Red Spikes

by Margo Lanagan

  My mother came and turned the doorhandle. ‘Cerise? Cerise, darling?’ She tried to sound affectionate, because her visitor was there.

  I put my head out of the bedclothes and said, ‘Please go away. Please leave me alone.’

  They left me. Later when the lady had left, my mother tried again. ‘Cerise, open this door! What do you mean, locking your mother out!’

  ‘Please leave me alone,’ I said in the same chilly way, and again she left me. Which was what I’d asked for, but not at all what I wanted.

  The long afternoon went by. The blind dimmed with evening and the sounds of cars passing and people walking slowed and became more random and echoing.

  I lay in my sweat, half-stifled, awaiting stifling night.

  My father came home and there was quiet argument.

  Then the doorhandle again. ‘Sweetness?’ he said. ‘Will you let me in? I know you’re upset. Let me in and we can talk. I’m thinking maybe you need a hug right now?

  Maybe some dinner?’

  I had not cried until then. ‘No, please go away,’ I said – I could use the same clear, calm voice, even through the tears. I was going to stay in here forever, hungry and unwanted. He would never hug me again.

  He tried several more times during the evening.

  ‘Please,’ I finally said, because it was true. ‘I’m sleeping.’ And he left me alone.

  Deep in that night a noise woke me – some rustling-winged insect landing nearby. I had fought free of the sheet and quilt in my sleep; I turned my head on the damp pillow, and opened my burning eyes. There it was, outside the swinging blind, on the sill: rustle-rustle, scrape.

  I sat up. I was hungry. I am a solid girl with a good appetite, and I felt hollow and unbalanced. (My grandmother: She eats everything I put in front of her. It’s marvellous. My mother: Hmm. Yes, marvellous. My grandmother: While you were always so picky.)

  The blind swung in, and the small person squatting on the sill showed clearly against the city-lit clouds. She had thin dark arms and legs, and wore a ragged garment patterned like a Tiffany lampshade. Her head was like a praying mantis’s, with bulging eyes at the top corners and a pointed chin. She smoked a pipe with a tiny bowl and a long, curved stem. The spicy smoke made my mind sit up and gasp and fumble after the memory that matched the smell.

  ‘You’re a fairy!’ I said.

  I saw two little puffs of smoke as she snorted, before the blind swung back and covered her. I raised it quickly; she was still there.

  ‘You have forgotten all your old language.’ Her voice was brittle as a cricket’s.

  ‘What language?’

  ‘Ha,’ she said. ‘ “Fairy” language, you would call it. If I told you the word, you would not hear it.’

  ‘Try,’ I said urgently. ‘Please.’

  ‘I tried,’ she rattled. ‘Your ears are all fleshly now, all blood and gristle and little hairy hairs; you hear nothing.’ She sucked hard on the pipe and pushed the coal into it until her fingertip glowed.

  ‘When you say “now” – when you say I’ve “forgotten” . . .’

  She blew three tiny smoke rings, then sighed out the rest of the lungful of smoke. ‘I am not what you would call a Good Fairy. I wouldn’t be here if I were. I don’t talk and connect and orient. People can work it out for themselves, I reckon.’

  ‘Work what out?’ I said. ‘And what if their brains are all blood and gristle too, and they can’t?’

  She knocked out the pipe against the sill, with a shower of sparks, and stuck it away in the thin black frizz of her hair. She spread out her wings, which were like a dragonfly’s, and groomed them quickly with her black arms.

  ‘You’re a Clay-Daughter,’ she said.

  ‘A what-daughter?’

  ‘Clay. Clay. You can’t tell me you never noticed how rounded and mud-coloured you are.’

  ‘But what is a Clay-Daughter?’

  She was poised to fly off. ‘You were a swappee. You belong in “Fairyland”. But nay, your flesh-twin is there instead, going all to Clay. Somebody threaded the pair of you, back and forth and back between the lands, to make this slip-through that I’ve just used.’ Shirr, went her wings, and she backed off the sill into the air.

  ‘Stop!’ I cried. ‘Tell me! My “flesh-twin” – how do I find her?’

