by Ali Shaw
‘Understand what?’
‘Me. That maybe I’m not so unusual.’
She stepped away, confused. Part of her wanted to shine the torchlight into his every pore. Part of her thought she had already risked enough.
Then she heard a faint noise like the leftover tremble after a cymbal is struck. ‘Finn? What was that?’
‘It was me,’ he said. ‘It’s the thunder I have for a heartbeat, the same sound you listened to when we caught the canaries in the woods. It’s just that, in these caves, it’s quiet enough to hear it without putting an ear to my chest.’
Elsa felt suddenly claustrophobic. When the thunder whispered out of Finn again, it felt as though all of the weight of the mountain was about to crash down on her. She gripped the torch tightly, and flashed the light back towards the tunnel they had come from. Stalagmites and stalactites swung shadows through the beam.
‘I can’t stay here, Finn.’
‘Elsa, please ... is there no way we can get past this?’
‘It’s like you said – I just don’t know. For now I need some space.’ She shrugged and struck out towards the lightest part of what was before her, trusting the hard rock of the tunnel wall to lead out of the cave.
Behind her the thunder sounded louder, slow and melancholy, like a lament. She took a few more faltering steps, then could not help but turn to shine the torch back.
‘Elsa, a week or so after I struck my mother, she tried to tell me that she still loved me. She stood before me one sunny afternoon, and I could see her lips trying to form the words. But she had become so frightened of me that she couldn’t get them out. That was the worst thing I have ever seen, and I would never risk seeing it again. Soon after that she left Thunderstown. But when you placed your ear to my chest, I felt like we were safe. I felt like we were too attuned for there to be lightning.’
His body was as still as the stalactites, but he was crying. The beam of light glittered. The air had filled with diamond dust, icy particles dancing in and out of the light. Each of Finn’s tears, as it emerged from the duct, crystallized at once into a glittering speck that flew forth. The tears swirled and shimmered in the space between Elsa and Finn, and some caught the light like prisms, filling the cold cave air with rainbow colours.
Elsa stood, enchanted, in the tunnel. She wanted to stride back to Finn and melt through his wintry sorrow with the heat of a kiss. But she had always known not to toy with lightning. She turned back through an excruciating half-circle, then left him behind her in the darkness.
12
GUNSHOT
At the humid close of the afternoon, Daniel walked Mole into Thunderstown. The old dog waddled slowly, pausing every few minutes to regain her wheezing breath, her good eye shut tight and her blind one fixed on the middle distance. In this stop-start fashion they made their way under the cold shadow of the Church of Saint Erasmus and eventually to the door of the Thunderstown Miners’ Club. It stood in the mouth of Widdershin Road, where the leaning eaves kept it in constant shade. These days its concave door was hard to budge, and the wood strained when Daniel held it open for Mole to enter.
Inside, an old lamp hung its broken bulb over an unstaffed desk. Through a door lay the common room, which would smell forever of the generations of pipe smoke that had turned its wallpaper yellow. Bolted to its walls were pickaxes and rusty hand drills, and black-and-white photos of stiffly posed workmen or of the mines themselves, dark squares charred into the rock face.
Now that there were no miners left in Thunderstown, their club had a ragtag bunch of patrons: tradesmen and clerks and gossiping men like Sidney Moses, Hamel Rhys and Abe Cosser, who sometimes met in the common room to play chequers or sip broth and who always wore their rain caps, even indoors. Daniel never attended such gatherings, although he was counted among the club’s members. The head man of the Fossiter family (although none had ever been miners) had always been given a seat at the club.
A ring of hand-me-down armchairs stood in the common room, and Mole curled up at the foot of one of these and tucked her nose into the crook of her foreleg. Daniel watched her for a minute, thinking how pitiful she was, to have changed from a huntress as lethal as a bullet to a stiff sleeper like a taxidermist’s masterpiece.
