The Travellers and Other Stories (22 page)

Hannah stepped forward and took hold of the soggy mound of cloth at his head and squeezed it. She wrung it out and smoothed it down a little way and when Annie helped her turn him over the two of them pulled smartly at the filthy hem to cover his naked parts. His face was the colour of a thunder cloud, and one of his eyes was gone. There was a wound in the ugly swelling of his ankles, a slice of his soft flesh beginning to uncurl from around the bone, like the peel from an orange. White sea-lice crawled in the open seam. Hannah knelt beside him and put her arm behind his neck and tried to raise him but she couldn't move him. He was half sunk down in the wet sand and even when we lifted the hanks of his long hair so there was nothing holding him down, we couldn't shift his weight, only roll him to and fro. So Hannah took his arms and Annie and I took his feet and we tried again but we still couldn't move him. It was like trying to drag a hammock full of stones. I wondered if we might have to leave him after all, but Hannah said we should probably bring a door and put him on that; wait for him to float up with the rising water and float him to the shore and carry him home to Bella on the door.

She looked at Annie and asked her if she'd go with her and help her take the door off its hinges at the back of her place and bring it down, but Annie was staring at Matthew and biting her thumb and didn't seem to know how to answer, so Hannah turned to me instead.

‘Peggy,' she said. ‘We have to.'

‘Do we?' I said.

‘Yes,' said Hannah, in a firm voice, so I said all right I'd go with her if she wanted me to, but wouldn't it be better if I stayed behind with Annie to hold him while the tide came in? If there weren't two of us to hold him when he floated up out of the sand we might lose him again.

Hannah seemed to think about this, and for a moment I thought she was going to say,
Well perhaps that would be for the best, if we lost him again
, but she didn't, what she said was that she'd go back by herself for the door and collect Mary on the way to help.

So Hannah went off to fetch Mary and the door and Annie stayed behind with me and while they were gone Matthew High rose up slowly out of the muddy sand on the incoming tide. We took a hand and a foot each, Annie and I, and held him there while he rocked back and forth on the surface of the rising water. I looked at Annie. She was thinking about Bella, you could tell.

‘They will have to hurry,' she said.

‘Yes,' I said, ‘They will.'

You have to see the tide here to believe it: once it starts properly on its way—once it's finished its long slow trickling start—it comes racing forward in a great greedy rush, and even floating in the water Matthew High was heavy and hard to hold onto and kept sinking down beneath the surface. I kept looking at Annie. I knew what she was thinking because I was thinking it too—that we could both of us let go of his hands and feet and leave him there till the tide turned and let him ride back out on it like a Viking and be dragged down by the current; the sea would take him and Bella would never know.

I think there was a part in all of us that day that was tempted, even Hannah, and while I stood there in the freezing water with Annie Cotton, I thought,
well, if they are too long we will just have to let go and that will be that and no one could ever blame us
. Faster and faster the water rose up around our waists and our skirts swirled around us like weed on top of the grey water and so did Matthew High's long thick hair. He lay between us like a big puffy eiderdown. There was a weight to him though, even in the water, a gravity. He was swollen and cold but he was so solid it made you want to cry out. I thought of Bella and I wanted more than anything to let him go, but we could see the others now, coming back with the door, Hannah trotting smartly in front, Mary behind.

‘Look,' said Annie suddenly for the second time that day, and this time she was pointing to a shell, lodged in the mucky hollow where Matthew's missing eye had been. It was small and white and shaped like a helter-skelter. I picked it out and closed my hand around it and pressed its point into my palm to feel the sharpness of the pain.

When Hannah and Mary came splashing towards us we pulled Bella's husband to them and when we had him on the door we floated him to the shore and carried him over the grassy mounds between the channels and laid him on the shingle between the marshes and the road and that was when we saw Bella High heading along the road in her rubber boots and her long jumper and her yellow skirt.

Even from this far off, it was obvious she didn't know yet. You could tell by her walk that she hadn't seen anything.

