by Ray Cluley
She put on her jumper, one that Grandma had knitted. It had a lamb on it and the fluff of its fleece stuck out from the front. Tanya liked to pull it into shapes like hair styles. She went out the front but would go around back to hear what they said.
It was dark, and the town was quiet. At the front of the house the path twisted its way up into the mountains where the caves were. The mountains were big jagged triangles and you could only tell they were there because of where they cut into the sky, hiding the stars. A few of the other houses on the path had their lights on and Tanya watched shadows behind the curtains as people moved around inside. Window curtains that you could see through. She went around the side of the house, jumping down quietly from the porch and running through the tall weeds, slowing down when she saw the light spilling from the kitchen onto the back garden steps. If she sat on one of the low ones she could hear them without being seen from the window; the garden was very steep.
“. . . livestock allowance,” Father was saying. Tanya hoped they were finally going to get a goat.
“We’ve been turned down every year we’ve applied.”
“Yeah, well, things are different now aren’t they.”
Father sounded angry and it made Tanya want to cry again. The lights of the town below blurred because her eyes were wet, but she didn’t cry.
“Alan said he’ll appeal about the accident, have the blood count as our—”
“Come on, it’ll go to the town kitty if it counts at all.”
Father had nothing to say to that.
“I could teach her at home,” Mother continued. “As long as I’m sick, I should do something useful.”
“We’re not pulling her out of school.”
“I can—”
“No.”
This time a tear did fall but Tanya wiped it quick as if it were never there. She didn’t want to stop school, but she would if Mother said so.
“Look,” said Father, and his voice was softer, “I know you could teach her, but for how long each day before you had to rest? And it’s not just about the lessons, it’s about the other children. She needs to make friends and all of that.”
“Then let’s move and she can make new friends. Not all towns have this stupid fucking tribute law.”
The idea of moving made Tanya gasp and the bad word made Tanya gasp again straight afterwards. The light she was sitting in suddenly had a shadow in it and she nearly gasped another time because of its weird arm but she realized it was Father even before he opened the back door. She hopped off the step quickly to run back to the front but she slipped and fell, hitting her knee on the stony ground and tumbling someway down the path so it scraped the skin of her shins. Then Father was there, kneeling next to her and hushing her tears.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”
This time Tanya believed him.
S
Even after she’d been sent to bed Tanya lay awake for a long time. She kept pressing her knee which felt bigger than usual and squishy. It hurt a little bit but not too much, and the strange feel of it was interesting. It felt like the curtain did sometimes when it was full. Farther down from her knee her shin pulsed with a dull throb. She could ignore that though because she was still trying to hear Mother and Father talking. She tried, but she couldn’t make the sounds into proper words. When she closed her eyes to hear better, she fell asleep.
She dreamt of Grandma, calling her name from the front room, but every time Tanya went to see, she wasn’t there.
S
It was nearly afternoon when Tanya woke up, which was all right because there was no school. She got up and winced because the sheet was stuck to her leg for a moment. She had a thin scab over her scrape and her knee was a dark colour but it only hurt if she touched it. It made her remember Father’s arm and she went to see if it was better.
The bed in his room was empty. She went to Mother’s room but hers was empty, too. It still smelled of the sick smell but the window was open and the bed was sort of made.
“Ma?”
Mother was in the kitchen. She was trying to make bread but she wasn’t pushing the dough very hard. “Breakfast? There’s some oats left.”
Tanya shook her head.
“Your father’s gone in to work today.”
“What about his arm?”
“Yes, well, he’s going to see if there’s a different job he can do if he can’t do his usual one.”
“Is it better?”
“No, I doubt he’ll get a better job, not now.”
“I meant, is his arm better?”
“Of course it’s not better.”
Tanya was worried. Mother was moving the dough around but she wasn’t doing much except pushing flour onto the floor.
“I can help,” Tanya said. She went to the sink to wash her hands because she’d been playing with her new scab.
“I can do it, I’m not a cripple.” Then she leant over the dough and her shoulders began to shake. “Sorry, hummingbird,” she said. Her voice sounded watery. “Sorry.”
Tanya said it was all right.
“Why don’t you go and play for a while?”
But Tanya didn’t want to play, not with other children anyway. Not today. She went to the living room and looked to see if her circles were still there in the dust. They were, though a couple had been scuffed a bit by Father’s boots. The flies were still there too, and at first she thought there were more but it was a scattering of loose pebbles from the path outside where she fell. Next to them was the handkerchief Father had used on her shin. She gathered the little stones up into her palm, leaving tiny dots wherever her fingertips touched the cloth. She could have used the handkerchief but she wanted to feel the cool clamminess of the curtain, to see if it felt different.
She couldn’t tell.
Some people didn’t like to touch it at all and they would “let their blood,” Mother said. When Tanya said that sounded unfinished Mother said it would never be finished, so Tanya still didn’t know what they let their blood do. It gave people scars, though.
