Water Shall Refuse Them

by Lucie McKnight Hardy

  My dad got in the driver’s seat and started the engine. Lorry was scratching at his legs.

  ‘Alright, Linda?’ My mother didn’t say anything, just gave an almost imperceptible nod and stared straight ahead.

  The wren’s wing had come away neatly enough, a smear of blood on the sinew and bone the only sign that it had been wrenched from the bird’s body. It sat in the treasure bag with the other relics, wrapped in one of my mother’s silk scarves. The rest of the bird I had thrown into the hedge, a gift for Mrs Akhar’s cat. It occurred to me that it might still be alive, and the thought made me smile, the little bird flying helplessly in circles, one wing flapping, getting nowhere.

  The treasure bag sat on the floor between my feet, and in my head I counted off the relics: Robin’s egg, magpie’s egg, duckling bill and bone. Blackbird’s egg, feathers of wren…I knew that there was only one more to get. One missing relic that would make the incantation perfect.

  ‘Right’ my dad said. ‘You ready, Jenny Wren?’ His eyes met mine in the rear view mirror. My heart was jabbering in my chest.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, and I was smiling. ‘I’m ready for anything,’ and just like that we left.

  Eighteen.

  ‘Sometimes, you find out something about a person and it completely changes your perception of them.’ There was the trace of a smile on Mally’s lips. We were in my bedroom and he was holding the wren’s wing in his hand, splaying the feathers out across his palm.

  Nobody had been up when he and I had got back to the cottage. It was still early enough for the heat to be tolerable but I knew that later in the day, once the crucible of the valley had allowed the still air to stagnate, it would become insufferable.

  In the hall it was still and silent, and as I closed the door behind us we stood close together and I could feel the heat from Mally’s body. We’d managed to fill the water bottles and lug them back with us. We left them in the hall and I led the way up the stairs, quickly, running, conscious of Mally coming fast behind me. We turned the sharp corner of the staircase and started up the steep steps to my attic room, using the banister to haul ourselves up.

  The relics were lined up on the mantelpiece, exactly as I’d left them. They weren’t as awe-inspiring a sight as the skulls in Mally’s bedroom, but they still made a fine display.

  ‘This is my collection,’ I said.

  At first, he seemed unimpressed. He put his camera down on the bed and picked up the eggs one by one, first the robin, then the magpie, running his thumb over each one’s surface and examining them in turn before returning them to their eggcups. When he came to the duckling a shadow of bemusement passed across his features, before he worked out what it was and a crescent of a smile touched his lips. He dealt with the blackbird’s egg in a perfunctory manner, turning it over in his hand and nodding, but when he came to the wren he changed. At first, he held it between finger and thumb, spreading the feathers out across his palm. Then he brought it closer to his face and inspected the end where the feathers were joined. The bone.

  ‘It’s a wing’, he said, and as I nodded, his sharp, bright white teeth appeared in a broad grin.

  ‘From a wren,’ I said, unable to keep the pride from my voice.

  ‘Clever,’ he said, and that was it. He approved.

  ‘So, this is your collection, then? Like I have the skulls, this is what you collect?’ He was facing the little arched window and the sun was streaming in, lighting up his eyes and causing his pupils to contract to pinpricks. In that light, I saw that his irises weren’t brown as I’d thought, but a dark orange.

  ‘They’re the relics,’ I said. ‘That’s what I call them.’

  ‘Relics?’

  ‘Yeah, I know. It sounds a bit religious, doesn’t it? I don’t know why I called them that, it just came to me one day.’

  ‘Something to do with your Catholic upbringing, probably.’

  He was still smiling, and his hand came up and I felt the tickle of the feathers against my cheek. He nodded, as if he wanted me to go on.

  ‘It’s all part of the Creed,’ I said.

  ‘And what’s the Creed?’

  I moved away from him and sat on the end of the bed.

  ‘It’s…it’s kind of like a belief system, I suppose. Not a religion or anything like that, because I don’t believe in God. It’s kind of like a set of rules to live by to make life easier.’

  He shifted the camera out of the way and sat down next to me, still holding the wing.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  It felt strange talking about the Creed for the first time, and I was worried that I’d somehow make it less powerful by talking about it. But Mally had given me the crow’s skull, the final relic that had allowed me to complete the incantation, and so he was a part of it too. I took a deep breath. I had rehearsed this speech in my head.

  ‘The Creed is based on the relics. Each of these is a bird’s egg or bone which is significant because of the circumstances in which it was obtained. The relics were found in a particular order. That’s important. When I list them in the order they were found, their names form a rhythm, they have a…a cadence which is pleasing to the ear. This means that they were meant to be found in that order. It’s a sign that the Creed is overseeing everything. I suppose you would call it a verse, but I call it the incantation.’

  ‘The incantation?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Say it to me.’

  ‘That’s the thing. I mustn’t tell anyone. If I do, it won’t be as powerful.’

  ‘But it’s to do with the relics, right? Kind of listing them in order?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘OK. Got it. Carry on.’

  ‘Well, I tell myself that if I say the incantation out loud before I go to sleep, then in the morning I’ll be able to remember the dream.’

