Mary
The door creaks open. I wipe my eyes and nose on my sleeve. A little girl with a pale face and light wavy hair peers round it. Big blue eyes. She’s so pale her skin is almost see-through. She steps into the room and folds her arms across a fancy grey dress, clean and pressed. Another face, the same face, looks round the door and joins her. Her dress is the same, only nut-brown. She shuts the door and folds her arms the opposite way, left over right. Them look like reflections. Twinned. With bare feet.
Them stare at me, not moving.
I take a step towards them.
The twin in the grey dress backs away.
‘Dun worry.’ I take my coat off and put it on the table. ‘I’m Mary. Going to do a broiderie for your Mam.’
Them glance at each other. Something flickers in thems eyes.
I pick up the picture. ‘This boy, have you seen him?’ I keep my voice gentle.
Them turn away. Them each have ribbons in thems hair, one brown, one grey. Them walk out of the room. One twin looks back at me, smiles with tiny clean teeth. The smile dun reach her eyes.
I follow them. Them stop next to another door. I look down at my dirty dress, torn down the middle, stitched rough. Covered in brown stains, still damp. My dirty bag with just one handle and threads hanging loose. A gash in my leg, thick dark blood and dirt smeared across it. The bruise around it already blue. My hair, tangled.
‘We’ll clean you up—’ says the twin in grey.
‘—because you stink,’ says the other.
My cheeks flame, ‘That’s rude, now!’
The twin in grey steps back.
I fold my arms. ‘Do you think rude together, as well as talk it?’
Them take each other’s hands. The one in the brown dress says, ‘We always think together when we agree. And we always do—’
‘—agree. Apart from when—’ the twin in grey smiles.
‘—we can’t decide which of us is prettier or cleverer.’ Thems smiles drop.
Them open a door to a steep wooden staircase leading upstairs. ‘The bath’s ready. We’re going to clean you upstairs in our own bathroom, where we wash our dolls.’
‘You have a washroom here just for dolls? Course you do.’ I follow them upstairs.
In the twins’ bedroom, two grand wooden beds stand side by side. Two mirrors over two sets of drawers. Blackberry-colour fabric drapes along the walls, silver trees painted over it. I follow the twins to the corner of the room. Them lift the fabric, and there’s another door. It opens into a washroom with a huge wooden washtub right in the middle. It’s painted with curled shapes like seeds growing, bean to shoot to root. The washtub is full of steaming water and thick bubbles froth on the surface. The twins pick up two metal buckets.
The one in grey says, ‘We’ll fetch more hot water, it’s nearly full.’
I say, ‘Dun worry. It’s just right. You two wait in your room for me.’
Them hold each other’s hands and stare at my dress, like them’re thinking really loud that I should take it off right now.
My hands are filthy, black grime under my nails. ‘Come on. You wouldn’t bathe in front of me. I’ll let you brush my hair after.’
The twin in brown whispers, ‘Dress up dolly. We can give her ribbons in her hair, make her look like she’s going—’ them smile at each other and whisper together, ‘—outside.’
Them glance up at me, heads tilted.
‘Go on, out. Guard the door so no one comes near. It’s an important job. You can play with my hair after, and we’ll talk about the drawing of the boy.’
Them smile. Them might mean it this time. Hard to tell. Them close the door behind them.
If I stay in this washroom as long as I can, there’s still a tiny bit of hope that Barney is still alive. I can hold it in my hands, make it spark, make it glow bright, keep it hid just for myself. Not think about what it will feel like, when it goes out.
I pull my dress off over my head. It looks like a dirty dishrag on the floor. I check the door is still closed. I pull off my vest, unbind my breasts and them ache as I kick off my boots and socks. I step out of my drawers, pick them up and look at the gusset. No blood. Pinheads of light swirl behind my eyelids, I grip the edge of the washtub.
In the small rippled mirror my eyes are too old for my face. Dun want to look at my belly. From the pain tight across the skin, the smears of dried soil over it, I know that’s where hims hands were. I can smell the dank dead graveyard on me. Sickness catches the back of my throat. I splash water over my face. My hands are smeared in dirt.
