The Girl from Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  With a great crack, everything goes quiet and radiant orange. The silence is shocking. Before me is an orange silken ribbon, rippling, stretching into the distance, which will lead me—where? For a moment, tiny in my ear, is Alonso’s voice. He is weeping, calling for me. He is far away. I try to cling to the sound, to him. But the way ahead is smooth and easy and delightful. He fades. I flow. I follow the orange ribbon like a road. I go on and on, and it is cool to my bare feet.

  WAYS OF ESCAPE

  1919

  Frank is the only one to wake.

  He starts up into soft light. The pre-op tent is amber, shadowed, the air sad and sulfurous. Breath and flesh. No one stirs. They lie in rows, neatly bandaged. For once, they are all asleep. Through the canvas wall, the nauseous grinding of the generator.

  Between the rows of cots drifts a shape like a black candle flame. The figure stops by each sleeping man and bends, as if to kiss or drink. His fingers come away gleaming: cigarette cases, coins. Frank watches. The thief comes toward him, organized and graceful.

  When the man touches him, Frank does nothing. He looks into the thief’s face, what he can see of it. A gray scarf covers the mouth and nose. Brown eyes hold his own. They narrow, creasing at the edges, warm. It’s as if the thief is smiling beneath his mask. But it could be disapproval.

  The fingers move like anemones inside Frank’s jacket. They light on Frank’s father’s watch, his tobacco. They curl around the solitary coins in his pockets, the bundle of letters near his heart. They linger on the handwritten label that is sewn to his breast pocket, listing his injuries. The fingers stroke it.

  “I need it,” Frank says.

  The thief hums tunefully. The label slips its moorings, vanishes into his hand.

  “Leave it,” Frank says, but there’s no one there. The tent flap stirs in the breeze, lets in the night.

  Far out in the dark French fields, there comes a long, high note. It’s most likely a dog, but for a moment, it sounds like music.

  • • •

  Sister wakes him. “Time,” she says. “Come, you.” Her hands are hard and careful. She’s a farmer’s daughter.

  The man lying next to Frank shudders. A broken silver chain dangles in his bandaged hands. Eyes the color of fire peep through gummed-up lids. He wails. He makes inexplicable sounds like water going through a cistern.

  “Private Trevor,” says Sister. “That’s not a song. As far as I know, songs have words. Goodness.”

  Private Trevor’s ululations come higher and higher until they fade. Then he says in a strong Welsh voice, “Took my wedding ring, the shit.” The chain swings.

  Sister says, “Everyone was had. Such a thing. Who would do it to the wounded?” She is cool, offended—by the language, by the theft, or both.

  “My label’s gone,” Frank says. He should say, now, that he saw the thief. But he doesn’t. All his attention is taken up with what’s shortly going to happen to him. He’s shaking.

  Sister’s lip twitches, her eye flickers toward his leg, and Frank is ashamed of his stinking flesh.

  “You’re from London, Private Coulson,” Sister says.

  “London,” Frank says.

  “There you are then,” she says. “Just think. Such a quick thing, and then you’re home. Back to London. With a nice girl waiting, most likely.” Frank thinks of Madge. Her letters resting somewhere near the thief’s heart.

  They come with stretchers. Frank is carried, swaying. He stares up into the blue morning. When canvas closes once more over his head, he thinks he’ll die.

  This tent is not like the other tent. This tent has many flat surfaces and edges. It smells of hot metal and sawing and blood.

  The doctor says to Frank, “Be over before you know it, bombardier.”

  The doctor’s eyes are black underneath them, as if he’s been in a punch-up. He wears a mask over his mouth.

  Flat on the table, Frank breathes ether and swims. The doctor looms over him, a tired pink and yellow, eyes narrow. It looks like he’s smiling behind his mask. Or it’s exhaustion.

  As the dark closes over, Frank realizes that someone is beside him. It’s someone he knew long ago, or maybe someone he doesn’t know yet. He feels the warm track of their fingers as they trail across his cheek. When he licks his lips, he can taste their tears.

