Magrit

by Lee Battersby

  She laid the cotton wrap on the concrete next to her, where the lee of two crossed headstones provided a shallow shelter from the rain. She lifted the baby from her lap, placed him in the middle, and tucked the wrap around him so that only his sleeping face was visible. Then she took up position on her tummy, and waited.

  Whatever touched his face first, she decided. That’s what his name would be. No. She changed her mind. The first two things. That way she’d have two different things to call him, and it would stop her confusing the baby with the original objects.

  The first two things to touch the baby’s face would give him his new name.

  And that’s how he came to be called Bugrat.

  THE SHAPE OF MAGRIT’S LIFE changed. Bugrat was a hungry baby, and where once she filled her day with games of Pitch Pebble and Fountain Splash, Tickle Rat and Headstone Hop, now she was constantly on the hunt for worms to squish. At first it was fun, like a game of Rubbish Hunt but with only one type of rubbish to hunt. But Bugrat wanted feeding four or five or six times every day, and as many times again during the night. Soon the game stopped being a game: it took her away from her own things, until all she ever did was feed the baby, clean him up and feed him again.

  And, oh my goodness, the poo! Master Puppet had been right about the poo. It seemed that the dawn brought the poo with it, because as soon as the light of the morning crested the surrounding buildings, Bugrat yawned, stretched until his face turned red with effort, and delivered a loud, squelching, squirty poo that came out and out and out as if it was never going to end.

  At first, Magrit hadn’t known what to do with it. She tried splashing Bugrat with water from a puddle, cooing and humming TV tunes in the hope that he would ignore the feel of icy water on his legs and bottom and concentrate on her not-at-all happy smile above him. He had not been fooled, and her efforts only made him cry harder. Then she had tried rubbing his bum with a torn pillowcase, but all that did was spread the poo over the baby and the pillowcase as well. In the end, she chose a font near the centre of the cemetery and used it as a bath, ignoring his squeals of displeasure until the whole unpleasant task was completed.

  When she was done she had wrapped him up, hugged him against her bony chest until he fell asleep, and then spent an unpleasant hour scooping the mucky water onto the grass below. The font would refill the next time there was rain. But she would never again use it for drinking water. She had wrinkled her mouth in disgust and stood back, counting the fonts around her. As long as the baby only pooed twice a day, she had calculated, and it rained about once a week, things might be okay.

  “I told you,” said a leathery voice, from up where Master Puppet sat. “I warned you.”

  This time, Magrit had not spoken to him.

  Today, after her bottom-washing routine, Magrit carried the sleeping baby into the nearest vault, away from Master Puppet’s contemplation and his humourless chuckle. She sank down into a dry corner, placed Bugrat in her lap and rested her head against the stone sarcophagus inside. Magrit did not often cry. But she was tired. Very, very tired.

  She had not been so tired in a long time. Not since she had wandered through the grass one day, when the cemetery was much, much younger. Magrit tried never to think of that day, or the corner behind the chapel. There was something in that corner, something that made her mind buck and shy away. At the edge of her memory, she recalled feeling hot, like she was wearing a blanket inside her body, and her eyes being so heavy she could not keep them open. She remembered lying down on the cool ground, remembered closing her eyes and sleeping so long it felt like tens of years passed before she heard Master Puppet’s voice calling out within her mind. She woke to find the graveyard sunk in shadow. She had never gone back to that place. And she had never been so tired again, until now, holding Bugrat in her heavy arms.

  All she needed was a nap, she told herself. Just to close her eyes and nap. Trying to nap when the baby was sleeping was what she did now, as often as she could. An hour here, an hour there. She was beginning to lose the hang of sleeping properly.

  She wished she knew if this was how mothers felt, but every time she tried to remember her own mother, all she could recall was the sound of a worn-out voice always shouting at someone or other. She didn’t like the memory. It grated against her mind, like the caw of the crows she sometimes had to scare away to get to the freshest rubbish. She shifted against the stone and tightened her grip on Bugrat. She didn’t want to be a mummy with a crow voice. She would nap when she could, and always, always be happy.

