As I stepped on the moor for the first time in a little under a year, I told myself that it didn’t resent my absence. It wasn’t my jilted lover, or a mother left to rot. If it did care about my return, it would have no way of showing me. All its little expressions – the Neolithic huts and stalagmiting granite ruins – were 10,000 years in the making. In any case, I would not be there long enough to hear what the moor had to say.
Stood there once again, everything as it ever was, as it ever would be. I felt as if I could catch sight of every version of myself that had ever moved across this land.
There were few signposts, but I followed my own waymarkers – the angry little dog that screamed from the green gate by the road, a circle of burnt gorse with crisp limbs, the paddock of Shetland ponies, bouncing across the field. The evening hadn’t fully fallen yet, instead the moors burnt orange.
Gorse bushes were blooming on the banks, small cups of flowers that uncurled a bright yellow. I picked the petals, sniffed them, crushed them between my fingers. I thought of making tea, imagined being a person who forages and makes the most out of everything. The flowers smelled like coconut, and the scent would linger on my hands for the rest of the evening, but I wouldn’t recognise it until later in the night, when I wiped sleep from my eyes and was transported somewhere tropical.
I took a detour on my way to the house, climbing up a bank into towering bracken. Rounding a corner, it loomed over me, just as I remembered. Stood on Pendrift Downs, Jubilee Rock. I had always found it humbling, this thing that was named 200 years ago. Side-stepping the tufts of baby gorse creeping by my feet, I rounded the rock, reaching the carving on its flattest side.
A coat of arms larger than a grown man was etched into it in 1810. The creatures that flanked either side of the shield looked like lions, but there was something off about them. Part way down, they devolved from lion to sea creature. I wanted to see the fault that had been branded on the rock’s side. I traced my fingers across the lions’ mane, over the whipping tongues and then lower where, instead of hind legs, there were mermaid tails, and ridges that lined the backs of the lions like the fins of seahorses. I had always imagined this carving was an act of rebellion, a young man left to work alone by gaslight, toiling through the night as he committed the image to the rock, deciding to make his own history.
With Jubilee Rock blocking my view of anything apart from the waist-high bracken, I felt like I could stay just there and forget about Trewarnen completely. When night fell, I could shelter by the rock. In the morning, I could drink water from the stream. I would turn my trousers up at the ankles and stand barefoot in the river, catching brown trout with my hands, or maybe even a freshwater eel if I could bear the whistle of its slimy skin against my fingers. I would carry them back to my rock, fingers hooked through gills, eels worn round my wrists like cuffs. I’d find flint in amongst old ruins and start a fire as the fish baked in the afternoon heat on the hot stone. Roast them on a spit. In summer I would pick elderberries. In autumn, blackberries. I would crush furred nettle leaves between hardened fingers and stew them in water over my fire for tea. I could stop, keep clear of the farmhouse altogether; my mum and aunt and all the ghosts could stay locked up there without me. I could miss the memorial, pretend I was still packed away in the city. Avoid the faces of the people I’d left behind. My return would be just another rumour on the wind. I could live off the moor, hidden, another urban legend. The Beast of Bodmin and I, both creatures with too many stories to live up to.
I scrambled to the top of Jubilee, the stone grazing my palms as I dragged my body upwards. Once there, I sat and licked the blood off my hands and looked across at the moors. Above ground and sludge and mulch, where everything should blend into a smudge of earthy paint, I saw something moving between the bracken. The ferns bent over themselves, parting a green sea. I craned my neck and saw the docile horns of a highland cow, but when the cow stopped to graze, the movement carried on ahead of it, disjointed.
Even the gorse seemed to fold, creaking apart as something pushed through. For a moment, I thought I saw a person – her – a black coat, a drape of material blurring into the bush. I clambered to my feet, stood high on the rock, feeling ridiculous, but suddenly, fully, desperate. Was it, could it – but no. On the balls of my feet, at the highest point of the rock, the darkness I had seen was just shadow. I couldn’t tell what was causing the land to split. Instead, I saw, in the distance, the house. Trewarnen. Twice gabled, fronted with a mouldering porch. It stood low and wide, spreading across the land like a fungus.
I climbed down from the rock and started back along the road, the house in front of me. My phone vibrated in my pocket, I checked who was calling and then ignored it: just Chris. We hadn’t spoken properly in months, although he’d tried – messaging me, ringing, at one point he sent a letter – and I still wasn’t quite ready.
My aunt must’ve told him I was coming home. They ran into each other quite often, always moving in the same small circles, the way people who never leave home tend to do. Chris was my only friend left here, my only friend anywhere, and it sounds heartless to say but I had no desire to see him. I knew he’d want to talk to me about Claud. He’d dealt with all the repercussions of what happened without me. He’d been to her funeral whilst I stayed hidden away in the North – I had only left Cornwall two months before the service. I imagine he would’ve comforted her mother, shaken hands with her father. I know that he answered a lot of questions on my behalf; people were angry. I know, because he sent me an email, a long diatribe about the state of ‘backwards village life’. He called it homophobia; said they were just trying to blame me because they thought I was Other.
