by Emma Timpany
‘Yeah, maybe we want to have a bit of fun,’ the first man agreed.
‘It’s been a long time since we got to see the real world.’ The ghosts all started talking over each other again in agreement.
Jane was panicking. Her heart was beating so fast she was sure it would give out at any moment. She couldn’t even get in enough of the dusty air to breathe.
‘You have to go back,’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
‘Says who?’ A woman with long, dark hair stepped forward from the crowd and looked straight into Jane’s eyes. Jane knew who she was instantly. Her eyes were less buggy but apart from that, miraculously, she didn’t look so very different from her mannequin.
There were general noises of agreement from the rest of the ghosts. The girl with no name smirked.
‘You don’t want to be out here,’ Ed said. He flung an arm around a man with one leg. ‘Trust me. I’ve been stuck out here for over a hundred years now. It’s torture. Have you ever heard of reality TV?’
‘What’s TV?’ the woman with the short hair asked.
‘What’s TV?’ Ed laughed. ‘Oh, I can’t tell you how much I wish I didn’t know what TV was. And that’s not even the worst of it. They all have these little computers in their pockets that tell them what to do and how to think and they take them everywhere. Jane, show them your little computer.’ Jane fumbled to get her phone out of her pocket and hold it up for the ghosts to see. ‘She never leaves it alone. It’s sad, really.’
Selina Wadge was suddenly a breath away from Jane, her long hair swinging forward as she peered down at Jane’s phone. ‘What’s a computer?’ she asked.
‘Careful,’ Ed warned. ‘Don’t get too close. You might get addicted like she is.’ Selina jumped back and a few of the other ghosts seemed to move a little closer to the door. ‘Honestly, it’s so boring out here these days. All they ever do is stare at those things. Isn’t that right, Jane?’ Jane nodded. Ed started to guide the man with one leg back towards the door. ‘This isn’t the place for us. Not any more. Now, let’s get you all back where you’re supposed to be before Big Brother finds us.’
‘Who’s that?’ the girl with no name asked as Ed shepherded her through.
‘You don’t want to know,’ he said seriously.
Selina Wadge was the last ghost to go back. For a moment that felt altogether too long for Jane, Selina stood on the threshold, looking around at the old stone walls of the jail. Then, at last, she stepped through. They were all gone. Except Ed.
Jane didn’t feel relieved. She felt numb. Empty.
‘Well?’ Ed said. ‘Close it before any more get through for God’s sake.’
Jane swallowed her heart. ‘I might not be able to open it again,’ she said softly. ‘This might be your only chance.’
‘Oh.’ Ed looked back over his shoulder. Standing there, in front of the door, he had a sort of glow around him, like the girl with no name had had. In a flash Jane saw Ed walking through, and imagined herself going back to the empty house, alone, never hearing him laugh again. Jane’s hands clenched, a vain attempt to hold herself together.
Ed turned back to her, a small smile on his pale face. He stepped away from the door, towards Jane, and the glow faded. ‘I’ll live,’ he said, with a shrug.
‘No, Ed, you should go. You should be at peace.’ Another one of her grandmother’s lines that felt heavy on Jane’s tongue.
‘Do you want me to go?’ Ed asked. The smile had fallen from his face and the pain Jane saw there instead was too much. Her vision blurred with tears.
‘Of course not.’ Jane’s voice cracked. ‘But you shouldn’t be stuck here.’
‘I want to be stuck here,’ Ed insisted, sounding desperate now. ‘Jane. Close the door.’ Jane knew she could push him through it. She had seen her grandmother do it countless times. All she had to do was reach out and give a little push. She didn’t even have to touch him.
It would be for the best. Ed could be where he was supposed to be. Jane could give him the peace he deserved.
Jane blew out the candles. The door closed, all the air rushed back into the room, and Ed still stood in front of her.
‘You were going to push me.’
Jane wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘No, I wasn’t,’ she answered truthfully.
‘I’ll go when I’m good and ready,’ Ed told her, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket. ‘Don’t try anything like that again.’
‘Sorry,’ Jane said. She was more exhausted than she had ever been in her life. Her bones felt tired.
