Authors: Trezza Azzopardi
Keep her company, Pats, he said, Just in case.
It was as if he didn’t trust me.
I don’t need to promise, I said.
Promise me now, he said, crouching down so his face was close to mine, Promise you won’t leave her.
I nodded, but said nothing.
I want to hear you say it, Pats. Cross your heart and hope to die.
I licked my fingers and made a sign of the cross on my throat.
Cross my heart and hope to die, I said.
~
Snow White lies in her glass case. She won’t show them she’s awake. She knows that if she did, she would not be allowed to stay, to watch the clear sky overhead, or
the trees, their branches stirring in the breeze. She is not aware of the ivy, creeping like a thief over the surface of her tomb, its suckers seeking purchase on the glass: her protectors have
cleared a broad circle through which to observe her. Each day, between the slits of her eyes, she detects their forlorn expressions staring down at her. She remains completely still. Sometimes rain
falls; thick drops that spatter inches above her face. She cannot taste them, though her tongue longs for it. Snow White watches as the splashes soften to trembling blobs. They are bell-shaped
mirrors on the valley, they hold a rainbow, a curve of fern, the halo of a sunset. When the drops dry, they leave stains that only she can see. Sometimes a leaf falls, a bird dangles a worm, a
snail spends the day, its silver belly quivering a trail of mist across her face. She lies intact.
Snow White chooses to remain asleep. The thought of waking is abhorrent. Here she is entombed, undisturbed. At night, when all the faces go away, she has the privilege of the moon. In her head,
under winking stars, she dances.
~
I’m quiet as a mouse. My mother lays flat on the bed. She doesn’t want any chocolate and she won’t do stories; all she needs, my father says, is peace. Her
palms are turned up towards the ceiling, white as lilies. Her nightgown is open at the neck, the ties hang loose and tremble as she sips the air. The dip in her throat is a well of sweat. The room
gets hotter with every breath.
I want to help, but all I can do is look. Look and count. I sit on the edge of her bed and count the slats on the shutters, then the strips of light across the ceiling, from broad to narrow and
back again. I count the spikes of mirror stuck in the frame.
Her eyes flick open.
What’s that, she says.
I think she’s seeing the ghosts again, and go to fetch the broom. She stops me, blinking quickly, turning her head to one side.
That noise.
We’re both listening.
There, she says.
I can’t hear it. I think it must be the ghosts, bending over the bed, whispering in her ear; making demands.
Shall I do your hair, Mam? I say, to distract her from them. Maybe if I sit close they’ll clear off for a while.
Her brushes are kept in the top drawer of the dresser. They are backed with mother-of-pearl. But they’re gone. Only a chipped bone comb with a hair hanging from it like a
line of spit. Where the brushes used to be there are more lumps of hair, twisted together into a nest.
Her head is heavy in my lap. I don’t mention the brushes. I comb carefully, watching the bone teeth as they scrape a path through the strands. Her eyes are two slits.
Not now, she says, raising a hand, Leave me be. A smell comes off her skin, like pear drops. Sweet, and stale underneath. It makes me feel hollow.
Shall I open the window, Mam? Let some air in?
There it is again, she says.
I get up on the stool near the shutters. The noise is inside them. It starts at the bottom and works its way to the top, then silence, until it comes again, up and up, a fizzing
noise. I open the shutters a crack, using my fingertips to ease them apart. Just a tiny sliver of light coming in. She won’t mind that. A wasp is trapped between the wood and the glass. It
zigzags all the way up, drops onto the sill and spins round on its back. It jumps up and starts again. In the yard I can see the Moon children, playing a game. Eddie Moon has a scarf tied over his
eyes. He’s staggering like the wasp, his hands clutching at the space in front of him. The others pull at his clothes, run round him in rings. The smell of pear drops is stifling. I
can’t find the wasp, but I hear it, spurring. I push the window open and the air comes new; the cries of the Moon children carry on the breeze, daylight hangs broad as a bedsheet over the
yard. Inside my mother’s room, the blackness swims before my eyes.
