by Kate Hamer
She pretend-heaves. ‘Yeeuk.’
‘Come on.’
She doesn’t nervous-fake laugh like she normally would. She looks over to where Grace is. Grace has moved away from us. She’s standing, watching the flow of the river with her face screwed up in concentration and her head cocked to one side, like its babbling has something to tell her that’s absolutely vital for her life. Her hair has grown a little bit; she’s let it go as far as the tops of her ears. It’s the colour of burnt butter and it makes her look softer now it’s marginally longer. She seems almost child-like for once. She usually looks like she’s about to smash your face in.
‘D’you think we’ve upset her? Grace’s mother’s not a bitch,’ Orla says quietly. ‘We shouldn’t say things like that in front of her.’
‘True, but that’s only because she’s so sick. If she wasn’t she’d be the same as all the others.’
Orla is scratching the hard-packed mud miserably with a stick. ‘D’you think they hate us too?’ Orla looks up, like she’s surprised herself. ‘Perhaps when we get as big as them, or even bigger – I’m a head taller than my mum – they start hating us too, but they have to do it in private. It’s a secret because you aren’t supposed to hate your own offspring.’
‘Of course they do.’
I sneak the blotting paper out of my pocket and put it on my tongue. I want to look inside that pyramid now. I can’t wait any longer. The time for observing others will have to wait.
‘Listen,’ I say, as I feel the paper turn to mulch in my mouth. ‘Wouldn’t you be disappointed if you had children and all they did was grow up and wish you were dead? I’m surprised you’ve only just realised it.’
‘I don’t wish my mum was dead.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘I think they’re afraid.’ Orla stops, like her scratchings have finally revealed something to her. ‘I think that’s what it is: they’re afraid such a lot of the time. They live in fear. You can see it distorting their faces.’
With this, I must admit, she might have a point. It’s a surprising thought. Maybe she is afraid of me and that’s why things are the way they are, but before I have a chance to answer, Grace turns abruptly. ‘What are you talking about?’ she calls over.
‘Not much,’ Orla calls back. She doesn’t want Grace to know we’ve been talking about her mother. She’s as touchy as a cat about that.
Orla hugs her arms around herself again. ‘I think it’s starting. Fuck, fuck. Phoebe, I’m scared. I’m really, really scared.’
‘Don’t be,’ I breathe. ‘It’s wonderful.’
She puts her hands up to her head. ‘What if I can’t control it?’ Her eyes are wide, terrified.
I go up to her and wrap my arms around her. ‘Sssh, you don’t have to. It’s better if you don’t try.’
I feel the wet of tears on my neck and she whispers, panic in her voice. ‘Phoebe, hold me, hold me. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. There’s something behind that tree. I can’t see it but I know it’s there.’
She leans back and her face is a downward mask, like the painted face of tragedy in the theatre. It plants a horrible cold seed of fear in me as well.
‘Stop it.’ I shake her. ‘You’re making me afraid too. Don’t be a silly cow about it. Breathe slowly.’
‘Don’t shout, for fuck’s sake. There’s no need to shout at me. I’m frightened. Hold me again like you did just then. I feel like I’m going to fly up off the ground and spin off. Please.’
‘Sssh, there, there,’ I croon, as much to calm me down as her. I put my arms around her tight like I’m pulling her back down to the earth. We nuzzle, hot cheek to hot cheek, and I focus over her shoulder. A group of crows rise up together in crooked flight. They burst into a million pieces in the sky and the pieces fall down on us like soot. I put my hand out to catch a flake and it slips through my fingers. It’s astonishing. I’m transfixed by the beauty of it.
She nuzzles back into my neck, hiding her eyes and whimpering.
‘Just try looking,’ I whisper right into her ear. ‘It helps you to see everything as it really is, what everything is truly made of.’ I feel her begin relaxing into my arms. We melt into each other, our flesh reaching out for the feel of flesh, and her sobs begin to change to snuffling.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ When Grace comes over I can tell she’s really far gone. Her face is hectic.
‘Nothing. We were just talking about doing the spell, like we did before when we were kids.’
