by Priya Sharma
“Aunt Steph, I’ll see you home.”
“I’m not your aunt.”
“No, Ash, you should stay.” Elsa joins us.
“It’s fine.” Ash kisses my cheek. My flesh ignites. “May I come and see you again? Tomorrow?”
“Yes.” It’s as easy at that.
“Until then.” He steers Stephanie towards the door.
The noise starts up again in increments. Ash’s departure has soured my mood.
Pippa can’t settle. As the mourners gathered around Dad’s grave she cringed and started to wail as if finally understanding that he’s gone. Now she’s wandering about, refusing to go to her room but flinching when any of our guests come near her. She stands, shifting her weight from foot to foot, in front of the twins who are perched in her favourite armchair.
“Oh for God’s sake, just sit somewhere will you?” I snap.
Pippa’s chin trembles. The room’s silent again.
Elsa rushes over to her but Pippa shoves her away. Elsa grabs her wrist.
“Look at me, Pippa. It’s just me. Just Elsa.” She persists until Pippa stops shaking. “Better? See? Let’s go outside for a little walk.”
Pippa’s face is screwed up but she lets Elsa take her out onto the patio.
I lock myself in the bathroom and cry, staying there until everyone leaves. I’ve no idea what I’m crying for.
*
I wish this humidity would break. It’ sticky, despite yesterday’s rain. I feel hungover. Lack of sleep doesn’t help.
I wave goodbye to Elsa and Pippa as they go out. Elsa’s keen to be helpful. I’ll drop Pippa off, I’ll be going that way to the shops. Why don’t you go and get some fresh air on the lawn? You’ll feel better.
I can’t face sorting out the last of Dad’s clothes. The thought of the hideous green-gold wallpaper in there makes me want to heave. Instead, I take boxes of papers out to a blanket I’ve laid out on the lawn. It’s prevarication. I’m pretending that I’m doing something useful when I should be sorting out our future.
All the ridiculous talk of swapped babies and symbolic eggs seems stupid now that I’m out in the fresh air.
I imagined it would be cut and dried when Dad died. Sell the house. Find somewhere residential for Pippa or pay Elsa to take care of her. Now I hate myself. I have all along, and have taken it out on Pip. She’s the purest soul I know. There’s such sweetness in her. How can I leave her to the mercy of others?
How can I love her so much yet can’t bear to be near her sometimes? I fought everyone who tried to bully her at school. I became a terror, sniffing out weakness and reducing other children to tears. I started doing it just because I could. They hated me and in return and I felt nothing for them, not anger, not contempt. That’s how damaged I am.
I’m afraid that everything people think of me is true, but I’m not afraid enough to change. I am selfish. I like my own silence and space. I hated Dad for saying, “You will look after Pippa won’t you? The world’s a terrible place.”
Need. Nothing scares me more.
Then I look at Pippa, who is far more complete a human being than I am. She’s no trouble, not really. I could work from here and go to London for meetings. All I need to run my business is a phone. It would only need a bit of will to make it work.
I pull papers from the box. It’s an accumulation of crap. Receipts from electrical appliances, their warranties long outdated, bills, invitations and old business diaries.
It’s so quiet. I lie back. There’s not even the slightest breath of a breeze. I shield my eyes as I look up. The trees are full of Corvidae.
Birds don’t roost at eleven in the morning, yet the rookeries are full. Sunlight reveals them as oil on water creatures with amethyst green on their foreheads and purple garnets on their cheeks.
Rooks, weather diviners with voices full of grit who sat on Odin’s shoulders whispering of mind and memory in his ears.
How Elsa’s lessons come back to me.
She taught me long ago to distinguish rooks from crows by their diamond shaped tails and the bushy feathers on their legs. I find these the strangest of all Corvidae, with their clumsy waddles and the warty, great patch around the base of their beaks. It’s reptilian, Jurassic, even. A reminder that birds are flying dinosaurs, miniaturised and left to feed on insects and carrion.
