A State of Grace

Author’s note:

The children are:

Brythyll (trout) 13–14 years old

Laurence 12 years old

Boy 7 years old

Nan 4–5 years old

Mother and father who appear generally as mere shadows in the story.

The two grandfathers who are responsible for the children’s education. One teaches them music and mathematics. The other teaches everything else.

The time is probably the thirties.

The place probably Britain (a suburb of London?).

•

Deep pools full of green fishes – these are the words that come first to her mind upon waking, and they are not simply words, for looking down she can clearly see sinuous creatures flitting in and out of the waterweeds, and her fingers like so many pale cormorants fishing for them in the drowned sky.

No-one has ever touched the sky, but there it is, as real as numbers which surely mean nothing at all without the fingers to count them on. As real as five-finger exercises up and down the keys, marching sometimes, sometimes dancing, white and black and white and black and white again. The only colour the pink of the child’s fingers. You think so? Surely there are as many grey fingers and golden ones, and what of the black so nimble on the plastic keys connected to the hammers that connect with the strings.

The notes after all sound tinny that should be silver. And she sees again the laburnum tree in her aunt’s city garden dribbling gold onto the small space of mown grass. In her mind there is silence as deep as only the deaf can hear. Must I die, she asks before I can comprehend silence. And she lifts her fingers cold and creased from the pool, pearshaped beads falling upon the green blades of the verge.

What it is to be left to oneself so early waiting for the dawn chorus to begin. A minute and another minute and another: twit says the first note and then twat, and broader and broader until all the small insults of the tongue have become nothing but notes in a string of notes in the great first song of the birds, the many tiny pips that are part of the golden flesh of an orange.

The sun, ovoid and not yet glowing, rises dripping out of the water shooting off pale blossoms like a primrose its buds, the buds opening noisily as umbrellas. Now insects are bristling among the blades of grass, hopping and humming and beginning to bite the air with mouths as small as the points of fine needles. And she rears up only to be faced with a strange pair of eyes. Only to be held down by a pair of strange hands. It’s much too early, she hears herself saying. She’s annoyed that she’s laughing when she says it. He’s closing the windows and doors, he’s taking away the garden and bringing her nothing but curtains and looming sofas and chairs uneasy in their dark corners.

Should I have brought you a rose? His voice is like the sudden appearance of scissors brought out to snip the cords that connect her to herself. Fish swim away from fingers, or with them in their toothed mouths. Pianos float away on streams, never perhaps to be played again, gnats sink back into their beds of weedy grass, the birdsong abruptly ceases. The shutters have been closed against the closed windows.

In the darkness she thinks of a long green fish swimming inside her trying to reach that part of her mind that can understand the way he is, the way he imagines himself as a kingbird flying upwards until he breaks the sky with his crest, breaks it with a cry that is almost a song.

Another day she is looking for a home. All this has happened in the past, she reminds herself as she travels on through the world, yet I need not change tense, for the present is merely a knot in the string I move through my fingers. In a moment or two it will have passed on to other hands. And other places other lands. If she is at heart a woman, she will divide and become several interchangeable persons, then these will divide and become a crowd. You cannot call this multitude an army for each of the entities is her own person. Not one will be exactly like another. Each will think in her own chosen images, and each will dress in her own particular manner.

Here is a story that any of these persons might tell: Once an old tyrant ruled the earth and its many peoples. He it was who set words against other words and caused them to fight terrible wars over things as small as syllables. This went on for many years, but in the end people got tired of fighting and eventually settled down. This did not suit old N in the least and he soon invented another way to get them at loggerheads. Everyone has a double somewhere in the world, he declared. I command each of you to go forth into the world and seek your double and don’t come back home until you find that one exactly like you. No-one stirred. Everyone stayed at home and got on with daily life. Why should any of us want a double, they told him. Enough is the burden of jollity and shame that we each one of us carry forward to the grave, whenever and wherever that may be. Doubleness would multiply and not divide our sorrow.

It has been decided that the children are to choose which of the two houses the family will live in. There is no other choice, just the two. They are hesitant, even after having consulted in the back garden of Number Twenty-eight. For here is an apple tree with a short trunk springing out of the worn grass like a mushroom, its many sturdy branches all leaning to the south. Aha, the north wind, their father warns them. What do they care? A tree with enough easy branches to hold them all is a treasure, or at least an opportunity. Here they could hang like a tribe of monkeys in a cruel zoo watching their parents watching them, and behind their parents the usual row of aunts and godmothers and the two grandfathers whom fate has allotted them.

Number Thirty-two, on the other hand, has a high patch of rhubarb and an old grey shed with spaces between the boards. Inside people can look out, but outside people, however hard they peer, can see nothing in the mildewy dark but broken slats of light and the peculiar glow of unfamiliar eyes.

