She was never particularly benevolent, though it was useful for other people to think Her so. A game of whispers, the stories about Her changed with each telling, until Her trades seemed kind and Her punishments just.
She had just one aim: life. Life, and a little bit of force when things did not go Her way.
It was man who changed the narrative, assigned morality to Her actions, made Her a figure to be bargained with.
She is simpler than that, older than that, harsher than that. She gives only so that She can take back.
That first time Claud tried, I was in the city, in a club.
I had left Cornwall behind, and had begun to feel the distance keenly. Manchester is a city of brick and height. The office blocks hide the horizon, and I missed the uninterrupted views of the moor. At first, I thought Manchester was a city without lungs – the student houses around me seemed anaemic, all paved yards with only the odd tree. Oftentimes, I took myself for walks into the city on the nights when I was lonely, hungry for the touch of land. I found myself drawn to a park dotted with trees, sturdier than the ones that struggled to grow on the estate. I went to the park with headphones on, blocking out the reality of the city. My intention was always to walk, simply that. And yet each time I took myself to the park, I found myself sat in a copse of trees. It was only when I had dirt in my hands that I started to feel at home. Soon, I began to take a scoop away with me each time I left the park, a pinch in a pocket here, a thimble dropped in my bag. Back in my room, I piled it in the drawer of my bedside table. During the long hours of the afternoon where I had nothing to do, I would sit by the window and watch cranes building – always, more building – as I rolled the dirt in my palms.
For all that I felt the pull of Cornwall, Manchester had given me the key to something else – a community I hadn’t had before. I had had enough of hiding behind Claud’s discomfort, her secretiveness. I wanted to be seen. The silent nods, from women in boots like mine, with cropped hair like mine. The fleeting looks of recognition from the girls who danced down the street arm in arm, matching blonde hair and dresses, pretending like they’re sisters. The women saw me.
The club was small, barely more than one room. All dancefloor, sniffing and touch. In the dark, I felt sure of myself in a new way. I was in uniform: heavy black Doc Martens, purple trousers. My top was vintage leather and cropped, bought off the cute girl with the eyebrow piercing and blue hair in the market. My cheekbones were cut with glitter. That night, I left my breasts behind. Wrapped in a binder that smoothed, the slick lines of my hip bones showing, my breasts bound. When no one was looking, I pulled an ice cube from my glass, rushed it across my stomach like I did that first heatwave.
In the bar, soft hands with long fingers, artist’s fingers, slipped around my waist. They belonged to strong arms and a hushed voice that whispered, ‘You make such a pretty boy’.
All around me pretty boys danced and touched each other. If they touched me, I could see how easy it would be to remove myself and step into them. A pretty boy. But I wasn’t that. Not a pretty boy, and not Claud’s secret girlfriend either. I felt like a creature.
At the bar, a woman – older, almost my mother’s age – used her eyes to take in each part of me, and I stopped twirling. I moved slower, for an audience that appreciated it. The hands of the pretty boys swayed me, and I watched the woman watching me, and I knew that if I tried to speak no sound would come out. My voice had been stolen, my mouth parched. Just like the sloe berry from my childhood, the woman had drunk me down and I was nothing but thirst.
In the bathroom, tinny speakers played Meatloaf, and I locked myself into the unisex cubicle, ignoring the four feet in the next stall. I didn’t cut lines on top of the stained toilet cistern; I couldn’t bring myself to put my face so close to it. Instead, I pressed my back against the door and reached into the pocket of my trousers, where a small pile of dirt sat. I scooped a bump with my fingernail and held it in front of my face. I took a moment, counted my blessings, before bringing it to my nose – God bless God bless God bless – then I breathed in and let it drip down my throat.
The rusty fizz dripped down, and I fought the urge to spit it out. As a child, my mother would spoon feed me raw eggs for infections. She would crack them in her fist, and say ‘Just keep it down, Sprig, it’ll be worth it’.
I thought of my mother’s words and clamped my jaw shut.
It was hours after, back in my shared house, when the comedown began to drain the serotonin from my body, that I heard about Claud. My aunt texted me: Claud has had an accident, she’s injured, but she’s fine. At that time, I knew no details, but I knew Claud. I knew what that would mean.
I unbuttoned the closures on my duvet cover and climbed inside before buttoning it back up. Outside of the duvet, the sky was brightening. I thought of Claud, injured but fine.
I thought of the first time she had told me she loved me. I was sixteen, she was seventeen. We’d been to a party where I knew no one and Claud knew everyone, which was the balance of power we often danced across. I knew I was only in the room because of her, and so I did whatever she asked of me, and took whatever she told me to. Everything tasted like salt and our throats burnt with the need for something non-alcoholic.
The morning after, we hid under the covers in the caravan, me kicking my legs in the air to pitch them as a tent, her counting the freckles on my stomach. She kept losing count, starting again, and laughing to herself as I shimmied beneath her fingers. There were only five, but we were in the stage where everything about the other was insurmountable – there was an impossible glory in being together, slightly high yet still so fresh. She said she loved me then, her breath clouding in the cold air. I opened my mouth and caught it, swallowing it down whole. The morning light was streaming in through the window, turning the off-white bed cover into an orange cloud above our heads.
And then I let myself think, yes, this is what I deserve.
Claud tried to end everything on the same evening that I was out, enjoying my freedom away from her, looking at other women. I had felt like a conduit for a tragedy once before then. At Trewarnen, when my grandmother was still alive, and I was living with my mother in the village.
My grandmother hadn’t liked a lot of things. I was one of them. Generally, Esolyn was of the opinion that children were both too short and too stupid to be of use, and whenever me and my mother visited the family home, she would want me out of sight.
