Water Shall Refuse Them

by Lucie McKnight Hardy

  dead ink

  Copyright © Lucie McKnight Hardy 2019

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Lucie McKnight Hardy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Dead Ink, an imprint of Cinder House Publishing Limited.

  ISBN 978-1-911585-56-5

  ePub ISBN 978-1-911585-57-2

  Cover design by Luke Bird

  lukebird.co.uk

  Cover photgraphy by Tiffany Combs at Unsplash

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc.

  www.deadinkbooks.com

  For Dom, and for Ted, Ben and Florence.

  All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.

  Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum, 1487

  One.

  Saturday 31st July 1976

  The head in my lap was heavy, and the heft of the forehead and chin sent it tipping forward every time we went round a bend. By the time we got to Bristol my legs were sore and cramped. I licked a finger and swiped at the smear of blood on the thumb of my other hand. The jabbering in my chest had stopped and I was infused with that familiar numbness again.

  A mix-up with the trailer meant that we hadn’t left home until the afternoon, later than planned. By the time we’d crossed the Severn Bridge it was getting on for six o’clock and the heat was the result of a day’s fermentation. The heatwave had been going on for months, each day hotter than the last, and they’d said on the radio that today was the hottest since records began. My dad kept saying how good it would be to get out of the dust and dirt of the city; he seemed to think the drought wasn’t affecting Wales.

  As soon as we came off the motorway and started driving north the roads became smaller and rougher, more like dirt tracks than the roads I was used to. The lanes appeared in my head as arteries, gradually thinning as we got further from the city, the blood being depleted of oxygen as the roads ran out of traffic. Occasionally, we had to pull over to let someone pass, or reverse into a passing place at the side of the road, but we met very few other cars. Then we started the climb.

  The slope wasn’t too steep at first and the Cortina steamed ahead, but it started to struggle as the track became narrower and harder. The vinyl seats under my thighs were slick with sweat.

  My mother was sitting up ramrod straight, her face turned away from us. The whole of the journey she’d peered out of the window as the hedges whipped past. At first I thought she seemed calmer than she had been in months, but then I saw that she was working away at the fabric of her skirt, rubbing it over and over between her fingers and her thumbs.

  Lorry slept next to me, his head thrown back and his mouth open, breathing steadily. He was clutching his clown doll and holding it up to his mouth. His stubby legs jutted off the seat, and his bandages were grubby and had started to come loose where he’d been scratching. Blood was seeping through. He’d been worrying away at his legs ever since we’d left home, only stopping when he fell asleep. I knew that under the bandages the sores would be raw and wet.

  My dad sat hunkered down in his seat, knuckles white from clutching the steering wheel. He didn’t really know where he was going; he was just following the directions his friend had written on a scrap of paper. We had the radio on, the chart show on Radio One. That Elton John and Kiki Dee song was number one for the second week running and I was sick of its relentless optimism. Then the news came on. A story about a toddler who’d been locked in a car by mistake and died of heat exhaustion. My mother’s shoulders twitched, but she didn’t say anything. My dad turned the radio off and when he spoke I knew it was to fill the silence.

  ‘We’re nearly there, Nif. Nearly there.’

  When his eyes met mine in the rear-view mirror the shadows under them were darker than usual, his skin dull despite the tan. The hair that hung to his shoulders was longer than it had been in years.

  My brother looked at me through half-closed eyes, and dribble ran down his chin. He held out his hand and I took his chubby fingers and squeezed them. He sat up a bit and leant his head against the window.

  ‘Lorry wanna wee.’ The voice was small and plaintive and thick with sleep.

  ‘Dad—’

  ‘I heard.’

  The road widened to allow an entrance to a field, and the wheels churned up dust as we stopped. I put the head, wrapped in its layers of hessian and plastic, onto the seat next to me. My dad turned around and reached over. He stroked the head gently. Patted it.

  I got out and walked round to the other side of the car, opened the door and picked up the bulk that was my brother. He put his arms around my neck and I braced myself to take his weight. He was getting too big to be carried now.

  ‘Nif! Lorry really, really need a wee!’

  ‘OK. Hang on.’

  I helped him get his trousers down, and made him lean forward and point himself into the hedge so the stream of piss missed his shoes. When he’d finished, I bundled him back into the car and he went straight back to sleep.

  All this time my mother sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, her hand hanging out of the window with a cigarette clamped between two fingers. The fingers of her other hand were turning over the fabric of her skirt, rubbing and stretching.

  My dad had lit a cigarette as well, and was walking up and down next to the car. He leant against the driver’s door and I stood next to him, enjoying the burning of the hot metal through my t-shirt. He squinted at me, the sun in his eyes. He took a long drag and held it in, blew it out slowly and pointed his face to the sky. The smoke curled up into the still air.

  ‘Why don’t you stop cutting your hair, Nif?’ He turned his face away from the sun and looked at his feet. He rubbed them around in the dry dirt and his sandals made grooves in the dust. The ragged hems of his jeans traced faint lines after them.

