My Name is E

by Frederick Lightfoot

  With such knowledge she began to cry herself. I admitted it had been hard over the years not having a single snap, but then there is always something to break you and something to sustain you. I told her she was a great help. She skewed her face. Perhaps I was being indiscreet.

  She stood up, saying she didn’t do anything really. But she was an enthusiast, I insisted. I went straight on and told her it was enthusiasm that saved me. She smiled in the mirror and asked me for what, enthusiasm for what? For poetry, I said, and smiled in return. My friend, I explained, the one who died, taught me about poetry. She was a poet herself. A good poet, my hairdresser wanted to know? I thought so, I said, without insistence. And with a great open arm embrace of time, my efficient, insightful hairdresser said she must have been then.

  I returned to the snaps. I didn’t mind crying.

  I’m an enthusiast and so was my friend.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Martha was feeding her chickens and bantams. The ground was frozen hard so the seed lay on top of the mud. She ignored me and carried on, her poultry pecking madly around her feet. I leaned against my weapon as if it were a staff. I had covered the head, the blade, clumsily with a bag, which must have made me seem mildly eccentric. I watched the feeding birds until Martha’s seed bag ran out then called to her: ‘‘Agnes tells me that it was you who found Abby and the baby.’’

  She looked towards me, making no gesture of surprise or irritation, no gesture of pretence. ‘‘Sadly,’’ she said without emphasis.

  ‘‘Were you not pleased?’’

  ‘‘Pleased?’’

  ‘‘Yes pleased, pleased you’d got rid of them both. You never did want our kind to breed.’’

  ‘‘You’re not her kind, Judith Salt, so don’t claim it.’’

  ‘‘Oh but I am, Martha. I really am.’’ She shrugged and began to fold her empty seed bag. The birds were ranging more widely, searching out the food. Martha was preparing to go. I called: ‘‘You haven’t said you weren’t pleased.’’

  She turned to me again, her head held back, refusing to show impatience. ‘‘I wasn’t pleased, but I wasn’t hurt. I’m not going to pretend that. What life had she had, and for the child maybe worse, certainly worse.’’

  ‘‘So you killed it.’’

  ‘‘No I didn’t. She did.’’

  She turned away and made towards the kitchen door. I followed, making my way through the still pecking poultry. Before she reached the door I called to her: ‘‘She wouldn’t do it, so you can’t tell me that.’’

  She carried on. I thought she wasn’t going to stop. Perhaps I would have to pursue her all the way, but then she turned impatiently, looked me in the eye and said: ‘‘I don’t want you to come in, so go away.’’

  I ripped the ridiculous bag from the end of my spear and rammed it up against the side of her neck. ‘‘I always knew it would be you,’’ I said. ‘‘Deep down I knew you would be the one I’d have to come for. You told her too much.’’

  She looked more shocked and vulnerable than I had anticipated. It aged her. She backed away, nervously feeling for the doorway behind her, but came up against the corner where the lean-to kitchen joined the house. She had no where else to go. I pressed the flat of the blade firmly against her neck. She gazed upward, beyond me, as if help must be somewhere at hand, though in reality knowing it couldn’t be, because no one came there informally. Never having made anyone welcome, she had brought this on herself.

  She made a number of attempts to speak, but failed each time, her lips and tongue moving but no words materialising. I smiled and gestured for her to speak up. Still she failed, so I gestured again more forcibly, my free hand waving in front of her eyes demanding greater volume. Eventually she stuttered: ‘‘What do you want me to say?’’

  ‘‘What do I want you to say? Oh I don’t know. Try telling me I’ve been a good girl.’’

  ‘‘You’re a good girl, Judith Salt.’’

  ‘‘Excellent, my name as well, identified. That really is good. Now tell me all the secrets you told her.’’

  She began to tremble. Not in my wildest imaginings had I expected the matriarch to display such fear. In its own way it was unnerving. I wanted her death to be devoid of pity. In order to eradicate any misplaced sympathy I pictured her crimes. She was steeped in them. In the same moment she shook her head, as if defending herself, and from deep in her chest asked: ‘‘What, what secrets?’’

  I moved closer to her, leading myself along the shaft of the weapon, crawling my way towards her: ‘‘Harold’s father?’’

  She shook her head, though I didn’t get the impression she was refusing me particularly, rather refusing the knowledge, refusing it to herself. I demanded again, reminding her that she must have told Abby when Abby was a baby. ‘‘I can’t say,’’ she stammered, then looked squarely at me, her expression horrified, appealing, and again shook her head, again refusing herself.