Trewarnen had been a working farm once. Back then, there were horses and cattle in the stables, just a handful of each, enough to provide milk to some houses in the next village over. The cattle all died after an outbreak of mad cow disease when I was too young to understand, and when my grandmother was old enough to know better. She thought it was my fault, although I was only seven. She didn’t see me again after that, claiming I was bad luck. She died a year later.
It was infected bone meal in their feed. They should’ve been on a strict herbivore diet for years, ever since the earlier outbreak in the Eighties, but they were Esolyn’s cows, and much like with her daughters, she followed her own rules when it came to their treatment. She only found out what it was after one died and was tested, and then she was ordered to slaughter the rest. They were taken to the quarry in Liskeard and burned. They had been dairy cows, and as a child I thought of them as muscled, strange, overgrown puppies, who knocked their heads against my shoulder for food.
They ran out of luck on a June day that lasted far too long. We were visiting Trewarnen for the day, and I’d already exhausted all areas of entertainment available within the farmhouse. I was sat beneath the kitchen table, using my claws to peel back layers of wood from the leg. All around me were knees and feet, and if I craned my neck upwards, the sky was only wood. I was a tiger in a wooden cage from an old-timey circus.
I had decided that I would scratch and roar until the ringmaster let me out, and then I would jump through hoops – maybe even hoops on fire – like all the best circus tigers.
Above my head, beyond my circus cage, I could hear my grandmother criticising my mother. The child was dirty; the child was slow. The child looked as though it could have lice. Her own children had never had lice. The child was disrespectful. The child was too loud. The child was too lazy. The child didn’t look like a Tregellas. The child needed to learn its heritage. I continued to scratch at the table, wondering who the child was and if we would ever meet.
‘Be careful or the tiger will eat you Mummy,’ I said, playing both the tiger and the warner, because even though tigers were ferocious, some people didn’t deserve to be eaten. Grandmother might deserve to be eaten, but luckily she had not stuck her head in the cage yet.
My mother gave me one of her special twinkly smiles, the kind that had become rarer than four-leaf clovers, reserved for special occasions.
‘I need you to go find me treasure, Sprig. Something real rare,’ she said.
I gave her back my own best twinkly smile then, all teeth. Even though one of them was missing, I knew it was still a good tiger smile, because my mother bopped me on the nose before she disappeared back above the cage.
It was late afternoon, that hazy light that makes everything look better than it is, and I went collecting treasures and dodging the wind. I tried to carry on being a tiger at first, but there were no rabbits for me to chase. I ran quickly towards a pigeon and roared, but the pigeon flew off much faster than I ran.
It wasn’t much fun being a tiger without a circus, with no elephants or ringmasters or twisty gymnastic people, so I was a frontier woman. A pioneer. A farmhand from the seventeenth century. I practised my curtesy, tying my cardigan around my head as if it were a bonnet. I pulled the corners of my mouth down as far as they could go, perfecting my starving expression, walking hunched over with one hand on my lower back – a hungry Edwardian farmhand, desperate for her next meal. I decided I would go back to the house in character, beg for porridge – or maybe toast and peanut butter.
I heard the sickly sound when I was on my way back. At first, I thought it was the wind, calling to me through the cracks in the dry-stone wall, and I was all poised to run away from it, until I realised the sound was coming from the barn.
It sounded animal, but it wasn’t like any noise I’d ever heard on the farm. I thought maybe it really was a tiger. As I got closer, it sounded garbled, desperate, which is not the kind of sound a tiger makes.
I edged my way to the stables quietly, convinced some great beast was hiding in there. A crouching giant maybe, its shoulders touching the ceiling, or a changeling baby, crying out for its pisky parents to take it home, its teeth a thousand sharpened nails in its mouth. When I peered over the stable door, sickle raised in defence, there was no magic waiting inside. No circus either.
The cow’s eyes were pulled back, the whites showing as they flicked about nervously. Her coat was covered in sweat, but worst were her legs, which had crumbled beneath her. She was trying to pull herself up, but her hind legs stayed folded, dragging across the floor behind her. It looked like someone had taken the cow apart and reattached her wrong, her front half desperate to move and her back half completely dead. The other cows had huddled in the corner, giving her space as she pulled herself forward, nostrils flaring in fear.
I didn’t dare go into the barn, so instead I stayed on guard for what felt like years and years. I stayed there by the stables until my mother came to find me, her steps light. She smiled, and for a moment I imagined everything was fine, that I would take my mother’s hand and run with her to the field with the longest grass and show her how we could be jungle explorers or bushwhackers, or even tigers once again.
But before any of that could happen, the smile fell right off her face, and then she ran to the house and came back out with Ysella, who was running as well, and my grandmother, who was shouting for someone to ring a vet, even though she held the phone in her hand.
Me and my mother went straight home, and we didn’t talk about the cow, or how my grandmother was crying. She didn’t ask me why I didn’t call for help.
We didn’t talk about how my mother had grabbed my wrist so hard that it made my skin go pink and hurt. We didn’t talk about how my grandmother’s hair had whipped around her head in the wind, leaving her looking like Medusa.
The next time we visited the farmhouse, we only saw Ysella. We had to wash our shoes in a bucket of disinfectant before we crossed the threshold, and my mother washed my hands so much they cracked. I wasn’t allowed to splash in the disinfectant even though I really wanted to. The barn was empty and had been cordoned off, but we didn’t speak about that either. I wasn’t sent out to hunt for treasures on my own that day, I wasn’t allowed out at all. We left before my grandmother came back.
