In Search of the Blue Tiger

by Robert Power

  I hear a whimper, but not from within the flames. It is Stigir, awaiting his cue. I pat my knee and he scurries over to me, arcing past the bonfire, skidding to a panting halt between my feet.

  We stand and watch as Carp reaches into the pocket of her smock. The flames light up the sharp edge of the fishmonger’s knife, the blade filed and honed to a razor-edged sliver. She stands over the altar, the flames all but parting in her wake. She lunges forward and then retraces her steps, the spilt blood of her father, the sacrifice, spitting and bubbling in the fire, dripping a trail across the stage.

  The fire is taking hold. The light of God grows and bellows; it heats our faces. The altar is a blazing ball, the wood and blood, flesh and rope, burning to an orange glow. One flame jumps an arc into the air, catching the old velvet curtain hanging above the stage.

  I feel a gust of wind. I look over my shoulder to see Perch and Carp standing in the open doorway. The two smile a joined-up smile. They hold the pose momentarily, then turn and walk away, back down the gravel path to the rickety gate. I feel Stigir shivering between my legs. The fire is hot, but he shakes and shivers, looking up at me for a sign. It, too, is time for us to leave.

  The curtains fall in a ball of flame, engulfing the remnants of the altar. I think of the baby in the coach-house, how helpless she must have been, no one to turn to, no one to comfort her and let her know that even in the depths of the fire there is purity, there is hope of salvation.

  The phone stays silent. He has not arrived and he has not called. Mrs April stands in the doorway of the sitting room, staring at the telephone, willing it to ring. Not even the hurly-burly and ding-a-ling-ling of the fire engines echoing from the other end of town tempt her to leave her house, to abandon her vigil. She twirls the long necklace around her fingers and sucks at the tiny pearls. She holds one between her teeth, resisting the impulse to bite through it. To break the thread and release the beads, to see them jump and leap to freedom. She turns her head and looks in the hallway mirror. The face looking back is forlorn and unloved. The calm green of her dress belies the sadness of its wearer. She sees herself alone. Alone in this large house; waiting to be rejected, but waiting in anticipation nonetheless.

  Maybe Father and Mother and the Great Aunt sacrificed the baby. They were always saying how bad everything was. Maybe this would change if they killed the baby girl for their demon Gods.

  It is later in the afternoon, long after the bells of the fire engines and police cars have fallen silent. Stigir and me have been in the woods, watching from a distance. We saw the roof of the old hall catch fire and collapse, the jets of water from the fire hoses twist and curl their way into the flames. The policemen came and went and came back again. The klaxons and bells signalling their arrival and departure. I saw Mrs Fishcutter and another woman. I think it was Sister Olga, but I couldn’t be sure, standing and staring at the smoking remains. Mrs Fishcutter, a handkerchief to her face, was being supported by her friend as she stood looking at the scene. We were too far away to see her expression, but at one point she slumped to one side and had to be led away to a bench near the gate. Groups of onlookers, all townspeople, had gathered to witness the spectacle. But the fire was short-lived. The wooden building, all but destroyed, smouldering, charred and hissing, and the crowds petered away.

  Now, as the dark begins to stretch across the town, we stand outside the house of Mrs April. Stigir and I, on the pavement, under the canopy of a huge horse-chestnut tree. The curtains are drawn, but I know she is inside. I must tell her what has happened. Before she hears the news from someone else who understands nothing of a kite in the air, a rook on the rampage, the neck of a swan.

  So we knock on her door. Something is hurried on the other side. The movement from the hallway, the sudden twist of the latch. The door is pulled open. Mrs April looks startled, surprised.

  ‘Oh, Oscar, it’s you … come in, come in. And Stigir,’ she says, composing herself.

  I notice the lipstick. It is bright red. So is the varnish on her fingernails. But she beckons us into the house. It is warm and inviting. Safe after the outside.

  She follows me and Stigir into the the parlour. But she is looking strangely at me.

  ‘Oscar, what on earth has happened to you?’ she asks.

