As the days of my visit dragged on, I had little hope that I would return to the city before the nights grew longer. My aunt had put my mother to bed last night, dosing her up with an emergency medication that left her sleeping until lunchtime. Later, when I was in bed, I heard the door of the farmhouse slam shut, but running to the window showed me nothing.
I got up and reached under the bed for my bag, but when I looked, the bag was gone. I searched my room, and then downstairs, starting by the front door. I kicked wellies and heaved foul-smelling wax jackets across the porch, in a desperate search for it, assuming I’d dumped it when I came in, without thinking. My phone was in the front pocket. I wanted to call someone else, anyone else, to see if they had heard about the memorial. It couldn’t be done spontaneously; it took planning. Maybe I had never been invited at all and nobody wanted to tell me that, but I needed to leave in two days time if I was going to make it back in time to start my summer job. And if, by some miracle, the memorial was within the next two days, I needed to try on the black dress I’d brought down with me, maybe iron it. I wasn’t sure if you were supposed to wear black to a memorial, or just a funeral.
If Claud were going with me, I would wear a suit. It would be bearable, going with her. She would be inappropriately loud and friendly, and her light would distract everyone from my shadow. Claud would probably wear a dress too, something cut short and black, and then no one would be surprised to see me in trousers and a shirt.
With Claud in a dress, we’d make sense to them. With my newly shaved head, they might not even recognise me. They’d see me and Claud as a couple. As long as we mirrored a straight relationship, it wouldn’t take long for the heterosexuals in attendance to forget we were both women. I wanted people to see us together, to show that what we had wasn’t some sordid little affair: it was a partnership. But if Claud was here to come with me, there’d be no need for a memorial at all.
Ever since reading the story of ‘The Baker and the Bread’, I had felt imbalanced in the house, as if my sneaking around and reading the notebook were marked on me for all to see, and now my bag was missing. The two things felt connected, as if I was being punished for my intrusion. I wanted to know what Claud had to do with the Pedri, once and for all. I had woken up with the determination to find out, to put an end to whatever this was, but then I had been blindsided. My bag had been removed from my room in the night, squirreled away. It was not just the bag itself that worried me, but what it represented: my escape. My phone, my wallet, everything I needed to leave here was in that bag. And somehow, during my sleep, someone – something – had come into my bedroom, crawled under my bed and taken it.
I cleared the floor in the porch completely and found nothing.
Downstairs, the house was warm. Boiling, in fact, for the morning, the heat toying with the smell of fish. Without wanting to, I touched the nearest windowsill. It felt like flesh, thick with grease and guts. Ysella’s ritual seemed to take place daily. Each afternoon she made her mash, sealing the house up with it. It knitted everything together, clamping the windows shut like scar tissue. The heat was attracting flies. It wouldn’t be long until they laid eggs in the old fish and soon enough, the eel would be alive again, grafted onto the walls.
I took the stairs two at a time, noticing the fur of damp on the walls, the flakes of paint piled at the sides of each step. It got hotter as I rose, but the walls were danker still.
The smell of damp, the fish, blocked my throat. I could taste it on the back of my teeth. I stopped part way to catch my breath – my stomach roiling with the smell, my whole self too queasy to run upstairs in one go. The hallway was in a worse state than I was. Books with broken spines lay upended, as if they had been catapulted out of rooms. Only the rug protected bare feet from rough wooden floorboards, but that had been kicked to the side, dejected. I leant against the radiator to rest and then recoiled quickly, as the heat of it hit the backs of my thighs.
They were trying to burn the damp out of the house, with the radiator on full heat. It made little sense – the clumps of paint on the walls, wet to the touch, the house shedding its skin. Things hadn’t been this bad when I arrived. They weren’t even that bad when I went downstairs earlier. How had I not noticed it before? I was so focused on the bag when I left my room the first time, I missed everything around me. How could something crumble so quickly?
She must’ve heard me curse at the radiator, as my aunt called out, ‘In here, Merryn’.
