It was day fourteen, I think. There was the before and the after. I had split.
I had been in my room since Ysella found me reading Folk. I had been keeping quiet. I pressed my ear against the walls to check if I was alone. The jackdaws were louder when my aunt wasn’t home. I didn’t know what that meant.
In my room, I read Folk cover to cover. I studied it in detail, taking a pen to each page that struck me, underlining passages before copying them out into the blank pages of Ysella’s notebook. When there were no pages left, I moved my bedside table out of the way, and wrote onto the pale patch of wall that was hidden behind it. It was only a matter of time before the book would be taken from me and hidden away somewhere by my aunt. That, or I would be taken away. If we were separated, I could not be sure that I would see the book again, or that the stories inside would remain the same.
Much had changed in the time I had been home, and all the things I had once believed to be true no longer felt real. The house I had come back to didn’t feel familiar at all. There was an oppression in the walls. I was waiting to suffocate under it.
I had believed there were reasonable explanations for everything that would happen in life – people were cruel because of chemistry or upbringing, coincidences existed because of probability, everything had roots in real life. Changeling stories were child abuse. Even the bottomless Dozmary pool was only nine feet deep. There was no such thing as the unexplained, the unbelievable, the unimagined.
But my homecoming, and all that had happened since, had changed that.
I started refusing the cups of tea my aunt had been bringing me. They were making me drowsy. She must have been putting something in them, something to keep me asleep. She didn’t want me to leave the room. Without the tea, I was able to understand things more clearly. Although my brain felt sharper, my body was not. I felt sluggish, my bones heavy. I was sleeping less, which was good. I’d almost stopped sleeping altogether. I was beginning to worry that I might be turning – into my mother, or into something inhuman. I heard Ysella and my mother talking about the same thing, discussing how I was changing, when they thought I was asleep. My room would be dark, the curtains drawn, the ottoman in front of the door.
I drew the curtains when I couldn’t look outside anymore. Each time I caught sight of the moors, I would lose hours trying to wedge the window open so I could get out, be amongst the land. I wanted to feel the soil. But the window wouldn’t move. And I didn’t want to break it, not yet.
I’m locked in, why are they locking me in?
Instead, I focus on what they say when they’re outside my door.
‘This was always going to happen.’ That’s my mother.
‘Then why did you bring her back here?’ Ysella.
‘Because it’s right. Because it is fair.’
‘We can fix it.’
‘She doesn’t need fixing.’ My mother. ‘She needs letting go.’
When I could no longer bear the soft, slipperiness of the walls, I began to write on the floorboards. I dragged the rug out of the way and wrote underneath that, covering it up at the end of every day so nothing could see it, not even the house. I copied from the book the dates of a series of ‘acts of God’ that had raged across the moors in the nineteenth century. Starting with the fall of Warleggan’s church spire in 1818, the moor was hit repeatedly by tragedy. In 1819, a mansion at Glynnduring was gutted by fire. In 1847, a broken waterspout in Davidstow caused eighteen feet walls of water to run down the River Camel. In the course of each event, a young person was killed, or lost. Taken back by the Pedri. Two lovers died in Lanhydrock House in 1881 and 1882 – one from the fire that took over the house, the other from grief. The Pedri took them both.
In 1890, animals and people were killed, trains were buried, ships were sunk and trees were felled by a week-long blizzard. In the same year, another house on fire, and a church. And then later that year, a drought, blistering, like the one scorching the grass outside my window in that moment. That drought lasted for so long that Dozmary pool ran dry, revealing at its base bone shards, clay pipes, coins and the bloated, lumpen bodies of eels, eyes swollen after a lifetime trapped in the lake.
The stories used to say that the water of Dozmary would swell and drop with the tide, that the whole thing was bottomless – these were the things that my grandmother believed – but it never led to the sea, it was just a trap, a pit where nothing could really survive, apart from the things that had no choice.
Folk was unlike any book I’d ever read. Now I knew that Esolyn wrote it, Ysella found it, and my mother gave it to me, I felt as though it was written for me. It was in this house because I was there. There were stories I’d heard before, stories I remembered from the nights when I was a child, whispered in my ear. It seemed that some of the messages were left for me, the bits that my grandmother underlined. It took me a while to work that out. In the book, there were four sentences that were underlined, three of which Ysella had copied out into her notebook and I’d already looked at. The fourth, the only one Ysella didn’t write out, was in the introduction to the book: The ground calls it home.
I wrote out these sections, the breaks in the text. I tried them in a few different variations, and it didn’t make sense. It was only when I laid them out in the order that I had discovered them that they made a new story, a story that felt like it might be mine.
