by Sara Banerji
Robert and Billy, after a single glance, let out guttural shouts of lustful joy and made a rush for her. Lewis and Charles held back for a moment before following them. James was sober enough to shout, ‘Hey! Watch it, chaps!’ before, infected, leaping for Sissy too. They had caught a tantalising glimpse of Sissy’s podgy little nubile body once before, when her clothes had burnt off at her mother’s dinner party. Now there was no auntie to protect her.
Sissy had been going to say, ‘How do you do?’ and ‘Do come in,’ or even ‘Was wollen Sie?’ and ‘Guten Tag, meine Herren,’ if the intruders turned out to be invading German soldiers.
She was taken by surprise as the men came at her as though she was not a person at all but a raspberry crop and they a flock of starlings.
Shouting, with a dotty look of excitement in their eyes, and making grabbing gestures, they came through the kitchen, their boots ringing on the flagstones, and with a yell of horror Sissy turned and ran, the little tea towel falling off like Eve’s figleaf before she even reached the door.
As Sissy leapt three at a time up the stairs, with five drunks bawling like huntsmen at her heels, she reflected that this was the worst example of people affected by Hitler’s Potty Powder that she had ever experienced.
George, certain now that they had come to get him, peed hotly into his pants as he hugged the cold rough brickwork of the chimney.
Sissy tried to get to Lump and bolt the door, but the men were too quick. She had got into the Hairy Petal Bedroom when they grabbed her and began pulling her this way and that, like a bone between five disputing dogs.
‘On to the bed!’ cried Robert.
‘Here! On the floor!’ said James.
Lewis’s hands were fondling her bottom, Billy had his between her thighs, Charles tried to snatch at her heavy breasts.
Then James said, ‘Into the car! Quick! Before the mother or somebody else comes!’
They were really getting their revenge.
Sissy screamed for George.
Outside the window he could hear her breasts smacking against her ribs as she was swung, heard gasps from her and grunts from the airmen as they tussled for her. George shivered with a pounding heart and couldn’t move.
I can hear my mother’s spittle bubble as they smother her. But flesh and blood and bone have shackled me, the mother milk in my belly weighed me, the knobbled clothes my father made pinioned me, so that I have become imprisoned. Far from rescuing the world, I cannot even save Sissy.
The airmen probably never knew, even as they ran with my mother down the stairs, that I was on the bed.
Four rush with Sissy. The fifth, Billy, lingers a moment to light his cigarette.
Sissy tries to scream and cannot, tries to breathe and chokes.
She has fed me with her body, smiled at me with love, and has been captured because she tried to save me.
I realise that, however weak I have become, I’ve got to help her, although I have only one thing left to save with now and that is the little bit of body on the Hairy Petal Bed.
I put all the tiny powers I still possess into the wrist of Billy.
Drink has numbed his nerves and he does not feel the flame flare in his fingers. He has drunk too much to even notice the smell of paraffin.
‘Throw it, airman, throw it!’ I say into his soul and, although he does not hear me, his body knows and he flicks the burning match forward into the paraffin drenched velvet. He does not even see the little gush of fire or hear the burp as the hanging catches.
George, hearing Sissy’s muffled yelps receding, held on to bricks, moaned, felt horrified, and did not know what to do.
Then he became aware of the familiar sound and smell of burning. He felt in his pocket, found the perfect match, and knew it had not been him.
Anticipation of pain leached away yet more of my spirit before my body was even touched and, as I began to scream, heat and smoke met over me like a canopy. I could feel the heavy ancient bedding belly out as it filled with hot air. It was the discomfort that made me yell. I did not need to be saved. There was no purpose in me. I knew that by now. The screams were involuntary because I was choking and felt afraid. Later I shall try to recollect my feelings, for what a spicy sensation fear is! One never gets it outside the body when, like a suit in a cupboard, one is waiting for a life. The greatest sensation one can expect is diluted bliss.