She spent the afternoon waiting for her father to return, putting tiny pebbles into each circle she’d drawn, and picking carefully at the scab on her leg. It was still too fresh but she could lift it at the edges if she was gentle. Eventually, after some careful patient picking, she had only the fresh pinkness of new skin on her shin and the thin scab in her hand.
She dropped it where the curtain gathered on the floor. It was bleached white in moments.
“What are you doing?”
Mother stood in the doorway. She had flour on her dressing gown and on her cheeks.
“Nothing,” said Tanya, but Mother came over anyway to see. By then the scab had crumbled to something a bit like flour and then even that was gone and they were looking at the “nothing” Tanya had said.
“You shouldn’t play so close to it,” said Mother.
“Why?”
Mother didn’t reply. She just stared at the curtain, looking like she had a hundred questions of her own. Or was carefully considering an answer to a different question altogether.
S
When Father returned he had a slip of paper that said he couldn’t work in the caves.
“They’ve shut it down.”
Mother was lying on her side because it made breathing easier, but she turned and sat up. “All of it?”
“Just the system where it happened. Officially it’s because of maintenance, but really they’re worried the taste has hungered it. They didn’t cut the cloth so now they need to let it settle, starve a little, work the other caves so it doesn’t think . . . well, whatever it thinks. Then they’ll declare the machines safe again.”
“Can you work one of the others?”
Father sat on the bed and reached out to take her hand. He reached with his bad arm out of habit but Mother pulled away at first. Then she apologized and held it and Tanya wondered if she should be watching. She was in the doorway, standing on tiptoes and then lowering herself; tiptoes up, and then back down. It was easy if you held the door frame but trickier if you didn’t.
“There’s not much going. Now that they’ve closed one cave they’ve had to reassign men enough as it is, and some are out of work until it’s open again.”
“But you—”
“I was the man responsible. It’s fair.”
“It’s not fair.” Mother raised his arm by the wrist and shook it so his hand flapped.
“Stop it, Marjorie.”
“You’ve got this and nothing else and a child to feed and put through school.”
“Stop it!”
She dropped his arm and he pulled it away from her.
“You still want to move? Fine, where will we go? Look at what happens at the other places; the loss of livestock and sometimes worse. Often worse. The lotteries, or a whole town enveloped just because—”
“I don’t think that happens.”
She said it to the covers and even Tanya could tell Mother didn’t mean it.
“We all pay our bit and it stays away and we do all right. The accident’s ours. The blood I lost has been reassigned to us. We’ll be all right for a while. I’ll find something.”
Mother closed her eyes. “I need to get better, Henry. That’s all.”
“Yes.” He stroked her forehead. He used his good hand. “Get better.” Mother smiled and looked at him, took up his other hand in her own again.
It was a moment so intimate and tender that Tanya stepped away quietly from the room.
S
“Why isn’t your mother sick?”
Koji shrugged, but he had an answer. “She had an operation after I was born.”
“What kind of operation?”
He shrugged again, and this time there was no answer except, “I don’t know. But she could pay tribute now, if she wanted. Father won’t let her though.”
Tanya wondered if the sickness and the bloodcloth in the mountains was linked. Mother said it was. She said it couldn’t take their blood so it took something else in a different way. “Blood, sweat, tears, and spirit,” she’d said. She had been trying to explain what happened to Grandma and Tanya wondered how she didn’t cry because she couldn’t stop.
Tanya remembered it very well. She’d come home from school and the first thing she’d noticed was the curtain in the front room was gone. The wall behind it was a cleaner dark colour than the rest of the wood and for a moment it looked like a door. Next she noticed Father’s work things on the kitchen table, which meant he was home early. She went rushing in to her parents’ room, for they’d shared a bed back then, calling for them, wanting to ask about Father being home and the missing curtain but also wanting to tell them about school and not knowing what order to do it in. They weren’t there, but coming out she heard hurried voices, sharp like an argument but not angry, coming from Grandma’s room, and then Father was coming out.
“Hey, little darling.”
He tried to close the door behind him but she screamed for “Grandma!” because she’d already seen inside. It startled Father enough that she was able to get past his legs and into the room.
Mother was sitting beside the bed, her eyes red and puffy from crying. Grandma must have been in the bed like always but Tanya couldn’t see her because the curtain was laid across it. She could tell where she lay, though, because the bloodcloth was a dark crimson colour clinging to the shape of her body like wet linen. Tanya could see the shape of Grandma’s head, the tiny slope of her nose, the pillow rise of her breasts. She could see each arm, the hands little spheres where Grandma had clenched them into fists. Her legs together made her seem like a mermaid, especially because of how her feet pointed up and out to make a triangle of curtain cloth.
“Hummingbird . . .”
Tanya thought it was Grandma speaking at first and yelped but the cloth at her mouth had not sank, she hadn’t opened it, she—
“She can’t breathe!” Tanya cried. “Ma, she can’t breathe, get it off!”
