My Name is E

by Frederick Lightfoot

  Seeing my tears, my evident grief, she expressed the most natural and exquisite concern.

  I said the nails were beautiful.

  She frowned at me sceptically, yet warmly, with her crisp, talking to a child look, which presumably says something about the half-crazy, demented way I come across to her.

  I insisted. The nails were lovely. They reminded me of when I was younger, I said, when women of my age wore wigs, false eyelashes, velvet chokers with cameo brooches, and painted their nails, pink, purple and orange with lipstick and eye-shadow to match.

  She smiled and said what anyone would in such a situation, that she bet I was a wild one.

  I gazed straight at myself in the mirror and smiled, though I wasn’t looking at myself at all, rather right through me.

  She suggested it would be better if she did the other hand as well.

  I agreed, saying I had no desire at all to be a lopsided freak, making no consideration at all of the fact that half of her head was almost all blonde whilst the other was virtually all black.

  Luckily I have never been a nail biter and could carry it off.

  *

  Despite Abby’s obvious enthusiasm for life, the way so many different and distinct things made her call out her name, associating herself with each one, making a compact, we always suspected she was dying, she was so pale and disarranged. How could we have been surprised then, when she chose burial; the calmness of her pleasure was un„expected, though. She was simply content to be in the dark, sitting or standing immaterial. In the mine she felt continuous with it, her mind free to explore any shape it chose. It was Grace who recognised that skill in her. It was the second time we found her there. As was so often the case she said enough to lead us to her, but there was something different, the frequency of the note making up her name had a new music to it. Grace called to me, loud enough to be a whisper: She likes finding herself here. Grace was right, of course, she was finding herself, finding the contours that made her an insect, an albatross, a scout, a trickle of water.

  Grace didn’t like it. The dark scared her. The dark underlined the problem we had in finding Abby. Her name came so distantly, and at such a low volume, it seemed as if she was farther away from us than she ever had been before, and then suddenly she would be there, someone to stumble over, to collide with. Worst of all was the fact that she would run off. She had no fear at all.

  Grace said it would be full of ghouls and ghosts. It was obvious. That’s where such things would find a natural home, underground, hidden, removed from prying eyes. After dark they would emerge into the outer world and wreak their revenge for being forced out of sight.

  In the daylight we told stories, Grace and I, of those subterranean creatures. At first they were monsters. We described heavy footed, troll-like ogres who liked nothing better than to gnaw the bones of unsuspecting children, particularly those who couldn’t hear its ponderous tread, though they might feel its vibration through their spine; but by that time it was already too late. At different times of the year witches would search the shafts for lost birds, mice and rats, and, naturally, hidden children, which they would take away to boil up into disgusting potions: and there were always ghosts, the sick spirits of the unfortunate buried, though we never thought of them as miners, those who might have met an untimely end, but always someone inadvertently finding themselves in the grave, not buried alive, just unhappily dead.

  To begin with we didn’t say anymore. The point was simply to justify fear, and no doubt enjoy it as well, but before long we found we had to put an alternate flesh onto the bones. It wasn’t enough to talk of monsters, ghouls and ghosts, there had to be something else. Grace said that if we went deep enough there would almost certainly be a dragon’s den, and if there was a den, then there had to be a captive. The creatures of the mine became beautiful as well as hideous. Everything had to have its opposite. That is how the world was constructed, in opposition, negative and positive. Pretty soon we were the beautiful things. That was Grace’s idea, her contribution to the game. If she had to find herself underground, then at the very least she had to be a princess.

  It was also Grace who demanded light. It must have been the fifth time we had been forced to climb through the breach in the ground to find Abby. Grace wasn’t in any mood for games. It didn’t matter that I signed for the utmost care and vigilance before we went inside, signalling the possibility of all manner of fantastic creature below, she didn’t want to play. She complained bitterly about Abby’s compulsion for burial. She went so far as to suggest that if Abby wanted to bury herself alive then that was her business, but she didn’t see why we had to join her. I said it was because we were sisters and that’s what sisters did. I know she was ready to snap that we weren’t real sisters at all, so I ran ahead and plunged into the mine without listening. Grace shouted along the shaft after me that she would only ever come again with light. I heard the word light which Abby can’t have, nevertheless it was Abby who brought the paraffin-lamp from the pig-shed the next time we went below ground, holding it above her head to reveal that hitherto hidden world, though she didn’t need it herself. The light was for Grace, for me.

  We never recognised the risk we ran taking the lamp in there. How could we?

  When I picture Abby now moving dreamily, gracefully along the shaft, like a fish in a tank, carelessly but generously eyeing everything around her, yet fixing on no point in particular, so that everything remained outside of time and space, it strikes me that she wasn’t a party to our games, but engaged in something altogether more serious. If she had discovered food and water in there I don’t suppose she would have ever returned to the surface. I thought there was something innocent and sweet in her infatuation, but now it weighs on me. Now I want to strike it from memory. Now I want them to suffer who could nurture in her a rejection of sunlight, of sky, of open space.

  I suppose it is only ever possible to play when you feel half good about yourself. You can’t play when you’re soaked through to the skin, when you’re freezing with the cold, when you’re frightened, when the world only treats you with hostility.

