by Penny Thomas
This is what I needed to do! No written words, bossy and inadequate, coming between me and reality. Not even spoken words. Just sound, pure. I try to copy the flickering of the fire and the water, producing them from somewhere unused and unaccustomed in my throat – ahhs and kkks, striking the vowels and consonants against each other like flint. Sparking meaning. I am the instrument, and I am the noise itself. I sing and howl, experimenting with sound, until the dusk falls and my voice breaks. Then I cram the food into my mouth without even bothering to heat it. I fall asleep on the bed, bloated and fully clothed.
All night, for every second of my sleep, the man waits on the edge of the forest. He knows how I have changed. He opens his mouth to speak, but I hear nothing, and he is too far for me to see his lips move. Though I run to the door as soon as I wake, run to the gate, to the start of the woods, he is not there. And this time, I was so sure he would be.
I eat my breakfast straight from the sentry box where it has been left. The Thermos is there, with its orange tartan pattern, its logo on the side. Incensed anew by the writing, the intrusion of the letters, I take a stone from the wall and I scratch at the paint until the word is gone, just shining metal underneath. The coffee inside is still hot, thick with creamy milk. I pour it hungrily into my mouth, throw the empty flask back into the shed. The rest of the day’s food is there – a pie, some apples, a ginger cake – and I eat it all where I stand, cramming and swallowing, barely chewing, licking the greaseproof paper clean.
The crows hardly move as I arrive at the cairn, just a desultory flap to acknowledge my arrival. They have taken yesterday’s bread. Stumbling in the long grass I fall to my knees, short of the chambers, and it seems right to be on the ground. I crawl towards them. The grass is loud in my ears. I hear the song of the ants, the hum of the earthworms – the cold, moist current that moves their muscle, rasping their clammy bodies through the mud. I do not know how I have ignored these sounds for so long, wasted my time with words. I hoot and moan, and the noise resonates in me like a bell. I put my head into each chamber, going frantically from one to the next, trying to find the perfect pitch, the perfect vibration.
I don’t know how long I stay there, making that sound, open-mouthed, trying to hone it. I just feel the cooling shawl of dusk, and know I have to get back to the house now before the dark, the cold. Movement is effort, heavy, like running in a dream. But I get home, I find my bed, dive into it and lie still to sleep.
Suddenly I realise I have to try to stay awake. If I can stay awake, I can meet the man. I have to tell him about this, to show him. My song. He has been waiting for me to find it. He has been waiting in the night, and I’ve been looking for him in the day.
Drowsy, I go to the tap and drink glass after glass of cold water, filling my stomach, trying to shock myself awake. I haven’t eaten since my binge this morning, and I think: God, so much food! I hadn’t realised it. Mrs Quinn has been feeding me like a hungry farmboy, like a pregnant sow. Bowls of potatoes, slick with butter; a loaf to myself, a whole cake. Why did I eat it? I never eat this much. I slide to the floor, exhausted with my own weight. The darkness makes me nod, my head going down to my chest like a bird’s. I jerk it up again. And again.
And I sleep…
A noise wakes me. I’m sore from lying on the floor, it’s still dark outside, I can’t see. Then there’s another bang, short, truncated. A piece of glass from the old church window flies into the room. Someone is throwing stones at it, someone is outside.
The man. He is at the gate. I think I will reach him there, my bare feet flying over the cold grass, but when I get to it, he is gone – no, there, in the woods. I run after him, but he stays always the same distance ahead of me, just at the corners, then gone, till I see him again through the trees.
The clearing is lit with a harvest moon, a singing moon some call it, fat and low and red. He stops by the cairn now, and I see how tall he is, but so thin, so wretchedly emaciated that it doesn’t matter that he is naked. I step closer. There is no smell from him, no warmth, none of the normal elecricity of life. I reach out to touch him, and he shakes his head, no, puts his hand to his mouth. To reassure him, I open my own mouth and the sound that comes out is purer than ever, as clean and clear as the moonlight itself. He steps back, shakes his head, tries to cover his ears; then he holds out his arm to me, and shows me lines carved there, fresh and bleeding – rough, painful wounds that he has scratched into himself. I resist, I don’t want to read, no speech, no language. But at last I have to look, and it takes my mind a moment to arrange the letters into the first word I have seen in days.
