My Name is E

by Frederick Lightfoot

  Abby’s spaces were St Bridget’s, amongst the long grasses on the grave before the lichen crowned angel, and on the coast, her shore, listening to her vowel, her name, hugging something close to her, sometimes Poppy, sometimes herself, looking from a small space to a big space. There were other spaces amongst the crevasse, troughs and fissures of the fractured landscape, the places we named Red Steps, Hawk Cliff, Ghost Valley, Lost Plateau, Frozen Fields, Waste Land, No Man’s Land, Lost Girl, maybe quite often in the disused car beneath Hawk Cliff, often inside a disused shell of hut along the quarry train escarpment, but never as frequently as those other two, never so regularly alone. In the named landscape we were pathfinders, explorers: in her confined spaces, small world within big world, she was a fugitive.

  I tried to touch her. She flinched and withdrew from me as if I was one of those who wished her harm. She eyed me with close attention, alert to my slightest movement. I don’t know why but I began to speak, so quietly I couldn’t hear myself, it was so below my frequency, and nor could Grace, so what hope was there for Abby? I don’t suppose the fact that her vigilance informed her that my lips were moving held any meaning for her. She was in no state of mind to try to understand or even wonder about it. She just wanted to know that she was safe, but in that moment we were all the same to her, all liable to hurt her, all tarnished with the same human contagion. Grace and I had lost all identity. We were hallucinations, figures of an inner world, unreal.

  In so many ways, that has never changed. I am her hallucination, a voice inside her head, because all other voices failed her. I am a spook, a story-teller, her conscience, her madness. I would never let her go. I go on and on, speaking between her ears, prising apart the understanding she had of the crimes people perpetrate against each other, demanding proof of her reason, exulting in her unreason, celebrating her wilful pleasure. I was with her, a stowaway in her dreams, a parasite, a lover, and I never renounced her, or proscribed her. At times I was her, and was never wise enough to know when I wasn’t. We were sisters, conjoined, two of three equal angles, an equilateral being, making sense of all we failed to hear, dependent on the voices in our heads, the voice in her head.

  Eventually I stalked her like a predatory animal, inching towards her, whispering to her deafness, certain in my own twisted mind that it was soothing her, consoling her, keeping her tame. However, at the crucial point, I didn’t pounce, but carefully fingered her, shaping her, restoring life to discreet portions of her flesh, as if she were a delicate work of art, a priceless acquisition, which she was. She looked at my hand, the fingers gently stroking her, as if it were independent in itself, an animal of some kind, a thing with its own mind. It was the hand, the probing fingers, she was unsure of, not the mind that lay somewhere else completely. She was reduced to her immediate world, capable temporarily of only responding to the stimulus of touch.

  I signalled to Grace to help. I don’t know why, but I had to move Abby, remove her from the averted gaze of the lichen crowned angel. It wasn’t that I considered one shelter superior to any other, I just knew it wasn’t good watching the rain wash chicken shit into her lashes, and her too removed to care, too hurt to consider there could be an alternative. Grace was reluctant. She was afraid, afraid of what her senses told her: that her sister had been hurt, maybe permanently disabled. It suggested things she wasn’t ready to know. She shouted at Abby again, shouted with the most childish voice she could muster, demanding that Abby get up and that she take charge of Poppy, though Poppy wasn’t with her – whether her loss was to be permanent or not we couldn’t guess – but Abby didn’t respond to her childish appeal. How could she? It wasn’t in her earshot. For her it didn’t exist, as so much else at that moment in time did not exist.

  I rebuked Grace and told her we didn’t have time for games. I know that hurt her. I was loading maturity onto her which she wasn’t ready to carry, and really, why should she have? Certainly her father had a deep seated belief that Grace was the physical embodiment of God’s punishment, but he didn’t try to drive any demons from her. He never resorted to violence against his pitiable child. It was his sin, not hers. He treated her with cold indulgence, providing her with anything he thought might occupy her mind, not because he believed it would educate her, but would at least keep her at peace. Her mother though, Eileen, was a Boland – who had certainly been around as long as the Shaughnessys – and simply loved her daughter. For Eileen, family took precedence over all else. The fact that one of its members was different was simply how things were. There was no mystery in misfortune. It ratified luck. Grace had no desire to part with her state of ignorance, her own state of grace, certainly not for the shit across Abby’s face, not without some resistance anyway. Eventually though, she came to Abby’s side, still rebuking her for being stubborn and a fool, neither of which made any mark on her, and together we got her to her feet.