  So, if she wasn’t playing what was she doing? What did she see as she took in the blood-red veins, the splintered haematite, the clusters of crystals, the shifting surfaces, dull and drab and then bright, sparkling, telling a strange narrative of abandonment and richness? It’s impossible to say. I have no way of knowing whether her love of rock dwarfed her love of the sea, but for a time it must at least have equalled it. She was obviously an elemental child, a child needing an element, a density with which to augment herself.

  There was something transparently beautiful in her appreciation, and yet at the same time impossible to describe. The only thing we could do was to join her in the quiet incantation of her name, which was no small thing, because, of course, language doesn’t just allow you to do, but also to be.

  Did Grace and I ever cease playing, girls’ parts, women’s lines: Little Bo Peep; Mary, Mary; Old Mother Hubbard? I don’t suppose we did.

  It was Grace who turned the mine into a real adventure. She questioned her father about it. At first he simply warned her to keep well away, saying mines were dangerous places, not to be interfered with. When she pressed him he became quite angry and warned her that he would punish her if he discovered she had been anywhere near one. She began to cry.

  Whether Seamus was motivated by heartfelt concern for his daughter, or rather was convinced that she didn’t have the mental capacity to understand is impossible to say. Presumably there were elements of both tendencies in his initial response. However, why it should have been on this issue that he chose to relent rather than any other is even more difficult to explain. Up until her questions about the mines Seamus had denied continually that Grace had an obviously enquiring, hungry mind. It just couldn’t be. Deafness was incompatible with religious experience and only religious experience was the authentic outcome of thought. Nevertheless, he chose this question as the o
ne to answer. He brought home maps from the local library, having made a point of going there during his school day. He spread them out on the sitting-room floor and commanded her to join him. He took hold of her hand, prised the index-finger out of her cluster of fingers, held it firmly and guided it from one named, disused mine to another, forming clear arcs and ellipses. After that he made patterns to overlay the map, making a tracery of imagined shafts, galleries and passages. He still warned her to steer clear, but now detailed the dangers of subsidence, collapse, becoming trapped.

  Grace never admitted her knowledge to Seamus, her participation in Abby’s discovery, but did stay clear for a few days, and in her most animated, grown-up voice insisted we did the same. After those few days of absence she brought us the maps so we could investigate the names together. Of course, we weren’t good readers. We weren’t taught to read, only to speak: but we didn’t speak together, we signed. So it was slow and painstaking work deciphering the words, but we stuck at it and then we signed them, signed mines, signed them for Abby, translating them for her, marking the air with their image, places of sanctuary, concealment, burial. We never gave much thought to the history that produced them. They were like natural wonders. Of course most of the mines weren’t nameable. We didn’t have a sign for Yearton, Scallow, Pelham, but had no problem with Black Moor and Stone. Abby started to chant her name when Grace pointed at her, meaning there was a mine called Yew. She didn’t understand when Grace added tree. She thought it was another. And then Grace shouted out with delight that there really was one named for Abby, a mine called Abbey. Just after that she looked downcast, even apprehensive and said there was a mine called Salt. There was a mine for me too. Grace didn’t hesitate in suggesting that my family must have owned a mine. – Years later I would find out that it was really Salter, but on the map it definitely said Salt. – Try as she might she couldn’t find one named Grace, though there was Florence, Hilda and Marigold, named after the daughters of the owners – Seamus told her that when she went back with more questions. That piece of information only served to confirm what Grace had said. If mines were named for families there must have been a mine in the Salt family. It was one small step to say if there was an Abbey, then it was hers, hers at some point in time. It didn’t matter that she was Abby, Abigail. Grace set out to prove it.

  Grace managed to turn her envy into sister love and was ambitious on our account, wanting our success, confirmation of our claims. Clearly having to accept the fact that his Godless child was demonstrating beyond all scepticism that she was educable, Seamus listened to her repeated questions with increasing confusion. He struggled with his own opinion, which he had never questioned before. He still refused to consider that his deaf child could ever fully know the truth of God, but maybe there were grades of insight as there were grades of deafness. Certainly she could never aspire to the whole extent of God’s grace, but possibly a lesser grace, knowledge of God’s lordship. He refined his sense of sin. His deaf child wasn’t a stone weight he had to carry, but a stone he was also expected to carve. She was a labour. She had to be educated. The questions about the mines started a new phase in Grace’s life. Seamus began to take an interest in her, which meant she was subject to rules and discipline. Eileen could no longer keep her out of the way, Seamus made her his business.

  Grace wasn’t aware of her new status in her father’s life, but simply accepted that he now bombarded her with questions each evening about what she had done, and more importantly what she had learnt, and set her small tests that resulted in his displeasure for failure. Years later Eileen chose to explain it, absolving Seamus of any fault on the grounds that he was a deeply religious man. For Grace the familiar was what it was. She couldn’t decipher the fact that she found herself asking with increasing regularity, and in an ever deflated voice: Have I been a good girl? The familiar is what we know, and erases what we knew. Memory is a dream of ourselves, which we can’t always believe. What we remember is gone and can never be retrieved. Memory is a struggle against oblivion, against the entire world dying because of our oversight. So much rests on it.

