The Girl from Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  Dad would plait straw men for Frank and Stephen, both his sons. The warm light of the stable, the red, large hands moving with intricate precision, the shape of a person slowly emerging from twists of disparate strands.

  Stephen, his half brother. Frank loved him with a younger brother’s passion. The tooth Stephen lost in a fight about a girl in a pub, long before the war. It made him more handsome, not less. Stephen, who, being older, always remembered to tell Frank about the things he had learned through four years’ advantage (about girls, mainly, that was that).

  They made a family, but a ghost was always in their midst. The other, hidden brother, never seen, not spoken of. Somewhere, a strange boy with Chloe’s eyes—which are also Frank’s eyes—with the same coal-black hair. It’s like theft, somehow. Or like a knotted handkerchief, a thing undone.

  Lottie asks, “You ever wonder where he is?”

  Sometimes in dreams, Frank runs after his hidden brother, arms outstretched for capture. They dart and duck, identical faces colored high with exertion, with pleasure. At the end, Frank seizes him, and they melt into one another like toffee: black hair, white limbs, blue eyes.

  “No,” Frank says. “Stephen was my brother.” Stephen, whose skull was shattered by a bullet at Cambrai. “Anyhow.” The hidden brother is most likely cold in the ground. Lottie looks away. She knows. Everyone is dead.

  In the distance, over the green summer lawn, through the wire, something stands white and still. Lottie looks at the girl, says, “D’you know why she’s like that?”

  “Well, she’s…” Frank shies, curious and coy, from the word.

  Lottie shakes her head. “They cut out little bits at a time. Did it too often.”

  The white girl stands apart, patient, black eyes hooded. Her face is brief, a slip of paper beneath the heavily bandaged head. Something travels through Frank’s nethers, light and cold.

  “Bits of,” says Frank.

  Lottie bites her knuckle. She looks at him with sympathy and taps her head once, lightly. “Through the skull, or the nose. The biter. She was a handful, in the beginning. I think that’s why they went at her so many times. But it won’t be long now. She can’t eat. She breathes and all that. But she’s gone. We don’t even use her name anymore. We don’t, when they go like that. Sounds bad, doesn’t it? But, I don’t know… It’d be like pretending they didn’t do it. Making out like she’s alive. You don’t want to know what it’s like over there. I declare, I could spit.” Lottie rubs her glowing face with a small hand. “Sometimes,” she says, “I think, well, she’s all right. She doesn’t know anything about it anymore. And there are so many things to feel awful about. D’you know, it’s me I’m sorry for. I want to dance in nightclubs. I want to eat grapes on a lido and wear proper stockings and I don’t know.” Lottie stops abruptly and stares at Frank. “I’m a proper monster, I’m sure.” She breathes quickly, hands folded together as if for church. Her eyelashes are thick and lustrous in the yellow light.

  He touches Lottie’s cheek. They look at one another, intent, as if examining for flaws.

  “I’ve a good mind to,” says Frank.

  “Go on then,” she says.

  • • •

  Later, when the sun is cooling on the grass, Lottie says, “That girl who came to see you.”

  “Madge,” Frank says. “She told me it was no good.”

  “Do you mind?”

  Frank is not sure. He doesn’t ask himself this sort of question. He fears he would never stop.

  Lottie yawns and says, “What’ll you do? Now.”

  After a while, he says, as if practicing, “My dad was a cabby. I know horses. I can run a motorcar. I suppose there are still motorcars and horses.”

  “I suppose.” Lottie touches his hand where it rests on her shoulder. As she does, the light goes. Pain, which visits him so rarely now, lunges through his leg. It races across his flesh with wicked appetite. It rolls into his bones and swills around.

  He presses an arm into his wet eyes. The afternoon is gone as if it had never been. What he speaks aloud then, he doesn’t know, but he must have said something, because when he surfaces again, Lottie is saying, “It doesn’t matter. Everything’s broken up and in bits. All the old ways. So you can take those bits and do what you want with them. Do you see?”

  Her voice runs over him, and her hands rest light and urgent on his chest. Everything about her, her scent, clings to him like perspiration. He feels everything. He wanted to give her something, but it’s too much.

