‘Jesus Christ, Zoë! What the hell are you doing to me?’
Her smile hardened. It marked her face like a wound. The child sat up and opened her jacket. Something was moving inside her shirt, a squirming, fluttering thing. . . .
Harry recoiled from it and from the child. She grinned at him with a dry chuckle. Her shirt was moving, for there was something inside it, something alive or barely alive.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ he cried out. ‘What the fuck have you got?’ When Zoë lifted her shirt, the jackdaw was there, a sodden black rag on her white belly. It was a broken thing. Slick with rain, tattered and shattered, the bird was dying. With its remaining strength, it sculled its wings, clawed for traction on the child’s skin, and the beak opened and closed in silence. The jackdaw slid down her thighs. She kicked it from her, and it fell to the floor of the cabin.
‘I found him in the long grass, Daddy,’ she said. She could hardly speak, because her smile was fixed so hard. ‘I found him by Mummy’s grave. Tycho’s going to die, isn’t he, Daddy?’
Harry said nothing. His body ached with cold. He flinched from the bird, which was panting and glaring, and he flinched from Zoë. She swung from the bed and stood up. She tugged the shirt over her head and was perfectly naked, her thin, hard body quite white in the light of the flames. She shone her face at him.
‘Isn’t he, Daddy? Tycho’s going to die, isn’t he?’
She stooped to pick up the bird. She held it by the neck, in her right hand. It dangled. Its wings didn’t move, but it rowed feebly in the air with the black claws. Zoë cracked it like a whip, once. Water flew from it. Harry felt the droplets on his face and heard the hiss as they hit the stove. The child rattled the bird at him.
‘He was going to die, wasn’t he, Daddy? Well, now he’s dead.’
She sat on the bed and laid the bird in her lap. She spread its wings across her thighs. The black thing was the centre of her. She caressed the drenched plumage, with her head down . . . she’d forgotten the man, her father, who stood naked and speechless and shivering on the far side of the cabin. Lifting the jackdaw’s beak, she stroked it with her fingertip. She preened the feathers. Then she lay down, and with the wreckage of the bird against her belly, a black smear on her colourless skin, she rolled herself into the blankets. Straight away she was asleep, her breathing deep and regular.
Harry went to Zoë’s bed in the corner. He didn’t want to touch her or be touched by her. He watched the firelight through the curtains of seaweed. Eventually, curled up very small, he also slept.
Chapter Nineteen
Much later that night, Zoë made her final flight through the seashell constellations.
Harry was woken, as he’d been woken so many times before, by the sound of her footsteps as she moved about the cabin. The fire had burned low. Still naked, she went gently from wall to wall and pressed herself to the shells, until there were pinpoints of blood on her chest and belly and thighs where the winkles had pricked. He didn’t try to stop her or persuade her back to bed. She was asleep, although her eyes were open and staring. As ever, he watched the child’s journey through the stars . . . this child whose blindness had released her, for whom blindness was a gift.
But this time was different. She was shaking her head, alternately frowning and giggling at the falsity of the charts. They were ridiculous. Sometimes she stood away from them, hands on naked hips, as though she could really see the maps on the walls in front of her, and she shook her head as if she could hardly credit the naivety of this primitive planetarium. And what did she do then? She spun from the wall, an expression of tremendous resolution on her face, and she reached for the hatchet by the stove.
Harry didn’t try to stop her. Why should he? He also knew that the maps were false. Why should he have tried to prevent the child, as she stepped lightly from constellation to constellation and smashed the winkles with accurate, rhythmic blows? She felt for the shells with her left hand, one by one, for she’d learned their exact positions from her father, and she dealt them each a sharp, unerring tap with the flat of the hatchet. They shattered. The fragments fell to the floor. Harry lay curled in the corner, and he watched. He almost got up to help, to abet the destruction; but the child needed no help. She was swift and efficient. In a matter of minutes, all the shells on all the walls were broken. The stars he’d translated from the skies to the cabin were gone, their smithereens dropped to the horizon. Dead fragments of dead stars. . . .
