by Livi Michael
For answer, she turns to one side. Still with her finger pressed to her lips, she starts tiptoeing across the wall. I follow her, and she leads me to the little dressing table. She stands to one side of it, pointing.
I look at the blank surface of the mirror. Can’t even see myself in there. I remember now that I could only see myself when I was with Mabb. I don’t like looking at it because it makes me remember all the times I sat with Mabb, brushing her hair. I remember the conversation we had about me going home, and how she told me I had a soft, jelly heart.
‘I don’t,’ I told her. ‘If it was that soft it wouldn’t be breaking.’
And she said to me…
She said…
‘Hearts don’t break if you keep them in a casket.’ And that’s when I look down, on to the table, and I see the casket.
It’s a small silver casket, with a queerly shaped lock, like two hands clasping one another. I pick it up and look at it. Silver scrolls and swirls all over in a complicated pattern that looks like woven leaves if you hold it one way, and a spiral maze if you tilt it another. I shake it and it rattles, there’s definitely something inside, and when I hold it to my ear I can hear it beating. Her heart!
I look at it in awe, then back at my shadow. She moves her hands as though opening it, but when I try to open the casket the little hands won’t budge. I press it all over and shake it again – nothing. Probably like everything else in this place, it works by magic. I shake it once more and consider trying to smash it, but the metal looks hard and strong. I look at my shadow in despair. She only shrugs her shoulders.
Then a thought comes to me. Hearts are opened by kindness.
Don’t know where that came from. I look quickly at my shadow, but she’s standing very still. I look back at the casket.
I think of the poor heart, locked away in there, trapped and beating, trapped like everything else in this faerie place. How lonely it must be, without anything to love, how it has to go on beating, without hope of ever being set free. It seems like the saddest thought in the world. A tear forms in my eye, painfully like before, but this time I don’t try to blink it back. I squeeze it out, and let it fall like a tiny tear-shaped jewel, towards the casket. And the little hands fly open and catch it, cupping it in their silver palms.
The lid lifts slowly on its own, and there, nestling in purple silk, is a tiny heart.
I’ve seen hearts before, when the pig gets slaughtered, or when Bryn and the others bring back a deer. They’re all twisted and bloody with tangled veins. This heart isn’t like that. It’s heart-shaped, of course, but smooth and perfect, shimmering with soft, shiny colours. And somewhere inside it is a faint pulsing light.
It looks like stone washed smooth and shiny by water, but when I touch it, it feels warm, and it gives a little beneath my fingers. I realize that I could squeeze it, maybe even make it break. I slip it into the palm of my hand.
And then I hear the door opening on the far side of the room.
I’ve just got time to snap the little casket shut and return it to the table before I turn to face Mabb, trying to smile. My own heart’s hammering and I can feel hers beating steadily between my fingers. She’s looking at me curiously, but she isn’t angry. ‘Are you looking for something?’ she says.
‘No,’ I say, moving a little way from the table.
She smiles then, and I can see she’s carrying something on a large leaf. Flower cups and berries.
‘I have bird milk here, and honey dew,’ she says, carrying the leaf towards the bed. ‘You must be hungry and thirsty after your long sleep. Won’t you come and eat with me?’
She is all sweetness and goodness, her beautiful face turned up to mine. But as she moves towards the bed I feel rage like a splinter in my heart. I remember how I laboured to make that bed. It took not hours, not days or weeks, but years of my life, threading cobwebs together and sewing insects’ wings. I made that bed at her bidding, and she took my life away. Anger twists my gut and I stay where I am, not following. She looks up at me, all puzzled innocence. Then she pats the bed.
‘Come and eat,’ she says. ‘Afterwards we will sweep the forest floor.’
Rage bursts in me then, like when Myrna cut the abscess on my knee, yet somehow I keep it from boiling over.
‘How long will that take?’ I say lightly, though my heart is still hammering.
She looks at me as though she doesn’t understand the question. ‘There is no time here,’ she says.
I’m advancing towards her now, fingering her heart. ‘No – no time,’ I say, stuttering with rage, ‘not in your world – only in mine! You brought me here and you took my time away!’