When I had calmed down enough from my panic attack, my mother left me in the garden. She didn’t speak, she just kissed me on the forehead and walked back inside. I stayed sat on the floor for a while. My hand reached for the only patch of colour on the ground, and pulled at a dandelion, the yellow flower radiating against my beetroot palm. I squeezed the flower, digging my nails into the flesh of it as I made a fist. The white milk and wetness from the burst petals coated my palm. I licked the sap from my hand, letting the acid sting of it burn against my gums as I turned my face to the sun. Once I felt appropriately bleached, I ducked back into the house, grabbed Ysella’s notebook, and then walked over to the orchard.
There was no great inheritance or grand gesture left to my mother or aunt when Esolyn died, no money to keep the farm they were left with going. The one thing they inherited was a small orchard. Tucked in one of the back fields were thirty apple trees, planted haphazardly. Each year my aunt would harvest the apples and make crumbles, pies, tarts and jams, travelling to the towns nearby and selling them to the cafés. The apples had spirited names, like Egremont Russet, Pixie and Bramley’s Seedling, none of which seemed real to me.
In spring, the trees fizz with white blossom, but by summer the branches will droop with the weight of the fruit, and Ysella will be crawling on her hands and knees, plucking the fallen fruit from the ground before the crows reach it.
She once told me all the things that can go wrong with apples. Brown rot, bitter pit, sawfly, apple scab. All these diseases and pests that rot the fruit from the inside out, devouring a harvest like a sweet-toothed plague. Brown rot is the worst – a disease where white pustules of fungus burst out of the skin, infecting the fruit on all the trees in one wash. It’s the disease she was most terrified of, and she would check obsessively for blossom wilt each spring, a sign that the rot is waiting within the tree. She would circle the branches like a hawk, holding white flowers between her fingers, removing any that look even a little odd.
Whenever I found a rotten apple growing on one of Ysella’s trees, I would take it and bury it at the far edge of the field, far enough away that she wouldn’t smell the sweet turn of the fruit, and deep enough that it wouldn’t be dug up by any animals.
I didn’t want the whole tree to be cursed, but I always felt sorry for the fungus, the thing that invaded and tore everything down. After all, it was only trying to live, to reproduce. How was it supposed to know what it wrought?
I sat beneath one of the trees with Ysella’s notebook. I still hadn’t asked my mother about the hair. She had already seemed off, and I knew that my panic attack had drained her energy further. There was no way I would get a sensical answer from her that day. Besides, I was seeing Chris that evening, and I needed to try and calm myself down before then. I decided it was time to read the rest of Ysella’s notebook.
‘The Baker and the Bread’ had told me nothing. There was no connection to Claud, beyond death, which was hardly a connection. Death was coming to all of us. There were only a few more pages in Ysella’s book with any writing on, and they seemed to be part of some convoluted poem.
The Cunning Woman and You
You, purveyor of lost hope and long regrets, willing to fold yourself into the arms of any man to pull through a lonely night ’til morning.
You, seed between your legs, womb wrought and tender. A sprouting inside you, a tree that swells, a branch that grows up your throat, your mouth wide with fruit.
You, upon the streets, stomach stretched, birth cobbled, screaming.
You, a babi in your arms, hefty as a tree trunk, a smile full of pips.
You, lost and alone in the furze of your child.
You, shaken awake by a stranger bound in black cloth, who says: Have you any need? Are you alone with child?
You, not used to being asked. Wanting help, you make up a tale about the father, make him a thief and a liar, wanting to punish him for the shame you felt when he left.
You, giving two gold coins at the promise of help, payment for a trade you didn’t know you’d made.
You, later, with a babi that has changed. The smile of pips gone rotten, peach fuzz burning to touch.
You, travelling to the next town over to look for the babi’s father, meeting a cunning woman instead.
You, hearing the story second-hand; his neck wrung like poultry. Punishment for a crime, a thief and fraud.
You, no time to mourn, the babi is hungry and won’t drink your milk, won’t take your finger or the teat of the goat.
You, with the cunning woman, laying the babi out at night, alone in the scrub, the only way to fix it.
I stopped reading before I reached the end. There was more, but I felt uneasy. I didn’t like the second-person tone, as if it was speaking directly to me. Once again, Ysella had dated it – 1843, Penzance – so I knew she was simply copying the words from some other source. It was dated at a similar time to ‘The Baker and the Bread’. There was more, too, more links between them. I turned back through the notebook until I found ‘The Baker and the Bread’ again. There it was – at the end of the first page, a sentence underlined: The Pedri makes a trade. I flicked back to ‘The Cunning Woman’. Halfway through the poem, similar language: Payment for a trade you didn’t know you’d made.
Both women, both mothers, in the stories traded with the figure in black. Coins to stop the baby from being hungry, coins to pay for ‘help’. Both women unhappy with what they had before the trade – one, hungry for more than burnt bread, the other, bitter and lying about her child’s father.
After each trade the baby itself changed, was replaced. A changeling, like Claud’s mother used to say. And the Pedri seemed to be there in both of these stories, swooping in just when the mothers were at their most vulnerable. Appearing to be helpful at first, but each time the trade seemed to be a trick. Make a trade with the Pedri, whatever it was, and suffer from it. Not just you, the person who makes the trade, but the people around you too. The father, the baker, and the children. All of them sacrificed, changed, by the actions of the Pedri – and the mother.
I didn’t want to read any more. The images of the starving woman and the baby with a mouth full of pips were looping in my mind. I shut the book and tried to centre myself, pulling out of the world of stories and back to the present, peeling a piece of bark from the tree and placing it on my tongue.