He crossed to a smaller adjoining room, where shafts of light slanted down from high windows and bookshelves spanned the walls. He ran his forefinger over the spines of the tomes there. These were Thunderstown’s family trees, most of which had finished branching decades ago, or else had been left incomplete by the present generation. Only the ten-volume sequence marked Fossiter remained dust-free, and it was the final book in this collection that Daniel now selected and took down from the shelf.
The binding still showed the stretched scars of the goat whose skin it had come from, as did the leather clasp he now popped open. The yellowed pages were all unnumbered and scrawled with handwritten notes. Connections forked down and interconnected from the top of each page to the bottom. Cousins had married second cousins; widows had been passed on to unmarried brothers. The name Daniel itself was repeated over and over: there had been a time when it occurred once in every generation. Now it was the only remnant of that grand family, a reverse Adam who would leave the final pages blank.
He returned to the common room and took a seat. Mole whimpered in her sleep, which he was glad to hear since it reassured him that she was still alive. He mimicked her stillness, sitting with his fists on the arms of the chair and the family tree open on his lap.
The names of his forefathers had all been written in the same scratchy script, in the same ink turned brown by age. His father had completed the final page at the time of Daniel’s birth, drawing a straight line down from his own name to that of his son. When Daniel had discovered it he had not known whether to hate or pity the old man, for as far as this family tree recorded it, Daniel had originated out of the body of the Reverend Fossiter himself. To rectify this untruth, he had borrowed one of Sally Nairn’s antique writing pens and a pot of ink that was like a jarful of tropical ocean, then returned to the family tree to slowly scratch his mother’s name and the line that bound her to him. Only when he had finished writing did he wonder whether he had made a mistake. He had written Maryam Fossiter, because she was his mother and he had come from her and he was Fossiter in every cell of his body. But she had not been a Fossiter. She had not even married his father, let alone taken his name, and that had been his father’s pretext for driving her away. ‘It’s as the Lord told us,’ he had said. ‘Those who are not with us are against us.’
Daniel closed his eyes and let his memories of her take centre stage. He could not picture her face (he had not been able to in decades), only her black hair dangling down to her waist. He could picture her forearms and hands and hips because he had been so small when she left that those had been the parts of her he saw the most of. He knew he had been in pain when she left Thunderstown, but it was a different kind of pain to the one that came when Betty went away. He had been too young to understand it. It had been an ocean on which he had drifted.
In his memory his mother hummed and leafed absent-mindedly through his father’s theology books, chuckling now and then as if all those essays by all those learned men were but the amusing mistakes of little children. His father watched her, incensed by her unbelief but silent nevertheless. That was one of only a handful of memories, which Daniel tended to as diligently in his thinkings as he did to these family trees.
He had, however, one stranger memory of her, one which did not comfort him but rather left him cold. In it, she sat in a rocking chair, on the porch of the vicarage. He – a little older than a toddler – had been digging about in the garden and had returned to the house to show her something he had unearthed. To his dismay he’d seen two wild dogs sitting with her, their muzzles resting on her lap. Their eyes were half-closed while she stroked their heads. He’d shouted, and ran towards her, screaming and waving his arms, and the dogs had sprung up and
fled into the mountains.
He harrumphed. He sometimes wished that that particular memory of his mother would recede into the past, and not present itself every time he recalled the happier ones. He got up and returned the family tree to the shelf.
Once, long ago, he had brought Betty to the Miners’ Club to show her his mother’s name here, along with all those hundreds from his father’s side. Back then, old Mr Nairn had cooked in the club kitchen every Sunday afternoon. Mr Nairn had been a man who found vegetarianism a hard thing to comprehend, and Daniel had known that his sloppy potato patties and brown cabbage would be fried in the gloopy white fat of a swine. Although that risked turning Betty’s stomach, he’d needed to bring her here to help her understand who he was and from what stock he’d come, and she had seen that and accompanied him with good grace. So many hours of so many Fossiter lives had been idled away in this common room that he could almost see the ghosts of his forebears holding forth in the armchairs that still bore the imprints of their bodies. He had brought Betty here not to taste Mr Nairn’s cooking, but to introduce her to the impressions made in the furniture. He had felt so proud to have her at his side. He had always been a big man – even as a child he had towered over his classmates – but with Betty beside him he had felt weightless, as if he were floating a foot off the ground.