  Frank says, “I shan’t be driving motor cars or riding horses, shall I?” He puts her from him. “Don’t,” he says.

  “Suit yourself,” Lottie says. He feels her leave his side, feels the slight movement of air.

  • • •

  Annie brings him a pillow. She proffers it vaguely. “Leaving us tomorrow,” she suggests.

  “Yes,” Frank says. On the other side of the ward, Lottie is laughing at something. Her hand covers her mouth. She’s far away, low lit. Her eyes move over him easily. They haven’t spoken since that day. Annie brings him things now and tends his new, healed flesh. Her touch is always tentative, as if she can’t quite credit his existence.

  “Where will you be going, then?” asks Annie. She holds the covered bedpan with absent grace.

  “Bromley,” Frank says. “To my uncle. He has a garage.” As he speaks, Annie’s eyes wander. She’s tired. Her question was a courtesy that she cannot now sustain. Or perhaps nurses just know lies when they hear them.

  The golden lamps are dimmed one by one, and the shuffling of men recedes into sleep. There is the usual crying out, of those whose fear catches them unawares before they settle. Every evening, they are surprised. Their memories of mud and blood and bared teeth, which the day has held at bay. Frank stares at the ceiling, willing everything to be white. Where will he go, when he leaves Earlswood? He thinks of ditches and newspaper and mossy bones. The night moves on.

  At length, Frank sits up. He leans from the bed and takes his leg from where it rests on the cabinet. Buckles, the now familiar melding of flesh and leather. He takes his uniform from its neatly folded place in the drawer. There’s almost nothing else; everything was taken at Dieppe. He dresses with care and ceremony, slow with the buttons. He smooths his shirt under his jacket, draws the trousers over his stiff, unfeeling leg. He looks at his few things that are left. Not much of a life.

  The final thing sits cold and heavy at the back of the cabinet, wrapped in oilcloth. Frank puts it in his pocket. He makes his way between the beds, out of the ward, and down the bilious green corridor. No one is there. Shouldn’t there be someone?

  The door to the garden is locked and bolted, of course, but only on the inside. No one is guarding against those who wish to get out. The night is warm, still, scented with smoke. A bonfire smolders somewhere.

  The tree spreads darker shadows across the dark. Under its branches, the grass is damp and riddled with roots, lumpy like objections. Frank tries to sit. His stiff, unreal leg skids, frightening. He leans against the trunk and shakes. Memory comes in sharp bursts, unbidden.

  Frank thinks of the boy he saw caught in the propeller at Verdun. He can’t recall his name. The boy turned to Frank, grinned, showed the gap in his teeth, and shouted, Look at that. Thunder later, I shouldn’t wonder. The sky behind him was like steel. And then his arm was gone, then half his head.

  There was a man who came out of the dark, one night, to give him a cup of tea. Frank couldn’t take it for the shaking. The man took his hand in his. They stood, rifles slung over shoulders, hands clasped in the quiet dark. Until the man closed Frank’s fist about the cooling tin mug and went.

  Frank thinks of Stephen, who before that had been the last boy to hold Frank’s hand and give him comfort. The weight of his arm about Frank’s shoulder. His rough tobacco scent. And the other. Perhaps in th
e gray waste of death, Frank will find both his brothers.

  The sliding on Frank’s face is hot. His hands dig into themselves. Moonlight shivers through the tree. Night flowers, honeysuckle, old earth. Burning leaves. Frank thinks of all the old things in the ground, dead and long-ago buried and forgotten. He thinks of all the new things that uncurl, green and hopeful, each day. He thinks of rocky islands, where there are only birds and the sea. He imagines a great hole at the center of the earth, which spews things out for a moment—houses and lives and string and lit windows and beer and red dresses and words from books—and then sucks them back in again like a whirlpool, like a drain. Everything, he thinks, will go back down that hole. And what’s at the bottom? There used to be reasons for things.

  He takes the revolver from his pocket and opens his mouth. It tastes of oil and shot. The click is shocking, rattles his skull. Frank screws his eyes tightly closed. Little lights dance against his eyelids.

  The blow comes through the dark like the wing of a bird. It glances off Frank’s brow, and he staggers. The sky and the tree and the grass revolve.