I followed Ysella’s voice, stepping into her bedroom. She was sat on the edge of the wrought-iron bed, legs planted apart, back straight. She looked statuesque, unsurprised by the state of me, my feet bare and my cheeks coloured. Between her legs on the floor was my mother, sat forward facing towards the wall, knees drawn to her chest, fingers roaming the floorboards. A clump of her hair was in Ysella’s fist. Scissors were on the bed.
To the left of them, large, black, open – my bag. I started towards it, but then the troubled looks on their faces pulled me up short.
‘What? That’s my bag – you took my bag,’ I said, pointing towards it lamely. I couldn’t place why it felt like I was invading their privacy, rather than them intruding on mine. Ysella rolled her eyes at me.
‘I’m cutting your mam’s hair. We borrowed some things, as you said. We’re done now.’
She held the bag out for me, and I took it from her. I walked out of the room, nodding, smiling. Calming myself.
‘Will you be down for lunch?’ Ysella called after me.
‘No,’ I shouted back, balancing on the top stair, ‘no thank you.’
I ran along the hallway, away from the image of the two of them, and shut myself in my room, bag held against my chest. I no longer trusted the lock on my bedroom door, so I pulled a chest full of linens in front of it and perched on the bed. I had my bag back; I had a partial explanation for the loss, and yet I still felt anxious in a way I couldn’t explain. I picked at a scab on my knee, grounding myself.
I tipped the contents of my bag onto the bed, checking that everything was still there. Wallet, phone, Ysella’s notebook – had she seen it? – some socks, my hairbrush. The brush caught my eye – I didn’t remember packing it. Why would I when I had nothing to brush? I assumed I had left it in the bottom of my bag, thrown in there out of habit and then forgotten about, but it looked different, new.
I turned it over in my hands, rubbing my thumb against the cheap plastic handle. It took me a moment to realise why it seemed changed: it was clean. Someone had been through it and pulled away the dead hair that matted around the bristles.
The rush of the morning, the stench of the house and the unwavering heat had left my head pounding. I waited until the sounds of lunchtime – the popping of the toaster, the clattering of plates in the sink – were done, before I took myself downstairs, in search of some water. My mother and aunt were both in the kitchen, seemingly well and at peace with each other.
When they saw how I was moving, they began to fret around me. My aunt directed me to a chair, pulling open my mouth to check my tonsils, testing the temperature of my forehead with the back of her palm.
I said I was tired, but my mother wouldn’t let it go, and instead of letting me sleep, she sat and watched as I drank a pint of her homemade golden milk – a mix of turmeric, pepper, cinnamon, and ginger root, heated through full-fat cow’s milk. I watched her throat bob along as I swallowed, a kind of harmonising with me as I drank.
She told me it would help the inflammation, that it was her mother’s recipe, and that I needed to finish it all, even when it came back up. And it did, over and again, sweetening my mouth a second, sickly time. She simply placed a hand over my mouth and told me to swallow, her chewed-down fingers pinching my jaw.
Ysella worked in the kitchen behind us, face hidden behind cupboard doors, tongue caught. She tore at an eel with her hands, hooking her nails beneath the loose flap of yellow skin she had cut. The pliers had been long abandoned now; the skin no longer removed in one pure piece. Instead, she peeled it back like wallpaper, chunks of meat sticking to the pieces she tore.
I drained my milk and eyed the sediment that gritted the bottom of the glass as Ysella picked up her bowl and moved towards a window.
‘That looks like it’s been pulled out of someone’s throat. Why are you doing this again?’ I asked, unsuccessfully resisting the temptation to poke the white marbled meat as she passed me. It was softer than I imagined it to be, like grabbing a fleshy hip, which somehow made it worse. Ysella cradled her bowl protectively.
‘It’s research, for work. Perhaps you ought to go and see your doctor in the city if you’re so ill.’
‘Work, for your story stuff, you mean?’ I asked, sounding more dismissive than I felt. I was tired, and my patience for her deflection was waning.
She said nothing, so I spoke into her silence, eager to fill in the awkward gap.
‘Sorry, not your story, your research. That’s cool. Bit weird, isn’t it?’ I paused. There was slime on my fingers from where I’d poked Ysella’s bowl. I knew I needed to be more direct. ‘Is that what this Pedri stuff is about, has it got something to do with the eels?’
