Snake Ropes (26 page)

I whisper, ‘There’s something you want to say. So say it.’ I put my hands over my mouth.

She stands like a tree, her feet planted like them have roots. ‘I’m the only one what knows, Mary. Know more than you do, an’ that’s not right—’

‘No, stop it …’

‘It were too hard.’

I stare at her face, a pale moon behind the fence. She can
help me. I pinch my hand and can’t feel it. I want her to go away. I want her to keep talking. I want to grip her hand, for her to pull me out of here. Kelmar’s face is a floating moon, it’s the only real thing I can see in this dark. Flashes of pictures flicker in my mind. Ice in the cold room. Soot on the walls. Pictures from Shadow Mary. Barney, newborn, screaming in Kelmar’s arms.

My voice says, ‘Help me.’

‘Mary, I know.’ She reaches a finger between the slats in the gate.

‘This is … no … no … dun want this.’ I shake my head. ‘Dun … just say it.’ I put my hands over my ears.

‘It’s best you remember.’

‘Why?’

She leans her hands on the fence, her mouth talks in the gap. ‘Because it were that tall man and him got out. I saw Barney in hims eyes when we took him to the Thrashing House. I saw, as well, you dun remember him.’

‘Dun say …’

‘I’ve searched east and west for you …’

Clouds pile up high. Black underneath.

Kelmar says, ‘Come on.’ She draws out a bright metal knife from her coat. Sticks it in the gate hinge. ‘You’re coming home with me.’ She twists the knife. Wood cracks.

I sink down in wet grass. Look up at the clouds what bunch, scrumple, bundle, spin. The gate splinters, cracks, her knife twists it open, the planks break, crack.

Kelmar, in the garden, with me. Her voice, ‘Can you stand?’

She pulls me up on my feet. The ground shifts. Ice through my legs and hips. Kelmar’s strong hands pull me through the broken gate, my bag knock knocks, the keys inside clunk.

Kelmar pulls me, fast walking.

Keys unlock. Rattle. Turn in my head.

Fast uphill, her arm, strong under my shoulder.

The cold air unravels twin hairdo.

Red ribbon, child’s play, falls away.

She pulls me along. Her mouth talking, telling me Mam said I were contagious, she took everyone in. She says, ‘I know what the shape of a baby is like, and her belly, it just weren’t the right shape.’

Unlocked.

A picture from Shadow Mary. Mam makes cushion bump, stitches it for her belly. Ties wadding around, makes belly big, bigger. Wears bump dress. Pretends pregnant. Me indoors for months. Belly swollen like moon. Not allowed outside. Doors locked up. Mam saying, ‘Mary’s terrible sick, get away, you’ll catch it.’

Kelmar’s voice, saying Mam locked us in the cold room so I’d be numbed with ice and not scream. Her words scratch the inside of my head. I’m remembering screams, trapped in my throat. My voice whispers, ‘The blank dark. Full of
your
blue eyes.’

Kelmar pulls me up the hill. The ground is too fast under my feet.

‘Stop.’ I stand still. ‘I’m not here.’

Kelmar lets go of me. ‘It’s shock. It’ll pass.’

I stand dead.

The lie I’ve been telling myself for three years …

‘Move!’ Kelmar’s arm around my shoulders.

I fall. The grass tilts. Washes me down a hill and up another in Kelmar’s arms. Track cuts through grass. Sand path. Low gate. Pebbles.

Front door opening.

Indoors.

Blanket chair softness. Think warm, but shaking cold. More blankets. Kelmar’s hands wrap and wrap and wrap. Her voice, saying there and there and there.

Kelmar’s blue eyes in the cold room.

The screech of a baby.

Mam saying him were hers.

Him were only ever mine.

Not my brother, my son.

The clouds pile up in the night sky above the rocky island in the distance. Every hair on my body is raised. My fingers are covered in dirt and scratches.

At the edge of the water I reach out my hands to rinse them, but the water glows bright blue. Too bright. I snatch back my hands. Just beneath the surface there’s seaweed, entwined and tangled. The seaweed is threaded through skeletons of fish, their eyes dissolved away to blank holes. The seaweed frays on the surface, the ends of it are dead strands. The small waves wash over it, fizz and bubble, change colour from blue to white to cream to brown. Strands of the seaweed move, coming out of the water, rippling over the stones, the strands are moving towards my feet, thickening …

I step back. The seaweed twists and coils, thickens, advancing towards me. I back away, clamber over broken rocks, my heart thudding, towards the caves, over sharp stones and cracked rocks. This is a poisoned shore. The broken rocks around me gleam along the waterline. A decomposing gannet lies in a rock-pool of green water. Streaks of bright colours, the algae is stained pink. I lean down to lift out the dead bird, I want to bury it. But something pulls my gaze away, to a path next to the caves.

