Witches Sail in Eggshells

by Chloe Turner

  Ben seemed to sense Rachel’s presence then, and he turned and waved. He was smiling, and a stranger would have thought nothing of it, but even from here she could see the duck and rise of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed hard. The woman lifted a hand to no one in particular and slipped inside the cab. Bare flesh swivelled on the seat, skirt inching up a fraction, as she closed the door. The taxi left at once, brake lights pulsing only briefly as it swung down under the railway bridge and away.

  Rachel knew there would be a moment that night when Ben would go to the bathroom, his set-aside clothes laid out on the bed like a flat-packed man. She would be able to check the pockets if she wanted, and she knew there’d be something there. A stray bead from that gilt choker, perhaps, kept as a keepsake, or a smudge, dark as blood, on the white cotton of his collar. A number written in his messy scrawl on a corner of the hotel’s postcard. Perhaps a single hair, not Rachel’s blonde, left entangled in his wool blazer’s lapel. It was whether she chose to see it.

  Rachel thought again of the hedgehogs in the swimming pool, of those creatures lifted in a chunk of ice, like flies caught in amber, clawing towards each other in the solidifying cold. A frozen tussle, two boars wrestling even as the water turned their blood to ice, or was it something else? A male and a female? Two warm bodies scrabbling for each other, seeking something—rescue, comfort, death-defying sex—as darkness closed around them. When the chance came that night, she wondered what choice she would make.

  Labour of Love

  First, for the back of the bed, a row of puckered yellow corn: Honeydew, for its sweetness. She dibbed neat holes in the earth, feeling the sand crackle under her thumbnail as she pushed down into the organic crumb. A parallel drill of cannellini: perfect white beans, a shallow handful from the bowl. As she knelt, loose stones made themselves comfortable in the soft tissue of her knees. The final row was for squash: three creamy seeds for each hollow in the soil. Fairy tokens, light as air. The strongest seedling would race to colonise the front of the bed, creeping between the stems of the other plants, spilling its heart-shaped vine down amongst the gravel.

  Three Sisters, they called it, Three Sisters planting. Corn and bean and squash, lying top to toe. She thought of her own siblings, so close and now so far away: her sister, minding a bookshop beside a lake in Ohio, and her brother in Kabul, with a wife who used to love him, and a job that threatened his life every day. And she thought of the baby inside her, barely there at all. No siblings for him; she felt too old now. So who would grow and thrive alongside him, this strange little seedling, whom she had never expected to come at all?

  As a child, she’d assumed she would marry, of course, and that children of her own would come. That she’d help pull on contrary wellies, wave off school trips, lay her own slippers beside another, larger pair. But the owner of that pair never materialised or didn’t hang around, more like. A chance encounter at a trade show when the snow was still on the ground. When seeds had been selected, and new tools picked from the shiny racks, she’d gone for drinks in town, a few beers by the fire in The Ship. He’d been in Taunton for a conference at the Manor, had struck up conversation while they stood at the bar. An American—they’d talked about the almond fields in Fresno, the yellow mustard that carpets the vineyards of Monterey County every spring, and the pleasure to be found in watching things grow. She’d liked him, although his hands seemed small and sickly next to her weather-hardened paws, and he’d uttered small sounds that had made her fear she’d hurt him. She’d toasted her own bread in the morning, but he’d already left when she came back with the tray.

  That taste in her mouth was back now, metallic like the silty clay of the Levels. It had come on almost at once, so she’d barely needed the plastic pen with its chromatogram window and its cheery leaflet to confirm the news. Though the taste faded a little sooner after waking each day, along with the sickness. Your baby is as big as a blueberry, said the book her sister sent. The waistband of her jeans already pinched as she knelt over the soil. It wouldn’t be long before she too began to swell and grow.

  Weeks later, it seemed unlikely that those jeans had ever fitted. She took to wearing an old canvas skirt tied at the back with a bow, and the tunic tops she’d favoured back at art college. Only a couple had survived the moths, and they faded to the colour of soil as summer wore on. When they became too tatty at last, she cut them for cloths and drove into town for saggy black dresses which expanded as she did. By the time of the Midsummer festival, she could no longer see her toenails when standing, though she knew they must be chipped red and less than clean from working barefoot in the orchard for days on end. Still, there were many who saw her on that day and thought she’d never looked better, and a few who told her so.

