by Anita Anand
‘I –’
And then I realised why she looked familiar. She was the spit of the girl who’d gone missing. They’d run her photograph on the front page of the Observer for weeks. And she was wearing the same WAAF uniform – green jacket, shirt and tie, pleated skirt, cap. Women’s Auxiliary Airforce girls, they’d been billeted all over the village during the war.
I couldn’t help it. My eyes were drawn down to her hands. I saw her gloves were torn, fragments of pale material, all in tatters at the cuffs. A matching scarf around her neck, pale pink with a red lining, coming unravelled too. No, not gloves, now I could see. Not gloves, but skin. Torn, tattered skin.
I took another step back, another, then turned and started to run. Stumbling, slipping, struggling to keep on my feet, running back along the path. I could feel her eyes on my back. I kept running, through the reed mace. Salt Mill House loomed suddenly up at me, threatening in the mist. For a moment, I thought I should stop there and ask for help. But, then, what would I say? That I’d seen a girl on the path and got the wind up. But, still, the foul smell hung about me, in my mouth, in my nose, seeping through my skin, and I couldn’t stop. Didn’t dare to stop.
I was out on the mudflats now, treacherous in the dusk. My boots sank lower at each step. The mud was like clawing hands around my ankles, trying to drag me down. Out here, pockets of swamp lay concealed amongst the reeds, sinking mud and false land where a person could be pulled down into the estuary. Flecks of grass, of seaweed, of sludge splattered up onto the back of my legs and skirt and hem of my coat. My throat was sore from running, burning like a slug of whisky in a child’s mouth, but panic kept me going, deeper into the marsh. On across the eel grass, where the savannah sparrows nested, over the samphire, faded at the tail of the year, past the creek, until finally Mill Lane was in sight and the solid, familiar outline of the library.
Finally, I stopped running, put my hand against the familiar bricks, to catch my breath. I looked behind me. Nothing was there, no one. I realised the smell had gone. The mist was also beginning to lift. I don’t know how long I stood there, only that already I was embarrassed at how I’d let my imagination get the better of me. That girl, whoever she was, what must she think? I took one look, then turned tail. She’d think I was mad. So what if she was dressed in rather old-fashioned clothes? And as for the marks on her wrists, just a trick of the light in the fading afternoon. She’d hardly have been walking around otherwise, would she?
I hesitated for a moment. I was late already and I looked a sketch. Salt water splashed up the back of my raincoat, my gloves stiff with mud. Mrs Sadler would be sure to pass comment, she was the type who didn’t let anything go. But there was something I had to do, read, before I went home. I wouldn’t rest else. Mrs Sadler would have to wait.
Quickly, I walked up the steps and into the library. To my relief, Albert was still on the front desk, his glasses perched on the tip of his red nose.
‘Back again?’ he said.
‘You know me, Bert, can’t keep away.’
‘Something I can help you with, love?’
‘No it’s all right. I can manage. I’ll be five minutes.’
‘Take as long as you like,’ the old man said, dabbing at his nose with his handkerchief. ‘No hurry.’
I rushed through the stacks to the archive room at the back of the building, where back issues of local and parish newspapers were kept. Floor to ceiling hanging files and oversize drawers, nothing had been put onto film yet. In the middle, a large central desk with drawers, the desk large enough to accommodate ten people working at any one time. I cast my eyes over the years, months, weeks, until I found the box I needed. Then, with my heart going nineteen to the dozen, I flicked through until I found the edition I wanted.
The black and white eyes of the murdered girl looked out at me. The brown hair beneath the cap, the belted jacket and pleated skirt, shirt and tie. I caught my breath. And beneath the description of the murder, her throat cut from ear to ear. The marks on wrists suggesting she’d been kept captive for a while before she died.
I slumped down on the chair, the photograph bringing the events of that night back. The whispers, the pointed fingers, the speculation. After the police had gone, Mum and my stepfather arguing in whispers, so the neighbours wouldn’t hear through the walls. She took Harry’s side. Said they were talking to every man over sixteen, nothing sinister about it. Bound to be one of the soldiers billeted at Oakwood or Goodwood. Besides, what respectable girl would go on her own, to a place like that? Asking for trouble.
Slowly, I put the newspapers away, turned off the light and left.
‘All done?’ said Bert.
I nodded. ‘I’ll be getting off home. See you Monday.’
‘Have a nice weekend, love.’
‘You too.’
I walked back up Mill Lane, then crossed over to the road where we lived. The back door was unlocked. I took off my boots and hung my coat, inside out, on the back of the door, before calling out.
‘It’s only me,’ I said, going through to the hall. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
Mrs Sadler was dressed for outside, hat and gloves on, hands folded in front of her. She glanced pointedly at the clock on the windowsill by the sink.
‘How’s he been?’
‘He’s been all worked up this afternoon. Talking about some girl and your brother Harry, too. Mind you, it’s hard to know what he’s saying half the time. And his language, I don’t mind telling you –’
‘Has he had his tea?’ I said, more sharply than I intended.
‘At four, as usual. When you weren’t back, I thought I’d better.’