A tall male figure stands at the top of the path on the hill. I blink, and he’s gone.

I climb the path, wipe my boots on the grass, which lightens in colour, thins and withers underneath them. I reach the top of the path. No cottages huddle near this shore. Just scrubland. I can’t see the man anywhere.

The Thrashing House stands tall in the distance. A long walk, but from there I can find my way back to Mary’s cottage. Perhaps it’s just the stillness in the air, perhaps it’s relief that I saw the seaweed before it reached my feet and dragged me into the poisoned waters, but my breathing has slowed, and as I look up at the sky I have this feeling that something’s changed. That Mary might have come home.

My hair glows so brightly, I must look like a walking candle as I step along a narrow path in between two peat pits, mounds of peat stacked like bricks, and gashes in the earth. A couple of wooden sleds lean against a stone wall. The air is thick and

still.

I hear distant voices, I take off the coat and use it to cover my hair.

Too late.

A woman’s voice calls out, ‘You. Hidden daughter.’

Walking towards me is the woman who asked my father for the plank, wrapped in a warm coat, a ragged grey shawl over her hair. There’s a younger woman with dark eyes with her. They both have empty round baskets strapped to their backs. They stop, blocking the narrow path.

The plank woman says, ‘I’m Camery. This one’s Chanty. Where you going?’

Chanty folds her arms. ‘Dun you mean, where’s she come from?

I say, ‘Let me pass.’

Camery says, ‘You went in.’

‘Where?’

‘Thrashing House, ‘ent it,’ says Chanty.

‘You’ve got the key,’ says Camery, holding out her hand. ‘Give it to us.’

Chanty says, ‘How’d you get out?’

I open my mouth to say,
Through a door, down a hole. Digging. Then tunnels. Caves
. But my voice doesn’t speak. I try again. I look over my shoulder at the clouds thickening, closer still. ‘I can’t say. Let me pass. There’s a storm coming.’ I step towards them.

‘Give us the key.’

‘I don’t have it.’

‘Well, where—’ says Camery.

Chanty glances at my coat, still over my hair. ‘Course she’s got it.’

I try to say,
I left it inside the lock
, but I can’t. ‘It won’t let me say.’

Camery says, ‘No—’

‘How do you know I was in there?’

‘Kelmar tried to stop you going in, only you slammed the door in her face.’

‘That was Kelmar? Running at me through fog, I thought—’

Chanty yanks my coat off my hair. Both of them step back, stare at my glowing hair, their eyes wide.

‘Must’ve been fearful in there, to do that to you. And you not able to speak of it,’ whispers Camery.

Chanty rummages in the coat pockets. ‘Nothing. What about her dress?’

‘It’s not in my dress.’ I snatch back the coat.

‘We need that key.’

I try to say,
It’s inside the Thrashing House, still in the lock
. But all I can choke out is, ‘I haven’t got it.’

‘We need it.’

I say, ‘You can always go in—’ and my voice won’t say,
the way I came out
.

‘Dun talk chicken shit,’ says Camery. ‘Not going in there. Not done anything wrong.’

‘Neither have I. Well, if you want the key back that badly, maybe you should take—’ My mouth opens and closes – I think,
the door off its hinges
.

They’re both frowning. ‘What’s she trying to say?’

Camery puts her hand on my arm and whispers, ‘What did you see in there? Were it paddles and bats, knives – all them kinds of things?’

‘I saw—’ I can’t say,
ghosts
.

They step back, pale.

Camery says, ‘Poor thing. You can’t even speak it. Were it
fear
did that to your hair?’

I try to say
no
, but it won’t come out.

Camery whistles. ‘Terror did that. So young, to have your hair turned white with shock. How old’re you?’

‘I think … I’m twenty-one, that’s the right age, isn’t it?’

‘You dun know your age?’

‘I must have lost count.’

‘Come to the Weaving Rooms. Tell all us women what happens—’

‘It doesn’t want me to say—’
how to get in or out, what it’s really like inside, or where the key is now
. Again, my mouth won’t speak. ‘I could try to write it down.’

Camery pulls her shawl tightly around her. ‘Do that. Come to the Weaving Rooms. Soon.’

Chanty says, ‘She can’t come to the Weaving Rooms yet. We women have other things to talk of, she knows nothing—’

Camery interrupts, ‘You seen a tall man up this way?’

I turn away and point in the direction of the poisoned shore. ‘There was a man – on the cliff—’

‘We’ll have to walk into the storm then.’

‘No – take shelter – I only saw him for a moment. He could have been any man.’

‘Well any man’s not good enough.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘They probably aren’t—’

‘What’s she meaning?’ Chanty says.

‘Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.’

‘You were. Heard you, I did.’

‘If the men can’t read or write, does that make them more … like beasts?’

