—None of yours.
—I saw the Burn House lights.
—Shut up.
—Was it your brother? Did he get the fever? Was there something wrong with him before? Is that why he died? Lena was only seventeen and there was nothing wrong with her before.
—There was no Lena.
—Yeah, okay, there was no Lena. But, all I mean is, she was just like us.
Kora’s sliding, she’s not paying attention to the slush ice. I go faster. I want to see her fall.
—It’s better for you and your mammy he’s gone. He wasn’t supposed to have been born anyway. Who would take care of him when – you know?
I hold what I want to say on my tongue like burning meat. Kora is a pain but she’s not wicked. Not that wicked. She says it like she’s been told it. So I hold the cruel thing I want to say until it’s cold enough to swallow.
I can’t laugh with anger-fever the way Mammy does so I look for the little dents bird-feet have made in the numb ground. There is a small pad shape in the snow, almost as big as a snowshoe hare’s mark. Next to it a bigger pad with five circle toes. There are no forefeet tracks, just two hind-feet, one bigger than the other. Kora sees them too.
—Is that a curlew? Will I get gold stars if I draw it right?
Poor Kora, I send her onto the worm-flats after the oystercatchers.
I draw until the splinters in my hands dig into hurtless bone. I keep drawing until I feel you wriggle in my fingers as I rub your small foot straight. What would Mr Berengar say in his special voice? Would he say that all the heat-torn pieces of the universe wanted to make themselves back to you?
*
Mr Berengar slowly tears the drawing out of my Log, careful not to leave a raggedy edge sticking out from the spine.
—Do you miss your brother?
—I have no brother.
—Alright, Hura, I just want to know where you think he’s gone?
—Back to the Earth.
I’m right but his face doesn’t say so.
—I’ve spoken with Kora. What I want to know is why you didn’t come to me with this yourself?
This is not his gold-star voice. He gives me stars because I draw exactly what I see. Accurate. True. But stars don’t really have pointy fingers, like a small hand reaching for a feather, the way that Mr Berengar draws them. I could draw them better if he let me.
—What was it you were tracking?
—Hard to tell, the snow was soft.
He holds up the torn page. Two feet, one bigger than the other. It’s drawn perfectly accurate and true.
—What is this, Hura? Did you make this up?
I drew them with my pencil and then traced over them again with the fine black pen so it couldn’t be undrawn. They look like islands now.
—Your job is to record accurate, observable facts.
He opens Kora’s book on the desk next to mine. A gold star next to her clumsy forks of oystercatcher feet.
—Kora didn’t log this, so why did you?
—Kora can’t draw.
—That’s unkind, Hura. So … what do you think these tracks belonged to?
—A young hare?
—They’re nothing like a hare’s prints.
—My hands were cold.
He won’t look at my winter-hand, he keeps his eyes on the tracks.
—You’re usually so good at this sort of thing. This cold will surely kill a leveret born so early. I doubt you’ll see it again.
I worry for the babba-hare digging in the hard ground for a green shoot even though it’s a lie.
He crumples up the page and puts it in his stove where a little sea-coal burns; it takes awhile for the paper to light. I don’t wait to see it blacken.
*
At home Mammy wears her wool and cloud colours and her belly has sunk in as if it’s forgotten the shape of you there. I don’t know whether to tell her what I drew. I don’t know if I say it out loud – will she blow away like ash-down?
*
It was me who first knew you were sick. I got in from school and before I could drop my clothes into the scald-water, you held up your hands for a carry, fretting with the wait. I could feel the heat coming off you. I didn’t trust my winter-hand to tell me the truth, so I pulled up your jumper and kissed your belly and rolled my cheek over your skin. I stuck to your hot tummy. —Mammy, I said and she did the same. I watched the little drum of your belly blow up and down. I watched the gooseflesh bloom. I noted the winter as it settled into you, next to the redwing sighting; they can’t hide their bloody ribs in the snow. There is a lot to attend to in watching.