  A white hand, white fluttering linen. The length of fence post shines in her hand, furry with earth where it was pulled from the ground. Her teeth are yellow like the smile of the moon. Her head is free of bandages, and without them, she is suddenly sharp, alive, the shape of her skull tender beneath fine new hair. The scars stand up like valley rims in the moonlight. The raw wound where her shoulder bleeds, syrup dark on her white skin. Her face is a mask. Her blank eyes have no center. The eyes expand, grow, and take up her face. They swell, spread into the air, take in everything until the world is made of one mad eye. How did you get over, he tries to ask, get out?

  The girl swings the post high above her head.

  Frank has time to think a few things before the second blow falls. One of them is Not ready at all, am I, actually? Not yet.

  The eye glistens. Something whistles. Everything droops and cants, is melting pitch.

  • • •

  Lottie finds Frank in the garden, sprawled facedown. He’s naked as a baby. His service revolver rests under his loose palm, silvered with rain.

  When Lottie turns him over, he wakes, spits, coughs. The hummock on his head sends out pulses of delicate purple, of black. Blood trickles down his face, a line drawn by a hot pin. He feels rotten.

  He holds Lottie close. She lets him. The shape of her is fleshly. “Shhh,” Lottie says, her gaze wide and dark as a deer’s. “Thought you’d done it,” she says. “Thought it was all up with you. We’ve been looking… I was beside myself. Such a commotion. The storm—”

  “Storm?” asks Frank.

  “Look,” says Lottie.

  The tree above them is stripped of most of its leaves. Branches hang raw and broken. Around, the grass is littered with the debris like the aftermath of a battle. The lawn is laced with pools of rainwater, gleaming. The ground beneath Frank’s shivering body is sodden, mired.

  “And,” says Lottie, “the biter—”

  “She took my clothes,” says Frank. Rage drops over him like a hot cloth.

  Lottie looks at him, careful. “She was gone this morning,” she says. “Room locked, bed empty, windows barred. She’d vanished, like in a penny dreadful.”

  Frank says, “I know. With my uniform. Clocked me over the head.”

  “Well,” says Lottie, uncertain, “no, she’d died.”

  Frank stares. “No,” he says. “Let me…”

  “We couldn’t see her anywhere. Or see how she’d got out. Gave us all the chills. But then I looked under the bed,” Lottie says, quickly now, “and she was there. With her head all bare. It was pretty bad. Her skull through her hair. All those scars.” Lottie starts to cry. “Crawled under her bed, curled up like a cat, and died. Perhaps she was afraid of the thunder. I think I was fond of her after all. And oh, those beds are bolted to the wall, you know. It was a business getting her out from under. And then—” Lottie stops, draws breath. Overhead, the clouds are breaking up, pierced by blue. Weak sun on her face. “When you weren’t in your bed either, I was that upset, I had the oddest thoughts. I thought”—she pauses as laughter struggles out of her, high—“they’ve only gone and run away together. I knew she was dead. I’d seen her, dead as anything. But my first thought—both of you gone from your beds, like an elopement…”

  Frank grips Lottie’s arms through the sleeves. He squints up at her, a vast blunt shape against the brightening sky. He wants to tell, to make her see the great mad eye, the yellow moon grin, the biter. He starts to say how it happened. But the words lollop and scatter before they meet his tongue. His head sings with canaries. And he isn’t sure, any longer, what has passed. There seems to have been a bargain made, somewhere, in which he’s come out best.

  Lottie blows her nose and grasps Frank’s hand, intent. “They wanted to bury her in the yard around the back,” she says. “Where they put the ones with no people. But I wouldn’t have it. I was sorry I stood by all those years. D’you hear? That I let them do it. She was no more than a baby. All she talked about was home. When she could still speak.

  “We were quick. Didn’t know when they’d come for her… We packed her up. Me and some of the other girls. Those who minded, like I did. It’s little enough we could do, goodness knows. We were in a state. Where to send her? There’s a man who wrote to her. They would never give her the letters.

  “Corpse, pauper fare, is two shillings and sixpence. Us girls paid it between us. I hope we did right. Ever packed a coffin tight for the train? It’s a business. I put the last letter in with her. So she has one at least.” Lottie weeps.

