1970. New owners came. They bought a barn from a man, a man who sells the land on behalf of the great mother, his wife.
A family of strangers, from a city far beyond the boundary. Far enough that they knew nothing of Her, trapped, or the women who walked the land.
Of the ancient hedge, they knew only of what they could take from it. They lit fires in dry months using the thatch and then snatched bluebells for their windows. The stranger children picked bark lice from the hedge, pulling them apart with spongy fingers. The stranger mother collected butterflies, graylings and hedge browns and fritillaries, pinned them to boards, and hung them upon the high walls of the house. And when the stranger mother took the last of the garden orange-tips, deep in the ground, She woke up.
The stranger family takes from the hedge. They take insects and plants and soon enough, they take the clitter too. The stranger father wants a sign for the house, so he unsheathes the quoit-top and carves their initials in it. The stranger mother takes a cup-stone. The stranger children hide stolen sweets and magazines in the hare-creep.
And beneath, She waits.
Occasionally the birds that roost in the chimney of Trewarnen die from exposure, or bad luck. A runt in the nest can’t shriek quite loud enough to be fed its fair share. Or the air is too dry, and the twigs that hold the nest in place begin to shrink. The frame of the nest contracts, balancing in place by a hair. When the nest is too small, the birds collect warmer materials for the chicks. Mud, horseshit, and, if they’re lucky, they find human rubbish too. Things that have been fly-tipped on the edge of the moors, thrown out of visiting cars. The foam padding from a sofa cushion. Loft insulation. An offcut of carpet. The odd piece of tent mesh.
All of these things add extra weight to the nest. It slips again, further down the flue now. Too far for the littlest chicks to fly out. Too tight for the larger birds to risk attending the nest; if they drop in, they won’t find the lift to rise out again. So the chicks die, trapped there in the cell of the flue. And maybe they’re mourning, throwing handfuls of soil on a casket, or maybe they’re just burying their shit like cats, but sometimes the parent birds will sit at the top of the chimney, dropping in more fur and twigs and leaves, covering the bodies of their chicks. And then comes the final straw, and the whole nest, rotten bodies and all, will land with a softened ‘clunk’ into the hearth, usually just as we’re eating dinner.
I was back home, part way through my breakfast of Chelsea bun and mould-free toast, when the latest nest collapsed onto the floor of the open fireplace, and a host of bluebottles took to the air.
Ysella ran to open the front door, bypassing the windows, as my mother attempted to herd the swarm away from the table. Eggs which were burrowed in the folds of the chick’s wings had birthed into flies in our kitchen, which was full of food scraps and sweating human skin.
I shoved as much toast into my mouth as I could before anything landed on the expensive fake butter and then pointed Ysella to the windows.
‘Shouldn’t we open those?’ I asked as she whipped at flies with a dishrag.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.
After they had disposed of the nest, I watched as my mother scraped the mould from the old bread, leaving festering scraps on the bread board. I’d offered her the new loaf, but she said she didn’t like waste.
‘I saw Joan in the shop. Still a horrible bitch.’
‘I’m sure.’
She started to poke at Ysella’s lard. I took my butter from the fridge and slid it over to her.
‘Use this.’
She nodded but didn’t look up. Ysella walked in then, bucket in hand. She saw me hovering and waved to the table, ‘Sit down.’
I did. I ran my fingers under the edge of the table, and found a carving of my name, spelled incorrectly: MERAN. I’d done it the day after that summer fete, when Mum and me had come to stay at the farmhouse for a week or so to let the neighbours ‘calm down’. I spent most of the time under the table, hiding from my mother and aunt and gran. They would forget I was under there, and I could listen to whole conversations before they realised. An accident, my mum said, again and again, as my grandmother disagreed. I’d sat on the floor and scratched into the wood above my head as the adults had talked around me, each of them just Legs with Voices. I had felt a need to claim the space as my own, a pull to mark that I had been there. I knew how to spell my name, of course, but Meran wasn’t in trouble, I was. And if I was Meran, I couldn’t be told off.
