Ghostheart (10 page)

I nodded.

‘Where’s your brother?’ she said next.

‘Home,’ I told her. She shook her head and pointed.

Boson was there at the back of the crowd, and the Marrey woman was holding his arm and talking gently in his ear. He was wearing his feathered cap and was plainly excited by all the fuss.

I had a terrible taste in my mouth. Like blood. Like rust.

‘What will they do to my mother?’ I asked Neen Marrey, keeping one eye on Boson. She was the only one I could have asked such a thing. The crowd had started up with tangles of singing and praying. The monks were chanting in their chapel-words that sound more like making lists than talking to God.

The Marreys were shamed folk like we were and perhaps even moreso, as their shame was passed on from their Old-ones as far back as they could remember, whereas ours was fairly new. Now her aunt had taken on that yellow-man they had no standing in town at all.

Next to Neen Marrey I was a regular girl.

She made me feel normal. I warmed to her somewhat.

‘What will my mother do?’ I asked.

‘Not much,’ she said. ‘It’s the penance. Mrs Quirk agreed.’

‘Why’ve you come, then?’ I didn’t like my mother being public entertainment.

As Moo passed, the old men on Mr Owney’s benches all stood up in a wilty row. The groggy town boys hooted at her from the snug, until Dolyn was sent in to quiet them.

Without her hair, Moo didn’t seem herself. She was shrunken inside the flapping shift they’d given her to wear. Now she knelt before the towering cross, a small huddle in the dust. On each side of her, two lines of Little Brothers formed up, like two black wings spreading from her white body.

She stood up. Her feet got caught up in the shift and she fell. I’d never seen my mother humbled by anything or anyone.

I went to lift her but Neen Marrey stopped me.

Moo had told me to stay home and keep my brothers home.

I was starting to see why.

My mother brushed down her penitent shift and told the whole of Shipton our troubles.

‘My family has suffered this before,’ she said, like she’d practised it. ‘There was another such as my son, in the generation of my fathers, and he caused as much bother in his own way as this one does now. I should have seen the signs of it but I was full of the will not to see, and I let my boy grow lopsided from the start. I let him talk with the birds. I let him dance with the cranes. I never once asked what they talked of, where he went with them.’

The outer folk leaned in to hear and just in case they missed my mother’s meaning, the Father said it again. ‘I’m afraid Mrs Quirk has fed her child’s soul to Shax and the lieutenants of the bird legions,’ he called out into the close, loud and important.

People rocked back a little, the mob moved like a wave.

Moo started up crying.

‘Not on purpose,’ he added.

‘I saw to it that he came to chapel and heard the holy words,’ Moo sniffled. ‘And when he started up sermonising out in the skybog, telling his birds about God, I thought it just harmless play. I thought perhaps he was getting ready to be a priest himself.

‘I was proud of him. It blinded me. I was slothful. It was easier to just let him be. I was greedy for his happiness. It softened me. I should have been greedy for his goodness.

‘I lusted after his rightfulness. I should have been lusting after his humbleness.

‘I was a glutton for his respectability. I should have stuffed myself with honesty.

‘Through my own fault, my boy was left to become a home for the wickedness.

‘I knew better but I pretended I didn’t. Let the blight fall on me. I should have known. I should have known.’ Moo drooped her head, clasped her hands and became quiet as the crowd.

She’d finished.

Neen Marrey had gone. My chest was about busting with shame and my ears searing. All through these terrible years Moo had behaved like Boson’s distempered particulars were his and his alone, and a deep mystery to be blamed on him or a sickness. Now she said such afflictions ran in her family blood. That she knew but pretended not to.

I turned to find my brother’s face.

There he was. He’d heard it all. I should have kept him home like Moo said. I wanted Pa to come and get us, but he’d said he wouldn’t be seen dead at a penance and he’d stuck to his word. There was just me.

My brother slipped through the mob like a whip-snake through the reeds, his face sharpened to a single point, and his affliction all that was left of him. Folk rocked sidewise as he, quick and wind-like, came straight to the cross. The Father blocked his approach to our penitent mother.

‘God has heard your mother,’ he told Boson, as if that’s all there was to it. ‘And if you do as you’re told from now on, there’ll be no more trouble.’ Everybody sighed like it was the end of a cold day and they’d come in to find the broth warm and their bed turned down.

Boson didn’t even try to look normal. He took the form of a crane. He opened his face to the Father, who stepped back somewhat.

‘Now, then—’ he said but Boson flapped a bit and warbled.

‘But. Who. Are you?’ my brother asked.

‘I am God’s servant,’ the Father told him.

Boson listened to the air.

‘No,’ said my brother. ‘No. He says he doesn’t know you.’ And he shrilled right in the Father’s face.

Boson turned and flew from the close, dropping feathers as he went. You could hear him all the way out of Market-Shipton. It was his own prayerful litany, the one he chanted with the birds and always had.

‘God the Brother,’ he whittered fadingly. ‘And God the Moo, God the Sister and God the Pa—’

Everybody was furious. He’d spoiled everything. And what’s more, he’d forgotten all about God the Dog. Because that’s when Mungo loped from behind me and bit the Father.

Right on his—

THE MORNING AFTER THAT STARRY night-talk, Pa and me got an early start in the cut. I sat up and wriggled blind as a mole out into the fresh morning. My weighted-shut eyelids lightened and I opened them just a slit. They rolled back in my head and trembled violently before settling to useful. I peered out of them at the just-before-dawn waking world. It was not light yet. It was only a change in the dark.

There was the half-built rick, there were the drying spits lying about ready to stack, and there was the turfbank dug right down until it was seeping water. It was all just as we’d left it days before. Nothing had changed up here.

