Snake Ropes (20 page)

‘You can see me,’ says Beatrice, with doubt in her voice.

‘Yes.’ Anita told me once that ghosts didn’t always know they were dead and would become offended if the living ever said it to them.

She says, ‘It’s taken too long to be seen.’ A low wind blows in the room, and is gone. ‘Am I still here?’

‘As clear as anyone alive would be.’

Beatrice puts her hand over her heart. ‘Dun know … how long … this will last,’ she pants. Her chest rises and falls against her hand. ‘No one sees me. I’ve lost all the names … the first things that went … I need them here, need them to think. Of. Me.’

I take a deep breath, ‘Mary’s hurt.’

Beatrice wails, ‘She won’t come home!’ Her breathing is too fast.

I touch her shoulder.

She looks at my hand, as if she’s unsure what it is. ‘Can you feel me?’

I nod.

Beatrice’s shoulder feels like a dead bird. Cold feathers. Desperately fragile bones. ‘Hold me.’ Beatrice has panic in her eyes as she stands up and reaches out her arms.

My arms open.

Beatrice’s thin frame leans into me … I listen for her heartbeat. There isn’t one. Mine beats hard. Dead feathers tickle at my neck. I’m holding her … I don’t want … I turn my face to hers.

Beatrice has grown pale feathers all over her, apart from on her face.

Her sharp eyes gleam.

I pull away, she grips harder. Cold crackles through my arms, my heart thuds, I twist away from her, but she grasps my back, ice pushes through my spine towards my heart.

‘You’re dead!’ I shriek.

A gale sweeps through the room.

I’m alone in the middle of the room, my arms wrapped around myself. A small white feather twists in the draught on the floor.

I’m freezing cold and I need to light a fire, but there’s no fuel by the empty fireplace. I wrap myself up in an embroidered tablecloth and feel like a crone. Crones wear shawls, so I find one, sling it around myself and hobble into the kitchen and out of the back door. There are old fishing nets strewn around, a rusted saw and a broken wooden table. The track that leads along the back of the other cottages is empty. A dog barks and I don’t think crones like barking dogs, so I drag the table quickly into the kitchen, get the saw and close the door.

The shawl and tablecloth I’m wrapped in are embroidered. Beatrice’s things. I tear them off and drop them on the floor. My hands are freezing and the saw is nearly blunt. So now I’m
a woodswoman, and I’m resourceful with a blunt saw. I get some good pieces of wood by sawing up the table and now there’s sawdust all over the kitchen floor.

I take the wood into the other room, lay the fire and strike a match, and another and another. Poor little match girl, so cold and alone. The fire takes a while to catch. I hold the shawl over the fireplace so it sucks up the air.

My teeth are chattering. On the floor by the fire, I hold out my hands and let the warmth spread through me.

Thoughts crash around my head, all fighting to be chosen and I don’t know which thoughts are mine and which are Beatrice’s. I get the book, sit in the chair by the fire and write:

Once there was a ghost mother
.

She was hungry for any kind of life, because she had lost hers somewhere. She thought her daughter could keep her alive, and she looked in the daughter’s heart, but she couldn’t make her home there. The daughter had a picture of her mother on a wall in her heart, and it wasn’t flattering. The ghost mother knew that she wouldn’t be able to live in her daughter’s heart, staring at this portrait of herself
.

The ghost mother was left homeless, seeking some other heart to live in
.

My neck prickles. Beatrice is back. I keep writing.

A word of warning to those seeking friendship: if you meet this ghost mother and she holds out her arms, don’t hold out your own
.

She’s grown her daughter’s bones and blood in her womb; she remembers the warmth and the beat, how her hopes were
built into the cells of her daughter’s body. And how to grow a heart
.

She remembers how much expectation she had to build, to pant her daughter into the world. But she realises that her expectations were unfulfilled. They were all the things that she wanted for herself and never got. So she is left wandering, seeking a heart, any heart, your heart, to make her home
.

Don’t ignore this advice and open out your arms – you won’t know anything is wrong, till you hear a heartbeat in your breast, that just misses the rhythm of your own. By then it will be too late
.

The ghost mother will curl warm in your heart while you stare through disorientated eyes, and find you don’t know what you feel
.

Beatrice is still here somewhere, hidden in some shadow, under a bed, in a cupboard, just in the corner of my eyes when I blink. She’s still here because I can’t stop thinking about her. I’m calling her back into her home with my thoughts. I gather up every embroidery I can find, roll them up, pack them away in the cupboard and close the door. I sit at the table by the window. The sea is empty and grey. I try not to think about Beatrice.

Instead, I think about my own parents.

In our last year on the mainland, my parents had a room they hid things in whenever anyone died. I saw them dressed in black, smuggling them in night after night and locking them in there. Valuable items – boxes of jewellery, pillowcases filled with gold coins, bundles of notes stuffed in a mattress, silverware, bronze statues, furs.

The money they had after each death can’t have just been the fee for my father’s services. They had a lot more money every time someone died. More than they knew what to do with. My mother ordered new clothes and jewellery. She paid young men to come and coil and uncoil her hair while she smiled at herself in the mirror. She got whatever she wanted delivered to our door in parcels. Fine lacework, designer shoes, bolts of silken fabrics, leather coats, delicate beading, fur-lined boots. Her face scrubbed plucked tweaked, injected smeared plumped.

She looked and felt beautiful. Stolen beauty.

My father would go out for expensive meals. I listened through the banisters when I heard the front door bang. My mother would rush to the door to hear him speak. He’d tell her how he drank the richest, most expensive wine, ‘Like the blood of kings’. I imagined shimmering wine glasses, brimming red, that a king had dripped from his forefinger at my father’s request.

