J (20 page)

Sibella kept her mother’s papers in a little suitcase under her bed, not daring to read through them in case her mother returned and discovered they’d been tampered with. After her father died she was cared for by the boy she’d been brought up with – a relation ten years her senior, she wasn’t sure from which side of the family, who longer ago than she could remember had come to live with them by the sea for his health’s sake (though he wasn’t allowed
to go out and breathe the sea air), a gangling, morose, pale-faced fellow with a talent for woodwork (he took over Sibella’s father’s lathe as automatically as he took over her) and a secret love of syncopated music. When she was old enough, they married. It was never really discussed; it was simply assumed that that was what they would do. Who else was there for either of them?

And in most regards it made no material difference to the life they’d been living before they married.

She had already, in line with
ISHMAEL
, changed her name from Hannaford to Cronfeld, and as her cousin Howel had changed his to Cohen she didn’t feel she had to make too big a change a second time.

On the eve of the wedding Sibella crept out of the cottage with her crazy mother’s papers and threw them into the sea.

Because she was a little crazy herself she no sooner threw them into the sea than she knew she shouldn’t have. What if a page was washed back up into the village on the tide and found by a fisherman? What if it was swept up into the blowhole and spewed out, paragraph by paragraph, for walkers to find? She scrambled down the rocks to see what she could rescue, then remembered she couldn’t swim. There was nothing she could do but hope. As far as she knew, no page ever was recovered from the water in Port Reuben. But from that time forward she lived in a sort of half-absent dread of something turning up, still just about legible, on a roller heading for the West Australian coast or on an ice floe in the South Atlantic, the precise consequences of which for her family could not be foreseen, but without question they would be disastrous.

If you want something to be destroyed for ever, her mother had warned her when she was small, you have to set fire to it and watch it burn away to nothing. It was a frightening time, the little girl knew, though she didn’t understand what made it so. Her father had never been more agitated. He wouldn’t allow the radio to be played and if anyone knocked on their door they
didn’t open it. Once, when they heard people coming, he held her to him and put his hand over her mouth. ‘If you aren’t quiet,’ he told her, when the visitors had gone, ‘we’ll have to put you in a drawer.’

She thought she heard her parents crying in the night.

Her mother’s words about the finality of fire stayed in her mind. She asked her if fire burned everything.

‘Almost everything.’

‘So what doesn’t it burn?’

Her mother never took time to deliberate. She had an answer to every question ready, as though she knew it was going to be asked. ‘Love and hatred,’ she said. ‘But I might be wrong about love.’

‘How can you burn love?’ Sibella wanted to know.

‘By burning the people who feel it.’

‘So why can’t you burn hatred?’

‘Because hatred exists outside of people. I liken it to a virus. People catch it. Disgust the same.That’s another thing that’s flameproof. It lives for ever. So my advice to you is never to inspire it.’

‘Love or disgust?’

‘Ha! The cynical answer is “both”. But I am not a cynic. Just a pessimist. So my prayer for you is that you will inspire love, but not disgust.’

‘How do I do make sure I don’t?’

Her mother looked at her and this time thought a while before answering. Then she laughed her crazy woman’s laugh. ‘You can’t!’

It was because she feared her mother was right and that hatred and disgust were indestructible by flame that Sibella threw the book into the sea. It had disgusted her father, it disgusted her mother even as she was writing it, and in so far as she could understand its ravings, it disgusted Sibella. So the bottom of the sea, where it could disgust the fish, was the best place for it.

As for what her mother told her about fire, she tried to live by it thereafter. She sat on the cliffs above the cottage and burned
things – papers, letters, photographs, handkerchiefs, wild flowers. Sometimes, after she was married, she thought she would have burned her jewellery had it been flammable.

She had a lot of time, while her husband worked on his lathe and Kevern was at school, in which to worry and remember, though she couldn’t remember ever coming to Port Reuben which was not, her mother had once inadvertently let slip, her place of birth.

