by Mike Allen
What else? He received word of Opal’s suicide—a suicide we could not have known about until last year’s discovery of merish song-shells. These shells, holding songs sung on the moon over a century ago, are currently stumping our scientists by washing up on Earth’s beaches. One of these shells has just been dated to the thirteenth of February 1889: the day before Wynn’s mental health took a drastic turn for the worse; the ninth anniversary of their first meeting. The song within the shell is English, which no other mermaids are known to have sung in. Now, her voice flies hauntingly across the years to us, and the song is all too familiar:
Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donned his clothes
And dupped the chamber door,
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.10
The responses so far to this discovery have been speculative, tenuous at best.
What seems to be a echo, perhaps a sort of feedback caused by the metaphysical transportation of the song-particles, has been seized on by some scholars who claim it is in fact a male voice singing faintly alongside her. Isobel Cutter even claims that it proves her (already widely discredited) theory that Wynn succeeded at becoming merman, writing that:
The fluidity between mortal and merish form needed to be activated somehow, and with no outside help his only option was astral projection. To hear him singing a duet with Opal seems impossible—unless, of course, he was successfully projecting onto the moon. Northcliffe’s later work mentions a ghostly lover slowly becoming more solid—perhaps this is Wynn, at last becoming the merman he longed to be. His Earthly disappearance, in that light, is only logical—his Earth-bound self would have eventually become purely elemental.11
As discussed, Northcliffe is hardly a reliable historic source—her refusal to join the human exodus from the moon at the turn of the century and the subsequent brain-damage and physical decay she must have suffered renders her late work (what has been recovered of it) particularly questionable. But besides this and Cutter’s flimsy science, the theory conveniently ignores the source of the song.
Here was a mermaid who had loved a man—who had been named after Ophelia by that man, maybe even driven mad by him—who knows what lasting psychological damage may have been caused by this passion for a man of the wrong species, and who could only ever fail to live up to her society’s ideal of masculinity? The answer, then, to the question of what possible reason she could have to sing one of Ophelia’s mad songs is woefully clear: unable to find him after his return to England, she chose to end her life in a way that she hoped would connect them. He had seen her as an Ophelia, so she would live out his ideal to the very end. We can imagine her wreathing herself in living flowers and walking, singing as she went, to the centre of Melzun, to the water-house with its tanks of clean water. We can picture her slipping quietly inside, opening a tank and climbing in and—singing still—closing the lid on herself even as she began to disintegrate, turning the fresh water to brine. Later, the tank would have been checked, found to be contaminated, and drained off outside the dome. And when the moon next released its absorbed water back into the sea, Opal’s particles would have returned with it, nothing more than foam on the high tide.
CROW VOODOO
Georgina Bruce
Mortimer Citytatters is a midnight crow and a sinister spiv, but he knows what people want in wartime is a story. So he tells them: spine-chillers, bone-warmers, knee-tremblers, colly-wobblers, stories that drill your teeth, that perform open-heart surgery, stories that make the blind walk and the lame speak. It’s a good all-weather business, combined with a spot of common or garden begging, that makes ends meet.
No one should trust Mortimer Citytatters, but Jenny is paying him to write letters to her sweetheart in the war. The crow writes scathing love letters, without a lick of sympathy in them.
Dear Robin, he writes in scratchy midnight ink, Now that the nights have turned longer, I barely think of you.
Robin reads them over and over, the black crow letters in the smudged envelopes that come every week. He reads them until the ink starts to wear away and the thin paper goes bald in thumb-sized patches. The letters are good: they have violence in them. They give him sleepless nights. I danced with an American soldier. He had strong arms.
Robin cannot stop thinking about Jenny’s cold little body, their first time together the night before he shipped out. He must come home safe, he thinks, home to her. But Robin worries about how she is making ends meet and what Mortimer Citytatters might ask her to pay for the letters. Surely it cannot be so very much. Tell me if it hurts, Jenny. But he doesn’t want her to stop.
