The Telling (18 page)

“All right, then,” he said. I felt that I could trust him.

When I got home, Sally had gone. I’d known that she would go, but I had not thought that it would be so soon, and had not realized how complete would be her removal. Her Sunday clothes were gone from the press, and she had taken two chapbooks and a ballad that weren’t really hers, even her cup was gone from the dresser. I should have been there to help her pack, to tell her she was welcome to the books, to carry her parcels for her up to the crossroads, and wait with her for the coach. I had occupied myself otherwise, and not well, and had not said goodbye to a much-loved only sister.

I found her doll that night, lying limp and grimy, one button-eye hanging on a thread, when I opened the press to get out my bedding. It had been mine before it was hers; now she had given it back to me. It seemed like a message; at twelve years old she was a woman grown up and gone out into the world, and I was still a child at home. It may not have been meant as such; she couldn’t have brought it with her, not to her work, and perhaps she had just not known what else to do with it, had not thought it good enough to pass on to another child, or thought it mine to dispense with, to throw on the midden or the fire. She might have thought our mam was not the kind to keep a daughter’s doll, but Mam is soft enough, if circumstances allow.

That night, for the first time since Sally was an infant, since she was weaned and put into my bed, I lay down alone. I missed
her. I slept shallowly, troubled by dreams. I dreamed I was wading through a shallow sea, and the sea stretched forever, and the sky was blue, and the sea was blue, and I waded with my skirts bunched up in my hands, and all around my legs tiny fishes fed, picking off scales of skin like the minnows do in the river; painlessly, slightly ticklish. I was happy, walking through the water and letting the fishes feed off my skin, but as I walked the sea grew shallower and shallower and the fishes began to die, drifting away from me and down into the bottom of the sea, and I knew I had poisoned them, that they were dying from my contagion. I tried to run, but the water was too thick and heavy, and I couldn’t get away from them; they mouthed off flakes of skin, and they gulped them down, and they died in their multitudes, and the reason the water was thick was that it was now dead fishes, slippery and heavy around my legs, and ahead, a mountain rose up into the sky, and ash tumbled out of it, and fire, and smoke filled the skies, making it dark, and something was coming towards me out of the darkness, and I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I had to keep on going, on into the darkness and the heat.

I was feeling sick;
that kind of low-level nausea that you barely notice till you swallow your saliva and your stomach lurches. The sky was too bright; it made me squint. A man stood outside a house: Willow Cottage. He was cleaning his car, an orange-red Volvo estate. He watched me pass as he soaped the roof with a sponge. I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and nodded at him. He was in his fifties, losing his hair. He didn’t quite nod back. There was money in my pocket; a satisfying clump of coins. I was going to the shop. Bread. Cheese. Tea. I raised my hands to push the hair from my face, and there was a shake to them, and my hair felt damp and greasy against my skin. Then the air
was suddenly dim, cool, as if I’d stepped into the shadow of a large building. I glanced around. It was just a glance; the ordinary blank face of a bungalow stared back at me. Then the grey rough-cast surface of the walls seemed to begin to melt, to slip and ooze away and reveal natural stone beneath. I blinked, and there were just grey walls and plate-glass windows and sunshine. The man straightened up from his car-washing, stared towards me. I turned and headed on up the street. On the right, on the end wall of a house, a bricked-up window seemed to shimmer with old glass; I glanced over, but the gable wall of the cottage was blank, just an outline of stone lintel, sill and upright, and infill where the window had once been. I could feel the hair pricking on the nape of my neck. As I passed, the converted barn seemed to sprout sun-bleached wooden shutters; to leak drifts of hay onto the road. When I looked it straight on, there was a 4x4 in the drive, net curtains in the downstairs windows. I turned away, and the garden seemed to melt back into pasture, to scatter itself with pale flowers. A water pump stood against the far end wall of the barn. As I came closer, I knew, I could hear, I could feel in the prickling of my skin, the faint whispering of women’s voices. I reached the corner, made myself glance around it, almost expecting to see her there, a young woman standing with a water jar on her hip, head cocked to listen to the evening gossip; the frown line between her brows, the shawl tucked over her head.

The pump stood with its back against the wall, its mechanism locked solid with thick black paint. A black bin-bag leaned against a green recycling box, and the tarmac had cracked to let a tuft of grass through. No one there.

I pressed my fingers and thumb onto my eyes, pushed at them,
trying to gather myself. I glanced back to see if I was still watched, but the man had gone. Somehow this made me even more uneasy. Then my phone went off, making me jump. I fumbled in my back pocket and flipped it open. My hands were shaking. Mark.

His voice was brittle. “I’ve been calling and calling. All I ever get is Call Failed.”

I unpeeled my lips. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d spoken. “The signal’s dodgy.”

“Are you okay?” His tone had shifted, softened. “Honey. Rache. Are you okay?”

The breath on my skin. The prickling air. The figure almost there in the corner of my eye. The way the houses had seemed to melt into something older. The way I disappeared. I couldn’t risk naming it; I couldn’t risk naming it to him. Then something moved, over to the right: my heart kicked; I glanced around. A blackbird, tilting his head to look at me.

