Wolf Light

by Yaba Badoe

  ‘Does anybody know that Nana Merrimore is no more?’ Adoma asked.

  Linet frowned, and reluctantly, face squeezed tight in anger, she shook her head. ‘If I tell them, they’ll disturb the lake. They’ll drag it and then not only will they find Nana, they’ll find all those other poor souls as well. Those women they drowned because they were witches. I can’t have that.’

  ‘Hush, my sister,’ I murmured. ‘Hush, Linet, hush.’ I smoothed her mane of midnight curls and when her head slumped on to my shoulder, Adoma and I cradled her until Adoma asked:

  ‘When are you going to call those people Nana Merrimore asked you to, Linet? Rosie and Redwood. You are going to call them, aren’t you?’

  Linet remained silent. Then, as her coldness began to thaw and warmth crept into her body, tears filled her eyes: ‘I never mentioned it,’ she confessed, ‘but I saw what was about to happen to Nana. Remember that day when I called you over, and she and her friends were drinking? I saw, but didn’t think it possible. Perhaps if I’d talked to her, I mean really talked to her, perhaps she’d still be alive.’

  ‘I saw Gran-pa’s end too,’ Adoma admitted. ‘I tried to delay it. Tried to prevent it, but I couldn’t. Linet, I don’t think you could have behaved any differently with Nana Merrimore. I don’t think that anyone could have stopped her.’

  The Lake-girl disagreed. ‘I should have done more.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Grandma warned me, but I didn’t believe her enough for it to sink in. Now it’s too late.’

  Suddenly, Linet’s face crumpled. ‘I want her back,’ she wept. ‘I want Nana back.’

  In a bid to console her, to help each of us take our first steps without our teachers, I said: ‘Come on now, let’s go and release our spirit creatures. Let’s light up the world and sparkle with sister-magic!’

  So that’s what we did. We slipped out from the ger. As soon as the light of the moon touched our shadow selves, we cast caution aside, transforming into creatures of air and land. Cradled by Mother Earth and Father Sky, we played through the night singing songs that soothed the pain in our hearts. We sang loudly, exuberantly on our staircase to the stars.

  23

  Linet

  When I open my eyes next morning Nana’s name is on my lips. She’s there in my heart and mind, and yet for the first time since she left me, I don’t turn away from light; I don’t close my eyes tight, and curled up in a ball cry: ‘Nana! Nana!’ again and again. Not today!

  Today I hear her whisper: ‘That’s sister-magic for you! Not only are you swimming in water, you’re jumping when you hit the ground as well.’

  ‘Nana, I miss you!’ I reply.

  Even so, I sit up thrilled by last night. As chuffed as the black-feathered bird within me, a bird red in beak and claw, I smile remembering: Yah! That was me, Linet Merrimore, up there! That was me in the sky swooping and diving. Me sitting on a leopard’s head on the steppes. And when the leopard snarled, I knew she wouldn’t bite me because the leopard was Adoma. And see that winter wolf dancing in starlight? The wolf with moonbeams around her neck? She won’t maul me should I peck at her tail, because that’s Zula and Zula’s my sister.

  Unafraid for the first time in ages, I spring out of bed and racing with Bracken to the lake, I step in.

  Bracken meows, nervous that I might take the plunge and do what Nana did. So I say to her: ‘Bracken, be quiet. Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. I’m certainly not going to leave you. Never ever, you hear.’

  My hands scoop up water and whirling and turning, I spray it in the air while I sing.

  ‘Linet Lake, Linet Lake soft as morning dew

  Your Linet-girl is here to play with you

  Linet Lake may your day be bright and true

  For when wolf-light comes, I’ll be here for you.’

  The ripples of the lake become still as a mirror. So still, the birds in the hobbled oaks opposite stop singing. Even Bracken stops screeching as the wind kisses me and then holds its breath. If I’m to talk, this is the time to do so.

  I couldn’t yesterday because crammed with grief, my throat clenched before I could speak. Today I touch my talisman to gather my thoughts, and say loud and clear so that those hidden beneath can hear: ‘Lovely lake, Old Hester, ladies of the lake, especially you, Nana… I wish you could have seen me last night. I went out with my sisters and each of us changed: one to a leopard, the other a wolf. I grew wings and flew as a chough. Wild, that’s me, wild and free. Nana, you should see me now! I’m not frightened any more. Not frightened of the sharpness at the tip of my tongue because that’s my beak. I’m a bird, that’s me. Nana, if you were here, I’d run to you, and hold you for ever.’