Zoë looked suddenly drained. Her body, ghostly pale in the dying firelight, seemed to droop. When Harry crossed the cabin and guided her to bed, he felt the cold in her. She was as cold as stone, like a dead, cold stone. The heat was going from her. The energy was leaving her.
Soon she was wrapped in the blankets again. Harry bent to kiss her, and the touch of her lips was like ice. However, she breathed evenly, without shivering. He left her to sleep, now that she’d done what she’d got up to do. Treading gingerly, barefooted on the splintered seashells, he put the hatchet by the fire. The blade was powdered with white dust, but the edge was very sharp.
Harry woke to silvery daylight. Aching in all his bones, he peered with bleary, mucous eyes from under the blanket. And the thing he saw was pure nightmare. He ducked his head from it. Shuddering like a spastic in the darkness of the covers, he wailed with horror. . . .
A figure was hanging from the ceiling.
Paralysed, sweating, with his knees to his chest, Harry hid himself. There was no sound in the cabin, only the chatter of his teeth and the moaning he couldn’t contain. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the images blurred and fused; the graphic, monochrome picture of Lizzie as she’d hung from the beam, her head enfolded, her white and bloody nightdress, her feet in the socks which were blackened and burnt . . . and the thing he’d just seen, a smaller figure, swinging, silently rotating. . . .
These two pictures flashed on the screen in his head, branded on the inside of his eyelids. Trembling, he saw every detail. The stench of scorching came to him, triggered by the twin visions, and he could hear the gurgling of the garrotted girl. He was inside the nightmare. It had come for him.
Until he felt a hand on his head, and a sweet little voice said, ‘Daddy! Daddy! What’s the matter, Daddy? Are you having a dream?’
Zoë pulled the blanket from him. She smiled like an angel. ‘Were you dreaming, Daddy? Was it something nasty?’
He looked past her, around the cabin. She seemed to follow his stare, but she laughed when he flinched from the thing he’d seen. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes until he could focus clearly.
‘I hung them up, Daddy!’ she said with a giggle. ‘They were soaking wet from last night. I hung them up while you were still asleep.’
Her clothes were there, that was all, dangled from the beam and drying in the warmth of the fire. There was a pool of water on the floorboards. Harry uncurled from the tiny bed and stood up, stretching himself tall again.
‘I hung up Tycho as well,’ she said. ‘I’ve been making things tidy. Come and look!’
As though he were blind and she were sighted, Zoë escorted her father about the cabin. She brushed him past the hanging clothes; he ducked from the broken body of the jackdaw, which she’d fixed to the beam with a pin through one leg, whose dishevelled plumage was steaming as it dried. The child had swept up the wreckage of the seashells. She was pleased with her work, quite radiant, although her hand was cold.
‘We can take Tycho with us today, can’t we, Daddy?’ she said excitedly. ‘It’s lovely outside! I’ve been on deck! It’s very frosty, but it’s lovely. We’ll take Tycho with us!’
As soon as he was dressed, they went out, along the seashore track. The frost had bitten. The fields were white over. Even the foreshore was frozen, the weed was silvered and the edges of the rock pools were blurred with ice. It was beautiful and cruel. Father and daughter walked side by side, their footsteps crunching on the gravel, and they negotiated the debris which the unus
ually high tide had left behind. The hedgerows were choked with driftwood and dead grass, all of it whitened by the frost. The thin, sunlit air pinched around their nostrils. In the fields, the cattle were like furnaces, the steam pluming from their muzzles.
Beautiful, the frost . . . and cruel. Every stone in the graveyard was shaggy with white fur. The long grass, once so rank and pungent, was cast in ice, a statuary of steel; overnight, all its blades had been sharpened. Dock leaves were cleavers. Nettles were bayonets. A lone foxglove, a survivor from the autumn, was a single silver sword. The snowdrops were as keen as stilettos. The cemetery, whose soft, secret corners had been tangled with wild flowers, was now the boneyard of a battlefield. The dead were buried, but their weapons remained behind.