Mabb’s fingers touch her chest, where her heart should be. ‘Keri,’ she says reproachfully, ‘I asked you if you wanted to stay with me and you did. Then I asked you to help me make this bed, and you did. When you asked to leave I sent you back.’
That stops me. I want to contradict her but I can’t.
‘Do you not remember asking me to come here?’ she asks.
I do remember. I remember vividly asking her to take me, not Lu.
‘Yes – but –’ I say, struggling to put all my anger into words, to stop her from twisting everything, ‘that was because my brother was ill – and I thought you’d taken him.’
She’s still looking up at me, all innocence, with that luminous face.
‘But that wasn’t the only time you wanted to see me, was it, Keri?’
She’s right. I know she is. I can feel the blood pumping in my ears. I can’t explain to her why she’s wrong.
‘Did you take my father?’ I blurt suddenly.
‘Keri,’ she says reproachfully. ‘We’ve been through all this before. If I had taken your father, he would have been here, safe and well. I could not save your father, but I can save you. Do you not remember me telling you this?’
I do remember. I remember that every time she went out, I would look for Lu and my father. I would run round and round her house, looking for them, and was often in tears when she came back. Then she would comfort me, and make me forget.
‘That is what it means to be human, Keri,’ she says to me now. ‘It means to lose everything you love. But here nothing is lost.’
I jerk my head towards the shadows then. ‘What about them?’ I say. Because now I realize that if my shadow’s on her wall, then all those other shadows must belong to people too.
She doesn’t answer me, but looks down at the coverlet, tracing a pattern of an insect wing with her finger.
‘What have you done to them?’ I ask her. ‘Why don’t you let them go? Why can’t they go back to their own lives?’
She looks up finally, and there’s a cunning expression in her eyes. ‘What happened when you went back?’ she asks.
But now my thoughts and words are jumbled so that I can hardly speak. ‘I-I went home –’ I stutter.
‘Yes?’ she says, still looking up at me. ‘Did they not welcome you?’
Pictures of my mother and baby Lu, then the old man and woman are scrambled together in my mind.
‘They did not know me,’ I say at last.
Mabb’s head droops and she gives a melancholy sigh. ‘Yes,’ she says sadly. ‘Human beings are like that. They remember nothing.’
She gets up then and begins to pace round the room. ‘All the times I have tried to befriend them,’ she says, ‘all the times I have tried to tell them what I know. They turn their backs on me, Keri, they build their huts and walls and weave their feeble charms, and think that will keep me out. And from time to time a mortal encounters me, and I give them what they most deeply desire, and then…’
She lifts her hands up and there is an expression of grief on her face. ‘Then they run away from me.’
She turns again and paces restlessly, then suddenly sinks back down on the bed. Her head droops sadly. ‘They have made an evil witch of me, Keri.’
And even though I think, I know, that this isn’t the ful
l picture, I can’t help seeing it through her eyes. How terrified people are of her, and of everything to do with faeries. How superstitious they are – how they make charms to ward them off, and tell stories against them, and build walls and huts and huddle inside them, desperate to keep them out. The faeries were here first, but we’ve driven them away.
‘They are trying to make the land their own,’ Mabb said. ‘They do not want me, Keri. They do not want the magic.’
But I think suddenly of Bryn and Griff and the others, trying to build that dyke to stop the fields from flooding again, and how all their hard work planting seeds in the spring is useless in the face of one summer flood. And I think of Lu and Ogda, old and bent and alone, still struggling to survive, and I say, ‘You could help them if you wanted to.’
‘Oh, Keri,’ Mabb says reproachfully. ‘Do you not think I have tried?’
And then I think about Guri, bringing fire for the People, but how that cost him, and how he lost half his life. He had to leave his shadow with Mabb, just like me. Maybe his shadow is one of those on the wall.
‘Well,’ I say, struggling to get my thoughts clear, ‘maybe they don’t want to become shadows on your wall!’