  • • •

  In England, Frank is taken to a madhouse. Earlswood Asylum was built for lunatic women, a nurse tells him. They are sealed tight in the west part of the building. They shan’t bother him. The nurse’s name is Lottie. She has smooth brown hair and a surprised expression. When she leans over to tuck in the sheets, her white bosom rests gently on his arm. The doctors and nurses work on both sides of Earlswood. These are the times. Everyone must do their part. “It’s a pain,” Lottie says as she tucks, binding him tight to the uneven mattress. Frank is left alone in a room of iron beds and men. Days go by.

  • • •

  They wheel him out into the garden. He blinks in the light. The grass is green and young. When he reaches down, the silky blades rise to his hand, to his caress. The garden has flower beds. There are marigolds. Geraniums. Young trees are planted across the sward in hopeful, shivering groves.

  A long chain-link fence cuts the garden in half. Beyond the fence, the earth is bare in patches, as if the grass has been torn up by its roots. The ground is gray and naked. One tree remains in the corner, its lower branches broken, twisted. A scar cuts across its trunk, deep and troubling. A discarded shoe lies in a puddle. This is where the lunatic women go.

  Frank sits in his bath chair in the sunshine amid the flower beds. Presently, the women come out. They are clothed in tubes of gray fabric. They stand, trembling. They stare. They are like underground things released into the light.

  Frank sees Lottie through the fence. She is stern, unlike herself.

  A breathless blond woman ambles over. She looks at Frank long and hard through the wire. Breath squeezes through her lungs. Then she throws her shift over her head. She hops and shuffles her feet, her headless body long and pale. She presses herself against the fence and then recoils from it elegantly, twirling.

  “Julia,” someone calls.

  Julia dances faster. She dances and throws herself against the wire until they take her away.

  • • •

  For the most part of most days, Frank lies in a cot in the long room with the other men in the other cots. There’s some talk and the wireless sometimes. Sometimes, there are card games. Frank doesn’t talk or play cards. People are too detailed. He prefers the vast white ceiling. His phantom leg sends him frantic. It sings with phantom pain. There is not enough morphia anywhere, for anyone. Sometimes, Lottie sits by him and knits. He’s quiet, she says, so she doesn’t drop stitches.

  On Wednesdays, the women visit. Sometimes, old men come and little boys, not many. The sisters, wives, mothers, cousins come with stockings drawn on their legs and bright lips. Then the men sit up, and everyone smokes and plays cards. They laugh. No one peels back the bedclothes to see what has been lost.

  One Wednesday, Madge comes. She tells Frank she can’t marry him after all. He won’t expect it. There’s silence between them for a time. From other beds, other people’s talk. The summer air is thick with it.

  “I do feel it,” Madge says. “I feel for you, Frank.” Her large eyes are rimmed with wet.

  “Not at my best,” Frank says. Words are worn down to nubs. He says, “Well then.”

  “Your leg?” she asks.

  “No.” It is though. Tendrils of pain curl around his shins. Both of them.

  Madge pats her eyes with a scrap of linen. Her eyelids large, blue-veined, powdered.

  “Daisy’s marrying,” she says. “Fancy.”

  Madge’s sister. Small, thin, with a chin made for digging.

  “Fancy her getting marr
ied before me,” says Madge.

  The pain stirs again in Frank’s missing toes, brushes through his knee, up into his groin where it nests, feathery. “Well,” he says, “needn’t be like that.”

  He first kissed Madge outside Mayrick’s Music Hall. He thinks of slicked-back hair and feet moving, slowly, one two, one two, hands meeting, grainy light, her face. Music and beer in his blood. Her hair. The scent of dusty evening streets. Breathing into each other’s mouths, not daring to move.

  These things are there, but removed, as if seen through gauze.

  “I thought it best to bring them,” Madge says. She means to put it down carefully, but it slips. It lands on the bed with a soft shhh in the blank place where his right leg should be. The paper is thin, curling at the edges. His letters.