‘Peeing in the bowl?’ Grace throws her head back and laughs.
Something tilts in me at the sight of her. Her real self is shining through the dirt of the world. She’s a monkey now, chattering her teeth, and I wonder why I’ve never seen her monkeyness before. Her dear little ears stick out from her hair. She’s saying, ‘I’ll make the piss. I don’t care. This is what happened the other day. It all spilled out of my mum and it was terrible, but this will make it all better and we can conjure an extra-strong spell. We can say exactly how we want things to be from now on and everything will be completely changed forever.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I ask, lifting my hair from my shoulders. But right at that moment a shaft of sunlight pierces through the trees and I have to let go of Orla to fall on my face and grovel there in the earth before it, because the light has the words of God printed inside it like a stick of rock. They are saying: You girls are absolutely perfect in this moment. When I lift my head back up, the words are melting, dripping down inside the tube of sunlight, and Grace is squatting on the rock with her knickers around her ankles. She must have taken off her shoes because her feet are bare and white against the moss and ferns.
Orla is smirking behind her, calm now but with tear stains on her face. ‘For fuck’s sake, Grace,’ she calls out. ‘We weren’t being serious.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Let her. She knows exactly what she’s doing.’ Because I realise now with great certainty how false the words in the sunlight are and the real revelation will come from Grace, who squats there like some pale sprite on her throne of ferns and ivy. It’ll come from her pee, which will be a kind of divining mirror because it’s come from a place so deep within her, like the thermal spring from the centre of the earth that feeds the Roman Baths, but the fact that her knickers have a piece of grey elastic hanging loose makes me ache for her anew. What kind of prophet has to put up with that?
‘Go on, Grace, do it,’ I call out.
‘I am,’ she calls back from her throne, and I can hear gushing and splashing from underneath her. She stands up, pulls up her ragged knickers and kicks out her foot to shake off the drops, then leaps off the rock.
The three of us crow with laughter. The laughter pushes me to the ground and doubles me up. It makes a different sort of tears stream down Orla’s face. It bounces off the sky and back at us like an energy we’re emitting. When we’re nearly done and have exhausted it, I sidle up to the rock on my hands and knees.
‘Christ, Grace. When did you last drink any fluids?’
The piss is murky dark with a scum of bubbles; the surface of it still trembles and the reflected trees part and re-form.
She waves my question away. ‘What else? What else?’ she screeches.
I take a couple of walnuts from my pocket and lob them. They fall into the bowl with a splash, then bob up and float on the surface.
We howl some more and Orla dips into her pocket, takes out a sticky packet of Haribo and shakes them in; jellied red hearts and lips follow bright yellow stars, rings and fried eggs.
‘What will you wish for?’ Grace asks, and as soon as she does I know for absolute certain what it is. The trees above us knit together to make a dark place for what I’m about to say.
‘The house, the house. I want the house for my own.’ I jump around in excitement at the thought and a shoe comes off. ‘S’all right,’ I shout. ‘I’m always losing shoes.’
Grace is a monkey now, her white foot on the bottom branch of th
e tree, then up to the next. She’s shed her school blouse now and underneath, her neat breasts are in a greying sateen bra with a ragged flower at the centre. Halfway up she stops.
‘Yes,’ she screeches. ‘Phoebe will be queen, queen, queen of her house. She will reign supreme from the top floor with her crown that I will weave for her out of rubbish gathered off the ground. She will look out at her subjects from above with an iron gaze but she will rule justly.’
As soon as she says it I can see it as clear as day. Me at the top window, staring over all of Bath with glassy eyes, a rough crown of woven rags and stones tipping over my forehead. I’m so excited I open out my arms and let out a piercing warrior’s cry. Orla cowers and covers her ears.
As I yell I make another silent prediction. Mr Jonasson will be as one who is under my spell and because of that she will be as nothing any more. It will be like she doesn’t exist.
When I’ve exhausted muttering my prophecies, I walk over and look up at Grace’s bright eyes.