I decided I’d try and breach the subject of the hunt with Ysella. I took my fingers from my name. ‘I saw Joan at the shop.’
‘In the village? I could’ve taken you to town,’ she said.
‘It was only a twenty-minute walk.’
‘That’s not the point, you know how they talk about you down there.’
‘Thanks for reminding me,’ I said. I’d slipped down in my chair as we’d been speaking, slumping like an angry teenager. I pulled myself back upright. I wasn’t going to regress. I spoke again. ‘She started talking about Esolyn.’
Ysella grimaced. ‘That woman needs to keep her beak out of things she doesn’t understand.’
Mum looked at me from over her toast, confused. ‘You didn’t tell me that. How did you get onto the subject of Mam anyway?’
‘I’m not sure. I just asked her a question. She spun it round,’ I decided to lie then. I took two different parts of the conversation and twisted them together. ‘I asked her if she knew anything about when Claud’s memorial was—’
‘Why would you ask her that? Why would she know?’
‘Of course she’s going to ask, Lowen,’ Ysella said, sharply. She looked at me, ‘If no one has a date for this thing, perhaps it’s best if you go home and come back when it’s all sorted.’
‘Oh, no, no need. It’ll be sorted soon,’ Mum interjected, sitting up straighter suddenly. There was something else Joan had said that was playing on my mind.
‘She also asked me about the hunt last night. Well, she called it a hunt.’ I turned to my mother, ‘Didn’t you say they were looking for something? She made it sound a bit more extreme.’
Ysella scoffed. ‘What are you doing putting such ideas into the girl’s head, Lowen?’ She put her bucket into a cupboard and began to wash her hands at the sink, scraping under her nails. ‘Ignore them both, dear. Some of Steve’s cows got out, over on South Penwint. They were just trying to round them up. A hunt! Honestly.’
I looked at Mum for confirmation, but she’d started to pick the burnt bits from her toast. Ysella tutted. Joan was dramatic. And my mother had always been fanciful, that much was true.
‘What are you doing today, Merryn?’ Ysella asked. She buttered a slice of toast and placed it in front of me. I couldn’t tell if it was the fresh bread I’d bought, or the old stuff.
‘Oh, thanks. I’ve already eaten—’
‘Eat.’
‘Right.’ I tore the bread into little strips as I spoke. I’d throw it out for the chickens later. ‘Well, I need to figure out what’s going on with the memorial,’ I said.
‘What you need to do is eat,’ Ysella responded.
I dropped the bread back on the plate and turned towards Mum. ‘Well?’
She ran her nail against the blackened crust of her toast, scraping away the burn. ‘You could do with eating some more vegetables, you look very pale.’
‘She needs iron, Lowen. Meat. She’s probably anaemic if she’s pale.’
‘Can we focus please?’ I asked, but my mum had already started speaking.
‘Lettuce! Leafy greens, that’s what you need.’
‘No, she needs kale. Brassicas, that’s where the iron is. Or meat. Or nuts?’
Mum left her toast and started ferreting around in the drawers, pulling out herbs and condiments, dumping them onto the counters.
‘What are you doing?’ Ysella asked.
‘We’ve got some iron tablets somewhere,’ she said. Ysella mumbled in agreement and joined my mother, crouching in front of cupboards. Neither of them was looking at me.
‘When’s the memorial?’ I asked, directing it to both, either, of them.
‘We’re a bit busy right now, Mer,’ my aunt’s voice called from over the counter.
‘I’m busy too! I’ve only got so much time off until I need to start my new job, I can’t just hang around down here waiting.’
‘Not everything revolves around you, Merryn.’
Just then my mother shook a jar of tablets in the air, ‘I’ve found them!’
I tried to ignore her, to keep talking as Ysella took the jar from her hand. ‘Obviously it’s not all about me. But I came down now because you guys told me it was this week, and now you’re acting like you don’t know. Is it this week or not?’
‘Tone.’ Ysella looked at me until I shrugged, and then said, ‘You can’t expect everyone to move at your pace.’
‘I just want to—’
Ysella turned to my mother as I was speaking. ‘These are fish oil, not iron.’
