Tender Morsels (2 page)

‘Shh.’ She kept writing.

‘You’re very welcome to if you want.’

‘Dought, shut up or I’ll whap you,’ she said, but without heat; she were too concentrated on the marks she wasn’t making.

And she put me to sleep that way, and in my dream I sat up and the hay fell away, and it was daylight, and the field was full of haymakers, but they were all to a man or woman short-stumps like me. In fact I was one of the taller among them and one of the more handsome.
Dought
, they were saying.
Where is Dought? We need his aid at the wagon. Oh, here he is!

And they needed me to do much what Shakestick did—that is, to say how things would be done and choose who would do them from the crowd. Respect came at me from all sides. People soberly took me at my word and did as I said. And several girls’ eyes gleamed and some of the older women’s too, towards me. I could have said the word and they would have follered me into the hay tonight just like I follered Hotty Annie.

‘Come back, Dought. Here comes Oul Shaky,’ says Annie in my ear. Darkness fell on the hayfield and she were pulling my pants up. Shakestick’s anger blew and banged towards us. Everything was scramble and stack the last forkings of hay, and shouts and smacks of the head for a while. Then we were in the cart and able to rest, jammed in so close we might almost do the thing again and not be noticed.

‘What was that,’ I murmured to Annie who I was half on the lap of, ‘what you done to me?’

‘Well, if you don’t know that, there’s something wrong with you.’ She laughed.

‘No, after. On my forehead. So that I went away.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve begun to be full of that stuff, these last several months. Curious, int it. Did you like it?’

‘Like it? If I could get there and live there I would be happy as a king in his treasure-house.’

‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘I have wondered that.’

‘Oh, I would be happy, all right, no doubting it.’

‘No, I’ve wondered if I could send a person there. I think mebbe
I’ll be able to, one day. Right now all I can do is show.’ She looked tired, and more serious than I had ever seen her. The road’s stones and sprouts flowed behind her along the gaps between the cart-slats.

Beamer leaned in and goggled at me. ‘She will show anyone,’ he said. ‘You show her yours, she will show you hers, and even give yours a rub for you if you ask nice.’

‘You goose.’ Annie laughed and whacked at him. ‘We’re not talking about that.’

‘Oh well, makes a change, then, don’t it?’ said Beamer mildly, and sat back to his place.

Liga’s father fiddled with the fire, fiddled and fiddled. Then he stood up, very suddenly.

‘I will fetch more wood.’

What’s he angry about? Liga wondered. Or worried about, or something. He is being very odd.

Snow-light rushed in, chilling the house. Then he clamped the door closed and it was cosy again, cosy and empty of him. Liga took a deep private breath and blew it out slowly. Just these few moments would be her own.

But her next breath caught rough in her throat. She opened her eyes. Grey smoke was cauliflowering out of the fireplace, fogging the air. The smell! What unnameable rubbish had fallen in the fire?

She coughed so hard she must put aside the rush mat she was binding the edge of and give her whole body over to the coughing. Then pain caught her, low, and folded her—just like a rush-stalk, it felt—in a line across her belly, crushing her innards. She could hardly get breath to cough. Sparks that were not from the fire jiggled
and swam in her eyes—she could not see the fire for the smoke. She could not believe what she was feeling.

The pain eased just as abruptly. It let her get up. It gave her a moment to stagger to the door and open it, her insides dangerous, liquid, hot with surprise and readying to spasm again.

Her father was halfway back from the woodpile, his arms full. He bared his teeth at her, no less. ‘What you doing out?’ White puffs came with the words. ‘Get back inside. Who said you could come out?’

‘I cannot breathe in there.’ The cold air dived down her throat and she coughed again.

‘Then go in and don’t breathe! Shut the door—you’re letting the smoke out. You’re letting the heat.’ He dropped the wood in the snow.

‘Has the chimney fallen in? Or what is it?’ She wanted to step farther out and look.

But he sprang over the logs and ran at her. She was too surprised to fight him, and her insides were too delicate. The icicled edge of the thatch swept down across the heavy sky, and she was on the floor, the door slammed closed above her. It was dark after the snow-glare, the air thick with the billowing smoke. Outside, he shouted—she could not hear the words—and hurled his logs one by one at the door.

She pressed her nose and mouth into the crook of her elbow, but she had already gulped smoke. It sank through to her deepest insides, and there it clasped its thin black hands, all knuckles and nerves, and wrung them, and wrung them.

Time stretched and shrank.
She
seemed to stretch and shrink. The pain pressed her flat, the crashing of the wood. Da muttered out there, muttered
forever
; his muttering had begun before her thirteen years had, and she would never hear the end of it; she must simply be here while it rose from blackness and sank again like a great fish into a lake, like a great water snake. Then Liga’s belly tightened again, and all was gone except the red fireworks inside her. The smoke boiled against her eyes and fought in her throat.

The pains resolved themselves into a movement, of innards wanting to force out. When she next could, she crawled to the door
and threw her fists, her shoulder, against it. Was he out there any more? Had he run off and left her imprisoned? ‘Let me out or I will shit on the floor of your house!’

There was some activity out there, scraping of logs, thuds of them farther from the door. White light sliced into the smoke. Out Liga blazed, in a dirty smoke-cloud, clambering over the tumbled wood, pushing past him, pushing past his eager face.

But it was too late for the cold, clean air to save her; her insides had already come loose. She could not run or she would shake them out. Already they were drooling down her legs. She must clamp her thighs together to hold them in, and yet walk, and yet hurry, to the part of the forest edge they used for their excrements.

