Da dun speak about Barney. I keep asking him questions, I know him has got an answer somewhere hidden in hims head, only him won’t tell me it. I dun like it here with just me and him. Him is out at sea all day and some of the night, thinking solid thoughts what always draw him back to land. And when him comes home, him wants me to fix the fishing nets while him eats dinner, then him washes the smell of sea and fish off himself and goes to sleep on Mam’s side of thems bed.
Each morning Da says, ‘It’s best to carry on as usual,’ before him takes up the nets and leaves. I wait for him to say something different, but him dun.
Tonight, Da comes in, pulling the smell of the sea behind him.
I say, ‘Tell me what happened to Barney.’
Him dun speak.
‘You just want me to broider. You never cared for Barney and you dun want me to find him. You …’
Him takes off hims coat and thrusts it on the hook behind the door.
‘You know something, but you dun want to tell me it, because we need less to live on, now him is gone.’
Him folds hims arms and says, ‘It’s best to carry on as usual.’ Him goes to the kitchen, picks up a bowl, ladles in the chicken stew, sits down and fills hims mouth with it so there’s no room for any answers to come out.
I’ve thought really hard about how to get an answer out of Da’s head and I think I can do it with just two words.
Da is going to be home for the whole day today, for him says the waves are white and high, which means the sea’s too full of wind and danger for fishing.
I practise while I get dressed and while I wash my face and tie back my hair, and the more I say it I know I can keep saying it because I dun think I can stop. In the kitchen I make our porridge and say it while I stir the pot.
Da walks in and I feel hims eyes on me.
I say, ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me …’
‘Stop it, Mary.’
I keep saying it.
Him takes hims porridge into the main room, sits in Mam’s rickety chair by the empty grate and ignores me.
I eat my porridge in the kitchen and between mouthfuls keep saying it.
When it comes to mid-morning, him shouts, ‘You’re driving me mad! Shut your bloody sodding mouth up!’ Him glowers at me like him wants to stick a fish hook in my lips, so I whisper, ‘Tell me tell me tell me,’ all the afternoon, all the while him goes in and out of the kitchen through the back door, and all the while him tidies up out the back, and all the while him gets water from the well and washes down the kitchen floor, and all the while him cleans and oils our boots, even Mam’s old ones she’ll never wear again, and all the while him shuffles in and out of the main room, all the while I try to teach my hands to broider again, all the while I peel potatoes and chop leeks for soup, and all the while I sit opposite him and watch him eat it without filling the empty bowl I’ve put in front of me.
Him gets up from the table, hims hands thump down.
I look up at him, say it louder, ‘Tell me tell me tell me.’
Him leans over me, says, ‘Forget Barney and get on with your broideries. What’s wrong with you? You’re skittering in some kind of madness and you’ll not be pulling me in there with you!’ Him gets hims coat and stamps off outside, hollers that him is off to the peat pits to do something useful, and the door bangs shut behind him.
Even without him here I keep on saying, ‘Tell me tell me tell me,’ because now I’ve been saying it all day long, I really can’t stop. The words are in my ears and my mouth and my head.
I keep saying it and the bells ring out, but Da still isn’t back. I say it at the moppet but it just stares back at me, all wonky and silent. I put the moppet on my pillow. The moppet rushes the sound of the sea into my ear, but I keep whispering till I fall asleep.
Morgan
I’m locked in my bedroom, being punished for the rice.
Mum said, ‘I would never have dared waste food. Never.’
I said, ‘It’s not a waste. There’s always loads of rice because someone keeps leaving it outside our gate and you let Dad out to bring it in, but we never talk about it. I ask, but you won’t tell me.’
She said, ‘I don’t want to talk about rice, and you, you’re giving me a headache – what do you mean, hungry? I’m hungry, my family only had two rooms, between six of us – no room in there for me, not for anything I might be hungry for … broken hand-me-downs—’
I said, ‘I’m not a child. You’ve moved the age. It was eighteen. I am eighteen.’