She spun the jar around in her hand, and the two of them stood over the tablets, reading the small print.
I sat in silence, trying to wait out their distraction. It was harder than ever before to get a straight answer out of either of them. I wasn’t sure if I was struggling because I’d been away from home for too long, had somehow lost my grasp of the language we shared. Or if something was wrong and they weren’t telling me.
Maybe Claud’s family really didn’t want me there after all. Maybe they’d forbidden it, and my mum had missed the social cues, and Ysella was trying to protect me. I’d kept away from the funeral, just in case, but my mother had convinced me on the phone that all was fine now, that it always had been, that I was paranoid.
‘Mum?’ I asked, ‘Do you know anything?’
Finally seeing me, she stepped away from Ysella and the tablets and came over to the table. Her eyes were heavy, her mouth downturned, an expression ready to deliver bad news. I sank down in my chair.
‘I’m sorry, the tablets say they’re good for your heart, but not for iron.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘It’ll all be fine, trust me,’ Mum said, ‘we’ll cook you up something leafy and you’ll feel back to normal! And it’s lovely to have you back, isn’t it Ysella?’
Ysella tutted in my direction, and I glared back at her. Miserable old woman. They were both as bad as each other. I could accept my mother making little sense, but Ysella was the reasonable one. There was no reason for her to be so unhelpful, unless I was right, and Claud’s family were trying to keep me away.
I could tell I wasn’t going to get a straight answer from either of them, so I turned back to my mother and said ‘As long as you’re sure it’s all fine. I just – I want to be prepared, that’s all.’
She smiled, her eyes and attention far away.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Claud’s father didn’t want me there. He had been kind to me when we were younger, but as we turned seventeen and eighteen, he began to see our relationship for what it really was: burning. I knew he didn’t like me, but he loved Claud, wholly, and he must have been able to see that in me too. I couldn’t imagine him banning me from the memorial, though. Her mother? Maybe.
I had never met Claud’s mum. I didn’t want to; I’d heard enough stories. At times I wondered if she were more like my mother than Claud let on.
There was one crossover in our childhoods that particularly stuck out to me: a kind of fairy tale we had both been told by our mothers. I didn’t realise that these stories were unusual until we became friends with Chris and learnt that there were other ways of being brought up, childhoods with traditions rather than superstitions.
We were fifteen, and the three of us were sat in Chris’s house on a Saturday. We didn’t come here often, although it was our favourite place to be. The living room was small, with purple walls covered in paintings Chris’s mum had done of wolves and orcs and dragons. The sofas had velvet brocade throws on them, and the shelves were lined with various goth-adjacent figurines. The house felt like it had been styled by Par Market and a World of Warcraft forum, and we loved it. Whereas my mother, and my home, felt odd and uncomfortable, Chris’s mum wore her differences as a lifestyle choice. She would interrupt us only occasionally, coming into the room in a waft of sandalwood, a plate of mini pizzas offered. She would smile, ask us what books we were reading, and then leave again, dyed black hair swinging in a messy plait down her back.
On this Saturday, Claud had been talking about her mother. She had spoken to her the night before for the first time in months and it hadn’t gone well. Her mum had been slurring slightly on the phone, growing increasingly frustrated with Claud as she realised how out of touch she was with her daughter’s life. Each of us was nursing a coffee, although Chris was the only one who actually liked it. Me and Claud had accepted the offer from his mum so we’d feel sophisticated. I thought it tasted like the water at the bottom of the washing-up bowl, but I sat with my legs crossed and the mug held in front of my lips. I imagined I looked otherworldly, Parisian. Claud did the same, my coat round her shoulders even though we were inside. Each time she took a sip, she scrunched up her nose. She looked beautiful.
‘She was asking me about friends I haven’t seen since primary school. When I told her I had no idea how Jenny’s horse was or where Sarah was going on holiday this summer, she started to accuse me of thinking I was too important to talk to her, it was stupid.’
