‘I suppose those eyes will have to wait,’ he said, and took my brother off me. My brother started crying, his fingers twisting into my dad’s hair. ‘OK. I know you’re hungry. Let’s get you fed, shall we?’ My dad started towards the door, but then turned back. ‘Have you seen your mother, Nif?’
‘She was with Janet earlier, in the kitchen, but she’d gone when I got back just now.’
‘Ah, yes, that reminds me.’ He pushed his glasses up his nose and shuffled to readjust Lorry on his hip. He sounded hesitant, almost embarrassed. ‘Janet’s coming round tomorrow. She’s going to dowse for water in the garden. Your mother’s got a bee in her bonnet—reckons Janet has a knack for knowing where the springs are underground, and she thinks she might be able to find us one so we don’t have to go to the well all the time. If it works it should make your job a bit easier, eh, love?’
I nodded, but I thought about all the time I’d spent at the well with Mally. The well and the field had taken on a special significance for the Creed, now that the relics were there.
‘C’mon then, little feller,’ my dad said. ‘Let’s go and find Mummy and have a snack. Come on, Nif.’ He gave one last look at the bust.
I followed him out, but then I remembered that he hadn’t sprayed the bust with water, to prevent it drying out. I doubled back into the studio. I picked up the water bottle and gave it a shake. It was full. There was a nozzle attached to it, so that it could spray a fine mist of water over the bust, and I tested it against my face. The water was lukewarm, but it still felt pleasant in the mugginess of the studio. I sat on my dad’s stool, the one in front of the potter’s wheel, and carefully lifted the hessian away from the sculpture.
It had changed since I last saw it. The hairline was lower and the forehead unlined and crease-free. The nose was shorter and tilted at the end. The cheeks had become plumper, and there was a hint of fullness under the chin. Now, it resembled Janet.
Twenty.
Tuesday 10th August 1976
‘Witches’ knickers.’
‘What?’
‘Witches’ knickers.’ Mally pointed at a carrier bag that was hanging, snagged in the hedge. ‘That’s what some people call them. Witches’ knickers.’
We were walking along the lane: me, Mally and Lorry. It was quite early in the morning, but already the sun was jabbing at us. I hadn’t washed for a few days and the animal smell on me was ripe and raw, so I decided to take Lorry to the stream as soon as I got up. He’d still been eating his breakfast, a piece of bread smeared with jam, but I didn’t want to hang around so I made him bring it with him.
Mally came out of his house just as we walked past and bounded into the lane next to us. He had a buzz about him, an energy that meant he was constantly twitching, or fiddling with his camera, and I suspected he’d been keeping a look out for us from his bedroom window. I hadn’t said anything.
‘So, did it work then? Did you remember the dream? Did you remember who was on the phone?’ Mally was walking backwards, a couple of feet in front of me. He had his denim jacket on, but no shirt, and the Orion’s Belt of moles across his belly winked at me as he moved.
‘Nope. Nothing,’ I said, and pulled Lorry away from the carrier bag.
I’d woken late that morning to the sound of someone tapping on my brain. At first, I couldn’t work out if the sensation was sound, and I was hearing something loud and persistent, or if there really was someone standing next to me in my bedroom, their knuckles banging off my head. In the end, I’d dragged myself out of sleep and worked out that it was a noise—a loud, rhythmic, metallic noise.
The clanging continued as I pulled on my clothes and went downstairs. The front door was open and I could see my dad standing on the patch of concrete. He was holding a massive hammer, an enormous lump of metal on a wooden handle that must have been about four feet long. He’d stuck a crowbar into a crack in the concrete and was bringing the hammer down on top of it, each strike causing a loud and impertinent clang. There was sweat dripping off him, coursing down his bare back, but he didn’t seem to be bothered by it. He just kept on swinging the hammer, hauling it up over his head and letting its own weight send it falling back down onto the crowbar. I remembered that he’d planned to dig up the concrete, that it was one of the jobs he’d decided to do to repay his colleague for letting us stay in the cottage.