Camery says, ‘Than what? Dun see the deadtaker getting hims hands dirtied over a cow being down. Getting that cow up on its feet again, saving it, instead of sitting indoors waiting for folks to die. Our men take care of what needs taking care of.’

‘Don’t they want to read?’

Chanty says, ‘Read what?’

‘Oh.’ ‘What?’

‘No books. You don’t write stories down.’

Chanty says, ‘We’ve plenty stories. Tell them to each other.’

Camery tells me that women read and write – the spinning and knitting stitches they’ve found to work best, about the length of threads it takes to make a cloth, getting the right recipe for lye and about the temperature needed to boil colours into yarn. She tells me that women’s trade has kept all of the islanders alive for generations. She says, ‘You shouldn’t listen to your Mam.’ She folds her arms. ‘Nothing wrong with our men.’

‘You’ve met her?’

Chanty says, ‘Not able to talk about her.’ She opens and closes her mouth. Camery nudges her and they step to the side.

I walk past them, turn and say, ‘It might have been your tall man I saw. All the way down there at the shore. It’s a long walk. Hope you find him.’ I throw the coat over my hair and tramp along the path through cold, still air.

I didn’t realise how long it would take and how far it was – the distance from the peat pits to the Thrashing House, down the path from the cliffs to the beach, and through Mary’s cottage door. The view from my windows at home told me nothing of measurements. Neither did maps or geography books. They talked of inches and miles, gradients and heights, but not how long it takes to cross such a landscape in boots that don’t quite fit.

Mary hasn’t come home.

But someone’s been in here since I left, and they’ve turned over these rooms. The drawers with threads and needles are tipped under the table, the back door is open, knives and forks are mixed in with dry rice and sawdust on the kitchen floor.

In Mary’s bedroom, clothes from the drawers and cupboard are strewn across the floorboards. A box of keys has been scattered all over Mary’s bed.

On top of the keys, a scrawled note on rough white paper reads:

Key thief.
Give it back, Mary.
We know it were you
.

Those distorted faces at the window when I ran out must have come in here, searched the cottage and left it like this. I know how I’d feel if someone had broken into my room and torn up my books – I’d feel rummaged. But these are not
my
things.

I tie back my dimly glowing hair and gather up clothes, small jumpers, socks, trousers in a thick blue fabric, vests. Mary’s underwear, rags, dresses, about five rolls of bandages and a small mirror.

I clean a pot and make porridge, eat a huge bowl of it and it burns my mouth, but I don’t stop eating till the bowl is empty. I wash up the bowl, the spoon and the pot and all the knives and forks from the floor, and sweep up the rice and sawdust.

In the room with the fireplace I put everything away as it was, and sweep the floor behind the front door. Putting the broom down, I open the door to the room with the double bed – Mary’s parents’ room. Nothing’s been touched in here.

A small carved cupboard in the corner holds a jar of buttons, a pair of white gloves, thick fabric covered in patches: they’ve been repaired over and over again. There’s a dusty glass bottle. I take out the stopper and the bitter scent of the forgetting herb coils out into the room. I steady myself and clink the stopper back in.

Flat on one of the cupboard shelves there’s a raised piece of wood. I try to move it. It won’t shift. I take everything out and feel around the edges. I push on it. It clicks down, then opens. A secret compartment in the shelf. Inside there’s a small book with a black cover tied shut with string.

I touch the string around the book, and my fingertips sting – they feel like they’ve been cut, but there’s no blood. I look closer at the string, at the coppery colours twisted through it.
It looks like the moving seaweed from the poisoned shore. I get the white gloves out of the cupboard and put one on, stroke the string and look at the fingertip. It’s tinged yellow, smells of sulphur. I tear off the string.

Two choices. Read. Don’t read.

I sit on the bed and flick through the pages, entries in a tiny, even script.

This is Beatrice’s diary:

I flick forwards, to a few months later. I read:

I went for him, scratched hims face and him grabbed my wrists, still got the bruises, for him is stronger than him looks. I
screamed and cried – how could him touch my daughter how could him touch her how could him
.

But him said I should’ve let him have myself. But I never could have. Him said, what did I expect when she looks so like me?

But though I cried fit to break, him said him would come again for her till I gave him myself
.

I said never never never and said I’d tell the whole island, and that him would be punished
.

Then I said I’d tell all the other tall men, and only then, him spoke less angered
.

Him said on the main land them do prisons and all kinds of torture in prisons and is that what I want for him?

And I said yes. I do want that, I want you to be tortured, I want you to die for what you’ve done to her
.

Him said if I’d let him have myself, him would never have touched her, so that’s what him would say to others if I ever spoke out – him would say that I traded my own daughter
.

So if I speak out, or him speaks out, we will only speak against one another. And where is my daughter in this: she has no words to speak it
.

I have sworn him my silence, so him will let both of us alone, and I never will let her alone again, never when the tall men are here
.