  I can’t afford to forget, yet I can’t live with the memory.

  Someone had to die.

  Grace said that the men worked in the mines at the foot of the fells whilst the women looked after sheep and cows on the hills. Seamus told her the byres on the hill were once home to these people. The men would trudge down from the high ground before dawn and the women would set to in the fields. He rebuked her with the history, evoking its harshness. She would have been up before dawn, tending sheep, and been grateful to do it. There was no indulging children then. She should count her lucky stars, because she must have them, being fortunate enough not to have lived at that time.

  She wanted to know whether the Sempies or Salts ever owned a mine.

  He almost smiled and said the Sempies probably thought they did, but the Salts were never like that.

  It was evidence enough for Grace. The Sempies probably owned a mine, whilst I was disinherited. Of course, I was a Sempie too, my mother Flora, a Sempie, so I wasn’t disheartened. Nevertheless, we insisted, as guileless, loving, trustworthy sisters, that Abby’s was the first claim. It was important to us that she was the rightful owner, ignoring completely the fact that the mines were finished anyway, exhausted, empty vaults beneath the earth’s surface. She had already claimed it as a special place, her prize, but we wanted to make it real, make it true. We determined to prove categorically that the mine was hers, not realising she had already decided it was, hers in the only way that mattered, through belief.

  I questioned my mother, Flora, a Sempie, about her family. I asked her who the first was. She shrugged at that thought. They didn’t keep family records. She could tell me who she remembered. She could go as far back as her great-grandparents, Arthur and Belle. She didn’t remember them well, just a vague impression of strictness and darkness. Belle, whose name before Sempie is lost, always dressed in black, with a white apron and a bonnet. She had long grey, lifeless hair which she tied up under the bonnet into a dry, brittle knot. There were only three children as far as she knew, Martha’s father, Wilfred, her own grandfather, Jim and Hilda. I started at the name Hilda, the daughter’s name, the mines being named for the daughters. My mother pulled a face and said there was something wrong with Hilda, but it was never mentioned. She was pretty sure Hilda was taken away somewhere. Her grandfather Jim was the best of the bunch. Her own father, Dan, favoured him. They never missed a day’s work, never drew the dole, even when times were hard and times were always hard. How could I be expected to understand a time when times were always hard, she asked disparagingly, when there might not be enough food for the table, though the Sempies were better off than lots of others, but then the Sempies worked for all they had. Apparently Arthur had been shrewd enough to acquire a bit of land, which Wilfred after him had been gradually expanding, a bit here and a bit there, which might have amounted to a great deal but for the fact he died of influenza before the war, then both his sons were killed. No one knew what happened to the land after that. It didn’t appear that Martha had sold anything. It was generally considered lost, a tragedy, adding to the tragedy of all those hardworking men dying so young. So, the Sempies might never have been rich, but they had been landlords, on Martha’s side anyway. Jim wasn’t cut out that way.

  So what did they do?

  It seemed they worked hard, though not fixing themselves to anything in particular.

  What about the mines?

  Naturally, that was only to be expected, as it was for my father, until they paid him off, but he went straight onto permanent nights in the paper-mill.

  There was no glamour or heroism. It didn’t seem that the Sempies had come from anywhere. We were always here. We hadn’t exchanged countries like the Shaughnessys. It seemed a drab history, apart from Hilda who had to be taken away, and the fact that Arthur had acquired a bit of land, which Wilfred was managing very well until he died
of influenza and his boys were shot before they could take it on. Presumably the mine was on the land. Why else was it called Hilda? Arthur was my great-great-grandfather. He must have acquired the mine and named it for his daughter, before she was taken away, or in memory, named for the daughter who was gone.

  We went back to the maps. Everything fell into place. Hilda Mine was Abby’s mine. She had found the way into her own mine. Perhaps it was ownership drove her there, natural ownership guiding her.

  Of course she was only a Sempie because Martha said.

  We refused to consider that the mine would actually be Martha’s and then Harold’s. Hilda was Abby’s. If anything, they were keeping it from her. We determined we should explore every inch of it, try to unearth something, Wilfred’s or Arthur’s name engraved into stone, the Sempie name, Sempie somewhere underground. A mine called Hilda, Hilda Sempie.

  We said: You are a Sempie, your name, Sempie.

  Abby repeated it, delighted with it, thrilled with identity.

  It was probably ownership, the knowledge that the mine was hers, each spade of spoil extracted in her name, that tempted her to obsession. She had never been obsessive before, simply enthusiastic. There had always been too much to inspire her before for her ever to settle to one thing. She had had time for it all, the lichen crowned angel, the sea, the whole disorganised, scrappy domain, but for a while they were all abandoned in favour of time underground. Each day we found her there. She didn’t wait for us. It was as if delay like that would jeopardise her finding herself there. Nor did she have any need for light, which Grace insisted on. Indeed, it’s likely she preferred the dark and found the light an intrusion. Maybe that’s why she chose not to wait for us.