What decides them is Number Thirty-four – next door. This is a derelict church, a small sad building open to the sky. It has fallen rafters in the nave and long grass growing among the grainy tombstones and leaning rusty crosses. Its bell lies split among the weeds, and each of the four young minds is busy thinking of ways to mend it. One thinks glue, another rivets, a third is sure it can be welded. Put on the helmet, the welding goggles. How brilliantly shines the welder’s torch ruining the eyesight of any dog or child who might stare at it with unprotected eyes. Then boom boom dong, the great bell – they will name it Tomasina – will give tongue again. Her voice will sound once more all over the neighbourhood, waking people who would rather sleep, startling cats to claw their way up trees, and forcing birds to begin their foolish trilling before the slightest pale light is showing in the east. The grandfathers turn over in their snug sleep. Only the dead remain undisturbed beneath their humped blankets of weeds. After all they are awaiting a trumpet, not a bell.

~~~

The story has it that N once took words from women and stuffed them higgledy piggledy into the mouths of men. What could the poor fellows do? Silence was ruined for them and speech too, for before this they had much enjoyed listening behind walls and doors to the chitchat of women, their gossip and conjectures. What can a man have to say that is half as interesting as the babble of women? They were used to writing things down without saying the words aloud. Now the gruff sound of their own voices hurt their ears. And they were afraid, for hadn’t they read somewhere that spoken words are predatory wasps which lay their eggs in the orifices of a living victim. Whose child is this that gently lies egged on by his mother or his grandmother? Poor Boy could be slaughtered by the sound of speech coming from his unaccustomed mouth. Of course he won’t stay dead for good, but his resurrection will be a difficult one. It can be accomplished only with wings, gauzy and green, drying in the sunlight. Soon he will dance in the clear air, he will swoop and buzz and swoop and buzz again. Who will understand the words of his song? His sister believes, as she pushes him devotedly round the bumpy churchyard, that the future will translate his language and make it plain, plain as the broken bell and the altered psalms sung in a ring a ring-o. It is only when she vanishes, when she is lost and everyone is calling her that he learns at last to speak her name, Brythyll, a kind of fish in another tongue, his mother explains in the dark when he cannot sleep.

~~~

Nothing happened in the shed, she said afterwards, nothing at all. It was simply that he was in the shed when she went in. It was simply that they were there together, him and her, breathing in the dusk, playing spies, watching for strangers. They did not even touch each other. She was watching the house. He was watching the church. What’s a stranger, her father shouted. Do you know what a stranger is? Yes, she answered very quietly, and this one wasn’t. He wasn’t, he could never be a stranger. He has been here always. All the years and months, every day since God had created the land and the sea and all that in them is. You have never seen the sea, said her father. Not yet, she replied, but one of these days he will come again, in a car this time, and he will drive me anyplace I want. And I shall ask for the seashore and I shall pick shells on the edge of the tide.

All of them had looked there a thousand times when she went missing? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Whoever it was had taken her far away. Very likely she herself doesn’t know where she had been.

Laurence sits sideways on the warm tombstone. Suddenly Summer has come in, and every stone is hot. He has to keep moving his bum to a cooler patch. He doesn’t want to get so far from the empty nymph that he cannot keep picking at it with the nail of his little finger. He watched the dragon unfold in the morning and dry its wings until it flew away. Now he’s not sure that he shouldn’t have captured it in a jamjar and looked at it a bit longer, just to get the idea of the veins on its glassy wings, just to decide what the pattern was before he lost it forever. Something must explain the way the way it flew, jerky but rhythmical as a grandfather walking with a stick along the hard towpath beside the canal. In his mind Laurence is making a song of it, regretting the departure of the newly born insect, regretting the staggering of grandfathers as they descend the bank to the dark canal below.

~~~

There are two of them of course, and no grandmothers. It is vague where their wives have got to. There is a rumour that one of them is lying somewhere in the cold earth of the north, but the other – where can she be? No-one comes near answering that question, but Laurence believes she ran away with a Frenchman in her youth. Now that he has started French at school he hopes some day to find her picture in a book, a rather elegant figure leaning on a park bench in some misty place with her hands in a muff and looking dreamily up into the face of a man in dragoon’s uniform and a drooping moustache. It doesn’t surprise him at all that she seems so much younger than his mother.

The grandfathers, the two old men, seem happy enough. They have known each other since they were boys and have come to be very like one another. They both are tall and thin with grey moustaches, and how to tell them apart is that one is much redder in the face than the other. They even live together in the same rooming house two streets away and they often come on Saturday to take Laurence fishing. They argue a lot but the boy doesn’t mind that. His parents don’t argue at all, at least not within earshot of their children. They throw warning glances at each other whenever the possibility arises. Laurence is amused by this but wishes they would have a spat now and then to lighten the leaden air that always seems to surround them when they are together.

~~~

Nancy is talking to herself again. She talks all the time, Laurence tells the grandfathers, but she says nothing much. Perhaps she knows everything but gives nothing away. For a while Laurence doesn’t recognize this as a question and goes on pressing the bread-dough bait onto his hook. There’s a pause, a long one, all you hear is the babble of the child perched on the high bank above them playing one of her endless insect games where the beetles are kings and queens and the grass is a forest and a small yellow spider is, as she puts it, a captivated princess. From now on she will have to be taken on all the fishing trips. Girls must be watched, Mother has announced. They must never be left alone. Nancy must go fishing while the unwilling Bryll helps in the house, plumping pillows and watering dull houseplants. Later, her mother decides she may take Boy for an outing in the stroller round and round the churchyard next door, where she can be seen from the bedroom window. Don’t you dare get out of my sight.