  The fairy laughed, a noise like flakes of rust rubbing together. ‘The way I came, it’s still soft. But I never told you, is that clear? I’m not a Fixer; I’ve no business putting you to rights.’

  And she zoomed away between the buildings.

  ‘Cerise?’ The doorhandle moved again. ‘Are you all right? Did you call out for us?’

  ‘No!’ I said in the clear, calm voice. I leaped for the bed. ‘I’m sleeping! I’m fine!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I burrowed into the nest of bedclothes . . . ever noticed how rounded and mud-coloured . . . Down and down I crawled, wanting to bury myself right at the bottom and never be dragged out. You belong in ‘Fairyland’. The bed became very long, or I became very small, because I couldn’t seem to reach the end of it. And it was warm down here, even beyond where my feet could have warmed it. And the sheet-folds around me felt sticky. And there was light up ahead, as if I were in a cave, crawling towards the cave-mouth. Had my father dislodged the chair somehow, pushed the door open and turned on the light? And why was it – more than sticky, it was slippery, and I was slithering along it towards the light, towards the noise—

  ‘Oh!’

  Out I fell, into a party. Fairies danced in a whirl of black limbs and coloured rags. No, not ‘fairies’ – the nearest fleshly word for them was zithers, but the ‘z’ and the ‘th’ were Interland sounds, and couldn’t really be said with a mouth. A man, a fleshly man, full-sized, bone-thin, staring-eyed, played the fiddle among them, wild music in a complicated joke of changing keys, and the zithers sang and shouted up to him, and swung from his waist-length hair.

  I had fallen from a hole in a clay bank. Weeds curtained it, drooping from a rock lip above, where a roughly shaped stone stood on end. High above, all around, tall, thick trees blocked out most of the sky, which was lightening towards dawn. Down here, the zithers’ eyes and clothing lit the dance, as did some frail red lanterns strung through the undergrowth.

  ‘Come, lumpen!’ someone chirped at my elbow. ‘Join the throng! Dawn is near and dancing-time is dying.’

  Carefully I stood. My mouth waited for the old, lost phrases to form. ‘I did not come here to dance,’ I managed to say.

  The zither spun away into the dark whirlpool around the fiddler. Wings flashed mauve and green and crimson in the spidery whirling; eyes scrolled lines of light across the forest floor. Some danced and some milled about; some embraced at the edges of the dance floor and out among the trees; tiny pottery cups lay tipped and smashed beside a broken barrel.

  I gritted my teeth against the buzz and veer of the music, and picked my way around the crowd, checking for zithers with every step – the thought of their thin black limbs cracking underfoot filled me with horror. I knew where to go: follow the line of the clay; where there is a choice, take the downward way.

  I walked free of the dance and the dizzying lights, free of the magic that hung in a cloud over that clearing, smelling of cloves and altering any brain that came near. Here it was dark and quiet and my own senses spoke to me truly, of the clay winding ahead to my home, of the soft ongoing groan of tree-life and the gentle festivity of dark leaves, of beasts that slept like furred lamps here and there, in logs, underground, or folded small into nests and tree cavities overhead.

  I worked my tongue against the roof of my mouth; it came away a little, like melting chocolate but without taste. My hands were damp and soft too; I examined them in the dimness. A twig scraped across one and took some of my clay. I felt the scraped line in the back of my hand, but it did not hurt, and it would not last. My hair was heavy and flat against my shoulders.

  Down I went, and the forest cast ev
er thicker nets above me. Deep down ahead, where the clay slanted into the earth next to the water, was where I’d find my people. I was warm with walking; they would be cool from the night, barely able to speak or think.

  ‘Cerise?’ I called softly, remembering my fleshly mouth. Out under a spreading screen of branches I walked onto the stream bank, and there they were, their mouths agape and fingers glued together in sleep. Some were as yet only emergent, welded to the clay wall or leaning on fixed feet; the fully formed ones, who like me could move about, could try the different foods of the world, maybe, or make their marks upon rock slab and tree-bark, these sat or lay curled on their sides on the ground. All my blunt-headed family sagged and snored here, pale in the dawn dimness, and tiny others hung dormant, invisible in the Clay-mass, awaiting their time.

  ‘Cerise?’