  “I don’t have yours,” Frank says. “We were robbed. At Dieppe.” He thinks to tell her about the thief: the gentle hands, the dark eyes, his veiled mouth. Madge folds her handkerchief into neat squares. Her mouth narrows to a fine, dark line. He doesn’t tell her.

  Frank makes to take his letters. Perhaps there’s something of him in them that he can recover. The twine comes apart in his hands. The letters spew over the bed. Over his lap, his leg, and the not-leg. Words. Madge reaches for them with a cross tsk, and her hand grazes the cotton sheet, gentle, as if touching flesh.

  Pain furls and unfurls, floats on surfaces, reaches deep.

  “You’ll come again,” Frank says to Madge. “To see me.”

  Madge doesn’t say yes or no. She narrows her gaze as if affronted. He hopes she’ll come. Once, twice more, if only to prove herself kind.

  • • •

  The sun is hot wax, pouring down his face, his neck, rolling and dripping over his hands, his knee, his absent foot. It seems to Frank that he can hear the blades of grass stroking one another, the deep movement of beetles in the earth. He can smell the wicker of the chair he sits in, the hot tar of the road beyond the high wall, softening in the July heat. A bird whirs and scuffles in the tree behind him. The red of his eyelids.

  Something ploughs through the air by his face, pounds the earth by his ear. Frank starts up. Sun floods his vision.

  Behind the fence, the breathless woman is running. Up the garden, down, up. Her feet tattoo the bare earth. She falls, hitting the ground with a grunt. Her blue eyes are limpid with shock.

  “Julia,” the voice calls, not unkind.

  Julia shakes herself, leaps up, and runs. A silver cord of saliva dangles, flies from her mouth as she goes. Need shines in her face.

  Frank closes his eyes. The warm earth turns.

  He does not immediately recall where or when he is. The air is scented. The lawn stretches empty and living into the dusk. Shadows cluster under the spreading trees. The garden is garlanded, dark. Distant, from the house, comes clanging metal, far voices. He catches the vague scent of suet, which means cooking. White moths flicker in the fading light. The thin twist of a crescent moon.

  Behind the fence, there stands a figure. It is white against the dusk. The skin, the hair seem white, all white. It stares with white eyes. It is as still as though painted on the air.

  Frank’s insides lurch. Fear comes like a bullet past his cheek. He makes to turn, to run, before he remembers: he is in a chair and in a hospital, the fence is not ringed with barbed wire, and he won’t run anywhere, not ever again. The ground heaves up, and he is falling.

  He’s caught by a thin, strong arm. Lottie puffs, comforting in her crisp white. She pushes and maneuvers him back into his safe, enclosing wicker cage where he collapses, full of gratitude. Lottie and he breathe heavily like cattle resting. In the last of the light, her small features are strange, still beneath her cap. Her skin smells clean with Pears soap.

  “Pay her no mind,” Lottie says.

  Behind the fence, the girl is a pale spear. Her white arms hang straight. Her shift flutters about her white ankles. Her face is peaceful beneath the turban of white bandage. Her eyes are not, after all, white, but lashless and closed as if graven on her face.

  Lottie watches the girl, hands tucked into her elbows, knuckles tight.

  “Who?” asks Frank.

  “That’s the biter,” Lottie says.

  The white girl stares inside herself.

  “Her head,” Frank says.

  “She doesn’t bite anymore,” says Lottie. “Supper.”

  • • •

  The next day, Frank watches. Behind the fence, Julia runs. Her feet hammer the earth. She blows like a racehorse and runs, drawn by the invisible, desirable thing. The hot day wears on.

  As the afternoon sinks into evening, the girl is suddenly there behind the wire, a white pillar on the summer green. Frank wheels himself close to the fence. The lines of her face are deep, intent. Ripples pass over soft, closed lids. Something urgent passes within. She’s smaller than expected.

  “All right,” Frank says to her. It’s as good as talking to salt.

  He puts two fingers through the chain-link.

  The white lids shiver. They part. Her eyes are black scrawls on white. As the girl leans in, Frank knows with delicious certainty that she’ll have his fingers off. He feels as if it has already happened, the clamp of her teeth, her mouth closing like a trap on him. He doesn’t move.