Boy can walk if he wants to, Bryll knows, and as soon as her mother has tired of watching, she will drag him from the push-chair and stand him up and sing to him and teach him to dance.

~~~

There are no signs of where she had been those three days, or what had happened to her. All anyone knows is that she was found in the churchyard on Sunday afternoon fast asleep, her breath smelling of peppermint and her hair of chamomile. She seemed reluctant to come out of her dream, reluctant to come back to them. The first thing her mother looked at was of course her underwear. It was clean and innocent, had obviously, with her cotton dress, been recently washed with rose geranium soap. The delicate shine of the chamomile is hard to get rid of. Perhaps it will never go away. Her mother has faith that the rose scent can eventually be washed out of her clothes, at least it will be diluted into an ephemeral sweetness. But isn’t that anyway the smell of a budding young girl’s body?

She’s not a child any more, ventures one of the grandfathers, she’s flowering out, you must see that. The woman looks up into the old man’s face and sees that it is her own father who’s speaking. She gives a long sigh of relief. After all there are things a father-in-law should never mention.

The girl was barefoot when we found her, she blurts out. Heaven only knows where her sandals have got to. Heaven only knows.

~~~

Time for Nancy to start music lessons, announces the pale grandfather, the one who always teaches them piano.

Are you sure? Mother is balking because Nancy is the last born. She’s had enough lately of daughters growing into puberty, of going off no-one knows where. Nancy’s four, she says, only four years old.

That’s old enough, the old man’s insistent, for someone with an ear. Nancy sits at the piano bolstered by two cushions and splays her fingers on the keys, Grandfather takes one sticky hand in his. Jam, he says and lifts her down, wash ’em first – and use soap, lots of it.

She stands on the stool in front of the sink listening to something going on in her head. At first she can hear nothing but the water running through her fingers. Tapwater, tapwater running through the cracks in her mind. Then she hears the music she might have played with Grandfather, there are trills, there are runs, there are even melodies softly and slowly played. She thinks of the mystery of the piano keys, how she could have found out what the difference is between white and black, between darkness and light, between hot and cold. And she turns off both taps as hard as she can until just a few drops are dribbling through their metal mouths. She jumps down not bothering to dry her hands and goes out the back way to join Bryll and Boy in the churchyard. She has decided against music and will never try it again, grandfather or no grandfather.

~~~

None of the grownups, unless you count Bryll as one, knows about the crypt. Laurence found it under some heavy boards which only he is strong enough to move aside. Laurence is in charge, and they only go down there when he lets them. Just the four of them are ever to know about it. One by one he nicks their thumbs with his pocketknife and they swear a bloody oath. Nancy is the only one who cries at the cut. Boy seems to enjoy the whole thing and spends the next hour lifting the little bit of cut skin trying to make the tiny wound bleed again. Finally Bryll has had enough and slaps him. Then he gets sulky and won’t speak, just like he does when the parents or the grandfathers are around.

The crypt is a shallow one, only ten steps down and you’re there with your feet chilled by the stone floor. You’re there under the church with the dead, for this, Laurence has told them, is where the souls belonging to the bodies buried in the churchyard live until the Awakening. He takes out two stubs of candles and lights them. There is a smell of laundry bleach and wet feathers.

No-one speaks. Nancy’s head aches in the silence. Bryll is sure she can find something better to do. Only Boy is really enjoying the whole thing, lolling against the dank wall and sucking away at the taste of his own blood.

~~~

Laurence announces that he will think a story. The rest of them are to stare at the candle flames and open their minds to his unspoken words. The story is about heads. They know that much. How can it be about anything else? There was once a cruel king who cut off the heads of all his subjects. He did it with his sword of state, a hundred heads a day until everyone was decapitated. He arranged all the heads in rows on the terraces of his palace. He found he liked doing this, and eventually he became obsessed with the interesting patterns he could make by moving the heads around. It took up all his time and he never got tired of it. But the heads did, and he knew it for he could hear them whispering to each other at night when he was trying to sleep.

What could they be plotting? Were they out to have their revenge? Time went by and the heads rotted and became skulls. The birds picked them clean and left them white as ivory. All the countryside was empty and there were no telephones anywhere, but somehow people from neighbouring countries heard about the strange palace of ivory skulls. Songs were written about it, and maps were drawn of the best way to get there. The foreigners just couldn’t wait to visit and see for themselves. They brought floodlights and music with them and set up stalls and sold little white skulls made of sugar. And if in all that hubbub they happened to notice a feeble old man muttering to himself and wandering about on the terraces they were kind enough to slip him a coin to shut his gob and get his bony butt out of the way of the traffic.

~~~

Bryll tired of this story when it was less than halfway through. Her mind wandered from Laurence’s and her eyes from the candle flames. She began to tell her own story and brought Boy under her influence in a matter of seconds, though he wasn’t at all pleased with her romantic little tale and liked the skull one much better, there was no way of ducking her power. Nancy was faithful to her big brother and stayed with him till the end, even laughing at the end joke though she wasn’t quite sure why it was funny.

~~~

After the supposed walk Bryll brought home weed flowers from the churchyard and shoved them into an old green-glass vigil lamp she had found among the graves. That they may burn as bright as candles, she whispered very low, but still her mother heard the words and wanted to know what they meant. Bryll didn’t answer. For how can one thing mean another? Each thing must have its meaning just as each wildflower must grow on one certain stem and not another.

