My brother shot me a day-bright grin from inside his snug. Pa stopped in the moon-shadow of the hazels.
‘Fermion,’ he said. ‘Boson tells me he was nesting.’
I wanted to say it was the wrong season for nesting and anyway he wasn’t a she-bird but it would sound like I didn’t care, or that I didn’t grasp that right here was trouble whittering at us from inside Pa’s hides.
The next day Moo sent me to fetch that Mrs Slevin who everybody calls Ma, and the old shrub-mutterer came straight when I asked her, like she’d been waiting. She hobbled almost sidewise along the bog-ways trailing her blind son like she was proud of him.
That Scully Slevin; his milky, rolling eyes gave me the heaves and he had an unearthly habit of knowing when you’re staring at them. Not that I stared. I didn’t even want to look in case it was catching. He might’ve looked right into your soul with those eyes and shot some Otherwise thing that could send you west.
‘Why did you send for them?’ I asked my mother.
Moo’s more chapel than stone-circle. Ma Slevin was only ever looking for folk to fill with her changelings and so forth. She always left me jumpy and with a headful of itches.
‘She knows the old cures for the old afflictions,’ Moo whispered as that hip-tilted crone stumped into our place like she owned it.
Mrs Slevin took Boson from his bed and stood him on a chair to look him over. ‘Well, my tantony, what have you been up to?’ she asked him.
Boson tapped at his temple and brow, and shook his finger at her. She went to grab the finger but her sharp movement quickened him. He leapt onto the table, then into the storehold and behind the woodpile. He snugged down in there like we couldn’t see him. We all followed and stood around.
‘Who are you looking for?’ he asked and turned the face of innocence to us.
Nobody said anything. A slyness greased his eyes. He stood up among the kindling.
‘He went that way,’ Boson told us, pointing out the door. Of a sudden he was up running, shrilling, making a dash for it. Pa rolled his eyes and went after him with Scully Slevin.
‘Well. He’s full of it, isn’t he?’ Ma said to us. ‘Is he making a home for some Dead-’un, do you think?’
Moo, over by the crushing stone, tutted as loud as she could and crossed herself. ‘We’re all no better than the dead ourselves, Mrs Slevin, and it’s best to remember it. Piles of lively bones, we are. Just corpses walking about.’
‘Well now, I think the dead might argue that, Mrs Quirk, seeing as how Themselves are always after living again. Does he hold converse with them, that you know?’
Moo turned the stone and started up grinding. ‘Of course he doesn’t.’ She crushed the fennel seeds in with the angelica, and leaned on the pestle mouthing the chapel-words. Ma Slevin came up quiet behind her.
‘Is he troubled by sulfurous wind, red flux, or sudden witches?’ she asked, quiet-like.
My mother clouted the stone with the pestle.
‘No,’ she snapped.
Mrs Slevin made a circle in the air with her hands and stepped through it.
‘Does he travel with the Others? Is he all straw and ale-breath in the morning? Is he drawn to the burrows? Does he—’
‘No, he doesn’t and he isn’t,’ said Moo. She shook her head and crossed herself. ‘We don’t hold with such things,’ she said.
‘How can you believe in one who’s faraway in heaven, Moirrey, when you don’t believe in the Others who are right here?’ Mrs Slevin said somewhat crossly of a sudden. Then she shrugged. ‘I mean, it only stands to reason.’
‘Just look to the cures,’ said Moo, seeing me listening by the hearth.
Ma made the motion of sewing her lips shut and took handfuls of bark-bundles to the pot.
‘I’ll shut my gob, then,’ she said to me in a low voice as she passed.
We could hear Pa and Scully trying to herd Boson back to the house. Pa was whistling like a plover, just right, and Scully was making the cow-sounds of nesting puffins on his fiddle. My brother’s feet padded around the back of the house, we heard a scuffle at the axe-block, and then they were back with him tucked craning under my father’s arm.
Pa set Boson back on the chair and Ma took his hand and looked deep into his eyes. He looked back.
‘Mrs Quirk, we need the full nine bits I think.’ She sucked air in through her gums. Boson grabbed her jaws and opened them. He listened to her breath moving like it was a prayer.