Her voice was begrudging, hard done by.
‘Yes, thanks. And for staying late. I’ll see you Monday?’
A sly look crossed her broad face. ‘I don’t know. Mr Sadler doesn’t like me coming here, you know how he is.’
I was tempted to say, no I didn’t know, but I was still more shaken up than I cared to admit and, besides, who else would come in and sit with my stepfather? I went to my purse, got out a five-bob note, and put it on the table. Would that help matters indoors, I asked? I could see her thinking about it, totting up the extra shillings. She held out a moment longer, then her hand reached out and took it.
‘See you Monday then,’ she said.
After she’d gone, I locked the back door and since there was no one about to see, stepped out of my skirt and sponged the mud as best I could. While it dried, I put on my old gardening skirt that was hanging over the back of the chair where I’d been mending it earlier. I looked at the clock. Only five o’clock and already it was black as pitch. I leaned over the sink and pulled on the curtains to shut out the dark. The wire was old and the fabric too heavy, so they stuck half way, as they usually did, leaving a slat of silver light coming in from the light in the alley that ran along the back of the cottages.
At seven o’clock, I took a tin of soup from the larder and put a saucepan on the stove, cut two slices of bread and buttered them, then put a piece of cheddar on the side of our plates. We ate our meal in silence and the evening dragged, as it always did. I put on the wireless to keep him company. I picked up a novel I’d been reading, but it didn’t hold my attention. I couldn’t stop thinking about the newspaper article, about my brother, about all the worry that had sent my mum into an early grave.
My stepfather was restless, talking, mumbling, drifting in and out of sleep. Looking at him now, I wondered at how I’d ever been so scared of him. He’d been a big man in his day, working at the Anglesey Arms in Halnaker after we’d moved from here, until that job, like all the others, fell through. He called them misunderstandings, said everyone was out to get him, but the plain truth was he was a drunk. After that, he never worked again. He just sat about the house with a bottle in one hand, cigarette in the other, picking fights with any of us stupid enough to get in his way.
At nine o’clock, I put him to bed – he slept downstairs now – then
went back into the front room to get things straight for the morning, as if it mattered. Nobody but Mrs Sadler and the vicar ever visited. I turned off the table lamp, then went back through to the kitchen to get a glass of water to take up with me. Except for the corridor of light coming in through the gap in the curtains, the room was dark. The cold tap spluttered, the pipes complaining, so I let it run a moment. Then, through the gap in the curtains, I swear I saw something move in the yard. My heart lurched. I put down the glass on the draining board and leaned forward to look out. Nothing, just my own reflection looking back at me in the cold glass. I knew I’d locked the back door earlier, but I glanced over all the same to be sure. The key, which I always left in the door, was gone. Telling myself not to be so jittery, I crouched down. I ran my fingers over the coarse mat and was relieved when my fingers connected with the cold metal. Odd it should have fallen out. I shot the bolts top and bottom, just to be sure, then picked up my glass and went back into the cold hallway.
I caught my breath. Then sighed. ‘You gave me a fright, Dad,’ I said.
My stepfather was standing in the corridor, swaying slightly on his feet.
‘What are you doing up?’ I said, not expecting an answer. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
‘She’s here.’
‘What did you say?’ I gasped, astonished he’d spoken. Then I saw his eyes. Clear for the first time in years, unclouded, and fixed at a point behind me.
‘She’s come,’ he said again.
‘Who’s come, Dad?’
But even as I said it, of course I knew. I could feel the prickling on my skin at the back of my neck, my hands. And the smell of the shore at low tide. I didn’t want to look round, but I couldn’t stop myself.
Slowly I turned round, to face the girl I knew was standing behind me. The skin at her wrists, rubbed raw where the wire had cut through. The ragged red seam where his knife had dragged across her throat, right to left. The work of a left-handed man. Not Harry. For all his faults, not Harry.
For an instant, I saw her clearly, both the girl she had been and the girl she now was, twelve years dead, lying in the churchyard with a headstone at her feet. Then slowly, she began to lift her head, the same steady and deliberate movement as on the path earlier.
This time, I forced myself not to look away. Then a rush of air, cold and damp like the mist on the marshes, as if someone had opened a door and let the night in. And a dreadful howling, like a deer caught in a mantrap. Only afterwards did I learn that sound came from my lips. The girl smiled, then her features, printed pretty on the front page of the newspaper all those years ago, began to change, collapsing in upon themselves. Brown eyes becoming white, red lips shrivelling to black, her skin a spider’s web of veins and blood.
Suddenly, she leapt. I screamed, hitting at the air with useless hands, to protect myself or protect him, I couldn’t say. But he didn’t resist. His legs buckled and he fell forward, arms by his side, making no attempt to break the fall. Then silence, stillness.
I sank to the ground, knees drawn up to my chin, oblivious to the blood seeping across the tiles and soaking into the hem of my skirt. I don’t know how long I lay there, we lay there, only that I gradually became aware of banging on the front door and someone calling my name. Later, they told me it was my screaming that alerted the neighbours something was wrong. That, and a strange smell of rotting seaweed permeating through the thin cottage walls.
