Hair Side, Flesh Side

by Helen Marshall

  The ghosts had gathered to watch. They wore silks and velvets, jewels in their hair and some of them had weapons buckled to their sides. They were beautiful and aristocratic, with faces that bore some resemblance to the duchess, but, their fingers—oh, my darling!—their fingers were red, and there was something wild in their eyes.

  They parted, albeit angrily and with brooding looks, when she started on the path back into the manor, but part they did for she was sitting vigil and they knew she was not too be touched.

  That night, Gwendolyn laboured at putting right all the things in the house. There was much she could not do, but she did as she could. And the ghosts watched. And they muttered. And when they did not mutter they stared at her with their grim eyes and their red, red fingers, until finally Gwendolyn felt something hot and bright flash through her, and it was anger.

  “You did this, all of you! You loved this place, protected it for hundreds of years and then you tore it apart. Why? Why?”

  At first, there was a long silence.

  And then one answered: “We have no kin. We are alone, so very alone.”

  And another: “To pass the time.”

  And a third: “There was no one to tell us not to.”

  And, at last, the duchess spoke: “Because this is a place for the dead. We do not want strangers sleeping in the beds our children slept in, touching our things. I wish this place were dust, and we were dust in our graves, and all the forests of the world rotted down to skeleton leaves.”

  “You were a kinder person when you were alive,” Gwendolyn replied at last.

  “You were my closest-to-kin, and you left. It is not for you to judge.”

  Gwendolyn nodded slowly. Her hands were filthy from mending books, collecting strands of silk for repair, and from digging one lonely grave in the garden. They were servants’ hands, calloused, scoured now of polish and perfection; and Gwendolyn knew they were her mother’s hands, best beloved, hands that had been bound in service—and love—to this household. And Gwendolyn looked at her hands, and she looked at the hands of the ghosts—red, still, with Montague’s blood—and she began to speak:

  “In London, there are no ghosts.”

  Angry stares at that, and bloody fingers twitching. Gwendolyn did not care though. She hated their self-loathing, their spoiled faces, and the cold indifference that had settled into their expressions. Once, they had been a kind of family, familiar, comforting when her mum died. But these were different people, and Gwendolyn hated them. “In London, the dead are buried and gone in a fortnight, and the people ride the Tube every morning to work and every evening home, and they cannot breathe but for the press of bodies around them. In London they eat their dead. They burn them up in cigarettes and automobile crashes and pipe bombs. They screw them away with perfect strangers they despise the next day. They sniff the dead, snort them, inject them into veins. In London, they use up the dead. They feed their bodies to the city that neither loves them nor remembers them. I was happy there. In London. Where they carry around their ghosts inside, and the only harm they can do is to themselves.”

  And she looked at them, and her gaze was as terrible as theirs.

  “I’m going home now.”

  That was what she said to them, best beloved, to all those dead sons, murdered lovers, and aged monarchs, and she turned away from them and she began to walk. Slowly, carefully, but proudly. Only when she stood last of all before the ghost of Duchess Hardwick—powerful, fierce as a lioness, the way the portraits showed her back before age had bent her spine back in on its self like an old coat hanger—did she stop.

  “He loved you,” Gwendolyn said. “He loved you without question, and you tore him apart.” And there was no ghost for that little dog and Gwendolyn was glad of it. She met the duchess’s eyes and they were hard and they were cold—the kind of eyes, best beloved, that command obedience and fear, the kind of eyes that order death, the kind of eyes that are death’s ally—and she stared down those eyes until, at last, it was the duchess who turned away.

  “Take us back to the city,” she said. “Let the city devour us.”

  And Gwendolyn nodded.

  The ghosts murmured, shook their gory fingers, but the duchess raised her hand and there was nothing more to be said, for she was, perhaps, the greatest of them and also, perhaps, the most terrible.

