ALISON LITTLEWOOD
It was after nightfall when I first saw my new neighbour, though I didn’t know when she had decided to go out into the garden. I’d been busy unpacking boxes and telling myself I should be grateful for what I had, and it was dark when I went to draw the curtains across the window. She was in a wheelchair, nothing but a hunched, shadowy shape against the shrubbery. I might not have seen her if it wasn’t for the movement of her feet, kicking continually at the blanket covering her legs. I thought of Parkinson’s, of restless leg syndrome, other illnesses I couldn’t name and knew little of. Had she been taken ill just now, or was it of long duration? Did she need my help?
I felt bad that I didn’t know. I’d never met her before, though Mum had lived in this house for some years. I’d left home as soon as I was eighteen, anxious to experience all that London had to offer, and only came back when she got ill. I’d chosen to look after her, though I hadn’t wanted it, and by the time I reached her it was already too late. Now I was here, it was as if I couldn’t leave again – couldn’t be so ungrateful as to abandon her a second time, even though she was already gone.
The old lady next door tilted back her head to stare up at the stars, shielding her eyes as if they were too bright, and I just made out the smile that touched her lips. It seemed suddenly terribly romantic. She was old, infirm, perhaps couldn’t even walk, and yet there she was taking in the night air and dreaming, while I was twenty-four and acting as if my life was already over.
I didn’t go to check on her after all. I didn’t see her again that night, didn’t watch to see that she’d gone inside, closed the doors behind her, that she was safe. I slept right through to the next morning, stretched the stiffness from my limbs, brushed my teeth and dressed before I opened the curtains to see her sitting there, still in the place she had been.
I couldn’t breathe. Was she stuck there, unable to get inside by herself ? Had she fallen asleep – or something worse than that? She was old and alone and she had needed help; help that, once again, I had failed to give.
Thinking of heart attacks and strokes and other terrors of the elderly, I rushed downstairs and into my own back garden. Our two houses were the only ones set at the top of a leafy lane, separated from each other and the softly rolling hills around us by knee-high fencing. I stepped over it and rushed towards her, calling to see if she was all right, and she turned towards me, her look of astonishment stopping me dead.
“Goodness,” she said. “Have you seen a ghostie, lass?”
My alarm turned to apologies. I explained my concern and introduced myself, and she told me she was Annis Scollay, that she had just this moment stepped outside again – wheeled, I thought but didn’t say. Her legs still kicked against their blanket, a grey tartan, and the thought came again that she had some kind of illness, a muscular palsy over which she had no control. I tried not to look, though now and again a sharper kick drew my gaze.
“I did come out for a wee while last night,” she said. “I hoped to see the merrie dancers. It was on the news they might be seen this far south, but I didn’t see anything at all. Did you happen to see them, Sophie?”
I said I had not, though I remembered the news item she referred to – I should have thought of it before. If I hadn’t been so set on finding a place for everything, I might have tried to see the Northern Lights myself, though despite the newscaster’s assurance it had seemed unlikely they would grace the skies of Lincolnshire. They were meant for wilder climes, more northerly parts of the world.
“It’s still oorlich, though,” she said, shivering as if to explain her meaning. “We had that part of it, at least.” She fumbled under her blanket, pulling another one free; it looked as soft as mohair. She passed it to me and I shook my head – I’d come out here to help her, not the other way around – but she said, “That shade of brown, it’s called a murat. One of the finest you’ve ever felt about your neck.”
A strange curiosity came over me and I took it, wrapping it around my shoulders, and felt comforted at once. I snuggled into its warmth.
“My father reared the sheep gave that blanket,” she said. “Shetland sheep, on the isles. That one’s from my favourite. Bonxie, I called her, after the Great Skua chicks that lived on the sea cliffs. She was one of the best; the kindly sheep we called them, the ones that gave such wool.”
I couldn’t resist rubbing it against my cheek, almost thinking I could smell not the lanolin of sheep but the briny scent of the ocean.
“That’s right,” she said, as if I’d spoken. “There were ponies too, of course, our neighbours had them, and I’d go there whenever I could. I’d put on their halters and lead them about like dogs, for they were no bigger.”