Mabb’s tongue flickers around her lips, then she holds out her hand towards me. ‘You misjudge me, Keri,’ she murmurs, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. ‘I never took anyone who didn’t ask to come.’
‘Don’t!’ I say, jerking away. ‘You tricked me! You took my life away!’
‘Your – life?’ she says, and she gives a little laugh, like the tinkling of silver bells.
‘Yes – my life!’ I say, shouting now. ‘I went back home. And everything – everything – had changed. Years and years had passed without me. No one was left – at least – two of them were. But – they didn’t even know who I was!’
‘You did not have to go back,’ says that soft, soothing voice. ‘You could have stayed with me.’
‘No!’ I shout. ‘I did have to! I went home and my mother was – was…’ But I can’t bring myself to say the word ‘dead’. I can feel those hard, painful tears in my eyes. ‘She’d gone,’ I say.
Mabb isn’t looking at me. She’s gone back to tracing the edge of a wing with her finger. ‘And that’s why you’ve come back to me now,’ she says gently. ‘Because there is no place for you there.’
‘Yes – no!’ I say, suddenly aware that she might be trying to trick me again. ‘I want my old life back! Before you took all those years away from me! Before you robbed me of my time!’
She looks at me then, suddenly sly. ‘How much time do you think has passed now?’ she asks mildly.
I can hear a whooshing noise, like wind rushing through my ears and all my blood runs cold. Because, believe it or not, I hadn’t thought of that. Last time I was with her, forty years or more had passed. This time, hundreds and hundreds of years might have come and gone.
I make a small sound, midway between a choke and a whimper, and Mabb looks at me kindly. ‘We can see if you want to,’ she says. She crosses over to the dressing table and pats the stool. I look at her blankly. ‘Let’s look in the mirror,’ she says.
Hope flares in my heart then, that she’s going to show me something of my human life, the life I’ve lost. I might even see my mother, or my father. Still, I’m reluctant to sit with her at the dressing table, where I’ve spent so much time combing her hair. I cross the room slowly and perch on the edge of the stool, while she sits fully on it, and I can see her face clearly in its glimmering surface. This time I can see my reflection as well, but I don’t like looking at it. It’s pale and peaky, a little witchety face with huge, solemn eyes.
‘Look,’ says Mabb.
The surface of the mirror shivers and slowly clears. At first I can’t see what it’s showing me. Then slowly I realize that I’m looking at the huts and doorways of my settlement.
Everything is abandoned and deserted. The wind blows flurries of dust into the air. Rotting doors hang from the frames, and most of the roofs have fallen in. It looks old, older than it did when I last went back. There’s a small movement to one side of the picture, and a little brown figure emerges, scurrying about. With a lurch of my stomach, I realize it’s me. I’m scrambling around in all the debris, and though I can’t hear myself, I know I’m calling out names. But no one comes, not even the little old man and little old woman that were Lu and Ogda. I’m all alone in the empty, crumbling village.
My stomach turns over, and I feel sick as I face my mother’s hut. I walk in through the open doorway. I look all around. It seems deserted. Only a rat runs squeaking across the floor.
Then I hear a cough and see him, finally, lying crumpled on a mattress of straw.
‘Ogda, Ogda,’ Lu mumbles. ‘You’re taking a long time with that water.’
My heart twists with pity then. I know, somehow, that no Ogda will come. He’s all alone.
I creep up to him.
He can’t see me.
I look at him, then, greatly daring, put my hand out and turn his face. He doesn’t seem startled by this, doesn’t even seem to know what’s happening.
He’s much older, I can see that, and his eyes are worse. His hands shake all the time. And he carries on talking to Ogda, but Ogda isn’t there.
I look round the empty shell of a hut. Doesn’t look as though Ogda’s been there for a while.
I can feel tears again, painful, pricking, but I blink them away. Daren’t think about it now. There’s work to be done.
‘Don’t be cross, Ogda,’ he says.
There’s no food to be found in the hut. I go outside and look for the hens. No hens, no pig. I go back into the hut. Pick up the broom and sweep it. Then I collect the remaining wood from the wood pile and light a fire. He turns his face towards it, his blank eyes open. ‘You’re back then,’ he says.
