Haweswater (29 page)

By the time of the arrival of troops into the Haweswater valley Janet had regained much of her strength, and would exchange words with her family if she was spoken to. Her child had developed the ability to smile and Jack Liggett had been dead for half a year. Her mother took her to the village of Bampton when she went to get the groceries and she walked as a pillar among the sane, cancelling rumours of wrathful delirium, though she was not the same wildcat she had been in her day, they agreed. She was not at all what she had once been.

When she learned of the impending devastation of the old village, Janet insisted that she accompany her father to Mardale to witness the spectacle of the bombing. She had not returned at all since her family had moved, when she had been wrapped in a blanket, growling softly like an injured fox. She told her parents that to go now would give her the peace they so desperately wanted for her. That she wanted herself. But Ella noticed her daughter’s fingers touching her lips as she spoke. There was enough animation in her to convey the lie. And Ella Lightburn was a library of lies, of collected, stored, macabre signs from her patients. The licking of a tongue at the corner of a mouth. A wrongly timed blink. The direction of an eye, up-cast. Tell-tale mannerisms which suggested hidden motives. The overspill of ill-thought, of premeditation.

Men with hypodermic needles hidden under their hospital pillows had searched out their faces with the stumps of their arms, phantom fingers playing over lips and eyebrows, accompanied by sudden conciliatory conversation. Ella saw the missing digits, blue flames roaring out of their wrists and
burning at their mouths. Then, in the morning, they would be swimming against a pillow of viscous red, a precise puncture to the throat, needle pressed in by the jawbone under a chin. The downward nod, the aye to suicide. Or a razor tucked into the broad artery at the back of a knee. Kerosene swallowed from a lamp. Ella knew that to anyone but a nurse there is little argument for an increase in life and calm as being an adverse occurrence in a patient. In the circumstances of improvement, it appears touched with a tainted concern, or with unwholesome intention. But she was a master of noticing behaviour that went against the grain of what a person wanted her to see. All Ella could do was lift the baby into her daughter’s arms and with silence accuse her of orphaning the child. But Janet passed the child back, went outside and hooked up the horse to the cart. She drove her father and brother to the valley, her conversation sparse, her fingerprints leaving furtive tracks across her mouth.

Janet watched the bombing alone, from the gentle hill next to her old home. Sitting on the dry ground hidden between the gorse and holding her knees, close enough to the soldiers to watch them work. Her father wondered where she was but knew better than to search her out and approach her. He believed her to be making her own private peace, and, in a way, she was. The sky moved its pieces of white. Above her were the towering shadowy crags of the Rigg. A circling eagle, stretched on the gale in the upper atmosphere as it left the valley for silence. She thought of Jack Liggett, who felt close by. He was in the air, where his sallow chest had breathed out, the ground, where he had spilled out of her as she lay next to him, a hand on his wet stomach. Once she had found herself in the elements, felt the pull of nitrates and molecules in her body as the land changed within its existence. Now he was living in the old territory. A man who had
torn his roots out of the city for her and transplanted the best of himself. He was here, within reach. The landscape had him enfolded, safe, like bark holding back the spreading rings of a tree. She put her face in the grass and her tears swept down concave blades and soaked into the dry earth, into the fossils and claws and muscles of rock from thousands of years ago. And her mouth was open and rigid like a paralysed flower, letting out fluid. The scar on her forehead raised as her face contorted with grief. It seemed he was shouting through the soil to her, faintly. A ghost in the elements. She swore then that she would make her life worthy of his death and gradually the tears bled away.

She kept away from the crowd that included her father, remained concealed from the group of army officers as they marched to and from their camp. Explosions tore through the grass. She inched closer to the volcanic axis. Pieces of rock landed around her as she sat, they nicked her face and caught in her hair. She did not move. Even as she felt the sharpness of stone on her cheeks, she would not leave the surroundings where Jack Liggett spoke through the land. Her mind faltered across past meetings. It had been here in the corner of this field that she had cut out from under his skin a piece of shale that had become lodged in his back after they rolled and fought on the ground. His eyes watery and laughing with the pain.

– You’re enjoying this.

– I’m not.

– Then why is it taking so long. Is that blade sterile?

– I want to be sure the scar is worth having.

She reached for a small stone lodged in the grass, put it into her mouth, and its wet minerals lined up along her tongue. She put two more in the sockets of her closed eyes and lay back as if to sleep. After a time the explosions became so loud she thought they were right next to her. And still she did not retreat.