  August: Your baby is the size of an heirloom tomato. An overblown thing, this variety, deep clefts between bloated bulbs of orange flesh. The child might be thriving, but it was not a good year for the vegetable garden. Strange, because the spring rains had been kind, and her friend Peter had boasted that his willow harvest was set to be the best for years. The fields had been rich with cowslips, purple bugle, and even a clutch of green-winged orchids—those bright jesters—brightened the old hay meadow behind the cottage. But the orchard had been slow to blossom and fruit this season. Even the Clarinette, usually plump and knobbly by this time, were warped, and small, and troubled by woolly aphids which she struggled to keep at bay. The late bloomers—Fair Maid of Taunton and Bridgwater Pippin—had barely fruited. And the Kingston Black, the big old tree at the back which bore a heavy cider crop every other year, had failed altogether this spring.

  She was saddest about her squashes, which had not fared well alongside their sisters. Over the years she’d tried all sorts—Black Futsu, little pattypans and the garish Turban—and enjoyed them all. But she was best known for the size and sweetness of her butternuts, which she sold in the farmers’ market in Wells. This season, though, those bighearted leaves had sagged from the start, drooping from their stalks like wet sheets. After a few days of rain, the first pale freckles of powdery mildew began to spread from front to back, a dusting of exhaustion for the troubled plants. Then, later, she was forced to crouch awkwardly, enduring kicks of protest, to pick off the refined lemon and ebony carapace of an army of cucumber beetles, which had taken up residence across the bed.

  September: Your baby is the size of a large eggplant. The image is set alongside a bowl full of purple-pink flesh with a high sheen. By now, her belly was scored with fine pink lines, and her breasts spilled over even her fullest bras. When the sun was high in the sky, she could do little but sit in the orchard’s shade, trying to ignore the scanty crop that hung around her. By night, she slept with all the windows open, but still the warmth and the relentless kicking left her weary and slow by morning.

  Some weeks later, though, came a night that brought some relief: a light rain skimmed off the heat of the day, the kicking slowed, and she felt rested when she woke for the first time in many weeks. Later that day, she went walking along the route of the Sweet Track, that strange raised-timber causeway which has given safe passage to six thousand years of travellers through the Avalon Marshes from Shapwick to the Polden Hills.

  She walked further than she should have, perhaps, drawn on by the lure of the tor, but she felt fit and strong. When her swollen feet began to pinch a little, she rested amongst the reeds. The bright flags of yellow irises fluttered amongst the green, and she wriggled her toes in the dark water of the channel. She closed her eyes to feel the sunshine on her lids, heard the marsh frogs’ laughing chirrup all around.

  Even when the cramps started, she didn’t panic—she wasn’t disposed to—but retraced her steps across the heath. Stopped now and then, hands around the bloated swell of her belly, willing the pain to end. But by the time she got home, the bleeding was underway, and fear was clutching at her as bad as any cramp.

  Peter came, throwing out sheep hurdles and reels of twine from the truck’s front
seat to make room. He drove her to Musgrove Park and waited until she was admitted. Helped her to a bed in a ward that smelt of gravy and bleach and sadness. He wanted to stay but was shooed away by a fierce midwife with angry red hands.

  The next day she found him waiting for her in the badly lit waiting room, with its Jack Vettriano prints and its view over the back of the incinerator. They sent her off with a plastic package to hold her bloodied clothes, and a handful of leaflets about self-care, and support clinics, and gardens of remembrance. In the truck, she barely heard Peter’s stammer as he struggled for the right thing to say. She stared out at the pinking maples lining the high street, the harvest festival banners, the women pushing buggies between busy market stalls. As they waited for the traffic lights to change, the colours merged and swam, and she bit her lip to stop the tears falling.

  It was many weeks before she felt able to get out to the garden. It hadn’t fared well in her absence. The apple trees were bare, only a handful of windfalls left in the grass. Peter had taken the meagre harvest to the cider mill while she lay in her room, watching patterns thrown onto the whitewashed walls by the autumn sun.

