Ghostheart (23 page)

Out in the lolloping reeds the world is a changed place. The ground is changed; it’s not dry but also not wet, not holding but also not sinking, it’s not the shore but also, not the lake. It’s someplace in-between, someplace you need marsh-skimmers to navigate. Without them you sink straight down, your own feet cutting a new path deep into the water. With them, you just bounce.

The only thing about it is you do have to keep moving. Even with your skimmers on, if you stop you’ll sink. You have to fix your eye on something ahead, it doesn’t even matter what it is. Then you make for it without thinking too much.

Of us two skimming Quirks, Boson was the bettermost. He took to it like a young wader. He went further in than me, into the scantest of reedbeds, the thinnest of rushmats, until it seemed to me there was only the water left for him to walk on. He never sank through the reeds into the lake, he never lost a skimmer in the soggy sedge; he just kept moving, slow, forward. His way of going took him right out to the reeds’ edge where the flarks break away and the water spreads big and glittering. I could never go out so far; my coward’s legs wouldn’t take me and that’s all there was to it.

I’d watch from the shore and he’d stand out there on one leg like a crane. His whole self quickened on the reedshore. He looked back at me as if I knew the same things he knew.

The secret language Moo thinks we shared was really only silence. In our silence we thought we knew each other better than anybody. But silence lies as much as any other way of talking.

Talking makes folk think they know each other. They think they belong to each other. They think they are all the same thing. Oh, he’s a Quirk, or a Fell, or a Craig, they say — as if that’s all there is to it. We
always
do this, and we
never
do that. People think families are the mud-bottom answer to everything about a person.

But there are strangers in families.

Families are tricky. There are redheads in dark families, and giants in short ones. Tall, cheerless, tidy people will of a sudden breed a cloddish and comical shrunk. Out of grog-blossomed hill-trows will come a tender princeling, and humble periwinkle families will sport some proud lily. There are plenty of folk that seem to come from another country, strangers living with us right in our own snugs.

Some are like ghosts in the family; not quite there, vapour traces either just coming or just leaving. Others make so much fuss, needling at everybody until you could just put them in a boat and send them off yourself. But most try to make a good fit, twisting themselves until they’re crook-limbed and all anyhow.

Then there are those who think they’re a good fit, but it’s a trick of the light. They dote on each other. They think they know one another.

It’s easy, these ones say, this family thing. It’s obvious. It’s safe.

And then one day everything changes and it’s a new world. It’s downside-up and full of strangers. Everybody has to change. Everybody has to start trying to find their way home again.

That’s what happened to us.

Moo, with her penance and her sorrows, tried. Pa, with his grog and clouting, too. Even Gilpin had tried, digging himself home through the mud. But something was gone from our family and would never come again. It wasn’t just Boson; it was all of us. Without him we’d all gone missing. And that was all there was to that.

This time it hadn’t been me who was in a hurry. This time he’d been the one to go ahead. He couldn’t wait for me.

Gilpin came back from marsh-skimming. He was done-in and lay down in the gold-flags with his face to the sky. The clouds scumbled in his eyes and he reached his little hands up to them, opening and closing his fists and humming a bit. His baby-nose was going, and I could see quite the gruntle growing on him. I picked him up by his fists and swung him onto my back. He gripped my ears and me and Moo gathered the marsh-skimmers from his feet and we left the reedswamp.

As we passed above the Cronkward we saw Lily Fell, hurrying westward in flurries of soft red wool. Her little coracle rested on her back like a bog-turtle’s shell. We called but she was settled as an owl, otherwise as a magpie. She was making a beeline.

She was all for the other island.

We went home by the Blackwater and the downward paths. As we passed the river I saw that Scully Slevin sitting on a flatstone, his feet in the water, tuning his instrument by feel. We greeted him as we passed and he looked right thankful for it. Behind us he started up a skipping, slippery sort of tune that tumbled over the ear like water over pebbles. I turned but he was gone. It was the river itself that was singing.

I should have known.

My brother was right. Things are exactly as they seem. There really are singing waters and talking mud. There are swimming birds and flying fish, birds that talk and folk that don’t. There is a knowing in the inward parts of a person and also, inside-voices. There are worlds we know nothing about tucked inside this world. It was him that showed me how to stop and see them. The spiders in their air-sacks under the water, the gembugs stuck green to deep mud-roots, the islands that come and go, and the monsters on them waiting to be called home.