She did not achieve it. She fell to her knees in the snow. Inside her skirt, so much of her boiling self fell away that she felt quite undone below the waist, quite shapeless. No, look: sturdy hips. Look: a leg on either side. A blue-grey foot there, the other there. Gingerly, Liga sat back in a crouch to lift her numbing knees off the snow. The black trees towered in front of her, and the snow dazzled all around. She heaved and brought up nothing but spittle, but more of her was pushed out below by the heaving.

She crouched, panting. From her own noises she knew she had become some kind of animal; she had fallen as low as she could from the life she had had before Mam died. Everything had slid from there, out of prosperity, out of town, out of safety, when Mam went, and this was where of course it ended, with Liga an animal in the snow, tearing herself to pieces with the wrongness of everything.

With one last heave, her remaining insides dropped out of her. She knelt over their warmth, folded herself down, and waited to die.

But she did not die there. The snow pained against her forehead and her knees, and the fallen mass of her innards began to lose its heat in the tent of her skirt.

She tried to lift herself off it. At first her knees would not unbend, so she tipped herself forward onto her front . . . paws, they felt like, her front claws. And hoisted her bottom up from there.

‘Oh, my Gracious Lady.’ Her voice sounded drunken and flat. Between pink footprints, her innards lay glossy and dark red. Her feet were purple, blotched yellow, weak and wet with melting pink snow.

She should go back to the house—that was all she knew. And so she laboured towards it, top-heavy, slick-thighed, numb-footed and hollow, glancing behind as if afraid the thing would follow her, along its own pink trail.

Da snatched the door open as soon as she touched it. He stood there, hands on hips. ‘What’s a-matter with you?’ The air around him was clear and warm; in the crook of his arm, the fire flowed brightly up around the new logs. Would he even let her in?

‘Something,’ she said. ‘I lost. Something fell out.’

‘What do you mean, silly girl?’ he said crossly. ‘You went for a shit and you had a shit, as you said.’

‘Something else,’ she said uneasily. His scorn, as usual, made her doubt her word, made her doubt her memory. Here he was, same as ever; here too was the house, all familiar, ready to go on just as it always did. Look, there was her weaving, put aside perfectly neatly.
Pick me up
, it snapped at her.
Continue with me; time is wasting!

‘Get in, get in!’ her father growled. ‘You are letting out all the warmth, standing there like a lummock.’ And he flapped his hand at her, sweeping her in without touching her—and no, this was not what she wanted either. It was good to be warm, but dying outside in the snow would be less wretched than the indoor life again, in all its shuffles and snarls.

She washed and organised herself; really, she was quite similar to before, only somewhat softer and leakier and cramp-bothered. Her father kept his back to her, and hummed a tune under his breath. Slowly, slowly, she went about; slowly she began their meal, scraping the parsnip, pulling the dry-meat into its strands. Everything looked odd and felt odd in her hands, as if she had never done this before.

Her father, still humming, went out to relieve himself. He spent a good while doing it. Liga peeled the last onion they had and
chopped it up fine and glistering, like salt-crystals or jewels, only with that good rich smell.

He strode back in, startling her and making her knife hover over the board. ‘Mekkin a stew, are ye? I’ll melt ye some clean water.’ He was inflated, glowing. She felt him take the pot and go out again.

‘Here we are!’ He thundered in and swung towards the fireplace, hooked up the pot of snow, bullied the fire. ‘Nothing cosier on a winter night: a nice hot fire, a bit of stew!’

He stood and turned, pleased, hands on hips. Warily, she glanced at his face, which beamed on her. All sense that she could judge things aright had left her; he would have to show her again, piece by piece, and she would have to sit very still and alert, and learn as well as she could.

Winter passed, night by long night and day by short day. Liga was kept busy following all her father’s rules. These seemed to change by the hour. He railed at her for sitting quietly by the fire; he grew irritable when she busied herself about him. He roared at her for oversalting the smoke-meat; in cold silence, he added salt to it himself. He nagged and banged about that her bloods did not come; when they did, he cursed her and called her filthy. He banished her to the truckle bed; ‘What are you doing down there?’ he said, outraged, when she went to it the next night.

The best was when he went into the town and left her; he had now forbidden her to be seen there, even in his own company. ‘Especially that,’ he said. ‘Especially that. We don’t want people talking, how old you are now and all filled out like that into your bodice.’

It was very dull there in the cottage alone, but it was better than the adventure of his presence, which, even when he was silent, put such a press on Liga’s mind that sometimes she could not think at all; he made around himself a kind of frozen space into which she could only step wrongfooted.

At the very end of winter, Liga turned fourteen, and no one noticed but herself. Then spring exploded in its usual celebrations, fat with clumped blossom and bursting leaf, raucous with birdsong. In April, her bloods stopped, and Da grew by turns wilder in his tempers and more silent in his sulks.

‘Bleed, girl, bleed!’ he shouted at her one night, turning back to her after he had had at her and fallen away.

‘I cannot
make it happen
,’ she said angrily.

‘I
know
that, curse you!’

‘I’d think you would be glad—you always say how dirty it is.’ And she crawled away to the truckle.

His head loomed at her over the edge of the big bed. ‘Are you really so stupid?’ he said, as if astonished.

And she supposed she was, because she did not know what he meant. She stared up at him, at the shaggy shape of her looming ignorance. She thought he might spit on her, so long and intense was his silence. But he only jerked out of sight, with a scornful noise in his throat.

In late summer he brought home a preparation in a cloth, and boiled it up, and drew the foul-smelling liquid off the boilings into a cup. ‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘I have got it from a woman up town. She says it will give you strong bones.’

Is there a problem, Liga wondered, with my weakling bones? There must be. She glanced stealthily at her arms on the table beside the dreadful tea, and waited unhappily for something to crack and crumble in her frame as she sat there, her mouth shrivelling with the drink’s bitterness.