George struggled over the tiles, thrust head and shoulders through the window, peered into the room, eyes watering, nose running, breath going fast from excitement now, not fear. The room was black and glowing with fire but, through the crackles, he could hear Lump screaming.
There was something about fire that always transformed George, and, filled with a glorious joy, fear scalded from his system, he leapt into the room just at the moment when, with a whoosh, the heat overwhelmed the smoke and roared up in flame. As George reached the bed the hairy petals began to explode in puffs of hot plaster, dust then rained down like scalding devil’s ears.
The hangings of the fourposter bed were blazing now, while the baby bawled in its centre. A beam caught fire and began to crack and buckle as George threw his fat cool body through a wall of fire to get at Lump.
The airmen carrying Sissy heard the roar, turned, saw fire leaping from the Hairy Petal Bedroom window, and letting out yells of horror dumped Sissy on the grass. Lump’s plan had worked. In the shock of seeing the fire, they forgot they had even been carrying her.
The moment her feet were on the ground she began to run, screaming, naked and white, slack belly that had two days before been full of child, breasts leaking, thick thighs trembling.
‘Lump! Lump!’ she screamed over and over.
I heard her, knew I was loved, and in that moment my existence did not seem so wasted after all.
The five young airmen, suddenly sobered with horror, stared at the bursts of fire, thrusting from the bedroom window, and, in its centre, the pale smudged face of George.
‘It was me,’ gasped Billy. ‘I threw the match.’
George leant out of the window clutching a bundle. Flames stood around him like a halo, then his hair began to burn.
‘Here Sissy! Here!’ he shouted, and threw.
Sissy put out her arms as a tattered bundle came tumbling and shrieking through the air like a red hot angel.
Sissy seized the baby who had come to sweeten the world – the world’s last sugar lump – out of the sky. Clutching it to her body, she yelled, ‘Come on, George! Jump! Jump!’
He had become invisible in the dense smoke, but they could hear his voice.
‘I only ever loved you, Sissy.’
‘You’ve got no time for slop, George,’ Sissy yelled, furious. ‘Come on. Bloody jump.’
She waited with her arms wide.
The five airmen yelled, ‘Come on, George! Jump!’
Window glass exploded suddenly, spraying out like Christmas decorations, then shot up into the air in a fountain of glittering fragments. When it cleared, there was no George in the window.
Sissy began to scream his name, and tears born of smoke, fear, and sorrow, started pouring, unchecked, down her face.
No George appeared.
With a great roar and a gush of flame the chimney above the Hairy Petal Bedroom plummeted into the roof, punching its path through slates, rafters, ceilings. It must have entered and filled the Hairy Petal Bedroom because a moment later a surge of fire and smoke gushed out of the window, and inside the room could be heard the thunderous sound of falling masonry.
Distantly, there came the sound of approaching fire engines. The airmen started to sink with sadness. Sissy, hugging Lump to her body, fell on her back on the grass and, rolling from side to side, began screaming with misery. Billy took off his flying jacket and gently dressed Sissy in it. She did not seem to notice.
‘What a foolish boy to lose his life to rescue a doll,’ Lewis said. They didn’t even know that Lump was alive, but took it to be a toy.
; Elizabeth and Beattie saw the Plague House smoke from the window of Beattie’s cottage.
Elizabeth sprang up, suddenly sick with dismay.
‘I’ve been a bad mother,’ she told Beattie, as Beattie took the astonished and outraged pony out of its stable and began to harness it. Never before had anything been expected of it at one in the morning.
‘You can’t be what you’re not,’ Beattie told Elizabeth.
‘They might be burnt to death by now,’ whispered Elizabeth. ‘And I haven’t loved them enough.’
Beattie assured her firmly. ‘One of the things their unusual education has given them is the gift of survival.’
‘I didn’t give them education,’ cried Elizabeth as she followed Beattie up the little iron step into the cart.
‘Well, there’s good and bad in everything, even education,’ Beattie told her, drawing the tassel of the whip across Patacake’s quarters until the pony broke into a gallop. Even Patacake’s fetlocks had to be sacrificed tonight.
