‘Rose?’ he persists when I don’t answer him, won’t look at him. I can feel him, hesitantly now, touching the hair at the back of my neck.
‘Leave me alone, Lawrence.’
For pity’s sake, leave me alone!
There’s a silence behind me, as I feel him taking stock. He’ll imagine I’m still in a huff, pushing him away after yesterday. He’ll imagine I’m being impossibly touchy and unreasonable and any minute now he’ll take a step back or two when he realises how chippy I’m being.
But he doesn’t. He puts his arms out, turns me about to face him, instead.
‘Do you really want me to leave you alone?’ He looks at me through upturned eyes. ‘Is that what you want?’
I don’t answer. I can’t. It doesn’t matter
what I want
anyway.
‘You’re disappointed that it’s snowed again, I can see that. You’re sad that you can’t go home to your dad, you can’t go and fetch your letter ... but, you’ll get there, Rose. You’ve had some set-backs, that’s all.’ His voice sounds weary this morning. He’s used to more than
set-backs
in his life, I remember. He’s used to dealing with crises on a day to day basis. He copes with things like war and horrific injuries and tragic tales and here I am - a girl who’s lost a letter, a girl who’s stuck in a make-shift shelter for a couple of days, that’s all he’ll see.
‘I know that’s what you think,’ I say in a small strangled voice. ‘But the truth is, Lawrence you have no idea of anything about me. No idea of my life. No idea of my dreams. No idea of why I’m not going to achieve any of them …’ I swallow down the rest of my words shakily.
Christ
, I didn’t mean to say any of that. Where did they all come from, these words, where did they all spill out from?
‘Tell me then.’ I can feel him shivering behind me. He could go back in, leave me to the cold morning and enjoy a bit of warmth by the fire but he doesn’t do that. When I look at him properly I can see the bristles of his three-day beard, so much more pronounced than yesterday, looking stark against his cold pinched face in the moonlight.
‘Why?’ I ask. Why do you even ask me these things, Lawrence? Is it so I come again to believe that you really care when we both know that you don’t. I don’t matter to you, do I? Not enough.
‘Tell me all the things about you that I don’t yet know,’ he says softly.
Tell me all the things
… I look at him painfully.
‘Do you really want to know?’ I can feel his eyes on me, drinking me in, compassionate because I am hurting and only a little curious about what it is I have to say. I don’t even, really, know why I have to say it.
‘Tell me,’ he nods.
Shall I tell him? The thought takes root, sends out little tendrils in every direction so I can taste the flavour of what it might be like to share this place with someone; gauge what his reaction might be. I never talk about Mum with other people. I never talk about how she died. I take in a little shuddering breath;
I never talk about magic.
The moonlight is so bright, the dark sky so still, so closed. The snow muffles all sounds for miles around, feeling like a protective blanket, cocooning us in here so I get the feeling that it will be okay for me to speak. Nothing I say will ever go any further, and maybe - he will even understand?
‘The reason I got so upset with you yesterday,’ I gulp
.
‘It wasn’t entirely to do with you. Oh, I wanted you to kiss me, yes,’ I glance up at him nervously but there’s a certain freedom in having made the decision to be honest with him, and he nods, acknowledging my words, unsurprised by them.
‘But I guess the thing that really hit me hard yesterday was realising that every single time in my life when I’ve really wanted something -
really wanted it, more than anything
– something bad has happened.’
‘Every time?’
‘Every time that matters. Every time I can remember. I’ve been going over it all in my mind, all night. What I said to you just now about the best course for me being to just not desire anything, to stop wanting - I really meant it.’
He considers this for a while.
‘And right now ...’ he says slowly, ‘You want
me
?’
I blush fiercely.
‘And you’re afraid that, if you keep on wanting me ...’
H
e lifts an eyebrow, ‘Something bad will happen?’
My teeth have begun to chatter. I don’t know what we’re doing, standing out here having this conversation. I don’t know why I even started it. I can’t finish it. I just stare at him.
