The Singular & Extraordinary Tale of Mirror & Goliath: From the Peculiar Adventures of John Lovehart, Esq., Volume 1 (Notebooks of John Loveheart, E) (13 page)

W
hat is my earliest memory
? I remember when I was called Myrtle. That was my name. One of three sisters.

Myrtle Violet Rose.

We were listening to Grandpa tell us a fairy story. It was about a wolf who lived in the forest and he was very hungry. I remember Violet was frightened; she didn’t like his big teeth and his big yellow eyes.

Wolves are supposed to love the moon, they are deeply in love with her. She protects them, she gives them power, feeds them with love. Stars tremble about her.

Grandpa says the wolf can disguise himself. He wears the clothes of humans so they can be tricked and eaten. In this story there is a little girl with a red cloak. She carries a hunting knife in case a wolf tries to eat her. A huntsman watches over her, he has a big axe and he knows the forest and can recognize wolves.

Is London a great forest? Are there wolves dressed in top hats? Smiling, eating cake and drinking tea?

My name was Myrtle. I didn’t own anything red. The only red was my hair. My sisters’ hair was brown. My sisters said fairy folk have red hair. Red as a sacrifice. Am I a piece of meat? Will a handsome wolf man want me for dinner?

Grandpa says the wolf dresses up as the little girl’s grandma and sits in bed waiting for her. Granny’s shawl on his shoulders, her spectacles perched on the end of his wolfish snout. Tucked up in bed. The moon heavy, prehistoric above him. A night light.

“I don’t want her to get eaten,” said Rose, and covered her ears.

“If you don’t listen to the story, you won’t learn anything,” Grandpa replied, his yellowish teeth snapping together. What did he want us to learn? Did he want us to carry an axe? What was the lesson?

The moon is always on the side of wolves. The huntsman guards the forest path. If you have tea with a wolfman in a top hat then you will probably be eaten. Maybe the granny wasn’t tricked. Maybe she let him in. Maybe there is something inside us that wants to be gobbled up. My sisters were scared of the story, they didn’t like wolves. I touched my hair, I could feel the heat, the teasing itch.

And that was my first memory.

My name was Myrtle. When I died, I jumped into a mirror. Became a reflection. Part of the moon. The wolves sing to me at night now.

I
was abducted
from a field of flowers when I was sixteen years old. There were poppies in the field, as red as fire. Bursting like blood vessels. I remember that he smelt of angels. My Auntie Eva told me that angels smell like fireworks because the atmosphere burns their wings, crackles them like paper under a lighted match. Auntie Eva said never trust angels because they are beautiful. But he wasn’t beautiful. He was small and poisonous with dark spectacles. I wanted him so much to be beautiful.

On hot summer afternoons I used to visit her. She lived in a rundown cottage near the river, cracks in the walls, white paint flaking like old skin. I would touch those walls with my finger, imagining I was touching a tree and trying and guess its age. Ring on ring. She called herself a happy spinster. She hated men and mirrors. She said both were liars.

Sometimes she would make a pot of tea and we would sit and feed the birds in her little garden, mostly blackbirds and one very overweight robin who was her favourite. We sat in a lazy dream listening to the slow fat beat of wings and the soft slithering of snails. Sometimes she would read my palm. She had an interest in the occult. Her grandmother Molly had been a fortune-teller in Brighton on the pier. There was a strange old photograph of her in the hallway with a red turban on her head and a dead stuffed snake coiled in her lap. She looked like a fraud. Auntie Eva would polish her picture every spring like an ornament to make sure Grandma Molly could keep a watchful eye over us. I wondered why. There really was nothing much to see.

The cottage was small and painted with the colour of sunflowers, which had faded over the years into a smoker’s-finger yellow. The furniture was all from philanthropic charities, a broken sofa with a floral print and a ringworm occasional table. Wonky legged chairs and a strange squashy cushion seat with bumblebees embroidered on it, flying in circles. Her strange assortment of relatives adorned the walls in old frames, a photograph of Grandma Molly’s father, Reginald Crump, a taxidermist who was hung for poisoning his wife. Reggie’s portrait was appropriately hung in the outdoor privy. In Aunt Eva’s bedroom, in a beautiful ornate frame decorated with dragonflies coiling like the fingers of a magician, danced around a picture of twin baby boys in a pram. The names underneath read
Arthur &
Goliath, Cairo 1850.
Their father was as rich as a prince and was an explorer and archaeologist and his name was Gawain Honey-Flower, a huge man who had travelled out to Cairo and, as Aunt Eva fondly recalled, met a beautiful Egyptian woman, plump as a pagan goddess. The story changed depending on how much wine Aunt Eva had drunk. Sometimes she was “a witch, who had caught Gawain’s soul in a mirror”, other times “the daughter of a pig farmer, who had a toothy grin like a carved pumpkin on Halloween”. Either way, the fate of their children remained the same on each story telling. A year later the twins were born: Arthur who sucked his fingers and Goliath who gobbled everything up just like a bear cub.