Some trees are easy to peel. Silver birch flakes off in your hands without resistance, but with the apple trees you need to dig your nails in and tear. The flesh under the bark is wet and polished, like the inside of a coconut. People know trees for their sap, the glue they use to hold themselves together, but more often than you might imagine they drip with a thin cloudy-white milk, like the first drop from the cow before you really begin.
Ysella and my grandmother would talk of trees as houses.
Not for birds or creatures that we know to be real, but for the piskies. There were no rope swings or treehouses as I grew up – even climbing the trees would have to be done in a secretive manner, to avoid awakening the imagination of my aunt and Esolyn.
There was something sacred in the trees for them. When a tree is old, its roots lift themselves from the ground, hungry for fresh soil further away, ready to feed the tree in its old age. As the roots stretch, they become crooked, arching above the ground like fingers grappling at soil. The roots create holes, and that’s where the piskies get in, in the spaces we don’t notice. They slip into the cracks.
On equinoxes they would leave offerings to the fairies. In spring it was always the first brave flowers, cowslips and spring squill, picked and placed in tiny bouquets at the base of the trees, for a bountiful season and calm seas.
For the winter solstice, supplies would be left, things of use: tufts of animal fur, feathers, matches and coal for fires. Anything to keep them warm and happy over winter so in spring they will rise again in good spirits. My fingers would fit into the arches beneath proud roots, and I would pull and pull and pull until their bounty became mine, my cheeks soon full of the offerings my aunt had left.
When I was young, my mother would speak of darker spirits, local ones that lurked in stone circles on the moorland and caves by the sea. Things that would creep along roofs and break into houses through holes in the stone walls.
Ysella would shush her, holding a hand up and throwing her eyes towards me, claiming she didn’t want me frightened of Trewarnen, preferring to tell me stories of pretty creatures in petal dresses and flower garlands, anything to make me feel safe in this land.
My mother has a selective memory when it comes to her parenting. If I asked now, she would deny having ever taught me of anything malevolent. She would claim that they were all just standard fairy stories. But I could see my mother’s beliefs clearly, in the way she left saucers of milk on the porch. Or how, in winter, she and Ysella would set tiny fires in the moorland around the farmhouse. How they both walked out each night to light lanterns in the fields and along the driveway, as if they were leading something home, how holy words would find their way under my pillow on quiet nights.
The story of the cunning woman read like something my mother would believe, but my aunt was more logical than that. Her connection to the past, to the Cornwall of before, was strictly historical, cultural. I had always believed that Ysella carried out these acts – the lanterns, the eels – as a form of remembrance, not because she thought they were actually doing something. This is what confused me. If the notebook had belonged to my mother, I would’ve brushed it off as another one of her fancies. Ysella’s behaviour since I had been home pointed to her believing her own stories. And if she went the same way as my mother, I didn’t know where I’d be.
Chris was more my friend than Claud’s, which was partially why I hadn’t seen him in so long. Although I had known him as a child, we moved in different circles for years.
Eventually, in year nine, he joined our friendship, a latecomer to our island. Me and Claud were already cemented in our duality, after two years of a very singular friendship. Our identities – mine, at least – were formed around the relationship we had with each other. Without Claud, I didn’t know what I was. Chris came to us unbidden. After the leg incident, as it had come to be known, he went to a different primary school, and I didn’t see him again until secondary. The time away had left him more outcast than ever. He returned to school having missed the years in which friendships are made, when bonds are forged. There was no space for him in the groups, the pairs, the trios. He had been by himself during his recovery, and that made people suspicious, scared of the person who’d spent most of his time alone. He didn’t understand the jokes, the unspoken rules, didn’t know exactly what to wear, or which teachers it was OK to respect, or which girls he was allowed to fancy. Worst of all, he didn’t see himself the way everyone else did – he couldn’t acknowledge that he was odd, the kid with the bone sticking out of his leg and the hysterical mother. He wasn’t in on the joke, he wasn’t humbled by his social standing. Instead, he was just nice.
One day, when Claud was off school sick, he sat next to me in History. Seeing that I was alone too, he started talking as if he had always been there, as if we were already part way through a conversation. The incident sat between us, but it was never discussed. It didn’t need to be – it was the one connection Chris had to someone in school, and it knotted us together. And even though I had never given much attention to anyone other than Claud, I suppose I saw something in Chris too, because for the first time, I tried. I opened myself up to him, one question at a time. From then on, Chris was always around. Perhaps he knew I owed him. When Claud returned to school, he gave her the same treatment, greeting her like an old friend he’d spoken to every day for years. We didn’t ask for his company, nor did we particularly cherish it at first. One day there was no Chris, then the next there was. Through no choice of our own, somehow Chris became one of us. At points, Chris became a sort of boyfriend to me. One I would revisit whenever Claud chose someone new.
At first, I thought it was shame that made her do this. She was unwilling to tell anyone we were together, and I thought it was because she was worried about how her family would react if she was with a girl. As we grew older, I began to realise that Claud wasn’t ashamed of her sexuality – which was a beautiful, flowing thing, much like mine – she was ashamed of being happy. There had been other girls when we were in college. Girls she would grab and kiss at parties, performing for the chants of the boys. Girls I would bump into leaving her bedsit early on a Saturday morning, hair dishevelled, when I arrived to check she had something in her fridge for the weekend. I would spend the night at hers and find women’s rings on the bedside table. She wasn’t afraid to let people know what she was doing with women, but couldn’t let anyone see her happy in a relationship. She wouldn’t dare to be caught in love.
