‘Come on, Bianca! Howay!’ They’re comin’ closer. A couple of the blokes are running now. The others are backin’ away. One stands in their path and gets a knife in his arm. ‘Begone!’ she screams again. ‘We’re doin’ this for you, for all us bints. What’s he turned from women for? Aye, Orpheus, what you turned from women for?’ He stands up with the lyre and the women start to scream and howl and yell. ‘We cannot hear you!’ they scream. They yell louder, louder, come closer, closer. It’s like they’ve known him forever, hated him forever, like they’ve been huntin’ the earth for him forever. It was like this is how it was always meant to be and as if he knew that this was how it was always meant to be. Oh Jesus Christ how hard am I? He pushes me. ‘Just go!’ he says. And I see in his eyes that he cares for me, that he cares for all of us. And I love him. I bliddy love him love him love him, but all the same I want to run away with Crystal to the dunes. Ha! So much for how Love conquers Death. We don’t get the chance to run. The yelling and screamin’ gets louder. Two of the women get us in their claws. ‘Sleep!’ they hiss, and they spit something in our eyes. They kiss us and spit something in our mouths. They drop us to the sand and we’re gone.”
She paused.
“How can I get it out?” she said. “Will telling it help it to seem better? Will it seem more sane?”
She swigged the vodka.
“They killed him,” I said.
“How did all this happen to us, Claire? We’re just kids. We’re just us. We’re just…”
“They killed him.”
“I seen some of it, but it was like dreams. I wondered was I dyin’ or already dead. We were drugged or something, out of it. I seen the knives and the hatchets goin’ down. It was that wild at first. Screaming and yelling and thumpin’ and rocks bangin’. The women crawling all around him and all over him. The fading light then a fire burnin’. Then the night with the stars shinin’ down and it went all calm. Just little bursts of laughter from the women, just sighs and groans. Just the noise of the sea. And the night goin’ on and goin’ on and me and Crystal couldn’t move. And I kept on thinkin’, This is it. I’m dead.”
She let a few tears fall. I reached out and touched her again, and she looked straight at me, biting her lips like a little girl.
“And the light come back,” she said, “and I wished it hadn’t. I wished that light would never come again. I wished that I’d been right when I thought that I was dead. I come out of the drugs or whatever it was. The women were still there. There was blood all over them. I’m tryin’ to get up. One of them turns to me. ‘We done this for you,’ she said. ‘Me?’ I gasped. ‘Aye. For all bints, always and everywhere. He’s the cheater, he’s the teaser. We done it for Ella.’ ‘For Ella?’ I get up onto me elbows and I start to see. ‘Aye,’ she says. ‘For her. He charmed her, he enticed her with his lalalalabliddyla. Charmer, teaser. And then he let her die.’ I knelt up. She stood aside. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘we’ve made him follow her.’ And I saw him then, Orpheus, all in pieces, scattered on the sand, bits of him turnin’ at the water’s edge. Fingers, feet, bones, bits of him like joints of meat. His head in a rock pool further down and the lyre lyin’ right beside it. Crystal’s gaggin’ and retchin’. And the women walk away, laughin’. ‘He knew he had it comin’!’ one of them yells. Mebbe I’m still half-drugged. There’s spray above the sea, sand blowin’ in the breeze and all that dazzling light from the risin’ sun. The women are gone, quick as they came, and there’s just me and Crystal and poor Orpheus and what the hell could we do, Claire? We back away like bairns. We see the crows droppin’ down to him and jabbin’ their beaks at him. We see things crawl out the sea to get bits of him. We see a big black dog running along the beach to get bits of him. And the sun’s risin’ and the sea’s turnin’ harder like it wants to get at him and carry more of him away. We see his head and his lyre lifted and carried out, Claire. We
see what must be heart, liver, lungs. And the crows and gulls is goin’ crazy for him. And here come more damn dogs. Oh, Claire, we couldn’t run. We couldn’t do nothin’. We stood in the dunes and saw Orpheus, all the bits of him, taken away. And the sea was so damn black like his blood had darkened it, and it came so bliddy high to clean away all sight of him. How long did we stay there? Who knows? Till afternoon, mebbe, and not a soul passed by, till there was just the beach, nothin’ but the beach, and no more Orpheus nowhere to be seen.”
She stared into the corner of the room, as if that was the sea, that was the beach.
“I saw it,” she said at last. “But how can I believe it?”
“I don’t know, Bianca.”
“Crystal says it was all tricks and drugs and vodka. Must’ve been, she says. But it can’t have been, can it?”
“I don’t know, Bianca.”
“And I know I’ll keep on seeing it all me life and getting horrified by it.”
She held her hands out to me and I took them and drew her closer. She rocked against me for a while.