The doctor said it was a heart attack. A blessing, he called it, that he went so fast. Here one minute, gone the next. Just like that. I said nothing. I knew now he had been dying for years. Waiting, all that time, for her to come and claim him.
And what of me? I stayed, of course. I wrote about it, not what happened that night, but about the murder. Sitting in the lending library, surrounded by all the newspaper articles and history books. In my own small way, I became quite well known. My book sits alongside all those writers I used to admire, which was all I ever wanted really. And, on winter nights, the lights still shine out across the fields, a sanctuary for anyone who needs a safe place to go.
(A version of this story was first published as ‘The Revenant’ in two instalments in The Big Issue, December 2009.)
FIGHT FOR LIBRARIES AS YOU DO FREEDOM
KARIN SLAUGHTER
My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that America doesn’t like to talk about unless something like Katrina happens, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged the forest for food. They put cardboard over empty windowpanes so the cold wouldn’t kill them.
Books did not exist here. When your kids are starving, you can’t point with pride to a book you’ve just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes – those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.
And yet, when he noticed that I, his youngest daughter, showed an interest in reading, he took me to our local Jonesboro library and told me that I could read any book in the building so long as I promised to talk to him about it if I read something I didn’t understand. I think this is the greatest gift my father ever gave me. Though he was not a reader himself, he understood that reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.
But, why do we need to read? It’s not a survival skill. Contrary to how some of us feel, we won’t die if we can’t read. I think the need for reading boils down to one simple issue: children are selfish. Reading about other people creates a sense of balance in a child’s life. It gives them the knowledge that there is a world outside themselves. It tells them that the language they are learning at home is the key to unlocking the mysteries of the greater world.
Reading develops cognitive skills. It trains your mind to question what you are told, which is why the first thing dictators do when they come to power is censor or ban books. It’s why it was illegal for so many years to teach slaves to read. It’s why girls in developing countries have acid thrown in their faces going to school.
You would just as soon cut Romeo and Juliet from a high school curriculum as you would cut algebra. Both train young minds how to think in critical ways. Both foster problem solving and spatial reasoning. Both create adults who question and contribute to society. Fundamentally, reading creates better societies. This is not a theory. This is a quantifiable fact: there is a direct correlation between the rate of literacy in a nation and its success.
This is why the funding of libraries should be a matter of national security. Keeping libraries open, giving access to all children to all books is vital to our nation’s sovereignty. For nearly 85 percent of kids living in rural areas, the only place where they have access to technology or books outside the schoolroom is in a public library. For many urban kids, the only safe haven they have to study or do homework is the public library. Librarians are soldiers in the battle for our place in the world, and in many cases they are getting the least amount of support our communities can offer.
We need to shift our national view of libraries not as luxuries, but as necessities. When tragedy strikes in other nations, we are generous, but our libraries are being hit with a tsunami and there has been no call to action. Staff are being fired. Hours are being cut. Doors are being closed. Buildings are being razed. Kids are being left behind. Futures are being destroyed.
Libraries are the backbone of our educational infrastructure, and they are being slowly broken by bankrupt local governments and apathetic politicians. As voters and taxpayers, we have to demand that our local governments properly prioritise libraries. As charitable citizens, we must invest in our library down the street so that the generations serviced by that library grow up to be adults who contribute not just to their local communities, but to the world.
Kids who read become students who do well in school. Students who do well in school go to college. College students graduate to good jobs and pay higher taxes. Libraries don’t service only left-wingers or right. They
don’t judge by class, race or religion. They service everyone in their community, no matter their circumstances. Rich or poor; no one is denied. Libraries are not simply part of our guarantee to the pursuit of happiness. They are a civil right. If we lose our libraries, we risk losing our communities, our families and ourselves.
(Reprinted with permission of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)
AFTERWORD
MIRANDA MCKEARNEY
In Tower Hamlets, I join a library’s weekly story time, alongside a flood of families with under fives – speaking the most fantastic mix of languages.
Then on to St Helens, where I talk to a crowd of young people, who’ve been working on a community Reading and Writing Roadshow. It’s based in the central library, aimed at other teens, and they all share it through Facebook and Twitter.
At Catford Library, Louis Howell describes the months he’s spent helping younger children get through the Summer Reading Challenge. They’ve now read six whole books – and the staff say Louis has built up a bit of a cult following. The readers are mostly young Afro-Caribbean boys, previously reluctant to read.
Swansea Library has a sensational view out to sea, as well as a cheeringly young and enthusiastic staff – who love to share stories about their reading support work. Their book displays are vibrant, their reading groups well attended, they host excitingly diverse author events and help introduce people to the worldwide web as well as words on paper.
And then in Sevenoaks, librarians tell me about running an experimental event, where the author attended via Skype. We talk about it while the knitting club meets alongside us.
Everywhere you go in the UK, there’s a library, right at the heart of the community. Helping people research their family history; find a poem for a funeral; get online for the first time; use the space for community meetings; meet an author or introduce their baby to the rhythms of language.