Chris was the boy who would stay home forever. The rest of us always knew it, but nobody ever brought it up. Each week he’d have a new big idea, a new place he would go to, a new way he would travel the world, and I’d smile wryly back at him because his eyes would be so eager, so pleading that I knew he needed to believe it more than he needed to do it. So, I’d say, ‘Sure, you will.’
Of course, you’ll study in London, of course you’ll live in Berlin. Of course, you’ll get into spoken word and open mic nights, and of course what you’ve got to say will resonate with people. Of course, when you take me to the station we’ll keep in touch.
He drove me to the train station when I left. I went on the sleeper train, with a rolling suitcase and a backpack, and he stood on the platform, one hand in his pocket, the other in a wave.
I’d switched my phone on earlier that day to find a reply from Chris. ‘See you at eight.’
I sat in the pub, mildly pissed off at the scenes of drunk joy that were unfolding around me. Bodies were pressed against each other to get to the bar, and I had to fold into myself just to squeeze past them without being touched when I arrived. Chris had chosen a corner table near the back, in a little alcove from which we could watch everyone else. He was pleased with our perch, but I longed to be out of the way, facing a wall so that no one would recognise me.
I needed an evening to be a different Merryn to the one in the farmhouse. I wanted to ask Chris about Claud as soon as he waved me over, but I didn’t dare. I saw in his face that he wanted to ask me about Claud, but he didn’t dare either.
Instead, we settled on a brief hug – him holding tighter than me – and quickly sat down. The jumper he was wearing smelled of cigarette smoke. I suppose I did too, but I like to think it was less obvious on me. He ripped apart a bar mat with dirty fingernails as he spoke.
‘Feels like it’s been forever, Mermaid.’
‘You think? It’s only been a year.’
‘A year without calling, or texting, sure.’
‘C’mon man, you know it’s not been easy. Are we really going to go through this?’
‘No, yeah, you’re right. You’re here!’ he said, dragging his hand over his face and then smiling, properly this time. ‘Let me get us a drink, beer? Beer. And then we can properly catch up. It’s good to see you, seriously.’
He stood up, motioning to the bar, and squeezed his way around the bodies packed by our table. I felt my cheeks flush as people turned to look at me, all of them wondering why Chris was so happy to see some girl with her hair chopped to her temples. I pulled my hood over my head and leant back against the panelled wall. I certainly didn’t look like their usual crowd, but I’d rather they thought I was weird than recognised me as a Tregellas.
Chris came back with two pint glasses held high, streams of beer running down his thumbs and wrists.
‘Still haven’t got the hang of that,’ he said, putting one down in front of me and spilling it further. ‘Jittery hands.’
I dabbed the puddle with my sleeve. ‘Thanks.’
‘How’s it going with your mam and old aunt? I saw Ye buying milk earlier. She looked furious, like she had a personal vendetta against Big Dairy.’
‘She does.’
Chris laughed, but then stopped. ‘You all right?’
I looked up at him. I’d been staring at the fizzing bubbles of my pint, distracted by the mention of Ysella, thinking back to the strange scene in the kitchen this morning, ‘Huh?’
‘Are you back in the room?’ He smiled, ‘Your sleeve is soaked.’
I hadn’t noticed how much beer I had soaked up. I lifted my arm and wrung out my sleeve with my other hand. ‘Ah, had an argument this morning, you know how it is,’ I said, screwing up my face. He nodded, though I knew he did not know how it was at all. Chris’s mum was nothing but gentle. She doted on her only child and let him do whatever he wanted, which luckily for her, was never a lot.
‘Speaking of mams, Selena says hi.’
‘Ugh, don’t call her Selena. It makes us sound old. Still her good gothic self?’
‘Yup, she made me go to Stonehenge for her birthday in March. Freezed my bollocks off whilst she shook a tambourine with some crusties who were protesting.’
‘God, I think I’d rather be friends with your mother than you.’
‘As if you’d give a shit about some old rocks.’
‘Touché.’
‘So,’ Chris took a swig of his pint, ‘are you going to tell me how you are?’
‘I’m fine, Chris.’
‘No, I mean seriously. When you didn’t come down for the funeral, I was really worried—’
‘Can we not?’
‘Really? We’re just going to act like—’
‘Yeah, I think so.’ I said. He looked hurt. ‘I’m sorry, I just, I could really do with a normal evening. Obviously it completely ruined me, you know that.’
‘Of course, it did,’ he reached out and squeezed my wrist.
‘How could it not? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to come back at all. But I’m here now, aren’t I? And I’m going to go to the memorial.’
‘What memorial?’
‘The memorial. Cl— her mum’s arranging it. Didn’t you know?’ Chris was shaking his head, ‘Shit. They must’ve … no, maybe they just didn’t send invites out? I guess it’s not the sort of thing you send in the post, is it? I’m sure you’re invited.’
‘I haven’t heard anything about it.’
‘Mum rang me up and told me. It must be a word-of-mouth thing. It’ll just be a mistake if you’ve not heard yet. You’ve got to come; I don’t think I’d be able to do it without you.’
‘It wasn’t exactly a party going to the funeral without you.’ Chris said. The words felt like a knife, but his face looked so sad, I knew he didn’t mean them cruelly. Sometimes I forgot how close Chris was to the two of us. It might’ve felt like me and Claud were in a bubble, but that just wasn’t true.
He carried on; his tone softer. ‘Sometimes I think I see her, you know, out on the moors.’
‘You do?’ I asked, thinking back to my walk when I first arrived, the long black coat I thought I saw in the distance.
‘Yeah,’ he said, fiddling with the beer mat in front of him, ‘Selena said it’s normal, to get visitations or whatever. You’re supposed to feel like they’re watching over you. She said it’s a blessing, to feel so connected.’