On Lizzie’s headstone, where the letters of her name had been cut so deep, the frost defied the child’s sensitive fingertips. Zoë knelt, as she always did. She felt for the words, as she always did. But the frost had erased them. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking the grave. All around it, as though the tide had really reached so high, there was seaweed, so dry that it crumbled at Zoë’s touch; there were bones, whose bone whiteness was fettled to ice whiteness, the skulls of godwit and heron, as different as tweezers and dagger; the egg cases of rays, split by the cold; the gaping shark mouth of dogfish; even, among the accumulated gifts at the grave, the bits of the brittlestars.
Poor things they were, the segmented arms a powder of cartilage, the disc-body ground to dust. They’d come from the estuary, the shards of a shooting star that had signalled the death of the woman and the birth of the child. Some of them had hung on the Christmas trees in the Ozymandias. Now, they were grains of salt and sand and ice. Zoë brushed them aside.
From under the folds of her jacket, she brandished the bundle that had been Tycho. She opened it out, spread the wings wide, laying it where the brittlestars had been. Its head lolled. The home-made beak fell askew. The claws were clenched into scaly fists. The bird sprawled on Lizzie’s grave, the only black thing in the frosted whiteness of the cemetery. It steamed a little in the brilliant sunlight, as bright as jet.
Zoë said nothing, but she watched her father and smiled as he felt at the words on the headstone. Then they left the bones and the bird and returned to the boat.
Chapter Twenty
It was summer again. The estuary began to steam and stink.
Under a white sky, the shallows lay still, scummy with brown and yellow bubbles. The movement of the tide did nothing to cleanse the mud, which sweated and staled like the flesh of something sick. Eels writhed in the pools that the sea had left. On the foreshore, the weed was baked crisp; it seethed with millions of insects. The air was loud with the droning of big, black flies. It was a sweltering summer, nine years since Lizzie had died and Zoë had been born.
Harry continued to look at the stars, although the heat haze veiled the constellations. Zoë took no more interest, now that the charts were destroyed. While he reclined in the easy chair with his eye to the lens of the telescope, or lay on deck with the old binoculars, the child seemed to watch him. She smiled faintly. She sneered. The man and the child were alone together, adrift on the Ozymandias, adrift on a dead calm.
The others had gone overboard: Helen, whom Harry sometimes met by chance in town, where they talked inconsequentially and glanced at one another’s hands and lips as though remembering the touch and the taste of them; Dewi, whom he never saw again; Frank, who would wave from the wheel of the Morris in the streets of Caernarfon; Seamus, the kitten, who’d survived no more than a fortnight before finding poetic fulfilment in a vase of dead roses; Tycho, the jackdaw, who’d been broken and mended and broken again, thrown out like a rag, disposed of. Lizzie was long gone.
Harry and Zoë were alone together, becalmed on brackish water.
And something odd was happening, all the odder because the summer was so hot. Zoë was cooling. She grew weary and pale. For a while, Harry had associated this with the general lassitude that the weather had brought: the whole world was dazed. But her weariness was deeper than that. Her eyes, which had glittered so brightly, had gone dull. Her silvery hair had lost its lustre. In the touch of her skin there was a strange clamminess, a chill that grew colder by the day. All her boiling energy, which she’d sucked from her mother until the woman was drained to death, was leaving her. Her heat would soon be quenched.
And, in the way she turned her eyes on him and smiled, Harry could see that she knew.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was Zoë’s ninth birthday. ‘Pick me up a bit later from school, Daddy,’ she told her father. ‘Mrs Henderson said we can have a party this afternoon.’
Harry told her that they’d have their own private party in the evening, on board the Ozymandias.
So he had more time to spend alone on the estuary: alone, except for the hundreds of gulls and waders among which he moved so slowly, so persistently. The tide was rising, a scum of simmering bubbles. The sun was hidden by dense white clouds, but the heat was stifling. There was a smothering haze. Harry trudged along with his head down and his hands in his pockets, blind to the birds and careless of the heat.