“You grew up on the Shetland Islands?” My eyes widened. They seemed as unknowable to me as a place in a story. I wasn’t certain I could have pointed to them on a map.
“On Foula,” she said, clearly loving to speak of it. “The most westerly of them all, and separate from the rest – divided from them by a nasty reef, the Shaalds, though I always thought of them as the hungry rocks. The loneliest island in Britain.” She said this last with a touch of pride.
Caught up in her words, I only said, “I thought I detected an accent,” though the truth was that at times I could and at others I barely heard it. It seemed to come and go, like something she half-remembered.
“Aye, it’s still in me, when I think of it,” she said. “Mostly it’s gone. I lost a lot of things when I left. Found some too. That’s what happens, I suppose.”
She glanced at me as if she saw right through me and I thought of the way I’d inherited the house, had been given everything. It had been at once too easy and too hard. I had lost my mother; I had done nothing to help her. I hadn’t earned such a home, hadn’t given enough. But I was helping now, wasn’t I? Old people liked to chat about their lives, their memories. Annis certainly seemed to relish the chance to talk to someone, and my mother might have liked to know that I listened – so I asked Annis to tell me all about her life on Foula.
I wasn’t sure she heard. She was staring into the garden, focused on a little twig that was still twitching as if a bird had just flown; then she looked away as if it was nothing after all. Her gaze softened, as though she saw only distant places, other times.
“I saw a trow when I was thirteen years old,” she said. “Is that the sort of tale you like, hen?”
I smiled and nodded, wondering what on earth a trow was – a fish? A bird? – trying not to feel like a child at bedtime, listening to stories at her mother’s knee.
“The aurora shone that night,” she said. “The dancers were merry then, perhaps a little too merry, so in a way it was all their fault, for if they weren’t shining the path would have been too dark to go out. It was approaching winter, and the nights were longer than any you’d imagine, though it was between the weathers; we had gales before and gales after, but that night it was still.
“I’d only been to the Turvelsons’. They had the next croft to ours, and my mother had sent me to borrow a little butter. She was baking biscuits for the wee ones’ birthdays, but it was me who had to go.”
Her accent seemed to deepen as she remembered. She pronounced mother as modir.
“It hadn’t taken long, and the parcel was greasy in my pocket. It’s lucky our neighbours were close by. Fewer than forty souls lived on Foula even then, all of us on the easterly plain. Most of the Isles are empty, did you know that? And none can count them. There are said to be a hundred islands and skerries, but no one really knows, and some are said to appear and disappear at the bidding of the selkies.”
I smiled at her whimsicality, but now that she had begun she seemed barely conscious of my presence.
“The sky to the north was all aglow,” she said. “Every few steps the path shone green at my feet and I saw everything – and nothing, for the shimmering in the sky made the hills darker than ever. The trows are hill-dwellers, did you know that? I looked at the great mound of Hamnafeld, which drops on the other side sheer into the ocean. On its top, that’s where they say the door is: the Lum of Liorafeld, an opening that goes straight down to their homes underground. Some have let lines down to try and find the bottom, but no one ever can. Those who seek it rarely even find the door.
“That’s what my grandmother told me, and that’s what I was thinking of. Perhaps that’s why it happened – they were drawn to my thoughts, or perhaps it was only the butter, or they liked the pretty lights. Whatever the reason, I felt their eyes on me.
“That feeling you have sometimes, of being watched – it doesn’t happen often on Foula. There are more ponies than people and more sheep than ponies and more birds than the rest put together, and never a stranger, especially not in winter. Still, I knew it when it came, that feeling, crawling all over me like dirty fingers.
“I turned about and there he was: a shape where none should be. He stood halfway between their home and mine, as if he’d just then stepped out of the peat bog. One moment he was clear, outlined in the flicker, and the next I could barely make him out. But tall he was, and grey; I thought his clothes were grey and his skin too, his raggedy beard and tatty hair, all of him, and I knew he was looking at me, though I couldn’t rightly see his eyes.