  I look down at my clothes. I am coated in mud. I catch my face in the mirror. It is smeared with smoke and tears, tears I don’t remember crying. Stigir lies down by the fire and begins to sleep. Mr April smiles at me from the picture on the sideboard. I know he knows I’ve done right. I fancy he winks at me, and the big battleship behind him hoots a ‘well done’.

  ‘We were in the play,’ I say, staring down at my shoes. One lace is undone. ‘There was God, and I was Abraham, and Stigir was the ram in the burning bush. And I knew before any of them told me it would turn out different. That I would never give Stigir his cue.’

  Mrs April takes me by the hand. Gently, she guides me, bids me to sit on the sofa.

  ‘Now sit down and explain to me what happened.’

  Her voice is so kind, like it always is. Like when she asked me to take cake with her and when she quizzed me about the colours of tigers.

  ‘What play, Oscar? What happened in the play?’

  What is in the room? What is it Stigir sees, as he lifts his head from the rug by the fire, that I sense as Mrs April squeezes my muddy hand. Is it the baby? Is it Blue Monkey carrying the baby in his arms, brushing past me, between me and the photo of the dead sailor husband?

  I try to explain to Mrs April. To tell her what I know of love, of animals that are people and how people become animals and how demons roam where you least expect them. How Father told me it was for love that things happened the way they happened. Of the kiss in the alleyway, of Perch and of Carp, the fire in the coach-house, the speckled scarf and the flames embracing the altar. I cry tears now as I tell her. And the babe nestling in the arms of Blue Monkey cries for her mother. The babe, who has been so alone and lost all these years, cries and cries for her mother.

  Mr April reaches out from the photo on the sideboard. He reaches to me, reaches for my heart from the depths of the ocean, where the seagrasses caress his face like the loving touch of his young bride.

  I sob for all the nights I heard the sounds and all the stolen hours of the small boy alone in the empty dark. Mrs April holds me close and tight and rocks me to and fro in her arms. The smell of the scent of her: a healing balm. She asks me no questions, but something tells me she knows something of what has happened. And something tells me she will understand and will love me through it all. For I am but a small, crying child, tripping and tumbling in this terrifying business of meeting life.

  ‘Lie down and sleep, little boy, my little Oscar,’ says Mrs April, as she settles me on the sofa. She strokes my hair, as dirty and matted as it is. She hums me a lullaby. Something in the softness of her singing, the coolness of her hand on my brow, lulls me into deep velvety sleep.

  NINETEEN

  INNOCENCE UNTIL FOUND GUILTY

  ‘’Twas but a dream; but had I been there really alone; my desperate fears, in love, had seen mine execution.’ Herrick

  Down on the quayside it’s colder than the ice in the crates. The screams of the seagulls are muffled by the bitter early morning wind. They sweep by in convoys, picking fish scales and slivers of flesh from the paving stones and the steps leading down to the boats.

  On the air, every word freezes like frosted glass. You can see it from the mouths of each and every fish-packer. Nouns and verbs crystallise as they slip off the tongue, slide from the lips, then splinter and fall to the ground. A passing bird may catch one in its beak, mistaking it for a morsel, and take it high above the waves and the outhouses, the cranes and the fishing boats bobbing in the harbour. A ‘fool’ or a ‘damn’, a ‘silk stocking’ or a ‘cottage pie’, is let slip from the beak of a bird as it gulps in the air and peels away to make another assault, a downward spiral in search of scraps.

 
‘And what,’ says Mrs Giblet under her breath, where no seabirds roam, holding onto words for all they are worth, ‘do you make of all this talk of sacrifice and ropes and children with flaming torches?’

  She says all this to Muriel Innard. Neither woman looks up from the job in hand. The cold wet fish slipping and sliding in their grips. To be scaled and filleted and then tossed in a single movement to the coffins by their benches, nestled in ice, freshly dead eyes staring up to the stars above.

  ‘Daughters sacrificing a father, have you ever heard of such a thing?’ says the second woman, her bloated fingers slimy with the blood and sheen of her work. ‘While we women sacrifice everything for our children and when they’ve gone and done with us we’re left here to skin the fish for their dinners. Sacrificing the fingers of our hands so they can be fed.’

  ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ the first woman says. ‘It’s not natural. A child spilling her father’s blood.’

  ‘The strangest of religions,’ says the second woman, bracing herself against the cold icy blasts of the fish sheds, who each Sunday prays to angels and virgins to ward off the fires of hell.

  At that moment, a tern, seeing the sparkling ice-droplets caught in the morning moon, swoops and spears them on the wing. Soaring high away to her nest on the South Bay cliffs, the tern feeds her hungry chicks on ‘sacrifice’ and ‘daughters’. In the nest that night her babies sleep sound and contented, a sea of words swirling above their heads, peppering their dreams.

  They look at me through the little spy-hole in the cell door. First one eye, then another. Some muffled conversation in the corridor, then another eye appears. I don’t have to look at them to know they are looking at me. The guard says it is only for a short while that I will be held here. Just for the time of the trial. I even heard one say, ‘It’s for his own protection.’ But that’s fine by me. I can hear the flap sliding back and forth. These adults don’t know what to make of me. They think I should be frightened, should need to be looked after and comforted. But all the while I lie on this little bed like a prince in a castle. How can they know how safe I feel here? Here, in my priest-hole.

  I first found out about priest-holes at school. It was during a wet lunchtime when I was in the library, looking at a book about medieval castles. On one page was a plan showing the thickness of the castle walls, describing how secret passages often ran through them. Sometimes there were priest-holes, tiny rooms built into the walls, so priests could hide if the castle came under attack. For nights after, I imagined myself to be the priest hearing the marauding Vikings battering the walls of the castle. The huge fortified door would splinter and, just as they rounded the corner to plunder and massacre, the screams of their bloodlust curdling the air, I would climb into the priest-hole, pulling the hidden door closed. They would never know I was there, though I could hear them rumbling past like an avalanche.

  The spy-hole flaps open. Another eye stares into my sanctuary, amazed at the small boy who rests so peacefully in the little room in the attic of the town’s only courthouse.

  Maybe Armageddon will be late and I’ll get old and die before it happens. So then, if Jehovah is not pleased with my sacrifice of Mr Fishcutter, I’ll get a second chance. I hope I will know what I know this time next time.

  These are some of the things I will do differently.

  I will run away to sea to be a cabin-boy, if I get a yearning, and take my dog with me.

  I shall ask Great Aunt where she was when the baby died and I’ll cuddle the baby when she’s resurrected for her second chance.

  Here are some of the questions I want to ask Jesus when he comes back to look after us all.

  Will everyone come back at the same age they died?

  If they are very old will they be in good health?

  If we have 1000 years to show Jesus we are good, when do we stop growing old and at what age are we grown up?

  When the Devil is unleashed at the end of the 1000-year reign of Jesus will there be animals and demons and other sorts of things to confuse and test us?

  The trial is the biggest event to hit the town since the tidal wave of fifty-nine. Everyone has a view, no conversation ends without speculation and hearsay.

  ‘I knew that family would cause trouble,’ says Mrs Butcherhook to Miss Spinster on the way to market, tying the knot of her headscarf tight against the bitter northerly wind. ‘What with their rat-a-tat on the door and “Here’s the good news of the new order.” Fornication and murder, that’s what that’s all amounted to. Fornication and murder.’

  Big black clouds roll in from the sea like a massive carpet being unfurled for a State occasion. Miss Spinster shivers and shudders, her tiny body recoiling against the onslaught of weather and words.

  ‘Who would have thought it of Mrs April?’ says Mr Clerk in the snug warmth of the Town Hall. He sips his eleven o’clock tea and nibbles on a flapjack as he spies Miss Spinster and Mrs Butcherhook scurrying past on the opposite side of the street.

  ‘Not me,’ replies Miss Shorthand, filing a nail during her break from filing correspondence. ‘Only last week I was standing next to her at the Donkey Derby. And, Mr Clerk, do you know what she was talking to me about?’

  ‘No, I do not,’ answers Mr Clerk, the cake crumbs clinging to his lips as he speaks.

