Anarchy (32 page)

“Why?”

The woman took a while to think about it as she worked on her other boot. “The snow, at first. You couldn't get to the shops. Places were cut off. Then, I don't know. Freezing pipes, power lines down, things like that. Supply problems. Falmouth's on the coast, of course, so they could get some things in that way, but still. They'll probably be gone.”

Marina wasn't sure she understood, but this version of Gwen wasn't as easy to put questions to as the proper one. “Horace wouldn't let things like that bother him,” she said, although she was thinking,
But he stopped coming to see me.

“Well, that's good to know.”

“You said you'd take me there. You said that's where we're going.”

“We will. Yes. But.” She wriggled on the sacks, folding one into a pillow. She seemed almost too tired to speak. “I've seen some terrible things on my way here. We might not find anyone there. Or it might be worse if we do find someone, the wrong people. You need someone to look after you properly.”

“I'm not going back to the house.”

“Marina.”

“No. I'm not. I'm never going to just sit and wait and be alone like that again.”

“I could come with you.”

“No. Anyway, Holly wouldn't let you.”

“Who's Holly?

“She guards the gate. She already killed people who tried to come in. I don't know who they were. I'm sure she wouldn't actually kill you if I asked her not to, but she won't let anyone past.”

“Is Holly your dog?”

“Dog?” Marina said, baffled.

There was a lengthy silence. Rain began to fall.

“I won't go home.” Marina pulled her knees up to her chest. “Horace will be there, it's where he lives. Anyway, you're supposed to guide me. Or if you don't, I'll find it on my own. I'm not a child anymore.”

“All right.”

“Gwen wouldn't have tried to stop me. She always said one day I'd make my own way in the world.”

“Did she.”

“I've only just started. I'll learn what to do. If we can't find Horace, I'll figure it out by myself.”

“All right, Marina.”

“But we will. He told me he'd always be my friend. Lots of times. It's just that he can't use his boat.”

“Marina?”

“What?”

“We'll go there. Together. Don't worry.”

A cold and calloused hand patted her foot.

The sacks were scratchy against her skin. Still, it felt good to lie down. The threat of more tears seemed to have passed. They lay together quietly while the rain strengthened, listening to its familiar monologue instead.

Later, the woman asked: “Don't you want to try and sleep?”

“I'm too hungry to sleep.”

“I know what you mean. I had some nights like that until I got used to it. We'll find something tomorrow. Try not to think about it.”

“Is it always like this here?”

The woman rolled over in her nest of sacking and cardboard and straw and dirt. It was getting very dark outside by now, the clouds heavy and the evening drawing on. Marina almost couldn't see the outline of her new companion, only an arm's length away. “What do you mean?”

“Living in houses like this. Being hungry. Daddy always explained that our house was different from everywhere else but I didn't think it would be like this. It's not like things I've read.”

“Oh, I see. No, this isn't— Everything used to be quite different. I used to . . .”

The rain drummed steadily above them.

“What?”

The woman sighed. “I used to live in a normal house. Nicer than normal, I suppose. I used to be warm. Dry. Clean. Food everywhere. That's a strange thought, isn't it? You could just open the fridge and there'd be food in it. Or walk down the street and buy some. Beans from Africa or wherever, just down the road. That seems wrong, when you think about it.”

Marina was still trying to puzzle out what Africa had to do with it when the woman added, “It's like a dream now. Forty-three years. Like I dreamed the whole thing.”

“Gawain said something like that.”

When the woman spoke again her voice had changed. In the dark, when she was just a voice, she wasn't like Gwen at all, not even slightly.

“What did he say?”

“That it would be like waking up from a dream. Or he said it would be like remembering something you'd tried very hard to forget.”

The woman didn't move or make a sound for a while, so Marina went on. “I can imagine that. You know that feeling when you think of something you did or said once, really embarrassing or stupid things, and you have to make a little noise and sort of push them down out of the way again? Imagine if you couldn't. If they kept coming back up.”

At first she thought the pattern of the rain on the roof had changed, but after a minute or two she realized the new noise was coming from inside, from the body in the dark.

