A Woman Clothed in Words (11 page)

Number Thirty-two, on the other hand, has a high patch of rhubarb and an old grey shed with spaces between the boards. Inside people can look out, but outside people, however hard they peer, can see nothing in the mildewy dark but broken slats of light and the peculiar glow of unfamiliar eyes.

What decides them is Number Thirty-four – next door. This is a derelict church, a small sad building open to the sky. It has fallen rafters in the nave and long grass growing among the grainy tombstones and leaning rusty crosses. Its bell lies split among the weeds, and each of the four young minds is busy thinking of ways to mend it. One thinks glue, another rivets, a third is sure it can be welded. Put on the helmet, the welding goggles. How brilliantly shines the welder’s torch ruining the eyesight of any dog or child who might stare at it with unprotected eyes. Then boom boom dong, the great bell – they will name it Tomasina – will give tongue again. Her voice will sound once more all over the neighbourhood, waking people who would rather sleep, startling cats to claw their way up trees, and forcing birds to begin their foolish trilling before the slightest pale light is showing in the east. The grandfathers turn over in their snug sleep. Only the dead remain undisturbed beneath their humped blankets of weeds. After all they are awaiting a trumpet, not a bell.

~~~

The story has it that N once took words from women and stuffed them higgledy piggledy into the mouths of men. What could the poor fellows do? Silence was ruined for them and speech too, for before this they had much enjoyed listening behind walls and doors to the chitchat of women, their gossip and conjectures. What can a man have to say that is half as interesting as the babble of women? They were used to writing things down without saying the words aloud. Now the gruff sound of their own voices hurt their ears. And they were afraid, for hadn’t they read somewhere that spoken words are predatory wasps which lay their eggs in the orifices of a living victim. Whose child is this that gently lies egged on by his mother or his grandmother? Poor Boy could be slaughtered by the sound of speech coming from his unaccustomed mouth. Of course he won’t stay dead for good, but his resurrection will be a difficult one. It can be accomplished only with wings, gauzy and green, drying in the sunlight. Soon he will dance in the clear air, he will swoop and buzz and swoop and buzz again. Who will understand the words of his song? His sister believes, as she pushes him devotedly round the bumpy churchyard, that the future will translate his language and make it plain, plain as the broken bell and the altered psalms sung in
a ring a ring-o.
It is only when she vanishes, when she is lost and everyone is calling her that he learns at last to speak her name, Brythyll, a kind of fish in another tongue, his mother explains in the dark when he cannot sleep.

~~~

Nothing happened in the shed, she said afterwards, nothing at
all. It was simply that he was in the shed when she went in. It was simply that they were there together, him and her, breathing in the dusk, playing spies, watching for strangers. They did not even touch each other. She was watching the house. He was watching the church. What’s a stranger, her father shouted. Do you know what a stranger is? Yes, she answered very quietly, and this one wasn’t. He wasn’t, he could never be a stranger. He has been here always. All the years and months, every day since God had created the land and the sea and all that in them is. You have never seen the sea, said her father. Not yet, she replied, but one of these days he will come again, in a car this time, and he will drive me anyplace I want. And I shall ask for the seashore and I shall pick shells on the edge of the tide.

All of them had looked there a thousand times when she went missing? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Whoever it was had taken her far away. Very likely she herself doesn’t know where she had been.