As Elizabeth and Beattie came through the front gates, the pony, foamed white with sweat, saw the flaming bedroom and started rearing like something out of a cowboy film.
A second later the figure of George appeared swaying in the doorway. His clothes hung in tattered shreds. His skin was smeared with charcoal, his hair was almost singed away. Water blisters were rising on the edges of his ears.
‘I wasn’t going to come, Sis,’ he whispered. ‘I was going to stay there in the fire for ever because the only things lying ahead for me seem to be prison and having my … my … chopped off…’ He paused, gasping, one eye swollen shut, the other clumped with melted lashes. ‘But something extraordinary happened.’ His throat was so hoarse and scorched that his words were hardly audible, and Sissy had to lean over his mouth to hear him.
‘Just when my hair began to burn, something grabbed me round the shoulders, and I felt myself being pushed out of the Hairy Petal Bedroom and towards the stairs. It was like being blown along in a whirlwind.’
‘Perhaps that’s what sometimes happens in burning houses,’ said Sissy. ‘I think it was Lump,’ said George, and slumped unconscious.
Elizabeth rushed towards her children, arms stretched out, as though relief following shock had liberated her from revulsion.
Mrs Lovage would have been dismayed, seeing in these spontaneous gestures a lowering of standards, the dismissal of daintiness, but Mrs L was out of the village that night, aiding a sister in the grip of a hiatus hernia. She would return in the morning to gobble with knowing horror at the sight of the black hole punched in the face of Elizabeth’s Georgian mansion, and see in the charred chaos of the house and garden her own re-entry into favour.
Sissy, standing over the slumped form of her already stirring brother, clutching the saved Lump, smiling on the two beloveds, swung round at the sound of her mother’s cries – ‘George? Sissy?’ – and swiftly chilled her expression, unable, having so far experienced only reproach, to accommodate herself to its opposite.
The sight of the swathed thing in Sissy’s arms stopped Elizabeth with a skidding abruptness of which Mrs Lovage would have approved, and Elizabeth’s face, which had become rosy with the heat of the fire and relief at the rescue of her children, went pale as realisation returned.
Sissy stood numb, drained, not feeling anything – her only thought was ‘How nice to be George,’ who was now comfortably murmuring, ‘What a blaze! Oh, what a blaze!’ apparently unperturbed by emotions wilder than the snorting of cinders.
Mother and daughter faced each other over an impassable infinity of unacceptable grandchild across which there seemed to be no bridge.
Beattie, having managed to prevent the poor pony – who had had too many frights in the Plague House already – from bolting like Pegasus into the sky, emerged out of the smoke, and understood.
‘Come, Elizabeth,’ she breathed and hugged gently till Elizabeth’s trembling stopped.
Carefully, so as not to hurt him, Beattie raised George till he leant against Sissy.
Then she took the bundle out of Sissy’s hands.
‘Come, darling creatures,’ she said to Sissy, Elizabeth, George and Lump.
Beattie, the bridge, led the way, holding Lump, to undamaged bedrooms. Sissy and George propped each other up, and Elizabeth followed, feeling somehow free.
Only one strange thing happened that night.
As Sissy had taken the child from Beattie, its coverings had fallen back, and for a moment its face had been exposed.
Elizabeth, with a small sigh that did not sound despairing, had reached out and gently touched the white globe of heavy baby forehead with the tip of her little finger.
I have decided to go, taking with me the memory of that precious caress.
I will try again in about two hundred years, if the human race has not destroyed itself by then.
I had hope of success when I managed to approach the heart and mind of Elizabeth and rock her on the golden water of the moat.
There was a moment when George heard me and began to understand who I was.
I had come out of Sissy’s body but I saw that she had already started hankering for games in the garden with George and, to be able to fulfil my potential, I needed to be concentrated on.
God’s caressing finger was born to Sissy, and, because of war, and conflict with her mother, she never knew it.
