To the Devil - a Diva!

by Paul Magrs

  ‘You what?’ Katy thundered. I was secretly pleased she could get so worked up on the Figgises’ behalf.

  ‘Our new mammy has told us all about them two,’ Samantha said. She rolled her eyes. ‘All about them. She says you two are in the right place. In their midden. In all their muck.’

  That was when I found my own voice. ‘Their house is immaculate! You don’t know anything!’

  ‘Yeah,’ Katy jeered. ‘At least they didn’t have to cut off our hair. At least we weren’t infested.’

  Samantha lunged at Katy then and, the next thing we knew there was a fight on. It didn’t last long, because me and the ginger girl were there, momentarily allied, in pulling the two of them apart. The blonde girl had tight hold of Katy’s long hair. She was really scragging her. Katy had nothing to get a grip on, but she was lashing out with those deadly feet of hers. That little lane rang out with our shrieks.

  Then suddenly it was over and we were all panting, glaring at each other. All of us were shocked at the violence that had broken out. Our nettles were strewn all over the rutted road.

  ‘She told us! It’s true! Our new mammy said!’ Samantha started shrieking.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘That dwarf woman lets the devil suck her titties of a night! And that old man puts his thing in her bum! Everyone in town knows all about it! They’ve seen it! My mammy’s seen it happen! All of it’s true!’

  Katy was frozen. The language coming out of that girl had brought her to a standstill.

  Then the two of them were running away. Their voices came floating back, mocking and scared.

  ‘You two are in the right place! You’re in an evil midden! That’s where you live!’

  They were gone. Katy and I looked at each other and then at all our nettles lying everywhere. All our morning’s work. We didn’t know what to say.

  We were left feeling very odd. And resentful, too. We hated those two girls. Who were they to go shouting things out about our newfound adopted parents? We could shout back and we could drown out the gobshites. But something about what they had said stuck with us. We couldn’t stop thinking about it, or going over it at night when we whispered across the space between our beds. We were at that point where your imagination goes a bit funny. We were ripe for that. And the two of us kept seeing, in our minds’ eyes – lurid and childlike as they were – that picture of Michael Figgis putting his thing up Isla’s bum. And then Isla with a devil suckling at her breast. That was the kind of picture that stayed with you, that no amount of chocolate bars (just where did they get them from?) in their sunny dining room could dispel.

  We knew what devils were like. We knew what they looked like and all about them. Short, oily-skinned and lizardy things. Grinning imps and gimps of the perverse. We picked this up from the nightly readings that Uncle Michael treated us to. When we sat by candlelight with Isla and she clutched our hands in fright: that was the kind of stuff he read aloud in his husky voice. All about the demons, the good and bad ones, that lurked out there, beyond the strong protective charm of the homestead. He gave us their strange-sounding names in old-fashioned languages and made us repeat them like prayers. And we did so, in time with Isla’s high, smooth voice, because we didn’t want to upset them both. We knew we were guests in their tall skinny house and so we’d better do what they said. We learnt the names and habits of made-up beasts and monsters and we intoned them back in all innocence.

  Michael told us that these imps and gimps roamed the dark countryside, and all the hills and dales, and they were looking for souls such as ours. Stainless, the two of us, and apt for the taking. They could nip in like a wolf into the sheepfold. We were lucky to have the Figgises to warn us. To shoo the bad devils away. And we nodded, and agreed, and again we counted up our lucky stars.

  ‘They’re just crackers,’ is what Katy said, hissing across our dark bedroom. ‘Harmless and crackers.’ With her Irish connections, Katy knew all about superstitions. She thought the Figgises simple country people.

  ‘Do they ever come to town, these demons?’ she asked Uncle Michael one night, interrupting his tale-telling. He looked startled, silhouetted by the fire, this bulky old dog of a man. He had one of his treasured books open on his lap. His face creased as he stared at us, and I wanted to nudge Katy for breaking into his flow. But then he smiled gently, and looked glad that she was taking an interest.