She shuffled closer and raised her head. The choked sniffs became a little more distinct.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” the answer came, in a watery, broken voice she couldn't imagine ever mistaking for Gwen's. “I'll never be all right.”

“What's wrong?” She patted around tentatively and found wet and greasy hair.

“Did he try to forget me?” A cold hand found hers and pressed it to a cold cheek.

“Gawain?”

“Yes. Gawain. I wasn't very nice to him.”

Marina found it strange being in the presence of someone else's grief. She'd always thought it was the other way around: children were sad and adults did the comforting. She couldn't work it out.

“I don't remember him saying anything about his pretend mother not being nice.”

The woman didn't answer again. Her stillness was terribly bleak. “Sorry,” Marina added. “You seem nice to me.”

“Actually,” the woman said, though it was more like a whisper. “Let's not talk about it.”

So she didn't; but she kept her hand where it was. The woman shivered against her palm for a while.

“I'm so glad I found you,” she said eventually, in a proper whisper. Marina could barely hear it over the weeping of the sky.

• • •

“Marina?”

“Mm?”

“Were you asleep?”

“Almost.”

“Sorry.”

“It's okay. I'm not feeling so hungry now. It goes in waves.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Okay.”

“Do you know anything about God?”

Marina shifted. The padding of the sacks wasn't very thick and the floor beneath was hard.

“I thought that was all made up.”

“Oh.”

“Wasn't it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Horace can probably explain.” She'd been thinking about what his house would be like as she dozed in the dark. He'd never actually mentioned beds, as far as she could remember, but she felt sure it would have them.

“Was he the one who told you it was all made up?”

“I can't remember. I thought everyone just knew.”

Marina heard things being shuffled around nearby. “You were right, I should have taken the wet clothes off right away. I can't get warm now.”

“The rain's stopped, though.”

They listened together.

“I talked to my sister,” the woman said. “On a broken phone. She died fifteen years ago.”

“What was she like?”

“Iggy? She was . . . Fiery. Passionate. She was always angry about something.”

“Not like you.”

“No. Not like me.”

“You're not at all like Gwen either.”

“No. She was always so happy, wasn't she?”

“Not always, not really.”

“I think she was. Compared to most people. She'd worked out the secret of it.”

“She's not dead too, is she? I saw her drown, but it wasn't really her at all. She spoke to me through that telephone.”

“I was told she was worse than dead.”

“What does that mean? Who said that?”

“The woman in the river.”

Marina felt the bad memories rising, inching up like the tide.

“She's a liar.”

“You're her daughter,” the woman said, “aren't you.”

“I never knew her. She went away before I could remember. Everyone told me I didn't have a mother.”

“Have you talked to people who've died before?”

“No. I never knew you could do that.”

Marina thought the woman had dozed off, but then she said:

“Neither did I.”

“I think it was the man I told you about. The one who took the acorn. I thought he probably wasn't really a man. He was the one who made me use the telephone.”

“That's why I asked.”

“Why what?”

“About God.”

“Oh.”

Marina was sleepier than she'd guessed. She felt it coming over her, reassuringly like the way it always had before. She remembered Gwen sitting in the chair with yarn and a needle at bedtime, fixing holes in Marina's sweater, laughing and calling herself
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.

“She said Gav can make everything all right again. He has to give something back. That's what she told me to tell him. Then everything'll go back the way it was.”

“Who says?”

“Iggy. Ygraine. My sister.”

All these other people were going fuzzy in her thoughts.

“What's your name?”

“Hmm? Oh. Iseult.”

“Like in the story.”

“Yes.”

“We have a beautiful book with that story in it. I always loved the pictures of her. With her long red curly hair.” Now she was recalling Gwen's voice reading the thousand-times-repeated words while she lay in bed.
“In the faraway county of Cornwall, all surrounded by the sea”—That's not far away at all, Marina, that's where we live!—“there was once a castle all surrounded by the sea as well, and in the castle there was a king who loved to sail. . . .”

“Marina?”

“Mm?”

“That would be good, wouldn't it? If everything went back to how it was, like Iggy said? But with us all together?”

“Iggy's your sister.”

“Yes.”

“Who died.”

“Yes.”

“It sounds odd. I don't understand how you can talk to someone if they're dead.”