“But it’s weird,” she said.
“What is?”
“It’s like tellin’ it helps it. And when I tell it, it’s like, underneath it all, is a thing about love.”
“Love?”
“I loved him and always loved him and always will.”
She leaned close against me now. I held her gently.
“And it’s like he loves me. Me, stupid thick Bianca. And like he loved all of us. He hardly saw us, he only saw Ella, and he loved her all the way to Death. But he loved us all, Claire. Is that stupid?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“He sang for us and played for us and made us feel…But there’s no words for what he made us feel.”
She rubbed the stains on her hands. Orpheus’ blood crumbled from her skin.
“He was something, eh?” she whispered.
“Aye.”
“He was bliddy something, and he came to us.”
She kissed me on the cheek.
“I’m happy,” she said. “Can that be right? That’s the weirdest thing right now. I’m bliddy happy, Claire. How can that be?”
The night’s gone. The sun’s come up. The story’s done.
Orpheus is with Ella again, wherever Death is, somewhere far beyond the Ouseburn gates. The rest of us go on. We continued with our lessons, our gatherings at The Cluny.
We did our exams in a weird state of ecstasy and distress.
I did well, of course.
“I’m so pleased, Claire,” Krakatoa purred to me. “I always knew you had it in you.”
I’m going south, to university, to read the words that make the world.
I already plan that next year I’ll walk on the beaches of Greece. I’ll drink ouzo and retsina with a still-to-be-encountered love. I’ll feel sun that has true heat in it, swim in sea that isn’t icy. I’ll travel to the places where the ancient stories have their start.
I leave in just a few days’ time. In the evenings, I sit longer than usual with my parents as we prepare to part. We look at old photographs: me as a baby, me as an infant, me as an adolescent, the three of us in beautiful formations in the world’s shadows and light. We talk of the days before I was here, the day of my birth, the days of my growth. We laugh, we hug, we blink the tears from our eyes. We are members of a little family in a little home. Beyond us is Tyneside, the beaches and coalfields of Northumberland, the world, the galaxy, the universe, everything that there has ever been and will ever be.
I pack cases, gather clothes and belongings, things I need, things that I can’t do without. Clothes, books, cash, credit card, some childhood toys. I’ll take this earring as well. I found it yesterday. I went down to the Ouseburn to say farewell to the childhood monsters just beyond the gates. There it was, caught in the litter gathered at the base of the humming metal bars. I stretched down, teased it out, held it on my open palm. It’s a little white dolphin earring. The gift of Ella, sent from Death.
Can that be true?
Yes. No. Maybe.
Maybe it’s all been just coincidence, tale-telling, rumour, madness, the madness of being young, the madness of knowing love for the first time, the madness of being alive in this miraculous place. Maybe we didn’t really hear what we thought we heard, or we didn’t hear it in the way we thought we heard. Maybe we didn’t really see. Maybe we didn’t feel what we thought we felt. Maybe…
But we did. We know we did.
And I know that he is gone and is still here.
I know that both of them are dead and both are young.
I hear him. His song is everywhere, is scattered like his flesh. He sings through beaks. He bleats with the lamb and howls with the wolf. He sings with the breeze through the treetops and the grass. He sings the petals of daisies, the berries of hawthorn, the taste of pears. He sings these bright late butterflies, and the dark new chrysalis where the butterfly will grow again. He sings the geese’s glorious v-shaped migration and return. He sings the rays of the sun, the falling of the rain, the running of all water through Northumberland and the endless flowing of the Tyne. He sings us, us, us. He sings our flesh, our blood, our bones and breath. He comes and goes. Sometimes he stands at the edge of things, waiting for his chance to enter the world again. If we open ourselves to him and allow him into us, he will make us free. He will give us his song and let us dance.
I’ll take the mask of Orpheus with me.
I’ll keep it always.
I put it on now, the final act of telling this tale all night.
I look through his eyes. I breathe his breath.
Sing through me, Orpheus, as I speak these last words.
This word then this word then this then this.
Lose yourself, Claire.
Be gone. Be gone.
Be nothing.
And oh! He comes!
He comes, singing his way to my mouth, and there, just behind him, is beautiful beloved Ella, coming out from Death.
David Almond grew up in a large family in northeastern England and says, “The place and the people have given me many of my stories.” He worked as a postman, a brush salesman, an editor, and a teacher but began to write seriously after he finished college. His first novel for children, Skellig, was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book and an ALA-ALSC Notable Children’s Book and appeared on many Best Book of the Year lists. He also wrote My Name Is Mina, the prequel to Skellig. His novel Kit’s Wilderness won the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature and he is the winner of the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award. David Almond lives in England.
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