I turn my head. Crows have gathered too, on the patio furniture, the bird baths, the roof and, of course, the crow palace. The washing line sags under their weight.
I daren’t move for fear of scaring them. Perhaps I’m scared.
Ash walks through their silence. They’re not unsettled by his presence. He’s still wearing the same suit. His stride is long and unhurried.
He doesn’t pay attention to social niceties. He falls to his knees. I lean up, but I’m not sure if it’s in protest or welcome. It’s as if he’s summed me with a single glance when I’m not sure what I want myself. He presses his mouth against mine.
He pushes my hair out of the way so he can kiss the spot beneath my ear and then my throat. The directness of his desire is exhilarating, unlike Chris’ tentative, questioning gestures.
He pulls open my dress. I unbutton his shirt. He pulls down my knickers with an intensity that borders on reverence.
His body on mine feels lighter than I expect, as if he’s hollow boned.
When he’s about to enter me he says, “Yes?”
I nod.
“Say it. I need to hear you say it. You have to agree.”
“Yes, please, yes.”
I’ll die if he stops now. The friction of our flesh is delicious. It’s as necessary as breathing.
When Ash shudders to a climax, he opens his mouth and Caw, caw, caw comes out.
*
I wake, fully dressed, lying on a heaped-up blanket beneath the crow palace. There’s a dampness between my legs. I feel unsteady when I get up. The shadows have crept around to this side of the house. It must be late afternoon.
When I go in, Elsa’s in the kitchen. She’s cleaned up after yesterday.
“I’m sorry. I was going to do that…”
“It’s okay.” She doesn’t turn to greet me.
“Where’s Pippa?”
“Having a nap. We’re all quite done in, aren’t we?”
She turns to wipe down the worktops. She looks so at ease, here in Dad’s kitchen.
“What happened to my mother?”
I have to take the damp cloth from her hand to make her stop and look at me.
“It’s all on record.”
“I want to hear what’s not on record.”
“Then why didn’t you ask Michael while he was still alive?”
I’ve been expecting this but the anger and resentment in Elsa’s voice still surprises me. I take a deep breath. Retaliation won’t help my cause.
“Because he hated taking about her.”
“Then it’s not my place to tell you, is it?”
“Of course it’s your place. You’re the closest thing to a mother that either of us have ever had.” I should’ve said it long ago, without strings. The tendons at Elsa’s neck are taut. She’s trying not to cry. I didn’t just leave Dad and Pip. I left her too.
“You were born in this house. The midwife didn’t come in time. Your father smoked cigarettes in the garden. Men didn’t get involved in those days. I helped bring you both into the world. I love you both so much. Children fly away, it’s expected. I just didn’t realise it would take you so long to come back.”
“I know you loved Dad too. Did he love you back?”
“He never loved me like he loved your mother.” Poor Elsa. Always at hand when he needed her.
“You sacrificed a lot to be with him.” Marriage. A family of her own.
“You’ve no idea.” Her voice is thick with anger. “It’s utterly changed me.”
Then she bows her head. The right thing to do would be to comfort her. To hold her and let her weep on my shoulder. I don’t th
ough. It’s a crucial moment when Elsa’s emotions are wide open.
“The papers said Mum had postnatal depression and psychosis.”
An illness that follows childbirth. A depression so deep that it produces bizarre beliefs.
“They were desperate for children. They would’ve done anything.”
“Anything?”
“Fertility treatments weren’t up to much back then.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, you happened. A surprise, they told everyone. I remember holding you in my arms. It was such a precious moment.”
“When did she get ill?”
“When it became clear that Pip wasn’t doing so well. You were a thriving, healthy baby but Pippa was in and out of hospital because she was struggling to feed. She slept all the time. She never cried. You were smiling, then rolling over, then walking and she was falling further and further behind.”
“And Mum couldn’t cope?”
“The doctors became worried as she had all these strange ideas. And you were a real handful.”
“Me?”
“I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t say this.”
“Tell me.”
“You were just a little girl, trying to get their attention. You’d bite Pippa, steal her food. When you we big enough, you’d try and tip her from her high chair.”