  Then they began to file past Gwendolyn, one by one, the dead sons, the murdered lovers, faces that had comforted her at her mother’s funeral, faces she had known from her childhood, faces that had loved her once, in their own way, and she had loved as well. Last came crinkle-eyed Damien, and his fingers were red too, but he kept them hidden in shame.

  “Not you,” she said, but he shook his head sadly.

  “These grounds are no longer mine to keep,” he told her. Gently. In the voices of a father, and a grandfather. “And I would like to see the city.”

  “You wouldn’t like it,” Gwendolyn said softly. “It’s a cruel place for the dead.”

  “Aye,” he said. “Most places are.” He made a move to join the others, but stopped. “Care for your mother’s grave, love. It is a hard thing to be dead and alone.”

  Then Gwendolyn really did cry, and they were large, proper tears, the kind you can only cry when family is around. And she sobbed until her nose was red, and her face was a roadmap of dust trails.

  The ghosts took the morning train back to London, and as it snaked its way amongst the hills and clumped villages of the English countryside, Gwendolyn found them on their best behaviour. They chatted amiably about the city in their days, meeting Queen Elizabeth and that firebrand Mary, Queen of Scots. How it might have changed, what they had heard about the smog. They seemed happy almost. Excited. Like children going to the fair.

  Gwendolyn listened a little, but mostly she sat with Damien and told him all about her life at university. She left out the parts about snogging, because, my darling, that is the way of these things, and besides she thought that maybe he knew all about what growing up meant.

  Finally, best beloved—and I know you must be tired, my girl, you have held on for such a long time and you have listened well—they alighted at King’s Cross, and one by one the dead sons, and the murdered lovers, and the aged duchess disappeared into the press of people boarding the Tube for work. It would be quick, Gwendolyn knew. The city was a cold, indifferent place. It had eaten all of its own ghosts long ago, and would be hungry for more.

  Only Damien remained. Gwendolyn smiled, shy again, afraid, sad. “Will you go too?” she asked.

  “Aye, love. It’s long past time I did something with these old bones. I’ve followed that lot around so long, I’ll be half-mad without them.”

  “You could stay,” she said.

  “I shan’t, though. Your heart only has room for one ghost, Gwen, love, and you must keep her safe from the city, and from us.”

  Gwendolyn nodded, and she reached out to touch him, to offer a final gesture of goodbye—but it was too late, too late as all goodbyes are. Particularly the ones that matter. And when he vanished, it was amongst a group of giggling school girls come to the city for the weekend to celebrate their A-levels.

  She knew she was supposed to be sad, but the funny thing was, in the end, she wasn’t anymore. The sadness was gone with the ghosts—for that, my best beloved, is the way of things. It has always been the way of things. The dead cannot stay. They are decay, ruination. Things falling apart. They cannot stay, my bright, beautiful girl—my Gwendolyn. My best beloved. But I will tell you a secret, a secret only I know—the secret that makes this a happy story, after all, and not a sad one, or a scary one, or even a hurtful one. As Gwendolyn left King’s Cross, she felt a kind of weight settling in her chest, a good weight like a rosebush anchoring into her stomach and sprouting beautiful blossoms, pink, orange-tipped, yellow, into the dark spaces inside her.

  It is time, best beloved. I have held you and I have loved you and but my finger
s are cold and dead: you cannot hang on to me forever. You are young, as that Gwendolyn was, as her mother was before her, and you are destined for places that sparkle with their own newness. Those places would devour me. What is warm and bright for the living is hateful to the dead. It is the way of things. Always. Even thus. Look once, my love, my little girl, because when you love someone, and you know you will not see them again, then you must look. And then carry me with you. Inside. Where I can take root and grow. Where my hands will stay clean.