Can’t get in this washtub, I’m too filthy.
On the damp floor in the corner I curl up, my arms around myself. I hear Langward’s voice in my head … You look so like your mother. Press my cheek on the floor. And I do look like her. I curl up tighter.
Him dun see me, him wanted something of hers. Wanted to spite her, even when she’s dead. Because the way him loved her is like a poison that spreads.
My head’s full of thorns and spikes.
Blackthorn bush thoughts: part of me is still lying there in the graveyard, staring up at the sky through tangled twigs and thorns. A shadow of me peeled off, feeling all the things I dun want to feel, waiting to be buried.
Thorn.
Lying here thinking him might’ve said the truth: Mam traded me.
Spike. Spike. Spike.
The worst thing of all is that it could be true.
And she’s not here to ask if it is.
Thorn.
My shadow, peeled away.
Sinks into the earth. Mine.
Not mine.
Never going to let anyone touch me.
Are there any hands what dun want anything for themselves, just to stroke me into light?
Everything needs to stop.
Everything needs to come back.
My heart judders.
I’ve got to get clean and stop thinking half in half.
Under the water in the washtub I open my eyes and surface.
If I leave my shadow, her, in the graveyard, she’ll rot like all the corpses. She’s stuck there. I shout Mary! in my thoughts. Plunge down in the water, see her lying in the graveyard. Stand up! Behind my eyelids, she hobbles to her feet.
I surface.
Come here. I breathe in.
Plunge down.
I see her. She staggers. Pushes her way through bushes, hobbles over stones, her arms flail. She trips and stands and trips again – she moves like she’s being tipped in waves. She crosses the fields. Threads tied from her waist to mine tug her along. She pitches, surges, tilts.
She drifts through the pink fence, sifts through the front door like she’s made of black smoke, climbs the stairs, passes through the twins’ room. She’s at this door. I judder as she sieves through it.
I surface.
She stands at the other side of the washtub.
We stare at each other through steam. She’s got my face, body, ripped dress, but she’s made of grey and black twisted threads.
She’s angered, hurt, crying. Tears leave pale trails on her grey cheeks. She reaches her hand into the washtub, splashes water on her belly and winces.
I stand up, all clean and clear, no pain in my body.
She stands opposite me, smeared in dirt, face dark and full of pain. She bares her teeth at me and pulls her dress open. I look at her belly. It sags from hurt, her skin hangs like folded linen. I look down at mine. Now I know what Langward did. Stretched from our right hipbones up to under our left ribs. The cuts show the letters, a deep, red word, carved in our skin with my knife:
LOVE
Love, that I dun feel and is not felt for me.
Love, a scar to heal over time.
Love can scab up, dry out, flake off.
I reach out my hands. Shadow Mary groans and it sounds in my head. Her hollow eyes scowl under strands of hair. Neither one of us wants to be attached back onto each other. This is Shadow Mary, my own twin
.
What do you want? I ask her in my thoughts.
She clenches her hands. She holds them out and looks at them. Her nails have grown. Four crescents of black blood, across the middle of her palms. She sighs, like it’s a relief. Her voice in my head says, Hide me in the moppet, with Barney.
I look down at the palms of my own hands. Them are clean and clear, wrinkled and puffed up with water.
The moppet is curled tight in the bottom of my bag. I pull it out and drop it on the floor. It sits up, raggedy ears hanging over its beady eyes, dull with steam. I turn the moppet round so it faces Shadow Mary. Get in. I think at her. She steps towards me, fists clenched. I think, Hide in the moppet, with Barney. I’ll look after you.
She breaks into pieces, smaller and smaller, and drops through the steam. My heart thuds. Shadow Mary is a pile of blackness on the floor. The blackness moves like a dark fog. It gets sucked in, where the opening of the shell must be.
The moppet slumps forwards. I pick it up and put it next to my ear.
Barney’s voice says, ‘Mary here.’
