The crying baby is keeping Naomi awake, that and the heat, the interminable heat. The thin reedy wail bores like a screwdriver into her head. Why doesn’t Sean do something? It’s his baby, isn’t it? Bria? Only, this isn’t Bria. This is the baby growing inside her, the ball of cells dividing and sub-dividing, getting bigger every day. And already, nestled in the red blanket of her womb, as hot and sleepless as she is, it has begun its endless mewling. She turns to Sean, but Sean is drunk. Sean is wallowing in oblivion. His breaths are so shallow he might as well be dead. She must take care of it herself, be Mother to it, rock it to sleep. Because that’s what mothers do, they comfort their crying babies, when they are sad they make them happy again.
Her own mother died, and that was very careless of her because it meant that when she was sad there was no one to make her happy again. And when she cried, there was no one to comfort her. Soon she would be a mother herself. She wondered if she would know what to do, how to dry up the tears. This baby is hers, hers and Sean’s. Or is it hers and Enrico’s? Enrico’s baby? She doesn’t know, doesn’t care. She only wants it to be quiet. She will do anything for silence, anything at all. She squeezes her eyes shut, wishing herself away, somewhere quiet, somewhere she can be solitary. But when she reopens them time has played its customary trick on her. It has drawn her back through the veil of years, unmade the woman until she is a girl again, an unwanted child, one among many, inconvenient, abandoned, orphaned, wakeful in the unending night. On and on and on it goes, the crying baby in the cot by her bed. It no longer knows for what it cries, just that it has needs, needs that no one will fulfil. Why doesn’t the house mother come and shut it up? Why doesn’t she make it stop? It will not let her rest, the screaming baby.
She kicks back the sheet and still she is too hot, sliding about in her own sweat. So she tears off her sleeping shift and stands in the thin grey moonlight, reviving her body with her fluttering hands. If The Blind Ones hear Baby howling, if they peek through the narrowed slits of their eyelids and see her out of bed, they also choose to be deaf and dumb. Both sash windows are stuck fast. Using all her might, she manages to lift one an inch, lowers her face to the warm draught, gulps in air. But the other will not budge at all. She reported it to Miss Elstob, told her they were stuck, that she needed to get Mr Plinge to come and mend them. But nothing was done. Nothing is ever fixed here. And still the baby cries, wailing and wailing into the suffocating gloom. She treads softly, reaches the cot, sees Baby, the sickly scrap, rigid and purple, eyes bulging, face wet with tears and snot, night shift sodden and stinking. She can smell piss, piss and puke. She reaches down and feels the forehead. It has a fever. Miss Elstob should give it a bath, a cool bath to bring the temperature down.
Someone should put the poor hot baby in a tub of cold water and wash all the hotness away. Now she grabs one of the waving arms, grips the tiny forearm so tightly that the infant gives a piercing yell, making her eardrums itch. The door immediately flies open, as if the house mother has been waiting behind it, and the light blinks on. And there she is, Miss Elstob, in a stained dressing gown, her wide-set mud-coloured eyes screwed up, her broom-brush hair awry, the large black mole on her knobbly nose quivering with each indignant inhalation.
‘Mara! What are you doing? Why are you naked? Have you no shame, girl? You’re a whore, like your dead mother was. All filth, that’s what you are. I told you not to touch the baby, never to touch the baby again. Your job is to clean the shoes and make the beds.’ She speaks in a voice that is dreadfully kind and mushy. ‘Do you remember what I said? If I saw you near the baby again I’d have to punish you.’ And The Blind Ones hunch their necks into their tortoiseshell shoulders, and fist their sheets more tightly. They push their sightless faces into their mattresses. ‘You need to be taught not to behave like a savage.’
She begins to advance. But Mara stands her ground. She pulls herself up so that although she is small, she feels as if she is growing tall as a giant. And Miss Elstob must also see the giant for a second, because she pauses, her eyes running all over her nakedness. ‘The baby . . . the baby won’t stop crying.’ Between the wooden slats of its cot, Naomi sees bubbling spit frothing at the baby’s open mouth. It fights for breath, making ghastly grinding choking noises. ‘I took my shift off because I am hot, too hot. The windows won’t open. I told you they wouldn’t. And I am hot, hot as fire.’ The baby takes a sudden gasp, then a beat, followed by a howl that makes Mara’s blood curdle.
In one stride Miss Elstob is at her, slapping her face, her chest, punching her in the belly, kicking her legs out from under her. She has a hold of Mara’s wrist, and each time she strikes her and the child flies backwards, she tugs her in again. Then she drags her kicking and screaming downstairs, in passing seizing up her cane, where it lies propped in a corner. They are in the kitchen, the homely room with the big table that all the children sit round to take their meals. She grabs a fistful of Mara’s long black hair as she wields the cane. She can hear it whistling through the air, feel it biting rabidly into her buttocks. But she will not cry out, she will never cry out. Her hair is being torn from the roots, her beautiful black hair, but still she makes no sound.
