Water Shall Refuse Them

by Lucie McKnight Hardy

  It was a skull, a bird’s skull with a sharp, shiny black beak protruding from the bone. It had been placed on the post so that the spike pierced one of the eye sockets, the skull tilted in an absurd expression of confusion. I lifted it carefully off the fence.

  The surface was scattered with hairline cracks, tiny fissures that spread in a web over the cranium. The pearly-white bone held eye sockets that were dark and empty. The skull fitted comfortably into the curve of my palm, but the beak was heavier than the bone, and it tipped forward, the sharp end pressing into the soft flesh of my fingertip. I bent to it and breathed in deeply—at first I thought it had no smell at all, but then I caught the suggestion of something warm and dark and earthy.

  In my mind, I recited the incantation. Robin’s egg, magpie’s egg, duckling bill and bone. Blackbird’s egg, feathers of wren…I felt sure that the bird’s skull was the final relic, the one that would complete the incantation. I left Lorry lying there in the sun and ran up both flights of stairs to my bedroom. I placed the skull on the end of the mantelpiece, next to the other relics. It fitted perfectly.

  Four.

  I used to enjoy going to church. Of course, I was younger then, but I used to love the ritual of walking up the path to Our Lady of Holy Saviour every Sunday morning with my mother, and the warm smell of incense that would greet us as we pushed open the heavy wooden doors. I’d wonder if the holy water in the little bowl on the side really was magic as I poked a finger in and made the sign of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

  I would dip to one knee before shuffling along the pew, and feel the embroidered prayer stool hard-stuffed under my knees. Then I’d sit on the slippery polished wood and gaze at the enormous crucifix that was suspended above the altar. I used to marvel at how Jesus’ face could be formed into such an exquisite expression of tolerant melancholy, while at the same time he wore a crown of thorns and was pinned, hands and feet, to the cross.

  The thing I liked most about going to church was the long, drawling incantations, in a language I didn’t understand, but which was still somehow familiar. Father Declan’s voice was low and monotonous and reassuring, and I would find a tranquillity in the church that I don’t think I’ve ever felt anywhere else. I never really felt very religious; I never prayed at home, or read the bible, so when my mother stopped going to church, after the accident, I stopped going too. For me, the church was about the sights and the sounds and the smells, not about God.

  If I had seen a psychiatrist like they wanted me to, he would say that I was trying to impose order on my life by constructing a new religion. He would say that after Petra died, and we no longer went to church, I needed some stability in my life, something to cling to while my parents got on with their grief. To an extent, this hypothetical psychiatrist would be right. I did find that after the accident I needed something that gave me a purpose, even though I already had Lorry to look after, but I didn’t need a religion; I had never really had one to start with, not in the full sense. What I needed was something to take control of my life. That’s probably why the Creed found me.

  Finding the robin’s egg had been the start of it, a couple of weeks after the accident, even though I didn’t know it then. It was another couple of weeks afterwards that I found the magpie’s egg, and then it seemed like a sign.

  It was Maundy Thursday. It was also my sixteenth birthday that day, but no-one had remembered; it was only a month after Petra died. I was playing in my bedroom with Lorry, getting him to lie on his back while I rolled a toy car across his belly. I remember the smell telling me that I needed to change his nappy before I made his dinner.

  My mother had been getting increasingly agitated all day, and I’d heard my dad on the phone to the doctor that morning. She’d started shouting things, and there were scratches on my dad’s cheek when he came out to let the doctor in. When I walked past the door of the bedroom I could see a sliver of her through the crack, lying on the white sheets, mouth open, eyes blank. She wasn’t my mother anymore. She was an impostor, a depiction of what she had been, with the inside, the important bit, missing. It was as though someone had taken her away and replaced her with a statue.

  I went out into the garden that morning with Lorry, half expecting my dad to come after us and tell us to go back in again, that we weren’t allowed out on our own. But he didn’t and we made it down to the bottom of the garden. Although the heatwave hadn’t really kicked in by then, it was still warm and stuffy for Easter and I only had on a t-shirt and jeans. Lorry was shuffling along, grunting and hanging his tongue out like a dog.