RUN
And he opens his mouth, and I see the torn scrap of muscle where his tongue used to be. My song ends like a stab and I turn to run and Mrs Quinn is there with us, standing at the head of the cairn. No farmer’s wife now, she is dressed in nature – around her neck, a string of strange fruits, like apricots or figs or mushrooms, but shrivelled and congealed with their own dark juice…
I have been running all night, but I am no closer to the cottage. I can get nearly to the gate, but this must be a dream, because the dawn comes up and still I run, and still I am no closer. The birds sing, and then they fall silent. I see Mrs Quinn come out of the cottage, a young man behind her. He waves her goodbye, and when she has gone he looks inside the sentry box, takes out a basket, a tartan flask inside it, food. I scream for him to stop, but no sound comes from the wound of my mouth.
He turns and walks back into the house. I will have to wait for night to fall.
Mad Maisy Sad
Suzy Ceulan Hughes
I have stayed too long in this place and it is full of ghosts. They jostle me on the pavement and in the narrow aisles of the village shop.
Sometimes I walk in there and know that Cai is around the corner, picking through the carrots and the apples. He will buy only two or three of each, leaving the rest marked with his scent. The rancid smell of unwashed hair and clothes, old cooking fat and body odour. The scent of loneliness and neglect.. How long has he been dead now…?
I put the bag of sugar, the apples – I hope they’re not the ones Cai has touched, and I shall wash them when I get home, just in case – and the Western Mail on the counter.
‘But Maisy,’ says Gwen the Shop. ‘That’s the third bag of sugar you’ve bought today. Are you sure you want so much?’
‘No, no,’ I say. ‘You must be mistaken. I just went to make myself a cup of tea and realised I’d forgotten the sugar when I came in earlier, and the newspaper and apples, too.’
‘Ah well,’ she says. ‘If you’re sure.’
And she taps the items into the till and packs them in my bag for me.
She’s quite right, of course, that I have bought three bags of sugar today. But this time I’m being forgetful with intent. The sloes are ripe and ready for gin-making, but I hardly need the whole village to know I like a tipple. I’ve saved the bottles carefully from last year, and I bought the gin some weeks ago, on my last trip into town. There’s enough gossiping goes on in this village without giving them cause for it. And I should know…
See dear Mari walking up the street there? She’s round and grey now, her breasts sagging to her belly and her hair wisping over her ears. Her knees have gone and she walks with sticks, slowly. Ah, but she was a one. She had true blonde curls well into her forties, and fine breasts whose nipples pointed to the sky. Our men use to vie with each other for which of us had the best bottom in the village. All gone now, of course, the laughing men and the pert buttocks.
Mari thought life fun, and there were those who hated her for it. Time she grew up and acted her age, they’d say. Mutton dressed up as lamb. And they would purse their lips so tight they looked as though they were sucking wasps.
‘I’d like a stamp as well,’ I say, ‘for my son’s birthday card. It’s his birthday on Thursday, you see, though I can’t for the life of me remember how old he is.’
‘But Maisy,’ says Gwen, ‘you
r son is dead. Have you forgotten that Peter died?’
I stare at her. I had forgotten, this morning, when I was writing the card: ‘To dear Peter, with love always and forever from your mother.’ But now she says it, I know she’s right. I look down at the envelope lying on the counter, and for a moment fail to recognise the cramped and shaken handwriting that is now mine. I wonder who is living at the address that once was his. What will they do with this card addressed to a man they’ve perhaps never heard of? He would be grey and almost old himself now, I think. If he hadn’t died.
I look out of the window and see that Mari has stopped for a breather, resting those once-pert buttocks against Evan’s low garden wall. I suddenly remember that Peter had a bit of a thing for Mari when he was a boy. She was beautiful, and kind as well. A teenager’s perfect pin-up. What would he say if he could see her now I wonder? I know straight away that he’d be sad. It’s Mari who’s the ghost, I think, not Peter. Does that make me a ghost, too?
