by Paul Kearney
First published 2016 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-84997-918-4
Copyright © 2016 Paul Kearney
Cover art by Oz Osborne
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
In memory of my father, James Francis Kearney,
who showed me what it was to be a good man.
Author’s Note
DURING THE COURSE of this narrative I have striven to follow faithfully the geography and history of the places described therein, but I have also taken certain liberties with space and time. I know the distance from Idstone Hill to Wayland’s Smithy; I have walked it more than once. And I know that my fellow Ulsterman, C.S. Lewis, found his faith some months before his appearance in this text. I hope that the reader will forbear from comment if he or she finds that I have skewed dates and places a little in my telling of Anna’s story.
Part One:
Jericho
I form the light, and create darkness;
I make peace, and create evil:
I the Lord do all these things.
Isaiah 45:7
1
ALL DAY, PA went on, and it was raining outside in buckets and bowls, the kind of rain that makes another life for itself on the ground – it grows up and gathers together and starts gurgling everywhere. I like that rain – sometimes – I like looking at it, and thinking about it, but it’s nasty really.
I LIKE TO hear Pa talking, and better still when he reads to me as it’s growing dark and the lamp-smell is warming up the room. It reminds me of that other time long ago, before Oxford and England.
But when he stands on that dusty stage and speaks and raises his voice over their heads in the hall, I hate it so much. I don’t want to shake hands with them as they file in and out, like they were a congregation and he was their priest. They all have such sad eyes. Even Pa can’t change the hopelessness in them.
TALKED TO PIE today for a long time and tried to make her dance, but she’s lazy. She’d much rather sit in the crook of my arm and watch things. I could scold her for being so lazy, but that would be Hypocrisy, which Pa hates, because he says I’m as lazy as Pie, and I hate the rain even more.
I’m getting too big for Pie, Pa says. I like it when he tells me I’m growing up, but I won’t let her go. She’s my best friend, if a friend is someone you can tell things to, and sit quiet with, and hug in the dark of the night.
He doesn’t like her. She still has the burn marks on her from that last terrible day, when we were hemmed in between the fire and the sea. The day mama died.
WELL, ALL RIGHT. In this country there are galoshes and things, which can be fun; I love rubber boots, (and umbrellas – especially in the wind), but in the by and large of all that, the weather here is not nice.
I REMEMBER THE warm rain coming over the hills behind the city; they were blue in the distance, and then yellow with sun and dust up close, and the crickets shimmered in them like an invisible gossiping little crowd. And the rain was warm, and swept across the land and upon the sea like a vast hanging music, dark and bright and silver, like God had made a painting.
Pa tells me I have no memory of anywhere else but England, and really doesn’t like me talking about it. He gets angry sometimes, and has that look in his eye, the bright fire where bad things burn. So I go quiet, and he lays his hand on my head – sometimes – and it’s all right again.
I am getting big. I got new shoes last week. Except they weren’t new. They belonged to Miss Hawcross’s niece, who must have very big feet. But I stuff newspaper into the toes and they’re quite all right, except when they get wet. I wonder if she is a pretty girl, whose shoes I wear, and if her toes feel something when I wiggle mine in her old shoes. That would be nice. We could talk to each other, make up a language of twitching toes, and compose long letters while walking down the street.
Miss Hawcross says I have a mind like a dragonfly, which I thought was a fine thing, but apparently it’s not; and she snaps the ruler across my knuckles when my dragonfly mind wanders, sometimes soft, like a joke, and sometimes hard, with the edge. She is very old, thirty at least. Pa told me once that she loved a man who died in the War, and that I must be good and meek and kind with her. I think of that when the ruler cracks against my knuckles, and I look at Pie and smile knowingly.
SO, I KNOW all this stuff – and so much I know is supposed to be useful but isn’t, like algebra and the gerund and how the subjunctive works and who was the king with all the wives. And the other things, the important ones – I am not allowed to mention them. As though the dragonfly is walled up in a quiet garden and flits around all the dead flowers, and can tell what colour they were when they were alive, and the names they had and how they smelled…
I do remember – and even the priest says you don’t have to forget a sin. You are sorry for it, and then it’s forgiven.
God forgives you. Our God, anyway.
But I remember what happened to us between the fire and the sea, and sometimes I think Pa hates it because the things I remember are not for me to be forgiven, but for him. And he can’t forget or forgive himself. That’s why he never sleeps, and why he drinks so much. He told me once that there are no memories at the bottom of a glass.
But even I can recall as clear as anything our lives back then so far away, in the lost city, when it was warmer – hot, lizard hot – and that bright, bright light had the dust-herb smell in it.
Nothing smells like that here. The only smells at this time of year are unpleasant: the drains, and the omnibus. The people on it when they are damp.