  In the raised bed, Three Sisters were now down to two: the beans had fallen foul of the snails, which were sliding around their broken corpses even now. The sweetcorn had at least fruited, the silky tassels at the head of each cob just starting to brown. She picked one, twisting the cob hard from the stem so that the whole plant was almost tugged from the soil. The husk was baggier than she would have liked, and when she peeled it back, the kernels were thin and dry, releasing no milk when squeezed.

  The squash was an even sorrier sight. Even those blooms that had fruited seemed to have vanished, and the vine was starting to die back already, the leaves discolouring, wilting and deflating so that patches of bare soil were visible once again. She knelt—her belly had started to recede, but it was still an effort—and took her garden knife from her pocket.

  She’d almost worked her way through the spent foliage when she saw a flash of cream flesh between the leaves. She sat up then, slashing hard at what was left of the vine, flicking aside a fat, frilled slug which clung to the stem. And then, in the final foot of soil, revealed as she ripped away the last browned leaves, she found a ripe butternut as big as any she’d ever grown. Cushioned by a dent in the soil, its skin was smooth and unblemished. A single tendril curled tightly from where stalk met flesh. The faintest green stripes ran from head to toe, over the bulbous bottom with its ribbed cheeks of flesh, and down to the tight button at the base.

  She clipped the stalk with her knife—a single, sharp cut, feeling the prickle of the stem against her fingertips—and lifted the squash. It was warm and so heavy that she had to lean in with both arms to retrieve it. A blackbird began to sing in one of the apple trees—the pretty, bittersweet Chisel Jersey that grew on the bank of the pond. She cradled the great fruit at her elbow, running her fingers over its curves and ridges, marvelling at its weight.

  The bird at the pond was joined by another: a robin, singing from the lowest branch of the Sweet Reinette. As they filled the tired garden with their song, she sat back on her heels, shifted the weight a little in the crook of her arm. Stroked the flawless flesh of the squash once more and began to smile.

  While the Mynah Bird Watched

  When their turn comes, the sun is dipping low, casting long shadows against the pockmarked walls of her consulting room. They’ve been here before—this man, this girl. Agnes recognises the slump of his shoulders, the sprouting hair at the base of his neck where a shave is overdue, the dusty outline of an old stain on his lapel, under a pin for the city’s soccer team. When Agnes motions for them to sit, the man slumps in his chair, as if the air has been stolen from his lungs.

  The girl is different. From the outside, her condition manifests itself only through the bald patches across her scalp, and those beads of fever-sweat across her brow. Her hollow cheeks would not mark her out in that waiting room, where malnourishment and anaemia are merely background noise. The bulging masses of her liver and spleen are a secret that only Agnes’s tests have revealed. But the girl sits tall in the man-sized chair, her beaded braids swinging even after she is still. Agnes is reminded of someone, long ago, as the girl fixes her across the table with that unbreaking stare. As she grips the desk at the meeting of cracked green leather and well-worn kiaat heartwood, knuckles whitening as she presses down on the heavy stitching.

  ‘My wife will come. She must have been held up at the market. Please, wait.’ The man is sitting upright now. He has realised that their turn could slip away.

  ‘There is a line. Many to see before I can go home.’ Agnes traces the thin skin at her temples, feels the mesh of tendons and skull beneath.

  ‘A minute, please. She will not be long.’

  He is right, because the door opens then, revealing a scene of confusion. Ndali is trying to keep a woman from entering, and Agnes can hear the grumble of the queue behind. Another woman, a baby slung over her shoulder like a dishcloth, shouts something from the far side of the hall.

  ‘I’m sorry Doctor, she…’ Ndali is doing her best to keep the peace.

  ‘It is fine, Ndali. Madam, please, come in.’

  The voices in the hall subside as Ndali ushers the door closed. Agnes sits back in her chair. A police car whines past the window.

  ‘Claudia, where have you been?’ the man demands of his wife. There is an angry twitch above his eye.

  ‘A truck hit the water tower. They closed the road. I got off the bus to walk.’