“I don’t know what I would have done, screamed or run or nothing at all, but thanks be, he started walking away. He didn’t walk like ordinary folk, though. He walked like a trow, and that is, backwards – he never so much as glanced behind him to see his way. At least, I don’t think he did. He came and went in the light, but I felt him still watching me, and I shivered, because I knew then I’d seen one of the folk. Some say the trows are like Norwegian trolls, others the English fairies, but I think they’re something in-between.
“The fear took me then and I ran all the way home. When I let myself in at the door, my mother called out for the butter; my little brother and sister looked up from their game; and Gran took one look at me and shrieked fit to wake all the angels in heaven.
“Well, there was uproar then. ‘What is it? What is it?’ My mother cried, and I could scarce speak for trembling, but Gran only held my face to the lamplight, tilting it this way and that way.
“‘What did you see?’ she spat, and I was so frightened I thought to lie, but I knew she’d see it on me. She saw many things, my Gran; too many, perhaps. So I told her.
“She crowed as if she’d caught a fish. ‘I knew it!’ she said. ‘It’s left its mark on you!’
“Well, my brother grinned and my sister laughed, but my mother only sighed and went back to the oat-biscuits, taking the butter with her. Me, I went to the mirror. I stared and stared into it, trying to see whatever Gran had seen. Left its mark on you, she’d said, but no matter how I tried, then or after, I never could see a trace of it.”
Annis stirred in her wheelchair, blinking as if she didn’t entirely know where she was. I became conscious of her feet constantly shifting against the blankets, the sound seeming suddenly loud. I realised it had been there all the time she spoke, almost like whispering, or perhaps like waves breaking on the shore. Now I realised she was waiting for me to respond and yet I didn’t have the first idea what to say.
“There’s more to it, of course,” she said. “I should tell you of the year I turned sixteen – of Yule, and of the thing that happened to the twins – my brother and sister.”
Her whole body twitched in her seat and she gave an especially hard kick. The tartan blanket fell aside and I caught a glimpse, not of some wide-fitting brogues or house-slippers or any such thing, but the most exquisite bright red shoes. She caught her breath, pulling at the blanket to cover them once more.
“I’ll tell you of those too,” she said, “but not now.”
I must have stepped closer without meaning to, thinking to help her I supposed, for she reached out and grasped my hand in one bony claw, crushing my fingers.
“I’ll go inside,” she said. “I’ve said enough, I think.”
She cast glances to the left and right before waving me towards my own garden, ignoring my goodbyes and offers of help as she pulled at the wheels of her chair. I’m not sure I was really seeing her any longer. I could still picture those shoes, the brightness of them, the perfect red of them: their pointed toes, the tiny, almost invisible stitching, the suppleness of the leather. I realised I hadn’t said a word about her story. It wasn’t until I got inside that I found her soft woollen blanket was still draped about my shoulders.
* * *
As I got on with the task of settling into my mother’s house, Annis’s tale began to seem more and more outlandish. I didn’t know what to think of it, or of her for telling it. Her words were surely make-believe, or at least little more than a mingling of her past and the tales she must have heard in childhood.
Still, I kept returning to the blanket where I’d left it on the table, picking it up and touching it to my cheek. Was that scent still there – the harsh, raw wind, carried across the Atlantic? But when I closed my eyes it was those shoes I saw, such pretty shoes for one so old, and I wondered how it must feel to wear them. Was that why she was always fidgeting, as if she longed to dance? Or did her feet simply follow in the wake of her wandering thoughts?
I shook away the idea and decided I would look in on her again. It seemed like fate, then, when I looked out of the window and saw her emerging into her garden, into a day that was still struggling to become bright.
After last time there seemed little point in standing on ceremony and so I went into my own garden and waved as I stepped over the fence. I made to hand over the lovely blanket but she gestured for me to hold on to it, so I wrapped it about me and nestled into it once again.
