Water Shall Refuse Them

by Lucie McKnight Hardy

  I turned to the sink and clattered the breakfast stuff around. I scraped crumbs off the plates and wiped jam off the knives. I pushed a musty grey cloth around the insides of the cups and put everything on the draining board, and then I turned around and faced the boy. He had his hands in his pockets and his hips thrust forward and there was that grin again. He’d been waiting for me.

  ‘So, lesson two today then, eh, Nif?’

  I found myself nodding, unable to take my eyes off him, this peculiar boy with shaggy hair and eyes like bruises and the tiny pointed teeth of a rodent.

  We walked along the lane from the cottage in silence. Mally let Lorry hold his hand and my brother was enraptured, alternating his gaze between Mally’s face, the Polaroid camera, and the lane in front of him. He was mesmerised. It was still early, but a couple of people were out in their gardens, watering flower beds and cleaning windows. I thought one man had caught my eye and I gave him a nod and a little half-smile, but he quickly looked away and went back to tinkering furtively with the hosepipe that lay on the grass in front of him. Somewhere a lawnmower buzzed and a grasshopper creaked out its song, but everything else was silent.

  The war memorial stood black against the limpid sky. Small and inconsequential curls tipped the points of the cross, as though put there as an afterthought, and the pillar tapered, wider at the bottom, until it reached a large plinth that was encircled by the stone steps. The whole thing was worn and chipped; it looked ancient.

  The three of us stood at the bottom of the monument, the plinth now cleared of the cigarette ends and empty lager cans. Lorry had let go of Mally’s hand and was clambering up the steps. I put my fingers in one of the little concave dips at the base of the monument and marvelled at how smooth the stone there was.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s not a war memorial, is it?’

  ‘Co-rrect,’ said Mally, feigning the voice of a quiz show host. ‘And for your next point, can you tell me why you think that?’

  ‘Well, it’s far too old for one thing. The stone’s really worn and it’s all crumbled away in some places.’ I went on before he could interrupt. ‘And there are no names or dates, and that’s the whole point of a war memorial, isn’t it? To remember the dead.’

  He was looking mock-serious now, frowning and nodding his head.

  ‘So, young lady, for another point, and to win the game…can you tell me what it is?’

  I stood back from the steps and looked up at the cross at the top. I felt as though the answer was there somewhere, would be obvious when I knew it, but I couldn’t think what it could be and shook my head.

  ‘Shall I tell you?’ Mally was looking excited, like a kid with a secret he was bursting to share.

  ‘Go on, then.’ I sat on the stone steps and stretched my legs out, enjoying the light touch of the early sun.

  ‘It’s a plague cross.’

  A faint breeze blew on the back of my neck, lifting the hairs there. Lorry climbed down from the steps and wandered over to the other side of the lane. He started gathering up clusters of sheep’s wool that had snagged on the barbed wire fence.

  ‘You know about the plague, right?’ Mally said. ‘Sixteen-hundreds and all that. Bubonic plague all over Europe? Hundreds of thousands of people died. A quarter of the population of London was wiped out.’

  I nodded. ‘Wasn’t there a massive fire that stopped it, though?’

  ‘That’s right. It did, but by then it had already spread to other parts of the country. This village had it really bad—I mean, really bad—and most of the people living here caught the plague and died.’

  He looked at me from under his eyelashes and then he looked down. I followed his gaze and saw that his fingers were rubbing the inside of one of the little indentations in the plinth.

  ‘When most of the village was either dead or dying, there was no-one to grow the crops or look after the animals. People from the nearby villages wouldn’t come near, for fear of being infected, and so the people from this village needed to be able to buy food without passing on the disease.’ His voice had lost the showman’s swagger, and had taken on the patiently explanatory tone of a teacher.

  ‘They built this cross thinking it would protect them and they’d put their coins in the little dips all around the bottom, in order to pay for the food. The traders would take the coins and leave the food and everyone was happy.’

  He sat down next to me and I was conscious of my dirty t-shirt and the acid smell that lifted to my nostrils.