She said, ‘It wasn’t. It was always twenty-one. You’re too immature to leave home. You’re making me feel nauseous. Is this what you want? That rice is disgusting. Congealed. I feel sick.’
How often she tells me how I make her feel.
She yanked me into the kitchen, handed me a bucket and a cloth and walked out. I cleaned the rice off the table and it took a while because it had set like glue. I wasn’t sure what to do with it all, so I took the grille off the drain just outside the back door and pushed it down there. It filled up the drain and there was still some rice left. So I filled the bucket from the well and poured it in. It glugged through the rice, which sunk a bit in the drain. Not enough. So I wrapped my hand in a towel and pressed it down to make room for more, and the towel felt like a slug. I poured more water in, and more rice, more water and more rice, till all the rice had gone.
The drain might be blocked.
Mum came back into the kitchen with Dad when I was looking at how shiny the table was. Neither of them spoke. They both hauled me up the stairs, one arm each, pushed me into my bedroom and locked the door.
I didn’t speak either. Because it doesn’t matter. It happens all the time.
I stare out of my bedroom window. On the hill in the distance is the tall building with the bell tower. Sometimes it seems newly constructed, perfect. Other times, when the wind blusters and the sky turns charcoal, it’s more like a ruin, the ghost of a house.
My bedroom is the smallest room in our house. There’s nowhere to hide things, even if I managed to steal anything of use. In here, I have: my books, a single bed, one table, one chair, my old dresses of Mum’s that she’s taken in, my rags, a tiny pair of nail scissors and a hairbrush.
Other rooms, I’m kept away from. The room Mum builds furniture in has hammers, saws, screwdrivers … all the tools she needs to create furniture of beauty and function, but the same tools I’d use to break my way out.
The high fence outside, the fence that runs all the way around our house, has only one gate. The gate is kept padlocked. And Mum has the only key. It swings from an old charm bracelet that she never takes off her wrist.
She said for years I could have my own padlock key when I was eighteen. That she’d get Dad to go to the smithy and get one cut for me. And I’ve counted the passing of years and months and days, imagining my eighteenth birthday, when I’d walk to the gate, my hand outstretched, my fingertips clasped on the key, unlock the padlock and walk away.
But my eighteenth birthday was three months and twelve days ago and I still haven’t been outside. Because Mum changed her mind. So she told me she’d never made that promise. She said, ‘I just wouldn’t. Doesn’t even sound like me. I’d worry too much. You don’t want me to worry, it fills me with …’ She held her chest, as if she couldn’t breathe. Then she narrowed her eyes and said, ‘You wouldn’t want to make me feel like that.’
After her mind had changed, and my birthday had gone, I tried to dig my way out under the fence with a bread knife. In five weeks I’d only dug down about a foot, a tiny bit at a time. I hid the hole under a plant pot.
Then a stormy wind blew the plant pot over and the knife went blunt and my mother found the hole and cried and raged in her room and my father disappeared in there with her, and when they came out they hid the knives till they realised that meant I couldn’t cook, so they gave me just the one, watched me chop vegetables with it, and then took it away.
By the t
ime they trusted me enough to give me back the knives, or didn’t want to watch me making their meals any more, I’d decided to steal the padlock key when she was sleeping. The night I made my first attempt, their bedroom door was locked.
It was locked the next night, and the next, and the next.
The night after that, I tried again, but a small square of white paper was pushed out under the door, and it said in her handwriting: ‘I’m cleverest.’
I realised then, she’d decided to think of everything.
One night last week, I saw my twin sisters steal down the stairs to the basement. The next night, I went down the stairs. At the back of the basement are three rooms: one for the coffin-building, one for the office where my father writes all the deaths in his book and the other for the preparation of bodies. In the coffin-building room there was a hole that the twins had started to dig in the back wall. It had been boarded over, roughly. My mother’s handwriting was smeared in pink paint over three planks she’d hammered across it: ‘Morgan. You will never think one step ahead. I know you better than you think.’