Father had held her shoulders, tried to turn her around and out of the room, but Mother said no and that was when she explained. She told Tanya it was Grandma’s decision, and she tried to explain about ubasute, which was a word Tanya had forgotten, but Tanya didn’t really listen. And she couldn’t look at Grandma either. She stared at the curtain pole that had been leant in the corner on the room, and one of the gloves Father was supposed to wear at work on the floor beside it, as Mother talked quietly. She said Grandma would always be with them, but Tanya didn’t want her always in the curtain, and Mother brushed at her hair and rubbed her back to make her feel better. It didn’t help because Mother was still wearing the other glove.
“Hey, Tanya.” Koji pulled her hair to get her attention.
She rubbed her eyes and hoped he didn’t think the tears were there because he’d yanked her ponytail. “What?”
“Drummond said that all girls have their own red curtains and that they bleed for a whole week every single month. Is that true?”
Tanya could see Drummond and his friends having a spitting competition against the schoolhouse wall. The other children were running around each other, calling and laughing and playing games while she and Koji sat on the bench eating their lunch.
“I think so,” Tanya said. “I don’t really know.”
“Do you have to cut yourself? Where does it come from?”
Koji took a bite of his sandwich. Tanya decided not to tell him and shrugged instead.
“A whole week?” he said around a mouthful of bread. “How come you don’t die?”
Tanya didn’t know that, either. And anyway, thinking of Grandma and how sick Mother was, she sort of thought that they did.
S
Tanya went to bed that night thinking of the conversation she’d had with Koji and hearing her parents argue quietly in the room next door. It made for a troubled sleep.
She dreamt that she went to the caves, which was how she knew she was dreaming because girls weren’t allowed. She was wearing her father’s overalls, the long legs folded under her feet and wedged in the boots like thick socks. The safety helmet on her head was too big; when she looked up at the mountains she was walking to, it fell back and she had to hold it on, and when she looked back down at the path she walked upon it fell forward and covered her eyes. She had Father’s long gloves clenched in one hand and kept trying to put them on, but they were always too big or, strangely, too small, and every time she tried she said, “Damn things don’t fit right,” even though she knew not to say damn. She would throw them to the side of the path but after a few steps towards the caves they’d be in her hands again and she’d try them on again and all the time the caves weren’t getting closer at all.
Pulling yet another glove onto her right hand she felt it fill with cold water but when it spilled over her cuffs she saw it was actually blood and she grunted her disgust, pulling the glove off quick and dropping it to the gravel path which was more like the one in her back garden than the road leading to the caves. Blood continued to spill from the glove, and it began to rise up out of the ground, emerging from beneath the small stones like a bath was filling up underneath. Her shin was bleeding again, but instead of running down her leg it looked like it was running up from the ground and into her scraped graze.
“Get away!” Mother screamed, “don’t play so close to it!” But when Tanya looked up, letting the helmet fall off her head this time, she saw not her mother but all the men from the caves running downhill towards her. “Get away!” they all yelled together with Mother’s voice. Some even made giant gestures
with their arms, sweeping them forward to show her which way to run which was down, down, the same way as them, away from the caves, down.
Behind them, spilling from caves which were suddenly close, was wave upon wave of thick curtain flesh, bloodcloth unravelling from the mountain darkness like a huge fat tongue. It folded upon itself and pushed its way downhill, knocking down trees at the roadside and engulfing those too slow to outrun it.
Tanya turned and ran, not to flee the horror but to warn her parents, but somehow the curtain had overtaken her and she was running on top of it, terrified of falling over. It sank and squelched under her feet, blood spitting up like puddle splashes, the meaty smell as thick as the flesh it came from. Ahead of her, the mass of it washed up against the buildings below in giant fleshy waves. It poured into open windows and knocked down doors, filling houses with its hungry cloth that wasn’t cloth, was never cloth, demanding its payment with a voice nobody could hear but everybody listened to which meant they couldn’t hear her screaming, “No! No! No!” The only person who knew she was screaming was Tanya, and it woke her up.
Even awake, in her bed, in her room, the fear still gripped her, as tight as the cloth that was all over her like it was on Grandma, clutching at her legs, wrapped around her arms, and she fell from bed trying to get away from it.
Father came in and struck a light, Mother’s calls of concern behind him in the dark house, and Tanya saw the curtain she struggled with was only her own bedding. The sheets were soaked with her sweat and her tears, but not with her blood.
S
Tanya blew the dust on the floor, bored of the circles she saw there. She rubbed them away with her hands. The wooden boards under her palms were worn smooth with age and use, and yet she felt a stab of pain; one of the edges had been scuffed rough and now she had a splinter in the pad of her finger. She pulled it out easily and waited for the blood to rise, wondering if she should give it to the curtain. She was never scared of her own blood like some children were. “Blood is a sign of living,” Father said.