The bombs continued to detonate, bragging through the village, to where she was sitting, alone. She caught pieces of the old village in her new locks of hair, in her lap, in her skin.

Above, the sky moved pieces of grey and white, meaning a change of season was coming, exactly as it had a year ago. When she had fallen on the bridge for no reason and the battle had been about stealth, about who could find the next hidden channel in the other, and she still had one foot solid in her old life.

She did not move until she saw the Bampton policeman leave the tent where the military equipment was kept, to shift the crowd having rocks rained down on them, and then to survey the damage to his motorcycle as it was hit by a large shard of slate. Her fingers came to her mouth, brushed past. There was a splinter in the cushion of her upper lip. When the man was gone she stood, walked low and silent around the village, down through the dust and debris to the outer tent, without taking her grey eyes from it. Within a few steps her body became feline, remembering how it had moved before the energy had left her. A rough flap of canvas brushed against her forehead and she was inside, surrounded by a bitter smell of clay in the semi-darkness, hands groping for wire, a loose detonator and the tightly wrapped bundles of explosive.

Isaac climbs back into the cart, where his sister is already sitting holding the reins. The fireworks are over. The village is gone and his collar is dripping with river water. Under his sister’s feet is a hemp sack, held tight between her ankles. Big enough to contain a dead lamb or a large bird, small enough to be overlooked amid the clutter of the cart. Her face is dry, lined with fur on the bridge of her nose. His boots are wet and his shirt is dripping. A last swim in the Measand river before it is consumed by unrelated water. A salutation to the trout and the water boatmen and the mystery of the riverbed as it washes itself clean and smooth. He has said his goodbyes now, will conquer the rivers of another place. He is seven years old. A boy with a head full of strange ideas and notions,
a belief system already too resolute for his youth. He sees that the spirit which has evaporated from his sister is back, flickering under the fur of her skin. It is not gone yet. Will never be gone. Energy can only be displaced, never destroyed, he had once heard it said.

For a moment he is not sure that she is silent, the closed statue on the wooden seat. There is a voice in his head that is speaking to him, telling him that this is who they are, she and he, people from this carnal realm of water and earth, full of the atoms of this old, dying, re-living place. The blood in his hands will tell him where he belongs, where it will be brightest. Seven years old. An old-before-he-was-young boy, who came out of the womb that way. In this valley, his heart is a beating stone that will carry him down to the depths. Where life is slower and faster at once. And better. The voice in his head tells him that he will come back. One day you will surrender your heart of stone to the place that has made you infinite.

Isaac moves to his sister’s side. She raises her arm to make room for him. She is saying her goodbyes as he has said his, in the silence, with the voice in his head. And he, no more than a child in years but ancient still, having more understanding than he will ever have in his life again, lets her go.

Looking up, there are stars. The plough, Orion’s belt. Constellations only seen from this northern hemisphere. In Australia and New Zealand there are different stars, Hazel Bowman had told them in school, other points of reference that the warrior nations navigated their boats by, waged war under, and the moon is bigger there, too. Somewhere at the back of the sky is Pluto, discovered in the year of her brother’s birth, but dying for millions of years before. Janet feels a little warmth coming off the northern moon. Enough to warm the backs of her hands as she works, gathering wood. It is late summer and the season has been cooling, slowly, on the black roof of the Swindale pools where dragonflies are in abundance. In these past few days summer has flared up again, as if striving for temporary renewal, and for now the air remains humid, close. The dam is almost complete, only the last facing remaining absent from the structure. Water is not yet building behind it, and the divided river takes it through what will be the sluice gates of the reservoir. There is not water enough to create a disaster of biblical proportions, should it be released.

She arrives at the site a little after one in the morning, builds a small fire from brittle pine cones and sticks on the forest floor, and she walks around it, east west, west east, trying to dissuade or convince herself about that task for which she has walked seven miles this night to undertake. Though perhaps the walking is only for summoning a spirit, and she already knows the course of her life. She keeps the old satchel which she has carried a good distance from the flames. For all her uninhabited body, she is still able to bring to mind rationale, techniques which she will need,
reasons for her presence on the edge of the wooden site buildings, technicalities. She knows that her life had been pared down to this. She knows that she had dissolved already, in part, and that there is only a body remaining, a few thoughts, purpose, enough. She is a single, disparate cell. There are small recollections, shards of memory scattered above the grey mass of her disposition, not enough to prevent a journey towards release. A slight, warm wind coming off the moon, whispering along the wall of the dam. She reaches out hands towards it, presses smooth rock. Looks up, up.

