A Song for Ella Grey

by David Almond

  TWELVE

  There were tiny bulbs of blood on the tiny bite marks on her ankles. Tiny tiny tiny things. I bent down to them and sucked and spat, sucked and spat. There was hardly a taste from them, just a tiny touch of bitterness, hardly anything at all. Sam dragged her from me, lifted her into his arms and ran. He ran along the jetsam line. He floundered on the soft sand, so he ran through the turning edge of the sea and the water danced and glittered at his feet. Maria and Michael and Angeline and I followed. We couldn’t keep up with him. All of our phones were dead, no power in them. We kept clicking them anyway, snarling at them, glaring at them. Somebody, who might have been me and might have been all of us, kept calling,

  “Help! Help! Bliddy help! Ella! Ella!”

  There were families and walkers on the beach below the castle. They turned to us in dread.

  “Snakes!” yelled James. “The snakes got Ella!”

  The watchers wore shocked faces, round mouths, furrowed eyes, like masked actors in some ancient play. We ran through the lengthening shadow beneath the castle. Sam slowed, churning his way inland through soft sand again. He gasped and wept. We caught up with him and tried to help, going in close to take her legs to try to share the weight, but she dangled like a dead thing, and trying to help just made it worse.

  “She’s stopped breathing,” Sam gasped.

  He found new energy, ran up the black road of The Wynding towards the village.

  “She’s gone!” he gasped.

  I stumbled at his side. I kept reaching to her, trying to touch her heart. I touched the tiny tiny bite marks.

  “They’re just adders,” I said. “They can’t kill. She’ll be safe. Ella! Oh, Ella!”

  “Help! Help!” we cried.

  “Ella! Ella!”

  “Don’t die!” I screamed into her ear. “Don’t bliddy die, Ella Grey!”

  Where to go to? There were hotels, cafés, a church, a gift shop, a butcher’s shop, a gallery. We just stumbled into the green at the heart of it all and yelled like bairns.

  “Help! The snakes have killed our friend!”

  We laid her down on the grass as they came out from the buildings towards us, as they paused in their early-summer Bamburgh walks. There we were, a bunch of kids, half-naked, with the body beside us in the grass, not knowing what to do, not knowing anything.

  And then the policeman, hurrying through the watchers. The policeman from the time before, our friend.

  “The snakes have killed Ella!” we gasped at him.

  “They can’t have,” he told us, as he touched her throat, as he felt her wrist, as he touched the bites. “Not the adders. Yes, they’ll bite, and yes, they’ll cause you pain and yes, they’ll cause you sickness for a little time. But kill? No. Never.” He leaned right over her. “Or very very rarely,” he whispered. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.” He gave the kiss of life, tried to breathe life into her. “I’m sure she’ll be fine,” he gasped. He tried again, again. He took out his phone. He trembled as he spoke into it.

  “They say it was snakes but mebbe it was something else. No, there’s no response from her. No…I tried that. No…Hurry. Hurry!”

  I shoved past him. I opened her mouth with my fingers. I breathed right into her, breathed right into her, tried to breathe my own life into her, tried to call her back from death.

  I yelled right into her open mouth.

  “Ella! Ella! Ella!”

  They were gathered all around us on the green. A dozen, two dozen, three dozen folk.

  We heard the siren from the road that runs beside the coast.

  “Don’t go!” I yelled at her. “Don’t leave me, Ella Grey!”

  Then here was Orpheus, coming through the folk.

  He shoved me away. He leaned over her, and he breathed like I had into her open mouth, he sang a desperate song down into her deepest darkest depths.

  “Ella! Ella! Ella Grey!”

  He knelt and played his lyre. He leaned over her, bared his teeth at her, as if he wanted to force the music right into her.

  “Come back!” he yelled. “Come back to me!”

  Then the ambulance was there, and two green-clothed medics came, a woman and a man, and pushed Orpheus aside.

  “Not here, son!” they said, as if he were a little child.

