by Robert Power
When I get close she takes my hand between hers. It feels like a small animal being protected. She squeezes it gently.
‘I’m so sorry to have heard about your Father,’ she says softly.
‘It’s okay,’ I say, and it is. ‘Thank you.’
Just then Brother Moses appears, his mop of bright red hair heralding his arrival.
‘You must be the famous Mrs April. I am Brother Moses and we are librarians in arms. This way,’ he says and bows low for us to follow his direction.
In the library, I can see Mrs April is impressed. She runs her hands along the finely embossed spines of the books with relish and admiration.
‘What absolutely beautiful books,’ she says, ‘and a simply perfect room.’
Brother Moses looks pleased.
‘Well, I’ll leave you two together,’ he says. ‘I know Oscar wants to show you what he’s been doing while he’s been here.’
We sit together in a bay window, overlooking the garden where three monks are hoeing the furrows between rows of broccoli and asparagus.
I show her my new scrapbook.
Her eyes brighten as she sees the picture of the Blue Tiger on the front. I feel proud and happy.
‘What a lovely drawing, Oscar. All your own work?’
I nod and smile.
‘And inside, what have you written inside?’
So, with the sounds of hoes slicing the soil and striking stones, I tell her about tigers and gods and time travel and wormholes and the vast mystery of the world growing around me. And I describe my altar. The way shells from Open Bay sit at the feet of the Blue Tiger. How God is everywhere for me to find. How Brother Moses has taught me that Saint Augustine and Buddha can stand happily side by side.
As always she listens as if she’s hearing all this for the first time, never impatient, never mocking; finding pleasure in sharing in my own discovery. I show her my entries on tigers in legend and ritual and read her fragments on shaman and tiger gods, time and time travel.
Brother Moses brings us tea and biscuits and we talk the morning away.
At lunch Mrs April copies me copying Brother Moses. Today’s dinner is baked potato, so we all take just the one. It is already coated in grated cheese and parsley, but I follow Brother Moses’ example of three spears of asparagus. I notice Mrs April does the same and I feel proud to be showing her something.
We sit and eat our food in silence, though Mrs April’s smile says every bit as much as words.
After lunch we take Stigir for a walk outside. There in the strawberry patch Brother Saviour is busy checking the runners.
‘Oscar, Mrs April, it is time,’ he says, seeing us approach, waving the secateurs above his head.
‘Oscar, you can free these offspring from their parents,’ he says enthusiastically. ‘Just cut here,’ he adds, showing me the point at the base of the main plant where I should cut.
I kneel down and carefully cut the runner free from the parent.
‘Now the other end,’ he says, pointing to the fledgling plant.
I make a similar cut at the base of the fresh new strawberry plant, the life-giving runner no longer binding them, its task performed.
Mrs April and Stigir look on. I feel as if I am the novice priest performing an ancient rite.
‘And now for kite flying,’ says Mrs April, holding the folded blue kite aloft, and off we go down the hill and well-trodden path to Open Bay.
‘How much has happened since that autumn day on Boxton Hill, when we first went kite-flying together, we three,’ says Mrs April as the kite jumps on the back of the wind and soars in an upward spiral. Stigir leaps into the air in a vain attempt to catch the kite, already far out of reach.
The wind is wild and unpredictable, swirling in from the open sea, catching the headland, then swooping up and around the cliff-tops.
I do my best to tame the kite as it jerks and gyrates. But the wind is in a mocking mood, dropping and surging at will. Just when I think I’ve mastered it, the wind hurls in from the west in a sudden upward gush, catching the kite totally unawares, sending it crashing against the cliff wall, where it tangles itself, fluttering and flapping, in the branches of a box elder that has made its home twenty feet above us.
‘What a pity,’ says Mrs April.
Stigir barks a command for the kite to free itself.
‘I’ll get it,’ I shout, and before she can object I’m clambering up the cliff, like a mountain goat.
‘Be careful,’ she says, as all adults must, gasping, her hand to her mouth. ‘Please, Oscar, do take care.’
Only move one limb at a time, I remind myself, and you can’t fall. Who told me that? Who taught me? And never grip anything that can come away in your hand.
