The Limits of Enchantment

by Graham Joyce

  The next two days comprised forty-eight hours of intense preparation, starting with the baths. I hauled water from the pump and heated it on the hob to fill the zinc tub. Dawn, noon and dusk of each preparation day. Of the nine ingredients required for the bath infusion I was a little short of sandalwood, but now I was committed I couldn’t go out and get more, so I made it spin out with frankincense which would have turned Mammy’s nose up, but needs must. The care required to discard the water was a real chore. I couldn’t drag the bath into the garden for fear of slopping some of the water, so it had to be taken out the same way as it was brought in, a bucket at a time, and poured into a hole in the ground. After each bath I burned the cloths or towels on which I dried myself.

  I hadn’t heard any more from Judith. I trusted she would come to shield me on the Friday but I had no way of knowing if she would turn up. Now that I had begun the preparations I couldn’t go out to visit her, and neither could I – for fear of contamination – send a message with anyone else.

  Disaster almost struck on the Thursday morning, when I heard a rapping on the door. I was upstairs at the time and I glanced out of the window. It was Arthur McCann, in his estate gear. I don’t know what he wanted. I hid myself, lying on the floor as he knocked again. So persistent was he I thought he’d never go away. He tapped a third time on the window. Thankfully he didn’t try the door, because he would have found it unlocked. I never had the habit of locking the door. But after he’d gone I went downstairs and I turned the key in both front door and back, as again I couldn’t risk contamination with any person at this stage.

  During this time I drank only water and ate nothing but thin soup.

  I was super-careful with the mushrooms and the catnip and the hellebore. I knew the dangers. Scrape the white warts off the glorious red mushroom? There’s more to it than that. The month in which it is collected and dried means everything. Its habitat, likewise. Count the white spots, Mammy had said, and take care. Examine the collars on the stalks, and discard if swollen. See this one is not red but orange, watch out. Inspect the gills, and be cautious. Dry slowly, slowly. All those years I’d watched Mammy like a hawk, and I was glad I had. Fly. It can drive a person mad. I know it can.

  That was Mammy’s name for it: fly. I’d come to think of it as the ticket.

  At dusk on Thursday I drew the final bath, but not before lighting a fire in the hearth. I’d swept out all the old ash and made sure that I burned no other wood than oak and certainly not coal. While it was blazing I boiled my pans for the bath. I steeped my sachet in the warm water: it contained equal parts basil, thyme, vervain, valerian, mint, rosemary, fennel, lavender and hyssop. After squeezing the sachet I sprinkled into the bath a handful of soap. Then I got in, and with the fire crackling around the oak logs I was able to let myself go into the flames.

  I came to when I felt the water cooling around me. Then I got out, and I shaved my head plus all of my body hair and trimmed my fingernails and toenails. After that I had to empty the bathwater in the garden. I also made a small bonfire of all my hair and nail clippings and the towel I’d used to dry myself. I thought to burn Mammy’s hair and nail clippings I’d brought back from the hospital, but some instinct made me leave them hidden in their jar on the shelf. Then I went to bed in the luxury of clean sheets.

  I started to get pins and needles in my fingers and thumbs, a sensation that made sleep even more difficult, and yet I knew that above everything I would need a good night’s sleep to be rested for the trials of the day. But every time I closed my eyes in the dark I had the most terrifying thoughts, and if I did manage to drift off to sleep I would jolt awake with thoughts of William shouting in my ear. The jitters had me. With sleep eluding me I got up and checked and rechecked the dates and I reaffirmed the position of the moon. I knew I hadn’t made a mistake but I needed to occupy my mind to see off the terrors.

  Finally I did sleep, but I dreamed of a pair of ancient hands folding a black piece of paper until it seemed too impossibly small to fold any further, but the hands folded it again, and still again, and yet again, and each further impossible fold seemed horrifying to me, and then I woke into the grey-light of pre-dawn. I dressed hurriedly. I went downstairs and I made the infusion of tea and I gulped it down. The fire was still in from the night before, so I brought it back to life and banked it up with oak logs.