Shadow Mary says, ‘Go. To. Sleep.’
I imagine me and Barney are together, curled up for sleep, me stroking hims hair. I listen close, and say, ‘Barney, I’ll always keep the moppet, no matter what, because you’re mine.’
Shadow Mary’s voice says, ‘Go. Away.’
Morgan
‘You can see me,’ says Beatrice, with doubt in her voice.
‘Yes.’ Anita told me once that ghosts didn’t always know they were dead and would become offended if the living ever said it to them.
She says, ‘It’s taken too long to be seen.’ A low wind blows in the room, and is gone. ‘Am I still here?’
‘As clear as anyone alive would be.’
Beatrice puts her hand over her heart. ‘Dun know … how long … this will last,’ she pants. Her chest rises and falls against her hand. ‘No one sees me. I’ve lost all the names … the first things that went … I need them here, need them to think. Of. Me.’
I take a deep breath, ‘Mary’s hurt.’
Beatrice wails, ‘She won’t come home!’ Her breathing is too fast.
I touch her shoulder.
She looks at my hand, as if she’s unsure what it is. ‘Can you feel me?’
I nod.
Beatrice’s shoulder feels like a dead bird. Cold feathers. Desperately fragile bones. ‘Hold me.’ Beatrice has panic in her eyes as she stands up and reaches out her arms.
My arms open.
Beatrice’s thin frame leans into me … I listen for her heartbeat. There isn’t one. Mine beats hard. Dead feathers tickle at my neck. I’m holding her … I don’t want … I turn my face to hers.
Beatrice has grown pale feathers all over her, apart from on her face.
Her sharp eyes gleam.
I pull away, she grips harder. Cold crackles through my arms, my heart thuds, I twist away from her, but she grasps my back, ice pushes through my spine towards my heart.
‘You’re dead!’ I shriek.
A gale sweeps through the room.
I’m alone in the middle of the room, my arms wrapped around myself. A small white feather twists in the draught on the floor.
I’m freezing cold and I need to light a fire, but there’s no fuel by the empty fireplace. I wrap myself up in an embroidered tablecloth and feel like a crone. Crones wear shawls, so I find one, sling it around myself and hobble into the kitchen and out of the back door. There are old fishing nets strewn around, a rusted saw and a broken wooden table. The track that leads along the back of the other cottages is empty. A dog barks and I don’t think crones like barking dogs, so I drag the table quickly into the kitchen, get the saw and close the door.
The shawl and tablecloth I’m wrapped in are embroidered. Beatrice’s things. I tear them off and drop them on the floor. My hands are freezing and the saw is nearly blunt. So now I’m a woodswoman, and I’m resourceful with a blunt saw. I get some good pieces of wood by sawing up the table and now there’s sawdust all over the kitchen floor.
I take the wood into the other room, lay the fire and strike a match, and another and another. Poor little match girl, so cold and alone. The fire takes a while to catch. I hold the shawl over the fireplace so it sucks up the air.
My teeth are chattering. On the floor by the fire, I hold out my hands and let the warmth spread through me.
Thoughts crash around my head, all fighting to be chosen and I don’t know which thoughts are mine and which are Beatrice’s. I get the book, sit in the chair by the fire and write:
Once there was a ghost mother.
She was hungry for any kind of life, because she had lost hers somewhere. She thought her daughter could keep her alive, and she looked in the daughter’s heart, but she couldn’t make her home there. The daughter had a picture of her mother on a wall in her heart, and it wasn’t flattering. The ghost mother knew that she wouldn’t be able to live in her daughter’s heart, staring at this portrait of herself.
The ghost mother was left homeless, seeking some other heart to live in.
My neck prickles. Beatrice is back. I keep writing.
A word of warning to those seeking friendship: if you meet this ghost mother and she holds out her arms, don’t hold out your own.
She’s grown her daughter’s bones and blood in her womb; she remembers the warmth and the beat, how her hopes were built into the cells of her daughter’s body. And how to grow a heart.