The Pedri makes a trade
a babi that has changed
You, come of age and are returned
the ground calls it home
I broke into Ysella’s desk on the day – don’t ask me which day, all are blended, all are ankoth, unknown – my mother slid a piece of paper and the key to my room under my door with an instruction written on it: Look in the drawers.
I knew by then that she’d been right, about a lot of things. The memorial was a trick by my mother, a way to get me home; that was why Chris had not been invited, why they would never give me a date. It was something to bring me back here, an excuse to lock me in. I willed myself to feel angry about it, but I could only think of what had happened to Claud.
The iron of her face. The way her brittle body bent, her small patches of softness, the downy hair that hid behind her ears. All of the little tokens I had given her, the gifts I’d foraged over the years, the pieces she dropped in her pockets, that made her coat jangle whenever she picked it up, they simply got too big. They grew. And then the weight of them took her under. She had a piece of granite from the wall in each pocket. No one but me knew where they had come from.
I stayed silent when the note came through my door, so that my mum might believe I was sleeping. Or gone. I didn’t want her to worry anymore. I listened to the sounds of the house and ran my fingers over the indents of her words. I looked at the floor, marked with the fires and losses of the moor, and the wall, where I had hoarded lines from the stories I had read. Whatever I found when I followed my mother’s note would surely be the end of it all; it would have to be.
I waited until it was dark, until I heard the front door open and close again, and then I moved with a whisper into Ysella’s bedroom. Wary now of all the ways the house had tried to trick me, I waded slowly on tiptoes through the darkness, one finger trailing against the wet walls for stability. The bare wood floor prickled my feet. As I stepped through the doorway into her room, the temperature dropped – she had gone out for the night with her window wide open. I moved to shut it, eager to begin my task, but the crunching of gravel outside distracted me. Dropping to my haunches, I peered over the windowsill into the courtyard. The view from there was much clearer than from my room.
Ysella, scarf pulled high around her neck, ignoring the nighttime heat, pulled a bucket full of something wet and shining behind her. The skins of the eels, no longer writhing. I watched until she disappeared over the stone hedge, into the fields and moorland beyond.
I turned to her desk. It sat unassuming against the back wall, drawers locked. Earlier that day, I had searched amongst the unwashed pans and dishes in the kitchen cupboard for Ysella’s tools and stolen a small claw hammer, which I’d snuck upstairs, held against my stomach with the scarf, forcing it into place next to Folk. I didn’t bother attempting to pick the lock – I wanted Ysella to know that I was no longer waiting for the slivers of information they offered me. I was taking it for myself.
I tried to prise the drawers open, using the claw first, but I wasn’t strong enough to pull them out. Instead, I spun the hammer round and swung it into the front of the top drawer. The effect was instant – and the violence of it joyous. The drawers split and screamed as great chunks of wood broke away from the desk.
I thrust my hands into the yawning throat of it and pulled out every last word.
With Ysella safely out of Trewarnen, on the moors, dragging her bucket of eels, I spent the night in her room, reading through her papers. I found diaries, files, photocopies, drawings. An old dictaphone. Treasure.
Treasure, more than just the Pedri. Myself, my mother, our histories, bound up within those drawers.
I had long ago guessed that my father wasn’t local – it was the only thing I could imagine causing the great dislike my grandmother had felt towards me.
In the desk, I found a series of items that proved me right: train tickets to Dawlish and back, and a postcard from my mother addressed to Ysella, with the coastline across the front. I had asked my aunt about my father’s identity many times, and she’d always claimed to be ignorant of it. There it was, locked in her desk. A shame to find that he was just a man. Plain and pale, he looked no more like me than my mother did.
There was more to be found, tucked amongst rolls of receipts and old books. My birth certificate, a blank space where my father’s name should be, my birth not registered until four months after I was born. Written prescriptions for my mother, dating back twenty years. The anti-psychotics and benzodiazepines appeared just a few months after I was born, proof of the root.
No baby photos, but a photo of me age six or seven, stood in front of the cottage in the village. It looked like summer; I was wearing shorts, stood next to the blue sparks of an agapanthus in flower. My limbs looked too long for my body, like I had too many joints, beetle-like, and I was holding onto a hand. I couldn’t see who it belonged to, my mother or Ysella. I held the photograph close to my face in search of a trace of nail polish, or the butt of a cigarette that would prove it was my mother. At that age, she smoked constantly and held me rarely. When I grew older than the child in that photo, when I grew into someone else entirely, the smell of tobacco would always conjure my mother’s face, along with the rose water she would dab on her throat after a smoke.
I dropped the picture back onto the remains of the desk. I did not need to mine an old memory in the search for tenderness. My mother had already done me a kindness. She was letting me go.