That was why people thought she was mad. Well, that was one of the reasons.
‘And?’ said Mrs Dark.
‘I’m miserable,’ said Deirdre desperately.
‘Because you don’t have any friends?’ said her grandmother incredulously.
‘Yes,’ said Deirdre. She swallowed. ‘I was wondering whether you might reconsider, about Galahad.’
Mrs Dark stared at her.
‘He’s the only one who likes me, Grandmother. I’m so – different. He’s the only one who understands. If you would just let us sit together in class, I would be all right. He would – protect me.’
‘Has he spoken to you?’
‘No.’ But Deirdre was not a good liar.
‘If he speaks to you again I will ring the school.’
Deirdre’s heart sank. For a moment she thought she would be sick with despair. But her grandmother was not looking at her. She was looking down at her architectural plans. For a little while she was silent. Then she took a breath to speak and for one wild moment Deirdre thought she was going to relent. But instead she said, ‘Tell me . . . does everyone laugh at him because of his name?’
Deirdre was startled. She said nothing. But she didn’t need to, for her grandmother answered herself.
‘I always thought everyone would laugh at that name. It is so ridiculous. No one could live up to it. No man in real life, anyway. Men are not knights in shining armour, Deirdre. Least of all your Galahad.’
Deirdre went quietly down the long, narrow hall to her bedroom and shut the door. She sat on the bed and listened to the water from the ceiling dripping into the two buckets on either side of the old-fashioned dressing table.
She could have argued, she could have begged, but she knew it was futile. Mrs Dark was impenetrable, indomitable, deaf to pleading or argument, and always certain she was right. Deirdre lived in a totalitarian regime.
Home was ruled by a dictator; school by the mob. Home was almost unbearable. But there was no escape. Her experience of school, which was all she knew of the world outside – was teaching her that. As for the only other hope – Gal – her grandmother had cut that escape route off a long time ago. And every time it opened again, she shut it more firmly.
‘Dead-tree,’ said a girl waiting with a friend by the school gate one morning, as she arrived at school, ‘come up the back with us.’
Up the back was where everyone smoked before school. Deirdre, of course, did not smoke. She was nobody’s idea of a rebel.
She did not want to go up the back. She knew whatever they had planned would be a nasty surprise. But she felt she had no choice. If she did not cooperate, the consequences would be even worse.
So she ducked her head with a defeated little smile and followed them.
‘I heard your grandmother sleeps on a gold bed,’ said one of the girls.
‘No,’ said Deirdre, surprised. ‘It’s pink.’
‘Why do you sleepwalk?’ said the other.
‘I can’t help it,’ said Deirdre.
‘How come your grandmother’s putting on extensions?’
‘Yeah, how come? Dad says she hasn’t got enough tenants as it is!’
Deirdre glanced up nervously, then down again.
‘I don’t know.’
Up the back was a scrubby, muddy patch of earth on the other side of a portable classroom at the farthest extreme of the school. Behind it, on the other side of the fence, was wilderness. It was out of bounds, but not very well policed. Especially in the early morning.
There was a dead tree there. They had piled sticks underneath it, and they had several lengths of old, dirty rope. The whole class seemed to be there. Except for Gal.
‘We’re doing Joan of Arc,’ said one of the girls. ‘We want you to be Joan.’
Deirdre felt sick.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Because you hear voices,’ said one of the boys, and they all laughed.
‘I don’t hear voices,’ said Deirdre, but nobody listened. And already someone was pulling her towards the dead tree.
‘Don’t worry. We’re going to do it for Mrs Shelley. We want to practise first. She’ll love it if you’re Joan.’
‘Yeah,’ said somebody else. ‘She loves Joan of Arc. And she loves you. And if you play Joan of Arc it’ll be, like, double love!’
‘Love on wheels,’ said somebody else.
‘Love Unlimited.’
‘The Summer of Love.’
Deirdre was miserable. She knew she had been brought there to be mocked. But she didn’t know how to talk her way out of it. And, as usual, she felt that if she didn’t cooperate, things would be worse for her.