  ‘They put vinegar in the holes where the coins went. They thought that vinegar would kill the plague germs.’ He snorted, as if affronted by the sheer naivety of these people, hundreds of years ago.

  ‘But we’re miles from London.’ I thought of the journey we’d taken only a couple of days before, the car eating up the miles as we’d driven through the heat. ‘How did the plague get all the way over here?’

  ‘It found a way in.’ He looked me right in the eye. ‘It came in from the outside. You see, however hard they tried, the villagers couldn’t keep all the evil out.’ He said the word ‘evil’ with relish, drawing it out and making it sound dramatic. He was grinning. ‘And that’s why they hate us. You and me. We’re outsiders.’ He shrugged. ‘We’re evil.’

  ‘I haven’t even met anyone here yet—apart from you,’ I said. ‘Why would they hate us?’

  ‘Trust me. They will. If you’re not from around these parts, you’ll get no welcome here. You and I need to stick together.’

  Without warning he sprang up and pointed the camera at me. Before I could move away or put my hand up over my face, there was a click.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I asked, conscious of my spiky hair and spots.

  ‘Call it a souvenir,’ he said.

  ‘A souvenir?’

  ‘Yeah. A memento of when we first met.’ He had turned the camera around and was looking intently at the slot at the bottom, waiting for the photo. He looked up at me and he was grinning again, tongue just visible between his teeth.

  ‘Come with me. I want to show you something.’

  He grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. His fingers were surprisingly cool. We started to walk back the way we had come. I dragged Lorry away from the fence and saw that he’d accumulated a little pile of greasy, dirty wool that he clutched in one grubby hand. As we walked over the little bridge Mally kept on fiddling with the camera, impatient for the photo to appear. We walked in silence for a while, the dust lifting from the lane beneath our feet, the grass on the verges defeated and parched. A pair of rabbits stumbled into the lane and stared at us vacantly. Lorry ran after them, his hands outstretched, and they dragged themselves lazily away from him and disappeared into the cows’ field.

  Mally hadn’t even seen them. He was still playing with the camera.

  ‘We’re friends now, Nif,’ he said. ‘And friends have to stick together. What you have to remember is that there are three sorts of people in the village.’ Now he looked over at me. ‘There are the outsiders: you, me, our parents. There have been others, but they’ve never stayed for long.’ He went back to tinkering with the camera.

  ‘Then there are the normal villagers. Well, I say normal, but most of them are weird. My mum says they’re inbred and that affects their…mental faculties.’ He looked at me again, cross-eyed, and rapped his knuckles against the side of his head. Despite myself, I smiled.

  ‘They’re mostly harmless, that lot. People like Tracy Powell and Fat Denise and the rest. Not a lot going on upstairs but not too much of a problem.’

  The camera started to make a churning sound. Slowly, the photograph appeared from the slot, just a grey square in a white rectangle. He pulled it out gently and wafted it in the air, waiting for the picture to appear.

  ‘And the third sort?’ I couldn’t help asking.

  We were standing outside the chapel by then, nothing inside visible through the blank, unseeing windows. The gates were resolutely padlocked. My parents�
�� car was back, parked on the little gravelled area at the top of the stone steps.

  ‘They’re the ones you have to worry about. The chapel-goers.’ Mally tossed his head at the chapel as he said this, and I thought about the day before, when I’d seen the congregation arriving, and the strange ritual they’d performed. ‘They’re the troublemakers. You see, they hate everything about me and my mum because we’re outsiders. It has nothing to do with religion or with not going to chapel. There are plenty of people round here who don’t go to chapel and they all manage to get along. It’s because we’re different, that’s all.’

  ‘So why do you stay here, then? If no-one likes you, why do you and your mum insist on staying?’

  ‘Sheer bloody-mindedness on my mother’s part,’ he said. ‘She knows that they don’t like us here, don’t want us here, but she’s always been one for antagonising people.’

  ‘What about your dad? Where does he fit in?’

  ‘He doesn’t. I never knew him. Didn’t stick around. Disappeared before I was born.’

  ‘Did you ask your mum about him?’