  Being always happy was sometimes hard, especially when she had to do it for months on end, and even more especially when, in late autumn, Bugrat’s teeth started to come through, and all she could do was let him nip at her fingers to soothe his pain and not cry out when he drew blood. Or when he started to crawl and scurried away to some corner when she wasn’t looking and cut himself on a sharp-cornered bag of refuse.

  On those days she would glance down at her own scarred and ragged knees and sigh. She had survived similar escapades and grown to be almost ten, hadn’t she? It was all just part of growing up, she knew, all just part of claiming her world as his own.

  The tiredness never quite went away. It became a fact of life, as much as her bones and her skin and the scratch on her finger that never quite healed. And despite her constant tiredness and the sleepless nights and the endless fear of discovery and the worry that she was doing everything wrong, there were happy times.

  One night, nine months after his arrival, Magrit carried Bugrat into their favourite sleeping crypt, and snuggled him into a thick nest of rags she had assembled to ward off the cold of the winter just past. As he lay silent, with his big eyes watching her solemnly, she wrapped rags tighter and tighter around him, crooning a half-remembered rhyme from her long-ago life.

  “Snug as a Bugrat with a grub …”

  Suddenly, he wriggled his arms free and lunged towards her. Before she could react, he pressed his chubby hands into her cheeks and bumped his face against hers. His lips, wet and sloppy with the drool that always coated his chin, pressed against hers for a fleeting second. Then he lay down, and regarded her. Magrit stared at him for long seconds, then bit her lower lip and leaned down to kiss him.

  “I love you,” she said.

  She gazed into his eyes hopefully. She didn’t need him to say the words or even attempt to. A single noise would have been enough to fill her heart. But Bugrat stayed silent.

  “Just once? Say it once?” she said. In the end, all she could do was hold him as his eyes fluttered, and closed, and his soft breaths deepened and flattened into snoring.

  When she was sure he was asleep, she crept out of the crypt and stood beneath the dim outline of Master Puppet on his roof.

  “He kissed me.”

  Master Puppet said nothing.

  “He loves me.”

  “How nice for you.” His voice was neutral, showing no emotion, saying nothing beyond the flat, grey reality of his words. Magrit sighed, then hung her head, and gave up her tiny pretence of rebellion.

  “Why won’t he speak to me?”

  “Perhaps he has nothing to say to you.”

  Magrit bit down on the angry, hurtful words she wanted to scream.

  Eventually, in the calmest, most even voice she had ever used, she said, “You are supposed to be my friend. And you’ve never kissed me. Never even once. You’ve never given me a nuzzly hug, or wrapped your fingers around one of mine while you fell asleep. We’ve never played tickling games in the dark. You’ve never made me giggle and giggle and giggle. You’ve never done anything.”

  “Haven’t I?”

  Magrit’s fists were clenched so tight they hurt. She pinned them to the sides of her legs, so that they wouldn’t do anything she might regret. “Bugrat got so excited the first time I held a rat and let him stroke its fur, he weed himself. And the first time he held a spare crust of bread in his hand and let a raven peck it out, he squeezed my arm so
hard, I could see his finger marks on my skin for ages.”

  “Happy days.”

  “All you do.” Her legs were quivering, and Magrit locked her knees together. “That’s all you do. You sit there, above me. Making nasty comments. Criticising me. Sniping and putting me down and talking to me like I’m a silly girl who has to be told I’m stupid all the time. You don’t even … You’ve never …”

  She wanted to say, “You don’t love me. You’ve never loved me.” But she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Something inside her knew that if she did, she would cross some invisible line that she could never un-cross. For all his faults, she knew the charge of lovelessness wasn’t true. Master Puppet did love her. His love was real, but it was a cold, hard skeletal love.

  Now, while the sun shone weakly through the smog layer and bathed the graveyard in its thin grey radiance, he said nothing. When the cold of the night became too much like the cold of their anger at each other, she spun on her heel and stalked away, back to the crypt and her own nest of rags.