Laurence sits sideways on the warm tombstone. Suddenly Summer has come in, and every stone is hot. He has to keep moving his bum to a cooler patch. He doesn’t want to get so far from the empty nymph that he cannot keep picking at it with the nail of his little finger. He watched the dragon unfold in the morning and dry its wings until it flew away. Now he’s not sure that he shouldn’t have captured it in a jamjar and looked at it a bit longer, just to get the idea of the veins on its glassy wings, just to decide what the pattern was before he lost it forever. Something must explain the way the way it flew, jerky but rhythmical as a grandfather walking with a stick along the hard towpath beside the canal. In his mind Laurence is making a song of it, regretting the departure of the newly born insect, regretting the staggering of grandfathers as they descend the bank to the dark canal below.

~~~

There are two of them of course, and no grandmothers. It is vague where their wives have got to. There is a rumour that one of them is lying somewhere in the cold earth of the north, but the other – where can she be? No-one comes near answering that question, but Laurence believes she ran away with a Frenchman in her youth. Now that he has started French at school he hopes some day to find her picture in a book, a rather elegant figure leaning on a park bench in some misty place with her hands in a muff and looking dreamily up into the face of a man in dragoon’s uniform and a drooping moustache. It doesn’t surprise him at all that she seems so much younger than his mother.

The grandfathers, the two old men, seem happy enough. They have known each other since they were boys and have come to be very like one another. They both are tall and thin with grey moustaches, and how to tell them apart is that one is much redder in the face than the other. They even live together in the same rooming house two streets away and they often come on Saturday to take Laurence fishing. They argue a lot but the boy doesn’t mind that. His parents don’t argue at all, at least not within earshot of their children. They throw warning glances at each other whenever the possibility arises. Laurence is amused by this but wishes they would have a spat now and then to lighten the leaden air that always seems to surround them when they are together.

~~~

Nancy is talking to herself again. She talks all the time, Laurence tells the grandfathers, but she says nothing much. Perhaps she knows everything but gives nothing away. For a while Laurence doesn’t recognize this as a question and goes on pressing the bread-dough bait onto his hook. There’s a pause, a long one, all you hear is the babble of the child perched on the high bank above them playing one of her endless insect games where the beetles are kings and queens and the grass is a forest and a small yellow spider is, as she puts it, a captivated princess. From now on she will have to be taken on all the fishing trips. Girls must be watched, Mother has announced. They must never be left alone. Nancy must go fishing while the unwilling Bryll helps in the house, plumping pillows and watering dull houseplants. Later, her mother decides she may take Boy for an outing in the stroller round and round the churchyard next door, where she can be seen from the bedroom window. Don’t you dare get out of my sight.

Boy can walk if he wants to, Bryll knows, and as soon as her mother has tired of watching, she will drag him from the push-chair and stand him up and sing to him and teach him to dance.

~~~

There are no signs of where she had been those three days, or what had happened to her. All anyone knows is that she was found in the churchyard on Sunday afternoon fast asleep, her breath smelling of peppermint and her hair of chamomile. She seemed reluctant to come out of her dream, reluctant to come back to them. The first thing her mother looked at was of course her underwear. It was clean and innocent, had obviously, with her cotton dress, been recently washed with rose geranium soap. The delicate shine of the chamomile is hard to get rid of. Perhaps it will never go away. Her mother has faith that the rose scent can eventually be washed out of her clothes, at least it will be diluted into an ephemeral sweetness. But isn’t that anyway the smell of a budding young girl’s body?

She’s not a child any more, ventures one of the grandfathers, she’s flowering out, you must see that. The woman looks up into the old man’s face and sees that it is her own father who’s speaking. She gives a long sigh of relief. After all there are things a father-in-law should never mention.

The girl was barefoot when we found her, she blurts out. Heaven only knows where her sandals have got to. Heaven only knows.

~~~

Time for Nancy to start music lessons, announces the pale grandfather, the one who always teaches them piano.

Are you sure? Mother is balking because Nancy is the last born. She’s had enough lately of daughters growing into puberty, of going off no-one knows where. Nancy’s four, she says, only four years old.

That’s old enough, the old man’s insistent, for someone with an ear. Nancy sits at the piano bolstered by two cushions and splays her fingers on the keys, Grandfather takes one sticky hand in his. Jam, he says and lifts her down, wash ’em first – and use soap, lots of it.