  I pause as my conscience pinches, urging me to say more. Lips tight as a clam I’m quiet until the best part of me, the part that listens to my sisters’ advice, prises my mouth open: ‘By the way, Nana, I haven’t got in touch with those friends of yours as I promised. Don’t worry I’ll call them soon. I might even call them today after I’ve done what I need to. Bye, Nana! Goodbye, ladies of the Linet Lake.’

  My conscience pursuing me, I run back to Carbilly and do what I do every morning. Wash. Dress. Feed and water Bracken. Eat a hunk of brown bread. Down a glass of milk. I’m preparing for the day ahead, when the hairs in my ears prickle and I hear footfall outside.

  I pull Bracken to my side and a finger on my lips, catch her eye: ‘Shush,’ I tell her.

  There’s a knock on the kitchen door.

  Apart from Bracken and I, no one’s set foot in Carbilly since Nana’s friends came to see her. No one’s called her phone or written us a letter.

  ‘Quiet, Bracken.’ I dig my hand into a packet of biscuits and take one out. She nibbles it.

  A second knock. Then a third. Louder. Determined.

  I sniff and catch a hint of Lance in the air.

  That blackberry tang tickles my tongue. I swallow. Hold my breath. Berries juice my heart as the bird within me stirs, eager to fly once again.

  ‘Not now,’ I groan. ‘Please, not now.’

  Bracken yawns.

  I stroke her neck to distract her from Lance at the door: ‘Relax. Good girl,’ I whisper hoping that if we can only be quiet enough, Lance will walk away and return when I’ve concocted a tale to tell him.

  Another knock and the door latch rattles. ‘Nana Merrimore! Linet! Are you in?’

  Bracken meows, breaks free and yowls.

  I get up. Too quickly, because I trip on a chair beside me and as it clatters to the floor, there’s nothing I can do but shout: ‘Coming,’ and open up.

  Lance is holding a bag. ‘This is for you and your nana,’ he says, ‘apples from Crow’s Nest.’

  The token around my neck quivers at the mention of Nana’s name. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I try to find my voice, find the right words, but Nana’s absence seizes me, and I can barely stand up.

  As Lance lurches for my hands to hold me upright, apples tumble over the floor. ‘Are you OK?’

  I shake my head. He pulls up the toppled chair, sits me down. Yanks its neighbour and while I struggle for breath, searching for a way to explain the predicament I’m in, Lance sits opposite me.

  Overwhelmed by grief, I can’t hold it in any longer, can’t stop the lake of tears inside me from streaming out. The more I cry, the more sobs wrack my body, the firmer Lance presses his hand in mine. Skin to skin, he gradually soothes me while the beat of his pulse steadies my runaway heart. He doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t pick and probe but waits until the ache inside me subsides.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’

  ‘Water will do.’

  After swilling out a glass at the sink, he fills it to the brim.

  I gulp it down.

  Still no questions, just the gentle graze of his eyes on mine. They’re blue, the blue of irises that come up every spring at the lake’s edge; fiercely blue with purple glints of kindness. Loving-kindness, Adoma calls it. Even through a kaleid
oscope of tears, those eyes do most of his talking for him.

  I answer them with words that tear my heart open: ‘I’m missing Nana.’

  ‘Is she away?’

  ‘She’s gone.’

  Again, he waits until I’m able to tell him more. Unsure how much I can trust him, I stick to the facts: ‘She’s not coming back.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  I nod.

  He gets up and one after the other picks up the apples that rolled on the floor. As he places them in a fruit bowl on the table, he looks around, taking in the wreckage in what was once Nana’s tidy kitchen. His eyes flit here and there and as I follow them, I glimpse what he’s seeing: Nana’s sink groaning with unwashed plates, instant noodle cartons on the counter, a half-eaten apple on the table, a hunk of bread I’ve just bitten into, and beside that open packets of biscuits by a half-used tin of cat food.