There was a gunshot. He blinked and for a moment did not know what year of his life he was living in. Mole had heard it too and was struggling to her feet, her ears straining and her bad eye weeping. It had come from out in the street, and Daniel headed straight for the exit from the club, Mole puffing along behind him.
They went a little further down Widdershin Road, where a junction led into tree-lined Foremans Avenue, and from there onwards to Drum Head. Thirty yards along this avenue lived Sidney Moses, who now stood outside his house with his rifle in his hands. He did not notice Daniel when he approached, for he was too fascinated by the goat that was sitting in the shade of one of the avenue’s trees. Fragments of bark and lichen were stuck to its panting tongue, and a bullet wound in its neck was flushing blood into its beard. It knelt reposefully, as if dying were a state as ordinary as basking in an afternoon’s hot sun.
‘You fool!’ yelled Daniel, snatching the rifle from Sidney’s hands. Sidney offered no resistance. Daniel readied the gun, steadied his aim against the anger rushing up from inside of him, and shot the goat between the eyes. Mole barked painfully as the shot rang out. The goat’s horned head dropped down to the pavement.
The gunshot brought Sidney to his senses, and he looked at his rifle in Daniel’s hands as if he did not remember how it had got there. ‘Mr Fossiter, I ...’
‘What were you thinking?’
‘I shot a goat. It had been eating the trees.’
‘But you didn’t shoot to kill.’
‘No, I—’
‘I know full well that you can fire a rifle, Mr Moses, and I declare that you did not shoot to kill!’
Sidney lifted his rain cap to wipe a line of sweat from his forehead. ‘Of course I shot to kill!’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘I damned well shouldn’t have been forced to! This town employs a culler to keep these vermin from its streets. Have you seen him today, Mr Fossiter? He’s a big man with a beard – hard to miss. He would have been useful here earlier, while this beast was munching its way along the trees of Foremans Avenue!’
‘I was in the Miners’ Club. You know I’m often there. You could’ve at least tried to find me.’
Sidney stole another glance at the goat, and there was that same grim fascination. He licked his lips. ‘We never know where we can find you, Mr Fossiter, because you do not tell us where you are going to be.’
‘Yes you do, Sidney, you all do – you know I am going to be culling the goats.’
‘In the Thunderstown Miners’ Club? I don’t believe there are many goats in there, except for the heads of some your great-grandfather shot. And I see you have even brought that terrifying bloodhound with you!’
As if on cue, Mole sneezed and shook her head.
‘I don’t need a dog to catch goats.’
‘And just as well – that sorry creature wouldn’t say boo to a goose,’ said Sidney, flourishing his arm towards the animal beneath the tree.
‘Mr Moses. What do you plan to do, now, with your kill? Do you know how to skin the hide and chop the meat, or do you plan to leave it to fester here in Foremans Avenue?’
Sidney shrugged. ‘I own plenty of shirts, coats and jerseys, Mr Fossiter. I have radiators in my house and I have a freezer full of chicken, lamb and fish from the market. So I need neither fleece, leather or goat mutton. What’s more, I own a motor car and a trailer, with which I intend to drive this carcass out of town and dump it in the ample wilderness surrounding us, where I fully expect the crows to finish the job.’
Daniel was about to retort, but managed instead to bite his tongue. He knew full well he could not best Sidney at words. Mole sneezed again and shivered as it moved through her. Daniel stepped briskly past Sidney, grabbed the goat by the horns and made to drag it after him. ‘Do not trouble yourself with your trailer and your motor car, Mr Moses. I will make leather out of it.’
He began to plod away towards his homestead, with Mole labouring behind.
‘And then what?’ called Sidney after him.
‘I will return to my duties.’
‘Must we be rivals, Mr Fossiter?’