Ysella froze, bowl in hand, her back stiffened. And then my mother laughed, forcefully, her attempt to block the conversation coming a beat too slow. It was a shrill and uncomfortable noise, and in that moment, I knew it had not been a good idea to bring this up.
Before Ysella could respond to me herself, my mother began to talk and didn’t stop.
‘That’s a funny word, isn’t it? Peddy. Seems foreign. Shall we all eat dinner together later if you’re feeling better, Sprig? Should be nice, shouldn’t it? I better make you another cup of something warm before you’re off up to bed, you are looking peaky. Isn’t she looking peaky, Ye? Don’t you think?’
She darted around me in a complicated two-step, magicking some loose herbal tea from a shelf and a strainer from the floor behind a Bag for Life full of empty juice cartons.
Across the other side of the room, Ysella had broken from her freeze frame and was slopping her mixture onto the windowsills again. It spread as thick as oil paint, with only trace amounts of blood catching on the glass.
I watched as Mum poured the tea, my stomach turning with the thickening of the water as the limescale settled near the top of the cup. I grabbed my mug out of her grasp too quickly, spilling hot water down the side and leaving a trail across the floor as I ran back upstairs.
I heard my mother’s voice trailing behind me, her voice hitching with panic as she said to Ysella, ‘I told you not to do it whilst she was in the room, for God’s sake’.
I knew then that this was something. I had been fearful, before, that my obsession with the Pedri was a misplaced symptom of my grief, a way to avoid thinking about Claud, and everything that happened in the time before I left for the city. But now I knew I was right, it was something. The Pedri was worth knowing, and worth hiding.
When I got back to my room, I was sweating. I walked to the mirror, contorting my body into different positions, trying to see myself as Claud would have. The damp had left my skin puckered and clammy, sticky to the touch. The hair under my arms was growing out. The first time it had ever done so, after being shaved away ever since it first dared to grow. My legs, also covered in a fine sheen of hair, shiny now from the damp. Looking in the mirror then, my head shaved, droplets of sweat still running down my forehead, I felt more sea creature than woman – a kraken, a merrow. My thighs stuck together, and I saw myself, tail and gills, snarling teeth, dragging people down with me into the deep.
My head began to throb and swim, and the quick pain made me feel foolish, stood naked and feverish looking at myself, so I crawled back into bed. Ever since that first time, my migraines tasted like sloe berries. I closed my eyes and willed the taste away.
I opened my eyes and saw the window shattered. My migraine had darkened the edges of my vision and I saw an aura fall into the room. I pressed my fingers against my eyelids, willing the dark splotches to go away, but when I opened them, it was still there, a large dark slug of shadow, dragging itself across the floor. As if it had hauled itself in through the cracks. A living thing.
I tried to scream out to Ysella, but my voice was hoarse, my sight still pulsing from the migraine. The darkness moved across the room, sucking up everything it touched until it was all consumed. It couldn’t be. I tried to shake the sight away, but the pain in my head was dull and smothering, and I couldn’t hold on.
I felt boneless, a wisp with no substance, as if the dark sky were matter, holding me down. Still it reached for me, closer again. I needed to push myself up, get off the bed, but my feet only hooked into the mattress, the pain in my ankle from the night outside locking me in place.
The darkness closed over my foot, casting it in shadow, before I could finally move. When I could, I slammed my body back in panic, let my skull smack into the wall.
I woke to pain. A mouth so dry, my gums felt as if they were cracking. It was still daylight, just. Something had lifted. My headache was easing. When I looked to the window to see the damage, it was unbroken, solid. Not even a crack.
People and places and brains can trick you. Ysella once told me about Plato’s allegory of the cave. How the people trapped inside, faces turned to the wall, thought the shadows projected onto the walls were real, when actually, the real objects were blocking the light that shone from behind them. He reasoned that when one of the prisoners broke free, he’d be overwhelmed by the sight of the real world. If the shadows were fake, what was blocking the light in my room? What if the real world was worse than the projected one?