Red Spikes (19 page)

‘For the sons as well. You don’t want that to be their last memory of you.’

I cleared my throat. ‘They’ll remember Mummarn well, all right.’

They agreed, glad to hear me speak after my long silence, after Mummarn’s upsetting sounds.

She started moving around again in there.

‘Oh, blow,’ said Longhair. ‘I hoped she had gone to sleep.’

All our belongings were out along the front wall; the house was an empty room where Mummarn couldn’t hurt herself. She wailed again, the wail that rose from somewhere deeper than her own body and ran across my scalp like tree-rats. Hogtie and Longhair leaned in around me. Charger lifted his head from Liklik’s side and crooned, and we had to laugh a little.

‘As if he’s saying, “Ooh, I know how you feel!”’ said Hogtie.

‘He’s a good dog,’ said Longhair.

But then Mummarn screamed inside ‘Val-laaaaah! Bra-vaaaaah! My babies!’ and I cried again, and Longhair with me. If only Mummarn would not say the names! I did not want to think of the boys. Last I had seen of them was dry-eyed Brava waving back to Mummarn as she stood straight and smiling at the end of the bridge, fraught-faced Valla fingering away tears as he looked over his shoulder. The Church-man had clothed his whole self as if to make himself dark like us, except for his white collar, which I remember; it bobbed away through the trees. Sour old Three-Plait had come with the man, to do the talking; each widow had hoped to see her husband in that task, but,
Of
course they send the old bachelor,
Widow Split had said,
the only
one that’s
not
missed
. Three-Plait, with no beard at all and only that close-clipped hair, in the same hot black clothes – he had hurried after the Church-man as if he were afraid of us. The whole business had been so fast, like a hawk snatching up a fish and flying off.

‘It was
good
that it was fast,’ I said still crying, nearly asleep against Longhair’s shoulder. ‘It was easier to keep our dignity.’
We will keep our dignity
, Mummarn had said, embracing the boys in the house before we went down to the bridge.
We will not shed a tear.
And they had nodded, blinking.

‘Yes, just for that little while,’ said Hogtie.

Until Widow Split had called from across the gorge that they were passed into Broad Valley. Mummarn bent and broke then, and we all rushed in to catch her.

What happens to our offerings?
I had asked Mummarn as we walked down the path from Pinnacle Cliff.
Does it eat them,
too, like the house? Or do they fall out, into the sea?

It carries them all the way up,
said Mummarn.
Our offerings
and our words are caught inside it like fish in a tide-trap.

I could tell from her face that she believed this.
And
then?

And then is not our concern.
Mummarn had smiled down on me. She was quite dry-eyed, then; I could not imagine her ever crying again.
The gods do what the gods will
do. We have shown them our people; we have told them how things
are for us and we have put in our plea. It’s as much as we can do,
here on the ground.

I didn’t smile back; I didn’t laugh at her mistaken thoughts; I didn’t say anything. I hardly knew what had happened; I hardly knew what I carried home inside my own skin. Suddenly I was not the same kind of creature as Mummarn, as anyone else alive that I knew. I was the kind that could learn to call the gods down from the sky and up from the sea, the bigger elder gods, not such small fry as we had seen today. And I would not need to hurt them with hooks, or construct fancy bait for them, or build up my winding-muscles. All I need do was listen to and learn their songs. And if I sang well enough myself, I might ask anything of them – that they organise the Church away, for instance, that they bring the men back to our village of widows. Now that those things are accomplished, it’s as if they were always meant to be. Back then, when I was little, before everything, I could hardly imagine what I might do.

{ Daughter of the Clay

Maybe the heating ducts brought the words to me
from the other room.
Maybe the secretive softness of the women’s voices made my ears stretch to hear. I stopped trying to push the doll’s arm through the narrow spangled sleeve. I lifted my head.

Are you
not able
to have other children?
the visitor-lady asked my mother.

Oh, I suppose I am
able
. I’m afraid, though. That they
would all turn out the same. Like Cerise.

I stood up and coughed and dropped the doll –
threw
down
the doll – so that they would stop talking, and they did. I wanted to run out of the apartment, down the stairs round and round, out into the park and under the fresh-leaved trees, around the lake screaming until I was exhausted, until I forgot what I’d heard.

I closed my bedroom door on the silence outside, and propped my chair under the handle. I closed my blind on the sunny, breezeless open window so that it was as dark in my room as I could make it. I went to bed, all in my clothes, pulling the covers over my head. It was hot, but I made an airhole and I lay there and I tried not to exist.

My mother came and turned the doorhandle. ‘Cerise? Cerise, darling?’ She tried to sound affectionate, because her visitor was there.

I put my head out of the bedclothes and said, ‘Please go away. Please leave me alone.’

They left me. Later when the lady had left, my mother tried again. ‘Cerise, open this door! What do you mean, locking your mother out!’

‘Please leave me alone,’ I said in the same chilly way, and again she left me. Which was what I’d asked for, but not at all what I wanted.