  He peeps into the sitting room beyond. Piles of paper scattered everywhere. Papers from Nana’s writing desk and opened files. Papers and books: all over the floor, on side tables, on the sofa and chairs. I see the mayhem and spinning back to my day of torment, relive what happened.

  I watched Nana sucked into the drowning pool. Watched to see if the ghosts there would fling her out like they did me. I waited and waited and when they didn’t, I fled into Carbilly in tears and searched everywhere: through Nana’s books and papers, notebooks, stacks of bills, invoices and photograph albums. I rummaged through everything I could lay my hands on believing that somewhere in a forgotten corner, she’d have left me a note; a message, at the very least, to explain why she’d left me.

  In despair, I hunted through the house: the sitting room, Nana’s study, her bedroom. I looked and found nothing. Not a scribble, not a word to say how sorry she was to leave me. Why not? I couldn’t understand why not.

  I still can’t. I drag myself to the sink and start to wash the plates. When Lance joins me, shadows on his face tell me he’s worried.

  ‘Has she really gone?’ he asks.

  I nod.

  ‘Did she go the way of her mother and her grandmother before her?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ Anxious in case he’s said something he shouldn’t, he brushes a hand through raven-black hair.

  ‘Know what?’ I press him.

  ‘Hasn’t anyone told you?’

  ‘What?’

  He blinks, turns away and as he does so I remember similar looks and asides directed at Nana and I whenever we ventured into Blisland, our nearest town; asides and whispers I never questioned because they seemed as rooted in our lives on the moor as its granite core: myths about us Merrimores.

  A smile hovers over Lance’s lips: ‘Rumours that’s all it is. Old stories and rumours.’

  ‘Go on, tell me!’ I insist. I dip my fingers in the sink and flick water at him.

  Lance backs away, his smile expanding. ‘It’s crazy, I know.’

  I follow him, spitting water from the tips of my fingers. Water magic. He grabs my wrists and as the warmth of his touch seeps into my skin, I sizzle.

  ‘We’re worried in the mind, most of us, I know,’ he admits. ‘But just about everyone on the moor says Merrimore women aren’t born like ordinary folk.’

  Hand in hand we rock with laughter. Doubled over, we crumple to the ground. On the cold slate floor, hands light as a feather clasp mine.

  ‘Told you it was crazy but that’s the moor speaking. They say you come from the lake out there. And when you’re ready to go, you return to it.’

  Nodding, I laugh, half-hearing an echo from long ago of words spoken to Zula. Memory rustles through me, and as my voice drifts like a leaf to the ground, I catch it and remember.

  ‘I’m a Merrimore!’ I said to Zula. ‘We’re water witches, we are! We’re born in water and return to it when we die!’

  I’ve known this all along, it seems, and yet never grasped the truth of it.

  ‘Is that what you believe?’ I ask Lance. ‘That I came from the lake out there and when I’m to die, I’ll return to it? Am I that peculiar?’

  Lance shrugs, undecided: ‘I did wonder when I saw you in the mist, but after we went up the tor together…’ He shakes his head.

  No sooner said, then Nana’s phone rings.

  I run to pick it up. On the other end is Nana’s friend, Redwood. He’s with Rosie, just round the corner, and would like to drop in.

  I say, ‘Fine.’

  24

  Linet

  I said ‘fine’ but in my heart I want to disappear. If I had it in me, I’d say Abracadabra! Hey presto! And then whoosh! I’d be out of here in a puff of smoke. I’m tempted to use Nana’s camouflage trick and blend into the clutter of Carbilly. Merge with the stone slabs on the floor, meld with the enamel in the sink. Best of all would be to swirl around in water and gently slip down the drain, because nothing could be worse than the questions fluttering in my belly. Questions such as: if they’re my guardians now, what do they intend to do with me? Will they stay with me at Carbilly? Or try to palm me off on my mother? She can’t want me, can she? My stomach heaves. If I could, I would do all of the above and more, even transform into a chough to make my escape. But it’s best not to with Lance here.

  My heart misses a beat, then starts pounding so hard I can’t breathe. I’m about to bolt when I do what Nana used to do, do what she taught me. I place a hand on my heart, take a deep breath and by the time I’ve counted to five, the stampede in my chest eases. I exhale, say to Lance: ‘Nana’s friends will be here soon. I think I’d better clear up the rest of my mess before they appear.’