She remembers how much expectation she had to build, to pant her daughter into the world. But she realises that her expectations were unfulfilled. They were all the things that she wanted for herself and never got. So she is left wandering, seeking a heart, any heart, your heart, to make her home.
Don’t ignore this advice and open out your arms – you won’t know anything is wrong, till you hear a heartbeat in your breast, that just misses the rhythm of your own. By then it will be too late.
The ghost mother will curl warm in your heart while you stare through disorientated eyes, and find you don’t know what you feel.
Beatrice is still here somewhere, hidden in some shadow, under a bed, in a cupboard, just in the corner of my eyes when I blink. She’s still here because I can’t stop thinking about her. I’m calling her back into her home with my thoughts. I gather up every embroidery I can find, roll them up, pack them away in the cupboard and close the door. I sit at the table by the window. The sea is empty and grey. I try not to think about Beatrice.
Instead, I think about my own parents.
In our last year on the mainland, my parents had a room they hid things in whenever anyone died. I saw them dressed in black, smuggling them in night after night and locking them in there. Valuable items – boxes of jewellery, pillowcases filled with gold coins, bundles of notes stuffed in a mattress, silverware, bronze statues, furs.
The money they had after each death can’t have just been the fee for my father’s services. They had a lot more money every time someone died. More than they knew what to do with. My mother ordered new clothes and jewellery. She paid young men to come and coil and uncoil her hair while she smiled at herself in the mirror. She got whatever she wanted delivered to our door in parcels. Fine lacework, designer shoes, bolts of silken fabrics, leather coats, delicate beading, fur-lined boots. Her face scrubbed plucked tweaked, injected smeared plumped.
She looked and felt beautiful. Stolen beauty.
My father would go out for expensive meals. I listened through the banisters when I heard the front door bang. My mother would rush to the door to hear him speak. He’d tell her how he drank the richest, most expensive wine, ‘Like the blood of kings’. I imagined shimmering wine glasses, brimming red, that a king had dripped from his forefinger at my father’s request.
‘Ooh, and what did you eat … my lord?’ Mum sniggered up at him, her hands on her chest. My father told her, ‘Seventeen courses. Twenty. So many I lost count.’ He’d lick his lips and smile. ‘Sil
ver spoons and forks for fingers,’ he once said, as he arrived in the hallway downstairs. He glanced up, caught me watching, fluttered his fingers at me with a glint in his eye, and shouted, ‘Child, back to bed.’
He filled himself with food and wine. Stolen sustenance.
Now my mother is no longer beautiful and my father picks at his food.
What happened to make them run? My best friend, Anita, was a ghost. Proof that ghosts exist, if my parents decided to believe me. But they didn’t.
‘Ask them where they get their money from …’ Anita whispered, over and over into my ears as I slept. I’d hear her halfway between sleep and waking, her lips over my ear, holding her hair away from my face, being so careful never to let any part of herself touch me.
But I didn’t ask them.
But, perhaps, one day they saw her.
Anita could have poked my mother in the face, called her … a thief? She might have kicked her, pulled her hair, made fear rampage through her heart for a moment, for a day, a week, a year … and still, now. If my parents stole from so many dead people’s homes, raided their possessions, they could have thought a whole army of ghosts might be marauding after them. No wonder my mother doesn’t think she’s safe.
When we left, they brought bolts of cloth, seeds, cans of plant feed. They brought crates of books and clothes. They brought Mum’s hammers, saws and chisels, Dad’s embalming chemicals and scalpels, cloths for shrouds. Handles and hinges and fittings for the coffins. They brought his smart suits and her chalks and paints and rolls of paper. They brought themselves: an undertaker and a coffin-maker when there was no one else here to do these jobs. They grew as much food from the seeds as they could. Anything my parents need but can’t grow, my father very occasionally goes out to get. And he gives the islanders ‘forwards trade’ for it. Forwards trade is for death: his promise to prepare bodies, provide a coffin, dig a hole. So people give him what he asks for.
Because the dead must be buried.
Snake Ropes Page 18