by Kate Hamer
Four of us are in the water. We three circle around him, almost protective now. Six hands all reaching out and holding him in place. We stripped him naked first. I can’t remember anyone suggesting it, but then I was high up and perhaps couldn’t hear – sounds were a mere whisper in the leaves by the time they reached me. It seemed somehow the right thing to do, I’m sure. Grace led us in that, I think. First we uncurled him and then undid his shirt, stripped him of that, his trousers, shoes, socks, underpants until there was a bloody mound made of them. We looked like nurses, almost.
‘He’s gone so pale,’ I heard Grace murmur. ‘It must be with so much blood gone.’ And when I look down I see that to be true. He is indeed pale and his flesh looks white and moistly sheened like a bone does when it’s newly stripped.
The current in the river is faster than I expected but we three can stand easily enough, all of us being young and strong.
Grace says something and I see her lips move but I can barely hear. There’s a ringing in my ears as if I’ve been deafened by a gunshot going off next to my head, or an explosion by my shoulder. I shake my head to dislodge the ringing.
‘What was that?’ I ask. ‘What was it you just said?’
From our ring-o’-roses circle blood flows steadily and winds its way downstream.
‘We need to wedge him underneath the rock,’ she says, ‘the rock that the wishing bowl is on,’ although I’m not sure if I’m hearing her or lip-reading. Then, ‘We can hide him there but we’ll have to push with all our weight,’ comes in shockingly clear because the ringing has abruptly stopped. We gather around him and float him over to our rock that sticks out into the water like a giant crochet hook. He rolls in the water. His skin is slippery like an octopus. At one point Orla stumbles and lets go and my hands slide over his naked body, and it’s only Grace, holding onto his foot, that stops him from sailing down the river.
Grace’s face is wet, dripping. The water beads on the ends of her hair that’s sticking up in points. She looks like a young soldier; with her cropped hair and wet vest, like one of those kids in Vietnam engaged in jungle warfare and stealing along the river to avoid the enemy.
‘Concentrate,’ she yells at me, because I got distracted staring at her and thinking these things about her being like a soldier. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ she says. ‘I can’t do this on my own. The three of us need to gather round.’ She takes a hand away and wipes water out of her eyes with the back of her arm. ‘And we need to put all of our weight down to get him under the lip of that rock. That’s what will keep him in place and hide him.’ She wipes again, rubbing her face into the crook of her elbow. ‘But it needs a lot of force and for you two to fucking concentrate.’
Orla and I nod dumbly. We do as we’re told and press down on him with the flats of our hands. I want to scream. I want to cry out at the feeling of his naked wet dead flesh sliding under the palms of my hands and the only thing that’s stopping me is the sight of Grace’s face, all hard bone and paleness and determination. We put all our weight on him but the rock is so deep into the water we can’t push him far enough to get him beneath and under the huge stone hook, and he surges back up almost straight away, mighty and white in the water, his penis flopping to one side and his balls bobbing like two apples.
‘Try harder,’ says Grace. ‘Dear God, fuck, fuck, try harder.’
I flex my muscles and heave and push into him with my elbows and use every ounce of strength I have, and he does, he slips underneath the rock. Not having his weight to lean on makes Orla stumble face forward into the water and she has to jump right up, coughing and spluttering. I take her hand and we both stand, buffeted by the heavy flow, watching Grace as she plunges her arm into the water and feels about at his body. I don’t know how she can do this. I want to scream again.
‘It feels secure,’ she says eventually. ‘We can all get out now, but we have to see what it looks like from the bank.’
One by one we clamber out, pouring water from our clothes and hair. Grace stands right on the tip of the wishing bowl rock.
‘Hmmmm,’ she says, ‘hmmm.’
‘What is it?’ I ask. I want to scream again.
‘Come and look.’
I really, really don’t want to but the expression on her face is so savage I don’t argue. I lean over the bank and that’s when I nearly puke because there’s a white foot, long and lean, ghosting up out of the water. It sways lazily from side to side in the current like a fish.