‘Ooh, and what did you eat … my lord?’ Mum sniggered up at him, her hands on her chest. My father told her, ‘Seventeen courses. Twenty. So many I lost count.’ He’d lick his lips and smile. ‘Silver spoons and forks for fingers,’ he once said, as he arrived in the hallway downstairs. He glanced up, caught me watching, fluttered his fingers at me with a glint in his eye, and shouted,
‘Child, back to bed.’

He filled himself with food and wine. Stolen sustenance.

Now my mother is no longer beautiful and my father picks at his food.

What happened to make them run? My best friend, Anita, was a ghost. Proof that ghosts exist, if my parents decided to believe me. But they didn’t.

‘Ask them where they get their money from …’ Anita
whispered, over and over into my ears as I slept. I’d hear her halfway between sleep and waking, her lips over my ear, holding her hair away from my face, being so careful never to let any part of herself touch me.

But I didn’t ask them.

But, perhaps, one day they saw her.

Anita could have poked my mother in the face, called her … a thief? She might have kicked her, pulled her hair, made fear rampage through her heart for a moment, for a day, a week, a year … and still, now. If my parents stole from so many dead people’s homes, raided their possessions, they could have thought a whole army of ghosts might be marauding after them. No wonder my mother doesn’t think she’s safe.

When we left, they brought bolts of cloth, seeds, cans of plant feed. They brought crates of books and clothes. They brought Mum’s hammers, saws and chisels, Dad’s embalming chemicals and scalpels, cloths for shrouds. Handles and hinges and fittings for the coffins. They brought his smart suits and her chalks and paints and rolls of paper. They brought themselves: an undertaker and a coffin-maker when there was no one else here to do these jobs. They grew as much food from the seeds as they could. Anything my parents need but can’t grow, my father very occasionally goes out to get. And he gives the islanders ‘forwards trade’ for it. Forwards trade is for death: his promise to prepare bodies, provide a coffin, dig a hole. So people give him what he asks for.

Because the dead must be buried.

My parents are thieves and they stole from the dead.

My father’s greed. He persuaded Mum to help him steal.

His idea, and now, his guilt.

A fog is coming in. The sea is settled, with the tide out, washing on the sand. I wonder who is staring out of the windows in the cottages next to this one, if their parents ever stole, and if it made them feel this kind of angry-sad, when they finally let themselves realise what they’d known all along.

So I was brought with them, made to cook and clean in a house they built themselves – a house no one had died in – a home with no ghosts. My past was denied, along with theirs. So I ended up living inside my storybooks. My favourite story wasn’t in any book. It’s been hidden in my head.

I write it down:

A Story of Love

A young woman is trapped in a house for too many years. One day she begs the sky outside her window to come and take her away. She cries at the sky. It doesn’t listen. She shouts and whispers. The clouds look sorry, make rain, but nothing else happens
.

When she tells the sky she loves it, wants to float in it, to love it for exactly what it is – an open expanse of clouds, of rain, of gales and snow, of sound and light and dark – the sky knows that she has seen it for itself, for all of the parts that make up the whole sky: she doesn’t just love it for its sunshine or blue. The sky grants her wish
.

The sky blows a gale that sends a witch, steering a pirate ship, to just outside her window. The witch is singing the most heart-rending soaring song the young woman has ever heard. She dances over to the witch’s ship on the notes from her voice and the witch transforms her into a cat
.

The witch strokes and fusses and loves her. For years the cat and the witch are content, but later, the witch sees that though the cat is a good rat-catcher and is content on her lap, it always
goes into the cabin when it rains, having a dislike of water. The cat seems strangely guilty about disliking the rain. The cat remembers the promise it made when it was a young woman – to love the sky for exactly what it is
.

The witch sees the cat looking sadly out of the cabin window at the rain, relents and changes the cat back into the young woman, who by now is no longer young. The witch thinks that the woman, having lost all those years to being a cat, will become angry and leave her. But the woman is not angry with the witch. ‘Those years were not lost: I have experienced purring in my throat, the sweet taste of cream, the euphoria of catching rats, a taste for the warmth of fresh blood and the gentleness of your hands.’

The witch trains the woman as her apprentice. They bargain in conversations made from tumbleweed, throw black and white chess pieces backwards and forwards between their hands and the woman learns enough to become a powerful witch. They rescue one another from melancholia, laugh over the naivety of kissed toads and debate to the conclusion that power should be earned and not claimed
.

They travel the skies, landing whenever they feel the desire to do so. They sell poisoned apples to the suicidal to grant them a quick and painless death, and laugh if they decide not to eat them. They offer lovesick maidens potions to cure them of unrealistic visions and then give them telescopes so they can map out the stars
.

After many years of travel, when they have learned all they can from responses to both help and hindrance, they see they have become old. They land the pirate ship on a high rooftop in a city full of chimneys. They take in lost children and transform them into cats if their lives are not making them happy. Every night the two witches sing at the sky, their voices
rise into the stars, are soaked clean by the rain, scrubbed by the clouds, and dried by the gales
.

There they live to this day, in their ship full of purrs
.

I wake in the chair by the fire that’s gone out. A wind is blowing in Mary’s parents’ bedroom. I get up and struggle with the door. A gale blows it shut, but I shove, it springs open, and there isn’t any wind.

The window is closed. Embroideries are strewn all over the double bed. On the bedside table there’s a pillowcase embroidered with an albatross, and a bedspread stitched with crows, seagulls and owls hangs from the wardrobe door. A gale has rampaged through this room, scattering embroideries that lie where they’ve fallen.

Beatrice has thrown her embroideries around again, to tell me she’s still here.