The Woman who Loved an Octopus and other Saint's Tales

by Imogen Rhia Herrad

  I speak the words I have thought out beforehand. I speak like an automaton.

  ‘Do you remember me? Do you remember what you did to me? Look what you have done to me!’

  He looks up.

  He sees my bloodstained clothes. His smile slips.

  I put my hand between my legs and dip it in and spray him with the blood.

  He recoils.

  Now I smile.

  I lean against the door frame and cross my arms over my chest.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ I say. ‘Remember the ride in the car? How I asked you to take your hand away? How I asked you to stop? How I screamed because it hurt? How you put your hands around my neck and squeezed. Remember?’

  I can see from his eyes that he does remember, now. He tries to put his smile back into place.

  ‘I thought you enjoyed that,’ he says.

  I cannot breathe. I remember the hands round my neck. I move forward and, before he has time to react, I slip a rope round his neck. I pull it tight. My hands feel alive. I am rewarded with the astonished look on his face that is now becoming red, and the sound of his breath whistling in gasps.

  But then the moment of surprise is over, and he lifts his hands and puts them between my arms, and he shoves my arms apart, and I remember how much stronger than me he was that night, and I remember the fear and how I couldn’t breathe, and my arms drop and the rope falls from his neck and we stand there, chest to chest on his terrace; and I want to run away.

  I bend down and pick up the rope and he doesn’t stop me. And then I turn around and walk away. And he doesn’t stop me.

  At home, I smash every plate and glass and mug in the house. I rage and scream and fling myself against the walls after the crockery has run out.

  Then I sit in the silent house and listen to the small bright sound of glass splinters settling.

  I need a break. I take a weekend off and spend it by the sea.

  Pebbles are a good start, but they soon become too small, sailing lazily through the air and dropping into the water with an elegant little splash.

  There are some boulders further up the shore. I try to lift a small one and find that I can do it quite easily. But when I throw it, it falls far short of where I have aimed it, just a few feet away from where I am standing. I get drenched.

  I think of the ride in the car. I think of myself stupefied with shock, with disbelief; weighed down so that I cannot fly away. I think of myself now, unable to fly.

  Filled with fury, I pick up another large rock and hurl it with as much strength as I have. It flies in a beautiful arc, for quite a long time, then disappears into the sea. I can see white foaming up where it falls, but I don’t hear the splash. I bend down for the next one.

  By the evening of that day, I can heave up a boulder as large as myself and throw it a good few yards.

  By the end of the weekend, I can throw one of those boulders so far that I don’t hear the splash as it hits the water.

  I leave the beach and walk inland, juggling with some rocks as large as my head. I go back to the house of the man who has violated me. I can see that he is at home, because his car is parked outside. I remember the car. It is the same one that he gave me the lift in. I throw the rocks at it. They bounce off the metal, only leaving some dents. The car alarm starts to wail. I pick up the car; I am surprised how light it is. I toss it from hand to hand, then throw it against the garage wall. There is a loud bang and a crash and dust billowing, and then the house alarm goes off as well.

  I kick down the front door of the house and go inside.

  I meet the man in the corridor; he has heard the crash and the alarms and I can see that they have done their job. He is alarmed.

  He is even more alarmed when he sees me. I am pleased.

  He tries to move past me, but I block his way.

  ‘Let me through,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I say. Oh, what a lovely feeling this is, to say No and stretch out my arms to block his passage, and to see him stop.

  Not for long though; he still tries to squeeze past.

  I pick up a small hall table and hurl it at the ceiling. Splintered wood and lumps of plaster rain down on us. His eyes open wide, he backs away. I tread on his toes, step by step, and force him onto the terrace.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asks. He really does not know.

  ‘You know who I am?’ I want to make certain.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, testily.

  ‘You know what you did?’

  Silence.

  I kick his shin and repeat the question.

  ‘Yes!’ – as though I had reminded him of something he’d rather not remember. I suppose I have.

  ‘You owe me an apology. I want you to say that you’re sorry.’

  He gapes.

  I find that I am screaming at him. ‘Do you know what you have done?! Do you have any idea what it felt like? What I felt like? You shit!!’ I kick his shin again, and his crotch, hard; I pick him up and slam him against the garden fence.

  Neighbours’ startled faces appear and quickly duck out of sight again.

  I grab him by his shirt collar and swing his body through the air; then I let go. I see him fly and am reminded that I may now be forever earthbound, because of what he has done to me.

  I scream and I roar. I pluck him out of the air and send him flying again with a punch, like a volleyball, like a football, again and again and again.

  Finally, out of breath, I drop him into his rose bush from a great height and look down on him as he crawls, slowly and painfully, out of it. I haven’t felt this good for a long time.

  Then it strikes me what I am doing. I am looking down on him. I am in the air and he is on the ground.

  I leave him to his crawling.

  I fly to the nearest B&Q and pick up a couple of bags of cement and plaster and a new door.

  And then I fly home.

