by Sarah Moss
Ghost Wall
Sarah Moss
Contents
Title Page
Ghost Wall
Acknowledgements
Copyright
THEY BRING HER out. Not blindfolded, but eyes widened to the last sky, the last light. The last cold bites her fingers and her face, the stones – not the last stones – bruise her bare feet. She stumbles. They hold her up. No need to be rough, everyone knows what is coming. From deep inside her body, from the cord in her spine and the wide blood-ways under the ribs, from the emptiness of her womb and the rising of her chest, she shakes. A body in fear. They lead the fearful body over the turf and along the track, her bare feet numb to most of the pain of rock and sharp rushes. Chanting rises, the drums sound slow, unsyncopated with the last panic of her heart. Others follow, wrapped against the cold, dark figures processing into the dusk.
On arrival, they strip her. It is easy; they have put her into a loose tunic. Her body is white in the pale red light, solid against the wisps of fog and the tracery of reed. She tries to cover herself with her hands, and is not allowed. One holds her while the other binds her. Her breathing is accelerating, its condensation settling on her face. All of them are accompanied by their exhalations, slowly dissolving into the air. They turn her to face the crowd, they display her to her neighbours and her family, to the people who held her hands as she learnt to walk, taught her to dip her bread in the pot and wipe her lips, to weave a basket and gut a fish. She has played with the children who now peep at her from behind their mothers, has murmured prayers for them as they were being born. She has been one of them, ordinary. Her brother and sisters watch her flinch as the men take the blade, lift the pale hair on the left side of her head and cut it away. They scrape the skin bare. She doesn’t look like one of them now. She shakes. They tuck the hair into the rope around her wrists.
She is whimpering, keening. The sound echoes across the marsh, sings through the bare branches of rowan and birch.
There are no surprises.
They place another rope around her neck, hold the knife up to the setting sun as it edges behind the rocks. What is necessary is on hand, the sharpened willow withies, the pile of stones, the small blades and the large. The stick for twisting the rope.
Not yet. There is an art to holding her in the place she is entering now, on the edge of the water-earth, in the time and space between life and death, too late to return to the living and not time, not yet, not for a while, to be quite dead.
DARKNESS WAS A long time coming. The fire crackled, transparent against the trees, its purpose no more, no less, than ceremonial. We had been pushed away from each other by the heat that no-one wanted. Woodsmoke stung my eyes and the rock dug into my backside, the rough tunic itchy under my thighs. I slipped my foot out of its moccasin and pointed my toes towards the fire for no reason, to see how it felt. You can’t be cold, my father said, though it was he who had lit the fire and insisted that we gather around it. I can, I thought, if I’ve a mind, but I said no, Dad, I’m not cold. Through the flames, I could see the boys, talking to each other and drawn back almost into the trees as if they were thinking of melting into the woods and creeping off somewhere to do some boys’ thing at which I would probably be more skilled. My mother sat on the stone where my father had told her to sit, tunic rucked unbecomingly above her fat white knees, staring into the flames as people do; it was boring and my father was holding us all there, bored, by force of will. Where do you think you’re going, he said as I stood up. I need, I said, to pee, and he grunted and glanced towards the boys, as if the very mention of biological functions might incite their adolescent passions. Just make sure you go out of sight, he said.
Within a few days, our feet would wear a path through the trees to the stream, but that first night there was moss under foot, squashy in the dim light, and patches of wild strawberries so ripe and red they were still visible in the dusk, as if glowing. I squatted to gather a handful and wandered on, picking them out of my palm with my lips, kissing my own hand. Bats flashed through the space between branches, mapping depth into the flat sky: I could still hear them then. It was odd to walk in the thin leather shoes, only a layer of borrowed – stolen – skin between my feet and the sticks and stones, the damp patches and soft places of the woods. I came to the stream and squatted beside it, dipped my fingers, listened. Water over rock and peat, leaves stirring behind me and over my head, a sheep calling on the hill. Fresh dew came through my shoes. The stream tugged at my fingertips and the heather explored my legs, bare under the tunic. It was not that I didn’t understand why my father loved these places, this outdoor life. It was not that I thought houses were better.