I had to go. I was too precious to waste, and no one, not even Sissy, could hear me so that, in the end, I was starting to be unable to hear myself. I was the bridge between man and Heaven, and with their screaming and their crying they have extinguished me.
‘You really are the hero now, George,’ Sissy whispered that night in the Apostle Bed. ‘You saved the life of Sugar Lump,’ and he, pasted with ointment and swathed in bandages, nearly smiled with pride, then yelped with pain because his lips were blistered.
They slept cautiously, George afraid to move from pain and Sissy still sore from childbirth.
She woke before dawn, realised she did not hear the usual snuffling breathing and gobbling sucking of the malformed baby and whispered to George, her words echoing among the wooden tasselled bedposts ‘Lump is dead.’ She was certain, even without looking, because of the quality of the silence.
George, sitting up wildly, then shrieking as he remembered his agony, said, ‘You haven’t even looked! Hush can’t be dead! I risked my life to save Lump!’ as though no baby would be so inconsiderate as to die after such a sacrifice. He could hardly remember how he had wanted Lump to die – ever since Lump had smiled at him and he had understood that Lump was something wonderful.
Sissy pulled up the knitting and stared at the pathetic body.
‘Gone,’ she said, her voice echoing hollowly.
‘Oh,’ cried George from his heart.
Sissy began gently to stroke the lifeless body. She had done this when the Silly Dog died, and the guinea pigs too, and George knew she was saying goodbye.
It was chilly so George pulled the Parson Quilt from the bed, moving carefully so as not to crack his blisters, and wrapped it round her.
‘Come on, George, we must bury Lump now,’ said Sissy.
Like Siamese twins, held together by a seventeenth-century pornographic tapestry, they went down the stairs and into the garden, George hobbling, stiff where his skin was scalded.
George and Sissy buried Lump beside the Silly Dog and Teddy’s doorkey.
Sissy had to do most of the work because George’s hands were bandaged. When the job was complete Sissy patted the soil with her hands to make it even, then crept about in the dark finding crocuses to strew. Then George and Sissy stood up, bowed their heads, and said in unison, making one or two false starts before they got the words coming out together, ‘Goodbye, Lump.’
Sissy was just turning to move away when George suddenly added, ‘See you soon.’
‘You spoiled the whole thing,’ Sissy accused. ‘How can you see someone soon when they’re dead?’
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br /> George writhed his features around. ‘I just get the feeling that being dead is not exactly what we think,’ he tried to explain. ‘Lump sort of smiled at me, and I knew hush was trying to tell me something.’
‘Oh pooh!’ said Sissy who did not like to think of Lump having a secret understanding with somebody else.
Then George and Sissy went silently back into the house, speechlessly climbed the stairs and, passing the Apostle Bedroom in which they had begun the night, went on till they reached the Sad Bedroom. They climbed into the bed, George letting out little squeaks of pain as he bent his knees, then Sissy lay down on her stomach, pulled the cover over her head, and after a moment began to scream and kick. Then George started up. They cried and screamed, sobbed, roared, and whacked their legs against the mattress. They nearly fucked, but thought they’d better not in case they made another Lump. They went to sleep at last, wet with each other’s tears and running noses, and slept till it was day and they could smell breakfast being made downstairs.
‘I am cured of Lump,’ said Sissy.
‘I am cured of Lump,’ said George.
Chapter 20
The house was saved apart from The Hairy Petal Bedroom, and Charles, Robert and Lewis came to clear up. They worked silently and sadly this time, not only out of shame but because Billy and James had been lost over Germany.
‘Sissy and I want to make a bonfire,’ said George, his voice high and nervy.
It was breakfast time.
He looked cautiously from Elizabeth to Auntie Beattie. A shiver went through his body as Beattie said calmly, ‘Be careful which way the wind is. You don’t want to set the trees on fire. But how silly of me to tell you. You have been an expert with fires for years, haven’t you?’
George felt his face go red, and wondered how much she knew.
‘Have some coffee,’ said Elizabeth to Sissy, reaching for the jug.