Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

  Lottie blows her nose and grasps Frank’s hand, intent. ‘They wanted to bury her in the yard round the back,’ she says. ‘Where they put the ones with no people. But I wouldn’t have it. I was sorry I stood by all those years. D’you hear? That I let them do it. She was no more than a baby. All she talked about was home. When she could still speak.

  ‘We were quick. Didn’t know when they’d come for her … We packed her up. Me and some of the other girls. Those who minded, like I did. It’s little enough we could do, goodness knows. We were in a state. Where to send her? There’s a man who wrote to her. They would never give her the letters.

  ‘Corpse, pauper fare, is two shillings and sixpence. Us girls paid it between us. I hope we did right. Ever packed a coffin tight for the train? It’s a business. I put the last letter in with her. So she has one, at least.’ She weeps.

  Everything is too near, pressing on Frank’s skin. The wreckage of the garden, mournful. The battered crimson heads of poppies, scattering the ground. The crack of a broken branch swinging in the wind. How did things get so sharp? The scent of wet earth, of green, is overpowering. The ringing of glass from somewhere, which is the milk cart arriving; late, strident, unnecessary. Most of all the itch of his leg where the thigh fits into the smooth prosthesis. The bluish, clumsy handwriting of the scarring, then leather and steel. He’s a man and then he becomes something else entirely at the knee. For the first time it occurs to Frank that this might, eventually, become something he rarely thinks of. In the same moment it comes to him that the war is really over.

  Frank says, ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Iris,’ Lottie says. ‘Iris and something foreign. Enough for you?’

  Frank breathes. The milk cart moves down the road with a clatter. It’s enough. ‘Let’s go in,’ Frank says. Then, ‘I’m not decent.’

  ‘Seen a deal worse,’ says Lottie. She pulls, he pushes and wavers to his feet. As they go the wire fence gleams in the coming sun. It will be hot again this afternoon. At one end the mesh sags, slack and shining. A ragged hole gapes in the ground where a fence post is missing.

  Iris

  1919

  Burn it, Papa whispers. My dreams are peopled with the dead.

  Coughing, awake. Smoke billows, acrid and bad. Before the fire in the hall. Rawblood’s like a shell around me. Outside, the moor is quiet. Upstairs, everywhere, wind whistles down the halls, through the passages, raising dust sheets, rattling the swollen doors. Rawblood has its own internal weather, now.

  Must keep the fire going. I am cold, very cold. I break old packing cases open and snap the legs off white-veiled furniture. This was the only hearth whose chimney was not hopelessly blocked. The flames dance, pirouette with the wind. They have a greenish tinge. Something to do with the peat. This affected me more than the rest. I knew when I saw the pale green flames leaping in the deep hearth that I was home.

  She won’t show herself. I have raged through the house. I have torn boards from their moorings. I have clawed holes in the plaster. I have crawled through the cellars like a grub. I climbed into the velvety, suffocating chimney – it spat me out, guffawing soot. Maybe she’s gone. Maybe she’s dead like so many others, these last years. Can ghosts die?

  The dreams are very bad now. I dread sleep. I cannot bear to look through her eyes. What she does. The things she feels. They are bleeding into everything, spilling into my wakeful hours. She’s here all right. I feel her. I taste her in the air. She lies all over like a skin. She lingers in the air like perfume. Rawblood breathes her like a lung. This house. My house. It is a part of me like a limb or an eye. But something has poisoned it. It is suffering and sick.

  I cannot go into some rooms. In the study there is a hanged man. He sways, creaking, from the beam. His blackened face, his toes pointed gracefully at the floor.

  Fire. Black. Fire. I start awake. Mustn’t sleep.

  The image that swims in my mind’s eye is the skeleton. The bones laid out on the mahogany table. The ivoried yellow of them, the perfect order, so quickly reduced to piles of nameless bone. All those years ago.

  I feel a bit like that skeleton these days. All of me spread out and unreal, spiralling on the eddies of dust up into the distant heights and reaches of the house. It is so cold. Mustn’t sleep.

  I’m in the hall outside my old room. The narrow doorway before me, black, framed with moonlight. In the shadow there stands something thin and angular and white against the dark.