Pa was already in the cut, his whole self hidden below its edge, throwing the spits up over the bank. Spit after spit landed black and wet up on the lag. I went to work on the half-built rick and slowly the sun came warm. Me and Pa and the sheep-bags and the turfbank all quietly steamed in full morning. I kindled the turf back to a glow and heated the brew. We sat on the bank sipping together and watching the sky.

Leaning against my father I felt all my longings drain away; I was almost happy. I let myself fill with bleary clouds. Maybe when we got home Moo would’ve come out from under her shawls and started talking again. Maybe there’d be a warm pie or even a frumenty. Maybe we’d find her and Gilpin out in the plots, laughing and throwing snails to the hens.

Pa got up and fetched his jug from the stacked ricks. Wiping it with his sleeve, he took a pull and kept on pulling until it was empty.

‘Wake up!
’ snapped the inside-voice.
‘Look.’

All the hopeful softness set hard again. All the bleariness cleared to sharp lines. I stood up and put my hands on my hips.

‘Pa,’ I called to him, and my voice rang shrill and wrung-out like some harbour-wife. ‘Put it down!’

The inside-voice laughed.

Pa turned to me like I was just some voice, familiar but faraway.

‘I’m only warming my cockles,’ he told me, heartfelt and rightful.

‘Your cockles must be charcoal by now,’ I said. ‘What are we going to do about my mother?’

He turned from me like I was a stranger.

‘Fermion,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen her. There’s nothing I can do.’

‘
There’s
nothing he can do,
’ smirked the inside-voice.

I was raw as a shelled sandhopper and my blood ran black with him. What was he for, if not for saving Moo? And Gilpin and me. What good was he?

‘You mean,’ I told him. ‘There’s nothing you
will
do.’

He jumped back into the cut and disappeared. Straight-up, a quick rain of spits came over the bank like he had grown extra arms. Looking over the edge I saw him down there, small and dark like a trow risen out of its earth mound, his back curved against me. There was to be no more talk.

Pa hadn’t come to Shipton the day Moo took the penitent sheet. She’d gone and done her best but the chaos of my brother wasn’t cured so easily. By that day at Shipton Cross, Boson had already become a common amusement. After Moo aired the whole thing in public, he belonged to everybody.

After that my brother wasn’t a person. He was part-Shax, part-mooncalf, part-distemper and wholly deformed. The Brothers and my mother made it so with all their talk of sin and demons and so forth. After the penance, all that was left was the punishment.

At least that’s how I see it.

So when Boson ran from the close there was a clamour of voices. Some shouting he should have more respect for his poor mother, some aping the shrilling noise he made, and among it all, other sad tones sighing. There was some singing.

The Brothers started up chanting. Nobody knew what to make of it all.

Moo just stood red-cheeked in her white shift, freckled arms hanging, rocking back-and-forth. I could see she was done-in, all her cures tried and hopeless. The penitent sheet had been her last weapon.

I followed my brother out into the yellowing greenplots. He was far ahead, just a speck flying up the Bogward. I would never catch him that way. As I watched him, my heart flew with his up the lonely path home. I could feel it fluttering, trapped in the cage of his chest.

Leaving the Bogward, I struggled out across the plots and to the foot of the Cronks. From there I could see Boson above me against the sky, his great clumsy hands flapping out on either side of him as he went.

Then I saw the others.

Dolyn and the towny boys were stalking him. They trotted behind him in a little mob, like ponies in a storm. My brother hadn’t seen them.

I rushed to ford the shallower arm of the Blackwater and breasted the rise up to the Bogward.

Too late. All the gusto I’d seen in Shipton seemed to have flowed into this bit of the town, broken away, ganging after Boson. I could tell they were all spittle and gore and ready to go him.

I shouted out. My brother didn’t hear. But the boys did and that was that.

They pressed their elbows into their sides and ran tight and hard like boys do when they’re serious. If they’d run a bit looser I wouldn’t have been so dreadclad but as it was, it was as if I’d shouted
Go!
My legs started to heave me up the rise but it all was all dreamlike; I was moving through honey.

I wouldn’t get to him in time.

Too late. Up on the path, up through the dust-bands, God’s servant Dolyn came heavily loping. Lumbering hard behind Boson, grinning and knuckle-cracking, he came. And behind him, the ready towny boys crackling like lightning and eager for it.

It was all over quicksmart. There was no time. That Tempus had a point. While I stood watching, time bunched up and a minute passed like an hour. When I moved to help, the minutes rushed like storms.

Too late. The little mob closed in and Boson was hidden from my eyes. Fists and elbows raised and fell. I scrambled up between scree and I could hear them quietly grunting, business-like. My own breath was flaying my chest. There were the shrub-wrens rising all around, and the fists were falling faster. Then, as if they were weary, the boys backed off and panted in a circle around my brother’s body wiping their brows. They might have stopped then and gone home to brag about it, but Boson rose from out the middle of their circle and stood up. He was swaying and bleeding. He stretched his throat straight-up, long, white under the chin, and he crowed.

He never did know when to stop.

The boys let up a howl. The circle closed again. They kicked now, as well as clouting. Boson was sinking under them. Someone’s hand was raised, and I saw the blade shining.

Then I was crawling, legs burning and guts twisting. I had no breath left to call his name so he’d know I was coming. A ditch opened under me and I rolled into it face-first, my arms giving way like water. Then all of a sudden Lily Fell and Old Shambles were right there in the middle of the ruckus.

‘Oy!’ I heard the old man bellow and he sounded like everybody’s pa all at once, quickening to a wallop.

The boys stopped mid-thug, their fists still raised. They looked around at the path, at each other, baffled by the unexpected voice. Lily Fell took her chance. She fell over Boson’s body and hung on to him cursing like a tanner. None of the boys were willing to go the old lady, but they were sulky at the loss of their game and turned for a moment to consider the old man.