A Woman Clothed in Words (12 page)

~~~

Some message from afar. That’s what Laurence wants most of all. Of all his longings this is the strongest. He always works the hardest at the fire, piling up the dirty papers loosely to make the greatest heat, taking out the book of matches with a conscious flourish. As soon as the flames are high enough, he gives the signal to pile on the tufts of grass, the clumps of scooped-up damp leaves, and soon there is smoke rising, smoke that makes his throat ache for he won’t stand back like the others, he has to be the master of this ceremony, staying with the fire and feeding it now more paper and now more grass. The smoke gets into all the pipes of his nose and chest until his eyes are watering and he can’t stop coughing. Nancy stands there admiring his bravery till he gives her the signal to go to the end corner of the lot and watch for an answering signal, another smoke rising from another family somewhere who are stuck with their own company every day of the year and not allowed to go to school, because of the neighbourhood, their mother says, but they know it’s because of Boy, and perhaps a little because of Brythyll and her strange disappearance that time. Any child could be abducted, Grandfather said as though it was something quite ordinary. The other grandfather perhaps just to be argumentative said right out that such an event, not really explainable, was something to be proud of, for it showed the family to have something different, something richly strange about it. The two old gentlemen argued the point for an hour or more, their voices rising and rising until Father says
shut up both of you and have a beer.
There’s nothing more to it than the high price of education.

The Sermon on the Beam

The beam is the only one strong enough to stand on. It’s burnt but not burnt through. The charring is a ripple with the slick grey sheen of old burnt wood. Church fire, wildfire, foxfire, St. Martin’s fire, these were the first words of Laurence’s sermon. They came from the paper in his hand, his other hand clasped the uncharred upright. He looked down sixteen feet on the upturned faces of his congregation, those three who tried to look him in the eye but could not for the distance between them made his eyes small as currants. He seemed so high. He was so high. Better to fix their gaze upon Grandfather’s old white ladder leant against what was left of the south wall whose bricks, flame-cracked and heat-broken, crumbled from month to month. How long before they would become simply a huddle of broken red clay? Firefly, fireman, fire ant, fire away, fire away, fire away blurted Boy from the sagging pushchair... Away away away. Oh, oh, come down Laurie, Nan whispered very low, for might not a loud noise tumble him from his high uneven perch in the birdcage of the sky?

This is the Word, continues Laurie, loudly, firmly. He looks outwards now and sees clear to the slow brown waters of the canal. The word is fire...and water, he adds, curiously conscious
that the canal will not be pleased to be left out of the picture. Should he include the trees? He decides not. Fire and water should be enough, for the present. Suppose that a wind sprung up and blew his words back into his mouth? But there is no wind and he must go on until the end.

And what is the end and when? Laurence thinks of this as the central question of his homily. We are all going on to a place between earth and sky. I am going there and I am taking you lot with me. This had been meant as a promise, but perhaps, during the time after his voice jumped out of his mouth and hovered like a canker worm on its thread before swinging down to land in the ears of his listeners, perhaps it had metamorphosed and attained its next instar, had become a threat. I can’t get it back. Laurence had never before felt the terrible desire to scoop up his words and thrust them back into his mouth – to eat words to eat worms.

The faces looking up trustingly crumpled. All the six eyes shut at once. They willed him to stop preaching, to jump down, to land amongst them and leave his priestly self up there wobbling on the beam. What happened was not so much a fall as a leap. The scarf he was wearing as a stole wrapped itself around his neck, caught itself on a nail, tore away from the nail as he sailed to the grass, his arms outstretched his mouth open, not screaming but shouting the long word hidden behind his tongue. Brythyll heard the word as her name and stood her ground ready to break his fall. Boy saw his outstretched arms as a crucifixion and began to sniffle and weep holding his face in his hands, not looking at the downfall of his brother. Nan just watched and was happy with Laurence’s flight. Her hands clapped and clapped as he landed neatly on his feet and strolled off up the little rise behind them, brushed himself off, rearranged the torn scarf and continued his sermon where he left off, even bothering to finish the sentence he had begun standing up there on the burnt beam.