I choose my hand and foot holds carefully and I am soon high above Mrs April and Stigir, who watch my progress from the beach below.
I like it up here, inching my way closer to my goal. Over my shoulder I can see the bay give way to the open sea. There’s peace and quiet up here, even as the wind whistles around me.
I dig my toes into a small ridge and haul myself up the last few feet by grabbing the thick anchoring root of the elder tree that snakes out of the soil in search of droplets of sea spray.
The kite and branch are within grasp. Steadying myself on the ledge, I reach up to grab the string, but a gust of wind flicks the kite upwards. As if in a tease, the kite shakes and flutters, before catching a thermal and circling away from the clutches of the tree. Its leap to freedom makes me smile. I watch it hop and skip into the sky, its deep blue sharp against the milky white clouds. It loops and accelerates out to sea. In its wake I fancy I see the outline of the galleon on the horizon, a puff of sails. But as I squint my eyes, the kite hurtles back inland and there is nothing but the wide expanse of water.
Down below Mrs April shields her eyes from the afternoon glare, just like she did that day long ago in the park.
‘Are you all right?’ she calls. ‘Please come down now.’
‘I will, I will, but the kite, it’s free,’ I shout back, seeking it out against the deep green of the woodlands fringing the shore. There it is, tangled in a tall cypress tree, its end pointing downwards. My eye follows the line and I see a chimney pot poking out above the trees. Tantalisingly, it appears and disappears as the trees bend and sway in the wind. But it’s there, a mysterious house hidden in the woods. An adventure to be had.
As I stretch my neck to see more (the outline of a roof, some broken tiles), the ledge beneath my feet disintegrates, sending clumps and clods of soil banging and bouncing and avalanching down to the beach. My heart jumps a beat, but I dig in and steady my feet. There’s a gasp from down below, but I wave to show I’m okay. Carefully, I make my way back down to the base of the cliff, retracing my steps, the kite and chimney pot receding from view.
‘Looks like the kite had had enough of being tied down,’ laughs Mrs April.
‘It seemed happy in the sky,’ I say, the ruined rooftop at the fore of my mind.
Stigir snuffles around my ankles, eager to play.
‘You two go off,’ says Mrs April. ‘I’ll set up a base camp while you explore.’
Mrs April watches them head off to the shoreline, the boy and his dog. She smoothes out the rug on the sand, weighing it down with the picnic hamper. As she sits down she feels the tiredness creeping over her. There’s a buzz to the salty sea air and a warmth to the sun that has edged out from behind the clouds. Oscar and Stigir play and gambol at the water’s edge. She watches them for a while, her mind settling to the lap and lisp of the waves.
Something of the sound of the pebbles rattling on the beach brings Mr Fishcutter to mind. And then Mrs Fishcutter, standing by the counter one summer’s morning. Mrs April was on her way to the library, having taken an unnecessary detour in the hope of spying her lover. She’d looked in the window of the shop and there was the other woman, scrubbing blood from the large wooden cutting block. Their eyes met for an instance
and both seemed to know what was already known.
The age-old dance.
The rhythmic sounds and peaceful warmth entice her to lie back on the sand.
She dreams of Tidetown and all its folk and its library full of stories and images from its long and little history. She flutters between the folds in the curtain into dreamworld and gently meanders through her sleeping mind.
She sees the panorama of Tidetown. The church spire points out a crescent moon, a slice of pear in an ink-black sky. The stars, fiery needle pricks, open and close on stretched calico. In the town’s only graveyard, on the uppermost branch of the oldest oak tree in the county, the town’s rare white owl blinks a slow blink. The cold headstones, colder still in the very middle of the night, keep secret and hidden their daytime rhymes:
‘At peace in heaven among his brethren.’
‘Asleep in rest, forever blest.’
‘But it is I who am asleep,’ says Mrs April to her dream, ‘gentle sleep, nature’s soft nurse.’
