Twenty-three.
‘So, what’s the real story?’ I was using the contraband corkscrew to attack the wine bottle we’d nicked from the cupboard under the stairs. The cork was stuck and had started to crumble.
Mally had given the skull in its jar of bleach a cursory inspection, and we agreed that it was ready for washing. I wanted to ask him about the relics, about digging them up again so that I could give the Creed the power it needed to get back at Tracy Powell, but he seemed preoccupied. I thought he might be upset about his mother’s confrontation with the beetle man.
‘What do you mean, “the real story”?’ He didn’t look at me, just flung himself onto my bed and stared up at the ceiling, arms behind his head.
‘Well, all that stuff your mum told my dad, about them not liking you just because you’re different? That’s not quite everything, is it?’ I managed to get the corkscrew in far enough to gain traction, and pulled at the cork. It came out with a pathetic plop and I took a mouthful. It tasted vinegary and vile. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
‘You told me about your ancestors being the ones who brought the plague to the village. I know about that. But that doesn’t explain what Lyndon Vaughan just said to my dad. He said your mother was evil. Why would he say that?’
Mally sat up and grabbed the bottle from me. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
He took a massive swig from the bottle, then handed it back. He went and stood at the open window and took a packet of Benson and Hedges and a box of matches from the back pocket of his jeans. The flame was almost invisible in the stream of bright sunshine and the cigarette glowed a dull red when he took a drag. He leant out of the little window and blew out a steady stream of smoke. I stood next to him and together we looked down on the patch of grass at the front of the chapel, and the parking area where Lyndon Vaughan and Mr Beynon and the chapel-goers had congregated. The scent of the honeysuckle was clotting the the air again, languid and sickly.
‘When we first moved here all sorts of heavy shit happened,’ Mally said, and his voice was quiet and steady.
‘What sort of shit?’
He took another drag on the cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for a moment. He pushed his head out through the window before he exhaled. Then he handed me the fag.
‘It was like they’d already made up their minds to hate us, before we even moved in. Like they knew who we were and didn’t even give us a chance.’
‘Like they knew about your ancestors?’
He nodded. I tapped the end of the cigarette on the outside window sill, and we watched as the little log of ash rolled away and disappeared over the edge.
‘What happened to them?’
He didn’t reply at first. He grabbed the wine bottle out of my hand and took a huge swallow. It was like he was steeling himself for something, and what he said next made me realise why.
‘They said they were witches.’
‘Witches?’ He nodded.
‘That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’
‘Not really. This was 300 years ago, remember. People were nuts back then. Thought any woman who was a bit different or who acted strangely was a witch.’
I was quiet for a while, processing this information.
‘But why would Lyndon Vaughan and the others hate you because of your ancestors? Surely they can’t believe in all that?’
Mally took another swig of wine.
‘It’s…weird. After we moved here, back in January, strange things started to happen. People got sick and stuff. They started finding dead animals lying around, with no signs of how they’d been killed. You know, all that Hammer Horror bullshit.’ I could tell he was trying to make a joke of it, but there was a tremor in his voice.
‘Go on,’ I said.
He took another drag on the cigarette then leant out of the window. When he spoke, his voice was so quiet that I had to strain to catch his words before they disappeared into the still air.
‘Then they started saying that my mother was bewitching people.’ He made little inverted commas in the air with his fingers. ‘You know, making them fall in love with her. And it’s true. There were lots of blokes in the village that did fancy her, including Beynon.’
I must have looked shocked, because he smiled briefly before he carried on.
‘Some people in the village think my mother tried to seduce old Mr Beynon, that she tried to get him to screw her. They said that my mother wanted to shag that old man.’ Disgust clouded his face. ‘As if. He was the one hanging round her all the time, trying to get into her knickers.’ Before I could say anything, he went on.
‘Lyndon Vaughan backed him up of course, said he’d seen my mother collecting herbs at midnight under a full moon, or whatever other shit he’d seen on the telly. Honestly, it was like there was a witch hunt.’ He stopped himself, realising what he’d said, and I was relieved when his scowl transformed into a grin. ‘It was. It was just like a witch hunt. Whenever we left the house they’d be there, Beynon and Lyndon Vaughan, staring at us, not saying anything. And then they started doing this weird thing, shaking branches at our house and what-not, saying they were going to cleanse it.’ He was rolling the cigarette in his finger and thumb, twisting it backwards and forwards.
‘You’ve seen the circles they’ve scratched on our gatepost? The overlapping ones, all different sizes? They come along and make them with a compass, for fuck’s sake. They call them witch marks. Say they’re to ward off evil.’ He’d grown angry again, and both his fists were clenched at his sides, the cigarette crushed between his fingers. The sinews stood out taut on his arms.
‘They’re like the circles in the pub,’ I said. ‘The ones over the fireplace. They’re the same, scratched into the wood: sets of concentric circles that overlap. Did they put them there, as well?’
‘They’re old ones. Ancient. They’re probably here from when our lot first moved here. The Derbyshire lot. This village has a long history.’