When I returned to the fire, my mother was kneeling at its side, not propitiating the gods but hefting slabs of green turf from a pile. Give us a hand, Sil, she said, he says if you do it right you can cover it for the night and pull the turfs off in the morning, he says that’s how they always did it, them. In the old days. Yeah, I said, kneeling beside her, and I dare say he didn’t say as how there was someone to show you, in the old days, how they didn’t just give out instructions and bugger off. She sat back. Well, she said, but they’d have known, wouldn’t they, back then, not have needed telling, you’d have learnt it at your mam’s side and don’t use language like that, he’ll hear you.
We were sleeping in the roundhouse, my parents and I. The students had built it earlier in the year, as part of a course on ‘experiental archaeology’, but they had been firmly resistant to my father’s view that everyone should sleep in it together. There was no reason, my father said, to think that Ancient British households had been organized like modern families, if the students wanted a real experience they should join us on the splintery bunks they had built and padded with deerskins donated by the anachronistic local lord of the manor. Or at least, since the lord of the manor lived in London and certainly didn’t spend his summers in Northumberland, donated by some servant on his behalf. Professor Slade said ah well, after all authenticity was impossible and not really the goal anyway, the point was to have a flavour of Iron Age life and perhaps some insight into particular processes or technologies. Let the students sleep in their tents if they prefer, he said, there were almost certainly Iron Age tents also. Skin tents, Dad said, none of this fancy nylon stuff. The tent we used on our holidays was made of canvas the colour of apricots and possibly left over from the Second World War. I had noticed that the students had pitched their inauthentic colourful and waterproof nylon tents in the clearing below our hut, screened by trees and hillside from both the roundhouse and the Professor’s larger tent nearer the track where he kept his car. I could sleep in one too, Dad, I said, give you and Mum some privacy, but Dad didn’t want privacy, he wanted to be able to see what I was up to. Don’t be daft, he said, of course you can’t sleep wi’ the lads, shame on you. Anyway privacy’s a fancy modern idea, exactly what we’re getting away from, everyone trying to hide away and do what they want, you’ll be joining in with the rest of us. I do not know what my father thought I might want to do in those days but he devoted considerable attention to making sure I couldn’t do it.
The bunks were exactly as uncomfortable as you’d expect. I had refused to sleep wearing the scratchy tunic that my father insisted in the absence of any evidence whatsoever to be the Ancient British nightdress as well as daywear, but even through brushed cotton pyjamas the straw-stuffed sack was prickly, smelt like a farmyard and rustled as if there were small mammals frisking in it every time I moved. The darkness in the hut was complete, disconcerting; I lay on my back moving my hands in front of my face and saw nothing at all. My father turned, sighed and began to snore, an irregular bovine noise that made the idea of sleep ridiculous. Mum, I whispered, Mum, you awake?
Shh, she hissed back, go to sleep. I can’t, I said, he’s too loud, can’t you give him a shove. Shh, she said, go to sleep Silvie, close your eyes. I turned onto my side, facing the wall, and then back because it didn’t feel like a good idea to have my back to the darkness like that. What if there were insects in the straw, ticks or fleas, what if they got inside my pyjamas, what if there was one now, on my foot, maybe all the way up my leg, jumping and biting and jumping, and on my back, coming through the sack, several of them, on my shoulders and my neck – Silvie, hissed Mum, stop wriggling like that and go to sleep, you’re getting on my nerves summat proper. He’s getting on my nerves summat proper, I said, they can probably hear him in Morbury, I don’t know how you put up with it. There was a grunt, a shift. The snoring stopped and we both lay still, frozen. Pause. Maybe he’s not going to breathe again, I thought, maybe that’s it, the end, but then it started again, a serrated knife through cardboard.