  Tydfil

  Fifth century

  Tydfil (also Tudful or Tudvul) was one of the many daughters and sons of King Brychan. She was killed in about the year 480 by a band of marauding pagans, either Saxons or Picts. Much is known about Tydfil’s death and the manner in which her brother Rhun avenged it, but almost nothing appears to have been written about her life.

  The town of Merthyr Tydfil is named after her.

  Do you know what Merthyr means?

  It means Martyr.

  Do you know what Martyr means?

  It means Witness.

  Listen.

  What do you hear?

  The breath of the wind. The calls of jackdaws, ravens, magpies. The songs of thrush and blackbird. The laughter of the river as it trips and hurries over stones, towards the sea, towards the sea.

  At night, the river tells me stories of the sea, of the huge inky wateriness of the ocean that is the dream of every little spring and brook. Soon, soon, the waters sigh as they slide past me. Soon, the sea.

  I have never wanted anything but this: my river, my valley, my forest full of ancient trees and many creatures, and my own company. Occasionally also Brother Pedr’s but, praise be, he never stays long. Brother Pedr comes by every month to hear my confession and have me hear his so that we can absolve each other. He is a hermit like me. He lives more than half a day’s walk away to the south, in a cave on a hillside. Before he became a hermit, he swore many solemn oaths: to give up the pleasures of the world and the flesh and all human company and to chastise himself in solitude. When he found me living in my hut by the river one day, he made me swear the same oaths.

  He would not have understood that what was a sacrifice to him was for me the lifting of a stone from my heart. What could there be in the world that was better than this?

  He left children and a wife whom he still misses keenly, but he loves God more than he loves them.

  I left behind a local warlord who fancied me for a wife, and a father and mother who couldn’t believe their luck that somebody would take me off their hands. I did not give up a lif
e like Brother Pedr. I found one here, far away from those of my own kind.

  * * *

  Listen.

  There is the sound of horses’ hooves on the wind, the clink of metal on metal, the creaking of saddle leather.

  There are men coming this way.

  I try to hide but it is too late. I run, but not fast enough.

  Look.

  There is my body on the ground, a knife in my side in the very place where Jesus was pierced by the soldier’s lance when he hung on the cross. Brother Pedr would be pleased by the sight. He sets great store by the sufferings of Our Lord, and of those of the holy martyrs and confessors who died at the hand of the Ungodly. But I am not pleased. I cannot tear myself away from the memory of the pain, from the sight of the blood that streams out of my body.

  The men who have just killed me are now tearing down the hut that I call my church; it is only made out of wood, with clay to stop the leaks in the walls and roof. A moment later it is just a heap of firewood. I hear the crackling of the flames and even feel the heat. I want to cry. This was my house, I built it with my own hands.

  I wait. I wait until, finally, they leave. Then I sit by the river for a long time until all I can hear is silence again. But the stink of burning and of blood will not leave my nostrils.

  I drift away, along the stream, into the hills and the trees. I will live here where killings occur only out of necessity, because a fox and a bear must eat, not because they’re greedy for power or gold.

  I stay with the trees and the birds and the shrews and the foxes for a long time. I spend days and weeks watching the pattern of light and shadow change on the hills, listening to the hiss and whisper of the rain. I spend a lifetime inside a tree, slowly growing and stretching with it; feeling leaves and acorns drop from me in autumn, feeling the storms tug at my branches and bending with them in a wild dance; feeling new leaves bursting out of my fingertips every spring.

  One autumn, many seasons later, the tree, grown old and heavy with life, is toppled by a storm, and I have to look for a new home.

  I tell myself that I am now, after all, ready to leave this world and move on to the next. I have grown many, many years older than anybody I knew when I was still alive. But my hunger for life has not lessened.

  For the first time since I have come to live in the forest, I wonder what has happened to the place where I used to live. Brother Pedr must long since have died, but another might have taken his place. Or mine.

  I decide to go and have a look. It is a long time since I saw one of my own kind.

  There is a little hamlet now by the river, with my church rebuilt in the place where it used to be, and a stone cross beside it.

  A group of women are busy by the river, some washing clothes in the water while others wring out the heavy wet bundles and others still spread them out to dry over bushes and on the short, hard grass to the left and right of them. Children herd goats and pigs and geese on the Green.

  I go into the church. I have missed it.

  A girl is kneeling in front of the cross on the altar, just in the place where I used to kneel. How I envy her her life.

  She is praying silently. Then she looks up and for a wonderful moment I think she can see me. Has she heard me? Seen me? Felt my presence?

  Am I a ghost now?

  She is crying. ‘Help me please, Father. In the name of Saint Tydfil... ’ It seems I have become a saint in my absence.

  ‘I wish I could help you,’ I say.

  She is turning her head, as if she has heard a sound and does not know where it might have come from.

  ‘Tell me,’ I say, speaking slowly and clearly, as though that could make her hear me. ‘Tell me.’

  Words and tears spill out of her. She is an orphan and a servant to anyone who needs work done and will give her food and a place to sleep in exchange. Her name is You little slut there, but she likes to call herself Morfudd. She has just spent a week looking after the house and children of Mair who had her eighth lying-in, and now she has been accused of stealing Mair’s good sewing needle.