Mally had said that the chapel-goers thought that his ancestors were evil, that they practised witchcraft. Did they think that Janet was the same? Were they trying to defend themselves using their own type of magic? There was nothing overtly Christian about the ritual I was witnessing; it was more basic than that. The actions they were performing—the herbs and the water—were more like an ancient pagan ceremony, with none of the trappings of religion I’d grown used to when I went to church.
‘I’ve seen them doing all that stuff. Making the circles and the stuff with the leaves and water.’
Mally nodded.
‘What happened to make them start doing it all? Something must have happened to set them off?’
He took another swig of the wine before he went on. ‘There was this…accident. Or…not really an accident. More of an incident. One day old Beynon woke up and he couldn’t see anything. He’d got cataracts in both eyes and he just literally couldn’t see. I mean, how does that happen to someone?’
Mally was holding the bottle in one hand, and I could see that it was nearly empty now, even though I’d only had one mouthful.
‘He went to the hospital and they just told him to wait and see if he got his sight back. That was at Easter and the old guy’s still blind as a bat.’ He raised the cigarette to his mouth with his other hand and took a drag. There was a vertical furrow between his eyebrows, something I hadn’t noticed before, and it made him look tired and cross, and older.
‘Of course, they said it was our fault. That my mother was a witch, like her ancestors, and she’d put a spell on him to make him go blind. Can you believe that? In this day and age? For fuck’s sake, Nif. It’s 1976!’
I remembered what the beetle man had said to Janet outside the cottage, how he’d referred to her dowsing rod as a witch’s stick, and how he’d warned my parents away from her.
‘And what do you think?’
‘Me? What do I think? I think that’s ridiculous. She�
�s my mum. She’s not a witch for fuck’s sake!’ He stood at the window smoking angrily. After a couple of minutes, he stubbed the cigarette out on the window frame and strode over to the mantelpiece. He picked up the jar with the raven’s skull in it. He held it up to the light and looked at it intently for a few moments.
‘Tell me the incantation,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The incantation. Teach it to me. If you trusted me, you’d tell me.’
I turned this over in my mind. Part of me wanted to keep the Creed for myself. It was mine: it had chosen me. But the other part of me felt that Mally deserved to be in on it. He’d given me the crow’s skull, the final relic which allowed me to complete the incantation, and now the raven’s skull which was going to help me get revenge on Tracy Powell. Surely I could trust him?
I turned to face him. His hands were cool when I held them. I looked right into his eyes and started reciting. ‘Robin’s egg, magpie’s egg, duckling bill and bone. Blackbird’s egg, feathers of wren, the skull of a crow.’
He repeated it after me, and when he faltered a couple of times I corrected him. We said it together until he knew it perfectly, and then we chanted it over and over again, feeling the words surging around us. They melded together into something palpable, something greater than the sum of its parts. We bounced on the bed, chanting the incantation. We sang it and we shouted it and then we lay down, facing each other, laughing. There was something magical about it, about the two of us, there and then. There was an energy in the room, a feeling of anticipation, of something momentous about to happen.
When Mally put his hand under the waistband of my shorts, I was already expecting it. His long fingers inched lower, burrowing, searching, and then his hands moved round to my hips and deftly slid my shorts and my pants down, so that they bunched around my thighs. My fingers danced over his Orion’s Belt of moles, and he grabbed at his belt and undid it in one movement, sliding it out of the belt loops and throwing it to the far corner of the room. It hit the chair with a loud clanking sound.
He rolled me onto my back and lay on top of me, his body surprisingly heavy for someone so lithe. I could feel him digging into my belly. I knew there was no turning back.
‘Ready, Nif?’ he asked. The sun was coming through the window and casting his face into shadows—and I thought then that was the reason the sun was so bright; it was to make the things in the shadows so much darker and hold their secrets away from the light—and then that little half-smile was back on his lips.
‘Do you trust me, Nif?’
I nodded and his fingers were moving and there was the slow slide of denim against skin and then he was inside me.
Twenty-four.
Mally didn’t stay long afterwards. He’d said he needed to get his mother home, that she’d be no good on her own after all the wine she’d drunk. When we heard the bottle smashing downstairs, we knew something was going on. I listened to his footsteps clatter down the attic stairs, and then I went to the open window and looked out onto the lane and the patch of grass in front of the chapel.
It was early afternoon, and even though the heat hadn’t diminished at all, I began to wonder if Janet had been right about the weather turning. There was a new smell to the air. It was more robust, more substantial, and I thought I could taste it now, earthy and damp. It was just as heavy as before, but there was a definite shift. It was like the change that had come across my mother since we’d gone to stay in the cottage and she’d become friends with Janet: different, but not necessarily better.
The light had changed as well. The sky had lost the translucent glow I’d come to expect; now it looked weak and insipid. The blue no longer had the glossy sheen of satin, but instead was faded and worn like denim.