  ‘Trellising. She was telling me how the strong, unseasonal winds, that’s what she called them, “unseasonal winds”, were causing mayhem in the garden. She said the winds were playing havoc with the new trellising she’d put up near to her conservatory.’

  Mr Clerk stares out of the window, conjuring up the scene at the Donkey Derby. In his mind’s eye he sees all the children of the town, innocent as the sands, waiting on the beach for their turn to take part in the races. The doughnut sellers and tombola stalls lining the course. And there, amongst the excited cheering crowds, Mrs April, the fornicator, about to incite murder.

  ‘Unseasonal winds,’ ponders the Town Hall official, ‘now there’s an interesting turn of expression.’

  Behind closed doors, for she has been asked to take leave from library duties, sits Mrs April. The black clouds covering the town darken the room. She contemplates lighting a candle, but it is late morning and she would rather sit in semi-dark for a while than confuse the flow of the day. Anyway, it is her experience that everything passes and soon enough it will brighten up. In her hand she holds the photo of her husband. As in his brief life, he smiles up at her, holding her in his gaze.

  ‘Dear, fine man,’ she sighs gently to herself. ‘What a veritable pickle I’ve gotten myself into here.’

  His smile flickers. She smiles back at him.

  ‘Who would have thought it,’ she whispers, holding the photo close to her cheek, ‘murder and intrigue.’

  She thinks of the last time Oscar sat beside her, his face and clothes smeared with mud. The tears streaking his cheeks, his small frail body shaking and shivering with the cold and fear of it all. He had told her what happened in the hall. The play, the fire, the sacrifice. As he cried he spoke of blood on the wall of his mother’s bedroom, the baby burnt in the flames of the coach-house, animals and spectres stalking the night, and the resurrection of sorrowful children and long-dead mothers.

  In the face of all the shock, the intense enormity of it all, all she could do was to hold him close to her, to protect him from the ferociousness of the world. So she did, rocking him back and forward until he slipped deep into sleep. The clock on the mantlepiece ticked and tocked away the seconds, the minutes, the hours. At some point she eased him onto the sofa, covering him with a blanket.

  She had sat waiting for morning to arrive. She thought of Mr Fishcutter and the strange, sudden end of the affair. She had known for some time the end was likely, although a part of her, the part not wanting to be lonely, denied it, hoping it could be different. But a certain predictable pattern had been unfolding for some weeks. His quiet moods. His reticence to commit to the next meeting. The sense of his guilt pervad
ing their recent times together. She had seen it all before in her relationships with other married men. She, believing in choice, felt no sense of wrongdoing or shame. But they, once the blindness of passion receded, always slipped into a malaise of conflict and confusion. Yet none before had ended like this. In a burst of flames, uncontrollable and all-consuming, just like the passion that had ignited this whole trail of events. Poor dear Mr Fishcutter, thought Mrs April as the long night receded, combusted in the blue-flamed chemistry of passion, guilt and sacrifice.

  As the dawn chorus, innocently, obliviously, took up its song, Mrs April picked up the phone, ran her fingers along the scar on the table leg and dialled the police.

  TWENTY

  OSCAR BECOMES A CRIME REPORTER

  ‘Conspiracies no sooner should be formed than executed.’ Addison

  The public gallery at the Crown Court is full, save for two empty seats. No one sits next to Mrs April, but all eyes, ears and lips are on her as she takes her place.

  ‘The brazenness of her,’ whispers one, cupping the ear of her neighbour.

  ‘A real woman in black,’ scythes another.

  The judge enters the court, garbed in purple robes, fringed with the fur of a black bear. He holds in his hand a golden orb, as befitting his status, the severity of his office and the gravity of the crime before him. He is tall and old, with a face lined with each sentence he has passed, eyes dulled by the call to execution and the sight of the gallows. The clerk stands before the bench. He opens a huge ledger book, places a pair of wire-rimmed glasses on the tip of a tiny nose and reads from the handwritten entry of the last page.

  ‘This court is convened to deliberate on the untimely and unlawful killing of Mr Fishcutter, late of the parish of St Anthony. Let all those present give witness to the fairness and impartiality of these proceedings, in accordance with the laws of this just land.’