  ‘And those clothes. You’ve got loads of nice things to wear. Why do you have to go around dressed like a boy?’ He took off his glasses and polished them on the hem of his shirt. When he realised he wasn’t going to get an answer, he sniffed.

  ‘C’mon, then, Jenny Wren,’ he said and put his hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him off. That was his old name for me, the one he used to call me when I was a little kid. I was called Nif now, thanks to Lorry. When he’d first started talking, just after the accident, he couldn’t say Jennifer or even Jenny, so he called me Nif and it stuck. We’ve always called him Lorry, even though his name’s Laurence. You’d think he’d be called Larry.

  ‘Not far to go now. Final push and all that,’ my dad said. He ground out the cigarette and took a flask of water from the car’s side pocket and dribbled some over the fag end, making sure it was properly out. He took a huge gulp of water and his Adam’s apple bobbed. He offered the water to me but I shook my head. We climbed into the car and I put the head back on my lap.

  My dad started the engine and pulled out into the lane. My mother carried on staring out of the window and nobody said anything for a long while. We turned a bend too fast and I slid across the back seat and into Lorry who woke up and started to wail, grabbing at his bandages. My mother swivelled round and frowned at him, then at me, and I shushed him and patted him and tried to comfort him. After a while he shoved his thumb into his mouth and whimpered a bit before he went back to sleep.

  I was glad that I had the treasure bag with me in the back seat, rather than packed away into the trailer with the rest of our stuff. It made me feel safe. I counted off the relics in my head. Even though the incantation wasn’t finished, and I still needed another relic to complete the rhythm, the fea
thers meant it was nearly there. I saw another small smear of blood I’d missed, on the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger, and licked it off. I carried on reciting the incantation, and the repetition of the familiar words made me drowsy, and I must have started to doze off, because a bump in the road made me sit up, instantly awake.

  I saw that we were still climbing, the road going up and up. The light by then was waning, and everything was bathed in the insipid flush of the sun just setting. We kept on going uphill, for what seemed like forever, and when I’d counted to 386, and I thought we wouldn’t be able to go any higher, we drove over a bump and suddenly we were at the top of the world looking down into the valley. My dad let out a long breath and changed gear and the car started the descent. The heat intensified, as though any breeze there had been at the top of the hill had run out and we were entering a bottle of stale air. It felt as though, on making the descent into this parched and febrile valley, we’d awoken some sort of hostile force.

  A sheer drop fell away from my side of the car, the grass all the way down patchy and sparse. A few houses stood on the road, clustered here and there like flies on raw meat, but mostly we passed only tatty sheep that gazed blindly at us as we bumped along. At the bottom of the valley lay a stream, which looked as though it had once been a lot wider and deeper, but had obviously been depleted by the heatwave. Now it was no more than six feet wide and a couple of feet deep, the dry banks on either side steep and bare.

  My dad turned the radio on again, but there was no signal, just the buzz of white noise. He switched it off and we followed the road along the edge of the stream. We hadn’t passed any other cars for at least half an hour by the time we turned another corner and came to the dirty road sign that announced the name of the village. It was a word I knew I would struggle to pronounce.

  As we entered the village, a glowing grey veil hung over everything. There were no street lights here, and everything was held in that suspended place between light and dark. When the road straightened out some houses came into view, their front gardens meagre and poky. In a few, I could see televisions flickering through the windows, and where the curtains hadn’t been drawn, the backs of people’s heads. We came to a branch in the road, and immediately in front of us stood a war memorial, carved from the same sullen grey stone as the houses. Everything in the village had a pallor to it, the look of an invalid.

  The car swung to the left and, for a moment, a group of teenagers were lit up. They turned towards us, half a dozen of them, their eyes blank in the reflected headlights. They were squatting on the steps at the bottom of the war memorial, each of them clutching a cigarette, the ends glowing like hot coals in the gloom. As we drove past I twisted in my seat. The tallest one—the one with long hair scraped up into a ponytail on the top of her head—caught my eye and held it. Her face was all scrunched up, the features too close together, like someone had taken her face in the palm of their hand and squashed it. She raised her middle finger at me and grinned. I looked away.

  The only other living things we saw as we made our progress through the village were cattle, their pale faces luminous in the gloom, surveying us blankly from the other side of a barbed wire fence. We drove past a chapel, a monolithic ugly thing, two high windows standing sentry on either side of a solid wooden door. A pair of iron gates set into the metal fence was secured by a chunky padlock.

  ‘Here we are!’ my dad said, and there was a crack in his voice that gave away his relief at finally finding the place.

  The Cortina staggered to a halt and crunched over gravel as it pulled into a narrow driveway that was fronted by iron railings. My mother turned around in her seat and looked at Lorry and then at me. The car stopping had roused Lorry, and he stirred but didn’t wake up, his bottom lip sticking out like it always did when he was asleep.

  ‘We won’t wake him,’ my mother said. ‘We’ll leave him to sleep and then put him into bed when we’ve got ourselves straight.’ She opened her car door, and made sure to close it softly behind her.