  I stepped outside to go to the outhouse. I still had the pins-and-needles sensation in my fingers and thumbs, and my shaved head felt chilled in the morning air. As I hurried over to the outhouse first a robin hopped across my path which was a good sign, and then a toad which was bad. The two together meant an unresolved situation and I almost wanted to turn back. Even at that stage I could have put my fingers down my throat and retched. I would have been happier if I’d seen only my friend the robin. But I watched the toad hop on to the garden and squat somewhere in the rhubarb patch.

  When I returned to the house I had to make a decision about the door, because I didn’t know whether to expect Judith. I now thought she was about to let me down, though the implications for her had she done so would have been equally dire. I needed to keep the door locked, but if she were to arrive after it all started then how would she get in? Finally I left a sheet of newspaper outside, closed the door and turned the key, leaving it in the lock. I knew she’d figure it out. But for good measure I opened a side window a crack.

  The tingling sensation in my fingers was beginning to spread to my hands and feet. I also felt my lips becoming numb. I calculated I had about ten minutes before I would have to sit in my chair and be content. I kept trying to lick my lips. I drank some water. I repositioned the chair so that it directly faced the door and front window, but I made sure that it fell under the shadow from the crossbeam and hanging herbs, so as to make it difficult for anyone looking in to see me. Remembering to fill a pint glass with water, I placed it on the floor by my chair. Finally my muscles started to turn kind of slushy, so I sank back into the chair and let my arms fall to the side.

  I could feel blisters of sweat the size of half-crowns appearing on my brow and running into my eyes, but my arms felt too heavy to lift to my face. My bowels churned. My tongue furred and seemed to swell inside my mouth. Reaching for the glass to take a sip of water seemed a superhuman effort and took every ounce of my strength, making the perspiration run faster. My heart thudded in my chest. I began to feel terribly frightened. Suppose I had made some kind of error after all?

  I sat immobile for a while. I might have fainted clean away, I don’t know. Then Judith came knocking.

  She hammered on the door. Then I saw her face appear at the window, hand held angled above her eyes so she could peer into the gloom of my cottage. Perhaps I was too clever in concealing my chair, because she appeared not to see me. There was nothing I could do to attract her attention. My body felt like an anvil at the bottom of a pond. It was as much as I could do to keep open my eyelids. I made a vain attempt to move my hand, to make a motion, to signal her in some way, but I barely managed to twitch a finger.

  She went away, and after a few moments I heard her shuffling about at the rear of the house. I heard her try the handle of the back door, but it remained locked from the time Arthur McCann had appeared. Then she came to the front of the house again, and peering in once more this time seemed to make out my lifeless shape in the chair.

  ‘Fern!’ she called, rapping hard on the window. ‘Come to the door!’

  But of course I couldn’t answer. My teeth tingled in my mouth when I tried to make a noise. After a while she went away, and the house fell silent.

  Did I doze? I know that a log shifted in the fire and that brought me back to awareness. Some of the feeling had come back to my body, and though I had to make a supreme effort to do so, I managed at last to stand and shuffle about. I needed to drink some water but my judgement was skewed and as I reached for the glass my hand seemed to pass through it. I waved at the glass twice before becoming distracted by some
thing outside.

  I looked out of the window and saw three blackbirds perched on the washing line. They were chittering to each other, switching places on the line. Their eyes seemed mercurial and bright and their sleek feathers had a lustre more blue than black and their orange beaks were more prominent than was normal. It occurred to me that these were what Mammy would call look-outs. I knew it was time for me to go outside, so I shuffled into my coat and made to leave.

  But the tingling hadn’t gone from my fingers and ridiculously I couldn’t find the strength required to turn the old iron key in the lock. I could grasp the key but my fingers had no leverage. It simply wouldn’t turn. So in the end it just seemed easier to rise above the kitchen sink and let myself out through the very window I’d left open earlier. Though when I did so the three birds on the line flew off instantly, so perhaps they were not look-outs at all. Perhaps they were just three birds on a line.