“Neither do I. I don't know very much at all, it turns out.”

“You're like me, then.”

“And everyone else.”

“Should we try going to sleep now?”

“Probably. Yes.”

25

M
arina woke many times in the dark, each time thinking she must have been sleepwalking. She'd slept often enough in places other than her bed. They'd made camps in different rooms, sometimes in the stables. On summer nights they'd put her father's old tent up in the garden or out in the fields if the ground was dry. But now she woke not knowing where she was at all, not even sure she could actually be awake. When the first guesses at daylight eventually appeared around her and she saw that she was sharing a grimy, smelly storeroom with a naked and grotesquely bedraggled version of Gwen, she had to reconstruct everything from the previous day piece by implausible piece, testing each memory carefully to see whether it bore the weight of actuality.
I'm not Gwen, no, I'm Gwen's sister. I came to find her and Gavin too. I'm his mother, not his real mother but he thought I was. Oh, God, so they left you too. Yes, Gawain, yes, him, oh, God. We'll go and find him together. You and I. O God in heaven.
She felt as if she'd perhaps gone to sleep and woken up inside a book, like Alice. But (as the light strengthened) there were the clothes hanging up, lined with drying mud, and (she sat up) there was the hunger too, waking up with her.

The woman—Iseult, like in the story, though her hair was dark and she didn't look like a princess at all—slept unquietly. Her lips twitched and made little sounds like seeds of words. Marina got up quietly and crept outside to pee and taste fresh air. The door creaked, making Iseult frown as if annoyed, but she didn't wake up.

The world looked a bit like one of Marina's own paintings of imaginary landscapes, all grey and murky blue because she always ended up getting the paints for sea and sky and grass mixed together. She was surprised again by how cramped it was. She'd always thought the world beyond the Pendurra gates must be vast, stretching off interminably like the sea, but the space behind the hut was hemmed in by shapeless walls of wet plant matter.

Something rustled among it, drawing her eye.

“Ahem,” said a muffled voice, from low down in the same direction.

Marina had been about to squat. She flinched instead, looking around.

“Ahem. Most rare and excellent lady. Were I practiced in doffing, and had I cap upon my head, I would at this instant doff my cap. Oblige me by considering the act performed.”

She couldn't see anyone. The voice was apparently buried in the hedge. She leaned toward it nervously. “Hello?”

“You might also honor me by taking a step in the direction of the approaching sunrise. We small folk struggle to make ourselves heard over the longer distances, and it would be unseemly if I were compelled to shout.”

She looked down near her feet, where the voice appeared to be coming from. “Who's there?”

“Now I've alarmed you. A woeful performance, I admit. A catastrophe of courtesy. May I entreat you in the name of your better nature not to show me a clean pair of heels at once? I confess that my address came off doltish, but I assure you, fine lady, it was long debated, and most sincerely meant.”

“I can't see you,” Marina said. “Where are you?”

The matted base of the hedge rustled again. “Concealment is the safest habit, by tradition. Not to mention experiment. You'll forgive me if I decline to abandon it. However, I may inform you that you are facing me directly as we speak.” She squinted into the shadows. “A gratifying arrangement, since it affords me full view of the gracious proportions of your person. The dawn itself acknowledges your loveliness. Or will, when it finally gets here.”

She looked back toward the hut. “Gwen?” she called uncertainly, and then corrected herself: “Iseult?” She remembered something about avoiding people. Intimidated by the breezy stillness all around, her call was hardly loud enough to carry to the door.

“What you can't see you fear,” the muffled voice said. It sounded like a jack-in-the-box talking with the lid closed. “Just, politic, sensible. In this case, though, that same native sagacity will surely compel you to put your understandable anxieties aside. Merely consider: if I had intended you any mischief, would I not have perpetrated it some hours ago, while you slept in maiden innocence and defenselessness? You
are
maiden, aren't you? By the by? Since the topic arises?”

There might have been something more solid among the shadows and the wet grass, a small dark shape camouflaged by foliage. She crouched slowly, keeping her distance.