  I clambered from the car and placed the head, very carefully, onto the seat. My legs felt heavy and sore, and I rubbed them to try and bring some life back into them. My dad got out and stretched. From where we stood, I could only make out the gable end of the house. There was one window up at the top, in what I took to be the attic, a tiny little arched window that was the only thing to break the expanse of stone. Even in the failing light of a late July evening I could see that the curtains on the inside were hanging from the rail, and that the linings were worn and ripped.

  The parking space was set up higher than the house and its garden, the cottage cowering away from the rest of the village. Steps led us down from the patch of gravel where we had parked the car to a little path of cracked and weed-ridden flagstones that forked to the left and took us to the front of the house. My dad went first, one hand rubbing at the base of his neck, the keys jangling in the other. A little iron gate squeaked as he pushed it open.

  My mother walked in front of me, arms knotted tightly across her chest, bony shoulder blades pointing accusingly at me through her blouse. Her hair had started to come loose from her bun, and greasy brown strands twisted at the nape of her neck.

  There was a thick smell in the air, a pungent sweetness emanating from the honeysuckle clinging to the front wall of the house. It smelt like old ladies and decay.

  The right-hand side of the house was made of the same sombre grey stone as the other houses in the village, but was even more run-down. A shabby open porch guarded the front door; the slates on its roof had slipped and were threatening to behead anyone standing beneath it. The windows were mottled with dust, their frames flaking and raw, the paint peeling like sunburnt skin.

  It was a lop-sided house: a recent, single-storey breeze block extension had been added on the left-hand side and it sat lower than the rest of the cottage and reached back at an acute angle, so from where I was standing, directly in front of it, it looked as though that side of the cottage was disappearing into itself. The more I looked at it, the more I could see that there were very few right angles to this house. The roof over the old part of the cottage was slumped in the middle, and the slates were slipping there. A pair of chimneys rose above the house, massive things that looked too heavy for the fragile roof to bear. Two upstairs windows were offset and asymmetrical. They gazed back at us, as if challenging one of us to be the first to speak.

  We stood on a cracked patch of bare concrete at the front of the house, the thick heat still palpable. There was absolute stillness and the air hung heavy and rank and dry about us.

  Then Lorry screamed.

  He was lying next to the car. He’d managed to open the door and had fallen out onto the dusty gravel that formed the parking area. Wailing, he lay face down in the dirt. My mother took a deep breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them they held the look of disdain she always wore for her youngest child. She looked at him and she looked at me and I ran to Lorry and picked him up, seeing the blood on his knees starting to show through the dust, how his bandaged shins were even dirtier now, the blood on them rusty and brown. My mother just watched, her bony fingers worrying away at the base of her neck, her face a contortion of pain, anger and defiance. Then she gave a little tight-mouthed smile and nodded. I could see how hollow her eye sockets had become; her cheeks looked like someone had taken a spoon and scooped them out.

  I turned away from my parents and grabbed a handful of gravel. I didn’t want to, but I had to, for the Creed, and I pressed it against Lorry’s knee and rubbed it in and he howled again.

  My mother didn’t react to my brother’s wails. Instead, she turned back to the cottage.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said, and for a moment I thought she was referring to Lorry.

  My dad had been a sculptor for as long as I could remember. In the early days, he’d told me, after he finished art college, he had made a living by painting portraits, commissions from the wealthy and the vain who want
ed to be immortalised in oils. He’d made a name for himself and had been quite in demand for a while as his reputation spread, but then he’d decided that he no longer wanted to paint. He told me he found the process of building up layer upon layer of paint restrictive. There was no way of removing what he had created: any mistakes he made would stay there, concealed by more layers of paint, and while they wouldn’t be visible, he would always know that they were there. He had instead gone into sculpting, and had used his reputation as a painter to build up a substantial client base. He specialised in busts, first crafting the head and shoulders in clay, before casting them in bronze for those who could afford it, and bronze resin for those who couldn’t.

  There was one bust he’d been working on for a long time. It had been in his studio at home, and when he couldn’t find time to work on it because of his commissions, it would be bundled up in wet hessian and plastic, and sprayed with water regularly to prevent the clay from drying out. It was a sculpture of my mother, a head and shoulders study, and she hated it.

  He had started it a couple of years ago and I was surprised that the clay was still pliable enough to work with. He’d explained that it wasn’t the same clay as when he’d started, that each time he worked on it he would remove some of the old stuff and apply fresh clay. The inside was hollow, and the skull-shape under the top layer would be set solid and too hard to work with, but the top layers were soft enough for him to mould and shape, his fingers easing and stroking and caressing.

  He would work on it intermittently, between his commissions and his teaching at the art college, but my mother refused to sit for him, so he would have to work from memory, shut away in his studio in the evening once she’d gone to bed. He’d collected together some photographs of her, all taken from different angles, and he referred to them occasionally, but she had changed so much since the photos had been taken that they weren’t really an accurate depiction of her. Sometimes I’d sit with him, watching as his fingers worked their way firmly but gently around my mother’s face, smoothing, soothing. In the last few months, he’d had to take away even more of the clay, and the cheeks had become hollower, the eye sockets deeper. He struggled to keep the sculpture looking like the woman my mother had become since the accident.