Read Reasons She Goes to the Woods Online
Authors: Deborah Kay Davies
Tags: #mystery, #nervy, #horrid, #sinister, #normality, #lyrical, #dark, #Pearl, #childhood, #sensual
Reasons She Goes to the Woods
A Oneworld
Book
First published in North America, Great Britain & Australia
by Oneworld Publications,
2014
Copyright © Deborah Kay Davies
2014
The moral right of Deborah Kay Davies to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act
1988
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78074-376-9
ISBN 978-1-78074-377-6 (eBook)
Typesetting and eBook by
Tetragon, London
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Oneworld Publications
10 Bloomsbury Street
London WC1B
3SR
England
As always,
for Norman,
with love.
Pearl is perched astride her father’s knee. Rain taps the front window and she can just make out, all along the wavering hedge, wet purple flowers that look just like miniature bunches of grapes. Here in the lounge the lamplight reaches out to rest on the carpet ridges and the stiff pleats bordering the cushions. She and her father are in a hideaway; he sits on the yellow-and-navy settee and she sits on him. It’s wonderful. But it makes her stomach growl, every time she’s with him. She plays with his sleep-soft hands, placing them on her cheeks. When she lets go, they flop back onto his lap, and she lifts them again. His lips are parted and she can see a wink of teeth. His eyes are closed, his breathing rhythmic and deep. She brings her face up close so that the room is filled with her father’s regular, heartbreaking features. Her small, strong hands are pressed to his chest. She rests her forehead on his, wanting to get inside. She inhales the smell of his neck deeply and squirms a little; his knee between her legs feels solid and warm. The living room is quiet. In the entire world there is only Pearl and her father. Her mother laid a fire before she went out; taking ages, leaving instructions, dropping things, then slamming the door and coming back. Now Pearl listens to the sounds coming from the grate as the flames lick each other and purr. From the place pressed against her father’s knee she feels a rippling sensation move through her body, as if a delicate, frilled mushroom were expanding, elongating, filling her up. She exhales slowly. She mustn’t disturb him. He would push her off with his beautiful hands if he woke
up.
Pearl is playing with worms in the front garden. Just where the earth is semi-solid and often splashed with rainwater is the perfect place for them. Pearl loves the wriggly, neat casts they leave behind. Especially she loves the way the worms clump together and make themselves into glistening, slow-moving balls. She gets lost in the task of unknotting them. When they are freed, the worms are usually kinky, and she works each one between her palms until it relaxes. Then she lays them out on the smooth mud. Today, in the middle of the lawn there is a huge black pram. Pearl has ignored the snuffling sounds coming from under the white blanket, and the tasselled corner that droops enticingly over the pram’s lacquered side. Her worms are neatly arranged in rows. Now she is drawn to the pram with its moving cover. The hood is up and the inside seems filled with light. She can see a tiny patch of pink cheek and a scribble of hair. She leans in and inhales the smell of baby flesh and warm plastic. Suddenly she feels huge and dirty, her knees and hands caked with mud. Pearl climbs up onto a wheel and pushes herself in beside the baby. Her legs are too long so she bends them to fit. Her head is crushed inside the hood. She breathes quietly, and with her shoulder presses hard on the warm little body beside her. She smells his milky breath, looking at how her muddy shoes have spoilt the white blanket. The hood’s lacy edging frames the porch. Pearl settles herself more comfortably, thinking about her worms nicely lying in their rows, and waits for the front door to
open.
