‘Old before your time, that’s what you are,’ Mared said, peering over her shoulder. ‘Goodness me, you’re getting serious.’
‘I’ve always been serious and you’re never too young to find things out, Nain.’
Mared flipped through the books, let her eyes dwell. ‘If you ask me, feminism is another version of kindness.’
‘Does it mean you’re a feminist then?’
‘Women died so I could vote, and I do vote, so yes, if that makes me a feminist, I guess I must be.’
‘Allegra isn’t. She says women’s libbers are man-haters.’
‘Allegra says a lot of things that don’t bear scrutiny.’
‘Could Meredith ever be one?’
‘Your sister has to work out who she is before she can work out what she is.’
‘I think perhaps they’re the same.’
Mared smiled. ‘See? I told you, old before your time.’
She looked like any other girl on a bus on her way to college. An ordinary girl reading a novel; perhaps looking up now and then, staring out of the window before returning her gaze to the page. In her jeans and neat blouses, her hair tied back with an Alice band, you would take Verity Pryce for a shop girl or a typist.
Or a trainee librarian.
Her carefully arranged face disguised whatever delight or disaster lay beneath. Verity Pryce learned to make the best of things. College opened doors and she marched through them, light on her feet, wearing the green boots Meredith decided she no longer wanted to wear.
‘After the fuss you made?’
‘I didn’t make a fuss, I made her feel guilty and it worked.’
‘But you love them.’
‘I don’t want anything from her.’
From an open book Meredith changed into one as closed as a locked diary. She couldn’t bear for people to see who she really was – a lost girl with a hole where her heart once was – so she let them see a made-up version, a weirdo no one wanted to get close to.
A million words stuck in her throat and she wrote herself in invisible ink hiding anything that might give her away. She began wearing the kind of clothes that drew attention to her defiance.
With Mared’s permission, she rooted in her grandmother’s wardrobe; borrowed Mared’s sewing machine, cut up old tea dresses, dyed them black and remade them into floating extravaganzas which, if she had seen them, Allegra would have envied. She twisted her hair into dreadlocks, bought a pair of granny boots and played Rumours until Verity threatened to throw the record out.
The change to Meredith’s life had happened in a moment. Or that was how it seemed to her. She’d had no time to prepare. One day she was in Gull House, the next an alternate, dismal narrative sidled in, took the place of the other one, and what went before became a memory.
She continued running away from school, and eventually kept her promise and ran as far as her granny heels could carry her.
With her own life falling apart, Allegra had nothing to spare for her traumatised daughter. And the education authorities didn’t appear to care about Meredith’s absences. Warnings about prosecutions washed over Allegra’s head like rain, and Meredith fell between the bureaucratic cracks. Already in danger of disappearing, she went unnoticed, as if she had finally learned how to make a spell that worked. She drifted in and out of the house, dressed in black, barely speaking.
One day, Verity followed her and discovered her sister hanging out in a local park with a group of people bedecked like troubadours, swathed in a sweet scent Verity suspected might be marijuana.
Meredith didn’t mind her sister discovering her.
‘Hey, sis,’ she said, ‘how’s it going?’ and Verity realised Meredith hadn’t called her ‘sis’ before or used any kind of language reminiscent of a world she’d thought neither of them knew much about.
Somehow, Meredith had found it; fallen in with a group of people who expected nothing of her and at the same time, in the event she had anything to say, were willing to listen.
If I want to I can make flowers grow from my fingertips…
Because they were kind, they pretended to believe her. Then they saw how deeply her sorrow was etched, how her tears turned to seeds and then to flowers an impossible shade of blue, so beautiful no one knew the name of them.
It didn’t matter if it was true or not. Imaginary flowers would do nicely.
They introduced Meredith to the animal rights movement and she joined PETA; joined in protests against animal farms.
‘Animal suffering isn’t new, Verity. It isn’t only women who need liberating.’
She celebrated her sixteenth birthday by turning up at school in an anti-vivisection t-shirt, to inform her teacher she wouldn’t be coming back.
‘That’ll show her I’m not the rude, stupid person she says I am. I could have just as well have not bothered.’
She moved out of her grandmother’s house and into a squat, and at first her new friends fed her. When Mared, deciding to side with the devil she knew, made her granddaughter a small allowance, she bought food to share and made her room so beautiful that people came from miles around to admire it. Her originality drew the sort of friends who liked her for her own sake, for her gentleness and generosity, and she became a true bohemian, the kind Allegra could only aspire to be.
She promised Verity she wasn’t smoking drugs and Verity decided it didn’t matter if her sister was lying.
I tell fibs to keep you safe…
Meredith was far more addicted to the past than she would ever be to drugs; she didn’t want to forget anything.
‘Just because the pieces of me look like they’re holding together,’ she told Verity, ‘it doesn’t mean bits of me aren’t broken.’
‘Are you going to be all right?’
‘Of course I am. I’m always all right.’ She didn’t look at Verity when she said this. ‘I have Angharad.’
‘I thought…’
‘You thought because I’d stopped talking about her, I’d forgotten her? Oh, Verity, you mustn’t worry about Angharad.’