I didn’t bother telling her it was the twins. When they were really small, the twins joined in my games. Before they learned that they could play more interesting games when alone with each other. The babies they’d been when I carried them, one in each arm, the toddlers they became, one attached to each of my legs, have now become inseparable. In my parent’s eyes, they are obedient little girls. In mine, they are far too quiet, and they tell one another’s lies a little too well.
I went into their room and asked them about the hole in the basement. They gazed up at me, holding hands, and said in rehearsed voices, ‘It was a tunnel. For you. It was meant to be a surprise.’ When I told them I didn’t believe them, they looked at each other’s eyes in silence, the kind of looking that they can get lost in for whole days, or until they get hungry.
Since then, I haven’t thought of another escape plan to try.
Other than the one I’ve got now.
The one where I annoy my mother so much she’ll want me to leave.
But I can’t annoy her tonight because I’m locked in my room till my family get hungry and remember that no one else wants to cook. I don’t mind being in here, because my books are locked in with me.
I am reading reading reading, locked in the stories.
I’m a wicked daughter, a drunken witch, a terrible scientist, a king with a severed hand, a resentful angel, a statue of a golden prince, the roaring wind, an uninspired alchemist, a fantastic lover who has only one leg, a stage magician with glittery nails, a shivery queen with a box of Turkish sweets, a prostitute wearing poisoned lipstick, a piano player whose hands are too big, a raggedy grey rabbit, a murderer with metal teeth, a spy with an hourglass figure …
I am eighteen years old and my real life is here locked inside these books.
My pretend life is here, locked in, with my family.
I breathe on my bedroom window and write in the condensation:
WITCH REQUIRED,
PREFERABLY WITH BROOMSTICK.
ENTRAPPED FEMALE IN NEED OF
ESCAPOLOGY LESSONS.
PLEASE APPLY WITHIN.
Mary
The tall men are at our door and I’ve little from my hands. Just a few thin white pockets I’ve broidered with grey rabbits. Them dun say anything about why there are so few broideries. Them hold up the pockets and one says, ‘Good size for mobile pouches, but they’d prefer owl motifs.’
I take what the tall men offer, which isn’t a lot.
Them give me another box of exotic fruits and some ice.
I dun tell them that one box of fruits isn’t enough to trade on for what we really need: all the milk, eggs, meat and vegetables what we get from the farms.
I say, ‘What’re them dried maggots you gave me the last time – what’re them meant for?’
The tall men look at me blank, so I show them the small sack.
‘It’s rice. From China,’ one says, like that should mean something.
Them heave the two barrels of fish down the beach to the boats. I put the ice in the cold room. Them bring back the empty barrels and leave them outside.
I go back into the cottage and the front door closes behind me. In the box, there’s a great rough fruit with spikes of leaves on the top of it. It smells sweet enough but I dun know how to crack it open or how it should be cooked. And these small fist-sized fuzzy things again. Them have small round labels what say kiwi, and the picture of a fat bird. Dun think them’re eggs of any kind, but. I’ve still got some of these from last time, and them’ve just wrinkled up and stank the cottage out with the smell of piss.
Through the window I watch the tall men loading the boats. The crates of ropes are out there on the shore, the tall men pick them up, wearing thick gloves, and put them in thems boats, careful. The ropes are left on the edge of the beach before the dawn breaks. No one talks about them. Mam wouldn’t tell me – I asked, only she said, ‘Dun ever, ever touch the ropes – them’ve some bite in them.’ And she laughed like she dun mean it. Even when I’ve been up early, I’ve never seen who brings them, but the tall men always take them away.
There’s poison in the ropes. Them look like snakes with no heads, and them move, twist and coil. Little glints of sharpness are tangled through them, like teeth, but not shut away in a mouth where them belong. My shin is still bruised from where I got bit.
Some of the women are on the beach with baskets and boxes of cloths and linens, knits and weaves. Camery and Chanty carry a rolled-up tweed fabric them must’ve made in the Weaving Rooms. Chanty’s not long twenty-one, so she’s done well to learn that quick to make it. Or stuck out her lip and whinged enough to get a whole lot of women to help her with it more
like.