The bell would go soon. She only had to endure until then.
Most of them just watched, sniggering and smoking. About four of them tied her to the tree.
‘Look!’ said someone. ‘Dead-tree is tied to a dead tree!’
Deirdre was devoting every nerve in her body to seeming like a good sport – cooperative, casual and unworried. She was in an agony of humiliation, but felt that the only way she could retain some dignity was by not showing it. However, her feelings were so intense it was almost impossible to suppress them. They were all looking at her. She could not meet their eyes. Her face was flaming.
And she hated them touching her. It was so hard to be touched by people who had contempt for you. It was as if she had some terrible disease; it was as if it was all her fault that she had this terrible disease; it was as if it really was medieval times and she was a leper. She was embarrassed by every part of herself. She wished she could have no body. She wished she had never existed.
It was strange. She didn’t hate them, she wasn’t angry with them. She feared them. But the only person she hated, the only person she was angry with, was herself. The more they bullied her, the more she lived in dread of them, and the more she hated herself.
‘Why do you wear those long socks?’ said one of the girls.
‘Yeah, why don’t you dress like us?’ said another.
There was nothing she could say.
Then somebody threw a cigarette butt onto the pile of wood beneath the tree. Nothing happened, but they all laughed, and a few others threw theirs too.
The kindling began to smoke.
A few of the kids got a little worried at that.
‘We better untie her,’ said a boy. ‘The bell’s about to go, anyway.’
‘Oh, not yet!’ said somebody.
‘Yeah, it looks cool,’ said somebody else.
Deirdre was trying not to panic. She was almost more afraid of panicking, or at least, panicking in front of them, than she was of being burned. But nothing would burn. Everything was so damp, from the rain yesterday.
And yet the smoke increased.
‘So anyway, are you a witch?’
‘Yeah, admit it, and we’ll let you go.’
Deirdre started to cough.
‘Why don’t you smoke?’ said one of the girls incidentally.
‘She’s smoking now,’ said one of the boys, and they all laughed.
‘Come on, admit you’re a witch.’
‘I’m not a witch!’ said Deirdre.
‘You are a witch. You’ve got a witch’s name. You live in a witch’s house. Your grandmother’s a witch. And you sleepwalk.’
‘I’m not a witch,’ said Deirdre again. ‘I’m not a witch. I’m not a witch. I’m not a witch. I’m not a witch.’
For a moment, she thought she saw a small red flame beneath her. She thought she had imagined it. Then she realised it was true.
She looked around and saw a sea of frightened faces. Then the bell went. It was an electric buzzer, a little distant from this end of the grounds, but audible nonetheless.
About half the kids fled immediately, slithering off through the mud and the dead leaves. The other half dithered. Then Gal came over the fence from the wilderness.
He always came to school this way. And he always came as late as pos
sible.
For a split second he stopped short, staring. The expression on his face didn’t seem to change at all, but the colour drained from it, so that his eyes burned weirdly blue against the pallor. Then he dropped his bag and went straight to the rope that tied Deirdre to the tree.
It was not easy to untie.
Gal seemed strangely calm, as if involved in some absorbing hobby – building a model boat, say.
Suddenly a flame licked upward.
That was when the rest of the children ran away.
Gal abandoned the rope, stamped on the flame, burned himself, cried out with the pain, but put it out. Then he got the knots undone, every mean little one of them, and the old rope scratched his fingers until they bled, while Deirdre, having abandoned all dignity, gabbled as if in a fever about the past.
‘I can’t remember what it was!’ she kept saying in an awful, keening voice, weeping inconsolably. ‘If only, if only, if only, I could remember what it was!’
For everything always seemed to come back to that – the thing she and Gal couldn’t remember. The thing that happened when they were five. Gal kept trying to console her as he worked.
‘One day we’ll remember, I promise, Deirdre. We’ll find a way to remember, and then everything will be all right. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. It’ll be all right. When we remember. I promise.’