A couple of windy days and the graveyard is full of garbage, mostly old paper. Old because yellow at the edges and scrunched and written on, so no good for drawing. Bills for uninteresting things. Milk cartons smelling like foreign cheese. Messy paper plates bent in the middle. Letters to and from strangers whose words appear often in Bryll’s sacred songs: “love to good old aunt Bessie” and “rest assured my dear sir” and “I kiss you goodnight with all my heart.” It always takes at least an hour to clean everything up because every piece must be looked at and decided upon. It could be, Boy always says, some message from afar. This is a favourite saying of his and he uses it so much that they are sick and tired of it, and shout him down, or try to. This only makes him laugh. He rolls about on the grass and gurgles and his face is horrible when he laughs. His wide gums show pink and shining and he dribbles between his teeth and his tongue sticks out and ends up lolling from the corner of his mouth. The sight of him almost makes Bryll understand why their parents think of Boy as stupid. More fool them. Boy can walk and sing and add up more numbers than you can throw at him an hour at a time if you want to. He never seems to get tired of that game. Bryll has made up her mind to teach him to read this fall. After all he is seven-and-a-half already, getting on for someone who can’t read yet.

~~~

Some message from afar. That’s what Laurence wants most of all. Of all his longings this is the strongest. He always works the hardest at the fire, piling up the dirty papers loosely to make the greatest heat, taking out the book of matches with a conscious flourish. As soon as the flames are high enough, he gives the signal to pile on the tufts of grass, the clumps of scooped-up damp leaves, and soon there is smoke rising, smoke that makes his throat ache for he won’t stand back like the others, he has to be the master of this ceremony, staying with the fire and feeding it now more paper and now more grass. The smoke gets into all the pipes of his nose and chest until his eyes are watering and he can’t stop coughing. Nancy stands there admiring his bravery till he gives her the signal to go to the end corner of the lot and watch for an answering signal, another smoke rising from another family somewhere who are stuck with their own company every day of the year and not allowed to go to school, because of the neighbourhood, their mother says, but they know it’s because of Boy, and perhaps a little because of Brythyll and her strange disappearance that time. Any child could be abducted, Grandfather said as though it was something quite ordinary. The other grandfather perhaps just to be argumentative said right out that such an event, not really explainable, was something to be proud of, for it showed the family to have something different, something richly strange about it. The two old gentlemen argued the point for an hour or more, their voices rising and rising until Father says shut up both of you and have a beer. There’s nothing more to it than the high price of education.

The Sermon on the Beam

The beam is the only one strong enough to stand on. It’s burnt but not burnt through. The charring is a ripple with the slick grey sheen of old burnt wood. Church fire, wildfire, foxfire, St. Martin’s fire, these were the first words of Laurence’s sermon. They came from the paper in his hand, his other hand clasped the uncharred upright. He looked down sixteen feet on the upturned faces of his congregation, those three who tried to look him in the eye but could not for the distance between them made his eyes small as currants. He seemed so high. He was so high. Better to fix their gaze upon Grandfather’s old white ladder leant against what was left of the south wall whose bricks, flame-cracked and heat-broken, crumbled from month to month. How long before they would become simply a huddle of broken red clay? Firefly, fireman, fire ant, fire away, fire away, fire away blurted Boy from the sagging pushchair... Away away away. Oh, oh, come down Laurie, Nan whispered very low, for might not a loud noise tumble him from his high uneven perch in the birdcage of the sky?

This is the Word, continues Laurie, loudly, firmly. He looks outwards now and sees clear to the slow brown waters of the canal. The word is fire...and water, he adds, curiously conscious that the canal will not be pleased to be left out of the picture. Should he include the trees? He decides not. Fire and water should be enough, for the present. Suppose that a wind sprung up and blew his words back into his mouth? But there is no wind and he must go on until the end.

And what is the end and when? Laurence thinks of this as the central question of his homily. We are all going on to a place between earth and sky. I am going there and I am taking you lot with me. This had been meant as a promise, but perhaps, during the time after his voice jumped out of his mouth and hovered like a canker worm on its thread before swinging down to land in the ears of his listeners, perhaps it had metamorphosed and attained its next instar, had become a threat. I can’t get it back. Laurence had never before felt the terrible desire to scoop up his words and thrust them back into his mouth – to eat words to eat worms.

The faces looking up trustingly crumpled. All the six eyes shut at once. They willed him to stop preaching, to jump down, to land amongst them and leave his priestly self up there wobbling on the beam. What happened was not so much a fall as a leap. The scarf he was wearing as a stole wrapped itself around his neck, caught itself on a nail, tore away from the nail as he sailed to the grass, his arms outstretched his mouth open, not screaming but shouting the long word hidden behind his tongue. Brythyll heard the word as her name and stood her ground ready to break his fall. Boy saw his outstretched arms as a crucifixion and began to sniffle and weep holding his face in his hands, not looking at the downfall of his brother. Nan just watched and was happy with Laurence’s flight. Her hands clapped and clapped as he landed neatly on his feet and strolled off up the little rise behind them, brushed himself off, rearranged the torn scarf and continued his sermon where he left off, even bothering to finish the sentence he had begun standing up there on the burnt beam.

~~~

Boy sits there for a minute or two admiring the quiet of the two women, admiring the orange and white of the flowers, sniffing up the warm scent of yellow petals and yellower pollen. Some leaves bent in the middle from rough handling smell wettish, and green juice oozes from the cracks. And behind them a whole dark church unburnt. All its shell unbroken. Dark inside like a head when no one is thinking, when the mind is like a dim fishtank, enclosed and with just a few bubbles arising, breaking on the surface, popping out of the nose and the mouth in little puffs, puffs which bring no ideas up from the mind. Water water on the brain, Boy sings ... water water water.