The long afternoon went by. The blind dimmed with evening and the sounds of cars passing and people walking slowed and became more random and echoing.

I lay in my sweat, half-stifled, awaiting stifling night.

My father came home and there was quiet argument.

Then the doorhandle again. ‘Sweetness?’ he said. ‘Will you let me in? I know you’re upset. Let me in and we can talk. I’m thinking maybe you need a hug right now?

Maybe some dinner?’

I had not cried until then. ‘No, please go away,’ I said – I could use the same clear, calm voice, even through the tears. I was going to stay in here forever, hungry and unwanted. He would never hug me again.

He tried several more times during the evening.

‘Please,’ I finally said, because it was true. ‘I’m sleeping.’ And he left me alone.

Deep in that night a noise woke me – some rustling-winged insect landing nearby. I had fought free of the sheet and quilt in my sleep; I turned my head on the damp pillow, and opened my burning eyes. There it was, outside the swinging blind, on the sill: rustle-rustle, scrape.

I sat up. I was hungry. I am a solid girl with a good appetite, and I felt hollow and unbalanced. (My grandmother:
She eats everything I put in front of her. It’s marvellous.
My mother:
Hmm. Yes, marvellous.
My grandmother:
While
you were always so picky.
)

The blind swung in, and the small person squatting on the sill showed clearly against the city-lit clouds. She had thin dark arms and legs, and wore a ragged garment patterned like a Tiffany lampshade. Her head was like a praying mantis’s, with bulging eyes at the top corners and a pointed chin. She smoked a pipe with a tiny bowl and a long, curved stem. The spicy smoke made my mind sit up and gasp and fumble after the memory that matched the smell.

‘You’re a fairy!’ I said.

I saw two little puffs of smoke as she snorted, before the blind swung back and covered her. I raised it quickly; she was still there.

‘You have forgotten all your old language.’ Her voice was brittle as a cricket’s.

‘What language?’

‘Ha,’ she said. ‘ “Fairy” language, you would call it. If I told you the word, you would not hear it.’

‘Try,’ I said urgently. ‘Please.’

‘I tried,’ she rattled. ‘Your ears are all fleshly now, all blood and gristle and little hairy hairs; you hear nothing.’ She sucked hard on the pipe and pushed the coal into it until her fingertip glowed.

‘When you say “now” – when you say I’ve “forgotten” . . .’

She blew three tiny smoke rings, then sighed out the rest of the lungful of smoke. ‘I am not what you would call a Good Fairy. I wouldn’t be here if I were. I don’t talk and connect and orient. People can work it out for themselves, I reckon.’

‘Work what out?’ I said. ‘And what if their brains are all blood and gristle too, and they can’t?’

She knocked out the pipe against the sill, with a shower of sparks, and stuck it away in the thin black frizz of her hair. She spread out her wings, which were like a dragonfly’s, and groomed them quickly with her black arms.

‘You’re a Clay-Daughter,’ she said.

‘A what-daughter?’

‘Clay. Clay. You can’t tell me you never noticed how rounded and mud-coloured you are.’

‘But what
is
a Clay-Daughter?’

She was poised to fly off. ‘You were a swappee. You belong in “Fairyland”. But nay, your flesh-twin is there instead, going all to Clay. Somebody threaded the pair of you, back and forth and back between the lands, to make this slip-through that I’ve just used.’
Shirr
, went her wings, and she backed off the sill into the air.

‘Stop!’ I cried. ‘Tell me! My “flesh-twin” – how do I find her?’

The fairy laughed, a noise like flakes of rust rubbing together. ‘The way I came, it’s still soft. But I never told you, is that clear? I’m not a Fixer; I’ve no business putting you to rights.’

And she zoomed away between the buildings.

‘Cerise?’ The doorhandle moved again. ‘Are you all right? Did you call out for us?’

‘No!’ I said in the clear, calm voice. I leaped for the bed. ‘I’m sleeping! I’m fine!’

‘Are you sure?’

I burrowed into the nest of bedclothes . . .
ever noticed
how rounded and mud-coloured
. . . Down and down I crawled, wanting to bury myself right at the bottom and never be dragged out.
You belong in ‘Fairyland’.
The bed became very long, or I became very small, because I couldn’t seem to reach the end of it. And it was warm down here, even beyond where my feet could have warmed it. And the sheet-folds around me felt sticky. And there was light up ahead, as if I were in a cave, crawling towards the cave-mouth. Had my father dislodged the chair somehow, pushed the door open and turned on the light? And why was it – more than sticky, it was slippery, and I was slithering along it towards the light, towards the noise—

‘Oh!’

Out I fell, into a party. Fairies danced in a whirl of black limbs and coloured rags. No, not ‘fairies’ – the nearest fleshly word for them was
zithers
, but the ‘z’ and the ‘th’ were Interland sounds, and couldn’t really be said with a mouth. A man, a fleshly man, full-sized, bone-thin, staring-eyed, played the fiddle among them, wild music in a complicated joke of changing keys, and the
zithers
sang and shouted up to him, and swung from his waist-length hair.