~~~

Boy sits there for a minute or two admiring the quiet of the two women, admiring the orange and white of the flowers, sniffing up the warm scent of yellow petals and yellower pollen. Some leaves bent in the middle from rough handling smell wettish, and green juice oozes from the cracks. And behind them a whole dark church unburnt. All its shell unbroken. Dark inside like a head when no one is thinking, when the mind is like a dim fishtank, enclosed and with just a few bubbles arising, breaking on the surface, popping out of the nose and the mouth in little puffs, puffs which bring no ideas up from the mind. Water water on the brain, Boy sings ... water water water.

Things dry and clear up and there is a light to turn on. The small light showing the hopeless dry fish and pondferns sticking to the neck of the huge green bottle which was his idea for a fishtank. And wasn’t it Bryll, herself a fish, who had turned on the tap and drained the brain and made him see outward and speak, and now she wanted him to read. He took the two books from under his pillow, they were both dull-looking on the outside:
The Lore of Faery
and
The Laws of Physics.
His sister would judge him for which one he chose to read. He turned inward to the dry blank room of his skull. Once he had seen maps on these walls, all maps of a country he had once made up his mind never to leave. But he had left. Was it before or after the flood? Had it really been a habitation of greenish light? Now everything was stark, a place of brilliant grey and white. Speaking was outward. Reading was gathering in. Stuff stuff stuff, my head is full to aching, chiff and chaff, dead bodies of thousands of flies come to feed on the harsh little bodies of the spiny little fish not knowing what deadly poison they carried. And who will eat the flies? Boy thought of a black bird with tall yellow legs, its claws scratching at his scalp. Just before the bird lands he remembers its word – gallinacious. If he says the word aloud and carefully will this prevent the bird from eating the dried flies? Can he save the bird and stop the cycle of doom? And save himself to be his own idiot?

The next story he tells himself is about a tube endlessly turning itself inside out. It’s somehow attached to itself, as though it was a ring. But it isn’t a ring. He tries sliding down its curves to find the join, but that doesn’t work and he slips inside. The light is not so bright now and the tube is much more lovely. It has rainbow colours. Pearly pearly, he says thinking of the one little pearl in Bryll’s ring she wears on Sundays and birthdays and Christmas. But this is Easter coming. The flowers and the dark church and the Saturday of sorrows and thinking as the light hits his eyes that it is not coming from night into day, but simply that things have changed around and night is now bright as though the stars were a disease of the sky’s face that had spread all over and the day was cloudy and eclipsed and only the outlines of things showed. These were also the outlines of ideas like the picture of the Turing machine in the book – the precise drawing of it, the endless tape. If it hadn’t been for the pain of his jealousy he would, he knew, have been able to think of these things first before anyone else: the pearly tube, the endless machine.

~~~

How awkward to know that you are the child your father never speaks of but thinks about all the time. Nan watches him. She sees his elbows on the table, his head in his hands. She dreams of him bringing the cup to his lips as the kitchen light burns above him and the light that lightens him, the one that glows in his chest like a dahlia, shines behind his flesh and his ribs to be comprehended only by her. For you cannot say anyone can see it. It is to be known not seen, gloved as it is in the envelope of his being. And she knows he dreams of her smashing through the fragile flesh with her small fist snatching at his glowing heart, holding it in front of the open window and all the moths in the garden come in to circle around dancing and wishing to die in their dance.

She wakens from one dream into another and lies low in a hammock that is not her own – the down, the gossamer, the breeze blowing in. It’s still not morning when she opens her eyes for the third time. She’s fallen out of bed, but didn’t feel the bump, only the cold hard floor, her feet tangled in a web of torn cloth that once was a pink sheet with faded white daisies. Give me this day, this day that follows bright and hard as a sardine can. You can’t get into it too easily, you have to find something to open it with.

Her father has hands with hair on. Black. Grandfathers? White hair for the music one. The one who does the other lessons? His have red freckles going up and down the fingers, even under the nails if you look carefully and can get near enough to stare.

She opens the door and goes out. Shadows like fleeing people run about in the garden and lie down in the churchyard where the tombs used to be. They must have taken away the bones and the hair and the winding cloths they were buried in, for this place has been declared not sacred and only the stones leaning this way and that with hardly to be read names, only those remain.