‘Maybe tonight then,’ Mally said, and he spun round so he was walking next to Lorry and grabbed hold of his hand. I knew that the dream came in those few moments before I woke up, and the fact that I’d been woken before I was ready, artificially, meant that I hadn’t had the dream. My dad’s fault.
The plague cross had just loomed into sight when we saw the magpies sitting on the barbed-wire fence, heads hunkered down into their shoulders. There was a whole flock of them, seven in total, and they watched us, glass-eyed and judgmental. Mally slowed down as well when he saw them, and then we stopped—the three of us stood in a row across the width of the lane. The magpies were about twenty feet away.
Even before Mally’s hand went to the inside pocket of his denim jacket, even before he pulled it out and showed me what it held, I knew what it would be.
‘Lesson three, Nif?’ He was smirking now. ‘Think you’re ready?’
I nodded. I knew I was ready. He handed me the wire.
It was wound up on itself, and as I loosened the end from where it was wrapped around the coil, I felt the spring of the energy within it, as though it had a life of its own and was trying to free itself. I flexed it in both hands, feeling the slight resistance of the metal as I pulled it through the loop at the end. It wasn’t anything special, not a hangman’s noose or anything like that, just a straightforward running knot with the tail stuck through. I uncoiled it, and saw that it was much longer than I’d been expecting, a good twelve feet or so.
‘You’ve got to stand back from them, from the bait. If you’re too close they won’t come.’ Mally had read my mind.
He lifted the camera strap over his head and hooked it around Lorry’s neck. Lorry beamed. Then Mally took the wire from my hands and laid it out on the lane. It glinted, a metal snake on the dust. He grabbed the last bit of bread from Lorry’s hand, and I thought Lorry might protest, but he was too intent on examining the camera.
Very slowly, crouching down, Mally walked towards the magpies, who lifted their heads up slightly, tilting them on their necks, but other than that they showed no signs of being bothered. When he was about ten feet away from them, he pushed the noose-end of the wire onto the lane in front of him, between him and the magpies. Then he bit off a piece of the bread and tossed it, without aiming, at the loop. It landed right in the centre. He turned to me and grinned.
Lorry started clapping, and I grabbed his hands and held them still and shushed him. The magpies still hadn’t moved. Mally backed away from the birds and when he was down on his haunches next to the end of the wire he picked it up. Then he lay on his stomach in the dust and waited.
I had counted to 124 by the time anything happened. It was the middle magpie that moved first. Its head moved infinitesimally on its shoulders and it focused one eye down onto the ground, onto the bread. After a few seconds, it fluffed up its wings, a flutter of black and white, like it was getting ready for something. Then it stood up and hopped down onto the ground, landing a few feet away from the bread.
Although he hardly moved, I could tell that Mally was tensing, waiting for the magpie to put its head into the wire loop. It hopped forward, speculatively. Then it hopped back again, never taking its eyes off the piece of bread. It seemed to be considering its options. Then it hopped forward again and this time put out its beak to take the bait.
Very slowly, Mally tilted the wire ring so that it was at right angles to the ground. The magpie stopped and twisted its head again. It looked down at the trap with one eye, then reached its head forward through the loop, its beak already open to take the bread. Like lightning, Mally yanked the end of the wire.
The bird’s wings flapped and flailed as the loop caught tight around its neck. A cloud of dust lifted around it, and it tried jumping backwards, away from the noose, but that only made the grip tighter. After a few seconds, it seemed to realise this, and it stopped moving and collapsed to the ground, its wings limp in the dust. The other magpies had already flown off in a clatter of black and white.
Mally pushed himself up onto his feet, brushing the dust off his jeans with one hand, but holding tight onto the end of the wire with the other. He held it out to me.
‘Do you want to do the honours?’ he asked. I couldn’t tell if the light in his eyes was a reflection of the sun or something else.
I felt the now-familiar thrill in the pit of my stomach. It was the same feeling I’d had whenever I discovered a new relic, except each time it had got better, more intense—and now it felt like an electric current was passing through my body. The metal in my hand was warm, almost hot, when I took the wire from Mally, and I gripped it tightly.
