But where will you find them?
In the sky?
Look up, and see the work of Giant Hands
About you
Around you
For you.
They weave clouds from tears
So cry for what cannot be:
Feed the clouds
Then find solace in the good, strong heart
that is waiting.
* * *
Why so many ill children and unrequited love stories? I confess, I do not know. It perplexes me. I harbour theories:
• The village is an experiment run by unscrupulous scientists who want to see if it is possible to regress human achievement back to the Stone Age; the mist of the mountains is actually a powerful gas that works by shrinking the frontal cortex.
• The village doesn’t exist at all, and this is an elaborate hoax being played upon me as part of a television programme that airs nightly to the amusement of millions of people. All the villagers are actors. Some are better at acting than others.
• The village has always been my home and everything before, including phones and nightclubs and bus services, has been created by my sick and troubled imagination. And I’m obsessed with sick children and unrequited love. In short, I’m mad.
I could pick one of my theories and stick to it but instead I like to roam free, siding with whichever one suits my mood. Right now, I’m mad. I’m enjoying the broadening complexities of the word. Also, there’s a lot of room within my job specification to play madness. The villagers seem to like it, too. It suits their image of me – the things I say and the way I am.
* * *
“Mine’s burning,” I tell her.
“That’s okay,” says the Enchantress. “The outside gets a bit black but the inside is still yummy. I can’t believe you never did this before.”
“It wasn’t that sort of childhood,” I say. I remove my stick from the flames and examine the charred, gooey mess of marshmallow. It has ash stuck to it.
“Seriously, it’s delicious,” she says. “Pop it.”
“I’m not popping it. It’s too hot to pop.”
A stone is flung out from the darkness; it smacks into the bonfire and dislodges the tent of sticks, which send up a plume of smoke and cinders, and a wave of heat. I put my hand to my face and feel my cheeks, awash with it.
“Just chill!” shouts the Enchantress, and from behind a large rock nearby I hear the Disenchantress mutter, and move off. She’ll do it again in a minute or two. She really cannot divorce herself from her job anymore. When we first began these meetups she would join in with the normal conversation and even say amusing things, droll things, every now and again. That hasn’t happened for at least a year.
I nibble the marshmallow and taste smoky, sweet strangeness. It’s not like any other taste. I’m not sure that I like it, but that doesn’t matter. “So, how’s your mother?”
“It won’t be long,” says the Enchantress, throwing back her head. “I can’t see the stars from down here. What a relief. Even when I was back in town, getting her moved to the hospice, I’d find myself outside at dusk talking to them. My girls. The stars, I mean. It’s just habit. It’s all become a habit.” I glance up too, and see the smoke rolling skywards, making its own mysterious, curling patterns before succumbing to dissipation. “When she really starts deteriorating, they’ll call me and I’ll try to get back in time to say goodbye. I’ve said it anyway, though, just to be sure.”
“Said what, sorry?”
“Goodbye.”
“How did you do that?” I ask her. I can’t imagine it – such a huge thing done at the wrong moment, as a failsafe, simply to make sure it had been done. A rehearsal, perhaps, that might have to be the stand-in for the real show. I never said goodbye to my own parents, not in that way. They’re still out there, ongoingly doing parental things; I’m sure of it.
The Enchantress shrugs. “It’s just a word.” What a strange thing for her, the weaver of words who soothes starlight, to say. I watch her pop her own marshmallow, as if the heat does not affect her, and then she skewers a new one on the end of her stick, taken from the plastic packet beside her. “You want another one?”
“Yeah, okay.”
She passes me a white one, and I eat it straight away. It’s better cold, I think: soft and dense, intact, soothing in my mouth.
“You’re not meant to do it like that,” she says. She gives me another one, and I spear it on my stick to make her happy.
“Thanks for sharing these,” I say. “I keep meaning to take a trip to town. It’s been ages.”
“What will you bring back? When you go?”
