by Marele Day
He was also surprised to see how much knitting they had done. At some point the story had taken over and he had become oblivious to time. The clickety-click of the knitting needles had become the clip-clop of horses entering the forest. He flew like a bird with the princes, felt the welts the nettles made on the princess’ skin, her anguish at the overwhelming task.
Now he was out again and the needles were still. The room was full of silence, of things suspended, being absorbed, digested. They pursed their lips, nodded slowly, as if he had presented a learned dissertation, and they had found his argument convincing. What had they heard in the story and what were they judging?
From the idle roll of a ball of wool had come a story of regaining human shape. But who would make for him the shirt that would break the spell of the plaster cast?
Though he had finished the story it had not gone away. He had conjured it up and it sat in the room like a hologram. When he looked at it from one angle he saw swans. If he tilted it a little the swans became men again. And the women in the story—beautiful from one angle, vengeful and witchy from another. Daughters turning into wives and mothers; mothers and wives into wicked witches and old hags.
And yet it was mothers who passed these stories on, mothers and grandmothers. The soothing comfort of the rhythms, as soothing as a cradle being gently rocked. And though the world is wicked, my son, I am always here. To kiss you goodnight and tuck you into the blanket of happily ever after.
He looked at the three of them, childless grandmothers sitting by the fire knitting, harmless as his own grandmother knitting in front of the television. And yet they had trapped him. In their sticky web.
On the table was a basket of green that hadn’t been there before. Nettles. He had a very strange feeling in the pit of his stomach.
‘Knit?’
His mother had shown him a way of knitting when he was a child. Not with needles but with an old-fashioned wooden cotton reel with four small hammered nails marking the corners of a square. She started it off for him, lowering a length of wool through the hole in the middle of the reel, then winding wool around the nails to make a fence. Then she showed him how to loop the underneath wool over the nail. He tried it a few times, Mother keeping a gentle eye on him and smoothing over his initial mistakes. Then, joy of joys, a thin knitted snake appeared through the bottom of the cotton reel. Oh, he would make one so long that he could coil it around and around to make a mat that covered the whole floor. He had races with his sister to see whose snake was the longest. He used all the different coloured scraps of wool and eagerly watched as a new colour came through.
He had only enough snake to make a drink coaster by the time he lost interest. His sister, on the other hand, went on and on, trailing her snake from room to room, as if it was a pet. He pretended he didn’t care. It was girls’ stuff anyway.
‘Not really,’ he said.
‘Time to learn,’ said Iphigenia. She and Margarita stood up. Iphigenia came over to the man and loosened the binds around his wrists. It was a good start. He rubbed circulation back into his wrists, wiggled his fingers.
Outside it had started to rain. He could hear the different rhythms of it, heavy then soft. The sound of it on the roof, the splash as it ran off, the change in pitch as the buckets began to fill. He imagined the rain falling through the holes in the roof of the chapel, watering the vegetation growing out of the head of the Blessed Virgin, cascading down her garment. At least in here there were no drips and though the window had no glass the wall was too thick for the rain to splash in.
Margarita gave the demonstration, picked up a ball of grey wool and a pair of needles thick as skewers from a Sunday roast. ‘Left hand like this,’ she said holding up the needle with the cast-on stitches. ‘Needle through stitch, loop around needle, pull first stitch over.’ He watched as the stitches were gradually transferred to the needle in her right hand. ‘Plain. Later comes purl. Plain and purl together make stocking stitch. More tension and spring and gives a nice finish.’
She completed one row, then another, working slowly and deliberately. But not the way Miss Black or his mother showed him things. She didn’t seem to care whether he was learning or not. It was just a chore. She dropped the knitting in front of him.
‘You.’
The wool had an odd texture, the colour an exact match for her hair. A cold clammy shiver overcame him, as if she was breathing on his body. He tried to concentrate, think of something positive. At least his hands were free. He pushed out his elbows, trying to give himself more room. He stuck the needle through the first stitch. And now? It had looked so easy. But which way did the loop go? And why wouldn’t the stitch come off smoothly? He tugged and tugged at the knitting, bringing three stitches off the needle at once.