  It was Lorry who spotted the axe, lying in a pile of wood behind the shed. The wooden handle was sticking up in the air and had a pale sheen of grey-green mould blooming on it. It was heavier than I’d been expecting, and when I tried to pick it up I struggled against the weight of it and it had stayed jammed in the woodpile. The mould came off onto my palm and I’d wiped it on my jeans. The second time, I lifted the axe with both hands and it came up, scattering little logs from the heap where it had been lying. It was about three feet long and the blade was rusting and dull and huge. I swung it like a pendulum and imagined a woodsman heaving it over his shoulder, maybe Little Red Riding Hood’s father, bringing it down under its own momentum onto the neck of the wolf.

  It was on the back-swing that the axe caught in the rhododendron bush behind me. A clatter of twigs and small branches fell to the ground, along with a dusty pile of dry mud. Two eggs rolled out from the remains of the nest, larger than the robin’s egg I’d found, a greenish-blue with dark olive-green mottling. One of the eggs had cracked and, as I watched, a jelly seeped from it, red and orange and black. I leant down and prodded it with a fingertip, then I used a nail to peel back the shell from around the crack. A tiny beak and two bulbous black orbs were revealed. The creature gave a shiver and then it stopped moving. I picked up the other egg and put it in my pocket.

  Lorry started prodding the broken egg with his toe. I grabbed his hand and pulled him away and dragged him up the path to the back door. I already had my hand on the door handle when I heard a flutter, barely there. I turned around and a magpie was standing next to the bundle of twigs. Its head was twisting, first one way, then the other, looking alternately at the egg and at us.

  I had a flash of memory of a song my mother used to sing to me, when I was younger, much younger, and was learning to count. We would sit at the dining room window, looking out over the back garden, counting the magpies as they fluttered down and inspected the bonfire.

  ‘One for sorrow, two for joy,’ the song started, and then my mother’s face would light up and she would hold her crucifix while she sang the next bit. ‘Three for a girl and four for a boy.’ It was as though she was wishing for another child, or praying—I couldn’t tell which—but after that, the song came to take on a special meaning for her and she would look out for magpies wherever we went.

  Even then I knew I wasn’t good enough for her.

  I held Lorry’s hand as we watched the magpie inspect its shattered nest. It hopped closer and nudged the smashed egg with its beak. Then it started pecking at the broken remains of its chick.

  The bird skull looked at home next to the other relics. That was the thing about the Creed: the newest addition had to go on the right-hand side, never mind how unsymmetrical that made the relics. At first it had really bothered me, like when I found the blackbird’s egg which was a bit bigger than the robin’s egg and made the display off-kilter. But the Creed said that was how it had to be done and it looked fine to me now.

  Of course, I’d been wondering about how the skull had got onto the railings. It looked like it had been cleaned, or bleached somehow, and I was intrigued about who had left it there. The only people I could think of was the group of girls I had seen by the war memorial on our first night in the village, and I wondered if they’d left it as a warning of some sort.

  The air in my room was stuffy and dank, even though the window was thrown wi
de open. I knew that outside would be no better, that even when a rare breeze came, it would be hot, and would carry with it the dust that seemed to settle on every surface, choking all the living things. The heatwave had assumed a permanence in our lives. There seemed to be no end in sight, no relief from the relentless heat and light and the decay it was causing. It seemed strange to think that there had been a time, only a few months ago, when the grass had been green and fresh and abundant, instead of wizened and parched. It was as though Petra’s death had lingered somehow, had insinuated its way not only into the crevices of our lives and infected us, but into the wider environment, into the weather and the landscape. By coming to this village, we had not escaped from Petra’s death, but had taken it with us.