‘You’re part of this community, Mer,’ he’d written, ‘you belong here as much as anyone else. More than most, actually. You know they’ve always been this way; they did it to your mum too. Don’t let them scare you off coming back home.’
In fact, I had pined for the place where I grew up, the open moorland and the quiet sky that I couldn’t find in the city. I wasn’t frightened of the villagers, no. I was scared of what would greet me as I opened the door to Trewarnen.
My mother used to make up stories about the moors. All the best ones were about the sea, usually. You had the mermaids of Zennor and the knockers in the coastal mines, selkies dragging themselves ashore and swapping seal-blub for woman-fat. Everyone else had a version of Cornwall – beach Cornwall, magic Cornwall – that seemed sunnier, brighter, richer than ours. We had marshes that drowned sheep and cow shit on the road. Farmers with burst blood vessels and ponies with curled hooves. Other people had surfing lessons and expensive dogs that their mothers took on coastal walks.
My mother would sit me between her legs as she scraped at my scalp with a nit comb and tell me the moor was magical too, with secret treasure and hidden spirits. She’d wrench lice from my hair and squeeze them dead between her thumbnails, their little bodies bursting open – pop! – with a gush of my blood. She didn’t like to sit still, my mother. Her hands needed to be busy, so story time would come as she combed, her drolls punctuated by the pop, pop, pop of my parasites.
The stories weren’t always good. Most of the time they were stops and starts, the beginning of a tale that would turn into a lament about the village, or a boyfriend, or the shopkeeper who always put the change onto the counter, never into Mum’s palm, as if she were grubby. Sometimes the stories were about her and Ysella, my aunt, when they were young, my grandmother playing the part of a bastardised Baba Yaga, an old crone with chicken legs putting curses on happy children. Other times, the stories were about me, as a baby, a time that I couldn’t remember no matter how tight I squeezed my eyes and wished.
‘You were perfect, perfect, perfect. Perfect and wee,’ she would say, splitting a section of my hair with the comb and scratching near my scalp with her nails when she found gold. ‘Eggsssssss,’ she would hiss, stretching out the discovery – and then the story would be gone. My hair is scalp-shorn now, bleached like wet sand. More than a decade since she last took a comb to it, now there’s nowhere to hide.
The best stories were about the sea, but there were others, ones that weren’t told so often, about rivers and quarries. Mermaids aren’t just for salt, she’d tell me, there’s freshwater secrets in the lakes you see on this land. The bronzy murk of them might keep it hidden, but right at the bottom of each lake there are eels the length of dragons and oysters with pearls like puffballs. There are fish with legs and frogs with teeth, and all the piskies and spirits that guard them. There are little girls born from the mud and boys made of stone.
‘It’s a wonderful place to live, little sprig.’
When I was a baby, my mother moved us to a small cottage in the nearest village to Trewarnen, Blisland. She had fallen out with my grandmother, Esolyn, and became the first Tregellas woman to leave Trewarnen. Our time in the cottage wasn’t happy. As a child, I believed my mother’s discontent bled into the walls themselves, marring my childhood with an uneasiness I couldn’t shake. My mother had fled her mother, returning to the family home only once Esolyn was dead, but there was an ill in that cottage that followed us back to Trewarnen.
Only once I left for the city, for Manchester, did I start to feel well, less soul sick. Fleeing mothers proved to be hereditary, though I had run further from mine than my mother did from hers, but mine would still be rooted in Trewarnen when I reached it.
I had been asked to return, not for her, as I had expected, but for Claud’s memorial. Her funeral had been rushed, arranged in the days after her body was found, and the impact of her death stuck to the local area. When my aunt rang to invite me to the memorial, I was surprised. I couldn’t imagine why Claud’s family would want me there, or how my aunt had been told about it. I had spent the last year in the city rotting in my grief. I’d left because I wanted to be away from all of it, from my mother, from Claud, from Trewarnen. I wasn’t expecting to have one of those things taken from me forever in return. But time away from the moors had given me a clarity, an ability to look back at the things I had done; that we had done to each other.
Stood in front of Trewarnen, I was surprised by how stark and small it seemed, squatting in a patch of land. The house looked shorter and thinner than I remembered, rising from the ground like a baby tooth. It seemed to lean in the wind, the dark grey stone a shadow against the fields. When I had left, home had been a moving beast, stretching its foundations out towards me, fingers trying to pull me back before I crossed county lines.
