Snake Ropes (7 page)

I pull away. ‘Guilty of what?’

She pulls me back, says, ‘Ask that pair. Them’re calling the tides of us all tonight.’ She’s looking at Valmarie and Kelmar, who stand watching as Da is pushed and shoved and carried up the path by a wave of folks.

Them’re taking him to the Thrashing House.

I’m shoved closer to Valmarie. I elbow through about five folks and yell at her, ‘Dun put Da in there – him has to speak!’

Valmarie says, ‘The others have spoken enough. Your father, her Martyn,’ she nods over at Annie, who lies face down on the sand, her shoulders shaking, ‘my Bill and Kelmar’s Clorey. They took and traded the boys, not theirs to take. A price has to be paid, a judgment made.’

I shout, ‘How do you
know
?’

Valmarie talks loud – she’s telling all of us, ‘Because we called her up. Me and Kelmar called for justice.
For times when you don’t know who is to blame.’
She sounds like she’s singing a
song. Her eyes shine like black glass. ‘We called her up, set her on whoever took our sons. Thought she’d go for the tall men; we even timed it for when they were coming. Only she knew. She went for the fathers. Sent each one mad. And they’ll be punished. We’re the mothers. We have the right.’

Kelmar’s voice hollers, ‘We made Bill, Clorey and Martyn talk before we put them in. Admitted it, all three – gabbled out the truth. The fathers of our boys took them from us. Traded them with the tall men. Our sons are lost to the main land.’

‘No!’ I yell. ‘Them dun take
Barney
—’ I’m shoved further away from Valmarie and Kelmar, between pushing shoulders and nudging elbows and all around me voices are shouting and fretting.

A voice close to my ear says, ‘You’re so like your mother.’ I spin round and it’s the tall man, Langward, here in the crowd. Someone pushes me, I shriek out, ‘Why’re you here? You’ve got a light to flash, call back the boats! Get gone!’ but I can’t see him.

I see Nell and call out, ‘There’s a tall man still here!’ but I’m shoved away from her and she’s lost in the crowd again.

Valmarie and Kelmar see Langward in the middle of the crowd, hims arms outstretched like him is set to walk into the sea, not drowned in a crowd of angered people. Them charge in, shrieking like the owl woman. Them drag him towards the path what leads up the cliffs to the Thrashing House.

At the bottom of the path them turn and face us all. Valmarie’s black hair beats against her pale face in the wind. Langward looks blank, like him has got a mask of hims own face on. The two women hold him firm, though him dun move.

Valmarie’s mouth is a sneer. She calls out, ‘This one,’ she yanks Langward’s arm, ‘doesn’t belong here. And look out there.’
She points a pale hand out to sea, ‘The others were waiting for him, and yet he doesn’t go!’

Voices in the crowd murmur, ‘Thrash … thrash … thrash …’

Valmarie stands tall, her voice a bell, ‘Staying behind, thickened with guilt. His guilt forces him to stay. Was it his idea, did he talk the fathers into trading our sons?’ Shouts and cries shriek all around me in the crowd.

I’m pushed closer. Kelmar shouts, ‘Him is called!’

‘Thrash … thrash … thrash …’

I shout, ‘So take him, but let Da go! Make Da talk!’

Valmarie reaches in and pulls me towards her. She hisses, ‘This is justice. All four sent mad. All four to be thrashed.’ She grips my arm hard and I’m too close to Langward, I flail and scratch her face. Someone tears me away.

Blood runs from the scratch on Valmarie’s cheek.

Her coat falls open and the Thrashing House key hangs from the chain around her neck. I stagger away from her, trembling. Her eyes spark, like there’s some kind of animal living inside her and it wants to bite me. She changes her mind, looks away.

Kelmar stares at Langward’s eyes. Him smirks like this is a game. Kelmar’s mouth opens wide. She says, ‘Mary—’ and stares her moon face at me. She frowns, closes her mouth and grips hard on Langward’s arm.

Her and Valmarie march Langward up the path to the cliffs, towards the Thrashing House. The rest of the crowd follow, Nell, Moira, Camery and Chanty among them, Jek’s joined them as well. Even Merry and a crowd of farmers, other fishermen Da knows. Thems voices low. ‘Thrash … thrash … thrash …’

I kick at the wet sand. There’s a soft creamy owl feather tangled in my hair. I put it in my pocket.

I walk to the edge of the waves. The tall men’s boats are still further away. Langward must have shone that light at them to make them leave. So him wanted to stay
here
.

To look for Barney.

But Langward dun know what goes on in the Thrashing House, else him wouldn’t have let them take him there.

I take the owl feather out of my pocket and put it in the foam of the smallest wave.