“Confessed, confessed,” the voice prattled on. “It's an indelicate question. On nodding terms with vulgarity, if one were absolutely candid. What can I say? Fine speeches aside, I'm a vulgar fellow. There. Accused out of my own mouth. The shoe is tanned and stitched and fits me as snug as you like. Guilty. Still. Ahem.”

“I thought we were alone,” Marina said. “Is that you? In the bushes there?”

“Shame mortifies me, good lady. Turn it which way I can, the meaning of your question remains obscure to my small wit. Assure yourself that I would reply in a snap”—something tiny clicked, like a dry twig breaking—“if it were otherwise. Perhaps if you would deign to approach a little, as I suggested on—”

“I don't want to come any closer.”

“Ah. You are, if I may say so, categorical. Well. No doubt my voice will benefit from the exercise.”

“Are you one of the little people? Gwen said you were all in hiding.”

“The conversation is a rare honor, to be sure. I feel the privilege very deeply. Very deeply. Indeed, so sensible am I of the condescension you show me by prolonging our interview that it pains me to insist . . . to reiterate . . .”

Marina glanced over her shoulder again, remembering what Iseult had said about doing the talking if they met anyone. As she did so, she noticed she wasn't even dressed.

“Oh no. I haven't got my clothes. Let me go and see if anything's dried.”

“No!” Marina had stood up straight; the flustered squeak stopped her. “Hold your ground! Pardon an unvarnished negative, but no! Stand fast. Whoa. There.” Startled by the change in the voice's tone, she'd stayed where she was. “So. Your, ah, modesty does you great credit. An underrated virtue. A, ah.” It seemed to be struggling to recover its fluency. “A maidenly quality. One might say. A virginal attainment. But I, ah, we should both be the poorer were you to allow it to truncate our tête-à-tête. Fatally. A mortal blow, you see. Turn your back even once and we can speak no more. By what frail threads, and so forth. There, now. There. The crisis passes.”

Marina hesitated, feeling suddenly self-conscious. She crossed her arms over her chest.

“You mean you'll disappear if I turn round?”

“Crudely, yes. In a nutshell. So it might seem to a neutral observer, if one were present, which of course would be an impossibility, but let that rest.”

“I didn't know,” she said, not sure what to do. She wished Iseult would wake up. She was surprised all the talking hadn't disturbed her. “I've never talked to anyone like this before.”

“Then I will redouble my efforts to leave you with only the happiest of associations when you reflect on our encounter in future years. And, on the subject of first occasions. Ahem. On the matter of unprecedented conversation. May I refer my inquiry to your attention? Once again?”

“That must be why hardly anyone sees the little people anymore. Is it? Gwen said it used to happen all the time, but then it stopped.”

“Gracious lady. The night wastes on. Time, though infinite, is paradoxically also short, and, to be blunt, getting shorter.” It was still murky overhead, but the shape hidden in the base of the hedge seemed to show itself a fraction more clearly. Its voice turned up a notch, rattling with impatience. “At the risk of giving offense where none was offered, permit me to remind me of what you cannot have failed to note yourself, to wit, that in the course of our dialogue thus far you have presented me with not less than six questions, perhaps more if one were to relax one's grammatical precision a hair, the majority of which I have done my best to answer according to my best estimate of their intended sense. Whereas. Whereas I, you will recall, excluding merely rhetorical flourishes which not even the driest pedant would attempt to class under the heading of the interrogative, have limited myself to one. One merely. The singular. The bare minimum. One question, posed with the utmost simplicity. Unambiguous, straightforward of purport, admitting of only two possible answers, mutually exclusive, and neither taxing you further than a single syllable. Justice, sweet lady! Justice itself bids you recompense me with that syllable, before you enmesh me in extravagant discourses of a historical nature. Daybreak would be upon us before I'd so much as composed the preamble. Seize the moment! Redress the balance! Favor me with a solitary word! Speak!”

The voice had almost squeaked itself hoarse by the end of its outburst. Marina heard a hint of anger in it. She fell back a step.

“What do you want me to say?”

“By all that's green and grows in shit! Are you or are you not a virgin?”