Now, I could see it for what it really was. A humble cell, a faulty seedpod. A place in which my mother and aunt had sat and grown, and would eventually die, without breaking through to the light of real life. I had been trapped here, I realised. Squashed under the weight of its beams and limestone walls, thick to keep the outside world away. And now I had no choice but to enter again.
My mother was fizzing when I arrived. The lights were off in the hall, and I could just make out the outline of our sharp nose, her eyes yellow.
‘I’ve been reading about beetles. Sex something. What was it, Ysella? Ysella? Sex?’ she said, as she held me by the shoulders and appraised me, taking in the hoody, the short hair, the trainers. As she held on to me, I faltered at her scent – not the essential oils and cigarettes of my childhood, but something new, something earthen. The taste of it filled my mouth.
‘Sexton,’ Ysella shouted from inside the kitchen.
‘Yes! Sexton beetles! Little gravediggers,’ Mum said, walking me towards the dark kitchen. ‘Eating dead things, Sprig. Mice, voles.’ Only my mother had ever called me Sprig. The childhood nickname made me twitch. ‘Bury them underground and then eat them! Like undertakers,’ she said.
‘Weird,’ I replied, feeling around on the wall for the light switch. My hand brushed against something soft and damp before I found it. I recoiled.
Yet, once illuminated, I could see nothing but dry wall.
Away from my mother the smell remained, coating the kitchen. ‘Why were you sat in the dark in here?’ I asked, pushing a crate of mouldering bulbs and some wellies out of the way so I could put my bag down on a clear patch of floor. I picked up a bulb, a tulip, and held it to my nose – nothing. I scraped the blue fuzz from its base.
Mum sat herself at the table, unaware of the mess and the smell as she talked quickly. She didn’t offer me a seat. In front of her was the debris of her nail-biting habit, tiny crescents of white keratin positioned like a swirl.
‘The birds are back, you know. All up in the chimney again. Haven’t been able to light the fire in nine months, have we, Ysella? Bloody thing’s still letting in smeach, mind. Stinks of ash.’ She bit at her thumbnail as she spoke.
Not ash. Salt and rot. That was the smell. Clay pulled from an old marsh. It was fertile, the smell of an animal locked out in the rain. A damp sweetness.
Mum flapped her hand at the large stone fireplace behind her. Her eyes were still, set on my head. Ysella was crouched down behind the kitchen counter, searching for something. Her disembodied voice shouted a greeting from out of sight.
‘How are you, Ye?’ I asked.
‘Oh, surely well,’ she said. Something clattered onto the stone floor, and she swore. ‘Has your mam told you about the birds?’
‘I have, aye,’ Mum said.
The birds used to come every year. All throughout the winter, my mother and Ysella would make do with rusted radiators, refusing to clear the chimney flue of the twigs, hair, old cigarette packets and horse shit that were loaded in there. They’d say they liked providing a safe place for the birds to nest over winter when the trees had shrugged off their leaves. With the chimney blocked this way, no sound got in, except that of the birds. No traffic noises, no distant moans of the tractors that would normally colour the moors. No whistle of wind. Just a stuffed-up silence, the occasional scratch of talon on stone, and the echo-snap of a wing in a chamber.
I eventually found a seat at the table as my mother watched, resisting the urge to run my hand over my scalp. She wanted to speak on it, I could see, but she wouldn’t. It was a rule then that we never discussed my appearance, so different in style from her own. My family were a line of muted, mousey women, often fading into the landscape of the moors in a way that made them appear ghostly, until I arrived. The shadowy mass of my hair had been a point of contention with my grandmother. We became too visible. When I left, I shaved it. Bleached what little was left until my scalp prickled with the burn of ammonia. Now, pale and lost, I looked more like my family than ever before.
The table was almost entirely covered in stacks of papers – letters read and abandoned, shopping lists of items never purchased, ripped from notepads and written on the backs of magazines. The mess made my mouth feel claggy. Perhaps it had been this way before I left too, and it was only now I’d seen another way of living that I’d started to notice. I blinked it away. I caught my mother’s eyes, dragging them down from my head, and smiled at her like I had practised, all gums. She smiled back, showing a sliver of bitten nail hooked on her front tooth.
‘Tea?’ Ysella asked, popping up from behind the counter, waving three mugs.
*
The taxi driver had clocked me immediately at the train station.
I thought I was safe, with my hood up and my voice disappearing the way it had. The edges of my accent were lost somewhere on the train between Plymouth and Birmingham. Over the past year I’d been shedding it like stray hairs. One morning I’d wake up and find violent R’s strewn across my pillow. I’d pull Es and Azs and Ens out of the shower drain, trying to fit them into words like puzzle pieces, never quite finding the right shapes again. Somewhere along the way I’d picked up an H, maybe on my first night out in the city. After years of ’ave and ’ope and ’air, I had Have and Hope and Hair. I lay in bed at night, whispering them at the ceiling.