‘You go and tell her Peggy,' said the others but I said I couldn't do it. I knew I couldn't be the one to tell her. I knew the words would lodge in my throat like a splint of wood and I would stand there looking at Bella High's lovely face with its sparkling grey eyes and its sweet mouth and all those glossy chestnut curls falling over her shoulders like a shower of bells and I knew I didn't have the strength for it. I knew I wouldn't be able to drag the words up. They would stay there like a big clot, or a hard pebble, stuck in the narrow tightness at the dark back of my mouth. You could tell none of the others wanted to do it either. No one had the stomach for it, not even Hannah, not really. Annie looked at her feet. They were cold and dirty and covered in black sand. She was shivering. Mary was gawping at the bloated mound of Matthew stretched out upon the door.

At last Hannah said, all right she would go. She would go home and put on her mourning bonnet and then she would go to Bella High's house and tell her to prepare for a funeral and then the rest of us could bring Matthew to her.

We watched as Hannah set off towards the road above the shingle beach and Bella, further up, carried on along it in her yellow skirt. Moving against the stone walls and the dark gorse at the road's edge she looked like a piece of sunlight or a daffodil petal or a rich curl of fresh butter, and I felt a kind of burning in my chest, looking at Matthew lying with his flabby upturned face upon the door.

She was at her gate with Hannah when we came up to the house, her hand to her mouth. There'd been such a tension among us, all the way—me and Annie and Mary—carrying him back, all of us silent, getting ready to show him to her. I can still feel it, the weight of him on the door, the huge squashy bulk of him, like a vast fish or a great dense jelly, the way he flopped and bounced.

Matthew High, here. Matthew High home. Returned, delivered.

She was quiet, Bella. None of us knew what to say to her. When Hannah said, ‘Will we bring him in, Bella?' she just nodded. She looked small like a child and I felt huge and big-knuckled and ugly the way all of us always do in the presence of Bella High. When we brought him in on the door Mary said, ‘Where will we put him?' and Bella said, ‘On the bed,' and until that moment when we rolled him off the door onto the bed in a big squidgy lump, dripping slime and water onto the counterpane and the wide clean boards of Bella High's floor, she had not shed a tear but when she saw him lying on their bed she started shaking and gulping and none of us knew what to do and it seemed like it would go on forever, her weeping and us standing there like a row of posts but in the end Hannah stepped over to her and put her arms around her and said, ‘Hush. You must get him ready,' and when at last Bella was quiet again she went to the dresser and opened a drawer and pulled out a cloth and a comb and began to wash and dry him. She rubbed his long hair with the cloth and pulled the teeth of the comb through it, pushing the water up and out, tugging gently when it caught on a shell or a snail or a frill of slimy weed. She made a kind of top-knot behind his head, which was how he used to wear it and when she was done we watched as she kissed the bony hollow with its lost eye and took the blotched pumpkin face between her hands and held it, cupping it close, like a piece of treasure.

I tried to picture myself in my own home, holding a cloth and a comb, fetching a folded suit and a white laundered shirt from the dresser and saying, as she was now, to Annie and Mary and Hannah and me,
Pass me that neck-tie will you, those socks and shoes? Help me, will you please, while I get my husband into these?

A little while later, Elizabeth Lesh came, and Fran Hodge, and the Cragg sisters. The news had spread quickly and by nightfall there was no one who hadn't come to witness it, this offering from the sea.

It is the worst of all sins, envy. It eats away at what's left of your heart and fills you up with black and bitter thoughts and shrinks your life to nothing, and it isn't because you've been
told
that envy is a terrible ugly sin that you know it to be true—not like other sins that you're told are wrong but don't feel it—it's because you can
feel
the way this one eats you up and shrivels your whole life until you're nothing but a dry envious stick with nothing in your soul but the thought of Bella High and her vast tremendous luck; her great good fortune.

It was Annie who broke down, just as we were getting ready to leave the house; poor scrawny boss-eyed Annie who went up to Bella High and started screaming in her face that it wasn't fair, the way she was always the one to get everything in this life—how it had always been her that was blessed with the best of everything and now it was the same all over again and Annie held out her long empty hands before Bella High and shook them and wheeled round in front of us and shouted to us all as if we didn't know it, that the earth was a place of gifts for Bella High, always had been. Everything she wanted it gave up to her in the end. She had always had the earth's gifts and now she had the sea's too.