Now her nails are driving into her shoulders, pinching so tightly that it feels as if they are being hammered through her bones. And she is being pulled across the room, through the doorway and down the corridor. She smells Miss Elstob’s bad breath, foul as a sewer drain, and with it she sniffs the acrid buried scent of coal. Then she is being thrown into the coal cupboard with such force that her head strikes the wall with a crack, so that she thinks her skull may have broken open like an egg. The door slams shut and the key turns in the lock. ‘Don’t,’ she whimpers quietly. ‘Don’t . . . Miss Elstob.’ But the next second the line of light, the line of hope, under it is gone, and she is plunged into absolute darkness.
She is sprawled on a heap of coal. She can feel ragged lumps and points of it digging into her battered body. And there is the taste of salt metal on her lips. She licks it and savours her own blood. The heat in the coffin-like space is so intense that it is as though she is being cooked alive. But she does not cry out. And this, not because she is brave, not now. Now she would holler all night, and beat upon the door until her fists are worn to tattered stumps of bleeding flesh. She does not cry now because, just as the baby will soon discover, it is senseless. No one will come to rescue her.
She is breathing in the soot. It is choking her lungs, clogging her pores. With each painful move the coal possesses more of her, blacks up her white skin, fills her nostrils and her mouth with peppery dust. By daybreak she will be a chimney sweep, the soot so ingrained in her that she will not be able to wash it off. She will be branded with its sooty mark. And the crust of fear in her stomach is a living thing, a black spider with a hundred tangled legs spinning fur balls inside her. Her bladder is full and suddenly she feels the stinging warmth of her own urine as it empties. If she dies this second it will be okay. She rests her head against the bricks, lets them bruise her cheeks with their rough touch.
The black is only a seed behind her eyes when it is born – a dot, a speck, no more. But it propagates. A bright jet bead that sends out a million inky shoots to dye every cell in her body. And with this black dawn comes rage, a murderous, unwieldy, uncompromising tidal wave sweeping through her. She scrambles to her knees and the sharp spears of coal stab agonizingly at her kneecaps. She grits her teeth and feels for the door. She knows it is painted in sky-blue enamel gloss. With the black wind at her back she carves her name. She uses all her fingers, all her nails, chipping at the paintwork, digging them deep into the wood. In the stillness the scratching seems loud, deafening. A splinter jabs under one nail, two, then three. She pauses, listens to the ‘huff, huff’ of her rapid breathing, feels in the dark for the needles of wood, and carefully picks them out. When next she carves her fingertips are bloody. She cannot see it, will not see it till morning, but her blood has stained the pale wood, coloured the engraving. ‘Mara’ is inscribed in red. She speaks with the little breath she has left. ‘I am Mara,’ she hisses. ‘I am Mara.’ Then she sinks back on her bed of coal. In her overheated dreams she becomes a mermaid. As she darts through the healing coolness of water, the blackness dissolves to reveal the spangle of her platinum scales.
***
Owen’s second night in the flat. They share a salad. It is too hot to eat. And they drink chilled white wine. Naomi plays records, Bob Dylan, The Eagles, then later, when they are all mellow, Johnny Cash. She knows her music and Owen wonders about that. If they ate little, Sean ate nothing. But he drinks as if he has an unquenchable thirst. Owen, tracing the falling level in the brandy bottle, marvels at his appearance of sobriety, at his steady hand and clear speech. He goes to bed before them, wary that he may be intruding, pleading exhaustion. He lies back on the divan, among the towers of cardboard boxes full of stock for the stall. For once there are no visitations from the Merfolk, or from Sarah either. He takes this as a good sign. He dozes for a time and wakes to the sounds of Sean and Naomi making love. In spite of feeling like a guilty voyeur, he listens intently, hardly daring to breathe. With only a stud wall between them, their mounting tension is his, the rock and roll of their tussle, the ascending scale of their groans and gasps, the shudder of Sean’s pleasure, the shriek of Naomi’s orgasm. Afterwards he becomes aware of the leaking bath taps hissing. Sean keeps promising to replace the washers, but for now it is an unending chorus of laryngitic croaks. It is as though they are having a conversation, as though there are spirits locked in the pipes.
‘Haaa . . .’
‘Ahhh . . .’