  He smiled a tired, resigned smile. ‘Of course. Each time she’d give me a different answer. Travelling salesman, just passing through town. Lorry driver, likewise. Airline pilot. Every time I asked her, she’d come up with something different, so I gave up asking.’

  We were outside his house and he turned to the gate in the picket fence and pushed it open, the bottom of it scraping along the yellow grass. I noticed a pattern that had been scratched into the wooden gatepost, an arrangement of sets of concentric circles, overlapping and intertwining, that made me think of the simpler patterns I used to make with my Spirograph.

  ‘Welcome to Chez Mally,’ he said, with an ironic twist of his eyebrows, and he bowed down and swept his arm in a magnanimous invitation to enter. I felt no surprise that this peculiar boy lived in the house opposite ours. It was inevitable.

  Eight.

  Mally led me straight round to the back of his house. I’d taken Lorry over to our cottage and watched as he walked down the stone steps and in through the front door, and now it was only the two of us. I was surprised to see a small, very tidy garden, enclosed by a low fence. There were brightly-coloured flowers growing around the edges, thriving in what should have been bare soil. Pinks and oranges, purples and yellows screamed in the sunlight, and in neat rows grew various herbs, their leaves dark, moist and vibrant. I realised with a jolt that I hadn’t seen anything as lush and vital for weeks. The colours were wanton and extrovert.

  The top half of the stable door was open and I could see in to a poky kitchen. Most of the room was taken up by a Formica-topped table, but around the edges were sideboards and cupboards, a sink and an electric oven. Bunches of herbs and flowers hung from the beams, forming a canopy of dried and withered vegetation, and they brushed the top of my head as Mally led me over to a narrow flight of stairs in the corner of the room. He led me up, but he paused outside a closed door on the first landing and put his finger to his lips. Then he made a drinking motion with his hand and stuck his tongue out and I guessed that meant that his mother was in bed with a hangover. We carried on up to the second floor.

  Mally’s bedroom was cool and dim. There was a pungent smell, not unpleasant, but dark and woody and earthy, like the smell of the crow’s skull he’d left me. I walked straight over to the window and I wasn’t surprised that I could see right into my bedroom, which was lit up by the sun.

  His bed was pushed into the far corner, away from the window, and he took the camera from around his neck and put it on the bedside table before sitting down on the bed. His face was blank as he passed me the photo he’d taken of me, which was now fully developed, and a cursory glance told me I hadn’t got any less ugly since I’d last looked. I tossed it back at him and he slid it onto the bedside table, on top of a pile of magazines. He lay down and put his arms behind his head, watching me. I stood with my back to the window, leaning on the window sill.

  ‘So? What did you want to show me?’

  ‘Look around you. What do you see?’

  For the first time, I looked properly at the room. Apart from the bed and the bedside table there was a desk and a chair in the far corner, a narrow wardrobe and an old pine cupboard about the same height as me. There were haphazard piles of books leaning against the wall, and above them were tacked a few posters: Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd. There was a record player on a stand and a stack of 33s. An electric guitar was propped against the end of the bed.

  On the wall next to the bed was a collection of Polaroid photographs, mostly three-quarters shots of people. They were arranged in a grid, each meticulously and evenly spaced from its neighbour. Stepping closer, I saw that they were people I vaguely recognised, people I’d seen outside the chapel. The photographs all had the same orangey-brown glow, and in all of them the subjects were either looking away from the camera, oblivious to the photo being taken, or were covering their faces with their hands. In a couple of the pictures the people looked like they were shouting at the person taking the photos, their faces contorted in anger. It was obvious that none of the subjects had wanted to have their photo taken. In the white strip along the bottom of each picture a date was scrawled in a looping hand.

  ‘Why do you have all these?’ I asked, leaning closer and examining each of the photographs again in turn.

  ‘Because it annoys them,’ he said, and he gave a small chuckle.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The chapel-goers. I told you. They hate us. They can’t stand us because we’re outsiders.’

  ‘Are they really that…’ I searched for the right word, ‘narrow-minded?’ He snorted.