Jenny could write her own love letters, but Mortimer Citytatters is a midnight crow and he has the cruel voodoo she needs. The letters are black crow magic, but if they keep Robin safe it can’t be wrong, Jenny tells herself. She is paying for the promise of his homecoming, but she doesn’t know how much. It costs such a very little, really, and it hardly hurts at all, the crow says.
Bombs fell near us. I could be dead by the time you come home. The tramps sit on legless chairs in the rubble.
Mortimer Citytatters keeps Jenny’s account very carefully. It is a long time before he lets her see his sharp beak.
He names the baby Savage Citytatters, a good crow name and it will give her black hair when she grows up. He tucks her under his waxy black wing; she feeds on softened grubs out of his gullet. The baby doesn’t cry much. Perhaps she is content to sleep in the humid feather bed and eat mushy grubs; perhaps it is nice.
When she can walk on her podgy legs, Savage Citytatters goes with her father to the City. While her father tells spells and stories to the war-dazzled punters, Savage collects rubbish in a little bag: used tickets, apple cores, bread crusts. The other crows call her sweetling and hushling, and give her cigarette ends to put in her little bag. Mortimer Citytatters calls her darkling vane, and sometimes, Jenny’s chicken, which are special magic names a father should teach his child. In the evening they go home to the tarpaulin house under the bridge, and after doing her chores, Savage spreads the contents of her little bag out on the ground, and sees which things have power. Sometimes it is an apple core, and sometimes it is not. Paper is often good. This work is arcane and difficult, crows’ work. Savage usually mistakes the things for what they are not, and the things get thrown on the fire.
Although she is small, Savage must work hard for her father. If she works hard, Mortimer Citytatters will stroke her black hair with his wing. Savage collects wood, and begs for matches, and makes the fire just warm enough. She has to find food. Sometimes it rains and there are big snails, or she makes a stew of apple cores. Once she found a bag of kittens, alive, that had been swept up the bank of the oily river; she roasted them with wild onions. She sweeps the floor of their home, which is always too muddy, and re-makes the deep nest. At night Savage curls under her father’s black wing, and he tells her the crow stories.
Once, a girl, he says in his laconic black voice, and that is the whole of it, came on a shuddering horse to a stop. They had pieces of moon, they were silver, and then there was the Very Old. The Very Old put the moon into the girl, into her belly, and the girl bled on the horse, so the horse galloped away. In the moonlight they didn’t. In the sunlight they did. That is how it happens.
Savage feels the story wake up inside her belly. She thinks this story was sleeping in her insides, and now her father has woken it with his telling. The more stories awake within her, the more she is crow, and the more power she can find in the world. This is why the stories are told, father to daughter. Savage curls up under the wing and feels a fierce love for Mortimer Citytatters that carries her off into sleep.
* * *
Jenny comes to the City to watch the girl and the crow. She doesn’t tell Robin. He came home from the war, like th
e crow spelled, but broken and spoiled. So Jenny comes to the City alone and stands at the edge of the square, smoking her cigarettes one after the other. She doesn’t want to come, but she must be punished, she thinks, the way some women punish themselves with knives and flames.
Savage Citytatters, she is thirteen and becoming more crow every day. She sees the woman watching and her heart flaps its black wings at her. Why does her heart fly to her? Like it is flying out of her chest, towards the woman, and Savage feels strange to herself. She wants something she cannot understand: to stand next to the thin small woman and lay her head gently on her shoulder, to softly take her hand.
Now she is old enough, Savage stays with her father when he tells crow stories, and there are punters come for the telling. Mortimer Citytatters takes a tooth from one man, takes a whole eye from a girl. They want things from the crow that only a crow can give. They only pay what they can afford. We must make ends meet. Now that there is something that Savage wants, she feels pity for the people who come for crow voodoo. She will not let her father know she is starting to like how it feels: the pity, the wanting.