~
At first, Snow White thinks it is a shroud. She finds it difficult to move. Her arms are numb, her head is heavy on her neck. She practises moving, starting with her mouth,
stretching it wide. Her lips crack: she tastes blood. She opens her eyes. They are filmy, there is no focus, just a trail of sparkle from the snail on glass, which isn’t a sparkle at all;
it’s a bar of light. There are many bars of light above her. They must have moved her from the wood, moved her into a horrible place, a shed or a workman’s hut; she can’t make out
where she is. There is a noise of humming, a slow familiar drone. Wasps, and no glass case to keep them out. They will feed off her; they can smell the slice of apple, lodged in her throat. She
must turn her head. It takes a long time; it’s full of stones. She sees a small child sitting beside her. The child has her hand open and is counting on the fingers. Snow White sees the
numbers mouthed, but hears only wasps. The child speaks, but Snow White is unaccustomed to the sound of voices. The child is asking, the child is fetching. She lifts Snow White’s head onto
her lap. Now she is staring up at the child, at a hoop of orange light around her face, as if the child is on fire. The child is pulling something, dragging it across Snow White’s head. The
pain is fierce and burning.
~
Why don’t you –
my mother from her bed, her words strung out like the pennants on a kite
– Go and play?
Outside, the Moon children shriek. A cheer goes up. Eddie has caught his big sister Bonnie. Inside, the sound of my mother’s voice, breaking open.
Go on. Go. Let me be.
I can’t, I say, I’ve promised Dad.
Out there, she says, Go. Let me be.
~
I go and play with the Moon children. We leave the bulldog tied to the water pipe, and we leave my mother, sleeping on her bed. Outside, the air moves with me. I run into it. We
play Tag, racing through the lanes and down to the park, Bonnie chasing Eddie through the gap in the hedge at the back of Chapelfield, yelling at him to slow down, let up, so at first all I hear is
noise: Bonnie’s shouts, Josie and Pip calling after her, the grind of a machine, and above it, floating in and out like a wheeze, a bright metallic music. And then I see.
I’ve never seen such a thing. There must be fifty of them. A hundred. Their manes are silver and yellow and gold and black, their saddles are knobbled with jewels that glitter in the
light. Streaming towards us and away; sucking the air from our bones, blowing it straight back in.
The gallopers!
Eddie stands stock still, his arms raised up in the air as if to be lifted. Above us, the horses fly.
~
On the pillow beside Snow White’s head is a comb. She recognizes the smell of it: a smell of death. She remembers the face of the deer, a curious blinking eye, and the
beige underside of its tongue, licking away a fold of snow. An arrow of light breaking the sky above her, and the deer sighing, slanting to the ground. She knows the smell of death. Snow White
raises herself from her bed. The child has gone now; there is no pain.
Where is my mirror, she says.
~
Sorry, mister, says Bonnie, not sounding sorry at all, We’ve got no money.
Bonnie tries to negotiate with the man. If he lets us ride the gallopers, we’ll tell everyone we meet, we’ll come back tonight with all our friends, we’ll come back and pay for
the free ride he doesn’t want to give us now. The man looks unimpressed. He wears a vest like my father’s, but has hairy arms, and a thick black belt holding up his trousers. He reminds
me of the giant in
Jack and the Beanstalk.
The horses stand frozen in a leap, teeth bared as if to bite him. The man wraps his hand round the twisted pole that is speared through
Bonnie’s mare.
As soon as it had slowed enough, we jumped on the platform and claimed one each. Now the man wants money from us.
She don’t go until I stoke her up, he says, pointing his thumb over his shoulder, So you lot can suit yourselves.
We are happy just to sit, racing each other on the spot and geeing with our invisible reins. Eddie has climbed up to sit with me, his two fat legs hanging over the side.
He’s hot and sticky, he wriggles against my lap. I want to push him off, but then Bonnie leans over from her galloper and grins.
He’s side-saddling, she says, Ent he posh!
The other horses are all taken. People are waiting to go, shouting at each other over the polished manes and then shouting at the man to get a move on. He tries to look stern,
but then he sees Eddie, his fingers white from gripping the pole, and he relents.
One go, he says, That’s all. One go round and then you’re off.
I nod at him.
That’s a promise ’n’all, he says, pulling one of Eddie’s legs over so he straddles the horse. I think he wants
me
to promise. I lick my finger, ready.