  [ heart ]

  PIECES OF BROKEN THINGS

  When Carolina Herschmire went out of the house on that warm day in September, her husband of twelve years, David, took all the things she had left behind—old CDs, her favourite pink argyle sweater, picture frames purchased together, a single lolling-tongue sneaker—and buried them in the backyard by the garden. He dug the hole with an old spade, and as he shovelled each layer of dirt aside, he thought back on his life with Carolina. There were good times, mostly, as he remembered them. They’d fought as any couple fought—over work, over money—but he’d always taken heart in the fact that the fights, framed as they were by the banalities of life in the city, had always been about their love for one another. Loneliness. Separation anxiety. The fear of disappointing the other, the fear of the other not being happy with a smallish, shared house with thin walls. They were fights about loving too much, not loving too little.

  And so David had been caught off guard when Carolina—Carol, he had called her sometimes, when she was bossy, or ’Lina when she was sweet—said her love was gone, that there was nothing left. He did not know what to do. He was used to the moods that her love took, the way it could be as strong, and swift and absolutely present one moment and then an elusive thing the next. It was not how David loved, never with that surety, that flood of passion that she could show, but then again, never did he have those moments of absence, the blank holes when his love disappeared altogether. He thought this might be one such time. And so David offered to share. He took out a piece of his love—wriggling from exposure to the cold—and held it in front of her. But Carolina—Carol, this time, he thought—kissed him very lightly, very chastely, on the cheek and closed his hand, pushed the love back into his chest where it continued to squirm and wriggle uncomfortably. She said that it was all right, she hadn’t run out so much as she’d decided to get rid of it, she didn’t want love anymore. Love, she said, love was messy and incomprehensible and she, almost forty now, almost the big four-zero, didn’t want messy and incomprehensible.

  She had, she told him a little bashfully, replaced her heart with the only thing she could get to fit—a tiny clock the pawn shop owner had handy. She showed it to David. She undid the front of her cream silk blouse, and David got a glimpse of a little ormolu face with two prim hands nestled in the little hollow between her breasts. He loved her breasts. They were petite, like teacups, and they fit perfectly in the palm of his hand. A day ago, had she undone her blouse, he would have thought it was the prelude to something a little more exciting, it would have been a Good Thing in his books. But the sight of the clock chilled him to the core, and he felt something inside his own heart go pop-whir—he knew there would be no more Good Things coming, knew with absolute certainty that it was over.

  “It was all they had,” she said, just a little shyly now, but David realized it wasn’t shyness about him, about what he thought of all of this. It was a kind of shyness with herself. She touched the clock, just once, and it made a kind of a little bing. When she looked up, her eyes were shiny like new pebbles, but there weren’t tears in them. She wouldn’t be staying, she said. Without love it felt odd to see David, he looked so different from the days when she had first met him in high school, older, he wasn’t the same person. And she already had one clock in her chest—another reminder of all that time slipping away, that time that was all hers, that she didn’t have to share it anymore—it would be too much to bear.

  “Please, Carol,” he whispered.

  “I never liked it when you called me that,” she said.

  So David made a pot of coffee. He wasn’t used to doing it, Carolina always made the coffee, but she was leaving and David didn’t know what to do about it. She said she was going to stay with her mother. While she began to collect her things, he fiddled with the filter and watched it percolate with a steady fascination. As the coffee drip-dripped out, he thought about the slowly ticking clock where his wife’s heart had been, and felt for his own heart, tried to feel the beat of it, tried to check if it was still going. The coffee dripped. It was the only noise. He wondered if he was dead, if he was heartbroken, if she had maybe, accidentally, gotten rid of his heart instead of hers. She was always doing things like that. Taking his socks, his favourite books, his reading glasses. But then he felt a light thump-thump, and he breathed a sigh of relief, only it wasn’t quite relief. It was something else.

  On the morning after Carolina left him, David woke up in an empty bed with missing things around him, things he remembered used to be there. Inside him, he thought, would be another hole, another empty place where all the love for Carolina had been. But he was surprised to discover that it was still all there, wriggling around inside him. It was strange—his love had become a gentle thing over time, a comfortable thing he wore like an old sweater or stubble on Saturdays. If he had been asked, he would have said he was very much in love, that he never looked at other women, that he was quite happy. But the love he felt now was different—it wasn’t that love, it was something hammering at his ribcage, something strong and desperate to be satisfied.

