by Sarah Winman
They all three looked down into the watery universe as the orange stars twisted and danced on the gentle current.
Who are they going to take back home? said Peace.
Me probably, said Marvellous, and she dipped her stick into the water and watched an orange arm reach out to hold. Definitely me, she whispered.
How did you know he was the one? said Peace.
What’s that? said Marvellous, leaning close.
Jack. How did you know?
Because life without him would have been so wrong.
What was he like? said Peace.
Ordinary, really. But he had a stowaway poet that lived in his soul and that poet made him restless. But that poet also made him see the world like no one else. He was too good for the life he was dealt.
And what life was that? asked Drake.
The life of a miner. He wanted so much more. Deserved so much more. But what he wanted and what he was destined for were two very different things. He told me that the first morning he went to the mine, it was as if it was his last morning, and everything beautiful had to be etched on to his memory before the dark amnesia swallowed him whole.
He said he watched the rising sun burnish across the moorland, the gorse ablaze, more yellow than yellow, amidst the claret-dark sweep of heath. He had noticed colour before, but that morning it was different because he knew he would not resurface until his hands were the hands of an old man. His feet were already sore. He was wearing the same boots his father had died in.
He said he stopped and watched a sailing ship blow across that shimmering distant line and he gave that ship his heart for safe-keeping. He felt the moment it climbed from his chest and watched it fly towards the billowing sails whose cargo was tin and kaolin and other men’s dreams.
Two hundred and fifty fathoms below sea level they went looking for tin. Him and his brother, Jimmy, worked the deepest lodes that stretched out far far under the sea. They could hear the groundswell overhead as waves pummelled down on waves, and now and again they would stop and listen as pillars of pitch pine creaked like masts in the man-made gloom.
They worked in the scorching heat. Boots full of sweat and torsos bare, their white skin ghoulish in the candlelight. Jack told jokes but Jimmy didn’t laugh. He’d woken up with the bad luck shadow across his chest and he was looking out for Death instead. His fear was contagious and began to travel through the tunnels. Gradually the tap tap tap of hammers grew still, till only the boom shh boom shh of waves could be heard overhead.
At first, no one knew who started it. That’s what they said later. Some said Sammy Dray, others Tommy Ruff, but those boys weren’t singers, and this here voice came out of the gloom, a sweet voice they all said, belonging to no one they knew. But they did know him, of course, for the voice came from Jack. He sang:
Amazing love! How can it be
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me.
Then Jimmy began to sing too, and gradually voices echoed along the shafts until there was the sound of eighty voices, a hundred voices and the sound of waves, and the earth holding itself tight in those tunnels, and those who were above ground swore they could hear that hymn coming from below grass, and the sheer beauty near enough stopped those engine houses. And those voices rose until the twelve miles of working tunnel were ablaze with song, as if that alone was support enough to keep back the weakening stope. And there were men who cried in that space touched by something divine. And as the last voice fell silent, so rose a crescendo of falling waves above just like cymbals. And in that darkness, came the light. And for a moment all fear abated in the hushed stillness of answered grace.
Those were the days when legends were born and names given, said old Marvellous. Singer Jack, that’s what they called him then. Singer Jack. Because those were the days when he still had a song.
48
The pollack had been as tasty as Ned Blaney said it would be, and Peace had baked it and served it with piles of saffron mash and spring greens. They had feasted well and their stomachs knew it. Drake sat outside against the bakehouse wall and watched the young woman with an old soul and the old woman with a young soul rock on their chairs in swatches of light. The slow creak of wood, the forwards-backwards motion of time, acted like a metronome to the gentle fall of sundown, and the dark blue stain that spread across the sky brought out the scent of lavender and violets, brought out the bats and the familiar haze of the moon too.
A man will go there one day, said Drake, looking up.
Why? said Marvellous.
Why? To explore, of course.
Men need to explore in here first, and she pointed to his chest. The moon has done fine without us, she said, and she pulled out her bottle of sloe gin, magically refilled from the night before. Some things are best left untouched, she said. Tides rise and tides fall. That is perfection enough.
I’ve upset you, said Drake.
No you haven’t, she said.
You can’t stop progress.
So they say, she said.
Wouldn’t you like to go, though?
To the moon? she said, and she took a swig of gin. I’ve been, she said, and as Drake was about to speak she raised her finger and silenced him.
They sat quiet. The satisfying rumble of digestion encroached on the silence and the flflfl of an overhead wing carried far across the valley.
The thing is, said Marvellous, it’s progress I find upsetting because progress finds war. And by the time I got to be old, the things that were once of value have diminished in worth, and it’s hard to keep up when you’re old. Not keeping up is upsetting. Let the moon be, and she raised her bottle to the white orb.
What were you like when you were young? said Peace.
I had little care.
Little hair? said Drake.
Care. Don’t know what’s got into you tonight, she mumbled.
I bet you were beautiful, said Peace.
No. I was never that. But men used to say there was something about me. Maybe they were referring to something sexual in my nature.
