When I open my eyes next morning Nana’s name is on my lips. She’s there in my heart and mind, and yet for the first time since she left me, I don’t turn away from light; I don’t close my eyes tight, and curled up in a ball cry: ‘Nana! Nana!’ again and again. Not today!
Today I hear her whisper: ‘That’s sister-magic for you! Not only are you swimming in water, you’re jumping when you hit the ground as well.’
‘Nana, I miss you!’ I reply.
Even so, I sit up thrilled by last night. As chuffed as the black-feathered bird within me, a bird red in beak and claw, I smile remembering: Yah! That was me, Linet Merrimore, up there! That was me in the sky swooping and diving. Me sitting on a leopard’s head on the steppes. And when the leopard snarled, I knew she wouldn’t bite me because the leopard was Adoma. And see that winter wolf dancing in starlight? The wolf with moonbeams around her neck? She won’t maul me should I peck at her tail, because that’s Zula and Zula’s my sister.
Unafraid for the first time in ages, I spring out of bed and racing with Bracken to the lake, I step in.
Bracken meows, nervous that I might take the plunge and do what Nana did. So I say to her: ‘Bracken, be quiet. Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. I’m certainly not going to leave you. Never ever, you hear.’
My hands scoop up water and whirling and turning, I spray it in the air while I sing.
‘Linet Lake, Linet Lake soft as morning dew
Your Linet-girl is here to play with you
Linet Lake may your day be bright and true
For when wolf-light comes, I’ll be here for you.’
The ripples of the lake become still as a mirror. So still, the birds in the hobbled oaks opposite stop singing. Even Bracken stops screeching as the wind kisses me and then holds its breath. If I’m to talk, this is the time to do so.
I couldn’t yesterday because crammed with grief, my throat clenched before I could speak. Today I touch my talisman to gather my thoughts, and say loud and clear so that those hidden beneath can hear: ‘Lovely lake, Old Hester, ladies of the lake, especially you, Nana… I wish you could have seen me last night. I went out with my sisters and each of us changed: one to a leopard, the other a wolf. I grew wings and flew as a chough. Wild, that’s me, wild and free. Nana, you should see me now! I’m not frightened any more. Not frightened of the sharpness at the tip of my tongue because that’s my beak. I’m a bird, that’s me. Nana, if you were here, I’d run to you, and hold you for ever.’
I pause as my conscience pinches, urging me to say more. Lips tight as a clam I’m quiet until the best part of me, the part that listens to my sisters’ advice, prises my mouth open: ‘By the way, Nana, I haven’t got in touch with those friends of yours as I promised. Don’t worry I’ll call them soon. I might even call them today after I’ve done what I need to. Bye, Nana! Goodbye, ladies of the Linet Lake.’
My conscience pursuing me, I run back to Carbilly and do what I do every morning. Wash. Dress. Feed and water Bracken. Eat a hunk of brown bread. Down a glass of milk. I’m preparing for the day ahead, when the hairs in my ears prickle and I hear footfall outside.
I pull Bracken to my side and a finger on my lips, catch her eye: ‘Shush,’ I tell her.
There’s a knock on the kitchen door.
Apart from Bracken and I, no one’s set foot in Carbilly since Nana’s friends came to see her. No one’s called her phone or written us a letter.
‘Quiet, Bracken.’ I dig my hand into a packet of biscuits and take one out. She nibbles it.
A second knock. Then a third. Louder. Determined.
I sniff and catch a hint of Lance in the air.
That blackberry tang tickles my tongue. I swallow. Hold my breath. Berries juice my heart as the bird within me stirs, eager to fly once again.
‘Not now,’ I groan. ‘Please, not now.’
Bracken yawns.
I stroke her neck to distract her from Lance at the door: ‘Relax. Good girl,’ I whisper hoping that if we can only be quiet enough, Lance will walk away and return when I’ve concocted a tale to tell him.
Another knock and the door latch rattles. ‘Nana Merrimore! Linet! Are you in?’
Bracken meows, breaks free and yowls.
I get up. Too quickly, because I trip on a chair beside me and as it clatters to the floor, there’s nothing I can do but shout: ‘Coming,’ and open up.
Lance is holding a bag. ‘This is for you and your nana,’ he says, ‘apples from Crow’s Nest.’
The token around my neck quivers at the mention of Nana’s name. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I try to find my voice, find the right words, but Nana’s absence seizes me, and I can barely stand up.
As Lance lurches for my hands to hold me upright, apples tumble over the floor. ‘Are you OK?’
I shake my head. He pulls up the toppled chair, sits me down. Yanks its neighbour and while I struggle for breath, searching for a way to explain the predicament I’m in, Lance sits opposite me.
