My Name is E

by Frederick Lightfoot

  *

  For some time Abby gave up her second favourite book, The Adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Grace only ever let her look at it, never keep it for any length of time to secrete away in one of her many dens. It was too beautiful to part with, picture after picture of Dark Age knights, painted predominantly in various shades of vivid blue, in combat with serpents and witches, overviewed by beautiful, wretched women. Abby was particularly fond of a plate of Sir Galahad witnessing the Grail. She gazed at it with naïve joy, her face turning slowly as if to see it from every possible angle, but then one day, completely out of the blue, she gave it up, thrust it aside as if looking at it had become fraught with danger. It was as if she had realised, without having any skill to put it into words, that purity, the worldview of Sir Galahad, was incompatible with life. It was a sense that went right through her and really put a stop to any tendency towards sentimentality, though it didn’t stop her attempts at escape, doomed searches for the door through time that would allow access to such a chivalric world, a world of myth and magic. Little did we expect that she would find a door, a door into the dark.

  *

  ‘‘Just tell me this one thing,’’ I asked. ‘‘Why did she scare you so much?’’

  I knew before I had even asked, responding to my own impulse and instinct, that he would find the question unanswerable, but I failed entirely to predict his response. He took it seriously, patiently, trying to work out an answer that would make sense. He must have calculated that this was to be the cost of my compliance; the pay-off for allowing him to manhandle me, an answer to an unanswerable question. It was comical watching him squirm with its possibilities. In the end he gave the only answer possible. He wasn’t scared of anything. He smiled and corrected himself. He was nervous of heights, uncomfortable in high places, didn’t even like nailing down tin sheets on the pig-sheds. He didn’t like heights at all, but I shouldn’t go away with the wrong impression, he wouldn’t let it get in the way.

  I had no idea what he meant by that. The accompanying smile was dreadful, not asking but telling me he had passed the test, successfully answered my question. I felt sickened. His filthy smile was turning my stomach. I wasn’t prepared for it. He had always been so lazy with expression, to my mind only really capable of hostility or suspicion, and yet here he was trying it on with me, a deaf sister, a sister he would once upon a time have bullied and dismissed. So, what was going on? Was he feeling his age? Was it desperation in him, awareness that all he was equal to was a deaf sister, a sister who brazenly declared her deficit, who ripped back her hair to exhibit it to the world, who outfaced bigots with strength of purpose, as Donald called it? Is that how he saw me, a measure of his failing?

  I stood up, straight, rigid, and stepped towards him, until I was only inches from him, until he might have touched me with just an accidental movement. He eased himself back in his chair, his eyes slowly scanning my figure, up and down, though avoiding my face, sticking to the space between neck and thigh, making filthy calculations. I said: ‘‘Maybe I’m a high place, maybe you should be careful.’’

  He emitted a low groan, a purring sound. Was he excited or disgusted? Was he sinking or soaring? And how dare he make a transaction out of me. My instinct and urge was to smack him in the face, to smack him in the face and never stop until it was a disfigured sop, a parody of a face. I wanted to wipe his entire history from him, eradicate it feature by feature. However, I wasn’t so blinded by my mission not to recognise that I didn’t have a hope against him, so I smiled, gave him a signal of humour. Yes, I was having him on. Nothing to fear from a deaf sister. I was just being playful.

  He made a move to get out of the chair, a move towards me. I stopped him, laying my palm firmly on his shoulder, whispering, reminding him that Agnes might be back at any moment.

  He eyed me with his usual primitive vigilance. I laughed quietly and promised him that we would have our day. I even told him that he shouldn’t worry, we would definitely have our day. I can’t disguise the fact that there was a hint of relief in his expression. He had won what he wanted, secured enough. The prize itself wasn’t worth more than the winning. Well, we would see about that.

  I smiled again, coaxing and reassuring him, then lifted my palm to his face, and made an indentation along his cheek with my index-finger, like a blunt knife carving him. ‘‘She wasn’t a high place, was she, so why be scared of her, scared of someone in love with the shore, someone who’d learnt the sign for love.’’

  ‘‘I don’t know what you mean.’’

  ‘‘I’m just wondering, thinking about then, that’s all. I don’t mean anything, don’t mean anything at all.’’

  ‘‘She was an oddball, got people’s backs up, played games. You said so.’’

  ‘‘Yes, I said so. So you hit her?’’

  ‘‘It was my job.’’

  ‘‘Job?’’

  ‘‘She was mine, wasn’t she? I had to take her in hand.’’

  ‘‘But not yours to begin with. To begin with she was your mother’s.’’

  ‘‘She didn’t want to be saddled with a dummy, did she? Who would?’’

  ‘‘Is that what you thought?’’

  ‘‘That’s what I knew, what everyone knew.’’

  ‘‘But she …’’

  ‘‘I’ve had enough of this.’’

  He stood up, forcing me back a step. My hand fell away. We were at eye level, Harold just a few inches taller, but enormous in comparison, his interest slow but menacing.

  ‘‘I’m sick of your questions,’’ he said.

  ‘‘I’m sorry.’’

  ‘‘So what are you playing at? Why are you going on and on?’’