‘Oh man, that sucks,’ Chris said. ‘I can’t imagine my mum saying something like that to me,’
‘Your mum’s a babe. Of course she wouldn’t,’ Claud retorted.
‘Yeah, Chris. You’re the only one here with a normal mum.’ I blew on my coffee.
‘OK, OK!’ He held his hands up in the air in surrender, ‘I can’t help it if I’m from a functional family. Just means you guys get to grow up and be tortured artists and I’ll have to be something shit like an accountant.’
‘That’s true. Swings and roundabouts, I guess.’
Claud nodded and stretched her legs out in front of her. She had shorts on, and I could see the light blonde hairs around her knees where she’d forgotten to shave. I wanted to stroke them. ‘I’ll be an actress, and Mermaid will be a writer, and she’ll write the most gorgeous parts for me, won’t you?’
‘Yep. And Chris will do our taxes.’
‘Ha ha,’ Chris said, deadpan. ‘What happened with your mum then Claud? After that?’
‘Ugh. She was accusing me of all sorts, saying I’ve changed when I wouldn’t agree with her.’ Claud started to scratch at a dry piece of skin on the back of her leg. I tapped her hand and she stopped, smiling at me wryly. ‘She was clearly drunk. She started going on about that stupid story she was always obsessed with, the changeling thing. Her and dad were always arguing about it.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ I said.
‘Right.’ She rolled her eyes at me. ‘I swear she actually thinks it’s real.’
‘So does mine.’
‘They’re so weird,’ Claud said, forcing down a swig of coffee. I was inclined to agree.
In the weeks after her mother left, Claud had overheard her dad on the phone to her many times. At first, she couldn’t understand why her mum would talk to him, and not her. Until she heard him say, ‘You can’t be scared of her Mary, she’s still only a girl.’
We all sat quietly for a moment, me and Claud lost in our mummy issues, Chris with a puzzled look on his face.
‘Changelings?’ he finally asked. ‘They’re like shapeshifters, right? They go from looking human to being a giant bug, or a lion or whatever.’
‘What are you on about?’ Claud put her mug down, spilling a little. I mopped it up with my finger and then popped it into my mouth. She watched me do it and then raised her eyebrows at me. I shrugged. She leant towards me and whispered, ‘You’re gross.’ I laughed.
We squeezed each other’s hands, turned back to Chris. ‘Sorry, sorry. What were you saying?’ Claud’s hand in mine meant I could hardly focus on anything Chris was saying. Right then, he was as important to me as the sofa was – he was there, but I had no use for him.
‘Changelings. They can’t actually think that’s a real thing, can they?’
We both nodded. ‘But they aren’t shapeshifters. They’re like brood parasites. Cuckoos. When a mother gets tricked into raising something else’s child,’ I said.
‘Jesus.’ Chris leant back and ran his hand through his floppy hair. He looked genuinely perplexed. It was quite endearing. ‘I mean, I’ve never met your mum Claud, so fair enough, whatever. But I’ve met Lowen more than once and I know she’s a bit, you know, but surely, she’s not that … much, is she?’
‘I don’t know, I can never really tell. I mean, she’s never said anything about changelings, but that’s not because she doesn’t believe in them, she just doesn’t call them that. When she told me about them, she called them mylings, so it’s kind of different, I guess. But yeah, I don’t know if she really thinks it’s real life. I know that my grandma used to smack her and Ysella if she ever found them out playing by the standing stones when they were kids.’
‘Why?’
‘Apparently if you pass a baby through the stones, or something like that, then they can change …’ Claud let go of my hand as I was speaking and drank some more of her coffee. I paused, waiting for her to hold onto me again, but instead she started plaiting a bit of her hair. My hand rested on the carpet alone, unheld and utterly unnecessary. What was the point of my palm if it wasn’t pressed against hers? My fingers if they weren’t laced with her smaller ones? I squeezed my eyes shut, just quickly. This kind of thinking had been happening more and more lately, and I knew it wasn’t healthy. I couldn’t tie my whole being to hers, but I also couldn’t resist doing exactly that. Chris cleared his throat, and I opened my eyes to find him giving me a look – an ‘are-you-OK-or-are-you-losing-it-again’ look – so I tried to give him a reassuring smile, and continued speaking
‘Right. I know my mum and my aunt both got baptised over at Dozmary. Well, I don’t know if you can call it baptism, actually, if there was no priest, or vicar, or whatever, but I know my grandmother took them when they were babies and dunked them into the water. Apparently, that’s supposed to protect their souls so they can’t get changed.’