  I remembered Lorry, sitting outside on the patch of concrete, all on his own. I was about to go and check on him when the stillness of the morning was disturbed by the sound of an engine which drew me to my bedroom window. The enormous padlock on the chapel gates winked at me in the sunlight and a second later a car drove up and parked on the verge. It was dark blue and spotlessly clean, as though the owner had very recently removed the dust that clung to everything else in the valley. The driver’s door opened and a man got out. Small, hunched, dark-haired, he scuttled from the car. A beetle of a man.

  He reached round to the back door and opened it. A little brown and white dog—a terrier of some sort—jumped out and started sniffing around at the grass, its nose snuffling at the verge. The beetle man then opened the passenger door. From my bedroom window, I couldn’t see who the occupant was, and the beetle man stood for a moment, waiting for whoever was inside to get out.

  A head appeared. A man’s head—dark, like the beetle—but as the man pulled himself up to his full height I could see that he was much taller. He held out his arm, the elbow crooked. The beetle man took it and they looked like a peculiar parody of an old-fashioned courting couple. The beetle man led the taller man around the car and they stood in front of the iron gates. A set of keys was produced from the beetle man’s pocket and he fumbled with the padlock, and that was when the other man turned around and I saw his face for the first time.

  His shuffling gait had led me to expect an old man, but he was in fact not much older than my dad. His dark suit made his face appear pale, almost as white as the shirt he wore. He had black hair, Brylcreemed back over his forehead, and a nose that was long and angular, beak-like and hooked. His mouth turned down at the corners. In his right hand he held a book, small and leather-bound like the ones on the shelf in our living room.

  The beetle man hurried in through the gates and turned his attention to the lock on the chapel doors. They swung open and he disappeared inside. Brylcreem was standing just outside the gates, his hands clasped together in front of him, the book held tightly between them. His head was lowered and I thought he might have been praying. The terrier was skittering around in the courtyard in front of the chapel, and then it stopped and cocked its leg against a gatepost.

  The sound of an engine announced the arrival of another car before I saw it, but then it appeared and parked on the verge. A man got out from the driver’s seat, also dark-suited, and a woman followed from the passenger seat. The beetle man must have heard the car because he came scurrying out from the chapel to meet them.

  He greeted the man and the woman, and drew the man towards Brylcreem. The woman hung back, and busied herself with the contents of her handbag, but the man held out his hand to Brylcreem and the beetle man looked like he was introducing him, saying the man’s name. The minister greeting his flock, I thought, and it was true, they did look like a flock, but a flock of birds, not sheep. The man, short and puffed-up; the woman, small and neat and dressed in a dark skirt suit, even in the sordid heat, the waist pinched in and the neck with a wide collar. Jackie O but a decade out of date.

  More cars drew up and more people arrived, walking along the lane from both directions. Shortly a small crowd had gathered, all dressed in their Sunday best. The women all wore the same sort of suits as the first woman to arrive, greys and navies and variations on black, and some of them also had boxy hats on hairspray-tight hair. The women congregated in a wide circle, their mouths working away, all speaking at once, all pecking out their gossip.

  The men stood in threes or fours, silently holding cigarettes between pinched fingers, sucking in the smoke and not making eye contact with each other. One by one they approached the minister who would take their outstretched hand and shake it, his other hand gripping the man’s elbow and drawing him closer. He would lean forward and say something into the other man’s ear and then release his arm. None of the women approached the minister.

  I counted off all the men doing this in the five minutes I stood at the window. A pecking order maybe, an unspoken hierarchy of greetings? It seemed to me that everyone knew the routine, that nothing was left to chance. This ceremony was a well-practised and long-standing ritual.

  Then something peculiar happened. The beetle man opened the boot of his car and took out a box, a low wooden tray, the sort you get from the greengrocer to hold oranges. He took out bunches of what looked like herbs—green leaves tied together at one end in clusters, and each about the size of an adult’s hand. He passed these around, and when each member of the congregation had one of these bunches, he returned the box to the boot of the car and came back with a bottle and a shallow silver tray. He unscrewed the lid from the bottle and, holding the tray against his chest, poured in a small stream of clear liquid. Then the minister stepped forward and passed his hand slowly over the top of the tray, his eyes closed and his lips moving very slightly, for all the world like he was blessing the water. All the while, the congregation looked on silently.