  ‘‘The past, I don’t want to lose it, that’s all.’’

  ‘‘To hell with it!’’

  ‘‘But I don’t want to say that.’’

  ‘‘We don’t have a past. We’re still here. We didn’t know you weren’t.’’

  ‘‘And there’s still a meat van.’’

  ‘‘Of course, there’s a meat van, a high-class butcher, but that isn’t everything.’’

  ‘‘I don’t suppose he’s getting any younger.’’

  ‘‘Who is?’’

  I thought: I am, Harold, getting younger every minute, minute by minute, time sloughing off me, my tissues packed with collagen, all those years of smoking too much banished, an imago. Can you not see Harold, the female perfection of Judith Salt, standing in front of you, negotiating the charade that is human business? No, Harold Sempie, or whoever you are, I shall not let go of the past, I shall not be left high and dry, a tragic clown. I don’t ever expect to lose the past, though I accept I shall change my relationship to it.

  I said: ‘‘I don’t suppose there’s anyone to take his place.’’

  He glared at me, his anger at breaking point, without understanding why.

  ‘‘Still,’’ I said soothing him, telling him it was still playful, ‘‘all the more reason to take your chances, seize the day.’’

  He pouted his lips as if he were about to swing for me.

  I smiled and repeated that we would have our day.

  He made a move towards me. I shook my head.

  Not now.

  I suggested I should be getting on and slowly stepped away. He shrugged, letting me know again that he didn’t know I wasn’t here. I said we would meet again. I would make sure of it. A promise. He shrugged again, but the meaning wasn’t remotely the same.

  When I reached the door I asked: ‘‘How is Agnes, by the way?’’

  ‘‘Just the same.’’

  ‘‘What did you say to her when you hit her?’’

  ‘‘Stop playing games,’’ he said, then immediately turned towards the fire and slumped back down.

  Chapter Five

  Abby saw a spotted woodpecker dance up an electricity pole and held a chicken claw in her hand, which she looked at, and from that time onwards the two things b
ecame inseparable, creating the same feeling of sickness in the base of her stomach.

  The chicken claw was the only gift Harold ever gave her. He threw it at her and when she ducked he was moved to take her into the pig-shed and beat her. It wasn’t easy for him to provide a present and he expected her gratitude. He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her across the muddy yard, barking at her to pick it up, but she didn’t understand. In the end he threw her down, picked up the waxen looking thing himself, held it at her face and commenced to pull the severed tendons, giving the impression that the thing still had life. After that he threw it at her again, this time meaning it to hit her, and marched off cursing.

  When he had gone she crawled across the mud and picked up the claw from where his wayward aim had let it fall. She dabbed it clean with her dress and then sat there, not bothering to get herself out of the corn streaked slurry, just pulling at the tendons, watching the thing contract and relax. Then she saw the woodpecker. She looked again at the claw, imagining it contracting against a solid surface, and was just about to pull it again when she was knocked flying, landing face down in filth. Her stomach contracted and she felt a deep agonising sickness, but this time she decided to fight back. She suddenly leapt to her feet and began reaching up, tearing at Harold’s throat.

  She never forgot the shades of expression, the shades of meaning that crossed Harold’s face as she scrambled to tear out his wind-pipe. At first he looked shocked, non-plussed by her ferocity, and then, with his arms held out defending himself, a half-smile formed itself on his features. He realised he could enjoy this, and that his enjoyment would be saving face. He started shouting at her, swearing and goading, which even if she had been able to hear she wouldn’t have registered, she was too possessed by her need to fight. She was driven by fear, retaliation and something else, something so abstract that she wouldn’t have been able to name it, and for which I only have a few supposed words: dissent, shame, ecstasy, avowal – which was her name, but maybe that is too clever by half.

  Eventually, Harold subdued her – after all she was just a small thing, scarcely turned seven – grasped her firmly by the bodice of her pinafore with his right hand and lashed at her with his left. After that he began to throw her around the yard, until she fell face down inches from a manure heap, small rivulets of the slurry running against her. He glared at her for a moment, his massive torso heaving with the weight of his breathing, and then turned to march away. His temper hadn’t quite abated though, hadn’t been satisfied. He couldn’t stop himself from coming back to her. He lifted her up in one hand by the loose cloth of her pinafore, screamed right into her ear – presumably words to the effect that if she ever tried anything like that again, then the next time he would kill her – then flung her, as if she had little more body than Poppy, across the yard so that she ended up in a disjointed heap by the door of the pig-shed.

  Harold would never forget that fight, and even though he laughed about it, dismissing it – uttering threats of what would happen should she ever try anything like that again – he was aware that it had taken a great deal of brute force to subdue her, which embarrassed and troubled him, and determined him never to be caught off-guard again.

  He remembered hitting her across the buttocks and feeling that it was like striking a pillow, the flesh absorbing his blows, rendering them useless, and becoming so frustrated it crossed his mind to break her arms. Something stopped him, though, a residual commandment submerged somewhere in his subconscious, something he was absolutely certain wouldn’t interfere again. He would never be so lenient in the future. Nevertheless, the damage was considerable.

