Ink

by Alice Broadway

  ink

  To the Inkwell.

  You are the finest selection of writing friends a girl could ask for and I love you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  I was older than all my friends when I got my first tattoo.

  My mother loves to tell the story. I wish she wouldn’t. At two days old you’re meant to get your birth mark, but I got sick instead, and Mum cancelled the ceremony.

  Mum’s friends said, “You need to get her marked, Sophie. What are you going to call her?”

  But Mum told them she would wait until I was better. I would be named and inked then. She ignored their whispered warnings of what happens to babies who die unmarked. And so for twenty days I remained formless and void, until one day my mother said, “Let her be Leora.”

  And I was Leora. The word was punched with minuscule needles into my flesh. Tiny letters that have grown with me for sixteen years.

  We are not afraid of death. When your marks are safe in your book, you live on after you die. The life story etched on to your body is kept for ever – if you’re worthy. When we preserve the words, pictures and moments imprinted on our skin, our story survives for eternity. We are surrounded by the dead, and, for as long as their books are still read and their names are still spoken, they live.

  Everyone has the skin books in their homes: our shelves are full of my ancestors. I can breathe them in, touch them and read their lives.

  But it was only after my father died that I saw the book of someone I’d really known.

  We were lucky, really, seeing death walk up from a distance. It meant we could be prepared. We massaged his skin with oil; he told us the stories of his ink and smiled when he showed us the tree on his back with our names on. He was ready when he went, and his skin was prepared too. I watched his strong arms deflate, leaving the skin wrinkled like an old apple. I watched his straight back bend as though he’d been hit in the stomach. He stopped looking directly at us after a while; the pain was all he saw. It seemed like the sickness sucked him away, leaving just his shell. But the shell is what counts.

  People had brought us flowers and food to make those final days easier. Little love tokens for Dad when there was nothing else they could do. We weren’t the only ones whose hearts were breaking; Dad was precious to so many. The kitchen smelled of wilting petals, stalks mouldering in stale water and the casserole we hadn’t got round to eating. It was like death was catching. Mum wrapped the blankets more tightly around him and wiped sweat from her brow. Dad shivered and his breath sounded crackly.

  Yet when death came that bright day in late autumn, I was not ready. I could still taste the coffee I’d drunk at dawn after Mum woke me with a frantic whisper.

  “Sweetheart, wake up. I don’t think he has much time left.”

  I hurried to his side. The gaps between his breaths grew longer. Mum and I leaned close and held his hands. I wondered which would be the final gasp, the last silence before he wakes in the afterlife and breathes again. Suddenly, with a gasp, Dad’s eyes opened and he looked straight at me. His hand gripped mine. He eased his other hand from Mum’s and grasped the pendant he always wore around his neck. It was a slender, rough-hewn wooden leaf with a suggestion of veins etched into it, which hung from a leather string. It was as much a part of Dad as his ink; I’d never seen him without it.

  “Leora.” His voice was hoarse. “This is for you. Leora, don’t forget. You won’t forget me, will you? Please, don’t forget me.” Tears came to his eyes as he begged. “And promise that you’ll watch out for the blanks: be careful, my little light, my Leora.”

  I nodded and, through sobs, whispered, “I promise.” I looked at Mum, her lips tight and her face strained; she reached up and untied the leather that circled his neck, and Dad passed the pendant to me. I rubbed the smooth wood and tears fell from my eyes as I blinked. He turned to Mum and made certain hers was the last face he saw. He went from the land of the living hearing Mum’s “I love you, I love you, I love you” and feeling her kisses on his hand.

  And he left us. Just like that, he went. The sun dimmed. A source of true goodness had gone from the world and it was colder and darker without him.

  After he died, the embalmers came to our house. They dripped oil over his body and rubbed spices into his skin. They wrapped him in blue cloth and took him away. He looked like a king. He’d always seemed that way to me. For days after, I would go into the room and inhale the fragrance of his anointing. Maybe if I could breathe him in he would burst out of my lungs, fully formed and laughing.

  But the next time I saw him, his life had become pages. He would come home to us once the weighing of the soul ceremony had found him worthy. For now, we had to go to the museum if we wanted to be with him. We walked there in the light of an amber sunset, permitted to enter the museum after normal opening hours for this intimate viewing. In a private room that smelled of ancient wooden furniture and the perfume of whoever had been for a viewing before us, we were presented with my father in his new form. We placed the small casket with his skin book inside on the table. Mum appeared at my shoulder, her eyes wide. She had been tense and on edge ever since his death – less sorrowful than snappish and distracted. Sometimes I’d come into a room and find her staring into space, her hands clasped so tightly together the knuckles gleamed. I was starting to feel irritated by it; I didn’t want to have to think about her, not just now. I wanted my mum back – my calm, capable mum, who always knew the right thing to say.