  The woman took her pulse and checked her breath and breathed into her mouth. The man compressed her chest again, again. He cut open her wedding dress, opened a box, took out a machine, told us to keep back. He pressed electrodes to her skin. Ella jerked and jumped. She jerked again.

  They lifted her onto a stretcher, carried her into the ambulance.

  They let me climb in beside her, let me hold her cold hand.

  As the doors closed, I saw Orpheus, sprinting like a scared beast back towards the beach.

  THIRTEEN

  “She told us she’d be fine,” said Mrs. Grey.

  “And there’d be no trouble,” said her husband, “as long as you were there.”

  “Claire’s the best of friends, she said. And the others are lovely, sensible…”

  “Civilised, she said.”

  “And us, we were so backward.”

  “We were from the Dark Ages.”

  “Not like other parents.”

  “Not like other more advanced and modern parents.”

  “So we relented.”

  “We let her go.”

  “We let her go and so she died.”

  They stood in our kitchen, just inside the back door. The African masks and the Picasso print hung close by them. Mum heard them, and came to them. No, they said, they wouldn’t sit. They wanted no tea. No, no wine.

  “We’re devastated,” said Mum. “We loved her so very much.”

  “She was like another daughter,” said Dad, who came in, too.

  “She told us that,” said Mrs. Grey.

  “They understand me,” said her husband. “They know who I am.”

  They wore grey clothes and their faces were grey.

  “She didn’t mean it,” said Mum. “That’s just how children are.”

  “And you loved her, she knew that,” said Dad.

  “Love?” said Mrs. Grey. “It was more than love. We gave her everything.”

  “Of course,” he answered and he lowered his eyes.

  “Of course,” echoed Mrs. Grey, and I saw that she hated us all.

  “The boy,” said Mr. Grey. “Of course she told us nothing about the boy.”

  “You knew, of course,” said his wife to me.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “This so-called singer, this vagabond. This…”

  “He was unusual,” said Dad, “but there seemed nothing bad in him.”

  Both of them flinched.

  “What?” said Mrs. Grey. “You mean you met him?”

  “Just once,” said Dad.

  “He was here?”

  “Yes,” said Mum.

  “He sat at this table? With Ella?”

  “We saw how much he loved her, Mrs. Grey.”

  “Ah, that thing called love again! So you loved her like a best friend, and you loved her like a daughter, and you all saw how this wastrel loved her too, and you told us nothing, and you fed him and watered him, and you let him lead her to her death?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” whispered Mum.

  “No? Is this what your idea of love is? That it involves secrets and lies and ends in death? What about the love that we had for her? What about the love that would have protected her and kept her safe?”

  “We’re sorry,” said Dad. “We know now that we should perhaps have told you.”

  “Ha! And you,” said Mr. Grey, baring his teeth at me now. “What did you do to protect her? What did you do, oh best of friends?”

  “It was an accident,” I answered. “It was a chance in a million. It was the snakes.”

  “It was no accident,” said Mrs. Grey. “It was not the snakes. It was you and you and you, and the rest of the stupid
motley crew. You are the ones who caused the death of Ella Grey.”

  FOURTEEN

  The funeral was at the cold grey St. Thomas’ Church on Sandoe Street above the Tyne. The air was still, the sky was grey, the river was grey, the sea was grey on the bleak horizon. No birds sang. The church was packed: kids from school, teachers, neighbours, voyeurs drawn by the tale of the death of one so young. A couple of seedy reporters from the Chronicle and the Gazette, which had told the tale of the tragedy on Bamburgh Beach. There were grey suits, black ties, grey frocks all around us. We bereaved friends sat close together at the back. We wore our vintage, our flowers, our coloured Doc Martens, as Ella would have wished. Bianca and Carlo and Crystal Carr were near the front.

  There was no Orpheus.

  The Greys were in the front row on their own. Ella’s coffin rested on stilts at their side. There were groaning hymns, dirges, gruesome prayers. We didn’t know the words, we grunted almost-words along with the dire organ.

  The Lord’s our uhuhuh,

  We’ll uh hu.

  He lee-eeuh uh to uh.