When I woke up there was light seeping around the sheepskin hanging over the door. They probably didn’t actually have sheep, the Professor had said, but since we weren’t allowed to kill animals using Iron Age technologies we would have to take what we could get and sheepskins are a lot easier to pick up on the open market than deerskins. While I was glad we weren’t going to be hacking the guts out of deer in the woods with flint blades, I thought the Professor’s dodging of bloodshed pretty thoroughly messed up the idea that our experiences that summer were going to rediscover the lifeways of pre-modern hunter gatherers. The clue, I muttered, is in the name, you know, hunter gatherers? What was that, Silvie, said Dad, would you like to repeat what you just said to Professor Slade? Oh, please, call me Jim, said Professor Slade, and don’t worry, I have teenagers myself, I know what it’s like. Yeah, I’d thought, but your teenagers aren’t here, are they, gone off somewhere nice with their mum I don’t doubt, France or Italy probably. I turned onto my back, which was stiff, and bashed my elbow on the wooden ledge holding the straw sack. I wriggled cautiously over the splinters and stood barefoot on the bare earth, dry and dusty. There was barely enough light to see Mum’s and Dad’s bunks empty, the outline of the central pole disappearing into the darkness under the roof. Some of the Iron Age people kept their ancestors’ half-smoked corpses up in the rafters, bound in a squatting position, peering down empty-eyed. Some of the houses had bits of dead children buried under the doorway, for luck, or for protection from something worse.
Mum was crouching at the side of the fire, blowing on the embers, a pile of turfs at her side. So it does work, I said, how did you get the turfs off without burning yourself? She took another breath, leant forward and blew through pursed lips to the fire’s glowing base. The embers brightened in the sunlight. Leaf-shadows flickered. With great difficulty, she said, here, you try, it’s knackering my knees like nobody’s business. I went down onto my knees and elbows, hoped none of the students would come up and see my backside stuck up in the air, blew, and again. Watch your hair, said Mum. I took another breath, smelling earth and green wood. There, I said. Flames. What’s for breakfast? She shook her head. Porridge, she said, well I suppose you’d call it gruel, there’s no milk and it’s not oats, more like rye I think or let’s hope not barley else it’ll not be cooked this side of Christmas. Any honey, I asked; I would generally eat porridge only if it came with an equal volume of golden syrup, though Dad not so much liked it plain and heavily salted as believed in it the way other people believe in homeopathy or holy water. All this cancer, he said of Mum’s newly diagnosed friend, folk need roughage, weren’t never meant for all that processed muck, breakfast cereals and what have you, I’d as soon eat the box. Mum, what about dinner, I said, and tea? It’ll be whatever you gather this morning, she said, maybe fish, there must be berries, this time of year. You don’t, I thought, gather fish, there has to be murder done and you won’t be the one doing it, Mum, but instead of saying so I put a couple more kindling sticks on the fire and one of the nice dry logs the students had chopped as part of their archaeological experience.
Mum started pushing at the big stones at the edge of the fireplace and I went to help. They need to be in far enough to balance the pot, she said, he says we’ll be making a frame to hang it from later. Or a whatsit, a trivet. Out of what, I said, he’s never planning on blacksmithing, is he? Smithing was one of his fascinations. He remembered, he said, the last blacksmith in the village, who gave up a few years after the war, remembered being allowed to stand in the doorway watching the metal turn from solid to glowing liquid and back, the hiss and sudden billow of steam, the man’s scarred hands. It were sacred work, he said, in the old days, fire and liquid and tempered blades. Mum shrugged. He said to use stones for now. Bring us the pot, Silvie, it’s right by the door. The pot was iron, very heavy. I squatted, embraced it warmly, lifted with my knees but of course the thing was still ridiculous. Bloody hell, Mum, I said, how about a bit of toast instead, shove some sausages on sticks, but I could see from her face that I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. Dad was behind me. You know fine well they didn’t have toast, he said, and if I catch you sneaking off to eat rubbish there’ll be trouble, is that clear? Yes Dad, I said, sorry, only joking. Well don’t, he said, it’s not funny. And go dress yourself, put your tunic on, I don’t want to see those pyjamas and I certainly don’t want the Professor seeing them. The Professor, I could have pointed out, was the one wearing tennis socks because he thought the moccasins might give him blisters if he didn’t, but I went into the hut, rummaged in the suitcase Gran had passed on to Mum and put on knickers and a bra before the scratchy tunic. There’d been a discussion about that in the kitchen at home, weeks back. But you’ll be wanting us in our own undies, Mum had said to Dad, anyone might see anything else, those lads and our Silvie. She’d won a concession for toothbrushes too: stands to reason they didn’t worry themselves with that, weren’t going to live long enough to lose their teeth anyroad. And also, eventually, tampons, once Dad had pointed out once again that in the old days women weren’t going round forever bleeding all over the place anyway, all those doings starting later when there was less to eat and everyone better for it, and then women in the family way and feeding babies the way nature intended as long as they could, which was also what he said whenever he caught me or mum buying sanitary protection. Women managed well enough, he said, back in the day, without spending money on all that, ends up on the beaches in the end, right mucky. Or they died, I said, in childbirth, what with the rickets and no caesarians, but you won’t be wanting me pregnant, Dad, for authenticity’s sake? He’d put down the list he was writing, set the pen parallel to it on the counter and stood up, formal. Hush, said Mum, cheek, but she was too late, the slap already airborne. You court it, she’d say, you go just one step too far, what do you expect?