  ‘‘You told her and hated her for it, now tell me.’’

  She looked skywards, her face contorting with the name, her torso heaving. I wasn’t unconvinced that she was about to expire, stealing her secret away, but then she looked me in the face, almost smiled, sighed and said: ‘‘Aidan Shaughnessy.’’ She immediately repeated the name as if needing to confirm it to herself.

  ‘‘Then they are brother and sister,’’ I said, spelling it out slowly, with frank amazement, crazily really, as if she might not have realised the significance herself. ‘‘Harold and Agnes are brother and sister.’’

  ‘‘Half,’’ she insisted, as if the correction were everything.

  ‘‘Brother and sister.’’

  ‘‘Don’t you think I know? Don’t you think I did everything I could to stop the marriage?’’ She looked at me with furious intensity. ‘‘Do you not think I know why she was like she was, the child, an imbecile, a deaf-mute imbecile, born of such a marriage? Do you not think I’ve had to suffer that?’’

  ‘‘Why didn’t the two of you marry, you and Aidan, I mean?’’ She shook her head firmly, her expression obdurate, defiant. I peered at her, dumbfounded, yet impressed. ‘‘You’ve always given the clue, haven’t you? Never as hateful of Aidan as the others? I should have picked that up, but never did. But I don’t get it. You were going to evict them.’’

  She glared at me, her usual temper flashing in her expression. ‘‘Why not?’’

  I looked at her, the shifting expression, scarcely discernible but certainly there, the fine muscles in her features firing as memory flooded her, memories that she had probably prohibited for years. Naturally I was gifted at reading such signs, such faces, I had had a lifetime of it. There was bitterness, resentment and pain, the latter unmistakable.

  ‘‘He didn’t want you, did he?’’ I suggested tentatively. ‘‘Aidan Shaughnessy didn’t want you.’’

  She made no reply, but gazed at me coldly.

  I went on, trying to piece her hatred together. ‘‘I suppose you thought he couldn’t refuse you, after all you owned the lease to their property, to their survival. You didn’t count on Nora though, did you, didn’t count on her determination to make sure they came through. Is that why you hated her so much, because she got in your way, took away your power?’’

  She glared at me, her habitual gestures rejuvenated, her terrible contempt for everything restored.

  I lifted my head slightly, fixing her with my eyes. I felt enraged. What I’d learnt didn’t alter a thing, changed nothing, excused nothing. She had vindictively, systematically and persistently crushed and hurt my beautiful sister. She was as guilty as hell. I pressed the blade against her. All I had to do was swipe it across her throat, pierce her clearly defined wind-pipe and everything would be complete, my mission fulfilled. There would be recompense for what she had done to Abby. Someone had to die. It had to be her. I snapped at her, shouting it aloud, that it didn’t make any difference. She had killed the baby.

  ‘‘No,’’ she snapped back. ‘‘I
was going to bring it back after she stole it. It couldn’t have been left with her.’’

  ‘‘You were going to take it from her?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know. I don’t know what we would have done. Found somewhere for it, I suppose, God knows where, I don’t know. It would have been worse than her, I know that. It wouldn’t have had any life, not a proper life, not what would be considered a proper life.’’

  ‘‘Did you say that, that it would be worse than her? Did you say that to her, to Abby?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know. I suppose so. And it was true. Of course it would have been worse than her. But she smothered it, not me.’’

  ‘‘And you watched.’’

  She made no reply. I shouted it aloud, the fact that she had watched, shouted the accusation, the crime. I stood tall, stepped back and held my shaft at the end, the spear projected downward. The time had come. There was nothing more to say. I was finished with language, with explanations, meanings. I had one act to perform then it would all be concluded. It was my privilege to execute the matriarch. All the secrets she had shared with Abby would be done with. That portion of time would be completed, dismissed, dispensed with.

  I pushed my arms into the air. The spear was poised earthward. I stared into her face. I wanted to see how she would encounter death. There were to be no last rites, no chance of absolution, no last words. Her life was going to end as it was.

  I summonsed all of my strength for the thrust. I screamed my intent, a long, agonised vowel. I heard it gather around me, filling the air, saturating everything, the seen and the unseen, the myriad secretive spaces. It was Abby’s note, her name, a single profound and beautiful syllable, her name finally achieving recompense, control, justice. I rammed the spear through the air, my hollered note of identity following it.