  Mrs. Grey stood on the altar and tried to speak, but she was overtaken by grief. Her husband went to her side and gazed out at us.

  “Ella was the best of all daughters,” he said. “She was taken from us far too early. But she lives on within us. We shall always be blessed by the time she spent with us. She will shine always within us, our star called Ella Grey.”

  The priest told us that all things that live must die. He told us that Ella had lived a good life. A place in Heaven had surely been prepared for her. He told us that we would all meet again in glory. He led us in a final dreadful hymn that groaned through the incense-scented heavy air and echoed on the dull church walls.

  Black-suited men carried her out and drove her to the graveyard at North Shields. The earth was open, waiting for her to arrive. They lowered her in. More prayers. The priest splashed holy water down onto her. He scattered a handful of soil onto her. The sobbing Greys did the same.

  Then they and many other mourners left.

  The air hardly moved. A fine drizzle fell. I stayed a while. I stood above the grave.

  I wanted to leap down, smash the coffin open, haul her back.

  Soon the gravediggers were at their work, shovelling great spadefuls of black earth onto her, shutting her in.

  I hated it all. I cursed it all.

  Death. Stupid Death.

  Come back, Ella Grey!

  FIFTEEN

  Orpheus? No one knew where he had gone. Hadn’t been seen since he ran off that day at Bamburgh.

  It’s grief, some said.

  It’s guilt. He’s the one who charmed her. He’s the one she followed into the dunes.

  None of that. It’s simply that he’d never bliddy cared at all.

  What do you expect? A bloke like that. A waster like that.

  He never loved her. How can he have loved her if he left her like this?

  Not even at the funeral. Not even at the bliddy grave.

  I lay awake at night and wept.

  Ella. I wouldn’t have left you. I wouldn’t have made you follow me barefooted into the dunes. I would have kept you at my side. I would have loved you always.

  Where are you now? I whispered into the senseless dark. Ella, my love! Where are you now?

  And time passed and time passed and nothing healed. The horror didn’t diminish, nor the guilt, the pain, the grief.

  Then he came, out of the blue. He turned up at our door, on a Saturday afternoon. Stood there in the coat, the boots, the lyre on his back, the grey river and grey sunless sky beyond.

  “Where have you been?” I said.

  “Everywhere.”

  My mother called from inside the house.

  “Who is it, love?”

  “Nobody!” I yelled.

  I clenched my fists. I wanted to lash out at him, thump him, crush him, make him bleed, break his bones, make him feel the pain that I felt.

  “Why weren’t you here?” I said.

  “I’ve been searching.”

  “Searching?”

  “Graveyards and churches. Caves and tunnels. Potholes and mines.”

  “Searching for what?”

  “Ripping open cracks in the earth. Goggling into gutters and drains.”

  “Searching for bliddy what?”

  “For her, of course.”

  “For who?”

  “For Ella Grey.”

  Jesus. He meant it. He was mad, he’d always been mad. I’d led Ella to a madman.

  “Ella’s dead,” I hissed. “She’s in the earth.”

  “I’m going to follow her.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to find her.”

  “Oh, Orpheus.”

  “I’m going to go to Death and bring her back.”

  I groaned. But now I saw the depths of his pain. I reached to him. I touched his arm.

  His madness was grief. It was the madness of anyone who’s lost someone, who can’t believe they’ve gone forever, who can’t believe they won’t come back.

  And I shared the madness. I couldn’t believe that my Ella was gone. I couldn’t believe that I’d never see her lovely face again, never feel her touch, never hear her voice.

  I put my arms around him and we wept.

  “I can’t go on,” he said. “I can’t live without her.”

  “I know,” I sobbed. “Oh, I know. I know.”

  “Will you help me, Claire?” he whispered.

  SIXTEEN

  I shut the door and we went down towards the Tyne. It flowed and swirled and the breezes blew. We walked by the sites of ancient shipyards, over the cracks in the earth caused by ancient mines. We walked by the places where Ella and I had walked as children. I showed him the place where we washed our dolls together, where we played and splashed together. I saw myself as a girl in the places that I pointed to. I saw Ella as she was. It was like being in a place of ghosts, and one of the ghosts was me.