Drake looked away.
I see you, whispered Marvellous.
Are there no photographs of you? said Peace.
No, none. But I think I would have liked one as a child. I could have held it up next to my face, like this, and you could have told me if I was still here, somewhere in these features.
What colour was your hair?
Dark brown. Like my mother’s.
Were you tall?
Average.
What was your best feature, do you think?
My hope, said Marvellous.
Peace laughed. Who was your first kiss?
A lighthouse keeper with no name, said Drake.
How old were you?
Seventeen, she said.
Seventeen, sighed Peace. And who came next?
Jimmy came next, said Drake, then Jack.
Three loves, said Peace.
I think I had room for one more, said Marvellous.
Tell me the story of Jack, Marvellous. Tell me more about Jack.
And Marvellous said, You can’t have the story of Jack without Jimmy.
So tell us about Jimmy, said Drake, and after much cajoling, eventually she agreed. She asked only for a moment so that the cataract veil between Time-Past and Time-Now could shift.
She sat back and closed her eyes. It was a sweet sensation, like a hand in her hand, taking her down a long disused corridor with locked doors on either side. It was dusty and smelt of must. She tried each door but not one opened and it was only when she faced the last door, the battered blue door on the right, that she turned the key and the lock gave way slowly. And behind that door, she saw herself as a young woman, and the sight near took her breath away.
; Is that you? said Marvellous.
Is that me? said the young woman.
Marvellous opened her eyes suddenly. She asked Drake to light her pipe and to bring her a glass for the deep ruby liquid that came out at night. When all was still, she wiped her eyes and the telling began.
I am twenty-four, I think, said Marvellous. Quite young anyway. I have travelled west to the End of the Land as my father did before me to carry out my calling, and have anchored the wagon behind a windbreak of high dense gorse bushes. I am dreaming as young women do, most probably of love. It is June. Midsummer’s Day, and the air is sticky and sweet. I drop an egg white into a glass of water and under the hot eye of a midsummer sun I leave it there to think. The viscous fluid plumes and funnels and dances, and when it settles, I know it will reveal the image of my true love’s face whose arms will carry me for ever upon this earth. I wait. Hours later, a face forms. To this day I will never forget the shape of that face.
To Marvellous, the face was beautiful. She felt excited and impatient, so she kept herself busy by collecting skeins of furze for the stove – great armfuls of the things – and she waited. She went and filled saucepans from the stream and she waited. The sun cooled and the mists rolled in at three. Jimmy rolled in shortly after. She had smelt him coming, you see, because he was the smell of the land.
He knocked with the lightest touch and greeted her with the sweetest smile and offered her the warmest coin that he had clutched an hour-long in his palm. The face was a good enough match.
He was looking for a potion, he said shyly. A potion to make a girl notice him, a particular bal maiden who worked at Levant mine. You don’t need a potion, she said, you just need to find the right girl, and he laughed and she gave him back his coin and told him to go away and think about what she’d said.
He came back the following day after shift and she offered him a glass of rum that brought sweetness to his words and redness to his cheeks. She asked if he still wanted the potion and he said he wasn’t sure but would return the next day. He did that for another three days. Came after shift to drink her rum, and the more he came the less his words became. What have you been putting in my rum? he asked suspiciously. Hopes, she said, and he took her hand and kissed it.
She watched him go across the fields. He had a swagger. He carried his status between his legs and she’d never met anyone like him. She probably should have kept away, but that’s nature for you. Most women want the King.
(Peace laughed and looked at Drake. Hush, said Marvellous, and the story continued.)
Jimmy asked if she’d like to join him for a walk that coming Sunday. She didn’t hesitate. Eyes said yes before mouth could speak.
The sun was high, so warm. Linnets and yellowhammers sang across the day. The grasses were hot and steamy and pungent as they clambered over the dense bracken to a cliff path below. That’s when he told her he was a legend around those parts. People called him Fire-Out Jimmy on account of a fire he had put out in a bar room. She told him she hadn’t heard of him and he better not put her fire out. She had a mouth on her in those days. He said an oil lamp had ignited a woman’s skirt and he had ripped that skirt off her, and had jumped all over that skirt and stamped his feet until the fire went out. And that jump and foot stamping became known as Jimmy’s dance, and on Sunday mornings when they all drank, they shouted, Dance Jimmy dance, and Jimmy would, until the hobnails glowed red and flew out of his sole.
She wasn’t used to wearing a skirt, her father’s trousers were her familiar, but she wore one that day and her boots caught on the hem and it became ragged before they had even touched sand. She must have looked so awkward and unruly, but Jimmy said nothing; just held her hand every step of the steep pathway and his hand was clammy because nature was tumid, pulsing hot.