“My grandmother had a lot of superstitions,” she began, as if I’d never been away. “She always said the trows would punish a lass for forgetting to place a little resting peat on a waning flame. They like the fire, you see. They also like to wash their bairns on a Saturday and she would bid me leave out the water for them. If I neglected to do it, or if I did it well, before she’d even thought of it, why, she put it all down to the night I saw the peedie man.
“She wouldn’t let me forget, and anyway, I could not. I thought of him often: standing out there under the dancing sky, watching and watching for me. I don’t know if I still carried the mark Gran had spoken of. I didn’t like to think of it, much less ask – but the longing of it was on me, that’s what she always said, and it sent a shiver through me every time, as if I was still out there in the cold and the dark.
“But it’s Yule when the trows really wander above the ground. They come out seven days earlier, on Tul-ya’s e’en, and so it was the year I turned sixteen. Gran had me stick knives into the hams to stop the trows getting them, and it was me had to do the blessing on the little ones.
“I did it myself first: washed, then dipped hands and feet into the water while my mother dropped the coals in, so the trows couldn’t steal away the power in them. Then it came time for me to bless the twins, but they were older then, eleven years old, and they didn’t want me; they pulled faces and splashed till I was drenched, and so I told them they could take their chances.
“Truth be told, I was sick of them then. I had to cook for them, make sure their silly matching faces were scrubbed, comb their matching hair. I had to fetch this, tidy that, while they put out their matching tongues at me behind our mother’s back. Besides, that was the year of the red shoes, and after I saw them, I could think of nothing else.”
I realised that her feet were restless still, shifting and rustling under their blanket. I’d almost forgotten their movement, had neglected, somehow, to notice.
“Oh, but I was wild for those shoes. I saw them in a fancy shop on the mainland, right in the window they were and covered in ribbons, and I couldn’t talk of anything else. Besides, the dance was coming, and I felt I had to wear them. If I only had those shoes, Alex Galdie might dance with me. If I only had those shoes, I’d never ask for anything else again. Have you ever wished for something like that, Sophie – needed it so badly it’s like a knot inside of you that won’t come loose?”
She paused and I cast my mind back, but it was her shoes that came to mind, the lovely red of them, their softness, their perfect form, and I thought of dancing – of flying through the air as if I’d never fall to earth again. I blinked away the thought, but she hadn’t noticed my reverie.
“I saved and saved,” she said. “I dropped one penny after another into a jar to help buy them, though it was never enough. I begged; I wept. I did everything I was asked to do, washing the bairn’s mucky clothes before I was told, sweeping the hearth, anything my mother asked of me. And in the end she gave a great sigh and said I must be witched – in the hill was how she put it, meaning in the trow’s power – but she said they would be mine.
“Maybe she thought me cursed even then, you see, but I didn’t see it that way. Why should a girl only be dutiful all her days? Why must she think only of work and home and bairns and nothing more? It was a great wide world outside the door – right across the ocean. Every time I looked out I thought of it, and every time the young men looked at me I heard fierce music playing, felt the dance already in my feet.”
I could almost see it; that, or a memory. When she went on, I had to drag myself back from the vision.
“On Foula, Auld Yule is still celebrated in January, as it was in the Julian calendar, though all the rest of the world changed that in 1752. We hung onto things long past anyone else, perhaps because there was so little to go around. And so the dancing was set for the sixth. After that, the grey neighbours would go back inside the hill, their holidays over, but before then they’d dance all they could – and so would I.
“There was rarely any snow on Foula. You may not believe that, since it’s as far north as Cape Farewell in Greenland, but Atlantic currents keep the climate mild; it only feels so cold because of the wind chasing in from the sea. But it snowed that night – the night of the dancing. A good skim of white, and the wind made it bitter, every flake like a knife driving into your skin. And the way they flew all about, it was hard to see your hand before your face.
“The sea was alive as we made our way to Norderhus, near the harbour. I heard its song, deep and fierce. The Atlantic and the North Sea were at war, the sea black, the sky above pale as death. That wasn’t the lights, though; the only merrie dancers were all within. I could hear the fiddles on the wind, loud one moment, the next quiet and quick. I wasn’t yet wearing my red shoes, was carrying those under my oil-coat so they wouldn’t get wet. There was my mother, grandmother and me; the twins were judged too young, and I wasn’t sorry for that.