  It was only when she was safely burrowed beneath them, and had turned her face into the stone corner, that Master Puppet’s dry voice slithered down between the gaps in the stone towards her. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked. “What do you think is going to happen?”

  She did not answer him. Right now all she wanted to do was sleep. Master Puppet always had to be right, to get the last word in. His body was soaked in all the wisdom and knowledge the graveyard had absorbed over the centuries. Parts of him were so old Magrit could not count that high. He couldn’t stop acting like a grown-up even if he wanted to.

  “What’s going to happen when it’s not a baby any more? What’s going to happen when it grows up? What if it wants to leave? What will you do if it stops liking you? What will you do if it goes away?”

  “He’s not an it. He’s a he.”

  “Everything is an it, at one level or another. And what will you do when it realises you are just an it as well?”

  Even when she was ignoring him, Master Puppet’s questions knocked at her ears like unwelcome visitors, refusing to go away until she answered the door and let them in.

  EVER SINCE SHE FIRST ARRIVED in the cemetery, Magrit had named things that had no names, and discovered things that had lain undisturbed for centuries, to understand her world and growing to fit it like someone born to live there. There was a lot of fun to be had in Magrit’s cemetery, especially when the rain stopped and she could invent games with the puddles that pooled across the uneven concrete, jumping over and around, and most fun of all, into them. Then she could swish through the long grass and swipe up droplets from their tips, laughing as the spray tickled the inside of her wrists. She would hop from fallen headstone to headstone, or climb the walls of the crypts like a spider and pitch pebbles into the middle of the cemetery before counting how long it took her to race through the graves and find them. And the cemetery wrapped its cold, grey arms around her, and gave her what protection it could.

  All of these things were fun when Magrit was alone, but now that she had Bugrat to share them, they became more exciting than she had ever dreamed possible. Because he was too small to climb the crypt walls, she took to throwing pebbles at ground level and discovered a new game when she flung one into a vault and they crawled through the deep shadows within, racing to see who could find it first and win a big hug and kiss. Bugrat had not yet learned to walk, so rather than jump between headstones, she picked him up and swooshed him from stone to stone as if he was flying like the birds they sometimes saw between the roofs. And where she once attacked the rubbish bags in fierce abandon, flicking unwanted trash to either side in her search for food, now she carefully sorted through them, wary of hitting the crawling baby beside her.

  And because she was careful, and took time to examine the treasures she uncovered, instead of cramming down the first edible thing she chanced upon, she found tomato plants that had sprung from long-discarded seeds and now fruited against the walls, as well as potatoes and onions that budded and bloomed underneath the rotting compost of her discards. She ate fresh vegetables for the first time, and tears rolled down her cheeks for no reason she could understand except that everything tasted so firm and clean and fresh.

  If she was teaching Bugrat to walk and explore and discover the world around him, then he was teaching her patience and care in return.

  She exposed watermelons and pumpkins and capsicum, small and stunted and crawling with tiny flies, but to a girl who had only ever known the taste of rot and fungus and mould, they were a treasure without compare. Even Master Puppet smiled inside her head and said, “Well done, you clever girl,” when she showed him.

  “It was Bugrat,” she replied. “He showed me what I was missing.”

  “Did he just?”

  “Yes.” She turned to Bugrat. “Didn’t you?”

  But Bugrat said nothing, simply played with his fingers.

  Magrit’s smile faltered. “He never says anything.”

  “There will come a time,” Master Puppet replied, his voice flat and unemotional.

  “A time for what?”

  “A time to speak.”

  “When? When is he going to say something?”

  Master Puppet said no more, so Magrit put it from her mind, and returned her attentions to the boy.

  They passed their days in relative happiness, and gradually Master Puppet began to accept Bugrat into their lives as if he had always been there. He questioned Magrit less at night, and occasionally called the baby “Bugrat” instead of just “it”. When she caught him silently guarding Bugrat as he played alone in the grass in front of the chapel without making sarcastic comments to her about her parenting, she knew that what had once been a family of two people, and had then been a family of two different people, was now a family of three.