Jek’s caught eight barrels of fish and him helps the tall men drag them down the beach. Him passes my window, carrying a great sack of goods back to hims cottage. Camery follows him with a smaller bag, she pulls out a great big can with a blue label and shows it to him. Dun know how she’s going to get that can open. Never am sure about cans. I hardly ever open the ones I’ve got in the cupboard, unless we’re low on food, and I’ve sharpened a knife. The knife goes blunt getting just one open. Sometimes I’m not sure that what I find when I’ve opened the can is worth eating, for them’ve got the strangest foods on the main land. Chanty stomps past the window, carrying a small box of fruits.
Some of the tall men head to the path up the cliffs, off to the folk what dun come down to this beach. So everyone else is still getting thems trade done. I think of the tall man with Barney’s eyes. The salt and dust smell of him sticks in my nose. There’s something locked in the smell.
I get the moppet from the bedroom and go back to the window. Holding it up to my face, I stroke my cheek with its scratchy paws. I say, ‘What should I do?’
Barney’s voice speaks, ‘Tall man took me.’
I grip the moppet, hard. ‘Which one?’
‘Brown eyes.’
‘But I looked in the boats the day you were took and you weren’t there. Barney?’
The sound of the sea in the shell washes hims voice away.
I hug the moppet to me.
It can answer questions. So it’s real.
I pull at the front door, only it wants to stay shut. It’s all jammed up so I try the back door. I tug and kick at it but it dun want to let me out. I hear doors slamming and put my hands over my ears, only I can still hear them. I climb on the table, open the window and jump out. I push the window shut.
Annie’s talking outside her cottage next door with one of the tall men. She looks like she’s been crying, only she’s stood up straight and sure enough with her jaw out. Her three black dogs stand behind her, them dun leap at him. The tall man gives her a hessian sack. She must’ve done a lot of knits this month. She’s still talking, like she does.
The tall men are shifting boxes and crates onto the boats. A stack of handmade paper
, a small gate from the smithy, a basket of woollens. Everyone says the tall men all look the same as one another, but I can see thems faces are all different. I get closer, but not too close. I want to see thems eyes but my legs feel like them’re wading through thick water.
I blink hard, for the sky seems full of creases. I’m still too sick from the fever to be here on the beach. Lines of clouds on the horizon spread and split like strands of thread. The sun shines bright.
A sound of wings flapping. I look round and a barn owl is coming right at me. Usually barn owls fly silent, but this one is blustering, buffeting like it’s learning how to fly. Only as it gets closer I see its face. A woman’s face. Round like the moon, but angered and bruised, thick with frowns. It flickers and changes, like light jumping on the waves from the sun. An owl’s face. A woman’s. Owl’s.
I blink hard. My eyes aren’t right. I’m skittering back into the fever place again.
An owl’s face. Her head turns and her vicious eyes stare at me, like I’m an insect she’s hungry for. She hovers above me. I fall back on wet ripples of sand, my head too hot, my heart thud thud thud.
She swoops down so her face is close to mine.
Her white and golden feathers, hair, feathers, is all in tangles.
She screeches.
Her eyes burn. The sun shines white, too bright.
I shout, ‘Are you real?’
A couple of the tall men glance over at me but I dun think them can see her.
Her shriek is a tearing sound. Her woman’s face is cloudy and blue-grey, covered in bruises, or maybe that’s the colour of her skin. Can’t see her face for bruises, and it keeps flicking from owl to woman.
She lands on the sand next to me. Her breath stinks of blood. There’s a rattle in her throat what sounds like tiny bones breaking. She flicks her talonclaws in and out. She looks at me with longing … or hunger? She breathes so hard, the light feathers on her breast quiver. She’s searching for someone … not me. My hand reaches out to touch her feathers and I pull it back … she’s just an owl. Her voice screeches like it could tear the fur off mice. She leaps up into the sky and flies off, a flurry of pale wings, out to sea.
Snake Ropes Page 3