  So this is where you are, I say. I’m disappointed, somehow. It’s too simple. The face is hidden in shadow but the pale skull gleams through the shorn hair. She turns her head a little. A glimpse of bone-white planes and dark sockets. Something moves for a moment, in the pits of her eyes.

  I’ve seen you before, I say. You were in the cave all those years ago. You did not get me then, and you will not do it now.

  She shudders. Her balding, scabbed head dips and bobs. Moonlight crawls across it and somewhere in the shadows her mouth moves like worms in the earth. No words come. Desire rolls through the air, cold on her breath. It is old wanting, implacable as stone. Her will like the depths of a cave. The skin on my face and arms puckers and contracts. My flesh slides softly on me, gathers in chilly pools at my neck and wrists.

  Between us flows a tide. Years and my family’s blood. The twin weights of fear and guilt, carried always. My father’s fingers fumbling on the needle, seeking the vein. And all the others whom I did not know. My mother’s love. Treading through the generations, wading through our lives, devouring us as easily as knocking the heads off dandelions. It has all been this. You. The reek of her rises in my nostrils. It’s rot and hurt and burnt rope.

  What is it that you want? I say. Take me by all means. Where will you go, now that you’ve driven us all into the earth, one by one … what will you do when you have no one to torment? Too bad. I’ll not give satisfaction. What can you take from me that has not already been taken? Nothing. I am bereft, without limits.

  She shivers as if with pleasure. Dark blots and shadows chase across her thin enfolded form. It’s moonlight and cloud playing through the window, perhaps, or perhaps not. I’m uneasy, of a sudden. What exactly is this? And I can’t quite recall how I got here.

  Something unfurls towards me. It lies between us like a deep cut. It’s an arm, scabrous and wasted. The bone-white hand opens. I am already reaching for her, eager. The tips of our fingers meet. The sensation is surprising, smooth, familiar. She and I stand so, arms outstretched, fingers stiff and spread in formal refutation.

  Then I hurl myself at her, teeth bared, fists clenched. I smash into her and she’s hard as glass. But I go on. I rain down with crashing blows. I scrabble deeper, seeking the heart of her. The world is full of shining and blood and inhuman sound.

  I claw her smooth surface, beat her with my fists, elbows, skull. A cracking sound like the world opening. The truth comes slowly, as if through water. As Papa used to say, there is always an answer. It’s simpler than I thought and worse than I could have imagined.

  Pieces of the mirror come loose from the great gilt frame. They fall, blade-bright, to the floor, ringing, breaking. Each silver piece shows me back myself. Scattered, disassembled. My scabbed head, an evil moon, crossed with the many lines of old scars. My pale wizened frame. The black eyes crawling like beetles – they are my eyes. I see her now for what she is. She isn’t sending me dreams.

  I thought I was haunted. It’s the other way around.

  My hands are bruised, bloody, shaking. But I don’t stop. The thuds I hear are the deep thuds of my fists as they beat upon the floor, on the bright ruins of the mirror. I roar and smash. I smash until there is no treacherous surface to show me myself, to show me her, who are after all one and the same.

  I was wrong. There was something left to take from me after all. What have I become? Martin’s voice, Goodman’s voice in my mind, now of all times. ‘There is no her. There is only you.’ I am roaring again, my voice so hoarse it so
unds like stone grinding against stone. So he won in the end because I died in there, after all.

  I go through the ways and halls of Rawblood. As I pass each room I hear the voices within. My uncle Charles, playing with a little dog. Mary Villarca reading to her husband and laughing. I could reach out and touch them. I could do worse than that. I have done it.

  In every fibre I feel the hurt. What was done to me was unfair, unfair. Long years, I was taken bit by bit. Flesh, bone, organs and brain. For what? For sport. To prove or disprove some thin, half-formed thought.

  My rage grows, a warming flame. I am lit from within. The house opens up as I go. Rawblood reveals itself. The corridors grow long and strange to me. Doors lead off. There are many more rooms than I knew. Some doors stand ajar.