Margarita gave an exasperated sigh.
He wondered whether free hands were worth this humiliation. With a calculator or a keyboard his fingers were so agile. What was stopping them now? He looked at her hands, dry and tough like animal paws. Thick yellow fingernails. Yet they could work a row of knitting in no time.
He tried again, but all he managed to do was pull the existing stitches off the needle.
He could have cried with frustration.
He knew this feeling. Six years old again and learning to write. The board was a pattern of ‘p’s and ‘b’s and words: pop, bob, bib, pip. Miss Black, the lay teacher, had ruled lines on the board and told stories about how the letters got their shapes. In his writing book ‘p’ and ‘b’ were outlined in dots. He held his pencil as if he was going to stab someone with it and traced over the dots.
Miss Black came around looking at everyone’s work. She changed his grip, putting his little fingers into the right position. ‘Good,’ she said. Her voice was like honey on toast. She moved on, bending over the next child. As soon as he went to trace over the next letter, the pencil slipped. Of course his fingers had forgotten Miss Black’s intricate arrangement and returned to the stabbing position. To try to keep control of the pencil, he pressed heavily, so heavily in fact that the pencil point snapped off and he dug a hole in the page.
‘Damn.’
He was in such a cloud of red fury that he did not know the room had been shocked into stillness. When it cleared enough for him to see, he saw Miss Black glowering at him, her pretty eyes as black as coals.
‘Stand up.’
He obeyed. Even in a standing position he felt remarkably tiny. So tiny he could not even hear what Miss Black was saying but he knew she was cross. Very. Not a pretend cross, a real cross. He kept staring at her black belt with its large gold buckle as bright and gleaming as a fireman’s. Her perfume and beration mingled with his shame and he felt a strange tingling sensation as she shouted at him, her pointy bullet breasts hovering over his head, a feeling that would remain unnamed for years.
Now, instead of Miss Black it was Margarita who loomed over him. The lesson had been to no avail. Resigned, he held the knitting out to her. She went to take it but instead gasped and shrank away. She hastened back to the table, picked up other knitting and tried to lose herself in it.
Ignatius was mystified.
Iphigenia and Carla exchanged glances. ‘I will show,’ Carla announced.
She moved over to him and, after a moment’s hesitation, put her hands around his, the soft round curve she used for holding baby birds. Then she placed his fingers into position and together, double-handed, they knitted a whole row.
She let him try for himself. He poked the needle through a stitch, wound the wool around. She nodded encouragement. She made a movement with her hand indicating he should loop the stitch over. He did it.
He did it. Without stretching the wool or losing the stitch. He wanted to smile, but he kept his head down. It was just menial knitting, it wasn’t as if he’d discovered relativity. Nevertheless, he was pleased to accept her praise. ‘Good,’ she said in a voice that sounded just like Miss Black’s.
It was Carla who wore the smile o
f pride as she rejoined her sisters at the table. She wanted Margarita to look and see that he had learnt, that he was knitting all by himself. But Margarita appeared not to want to look. ‘Story?’ suggested Carla, trying to get Margarita out of her mood. Margarita took no notice. ‘Beauty?’ said Carla, reminding Margarita of the story she always liked to tell.
Margarita stopped. ‘Beast, Beast, clip your nails. You will scratch your lovely furniture. You …’
Ignatius heard a noise, a chair being scraped, but kept on, the work under his hands absorbing all his concentration.
Then he too became aware that everything had gone quiet. He looked up and saw the gap that Margarita had left. Perhaps he had somehow offended her. Good.
Iphigenia sensed the man’s knowingness. ‘Enough,’ she said. It was the tone a diner might use to a waiter ladling out soup. ‘For tonight.’
They started packing up. ‘I will practise,’ he offered when they came for his knitting. They took it away and without saying a word, bound his wrists.