Sometimes they stutter or give a wheezy cough. He nods off again listening to their ghoulish dialogue. When his eyes open next, apart from the taps all appears peaceful, so that he ponders what must have disturbed him. Then a scraping noise, or is it scratching? He sits up and pays heed. Is there someone moving outside his room? The scratching noise resumes. He turns on the light, rises, creeps to the door and opens it a few inches. The rest of the flat is in darkness. He passes a hand across his brow and wipes off sweat. He sleeps in boxer shorts and has no dressing gown. He contemplates pulling on his jeans, and then decides he is being foolish. In all likelihood it is nothing, night nonsense, the creaks and whines of old buildings expanding in the heat. And even if it is Sean or Naomi, he is decent.
He does not switch on the corridor light. He has no desire to attract attention to himself. They may feel it is peculiar, their new lodger prowling about in the middle of the night, on the pretext that he was disturbed by scuffling sounds. He steals past the bathroom where the taps whine like the wind, then moves stealthily through the bead curtain and into the lounge. The sash windows are still open, and a warm breeze, tainted with the residue of exhaust fumes, reaches his nostrils. A mix of moonlight and lamplight filters through them. Far off a door slams. He picks out the bulky shapes of furniture, not yet familiar to him. He glances to his right at the galley kitchen. All clear. He is about to go, to return to bed, when he hears the noise again, much louder now, very close, here in the room with him. His heartbeat is instantly racing. Perhaps they have mice, says the voice of reason. He stands very still, his eyes raking the semi-darkness.
He spots her knees then, her knees capped in moonlight. In a few steps he rounds the end of the settee and sees her, quite naked, curled up in the space between the settee end and the corner of the room. Her head is resting against the wall, and her fingers are scrabbling over it. Her silvered body takes him unawares so that he staggers back a pace. Her nipples appear black, and to his surprise so do the curls that cover her sex.
‘Naomi?’ He keeps his volume low, his tone reassuring and steady, though all this while his heart bangs in his ear. ‘Naomi? Are you all right?’ She makes no response – none at all. Her eyes are glazed over, unseeing. The blue is luminous, picked out in the nocturnal rays. The brown is one huge black pupil. He thinks that she may be sleepwalking, knows that it is dangerous to rouse someone too quickly from this hypnotic state. Snatching up a throw from the settee and crouching down, he cloaks her nudity with it. Her lips are moving but he cannot decipher any words. ‘It’s Owen, Naomi. Did you have a bad dream? Shall I take you back to bed?’
‘The baby won’t stop crying,’ she whimpers. ‘Someone make it stop.’ She must still be dreaming, Owen concludes. ‘It’s sick. Has a temperature. Needs a cool bath. I need a cool bath.’
‘Shall I take you to the bathroom? I can wet a flannel to cool you down.’
She seems not to hear him. ‘Look at me. Look at me.’ Her hands fall, palms outwards, inviting inspection. She might be reciting a nursery rhyme. Her tone is sing-song, a childish chant. It unnerves Owen because there are traces of Sarah in it. It has the cadence of need. ‘I’m all black, all filthy, just like she said. And I want to wash it away but I can’t.’ It is definitely a nightmare. He will have to be very careful not to startle her awake. There is no knowing what she might do as a result of such trauma. He considers fetching Sean, and then thinks about how much brandy he has consumed and decides not to. He attempts to lift her to her feet, but she resists.
‘No, no, I won’t go with you. I want to stay in my bunk. I want to stay with The Blind Ones.’ Now she is humming, a nasal hum interspersed with a few lyrics. He recognizes the song. Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’. The record she put on the night he came for dinner, the night she danced with Enrico, the night the Italian described the drowned village that lay at the bottom of Lake Vagli. He has begun to feel the pull of it, of the ghost village where once the stone buildings breathed the mountain air. Today no sky opens up above the hamlet. It is buried in water, icy dark water. ‘Walt? Walt? Is it you?’
‘It’s Owen, Naomi. Come on. It’s Owen. You’re safe with me. Let me take you back to bed.’
‘Walt, you shouldn’t have left me and gone with Judy. You shouldn’t have made me angry.’
This time when he gently pulls her up she is compliant, allowing herself to be meekly led. He hesitates before hers and Sean’s door, cautious of waking him. But he need not be. Sean is in his own drink-induced stupor, and does not stir. Owen helps her into the free side of the double bed, and tucks her in as if she is a child. Before he leaves he hears her mutter something. Back in his room he runs the sentence over again.
‘Walt, you shouldn’t have left me and gone with her. You shouldn’t have made me angry.’ A past boyfriend who had been unfaithful? Possibly even a husband? He mulls it over for several minutes. If he is correct, it is ironic. After all, isn’t Naomi stealing Catherine’s husband now? He thinks of his own mother, of Ken Bascombe, of America. She stayed, but she might as well have gone for all the difference it made. He wonders idly where Walt is this very second, and if he ever thinks of Naomi, of his onetime love with the spell-binding eyes.