  As we lifted the lid, a smell of wax and spice lulled itself around the room, raising a toast to him. And there he was, his skin taut, smooth and slightly shrunken. With each page we turned, we touched him again and remembered the roughness of his forearms, the smoothness of his back. Every stiff page told his story. Mum seemed nervous at first – her shoulders were tense under my arm – but she became calmer the further we read. The cover of his book, which was made from the skin from the back of his shoulders, showed a picture of us and the ink from his birth showing his name – Joel Flint. A good title. A good man. A good introduction. We turned a page and saw the tree from his back telling the tale of his family – me and Mu
m, the girls who captured his heart. I saw my name there and traced the letters with my finger. There were marks I hadn’t seen since I was a child. They looked much fainter now, blurred with time.

  We turned a page. Mum laughed and closed her eyes. “You might want to look away, Leora,” she said with a blush and pursed lips that hid a smile.

  She was right, I didn’t want to see it, but the flower which had been on his buttock was intricate and delicate. Stretched into the page of his book it looked like any other part of him, but it was secret. It was their marriage mark – added to each year, getting more and more beautiful as their love grew. Mum’s laughter suddenly blended with tears and she put her palm across her mouth as if stopping the sadness and reminding her of the kisses she missed.

  We turned the page.

  Chapter Two

  The morning after we open Dad’s book, Mum goes back to work. She says that it is time; that we need to go back to our normal lives; or, at least, work out what our new normal is going to be. Normal is very important to Mum; she’s always been effortlessly popular, sociable and busy, committed to the community, and I think she’s always been a bit bewildered that her own daughter is such a loner. I decide to get out of the house too, but head to the market; there is no school today; my year are all on study leave. I know I have to engage with that all again: with revision and final exams. I will have to work hard to make up for the time I’ve missed if I am to be an inker – which is all I’ve ever wanted.

  I walk along the pavement, which is rippled by tree roots beneath, and I wonder when we’ll get a date for Dad’s weighing of the soul ceremony. The most time-consuming part has already happened in the month since Dad died: the flaying, the tanning, the binding of his skin into a book. Now the people at the government need to study his finished book and prepare his case before the ceremony can happen. And then he can come home. Back with us, where he belongs.

  The weighing of the soul ceremony is where the leaders announce their final decision about the destiny of your soul. They will have studied Dad’s book and judged whether he has led a worthy enough life. The worthy go home with their family, are placed among their ancestors, and are read and remembered for ever. Their soul is safe in the afterlife. If you’re found unworthy your soul is destroyed in flames along with your book. I’ve never seen it happen, but they say you never forget the smell of a burning skin book. That won’t be Dad though; no one could have led a better or purer life.

  Closer to town the road narrows, until the pavement is just wide enough for one person. Walking down the dusty street I sneak looks into the windows of the terraced homes I pass. The higgledy buildings are each painted different colours and face right on to the pavement. When I was little I used to tell myself stories about the streets like this; I used to imagine a giant had squeezed the row of houses making each one skinny and creating wobbly roofs of different heights. Now, I tell myself different stories as I peep into the leaded windows and wonder about the lives within. When people don’t close their curtains I take it as an invitation to guess at who lives there and what their life is like. I am so engrossed in looking that I almost bump into a man picking the dead petals from the red geraniums in his window box. I step round him quickly, one foot in the road, inhaling the sharp bitterness of the dying flowers.

  I keep walking and, in my mind, I turn the pages of Dad’s book. I feel my shoulders relax. It was a beautiful relief to see him last night. Mum seemed like a different person when we left the museum; she sighed so loudly when we reached the final page, I thought at first that something was wrong, but when I turned to look she was smiling. She was right to: his skin tells such a good tale. When someone reads your book, they should be able to read your life story; they can weigh the good against the bad and know if you’re worthy. Everything important goes on our skin, because otherwise it stays in our soul, and no one wants their soul weighed down, either by pride at their good deeds or by guilt at their transgressions. We mark our bodies to keep our souls unfettered. Only the worthy attain remembrance, and to do that your good must outweigh your bad and your soul must be free.

  I smile at the thought of Dad’s pure soul ready to be counted worthy. I am longing for the day of his weighing to come.

  Dad was a flayer – his friends at work will have been the ones to slice his skin to make it ready for the tanners. He did the same for their loved ones and for the countless unknown people that came their way each day.