‘Come, Annie,' said Hannah at last and stepped forward and took hold of Annie's stringy red wrists and pulled her away and said to all of us that we should go now. So we all went home to fetch our funeral bonnets and came back and with Bella helping this time, we gathered Matthew up onto the door again and carried him to the church and Mary conducted the service and when he was buried we all left Bella with him. At the gate I turned and saw that she had lain down on top of the earth, and perhaps you will tell me that it would make no difference to be able to do that but it seems to me that it would.

She has put up a small round stone since then and she visits it often, this firm spot on the earth where she has laid him to rest.

When it was all over we took off our funeral bonnets and put them away. We all knew we would not need them again. It is something to do with the current here, the particular way it bends its muscle around this piece of shore. It means that when a boat goes over and is pulled down the men are flushed away and we do not see them again, ever.

Even so, a few of us went down afterwards to the shore and stood next to the little pile of greasy flotsam we have salvaged over the years that is ours—the orange buoy, the square of green nylon netting, the spars of wood, the shadows on the water that are nothing but the clouds.

IN THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

ON FRIDAYS WHEN
we met in the cave above the weir after school I always brought Trude something—some chocolates or some left-over wine I'd smuggled out of the house or a few flowers from the garden Mutti wouldn't miss—and in exchange she would give me a kiss. But after a few weeks my little gifts began to get on her nerves and one afternoon towards the end of autumn when I arrived with a handful of marigolds, she told me she was bored of my presents and the only thing she could think of that was interesting enough for her to want me to bring it to her, the only thing she could think of I could give her that would ever persuade her to kiss me again, was the heart of Magdalena Hirsch.

From this I concluded that she was bored of me, that she didn't really want to see me anymore, and this was her way of telling me to get lost. I went home, throwing the marigolds in the river on the way and told myself I'd better forget about Trude.

But I couldn't. Trude's lips were so soft and warm and kissing her in the cool cave after school was the best thing I'd ever done. I kept thinking about her and I kept thinking about what she'd said about bringing her the heart of Magdalena Hirsch. It was a stupid thing I knew it was, but somehow it caught hold of my imagination and wouldn't let it go and in the end one evening when supper was over and the washing up was done and everything was put away in its proper place, and Vati had settled down in front of the TV with his newspaper and his pipe, I told Mutti I was going over to Dieter's for an hour or so and I'd be back later and then I set off in the direction of the Hauptallee and from there I made my way to the cinder path that led into the woods.

‘Don't be too long, Peter,' Mutti called after me.

‘I won't.'

I'd never been near Magdalena's cabin in my whole life. I had no idea where to head for. I'd been into the woods many times to pick blackberries and elderflower and to take our old dachshund, Lili, for walks, but in my whole life I'd never gone beyond the point where the cinder path stopped and the dense middle part of the woods began. I don't know how long I walked through the thick wood. It was dark and drizzling and even through the trees the drizzle came down onto my face and hands.

When I came to it there was no clearing and no garden, only a low wall that ran round the cabin; no gate in the wall, just an opening you had to walk through to get to the door. I knocked but there was no reply.

It was years since I'd thought about Magdalena Hirsch, let alone seen her, and I'd never heard of anyone ever coming out here to visit her.

I walked into a small sitting room with bare timbered walls, a plain wooden table and a single chair next to it. On the floorboards lay striped woven rugs, the kind people like my Oma used to make during the war out of torn-up rags. In the corner there was a fireplace with a neat pile of logs next to it, a scattering of ash and cinders in the grate. There was a bed, cupboards and pans that hung from hooks in the ceiling; an oblong sink on cast iron legs. In the sink there was a plate sprinkled with crumbs, a knife smeared with butter. A little water had been run on top of the plate and some of the crumbs were floating in it. The bed was neatly made and covered from head to foot with a rough wool blanket. Beneath the blanket, when I lifted it, I found her pillow in a white cotton slip, small and flat and square; a flowery eiderdown, silky and cold. On the wall there was a bamboo mirror with a narrow dresser beneath it and on top of the dresser there was a white cloth and on top of the cloth there was a black lacquered box with a lid, oval in shape and roughly the size of my fist.