  Through this strange museum of my selves I browsed. This one had a stone lodged in its forehead, that one a pattern of mineral streaks laid in its surface; each was at a different stage of formation, but none was as formed as I, as detailed in shape and surface as a fleshly person.

  Except one.

  ‘Cerise?’

  She crouched on top of a low cliff of clay, her eyes glittering. ‘Why’djou call me that?’ she said.

  ‘Because it is your name,’ I said. ‘Your real name, in the fleshly world, where you began.’

  She climbed down the cliff. Her limbs were longer and finer than anyone’s here, although clearly made of clay. She peered at me with my own face, at my clay hair, at my fingers, which were shorter and blunter than hers, but had the same pearly nails.

  ‘Who am I in this place?’ I whispered. ‘What do they call you?’

  ‘Shorghchhh,’ she said. Of course. Shorghch. It was all coming back to me.

  Now the stream-chuckles and the breathing of the clay people were not the only sounds. Faint sighs and moans moved them; a few stretched and turned. Who’s this one? said someone, dazedly.

  ‘Come,’ I said to Cerise. ‘I will show you the way to your home.’

  I took her cool hand and led her back along the bank, up the hill. Dawn was opening the forest around us; high in the trees birds shook out their feathers and called in the first sunlight, though it stayed dark and damp down here.

  ‘What is it like,’ Cerise said, ‘my home?’

  ‘You’ll remember,’ I said. ‘Just as I remember this place. It will be easy for you, just as it was difficult here. All you will have to do is smile, and tend your hair, and keep your room tidy, and—’

  ‘I will have hair? Like a fox? What is a room?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Everything will be clear to you. You’ll have a beautiful mother and a very kind father and—’

  Something crumbled inside me, distantly, interestingly. It was like watching an apartment building collapse, an apartment building at the far end of our street, in which no one lived that we knew. I turned to watch Cerise stepping sprightly up the slope. ‘They will be different with you. They will be happy with you.’

  Her clay hair already shone better than mine ever had. ‘What is mother?’

  ‘You will see soon enough. You will know.’

  A man cried out ahead of us, up high in the clearing.

  ‘It’s that fiddler,’ I said. ‘Come along; we’re nearly there.’

  He shouted out more as we climbed, in a foreign language, a fleshly language – German, I thought. Was that the name of it? My Cerise language was coming unstuck in my head, suspended like so much soil in water.

  Cerise pulled on my hand. ‘I don’t like him,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t want to go near.’

  ‘We must,’ I said. ‘The way home is right there.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  In this better light I saw her necklace of twined thorn-twigs, with red berries spiked on each thorn-tip. How clever! my mother would have said. So pretty, and it keeps the thorns from scratching you! There was a ring, too, that matched, a cluster of four berries against her rough beige skin.

  ‘I’m certain,’ I said. ‘It won’t take long, don’t worry.’

  The fiddler raved and threw himself about on the bare dance floor, shouting in his German. He had what looked like shards of Easter egg in his hands and he stopped to suck ferociously on these now and then. They did not break or diminish – oh, they were barrel-staves, and he was sucking the last traces of nectar from them.

  Cerise was right up against my back, huddling down because she was taller than me and trying to hide. ‘Make him go away,’ she said.

  He saw us, the fiddler, and jumped to his feet. ‘Mongrels!’ He pointed two staves at us. ‘What are you? Not fish, nor fleisch are you neither!’

  ‘Quickly, Cerise!’ I pushed her past him – though shorter, I was much heavier than this long-boned girl. She whimpered and resisted, but she went.

  The fiddler came after us, shouting; he threw barrelwood at us, and nectar-cups. ‘Ow!’ said Cerise, but my skin was past feeling any stings.

  I pushed her through the screen of weeds under the marker rock. There was the hole, rimmed with wet clay. A warm breath came from it, smelling of the lavender room-scent my mother sprayed around my bedroom. (How can this room smell of earth, Cerise? she would say, spraying, bothered. We’re on the sixth floor! Have you tracked dirt in on your shoes? Show me!) A tiny distant voice came out of the hole, loaded with fear and grief, which I recognised as my father’s: Ceri-i-ise!

  Cerise baulked. ‘In there? I won’t fit!’