‘That sounds … nice’ I suggested, feeling unsure as to whether it was at all.
‘I’m not sure, it’s …’ Chris trailed off, sighed. I’d only seen him look so uncomfortable once before, on the day he drove me to the train station. ‘It’s not nice. It’s not like Selena says. I’ll be walking home, and it’ll be out of the corner of my eye, and I’ll think she’s there, in that creepy coat – but it won’t feel good. It doesn’t feel like a blessing, it freaks me out. And I don’t even know if it’s her. But it has to be her, right?’
It took me a moment to recollect myself to respond to him. This wasn’t like Chris at all, he didn’t buy into anything even remotely spiritual. ‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because if it’s not her, then who is it?’
The question unbalanced me; I had no answer for Chris. He was opening up to me, but I wasn’t ready to do the same.
‘I don’t know.’ I needed to get things back on track, ‘Come on. Let’s not do this right now.’ I reached over and ruffled his hair. He laughed, but it didn’t reach his eyes. I’d disappointed him, but he was too kind to show it.
‘Your hair’s grown,’ I said.
‘I know. D’you like it? Yours is basically all gone.’
‘Yep. Love it. You look like Heathcliff. Or some other moody moorland man.’
‘Moody Moorland Man. I’ll take that. I like yours shaved, by the way.’ He smiled, more genuinely this time. ‘How’s things at home? Completely unhinged, as normal?’
‘You know it.’
‘Are they being all right with you?’
‘Yeah. I mean, they’re being a bit standoffish with the memorial stuff. And there’s something else kind of strange too …’ I had been planning to use this evening as an escape from all the weirdness that had been going on, but the conversation kept toeing the same line. Seeing Chris again, seeing the way he furrowed his brow with such sincerity, even after I’d brushed him off, it made me want to confide in him. He was sat quietly waiting for me to go on.
‘Right, so. It’s probably nothing, but it still seems a bit odd. I found this notebook that belongs to Ysella, and I’ve been looking through it.’
‘You’ve been reading her diary?’ He pretended to gasp, hand to chest. ‘I’m scandalised, Mermaid. Is there anything saucy in there? Any toy boys? You know I’ve been trying to ride that train for years.’ He had a talent for lightening the mood.
‘Ha. No, not a diary. It’s more like research. There’re all these stories in there, some that have been printed out and stapled in, and others that she’s written out herself.’
‘So, she’s got this notebook full of stories. What kind of stories?’
‘They’re not that wild. They’re pretty dark, but no worse than what Mum used to tell me.’
‘Lowen always did have an interesting definition of a bedtime story.’
‘Mmm,’ I nodded and then took a sip of my pint. I needed to tell him the rest, to see if it was as odd as it felt, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready. He raised his eyebrows at me, his face open, waiting for me to carry on speaking. I decided to trust him.
‘But the worst bit is her name is written in there.’
‘Whose? Your aunt’s?’
‘No. Claud’s.’
‘What the fuck?’
I shrugged. His reaction proved that it was as weird as I’d thought. It also showed that he was kinder than I, willing to accept my story face-on, not avoiding it like I had with his.
‘Hold on, before we dive into this anymore, we need brain fuel,’ Chris said. He reached into the pockets of the battered aviator jacket he’d thrown over the back of his chair. He pulled out packets of Bacon Fries and pork scratchings, splitting both bags down the middle before pushing them between us.
‘What?’ he said, inspecting a long curling hair protruding from a pork scratching. ‘Look, I’m not cheap, but I’m not paying pub prices. A pound a fucking bag in here. Do you know what the worst of it is?’
I shook my head.
‘The scotch eggs they sell, £1.50, right? I was speaking to Cal who used to work here the other day – they get them from the big Asda! Four pack for a quid, stick some fucking cellophane round them, selling them for £1.50 each.’
‘That’s grim. I don’t like scotch eggs. I don’t understand them.’
‘Abnormal. Want a scratching?’ he asked, pushing the bag towards me. I tried to choose one without hairs, but once it was in my hand, I could feel the sharp spikes of stubble.
Chris carried on talking as I scraped at the scratching with my nail. ‘OK, so, what do we know? We know you found a notebook that belongs to your aunt, it’s got some spooky stories in it, and Claud’s name’s in there?’
‘Right.’
‘OK, well, that’s not actually a lot, is it?’
‘There’s something else.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Ysella’s been smearing this stuff – it’s like chopped up eel and butter – all over the window frames, and they’re both acting like it’s normal. And there was another word next to Claud’s name. Pedri. I thought your mum might know something about it. Has she ever mentioned a Pedri? Or “The Pedri”?’
‘Because she’s weird?’
‘Don’t be mean. Because she’s, you know. Because she owns a tambourine.’
‘And a didgeridoo. And a focusing crystal. Sure. Don’t worry, I’ll tell her you think she’s a freak.’ He grinned at me and started swiping at his phone. ‘I’ve got this app – like a translator, but for dead languages, old Celtic stuff. It’s all community led. The name Pedri rings a bell. That’s an old Cornish word though, isn’t it? Definitely doesn’t sound English.’
I nodded and popped a bacon fry in my mouth, letting it melt slowly until it was mush. I hadn’t thought about the origin of the name before, but Cornish made as much sense as anything.
‘How weird,’ Chris said. ‘I’ve found it. But it’s not a proper noun; it’s a verb. It says it means rot. What did you say earlier? It’s a story? Or a myth? About rotting?’
To rot. It didn’t fit. I shrugged. ‘I mean, I don’t know. I thought it was a name.’