‘Woah. That sounds like some proper pagan shit,’ Chris said, ‘that’s so cool.’
‘Did you get dunked?’ Claud asked, ‘Is that why your hair looks so wild all the time, because it’s full of pond water?’ She wrapped one of my curls around her thumb and bounced it. I heard Chris sigh, ever so quietly, but I couldn’t look away from Claud, her grin. I felt myself tip my head towards her, so she could carry on playing with my hair.
‘Ha. No, it used to really piss my gran off. I think that’s part of why she never liked me, because my mum didn’t half drown me when I was a baby. It’s crazy.’
‘Mad.’ Claud said. She was still playing with my curls. ‘What’s the difference with a myling anyway? I’m surprised I haven’t heard that one from my mum.’
‘So, a changeling’s like a swap, right? Or a trade. But a myling is something else. It latches onto a person and it feeds from them and uses them to build its strength so it can eventually go home.’
‘Like a cuckoo?’ Chris asked. I pulled my eyes from Claud and nodded. He smiled, grateful to be back in the conversation.
‘Like Mermaid,’ Claud said.
‘Yeah, right. I’m a spirit child sent to feed off you all, you got me.’
Claud clapped her hands together, ‘Fun!’
‘The way my mum tells it, the mylings start off really tiny, and they climb up onto your back. The more they eat, the bigger they get. And the bigger they get, the more human they seem. So, then you start to think that you’ve got this child on your back, and suddenly you’re a parent, and you’ll do whatever you can to keep this myling happy. And it gets really big, but the parent doesn’t want to let it go, so they do things like tie material around their waist to attach they myling to them,’
‘A papoose!’
‘Exactly. A papoose. Or chains. Basically, whatever they can do to attach the myling to them. But then when it’s big, the myling wants to go home – that’s why it’s different to a changeling, because a myling takes what it needs and then it has to go back to its own kind – but, of course, the parent won’t let go of it at this stage.’
‘So, what happens?’ Chris asked. Both of them looked at me intently.
‘Well. If the myling can’t get free, it keeps feeding from the parent, or the host, way beyond what it needs or desires. It gets so large that it towers above the body of the fully grown adult, its stomach spilling over the forehead of whoever carries it. Its weight will cause the new parent’s spine to collapse. And its legs will drag on the floor, scorching the earth they touch. The new parents, even though they’re suffering, will love the myling too much to do anything about it. Their slow suffocation will feel like a choice, right up until the myling becomes so big that it consumes the new parent entirely, until there’s nothing left of the person, but a pool of skin spread across the floor.’
Silence. I felt a blush prickle on the back of my neck. My mother used to tell me the myling story as if it were something funny.
Finally, Chris spoke. ‘Holy fuck. Your mum told you that?’
‘That’s so much better than a changeling,’ Claud said.
‘It’s wild,’ Chris agreed.
‘Is it true then?’ Claud asked.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Are you going to feast on us until we’re all used up?’
My mother had named me for joy, just as her mother had named her. Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of my life is the misplaced hope that comes with a name like that.
She had not often been a joyful woman, although I was told that she had always wished for me, and only ever for me. I was the reason for her living, the root of all her happiness, though that came fleetingly. Attempting to keep her happy took up the majority of my days. When we lived alone in the cottage, she was a wisp, and I would not dare move my eyes from her, having convinced myself that if blinked, she would slip through the floorboards, down to where all things nice were kept.
My mother was not like the other adults I knew. There were women in the village who were strong, shoulders square and brows domineering. My aunt was one such woman. Ysella was large. She had arms that could reach into a cow and pull life out, the calf slick and wet against her gloved hand. Hers was a body that could work the land, seemingly uninterested in desire, it was built to harvest and shear and provide.