Overwhelmed by grief, I can’t hold it in any longer, can’t stop the lake of tears inside me from streaming out. The more I cry, the more sobs wrack my body, the firmer Lance presses his hand in mine. Skin to skin, he gradually soothes me while the beat of his pulse steadies my runaway heart. He doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t pick and probe but waits until the ache inside me subsides.
‘Do you want some tea?’
‘Water will do.’
After swilling out a glass at the sink, he fills it to the brim.
I gulp it down.
Still no questions, just the gentle graze of his eyes on mine. They’re blue, the blue of irises that come up every spring at the lake’s edge; fiercely blue with purple glints of kindness. Loving-kindness, Adoma calls it. Even through a kaleidoscope of tears, those eyes do most of his talking for him.
I answer them with words that tear my heart open: ‘I’m missing Nana.’
‘Is she away?’
‘She’s gone.’
Again, he waits until I’m able to tell him more. Unsure how much I can trust him, I stick to the facts: ‘She’s not coming back.’
‘Are you certain?’
I nod.
He gets up and one after the other picks up the apples that rolled on the floor. As he places them in a fruit bowl on the table, he looks around, taking in the wreckage in what was once Nana’s tidy kitchen. His eyes flit here and there and as I follow them, I glimpse what he’s seeing: Nana’s sink groaning with unwashed plates, instant noodle cartons on the counter, a half-eaten apple on the table, a hunk of bread I’ve just bitten into, and beside that open packets of biscuits by a half-used tin of cat food.
He peeps into the sitting room beyond. Piles of paper scattered everywhere. Papers from Nana’s writing desk and opened files. Papers and books: all over the floor, on side tables, on the sofa and chairs. I see the mayhem and spinning back to my day of torment, relive what happened.
I watched Nana sucked into the drowning pool. Watched to see if the ghosts there would fling her out like they did me. I waited and waited and when they didn’t, I fled into Carbilly in tears and searched everywhere: through Nana’s books and papers, notebooks, stacks of bills, invoices and photograph albums. I rummaged through everything I could lay my hands on believing that somewhere in a forgotten corner, she’d have left me a note; a message, at the very least, to explain why she’d left me.
In despair, I hunted through the house: the sitting room, Nana’s study, her bedroom. I looked and found nothing. Not a scribble, not a word to say how sorry she was to leave me. Why not? I couldn’t understand why not.
I still can’t. I drag myself to the sink and start to wash the plates. When Lance joins me, shadows on his face tell me he’s worried.
‘Has she really gone?’ he asks.
I nod.
‘Did she go the way of her mother and her grandmother before her?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t you know?’ Anxious in case he’s said something he shouldn’t, he brushes a hand through raven-black hair.
‘Know what?’ I press him.
‘Hasn’t anyone told you?’
‘What?’
He blinks, turns away and as he does so I remember similar looks and asides directed at Nana and I whenever we ventured into Blisland, our nearest town; asides and whispers I never questioned because they seemed as rooted in our lives on the moor as its granite core: myths about us Merrimores.
A smile hovers over Lance’s lips: ‘Rumours that’s all it is. Old stories and rumours.’
‘Go on, tell me!’ I insist. I dip my fingers in the sink and flick water at him.
Lance backs away, his smile expanding. ‘It’s crazy, I know.’
I follow him, spitting water from the tips of my fingers. Water magic. He grabs my wrists and as the warmth of his touch seeps into my skin, I sizzle.
‘We’re worried in the mind, most of us, I know,’ he admits. ‘But just about everyone on the moor says Merrimore women aren’t born like ordinary folk.’
Hand in hand we rock with laughter. Doubled over, we crumple to the ground. On the cold slate floor, hands light as a feather clasp mine.
‘Told you it was crazy but that’s the moor speaking. They say you come from the lake out there. And when you’re ready to go, you return to it.’
Nodding, I laugh, half-hearing an echo from long ago of words spoken to Zula. Memory rustles through me, and as my voice drifts like a leaf to the ground, I catch it and remember.
‘I’m a Merrimore!’ I said to Zula. ‘We’re water witches, we are! We’re born in water and return to it when we die!’
I’ve known this all along, it seems, and yet never grasped the truth of it.
‘Is that what you believe?’ I ask Lance. ‘That I came from the lake out there and when I’m to die, I’ll return to it? Am I that peculiar?’
Lance shrugs, undecided: ‘I did wonder when I saw you in the mist, but after we went up the tor together…’ He shakes his head.
No sooner said, then Nana’s phone rings.
I run to pick it up. On the other end is Nana’s friend, Redwood. He’s with Rosie, just round the corner, and would like to drop in.
I say, ‘Fine.’