But I remember looking up at another sky, it was so blue and bright, and hot – I remember the stones burning under my legs, and something else in the light, that bright, bright light. I remember…
THE RAIN TAPS the glass, like a polite little man wanting in. I wish there was less noise in the house. I wish… I wish we had some more peace, Pie and me. I wish Pa would talk to me like a person again, and not like I’m some dog he is training.
I like dogs too. And cats. And horses. I think we had a horse once, but we never had a dog. I would have remembered that.
I remember the horse galloping past us that day through the crowd, knocking people down. It was all on fire, flames streaming from its mane, and its eyes so wide and white with the agony. It galloped past us, and I never saw where it went.
I want to stop having to look at all these people who come into our house – it’s not our house, really, but we do live here – and they sit down on our chairs, and talk to me in the old language and they think I understand what they’re saying, but sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t and I don’t want to anyway. And when they troop through the door I stand sometimes where the glass is, and watch them come in, and the way they wear shawls over their head, and even the set of their faces – no-one in Oxford is as lined and brown as these people are – and this is not who I am or was or will ever be.
Pa told me that. I would never be the same. I kiss Pie, and am so so glad. Pa loves me more than anything else in the world – he told me so, a long time ago – and so everything is all right. I suppose everything is all right.
Lord Jesus Christos. I say your name. Lord God please don’t send me to hell. I
am not a good girl – I know that – but I love my father and my mother (but she’s dead), and I love the wrens in the garden and the irises when they come up blue. Lord Jesus I try to be a good neighbour to everyone. I really do. But can you please kill all the Turks? Because they murdered my mother and took our home. And they need to be punished.
This is Anna. And thank you. Thank you very much .
AFTER I PRAY, I always feel much better, because I am told God is always listening – Miss Hawcross told me so. I hug Pie until I’m sure it should hurt but it doesn’t. I hug her so hard – until I think I can almost smell the sea again, and I think that if I open my eyes I might just be able to look at that line of blue – that other blue you don’t get here – I heard Pa once call it kingfisher-blue. Halcyon. Somewhere out on the horizon, it’s still there. I think Pa misses it something awful. I think the Turks took it from us because they wanted it for themselves.
I LOOK OUT at the rain, and think it cannot be the same world as the one I can still see in my head. All the colours have faded away.
PA SAYS WE mustn’t live in the past. We have become English now. But we were Greek once, like Homer and Helen and Heracles. He used to tell me stories of Achilleos and Odysseos, but not any more. Was Troy a real place? He won’t tell me. He looks out the window at the rain, as I do, and refuses to say. But I know we were Greek once, and Agamemnon was our king, and then he went to Troy and rode away on a great wooden horse and left us.
And somewhere out on the sea – Pa once told me the sea at sunset is as dark as wine – Odysseos still sails his ship, looking for us, trying to bring us home.
I miss Mama. I don’t remember her at all but I miss her – isn’t that odd? She smelled of lavender. And we had green basil growing in pots at all the windows, to keep out the flies. And it smelled like – like the best of summers. Like a land of dreams should smell.
And I hug Pie as I think of it, while the rain keeps tap tap tapping at the glass. We live in Jericho, in the city of Oxford, in the kingdom of England. And that is home now, and ever will be, until Odysseos returns.
2
I DON’T KNOW why that fat Henry wanted so many wives, I tell Miss Hawcross crossly, and for a moment I think she almost smiles. She is a small woman, with very thin ankles but a big… I’m not supposed to say it, but she has a big bosom, and looks like a puffed up little grey pigeon, with her hair up in a bun and a cameo brooch at her throat.
I see girls on the streets with short bobbed hair, and I saw a picture of Louise Brooks once outside the nickleodeon on Walton Street, and she looked so impossibly beautiful that when I got home I tried to cut off my own hair – it is as black as hers, and just as sleek when it’s wet – but Pa caught me at it and belted me until my nose bled. He gripped the hank of hair I had cut off as though it were something precious I had thrown away, and then he had to trim the rest of it anyway, to make it all the same length. It still wasn’t a Brooks bob, but it comes down to my shoulders now instead of the small of my back.
The children down by the canal still shout at me and call me a dago, so I don’t suppose it made much difference. It would be lovely to be pretty and elegant and sophisticated, and to smoke a cigarette in a long holder.
I bet if big fat Henry hadn’t been king, he wouldn’t have had so many wives. He was a wicked man, but sad, too I suppose. How awful, to never find someone you can truly love, so you are always looking for her your whole life. And cutting people’s heads off when they turn out to be the wrong one.
He was a great king of England, Miss Hawcross says, and I am to learn all about him and his family if I am to pass as an educated young lady and not a scrawny guttersnipe. And She gives me the flat of the ruler after that, just to make sure I remember. She is very keen on the word guttersnipe. And ragamuffin too.