  But outside it was the most splendid day in March! It was so bright that at first I had to shield my eyes. The sun was strong but everything was bathed in cold, metallic light, shining like chrome but without diminishing the colour spectrum. The water pump in the garden seemed huge, as did a single shimmering bead of water hanging from its lip.

  I lost a few moments and then I was walking along the street by the well. I paused to look at the crystal water trickling over the amber stones and into the clear well. Then I lost a few moments again and I found myself standing against a five-bar gate before the track leading to the woods. Even from there I could smell the incipient spring blossom, cloying and thick. The earth too seemed to be opening up its scents. Grass and leaf-mould and cow parsley and cuckoo spit on the tall weeds; brick dust where hardcore rubble had been dumped on the track to hold back the mud; lichen growing luminous green in the cracks weathered into the grey wood of the gate itself; living rust on the hinge. It was endless. I stood against the five-bar gate inhaling the compendium of odours, trying to separate and identify them. Far off amongst the trees I heard the cuckoo calling.

  This sensual flooding must have seduced me into a loss of time and place because I confused several moments again and I came to my senses when the cuckoo’s calling turned into a voice followed by a rattling sound, and I was back in my chair in the cottage. I must have returned there without realising it. I looked at the fire. The logs had burned down a little. The rattling at the door caused me to look up and I saw the key vibrating in the lock. Judith was at the door again, trying to push the key through from the outside. She’d found the newspaper and had slid it under the door to catch the key when it fell.

  My walk had exhausted me, because I was paralysed all over again. At last the key tumbled from the lock, but rather than fall clean it stopped for a moment in midair, then fell and stopped again. At last I heard the key hit the newspaper. Then the sheet of newspaper was pulled away with the key on it, and in a moment Judith had let herself in.

  I was most surprised when Chas followed her. ‘What has she done to her hair?’ he blurted.

  ‘It’s nothing.’ Judith approached me, placed the palm of her hand on my forehead and looked into my eyes. Then she smoothed at my blouse. ‘Blink twice if you feel all right.’

  I blinked twice.

  ‘But she had such beautiful hair!’ Chas protested, staring at me.

  ‘I should have been here earlier,’ Judith said. She lifted the glass of water to my lips and I drank. ‘I feel bad about it.’

  ‘Is she okay?’ Chas wanted to know.

  ‘I think so. Her lips look a bit dry, that’s all.’

  Chas came and kneeled in front of me, peering deep into my eyes. ‘Christ, her pupils are dilated. Just look at that!’

  ‘She can hear everything you say,’ Judith said. ‘She’s not like one of your potheads with a brain like mashed turnip. She’s sharp enough.’

  ‘She don’t look it.’

  I wanted to tell Chas to get out of my face. He was breathing on me. I was annoyed with Judith for bringing him here. All I could manage was a flicker.

  ‘She blinked,’ he said.

  ‘That’s probably her way of saying piss off,’ said Judith.

  Thank you, Judith. He looked doubtful, rubbed his jaw and then got up. ‘Is there anything to eat in here?’

  ‘Don’t touch anything. Brew some tea if you want to be useful.’

  Judith gave me another sip of water. While Chas was out filling the kettle she pressed her ear to my chest to listen to my heart. She seemed satisfied it wasn’t beating too fast.

  When he came back in I noticed he had a good poke about the place, though I don’t know what he was looking for. More than once Judith told him to leave things alone. Even though I could only direct my gaze straight ahead I could sense him behind me, eyeing every mousehole and nook. It made me uneasy.

  Judith soaked a flannel and came over to mop my brow and my neck, and it wasn’t until she did so that I realised how hot I was. She also wiped my chin – I think I must have been drooling. Then as they made tea I saw Judith mouth some words at him, obviously not meaning for me to hear. He grabbed her hair and kissed her full on the lips. She pretended to push him off. They were like playful kittens.

  He went upstairs and I could hear the floorboards creaking over my head as he moved around up there. Judith shouted for him to come back down. She told him to stop being so damned nosy, but eventually she followed him up there and after a while it all fell quiet.

