by Carol Birch
You could never find a needle of course when you wanted one. Good God, this was no life. Probably go septic and they’ll find me eaten by cats. Fucking cats.
The nightingale tells his fairytale
He just wanted to go and sit down and have another drink, didn’t want all this hassle of opening drawers and looking on shelves and not being able to find the damn thing, whatever it was, this just didn’t feel right or fair, he’d been good to those bloody animals. Tweezers, some of those tiny tweezers. A pin. Whistling, who was this, lazy whistle to the piano.
My stardust melody
The music rippled away into silence and someone walked along the landing.
He couldn’t move, just froze there with his mouth bone-dry.
No mistaking it.
The creak of a stair.
His arm, his hand burned. The thumping of his heart made him sick.
‘Who’s there?’ he shouted.
No sound.
He stood with his raging hand held up foolishly, listening intently to nothing but the rain. A minute passed. A sound once it’s gone is gone, there’s nothing left so it never existed. You doubt your own sense, and rightly. If he was ever to move again he had to go and look upstairs, so he walked to the door. Nothing there of course. Nothing on the stairs, nothing in the hall. The dark at the top of the stairs was thick. He turned on the landing light before going up. Nearing the top his mind forced vivid impressions upon him, hideous faces that suddenly appear, voices, things that aren’t there but don’t know it. But there was nothing: only the sound of rain steadily dripping into a bucket at the end of the landing. All the doors were shut. He had to try the rooms, open the doors and check each one. Nothing in here, nothing in there, nothing in the bathroom. Outside his grandmother’s old room, he hesitated with his hand on the door knob.
He hated this room. A pointless, dead area smelling of mould and the remembered smell of the commode, a horrible place to have in your house. Was he mad? Why was it there? Whose fault was it if not his? He could have got rid of it whenever he wanted.
He turned the knob and the door whined open. The first thing he noticed was the flickering light that had no right to be there. A small flame shivered on the mantelpiece above the black hole of the grate. The air was icy. Something was on the chaise longue, indistinct, stretched out. Still steeling himself for the ghosts and ghouls of imagination, he turned on the light, saw the crappy old backpack slumped on the floor, and was washed by a wave of relief so huge it swept him back towards the mellow wistfulness of before.
‘Get up,’ he said.
She had taken the heavy brocade curtains from under the window and completely buried herself, head and all.
‘Get up,’ he said, but she didn’t move.
‘Oh, come on.’ He sat down on the end of the chaise longue, squashing her feet and making her move them. ‘I know you’re in there,’ and even now when he knew who it was he still flinched a little when she sat up and put her head out, as if she might have been a corpse thing, the woman in room 237.
‘What the fuck,’ he said softly. He couldn’t be angry. He tried but it wasn’t working. She looked the same. A red scarf had been tied round her hair but it had come adrift and hung down. She hadn’t been asleep, her eyes were wide awake. No way she could have slept through the racket downstairs, the music, him bawling at the cats, singing, for Christ’s sake.
‘I was sheltering from the rain,’ she said.
He shook his head and almost laughed, then looked away. ‘So,’ he said, ‘back to the poor old fucker with the open door.’
‘Your door was unlocked.’ She pulled the curtains round her. ‘I knocked but there was no one in. I have a new camp now. Not in the old place. The rain got in and it’s all flooded.’
She’d waited for spring. It made sense. The bluebells coming out, the smell of grass, wild garlic. What must he have sounded like, roaring away? What stupid things had he said, what stupid songs, stupid everything. His palm was on fire. Poisoned. Amputation.
‘I was going to go when the rain stopped,’ she said, ‘you’d never even have known.’
‘Fucking cheek. I thought you were a ghost.’
‘It’s all ghosts round here,’ she said.
He walked to the mantelpiece. ‘Still talking shite,’ he said and blew out the tea light. ‘So it’s OK is it for you to come in lighting candles and setting the place on fire?’
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I set up camp in a hurry. My fault. The rain came in, a river, I had to, anyway, so, I wondered how you were.’
‘Well, I’m OK,’ he said.
‘What’s the matter with your hand?’ she said. ‘You’re holding it funny.’
‘Cat.’
‘Let’s see.’
He turned his back, stood up. ‘Downstairs,’ he said. ‘Now. Freezing. Turn the light off.’
He went down and waited in the pigsty mess of a place that he’d not cleaned since, oh Christ, poked about in the woodbox, put a log and a few lumps of coal on the fire. Someone in his house again; always strange, but this time stranger still, and for no reason he could explain. Thank God he was pissed. How anyone coped with anything otherwise he had no idea. He sat down and glared at the fire as if it was an oracle. She appeared a moment later in the same long coat she’d worn before, only this time it looked as if it had been cleaned, and there was a lily of the valley brooch on the lapel. The red scarf was round her neck. He didn’t want to speak, all too weird, just sat and watched her holding her hands out to the now blazing fire.