By the time they limped up to the school, the children were pouring out of the first lesson and on their way to the second. Gal and Deirdre made their way to the office and the children in the playground parted before them like the Red Sea. As they passed a small group near the main entrance a boy said, just audibly:
‘See? She is a witch. She’s put a spell on Gally-had.’
And Gal turned and hit him so hard it knocked him to the ground.
It had been so swift that no one had seen it coming. The boy was astonished. He seemed almost not to understand what had happened, until he saw the blood on his shirt. His nose was bleeding. He was desperate not to cry. But the other kids weren’t looking at him. They were looking at Gal.
Gal was staring at his fist.
He was already pale with the pain from the burn. Now he looked afraid.
Not of anyone else. Of himself.
The other children were afraid too. Not so much because of the punch, though that had been effective enough. It was the swiftness of his anger that really frightened them. And the deep place it came from.
Somehow all three of them got to the office, from where they were driven to the local hospital. Deirdre was treated for shock, Gal for a second-degree burn on his lower leg, the boy for a nosebleed. Neither Gal nor Deirdre went back to school that day.
Or any other.
Deirdre spent the next five and a half years finishing high school by correspondence.
And Gal was expelled.
The minute she put her key in the lock and pushed the door open, they heard it. It was a strange sound, constant, rhythmic, distant, like a drum beating, only more subdued.
Deirdre hesitated, then let herself and Gal in. She closed the door absently behind them.
‘What is that sound?’ she said, puzzled.
Gal had found it harder to get through the hole in the council’s hoarding than Deirdre had. He couldn’t squeeze through it, even sideways, without pushing it further inwards, making it crack and splinter with a queasy sort of sound. She was a little surprised. He was bigger than her, and taller, but not greatly so, and she had thought the gap larger. It was so easy for her. Now he stood brushing the wood from his shoulders, looking guilty, as if he felt he had broken in.
There was graffiti on the outside of the hoarding. Gal had seen it; Deirdre had not seemed to notice. THE CASTLE OF THE WITCH, somebody had written in blood-red spray paint.
Gal had always thought Corbenic looked like a castle. An Art Deco castle. And if ever there was a witch, it was Deirdre’s grandmother.
Now they were standing in the vestibule, the rather grand entrance to what had once been Deirdre’s grandmother’s block of residential apartments, and originally (when the town had been a fashionable holiday resort) her great-grandfather’s holiday flats. But tenants of any description had left long ago. Nobody but Deirdre and her grandmother had lived in the building for years.
The ceiling was startlingly high and ornamental, with white plaster fruit and flowers and ribbons modelled on it in relief. It was lovely, but the paint was peeling off it and there were dark stains, cobwebs, and pigeons roosting in the cornices, cooing and occasionally fluttering restlessly. The floor was richly carpeted, but the carpet was worn and faded and had a musty odour. Behind them were the lights of the misty street, visible because of the hole in the plywood hoarding and because the street entrance was a kind of jewel box of mahogany-framed glass. The name of the building, Corbenic, and the year its construction was completed, 1936, were written across the central panel in a stately semicircle. Looked at from within, it was of course written backwards. They had both been intrigued by that as children. Corbenic was the name of the Grail Castle of Arthurian legend, as they both knew. But the backwards lettering made it seem as if, from inside, the castle was somehow upside down and inside out. Or as if this castle was, anyway.
‘Cinebroc. It’s all still here,’ said Gal, half in grief and half in wonder.
He looked around him with the air of one who had stepped into a dream or the past. Before them was a wide, carpeted stairway; to the right of it, a bank of pigeonholes for mail, and the office door, locked. To the left, a long hall, at the end of which could be glimpsed an elegant frosted-glass door, which led to another wing.
‘It’s like nowhere else in the world, this place,’ he said. ‘It’s so beautiful, and so terrible – the best possible place and the worst possible place. It’s like – it’s like heaven and hell at the same time . . .’ It was a strange observation, and yet as he said it he seemed relieved, as if he felt he was home at last.
But Deirdre was still listening to the sound.