Savage Citytatters can find things of power when she needs to now, and that evening before home she trails around with her little bag, collecting apple cores, used tickets, and paper, always paper, and like this she comes to the edge of the square where the woman watched all day. The woman is gone, and there are many pieces of rubbish here, but there is one powerful thing that Savage badly wants. It is a cigarette end, smoked down to the filter, squeezed tight between the woman’s fingers and dropped, still smoking, to the ground. This special one Savage puts in the bag with the rest, with her father calling her to come, darkling vane, come home.
* * *
In Jenny’s home there is work: drudgework and slow patient work, the work of marriage. Jenny knows they did a wrong thing with those letters, all those years ago, but it is she alone who pays. She only wishes she could bring the girl home with her, sit her by the fire, pull out her soft black wings. Jenny has lullabies, clean apron pockets, warm bread dough: all waiting.
When Robin came home broken, Jenny married him anyway. She fed him and put him to bed every night, and washed him, and cooked and cleaned for him, and held his hand to cross the road, and did her best to love him. He doesn’t know to love her back any more, but some part of him remembers, for he often asks Jenny to read him the crow letters that brought him home. Jenny pretends she doesn’t understand, says not to be so silly, there are no letters like that. But on this night, just this once, when Robin asks for the letters, Jenny opens the locked cabinet and takes out the shoebox from under all the piles of wedding linen that they hardly use, and she takes out the old thin letters.
Dear Robin, she reads, a war goes on electric there are very flies in here I mean a man no girl no what is this sound I have under my wing. Jenny cries tears on the scratchy crow ink, melting the thin paper completely away in the worn patches where Robin once held it with his finger and thumb. You carry it on your back under water meadow grass fear no sky this sky is no good now why are you still flying. These aren’t their letters any longer, the spells have worn off them now, leaving behind the faded inky crow words without any magic left in them. Just nonsense. Jenny wants to put the letters away, but Robin holds her wrist, tells her to carry on. He closes his eyes, waits for the words again. This boat is sailing swimming birds swim under the water fish fly in the sky the horse comes be on the horse you horses swimming away.
When the letters are finally finished, Jenny feels empty, but Robin is full up. He doesn’t notice Jenny’s tears, but he says to her: “Remember how cold you were, little Jenny? And I said, Stop if it hurts, Jenny. Tell me if it hurts, love.”
In the night, Jenny wakes up in a silent bed, next to a cold husband. He has come undone at last: he is dead. Jenny lays her head on his chest and weeps on his blue cotton pajamas until they are wet and transparent, and Jenny’s face is stone cold all on one side.
* * *
Savage Citytatters spreads out her collection of rubbish on the earth. Of all the cigarette ends, she picks out the special one, and this she puts in a little pocket under her soft downy wing. Of the other things she puts the apple cores in for the stew, and the paper scraps are good for thickening soup, and everything else she sweeps into the fire. Again she feels her heart beating its wings inside her chest, and she thinks of her father’s grim beak. This is her first secret from him, the way her heart begins to spread its wings, and it is a dreadful bloody one at that.
Savage has never wanted anything before except to curl up under her father’s wing and sail into sleep on his dark voice, telling the crow stories into her dreams. She cannot understand why the small watching woman has power, or why Savage must keep it secret, but nonetheless there is an electric thrill in waiting for her father to fall to sleep deep inside the nest, so she can conjure magic in the secretive dark.
When she is sure that the crow sleeps soundly, Savage opens her pocket and takes out the cigarette end. She puts it on her tongue, tasting the vile burning poison in it, and sits next to the hearth, slowly chewing, and spitting the juices into her hand. When she is done, she mixes the juices with a little ash from their fire and puts it on the jelly of her eyes, inside her ears, her nose, her mouth, her anus, and her vagina. It stings and scorches, splitting her open in agony, but then the road appears, and Savage’s wings open new and black, spread full out and lift her into the sky above the City, flying the crow road into the past.