I try to picture what it is I most want.
A stone flies out again, and smashes into the fire. The Enchantress takes a marshmallow from the packet and throws it, with violent energy, into the darkness. There is a pause. Then the muffled voice of the Disenchantress floats forth.
“Thanks,” it says. “Tasty.”
“Where’s your family, anyway?” says the Enchantress, clearly proving her determination to switch the spotlight away from herself, whether I answer or not. But these are not the kind of questions I like.
“Oh, I don’t have a lot to do with them,” I say. “They don’t really understand me.”
“You don’t speak to them at all?”
“It’s fine. They’re farming folk, from the other side of town, beyond. They think I should still be there, milking the cows, and that’s not me, is it?”
Her attention is fixed on the fire: the slow settling of the embers after the disruption of the stones. “I don’t know if that’s you,” she says. She drops her stick, stands, and lifts her arms to the sky.
I see you, stars, little girls of light, I see you hiding, peeking out from between the fingers of Giant Hands, and you don’t know if we want you to adorn our lives with your bright, fair light because we are so busy down here, too busy to look up and tell you so. But you are wanted. You are loved, little dots, tiny twinkles. You are wanted, and you will be much missed if you do not come out tonight. So, find a way to slip through, we beg you. I am the mouthpiece of the village. I stand at the highest peak and wish I could hold you close, closer. You delight me, stars, with your ageless patterns and delicate beams; I would kiss you, if I could, and wrap myself in you. But I can’t. And that’s for the best, because you’re shy. I know it. I see the way you hide in the Hands. Come out, stars, come out. Slide through the giant’s grasp and keep us all in your glow tonight.
The Disenchantress mutters, close to my ear; how did she get so close? This time, for the first time, I hear every word.
You work so hard and nobody really appreciates it. Not one of them. What difference does it make? What difference does it all make, anyway? Pointless. Bloody pointless.
“I know,” says the Enchantress. “It’s just habit.” She sits down again, and we finish the marshmallows, and then start the slow climb back up the mountain to the roles we keep on playing.
* * *
“You are the Chantress?” says the frowning young woman. She falls into none of the usual categories. I don’t know what she wants, and what’s more, she’s caught me at a bad time: I’m fresh from washing my hair and am in my dressing gown. I don’t look the part and I don’t feel it. I shouldn’t have answered the door but it didn’t follow the usual pattern of three knocks, and I was curious. Perhaps it was someone else. A person from outside the village.
“If you’ll just wait, I’ll get changed and be with you.”
“No, please, I wish to speak with you, that’s all,” she says, so I have no choice but to open the door wide enough to admit her. She stands in my hut and looks around, as if searching for something other than the simple furnishings. “They’ve always said, my mother says, you’re from the town. Chosen.”
How stilted she sounds. Do any of the villagers have a sense of humour? I’ve yet to find it. “Yes, I was.”
“Didn’t you bring any of your own possessions with y
ou when you came to us?”
“Not really.” What things did I have? I think of the phone, of showing it to her, but I don’t like the way she’s making me feel. I’m being judged and showing her the phone would be an attempt to prove myself different. “Did you want a song?”
“What good would it do?”
“None.”
“Because there’s no such thing as the Giant Hands?”
“That’s right,” I tell her.
“Yes,” she muses. “That’s what mother told me you would say. You saved my life once, she thinks. It was when you first arrived. I was fifteen. I had a fever that wouldn’t break and you sang for me. Over me. But I don’t think it made a difference. I think I survived because I’m strong. Stronger than any imaginary hands, high above.”
Nothing about this is going the way it should. I haven’t moved from the door; it’s still open. “Listen, you go out and I’ll get dressed, and then when you knock again I’ll be ready to do this the proper way, okay?”
She doesn’t move. She says, “I’m leaving the village. I cannot be bound up in these old superstitions about stars and songs and stone-throwing. My mother made me come here, to see you, before I go.”