  She allowed herself to be led. Even now I don’t know whether she knew where she was being taken, nor whether she guessed my intentions. My feeling is she suspected something drastic and had given up all resistance. She walked like an automaton along the track, then the path, along the railway, over the bridge and to the shore, her favoured place, where Grace had named us sisters, named her Abby, and we took her right into the water – at first Grace hadn’t understood but quickly caught on – and we held her underneath the waves, held her under with our four stubborn hands, her own waving about her, lashing against the weight of the depth, then we dragged her, right up, lifting her from the pull of the water, the break explosive like a tearing of muscle, and again, until she started calling her name in loud repeated ecstatic chants.

  Then we stood together, up to our waists, the water bitterly cold around us and we carefully scooped water onto her face and removed the final traces of the yard floor from its surface. She stood there, awkwardly hunched, shivering, but clean, purified, quietly repeating her name through chattering teeth.

  Later we ran back to the village through ever heavier rain. The wind had picked up and blew fiercely across the bog land and lashed across the escarpment, making it difficult to even keep our feet. We went to Grace’s house, expecting the least of harsh receptions there. Grace’s father was out at work, so there was only Eileen to contend with. Eileen was remarkably generous though.

  She herded us into the loft and made us strip to the skin, and she stared for a while, until really it felt uncomfortable, and then with sudden energy she brought blankets and handed one to me, one to Grace, but Abby’s she wrapped around her, draping it as if she could avoid it touching her, yet at the same time cover her. Even then, I don’t think I realised she had been studying the marks on Abby’s skin, the telltale blemishes and blotches, the red sores, the heated flesh, and just at the base of her spine a great tear, exposing the pink flesh beneath that seemed to be oozing from her. I thought she was weighing us up, considering us wicked and wayward, being so wet, so obviously in the wrong. I wasn’t unconvinced that she was preparing to pronounce punishment, but none was forthcoming. In fact, she said nothing, nothing at all. She disappeared for a while then brought us a tray of tea, with a plate of ginger biscuits, still silent, obviously of the opinion that there was little to be gained in admonishing those who wouldn’t hear anyway.

  Abby was ill after that. I heard she was hallucinating, had even been found one night frantically running around the hen yard, desperately looking for the door out, which for some reason eluded her. She was always seeking a door into the dark but certainly we never expected her to discover it, a door, a door into the dark.

  *

  Donald made much of the fact that I spoke about Judith Salt – meaning a tall, inelegant girl on a northern coastline watching the distant thread of horizon with a wonder at the total inadequacy of the words at her disposal – as another person entirely. Today is not the last day of the past or the first day of the future, he insisted. Each exists within the other. You cannot escape Judith Salt.

  I found tha
t a strange conundrum.

  Was he telling me I couldn’t get away from him, from where we were, or was he informing me that some figure called Judith Salt would hunt me down, no matter where I ran?

  Perhaps he meant both, but more probably the latter. He seemed to take great pleasure in using the abstract past against me, accusing me of niggardliness, compliance, defeat. He would never believe me when I said it didn’t matter. He thought I was promulgating some form of forgiveness or resignation, by it; something without true catharsis to his way of thinking. Of course, I didn’t mean that at all. I never saw the sense of letting the past destroy the present, though I had no such aversion to the present destroying the past, or at the very least correcting it.

  Surely we owe it to those confined forever to speak out for them, to revenge in their name, to rectify the wrongs, otherwise the future will be impure, predicated on untruths and compromise. I don’t compromise, and yet Donald accused me of it all of the time, but how could that be, unless I had to compromise to him?