‘Bye Da,’ I whisper. ‘Wish I could miss you as much as I should. When you get thrashed, try to turn into something what’ll tell me what you’ve done to Barney, and I’ll be able to miss you a lot more. But if you’ve hurt him, then I’ll smash my way into the Thrashing House, and asylumfodder the ghost of you.’

Through a window upstairs in the corridor I watch the sea in the distance. The night sky blurs in the ripples of the windowpane like deep blue waves.

This corridor is the biggest space in the whole house. I’m pacing. I breathe condensation onto the window, and hide the sky. I walk along the corridor, along the black and white squares that Mum painted on the floorboards, past the closed doors. Mum is in the bedroom behind the second door on the right. Her mood is damp. Doldrums damp. It seeps out from under the door.

I reach the end of the corridor and breathe on the other window. I can blot out the whole island with just five inches of fog.

Stopping outside Mum’s door I listen to … nothing.

I walk with tiny steps, the whole length, and the whole length back. Cover these black and white squares with paper footprints, curled like autumn leaves … like somewhere
outside
might be, thick with an autumn that has no walls. I look down at my toes on the black and white painted squares.

Mum always says I’ll never be able to find my way back to the mainland.

I step on a black square. Both my feet fit inside it. I step onto a white one, balance on one foot. My game of three choices. Forwards, backwards, sideways.

Mum says I wouldn’t know the direction, which way to turn. What to do. Step on a black square. I’ll know when the moment comes for me to spring forwards.

Step back.

I walk forwards, black, white, black, white.

There’s a chill on my ankles as I pass Mum’s room. Whenever I ask her why we left, she says different things each time: ‘The wind blew us here,’ or ‘It was your father’s work,’ depending on what mood she’s in. For years I wished, on the fog I breathe on the windowpanes, for the wind to change and blow us back again, but it never did.

In our home on the mainland, when I was little, I was allowed to come and go to the nearby school. Mum didn’t trust people easily, and she didn’t like to go outside.

Some days she said I wasn’t to go to school, because, ‘It doesn’t feel like a safe day.’ On her unsafe days I’d stay indoors and keep out of her way. I’d play
three choices
. I made up this game after reading one of my storybooks alone, and then hearing Mum read it to me, and listening to how she changed the words. In the real story, the clever daughter always got three choices. My game started with flipping coins, where I’d give myself three things to do. One head and two tails meant I had to do the first choice, two heads and one tail meant the second and any other combination meant the third. I was never good at sums.

Once, on one of her unsafe days, the three choices I gave myself were:

1) stay in bed and read all day,

2) go into the back garden and collect up all the insects that live behind the nettle patch,

3) fan my face with the front door and talk to people I don’t know.

The coin flip got me the third choice. So I stood opening and closing the front door, watching strangers pass along the pavement. I flapped the door, singing
Come in, we’re friendly and we don’t bite; Come in, we’re friendly and we do bite;
and
Come in, we’re not friendly and we bite
. Some of the strangers smiled as they passed, but no one came in. I played that game all afternoon. Then my teacher stalked past on her way home from school, glanced at me, then at the window and shook her head. After she’d gone, I tiptoed outside down the marble steps and looked up through the railings at the window. Mum was standing there, her arms folded, her expression frozen; but her eyes moved, following me. That evening was the first that Mum locked me in my room.

A day or so later, Mum received a crisp white letter that she read, showed Dad and locked away in a drawer. She made a phone call and within a week my parents told me they’d told ‘the relevant authorities’ that I was to be home educated.

Mum was best at teaching maths and art, so on her safe days we’d paint pictures and measure the depth and resonance of the colours and calculate the proportions of positive line to negative space. On her unsafe days we’d sit at a table with one piece of paper and a pencil. On these unsafe days, she’d show me long division. Tunnelling down, she called it, the way her head drooped closer and closer to the tabletop. When her cheek rested on top of the pencil in her hand, I’d gently take the pencil away, make her a cup of tea and be quiet for the rest of the day.

Dad was best at biology and literature. He often took me into the overgrown back garden at dawn before he went to work, to examine varieties of insects. We’d make lists of adjectives to describe each specimen. He described butterflies as ambitious,
disillusioned, eager and brave. Spiders were painstaking and possessive. We laughed together, when he decided that earthworms were merely discreet. I liked collective nouns, and I remember shouting, ‘A clutter of storm clouds, a rehearsal of thunder and a rampage of rain!’ as we both ran indoors to get dry.