She stands on the stool in front of the sink listening to something going on in her head. At first she can hear nothing but the water running through her fingers. Tapwater, tapwater running through the cracks in her mind. Then she hears the music she might have played with Grandfather, there are trills, there are runs, there are even melodies softly and slowly played. She thinks of the mystery of the piano keys, how she could have found out what the difference is between white and black, between darkness and light, between hot and cold. And she turns off both taps as hard as she can until just a few drops are dribbling through their metal mouths. She jumps down not bothering to dry her hands and goes out the back way to join Bryll and Boy in the churchyard. She has decided against music and will never try it again, grandfather or no grandfather.

~~~

None of the grownups, unless you count Bryll as one, knows about the crypt. Laurence found it under some heavy boards which only he is strong enough to move aside. Laurence is in charge, and they only go down there when he lets them. Just the four of them are ever to know about it. One by one he nicks their thumbs with his pocketknife and they swear a bloody oath. Nancy is the only one who cries at the cut. Boy seems to enjoy the whole thing and spends the next hour lifting the little bit of cut skin trying to make the tiny wound bleed again. Finally Bryll has had enough and slaps him. Then he gets sulky and won’t speak, just like he does when the parents or the grandfathers are around.

The crypt is a shallow one, only ten steps down and you’re there with your feet chilled by the stone floor. You’re there under the church with the dead, for this, Laurence has told them, is where the souls belonging to the bodies buried in the churchyard live until the Awakening. He takes out two stubs of candles and lights them. There is a smell of laundry bleach and wet feathers.

No-one speaks. Nancy’s head aches in the silence. Bryll is sure she can find something better to do. Only Boy is really enjoying the whole thing, lolling against the dank wall and sucking away at the taste of his own blood.

~~~

Laurence announces that he will think a story. The rest of them are to stare at the candle flames and open their minds to his unspoken words. The story is about heads. They know that much. How can it be about anything else? There was once a cruel king who cut off the heads of all his subjects. He did it with his sword of state, a hundred heads a day until everyone was decapitated. He arranged all the heads in rows on the terraces of his palace. He found he liked doing this, and eventually he became obsessed with the interesting patterns he could make by moving the heads around. It took up all his time and he never got tired of it. But the heads did, and he knew it for he could hear them whispering to each other at night when he was trying to sleep.

What could they be plotting? Were they out to have their revenge? Time went by and the heads rotted and became skulls. The birds picked them clean and left them white as ivory. All the countryside was empty and there were no telephones anywhere, but somehow people from neighbouring countries heard about the strange palace of ivory skulls. Songs were written about it, and maps were drawn of the best way to get there. The foreigners just couldn’t wait to visit and see for themselves. They brought floodlights and music with them and set up stalls and sold little white skulls made of sugar. And if in all that hubbub they happened to notice a feeble old man muttering to himself and wandering about on the terraces they were kind enough to slip him a coin to shut his gob and get his bony butt out of the way of the traffic.

~~~

Bryll tired of this story when it was less than halfway through. Her mind wandered from Laurence’s and her eyes from the candle flames. She began to tell her own story and brought Boy under her influence in a matter of seconds, though he wasn’t at all pleased with her romantic little tale and liked the skull one much better, there was no way of ducking her power. Nancy was faithful to her big brother and stayed with him till the end, even laughing at the end joke though she wasn’t quite sure why it was funny.

~~~

After the supposed walk Bryll brought home weed flowers from the churchyard and shoved them into an old green-glass vigil lamp she had found among the graves. That they may burn as bright as candles, she whispered very low, but still her mother heard the words and wanted to know what they meant. Bryll didn’t answer. For how can one thing mean another? Each thing must have its meaning just as each wildflower must grow on one certain stem and not another.

A couple of windy days and the graveyard is full of garbage, mostly old paper. Old because yellow at the edges and scrunched and written on, so no good for drawing. Bills for uninteresting things. Milk cartons smelling like foreign cheese. Messy paper plates bent in the middle. Letters to and from strangers whose words appear often in Bryll’s sacred songs: “love to good old aunt Bessie” and “rest assured my dear sir” and “I kiss you goodnight with all my heart.” It always takes at least an hour to clean everything up because every piece must be looked at and decided upon. It could be, Boy always says, some message from afar. This is a favourite saying of his and he uses it so much that they are sick and tired of it, and shout him down, or try to. This only makes him laugh. He rolls about on the grass and gurgles and his face is horrible when he laughs. His wide gums show pink and shining and he dribbles between his teeth and his tongue sticks out and ends up lolling from the corner of his mouth. The sight of him almost makes Bryll understand why their parents think of Boy as stupid. More fool them. Boy can walk and sing and add up more numbers than you can throw at him an hour at a time if you want to. He never seems to get tired of that game. Bryll has made up her mind to teach him to read this fall. After all he is seven-and-a-half already, getting on for someone who can’t read yet.