It popped out. The thing that had broken loose in Margarita had now found its way to the surface. She lay in the Great Silence, the Knitting Madonna on her chest, so stiff and straight on her narrow bed that it might have been a coffin. Her eyes were riveted to the ceiling. In between the bones of timber, cobwebs and other things she saw the chandelier, its pendants set hard and bright as tears.
Beauty did not go to the Beast’s house, the Beast came and fetched her. ‘Beauty, my Beauty,’ he said. He played his tongue out so his cherry-red lips became moist and shiny, touched his moustache as he looked at her, running his fingers over it, curling it up at the ends like a suggestive smile. He had a name, a tawny name, but she had willed it out of her consciousness.
‘Beauty, my Beauty.’ The house was brown in her memory, with an upstairs and downstairs. The third step creaked and the corridor at the top was lit by gas lamps converted to electricity. Brass fittings on the walls with delicate glass hats. The garden had nothing in it except a few hard bushes. The house was in the country on its own, about an hour’s drive in the horse and buggy from the trainstation. There were two or three cars in the trainstation town but a horse and buggy were better suited to the country roads.
‘It will be an adventure for you,’ promised her father with a pasty smile. ‘A trip to the country. Imagine that. You can make up some lunch and take it with you.’
Standing in the kitchen of her father’s house in her best white dress with the blue sash, preparing thick slices of bread with pickled onion and ham.
‘No need,’ said the man with the black moustache. ‘We can stop at a tavern on the way and have a hot dinner. Grilled kidneys, a nice stew. What do you say?’
The two men looked at her expectantly. She noticed her father’s shirt fraying at the cuffs and a few grey hairs around his knuckles. He wore the same air of bravado he wore when trying to bluff at cards.
‘Will you come too, Father?’
‘Oh no no no no no no no,’ he said. ‘I have my affairs to attend to.’
He had not attended to his affairs in months. When he did venture out he would be gone for hours, all night sometimes and in the early morning she would hear him come in, hear him knock things over, crash. On those nights she would stay very still and quiet.
The visits of the men to the house became more and more frequent. She would put out the ashtrays, serve them wine, sit in the kitchen and listen as the room filled with their smoky conversation and leery jokes. The man with the black moustache and cherry-red lips would often be there. When they played cards his jacket would be off and his sleeves held up by gold armbands that rippled like metal snakes. He clasped a cigar between his teeth, even when he was talking. When she entered the room with a new carafe of wine, beckoned by her father’s bell or, later in the evening, his rough shout, the man would wiggle the cigar at her. He was not the worst of them.
The day he came for her there was a lot of talking. When they saw her at the top of the stairs he showed her his cherry-red smile, then Father shut the door, the dark timber door. She had crept down and listened but she could hear only voices not words. Every so often her father’s voice would be raised, then imploring, and when she put her eye to the keyhole she saw the visitor sitting in the lounge chair and her father passing in and out of the keyhole view. Pacing the floor, running his fingers through his hair then turning as if he’d suddenly had a good idea. But the man shook his head and stood firm. The man was in charge and her father only a visitor. Her father came towards the door and she shrank back so as not to be seen.
When she looked again the man was holding his hand out for her father to shake. She would never forget that hand. It had clipped black hairs on it, and the nails were buffed and manicured like a woman’s.
Margarita had seen that hand again tonight.
She closed her eyes but the hand did not disappear. Instead, the rest came into view. He had horns now and a cavernous mouth, he was going to eat her up. Long curling tongue, red and glistening. Run, Beauty, run. Run, run as fast as you can. Down the corridor, out into the open. There was a wall of fire.
Margarita lay on the coffin bed, wet with fear and sweat, as if a hand was reaching into her rib cage for her heart, a little bird wildly flapping about bruising itself. She gasped. She had scrunched the Madonna up into a little ball. When her heart subsided she smoothed the picture out again. Margarita held it to her breast, trying to take into herself the Madonna’s forgiveness and charity. She was having visions. Perhaps it was indigestion. When she closed her eyes again she saw that below the horns and the cavernous mouth was the collar of a priest.