“Nothing,” I said, not remembering the question.

“Come home. Sweetheart, come home.”

The blackbird’s eye was black and glossy, rimmed with orange. What did it see with the eye that looked the other way? In human vision, only a tiny proportion is direct, exact: the rest is filled in with the broad brushstrokes of the mind. So we see the mind’s constructions, not what is really there.

“Sweetheart?” Mark said it so gently; it made my nose prickle. “You’re allowed to find this difficult, you know. It’s allowed. You’re allowed to break down.”

The blackbird turned its head again. I looked away.

“Okay,” I said, and sat down on the grass verge. “Okay then. I give up.”

The phone cupped to my ear, I listened to Mark’s plans, the underswell of relief, the edging forward of my recovery. In a week, give or take, depending on appointments, I’d be sitting on Dr. Cowan’s vinyl chair, the words squeezing out of me in ugly clots, part request, part defence, part apology. I’d be talking to Dr. Cowan, but I’d be looking at the peeled man. The peeled man had watched it all, and didn’t judge. He’d observed the first blood pressure test, the dip of test-strip into the vial of urine, the taking of bloods; he’d seen the press of professionally cool fingers on my healing scar. His eyes bulging from the sockets, teeth bared in a lipless grin, he’d watched the same hand scrawl the prescription for those sweet blue pills. The peeled man knew everything. He knew the fury of a severed nerve, the touch-shy tenderness of inner flesh; he knew it in the dark meat of his heart, the dull ivory of his bones. And as I spoke to Dr. Cowan, the peeled man and I would eye each other, and Dr. Cowan would look at me, weighing me up, and when I’d finished talking he would caution me, and when he’d finished cautioning me, he’d reach for his prescription pad, and I would watch his pen scratch the words that conjured up those benzodiazepines, diamond-shaped, in the crease of my palm, sweet on my tongue, and the warm chemical certainty, the melting, the sense that everything would be fine.

I wanted Cate. I wanted Cate. It already felt too much like goodbye.

“Can I talk to her?”

“Tomorrow. She’s at my mum’s. You can see her yourself tomorrow. Get a good night’s sleep, then tomorrow just sling your stuff into the car and come home. Bring whatever. We’ll sort
the rest out somehow. I’ll deal with it. Or Lucy can; it won’t kill her to take on a bit of responsibility.”

“What about school?”

“You’re not due back till Monday; but I think you could do with some more time. We’ll talk to Dr. Cowan about that.”

We said goodbye. I flicked the phone shut, and held it in my palm. It seemed impossible to move. There was nowhere to go. Not back to the cottage, and face the massed evidence of my failure. Not to the shop, since I was leaving tomorrow, and wouldn’t be needing anything now. But soon the car-cleaning man would be out with a chamois leather, to wipe away the beading water on the bonnet, and stare at me. I hauled myself back onto my feet.

I walked slowly back along the verge, where the tarmac crumbled into grass, and little yellow flowers grew, their petals waxy and pointed. I had the word
celandine
in my head, but didn’t know where it came from. I reached the cottage. The sky was blue above it, the windows caught the sky and were filmed with shifting blue and white. All it needed was Mum on the front steps to complete the picture. I couldn’t go in. I picked a sprig off a low-growing plant on the garden wall, crushed the leaves, sniffed it. Thyme. I stuffed my hands into my pockets and continued on down the village street.

The street ended at the church gate. Daffodils stood in clumps in the churchyard, snowdrops lolled under the weight of seedpods. A dark yew tree stood to the right of the gate. The space was so quiet, and calm, and so old; the surrounding woods were like a filter on the world. I went in. The graves stood blank, their
backs to me, their faces to the east. I followed the path till it dwindled away among the graves, then I picked my way through the mounds till I’d reached the far wall, where I slumped down, and leaned my head back against the rough cool stone. The sky was overcast and the light was fading. A breeze had blown up: branches were tangling overhead, creaking against each other and casting moving shadows. That day in the rain seemed like an age ago; the gate into the woods must be somewhere nearby. I didn’t look.

Bits of stone dug into my back and the air felt damp on my skin. I could smell the dark rot of the woods behind me. I could smell the crushed grass beneath me. I could feel my own pulse, the way it made my vision throb at the edges, each invisible blood vessel juddering with its work. I could feel the press of my feet into the earth, the way my calf muscles bunched and my thighs stretched. My hand was haunted by the memory of her wrist, thin as sticks. The failing flutter of her pulse beneath my pressing fingers. The beats of her butterfly heart. I counted her pulse, conscious of the press of Cate’s feet, pushing against the inside of me. The taut, hard pod of my belly. The smell of coffee and chrysanthemums and cancer. And the great choking lump that was in my chest.

And then a shift. So peripheral to the vision that it registered in the flesh. I couldn’t help myself. I looked up, casting around. The worn faces of the gravestones stared back at me, blotched with damp. The boundary wall stretched out in either direction, its stones dark and cornerless, tracing an egg-shape around the dead. The earthwork rose up to my right. The light was failing fast, colours sliding into grey. The breeze kicked up
again; boughs creaked against each other, branches stirred. I was alone.