‘I think it will be all right,’ says Grace. She crouches down and uses her fingertips to steady herself as she gets as close to the edge as she can, assessing, deciding. ‘I think it will be OK. You have to get right to the edge of the bank to see anything and this place is so isolated as well.’ She nods to herself. ‘Yes, I think it will be all right. Besides, what can we do about it?’
‘We could cut it off,’ I suggest, and she stares at me and gives a short barking laugh. Her pupils are black chips. I see how the battle between what needs to be done and the effects of the LSD are raging inside her. I quail before it because I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone be so focused or so powerful in my whole life.
I look down and I have to clap my hand over my mouth to stop myself screaming. I truly think Grace will hit me if I do.
‘Fuck’s sake. What is it?’ she snaps.
I point silently to the wishing bowl where a huge drop of blood is pooled at the bottom, gleaming wetly like a jewel.
‘Clean it up,’ she says. ‘Clean it up and we’ll move on to his clothes. I need a minute.’
I use my hands to scoop up water and every time I lean in I have to look at that horrible floating foot. It’s unbearable. I use a dock leaf to scrub out the blood and it makes me think of all the times we three made our spells here. Our little wishes and dreams. And now this awful dark one seems to have come about and I’m completely lost as to what can be done about it. How it can be reversed. If there is a form of words, some incantation or some special herb or poison that will bring his body back to life again. I cling onto the idea that somewhere in all those library books it might be there. I’ll have to take them all out again and go through them one by one. But then I look down at my fingers and the crushed and now bloody dock leaf, and I fling it away from me with a little scream into the river because it’s brought me back down to earth.
‘Shut up,’ says Grace from where she is, standing by his pile of clothes.
So silently, pinching my lips together in case anything escapes, I pick more dock leaves and scoop more water and keep scrubbing and scrubbing, although I can’t seem to convince myself that I’m getting every speck of it.
Grace comes over to look. ‘That’ll do,’ she says. ‘Just get rid of all those leaves.’ She nods at the pile I’ve made. ‘Orla, come here.’ Orla has drifted off and is standing by a tree with her hands on the trunk like she’s feeling for a pulse. She doesn’t hear at first. ‘Orla, wake up,’ Grace barks. ‘Bundle those clothes up so the blood doesn’t show and use the jacket arms to tie it up while I have a look at the area.’ Grace rubs her finger over and over again at the spot between her eyebrows. ‘Then we’ll have to figure out what to do with our clothes. Somehow we have to get back looking ordinary.’
When Orla has tied the clothes into a tight bundle and Grace has inspected it to see if it passes muster, we take one last, long look around. The blood is mainly gone. It was caught by his jacket. There are a few drops clinging to the tips of stalks of grass and we carefully harvest those and fling them in the river. Now there’s just a patch of flattened grass where he lay. Grace drops to her hands and knees and runs her fingertips through it, combing the grass to check nothing has been missed.
One by one we crawl through the hole in the wall and Orla passes the bundle of clothes over to me before she comes out last. Her cheeks are wet and red and I realise she’s taken the chance to sob, coming through that wall, while Grace isn’t watching.
We stand under the girdle of t
rees and look out across the fields. It’s a perfect evening. Ribbons of pink dangle at the horizon. The heat has intensified to a point that all the warmth from the day seems to have gathered, as if in a bowl that is now being poured out.
Orla lifts her face. ‘It’s only because it’s summer – that’s why it’s so light still. It could be really late already.’
‘Shut up,’ says Grace. ‘Don’t say things like you’re a normal person. You’re not a normal person any more so don’t ever go thinking you are.’ The pad of her finger works back and forth between her eyebrows again. ‘Stay under the trees,’ she warns. ‘We’ll take off our things and hang them on the branches to dry. It won’t take a minute in this heat. Then we’ll work out what looks OK to wear. We should’ve done it back there but I’m not going back through the wall into that place now. We’ll just have to stay well behind the trees in case anyone comes along.’