I’d asked the driver to take me to Blisland.
‘You sure you don’t want the farmhouse? Tregellas, ’int it?’ he’d asked, voice all gravel and mud. I looked up from my phone to see his eyes still staring, his expression friendly. So much for anonymity.
‘Merryn. Yeah, no, just the village. Please.’ I lifted my phone up to signify the conversation was done, but he carried on talking anyway, asking me how the farm was doing nowadays. It was little more than an empty plot of land with the house stood in the middle, and everyone local knew that well enough.
‘Moved back to the village, have they?’
‘What? No, no, still at the farm.’
He overtook a tractor on a blind corner, almost rear-ending a Jeep. He let out a small grunt when we escaped death, whereas I was white knuckling it in the back seat, my fingernails cutting into the worn leather. There was a split in the seat next to me, silver duct tape pressing the bursting foam back into place. Each time he spoke, I ripped off a little bit more of the tape.
‘The village is dead these days, of course,’ he said, complaining about ghostly second homes, parish council cuts and emmets – tourists who mine the county like ants. ‘Full of strangers. Not you though,’ he continued, catching my eye, ‘you might sound like one, but you’re made of these parts.’
He was saying too much. I didn’t want to hear any of it.
‘Back for your summer hols then, are you? Sure, your mam’ll love that.’
‘No, just a few days. Maybe a week.’
‘Don’t you know how long, maid?’ he laughed. I forgot myself then, screwed up my face at his nosiness, and he saw me. I watched his back stiffen against the seat.
‘Sorry,’ I apologised, shamed by his discomfort. ‘I’m a bit distracted. I’m back for a memorial, so.’
‘Ah. The Hawkey girl, right. Terrible shame, that. Terrible.’
*
Mum coughed, straight into her cup of tea, and I stared up at the faces hanging from the ceiling. Toby jugs. Hundreds of them, with garish moulded faces. There was a new one, a ginger tomcat, hanging from the beam over Mum’s head. It had already taken on the blurred quality of something coated in dust. The others were a mixture of impish and goblin faces, each jowly like a melted waxwork. They gave the impression they were always watching.
Esolyn had referred to them as an inheritance and I overheard enough as a child to know that it was bad luck to throw out anything with a face.
Nothing else looked new, but unlike the moor, the house itself felt changed. Ill-fitting. The jugs, especially. There seemed to be more of them, jostling for space. Looking up felt like standing in a house of mirrors. Too many yellow-tinged eyes staring down from above. Hanging above the fridge, a Toby jug shaped like a mermaid was being slowly choked by a spider’s web.
‘What time do we need to leave on Saturday to get to Claud’s thing?’ I asked them both, as I took my cup of tea from Ysella. I was normally a very organised person, but this was the one thing I couldn’t bring myself to investigate.
‘Claud’s thing, dear? Your Claud?’ she said, not looking at me as she held out a second cup to Mum, who grabbed it with both hands.
Who else had a Claud? ‘The memorial. Mum said it was Saturday, right?’
Ysella went back to the counter for her own tea. At the table, my mother dipped a finger into her mug, winced at the heat and then stuck the finger into her mouth. Neither answered me.
‘This Saturday?’ I asked again, fishing an island of limescale from my cup, ‘Anyone?’
‘Your mother knows more than I do,’ Ysella said.
‘It’s been delayed, I’d say,’ my mother said, suggesting rather than answering.
‘What?’ I asked. I turned to my mother, waving a hand to pull her attention from the tea, ‘Mum?’
She moved her eyes from the mug slowly. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, it’s been delayed. There’s an issue with the roof, at her dad’s. It’s leaking. They’re rearranging though, no mind.’
I could still have been in the city, on my own. I felt duped, then. Dragged home early for little reason. I looked pointedly at Ysella, but she simply shrugged and turned to Mum, ‘You know, Lo, they’re named after the sextons who look after church graveyards, your beetles.’
She was right about the sexton beetles: they bury corpses for food.
It’s more than that though. They don’t just bury them, they breed on them, too. A male and female beetle will meet at the site of a dead animal, and if they’re a match, the pair will bond and fight off any other beetles that approach the food. Together, they strip the hair and feathers, plucking the body clean, and then they mould it into a ball, before pushing it deep underground.
They arrive on the moor in April, just in time for the resurrection, and by October they’re gone, just below ground. The bones of their meals stay in place forever, breaking down gradually to feed the soil. And so the cycle continues.
Knowing that I shouldn’t have returned so soon left me uneasy. I had been home for mere hours, and I was already seeing things I shouldn’t. I missed the city, where I had clean mugs and a descaled kettle and my own space. A place where the air smelled like traffic and takeaways, instead of the rot of this kitchen.