Goliath was sent to a boys’ school in England whilst Arthur trained with his father as an archaeologist and participated in the excavations of the tombs of the Pharaohs and the deciphering of hieroglyphics. At the age of 22, whilst exploring the Nile with a French aristocrat, he fell in whilst drunk and was eaten by a crocodile. Goliath was Aunt Eva’s favourite relative because he was “physically enormous and hairy”, two attributes which she thought of as wondrous. The remaining less interesting relatives were spotted throughout the house: a sturdy housekeeper, a balding pharmacist, a non-descript postman, a shrivelled florist and finally, lurking rather suspiciously in a mother of pearl frame by the cat flap, an incredibly ugly coffin maker. I wondered where she would end up putting me.

Aunt Eva was a great collector of knick-knacks and loved roaming round the flea markets, sometimes picking up the most disgusting and unusual items. In her kitchen drawer was a jar with floating glass eyeballs, a pair of birthing stirrups and a quack doctor’s prescription: Dr Tumbleweeds “Magical Remedy” for ailments of the heart, as thick and black as syrup. I opened it once, it stank of toffee apples and something rotting. On her bedroom table sat an assortment of coloured glass perfume bottles, aquamarine, ruby red, snail silver, flamenco pink. Little magic jars, each with a strange smell: peaches and cream, mothballs, lavender and butterfly wings, tickling the nostrils. On her hand mirror there was a picture of her and my mother when they were my age, wearing strange dresses and holding hands. I examined the photograph carefully; they were almost identical, it was only the sly look in Aunt Eva’s eye that gave her identity away. My mother never looked sly, always calm, always snow white.

The river curled round the bottom of Auntie’s garden, lapping like a greedy tongue. It was deep and thick water, full of glittering slime and snake-tail weeds. Her garden was on a slope, descending into the riverbank where great spongy heaps of frogspawn floated, soft and glistening. Occasionally we would see a little boat sail along the river, with a red sail. The man in it was a local, Mr Wishbone. He caught freshwater fish and slept on his boat. I waved to him once but he ignored me. I thought he looked hundreds of years old, like a moth-eaten wizard. Perhaps if you gazed into his eyes, you would turn into nothing. Aunt Eva had told me he’s an old miserable bastard and if he ever moored his boat at the bottom of her garden she would drill a hole in it and watch him sink.

On one afternoon that she read my palm, she opened a bottle of red wine and, after a few generous glasses, held my hand like a prayer book, studying the lines, the hidden words, the invisible threads of me. And she always said the same thing – “Someone is coming for you; he has ladybirds in his eyes.” – and then she laughed sadly.

“Is it a handsome prince?” I would say. She looked away from me. I took my hand away like a book that has been read and discarded. The little rituals we went through, they were always the same. As if we were both waiting for something to happen, something that, like lightning, would strike and leave a terrible imprint upon us. While we waited, we played these games.

The village in which we live was called Appledoor and was a small, sleepy-eyed place surrounded by fields of apple trees and ancient woodland. I had always felt as safe as a bed bug in this place. Snuggled up, squashed with love. But on the day of my sixteenth birthday things began to change. There was a great thunderstorm that day: black ribbons of darkness spread across the sky and the clouds were shaped like dragons, soaring and screaming. That evening the schoolmaster, Mr Quipple, was found drowned in the river. He had committed suicide, left no note.

Aunt Eva thought he was suspicious because he never grew any flowers in his garden. She said on Sundays he would read his newspaper in the garden and shout at the local tomcat if it was lazing about. She says that men who have gardens without any flowers or plants have no soul. She said the tomcat probably pushed him in the river. Or a mermaid lured him in, swishing her aquamarine tail and fluttering her moon-silver eyelashes at him. She kept the newspaper article of his death in the toilet next to our ancestor, Reginald Crump.

I asked her if anything else awful ever happened in this town and she said no, but she suspected the meat at the local butchers. “It’s probably human,” she said, then laughed out loud, a shocking laughter with hints of electricity in it that zapped and tingled.