  A white many-panelled door chased with gold. Through it an empty ballroom. The strains of distant music. Evening sun pours through tall bay windows. A gentleman stands in the centre, in a great powdered wig. Sapphires wink at his neck. He stares at his severed wrists and weeps. Blood splashes onto the parquet, falls in gouts on his blue satin shoes, drips down his elegant heels, pools in his sapphire buckles. His eyes are dark and longing. He looks at me. He raises an elegant hand and points. His accusation like a knife. I turn away in haste. I don’t know him. I’ve never met him. But I remember him. I recall the dark flower of rage that budded, that opened in me. Then he died.

  Further on, a rough stone arch set into the wall. Through it is a high wooden hall with a minstrel’s gallery. Two men sit at table in brown hessian robes. They dine off silver plates. Some meat, dark and rich. Their soft chins shake, juice runs down. Candlelight plays on the silver, and on their tonsured pates. Behind them, on the rushes which cover the floor, are the bloody corpses of two young girls. I both know and do not know what they did here. And what I did. The rage stirs, she stirs. I hurry on. Behind, the crunch of teeth on bone.

  There’s a gap in the wall. Door-shaped perhaps, but not a door. Rawblood simply stops. It is dizzying. The place beyond bounded only by the night sky. Three small dark men sit on hides spread across the grass. Firelight plays about their tattooed faces. Their features are achingly, instantly familiar. I can trace my father’s lineaments in theirs. Long-ago Villarcas, Hopewells, whatever name it was we first bore … But no, they are of a time before names, long before Rawblood was. The tips of their spears gleam. One of them weeps. The others raise burning brands above their heads and peer into the night. Their eyes meet mine. Their mouths open, long, impossibly wide, great black holes. They shriek. They run. Their torches trail through the night air.

  I let her in. I run after them over the hills in the dark, beneath the stars. The hunt. I catch them, in the end. I turn their faces to me, I show them her eyes. In them vastness. Rage, and nothing. I did it long ago. I remember.

  The corridor undulates and hums with time. For it is not Rawblood alone. There are doors to cities, high mountains, wherever my family are. The walls cannot be trusted. They flicker like reflections on water. They are brick then granite then aching blue sky then cellar walls … All the places laid over one another. So many. I had not known there were so many. There is no end to it. Dark paths, trapdoors, corridors. Rawblood creeps outwards like ivy, stretches ever back and back in time.

  Everywhere there are doors and walls and forests and pavilions and voices. Everywhere peopled with my family. All the generations which led to me. I touch them all. I am in them like a drop of ink spiralling in water. They bring me into being, I end them … It’s an endless, hellish circle. She is a wheel.

  I have tied us here. My family pine for Rawblood, they love it with a fervour. They sicken when away from it. All because I cannot bear to be parted from my home. Those who live before the house is built: they see it in their dreams and yearn for it, always. Aching desire which cannot be fulfilled.

  All the doors are singing. Dark and strong. I am called by them, deliciously. I’ve heard this song before, of course. But that was years ago. It sounded like water, then, behind cave walls. The ones which stand ajar … They are inviting and their song is very loud.

  There is a certain door. I know it’s here. I remember it. This is what happens. I go through to a blue and white nursery. I am tight-gripped in a blue blanket, looking up into my mother’s face. Her arms are loving about me. For the first and the last time. But her face changes as she looks at me. Horror spreads slow across it. The scent of blood and lilies all about us. My mother dies. I am left squalling in her arms with my grieving father and it all begins again … My life. My death. Her. This happens. Has happened. I remember.

  She stretches herself with pleasure at the thought. She loves to go round and round. Describing circles through time.

  No. I won’t. Keep it simple. I am Iris. And Rawblood is my home. I place my palms on the shuddering walls. I close my eyes and feel for the rough walls of my childhood. I seek them with my fingertips, and all my being. Where Papa and I were everything to one another. My house. If I am very still, I can feel the familiar granite. I keep my eyes closed and follow the wall. My fingers trace my old ways. I go on, down towards the great hall. I go by the ways I know. I keep my eyes closed, and I don’t turn or stop for the voices that call through the years.

  In the hall the fire glows red. I crouch by it. Papa always said there was no heaven, no hell. But there is. I’m in it. In the dark beating heart of it all.