‘If you start with all that weird stuff again you’re out on your ear,’ he heard himself say, ‘right? Rain or no rain.’
‘What’s wrong with your hand?’
It was lying on his knee, palm up, with a dark line surrounded by red in the middle of it.
‘What did you do?’
‘Fucking cat attacked me.’
‘What were you doing to it?’
‘Dancing with it.’
She smiled. ‘I can see you,’ she said, ‘dancing with your cat in the middle of the night.’
He drew back when she approached, but she came on relentless and dropped down onto one knee in front of his chair, and he didn’t want her nearness at all, it was all too much now, too late, too fat, too smelly, too gross. ‘Give me your paw,’ she said and grabbed his hand. It hurt like hell and she felt him stiffen. ‘Hurts?’ she said. He nodded. She spread it out with both of hers. ‘Got to come out,’ she said, ‘sorry, just got to,’ and removed the brooch from her lapel.
‘Oh God Christ,’ he said, ‘not that.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ she said, like all those kindly ladies in the far-off infant clinics who gave him stickers for being a brave boy. It was excruciating. The silver clack as it opened, the sliding of the pin swiftly under his skin. Air hissing through his teeth. She was strong. With one hand she held him firm, with the other she plied her needle. ‘Wo-oe’s me, wo-e’s me –’ she said, sing-song.
The pain was vile and made him want to puke. They always said that, doesn’t hurt, course it fucking hurts.
‘the acorn’s not yet fallen from the tree –’ quick and ruthless as she needed to be.
He was cold in spite of the fire. What creepiness is she trying on now? This thing, reciting, whatever it is she’s doing.
Why?
‘that’s to grow the wood –’ she said, delving deep.
Couldn’t trust a word she said. Trying to scare him.
‘Nearly there.’
Abashed, he looked down.
‘God love you,’ she said, ‘like a big stupid kid, aren’t you.’
She drew out the splinter with the pin, flicked the spiteful shard of wood, long as a sewing needle, towards the fire, pinned the brooch back onto her lapel and pulled the scarf from round her neck.
‘that’s to grow to the man –’
It was coming onto morning. The rain had started again, a lively downpour, sparking silver at t
he windows. The older he got, the more it seemed that simple moments like these could sprout a hundred – no, more, many more, and still more filaments of memory, all of them laden as myth.
‘that’s to make the cradle –’
She wet the corner of the scarf with her spit.
‘that’s to rock the bairn –’
and applying it to his palm
‘that’s to lay –’
and pressing hard with her thumb.
He shivered.
For a long time they sat without speaking. He didn’t know what to say or do, so he did and said nothing, while she pressed her thumb into the dark place in his palm, rubbing at the pain. His stupid eyes welled up and he felt idiotic. Those words, those words, he thought, what do they mean? Just her, being clever. Always someone being clever.
‘I’ll go when it eases off,’ she said.
He nodded, looking at the window.
Slowly, the room filled up with cats. Jintoo was there, acting the innocent.
‘Got any Savlon or anything like that?’ she said.
‘Somewhere. In there.’
‘Stick it under the tap,’ she said, so he went into the kitchen and turned the tap on and held his hand under it and looked out of the dark gaping windows, and she was behind him in the window and it was no good, no good, he was useless in these situations.
‘You’ll have to get it seen to,’ she said, ‘just in case.’
A door opened upstairs. They looked up.
It might or might not have been.
‘Think so?’ he said.
‘Yeah. I would.’
‘God’s sake,’ he said, ‘it’s just one thing after another.’
Bare feet on the landing, softly hurrying to the top of the stairs. She heard it too.
They looked at each other. Is it? You hear it?
Or is it just me?
‘I’ll come with you if you like,’ she said, ‘but you really should get an injection or something, just in case.’
‘OK.’
No more footsteps, nothing at all. Order in the house.
‘It’s happened before,’ he said. ‘It’ll go quiet now. I think.’
‘Yes.’
She smiled as if she knew what he was thinking.
‘Come,’ he said.
Back to the fire.
‘You should call a cab,’ she said. ‘Are you OK for money?’
‘You,’ he said, ‘asking me that?’ He laughed.
‘Just asking,’ she said.
He called a cab.
It didn’t stop hurting. She held his hand in the back of the cab all the way.
‘Don’t be scared,’ she said, ‘honestly, it’s all going to be fine, I promise you,’ and though he felt fear in his scruff and marrow, there was something else, a pang, an uprising through all his senses, not new but unplaceable; and he realised it was the exact feeling he’d had all those years ago when he’d got up on the big horse Pepper and ridden the beautiful thing round Gallinger’s field, and the sun and the sky and the air and the whole world had fallen perfectly into place around him.
About the Author
CAROL BIRCH is the award-winning writer of twelve novels, including Jamrach’s Menagerie, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. Her first novel, Life in the Palace, won the David Higham Award for Fiction (Best First Novel of the Year), and her second novel, The Fog Line, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Born in Manchester, she now lives in Lancaster.
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