‘Maybe even the twenty-seven,’ she added.
‘I’ve nutmeg here to start,’ said Moo, busy at the stone.
‘You think it’s Miasmic?’ asked Mrs Slevin. She took Boson from the chair and stood him before her. She pushed her fingers hard and sudden into his middle. He started up laughing and so did she. They laughed right in each other’s faces, their mouths wide and red. She shouldn’t have been encouraging him, the old hedge-rat, and I told her so.
‘I think it’s more likely a moon-ague,’ she said to my mother. ‘Do you have peony to hand?’
Even as Moo and Ma muttered over the leaves and barks, as they split each bundle into threes and nines and twenty-sevens, even as they turned Boson in spirals in the rue-smoke, my brother’s face was drooping. He turned eyes of such trouble to me that I went and stood by him. He beckoned me closer. I leaned in. He studied my face then gripped my hair on both sides of my head and shook me.
‘Fermion!’ he shouted in my face. ‘Fer! Where are you?’
Everybody circled us.
‘I’m right here,’ I said, pulling my hair out of his fists. ‘Right here in your face, you big dollop.’
He pulled my face about like he was searching for me in my own skin.
‘Tell my sister,’ he whispered loudly, nodding heavily like his head held weighty matter. ‘She’ll know what to do.’
‘Tell her what?’ asked Moo.
Boson’s eyes rolled up until they were only whites. He lay down on the ground. His words rolled out of him like gravel, hard and fast.
‘Tell her if you roll back the sky there’s another sky,’ he said. ‘You roll back the sea and another comes. There are other countries inside-out, upside-down, and everywhere. Tell her things are, things are — eggsackly as they seeemmmm. Egggsackly.’ He smacked his ashy lips on the last words like they tasted good and we all took a small step back.
He came at us with more.
‘There are singing waters in the other countries, and talking mud. Birds swim under the water like fish, you know, and fish fly in the air. Birds come and talk right at you. You know,’ he said to me. ‘You know in the inward parts I’m right. You know it inside.’
‘I don’t know anything like that,’ I told him straight-up. ‘What would I be doing with inward parts that know things I don’t?’
He sat up and leaned blood-eyed and sweating against Moo’s big belly that had Gilpin in it. She crossed herself and started up with the Pater Mary One. Boson watched her and mouthed along with his arms wrapped around her middle.
‘Pater King five, six, seven and that’s all,’ he whispered to the new-made brother or sister in there. ‘That’s for the wicked ones. We’ve taken care of them haven’t we, Mammy?’ He’d taken to calling her the baby-name again.
There was silence in the snug.
‘Ooh, he’s strong in it, isn’t he?’ said Mrs Slevin, impressed. ‘He’ll be a great one when he’s grown. You must look to it that he doesn’t get caught up in the towns.’
‘They’ll have him one way or the other,’ said Scully Slevin, quiet-like. It was the only thing he said and I remembered it later.
The townies think there’s no life up here. They think it’s all toads and biting things, but they’re wrong. If any of them spent more than one afternoon in our spread of meadows and water they’d know. Instead, they sit nice and tidy below, warming themselves at our turf, and think of us as just types of mudskipper.
But inside the moaney’s deeps of moss, its life floats and slid
es all about you. It’s even tucked into the pleats of its airs and vapours. You can never tell where it is, all this life that’s making the bog’s song, but there’s no denying it’s there. The hum-din just about does your head in. And if you lie still you’ll meet all of that life, all of it, eventually.
If I hadn’t held the dragonflies, if I hadn’t found the gembugs or the slough-worms, I suppose I might find it all somewhat disgustful up here too. I might think nothing could live in all this slough and sod, or that those that do must twist themselves into unnatural shapes to manage it at all. If I hadn’t seen the eel-road wriggling through our bottom plot I might think the bog lifeless too.
But I have seen it, and more.
The moaney’s a living place all right.
And anyway, we live here, don’t we?