  *

  At my age what I have discovered is discernment: I choose my leisure; my television and music, my hairstyle and makeup. I don’t have to take what’s there simply because it is. I can say no. I can say that this, that or the other is no longer of any interest. I am less discerning about speech. That is an old habit and seems impossible to break. I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with people out of laziness, laziness of words. My gestures suffer from the same laxity. Recreationally, however, I have developed my own culture, broken ties, released myself from my historical bind. It’s a start. If I live to a hundred I may yet achieve freedom, though I doubt it, in the extreme.

  *

  Inevitably the tragedy remains in the things I could do and not those I couldn’t.

  When the moment of retribution was to be realised I failed. The spear went hurtling across the yard, falling harmlessly amongst the poultry. I can in all truth state that it wasn’t the look in her face – the terror of pain, of dying, of an unprepared soul – that stopped me. Certainly I pitied her, in many ways pitied them all, felt sorry for their belief in nothing but existence as it is, like so many eager moths at a flame, trapped in their perpetual present, accustomed to brilliance but ignorant of its meaning, but pity wouldn’t have annulled my revenge. Pity drove it on.

  I had Abby’s oppressor in my grasp, her startled expression begging for mercy, and I had no intention of conceding. Oppressors have no rights that the oppressed should respect. If I had executed Martha though, maybe even returned and punished Harold, Agnes and Mr Drake for their parts in the crime, would it have made Abby’s past legitimate? Would it have been the corrective I sought? In that moment I understood something that Abby had always understood, that correction is not about vendetta: it is about the future, not the past. Inevitably it was Abby who said it to me, Abby who provided the revelation. I heard it as I screamed my intention, that loud, tortured, angry syllable, and it was her name I heard, that beautiful identity with which she announced her rightful place in everything, her name that called to me. Abby, my sister, speaking to me, her name, calling from a world as yet unannounced, calling me away from a primitive past.

  I threw away the weapon and told Martha that Abby reprieved her, though offered no forgiveness, and then I told her where she would find the others and left. I went to a phone-box and rang Donald. I told him I was coming home. I told him I agreed with what he wanted. He wasn’t ready. That was what he had told me. He was pleased that I had seen sense. It was the last conversation we had together, though I guess he knew I would be true to my word.

  *

  So, the last time I stood here I was twenty-five and pregnant and determined to kill someone, though in the end all I killed was myself, a part of myself, probably the greater part, and when all is said and done the discriminatory world colludes with my murder. It has time, scope, understanding and sympathy for it. There was no objection to a deaf woman terminating a potentially deaf pregnancy.

  Personally, though, I have done time for that death, solitary confinement, penance and, despite never rectifying it, I have reached a peace that requires no forgiveness, though I would never consider the crime legitimate. I could never think that.

  What if the entire world were illegitimate though: what if its random, tribal customs, its everyday practices, were rescinded and found culpable? Where would the perpetrator stand then? Condemned, naturally. Our punishment? Well, that is impossible to say. Contemporary, of course, whatever the contemporary world might be. I would stand alongside Martha, Harold, Agnes and Mr Drake and face the accusations, found wanting, found guilty, found able.

  I realise I can’t summons them back, though, can’t tell them their acts, their crimes and their perverted personal passions, were of another time and that time has disposed of them; that it is always in the nature of time to rob us of our relevance: though when I was younger, when I stood on this same shore subscribing to a different age, that is exactly what I believed I could do.

  Time is the miracle, the coincidence, the omen, the tragedy and ultimately, the triumph.

  Finally, Martha is dead, a very old woman, dead at last. I wouldn’t intrude on her funeral, – better attended than I might have wished for, but people have their own reasons – or on the lives of Harold and Agnes, both old and failing themselves, not this time: nevertheless, I insist on my right to lurk in the shadows and watch, not to make sure or to garner any satisfaction, but simply because I am a part of it, an inescapable player.

  When they are all dead, and that day must arrive soon, the worst that could be desired of me is reconciliation, a reconciliation I can never offer, never give, never accept because as long as there is no reconciliation the past will always exist, always be there spiralling into time gone, time lost, time removed, time future.

  And I spin with Abby in its writhing, anxious discord, bodies, sisters, with depth and weight, mermaids, after all, listening beneath the waves to a low groan that repeats endlessly: My name is E. My name is E.