‘So where was my place of birth?’ she asked.

‘Somewhere else.’

‘Where?’

‘Somewhere far.’

‘Was it nice?’

‘Nowhere’s nice.’

‘Why did we leave?’

Her mother ran her fingers through her distracted hair. ‘It seemed a good idea at the time.’

Her father overheard. ‘It
was
a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘It still is a good idea. We’re alive, aren’t we? Just don’t answer any questions.’

‘What questions?’

‘And don’t
ask
so many questions either.’

And that was all they told her. Her mother kissed her on the head and returned to the kitchen table to go on writing the book that never could and never would be finished. There wasn’t much talking in the house. Her father, too, preferred silence to conversation and work to pleasure. Both her parents seemed never to want to finish what they were doing, as though the moment they finished they’d be finished themselves.

She remembered how her mother worked, with a bright light to ease her depression always shining in her face, surrounded by books (which to Sibella’s sense only made the depression more intense), twisting loops of her hair around her forefinger, her head propped between two fists when she was thinking, and then her
mouth opening and closing as she wrote, occasionally laughing like a hyena, though whether at something she had read or something she had written, something that amused her or something that made her angry – because crazy people laughed when they were angry as well as when they were amused – Sibella was never sure.

‘Don’t read over my shoulder, Sibella,’ her mother would tell her when she tried to find out, ‘you’re blocking my light,’ but in so absent-minded a manner that Sibella felt it was all right to stay where she was and go on reading. She understood little of it at the time, not even the drawings and photographs her mother glued into the book, and wouldn’t have sworn that she understood it later when she had all the time in the world to absorb its meanings. But a few elusive phrases lodged in her mind – ‘when they saw a moneylender they saw a bloodsucker, for those two defiled substances, money and blood, circulate alike’; ‘whoever cleans bodies is hated irrationally for doing what needs to be done’; ‘let my child be brought up to the highest level of civilisation, she will still always be thought of as a divine executioner, the child of divine executioners, and must always live in expectation of execution herself ’ – and they were sufficient to persuade her that it had to be destroyed.

ii

Aged forty-five, and appearing older – while not growing crooked like her father, she had never possessed an iota of her mother’s looks – she tried to inspire love, as her mother had hoped she would, and had an almost affair with Madron Shmukler the village butcher. ‘You are nothing to write home about yourself,’ she told him when he expressed surprise that she attracted him given that she wasn’t at all pretty and not remotely his type. He too was forty-five and looked older. They didn’t bother to go through the routine of discussing their otherwise-engaged spouses, it was all
so predictable. He would deliver meat to the cottage and when the coast was clear they would climb the cliffs separately, as though going in different directions – though there was nowhere for either of them to go – and then meet on Port Reuben Head, which gave them a good view of anyone approaching. Here they would sit on the grass, surprised to be attracted to each other, and half-heartedly – no, quarter-heartedly, she thought – make companionable if perfunctory contact. He would put his hands on her breasts, which were still surprisingly soft under an item of clothing he was unable to name, and she would put her hands inside his trousers. What she found was surprisingly soft too.

Could you call that an affair? Neither of them thought so but they went on doing it, intermittently, until they were too old to climb the cliffs.

She had picked him out at the start of it because he was a butcher and she wanted someone to talk about blood to. Did he feel it polluted him?

‘Do I feel it
what
?’

‘What I want to know is whether butchers feel unclean. Do they fear they have dirty hands?’

He took his own hands out of her shirt – was it a shirt? – and examined them. ‘Look for yourself,’ he said. ‘You have to wash a lot in my line of work.’

‘No, I mean morally unclean. Spiritually . . .’

‘Cutting chops?’

‘Slaughtering . . .’

‘I don’t slaughter. I’m more like an undertaker. The animals come to me already dead, but instead of burying them I cut them up and sell them to you.’

Theirs was first and foremost a commercial relationship, he didn’t want her to forget. Though later, as a sign of his maturing fondness, he didn’t charge her.