So we do, and as I stand in my bra and pants and peep through the branches to check no one is coming I shiver violently despite the heat. The blood on my dress has mostly come out in the river but the whole thing has been left a horrible shade of pink. Mine’s the worst because I was the one standing downstream from him, and thinking how I’ve come off the worst makes me feel sorry for myself. I cover my face with my hands so I can’t see the clothes spread across the trees like hospital bandages.
Grace feels the clothes every now and again. ‘That will have to do,’ she says eventually. ‘As we walk along they’ll dry out more anyway. Damn.’ She’s unrolled her sweatshirt and is staring at it. ‘I’d forgotten that I’d cut myself and used this. Oh well.’ She shrugs it on. ‘My vest is too stained, so if I roll the arms up hopefully nothing will show. That’s mainly where it is. Now you two, get dressed.’
We do, quietly, meekly, then she makes us line up while she inspects us.
I see that I was wrong now, about coming off the worst. Orla has the biggest problem. The blood must’ve splashed in great gouts across her blouse, which is a soft green material and doesn’t seem to have washed out so much in the river as my dress. They’ve stayed there and turned into black welts. Her pink cardigan is a soggy bloody mess.
‘Fuck,’ says Grace, ‘we have a problem. You can’t go back like that.’
‘I can’t walk home in my bra,’ says Orla in a meek voice.
‘No. Of course you can’t. Phoebe, give her your mac.’
I clutch it tighter around me. ‘No, no. My dress has gone a horrible colour.’
‘Yes, but it might look like it’s meant to be like that. Take off your mac and let me see.’
I stare at her, holding my coat tightly around me.
‘Fuck’s sake.’ She starts pulling roughly at my lapels so I’m almost spinning around. ‘Take it off, you silly bitch. No way can Orla go home like that.’
‘Just do it,’ Orla roars and then begins to sob. ‘For God’s sake, just take the damn coat off.’
So, I take it off. Underneath, my dress is a nasty salmon pink and Grace twirls me around, inspecting. Her eyes twitch from the LSD.
‘You’ll do. Now let’s get out of here.’
Orla picks up Lucas’s bundle of clothes and we walk out into the golden heat of the evening, the three of us weaving one behind the other down the path, bordered by spreading trees on one side and a swatch of glittering corn on the other, gently undulating away into the horizon.
I start crying then because this is not the dress I want. She’s wearing that, the beautiful blue to her ball, while I have to put up with this garish pink. It’s unbearable. I can’t help thinking too, if only I’d been able to keep my own beautiful midnight blue dress, if it had never been spirited away and left the house buried at the bottom of a bin, none of this would ever have happened and everything would still be safe and all right.
39
Orla
I wake.
Twin beds. Rich cranberry covers against crisp white sheets. A delicate silvery voile blowing at the window. The high ceiling with its delicate mouldings of vines running in graceful swooping tracks gradually focuses. Silence. Someone in the room clears their throat.
I sit bolt up. Phoebe is on a hard upright chair at the bottom of the beds. She’s been watching us both sleeping. Grace is stretched out naked on the other bed, a sheet barely covering her body. Her nipple is a pale rose in the flatness of her chest and her hip bones press upwards towards the ceiling. I can’t see her face; her arm is thrown across it like she doesn’t want to look even when asleep.
Phoebe blinks. ‘I’ve been waiting for you both to wake up. I haven’t had any sleep at all.’
In the thin morning light her eyes are huge. I’m eaten up by them. I notice the filthy mound of mine and Grace’s clothes tangled together on the exquisite red and blue Persian rug between the beds. They are matted and disgusting. My green shirt is plastered with blackened blood and the fabric of Grace’s vest is silty with thin mud, dried out, and patches of watery-looking red. They look like the rags worn in a zombie movie.
I unglue my mouth. ‘Jesus,’ I say. ‘Jesus.’
Next to me, with a gasp, Grace sits straight up, her consciousness lit up all at once. ‘What time is it?’ she asks.
‘It’s very early,’ Phoebe says, her hands folded in her lap in the style of a prim teacher in an old film. ‘And while you two have been sleeping I have done just about everything.’
Grace paddles about on the floor until she finds her vest, but when she lifts it up to examine it and sees the red and brown stains, the seamy dirt, she flings it aside and falls back onto the bed and bellows into the pillow. Her skinny back lurches in and out as she yells.