The stars begin at the flat platform of the embankment’s edge, as if it is holding them in place. Jack Liggett’s monument envelopes the valley, it roars stone upwards above her. A vast monument to a man who has remade the world, sucking up earth and space and moulding it into the urban rib of Adam. It is a perfect colossus, the Waterworks’ obituary read in the
Manchester Observer
a week after his death, an emblem of the man who suffered that first magnificent vision, who had thought to regurgitate nature through the serpentine mouth of industry. It honours him more than anything else can.

But in this valley of broken water, of constant remaking and living earth, there are no monuments to death. Nor should there be. The land sucks back in what once it helped to produce. And the dam is a false idol, the hollow arm of God. Her hands on the wall lift, as if she will fall backwards and be swallowed by the landscape.

It takes her three hours to scratch and chip holes into the joints of the vast slabs, using an old chisel belonging to her father and, when that breaks, the iron hook used for removing stones from horses’ hooves. The facing is not so difficult to work with and the under-wall is almost beautiful, perfect and dense like marble as she tunnels in. She did not know it before, the cold beauty of this foreign piece, had never wanted to come with Jack Liggett and place her hands on its cold
flanks while he lived. She deepens the holes as well as she can with the instrument, unhurried, her fingers still damaged from old wounds and stiff. At the base of the structure she digs away the sods of earth, creating tunnels towards the foundations. She lights two candles to see better by, stands them at the foot of the mighty wall so that their auras meet, as if at an altar. They do not even flicker in the still night. She must always have known that there would be this sacrifice, her life has been in readiness for it, that her hands would prepare for it, quietly, writing herself into the blackness.

She slows all her movements further, is precise about them and focuses on her slender thoughts as she works, setting the charges in the trickery of the moon’s light. There is not much wire, only what her dreaming hand had stolen in darkness, and now it slips through her fingers like ink, like quick liquid. She prepares the detonator exactly as she had seen the young officer attach the instrument.

Later, a long way past midnight, it hits very dark. Dawn is only an hour or so away now. Above, the sky is gathering cloud, stacking it up in towering columns. The moon begins slipping away behind the obscure mass. She smells the coming rain, only a morning away. And still the candles do not flicker, are utterly without movement.

She allows herself only a few moments to prepare her own body, perhaps finding a reasonable blue cage within herself that she turns and walks into. Locking herself away from the torn hills outside, the bright, living water of the valley, her father herding cattle and her mother praying or kneading her knuckles down through dough. The beloved face of her brother. His pure dislocated, swimming form. Or a step forward, out away from captivity and the tight drum of the present, out towards the disparate shape of her love, his presence in the mountains. She closes or opens, renouncing all but the last aspect of herself.

On this night of gathering storm there is no regret. There is only the energy of the half-hidden moon that reaches her, dying over her hands on the detonator, and even the air, littered with the lost breath of the dam’s god, does not move. She is at the edge of a vast universe, where old elements are fused. Like a healed wound.

Then a flashing second, and her too close, too close to the wall, but she had known that all along.

She is caught up into the beauty of white light and noise, rock singing, and the speed of the air as the mouth of the explosion inhales once, deeply, then blows out fury. Trees leap into the sky. The elements combine. She pivots within the meld, brought up into the nucleus of a white dream.

And then she is struggling to sit up, her limbs not wanting to appreciate her brain’s flickering message, not willing to recover. She cannot even reach for her face, which is gone. She remembers at last that there will be no water rushing in a tidal wave over her, no lashing cataract, breaking loose and washing down the valley, destroying rivers in its wake. The uterus of liquid does not yet exist. But, even so, she feels it coming over her, a great pressure, a sea of red darkness, swallowing air.

The navvy does not hear the explosion but he feels its tremors, travelling through the wooden bunk-bed and into his body. He wakes from the periphery of sleep. He is aware of the direction of the seismic event, without having to see the bursting light over the tops of the spruce trees. History has picked up its pace and is speeding past him. The windowless cabin is unnaturally dark, a thick liquid black that offends the eyes, drips inside, makes a man dizzy and nauseous. But he has become accustomed to it, as the other men have also, they are able to move about inside the black hut even with this disability, until the door is opened, a column of unforgiving,
morning light blinds them, makes them double over and cover their aching faces. The hurricane lamp lies under the last bunk on the wall, for emergencies only, its oil too expensive to buy in the shanty village for everyday use. Other than a lasting affection for the local jerries, wherever money is concerned they have adjusted the capabilities of their bodies to avoid letting go of what little wages they have.