  I’ve had enough of this, I thought. The rest had given me back my strength and I found I could rise from my chair and I went out again. At least I didn’t have to leave by the window this time, since they’d left the door open. I’ll vanish from the garden before they’ll even miss me, I thought. Leave them to stew in it, I thought; I’d much rather be on my own.

  And I came to my senses again still leaning against that five-bar gate, watching tiny red spider-mites crawling in the lichen-green splits in the chrome-grey wood. And a voice that was my own but that sounded like Mammy in tone said, Move girl, you should move if you’re not going to get stuck here. Because that was the problem. Getting stuck.

  Mammy had said that was always the problem when Asking, getting stuck. You could gaze at a thing, like a stream of water or a mite crawling in a split in a gate and it would carry off your soul and you were left, hollow, empty, not even present. And Mammy would say it’s not just Asking that does this: it’s life, and you can also get stuck and go to sleep in a corner of your life and then wake up seven or seventy years later and it was all gone. She said how you could blink during one of your school days and then you blinked again and your own children were at school and you’d somehow got stuck and how we should never allow that to happen because we were too disposed to letting a life go by unheeded. And now, on this day, and under these lights, I knew exactly what she meant, and I said move girl, you’ve got to move.

  And move I did, rediscovering my ability to set one foot in front of another, drifting through the marvellous splintering chromium light down the track running along the edge of the woods. But in that time I noticed that something was happening to that chromium light: it was becoming tinged with violet and it was stretching. It had changed from soft, shining metal to another flimsier substance, like cobweb as seen on a misty morning, and it was falling off the trees and the bushes and the tall grasses as I passed through it and for a moment I had to laugh at my own foolishness because I realised this wasn’t a substance or a colour at all, it was merely the dawn, and it was passing, indeed had almost passed.

  How foolish of me to have mistaken the dawn for a colour. When it was actually a substance.

  But with that realisation came anxiety, because I also understood that I needed to find my territory, my position for the day, and quickly before anyone else should happen along. Then I saw the three blackbirds again on a branch up ahead and I felt a surge of joy because I was convinced they were looking out for me and I wondered if they were perhaps others from among the few. I stopped
to look at them and leaned my hand against a tree to recover my breath. Even though I was not exerting myself my breath came short in the excitement and anxiety of the moment. When I took my hand away from the trunk of the tree I saw that my fingers had been stained with the green dust that adhered to the bark.

  I covered my hands in it until none of my lily-white skin was exposed and then I proceeded to rub it into my face. It smoothed in like charcoal, but bright green, the colour of the spring hedgerow, and there, at the corner sleeve of the woods, I found my spot in the tiniest break in a tangled hedgerow of blackthorn, dogwood and holly.

  It was a lovely thick hedgerow, known as a midland bullock hedge and so called because it was strong enough to contain a charging bull. And here was that tiny gap inviting me in, with a soft floor like a welcoming sett or form, and I got in and the springy blackthorn and dogwood closed behind me with a whisper and I knew I might sit there all day in that thick hedge and not be seen. I prided myself that I’d found the perfect spot. Anyone happening by the path would have their eyeline cast ahead of him or her by the turn in the hedge and even if they looked dead on at me they might never see me. I was warm. I was comfortable. I was safe. More importantly, I was ready for what was coming. I closed my eyes and waited.

  Though I must have got stuck once more. Because when I opened my eyes again I was back in the cottage. The sound of Judith and Chas descending the stairs had made me open my eyes. I panicked, because it meant that I’d imagined myself going out, that I hadn’t been out at all, that I hadn’t found my territory and that I hadn’t settled in my perfect spot in the hedgerow.

  But then Chas appeared first, looked at me and said, ‘She’s back.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that,’ Judith said. ‘Where have you been?’

  Though I couldn’t answer, because my tongue was still furred and paralysed in my head and my teeth seemed too big for my mouth. Yet I was relieved because their words showed that I had indeed been out and come back again. For a terrible moment I thought I’d somehow dreamed it.