Over here! Jimmy shouted. A cave at the bottom of the cliffs, a great maw, potted by tidal pools and they struggled over the rocks with the ever-present counting-down at their careful heels. Inside, the slow drip of moisture fell on their heads, a clammy cold caressed their cheeks and always the counting-down, the sweet counting-down in the dank silence, to the time, of course, when they would eventually kiss. It was inevitable; he was bursting and she was eager. He caught her unaware. She was securing a lock of hair that had fallen loose. Leave it, he said. She left it and their lips joined. She felt her feet fall away. Felt the soft damp sand at her back, felt the hard warmth at her front.
He came every day after shift to her wagon and they made it rock and she became known as Jimmy’s Girl: a label as good as a ring. She was so happy that she hummed and he felt so lucky that he shone, and his sheen kept that bad luck shadow at bay. But while Marvellous saw him as her love, Fire-Out Jimmy, Legend of the Moor, began to see her as his lucky and indispensable charm. Luck was important to Jimmy because he believed in it, both the good and the bad, and he knew you couldn’t have one without the other because luck was life and life was luck. He reckoned he could hear the sands shift and watch the landscape darken as the bad stuff rolled in like swollen clouds.
One afternoon as summer was coming to its overripe end, Marvellous heard a knock at the door. She rushed to open it, blouse undone, and when she did she froze. For there, with a low sun at his back, was a familiar dark silhouette. The hazy shape of a face in the afternoon balm was Jimmy’s face, but not Jimmy’s face. It was a younger, softer, more perfect face with a huge smile. She staggered back and barely caught his words: Jack. Jimmy’s brother. Nice to meet you, because those words were faint and all she was aware of was that her heart had skipped a beat and in that gap had slid Doubt – staring up at her, drumming its fingers, waiting for her. She tried to shove Doubt aside but Doubt laughed because you can’t shove Doubt. It gives way a little because that’s what Doubt does. But it waits. Waits like a germ for the perfect conditions. Then it spreads. Then it suffocates.
I found this on the beach, said Jack, and I thought you might like it, and he handed her a dried-out starfish. It was orange and beautiful and oh she so wanted to keep it, but she gave it back to him and said, Give it to me when it matters, and she went to the stove to make tea. She said little after that. Snatched glances, that’s all, to the rare contours of his face.
He told her things he’d never told anyone and she kept silent. He told her he wanted to run away and explore the world. He told her he wanted to kiss the horizon and find love under a different sun. And he sang a song of his own, and his voice was so sweet that her veins filled with longing and jealousy, that heady little cocktail. She turned away in silence and rinsed a pan of rock samphire. One day in the distant future he would tell her how rude she was that day.
Autumn fell abruptly with the leaves. Her and Jimmy took a cottage on the moor, made a home. Her stomach stayed flat so they never married. He was the King, but she was never the Queen and he began to disappear at night, come home smelling of booze and other women’s cunny and with those smells and words of remorse on his lips, he would take her out of sleep, have her too, tell her never to leave him.
At night she listened out for footsteps on the roadway. She would take the lantern to the door and often see Jack alone, looking at the cottage, covering for his brother, telling her he was somewhere where he wasn’t. But mostly she would look out and there’d be no one there because the footsteps were the sound of Doubt coming to her door.
And once – silly her! – she invited Doubt in and they sat on the bed and she asked Doubt why he was here, and Doubt said, You know why. And she said, But Jimmy’s the one for me, and Doubt howled like a wolf and said, Then why invite me in? You and me could be friends you know, under different circumstances, and Doubt lit a big fat pipe and lay back on the bed and rubbed his stomach seductively. That’s when Marvellous told him to go. Didn’t want Doubt’s smell to linger, certainly not for when Jimmy got back that night.
Winter trapped the moorland, and daylight battled to find space b
etween the nights. The cottage was always cold.
Marvellous asked for little and gave little in return. She became ill and rattled like a bag of bones. Her mother no longer swam to her at night because her dreamscape had become a dry riverbed where everything had died. She couldn’t even hear the sound of water when she stood up to her knees in the sea. And she no longer swam except in Jack’s eyes, where she saw everything she used to be and everything she could be, and some days that was too painful so she no longer looked him eye to eye.
She was too tired to think about life beyond because her courage had crept away and her flame had gone out. Oh Fire-Out Jimmy, so true to your name! And then one day when Jimmy was out, Jack walked through the door. He sat at her table all stern and white and tense, and looked more like an egret than a man, and with barely audible breath he whispered three halting words and everything changed. As if winter had suddenly turned into spring. Then Jack reached out for her hand and said three more words:
It was me, he said.
Three more again: In the glass.
And Marvellous said, I know, and she held his face and kissed him hard, and Doubt never came back after that.
49
Jack began to visit often. Began to smile again because his dream-horizon was suddenly within reach. He began to sing again too, most noticeably in Marvellous’ presence, and her expectation and hopes grew. People began to remark about their ease and joy, and rumour quickly took flight. Birds looked up and ruffled their feathers thinking it was the wind until they felt a heavy whack upon the backs of their heads. What was that? said one thrush to another. No idea. Never saw that coming.