‘I am,’ I say. ‘I won’t leave you again.’
I touch his hand and he catches hold of it and presses it to his cheek.
‘Ogda,’ he says.
‘Oh, Lu,’ I say, ‘sweet baby brother – I’m here, I’ve come back, I won’t ever leave.’
My words are like the murmuring of the wind, but he grunts a little as though pleased, and closes his eyes.
I talk to him then, about our mother, and Myrna and Digri and Ogda, the way she used to be, and how we all played in the forest in the old, old days that seem as long ago as the dawn of time. And soon his breathing changes, and I can tell he’s asleep.
But I sit with him, and my heart is breaking. I will stay with him, of course, until the end of his days. I will help him, though he can neither see nor hear me. We will be company for one another. But then what?
Don’t know if I can die.
Don’t even know if I can sleep.
I wish, with all my heart, that I hadn’t come back here.
My breath catches, ragged in my chest. ‘That’s not what I meant!’ I cry, turning to Mabb. ‘That’s not what I want to see!’
‘No?’ she says, and she waves a hand at the mirror.
The picture mists over, and once again starts to clear. This time I see trees. Trees shifting and blowing about. The picture won’t stop moving and I realize that I’m seeing it as though moving through the forest. One hut, then another appears, then my heart beats thick and strong as I see people, my People, coming from the huts. Bryn, holding a lantern, and Griff and Digri behind him, then Arval and Gwern, and Mabda, holding a lantern of her own. Then at last I see my mother, her auburn hair flying as she hurries up the hill towards the forest. I move towards the mirror with a cry.
‘Don’t touch it,’ Mabb says, sudden and sharp. Then, more softly, ‘It’s only a picture, remember.’
But it seems so real. I make a small sound of pain as they lift their faces towards me, and I realize slowly, painfully, that they can’t see me at all.
But they’re looking at something – something coming out of the forest. My gaze turns with them, and my heart shifts as I
stare at a little, ragged, white-faced urchin, stumbling from the trees into my mother’s arms. And she’s so relieved to see me she can’t even speak, not even to tell me off. She hugs me and strokes my hair, and we turn and hurry back towards the huts.
But then the images move faster. I’m living with the People again – my People, but it’s as though I’ve become a stranger. Looking with hollow eyes at my mother and Bryn, who will get old and die, and Digri who will die in a fall, and Lu and Little Ogda, who will grow old together, but alone. I move among them in a dark dream, haunted by what I know, and getting no older myself. And sometimes the knowledge slips out of me, and the people I love best look at me as though I’m some uncanny thing, and make the sign of the evil eye. And when I grow no older they whisper about me in secret, and when my mother dies, they drive me away…
‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ I shriek, and I bound up from the bed and away from the terrible images in the mirror. I curl up tight in a corner of the room, burying my face in my knees so I can’t see anything. A great sob tears its way out of my chest.
Though I’m not looking, I can feel Mabb standing over me, but I shrug her away violently when she tries to touch me.
‘Poor Keri,’ she says, ‘poor, poor Keri.’
I look up then. ‘You did this,’ I say, pointing at her. ‘You! You’ve taken everything away from me!’
I can hardly speak, I’m so angry, and I don’t want to burst into tears in front of her. She’d like that – the old witch.
But she isn’t angry. Her face is full of gentle mourning. ‘Keri,’ she says, ‘don’t you see I gave you everything you ever wished for?’
I shake my head. I can’t even speak any more. I’m so angry, all the words are jammed up in my throat.
‘You wished for a playmate, and I gave you one. You wanted to be like me, and I helped you. Then you wanted to return. I was sad, of course I was, but I let you go. Only I didn’t want to send you back old and feeble, so I gave you your youth. I gave you back the years you’d lost.’
I stare at her. Everything she says is true. At least, she can’t see she’s done anything wrong. She really can’t. She’s looking at me, all hurt innocence, and I can’t help but see it through her eyes. She has given me everything.