The morning passed and the tide crept in. He returned to the boat to eat. He lay on the bed, and such an apathy came over him that he thought he would search the sands no longer, but let them be covered by the sea. He thought he might lie there and wait for the moment when the boat would be lifted, which would signify that another day was gone and his searching had been in vain. However, when he glanced at the scar on the beam above his head, when he felt under the pillow and touched the little present he’d wrapped for Zoë and hidden there, he sprang up with renewed determination. This was a special day, an anniversary. He had it in mind to find the brittlestar, that odd, antique creature which had been a kind of talisman for him.
The rising waters drove the birds more closely together. There was keen competition between the curlew in their flock, between the oystercatcher, the redshank and the godwit, as they probed the diminishing expanse of mud. The sun was filtered through a gauze of cloud. The heat was heavy on Harry’s head. As he walked, shelduck shouldered their way from pool to pool. A single crow sprang among the waders, and when it opened its wings in the sunlight it was no longer black, but as bright as silver. The sea inched higher. The man and the birds moved on a shrinking island.
All of a sudden, the birds were up. They rose in one great, clamouring crowd and beat around his head. When they’d gone, separating into squadrons of different species, only the crow remained with him on the hard, flat sand. It continued to work alone, a freebooter. The beak was in soft flesh, and, for the crow, there was nothing else: no sky, no sun, no sea, no man. Beak into flesh, that was all. Harry walked within a yard before the bird noticed him and flapped away, towards the shore.
It had left him the pieces of a brittlestar. A poor thing it was, beached and broken and dead, but it was what he’d been looking for. By now, the shallow water was all around him. He was quite alone on the estuary. Bending down and pocketing what the sea and the crow had abandoned, he splashed from the sandbank, knee-deep through the channels, onto the boulders and the weed of the foreshore.
He put the brittlestar on the bookcase and cycled to town to collect Zoë.
She’d aged. Born a boiling baby, a meteoric child who’d consumed all the energy around her, she’d passed through maturity and into old age within a matter of weeks . . . or so it seemed to Harry. It astonished him that no one else had noticed. Her teacher didn’t remark on it, and the children with whom she shared the classroom and the playground were apparently oblivious. But Harry could see it. Zoë was wan and fragile. Her prime was past. She sat behind him on the bicycle, and her arms around his waist were cold, a cold that enfolded him and penetrated his bones. She didn’t say a word during the journey home; there was no accompanying clamour of gulls, no entourage. Whatever magnetism the child had had was gone. Zoë clung to her father as he rode alo
ng beside the beach, and there was no warmth in her, although the day was so hot.
In the cabin of the Ozymandias, her cold was more powerfully contagious. A shiver passed through Harry’s body, between his shoulder blades, as soon as he and the girl stepped downstairs together . . . only a tingle at first, but then the hairs on his neck stood up. She stared around the cabin.
‘Well, Zoë?’ he asked her. ‘What do you think?’
He’d decorated the place for her birthday, with streamers and cards. It looked very pretty. As she negotiated her way about, to find what was different, she stumbled uncharacteristically, knocking into the corner of the bed. After exactly nine years of learning the cabin so that she was familiar with every corner, she was suddenly uncomfortable in it. Steadying herself after a bump on the bookcase, she put out her hand to the wall . . . and she frowned, her face puckered with puzzlement, at the feel of the blobs of glue which were all that remained of the seashell constellations. She was finding it hard to remember what they were. She caressed the tube of the telescope, as though for the first time. Watching her, Harry shivered again.
‘It’s lovely, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ There was a quiver of uncertainty in her voice. ‘This is our special place, isn’t it, Daddy? Just for us two? And for Mummy, of course?’
She held up her face for him to kiss, her eyes opened wide, her lips dry. The cabin grew cold, although the world outside was steaming in a heatwave.
‘Here’s your present, Zoë,’ he announced, and he produced the parcel from under the pillow. He watched intently as she unwrapped it. It was a book in Braille, an anthology of poems for children, which she flicked open and explored with nimble fingers. She touched his hands and smiled. He had a cake for her, too. She blew out the nine candles with nine tiny breaths and then asked him to place them around the cabin and relight them.
The Blood of Angels Page 30