ORDINARY TIME: AUTUMN 2017So, what were the Eldest Girls doing at the Sisters’ Stones?
This.
Britta held the book and called out the orders; she always liked to take the lead. Picture her: shoulders back, chin raised, thrusting the manual forward in one hand, looping the other arm casually across her waist. This was the stance she adopted when reading poetry aloud in class, as if she thought herself a holy orator, a female pope.
Or it was Anna who bent over the pages of that book, instilling the words with her trademark authority and reason, golden hair falling forward, shadows playing across her face. It wasn’t hard, since her tantrum in the Provisions Store, to imagine her in that dimmer light.
Or it was Jade-Marie. She could have been the one to read aloud, to call the shots, a bitten nail working its way along the words, her delivery stumbling, doused in amazement.
Whoever it was, they were in it together. One was as bad as the other.
They were united in their task, despite their disagreements about the right way to do things.
Should they loop around the Sisters’ Stones three times deosil or widdershins? they asked one another. Jade-Marie thought it unlucky to go against the way. Anna argued: how could it be? The world turns anti-clockwise and God created that.
His name came into their discussions often, never with a hint of shame.
‘It won’t matter,’ said Britta firmly. ‘It will work whichever way around, if our intentions are right.’
There was no shame in the saying of this either – the suggestion, the conviction, that what they were doing was right and good.
The circling done, they laid down knives, purposely crossed. They placed a stoppered bottle of water on the most westerly stone.
Another argument.
‘The wood is to the east, so that stone is the west.’
‘Wrong! The wood is south-west of here.’
‘No wonder you’re always getting us lost on the way back, Jade-Marie Ahearn. Do you even know your backside from your elbow?’
Nervous laughter, quickly fading out.
Tealights were lit in strict contradiction of the Closed-months Rationing rules regarding candles. If it was dry enough, they collected scrub and made a small fire, in strict contradiction of Article 5 of Lark Council’s Woodland and Pasture directive. They could not claim ignorance as their defence. The TV and VHS were rolled out of the school cupboard on their trolley at regular intervals to play the safety video. Its message was clear: messing around with fire was no joke. One spark and the whole of Cable’s Wood could go up. One fire with the right wind and the whole island would roar alight. Jade-Marie, more than anyone, should have known better; her mother was in the volunteer fire force.
They dressed in white, pulling old nightdresses from the bottom of their satchels and tugging them on over their uniforms. There were visible mends on the garments, suggesting age, but that hardly narrowed down who had given the girls their ghostly robes. Everyone on the island knew to make good and pass on. The dresses were large, drowning them, and from that detail, perhaps, the culprit might be found. Someone had to be helping, putting ideas in their heads. This wasn’t purely the stuff of instinct, their lying in the grass, star-shaped, hair spilling, black, brown, blonde.
Palms to the sky, they offered themselves, brazenly.
‘Visualise yourself becoming one with the earth,’ a voice intoned. (It was hard to see whose mouth was moving when they were lying down like that. From a distance, all three voices sounded alike.)
‘Let this terrible foulness seep into the soil.’
(They knew that’s what they were – foul.)
‘It’s not ours to carry, we can let it go.’
(Wishful thinking.)
‘And now we sing!’
They sat up.
Another argument.
‘I don’t want to do any of the songs we know.’
‘Why not? We can take them back. We can make them our own.’
Anna began a teasing verse of ‘Lord of the Dance’.
Jade yelped and covered her ears.
Britta lifted her mouth to the sky and began to howl, coiling vowels, the sound startling the others into silence.
‘Ooooooaaaahhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaahhhhh!’
‘What on earth is that supposed to be?’
‘I’m making it up, aren’t I? Our new kind of singing.’
The other two shrugged – why not? – and joined in. They added their own discordant harmonies to this hymn sent upwards to a tracing-paper moon.
On other occasions they kept their silence and knelt, eyes closed, writing on pieces of paper resting on their laps. Blinking awake from this trance, the girls read aloud their scribbles, sounding astonished at what was there, believing they’d played no part in the composition.
They joined hands. They made up chants.
Clean we are, pure we be
Our minds fall open and we can see
Take the dark, turn it to light
Wash this away before the night.