‘Rapunzel, let down your hair,’ I call up and have to double over I’m laughing so much, because even if she’s grown it a little bit, hair isn’t something Grace has ever had a lot of. It would never be enough for anyone to grab onto. Finally I stop laughing and straighten up. ‘What about you? What do you want?’ I shout. She’s lobbing bits of twigs and things that look like pine cones towards the bowl, and one hits like a bomb and an arc of urine splashes up Orla’s front.
‘Shit,’ she yells. ‘That’s horrible. I’m covered.’ She dances about like a crazed shadow, batting herself in panic all over – her shoulders, her hair – even though the sparkling yellow stain is only up her front. But we ignore her.
Grace swings her legs from her perch. ‘I want a toad,’ she shouts. ‘Like a proper witch. Bring me a toad.’ And I pretend to look under rocks, my belly tight with laughter, not caring about scraping my hands when I heave them up.
‘Not here. Not here. I’ll try that one,’ I call out to her. ‘Hang on for a tick. I’ll get something.’ I find a snail under a stone, a crisped mucousy flap hanging at its little door. He bobs his head inside and the flap goes down after him. ‘Look.’ I hold it up for Grace to see. ‘Will a snail do? It’s a huge one.’ I can feel the weight of it like a stone in my hand and without waiting for her answer I let him go, plink, into the bowl and he sinks to the bottom. I carry on looking for a while but my hands are sore now, and when we’re bored of that game, Grace leans forward on her branch and nods.
‘I know what it is I really want, more than anything.’
‘Go on.’
‘My own life. I want my own glorious life, but to have that, to want it, means Mum would have to die.’ A look of panic passes over her face and she wobbles on her perch. ‘No. No, I’m not wishing that. Don’t think I’m wishing that, spirits.’
‘What spirits are you on about?’ asks Orla.
‘Nothing, no one. I didn’t want the bowl to think I wanted her to die. It’s only that I never want to have to look at a fucking drip or a wheelchair or an adjustable medical bed again. I want the bathroom cabinet not to have a single bottle of pills in it. I want her to get better so I can walk out of the front door of our flat and not think about what’s happening there all day. I want to be able to think about the future and not see a gaping black hole in front of me. I want to go out with Daniel properly, like anyone else would.’ There are tears shining in her eyes.
She’s never said any of this before. Usually she keeps her cards close to her chest.
‘Come down,’ I say.
She climbs down, her feet clinging to the branches, and we huddle around the wishing bowl in a circle, our hands touching each other’s hands and heads and shoulders, winding towards the other, wanting the connection of flesh and hair. I feel the real crackle of magic go through us all and it’s like the world has been changed forever. Later, I think, I’ll picture this, our hair in stripes across our faces, our foreheads shining with sweat, our eyes wide open and demented, our crouching postures animal, the gritty earth lodging in our fingernails as we dig them into the mud – I’ll picture this and I might reel in disgust or fear; I might hold the image away from myself as if I might be tainted by it. But right now, at this very moment, I feel a strange elixir course through my veins as if we are capable of flight and the many other impossible things that usually remain hidden from our view.
*
We walk home through a golden red afternoon. It’s the time of year where the light stays, as if the sky is lit with lamps, right into the night. I sense the evening ahead and how, if the room is empty, I will watch out over Bath and the darkening evening like the queen that Grace saw, like the Rapunzel I always wanted to be.
We slip back into the home-going throng as if we’d never been away. Tomorrow we will have to deal with the excuses and the forged sick notes, except for Grace of course, who has a permanent excuse. Questions may be raised why the three of us all went missing at the same time, or perhaps the loosened atmosphere after exams means no one will delve too hard. That’s all for tomorrow. Now, we glance at each other, looking for reassurance, for the certainty that we have got away with it and that we are nearly home and dry; but it’s for pleasure too because a shared and secret delinquency is a joyful thing.
There’s something more, though. We have all been changed by today. There’s a feeling we’ve been a long way away and are now returning, and while we were away, lines have been crossed and decisions made. We have all told ourselves what we truly want deep down and we’ve never dared to before.
‘Have we really changed the future?’ Orla whispers.
‘Of course,’ I say, because I can still feel the hum of the elixir and the day travelling in spirals around the coils of my brain. ‘Everything will be different from now on.’