Things dry and clear up and there is a light to turn on. The small light showing the hopeless dry fish and pondferns sticking to the neck of the huge green bottle which was his idea for a fishtank. And wasn’t it Bryll, herself a fish, who had turned on the tap and drained the brain and made him see outward and speak, and now she wanted him to read. He took the two books from under his pillow, they were both dull-looking on the outside: The Lore of Faery and The Laws of Physics. His sister would judge him for which one he chose to read. He turned inward to the dry blank room of his skull. Once he had seen maps on these walls, all maps of a country he had once made up his mind never to leave. But he had left. Was it before or after the flood? Had it really been a habitation of greenish light? Now everything was stark, a place of brilliant grey and white. Speaking was outward. Reading was gathering in. Stuff stuff stuff, my head is full to aching, chiff and chaff, dead bodies of thousands of flies come to feed on the harsh little bodies of the spiny little fish not knowing what deadly poison they carried. And who will eat the flies? Boy thought of a black bird with tall yellow legs, its claws scratching at his scalp. Just before the bird lands he remembers its word – gallinacious. If he says the word aloud and carefully will this prevent the bird from eating the dried flies? Can he save the bird and stop the cycle of doom? And save himself to be his own idiot?

The next story he tells himself is about a tube endlessly turning itself inside out. It’s somehow attached to itself, as though it was a ring. But it isn’t a ring. He tries sliding down its curves to find the join, but that doesn’t work and he slips inside. The light is not so bright now and the tube is much more lovely. It has rainbow colours. Pearly pearly, he says thinking of the one little pearl in Bryll’s ring she wears on Sundays and birthdays and Christmas. But this is Easter coming. The flowers and the dark church and the Saturday of sorrows and thinking as the light hits his eyes that it is not coming from night into day, but simply that things have changed around and night is now bright as though the stars were a disease of the sky’s face that had spread all over and the day was cloudy and eclipsed and only the outlines of things showed. These were also the outlines of ideas like the picture of the Turing machine in the book – the precise drawing of it, the endless tape. If it hadn’t been for the pain of his jealousy he would, he knew, have been able to think of these things first before anyone else: the pearly tube, the endless machine.

~~~

How awkward to know that you are the child your father never speaks of but thinks about all the time. Nan watches him. She sees his elbows on the table, his head in his hands. She dreams of him bringing the cup to his lips as the kitchen light burns above him and the light that lightens him, the one that glows in his chest like a dahlia, shines behind his flesh and his ribs to be comprehended only by her. For you cannot say anyone can see it. It is to be known not seen, gloved as it is in the envelope of his being. And she knows he dreams of her smashing through the fragile flesh with her small fist snatching at his glowing heart, holding it in front of the open window and all the moths in the garden come in to circle around dancing and wishing to die in their dance.

She wakens from one dream into another and lies low in a hammock that is not her own – the down, the gossamer, the breeze blowing in. It’s still not morning when she opens her eyes for the third time. She’s fallen out of bed, but didn’t feel the bump, only the cold hard floor, her feet tangled in a web of torn cloth that once was a pink sheet with faded white daisies. Give me this day, this day that follows bright and hard as a sardine can. You can’t get into it too easily, you have to find something to open it with.

Her father has hands with hair on. Black. Grandfathers? White hair for the music one. The one who does the other lessons? His have red freckles going up and down the fingers, even under the nails if you look carefully and can get near enough to stare.

She opens the door and goes out. Shadows like fleeing people run about in the garden and lie down in the churchyard where the tombs used to be. They must have taken away the bones and the hair and the winding cloths they were buried in, for this place has been declared not sacred and only the stones leaning this way and that with hardly to be read names, only those remain.

~~~

It’s not that there are never any other children about. They go back and forth, up the road and down, and they stop at the gate and stare in. Between the bars, which is silly when you think about the churchyard which has no fence, no gate, and you can get into the garden through the side there. No children do except their own and dirty Tommy who strayed in, and ran away when they called him.

Broken Tommy, says Laurence. Broken on the wheel of obvious ill fortune.

So are we all, says Bryll passing by, her arms full of dry laundry.