Whether the gruel was rye or barley, it was still resisting the actions of heat and water when the students turned up. Grains bobbled like dead maggots. Did we put too much water in, I asked Mum, isn’t it meant to be going kind of gluey? You’ll have to be up and about earlier than this tomorrow, you two, Dad said, folk need to eat, this won’t do. I could see he wanted us to do something, speed up the heating of water and the expansion of grain. The agitation of molecules, I thought, remembering Chemistry GCSE. I took the carved paddle and stirred, made the maggots swim in one direction. It wasn’t fair for Dad to tell us off for oversleeping when he’d made us leave our watches at home and kept talking about the benefits of life without clocks. Folk lived by their bellies and the sun, then, weren’t forever counting off the minutes, folk knew patience in the old days.
We heard voices, laughter – I glanced at Dad, who didn’t always like it when people laughed – and the students came up the path. Pete, I remembered, Dan, and the girl was Molly. Last night, the first night, they had been in jeans but today they were wearing their tunics and looking no less silly than I did. Gorgeous legs, said Dan to Pete as they came out of the trees. Yeah well, Pete said, you’re flashing us your tits mate, thin
k you’ve got something a bit wrong there. Tits. I looked again at Dad but he wasn’t looking, wasn’t listening. Molly came behind them, tunic pinned with a CND badge and her fair hair in two plaits secured with elastic bobbles with red plastic cherries on them. There were colours in her hair like the grain in polished pine and you could follow them all the way down the plaits. I’m sorry, said Mum, I’m late with breakfast, it’ll be a while yet. No, said Dan, it’s fine, we don’t have meal times, Jim keeps saying. We just eat when it’s ready. Jim, I thought, Professor Slade. Can I help you, Alison, said Molly, really, there’s no reason you should do it all. Mum’s eyes met mine. Alison. My friends called her Mrs Hampton. No, she said, you’re all right, happen I can stir a pan, you get on. They sat in the sun, the students, chatted, teased each other, used some words I’d only read, laughed when they felt like it. I pottered, gathering kindling, more or less, staying far enough away not to look as if I wanted to join in but mostly near enough to hear what they were saying. Plans for later in the summer, ‘going travelling’ as if just moving around counted as a rational use of time and money. Inter-rail passes, Rome and Paris. Now you can go to Prague and Budapest too, said Dan, my sister did last year, before everyone started going. Pete had already been to Berlin, after his exams, had seen some of the wall come down. I’ve got a chunk of it, he said, at home, it’s pink because there were murals and graffiti on it already, it was dead cool, we sat on it and there were people with guitars and singing, beers all night, they don’t have closing time there. Only it’s actually a bit sad because everyone’s just nicking bits of it now, the wall, and if they keep going there’ll be even less of it left than Hadrian’s by the end of the century, you could kind of see the streets joining up again, fusing. I want to go there, said Molly, I’d like to see it for myself. Going to Berlin, I thought. How do you get to Berlin, can you start at the bus stop, do you take an aeroplane or the train, several trains? I knew many of the British isles, Holy Island and Anglesey, the Orkneys and several of the Hebrides, but I had never been overseas. We didn’t have passports. Where was the money coming from, what did Dan and Pete and Molly’s parents think of these plans? Dad went off into the woods, stiff-necked, and Mum’s face darkened, her shoulders hunched as she stirred the pot, as if there were clouds gathering that only she could see.