  ‘Do you want me to go?’

  ‘No! I need your help. You finish cleaning here, while I tidy up the sitting room.’

  While Lance flips a cloth in the air, I dart into the sitting room and quickly sort out the papers. Shove them in Nana’s desk and close it. Put books back on shelves of the bookcase in Nana’s study and then the bigger one in the sitting room. The books neatly arranged, I tidy away photograph albums in a cupboard beneath the stairs where Nana stored them. As I push them in place, of the hundreds of photos inside, one slips out and drops face up at my feet.

  Of all the pictures in Nana’s album, why does it have to be this one, the one I’d rather not see, that falls out? The one I used to spend hours gazing at until the day came when any patience I had with a woman who never wrote to me, never visited or spoke to me, shattered.

  My hand shakes as I bring the photograph closer. The resemblance between the two of us is uncanny. In ten years or so, I’ll look more or less like she did: black curly hair swept up, large eyes with a sheen of shyness and the brightest of smiles that I used to bask in till I knew better. My mother.

  I slip the photograph into an album and Lance shouts:

  ‘Linet, your nana’s friends are here.’

  I return to the kitchen and there they are: Redwood and Rosie.

  *

  As soon as she sees me, Rosie opens her arms. I put out my hand to shake hers, but taking hold of my fingers she pulls me in, and before I know it, she’s patting my back and crushing me against those bosoms of hers. Whether it’s her back-patting or her bosoms that unravel me, I don’t know. But from the moment she draws me in to her, palm rubbing my back like Nana used to, I’m undone again. I cling to her as if that rubbing motion is dragging out every morsel of emotion in me: every tear, and between my tears, every sob, and then every piece of my broken heart. She even smells of Nana, for between the mountains of her breasts is a dab of the scent Nana used: a dash of sandalwood with a musky splash of rose.

  I cry enough to fill the lake outside. Cry so much that Redwood flaps around me clucking while Lance hands me a dishcloth to mop my face.

  ‘Easy, Linet-girl, easy now,’ murmurs Redwood, a big, warm hand on my shoulder.

  Rosie steers me to the kitchen table, but like a child bereft, I won’t let her go. I can’t.

  ‘I need to be by the lake
,’ I stutter. ‘Come with me, Rosie, please.’ I won’t let her go because she reminds me too much of Nana.

  Bracken follows us to the Linet Lake, where we settle on my favourite perch for truth telling: a patch of emerald green grass between two granite boulders. Even before we’re ensconced, the lake is working its magic on me. Its large expanse the colour of the sky soothes me with the lap and splash of its waves. After the sunshine of early morning, a mist from the moor covers the lake with a hazy autumn shroud: a shroud for Nana, I believe.

  Rosie’s hands grip mine as, with lazy loops of lake-love coiled around me, I nod at the water and say quickly, before I can change my mind: ‘Nana’s down there. She gave herself to the lake just before noon on Saturday. That’s why I won’t live anywhere else but here. This is my home, where I belong. I shall never leave this lake or let the ghosts within her be alone. Do you understand?’

  ‘No one’s going to take you away, Linet-girl,’ she says. ‘Certainly not us.’

  ‘Did you know Nana was going to do what she did?’

  ‘I had an inkling. Especially when she sent me a letter to give to you should anything happen to her.’

  ‘You have a letter? A letter from Nana to me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rosie replies, and slipping a hand in the pocket of her skirt, pulls it out.

  I take it. My name, written in turquoise ink, is scrawled on a white envelope in Nana’s hand. I bring the letter to my nose. It smells of Nana and a sprig of lavender Rosie must have picked and left in her pocket.

  ‘I shall read it when I’m alone,’ I tell her.

  And that’s what I do. When they’ve gone and I’m nestled in Nana’s chair at Carbilly, I take out the letter.

  *

  Linet, my love,

  By the time you get this I’ll be gone to my home in the Linet Lake. That’s the way it is with us Merrimore women: the lake that flows through our veins splashing magic on us, eventually takes us away. This is how it has always been from one generation to the next until your mother left Carbilly. Remember, Linet, Maya wasn’t well. She needed rest and psychiatric care, which, with my help, she received. Eventually, she decided she needed a fresh start, so I took on the role of mothering you to help your gift grow.