  ONE DAY, WHEN BUGRAT HAD lived with them for almost a year, and Magrit was almost ten, he crawled to her across the floor of the crypt, took a handful of her skirt, and pulled himself to his feet. He glanced up at Magrit with a look of joyful concentration, rocked his foot off the ground and took a single, solitary step before falling to his knees. Magrit scooped him up and ran outside.

  “Master Puppet! Master Puppet!”

  Master Puppet stared down at her from his perch. “What is it, child?”

  “Watch.” She placed Bugrat on the ground and stepped half-a-dozen paces back. “See what he just did.”

  Bugrat crawled across to her. He pulled himself up and took another small step.

  “Did you see?” Magrit asked. “Did you see him do it?”

  “I did,” Master Puppet said slowly. “You are going to have to keep a much closer eye on your young ward from now on.”

  “What do you mean?” Magrit asked.

  “The child lacks reason, and requires a physical guardian as well as a moral one. I can only provide one of those services.”

  Magrit wrinkled her nose. Master Puppet was using grown-up words again, trying to confuse her, to make her feel small and stupid so she would stop asking questions. But she had grown up, just a bit, looking after Bugrat. She could ask grown-up questions too.

  “To where do you reference?”

  Master Puppet sighed. “Refer,” he said. “And I refer to the place of overgrown grass and hidden secrets. You know to where I refer.”

  Magrit felt a cold caterpillar crawl up the back of her neck. She began to turn her head towards the corner of the cemetery behind the chapel.

  “He wouldn’t,” she whispered. “He wouldn’t.” But Master Puppet simply stared at Bugrat so that Magrit imagined she could see a thoughtful frown on his skull. She whirled around and picked Bugrat up. “He’s just jealous,” she whispered to him in an angry hiss as she stalked away. Away from the cold corner that clamoured after her attention. Away from the new noise that called at the edge of her hearing, like Magrit’s own voice but weak and wavering. Magrit knew she should have stopped and investigated, but
she was too angry at Master Puppet to really pay attention. She had to get away from him. “He can’t stand up, or crawl, much less walk. He never even climbed up to the top of the chapel. I did that; yes, I did.” She glanced up at the gaunt, empty figure, draped over the large stone cross at the front of the roof. “I clambered up that crumbly stone wall and dragged him from crack to crevice. I hung his arms over that cross. I held his head until he could look over the grounds by himself. He can’t do anything. And I can walk wherever I want to.”

  Something whispered in the back of her mind, a ghost of sound. Magrit ignored it, ignored the tiny corner behind the chapel that said, No, no, you can’t. You can go anywhere but here.

  She wandered deep into the cemetery, where she trampled down a patch of grass and spent the afternoon playing games with Bugrat. In the end, tired out by his exertions, he curled up on the soft grass and fell asleep. Magrit lay down beside him with her eyes closed and felt the breeze tickle her face. She loved to feel it tiptoeing around her, day or night, without ever once pausing to say hello. The wind had its own business to attend to, and rarely stopped to chat. She cupped her hands behind her head and chewed on a stalk of long grass and daydreamed.

  Sometimes, Magrit wondered what existed beyond the boundaries of her brick-clad universe. There had to be something; she knew that without being sure how she knew. She had seen birds flying across the broad circle of sky between buildings, and it stood to reason that they had to come from somewhere and were going somewhere else. Occasionally, something small and very far away left a streak of white across her vision as it passed. Clouds strolled aimlessly from behind roofs and disappeared just as aimlessly behind others. The walls of the tenements were an impassable barrier. She might steal glimpses into their living rooms through the gaps in their curtains, but she had no idea whether the people she saw inside were as trapped as her, or whether they could leave their tiny rooms and go into … well, she didn’t know what, really. More tiny rooms, perhaps, with different televisions showing programs with different theme tunes. Or maybe each room backed onto a cemetery of its own. Perhaps it was Magrit’s failing that she had never found the entrance to her room, with her television.