Savage swoops above the tarpaulin house, above the bridge. She lands on the pale yellow lozenge-topped lamppost, and waits, and watches. She feels the buzz of the light under her claws, the vertiginous afterglow of flight, the viscous heat of magic inside her, and she sees the woman hurrying over the grass, down towards the river. She looks younger, and she is heavy, too, but Savage knows it is the same woman who comes to the City, the one who watches.
Then the crow road speaks to Savage, with a voice that uncurls itself from her insides, that speaks inside her mind. This is a crow story, too, the oldest one we have, says the crow road.
Jenny is getting big, but she runs as best she can over the coarse grass down to the side of the river, where Mortimer Citytatters is waiting in the gloaming. She is coming for her letter. This is the last one, Jenny thinks. She is sure the war will be over soon, sure that Robin will be safe home again. She is glowing with the knowledge of her baby inside her, and imagining Robin’s face when he sees, and making a family.
Mortimer Citytatters doesn’t have a letter for Jenny today. Instead he shows Jenny his cruel beak, and she tries to run away, slipping up the river bank. Of course it is not hard to catch her, to hold her down on her back in the wet grass. Here is your bill, child, now we must always pay our bills, don’t we? We got to keep these bargains nicely, see? Jenny screams but it is not enough, it can never be enough, even if she screams the fish out of the water, the birds out of the trees. Mortimer Citytatters digs into her big warm belly with his razor beak, ripping the stretched flesh apart in jagged tears. He puts his hands inside and pulls out the tiny baby, and it is too soon for her to come out, but it doesn’t matter because it is done. I can see your insides, Jenny, all your secrets. The crow bites into the umbilical cord, and then all three mouths are full of blood. Mortimer Citytatters tucks the baby under his wing and flies quickly away, leaving Jenny empty on the muddy grass bank.
Savage Citytatters finds that she knows this story, too. This is the hour of your birth. She watches her mother spill her secrets onto the grass, her father ransacking her insides. The crow road speaks this to her, shows this to her, cracks her open like an egg, and Savage screams.
Mortimer Citytatters, triumphant father, looks up when he hears the crow cry, and sees the crow looking down on him. He shakes his head and hurries on, pushing the stolen baby deep into his feathers.
When her father glares up at her, Savage feels the magic in her turn to stone and pull her down. She cannot m
ove her wings. Her claws skitter, she loses her grip and her balance, and she falls, hard, dropping out of the sky.
Savage falls off the crow road, and lands on the earth, in her own home, under the bridge. Her father is asleep in the nest. He has caught her stealing crow magic and when he wakes up he may punish her or praise her, she cannot guess.
Savage lies still for a long while, listening to the quiet earth, telling the crow road story over and over to herself. Sometime before dawn Savage at last sits up, crouches by the dying embers of the fire and reaches for a warm apple core. She is tired and thinks of crawling into the nest with her father. But her heart flutters wildly and longs to fly to her mother’s side.
Night turns to morning, and Jenny wakes up next to her dead husband, but her tears are for her stolen child. She imagines the girl’s hand warm inside her own. Time to come home now, love, Jenny whispers.
* * *
Mortimer Citytatters is awake. His beak is pushed under his black wing. One beady eye watches Savage crouching by the fire, chewing an apple core. There is crow in the girl already, he can see. So much. She has flown the crow road and seen the fact of her birth, and now, finally, Mortimer Citytatters can smell the human in her.
He watches her chewing her dirty fruit. Savage doesn’t remember that she is any bit human at all, thinks she is full crow, but now she has flown the crow road she has woken up the secret of her human past. Now that Savage can find the human inside herself, now she can feel it and say where it is, in her belly or her eyes or her tongue or her womb or her heart, Mortimer Citytatters will pin her down and cut it out of her with his iron beak, and then she will be fully crow forever.