Daniel stopped walking and turned back to him. ‘I have no wish to oppose myself to anyone. You, on the other hand, seem to delight in it.’
Sidney spread his arms and looked hurt. ‘You misunderstand me.’ He put his hands in his pockets and sauntered closer.
‘You would modernize,’ said Daniel. ‘You have talked about helicopters and satellite ... satellite—’
‘Satellite tracking,’ said Sidney gently.
Daniel snorted. ‘Have the goats changed in the last hundred years? Have the wild dogs begun to use helicopters? The methods of my family have always been sufficient. And always will be.’
Sidney sighed. ‘We’ve talked about this. I don’t want you forever catching goats and wild dogs. I want you to get to the root of the problem.’
Daniel scoffed. ‘I would have to kill every goat within a hundred miles of Thunderstown to get to the root of the problem. I would need an army to do that.’
‘I’m not talking about goats, as well you know.’
Daniel looked away shiftily down the length of the street. A wind blew and ruffled the fur of the goat he was pulling, puffing its dusty smell up into his nostrils.
‘And I have told you before – Old Man Thunder’s just a story. Come on, Mr Moses, there are so many tales here, why must you persist in believing this one? I’m telling you: not I, nor anyone else, will ever catch Old Man Thunder because he does not exist – he never did.’
Sidney smiled, but Daniel did not trust it. He was being tested, he knew, but on what subject he could not guess.
‘People say they have seen him.’
‘People say a lot of things. Words mean nothing, Mr Moses.’
Sidney studied him for a moment, then shrugged and licked his lips. ‘Imagine for a moment that he does! Just pretend, just humour me. Let’s say I did things my way, with all the new equipment I can lay my hands on, and I found him and brought him to you tomorrow. I dragged him down here to town and presented him to our culler for his judgement. What would you do?’
‘You would need to prove he was Old Man Thunder.’
‘And if I could? If he was stood here before you, riddled with weather, confessing I am he. Then what?’
Daniel snorted. ‘Then nothing. This is idle speculation.’
‘Would you do your duty then, Mr Fossiter? If the thing that eluded all of your forefathers was there for the taking?’
Daniel cleared his throat. ‘Mr Moses, I am not sure what more I can say. I do not believe in Old Man Thunder. I have endeavoured to make that clear to you.’
/> ‘No, Mr Fossiter,’ said Sidney sweetly, ‘you have endeavoured to avoid the question. I do not think you could do it. The townsfolk are concerned, and think you have gone soft. That Munro woman, that one who came from overseas, she took something from you that you have struggled to get back. She left you confused and without ruthlessness, doting over your blind old dog.’
He bristled at the insult, and his shoulders squared and as they did so the fur of the goat bristled in the wind. ‘Listen very carefully, Mr Moses. Were you to bring me Old Man Thunder, and were he to exist and be proven to be all that people say he is, I would slit his throat without hesitation. So that’s said, and you can tell the townsfolk to forget their concerns. One more thing: Betty Munro took nothing from me, and gave me things that you could never understand. If I seem weak-willed to you, it is because I always was, not because of her.’
With that he headed for the homestead, and left Sidney Moses behind him.
13
OLD WIVES’ TALES
After the ceremony they held for her father, Elsa stood in the crematorium garden, drawing in deep breaths of the whipping wind. The flowers were in full bloom in their beds, bobbing in the blustering air. Elsa wondered whether the owners of the crematorium had planted bird of paradise as a joke, since its orange petals looked like flames wavering in the wind. Then again, everything became symbolic after a death. She had argued with her mother about the shape and colour of the urn, until both of them, in tears, ceded that it didn’t matter and chose the least ostentatious one. She had seen a sun dog the other night, a blue and orange half-halo shining to the right of the sun, and had believed it to be a sign from her father, even though she had no faith in an afterlife and knew that sun dogs were just refraction. Only when she could not decide what the sign meant did she give in to her rational mind, and her rational mind left her to sob the evening away.