“Everyone was in the ben, the inner room, and in there, it was roasting. I left my boots with all the rest and slipped on my lovely shoes and the music was in them at once, fast and free and telling of new places, and almost as soon as I set foot in the room I was off – clasped by the hand by Alex Galdie, as close as you like, and he didn’t tear his eyes from mine a moment while we spun and we twirled. There was a light in his face when he smiled at me, and if I wasn’t witched before, I was witched then. I saw my mother watching and my grandmother both, and I didn’t care a bit. My shoes carried me off, and I was happy to go.
“I never once thought of home, or duties, or the land I was born in or the trows and their ways – not even their love of the dance. That tune ended and another began, wilder than the first, and Alex never let me go. He danced with me again, whirling me by the waist, and my feet went faster and faster till I laughed with joy.
“Trows love the fiddle, did you know that? It’s said they stole away the Fiddler of Yell for years and years, though he thought only a night had passed while he played for them. And it seemed they were not the only ones, for after a while I noticed from the tail of my eye the door opened and the twins glided in, all quiet-like, their eyes wide and their faces two matching smiles. Sneaked by they did, not speaking to anyone before they joined the dance. I saw them now and again as our paths crossed, touching hands, whirling away. Little knowing looks they gave me, and never a word. I remember thinking they must have longed for it just as I had, and I couldn’t blame them for that. I’d not sat down for a moment, never wanted to again.
“They danced beautifully. Not a hink nor a kink in it, and them so young.
“It was around midnight when my mother grabbed me by the hand and said we must be off. I looked about for the twins and couldn’t see them anywhere, so I asked her where they were, fidgeting all the while because the music played on and Alex waited and I could not bear to stand still.
“She shook her head. I thought the music had stopped her ears and so I shouted louder, but she couldn’t fathom the question. All the time the twins had danced, you see, something had stopped her from seeing; she’d never even noticed they were there at all. And then Gran said they couldn’t have come, not all alone, because when she stepped out of the door she’d made sure to lock it behind her.
“Well, there was an uproar then. The dance stopped quick enough and everyone put on their oilskins and sou’westers and went out to look.
“The snow hadn’t stopped falling, but the sky was dark again, deeper and blacker by contrast with the lights that danced across it. The merrie dancers had come after all, just as if they were mocking us.
“The bairns were not at the croft, of course. That was quiet, the door standing wide and the snow drifting in across the clean floor. Their beds were empty.
“We found the twins at the edge of the peat bog, just where I’d seen the peedie man. They were dead. They were lying in the snow, their eyes open to the sky, and snowflakes drifted into them, not melting. They’d been there all night, you see. They never had been dancing and never would – it was the trows that had come, stealing their likenesses so they could join in with the human revels.
“I don’t know if the trows had to steal their breath before they took on their shape, or if it was an accident they died. I didn’t know if those little bodies were really the twins at all – or if my real brother and sister were stolen away under the hill and those were nothing but the empty skins the trows had put on for the night, just like they were puppets.
“I wonder sometimes if the twins are dancing even now, under great Hamnafeld. I wonder if that’s why my feet will never be still – because my dancing is an echo of theirs. When at last my shoes give me peace, maybe I’ll know my brother and sister are dead. But then, years pass differently under the hill. They might be children yet – or far older than I am, my brother with a beard reaching to his feet, my sister with the light of ages in her eyes.
“My mother wailed and my grandmother wept, and I couldn’t comfort them. I remember I looked down into my brother’s eyes, and my sister’s, at the snowflakes falling into them, and I thought of the way I’d saved for those red shoes, one shiny coin after another falling into a jar. It was me who’d failed to bless the twins. It was me who’d tired of them, me who’d wished so hard to be free of them. And I was free – except for the way my shoes kept on twitching and shifting, not done with their dancing yet, restless as sin, reminding me of what I’d done.