  ‘I didn’t take it, as God is my witness!’ she says, although she can hardly speak for being convulsed with sobs. ‘I did not, I did not, but they don’t believe me, they’re going to take me before the court, and Mair says I’m going to have my th- thieving hand cut off!’ She is terribly frightened. I think if she had taken the needle, she would not still be here.

  ‘I wish I could help you,’ I say again, and I stroke her bent head and say her name, ‘Morfudd, Morfudd,’ to let her know that to me at least, she is not a slut.

  As she becomes a little calmer, I put my lips to her ear and whisper, ‘I will help you.’ She crosses herself and says the Lord’s Prayer. Then she looks around to make sure that nobody sees her, and kisses the crude little wooden doll to the side of the altar that is supposed to be me although I never had long golden hair in my life.

  When she slips out of the church, I follow. We go to a house on the other side of the Green. Morfudd creeps in on tiptoes, clearly hoping not to be noticed.

  From a bed in the corner a woman props herself up on her elbows and begins to scream at her. Morfudd does not try to defend herself, she merely stands, shoulders sagging, and waits until it is over. This infuriates the woman even more. She scrabbles around on the floor near her and throws something. The pisspot, as it happens. Several small children begin to wail. Chickens scatter in alarm. The straw wall drips.

  ‘Out!’ yells Mair. ‘Out, you daughter of sin, you ungrateful harlot!’

  Morfudd flees.

  I advance upon the woman on the bed. ‘How dare you,’ I say. ‘The wrath of God upon you! Have you no heart? What is a needle but dead metal... ’

  She rises and marches through me. She does not see me; she has not heard one word I said. She goes to a corner of the house, impatiently chases away a scratching chicken, and digs in the straw. Something glints in the thin sunlight that comes in through a chink in the wall.

  A needle.

  Mair coos over it, laughs, and puts it away again carefully. She straightens up.

  ‘Slut,’ she says in the direction of the door through which Morfudd has run. And spits on the floor.

  I spend all afternoon jumping into her path and telling her what a sin she is committing in treating poor Morfudd like this, lying and telling falsehoods. But she does not see or hear me at all. To her, I am not even a ghost.

  As evening comes, I want nothing so much as to return to my forest, to the quiet, the absence of human voices, human greed, human malice. I am tired of my own kind.

  I start to leave, to go back to the trees, but as I pass my church I remember Morfudd there this morning, praying to God in my name, sobbing with fear and despair.

  I will try one more thing. I go back to Mair’s house and I sit down in a corner with the chickens and the ducks.

  I ask them to help me. Together, we hatch out a plan.

  As a couple of Mair’s neighbours come to see her and the newborn later on, the fowl show an unusual interest in this one particular corner. They scratch and scrabble and finally set up a noisy chorus of cackling and quacking. The women come to look, and are confronted with the sight of one hen with the missing needle in her beak, while another flutters to sit on Mair’s bed and shouts ­– with a little help from me – ‘She took it, she hid it! She took it, she hid it!’

  The Day the Chickens Spoke in Tongues will be remembered in the village for generations. Morfudd keeps both her hands. She stays in the village for a few months more – visiting the church every day – then she decides that she wants to see the world. So she goes to the market town across the hill, half a day’s walk away. She walks right across the hill, past the gibbet outside the town wall, through the open gate and into the town that is full to bursting with people: more than she has ever seen in her life. It is a large town and she is frightened; there are cripples and beggars at every corner and they chase her away; they do not want her for compet
ition. So Morfudd knocks on doors, asking for work.

  After the first week, she is ready to give up and go back.

  At the end of the second, she has a post: a woodcarver requires a servant in his household and takes her on.

  When some years later his wife dies, Master Mihangel marries his maid-of-all-work, causing no little stir. But he doesn’t care, and neither does Morfudd. She makes a good wife and help-meet who quickly learns Mihangel’s craft from him. After his death, she keeps the shop open, just like her friend Heledd, the apothecary’s wife, had done some years previously, after her husband died. She becomes Mistress Morfudd, the woodcarver.

  One day, she is asked to supply a saint’s statue for a new church they’re building in her home village. The priest wants a Martyred Tydfil with pink cheeks and golden hair and a lot of arrows sticking out of her.

  But Mistress Morfudd makes a different statue: a short woman with dark hair and a smile on her lips.

  She walks across the mountains and puts it up in the church herself; she tells people that she is making a pilgrimage. The new church is built of stone: much grander than my little hut ever was. Morfudd hesitates for a moment before crossing its threshold; then she enters slowly and puts the statue down. She looks around herself, uncertain.

  ‘I don’t know if you’re still here. I wanted to thank you.’

  I give her a kiss on the ear for an answer, and she smiles and kisses the statue back.

  For a time I live in my new church, inside Morfudd’s statue. I listen to people’s wishes and prayers and help where I can. Girls tell me about their troubles and ask for painless monthly bleedings, deliverance from an unwanted marriage, happiness in love. Some seek mercy from a mother who torments them with beatings or a father who uses them as he would a wife.