‘Tell me what happened.’ I’m aware my voice sounds very small in the high-ceilinged room.
‘Orla, you know what happened.’ Again, the weird tone of voice, as if I’m being reprimanded in the classroom. ‘You both know. Grace stabbed Lucas and he died right in front of us.’
I look at Phoebe again. It’s the shock. It’s done something to her.
Grace twists and moans on the bed, banging the pillow with her fists.
Patiently, Phoebe waits until the noise subsides and carries on. ‘Then we hid him under the rock. We came home and I put you two to bed because there was still a lot to be done, and I could see that neither of you were going to be any help.’
I nod. Bits coming back to me in jagged flashes. ‘You put us in the shower.’
The hiss of hot water in my eyes. The acid still making everything unreliable around me, even the cubicle walls that reached up in a tower of white gleaming tiles to a dark point high above. Phoebe rubbing shampoo in my hair, rinsing and then repeating the operation all over again. Phoebe taking over from Grace as if she’d been handed a baton. Telling us what to do, and Grace useless and flopping over now, being dumbly fed into the shower by Phoebe as I stood shivering in a towel, watching the pink stream of water head towards the plughole.
‘Yes. I had to. These sheets would be covered in mess now if I hadn’t and think what work that would have created. My mother has them ironed perfectly and I’d need a week to try and make them look like that. I had to blow-dry your hair as well so it wouldn’t leave marks.’
There’s a moment of yawning silence. A car starts up in the street far below us and the sound sets Grace off again, keening into the pillow.
‘Grace …’ Phoebe begins but Grace sits up. Her face is white and hard. She points a thin trembling finger at Phoebe.
‘No. Shut up. Just fucking don’t. Please can you tell me what the fuck … I mean, what the fuck you were doing taking a knife with you to see that man? What in the name of God were you thinking of? I mean, it was you who took it, wasn’t it?’
Grace looks at me questioningly and I nod. ‘I don’t think it was either of us,’ I whisper.
‘Why? Why did you take that knife?’
Phoebe looks pinched. ‘It’s for reasons that I can’t explain in a way that I think you’d understand.’
‘I can explain it all right. It’s because you are a fucking crazy, crazy bitch, that’s why.’ Grace clutches her head in both hands. ‘And now this. Now this. Christ …’ she whispers. ‘Mum. I can’t have this. I just can’t.’
She stands up, the sheet falling away from her pale slim body. Her pubic hair is a dark blonde ruff. I understand it, the gesture. It’s saying that the usual niceties are meaningless now between us. That we have gone beyond that boundary and to stand exposed like that is nothing any more.
She starts snatching at her clothes, holding them up.
‘No.’ Phoebe bounds forward. ‘These need to go – you can’t wear them home.’
‘Fuck off,’ says Grace, jabbing her legs into her jeans.
Phoebe scrabbles around on her hands and knees and grabs at what’s left on the floor. ‘No, I must make absolutely sure these are destroyed. You’ll have to borrow something and bring it back.’
She holds our stinking little pile to her chest.
Grace shrugs. ‘All right. Whatever.’
I wrap myself in a sheet and follow after them, padding down the landing. There’s a smell of Dettol in the air. Flashes of yesterday come back to me, stumbling through the dark here, the pale outspread fan of Phoebe’s ribs catching the light. Crying out and feeling the walls cave in under my fingertips like jelly.
Grace turns. ‘Let’s get some coffee first. I might be able to think better if I’ve had some coffee.’ So I wordlessly turn and follow them downstairs. Through the open kitchen doorway there’s the cool marble worktop with a food processor on it that has the shine and colour of a vampish red nail varnish. Another memory: Phoebe talking on the phone, pacing back and forth in the hallway. Me creeping down stair by stair, peeping round the corner. Seeing her holding a knife up to the light, standing immobile, seemingly transfixed by its point. Then wrapping it in a cloth as if it were a baby and putting it in her pocket. I shake my head, trying to clear the image out, hitch up my sheet and pad in after them both.