As I looked out of the window, Mally and Janet came into view and started climbing the steps to the little parking area. Janet was weaving all over the place and Mally was trying to prop her up and make her walk at the same time, and it would have been funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. When they made it to the top of the steps I heard the familiar squeak as Mally opened the gate. Janet started to stumble forwards, propelled by her own weight, and her hands went out instinctively to break her fall, but she was too slow, and she landed awkwardly on the pile of broken concrete. She rolled over until she was lying on her back, slumped on the grey dusty mound, and she looked for all the world like a little girl, in her red vest and mini skirt, holding her arms up to Mally to be picked up. Mally stood there for a few moments, looking down at her, and I couldn’t see his face. I was glad.
Eventually, he hauled her to her feet and they crossed the lane together. When they got to the gate, Mally reached out to push it open over the grass. It got stuck and he had to push at it awkwardly with his hip, all the time supporting his mother. Janet reached out a heavy arm towards the gatepost and her fingers dangled in the air in front of the circles that had been scratched there, not quite touching them. Then Mally managed to get the gate open and the pair of them made their way up the path and disappeared from view.
In our kitchen, my dad was clearing up after lunch. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her head resting on her arms. At her elbow, the ashtray was overflowing, the spilled butts trickling down onto the table in a wave, as though they were trying to escape from the filth. Next to the ashtray was the bust my dad had been working on, and I guessed that my mother had brought it up from the studio, intending to show it to Janet. It was still covered in its plastic and hessian wrapping. On the floor at my mother’s feet were the shattered shards of brown glass that I recognised as being from the bottle Janet had given her: the potion.
I’d seen my dad drunk before, especially in the days after Petra died. He’d get my mother into bed and make sure she’d taken her Valium, and when he thought that Lorry and I were asleep, he’d sit in the brown Draylon armchair in the living room drinking glass after glass of whisky, the piss-coloured liquid slowly disappearing. From where I used to sit, huddled in the darkness at the top of the stairs, I would watch as his eyes started to get wet, usually after the third or fourth glass. Then he would start to let out short, sudden sobs, and as the level of the whisky in the bottle dropped his pain would grow, and he would let the tears flow, big fat drops that ran down his cheeks, past his chin and onto his neck. Once or twice I went down and stood in front of him, wondering if he could see me, but he looked through me as if I wasn’t there.
The next morning, it would be as though nothing had happened, and the empty whisky bottle and the glass would be gone, and there would be no trace of my dad’s grief from the night before except for the sagging around his eyes and the sour smell when he pulled me close to kiss me.
He was a different sort of drunk now. He was an angry drunk, and the tension was back in the room. It was as though Janet’s calming influence had left with her, and my parents were back at war with each other.
My dad’s movements as he tidied up the kitchen were jerky and sharp. His hands shook when he swept up the broken glass, and the ashtray tipped to the side when he went to lift it and it shed even more of the fugitive cigarette ends. There were broken eggshells on the sideboard, and the plates in the sink held the congealing traces of omelette. He was muttering to himself, his lips moving rapidly, his face set in a scowl. He didn’t notice me when I walked in.
I grabbed an orange from the fruit bowl and was making for the door again when my mother lifted her head up off her arms. She seemed to struggle to focus on me, and then it was as though she decided she couldn’t be bothered. She looked at my dad instead.
‘Clive?’ Her voice was a croak. He didn’t turn around from the sink where he was scrubbing plates. ‘Clive?’ I could tell there was going to be a scene, so I crouched down in the back hall, at the top of the steps down to my dad’s studio, and began to peel the orange.
My mother pulled herself to her feet, unsteady at first, and then, with great care, she crossed the floor to stand behind him. He was rigid,
his spine straight and tight, and he didn’t move when she placed a hand on each of his shoulders.
‘Don’t be like this. It’s not Janet’s fault. I asked her to help me.’ My dad shook her off and dried his hands on the tea towel that hung next to the sink. He took his time, very slowly and deliberately drying each finger in turn, all the time keeping his back turned towards my mother.
‘I asked her to make me the potions, and they help, they really do.’ My mother’s voice was wheedling, a whining drawl that made me want to punch her in the face, and when my dad spun round and lifted his hands I wondered if that was what he was going to do. Instead, he grabbed her shoulders.
‘Please, Clive,’ she wheedled. ‘You didn’t have to smash it. It’s not Janet’s—’
‘Janet! That bloody woman. She’s always here, hanging around, touching you and…and giving you those bloody potions!’
My mother’s face was impassive. He gave her shoulders a tiny shake.
‘You know what they’d be saying at home about the two of you, don’t you? They’d say you were a pair of dykes, the way you’re always together and hugging and what-have-you. You should be ashamed.’
‘Ashamed?’ My mother sounded incredulous but calm. ‘Ashamed? Of what we have? I don’t think so. What we have is beautiful. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘It’s not right. It’s…weird.’
My mother’s mouth twisted into a sly smile.
‘You think she’s put a spell on me, is that it?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Or are you jealous?’
‘What do you mean?’ My dad was suspicious.
‘I’ve seen you looking. I’ve seen you watching her sunbathing. Don’t tell me you’re not interested.’
My dad drew his hand over his eyes and let out a long breath. He’d gone from angry to weary in a few moments.
‘It’s true, isn’t it? You fancy her.’ My mother sounded like a teenager, teasing her friend about a boy.
Water Shall Refuse Them Page 19