‘I’m sorry I attracted a poltergeist to your place of work with my ghost energy,’ Ed replied. Jane let out a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Ed smiled.
‘Good. Now that’s sorted …’ Ed reached out a hand towards Jane. It was solid in her grip and not at all cold. ‘Let’s go home.’
THE SIREN OF TREEN
EMMA STAUGHTON
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.
Franz Kafka, from The Silence of the Sirens, 1917
MORWENNA
AN EVENING mist has fallen away from the moon, slipped sideways like a veil from her cuttlebone face. I watch as heaven’s brittlestars pierce the night-blue sky above Cape Cornwall and moonlight adjusts the scene to ghostly day. Except it isn’t day, but some otherworldly place where cattle stand, motionless zinc sculptures in grey-green fields, and the tin roofs of the milking shed gleam, corrugated slabs of silver in the yard.
On nights like these I wonder if you are watching her too, the moon. This luminous Neptune’s orb, which pushes and pulls at the edges of the ocean and squeezes my head until I’m wild. Even the cat is wild, tonight. She’s vying for a fight amongst the bedcovers, flexing hooked talons from soft mittens and whipping a venomous tail. My coaxing hand is too slow, and she has me and draws blood. I push her away and suck at the red scratch oozing from the back of my hand. I wish I could sleep through this madness, but I don’t sleep much these days.
I talk to you instead.
She’s come back, you know. The child. Blew in with a February fog. Of course you know. Maybe you sent her back to remind me? Did you think I could forget? There are some things a woman never forgets. She thinks I don’t know – she has an Irish accent and has changed her name to Clodagh – but I’d know your daughter anywhere. To see her and Matthew together: the hair, the height, the eyes, they could be twins. Tell me, what should I do?
The cursor blinks. I wait. Nothing.
Some days when I type a message I can hear you speak. Perhaps I’m imagining it? Second-guessing a response, remembering the uncomplicated logic of your replies and the comforting timbre of your voice. The cat reappears on the bed and makes a point of ignoring me. She turns her tortoiseshell back and begins to groom with a rasping tongue, and I catch the rancid scent of fish on her breath. We tolerate each other for a while, and then I push her off the bed and resume typing.
There is too much time to think when you cannot speak. Seconds seem like hours and hours like days. I find myself remembering your face. Like an Atlantic wave on a cold spring day, the sight of your face whipped my breath away, that first day on the beach at Sennen. We belonged, you and I, like the sea horses below the waves and the bracken and furze up on the moor, tangled together for life. But I never expected this.
I must have dropped off to sleep at dawn, because I can hear Matthew coming in from milking. The thud of the kitchen door below, the metallic scrape and clank of the kettle being moved across the range from warming plate to hot plate. The little squeal of the hot plate lid as he raises it. The rattle of dog biscuits as they hit three stainless steel bowls, destined for the collies in the yard. There is a reassuring sequence to the percussion of morning sounds.
I shift a
rthritic limbs and prop myself up against the pillows to stare out across the farmyard. Gone is the ghostly moonlit scene, replaced by the detritus of farming life. A moss-tinged rusty landscape of tin roofs, the Delabole slates long gone (sold for cash decades back), decomposing tractor parts, hens pecking for bugs and grain amongst last year’s mouldy straw bales, a pile of sheep hurdles, gates, galvanised troughs and the rusting remains of my brother’s Massey Ferguson tractor. Beyond, the clouds, the sky, the granite-edged fields, the telegraph poles … everything seems tilted towards the ocean, which flickers – a flatlined shallow cup of blue on the horizon.
Matthew’s here. I try to smile and fail as he knocks, enters and walks across the room with a cup of tea. He says good morning and stoops to kiss my misshapen cheek, slopping tea into the saucer. We dance around the spillage for a while, he puts the cup down on the bedside chest, I tug a tissue from a box and dab, he lifts the cup and I dab again. He looks tired. I open my laptop and begin to type:
I didn’t hear you come in last night?
He bends across me to look at the screen. He smells of sweat and the cowshed, and her.
‘I stayed at Clodagh’s last night,’ he says.
That’s three nights this week, I type.