“And what exactly was it that Mum believed?”
“She insisted she’d been tricked by the birds. They’d helped her to conceive and then they went and swapped one of you for one of their own.”
*
I wake in the hours when the night turns from black to grey to something pale and cold. My mind’s full. It’s been working while I sleep.
Mum’s insistence that she’d been tricked by birds. That they’d helped her to conceive.
They laid one of their own in your mother’s nest…
Cuckoo tactics. Mimic the host’s eggs and push out one of their own. Equip your chick for warfare. Once hatched, the hooks on its legs will help it to heave its rivals from the nest.
Look under the crow palace.
I pull on jeans and a sweatshirt. Dad kept his tools in his shed. I pull the shovel from the rack, fork and a trowel for more delicate work.
It’s chilly. I leave footprints on the damp lawn. It takes a while because I go slowly. First I take up turf around the crow palace. Then I dig around the base. The post goes deep into the rich, dark soil. My arms ache.
I lean on the post, then pull it back and forth, trying to loosen it. It topples with a crash. I expect the neighbours to come running out but nobody does.
I have to be more careful with the next part of my excavation. I use the trowel, working slowly until I feel it scrape something. Then I use my hands.
I uncover a hard, white dome. Soil’s stuck in the zigzag sutures and packed into the fontanelle. The skull eyes me with black orbits full of dirt that crawl with worms.
I clean off the skeleton, bit by bit. Its arms are folded over the delicate ribcage. Such tiny hands and feet. It’s small. She’s smaller than a newborn, pushed out into the cold far too early.
Mum and Stephanie were right. Here is my real sister, not the creature called Pippa.
Oh my God, you poor baby girl. What did they do to you?
*
“Are you okay?” Elsa ushers me into the kitchen. It’s eight in the morning. She has her own key.
I can’t bring myself to ask whether Pippa, my crow sister, is awake. How was the exchange made? Was it monstrous Pippa that heaved my real sister from my mother’s womb? Was she strangled with her own umbilical cord? And who buried my blood sister? Was it Mum and Dad? No wonder they were undone.
“What happened to you?”
Elsa opens a cupboard and pulls out a bag of seed mix, rips it open and tips out a handful. When she eats, some of it spills down her front. She doesn’t bother to brush it off. When she offers me some I’m hit by a wave of nausea that sends me across the room on rubbery legs to vomit in the bin.
“You’ve got yourself in a right old state.” Elsa holds back my hair.
I take a deep breath and wipe my nose.
“Elsa, there’s a baby buried in the garden.”
She goes very still.
“You knew about it, didn’t you?” I sit down.
She pulls a chair alongside mine, its legs scraping on the tiles. She grasps my hands.
“I didn’t want you to know about it yet. I wish that cuckoo-brained Stephanie hadn’t come to the funeral. And Arthur and Megan hadn’t interfered with that damn key. You found the eggs, didn’t you?”
I think I’m going to faint so I put my head on the table until it passes. Elsa rubs my back and carries on talking. When I sit up, Elsa’s smiling, her head tilted at an odd angle. A gesture I don’t recognise. “I’m actually relieved. It’s easier that you know now you’re staying.”
“Elsa, I can’t stay here.”
“It’s best for everyone. You’ve others to consider now.”
I press my fists to my closed eyes. I can’t consider anything. My mind’s full of tiny bones.
“Mum knew that Pippa wasn’t hers, didn’t she?” I’m thinking of the human-bird-baby in its shell.
“Pippa?” Elsa’s eyes are yellow in this light. “No, she knew that it was you that wasn’t hers. She had to watch you like a hawk around Pip.”
I vomit again. Clumps of semi digested food gets caught in my hair. Elsa dabs at my mouth with a tea towel. Her colours are the jay’s—brown, pink and blue. Was it her, stood at Mum’s back and pecking at her eye?
Pippa stands in the doorway looking from my face to Elsa’s and back again. I’ve never seen Pip’s gaze so direct.