He reached for the worn handbag she carried everywhere with her, though she kept almost nothing in it. ‘Same with a tanner,’
he said. ‘Whoever treated the leather for this old thing didn’t actually skin the animal.’

She didn’t like the way he handled her bag. ‘But you’re still a link in the chain,’ she said.

He stared at her in bafflement. What did she mean? Who was she? What was he doing with her? She was small and round, with flickering blue eyes and discoloured ping-pong-ball cheeks, and wore old-fashioned clothes. She reminded him of Miss Klug, one of his old primary-school teachers, unless what she reminded him of was how Miss Klug had made him feel – embarrassed to be her favourite, but safe. He was nothing to write home about himself, as Sibella had reminded him, but his butcher’s brawn and innocent blue eyes had excited a few women over the years, and but for his being married and having four sons, he wouldn’t have been embarrassed to be seen with any of them. Sibella, though, was not a woman he wanted anyone to know about. Was she crazy?

‘A link in what chain?’ he asked.

She laughed, reminding herself suddenly of her mother. ‘The defilement chain.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘Do you feel that the part you play in killing animals – I know you don’t actually
kill
them – I take your point about undertakers and tanners – but do you feel that there’s blood on your hands and that people treat you differently because of it?’

He wondered if that was the longest question he’d ever been asked. He flicked away an ant that was crawling up her leg. ‘Why would people treat me differently?’

She remembered the Untouchables of India, photographs of whom her mother found in magazines and pasted into her crazy person’s history. Their lowly status, according to her mother, had many explanations but none so telling as their original association with blood. They were their society’s ritual murderers, and as such considered unclean. The Burakumin of Japan – information about
whom her mother had also collected – the same. Butchers, undertakers, slaughtermen, spillers of blood, killers of gods. And the taboo against touching them could never be broken. They had death on them, and whoever had death on him was outcast. Illogical, because someone had to deal with the dead, the tasks they performed were indispensable and even sacred, but logic had nothing to do with defilement.

‘Because they can’t forgive the blood,’ Sibella said.

Madron shook his head. ‘Well that’s what you say, but they forgive mine fine enough.’

She shrugged but returned to the subject often. It almost became their love talk. Death, defilement, ritual murderers, sacred executioners.

‘Put another record on, girl,’ he would say to her.

And she would try. Sometimes, lying with her head against his chest, listening to the hungry screeching of the seagulls, looking up at the undersides of their ugly, torpedo bodies, she would almost succeed.

But she was never free of the sensation that she disgusted him. Which was strange because it was he – a man who dabbled in blood for a living – who was supposed to disgust her.

She loved him, after a fashion, nonetheless. And missed him more intensely than she thought she would when he died, more intensely even than she missed her parents.Was that, she wondered, because in their agitated distance from her they had been half dead already. She could barely remember her mother’s disappearance. As for how her father died, she realised with shame that she didn’t know. Howel told her it had happened. That she did remember. ‘I’ll be looking after you now,’ he said.

Poor Madron had a heart attack, that was all. One of those quiet ones in the bath. She hoped she hadn’t been instrumental in bringing it on. Not by making love, which between them had never been strenuous, but by making him feel dirty. Had she talked his heart into stopping?

She would have liked to kiss his perplexed brow one more time but she understood she couldn’t see him. She suffered the terrible fate of all mistresses of married men in that she didn’t dare show her face at his funeral.

‘Don’t show your face.’ Where had she heard that before?

It was on the seventh anniversary of his death – almost certainly not coincidentally – that she set fire to her fingers.

TWO

Friends

i

‘W
E SHOULD NEVER
have gone away,’ Kevern said to Ailinn when they were inside.

She felt he was blaming her, though the trip had been his idea.

‘Can you tell yet if anything’s been taken?’ she asked.

‘It’s not what’s been taken. I have nothing it would be worth anyone’s while to take. It’s what’s been
seen
that concerns me.’