  I feel him before I see him. Something vast and dark, lying in the shadow of the hearth just outside the firelight. No, anything but this.

  ‘Papa,’ I say. My heart is cold.

  The black pile stirs, heaving. Something runs shining in the runnels between the flags. It touches the toes of my boots and the scent of it rises, hot iron cooling.

  His face is pale and streaked with blood by the light of the dying fire. But of course I would know it anywhere. Years collide and memory. My father, the first person I killed. Or the last, depending on how you look at it. He’s here, and I will not let it happen, I will not.

  He turns his head with a groan. His breath whistles in and out. The syringe gleams, buried in his chest.

  I throw myself to the floor beside him. I try to take his head in my hands. I cannot grip, my fingers slip on the blood. But he sees me. I smile. ‘Papa,’ I say. ‘It is I, Iris, hush, I will help.’

  He convulses at my touch. He is white with fear.

  ‘I see,’ he says. ‘Her.’

  In his eyes I am reflected; the monstrous ruin of me. My fingers are not slipping on the blood after all, but slide through him, insubstantial. He claws at me in terror but we cannot reach one another, to hurt or to comfort, and this is worst of all. My father dies once more, long ago, beyond my reach; here, before me, the blood pooling warm on the flags.

  And then he’s gone. The flags are clean and bare and I’m alone, in the crackle of the dying fire. For how long? Some acts have such power that they never really end. Rawblood’s not a house, any more than I am who I was. We are changed. Here, my father is always dying.

  I run for the front door, unbar it with a crash, heave on the great iron latch. I kick. It won’t open. I beat at it. It holds. I try the window. It’s welded shut. I take up the cast-iron doorstop, arms trembling. I hurl it at the panes. It bounces off and hits the floor with an ear-splitting crash. I am sealed tight in my tomb.

  I look at the high, quiet hall of Rawblood. The fire cracks quiet in the grate, plays warm on the flags. The great marble mantelpiece, white as snow, a riot of gryphons, falcons, archers. The staircase curves elegantly up into the dark. These are sights I have longed for. Now I would do anything to get out. But I don’t get out, of course. I remember. I’ve done all this before. Round and round we go.

  There is always an answer. There must be something I haven’t tried. I dash the tears from my face and think. I search the long and terrible depths of my memories. There is something, something … Years and colours and thoughts dance before me, intermingling, the threads of all I’ve done.<
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  And I have it. It’s very simple. It’s sad. I can’t bear it. I have never been able to go through with it. Each time around, I have neglected this necessary thing. No more of that. I am Iris, and I must get out. I can govern my fate. Burn it, Papa murmurs.

  ‘All right,’ I say.

  The house shifts about me, a growing thing. Can Rawblood hear my thoughts? Does it know what I intend? I collect chairs, tables, hatstands, whatever is left. I bring them to the shadowed, flickering hall where the fire burns. I crack them over my knee with numb hands, pile the timber in. The flames tower into airy heights and spit hot. Old curtains, oil paintings obscured by the grime of years, anything. I crush the remains of a wicker chair. It all goes on. Dust and sparks fill the burning air. All the while I weep. Rawblood. My bones, my heart.

  In the study I find old bottles of spirits under cobwebs. They shatter in the fire and it roars, explodes its confines, licks up, blackening the white marble mantelpiece with hot tongues. Once more I sift through memory … There’s nothing. We are in uncharted territory, now. What will happen?

  I thrust two chair legs into the flames. They catch like torches and I run up, along the snaking staircase, touching flame to everything as I go. Rawblood burns behind. Heat at my back. I am blackened and breathless. When the torches are burnt down I let them fall. I race ahead of the fire.

  Through my old room. Someone is in the bed. A man, pale behind his moustache, shaking. A little dog growls and leaps for me, teeth gleaming. I hurl it from me. It disappears snarling into the thick smoky haze. I reach the window, gasping. Out into the cool night air. I crawl along the ridge of the roof towards the stable, until I can no longer feel the heat. I turn.

  The house is afire, a great candelabra. The windows are white with flame, it licks out and up. Spears of fire pierce the night. The doors are singing, high … all ablaze, all burning. My home, my prison.