‘You can hear it, can’t you?’ said Deirdre.
‘Yes.’
‘What do you think it is?’
Gal considered. It was as if he found the sound some kind of a relief as well.
‘You know,’ he began slowly, ‘when you hear a song, and you know it, but you can’t remember what it’s called or who sings it?’
Deirdre was silent. She knew exactly what he meant. The sound was deeply familiar to her too, and yet she could not name it. But she wasn’t as comfortable about that as Gal appeared to be.
‘Come upstairs,’ she said, and led the way, although she knew he would not have forgotten it.
There were twelve wide, carpeted steps, then a small landing. Sitting alone on the landing was a dark wooden table; on the table sat a sheaf of dusty silk lilies in a turquoise and white and gold and coral Japanese porcelain vase. Above it there was a mysterious leadlight window not much bigger than a kitchen clock. You couldn’t see through it, but in any case it looked out on nothing but a kind of hollow bricked shaft, which nonetheless seemed suffused with a curious, cold, misty light. Then there were seven more steps and a second, smaller vestibule like the one that made up the main entrance below. On the right side of this was the door to Deirdre’s grandmother’s flat. Behind them were stairs up to a higher landing. Opposite her grandmother’s flat was a second apartment, its door shut, only darkness on the other side. Deirdre chose a key from the large bunch she was carry-ing, put it in the lock on her grandmother’s door, opened it, and let him in.
He entered as if into faerieland.
She suddenly saw him again as a five year old, which was strange, because it happened just as she was reflecting on how tall he had become.
Deirdre’s grandmother’s flat had very high, almost cavernous, ceilings and generous floor space – but it looked small because of the amount of furniture in it. And because of how heavy and unnecessarily large the furniture was. It was furniture intended for a grand house,
not a moderate-sized flat. And there was something about this in itself that made you feel as if its owner had never quite come to terms with reality.
Gal stood gazing around him in the half-light created by the streetlights that shone through the bay windows from which Deirdre had looked out and seen him earlier. Meanwhile, with the air of one used to negotiating an awkward environment, Deirdre weaved her way swiftly around the room, replacing the keys, lighting candles – for the electricity had been cut off months ago.
‘It’s all still here,’ Gal whispered again.
But the flat had changed since he had last seen it. It was in much worse repair. And it was much more crowded. It had always been eccentric. Now it was insane.
The flat was like a robber’s cave from The Arabian Nights, or Tutankhamen’s tomb when Howard Carter first stumbled upon it. It was as rich, and as crowded, and as – crazy. It looked more like a storeroom, or an antique shop, than a residence. There was a dark, polished wooden dining table, with a Japanese vase full of silk flowers on an Irish lace doily, and two matching chairs. There was a velvet couch and a faded floral armchair and a sizable oblong coffee table. There was a heavy wooden fold-down desk with, oddly, a tumbled stack of business letters that seemed to be unopened, and, through the doorway, a bed that was too large for the next room, with a rose-pink quilted satin eiderdown and matching cushions. And a large old-fashioned dressing table, with a three-faced mirror and crystal boxes and trays and vases and bottles of perfume sitting above the drawers. In the corner, squashed up next to the wardrobe, there was a Japanese screen, with hummingbirds in flight amidst blossoming trees painted on a dull gold background. And draped everywhere, a little untidily, were embroidered fringed silk shawls, faded with age. Even the ornaments on the mantelpiece and the desk and the coffee table were not dainty but large and imposing: two matching, tall, graceful Art Deco ladies worked in porcelain, wearing sleek 1930s evening gowns; a carved wooden tiger the size of a small dog; twin marble bookends that were almost too heavy to lift; an old mantelpiece clock with a face as big as a dinner plate set in a kind of miniature Roman temple, with columns and porticoes; large electric lamps with shades that looked like 1930s women’s hats; a delicately painted Japanese fan, opened out and sitting on a small stand, which might once have been carried by a geisha. And dusty silk flowers. Everywhere, dusty silk flowers.
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