He gives me a look.
Is it serious? I search his face as he stoops once more to read the screen. I want to stroke his dark curls, bury my nose in the nape of his neck like I used to when he was a baby and smell his sweetness.
Now it’s Matthew who stares out of the window across the jigsaw of green where the cows are beginning to graze after two hours’ milking.
‘We get along well, that’s all,’ he says.
She’s a lot older than you, I type.
‘Does that matter? Dad was ten years older than you; it’s just the same in reverse, that’s all. I like her,’ he says. ‘She feels familiar.’
I say no more after that. The cat jumps back on the bed and starts to settle herself next to me. The day has begun and she’s ready for sleep. I wait for Matthew to leave the room before easing myself out of bed. It’s serious, I think, and dress in nondescript clothes – a brown woollen skirt and navy roll-neck sweater. It’s been a long time since I’ve been moved to take action. I have a sudden urge to clear cupboards and redecorate, purge clutter from the past. Spring fever. Adrenaline. I decide to invite the girl for supper.
An hour later, I drive away from the farm towards Penzance to buy provisions. It is a beautiful day and the verges wave armfuls of cow parsley, bluebells and pink campion. The moors, which appeared onion-skin brown a month ago, are now a carpet of pink and yellow thrift, heather and gorse. You loved this time of year when flowers push their anthers to the wind. A brazen act, you would say, like the two of us.
I’m heading for the big stores on the outskirts of town. I prefer them to the small shops, enjoying the anonymity and lack of human contact. The doctors said I was lucky. The stroke paralysed my vocal chords and one side of my face only. The face you loved to watch because it reminded you of wind on the water. You said you could see a squall approaching by the seech and gurnall of emotion riffling across my countenance, darkening my eyes and eddying around my mouth. The mouth you kissed with the incredulity of a man bewitched; a mouth now ugly in repose and grotesque in action. When I smile, it strains in one direction like torn rubber caught in a barbed wire fence. I have turned all mirrors to the wall, but still I see the horror of what I have become reflected in the furtive eyes of strangers. In the supermarket, I can at least scuttle through in an unremarkable fashion, lizard-like, darting from aisle to aisle, blending in with the tea, coffee and frozen vegetables. I am still coming to terms with this newfound reticence, this desire to be nobody.
I was lucky, they say. They do not know me.
I drive through New Mill, past the sign to Ding Dong that used to make me smile, and begin to plan a menu in my head: salmon mousse to start, followed by spiced Moroccan lamb and a lemon posset for pudding, to clear the palate. My first stop will be Cornwall Farmers to buy poison for the bait boxes. The rats have been bad on the farm this year; it’s the chicken food that attracts them. I will buy paint at B&Q, before stopping off at the big new Sainsbury’s on the old Isles of Scilly helicopter site. I might buy Matthew some new clothes. He will like that.
CLODAGH
FOG STOLE off the sea and swallowed the landscape, filling the high-banked lanes like milk. Clodagh searched for a landmark: a farm gate, a wind-sculpted tree, a lichen-clad mound of granite – some talisman from the past upon which to anchor her sight – but the once familiar road had disappeared. It could do that, sea fog. Creep in. It would have started as a thin white line, way out past Longships, and a heralding chill as the fog bank swelled across Mount’s Bay heading for land. The sheer speed at which a warm day in West Penwith could be erased never failed to surprise her.
The taxi driver wiped the inside of the car windscreen with a purple bar towel and lowered his window to dab at the side mirror. A blast of Atlantic air filled the cab. She closed her eyes against the seaweed breeze. Tiredness lapped. Memories jostled, tangled as the strandline after a high tide; swimming at Sennen, sand-blasted picnics, fishing in rock pools.
‘Your first time in Cornwall?’
She opened her eyes. The driver was watching her in his rear-view mirror.
‘Yes,’ she lied.
‘Down on holiday?’
She nodded.
‘Shame to arrive on a night like this, though. It’ll look different in the morning, you’ll see. Staying at the Tinner’s then, are you?’