~~~

It’s not that there are never any other children about. They go back and forth, up the road and down, and they stop at the gate and stare in. Between the bars, which is silly when you think about the churchyard which has no fence, no gate, and you can get into the garden through the side there. No children do except their own and dirty Tommy who strayed in, and ran away when they called him.

Broken Tommy, says Laurence. Broken on the wheel of obvious ill fortune.

So are we all, says Bryll passing by, her arms full of dry laundry.

Laurence brings a sandwich out and breaks it in two and gives Tommy the smallest piece because after all he is smaller. Boy sits dribbling on a log by the fence. When’s he going to stop that nonsense, he just does it because of keeping his place in the family. Have you ever heard him sing? He’s playing with the bag of clothespegs, the gypsy ones with the rusted metal rings around the middle. No springs but they are sturdy as legs, they have heard their mother say.

~~~

This night, announces Brythyll, is the Feast of the Dark, and she’s wrapping something in a navy blue paper bag. Dark food like licorice and parkin and loganberry jam. What else is black that you eat? Winedrops and sloes and purple gobstoppers. Nothing lighter than this, and she holds a winedrop up to the light. It’s a jewel, Boy thinks, but cloudy, a little too cloudy. His inside voice says ruby, garnet, spinel. Chocolate, he says softly in his dribbly outside voice, with raisins in.

It’s the dark of the crypt they’re after. A bit sloshy down there since it rained all last week. Rubber boots, rubber boots, sings Nan, why do you fade so soon? They start off so black and shiny and after a week or two they’re grey like the old ones, chalky grey and dull. Black, black, she sings sitting on the kitchen floor with one leg up pulling on the boot. Onyx, Boy says, jet, and a foamy gob leaps out from between his teeth.

They all stand with their backs to Laurence pressing their foreheads against the cold and slime of the crypt wall, while he concentrates on the story. It’s getting harder every time to do this. He’s getting too old. Perhaps this is the last time.

Once, he begins, a young man, his name was Zandor, got tired of the mountain where he had always lived, and decided to descend from those heights where the snow lay thick about his feet. He would go looking for the city his mother had told him about, which had grown up by an inlet to the sea, a harbour where boats and ships, so she said, bob night and day on the waves. When I was there last, she told him, there were foghorns and searchlights and dogs barking in the alleys and strangers, sailors perhaps, walking up and down the streets all night looking for a place to sleep, seeking for someone to keep them company in their dreams.

How to get there? Well, at the foot of the mountain there was a train station, where you could buy a ticket to any destination you chose. Zandor had no money but that did not prevent him from his travels. He loitered around the station all day and in the dark of the evening he hopped on the train when the conductor wasn’t looking. All night the train travelled on across a boggy plain and through dark coniferous woods until at last another day dawned. In the growing light he imagined early rising people on foot or on bicycles watching astonished at the sight of his pale face in the train window rushing on by to the seashore, his eyes weary and bleary with smuts from the burning wood, smoke and steam and the past dashing away from him, and the future coming towards him quicker than he would have thought possible. In spite of all this he was not ready for the city when it loomed ahead. It looked sad and grey in the fog coming up from the sea.

As he jumped down from the train with his small blue suitcase in his hand he noticed at once the deathly quiet of the place. That’s not at all what you expect from a city is it? No traffic, no lights, no churchbells, though it was Sunday morning, and from the sea no foghorns and in the harbour not a ship or a boat to be seen. Where are the people? he asked himself, but as his ears accustomed themselves to this strange place he realised that all was not as silent and dead as he had at first thought.