  ‘Oh, they do,’ he said. ‘Of course they do. Cities are full of corruption and blasted hope. The people there came from the countryside and they went to work in those evil factories and mills and lived in those tiny, dirty houses. And when despair sets in, that’s when the demons seize their chance. The demons love all that muck and disaster. The narrowness of those lives. Where you’ve been living is full of that kind of evil. And just think about what is going on there now, in those great big powerful cities of the world. The bombs falling on them; the lights switched off; the wailing sirens in the night and whole houses collapsing in flames. It’s the very image of hell, girls. Of course there are demons in your cities.’

  He had to stop then. Shushed by Isla, who had started up in concern: her silver eyes flashing. Because I had burst into tears. Before I knew it I was sobbing and heaving: great jagged wails came gasping out of me and I threw myself into our tiny aunt’s arms. I was shouting something about my mam, my poor mam, left behind in that wicked city. And the bombs falling on her and I could see our whole street doused in fire like hell itself and I knew that she was dead.

  ‘You’ve scared the child, Michael,’ Isla said levelly. My face was buried in her neck, I was almost suffocated in her yards of crinkly hair. She gripped me hard and sounded furious with her brother, though she didn’t move from her dining room chair. Beside us, Katy was quite still. Fascinated and probably disgusted, too, with this show of emotion from me.

  ‘They need telling, Isla,’ was all Michael Figgis said. ‘They need warning. You know that. The young have to toughen up. They have a lot to face in the future.’

  His words hung over us. A ghastly benediction. Katy said later, much later, that it was as if Michael Figgis had known exactly what the future held for all of us. That he had read all about it in those strange old books of his and he’d absorbed it, horrified, line by line. As for now, though, he just got up, as I tried to regain my breath and composure in Isla’s tiny grip, and he pulled on his old coat and plucked up his walking stick. I heard Katy’s quick, indrawn gasp. She thought he was about to beat us. But he flung open the door into the alley and muttered that he was off to walk the fells. It was nearly midnight. But it was spring and the moon was bright on the hillsides.

  ‘You mustn’t mind him, my pets,’ Aunt Isla told us both. ‘He has his set ways. He believes in what he believes in and he always has. We both do. All he says and does is because he loves us all very much and we are under his care. He wants the best for us.’

  ‘But he really thinks demons and stuff are real. And the devil.’ This was Katy. Calmer than me. Answering back. Wanting to know more.

  ‘So does your great Roman church,’ said Aunt Isla. She talked to Katy almost like she was a grown-up, I noticed. In the Figgises’ eyes, it was me who was the child. They looked at Katy more keenly, more appraisingly, as if they both recognised something there. I didn’t know what. I was surprised they didn’t think her cheeky.

  ‘There’s no Bible up there,’ Katy said, nodding at the shelves that were crammed with all of Uncle Michael’s precious things. ‘There’s no good book.’

  ‘No,’ said Isla flatly. ‘There isn’t.’

  Then she shooed us off to bed and, exhausted, I must have slept straight away, because I never heard Uncle Michael come back from his walk.

  * * *

  I got the occasional letter from home. The postal service was shaky, of course, but I longed for those days when there would be a crumpled envelope on the hairy green tablecloth. Mam’s writing, large but unsure, spelling out my name and my new addres
s. It struck me she was writing the name of a house that she had never seen. She didn’t know the rooms that I lived in now, and that upset me, even as I hurriedly, excitedly, ripped open her letters.

  Her tone of writing to me was rather polite, quite formal, really. It was the tone of someone unused to writing, I suppose. I was coming on in leaps and bounds with my education under the Figgises’ roof and I’m ashamed to say that I read Mam’s letters and I frowned at the phrasing, the spelling, the grammar. That was me at nearly ten. Within a few years I’d look back on those letters and see, underneath all the awkwardness of the language, the writing that went big and then small as if in relation to her confidence in spelling out these lines, and I would see the love there. The determination to remind me where I came from and who my mam was. Bless her.