The sky up here starts at the ground and you can’t see the finish of it for the life in you. Just lying out under it can do a person three hundred and sixty sorts of good. You fade to a breath under it, uplifted in the songs of woodlark, either in choirs or singular. And the big blue spread of it is like something you could just reach out and touch, but at the same time it’s far, faraway; like another kind of home you can’t quite get to.
Sometimes it’s like a whole other bog is laid out up there. The clouds pile-up in bleachy dubs and meadows, all white and grey instead of the black and green of our bog. On good days Boson used to say he could see that other moaney clear as day in the skybog pools. He could see me and him, tiny and shining, looking up at our down-turned faces.
On bad days he wouldn’t look, saying he could see our twinned country down there turning over and over, and it made him sick.
It was all very well for Ma Slevin to say how strong my brother was in his moony affliction. It wasn’t her that had to keep my brother from towny bile and fists, or keep him from falling into pits — or just from sitting too long with the warblers and forgetting to eat food like a person. It was all very well for her to pat Moo on the back and say it was a bit of a shock at first, she knew, but that soon she’d be proud. All very well to say it wouldn’t surprise her if the other one went his way too.
I was the other one.
My mother looked at me like I was a scorpion that reminded her of somebody she knew.
That night I warned Boson. I tried to be kind. I warned him what folk would say if he tried to tell them about his birdangels.
‘It’s true some folk are frighted by what they can’t see for themselves,’ my brother said cheerily.
‘No, Bose.’ I sighed. ‘Some folk aren’t frighted by that. All folk are.’
‘Well I don’t see why they’d be frighted of me.’ He stood on one scrawny leg in the ashes of our hearth, and watched the roof like he was expecting some caller to come that way. He was tucked in some mazy corner of his mind. I felt in my waters that it wasn’t going to end well.
‘I’m nobody,’ he told me, contented as could be.
‘You’re not nobody. You’re Boson Quirk and my brother,’ I told him but he just swapped legs and smiled. He lifted his throat and shrilled so blade-sharp and carrying I thought they’d hear it down in the Cronks.
It was a maddened, beaked noise for a boy to make. He shifted from foot-to-foot, slow, lifting each knee belly-high. Then twice he lifted that hard-bent knee right to his chin before stepping back, placing his foot just-so, deft and delicate toe-first down into the dirt.
Three times he tested these moves of a crane, trembling on his twiggy shanks, and then as my heart sank he rose dancing.
Those who don’t talk to creatures, who don’t hear music in water and wind, don’t trust those who do. I told him the towns would search him for demons. I told him they’d think his blather ironclad proof that his soul-battle had been wholly lost. Nobody would believe his jaw-flap about angels. They’d just think he was puffing himself up like he thought himself God’s cosset when he was just muddy old Boson Quirk from the bog.
Or, I told him, they’d think he’d handed himself over bit-by-bit to the Old Enemy.
It’s not like I didn’t warn him.
My brother chuckled and whistled all that night after the Slevins went and I lay beside him, listening.
The house was crammed with Boson. The rest of us stretched in our beds like mists on a bough, or like pictures of people. Only he mattered.
The next morning came and before the others could wake from the long night he rolled over and grabbed my ears with both his hands that smelt like rue and dirt.
‘Tell my sister they don’t stay dead,’ mouthed my brother as close to my ear as he could get.
Chapter Four
Wake
ON HIS SECOND DAY DEAD and laid out, Moo spread the food and I was sent to fetch the Slevins. To fetch Scully Slevin really, as Pa was set on doing the whole thing right with a paid-for fiddler and strong brew, but Moo said in her now-fading sort of voice that we couldn’t invite Scully and cut Ma. So before dawn on the day of my brother’s wake I dragged myself along the Eastward, cursing all such mornings.
The dry summer had turned the moaney talkative. Everywhere the mire shrunk into itself and the vapours rose disgustful. It was like all the waters were earwigging about our goings-on behind my back as I went.
‘Kop!’ said the rising gases.
‘Puh-puh-puh,’ said a set of bubbles.
But the dawn rose pearly and the path was lightened by cool-morning sunshine, and I couldn’t stay cursing no matter how mizzled I felt. I was walking the crown of the world.