Yet, and yet, and yet as soon as I peel away from the others and begin walking up the hill to home, the headiness begins to vanish into thin air. The street of the murder feels so close but even as I scurry away upwards to my house, it doesn’t seem to get any further away. Dread creeps in like rats into an empty building. We’ve fixed on our futures too soon, I think. We shouldn’t have done that. Only words, I tell myself, it was only words and thoughts, and then that fear creeps out and, like it’s left a gap, another one instantly muscles in.
I wonder how I look on the outside.
I don’t have the time to linger and compose myself. If I’m late I’ll be questioned, and right at this moment I think that could make me crumble. The idea of being the Queen of the House seems an impossible one now, a silly fairy tale that could never come true. I stop and put on my jumper over my mud-smeared blouse, but the thought instantly arises, Will that look even more suspicious on such a hot day? If I leave it off, do the mud smears on my blouse create words as clear as any logo, forming the shapes of eyes: ‘look, look’ – telling her to examine, to pry, to prod further?
I stand, torn, stuck about whether to have my jumper on or off, and the fear grows until it’s nearly enough to fling me to the ground. It makes the world swing back and forth until I’m dizzy. Surely it doesn’t matter any more about the jumper because my demented face will give it all away.
I begin climbing the hill again, sweating. Because I can’t figure out her timetable, I don’t know if she’ll be there or not now when I get home. It feels like she does it on purpose, to keep me in continual suspense.
I reach the blue painted front door and fish out my key from under my blouse, but just at the point that the tip of the key is in the lock an idea occurs to me that is so terrible I nearly cry out.
What if I didn’t write something bland and pointless in my diary this morning? What if, instead, I wrote something so awful she’ll be waiting for me with the diary in hand, all pretence gone that she doesn’t read it every single day?
This used to happen when I handed in essays, so instead of listing causes of the First World War, or writing a creative story about travelling, I imagined that wha
t was inside that exercise book being passed up the line and tumbling into the pile on the teacher’s desk was a catalogue of blood and depraved thoughts; that it was bursting with confessions, tracer lines of mutilations, of vicious thoughts criss-crossing the page. Several times I made some ridiculous excuses, my cheeks hot as the teacher looked on while I scrabbled to find my exercise book to check on the contents.
Pussy-cat face told me how to stop this, but for the life of me I can’t remember what she said and I turn the key as fast as I can now because I can almost see what I wrote this morning, how the ink flowed out of the pen and formed the words, the handwriting sloping forwards.
God, I can’t stand that cunt of a mother. Just looking at her face makes me want to drive a knife into it. Today I’m going to take the day off and take enough drugs to sink a battleship. I might even finally give Orla what she wants. I want to scream and run through the streets half naked. I want to batter someone because I’m sure now I made that man get killed by thinking things so dark they exploded around me.
Oh, and also.
One day I’ll fuck that teacher whether he likes it or not.
I put my hand to my mouth like I’m going to be sick and fling open the door.
I sniff the air. She’s not here.
Upstairs, I see by the hair that’s hooked over the back of the chair this time that she has read my entry for today. I open up the plain notebook, clawing at the pages until I find the last entry, written this morning even after I’d planned the debauchery of our day. I remember smiling to myself as I wrote. I freeze. There’s movement from downstairs. There’s no clackety-clack of heels on wooden boards but I know it’s her. Her movements are sharper, quicker than my dad’s measured step; she opens curtains with a flick of a wrist, snick, snick, like she wants to catch something going on outside.
How did this happen? How did I not smell her? She must’ve stopped wearing that perfume. Or changed her shower gel to disguise her scent. It’s special stuff that she gets from the South of France – mimosa – with a dry, sweet smell but fleeting, hard to catch in the nostrils, although I’m so vigilant I always do. Maybe she’s stopped using it on purpose so I can’t find her about the house and trace if she’s there. I think of the wishing bowl now. The snail crawling out of it with drops of piss falling from its stalk eyes, the ivy already pointing, realigning itself and growing fast towards that centre, everything speeded up like in a film. Nature stirring its own pot. I’ve no hope of being in control.