  ‘Ah yes. The dream. The one about Petra?’

  I nodded. ‘I know it’s about the night that Petra died. I know there’s a phone ringing and there’s water and that Petra drowned, but that’s all I can remember. I can’t remember who phoned, or why.’

  ‘So you don’t know for sure what happened the night that Petra died?’

  ‘I know that my mother left her alone in the bath when she went to answer the phone and that when she came back Petra had drowned. That’s all. My parents won’t talk about it.’

  ‘Can’t you ask your dad?’

  ‘I did ask him. Just the once, but he couldn’t tell me.’ The ashen face, the glassy eyes and the sagging jowls. I remembered my dad that evening when I’d finally summoned up the courage to ask him about Petra. He’d put his head in his hands and wept—great big real tears that ran in streams down his cheeks—and that was when I’d run upstairs and got into bed with Lorry and cuddled up to him and fallen asleep. I hadn’t asked him about Petra again.

  ‘OK. So what else is involved in the Creed?’ Mally was turning the wing over in his hand, fanning out the feathers against his palm.

  ‘Another part of the Creed is the balance. If a minor bad thing happens, I have to cancel out the negative energy by repeating it. It’s about finding balance, equilibrium. So, for example, if Lorry falls over and grazes his knee, I have to make sure he grazes the other one, so that the bad luck is cancelled out.’

  Mally looked thoughtful. ‘Like the crows? Two crows I see, good luck to me? That’s what you meant about repeating something?’ He sat forward and pulled the photo out of his pocket. The crows stared back at us.

  ‘Exactly. It’s all about balancing out bad energy with other bad energy. People say that two wrongs don’t make a right, but sometimes they do. It’s all about finding the balance, achieving equilibrium. It’s best if you can find an opposite action to the original one—for example, grazing the other knee, as that’s better balance—but if that’s not possible, it’s OK to just repeat the action.’

  ‘You seem to have it all worked out.’

  ‘No, no I don’t. That’s the thing
with the Creed: you have to work it out for yourself, and I’m still discovering things.’

  ‘But it works for you?’

  ‘I suppose so. After Petra died, I felt as though I didn’t have any control over my life, but I realised that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Now I don’t feel as though I’m in control of my own destiny and that’s a weight off my shoulders. As long as I can prove to the Creed that I am a loyal subject, it will look after me.’

  ‘So does that mean you’re no longer responsible for your own actions?’

  I shrugged, but before I could answer him he picked up my hand and turned it over so it was palm upwards, and he placed the wren’s wing onto it. It was barely there, weightless.

  ‘You wanted me to tell you a secret,’ he said. ‘Another secret.’

  ‘Do you have another secret?’ I asked.

  ‘Everyone has secrets. Look at you, and your collection. The relics and the Creed and the incantation. They were all secrets until just now.’

  ‘So, what other secrets do you have to tell me?’

  He was quiet for ages, and I thought he’d decided not to say anything. Then he took a deep breath.

  ‘You remember me telling you about the plague cross? About how the plague was brought here by outsiders and about how half the village was wiped out?’ I nodded, careful not to speak in case he changed his mind and didn’t finish.

  ‘Well, these people—two sisters, they were—came from a village in Derbyshire, a village that got the plague really badly. The rector there decided—decreed, in fact—that no-one should leave the village and risk spreading the plague germs. Just took it upon himself, just like that, to decide that no-one was going to be allowed to escape. He told them it was God’s judgement and they would have to face it.’ Mally gave a little snort of disgust.

  ‘They were meant to stay there and die, you see, so these two sisters decided to escape, and they did and they ended up here. Only thing is, they didn’t know they’d brought the plague with them.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ I asked.

  He took the wren’s wing from me and very gently splayed the feathers out across his palm. Then he looked up at me.

  ‘Because they were my ancestors.’

  I sat still for a moment, until he carried on.

  ‘It’s all written down. My gran had some old papers which she passed on to my mum, and that’s how she found out about our ancestors. She said she wanted to learn more about them—about her relatives from 300 years ago—wanted to get a feel for them and where they lived. This house was up for sale so she bought it, just like that—didn’t even come to see it first—and because we own it, there’s nothing they can do about us.’

  He was looking down at the wren’s wing again.

  ‘So, you see, the reason the villagers hate us so much is because they blame us for what our ancestors did to their ancestors all those years ago.’ When he looked up, there was the trace of a smile on his lips.

  ‘Sometimes, you find out something about a person and it completely changes your perception of them.’

  After Mally had gone, I spent the rest of the morning sitting on the patch of concrete at the front of the cottage, idly pulling up the withered dandelions that sprouted in the cracks. The relentless sunlight in my eyes got too much, so I turned onto my front and waited for the grasshoppers. I don’t know why, but there seemed to be a huge number of them around, and it was easier than I thought to catch them.

  All I had to do was sit very still and wait for them to land on the grass in front of me. I knew that once they started their creaking sound they were easier to catch, as if that distracted them somehow. Once I’d spotted one, I would slowly move both hands out, inching forward, little by little. At the last minute, when I was close and the grasshopper was still clicking away, I’d pounce on top of it with both hands. I would feel it hopping, little tickles against my palms and fingers as it tried to batter its way out. I’d let it do that for a few minutes to exhaust it, then, very carefully, I’d wriggle my fingers open and transfer the grasshopper to one hand, holding it tight, making sure there were no holes where it could escape.