  We spent the first few months we knew each other indoors. He would come to the house in Camden Town and spend much of the evening talking with the midwife and the nun. He made them laugh with simple stories of the absurd things people say to someone who is about to expose their bodies beneath the skin, reveal diseased bone and tissue, the malevolence of the body in not holding out. All the elderly women who thought he could see them naked, and would readily admit that it was more than their husbands ever had, laughing about it as if it were of no consequence, yet no doubt smarting at the absurdity. The little old man who had heard that if x-rays got inside you it made you impudent, meaning impotent, and flatly refused to have it done. Donald sat him down and gave him a good talking to and made him see sense. Unfortunately the x-ray was to reveal a right lobe loaded with cancer. Funny, absurd and poignant, Donald’s stories, all at the same time. At first the absurdity made him laugh, telling the midwife and the nun, an old man stuffed with cancer worrying about impotence, but eventually it would transmute into anger, and I would have to succour that.

  Except, I never could. How could I when he never wanted it to happen? He didn’t want that anger allayed. It nourished him, or at least he thought it did. I believe he had a real distrust of contentment because it wasn’t really happiness, but then happiness would always be flawed because it wasn’t ecstasy and could never be universal, and if it was how could it be particular, and so on and so on. So he chose discontent.

  I think I always knew he enjoyed it, the way I knew he really wanted to shock the nun. Why else would he always joke about sex? Sister Lavinia never was shocked, though. She was a teacher in an inner city school, for God’s sake, and there certainly wasn’t anything the midwife hadn’t seen.

  Naturally, I didn’t matter. At best I was simply overhearing what was said, but then I was deaf, so how could that even be possible? I was to be protected from the modern world. I think that’s why it took him so long to sleep with me. He just couldn’t bring himself to try it on. I told him, coaxing him, humouring him, or so I thought, I’m not a little deaf girl, in fact, I’m a tall deaf girl. At first he didn’t get the reference, the quasi-joke, so I told him, all his lame characters were little, little old men, little old women, all little. He sulked for the rest of the evening. I’m pretty sure it was because I called his characters lame.

  Was that piece of word play deliberate?

  Naturally.

  Even Michael, with all his religious zeal, had had no qualms about sex, even if he did ask whether I would prefer to keep my hearing aid in or not. He was so sincere I couldn’t be angry. It was as if he were offering absolution. If I wanted I didn’t have to hear, so perhaps I hadn’t really taken part. Silent sex was no sex at all: not hearing the same as not knowing, the world of encounter entirely optional.

  Donald was like a clumsy kid, not knowing what to touch, where to put his hands. It was as if my whole head was out of bounds, taboo, and yet not to be ignored. I told him I liked to have my ears licked, liked to feel the tip of the tongue flicking inside. That sent him wild. He fucked as if he were thrashing me, licking at my face like some overpowering dog. I could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t turned on, not in the way he wanted it to seem, the way he claimed later. He was enraged. He was trying to fuck the past away, fuck away the trace of any previous life. The very thought of someone else’s tongue anywhere near my offending ear was simply unacceptable.

  So, I told him about Judith Salt. I told him about the many things that Judith Salt had never thought might happen, like being there with him, in a North London house, in bed, with a nun just two rooms away. I told him Judith Salt was grateful. I told him Judith Salt was grateful because that’s what he wanted to hear, that Judith Salt was his mission, his strength of personality. In that way I told him he resurrected me.

  Judith Salt should not dismiss who she is. Judith Salt is worth everyone else.

  As always he demanded something, and then when he achieved it complained about it.

  He said I should be more independent, and then accused me of letting him down when I was.

  It was certainly me who pointed to the fact that we never went out, never went anywhere, but remained holed up in Camden Town like fugitives. He claimed it was him, that he was the one to complain about our segregation but that I was reluctant, as if I were ashamed of myself. He made much play of the fact that I shouldn’t be ashamed. I’m sure when we finally emerged, dinner together in a small, unfussy Italian restaurant – café by day, restaurant after six – I was a trophy, symbol of Donald’s grace. I hated him and loved him, at the same time, in the same look, in the same bemused, untruthful manner, admitting neither, saying only what was needed, or rather what was wanted.