Laurence brings a sandwich out and breaks it in two and gives Tommy the smallest piece because after all he is smaller. Boy sits dribbling on a log by the fence. When’s he going to stop that nonsense, he just does it because of keeping his place in the family. Have you ever heard him sing? He’s playing with the bag of clothespegs, the gypsy ones with the rusted metal rings around the middle. No springs but they are sturdy as legs, they have heard their mother say.

~~~

This night, announces Brythyll, is the Feast of the Dark, and she’s wrapping something in a navy blue paper bag. Dark food like licorice and parkin and loganberry jam. What else is black that you eat? Winedrops and sloes and purple gobstoppers. Nothing lighter than this, and she holds a winedrop up to the light. It’s a jewel, Boy thinks, but cloudy, a little too cloudy. His inside voice says ruby, garnet, spinel. Chocolate, he says softly in his dribbly outside voice, with raisins in.

It’s the dark of the crypt they’re after. A bit sloshy down there since it rained all last week. Rubber boots, rubber boots, sings Nan, why do you fade so soon? They start off so black and shiny and after a week or two they’re grey like the old ones, chalky grey and dull. Black, black, she sings sitting on the kitchen floor with one leg up pulling on the boot. Onyx, Boy says, jet, and a foamy gob leaps out from between his teeth.

They all stand with their backs to Laurence pressing their foreheads against the cold and slime of the crypt wall, while he concentrates on the story. It’s getting harder every time to do this. He’s getting too old. Perhaps this is the last time.

Once, he begins, a young man, his name was Zandor, got tired of the mountain where he had always lived, and decided to descend from those heights where the snow lay thick about his feet. He would go looking for the city his mother had told him about, which had grown up by an inlet to the sea, a harbour where boats and ships, so she said, bob night and day on the waves. When I was there last, she told him, there were foghorns and searchlights and dogs barking in the alleys and strangers, sailors perhaps, walking up and down the streets all night looking for a place to sleep, seeking for someone to keep them company in their dreams.

How to get there? Well, at the foot of the mountain there was a train station, where you could buy a ticket to any destination you chose. Zandor had no money but that did not prevent him from his travels. He loitered around the station all day and in the dark of the evening he hopped on the train when the conductor wasn’t looking. All night the train travelled on across a boggy plain and through dark coniferous woods until at last another day dawned. In the growing light he imagined early rising people on foot or on bicycles watching astonished at the sight of his pale face in the train window rushing on by to the seashore, his eyes weary and bleary with smuts from the burning wood, smoke and steam and the past dashing away from him, and the future coming towards him quicker than he would have thought possible. In spite of all this he was not ready for the city when it loomed ahead. It looked sad and grey in the fog coming up from the sea.

As he jumped down from the train with his small blue suitcase in his hand he noticed at once the deathly quiet of the place. That’s not at all what you expect from a city is it? No traffic, no lights, no churchbells, though it was Sunday morning, and from the sea no foghorns and in the harbour not a ship or a boat to be seen. Where are the people? he asked himself, but as his ears accustomed themselves to this strange place he realised that all was not as silent and dead as he had at first thought.

There was a sort of rhythmical soft roar going on which never stopped and never got any louder. Where there is sound there must be life, and he boldly marched up and down looking for the source of the noise; perhaps you couldn’t really call it a noise, it wasn’t loud enough for that.

He couldn’t see a soul in the streets, and so he began to try the doorknobs of the houses. Quite pretty houses they were too, all the doors painted bright colours which contrasted well with the grey stone of the walls. No two doors were exactly the same colour, but in one way they were all alike. They were all locked tight and bolted. There was no way at all to enter those houses. If they had the power of speech all the doors would have said the same thing – keep out, keep out.

To have come so far for nothing seemed ridiculous. If he turned tail and went home what would he tell his mother? No doubt she would by this time have let out his room to a lodger, some quiet man of her own age who ate everything put before him without complaint and whose light moustache was stained at the edges with the strong tea which she brewed for him three times a day.

There was nothing for it but to search around for a ladder, for he wanted at least to take a look in at the windows and see what or who lived in those neat forbidding little houses. Once up to the height of the lowest panes he could look inside, and what did he see? All the people were asleep, the parents in their beds, the children in their cribs, the grandfathers nodding in their rocking chairs. The noise he could hear was from the snores of all these people. not only the men and women and children, but all the dogs and cats were snoozing. Every easy chair, every cushion, every hearthrug had its dozing pet, gently snoring away. Perhaps in the back gardens mice and ants and small striped snakes were softly snoring too? Who knows?

All this annoyed Zandor. What a lazy lot! Didn’t they have anything better to do than snore their lives away? He would soon put an end to this apparently endless napping.

He took his ladder under his arm and walked until he found a church. A church with a convenient belltower. There he climbed into the steeple and untied the bell ropes and began to pull them with all his might. For a few minutes nothing at all happened, then the bells began to peal. What a terrible noise they made for Zandor had no notion at all about bell-ringing, of how it has its own musical rules; the words “ringing the changes” meant nothing to him. But the noise woke the people, and the people woke the dogs, and the dogs barked and woke all the babies, who howled for food and care. And that’s all there is to the story. Or nearly all.

There remains the arrogance of Zandor, a young man who believes he is not so much the awakener of the city but its creator. This is my city, he tells himself, and anyone else who will listen. This is my city and I made it, for didn’t it remain for years and years sleeping in my mind until I brought it to reality? Here it is: the people driving up and down the streets, the children playing in the little gardens out back of the houses. the birds chirping in the trees, the snakes squiggling in the grass.

I am who I am, these last words spoken aloud by Laurence have thickened the dark woolly air and no-one can hear any more of the story. It is sewn up into a bag of black felt that will never be opened to let out the stuffing, perhaps straw, perhaps sawdust. Nothing more can be done about this. Laurence is “out” like in a parlour game. Knowing is to forget what unknowing was. If there’s ever another story then Boy or Brythyll must tell it, must think it out, must thrust it out into the minds of the others.

No-one says any of this, they simply wait there in the dark for Laurence the storyteller to disappear. Will or can Laurence the listener remain? He decides not. Ascends into the dull night and a voice that is not a voice takes up the book that is not a book and begins to read.

Once, Nan begins, and the others imagine her voice, a thin voice still piping from babyhood, once, and then she stops as if a gate had shut in her mind. Once, once, once. Then silence, in which the other two allow the world to fall. It falls as though there was no end to falling, as though falling was all there was on this earth. Or in this earth, their cave, their underworld. Blank, blank, blank in the darkness. Then even the darkness disappears and there is nothing.