Now I know why my heart’s loveless. Pip’s not the aberration, I am. I’m the daughter of crows, smuggled into the nest. Pippa is how she is because of my failed murder attempt. I affected her development when I tried to foist her from the womb.
It’s all my fault.
Pippa edges around the room, giving the woman who raised her a wide berth. She tucks herself under my arm and puts a hand low down on my abdomen. She peers into my face, concerned, and says, “Birdies”.
Rag and Bone
I leave Gabriel in the yard and go into town, taking my bag with the vials of skin and bone, flesh and blood, my regular delivery to Makin. The Peels are looking for body parts.
I love the grandeur of The Strand. High towers of ornate stone. The road’s packed with wagons and carts. Boats choke the river. The Mersey is the city’s blood and it runs rich. Liverpool lives again.
I can hear the stevedores’ calls, those kings of distribution and balance, whose job it is to oversee the dockers loading the barges. The boats must be perfectly weighted for their journey up the Manchester Ship Canal. Guards check them to ensure no unlicensed man steals aboard. Farther along, at Albert Dock, there’s a flock of white sails. The Hardman fleet’s arrived, tall ships bringing cotton from America.
The Liver birds keep lookout. Never-never stone creatures that perch atop the Liver Building where all the families have agents. I keep my eyes fixed on the marble floor so that I don’t have to look at the line of people desperate for an audience. Peels’ man has the ground floor. The Peels’ fortune came from real estate, small forays such as tenements at first, but money begets money. They took a punt when they redeveloped Liverpool’s waterfront, a good investment that made them kings of the new world.
The other families have managers on other floors, all in close proximity as nothing’s exclusive, business and bloodlines being interbred. The Hardmans are textile merchants, the Rathbones’ wealth was made on soap, of all things, while the Moores are ship builders.
The outer offices contain rows of clerks at desks, shuffling columns of figures in ledgers. A boy, looking choked in his high-necked shirt, runs between them carrying messages. No one pays me any mind.
Makin’s secretary keeps me waiting a full minute before he looks up, savouring
this petty exercise of power. “He’ll see you now.”
Makin’s at his desk. Ledgers are piled on shelves, the charts and maps on the walls are stuck with pins marking trade routes and Peel territories.
“Have a seat.” He’s always civil. “How did you fare today?”
“A few agreed.”
I hand him the bag.
“They’re reluctant?”
“Afraid.”
There are already rumours. That the Peels, Hardmans, Rathbones and Moores, these wealthy people we never see, are monstrosities that live to a hundred years by feasting on Scousers’ flesh and wearing our skins like suits when their own get worn out. Their hands drip with diamonds and the blood of the slaving classes. They lick their fingers clean with slavering tongues.
Makin taps the desk.
“Should we be paying more?”
“Then you’ll have a line that stretches twice around the Mersey Wall consisting of drunken, syphilitic beggars.”
“Do we have to order obligatory sampling of the healthy?”
“That’s unwise.”
His fingers stop drumming.
“Since when are rag and bone men the font of wisdom?”
I’m not scared of Makin but I need the money so I’m respectful. Besides, I like him.
“At least wait ’til it’s cooler before you announce something like that or you’ll have a riot.”
That brings him up short.
“I’m feeling fractious today.” He rubs the top of his head like a man full of unhappy thoughts. “Don’t be offended.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re a good sort. You work hard and don’t harbour grudges. You speak your mind instead of the infernal yeses I always get. Come and work for me.”
“Thank you but I hope you won’t hold it against me if I say no.”
“No, but think on it. The offer stands.” Something else is bubbling up. “You and I aren’t so different. I had to scramble too. I’m a Dingle man. My daughters are spoilt and innocent. My sons no better.” His rueful smile reveals the pain of parenthood. “It’s their mother’s fault. They’re not fit for the real world, so I must keep on scrambling.”
I envy his children, wanting for nothing, this brutal life kept at arm’s length. Makin must see something in my face because he puts the distance back between us with, “Have you heard any talk I should know about?”