“Does she want me to sing a song that will make you change your mind?”
“Maybe.”
“Where will you go?”
“The cable car. Then the bus.”
“I have timetables,” I offer.
“I don’t need help.” She moves past me and out of the doorway, to stand in the grey morning light. No doubt it will rain later, but the air is clear, that much cannot be denied. Even if there is no sunshine, the air is clear and fresh and free. She will miss that, at some point, even if she doesn’t believe it now.
“I’ll sing you a song anyway,” I tell her. “That’s what you really want, isn’t it? Everyone does.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t sing to me. Your songs: they do work. But not in the way that you think.”
And she sings instead. She sings to me:
Why must you fight
Your reason for living?
You are the Chantress:
Your voice, your thoughts, your heart,
Your soul, have been poured into this life
By Giant Hands.
Do not look up to the stars:
They are not your domain.
Do not cast stones and threats upon those who need you.
Sing, Chantress, sing.
It is your gift, made for giving.
She has a good voice. It’s not as good as mine, but still, there’s something haunting to the melody.
“Goodbye,” she says, and sets off, on the rough path. I watch her go. I think about following her, catching her up and going to town together, to start afresh. But I’m not like her, not anymore.
I am the Chantress.
There’s nothing out there like it, and nothing could be as important. I wish I could make a joke of it, but I’ve run out of punchlines. I, and my fellow employees, have work to do here, for those that believe in us. You might say we are sisters. We are in the care of the Giant Hands.
BLESSINGS ERUPT
Part One
She asks me if she should have faith in her ability.
I want to answer her question. I would tell her it has no rules. It works just as well without the prayer and the singing. But there’s no point; I’ll never be given the opportunity to do it that way and neither will she. The process has become as important as the miracle she can perform.
So, I don’t teach. She is free to watch what I do, and she can make of it what she wants. That’s the deal I’ve struck.
“Believe in whatever you want.”
She looks doubtful. How beautiful she is, in her firm, unchanged skin. “But surely, if I believe in myself, it will work better.”
“What makes you think that?”
“It’s all in the mind, isn’t it?”
I shouldn’t speak to her at all. There are no words to be said that can’t be taken by her as instruction. She traps me into these patterns.
The room is cool. My scarf is itchy; it was a present from a grateful patient, knitted from a coarse plant-mix. My name has been embroidered into it. Hope. Or perhaps the patient did not even know it is my name. I’ve received many presents but this one is my favourite because I have a use for it. The rest belong to an age that has passed but I keep them anyway, in a box under my bed.
I am in my living-room hammock, looking out of the window at the new, vine-clad buildings and the adapted eco-cars, parked in a line along the street, brown as soil and fitted with shiny sun-charging roofs. Why are they so uniform in appearance, now? I’ve seen pictures of cars before the war, in many different colours and sizes. And why, come to think of it, are there always four wheels outside and a wheel inside, and the gauges and buttons and everything the same, when there was a chance we could have made something new, something different?
I know the accepted answer to this – it’s so anybody who remembers an old car can get in and drive an eco-car. If you’ve driven one, you’ve driven them all. It’s the best design for the whole world.
If I could drive, I would have a car made to accommodate my enormous form. It would not fit anyone else. The apex of good design should be how completely an object is made for its owner, not how easily it can be used by just anyone.
Despite my best intentions, I say, “It’s not all in the mind.”
I see our car pull up. It’s the usual design of course, and the back seat will barely be big enough for the two of us. I hope it’s not a long drive.
* * *
Past the living buildings in rich soil, the baby trees and the fecund eruptions, in the slow steady flow of traffic, we travel towards the Central Apartments.
I like the way the driver’s eyes flick to me in the mirror. He doesn’t stare. He takes a glance and then returns his attention to the road, calmly. He has the radio on the Good News Network which is saying they’re trialling another vaccine, and solar power broke records in our region, and there’s been more rainfall than expected: yes, this world is being put back together and we’re on an upward trajectory, all of us, together. Now here’s some light music.