  The day was as grey as the funeral day. There were foghorns out at sea.

  “I was wrong,” he said. “I was looking in the wrong places.”

  He crouched. He touched the petals of a daisy by the concrete path.

  “Sweet thing,” he said.

  He smelt his fingers. A beetle was crawling on them. He breathed on it and let it crawl back to the earth.

  A blackbird sang. He turned his face to it and smiled, and sang quickly back in answer.

  “I found nothing,” he said. “I thought I would have to kill myself.”

  A sudden flock of pigeons swooped over our heads. He made a noise of feathers with his breath and tongue. He made more birdsong and more birds came. He made a sound of water and two salmon leapt.

  “Then I knew I had to come back here,” he said.

  He blew an echo of the breeze. And the breeze blew warm. The clouds were opening, preparing for an astounding dusk, and twin beams of brilliant light shone down through them onto the city.

  “I knew I’d have to start from here,” he said. “Where it all started.”

  We walked on, to where the Ouseburn meets the Tyne. We continued alongside the stream towards Seven Stories and The Cluny.

  The day was darkening as we came to the slope of grass above the stream. There was music coming from The Cluny, the delighted screams of children from Seven Stories.

  “This is the place, Claire,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

  I led him down and we splashed through the water to the humming gates, to the rattling bolts and locks, the water rushing over us. Time flowed. Darkness thickened all around and the Tyneside night came on. I told the tales of when Ella and I were bairns. I told him what I knew, what I could remember. I told him of the joys we shared, the fears we ran from. I told him of our sleepovers, the many nights we lay together sharing dreams. I knew he must have known it all, but he said he needed to be told it all again, by me, in this place. He plucked the lyre and drew words out o
f me like song. I went back to the time before I knew her. I told him about the adoption, the Greys. I told him about the baby in the box on the hospital steps.

  “And before that?” he asked.

  “No one knows. All she had were dreams.”

  “Dreams?”

  “The kind of dreams that any of us can have. Darkness, voices, water.”

  “Darkness, water, voices,” he said. He peered through the gates. “Like this place.”

  “Yes. We looked through the gates together and saw monsters. We stood by the gates and listened to them sing. We felt water running over us like song.”

  He lowered the lyre, stooped down, let the water rush through his fingers, let the night deepen around us.

  “I need to be alone now,” he said.

  “What will you…?”

  “This is the place,” he said. “This is Death’s entrance.”

  He put a finger to my lips.

  “If you want her back, you have to leave me.”

  I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

  I stared into the dark.

  I wanted to rattle the gates and scream through them.

  “Ella,” I breathed. “Ella!”

  “No more words,” he said. “Go home, Claire. Go to sleep. Leave me alone. Don’t look back.”

  ONE

  And how do I go forward now? How do I tell what Orpheus did that night? I wasn’t there. I left him, I didn’t turn back. I walked through the shadows beneath the moon and beneath the city’s golden glow. I went home to whisper Ella’s name into the night. To enter a night of weird dreams in which time was all disjointed. I heard Ella calling, calling, calling. I ran to her and found her as a baby lying in a basket. I lifted her out and cuddled her and she giggled and whispered, See? It’s all right, Claire! I’ve decided to start it all again. Then she was a grown-up woman and she held me in her arms, and I looked up into her lovely face and she touched my cheek and soothed me like a mother, murmuring, There there, my love. Don’t cry. And there were sudden dreams that were formless, that lurched from my heart and throbbed in my brain and battered my bones. Dreams that were just gulfs of nothingness into which I fell and kept on falling for fragments of eternity. And dreams that rocked me on the bed as if the bed was a boat on an anguished sea. And sometimes there was singing, tiny, tiny, far away. It was the voice of Orpheus, coming and going, growing and fading, diminished by distance, battered by pain and winds and thrashing seas. A lovely note, so far away, coming and going all night long, a note of deepest love, profoundest yearning, unreachable.