Gwen the Shop is waiting. I glance down at the envelope and then lift my head to look at her again, making sure my chin is tilted slightly upwards. I still have a fine nose to look down, if that’s the way they want to see it.
‘I should like a first-class stamp, if you please,’ I say.
As I walk back down the street, I engage in light conversation with other ghosts. They’re surprised, because usually I ignore them, brush aside their vacuous greetings. But today I am sociability itself. I do not want to think of Peter being dead. It isn’t right, for a mother to outlive her son. It’s nature all gone wrong.
‘Auntie Maisy, are you all right?’
She’s a mere slip of a thing. I have not the faintest idea who she is. For a moment I am confused. I seek some resemblance in her face.
‘I do not have a niece,’ I say.
And then I remember. Of course, this is how it is. The young people call everyone Auntie and Uncle. She is somebody else’s daughter or granddaughter or niece. Not mine. I refuse to remember that my lovely niece is also dead, even longer dead than Peter. How can it be? It isn’t right.
You were my golden ones, the two of you. Let us leap the cracks between the paving stones, so the crocodiles can’t nip our toes. Let us hold hands and dance along the twilight promenade, the adults smiling at our antics. Let us feel the still-warm sand beneath our feet as we dodge the waves.
See the dolphins leaping. See the starlings swoop beneath the pier. See the moon, hanging huge and yellow in the navy sky.
With you, I became a child again. How many years ago? You’ve both been gone so long now. Yet your presence here is stronger than mine, though I am still alive.
‘I’m sorry, Maisy,’ says the girl.
She is not at all abashed. Young people are so confident these days.
‘I thought you were crying and wondered if you were all right.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘It’s this wretched wind getting in my eyes.’
I take my handkerchief from my pocket and wipe my cheeks, decorously, I think. She smiles at me. There is no wind, not the slightest hint of it.
‘Would you like me to walk home with you?’ she says. ‘I could carry your bag, if you like.’
‘That’s very kind,’ I say. ‘But there’s no need, really.’
When I reach the corner, though, the bag feels suddenly heavy in my hand. The lights are glowing in the window of the pub and I think I’ll pop in, just for a while, to break my journey and see who’s there.
It’s difficult to reach the bar through the throng of ghosts in their familiar places. I don’t want to be moithering Llew. Such a quiet and gentle man, who would yield his place without a word, even if I were unwittingly stepping on his toes. His elbows are on the bar, his pint in front of him. Yes, Llew was a gentleman. Not like Eddie, sitting on the tall stool in the corner, looking for all the world like a leprechaun. More mischief than malice, that one, but with the foulest mouth. Can’t be worrying too much about him. He’ll swear at me however wide a berth I give him. ‘Stay your tongue, Eddie, there’s a lady present.’ ‘Well, Duw Duw, bloody Saes…’ You’d have thought he was Welsh himself, but there, that’s another story.
When I’ve navigated the invisible presences at the bar, there will be the problem of where to sit. Never, never on the end of the settle at the corner of the bar opposite Eddie. For that was Dewi’s place. And his is not a lap I’d want to be sitting on. Dear Dewi, a dewdrop forever hanging from the end of his spiky nose and occasionally falling – plip, plop – into the tepid beer he’s been hugging to him for the past hour. Poor dab.
‘I’d like a sherry,’ I say. ‘A large measure of Harvey’s Bristol Cream poured over ice into a tall, slim glass. I like a sherry at this time of year.’
I drink sherry only at Christmas. It goes with mince pies and pickled walnuts and other things you wouldn’t think of having at any other time.
Oddly, the sherry is before me in a trice, as though the barman knew already what I should order, even though I’m making an exception and it isn’t Christmas at all.
I thank him and carry my glass carefully towards the table in the bay window. I weave my way politely through the ghosts. They stand aside for me today, though they don’t always. It depends who’s there, of course. There’s a space on the bench seat under the window, right in the middle. It’s my favourite place. The ghosts tuck in their feet and swing their knees aside to let me in.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Thank you so much. I’m very grateful.’