‘Weird name. There’s some more here, corrupt or spoil. That’s dark.’ Chris finished his drink. ‘Want another one?’ he asked.
‘Thanks.’
I was searching through the pork scratching bag for a crispy, non-hairy one when an individual bottle of rosé and a wine glass that still smelled like dishwasher were placed in front of me. Not looking up, I said, ‘Ah man, I can’t stand wine’.
Someone cleared their throat, and then I heard Chris say, ‘You all right mate? You don’t usually drink in here.’
Chris was stood, holding two more pints, and next to him was Paul, Claud’s dad. Paul was bald and tall. He wore his Fred Perry shirt buttoned tight around his neck.
‘Thought I’d bring a drink by for your missus,’ he said to Chris, ‘but she don’t seem best pleased.’
Chris laughed, put a pint down in front of me. I wanted to shrink down into my hoody until only my eyes were on show.
‘I haven’t got a missus, mate. It’s Merryn! And she doesn’t like wine. What brings you out this way?’
Paul stared at me, his eyes narrowing only slightly before he pulled a smile from his back pocket. I tried to smile back. He was wearing the black Swatch watch Claud bought him for his birthday when we were fifteen. We shovelled snow from at least eight driveways so she could save up for that thing. I poured the wine into the glass so I could avoid looking at him.
‘So it is. You’m all right Merryn, maid?’ He nods at me once before turning to Chris. ‘Been spending more time up this way recently. Summit weird on the moor. We’ve been out looking for it.’
The hunt, again. He’d been one of them.
‘Merryn’s mam lives out on the moor,’ Chris said, looking to me. I kept my mouth shut. ‘Has she said anything to you about something weird, Mer?’
I tried to say no, but my voice was shuttered. I swallowed a gulp of wine and tried again. ‘No.’ I had seen the way Paul had tensed when Chris called me Mer, the same as Claud used to.
‘All due respect to Merryn, mate,’ Paul said, visibly tightening his grip on his ale ‘but it’s her lot that are the problem.’
Oh no.
‘Her lot? What are you on about?’ Chris asked, looking from Paul to me and back again.
‘If her sort—’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Chris interrupted. He positioned himself between Paul and the table, blocking me from view. Paul downed half his pint, clearly drunker than either of us had realised.
‘That batty mam of hers has done something—’
‘Don’t talk about Lowen like that, Paul.’
‘I’ll talk about who I want, how I want,’ Paul said. He sidestepped Chris and pointed his finger at me, ‘especially when it’s her batshit mam that started this. No wonder she’s turned into a dyke, with a mam like that.’
I closed my eyes and pressed my hand against my mouth to ground myself. When I opened them, Chris looked furious and I could see, rather than hear, that he was telling Paul to get the fuck out in a low voice.
‘Your daughter didn’t seem to mind me being a dyke,’ I said.
‘Disgusting.’ He spluttered, his face purple. ‘Don’t talk about Claudia like that.’
‘Claud.’
He looked at Chris. ‘This is exactly why Mary didn’t want her at the funeral. Or any of her lot.’
‘Now that’s not fair, Paul …’ Chris started.
‘The only person who shouldn’t’ve been at that funeral was Mary. That woman ruined Claud’s life. She fucked her up completely. My mum might be batshit, but Mary’s fucking cruel. Leaving without saying goodbye? Saying she was scared of her? Cruel.’
‘You don’t understand anything,’ Paul said.
‘I understand enough to know that Claud wouldn’t be gone if she thought she was allowed to be loved.’
His whole face turned then, as he lunged across the table, knocking the wine onto the floor. I closed my eyes once more, waiting for it, for the repentance, for some smattering of pain that felt like closure, but it didn’t come.
When I opened them, Paul was being swallowed back by the crowd as the barman shouted at him to get out. Chris was being calmed down by a man in a flat cap but shrugged him off when he saw I was shaking.
‘Shit, Merryn. Are you OK? What an absolute dickhead. I’m sorry mate, I should’ve got rid of him sooner, I wasn’t expecting that. Are you all right?’ He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed. ‘Do you wanna go? We can go. In fact, Tony looks pretty mad, we might have to go.’
The barman was making his way to our table.
‘I just want another drink,’ I said, pulling at my sleeves. My chest was rattling. Chris smiled, just a little, and then saluted me.
‘Yessir. Let me sort Tony out, you stay there,’ he said, jumping up and intercepting Tony swiftly.
Tony averted; we kept drinking. I was already tipsy when I spoke to Paul, and what I said about Claud had filled me with such a strong sense of embarrassment that I began drinking quicker than Chris. I was drunk within the hour, and not the good kind of drunk, but the drunk that curdles your stomach, where you’re trying to crush something down, but it just brings it back up.
Another hour, another two. I couldn’t peel back my nails so I pushed them deep into the velvet of the barstool and thought about all the years of dust collected in that cushion, how when I first sat down, the particles would have floated up and gotten stuck in the fibres of my jumper and the roots of my eyelashes. I scraped my nails into the fabric, so all that dust got under them too – thick layers of other people’s skin trapped by mine.
I carried it with me, until later when we popped out for a fag, and I complained I was cold. Chris put my fingers in his mouth and sucked to warm them up, before kissing me. And then all that dust, all those people were in his mouth, and his throat, and his gut. All the people that had been in that pub and sat on that seat, leaving tiny traces of themselves behind.
I pushed him up against the limestone wall, moving so his knee pressed between my legs, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the dust and the people. How many of them had been stuck here, like Chris? How many of them had been frightened of themselves?