  The fiddler snatched the curtain of weeds aside. His face flowered into joy at the sight of the clay hole. He dived for it.

  ‘Stop him, Cerise!’ I shouted. ‘Catch his other leg!’

  She caught it and pulled. Her hair was already separating into silky strands. The berries at her throat were darkening and changing to faceted surfaces. She wore the face my mother wore when strangers asked her for money on the street, the I-should-not-have-to-endure-this face.

  Still, she was strong; she still had some Clay in her. And I was slabby and heavy now. Together we pulled the fiddler out of the hole. Clay smeared him down to the waist and squeezed out of his fists. His clayed face opened and he bawled in protest.

  Now Cerise knew what to do. She ran up the length of him. She crouched on his shoulders and cleared his claggy hair from the opening. Neatly she inserted her joined hands in the slip-through, her silky head, her narrow frame. She pulled up her long legs and kicked off from the fiddler’s head. The last I saw were her dirty feet slipping away, pointed like a ballerina’s. (No, point them, Cerise! Is that as far as they will point? It can’t be! )

  My ears popped; the scent of cloves puffed on the air. I lay across the fiddler’s legs, pinning him down as he rolled and raved and wept, and beat his clayey fists against the solid bank.

  ‘I had a mother once – and a father, too.’

  Zithers don’t understand this, and neither do the Clay. Zither-mothering and fathering is quite a different thing – a matter of feeding and magic and mild torture – and the Clay, of course, are born of earth and know no parent.

  ‘There was this fleshly thing, this fleshly tendency they expected of me. I watched real children do it, but I could not bring it out of myself.’

  Gerken sighs. She would move away were she not still anchored in the stream bank.

  ‘The father could tend towards me like a real one, somehow. But the mother – I don’t know, at the end there I think she was not even trying, really. She did not even touch me any more.’

  Gerken nods, though she cannot know what I mean. ‘It’s terrible that you can’t change back properly, once you’ve been even a little bit Flesh.’

  Byredy comes up the bank. ‘Accidentally I caught this extra fish,’ she says. ‘You might as well have it, Shorghch.’

  ‘Mm, a plump one,’ says Gerken. ‘And still kicking, look.’

  ‘Yes, and when you pull that foot free you can have some. Here, Shorghch.’

  I hold the f
ish around the middle and watch it gape and bend.

  ‘She is reminiscing,’ says Gerken to Byredy.

  ‘About her fleshly time?’ Byredy rolls her eyes, her face full of fish.

  ‘If you are tired of it, I won’t continue.’ I turn my back on them and bite into the fish. If only I could tell about it better!

  When she was bent over something – something else besides me (a letter, maybe, or a telephone) – I could see what they meant when they said she was a great beauty. Sometimes my father looked at her and was trying, trying to make right what was wrong – which was me, of course, which he could not make right, which only I could, which only I did! – and the reason he tried, I think, was in service to her beauty, because even he must not like the way her mouth pinched up when I was there, or the way her eyes widened and looked about for a reason to go out of the room, or the things that happened to her voice.

  There was a night, though, when I lay very nearly fleshly in my bed, and they came home laughing and then hushed themselves and came into my room. And in the dim light they could not see the Clayness of me, could only hear my breathing, see how small my shape slept, know that I meant no ill. And she leaned down in her furs and fashions and scent, and he in his vast coat – I could smell snow melting into the shoulders – and each kissed me, he on my temple, she on my cheek.

  They are like mineral stains, those kiss-prints, or like gouges in my clay too deep to refill. Every so often a zither cocks her head at me and says, What is it about you, then? – so others can see the prints, too. But what is the point of telling a zither, only to see her thin-shouldered shrug? Why would I tell anyone here that, a little and forever, I am Cerise with her silky hair and ruby necklace, and that she, though kisses rain upon her for all her mortal life, though our mother comb her and lullaby her and give her baby sisters and brothers for her playthings, will always have a whiff of Clay about her?

  Why? There is no reason to keep telling it, over and over. I did what I did. Only zithers can undo it, and they never do anything for the asking, only for their own selves and desires. Better to stay silent, better always to stay silent, to sit on my bottom among the Clay and fill my mouth with fish.