  Claudia has not looked at Agnes yet, so she does not know who sits across the table. As she fusses with a scarlet jacket that struggles to contain a spreading waist, Claudia does not know that the woman opposite is recalling a time, long ago. A dusty classroom at lunch recess, the window open wide to the parched air. A mynah bird chattering on a generator lid. A yellow lunch tin splayed on the tiles, and three girls squawking louder than the mynah as they unwrap every one of the careful parcels Agnes’s mother has packed.

  How they mocked the country food she had grown up with, her headdress with its garish zebra design, and her skin, darker than theirs—almost blue-black—and paint spattered with the fairy-prints of vitiligo. Claudia was beautiful then. High cheekbones where now there are sagging pouches. Fine, white teeth where now there is yellow rot and holes. Slim, bony fingers where now there are swollen joints, a blackened nail above the thin silver band on her ring finger.

  Agnes spreads her own hands across the table. Presses down at the fingertips as the girl did before so that the white patches where pigmentation has been lost stand out even more against the brown. She wonders what will come out when she speaks.

  ‘These drugs, that Maria needs. They are expensive.’

  ‘You can’t expect us to pay. We have nothing,’ the man says.

  ‘I know that. But you have seen the line. There are many in need. I must think of the rest.’

  ‘She is dying. She must have them. Claudia, you tell her.’

  The man’s eyes are rolling, red threads across yellow, as he pleads for his daughter’s life. But Claudia has seen Agnes now—really seen her—and her mouth sags open. Perhaps she too is thinking of the broken hinges of that lunchbox, and the maize balls crushed underfoot. Of textbooks with fluttering pages as they bump against the brick sides of the well. Of bright spots of red through a sky-blue polo shirt, where the compass point has found its mark.

  Claudia stares at Agnes until the doctor meets her eyes at last. Then Claudia looks down. Runs a tongue over cracked lips.

  There is a long pause. The man wipes a hand across a sticky brow. A bluebottle crawls across the windowpane, its legs thick-black and furred. The girl fidgets. Another police car passes, and the patrolman’s whistle sounds from the railway stop. The fly buzzes against the glass—suddenly, frantically—its fine gauzy wings grazing the dusted pane. Claudia does not move. Her head still hangs.

  When Agnes speaks again,
she keeps her body very still. She says what she needs to, and no more. Then, as she writes, she feels her jaw unclench. Her biceps slacken. She feels the tension slide from her shoulders, like the oshana that streams through the valley after the rains. She rips the sheet from the pad and hands the prescription to the girl.

  As they usher their daughter from the room, Claudia and the man are profuse in their thanks, but Agnes turns away as if she cannot hear them. She keeps her eyes on the photograph propped on the mantelpiece. On the blue sky and the green of the sweet potato vine, the dirt-grey thatch on the homestead where she was born. She lets them blur in front of her eyes until she hears the weighted door pull closed. She does not want them to see her tears.

  Collecting Her Thoughts on the Prison Steps

  She was always a collector, Ruth. Back at school, it used to be knick-knacks: scented erasers, scrunchies, and those little plastic balls you could fish out of ink cartridges if you had too much time on your hands. We used to swap picture cards from cereal boxes to complete the sets. We were close, Ruth and I, before life got in the way.

  Then later, older, and with some money from her job at the Co-op, her tastes changed and grew. Her bedroom and—when she moved out to escape her Dad—her first flat down the bottom of the Arwel Estate were full of cowrie shells, matchbox dioramas, anything and everything with a hippo motif. She wore silver rings on all her fingers: one stacked on another, and more hung on every branch of a little wooden tree beside her bed.

  Every year there would be something new: miniature books, ammonites, thimbles; vintage carthen blankets when she was feeling flush; glass bottles—it started with those old ones we used to dig up in the back garden now and then. Pretty soon she had a sizable collection—from antique shops, from bric-a-brac stalls, from that particularly bountiful spot behind the compost heap—and in every colour from deepest medicinal brown through to Bristol blue. She lined them up in height order on the windowsill behind the kitchen sink so that the morning sun flashed the colours across the opposite wall.