‘Is it because of what I said yesterday?’ he asks unexpectedly now. His eyes look sad. ‘About me not being the person you think I am?’
‘No,’ I croak. ‘It’s because of
me
not being who
you
think I am.’
‘Have we both been leading each other on, then?’
H
e looks pensive.
‘Perhaps,’ I lift my chin a fraction. ‘You think that I’m ... innocent and sweet and good, don’t you?’ A small smile creeps into his eyes now. I see him lick his lips.
‘The thing is ...’ I clear my throat. ‘I haven’t always followed an honourable course.’ His eyebrows raise slightly.
‘You, Rose?’ He looks as if he finds that hard to believe.
‘I haven’t.’ I look at the ground which is a strange blue-grey by the light of the moon. ‘Did you know, Wiccans believe that whatever intent you put out to others, it’ll always come back to you three-fold?’
He doesn’t respond. Of course he doesn’t. What am I expecting him to say to a statement like that, anyway? He’s got a hundred other more urgent things on his mind. The snow. The lack of food up here. Sunny. Lawrence looks up at me now, full of feelings but whatever he’s thinking he’s keeping his counsel to himself
‘It is one of the first rules of Wicca,’ I say to him in a small, strange voice, now. ‘That you must never seek to impose your will on another. Did you know that?’
‘I am not familiar with the rules of Wicca,’ he says at last. ‘Your mother was a witch,’ he hesitates for just the briefest second before asking; ‘Are you telling me now that you are too?’
‘No!
No
...’I take in a deep breath, ‘I am not a witch.’ I feel like I’m readying myself to jump into the deep end of a very cold pool and the shock of the water when I hit it - I know it’s going to hurt. ‘I’m no witch. But I’ve always known how to do what she did. I learned it at her knee. I’ve known for a long time how to use her powers.’
‘You used them, Rose?’ He’s standing very still. Oh, what is he thinking? I wish I could read his voice. I wish I had some way of gauging his reaction but I have none. I give a small nod.
‘What did you do?’ he says at long last. A tranche of snow to the right of us breaks off under its own weight, now. It slides off down the broken edge of the wall and plumps down into the snow, startling us both.
‘I brought Mum home,’ I say in a small voice.
‘You brought her home.’ The word ‘home’ hangs uncomfortably in the air between us for a good few minutes. I cannot imagine the reason why.
‘I missed her. Dad wanted her back, but she wouldn’t come home. It’s
all my fault
that she’s gone.’
‘Whoa, whoa …’ Lawrence gives me a puzzled look and I know I’m not making any sense to him at all. I’m going way too fast. ‘Just … what did you do?’
‘I brought Mum home,’ I say again. ‘I didn’t mean for her to die …’
She didn’t want to come back to us; no, I knew Mum had made up her mind she was happier where she was, she was never coming back.
‘I wanted her back. So I set up a magic circle.’ I glance fleetingly at Lawrence to see if I’ve lost him but his eyes are riveted to mine, intent. ‘I knew to do it properly it had to be nine feet in diameter.’ My head is suddenly full of irrelevant details;
‘I marked it out from the centre using a string that was four-foot-six.’ I glance at him uneasily. ‘I used a length of old knitting wool. Bright blue. I took it out of Mrs P’s knitting bag while she was out. I used the sitting room because it was the only room big enough.’ I stop, aware that I am shoring up the pain of my confession by swamping it in facts and figures. But nothing can stop the fact that my nose is running; my lungs are feeling very short of breath. Lawrence is shaking his head;
‘You didn’t
do
anything, Rose.’