  Then the beetle man held the tray out and, one by one, each of the chapel-goers stepped forward and dipped their bundles of leaves into the water. When they had all done this they turned, en masse, to face the tiny cottage that stood opposite ours. Without a word being spoken, they all raised their bunches and shook them in the direction of the house, causing a fine and barely visible shower of water to hang in the air for a second before it evaporated.

  Every one of them had their faces raised to the sky and their eyes closed. Almost imperceptibly, a murmuring began, as though one person had started it and then gradually all the others were joining in. Slowly, it got louder and more insistent. It was impossible to tell where the chant began or ended; it was incomprehensible, words overlapping and obscuring other words. It was a torrent of sounds I didn’t understand, like water over a waterfall. Welsh.

  Abruptly, as if on an unspoken command, the chanting stopped and the congregation turned back to face the chapel. They followed the minister as he led them in through the iron gates and over the courtyard that stood between the railings and the enormous dark wooden doors. As the doors opened, an immense wail emerged. I thought of my mother and her unholy shrieking in the early days after the accident, but then I remembered: the organ. The animal whine turned into a horrible dirge and the flock of women and the little gatherings of men came together, each couple pairing up as they walked into the chapel, heads bowed, women on the right and men on the left. In turn, they each handed their bundles of herbs to the beetle man, who placed them back in the wooden box. When they had all entered the chapel, the beetle man swung the doors closed behind them and they were swallowed by the darkness.

  I didn’t stop to think about what I’d just seen. I grabbed the empty treasure bag and pushed a couple of towels into it, and clean shorts and a t-shirt. On my way down the stairs I collected some clothes for Lorry from his bedroom. Outside the kitchen door I could hear the telltale rustle of words: my parents whispering an argument.

  Lorry was dozing when I got outside, his face turned up to the sky. I nudged him with the toe of my plimsoll and he lifted a hand to his eyes, shading them against the sun.

  ‘C’mon, Lorry. We’re going out,’ I said.

  He started muttering his resistanc
e to this idea, so I just hauled him up from the patch of concrete. He looked ridiculous in his pants and bandages, so I made him put on the clothes I’d got for him.

  As we passed the chapel, the little dog was still snuffling around, but it stopped when it saw us and yapped a few times. It scurried out through the gates towards us and I reached down to touch it, but it shrank away from me, its yellow teeth bared and its hackles raised. It started yapping again, and it only stopped when the howl of the organ started seeping out from the chapel, faint but insistent. The great wooden doors were closed, and the windows were all shut despite the heat, but the higher notes had found a way out through a crack somewhere and they followed us, their insistent whine taunting us as we made our way along the lane.

  Even though it was mid-morning, there was still no-one around. It was as though the whole village had gone to chapel. There was no-one sunbathing or chucking their bathwater onto the flower beds, like there would have been on a Sunday morning at home. A few ragged sheep peered at us over the barbed wire that ran along the side of the road, but apart from them the only living things were the magpies, four of them, sitting on the fence. They were preening themselves, dipping their heads under their wings and drawing feathers through their beaks, but they stopped when they saw us and watched silently as we made our way along the lane, their heads sinking into glossy necks.

  We came to the stream. Further down the lane, I could make out the war memorial standing stark and black against the hazy blue of the sky. I leant over the low stone wall and the water below moved slowly, thick and viscous. Downstream, where the oak tree hung over the bank, the water swirled darker, deeper, more inviting.

  I climbed over the gate into the field, the red paint flaking onto my palms like scabs, and then I helped Lorry to climb over. The grass here was coarse and long and it scratched my legs. I carried Lorry the last little bit, and I made him stand up while I clambered down to a shallow bank that sat under the shade of the tree. I lifted Lorry down after me, and got him to undress, easing the bandages away from his damaged legs, coaxing the dried blood away from the gauze. He cried, but eventually the bandages were off and he stood there, looking at his legs, curious.