She has a huge mane of thick hair that she dyes a vibrant flame red and crimps. It falls down to her waist like crazy snakes. I think she really is a beautiful woman. She’s something strange from a fairy tale, or maybe she’s Queen Titania. She’s made of raw magic and rare delights. She has just turned fifty and says she has never been in love. I don’t know if this makes her sad. I don’t really know how to feel about it at all. I think magical creatures find it difficult to live amongst humans, in a human world. She must be so frustrated. She must be so lonely. But she won’t tell me.

My mother is not beautiful like her sister, Eva. She is a tall, strong woman and a wonderful gardener. Hands always in the earth. Hands always making something grow. She campaigns for the suffragettes. I have no father. My mother told me he was a salesman just passing through Appledoor. He wooed her with magic tricks and then got her pregnant and left. There are no pictures of him, only her memories.

She said he was handsome with a lopsided smile and full of promises. And full of shit, as Aunt Eva often tells me. I am like my mother, tall and plain. My eyes are very pale, like a ghost. My mother tells me I have my father’s eyes. Hers are baby blue. They are the colour of safety and calm waters. Mine are the colour of moth wings, hiding and fluttering in a secret wardrobe. Just like Daddy.

On the day of my abduction, the sun was boiling like an egg. The hottest day on record for fifty years. I woke up sweating, my thighs damp. I’d dreamt that Aunt Eva was a mermaid swimming in the river, throwing insults at Mr Wishbone in his boat. I dreamt that mother was standing in a field of bright golden corn and that Daddy came to visit me, came into my room with a basket of apples. He said he knew a magic trick and he waved his hand over those green apples and they turned into bright red pomegranates, heavy magic orbs. He said they were delicious, “Why don’t you taste one, sweetheart?” His hair was greasy and his hands nervous. I thought, he’s just a con man. He’s a grin without a face. Something not to be trusted.

I heard Aunt Eva’s voice, like a soft siren coming from the waters, “Oh, my poor girl. That bastard. That bastard. He’s sold you.” The dream ended. I heard my mother leave the house and the neighbours’ dog howl. I pulled myself out of bed and stood in front of my mirror, examining myself. I thought, I have not been ravished yet, I wonder what it would feel like. I was sixteen and I had not been kissed. In fact, no boys had ever shown any interest in me at all.

I am only sixteen

                there is plenty of

                                        time.

I sat with Aunt Eva in her garden. She made homemade lemonade and put something alcoholic in it. She wore an extravagant, very low cut green dress with a string of fake pearls. She smelt of honey and spices. The heat beat down on us; we were two eggs in a frying pan sizzling gently. A quill rested in her hand like a wand, tapping against the garden chair. I think she would be capable of serious witchcraft. She wiped her lips with her sleeve and looked at me. “Darling child. Do you know that I own a shotgun?” I shook my head, I didn’t. She looked at me quite seriously. I could feel some dark magic humming under her words.

“I want you to listen very carefully to me, Pomegranate. I think something very bad is going to happen to you today. I have heard it in dreams. I have seen it in the smile of cats. Read it in the frog spawn.” She sat back into her sun chair and glugged down the remainder of her lemonade. I didn’t know whether to be worried or to laugh.

“Will you protect me, Auntie, with your shotgun?” I said, almost mocking her.

She stared at me. She had something alien in her eyes, something from a remote star.

“When he comes for you, I will be with you, and I will stop it.”

A long silence ensued between us. I could hear the wind pick up over the water, rustling, secretive. A cool sleepiness. She yawned and brushed strands of hair out of her eyes and then smiled a deep secret smile like a crocodile, and looked upon me. “I am going to tell you a story about me and your mother, when we were young girls in Appledoor. Would you like that, Pomegranate?”

“Yes,” I said, not really thinking. The sun was in my eyes, making me sleepy, making me dizzy. And so she began. She told me the tale, which she had told me many times. She told me the tale of the Lightning Tree in the field of flowers. And she said when she had finished the tale, she would take me to the field and show me the tree. And so I listened. I shut my eyes and let myself slip into the words, like maple syrup oozing over pancakes, with satisfying easiness.

When Eva and my mother were ten years old they went to live in a foundlings home called Honeybee House, the other side of the river. Their parents, my grandparents, had died in an accident. A train had derailed off a bridge; they had been trapped inside and drowned. Eva and mother never talk about their parents and they have no pictures of them. I wonder sometimes if they ever existed, if they are both strange women from another galaxy, touched with stardust. Maybe all my ancestors are borrowed from other people, photographs Aunt Eva has collected from her flea markets and adopted – made into an intricate jigsaw past. A fake scrapbook of memories. I wonder then, who are these women really? Maybe they are not human. Maybe they are the daughters of gods dropped from the heavens. And then, what would that make me?