They raise their glasses to me in a silent toast. I raise mine in return. It feels good to have their quiet company around me, to know they are all still here. I take a sip of sherry, and my heart feels warm and full.
‘Happy Christmas, Maisy,’ the barman calls to me across the empty room.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘And the same to you.’
I know it is September, but I wouldn’t wish to disillusion him.
A Soldier’s Tale
Jacqueline Harrett
I stand alone by the railway track. This place is desolate, hushed as a deaf man’s world. Even the birds have deserted. This is the end of the line but no trains come here now. The tracks are rusted, dirty brown where once they gleamed. No engines screech through the mist. No swirl of grey smoke into the pewter skies. That was in the beginning, but no longer. Days, weeks, years have passed. I have lost track of time. It no longer matters. Things were different then. I was a soldier of the Reich and this is my tale.
I joined up when I was sixteen. I was tall for my age so I lied and no-one checked or questioned too closely. It was all for the Fatherland. I was proud to wear my uniform and ignored my mother’s tears and father’s silence when I left. My little sister wept and asked who would help her to dig the potatoes or milk the cow and I laughed, full of the joy of going off to war. This was my freedom. I gave no thought to their grief only the glory to come. I was strong; I could run fast and shoot a rifle better than many of my friends. I was sure I would be posted to the front line and itched for the splendour of war. How foolish were those boyhood dreams. No glory for me. Instead I was sent here to be a guard at the camp.
‘Easy job,’ the commandant bellowed. ‘They show any sign of insolence or disobedience then shoot. Dirty Jews.’ He spat on the floor.
He was right. It was easy, at first. Trains rattled into the station, belched steam and disgorged their cargo. Men, women and children tumbled out of carriages, bewildered, blinking in the light. Silent. With them came the smell – fetid and ripe with fear. I ignored it all. I held my chin high and my gun higher – proud to be serving the Fatherland. They shuffled from the railway track into the camp where we took everything from them. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t see them as people but as animals, worse than animals. It was, after all, for the glory of the Fatherland.
Then, the girl came. Usually the Jews kept their eyes averted but she was different. She stepped from the train, filthy and ragged; her yellow star displayed clea
rly, her long brown hair loose around her shoulders. She stopped and stared at me until, aware of her scrutiny, I looked back. Her gaze was disdainful. She inspected me from head to toe and then back again, as if she was superior. She reminded me of my little sister. Then she stared right into my eyes. I recognised something in that look and felt shame creeping into my thoughts. I blushed, much to my annoyance. This was a war but were these creatures the enemy? How did killing them serve the Fatherland? For the first time I questioned the purpose of my task but I was a soldier, trained to obey. I did not dare to falter or question aloud. My thoughts had to be kept secret, locked deep inside my head. I dared not acknowledge these doubts, even to myself. I was a soldier of the Reich but I could not avert my eyes from hers.
‘Magda,’ someone hissed and she turned her head and moved to join the others. The spell was broken. She was herded off to the women’s compound although she was only a child, eleven or twelve perhaps.
After that Magda seemed to be everywhere I looked. Her hair was cut off and she wore the striped pyjamas of the camp but I would have known her anywhere. Her eyes seemed to follow me, reproaching, filling me with guilt. She was the same age as my little sister. She was hungry. They were all hungry. I started to think about what we were doing to these innocents. I could see my little sister’s face and wondered how she would feel in this place.
We had supplies. We were fed and given rations, meagre enough but more than the Jews who faded into skeletons in front of us. Many died before they reached the gas chambers. I shall never know why Magda had an effect on me. It felt unnatural. Her eyes searched my innermost thoughts and formed some strange telepathy. It was unreal and made me restless in my sleep, sometimes waking in a sweat imagining Magda pointing at me. As the days went on I could almost feel her hunger so when I thought no one was watching I would drop some bread or other scraps near her. Magda never acknowledged the food and I was careful not to say anything in case someone spotted me. We never spoke.