Silence can only be measured at its end. At its end the silence has been long. Has anyone breathed during that long quiet? Tie it, space it, tie it. The midwife times the clips between the ties and lets the cord drop into the future. Once, begins Nancy again, before I ever opened my eyes, before I ever saw you for the first time, I lived in the darkness between two worlds and while I was waiting to come to you there were stories and they all began the same way and ended the same way but the middles were quite different.

Now and then the Old Woman took my hand and let me feel in her basket. What was in there? Once a hen and once a horse, once a stone and once a needle and once a cup and once a bun of bread. I could choose my own story and my fingers fiddled around in all these things until they closed around a dried spiny little fish and then I thought of the sea, though I can’t think how I imagined such a thing, bigger by far than the land and far deeper than the mountains are high.

The sea, you know, brings all sorts of things to the shore and leaves them lying about on the sand. Some are weeds and some are empty shells and some are whales as big as churches. There are dead birds with wet feathers and live men stepping out of a fishing boat before they quite get to the beach. Heave ho, heave ho, they drag their boat up over the pebbles and the poor fish lying in the bottom leaping and squirming. I was standing on the shore and the last one to get out was a big boy standing up to his knees among the moving, shining fish and he was the one told me the story.

Once, she begins again, this time in the boy’s voice, the boy named Hallimor, or so they have been given to understand, and they can even see him sitting on the seawall, behind him the sea that multitude of human tears and above him the pearly sky, clear yet not clear for the sea breathes green water into the air and though we can see the sun and it shines down brightly yet it has no outline. There is no place where the sun is not but where it actually ends no-one knows, it bleeds its brilliant white into the sky. Once, says Hal, for they have decided to call him that for short, there was an island small and rocky with a few trees and a few houses, maybe three or four, and in one of those houses I was born and lived for the first four years of my life. Then I left and have never been back there, though sometimes as I sail the seas in my fishboat I think I see it especially if the mist fog is rising or the sun has set, but the island seems to sail away out of my sight as though I were an island and it was a boat. Shall I tell you then how I came to leave my home and why I can never return?

“Never is a very long time,” remarks Brythyll prissily. No-one has ever interrupted a story before. Silence cold and heavy greets her. Perhaps the spell is broken, perhaps they will never hear the end of it. But still the voice continues, the young man’s voice hidden under the shadow of the child’s:

Not so long ago, begins Hal once more, this time in an offhand kind of way as though this was not a story but a conversation, I met my island head-on as I was fishing with my skipper a little too far offshore to be safe. But first you should understand that I was born in a big house in the north where there are fells and lakes but few woods and spinneys and no forests at all. Aha, said Nan to herself, just like a big boy, they always think they can muzz your head so you don’t ask questions. Well, how long ago? she asks. Hal is silent for a moment, then, Do you want to hear this story or not? And he turns away. Yes, says Nan, tell me. And he does.

And this was the very same house where your people once lived. Grandmothers, grandfathers, great aunts and great, great aunts. And great great great ... as many greats as you can count on your fingers and more perhaps. As for me I was born in that house but not in that family. Do you want to hear how that came to be? Not particularly, I told him, but I expect you’ll tell me anyway. You’re lying, I said. And I remembered Grandfather, the music one, how he often says “with the best of intentions.” These are some of his favourite words. Like “Summer is over,” like “three four time.” He never says “three quarter time” like Father. How can I remember all this when Hal is the one telling the story and I’m not even born yet? Hal is saying those things about the ancestors because he wants to please me. I know better than to listen to someone who wants to please. Shut up Hal, and I almost lost the story. He was quiet for a long time.

Well, in this house, he continues, there were ten rooms, large rooms with bluestone floors and painted plaster walls. Nine of these rooms were occupied, not with people but with boats. Little fishboats you might say when they were tossing on the sea, but large boats if you saw them cooped up in a house. You’d wonder how they ever got into the rooms. But there are ways with these shore houses, I can tell you that, ways of getting them in there and ways of getting them out when they are needed, just as there is a way to float a boat from a beach when there’s no dock handy, and ways of pulling it up on the sand so that the high tide won’t take it out to blue water where it’d fill up with salt waves and be lost to its master forever.

Why don’t you ask me about the tenth room? Well that’s where the family lived pressed down like herrings in a barrel. Ten of them. The same number as the boats. Now Grandpa’s boat was the best of them, painted green and white and the name of this boat was Ivy. I could tell you the story of Ivy, or I could name all the boats and the colours and their owners first and go back to the beginning later, so choose which and hurry up about it. I haven’t got a hundred years, even if you have.

Nan

When you lean out of the upstairs window on a summer night the velvet dark touches your face softly, softly. It is the very colour of the smallest tadpoles that you remember from spring. Later the tadpoles got browner and browner until they were tiny mottled froglets. They had forgotten how to wriggle so they hopped; they hopped away into the grass and you forgot them for the love of moths and huge junebugs flying through the night. Flying through the open window and falling on the bedroom floor where Julius the white kitten hunts them and you have to bravely pick them up and throw them back into the soft warm night which waits out there in the garden. It is Grandfather’s garden, the music one. He’s the one planted all the plants long ago and now they are flowers, lilies and peonies and daisies.

And you shall climb over the sill and leap into the night and land softly in the dark grass and then down to the canal bank where grandfather has sworn you will hear the nightingale singing, burbling he says in the trees that hang down over the water. You never can see them, he says, but their song must mean they are there. If you can hear something but you can’t see it, it’s still a noun grandfather says, but really shouldn’t there be another sort of noun quite separate for things that are there but you can’t see? But what if you just can’t see them for the moment, like the Atlantic Ocean or the Tower of London? Can a noun be one sort one day and the other kind another day? Someone has to decide that. Perhaps God?

NAN – When is a noun not a noun?

GOD – I can’t answer that.

GRANDFATHER – Neither can I.

NAN – Give up?

GOD – I never give up.

GRANDFATHER – I do. When is a noun not a noun?

NAN – How do I know. Anyway, I asked you first.

And so on. There doesn’t have to be an answer for every little thing. Question and Answer: Question and Answer: All Grandfather’s test papers are like that. Laurence says it’s time for Nan to do essays, little ones in big writing perhaps. Grandfather says, let her learn to put sentences together first, not the cart before the horse. Nan wonders was the cart invented before the horse? Was it waiting there for the horse to be invented? God invented the horse, Laurence explains, it took a long time, like a million years or so.

God is a slow inventor. But the cart is a manmade object.

Nan stops thinking and kicks her legs about. Her dance makes a bumping noise on the wooden floor. Somehow she has got back into the house without even hearing the nightingales sing. She remembers the other house, the tall house in London. Almost in the city: Number Eleven, Nightingale Lane. She remembers her bed there, a small bed with brass rails. She remembers falling down the stairs. She cried but it didn’t hurt much really. She was a very little girl at the time.