But I missed the chatter of other children, the games in the playground, the different colours and smells; coat pockets with secret supplies of fizzing neon sweets, toy mice made from real fur, and more than once, a live earwig. Looking in lunch boxes was like peeking into kitchens. Curry or white bread sandwiches, pasta, buckwheat or noodles, yellow cheese, biscuits, oranges and apples. Once there was a lime. We’d made a hole in it and took it in turns to wear a green nose.

After not going to school for a while, I realised I should have been more careful when I picked what the three choices were. I decided to make sure my future choices didn’t involve anyone else, definitely not strangers, definitely not teachers passing by. I learned to stop flipping coins, give myself three choices and just pick the best one. This is how I’ve learned to trust myself.

In this house, I used to scrunch up my toes and fingers and claw my way around my bedroom and imagine being old Nogard – a dragon who walked backwards. As a young teenager I’d play with my hair. I’d become a garden witch – my hair backcombed with chives woven through it, a prancing prince with a neat ponytail and a pigeon-toed walk, or a queen with a high forehead who wore her fingers as a flexing, creeping crown. I played sleeping games and tried to fall asleep for a hundred years, but with my eyes open wide.

The last time I asked Mum, a few days, weeks ago, whenever it was, why we had to leave the mainland and come here, her reply
was, ‘All the doors slammed shut.’ When I asked her what she meant, she said, through thin lips, ‘I didn’t say that. Wouldn’t have done. There are no doors.’ But this house is full of doors, and all of them are closed.

Mum tells me I’ve forgotten the journey here, made up some distorted memory of it. She’s also told me over the years:

She says these things to make me believe I can find contentment in the life they’ve chosen for me. She says these things to make me believe I could never find my way back home. She says these things to make me believe that she has a great, but contained, wisdom, and this is the only place in which she can overflow …

I used to believe this.

But now. A travesty of wisdoms. I still like collective nouns.

An ambush of memories …

Memories are frozen moments, paragraphs cut from different books and shifted around. Us and our possessions, a truck, a cart, a train, then roads and boats … getting as far away from the city as we could. Sleeping in barns across the countryside. A travelling circus, a woman in a frilly skirt juggling paper hats to make me laugh. Bankers with gold coins piled on trays in cities. Windows in skyscrapers that changed colour with the sky. Highwaymen setting fire to barns, freeing the horses. More cities; eating chips and brown sauce in cafés with waitresses in blue shoulder pads and baby-pink aprons. Advertisement signs the
colours of emeralds and rubies, strings of lights like pearls, factories where silent women made the same dress, over and over and over again. Uniforms and bandits, bikers wearing angel wings. Spidery eyelashes, underground hospitals where people could buy new faces.

I don’t trust these memories are real, though they’re as vivid as a picture book.

But I do remember the coast, and the trader men in long coats and strange hats, with their great old steamer ship, loading our boxes and crates as I stood and looked at their smaller oar boats trussed to the rails.

They said, ‘We’ll take you as far as you can go,’ when they saw how much my parents were willing to pay. These men took the banknotes my parents offered and gave us safe passage through rough waters and remote cliff stacks, passing a surging of seals, a flicker of gannets, a huddle of puffins and a melancholia of cormorants standing on black rocks, drying their prehistoric wings through uncounted nights and days.

On the steamer ship, passing an archipelago of islands, the last tiny island I remember passing was called Hirta, and the men in strange hats said it was so remote that it had been evacuated years ago, because it was too hard to survive there.

They said, when Mum offered them yet more notes, that they were taking us to another island, even more remote, where some of the ancestors of people who’d lived on Hirta had disappeared to, generations ago. They told her that on this island, there are no clocks, that time is measured by the passing of seasons.

Mum said, ‘That sounds perfect – clocks, ticking, are only a measure of the length of time between birth and death, and after all, what are heartbeats for?’ And she threw her watch overboard.

The trader men said that no one but them knew that these
people lived here, and they took care not to introduce too many customs of the mainland, because that’s how colonies were destroyed.

My parents stared at one another for a long time when they said that. Some silences are best left alone, so I watched the wash at the back of the ship and tried to remember the journey, to fix it in my mind so I’d never forget how to return. And I thought about clocks. Without clocks I might not know how old I was or when it was my birthday. I cried a little and asked one of the trader men what the date was, so I’d be able to count nights and days and months and years.

In my bedroom I pull the atlas from the shelf above my narrow bed. Flick through the pages till I find the one that shows the direction. A map of a small country, with lines that divide it. All the tiny islands to the north and the west. Even Hirta is almost off the edge of the map, and this island which has no clocks isn’t there at all.

As far as we could go. So here we are. As far as we can go, unless we go back to the start. That is how I read my books. This is how I will also have to live my life.

A heartbeat of ticks. A limitation of maps. A circumference of stories.