Margarita got out of bed and knelt on the cold hard floor. Her jaw was hurting, she’d been clenching her teeth. Give me the strength to forgive, to accept with Christian charity. And if vengeance be Thine, oh Lord, let me be worthy. Let me be Thy sword, Thy vessel, oh Lord.
It was the gap left by Margarita that gave him the idea that they could be worked on one by one. A gap that he could make wide enough to slip through. Iphigenia, Margarita, Carla. In his mind he saw them as a collectivity—the nuns, the women, the three—but they were not all the same. They had always presented a united front but tonight for the first time he saw dissension. He rather suspected that he was the cause of it. How pleasing. Because then he could play them off, one against the other. Divide and rule. It had worked for the British Empire. He rolled the thought around in his brain, sucking at it every now and then like a lozenge.
The power of the community resided in Iphigenia. They followed her lead. But Margarita had taken it upon herself to get up and walk out of the knitting circle. He could work at this fraying edge.
His legs beneath the plaster were excruciatingly itchy. His nails were growing but he doubted they’d grow long enough for him to reach in and scratch. His hair was growing back too. Judging by the scratchiness of his beard it must be close to a week since they’d put him in plaster. He must have been missed by now. He only had the 4WD for ten days, the hire-car company must have phoned the palace to see why the car hadn’t been returned. The palace would ring his sister, she would tell them that he hadn’t arrived. She’d be worried. Ignatius was punctual, reliable. If he was delayed for some reason he would have phoned. If he was able to phone.
Would they alert the police, send a search party? Or just assume that he was yet another priest who had gone AWOL, like Brother Terry. Thirty years in the order then one Christmas he failed to appear. There was no word of him till eighteen months later when he sent a postcard from Canada, apologising for any inconvenience and announcing that he was living in a gay relationship with Denis, the handyman who had fixed up their guttering.
Say someone had notified the police, say someone had come looking. But Ignatius had no way of knowing. He felt lonely and abandoned, two emotions that beckoned him dangerously. If he went down either of these tracks he’d be lost. He veered away.
The tall one. Iphigenia. If not officially Mother
Superior then at least de facto. Iphigenia seemed to be the most worldly wise. She would probably have made a superb matron or school principal. Somewhere in her background lurked the maintenance of a stiff upper lip. He wondered how her vocation had come to her, how she had ended up in a place like this.
Ignatius had felt genuinely called. He remembered the precise moment that God had breathed on him. It was at the age of fourteen, in a maths class with Brother Carmody. He had spoken to the brother afterwards as if he had somehow played a part in it. He and Michael Duigan were invited for afternoon tea. Fat scones and soda bread with Mrs Tilley’s homemade jam and lashings of cream. He hesitated at first, having heard things about boys who were invited by the brothers, but nothing like that happened.
It was explained to him that he could begin now if he wished. ‘God knows,’ said Brother Carmody, ‘fewer and fewer are joining and the Church needs talented boys like yourself. You will be the new breed,’ he said, putting his hands on the boy’s shoulders. ‘But perhaps it is better to wait a few years, to know something of the world first. Girls,’ he said. ‘You may wish to marry, serve God in that way.’ He did not need to add that the purest, most committed way of serving God was through the priesthood. As for getting married, it was the furthest thing from the boy’s mind. He could barely bring himself to sit next to a girl, let alone marry one. Nevertheless, he had waited a few years and though he never forgot the breath of God in the maths class, by his late teens he was seeing the Church as a career, as other boys from school had joined the Army or Air Force.
If there was one amongst them who could possibly be reasoned with, be pragmatic, it was Iphigenia. Lying there in the darkness, he examined the possibilities. He had to demonstrate that he had the community’s interests at heart. He could show his usefulness, offer to do repairs, perhaps bring in materials from the mainland. No, not a good idea. His legs itched enormously, if only he could get at them. All he could do was bash them up and down on the bed, hardly the relief he sought.