Verity hadn’t thought about her for months.
‘I told you before, she hasn’t left me. She’ll follow me wherever I go, until she gets to the end of it.’
‘Have you told your new friends about her?’
‘No. Why would I? She’s my secret. And they’re the same as her; they don’t expect anything, they just want someone to listen. And they don’t ask questions. They live in a world they’ve chosen because the real one doesn’t have room for them. When I’m with them I can lose myself. I forget the bad stuff.’
‘Like Angharad?’
‘You know that isn’t what I mean.’
‘Sorry. I—’
‘Verity, I don’t mind.’ Meredith smiled her grave smile. ‘About her.’ Her refusal to use their mother’s name had become a habit. Her eyes still looked like lights but it was as if a dimmer switch had turned them down. ‘It doesn’t matter. About Angharad either. I can do it by myself.’
‘Do what?’
‘Listen? She’s still telling me, and it’s still sad. So sad sometimes it’s hard to hear because her voice is getting fainter.’
‘Can you tell me?’
‘Do you still want me too?’
She’ll follow me wherever I go…
Verity’s glass bones clinked together and she held her breath.
Tell me everything, because I don’t think you’re going to stay…
I survived neither the grief nor the elements.
In the end, it wasn’t only the cold or starvation that brought me to my end. My heart withered and once winter came, I lasted only a short time and one night I died.
Slowly, with the dying back of the season, my heart curled in on itself and turned to dust. Too weak to search for her, I gave in, tucked the tiny flannel heart under my worn-out gown and drifted into my final sleep.
If the God I no longer believed in proved to be real, then perhaps my child and I would
be reunited. Maybe I would discover angels were real. If not, I had the remnants of my hurt and prayed that unlike my mortal self, my unquiet spirit wouldn’t give up.
I became as light as a feathered wing, as heavy as death’s sleep, a thing made of vapour and dead bones.
The creature I became still searched for her resting place, for her lost child…
When they found me, they declared me a suicide and disposed of my remains in a place where no one would know I had existed. They put me in the ground but although they stripped me of my tattered, gown, they didn’t care enough to remove my chemise.
They left the little red heart still attached to my silent one.
In my cold, unmarked grave I was not found. Like an animal no trace of me remained. My flesh became a feast for the worms, my bones turned to dust and the earth took them.
Only my bloodless ghost heart beat on.
When the snow came, it fell like a final shroud, softening the ground and hiding all trace of me. It weighed down the trees whereonly the birds bore witness.
I will write my words into your dreams … because you are brave…
Present
The hut is hard to find, the markers gone, consumed by the wood.
I wonder if it’s been pulled down. The path, such as it is, is largely hidden and I use my forearms to fight my way through ferns and branches alive with liquid green.
It never stopped being her favourite colour. I open my hand, realise I’ve dropped the scrap of green cloth and I search fruitlessly for it. The woodland green is a disguise and I give up.
Something brushes my hand and I start back, half expecting…
What? A fairy?
They aren’t the kind in our storybooks, Verity … they’re Other…
Looking down I see a spider web lying against my skin and brush it off.
The trees thin, open out and here it is, in a patchy clearing dotted with clumps of tall grass: the hut, a huddle of partially visible lichen-covered stone. What is left grows out of the ground, the past reclaimed by nature. Vines and brambles wind over what remains, knotting and concealing. Beneath the ivy, I still recognise the shape of it, the short run of wall, the corner where we sat and I allow myself a brief smile because like so much I’m discovering today it strikes me as smaller, the way things are when we grow up and go looking for the past.
I’m standing in a memory.
She’ll follow me wherever I go…
For a while, in London, Meredith hovered on the edge of insanity. In the end, she took herself off, saved herself by leaving, wandering with the wind. Allegra threw her hands in the air and said she supposed her daughter was trying to find herself. It was the opposite. What had been sacred to Meredith was lost and the only thing she could do was keep moving, taking this or that fork in the road, not caring enough to find out if she had a place in the world.
The air is alive with the smell of wild garlic and old fungi.
A place where ghosts come to mourn…
Sixty
To no one’s surprise, the promises and assurances Allegra had relied on turned to ashes.
One day the man upped and left and only Allegra found the fact impossible to grasp.
‘It’s not like we didn’t try to tell you,’ Meredith said, not caring if she sounded cruel. ‘You should have listened.’
‘And look at you,’ Allegra said, ‘turning up to mock.’
It wasn’t altogether untrue. Meredith hadn’t seen her mother for months. Nagged by her sister, she’d agreed to pay a visit.
She watched Verity emptying ashtrays.
‘He must have said something to one of you. Did he?’ Allegra’s voice was tight with disbelief.
‘Mam, you know he didn’t.’ Verity laid the poppy shawl round her mother’s shoulders.
‘Well someone must know something.’
‘He told you what you wanted to hear, until he realised there was no money.’
‘Meredith, that’s enough.’ Verity pushed her sister out of the room. ‘Go away, you aren’t helping.’
‘I didn’t come to gloat. I came to please you.’
‘I know, even so, you aren’t helping.’