He hears the heavy breathing of the other men in the bunks below him. No one else has been woken. Their exhaling is in unison, with the occasional bark of a man as air catches in his throat, tongue on the roof of mouth. Their heads are like lead against a crooked arm, a bundled shirt. It is more like fine death than sleep. In their pure exhaustion, they possess no dreams, these men for whom only dreams might bring pleasure and release from the daily drudgery. They mention their own names so rarely to others that they are never called to in slumber, as if having forgotten an identity, the subconscious wary of vanity. But this man in particular is a light sleeper, has slept under trees and the rose bushes of lawns with his senses tuned to the slightest sound or shuffle along the earth, the rolling of automobile headlamps across his borrowed patch. He is aware of the movements of land and water around him, the slow-rolling obelisk of time. He knows it is early, and that something near by has been destroyed. That history for a few uncharacteristic moments tore through the valley.

He lowers himself down from the bed, hanging in midair for a second, then his bare feet, coming softly on to the carpetless boards of the floor, are as exacting as the ballet. He reaches back for his trousers, his boots, hooked to the bunk, but will not dress inside, where the lifted buckle of a belt might wake the sleepers, give the false impression that the day’s work is at hand. It is concern born of complete empathy, paternal almost. Then he hangs the boots back up again. He will not wear them until it is necessary for work. The greatest pleasure for the men away from the dam site is the absence of
restrictive leather and choked laces against the roof of a foot. They walk like children, barefoot in the grass, to the canteen.

As he moves, his gestures are perfectly mapped in the blind room. Seven steps to the cabin wall. The turning handle of the cabin door. A small finger muffling the latch as it sits back down.

Outside, new air floods him. The sky clearing its throat a long way away. And at the back of it are the last echoes of the tremors he felt at the edge of his sleep. He does not question their reality, he could not ever have dreamed such nebulous sound. He leans on the hewn wood of the hut, urinates, and then pulls on the moleskins. He lifts a lantern from under the lip of the hut and lights it, moving like a honey badger in the darkness, his muscles dense and stocky. On his shoulder a tattoo ignites, indigo blue. Old enough, weathered enough, that it is beginning to spread through the skin, letting out colour past its own borders. The shoulder lifts ink as it pushes up the lantern. In this opaque, oily glow, the light from the moon might be wasted, but still it drifts from behind the full clouds. Enough for the man to see the outlines in the distance, trees, mountains, the motionless road. He cocks a head, as if to gather more sound, and turns into the woods, pine needles bristling under the soles of his feet. Free of the line of men he moves fast, swinging between the columns of fragrant pine and spruce. The path almost doubles back at one point where the wood pinches in. He cuts through the twist of fairytale branches to join it ahead. Past the split tree three-quarters of the way in, where a man has tucked a small bottle of Rot under the bark for his workmate to collect as he passes. Such narcotics and poteens are illegal in the encampment, and cannot be risked passing within the huts. Sky up ahead. The trees fall away.

The halo of light from the lantern finds the body before the man does, at the edge of the wood, next to the dam site. There is bitter smoke. A fire has been left to die, streaking into the earth as the blast pushed past. Dry grass has been scorched.
In the yellow light over her she is a terrible mess of flesh and bone. Around her there is also prolific destruction. The smoking, ragged-black wall of the outer dam. Burnt grass. The trees have been unearthed, blasted full of rock. And against an untouched piece of wall is one impossibly lit candle, to the right of the yawning hole. The explosion, blanketed and dampened by the thick woods, flung back on itself, has brought down most of the smaller buildings on the site, and upended the boards set over the mud. His eye plots the incident.

He looks into the pool of light again. It is as if the man has been privy to the worst kind of killing in his lifetime and has within him a source of power to look at her. Though his eyes remain quick, a brevity of assessment. There is still beauty to her, the shapes she has made. The dress is purple with blood. She has no face. Though blue-blonde hair has disguised the damage to one side, masking it. The arms scarcely belong to the rest of her. Fuse wire has become part of her stomach, snaring into her ribcage. She is a broken marionette. Eight feet away from her a broken detonator lies on its side. Ticking bubbles of liquid leave her chest, but it is simply the spirit-levelling of fluids in her body. She is dead.