They summoned the dead, wearing headdresses made from the fat spiked leaves of the hawthorn tree.
A prayer was said for Bethany Reid, the girl who was swept away from the dogleg jetty to a watery grave in 2011. The sea surrounding Lark claims a child every seven years, so in the coming year, they all knew – time’s up. There had been doubts that Bethany’s death counted; she had turned sixteen the summer before, so was a woman, not a child. Would the sea be a stickler for its conditions? No one was sure. Mothers held children’s hands very tightly until the calendar turned to 1 January with no other soul lost. Rejoicing went on behind closed doors. Bethany was the sacrifice after all! God save the rest of us!
The Eldest Girls asked Bethany to speak to them via a swinging pendant – a small chunk of green stone strung on a silver chain. Britta held the piece of jade aloft; Anna asked the questions.
‘Will you help us? Circle for “yes”, go back and forth for “no”.’
Did Bethany respond? This is not a question you can ask if the truth and the light is genuinely in your heart.
They moved on to someone else. The girls asked ‘him’ to come to them, to speak, to enter them.
The young man with the gun eagerly reported this part.
He was out for the foxes, keeping down their numbers, when he was distracted by female voices, drawing him from the wood to the brink of the stones. This ‘him’ they were trying to summon came with no capital H; the young man was sure of it. No one asked for the Lord to come unto them like that, barefoot in the open air, arms aloft. They weren’t pulling themselves, hand-over-hand, closer to heaven; rather they were reaching high as they sank down to where Old Harry lives.
The story travelled through the Billet House, the Customs House, the Anchor. The Eldest Girls were an abomination, they said, for raising up heathen persuasions that Lark had long ago put to bed. But in the silence that followed these rough and noisy judgements, as the men sipped their beer in small groups of trusted fellows, sure that the girls’ fathers – the two who were still living – weren’t within earshot, they raised a tentative question: What kind of spell, do you think, those girls are casting?
Little debate was needed to arrive at a consensus. They were girls – what else could it be? It was a spell for love, for a certain kind of communion. The three had recently come of age, and that did something funny to a woman. They’d be thinking of nothing but marriage now, babies – common-sense flown from the window. Sense enough would remain for them to see the bleeding obvious, though: the number of eligible men on Lark was diminishing. Too many traitors were leaving for the mainland. The girls were calling on every bit of help they could get – from up above and down below – to snare themselves a mate.
Eyes went to the young man with the gun when this was said, and he began to see how they saw him. As something special.
Those girls could not rely on their soft looks. Even Britta Sayers, the one with the blackest hair … she had flaws in her genes. Take one look at the mother, Rhoda, on her shift at the Provisions Store – that jutting tooth, the heaviness of her brow, her body gone to fat. Britta might be bonny now, if you liked them feisty, but the men knew their proverbs. As is the mother, so is her daughter. Who wanted to go to bed with a vixen one day and wake up beside a toad?
Jade-Marie’s mother, Mary, was no guarantor for her offspring either. There she was, working at the foot of the gamekeeper, trying to claim a job that rightly belonged to a man – to a young man with a gun, to be precise. It was unnatural. Mary Ahearn had been forgiven for a while, with a dead husband and all that, but kindness had its limits.
As for Anna, she was angelic-seeming now, but she had French blood, Scandi blood, who knew how that might turn out?
Yet, you still would.
That’s what the men said, leaning in, smirking. Now that those girls were full-grown, you absolutely would. And despite all the attention given to their differences, there was no sense in picking a stand-out beauty. Each girl had an allure that was intensified, multiplied, by them being one of three. Their number made the men greedy. The appeal was to own the full set.
They had pricked one another’s fingers, said the young man with the gun, warming to his role as storyteller, and red had dripped onto the white of their nightdresses. They offered their fingers to each other to be kissed and sucked, whispering promises.
They knew they were being watched then, the older men told the young one, why else would they have smeared their lips with the stuff, if not for show? The young man went on to tell them of the rose petals, the trail of them leading from wood to circle.
The men sat back in their chairs, arms folded, case closed.
They were possessed with it, the Eldest Girls, possessed by him, that young man with the gun, and they were issuing a twisted invitation. The only question left was, how he would go about doing it – claiming his rightful prize?