“Did the grey folk grant me a wish that night when I was thirteen, do you think? Or did they curse me for always – or was it both together? For I’ll tell you this: sometimes, having your dearest wish put into your hands is the biggest curse of all.”
Annis stopped speaking but she didn’t look at me, just went on staring into the past, and I was glad of it because I didn’t know what to say. Did she really imagine her feet fidgeted the way they did because her shoes wouldn’t stop dancing? That was something out of a fairy story, one I had read myself when I was young. The girl in “The Red Shoes” was also punished for thinking too much of her finery; her new shoes forced her to dance and dance until she was exhausted and a kindly woodcutter saved her by chopping off her feet with an axe. Was that the root of Annis’s tale? Perhaps she didn’t have a physical illness at all. Perhaps her legs wouldn’t be still because she was punishing herself for some accident that happened to her siblings, and her ailment – her curse – was psychosomatic. But why did she not simply take off the shoes? I gazed at her in dismay, realising that perhaps I couldn’t help her at all, that maybe she needed more than I knew how to give. I had no idea if she was mad, but I didn’t think she could be altogether sane.
“Oh, it wasn’t like the auld story at all.” Slowly, Annis lifted her head and looked at me, and I fought the urge to squirm. Once again, she made me feel that she saw into me, that she saw everything.
“You think you know it, but it wasn’t the same. Andersen’s tale came out of a softer land, and it was naught like mine. There’s no woodcutter in my story, nor any wood; there were never any trees grew on Foula. It was a peat-cutter I’d set my heart upon, and he never did chop off my feet. He didn’t carry me over the threshold or tie my dancing feet to the kitchen table so I could gut the fish for his dinner. What kind of a man would do that? No: Alex Galdie decided he didn’t want me after all. He married a girl from Hametoon and settled on the island. It was me who left, on the very next boat I could. What else could I do? I couldn’t go home again. I’d got my freedom all right, but I carried the place away with me, and I’ll tell you, I was right about those shoes – once I had them, I never truly wanted anything else again.”
I still didn’t know what to say, so I took the blanket from my neck and wrapped it about hers. As I did, she grasped my fingers, gently this time.
“You could help me,” she said. “Would you help an old lady, dear?”
I told her that of course I would. I asked what it was she needed.
“I canna take them off,” she said. “I’ve tried and tried. But I know that you could – if you were willing. If you knew the story of them and chose to take them anyway, to make them your own.”
She kicked away the tartan covering her legs. Her feet kicked freely, her toes pointed, marking out the steps she couldn’t take. For an instant, the shoes looked as if they were being worn by someone younger; someone being whirled in a young man’s arms.
I focused again on her face, which was old and lined, her eyes watery. I reminded myself that hers was a mad, wild tale, with no sense in it. I didn’t believe she’d worn those same shoes for so many years. I didn’t believe that she couldn’t stop dancing – but she did. I could free her from her unhappy delusion. I may have failed to help my mother, but now I could help her neighbour – her friend.
And Annis could rest at last. She could have peace. She could go where she wanted, even home, perhaps. An image rose before me: Annis going to join her brother and sister with the trows, walking away from me backwards, her steps steady at last, and never taking her gaze from my face.
Another feeling came over me then, one that had been waiting beneath: of longing, almost of greed. I told myself it would be doing her a favour to take them – and they really were lovely shoes. They were wasted on her. She was old. What was the use of her dancing?
I reached out and felt soft leather brush against my fingers. As I did so, a sound reached my ears: the swift, low music of a fiddle. And I remembered what it had been like, in the city, so few years ago: the close dark, infectious music throbbing from tall speakers, the touch of a young man’s hand. I remembered how it had felt to dance, to be free, to never want my feet to be still. I knew I could be a part of that dance again – and the thought came to me that perhaps she was right: that if I let go, it would be for always. I might be joining the dance forever; I might never come home again.
It’s only a story, I thought.
Yet still, I couldn’t choose. I reached out and touched the red shoes and I listened to the rhythm of the dance, felt it beating in my blood. I could smell the sea, feel the cold ocean breeze in my hair. And I looked up, into Annis’s eyes, and found I couldn’t move a limb.