Meredith shrugged, took her bruised heart outside into the echoing grey of a London sky.
‘She hates me,’ Allegra said.
‘No, Mam,’ Verity said, ‘you broke her heart – you can’t expect her to care about yours.’
Her mother’s grief was immeasurable. Allegra had burnt her rotting boat and nothing would ever be the same again. Verity tried to work out when the despair began but it was before she was born, when her mother was a favoured child, carried everywhere by a father who’d adored her. And then he died and it was the first loss, the first desertion.
Allegra wasn’t made to be left behind.
Dumbfounded, Allegra slunk like a beaten dog, began drinking on her own in a nearby pub and once or twice became so intoxicated one of the barmaids had to bring her home, find her keys and see her up to the flat.
Verity did what she could. The flat became more chaotic. Her mother smelled of something other than sweat and gin. A trace caught in Verity’s nostrils.
If despair had a smell this would be it.
She cleaned the flat, threw out the empty gin bottles; took the bed linen to the launderette. She found her mother’s tarot cards, abandoned under a pile of clothes.
‘We could do a reading if you like.’
‘You despise my cards and in any case, I don’t trust them with the truth.’
A pessimist at heart, Allegra was too deeply wounded to any longer believe in anything.
‘Humour me.’ Verity shuffled the cards and spread them face down on the floor. ‘Go on, pick one. Please?’
Allegra shrugged, snatched a card and turned it over.
Silver stars decorated a blue sky; a solitary golden one hovered above a naked woman kneeling at a pool. She poured water from two pitchers.
‘What does it mean?’
‘Nothing.’ Allegra flipped the card onto the floor.
‘Are you sure? You always used to say the cards explained everything.’
Allegra looked as if she was watching from a distance.
‘I can’t be explained,’ she said, her voice shaky and unsure. ‘Because I’m not me, don’t you see? Not anymore.’
That makes two of you.
Later, remaking the bed, Verity found the book about the tarot underneath it, read the page about the star card and how, without the inspiration of the star, a person’s life could become drab and without purpose.
Perhaps the tarot cards knew more than she thought.
Bereft of hope, her wild illusions shattered, Allegra drifted into a state of melancholy.
‘Please go away,’ she said to Verity.
Given time, both Verity and her grandmother thought Allegra would come round. They were wrong; the man’s leaving was a desertion too far and Allegra’s mind changed course. As the weeks passed, they realised the grief wasn’t temporary. With the unkind parts of her diminished, Allegra no longer had the energy to be mean to anyone.
My mother is fading.
Verity’s fear crept in and she visited her mother whether she liked it or not.
‘You again,’ was all Allegra said, pouring herself a gin, fingering her dull curls, the neck of an unwashed frock.
Verity plucked up the courage to ask her mother why she drank so much.
Allegra looked so pained she wished she hadn’t.
‘It isn’t to forget, if that’s what you think.’ Allegra sighed, as if she was weary of breathing. ‘I’m tired of old clichés, Verity.’
The glass trembled in her hand.
If before she had drunk to forget, now, she said, it made her brave enough to remember.
‘I was an artists’ model, did you know that?’
‘Nain said.’
‘You should have seen me those days, I was a beauty; they all wanted to paint me. Before Idris, I had so m
any admirers. He wasn’t that special.’
A tear bloomed on the edge of her eye. She tipped her glass, drank down the dregs.
Don’t overthink it … it gives her courage.
‘It’s only anger keeps me going, Verity. Keeps me in touch with who I really am.’
Verity watched her mother and knew it wasn’t anger.
Her mother was scared, fearful of forgetting and terrified of disappearing.
Sixty-one
A year passed: it was 1982 and John Lennon was still asking people to imagine a perfect world.
The Pryce sisters still dreamed of deep snow. In London snow flew sideways, as if it was in too much of a hurry to land.
Verity and Meredith sat in a café drinking hot chocolate, watching. It was a dusting, barely an inch.
‘I’ve seen thicker snow on a Christmas cake,’ Meredith said.
She still lived in the squat and had a part-time job at an animal shelter.
‘You wouldn’t believe how many dogs get abandoned.’
Verity thought her sister looked abandoned. She was thinner than she’d ever been, edgier, and the skin on her face looked as if it might shred if you touched it. Steam from the hot chocolate began fogging the window and outside the snowflakes turned blurry and blue.
‘Are you eating properly?’
Meredith laughed and it sounded like bells. ‘Of course I am! Verity, have you seen the food parcels Nain makes me take away every weekend?’
The thin snow drifted against doorways, making little white heaps. Wherever they looked, Londoners lapsed into complaint, grabbed shovels and attacked.
‘It’s like they see snow as the enemy,’ Meredith said. ‘Why can’t they let it alone? Let it be white for at least a day. People in London are ridiculous.’
Neither of them said a word about Welsh snow and how they missed it – the cleanness and taste of it. How, when it snowed in Wales you couldn’t hear the birds, as if they too were in awe. In London buses still rumbled and doors slammed, agitated voices rang out. In the country when it snowed, the world fell silent.
‘How’s college?’
Snow Sisters Page 28