~~~

Brythyll at Easter Goes to the Church and Leaves Boy Outside in the Pushchair to Read

The dark of the church reminds Bryll of water. This is what she wants to tell him when she finds him at last in his own lair. She had thought she was a hound chasing a rabbit, but that won’t do. This place is a cold lake, and she is swimming in it. She’s a trout after a minnow, or a minnow about to swallow a pike. This is what she keeps trying to remember. She must not forget the questions, the request. She must not let the smell of him, so glowing and near, distract her from asking.

Where am I now? she’ll say, and where is it, where is the island you promised me? You said we’d live on an island far from the world, but it was just a room with a garden. I want the island. I want you to take me away. No-one will find us, no-one who can’t swim, that is. And there they are, Laurence and Boy and Nan swimming strongly, rhythmically through and over the water to the island of her mind.

And then she sees him through the dim, stacking books in the pews, those books with slippery green covers full of hymns. Singing is not enough, he has once told her. What God needs is you, not your voice squeaking away. That means you are God, I suppose, she remembers saying over the pillows at him, naked as Jesus on the cross. And she had laughed. But had she really said that or was it simply one of those conversations you make up afterwards? After the event. The words you wish you had once said?

She comes boldly near but he doesn’t look up. He doesn’t turn his head. How can he be unaware when she is suffocating with his presence? Well, he shall be startled, startled enough to drop the pile of books under his arm. Oh, he will say, it’s you. Come away to the island. Come where the dark surrounds us like water.

Ah, she thinks, but the shore is where I have always lived, except for that one excursion, that is. It is the land of Laurence, of Boy whose mind she has invented out of shreds, of little Nan who has invented herself. Most of all it is that other church open to the sky. It is the boxful of bones and the crypt full of stories.

When he looks up all she says is, I’ve come for you. You must bury the found baby. And she opens her jacket to show the small skull grinning from under her left arm.

Why? he asks turning round, seeing her, looking coolly into her eyes. She was in her box and we broke into it, Bryll explains. Laurence found her. We need to hear the proper words. The baby needs to hear them. Bring holy water and a book, we have two candles. Bring matches too. Six o’clock, he says and turns away. She knows he is pretending he’s forgotten the room, the bed, the pillows, the promise of the island. Or he has taken someone else there and was done with her. So he has freed me, and Bryll smiles, knowing whatever he may think, she has him hooked in the mouth like a fish. He will never be quite free of her. She remembers the grandfathers’ fishing lessons. She begins to play him. She begins to bring him in.

At last slowly while years and centuries pass, where continents vary and frogs become snakes and then birds which fly up and are lost in the sky, he lifts up his head and sees her. Lord lift up Thy countenance upon us: she has read this in the torn prayerbook in the crypt. Lift up your head and see me, I am here, she wanted to say Beloved, but not in this cold dark with the smell of dust upon the air.

What are you doing here, he says mildly. Without much interest, it seemed, but she knew she could tell that he was startled beyond startle. He had not expected to see her again. The island he had promised became a ploy, a lie. He was a liar. But she wanted, loved him still. I have come to ask you to ... to what? he couldn’t understand. To bury the baby Laurence found in the grave. The one forgotten in her little box. Did you phone the police, he answered, you must let them know. Did you tell your mother, your father. She knows he doesn’t just mean the baby. About that time when he had taken her into the house through the garden. Into the bed behind the curtain and called the whole thing an island in the dark and it was, but that was gone now, she wondered had he taken other girls there since then. She asked him out loud. Have you? He answered too easily. Of course not. But why are you here? We sinned, he explained, God was angry. Your god, she said, mine doesn’t care but yes the baby, the bone baby the little head, we all care about her, and please will you come and bury her and please don’t tell and we’ll bring flowers and we’ll even plant them, we’ll name her, we have named her Rhiannon, Rhiannon of the birds.