‘I
did
do something though. I did. I cast a spell to bring her back.’ Is this what it feels like to confess to a crime? I wonder now. All the details and particulars of what I did, they stand out in bright shapes and colours in my memory. They stand out like separate objects, apart from me. I remember I sprinkled salt around the perimeter to seal it. The salt was coarse and granular. I spilled some of it on the floor. I took her besom and swept the circle, brushing away the excess and clearing the energy like I’d seen her do before. I took some strands of her hair - off a brush I’d used on her myself just days earlier - put them in a muslin pouch with her name on it, attached to the end of a silken cord. I lit four candles, one for each of the four directions of the compass, asking in my mind as I did so that she might be pulled back to us, from whatever direction it was that she wanted to go.
‘To make her come back to us. To
force
her to come back. I knew that was wrong; that you should never compel anyone. I knew that.’ I made up some words, too. Any words would do, though rhyming words seemed to be the best;
By the rule of One, You home shall come,
By the rule of Two, I call to You,
By the rule of Three, Your home you seek,
By the rule of Four, You’ll be at the door.
‘I knew by the fourth day she’d be back,’ I breathe. ‘I knew it just as sure as you’re standing there in front of me.’
He blows on his cupped hands now. I realise I have kept him standing out here for a long time. The light from the firebrand he brought with him is flickering fiercely. It’s almost gone out.
‘And was she? On the fourth day?’
‘Oh, yes. She was. After refusing for months to leave that place - she suddenly took sick and she had no choice but to leave that camp.’
‘She took sick?’ I see a glimmer of understanding dawning now in his eyes. ‘Don’t do this to yourself, Rose. You never asked for her to get sick.’
But I’ve hit the cold, dark water in the pool of my deepest shame.
Smack
, and I’m in, head reeling, all my muscles juddering, gasping for breath and all I can feel right now is the shock-waves of an unspeakable, terrible remorse.
‘That’s how magic works though, Lawrence,’ my words all come out in one breath. ‘Magic shifts the energy around us, moves mountains, even, but it doesn’t trouble about who’ll get crushed underneath.’ I should have known,
as her daughter, I should have known.
‘That’s what happens if you don’t do it properly; if you’re uninitiated and don’t know what you’re doing or you’re careless, and that’s what I was, all of those things …’ I’m shaking, shuddering now, as a draft of pure cold goes right through me, right through the centre of me.
I should never have meddled …
‘You say she’d been living in the woodland camp,’ he considers slowly. ‘You don’t think - living in those damp underground burrows had anything to do with making her sick?’ Oh, that’s what anyone would say but I need him to understand the true significance of what I did …
‘It was four days precisely, after I cast that spell, that she turned up at our door. Do you really think that was a
coincidence?
’
‘I think …’
H
e gives me a long, hard look. ‘You wished for her to come home. You hoped for it. I don’t believe in spells.’
He’s wrong. I frown stubbornly.
‘Why did she get sick then?’
‘Who knows? Who knows how long that sickness might have been dormant in her?’
‘They never got to the bottom of that. She refused any treatment for it ...’
M
y voice is shaking and he puts his hands over mine now.
‘
Rose
,’ he says. I can feel, first, his hand creeping tentatively into my hand, then his arm comforting behind my back, rubbing my shoulders lovingly, saying this is okay, whatever it is, it’s okay because you aren’t in it alone. ‘Are you saying that your Dad didn’t insist she went for any treatment?’
‘Dad?’ I look up at him, puzzled. Then I shrug. ‘He tried, Lawrence. But she could be stubborn. She didn’t want to know …’
‘Whatever it was she wanted, it looks as if she chose her
own
path, Rose.’
‘What do you mean?’ I say, unsurely. ‘I cast that spell. Don’t you understand? I made her sick.’
‘You never
made her sick
. All you did was love her, Rose. You loved her and you wanted her back
-
what child wouldn’t? In the end, she never let you choose for her, did she? She wasn’t compelled by anyone, magic spell or no.’
You loved her and you wanted her back...
His hand is around my shoulders still, rubbing at my back consolingly, comfortingly.
‘She came back in four days, just as the spell had intended her to …’ I look at him wildly.