  ‘Narrow-minded doesn’t even start to cover it. They think we’re eccentric. They take that as a threat. Because we’re not like them, they think we’re bad.’

  ‘Why do they think you’re eccentric?’ I asked. ‘You seem pretty normal to me.’

  ‘Aha! That’s it!’ His finger jabbed at the air in front of him. ‘You think we’re normal because you’re an outsider as well. You’re just like us, and sooner or later they’ll turn against you as well.’

  ‘What do you mean “turn against you”? What have they done to you?’

  He leant forward, his hands on his knees.

  ‘They have these…rituals, I suppose you’d call them. Little things they do when we’re around. It’s like they’re trying to intimidate us or something. Fucking nutters.’

  I thought about the day before, when I’d watched the minister and the beetle man and all the men and women congregate outside the chapel, and the peculiar performance with the bunches of leaves and the water and the chanting. That had all been directed at Mally’s house.

  ‘So, you take photos of them, just to annoy them?’

  ‘Yeah. Why not?’

  ‘And how else do you pass the time? I mean, there’s nothing to do here, is there? What else do you do?’

  He was quiet for a moment, and looked at me, the dark smudges around his eyes sinking into shadows. Then he sprang up from the bed and darted towards the cupboard that stood against the far wall. He rummaged in a jar on top until he found a key, which he used to unlock the doors. They swung open.

  Lined up along the top shelf, and right at my eye level, was a row of bird skulls. Larger than the crow’s skull Mally had given me, five of them, all similar but not identical, each one having small variations in size and colour. Their beaks were all jet black, polished and glossy, and the eye sockets were huge shadows hanging in the stark white of the bone. He picked up the one that was in the exact centre of the row. It was a bit smaller than the rest, creamy beige and slightly dirty-looking.

  ‘What is it?’ It seemed only right that I was whispering.

  He didn’t answer my question, but reached for my hand and opened out my fingers. ‘Do you like it?’

  I was surprised by the weight of the skull, which filled my palm, the shiny black b
eak jutting preposterously forward. I held it up to my face and looked into the empty eye sockets.

  ‘Watch this,’ Mally said. There was a narrow shaft of sunlight piercing the window and settling on the bed in the far corner. He took the skull from me and held it up, angling it so that the sunlight was channelled through the eye sockets. The light that landed on the bed seemed stronger, more concentrated.

  ‘Good, isn’t it? It’s a raven, by the way. A raven is the only one that’s shaped like that, that’ll let the sun go right through it.’ He gestured at the row of skulls along the top shelf.

  My eyes travelled along the raven skulls and then down the shelves in the cupboard, each one containing between half a dozen and twenty or so skulls, all categorised according to size. Mally explained that there were jackdaws and magpies, blackbirds and starlings. The tiny ones on the very bottom shelf were mostly blue tits and chaffinches. I thought about the relics on the altar and a new feeling bubbled up inside me. It was something I hadn’t felt in ages, a feeling of quiet anticipation, of there being something to look forward to, but not quite knowing what that was. It was like Christmas was approaching but I didn’t know what I was going to get.

  ‘Why have you got all these?’ I asked. ‘I mean, what do you do with them?’

  ‘Nothing, really. I just like having them.’ He shrugged. ‘They look nice. Don’t you think they look nice?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, they do look nice. Very nice.’

  I took my time examining the skulls, picking up each one in turn, marvelling at their smoothness, their elegance, the sheer perfection of them.

  ‘Where do you get them all from?’ I asked.

  ‘Round and about,’ he said, and there was a sly grin forming on his lips.

  He went over to his bedside table and opened the drawer. He pulled out something shiny; it was a wire, long and thin, and it was coiled up into a tight circle. He explained how he’d made a noose out of the wire and lain in wait, sometimes for hours, using worms as bait.

  ‘The birds come and look at the worms. They’re tempted, you can tell, but they hold themselves back. I think they’re suspicious. Sometimes they sense that something’s wrong and they fly off, but usually they go for it. They’re greedy, you see?’ He was standing next to me, looking at me through those long eyelashes, and I looked right back at him.