Ahead, something tall and white reared out of the mist. The timber signpost to Gurnard’s Head and Zennor pointing the way with weathered boards and faded script. The fog thinned and the landscape made brief appearances as the car began its slow descent off Penwith Moor towards the coast. A fragment of pasture, a wind-bent hawthorn, a standing stone. The tower of Zennor Church. Her father’s hand in hers as they stood to sing his favourite hymn. She hummed, quietly, beneath the whine of the engine.
Eternal Father, strong to save
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep.
Five minutes later, she stood alone outside the Tinner’s Arms. The pub sign creaked as it swung from a gallows post above her, and she could hear the low murmur of voices inside. Across the road a flight of steps, rounded by the footfall of centuries, rose towards the dark tower of St Senara’s Church, which peered down at the pub through the mist. In the morning, if the light were right, she would photograph the graveyard. She loved the unkempt wildness of the place; a circular Bronze Age field strewn with storm-green granite headstones tilted like the wonky teeth of giants. To the north-east, the rolling moors of West Penwith climbed skywards above the tombstones in russet mounds of bracken and furze. Sometimes at dawn or dusk the moors appeared flame red against the blue. To the south-west, a granite-edged patchwork of fields spread out across the coastal lowlands and fell into the sea beyond Zennor.
Clodagh picked up her bags and started to walk away from the pub, past the church, towards the rhythmic pounding of the ocean.
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
MATTHEW
MATTHEW TREWHELLA hugged himself in the cold March air. It was six a.m. and the cows were taking their time, their Friesian frames swaying large out of the gloom.
‘No hurry, girls!’
He glanced up at a red-tinged mackerel sky. There would be rain later. His father had been a fisherman and taught him how to read the clouds, although Matt had not inherited his father’s call to the sea. Instead, at the age of three, he discovered tractors when his Uncle Pat swung him way up high into the rattling cab of a blue Massey Ferguson. It had smelled of mud and diesel, and driving along with his hands on the juddering wheel, and Pat’s arms wrapped around him, he had felt like a king. Still did.
Something caught Matt’s eye. The cows had seen it too and paused to stare, mid-amble. A woman’s torso appeared to glide along the top of a hedge, humming a tune. A minute later, her legs and body became united in the gateway, where she paused to look at him.
‘Morning!’ he called, raising an arm in her direction. He didn’t know her, but thought it polite to acknowledge another person that early in the day.
‘Morning,’ she said with a brief smile, before melting away down the lane towards the coastal path. She wore an old waxed coat and walking boots, and her hair was as wild, dark and tangled as a clump of bladderwrack. He should have said something, made a joke about being up early, engaged her in conversation. Damn it. He stamped his feet and rubbed his hands. Too late now.
The milking shed was warm with forty head of cattle munching and breathing. Steam rose from the cows’ flanks and small misty clouds puffed intermittently from moist, dark nostrils. Matt never tired of the scents and sounds, the smell of sanitation, cows’ breath and sweet haylage. The hum of the milking machine as it wheezed and pumped rhythmically like the embryo of a song. It was only as he wiped the cows’ udders clean and attached clusters of milking cups with an attendant suck and hiss that he remembered the name of the tune the woman had been humming. It was the fishermen’s hymn, his father’s favourite. The one they sang at his funeral. Before long he was singing ‘Eternal Father’ to the cows, and they turned their soft bovine eyes towards him and pricked their ears.
Clodagh
ST SENARA’S was quiet, as though the church had sunk to the bottom of a shallow sea allowing rays of light, not sound, to drift through its jewelled windows. Clodagh sat in her special chair, the one guarded by a mermaid rising through the dark-grained surface of the wooden bench-end and fish swimming along the embroidered seat cushion. Her father used to call her his little mermaid on the days he was on dry land. Sundays, mostly. The day fishermen went to church, mended nets and sang shanties in-the-round at the pub after tea. Some days, her mother would take her to listen, when the weather was warm and the men sang outside on the quay at Newlyn. Her dad led the singing in a strong clear voice, and the others replied. Call and reply. Call and reply. Like the rhythm of waves arriving and retreating across a beach. When he sang ‘Trelawney’ the men would puff up with Cornish pride; when he sang ‘The White Rose’ all the women cried.