  I was glad she was still alive. That the bombs falling on Manchester hadn’t taken her away. That she was still living a quiet, single life in the house that now seemed to me like somewhere I knew from a dream. She listed the streets that had been ruined and the homes that were now just rubble. All the ones with bay windows were gone. That was where our arch-enemies lived. The ones who thought they were better than us. Those girls were homeless now. They’d have to live in the gutter. When I showed this letter to Katy she laughed like a drain.

  Nothing ever came from Katy’s mam. We’d hear that my mam had gone round to see her, but she never got much sense out of Mrs MacBride. She was sitting up in her bed and the sheets weren’t clean. The room smelt of gin and she had some mangy old cat sitting there with her, and the cat had sores all around its neck. Mam thought Katy’s mam was losing her way. You didn’t even see gentlemen going round there these days. Katy listened to the news but she kept her lip buttoned. Never made any comment at all.

  ‘Well my darling I must go now and get on with things,’ was how Mam always rounded off her letters. ‘I hope that you are being good and well-behaved for Mr and Mrs Figgis and that you are not showing your old mam up. You stick in with your lessons and learn all your three rs like I never did. You have got to get away from living in places like weve alway had to live in Sally. You arnt to be Sally from the back ally like in the song now arent you love (ha ha). Well enough from me now with everlasting love your mother.’

  ‘Your mam sounds a bit daft in these letters,’ Katy sneered. I’d walked in on her in our room one day. She had them all out on my bed and she’d been reading them, holding them up close to her face. I was really cross. She’d been in the special box where I kept them, all tied up. I’d written ‘private’ on the box and Katy had waited till I was busy – out on the mangle in the back yard – before diving and going through all my business. My arms were aching and the front of my dress was soaked with sudsy water and I just saw red. I flew at her and next thing we knew we were rolling about on the bare boards of the attic room. Screeching and spitting and yanking at each other’s hair.

  ‘You fucking little bitch!’ Katy kept shouting, right into my face as she wrenched my hair. ‘They’re only letters! They’re just letters!’

  It was the first time I’d ever fought back. I’d shocked her and I’d shocked myself. She’d bitten her tongue and, when she shouted, she was spitting blood all over my face and panting hot, frightened breaths at me. Soon we were covered in fluff off the floor and each other’s blood and sweat. We tired each other out scrapping and no one came running to see what the noise was. Eventually we lay apart, winded and still, trying to breathe.

  I said, ‘My mam isn’t daft.’

  Katy didn’t answer. She rolled over and spat blood on the floor. She looked at me murderously from under her fringe.

  ‘She’s been good to you, Katy. And she goes round to see your mam. Keeps an eye out for her.’

  Katy grunted. ‘People shouldn’t bother.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone through my things,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll go through what I want.’

  Then she stood up, smoothed down her dress, and was gone.

  Katy must have felt like she could say what she wanted about my mam and what she had written to me because we were both improving so much in our own schoolwork. Before we’d left Manchester I’d only been OK with my letters and my numbers and Katy could hardly hold a pencil. We’d been in a class of nearly fifty in our old school and so we hadn’t had much encouragement. That was just how it was. But here in Kendal, under the care of the Figgises, everything had changed. We were tutored at home by Isla herself, at the dining room table. We both had these exercise books with smooth creamy pages and thin blue lines drawn in. They looked like they came from the last war, but they were fresh, untouched inside. We wrote with proper pens, dipping them in a bottle of red ink.

  That’s what I remember most about those peaceful afternoons, learning our letters. The clink and dab of metal nibs in the bottle of ink. The crackle of the fire and that heady scent of woodsmoke. Isla being all teacherly and the sternest we ever saw her: she would hover at our shoulders and check what we were writing.

  She was a brilliant teacher. Though we were sure we were learning about things they never taught at proper school. This was more exciting stuff. We copied out her recipes for her. We made lists of names and bits of things in what I think was Latin or really old English. And then our tiny aunt would heft down some of Uncle Michael’s old books (With him not there! The idea thrilled us both) and she would make us copy out passages that left us baffled. Our favourite was a bestiary, which Isla said meant a book of beasts. We had to write down descriptions of these creatures and instructions on how to tame them, or to kill them or to banish them safely to another land. What I liked doing best was copying out the drawings of them in bloody red ink. I was painstaking. My beasts were the best. Much better than Katy’s, who had no patience.