  Mum is a reader; it’s more of a calling than a job, I suppose, but it does pay. It’s hard to explain what makes someone a reader, but the best way is that some of us can read the meanings behind marks – we can see beyond the immediate message to what the ink expresses about that person’s heart. My mum can look at your family tree and tell who is the favourite child. She can look at the age marks on your hand and tell which year almost broke you. She can look at the marks that describe your qualifications and tell whether you cheated. People admire readers, but they also fear them. Mum once told me that everyone has secrets they want to keep.

  We shouldn’t really have secrets though. That’s the whole point.

  I have the gift too. I’ve been able to read people since I was a child. Mum says she worked it out when I got into trouble in my first week at school. I had asked a boy why he didn’t live with his real dad. When his angry mum showed up at the door demanding to know who had been gossiping about them, Mum knew I must have read between the lines on the boy’s skin. But just because I can do it, doesn’t mean I want to do it as my job. I love the glimpse it gives me into people’s marks and lives, but sometimes I get tired of ink shouting out the inner world of strangers as they pass by. I don’t think I could bear their anxious faces if they were sitting across the reading table from me, knowing that if their marks chose to reveal the truth I could see everything.

  No, my dream is to be an inker. All I can hope is that I do well enough in my exams, which aren’t looking as straightforward as they once were. I’ve missed so much time with Dad not being well. I’ve always got good grades at school without having to try too hard, so being anxious is a first for me.

  As I near the centre of town, the houses turn into rows of shops. I pass the bakery, a florist and the leather worker’s place where we get our shoes and bags mended. The dusty path becomes cobbles, and the narrow street I’m on takes me to the town square. In the middle of the large square is a small comfort-blanket of green, standing out bright against the stone and timber of the buildings surrounding it. And at its centre is the statue of Saint, the most important leader in our history.

  He stands in the middle of our bustling town, a tall figure in bronze: smooth, robed and watching us. I’ve always loved his story – the tale we tell to remind us of his faithfulness, the power of stories and of the soul-freeing necessity of flaying the dead. And, of course, he stands there as a warning to us about the despicable ways of the blanks. Footpaths cross the square, corner to corner, and people stroll along them chatting and trying to find a patch of grass between the footpaths where they can sit and drink their coffee.

  The square is where you can really get a sense of what matters in Saintstone. And if things matter here, they matter everywhere. All the towns around depend on us: Saintstone is where the government is based and where all the decisions of any importance are made. I like living in the centre of things. I’m not sure how it would feel to be in one of the smaller towns where everyone thinks they know you even before they’ve seen your ink.

  Depending on which way the wind is blowing, you can usually smell the smoke from the hall of judgement. It’s a large, circular building made of stone and coloured glass which tapers up to the wide chimney. The fire is always lit, the smoke creating permanent grey-brown clouds over the town. It’s where the weighing of the soul ceremonies happen and where Mum and I go when it’s our turn to speak the names of the dead. It’s also where matters of faith are taught and upheld. Our schoolteachers train there; our spiritual education and
formation is just as important as our academic attainment.

  On this side of the square, behind me as I walk, is the museum – my favourite place. It’s raised high, with steps all around it. It towers over us, all stone pillars and arched windows. It looks dark and imposing from here but when you go inside it’s bright and cosy. Dad used to take me there all the time. I swallow, feeling a sudden chill in the shadow of the building, and hurry on.

  Across the square, beyond the grass and trees and benches, I see an unexpected bustle and commotion. People are setting up loud speakers on a temporary platform that has been constructed outside the government building, a giant L-shaped box taking up two sides of the square. There must be a meeting I’ve forgotten about. People are gathering round; some are getting up from their benches to get a closer look, and there is a low hum of conversation.

  Seeing the government building makes me realize I’ve not been called for my truth-telling test in a while. I should expect it soon I suppose. We’re meant to have one every few years, to allow us to confess. The image of Dad taking me for the first time, when I was nearly fourteen, flashes brightly in my mind.

  Dad had assured me it was nothing to worry about, but that hadn’t stopped me being scared. We’d all been told about the machine that reads your pulse and temperature and beeps if you’re lying, but I’d never seen it. My imagination had convinced me that it was definitely going to hurt. I was certain that this would be the moment that I would be found out; I thought of all the little lies I’d told my parents and times I had sneaked an extra biscuit when I’d been told I’d had enough. I even had nightmares about accidentally confessing to a crime I hadn’t committed.

  It was an anticlimax when we were shown from the main reception and led in to a small, completely plain room with white walls, two chairs, a wooden table and a small contraption that was nothing more than a dull and battered-looking metal dome with a light attached and wires coming out of it. A man with a notebook was waiting and gestured for me to sit down, but when Dad saw how nervous I was, he asked if he could go first. He sat in the chair, placed his left hand on the dome and looked at me with a smile and a roll of his eyes that said, “This is a breeze.”