  So we started going out, Donald insisting on it. I think for a time that we were really quite happy. It seems strange recalling it, as if it couldn’t have been, as if the simplicity of it was in some way a deception. I believe, though, for a time, we did indulge in simplicity and stopped questioning what did and didn’t motivate and drive the other, stopped questioning how we found ourselves in the position we were. Richmond, Kew, Greenwich, then farther afield, Leeds Castle, Rochester, Canterbury and then the south coast, Brighton Pavilion and the beach.

  I said it was so strange that Judith Salt should find herself on a different shoreline, the continent just a stone’s throw away. I said Judith Salt had never been aware of the continent and that the sea could lead to a real otherworld, a tangible world. Judith Salt had only ever been aware that it had depth, that it called to her sister with a terrible but dignified insistence, championing a name, a source, a place where mermaids were adrift and free. Judith Salt could hardly believe in Judith Salt, but there she was, and was somewhere she must have been, and despite everything still was. Judith Salt poised at the edge of the known world, without ever realising she was at the brink.

  As I spoke, staring out at the horizon, Donald began a war dance. He marched around me, shaking his fists, signing incredible frustration, incredible perplexity. Then he started to berate and question me. How could I do it, stand there like some lunatic dredging up dead lives? Why did I have to dramatise it all in such a childish fashion? What about him?

  I told him the sea at Brighton was like a domestic animal, whereas Judith Salt was used to a wild creature.

  He shouted at me to stop it.

  Judith Salt was alone and depressed, brought low by the factors of a seaside resort.

  I told him I had to go, return to London. He went wild. I suppose it was understandable, after all, he had paid for a room, at the very least could have expected some sexual satisfaction in return, even if he was deep down concerned he was indulging a fetish. – At least he never asked me whether I wanted to remove my hearing aid or not, which I would have to admit I often did.

  Of course I stayed. We ate in a steak house because Donald felt in Scottish mood, which I didn’t really understand but assumed alluded to the tartan d
écor of the place, though now I’m not so sure. I was to learn that whenever he evoked Scotland it meant something to do with purity.

  In the event the steaks weren’t very good and Donald insisted on complaining, making more of it than he needed. Sure the waiter wasn’t very apologetic, but Donald acted as if he’d been insulted. He went on and on about knowing good meat and knowing good service, and wasn’t that what was wrong with the whole damned country, waiters like him trying it on. It was as if a whole mask had temporarily slipped and some rabid reactionary was reasserted. It ended up with Donald marching out with me following, apologising in his wake. On the doorstep he rounded on me, angered that I should have felt the need to apologise.

  Without any great demonstration of the fact I switched off my hearing aid and then removed it from my ear. Later, when we knew about the baby, he claimed that I’d removed it because I was sick of parading my deafness, that in Brighton I was deceitful.

  I hate to think the baby was conceived in a small, rough and ready hotel on the south coast, the window open, the sound of the sea presumably drifting in, though, as with all other sounds, banished, but it was probably the case. A baby conceived through mannered, impersonal sex, ovum and sperm conjoining in a silent world, a world in which speech was optional and largely regrettable.

  I guess it was inevitable.

  *

  From shore to shore, the earth is not round, but spiral, image lain over image – though never so completely that any should become a blur, a corruption. So, here I stand, Judith Salt at sixty, at twenty-five, wondering just what it is that has happened to me that I find myself here? What it is that has happened to me that I am under sentence to formulate an answer, delegated to fashion an action?

  I have no way of knowing how I feel about that.

  In fact, the most singular, strongest feeling I have is one of claustrophobia, but that is a somewhat ambiguous feeling, as it certainly has nothing to do with space. There is abundant space here. The amount of ground available per person is generous, some of the most generous in the country. It is something of a boast. Here there is enough space not to realise you weren’t here all along. There can’t be many places in which that could be the case.