  Slowly, I’d ease my fingers open and before the grasshopper knew what was happening, I’d use two fingers to pinch it gently around its middle. Sometimes, this was when they escaped, and I learnt to put more pressure on the insect’s thorax, the hard bit where the abdomen joined the head. Its antennae would wriggle wildly, and very delicately I would grip one of its legs between my finger and thumb and carefully pull. I would start with its powerful, jointed back legs, the ones it used to propel itself into the air, as they were the largest and would usually come away without difficulty. Then the two little hinged ones in the middle and the pathetic tiny front legs, the ones it used to prop itself up. These were more delicate and required a lighter touch, and could easily break if this part of the process was rushed. Finally, the wings and the antennae would come off and in my hand would be an inch-long twig.

  I spent a couple of hours doing that and by the time I went in for lunch, I had a little pile of green and brown sticks on the concrete next to me, some of them still twitching, but most of them still.

  When I went to bed that night, the relics were in their assigned positions on the altar. I picked them up in turn and rolled them over in my hand, examining them. By now I knew each one intimately. I knew how the robin’s egg would feel chalky when I rubbed it, how the magpie’s egg would snuggle neatly into my cupped hand, how the duckling’s beak and bone would lie, grotesquely beautiful, on my palm. The mottled spots on the blackbird’s egg would be clustered together in places, like my own freckles. And the feathers of the wren’s wing would fan out in my fingers, still joined together by the tiny piece of bone and sinew. Finally, I picked up the crow’s skull, the gift from Mally, and turned it over in my hand. I didn’t know it as intimately as the other relics, and even though I’d examined it several times since I’d found it skewered on the railings, I’d never noticed before the weight of it, the density of the bone and the obsidian hardness of the beak.

  I tried reciting the incantation, touching each of the relics as I named them, wondering if that was the missing ingredient that would make the Creed show me the details of how Petra had died. On the face of it, my memory of what happened that night was complete: it made an entire story—it had a beginning, a middle and an end. But still I had that niggle that there was something missing, the thing that appeared in my dreams that I could never recall. I played over in my mind what I could remember, trying to pin down exactly what it was.

  I had already given Lorry his bath that night, and was in the bedroom with him, putting him into his pyjamas. My mother always did Petra’s bath, and I was struggling to get Lorry to lie still so I could get his nappy on. I could hear my mother, her soft clear voice ringing out across the landing from the bathroom, singing as she played with Petra in the bath. ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill, to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came flying after.’

  It was the ringing of the telephone that cut her off. The white telephone that sat on a little teak table at the bottom of the stairs. I heard the singing stop, and then the splashing stopped as my mother hushed Petra. She rushed out of the bathroom and I heard the squeal of the creaky floorboard at the top of the stairs. I thought she said something, perhaps to me, as she started down the stairs, but I wasn’t sure, and by that time Lorry was crawling to the doorway so I grabbed him and put his pyjamas on. I remember wondering who could be on the phone, whose phone call could be so urgent that my mother would leave Petra in the bath on her own when she went to answer it. At least, perhaps I thought that; maybe it only occurred to me afterwards.

  She was only gone for a few minutes.

  There’s a special time of day, when light is caught in limbo. Dusk: that time when the twilight dips to a level where light and dark start to merge, and everything takes on a silvery, ghost-like sheen, when it’s difficult to
tell where one thing ends and another begins, and the lines of things are all blurred together.

  Standing at the altar, examining the relics, I could see that it was almost a full moon, hanging low, suspended in the pale grey light, a glowing orb. I realised I was still stroking the crow’s skull, and put it back on the altar, back in its place at the end of the row. I said the incantation out loud again three times, then I lay in the dark with my eyes open.

  Nineteen.

  Monday 9th August 1976

  In the weeks after Petra died, I fantasised about drowning. I would lie in the bath and take great big lungfuls of air and let the warm water wash over my head and see how long I could hold my breath for. Just when my chest felt like it would burst, I would hold on for a few seconds longer and then let the air rush in, cold white oxygen filling my lungs. I wondered if it was actually possible to drown yourself, to keep yourself under the water until your lungs did burst, or until you passed out and started breathing in water—or whether human beings had some self-preservation gene that made them sit up out of the water and not drown.

  I was thinking about this as I lay on Mally’s bed. It was late morning and the sun was streaming in through the window. I’d left Lorry sitting with my dad in his studio. There had been an uneasy truce between my dad and my mother, and they circled each other like hyenas. I’d thought it best to get out of the house.

  Mally was sitting on the chair, strumming softly on his guitar with those long fingers.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Nif?’

  ‘What?’ The question startled me.

  ‘Ghosts. You know. Dead people. Spirits. Things that go bump in the night and all that.’

  I thought again of water. Lying there on Mally’s bed I could feel water closing in over my head. It was warm water, not cold, and it was comforting at first, pleasant. As soon as I thought this, the sensation disappeared.