A pop song, all about happy love stuff, comes on. My student hums along.
“How can you stand it?” I ask her. “It’s meaningless.”
“I prefer it to the way it used to be,” says the driver, and I realise he thinks I was speaking to him about the news broadcast. So, he’s old enough to remember the bad old days of constant doom and gloom. Funny, he looks younger. I don’t have a memory of this myself. I read about it, once, in a Red Gathering history book Stanislav gave to me. He’s given me many books over the years, feeding my interest in the past, in the way it used to work. I guzzled up that dysfunctional world greedily. It made sense to me.
Not only does the driver look young, he also looks familiar.
“Did I treat you?” I ask him.
He nods. I see the smooth brown skin crease at the back of his neck, just below the line of his hair, and in the mirror his eyes move to mine and hold my gaze, this time. “You did. Thank you.”
“Where was the growth?”
“On the left side of my chest. You smoothed it all out. I haven’t aged a day since. It was a miracle.”
“I’m glad you’re well,” I tell him. “But it was no miracle. How much did you pay?”
“Twenty years of service.”
“Did that seem like a good deal to you?”
His gaze is firmly back on the road as we crawl along it, keeping pace with the endless traffic. “It did,” he says. “I’d pay it again.”
The student coughs, then says, “Turn it up, please.” So we spend the rest of the journey listening to happy songs.
* * *
We arrive at one of the new buildings, tall and straight, fresh from construction. The tenants will have sold years of their lives for one of these apartments. I wonder h
ow they can afford my services as well?
The driver says he’s been told to wait for us. I shift myself from the back seat and lumber indoors, with the student following after. The sliding glass plates admit us to a reception area with mosaic flooring, showing a sun with yellow triangular tiles intersecting with crimson squares that bear the mark of the Red Gathering. At the centre of the sun a tree has been planted, and a sign beneath it reads, in seven languages:
Feel free to breathe on me.
The student stops and speaks to the leaves on a nearby branch. I don’t hear what she says.
Stanislav is waiting at the lifts for us. He is wearing a hemp weave kaftan and has grown his beard even longer, with more knotted multicoloured shells within it. He bows to me, says, “Hope, my dear.”
“Oh piss off,” I tell him. It makes me feel better. He is a grand old man, now, and used to my ways. He doesn’t react. I think he wishes I would give him a reason to smile at me, like he used to, when I called him my father.
We all get in the lift and ride to a floor; I don’t register which one. A woman waits for us. She gasps at the sight of me and, for a moment, I think she might kneel, but Stanislav tells her smoothly to lead the way, and she takes me through to a spacious living room with a view that bemuses me. I look at the city laid out, the ruins commencing regrowth, the plants providing forms for so many projects built on plastic bones; the trees and buildings are fusing.
The woman, small and subservient, busies herself around us. She lowers sets of blinds over that view, one by one, until we are in shadowy semi-darkness. Then she shifts back the two sofas and the coffee table to make a space on the rug, which is woven through with living thread that is growing tiny white flowers. As she shifts the rug to one side, the flowers release a tender, gentle scent into the room.
“How much?” I ask her. “The rug?”
She doesn’t reply. Perhaps she doesn’t understand me, or perhaps she doesn’t want to say. I’m guessing the price was about three months of her life.
The door to another room in darkness is opened, and she steps aside as the patient emerges with a pained shuffle, side-stepping, crabbing into the room. I feel my hunger building as I sense the presence of his disease. His body is bent to one side in an arc that starts with his knees and continues to his neck. All of him is drawn towards the gravity of his tumour, which erupts from his left hip and is not so big, not anywhere near the size of the first ones I did. Perhaps people are more aware of their options nowadays. They don’t wait and hope it’s something else until it’s nearly eaten them alive. Or perhaps the disease is on the wane.
From the Neck Up and Other Stories Page 15