Mammy said:
—Go to Berengar and get paracetamol.
—But we can’t stop it. Mammy knew that.
—He can, Mammy said. —Go and tell him it’s for your brother.
—What’s paracetamol? She wrote it down next to your name.
*
I gave Mr Berengar the paper. And he told me to come in, I stepped over the yellow line and tried not to breathe too deeply. He went to a metal cupboard in his wall. There were small bottles and boxes, the kind we found washed up and cut out of the bellies of fish. There were the pills he gave me to stop my bleeds. He pushed them aside and took out a feather; it flickered a dun and mucky gold.
—You can have the pills if you can tell me what bird this is from?
He held it by the quill and stroked the smooth vane through his fingers. I couldn’t name what bird the feather came from and I know all the birds on the island: their tracks; their wingspan; their nesting places. I could still feel your heat on my cheek. Then Mr Berengar said it didn’t matter what the bird was called because they were all gone.
—What about the paracetamol?
He took my hand and put the feather inside, folding my fingers over it, and I felt the itch of the need to clean my hands.
—Do you want this or not?
*
I showed the feather to Mammy and you saw it and did that little grabbing star with your hand. You made the noise, that high gurgling cry when you saw something you wanted to touch. We rubbed your tummy, we tried to give you a stone to hold. But it didn’t stop the noise and you held your open hand out to us. You gave it all the fight you had left in your body to get that feather but Mammy said —No. We passed you between us, from one hush story to the other, all the time the noise scalding us, until you threw yourself into a kicky sleep.
When you took cold I climbed into Mammy’s bed and we curled up, cooried you between us, like deer-mammys do, all in a snug. Being hidden in the earth didn’t feel like we were being held anymore. I wanted someone to see us. See that we weren’t already dirt.
I rubbed your hands and feet. Held them in my mouth. We just couldn’t get you warm. Mammy said your name over and over. Names are for places that you’re from or have left behind. I asked if you were Earth again and Mammy said that was a load of shite. And she held you because that’s what Mammy means.
*
I tell Mammy. I tell her about the tracks and draw them again in the ground. Mammy packs me up a bag full of things this island doesn’t need. Her dress. Maps to a place that has roads and names. I cut her hair because I won’t be there to comb it and as I cut the splintering in my raw fingers comes again, like a thaw, and for the first time I am afraid of winter.
*
Once, before you, I woke to a soft padding against my window. The rain was a new sound in the thaw – something less mad than the constant creaking and tutting. It was skin-hunger – for something that wasn’t rough
wool or the numb nuzzle of cold – that made me go out. I opened my hands and the rain, fearless, fell into them – burrowing deep inside the creases. It wasn’t enough. I unbuttoned my parka; when it hit my skin the rain mapped me, finding places that wanted names and wanted me to say them. Mammy must have seen me like that, seen the unbuttoning and my mouth open for words I did not know. —What the hell are you doing? she shouted. —You’ll make
yourself sick. So I plunged my hand into the scald-water, clean and safe and screamless. She went to touch me then pulled her hand back, remembering the rule, and let the rain hold me. Mammy doesn’t always mean to hold. By the time I’d healed to numbness, I had the patience to watch for winter.
*
Snow falls like feathers after a kill. Bright and sudden. I’m making a path and someone is following close.
—Show me, Mr Berengar says. So I point to the ground and he gets onto his knees to look.
—Here?
He walks his fingers across the snow in case they can see what he can’t. But you’ve gone. It’s only winter lying there.
—It was a corncrake.
I don’t understand. Crake is your name.
—The bird the feather came from. I wanted to name him. Ask your mother? he said, like it was her who let you die. Like he’d written it down that way so many times it was true and accurate.
*
The night before we took you to the Burn House, Brak came. He said I should put something in the box with you and he wouldn’t tell. —What something? I asked him and he said —Like a flower or something he liked. So, I put the feather in your starfish hand and closed your fingers round it. Brak tied the box shut then and said I mustn’t say anything to anyone about putting something in the box because that was worse than making a path.