The magpie was completely still by now, but its tongue was sticking out, pointed, pink and sharp. It was panting, little ragged breaths in and out. Mally had told me that the best way to kill a bird is to quickly yank on the end of the wire, cutting through the neck and severing the head. It would be over in an instant.
Instead, I pulled on the wire and dragged the magpie towards me, its body and tail feathers making a trail in the dust of the lane. When it was lying at my feet, I lifted it off the ground, and it hung there, swinging slightly in the stagnant air. Its head hung limply down, and its wings were slumped, and I thought for a moment it must have died. But then its eyes flickered and I knew it was still alive.
I found the words forming on my lips without me trying, and when I started singing my voice was soft, falling like silk over the dusty stillness of the lane.
‘One for sorrow, two for joy. Three for a girl and four for a boy.’
I started swinging the magpie backwards and forwards, very gently at first, then quicker and quicker, like a pendulum. Even though I wasn’t looking at him, I knew Mally was staring at me. I could feel the heat of his gaze, and I swung the magpie faster and faster.
‘Five for silver, six for gold.’ I found myself drawing my arm up and round, behind my head, like I’d seen my dad doing earlier that morning with the hammer. I thought of Little Red Riding Hood’s father, the woodcutter, bringing the axe down onto the neck of the wolf.
‘Seven for a secret…’ There was a thumping sound in my ears and the sudden thought came to me that it was my heart pounding. I was about to swing the magpie down onto the ground, and I could already anticipate the pile of black and white feathers limp in the dust, when Lorry screamed.
I spun round and there he was behind me, his hands clamped over his eyes. He kept on screaming and then he started shaking his head, never once taking his hands away from his face.
I dropped the end of the wire and was barely aware of the magpie falling to the ground.
‘Lorry! It’s OK. Don’t worry.’ I put my arms round him and pulled him into me, breathing in his familiar biscuit smell.
‘Nif hurt bird,’ he panted, and took his hands away from his eyes. He looked at me in terror, but then his features shifted slightly and I saw suspicion and accusation.
I didn’t know what to say. I picked him up and cuddled him, and that was when I saw Mally running back down the lane, back the way we’d come. I thought he’d lost his bottle and had decided to go home, but then I saw him stop and reach into the hedge. He pulled out the carrier bag and shook it. Then he ran back to us, and when he got close I could see that his eyes were still gleaming. He picked up the bird with one hand and let it fall into the carrier bag. He coiled up the wire that was still attached to the magpie’s neck and placed it carefully into the bag as well. Then he grabbed the bag by the handles, for all the world like he was on his way back from the supermarket, and swung the bag towards me and Lorry.
‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Let’s take it with us.’
The magpie lay on the grass in front of me, not moving. Only the odd tremor of the feathers on its ribcage gave away the fact that it was still breathing, and occasionally one of its eyes would spring open and then slowly close again.
Lorry had calmed down and was paddling in the shallow water next to the bank. He seemed to have forgotten all about the bird, and was splashing and laughing softly to himself. Mally lay next to me. He’d taken his denim jacket off and was lying on his back, soaking up the heat of the sun. His skin was so pale it was almost luminous, unscathed by the sun’s vicious rays which had rendered my arms red and sore. He’d taken a couple of Polaroids of the magpie; they lay on top of the carrier bag in front of us. They were fuzzy and out of focus and didn’t do justice to what we’d just achieved.
I could feel the prickle of the sun’s needles on my back and wondered briefly if I should go into the stream with Lorry. The heat made it difficult to move so instead I concentrated on the feeling of the hard ground under me, the warmth pulsating from it through my t-shirt and into my belly. I felt Mally’s hand reach out and grab mine across the scratchy grass. It was cool and dry.
We were waiting for the magpie to die. We’d decided not to upset Lorry any more by killing it ourselves, but instead to wait until it died and then bury it whole. It was an experiment. Mally wanted to see what would happen to the rest of the bones when they were buried. I just wanted to see how long it would take for death to come.