The grass bristles with frost. Beneath the frozen crust lie the dead and gone of the town. Its tailors and cobblers, book-keepers and dairymen. In tidy rows rest the milkmaid and seamstress, the milliner and baker. Numerous of all, long beached and grounded, are the sailors and fishermen, lifeboat men and sea captains, hauled from the deep, salted and bloated, seaweed as a garland, bathed in brine. Washed up from shoreline and causeway, the storm subsiding, the waves calming, the pebbles settling on the seashore. Long silenced gasps and sobs from unbelieving relatives, torn from their beds to witness the horror on the tide. Funeral processions and petals on the flume. The church organ rumbling through evensong for those in peril on the sea.
Ebenezer Squarentrue, grave-digger and gardener, dead asleep in his hut, pays no heed to the hoot of the owl, the shift in the soil. His shovels and spades, hoes and rakes, lovingly cleaned, put to bed for the night, wait in an orderly row by the door, their morning duties ready to perform. His lime-green budgerigar, stock-still on its perch, eyes closed, snug and assured under its thick canvas blanket. Mr Squarentrue switches dreams without stirring, safe in the knowledge that all is well. Not a weed in sight, no daisies pushing through the grass verges of his graveyard.
Fresh earth bubbles like mincemeat over the grave of Barney Butcherhook, the town’s last butcher. The frost sprinkles on the newly dug soil like grated parmesan cheese. Six feet under, from a long line of Butcherhooks, the overweight body turns and twists, its tummy rumbling one last time before it implodes, full to the brim with the tripe and onions, offal and sweetmeats that ground his heart to a stop as he was serving old Grandma Hoopshaper her weekly ration. There had always been talk and suspicion as to what went into his sausages. Now the secret dies with him. The worms and centipedes, earwigs and larvae waiting to feast on the fat of his land. His shop already being readied for the new coffin-makers, the baked funeral meats barely cold on the trellis in the butcher’s yard. No more will Butcherhooks weigh out the meat and poultry, nor sharpen their butcher’s knives as the townsfolk wander by on the High Street.
Mrs April sees herself standing at the graveside of the butcher boy. She hears words coming from her mouth, out of sync with her lips. But the voice is not hers, but that of Judge Omega.
‘Will Barney Butcherhook, when he is brought to account, confess to tearing the heart from the blackbird in Grundy’s wood? Will he own up to placing it in the mouth of the suckling pig in the shop window one Saturday afternoon, as his mother washed the blood from her hands in the sink upstairs and the Jehovah’s Witnesses belted out a tune from the picture house across the street?’
As late as it is, the long-dead neighbours look on, curious as to the measure and cut of their new companion. In central position, the town’s most famous son lauds over all from his mausoleum. As regal in death as in life, Judge Tobias Omega, who rose to the highest office in the land, passes judgment over the new tenant.
‘In Justice he lived, in perfect peace he now resides’ reads his tombstone. Up and down the country, prison cells hold other epitaphs for the Judge, dug deep into their dungeon walls.
More modest abodes house the likes of herself, Great Aunt Margaret, and the Mrs Fishcutters (the First and Second), all a long time laid to rest.
‘At peace’
‘Only sleeping’
‘Gathered in the arms of her Saviour’
‘In sure hope of the resurrection’
An hour before dawn, she sees the ghost of herself, standing by the apse of the church. She is twenty-five years old and is combing her long brown hair by the light of the moon. Through her long-dead eyes she spies the two Mrs Fishcutters huddled in the porch. The three figures come together, as the old stone walls listen to their whispers, lest the words disappear into the sheets of mist caressing the church to sleep. The bare twigs of the willow tree rustle in the wind, as if applauding the scene. A passerby, though the strangeness of the hour makes any highly unlikely, might get a sense of the presence of the three women. A flurry in the corner of the graveyard, a twitching of the frozen grass, a mere flickering of a memory. But any passerby would scurry along, giving it all barely a second thought as they hastily make their way down the lane between the church and the cemetery.
Yet the three women have all the time they need as they join together in communion.
‘My heart bleeds,’ weeps Mrs Fishcutter the Second.
‘Mine too. For the Twins I left so helpless and tiny,’ says Mrs Fishcutter the First, with a sadness known only to the dead in mourning.
‘I did what I could,’ says the Second, reaching out a hand to the First. ‘As much as I was allowed. I gave them as much love as they would take.’
The two Fishcutter women hold hands, as Mrs April looks on, dreaming herself into the dream, the smile still generous on her face.