My mother was made of a different material. Fragile, but not brittle. Her personality was changeable, bendy. She could be worked in your hands and turned into any shape you required.
I was sat in my room trying to read an old book of fairy tales that had belonged to my aunt, when she popped her head around the door.
‘Sorry about earlier. It’s been a bit … stressful here. I wasn’t sure now was the best time for you to come down.’
I put the book down. I’d been reading something garish about a woman stuffed and roasted by a group of sprites. ‘Why? Has something happened?’
‘Oh, a few things. Your mam, for one. I’ve been trying to help her, but you know what it’s like. She gets overstimulated by change; it throws her off. She was so excited for you to come down; she’s been all over the shop with her meds.’
‘Has she been taking them?’
‘Oh, sure, sure. I make sure she does but it’s not always at the right time. You know how she gets. Easily distracted, that one.’
I always thought I’d return home to look after my mother. Once I was aware of her illness – if that’s what it was – the clock began to tick. I tried to make the most of my teenage years, fitting in as much life as I could, all the while aware that one day I would be called on to care for her.
That was the worry that had been at the back of my mind over the past few years. Each time I took an exam, went to a party, or spent my money on something foolish, I would remind myself that this could not last – there is no freedom in caring.
I have a job that I must do, and whether that job begins at twenty-five, thirty-three or forty-two years old, or even next year, no one can tell me. But I have always known it’s coming.
I imagined myself carefully labelling my mother’s medication, finding inventive ways to hide it in her food, like a dog, so the taste does not turn her stomach. I could track her moods, encourage her when she dressed herself, bathed herself, ate well.
One day, her mind would be so far gone, her medication so strong that she would hardly recognise me as her daughter. She would be the child and I would be the keeper; we could rebuild. I would work away my sins in that selfless, flattering way that people thought highly of, and then I would once again be free – free, and this time, redeemed.
This is the story I would tell myself, in the city, whenever I thought of home. There were many things I didn’t want to revisit in Cornwall, but I had at least thought that any future suffering would come with a level of retribution; a chance to cast off the events of before. I was waiting for the day that I could egg wash over my teen years until they were murky and covered and I could no longer remember them, distracted instead by the crispness of my good deeds.
That afternoon, I watched as Ysella drove a nail through the head of a dead yellow eel, its nervous system bucking at the imposition. She ran a knife just below the nail so she could unsheathe the skin. It was a slow process, using pliers to hook under the first curl of loosened skin, which she then tugged and pulled at, degloving the thing until what was left on the counter looked like little more than an extra-large drowned worm. I went upstairs to read, my mind full of the violence of that body, ballooning on the countertop, naked. I wanted to know what happened to the tunnel of skin left on the side.
They didn’t bin it – I checked the rubbish that evening. None of the meat was eaten, either. It wasn’t smoked or frozen or dried. Nor was it salted, oven-baked or stuffed. There was no frying with dill or salt or jellying. After everyone went to bed, I snuck downstairs to the empty kitchen. I searched in every drawer, cupboard and receptacle, every hole and hiding place, and found no trace of skin from the eels that Ysella had stripped and mashed each day.
It could’ve been festering in a jar somewhere, or pickled in strips, perhaps, but there was no way to follow the smell, because the whole house was full of it – meat and fish and blood and mud in one go. It reminded me of the smell of death on the moors – the stench would fill your lungs – but it was untraceable. You knew that somewhere, a forgotten sheep hung from a piece of barbed wire, but no matter how much you searched, you couldn’t find it and end the suffering. You just had to live with the smell until something came to devour it.
I got no clear answer from Ysella that day, on the hunt or the memorial. I had little choice but to accept what she said – Joan was nosey and untrustworthy, and my mother was too unstable to tell the truth. It had only been two days though. I had time. By dinner, my mother seemed calmer. When I told her I would be going to see Chris the next day, she seemed pleased for me.
‘Such a lovely boy, that one. I’m so glad you stayed friends, after what happened.’