Drunk on cheap pink wine and beer, me and Chris made it back to his and tumbled into each other on his bed.
When I touched his skin, all I could think of was raw meat, the slime of him, jellied eels. His tongue sat heavy in my mouth, but I didn’t mind. Told myself I didn’t mind anyway, which was practically the same. I kept my arm braced across my chest, my T-shirt still on.
I pressed my face into his shoulder and opened my mouth, nipped at him with little teeth. That part felt delicious. When I opened my eyes, I saw he had new hair now, growing from his back and across his chest. A single sprout had seeded above his Adam’s apple. I wanted to flick it, but I wasn’t sure if laughter was allowed during sex – or in this case, just before sex.
We had been in this position – this ‘almost there but not quite’ brand of intimacy – before. He was above me and only slightly inside me when I told him to stop. And he did. He pulled himself back and wiped the want from his face and sat up in bed bedside me.
‘Still?’ he asked, not unkindly.
‘Still.’
He nodded quickly, reaching for a packet of cigarettes. He offered me one, and I accepted as he pulled the duvet back over us, covering up our bare skin. It had been three years since the camping trip, and I thought I would’ve been OK by now. But I wasn’t. I still couldn’t have anyone but Claud touch me like that.
Now the illusion of sexual tension had gone, I felt more sober, and I could look at him without picking fault with the way he breathed or the earnest noises he made. He tapped ash onto his duvet and I watched as a burning cherry fell, eating through the fabric drowsily. Just as it seemed like it could ignite, he swatted it away, and I sighed in a way that made him laugh.
‘You can stay, you know. There’s no point walking back now. Selena won’t mind, she likes you,’ he said.
‘Sure, but I’ve gotta get back.’ Part of me wanted to stay, for the ease of it, the company. But I knew it would be awkward in the morning, navigating that not-quite-platonic space in the light of day, whilst both of us were still dealing with our grief.
‘I’ll walk with you then.’
‘No.’
I leant my head against his sharp shoulder. How different would it all have been if I had met Chris before Claud? Chosen him over her? I could picture it. I would’ve left the farmhouse and moved into the little terrace with him and his mum. We’d sleep on a mattress on the floor and spend our evenings watching documentaries about fracking and reruns of A Place in the Sun, smoking cigarettes and arguing over whether we’d take the apartment in Madrid. His mum would paint me a picture of the moon for my birthday, and we’d hang it above the bed, and every time we had sex (which we would, regularly and gently, but not too often), I would make eye contact with the wolf, and I’d feel safe.
If I had chosen Chris, Claud would’ve just been a friend, eventually. And all the things that had made me the person I was – the person climbing out of Chris’s bed, pulling my clothes back on – would never have happened, and we would probably be happy.
I couldn’t find my socks, so I stuck my bare feet into my trainers, ignoring the look of worry on Chris’s face. I knew he wanted me to stay, to try out what we could’ve had before. But it was too late, and I needed to go home. I couldn’t change it all.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I walk myself home in the city all the time. Besides, you know how me and Claud would walk home from parties together at this time.’
He bristled slightly at the mention of Claud’s name, but instead of speaking, he blinked quickly, three times, like she was an eyelash squatting in his view, ‘If you’re sure,’ he said.
He walked me to the door and gave me a hug. As he pressed me against his chest, I spoke into his T-shirt, ‘I think I’ve seen her too’.
When he let me go, I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me. He looked as if he wanted to speak, but instead he gave me a cigarette and a spare lighter for the road. He ruffled my hair as I ducked out into the night.
People in these parts held their stones and granite stacks – menhirs – in high regard. There are Druids and Pagans and Christians all with their own explanations for the stone circles. Like America’s crop circles, but these haven’t been made by combine harvesters. Esolyn thought the stone circles were true passageways; Mum and Ysella thought they were bad luck.
It gets passed on, that kind of fear. The only time my mother ever hit me, and it wasn’t even a real hit, was when I went to cut straight through the middle of the Hurlers Stone Circle. She’d been telling me stories of a piper who played beautiful music, and the young women dancing with them, but the women didn’t realise they were dancing on fae land and they were turned to stone. She said the number of hurling stones was forever changing, and I was a sensible child, back then. I wanted to count the stones so that on our next walk, I could see if it was true, see if they multiplied and shifted in the night, but as I went towards them, I was whipped back by her hand.
I tried to tell her that the stones couldn’t mean two things at once. I might’ve been young, but I knew the differences between fact and fiction, I’d done well in school, and I knew there was only one right answer to most things. There was no way pisky traps and fairy punishments were real. It couldn’t make sense. I told her so then and she dragged me further away, spitting at the foot of the stones before we left.
It might’ve been the drink, or it could’ve been the dark, but either way I couldn’t make sense of where I was going after I left Chris’s that night. I had been walking for a while, long enough for me to be nearly home, but I still didn’t recognise any of the land around me. Where there should’ve been landmarks, there was nothing of note, just moorland and hedges, which in the night gave the appearance of a hundred hunched beasts lining each side of the horizon. I found myself stood at a turning, the road ahead of me unending, the road behind me gone. I turned around, trying to find my way back to Chris’s house.
Our near-miss in bed had me remembering the night three years before, when a group of us went camping. When I think of that night, I never know if I did enough – or if I did too much, if I invited it. Remembering leaves my chest tight, a phrase I never understood before, but I could explain now: it feels as if the centre of me has been hollowed out and someone is slowly churning my lungs until the air is all gone, and it can’t be caught. And that, that is how I feel whenever I remember the
pink face
brown hair
wet lips
sharp fingernails.
A jumble of parts, collapsing in on me.