The weeping willow Pearl is riding dips its neck into a clear, brown stream. Sssshhhh, she whispers, as she pats the bucking trunk and grips with her thighs. Above her, the willow tosses its shaggy arms. Slim, fish-shaped leaves fall past Pearl and plop into the stream. She dangles over to watch and inhales as the slivers of green swim away; the stream’s breath smells of bright weeds, frogspawn, lichened pebbles. The water is a dazzling drink. Circular, swirling eyes come and go on its surface. Underneath, worm-thin plants all reach forwards, like hair in the wind. Pearl would love to be a stickleback, or a newt, and have the stream as her home. She climbs out of the tree and joins the tall fern-crowds running down to see the water. As she slips through they slap her with gentle, lemony hands, streaking her with juice. Pearl’s shorts and pink sun-top all feel so stupid. She wades into the water, her sandals growing heavy, and waits for the stream to settle. Insects are ticking in the undergrowth. Kingcups glow amongst the fleshy plants along the water’s margin. Pearl lies down in a smooth, shallow pool. Her hair entwines with the waving plants, her skin turns to liquid, her open eyes are just-born jewels. She can feel her brown limbs dissolving. Sunlight falls in bars and spots through the trees. As the lovely water laps her ears and throat, moves inside her shorts, slips across her fragile ribs, Pearl grins, thinking she hears laughter, and raises her arms to the just-glimpsed sky. These are some of the reasons she comes to the woods.
The ice-cream van has just driven out of the street; its tatty, fading tune makes Pearl feel bereft. She loves to stand by the juddering flank of the van and smell the petrol and vanilla it exhales. The smiling man made a towering cream cone for someone else, sprinkling it with coloured specks, squirting scarlet sauce from his old plastic bottle. Pearl wasn’t tempted. Alone, she sits on the kerb and licks an apple ice-lolly. The dust in the gutter is sour and hot, and Pearl sees there is a beetle pulling a dead leaf through it. She picks him up and flings him onto the grass. While he sails through the air Pearl sees his jaws are still clamped to the leaf; it makes her want to smile. But still, it’s samey, she thinks, how nothing ever happens in her street, and she sucks her lolly so powerfully the colour fades to ice. She drops a chunk inside her sundress, and feels it slither down to her belly button. Then Pearl senses an odd acceleration in the air. Her head feels as if someone has slipped a tight cap on it. Everything becomes empty and glowing, the sun obscured by mist. Pearl feels excited. She’s stared at the sky so hard it seems bright pink, and the outlines of the garden hedges are black and twitching. She begins to laugh as the hairs on her arms rise. Heavy, warm raindrops splat like flicked spoonfuls of soup on Pearl’s upturned face and bare shoulders. Lightning cracks above the rooftops, revealing the stunning light from a more interesting world behind the sky. Pearl drops her lolly in the dust, sits on the kerb and holds up her palms while racing clouds are reflected in her huge
eyes.
Pearl has been crouched in her cupboard. It smells of books and Plasticine, drying paintbrushes and the old wool kilt she hid long ago. As she sits cross-legged, Pearl can smell, amongst all these things, her own warm self. She puts her fingers inside her pants and dips them into the dense scalloped folds between her legs. Then she pulls her fingers out. Here is my smell, she thinks. I’m like the smashed roots of bluebells. She sniffs deeply. And the soft insides of baby hazelnuts. Then she crawls out of the cupboard and goes to her parents’ room. On her mother’s dressing table there are bottles and pots Pearl has never touched before. The sun can’t get into this room; it’s semi-dark even now, although Pearl knows it’s the morning. She sits on the stool and looks at all her mother’s things, then picks up a bottle and undoes the lid. It smells like her mother, and Pearl sneezes three times, her head nodding with each sneeze. She sniffs the tubes of scarlet lipstick, and the hairbrush. Even the cotton-wool balls in their glass jar smell the same. When she slides open the slim middle drawer, powdery air puffs up and makes her gag. She rummages amongst the silk fragments and lace underwear for a moment, then snatches her fingers away. In the tilted mirror she seems almost transparent. Pearl unfurls a lipstick and draws bold, red circles around her eyes and mouth. Then she makes faces in the mirror, her single, springy curl bobbing like a tiny, gilded horn. The white-covered bed stretches out, its edges crisp as a slab of stone. I love my own smell of bluebells and nuts, she thinks, crossing her eyes and making kissing sounds at her reflection.