Not only that, but I know some things he didn’t know.

There are strangers inside a person. Strangers inside who make landlubbers go to sea. Or make practical folk follow wispy Lamps into mists. Or just make mannerly people tell the Father where to go.

And there are monsters in there too. They take pleasure in fretting other people, making them shamed of what they can’t help. They want to sneer at the afflicted. They want to clout the dwindles. All of this.

And he was right about another thing.

Everything really is on the verge of happening at once.

But you have to listen to the voices.

You have to Stop It and Pay Attention.

And you always have to leave the safe paths for it to happen.

bile-sprite
— a poison-spitting spirit of the air

bodge
— [n] old timber; [adj] bodgey

boomers
[Manx] — huge breaking waves

bootless
— [adj] useless, pointless

brout
[Manx] — beast

buggane
— a degraded god, a malevolent spirit

clart
— [n] hard-packed, smooth, slippery clay; [adj] clarty

cosset
— [n] a shepherd’s favourite lamb; [v] to care for and protect in an overindulgent way

cronk
[Manx] — a hill

dollop
— a wet lump of something

dub
[Manx] — a small pool

earwig
— eavesdropping person

flark
— [n] a thick growth of waterside weed and grass that breaks off and floats into the river or lake; [v] to float off frumenty

frumenty
— [n] a medieval meal porridge to which meat or fish can be added

gormless
— without sense, initiative, or backbone; dull, stupid

grog-blossom
[Manx] — [n] a red nose from constant drunkenness

gruntle
— [n] a nose or muzzle; [v] to nose about in something

hedge-pig
— [n] a hedgehog

heishan
[Manx] — [n] half-grown girl, hoyden

irrits, the
— a bad case of irritation

kraken
— [n] a sea-monster, something like a huge octopus

longtail
[Manx] — a rat

merrow
— a mermaid

moaney
[Manx] — peatland, bog

moaney-fae
— [n] the faeries of the bog

mooncalf
— [n] a not-quite-right person/a deformed birth

piggin
[Manx] — a jar, a pot

queach
— [n] bog ground both slippery and sinking; [adj] queachy; [v] to slide and sink through such boggy ground

rick
— [n] a flat wheelbarrow

scraw
— [n] a brick of peat

scrofulous
— [adj] diseased, or morally corrupt

slane
— [n] a long-handled spade for cutting peat

stolch
— [n] mud that contains lots of leaf litter and humus; [adj] stolchy

tardle
— [n] a tangle; [v] to tangle

trepan
— [n] a boring tool used for drilling circular holes in bone, particularly the skull, in medieval medicine

whirry
— [n] a cross between a whirl and a flurry

wisp
— [n] a small, fast-moving ghost

Insomnium, somnium & phantasma
are Latin names for different types of dream or vision in Christian theory.
Insomnium
and
somnium
are relatively natural and harmless while a
phantasma
is a supernatural event, possibly brought about by demonic possession.

The Old English word
tantony
comes from the story of St Anthony’s pig.

St Anthony (c. 251–356) was the first Christian monastic to go into the wilderness to meditate. The story goes, while St Anthony was at prayer in his Egyptian desert cave, Satan came to him in the shape of a vicious boar and attacked him. Though the boar was merciless, the saint refused to reciprocate and beat it to death. At this he was lit by a marvellous glow — and the vicious boar turned to a humble and gentle pig. In pictures of him, St Anthony is commonly shown with this pig companion.

To call somebody a ‘tantony pig’ was to insult them. It suggested you were a person who blindly followed others.

St Anthony started a monastic order which, among many other things, raised pigs. People would bring their runt piglets to the monks to care for. In time a ‘tantony’ came to mean a runt piglet.

It then went on to mean a swineherd’s favourite in a litter of piglets.

Some of the words in this book are Manx, the talk of the people of Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. This language nearly died out, but is now reviving. There are still only two thousand speakers of it in the world.

To the marvellous young people who posted extraordinary clips on YouTube talking about, and demonstrating, what it’s like to live with bipolar disorder — my deepest thanks for putting yourselves out there.