  Everything is too near, pressing on Frank’s skin. The wreckage of the garden, mournful. The battered crimson heads of poppies, scattering the ground. The crack of a broken branch swinging in the wind. How did things get so sharp? The scent of wet earth, of green, is overpowering. The ringing of glass from somewhere, which is the milk cart arriving; late, strident, unnecessary. Most of all, the itch of his leg where the thigh fits into the smooth prosthesis. The bluish, clumsy handwriting of the scarring, then leather and steel. He’s a man, and then he becomes something else entirely at the knee. For the first time, it occurs to Frank that this might, eventually, become something he rarely thinks of. In the same moment, it comes to him that the war is really over.

  Frank asks, “What was her name?”

  “Iris,” Lottie says. “Iris and something foreign. Enough for you?”

  Frank breathes. The milk cart moves down the road with a clatter. It’s enough. “Let’s go in,” Frank says. Then, “I’m not decent.”

  “Seen a deal worse,” says Lottie. She pulls, and he pushes and wavers to his feet. As they go, the wire fence gleams in the coming sun. It will be hot again this afternoon. At one end, the mesh sags, slack and shining. A ragged hole gapes in the ground where a fence post is missing.

  IRIS

  1919

  Burn it, Papa whispers. My dreams are peopled with the dead.

  Coughing, awake. Smoke billows, acrid and bad. Before the fire in the hall. Rawblood’s like a shell around me. Outside, the moor is quiet. Upstairs, everywhere, wind whistles down the halls, through the passages, raising dust sheets, rattling the swollen doors. Rawblood has its own internal weather now.

  Must keep the fire going. I am cold, very cold. I break old packing cases open and snap the legs off white-veiled furniture. This was the only hearth whose chimney was not hopelessly blocked. The flames dance, pirouette with the wind. They have a greenish tinge. Something to do with the peat. This affected me more than the rest. I knew when I saw the pale green flames leaping in the deep hearth that I was home.

  She won’t show herself. I have raged through the house. I have torn boards from their moorings. I have clawed holes in the plaster. I have crawled through the cellars like a grub. I climbed into the velvety, suffocat
ing chimney—it spat me out, guffawing soot. Maybe she’s gone. Maybe she’s dead like so many others these last years. Can ghosts die?

  The dreams are very bad now. I dread sleep. I cannot bear to look through her eyes. What she does. The things she feels. They are bleeding into everything, spilling into my wakeful hours. She’s here all right. I feel her. I taste her in the air. She lies all over like a skin. She lingers in the air like perfume. Rawblood breathes her like a lung. This house. My house. It is a part of me, like a limb or an eye. But something has poisoned it. It is suffering and sick.

  I cannot go into some rooms. In the study, there is a hanged man. He sways, creaking, from the beam. His blackened face, his toes pointed gracefully at the floor.

  • • •

  Fire. Black. Fire. I start awake. Mustn’t sleep.

  The image that swims in my mind’s eye is the skeleton. The bones laid out on the mahogany table. The ivoried yellow of them, the perfect order, so quickly reduced to piles of nameless bone. All those years ago.

  I feel a bit like that skeleton these days. All of me spread out and unreal, spiraling on the eddies of dust up into the distant heights and reaches of the house. It is so cold. Mustn’t sleep.

  • • •

  I’m in the hall outside my old room. The narrow doorway before me, black, framed with moonlight. In the shadow, there stands something thin and angular and white against the dark.

  So this is where you are, I say. I’m disappointed, somehow. It’s too simple. The face is hidden in shadow, but the pale skull gleams through the shorn hair. She turns her head a little. A glimpse of bone-white planes and dark sockets. Something moves for a moment, in the pits of her eyes.

  I’ve seen you before, I say. You were in the cave all those years ago. You did not get me then, and you will not do it now.

  She shudders. Her balding, scabbed head dips and bobs. Moonlight crawls across it, and somewhere in the shadows, her mouth moves like worms in the earth. No words come. Desire rolls through the air, cold on her breath. It is old wanting, implacable as stone. Her will like the depths of a cave. The skin on my face and arms puckers and contracts. My flesh slides softly on me, gathers in chilly pools at my neck and wrists.