A raised voice made me look up. I could just about make out the lumpen forms of Tracy Powell and Fat Denise standing on the bridge. Their backs were to us, their fat arses propped against the stone wall. The bright colours of their t-shirts shimmered and looked as though they might disappear at any minute. I looked over at Mally. He still had his eyes closed.
Tracy and Denise hadn’t seen us, and from their arm movements I guessed they were sharing a cigarette, passing it backwards and forwards between themselves. In front of me, the magpie twitched, one leg shooting out behind it, tipping it over onto its side. The wire was still around its neck. Mally had said that it was best to leave it there for now, until it died, and then take it off later. I didn’t think we had much longer to wait.
‘I’m going for a piss.’ Mally was awake, and he hauled himself to his feet and slung his camera around his neck. I rolled onto my side and watched him saunter off towards the far end of the field and disappear behind the hedge.
Above my head, a dragonfly appeared and it dangled in the air, bobbing lazily. I wondered if I might be able to catch it and detach each of those glorious bottle-blue wings, one by one, and then its legs, but I decided it was too much effort and lay back down again. I put my head on my arms and after a couple of minutes, started to feel the tug of sleep.
‘You’re a fuckin’ sicko, you are.’ There was a foot on my back, planted between my shoulder blades, pushing me down and pinning me to the ground. Then I felt a hand on the back of my head, forcing my face into the sharp grass, and a pain in my temple where it was being pushed against the hard ground. Tracy Powell.
I could just about twist my head round far enough to see a shabby pair of sandals and red-chipped, ragged toenails. A pair of podgy hands appeared, the nails bitten down to the quick, and I guessed that was Fat Denise. I felt the pressure on the back of my head ease as Tracy let go of my hair, and the tendons in my neck strained as I tried to move my head. She stood up, but kept her foot on my back. I was trapped.
‘What the fuck have you and that saddo been doin’?’ Tracy’s voice was shrill with incredulity, and I guessed she was talking about the magpie. ‘That’s fuckin’ cruel, that is.’
I twisted my head round and could see that Fat Denise had picked the bird up and was cradling it. She tucked it under her armpit and used the other hand to ease the wire from the magpie’s neck, surprisingly gently, and throw it onto the ground. The wire jerked slightly as it unwound, then it lay still, glittering in the grass.
The magpie wasn’t moving, but after a moment it started panting again, harder and faster. It looked as though someone had breathed new life into it. There was light in its eyes again.
‘What’s wrong with you? Who’d do that sort of thing to a bird?’ Tracy sounded properly upset. ‘That’s what hangin’ round with Mally White does for you.’ She grabbed my hair again and pushed my face back into the ground.
‘Fuck off Tracy,’ I managed to say, my mouth full of grass.
‘He’s a fuckin’ nutter. Him and his mam should never have moved here. Nothin’ but trouble since the day they arrived.’ Fat Denise snorted her assent.
Tracy grabbed my hair again and yanked my head back. I tried to push myself up off the ground, but she put more weight onto the foot that she’d planted on my back and I was forced back down again. I used all the strength in my body to try to push myself up from the ground, but it still wasn’t enough. I was trapped under the weight of Tracy Powell’s bulk.
‘Nif? What’s happening?’ Lorry’s voice was small and plaintive and worried. I couldn’t see him, but could tell he was standing next to me, about three feet away.
‘Don’t worry, Lorry,’ I managed to get out, even though my face was being pushed into the ground. ‘It’s only a game. A game the big kids play.’
‘I don’t like it,’ he said, and he started snivelling.
I managed to turn my head just enough to see that Fat Denise had got hold of him in one hand, her pudgy fingers making a bracelet around his wrist. He was twisting and turning, pulling away from her and trying to get free. She still had the magpie under her armpit, nudged up against her fat tits. Sick filled my mouth and I swallowed it back down.
Tracy leant down and pushed her face into mine. I could smell her breath, pungent with stale cigarettes.
‘This your little brother?’
Water Shall Refuse Them Page 16