  We found her in the church grounds curled up at the base of a lichen crowned angel, a yellow capped angel smiling enigmatically, overviewing the dead, guarding, with its slow growths. This was another of her places, her favoured places, spaces into which she made herself fit. She was stained with mud and chicken shit. It was raining heavily, coming down in straight, visible sheets, with not the slightest breeze to divert it. It made the mud and shit run down her face, patterning her with filthy lines. Grace kept her distance, standing stiffly, occasionally commanding Abby to get up, shouting it and then signing it, growing increasingly scared at Abby’s lack of response, whether inability or refusal she couldn’t work out. I think she believed Abby might be dying. There always was that never admitted belief between us that she might be dying. We lived with it all of the time. It never crossed our minds that she was simply the living embodiment of what we all were, tiny tricks of life trying to work out an arrangement between body and reason. I was altogether braver. I went up close and peered at her, studying her as if she were some kind of specimen, after all she herself was convinced she possessed some essence of insect life, but it wasn’t the case. She wasn’t crushable, though she could be disfigured.

  Her eyes were vividly red. She had been crying but had stopped, stopped with a determination to deny she ever had. It made her face taut, vigilant and yet quick to cringe, her expression, her shiny red eyes, rushing between a near ground and a far ground, dealing with two worlds at once. There were small veins, tiny capillaries, apparent beneath the mud and shit. Within the next three days she would obviously be a patchwork of blue-purple bruises. Of course she still had green bruises, brown bruises, scarcely discernible bruises, bruises of all ages. We were quite skilled in knowing the age of a contusion, knowing just where the blow had fallen, the mark it had hit or missed.

  I made small oblique signs that we should go, but she wouldn’t entertain the idea. She curled into herself even more tightly and gazed straight ahead, in the direction of the angel but not at her, not at anything, nothing apparent anyway, which was how she was in her favourite places, in them and elsewhere at one and the same time.

  The geography of her world was definite and we learnt her territory very quickly, and more to the point learnt its ambition, her need for small spaces within big spaces, small worlds within big worlds.

  The village was small but scattered. At its heart there were rows of terraced houses, for the most part small houses built to accommodate mine workers and farm labourers, but a number were on a grander scale, presumably built to house higher ranks such as deputies and foremen. There were also a number of quite large dwellings, Georgian in build, occupied by land managers, factory managers, pit managers, the doctor and the vicar. These people all owned a car, which was still a novelty. On the fringes of the village were the prefabs, small kit houses constructed of rusted metal sheets, without gardens or yards.

  Around this congregation there were numerous scattered cottages, in rows of three or four, tied cottages that had once been attached to farms secreted amongst spurs of the nearby fells and at the head of bluffs that led up from the coast. Everything was built on low hills, in troughs or on escarpments, the land buckling before the great heights of the interior.

  The village had a single room school and two churches, one in the centre, St John’s, skirted by a beck which flooded in the winter and formed a small moat around the hill on which the church stood. The other, St Bridget’s, was on the track towards the coast, close to nothing, half-ruinous but not abandoned. In fact, though there were only half a dozen services a year, most people were still buried there. There were no graves in St John’s, not even a church yard, though there was a demarcated field about half a mile in the other direction with a neat brick wall and beautifully carved wooden gate. Despite the fact that most burials took place in St Bridget’s, its grounds were overrun, its ancient graves toppled over and smothered in grasses, its surrounding wall, high and crenelled covered in mosses and lichens. The church itself was simple and unadorned, its frontispiece surmounted by a very small, triangular bell tower. Inside it was bare and austere, simple wooden pews like boxes, with plain whitewashed walls, one wall only inscribed with a poem for sailors and beside it a list of parish vicars.

  The track went on from St Bridget’s, becoming smaller and smaller, until it was only a narrow path p
assing between a number of ponds and bogs, some natural but most man-made created from flooding of the deeply subsided mines that had worked there. Once there had been mines all around the area, but already by the end of the First World War there was little new ore to be extracted and the major mining activity was robbery from areas which had already been worked. By the nineteen twenties most of the mines were abandoned, leaving only a handful still in operation, by far the major activity being large scale quarrying farther inland.

  The path joined a rail track that ran along an escarpment connecting the quarries to the coast. Below the escarpment was an enormous plain of bog land that spread all the way to the coast, to the other side undulating farmland, and then, near to the coast, an enormous factory complex producing bricks and cement, with great constructions of chutes, towers, kilns and chimneys.

  From the rail track there was a short footpath to a sandstone Victorian bridge that crossed a large slow moving river, the footpath mounting one side of the bridge, crossing its top length and then back down onto the other side where it ducked under the bridge parallel to the river, after which it petered away amongst sandy dunes. The bridge was part of the coastal rail track; the iron-ore hops shunted from the inland track as far as the brick factory, then reversed and shunted north following the coast, one train a day, midmorning. The river, which ran parallel to the coastal railway, exchanged the interior rail bank for the seaward bank beneath the bridge.

  After the sand-dunes there was a corroded bank, with a steep jump down to the shingle. The coast was long and bare, with rocky outcrops skirted by blackened sands, leading to a long esplanade where sand and sea met.