Cross my heart and hope to die, I say.
Hold him tight, now, he says, pointing at Eddie. The music wheezes to life, and then we turn. We turn, and then we fly.
~
Who is the fairest?
My mother gets up. She looks at the room, at her sweated bed. It might as well be her coffin. She looks for the mirror. There is the back board of the frame in dull brown wood, and the frame
itself with the gilt flaking off. Inside it, a jagged oblong of silver shards show where her reflection should be. A stool near the window, where the child likes to sit. The child’s name
comes to her so easily, she thinks she must know it. Lillian Price. But it doesn’t sound right. Lillian Price is her own name. And the child is not like her, not in any way. Hair as red as
rust, eyes pale and round and staring like an idiot. Feeble-minded, they said she was. Lillian the mother sits on the stool and ponders Lillian the daughter, and Lillian’s father, and her own
father. She stares into a slit of mirror. Her hair needs cutting. She straightens out the knots with the fingers. The strands come away in her hands.
~
By the time I remember my first promise, the day is gone, the yard half in shadow. The bulldog has been taken in, and the knife-grinder’s bicycle is back against the wall.
I’m weightless with flying, with flying and sitting on the edge of the platform, feeling the gallopers kick their legs above us, and the thick oil swell of the engine below, juddering our
bones. We watched until the sun went down behind them, and the man watched us.
From my mother’s window comes a light: sharp, like a sunburst through a cloud. It’s swaying. I can see my father in his work vest, holding a candle up high. He must have come home
early to take us to the fair. I’m standing in the yard and thinking about the best thing I’ve ever seen, and will he be angry with me for breaking my promise to him, and will we go back
again to the fair. I’m not really looking, but then something happens in the window that is new to me. My father is holding my mother by the waist; they’re dancing. The flame jumps as
they move across the floor. She bends like willow in his arms. He catches her up, she bends again, he holds her to him. I have never seen them dance.
~
Cobwebs stop the bleeding, Richard remembers this from his childhood. He was running fast, climbing the railings that bordered the orchard where if he and his friends could have
tasted the fruit they would have found it bitter. But then the man was coming towards them and they fled, the point of the railing catching him in the soft part of the thigh, right at the top, so
he had to keep it pinched together all the way home. His mother raised her arm above her head, as if absently swatting a fly, and pulled down a cobweb from the porch. She wound it tight around his
leg; said there was no need for a doctor to fix it.
Cobwebs would stop the bleeding, but there are no cobwebs. There is not even a speck of dust.
~
My father staggers as she slips, their shadows curtsy off the walls, come back to meet them. His free arm holds the candle high above his head; the wax spattering like stars. I
watch my mother and father from the yard, then watch them closer, edging my way to the door. They are dancing on pure light, breaking the glass into smaller and smaller shards. He wears his heavy
boots; her feet are bare. The floor is full of pieces of sky. I see the heels of her feet as he tries to lift her, I see my mother peeling from him like a shadow. I see the black around her, a
river staining the floor. I see the ghosts, oozing.
My father turns. He looks through me, his hand coming down on top of the flame, red, redder, black. And then I see nothing at all.
All my own teeth, as they say in the papers. I don’t read the newspapers, they’re full of lies, but I like the Classifieds in the freesheet: Bargain Buys, For The
Home, Lonely Hearts. The men always say Own hair/teeth if they’re over forty. And 5 foot 8, which you know is going to be a lie. No one over seventy ever puts an advert in the paper.
You’ve given up by then. Well, I have. Not many of us can boast all our own teeth. Pensioner, arthritic hip, deaf in one ear. You might as well ask the undertaker to come round and measure
you up. I prefer the For The Home section. It’s different with furniture; the older it is, the more value it has. When I’m trying not to think, I picture a place of my own. I furnish it
in my head. It passes the time. Bargain!!! Antique cabinet £145. It’s a bit dear, but I wouldn’t mind that. Set of four dining chairs, teak-effect, £80 ono. A lot of money
just for something to sit on. And who would want Jays. Stuffed. Two. In cabinet. Very nice condition. £90. Who would want two stuffed jays? They look best alive, staggering over the grass
like drunks on a night out, not dead in a glass case.