Close by, a stoat weaves through the grass, carving a path between the tombstones, reverential, yet on the lookout for grubs or worms that might pop through the soil to catch a peek at the strange gathering above ground.
Mrs April turns to her two companions, holding out a hand to each.
Linked as they are, the three turn gently in a circle, entwined and embraced, their lives and hopes and memories swirling in the pre-dawn mist.
‘I was happy to see him at Appleby Fair,’ smiles the Second.
‘He fell for you like falling off a log,’ says the First, ‘that fisherman of ours.’
‘Our fisherman with the body of an angel,’ laughs Mrs April, throwing back her long brown hair, grasping the hands of the other two, swirling around and around.
Way above, the gargoyles, perched on the roof of the church, gaze down on the scene. Each one a crouching sentry, centuries old: the bull and the griffin, the eagle and the serpent. With open dry mouths and bulging eyes, they bear witness to the night-time dance below.
The circle slows, but the women hold to each other, linked in life and linked in death.
‘When all was said and done, we did our best,’ says Mrs April. ‘We left more than we took.’
‘I left my babies,’ whispers the First, so quietly that the gargoyles have to lean precariously over the guttering to catch her words.
‘I could never get close to them, they adored you so,’ says the Second.
‘The little ones,’ cries the First, a tear dropping from her eye. ‘I fear for them. Where are they now? So precious, so tiny.’
‘They got to live a rich life in the end, in their own way,’ says Mrs April, the smile still warm on her lips. ‘They grew to be the women they had to be. No need to fear, my dear.’
And she wipes the tear from the cheek of her friend and holds her close, whispering kindness and hope. Just as all those years ago she held fast the small boy covered in the soot of the fire and the mud of the woods.
‘You be my honey, honey-suckle, I’ll be your bee,’ sings Mrs April as the dawn pokes its head above the belltower of the ancient church.
As the morning sets in and the
birds go about their songs, a solitary bumblebee finds its way to the altar in the church. Beneath the stained-glass picture of Saint George and the Dragon, amidst the silver goblets and golden crucifix, it finds the nectar from the single orchid (propagated in the greenhouse of Beckett Vine, the verger) standing straight and erect in the thin-stemmed vase.
She shivers awake, the buzzing of a bee close to her face. The sun has disappeared and dusk beckons behind the clouds. Mrs April shudders, rubbing her hands together for warmth and to remind her where she is. She shakes her head, grasping at the shadow of her dream: a churchyard, the clasp of a cold hand, the long brown hair of her youth. And then it all disappears in a puff and she can recall nothing at all, not even a remembrance of the memory.
She stands up and looks around. No one to be seen.
‘Oscar. Oscar,’ she calls. But only the waves on the sands reply.
She rolls up the rug and picks up the picnic hamper. As she turns around there is Stigir, his head cocked to one side, his ears up and alert. He barks noisily in the direction of the woods and scampers off across the beach.
‘Take me to your leader,’ smiles Mrs April, and hurries off in pursuit.
Stigir stops at the end of the bay, where the sand meets the trees, waiting for his companion to catch up, mindful of the slow clumsiness of people.
‘Hold on a second,’ puffs Mrs April, the floppy canvas hat falling over her face, an image flashing into her mind of a startled Barney Butcherhook, small blackbird clasped in his hand. ‘Let me catch my breath.’
Stigir yelps Mrs April back to the present. He turns and squeezes between a blackberry bush and a box elder sapling.
‘Well, I do hope you know where you’re going,’ she says, holding in check her growing concern.
She takes a deep breath, bends low and follows the dog through the gap. Emerging on the other side, brushing the leaves and brambles from her clothes, her hat askew, she looks up to see a small overgrown path leading through the woods.
They make their way along the path, clambering over fallen tree trunks and wading through beds of nettles, crossing and re-crossing a small brook and then climbing a small incline. After fifteen minutes or so, with the picnic basket growing ever heavier, the path opens to a small clearing and there in front of them is the small house, smoke coming from its chimney. Mrs April watches it twirl skywards, and there, fluttering above in the treetops, like the star for the Magi, is the blue kite.