The sunlight was just a slim silver ring rising all around the bog rim. The still-dark ground and all its rush and wort glittered under a spread of dew-gem, each blade with its fat drop gleaming and each drop reflecting its neighbours until the whole world looked to be caught up in a silver net. Spidersilk between the grasses gleamed with dewdrops and I remembered that when I was a child I wanted to take them up and wear them just as they were.
Of a sudden the world was shining and not just because of the dew. I didn’t commonly remember anything about my childhood, and the memory of that girl and her dew-gems inspirited me. It was good to remember something from before.
‘Pip, pip, pip,’ said the bog.
Just over the lip of the moaney I stopped. There were the Slevins already, coming along the Skyward, Ma almost folded in half under her weight of baskets, and the boy ahead, fiddling. I didn’t know how they knew they were wanted. I didn’t know how Scully Slevin could walk so deft when he had as much sight as a stump. I didn’t know why Mrs Slevin was waving at me with such gusto, friend-like.
I lifted my hand in return, but not so’s you’d call it a wave.
Ma heaved herself up onto the shoulder of the bog.
‘Well, here we are,’ she said, in a muck of sweat and spittle. She gave me two of her baskets and turned to the green below. ‘Look at that. Beeee-oo-ti-ful,’ she sighed, one hand on her middle and the other fanning at her bunched-up face.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Scully stood by her now, rocking on his heels and smiling out into the sky like a real fool. I led the way back along the Eastward.
‘Seen the whale-mam, have you?’ Mrs Slevin asked me, out of nowhere. I shook my head. ‘Her calf’s beached itself round at Marrey Cove.’ I made no reply. Pa had said I had to fetch them, not that I had to be pleasant.
‘That’s what happens when they lose their pilot,’ she said, shuffling alongside me and gasping somewhat. I tried to get ahead so that I wouldn’t have to talk but that Scully kept up with me on his goat-feet as his mam dropped back on her old, hobbled ones. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes on the path so as to discourage him, but it didn’t work. He just strode out along the narrow path beside me.
How did he know which way to walk when he couldn’t see his way? It was unnatural. In my mind-eye I saw him in the boghole instead of Boson.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’re to see him off, then?’
I made an agreeing sort of noise and walked a little f
aster.
‘How’s your mother taking it?’ he asked.
I felt the clouds shift a little closer. I felt myself tilt to the sky. All I had to do was let myself go and I’d be there.
Faraway, nobody talked about the death of brothers.
Faraway, they never asked folk how they felt about it.
Faraway, they just knew.
‘She’s all right,’ I said.
I didn’t want to say how Moo hadn’t been right since we brought Boson home, or how Gilpin scurried about untended and rat-like. I didn’t want to say how my fussing mother had sunk into some boghole of her own, and was now keeping company only with moaney-fae. She was mobbed all about with them. You could feel them flapping at you when you sat by her, their black wings creasing the air and their beaks pecking at the sore places of her heart.
Scully Slevin nodded slowly. ‘And himself?’
‘All right,’ I said and that was mostly true.
My father was still my father, with no sign of clinging spirits about him. He was just sad, and then sometimes angry, but still working and eating and playing with Gilpin. It was just that he didn’t seem to know what to do with Moo. He and my mother sat each end of Boson, she watching the body and he watching her, and me watching them.
Why didn’t Pa just sort Moo out? He should’ve been telling her that she wasn’t the only one who sorrowed. That she wasn’t alone in feeling one of her eyes had been poked out. That she still had us to care for.
I was starting to think I would have to tell her myself.
Then Scully Slevin put his spidery hand on my shoulder. ‘And you, Fermion Quirk?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine,’ I told him shrugging his bony, white fingers off me.
‘Good,’ he said, all unnoticing of my disgust. ‘Because I wanted to say as how, in your brother, the affliction was a beautiful thing.’
I took a deep breath.
‘He was a special one,’ he added, as I thought he might.
I was pleased with my self-control.
Scully was quiet for a moment and picked at his bodgey old fiddle. He played a scrap of a cheerless sort of tune as we went and then he said, ‘Mam says he was like that other one.’
Ghostheart Page 3