I tell Mr Berengar —I put your feather in Crake’s box. This marks a path right through him. He says it over and over – the bird’s name and your name.
*
In the place with roads, it is my job to take people’s names when they come into this building, I write their names and give them a badge. The people here are afraid of distance the way we were afraid of losing it. Some of them want me to give them my name in return – so I tell them the one Mammy gave me, the one she dug out of the earth, the one that’s marked me with where I’m from and what I’ve left behind – and they hold out their hands to take it.
—Hura Coorie.
—Coorie? What does that mean?
—It means to hold.
Their hands are all different, in the same way their names are different, sometimes cool like sea-fret when it comes in the morning after a hot day, sometimes warm and heavy as a stone. Winter is not quick or cold enough to leave a mark here, so it cannot find its way back into the scald. There is only the hollow in my palm where your foot fitted perfectly inside that never gets tired of taking their hands.
THE MARY HOUSE
CRISTA ERMIYA
I wanted to be an only child, and I almost was. My sister Abigail was born with a hole in her diaphragm: her intestines pushed up through the gap to wrap themselves around her heart, dragging it to the wrong side. Abi’s life was saved by an operation when she was only a few weeks old, and she has a scar to prove it, a long thin line along her front torso, from left to right. Lift her blouse and it looks like her stomach is grinning.
Thirteen months younger than me, Abi could run faster, skip rope longer and hold her breath underwater a full minute more than I could. Most bitter of all, although we shared the same Pinoy features – dark hair, dark eyes, our mam’s flat cheekbones – things don’t look quite right in my asymmetrical face, whereas anyone who met my sister agreed: Abigail was a pretty girl.
Dad loved her. Miranda, our stepmam, loved her. I won’t say I hated my sister, but if someone tells you they have a sister who is younger and smarter and prettier, you don’t need to be told much else.
*
We didn’t hang out much but Abi hassled me to go out with her sometimes at the weekend: dire parties at friends of friends, or, when we were a little older, some dodgy club where she always claimed to know a sister of the cousin of the doorman who would let us in. I was invisible at such gatherings. Boys and girls would lock on to Abi, who chatted and danced while I sat unwanted in the kitchen, or at a tiny table surrounded by underage drinkers in a darkened corner of the club. I’d go home alone and cover up for her with Dad and Miranda, who believed she was staying over at a friend’s house to study. She always got A* grades anyway. I did too, but I had to work for them.
That summer I was seventeen and heading for the last year of my A levels. Abi was sixteen and waiting for GCSE results. We were at that stage in August when teenagers get bored enough to miss school when Abi suggested: ‘Let’s break into the Mary House.’
St Mary of Gaunt – everyone we knew called it the Mary House – was a tiny convent and seminary built in Northumberland in the early 1800s, near the small town where we live. It was an anomaly even then, built by a wealthy, largely absent landowner shortly after the English discovered their new-found tolerance for Roman Catholics. The convent and the main seminary closed in the early 1960s, but the junior seminary stayed open as a secondary school, until finally closing twelve years ago. Dad went to school there and even considered going on to Ushaw to train as a priest. If he had, Abi and I would never have been born.
Dad’s not into religion much now, we’re not even Roman Catholic. He left the Church shortly before I was born, and only had me baptised Church of England so I could get into the local primary school. Abi wasn’t baptised, because they usually let you into the school if you’ve already got a sibling there. But it’s always been a fascination for Abi, Dad’s counterfactual life without us. People break into the Mary House all the time anyway, and post the photos to social media. Sometimes security tightens up, but then the diocese runs into cash-flow problems and it goes back to an unmonitored CCTV system. There is a high fence around the perimeter with barbed wire at the top but there are gaps in it, if you know where to look. Abi did.
‘How many times have you been here?’ I asked. Abi shrugged, and said nothing.