After lessons, I see her out the door, because that’s polite, and watch her waddle down the street. A black straw boater she wears, when it’s not raining, and little boots with mother of pearl buttons. I wonder if she still thinks of the young man who died in the War. I wonder if he would still like her if he saw her now, with her pinched lips and greying hair.
It must be terrible to be old, when you love someone who died young. They never change in your mind, and every day you see yourself grow away from that person you were when you loved and knew them. Until you are more of a shadow than they are, and the girl you were is altogether gone, more dead even than the young man on the battlefield.
If I loved someone and they died like that, I should wear black for the rest of my life, and a veil. I would never forget them, or let anyone else edge their memory out of my mind. Memories are important, like the bones of the mind. We build ourselves upon them, flesh and blood moulded around the pictures of what is past.
I look at Pie sometimes, and think she is a memory herself. How I got her; who gave her to me. Every time I look at her I can see him smiling.
Anyway, that’s what I think. It is why I try so hard to never forget anything.
Pa is different. He wants to bury the memories and make himself someone else. It’s why he shaved off his beard, and wears tweeds, and fights so hard to look and sound and behave like an Englishman.
‘The English are a great race,’ he told me once. ‘But they have a deep down belief that they are the best of all peoples.
‘You and I come of the blood that bred Homer, and Aristotle, and Socrates and Alexandros. Whatever they call you, remember that, Anna. Our people dug the foundations of civilisation itself.’
That was a long time ago, when we first came here. I do not think he would ever say such a thing again. But it makes me proud, and when the children down at the canal throw names and stones at me, I ignore them, for I am of the same blood as Achilleos. The English have their castles, and Buckingham Palace, and the Changing of the Guard. But we have the Parthenon, and the Iliad.
THERE IS ANOTHER meeting in the house tonight. If I hear the word committee once more I shall scream. I suppose I am a scrawny guttersnipe after all, because I have not the manners to sit still and smile at the people as they troop in, shaking the rain from their shoulders. These are the Greeks now, these poor folk who look like beggars from another century. There was a big debate last week, and they changed the name of the Committee they are all so fond of. Now it is not Repatriation, but Resettlement. And there is talk of hiring a steamship or something. It’s all Greek to me.
IT’S DARK WHEN I creep out of the house by the back door, with the voices following me into the night. Ugh, winter; the light goes before the sun has a chance to get risen properly. I can see the gaslamps still on in the Lucy factory, up the canal, but when I climb over the garden wall, there is almost nothing but the blue deep dusk out to the west, over Port Meadow.
BEHIND ME, OXFORD is still busy and bright, and there are so many motor cars that they set up a hum in the night. This is where they build motor cars, this city, more than anywhere else in England. It seems strange, for there are so many days when Oxford is grand and beautiful and otherworldly, like a city created by a curious-minded king. The University did that. I think I shall go there, one day, and study something complicated and obscure just to show them I can, even if I am a girl.
But the land swells up to the west and there is a moon rising, low over the hills at Wytham. There are deep woods there, all damp and thick and full of deer and old trenches they dug to train the poor soldiers for the war.
I follow the canal to Walton Well Road, climbing the fences of other people’s back gardens on the way, and then cross it and the railway, and step light as a…. as a cat… to Port Meadow, where all at once the world opens up, and the city is left behind, and the moon is riding higher and higher, a horned moon with clouds drifting across it, the light burning their edges silver.
It is enough to see by, but I go slowly, all the same, walking off the beaten path in the grass towards the faint light of Wolvercote in the north. Somewhere to my left is the Thames, a tiny river here compared t
o what it is like in London, but much cleaner I’m told, a country river.
It’s cold, and the grass is wet, but I don’t mind, and nor does Pie. I hug her to me under my coat, and feel the newspaper in the toes of my shoes become damp and start to squish and tear.
This is what Pa taught me once. You find the Plough, which is seven stars in the shape of a saucepan, and the outer rim of the pan are two stars called the Pointers. You follow their line up, and there is a bright glimmer that seems almost on its own, and that is Polaris, and it points north.
And Orion has three stars in his belt. And the Little Bear is like the Plough, only smaller. And that red flicker near the horizon in the east; that is Mars.
They are all here; all my stars. It has been a long time since the night was so clear and still, and my breath is a pale cloud in front of my face, so solid-seeming I almost think I could grab a handful of it and put it in my pocket. And the cold is getting deeper, seeping through my coat and setting chilly fingers on my bare knees, but I don’t care. I tug Pie out of my coat so she can see the night too, and so I can hug her close to my face.
The world seems so not real at night under the moon and stars, with the streets and cobbles and motor-cars and heads-down hurrying people all taken away. Here and now, is the world as it was near to the beginning, when God breathed life into it out of the darkness, and brought it up out of the waters. Was that the second day? I think so. A world empty, before the creatures crawled out of the seas to set their footprints upon it.