  He tried to make the morning coffee, but his hands shook and the coffee grounds spilled across the counter. He could hear his heart still beating firmly away. He didn’t know what to do. He looked at the argyle sweater that Carolina had left behind, and his heart gave a little jerk. But it didn’t stop. It just sped up, faster and faster away. He saw the picture frames she had left behind, saw her picture in the frame, smiling with something that used to be love, he was sure of it, and that was just like rubbing flint and steel together. His heart began to gallop along so fast he thought it might just burst from his chest. He couldn’t look at anything else. It was too much—all this love bouncing around his ribcage and nothing to do with it.

  So he closed his eyes and he very carefully wrapped up the picture frames in the morning newspaper so that he couldn’t see them anymore. Then he went to the pantry and he got out a load of disposable plastic bags, the kind that Carolina used to save from the grocery store. He was relieved to find that his heart only sped up by a beat or so at the thought of those grocery bags. One beat, that wasn’t so bad, that would be all right. He took the bags, and he began to place things inside them, all the things left behind. He couldn’t look at them properly—that would just get his heart going even more. So he tried to squint his eyes so they looked like other things—things that hadn’t belonged to Carolina. He was squinting so hard he bumped into the kitchen cupboards and stubbed his toe viciously. The pain helped. The pain seemed to overtake the love all at once.

  After that, he learned. He would squint, and then he would try to remember what things of Carolina’s might have been left in the house, to collect them without seeing them. But he found he couldn’t even think of them, that he had to sort of squint his mind around them, trying to pick out innocuous things from his memories to focus his attention on, anything in the background, anything that wasn’t actually her.

  It took a long time, and David stubbed quite a few toes. He broke a lamp and found that he didn’t care. It was hard to muster an emotion as simple as caring when there was all that love; his head was full of it, his heart was full of it. So he took the bags to the backyard and he began to dig, fervently, desperately, lovingly—sinking the spade into the earth that she had been planning to build a garden out of this year (or maybe next, if there was time for it). She seemed to be everywhere, and it wasn’t just in the things, she was in the ea
rth, she was the earth, and he was digging, ripping into her face with the spade, digging as hard and as fast as he possibly could until it wasn’t her anymore, it was just a hole in the ground—unfamiliar as any kind of absence.

  When he looked at the hole, he felt a little of the love shudder out of him. It was just a tiny bit of love, but it flopped in the dirt by his feet for a moment like a fish. His heart slowed, just a few beats, but it slowed. He wiped his forehead, which had beaded with sweat at the hard labour, and he put the bags in the hole. As he laid them down—bags of trinkets picked up on vacation, broken earrings, receipts from the hair dresser—the love fell out of him bit by bit. Sometimes it squirmed on the earth, sometimes it lay there like a dead thing. But he put it in the hole along with all the other things, and as the love lay there glistening wetly, it didn’t seem like so much after all. David’s heart was slow now, and he could barely make out the sound of thumping, he had to pound at his chest several times with his fist to make sure the blood kept moving. But it was all right. It was better.

  That night, David poured himself a glass of scotch—three fingers, more than he normally had, but there was no one there to stop him. He sat down in front of the television, and he flicked it on. He watched a police procedural. He’d seen it before, he knew right from the start that it was the creepy convenience store worker who had done it, but then it was always the creepy convenience store worker. He wanted to make a joke about that, but there was no one to listen. He watched another. He didn’t know why. He didn’t particularly like police procedurals, but he liked the sound of voices in the apartment, the sudden violence of gunshots and sirens. When he got tired of the television, he listened to the couple who lived in the other half of the shared complex through the thin walls. They fought incessantly. They always kept Carolina up. They were in love, he decided. You only yelled that much when you were in love.