  Slowly, she rests her cheek against the wire, against his hand, like an exhausted child.

  Frank turns his face to the sun, and they stay like that for a time.

  • • •

  In the hot days that follow, Frank makes for the fence and sits by it. Sometimes she comes, and sometimes she doesn’t. Frank feels she recognizes him, that there’s friendliness between them somehow. Her eyes are rarely opened. She does not acknowledge him after that first time.

  “I never see her come or go,” he tells Lottie.

  “Well,” Lottie says, “she walks and falls like the rest of us, I assure you.”

  • • •

  The prosthesis is stiff and smells richly of leather. It makes Frank think of harness rooms and shining hide, horses’ eyes, and the scent of the blacksmith. Longing curls up deep in his midriff, sudden and brutal. He is surprised. It is a long time since he has thought of home, of anything but the present moment. The long room grows slippery, won’t stay still. The metal and leather are ungainly, hopeless in his hands.

  “It’s the strap,” says Lottie. “It’s like so.” Her hands are cool, light. They move on him, birds walking on sand. “It’s awkward. You’ll grow accustomed.”

  As they rise, the floor skids and bucks. The leather is tight about his knee, his shin, binding him like steel. He wonders if it should be that tight, but only for a moment, because then he is walking, with Lottie under his shoulder, grim and solid.

  “It’s like being on the sea,” Frank says. He is exhilarated. The windows, the walls, everything sways at an unexpected level. He is man-height once more.

  Lottie hums. “Is it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” Frank says to the top of her head. His smile is painful, like a crack in the ground. “Better.”

  • • •

  The sun falls through the beech tree, dapples the ground. Bark against Frank’s back, warm with the late day. Lottie sits at his feet, eyes on the daisies in her hands. She works steadily, piercing the juicy stalks with the pin. The white-and-yellow heads hang lightly from one another, impaled. Her white cap nestles in the grass. Without it, her head is small and beautiful like a nut. Lottie throws her eyes up at him, then down. Frank feels her attention, her alertness on him like an embrace.

  “My brother went to sea,” Lottie says at last. “He was killed. Sounds so silly, doesn’t it, when everyone was killed, so many. It was well before all this. He drowned off the coast of Gibraltar. In ’06.”

  Frank says nothing. Sometimes, the story is sufficient unto itself. Sometimes
, silence is what’s called for.

  “Stan,” she says. “He brought me oranges from Seville. You see, when Stan came back, the first time, I thought he was my dad. Because that’s who I had been waiting for. My dad. Not a brother. I was four. Met him at the gate.”

  She talks, and Frank leans against the tree. Her words fall around them in the warm air. It’s a short story in some ways. In others, it’s still going on. Lottie is ashamed, and loving, and puzzled by turns. The words she doesn’t say are there too, running through like ribbons. Her smooth brown hair looks warm in the sun, warm like the tree at his back. It seems to Frank then that it’s all part of the same thing: the sun, the tree, her hair, her voice.

  When she has told him what she needed to tell, they are quiet for a time. At last, quite naturally, he lays a hand on the shining wing of her hair. She smiles. “Families,” she says. She holds her hands high. The daisy chain forms a ragged O against the sky.

  Frank feels she has given him something. He’d like to give it back. He tells her about his mother. The aching blue of her eyes, her coal-black hair shot with gray, like veins through ore. Her name, lilting and foreign. Chloe. She tied knots in her handkerchief to remind herself of things. When her mind went, she kept the habit, though she no longer knew what the knots were for. When she died, her drawers were full of lengths of knotted linen. Blue, red, white, yellow. Silk, cotton. A long record, a litany of undone tasks.

  She had been in service when it happened, in a bad, lonely place with a name like murdered flesh. She ran away. She had the child. Frank’s hidden brother.

  Afterward, she went to London. She met Dad. He and his little boy, Stephen. He was grieving his dead wife. They married, and Frank was born. The four of them made a family.