  One day Katy asked Isla (we were both drawing a basilisk: some awful serpent thing with goggling eyes): ‘Where did you learn to be a teacher, Aunt Isla? Where did you go to school?’

  I looked up then from my own work to study our aunt. The nib dripped red blots on my page, but I didn’t notice that until I looked down again. For the moment I was transfixed – we were both transfixed – by the dreamy look in Isla’s eyes.

  ‘North of here,’ she said softly. ‘Not too far. It was an old school, not there anymore. A special place. Our parents wanted Michael and me to have the very best education.’

  ‘A posh school!’ Katy laughed. ‘Like where all the nobs go?’

  ‘Not posh,’ Isla smiled, fluffing out her hair. ‘No money was paid. But not everyone could go. Just certain people’s children. It was a sort of secret, really.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it was a bit out of the ordinary and people mightn’t have approved,’ she said. Katy and I exchanged a quick glance.

  ‘Did you have to live there, or did you come home each night?’

  ‘Oh,’ smiled Isla. ‘We both lived there all the years of our childhood. From five till we were sixteen.’

  We were shocked. ‘And you never saw your mam or dad?’

  ‘They came sometimes. The school would have a lovely open day twice a year. At the solstices. We would have a fete and a special celebration. It was wonderful.’

  We sat quietly, listening to the fire, staring at her.

  ‘There was acres of fields to play in. We lived in this huge big house. There were no set times or classes. We ran wild, really. Completely wild, and that was the idea, that we would learn most by doing exactly what we wanted. There was a big iron sign at the entrance, at the bottom of the drive, and that’s what it said in these huge letters, hammered out of iron: ‘Do What Thou Wilt Be The Whole of the Law.’ Aunt Isla looked at us both. ‘That’s a line from William Blake.’

  We knew who William Blake was, by now.

  ‘All schools should be like that,’ said Katy. ‘Doing what you want.’

  ‘People are scared of that,’ nodded Isla. ‘They think children should be controlled and told what to think. Michael says
that destroys their natural talent, all their natural desires. It makes everybody the same and the passion goes out of them.’

  We never really understood. How could we?

  ‘Michael says that, while we have the care of you two, we must think of it as a blessing, since we have no children of our own. We should teach you the ways we would have brought up our own. We have been lent you. And we have to do right by you.’

  ‘You have been very good to us,’ I said automatically.

  Aunt Isla suddenly looked very sad. Suddenly very much older. We were used to her being light, dancing about the place. ‘You will have to go home soon enough. We will lose you. You’ll be back in that city.’

  We went quiet at that. Any mention of home made us shiver hot and cold. Michael had slipped into the room behind us. For a big man he could really creep about.

  ‘So we have to make the best of the time,’ he said. ‘Train you up to live a proper life and teach you the ways while you’re still here. This is a rare chance you’ve got, girls.’

  I looked from him to Isla, to Katy and back again. There was something very strange in the air. It was just like we were waiting for bombs to fall and we sat there suspended. Exactly like in Mam’s letters, when she said you can hear that evil whistling from a long way away. And it gets closer and you pray it won’t hit. But she also said that it was worse if you heard nothing at all. That’s when the bombshell hit you out of the blue. That’s when you bought it and your number was up.

  Well, that dining room was silent just then. It was as if an obscure offer had been made. Michael’s eyes were wide and his mouth stayed open, a thread of saliva stretched between his lips. Aunt Isla was apprehensive – as, I realised suddenly, she often was in her brother’s presence. But Katy was looking very sure of herself, both arms resting on the table across her exercise book, her shoulders squared and resolute.

  ‘I want to learn,’ she said, nodding firmly. ‘I want to learn about it all.’