‘No.’ He shakes his head at me. ‘She came back in her own good time, Rose. It sounds as if she’d have taken longer than four days to get as sick as you describe. She chose to respond to it, how and when she did.’
Christ
,
I look at him shakily,
she did, didn’t she?
I wipe at my eyes fiercely because it seems an obvious thing now that he says it but it has never occurred to me before. I’d
begged
her to go into hospital, hadn’t I? Nothing I’d said or done could shift her, though.
‘She … she could have gone for treatment, you’re saying?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. Who knows what the outcome would have been? From the sounds of it she didn’t even give it a try …’
No, she didn’t, because she’d already made up her mind.
The image of that butterfly on its mounting board comes sharply into my mind now.
I never made up her mind for her
. The pain between my brows lessens a little bit. The thought eases itself into my mind.
Maybe I didn’t make her sick. I didn’t make her stay sick?
The butterfly in my mind opens its wings out suddenly, a flash of sapphire-blue in my memory. In a moment, it is going to soar off, just like I always wished it could do. It’s going to fly away, free. Could it be true what he’s saying? I didn’t do that bad thing … I didn’t make her die?
‘It wasn’t me, was it?’
‘No. It wasn’t you.’
‘But …
why did Mum want to do that, Lawrence?’ I look at him painfully now. ‘Refuse all treatment so that she would leave us the way she did?’
He bites his lip.
‘Sometimes … people have just got to leave, Rose. Trust me. It doesn’t mean they don’t love the people they’ve left behind.’
‘Those last few days before she passed away ... I was so
mad
at her, you know that?’ My words rush out now as if a floodgate has been opened; a floodgate on a lot of things that make me sound callous, bad things that I never wanted to say.
‘I was mad at her for going away and mad at her for getting sick and mad at her for … for everything. She embarrassed me.’ I say in a small voice now. I’ve never admitted as much to anyone but it’s true. ‘All those flowing robes and incense sticks and … and everything that went with it. Do you know she used to turn up at parent-teacher evenings looking like something out of the sixties? Didn’t she see what they were all thinking about her -
about me
- what they were all saying after she’d left?’ I shake my head helplessly. ‘Oh, I always defend her memory to the hilt with the likes of Carlotta but the truth is I’ve spent a long time distancing myself from Mum, making sure everyone knows I’m not like her.’
‘You don’t have to be like her,’ he says quietly. ‘She was always going to love you, anyway. No matter how you turned out. From the first time I saw you, I knew - you were a girl who’d been very loved, Rose.’
Oh, and now there is a pain working its way up from my belly, up into my throat like a thousand razors, it hurts,
it hurts
, but whatever it is, it’s coming out of me now, easing itself up and away in the long, keening sound that’s coming out of my mouth and I am mourning her at last. All those hot salty tears I never cried the morning I took up her last cup of tea and found that she’d left us in the night; all those cold, hurtful tears I didn’t shed the day we sprinkled her ashes over the side of that boat and into the choppy sea. All these tears, hiccupping and crashing right through me like white water on a frenzied, swollen river where the hell have they all come from, where could I have been storing them all this time?
‘What do you mean by that?’ I say at last.
‘Your parents loved you,’ his hands slide gently over mine. ‘I know this because it shines out in everything you are and everything you do, all the time. You’ve been loved. Once you’ve been loved, that’s something that stays with you a lifetime. It’s like a stamp on your soul. It’s like a very powerful light, attracting other people to love you, too.’
Other people? I look at him, gulping down my next thought.
But not people like you?
‘She died before I had a chance to tell her.’ I look away. ‘I didn’t get a chance to tell her that I loved her.’
‘I’m sure she knew.’ I miss her. He asked me that the first time he met me, didn’t he? I denied the extent of it then. I’ve been denying it for a long time.
‘
I miss her
…’ I wail. He pulls me to him, rocking me like a child. I’d forgotten what it was like to feel this open and vulnerable and raw. I’d forgotten what it felt like to hurt this bad and to feel so bewildered and helpless and new.