I straightened up and pushed away from the wall; coins dug into my thigh, my phone bulged in a back pocket. My legs ached. The breeze stiffened. I scanned the churchyard. Still nothing.

But then movement. In the corner of my vision. I swung around. An old headstone, low and dark; the same as the others. But there had been something there. Just that flicker of movement, like the houses melting, like the blackbird fixing me with its onyx eye. There would be a cat. A fox, perhaps. There would be a blackbird.

I was vividly aware of myself; the way my feet sank into the soft earth, the oily chill of my nose and chin, the tug and twist of my hair in the wind. I shoved my hands into my pockets. I was treading on grave earth; it seemed to give too much underfoot. Grit and cotton fibres pressed under my nails. My skin was bristling with cold.

The trees stirred in the wind, hissing. The shadows flitted over the headstone, making it look as if the stone were crawling with words. I came to the foot of the grave. No sign of a cat, a fox, not even a bird. Nothing but long tangled grass, bleached and dead and sodden. I came close, crouched down and rested a hand on the top of the stone. I read the family name. It was in capitals, across the top of the stone, like a headline. The stone was granular and cool, like sugar.

WILLIAMS

I rubbed at my arms and peered at the smaller lettering underneath. The first burial was in March 1802. Sara Williams and
her infant daughter, Mary, buried together. Forty years later, Sara’s husband, Isaac, was interred at sixty-three. Death in childbirth, the husband forty years a widower. I found myself welling up, stupidly, at this. I knelt down to peer at the names beneath. Damp pressed up from the earth and through my jeans. The letters became more cramped and narrow the further down the headstone they progressed. Tobias, Isaac’s son, and Anne, Tobias’s wife. The lettering had been eaten by the damp, algae softening its edges. I pushed aside the long grass at the foot of the grave.

also their son, THOMAS

Unease drew itself together, thickened and crept close.

Moss grew up the base of the stone; I pressed at it, feeling the dips and troughs of carving underneath. I dug a nail underneath the edge and peeled the moss away. It came off in a scab, bringing with it a layer of the crumbling stone. In uncovering the words I was eroding them, but I couldn’t stop. The stone was darker, damp, the words shallow and indistinct. The name was in capitals. An elongated rectangle of a name.

The breeze gusted stronger, blowing hair across my face; I pushed it back behind my ears. Then I remember a curious feeling of stillness, as if the breeze stopped, as if my heartbeat and breath were suspended for a moment. I did the only thing that I could think to do. I shuffled close. With a fingertip, I followed the loop and curve and rise of the first word. I was like a child again, struggling, tracing letters with a fingertip, forming words with my lips. The long grass brushed at my inner wrist.

and his wife

The stone wore at the pad of my index finger, crumbled softly under pressure.

ELIZABETH

No date, no space for anything more. I was held for a moment in stillness.

Elizabeth.

The beech leaves so new the sun shone right through them. The cool touch of linen to my cheek. The taste of liquorice.

My heart was racing. I shook my head clear. It had been a young woman’s voice that I’d thought I’d heard, the sunshine slipping under the door. I had sensed the presence of a young woman in the room, just out of sight. I had thought to see a young woman standing at the pump, catching up on the day’s news, waiting her turn for the water.
Elizabeth?

I was on my feet and stumbling back off the grave, my hand and arm stinging as if from an electric shock. I backed into a headstone. My hands fumbled behind me for the edge of the stone and caught it. I slipped past it, stumbling away. There was a strong smell of sweet rotting grass, of algae and moss and damp; it caught in my throat and dragged nausea up to meet it. I was weaving my way between the grave mounds, just trying to get away, trying not to throw up, dizzied by a vertiginous slide of images like laundry falling from a high shelf: the static in the air; sunshine streaming under the door on a dull day; a voice. A breath on my neck. Someone in the corner of my vision, waiting.

I’d reached the wall and the wired-shut gate into the woods. I glanced back. The Williams grave: I couldn’t pick it out. But I felt something. On my skin; on the hollow where jaw and throat meet, just beneath the ear: a breath drawn. Someone about to whisper in my ear.

I ducked away, desperate, scrambling up the gate. Wire sank into the ball of my thumb. I swore and lifted my hand free, the metal pulling from the flesh, the pain jarring all the way up to my shoulder. I dropped down onto the soft earth on the far side, pressing the cut to my mouth, digging in my pockets with my left hand in the hope of a tissue, stumbling on. The woods were dark.

I slithered down the bank. Birds rose cawing overhead. Stumbling downhill, I grabbed one-handed at saplings and tree trunks, tongue hard against the raw metallic harshness of the cut. Brambles tore at my clothes. I was going too fast, almost blind, not thinking. My foot snagged on something and I went headlong. There was a moment before landing, a moment suspended in the fall, both hands flung out in front of me, the darkness blurring, and I was thinking, this could end really badly, this could end stupidly, my neck broken, my head staved in, blood drying in the leaf mould, and no one would know to look for me here, and Mark would be ringing and ringing my mobile, and it would be a really stupid way to die, and Cate would grow up and she wouldn’t have a mum, not on any birthday, not on the day her first baby was born, and that just can’t happen to her.