*
The buildings were constructed in the Gothic revival style, all crenellations and gargoyles, but at a weirdly small scale, low-rise like almshouses. The north wing housed the convent, the south wing housed the seminary, and the kitchens and chapel were shared. The walls were covered in ivy, red edging the shape of each new dark green leaf. I thought it was beautiful.
‘Hideous, isn’t it?’ Abi wrinkled her perfect nose. ‘I hate to think of the women stuck here their whole lives.’
‘They chose to be here,’ I said.
Abi was incredulous. ‘You know why most of them came here, don’t you?’
*
The story of the Mary House is this: in the old days, all the novices are unmarried mothers, who arrive when they are close to labour. Some die in childbirth. Those who live stay on to become nuns. No one ever sees the babies. Locals say the boys are kept hidden, until they’re sent to the seminary at the appropriate age. They say that the girls, those not still-born, are smothered before the cord is cut. That is the kindest version. The other version is that the babies are buried alive, smothered in soil, a dry-drowning of earth and worms.
*
‘That’s just anti-Catholic propaganda,’ I protested. ‘People love to slag off nuns and priests.’
Abi smirked. ‘Where do you think they buried the babies?’ she asked.
‘Piss off.’
‘Don’t be so worthy,’ she said. ‘They must have buried them somewhere. Unless they ate them.’
The main doors were boarded over with heavy iron-mongery and the windows had bars.
‘Come on,’ Abi said. She pulled on my hand. I pulled away.
She sighed. ‘This way.’
We entered through a modern extension that turned out to be a toilet block. We climbed through a collapsed wall until we could stand upright on the tiled floor. The cubicles were painted a very pale sky-blue, or perhaps they had only grown pale from exposure to the sun. Part of the roof had fallen in – thieves had stolen some of the materials and made it unstable – so that the August sunlight filtered down. Ivy grew across the floor and up through smashed sinks. It trailed from toilet bowls and hung down from the gaping roof, curling over the high-mounted cisterns and down along the pull-chains. The
palmate leaves of the ivy, their delicate stems, the sunlight on the pale blue wood and the dusty porcelain, were an Insta-worthy composition. However, as soon as we walked through to the next room, the idyll of reclaimed nature transfigured into a choking mess of dust, damaged floorboards and tufts of probably asbestos-infused insulation that drifted through the vandalised building like tumbleweed.
The smell of damp was partially suppressed by the dryness of late summer. Our voices sounded thin in the space. I had been hoping for something more … well, Gothic. But where I had wanted to find wooden beams and cloisters, instead poky offices and corridors made up the derelict interior. People had broken in over the years to loot wood or metal or anything else they thought might be of use or sellable. August sunlight knifed through fractures in the walls and through the bars on the empty windows, casting shadow-cages onto the floors. We could hear the scratching of small creatures moving around inside the walls and the echo of pigeons from the roof. The ivy had got in here, too, and was carefully making its way across any foothold, navigating crumbling plasterwork. Some of the walls had been graffitied, mostly tags or profanities, and we came across the occasional discarded spray can. On one wall, someone had sprayed a huge heart and the names ‘Sam and Justin’. On another, a directive to ‘Fuck the Mags’, the black cat stencil underneath indicating it was put there by a Sunderland fan.
Tucked away on one corridor was a door with a small sign labelled ‘Administration’. The roof and walls were undamaged here, and even with the summer light slanting in from one end of the corridor, it was easy to miss the door. I would have walked past but Abi stopped me.
‘In here,’ she gestured.
It was small inside, more like an unusually spacious cupboard. The ceiling was intact, the room surprisingly dry. The walls were solid, one of the few places in the building where the wiring hadn’t been stripped out. A frosted window on the far side was unbroken and large enough to let light in, but small enough that no one looking in from the outside would be too interested. Inside were beige filing cabinets and, incredibly, stacks of largely undamaged files were both inside the cabinets and on top, piled halfway up to the ceiling. A few scrapes on the floor showed there had been some desultory attempts to move the cabinets, but I guess whoever had done so couldn’t be bothered to empty them first, and they were too heavy to lift otherwise.
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