She glanced over her shoulder again, troubled. “You mean—”

“A virgin! A maiden! An unplucked flower. An unsullied stream. A white sheet. A corked bottle, a cold fish, an intact proposition, a what-have-you. Are you essayed? Are you broken?” Marina had an uncomfortably abrupt memory of odd conversations with Gwen, almost the only times she could think of when it seemed like Gwen wasn't saying what she really meant. “Have you conversed criminally? Have you made the beast with two backs? Have you known boy, girl, animal, or object inanimate? Sweet mother night, how hard can an easy question be?”

“I'm only fourteen,” she mumbled, edging away from the agitation in the voice. In the stories the faeries or little people or Sidhe turned nasty very quickly.

“You won't answer?”

“I don't—”

“You refuse? You deny even a yes or no?”

“I'm going,” she said, and made to turn on her heel, and couldn't.

It was as though her feet were fastened to the ground.

The wet leaves flapped and parted. It was still difficult to see, but perhaps a thing like a small animal stood up among them.

“Gwen!” she shouted, forgetting herself, and then, “Iseult!”

“Now now. Don't alarm yourself.”

“What's happening?” She tried to pick up her foot, to take a normal step. Her legs wouldn't obey.

“I answered you as fairly as your questions admitted. You haven't answered me at all. Our conversation is incomplete, accordingly, and may not now be broken off until I am compensated. Rules are rules.”

“I didn't mean—”

“Never mind. Permit the condition of your hymen to remain veiled in the prudent mystery proper to maidens' matters. I'll take a better payment now.”

There was definitely something like a tiny bulbous man, strangely silhouetted, as if disguised by a cloak and hat made out of dust. His voice sounded sharper. The jack-in-the-box had been sprung.

“A keepsake,” he said. “A memento. Some piece of you to call my own. There's a thing finer than all my fine words together. And afterward we shall each reckon ourselves fairly dealt with and be on our separate ways. Though you might have selected your companion more wisely, I'll tell you that for nothing. To use a rustic metaphor, if you hitch your cart to a horse that's got nowhere to go, nowhere is where you'll end up.”

“Iseult!” she called.

“Precisely. Now, gentle lady. Here's a question worth its weight in cobwebs. What payment shall I exact? What, what?”

“Wake up!” Her mouth felt slow, treacly, like her legs. She tried to bend down to fend off the advancing thing and found that she wanted to do the opposite, to keep as far away from it as possible.

“A toenail? A corn? A handful of down? But then, why set the sights so cravenly low? If ever there were an occasion for boldness, this, surely, were it. An eyelash? A tooth! A yellow tooth, for the pommel of my bodkin or the heel of my boot. Or! Or, or.” The voice paused for a deep inhalation. “A hair! A golden hair, to wear around my waist. Wouldn't that be fine?”

“Help!” Marina shouted, her throat unclogging at last. She heard a shuffle from inside the hut. “Out here!”

“Tsk, tsk. She wakes. More's the pity. Alas and alack and woe to us both, my hand is forced.” Marina flinched from a sudden sharp pain in her heel.

“Ow!”

“Marina?”

“Gwenny! I'm outside!”

“Stand down,” sighed the miniature voice. “Your toll is paid. A satisfactory exchange. Though I, for one, will always wonder what might have been.”

“Are you okay?”

“I'm here!” Marina shouted, but already she could feel her legs thawing. She looked down and saw the blurry shape losing the little distinctness it had ever had. The voice was suddenly faint and tinny.

“A red pearl of your half-blood. I'll sip it from a silver thimble and toast your memory. Rare and precious, by the bouquet, though a smidgen too salty for the finest vintage. I blame the mother.”

“What's wrong?” Marina found she could twist around. In her panic she'd forgotten the name of the woman who stood looking exhausted and confused in the doorway of the hut, clutching a handful of dirty clothes in front of her. “Is someone there?”

She backed away from the hedge, looking around. “There was—”

“Is that blood? You've hurt yourself.”

She looked down and saw a red trickle.

“Let me see.” Iseult, that was her name. She crouched by Marina's foot. “There's something in your heel. Did you step on something?”

“No. Did I?”

Iseult bent close and then carefully plucked a tiny spike from the wound. More blood beaded around it. She held it in her palm for them to look at in the spreading light.

“That's a hawthorn,” Marina said, taking it and rolling it in her fingers.