Snake Ropes (3 page)

Somehow time has passed. Nights have washed through the sky like a dark blue dye, and rinsed out into days. The broiderie needles feel like them’re covered in salt. So do the linens and the threads and the table. So does the washtub, my blankets, Da’s fishing nets, the tatties and Barney’s bedsheets. Salt is used for the fixing of dyes, but I dun want the world to be fixed like this.

While Da is out fishing, inside this home I have to somehow keep, somehow live, no one else breathes this air, no one else eats or sleeps. No one stares from the window, washes or cleans, makes messes or broiders, loses or finds things, mends broken torn dropped things, cooks or tells stories, smiles, shouts or curses, unless it is me.

Barney’s toys are faded, bleached and pale from missing hims touch.

About one hundred and fifty people live on this island and if I have to ask every single one of them if them know where Barney is, I’ll lose my voice and my legs’ll fall off from walking to them all.

So I’ll have to do it a bit at a time.

This morning I can walk better, so I leave our cottage, turn left and walk as far as the furthest cottage on this row.

Rap on the door.

Chanty answers. ‘What you knocking this early for?’ Her hair is curly on one side and flat on the other. She’s got the Thrashing House key on a chain around her neck; it’s her turn on the bell list so I’ve got to talk nice to her today.

‘Excuse me, Chanty, for interrupting your sleeping. Thought I’d get your Mam. Have you seen or heard anything of my Barney?’ I ask, my arms folded.

‘Course not. You still sick? Been took. Tall men dun it. Ask anyone.’

‘I’m asking you. Please.’

‘Ah, get gone. Got too many things to do before the bells.’ She shuts her door.

I might have to talk to her polite, but I can think whatever I want. Bloody rude cow.

I hammer on the next door.

Beattie’s got her sleeves up. Her arms are red.

‘Have you heard anything of Barney?’ I ask.

‘You’ve been in bed the longest time. All right now? Come in, I’ve got eggs and tattiecakes on the go. You look like you could do with a bit of mothering.’

‘No, you’re all right Beattie. You heard any talk?’

‘No doll, no talk of the boys. Or nothing new or for certain. Get back indoors, it’s going to rattle down any moment.’ She peers up at the thick grey clouds.

It dun rattle down yet.

I bang on the next three doors.

Merry is sat just behind hims front door on a wooden stool, sharpening the paring iron and slane what him uses up the peat pits. Him dun bother answering me as him is old and miserable. Him dun ask folk questions anyway, so him won’t have been told.

Jek’s fixing hims fishing nets and asks me how come the women have took to putting buttons on the necks of the jumpers, and him shows me how easy them get caught in the nets. I tell him it’s probably to do with main land fashions, for Annie told me a few years back that the tall men wanted jumpers full of holes called the grunge, but now them want cable or ribbed.

Old Nell’s walking stick is leaned against Camery’s door, so she must be visiting her. I can hear them inside, arguing. Nell’s saying, ‘… them’re a danger to us, could’ve killed her. We
have
to keep getting them took …’ and Camery’s saying, ‘… so them’re a danger to folks further away? Well, why are we not bothered about them? Just because we dun know any main land folks, it dun mean them’re any less …’

I knock and Camery answers her door. She cries out and tries to hug me, but her pale ragged shawl stinks of chicken shit, so I get clear fast.

The last door is Annie’s cottage, right next to mine. If anyone’ll talk, she will.

She opens it before I get near enough to knock it. Her three great black dogs charge out and one thuds me spinning. Annie kicks the front door shut behind her, sweeps her frazzled hair off her face.

‘Oh Mary, come on. Glad you’re better. Gave me a fright you being sick so long. Let’s us two walk on the beach, the dogs need it.’

‘You’re all right, Annie, my legs’ll not do more than what
them’ve done this morning. You heard anything about your Kieran yet, or my Barney?’ I lower my voice. ‘What are them saying in the Weaving Rooms?’

‘Shush now. I’m not telling you Weaving Room talk. Look, whoosh! Them’re off!’ She strides after the dogs down the beach, her brown coat swashes in the wind. She calls over her shoulder, ‘I’ll pop round yours later, Martyn’s fixing up our new cottage at Wreckers Shore. Him’ll be gone all day.’

‘You’re moving Annie?’

She turns round and smiles. ‘Aye, but it’s lovely. More space all round it. We’ll grow tatties and onions and kale, it’ll be perfect. Dun be sad! I’ll still visit you. You get indoors afore the rain.’ She strides away. She could do with one of Beattie’s breakfasts – she’s just as skinny as me, and twice as tall.

I go back indoors to our cottage, sit down and let my head unravel in Mam’s old rickety chair. The rain rattles down on the roof and makes the beams seem too low. I’m too small to see anything, to find anything so little as Barney, when there’s this huge sky what takes over the whole island by hurling down all this rain.

So none of my neighbours know anything about Barney.

Or no one’s saying anything at any rate.

I keep the moppet hid from Da. The moppet fills a small part of the gap what Barney’s left, for it gives me hims voice. Not always; sometimes it’s just the sound of the sea, but sometimes it’s Barney’s baby talk I hear, before the waves wash hims voice away from me. I ask it over and over, every day, ‘Barney, where are you?’ But hims voice always says, ‘It’s dark.’ That makes me cry more than anything else.

Da dun speak about Barney. I keep asking him questions, I know him has got an answer somewhere hidden in hims head, only him won’t tell me it. I dun like it here with just me and him. Him is out at sea all day and some of the night, thinking solid thoughts what always draw him back to land. And when him comes home, him wants me to fix the fishing nets while him eats dinner, then him washes the smell of sea and fish off himself and goes to sleep on Mam’s side of thems bed.

Each morning Da says, ‘It’s best to carry on as usual,’ before him takes up the nets and leaves. I wait for him to say something different, but him dun.

Tonight, Da comes in, pulling the smell of the sea behind him.

I say, ‘Tell me what happened to Barney.’

Him dun speak.

‘You just want me to broider. You never cared for Barney and you dun want me to find him. You …’

Him takes off hims coat and thrusts it on the hook behind the door.

‘You know something, but you dun want to tell me it, because we need less to live on, now him is gone.’

Him folds hims arms and says, ‘It’s best to carry on as usual.’ Him goes to the kitchen, picks up a bowl, ladles in the chicken stew, sits down and fills hims mouth with it so there’s no room for any answers to come out.

I’ve thought really hard about how to get an answer out of Da’s head and I think I can do it with just two words.

Da is going to be home for the whole day today, for him says
the waves are white and high, which means the sea’s too full of wind and danger for fishing.

I practise while I get dressed and while I wash my face and tie back my hair, and the more I say it I know I can keep saying it because I dun think I can stop. In the kitchen I make our porridge and say it while I stir the pot.

Da walks in and I feel hims eyes on me.

I say, ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me …’

‘Stop it, Mary.’

I keep saying it.

Him takes hims porridge into the main room, sits in Mam’s rickety chair by the empty grate and ignores me.

I eat my porridge in the kitchen and between mouthfuls keep saying it.

When it comes to mid-morning, him shouts, ‘You’re driving me mad! Shut your bloody sodding mouth up!’ Him glowers at me like him wants to stick a fish hook in my lips, so I whisper, ‘Tell me tell me tell me,’ all the afternoon, all the while him goes in and out of the kitchen through the back door, and all the while him tidies up out the back, and all the while him gets water from the well and washes down the kitchen floor, and all the while him cleans and oils our boots, even Mam’s old ones she’ll never wear again, and all the while him shuffles in and out of the main room, all the while I try to teach my hands to broider again, all the while I peel potatoes and chop leeks for soup, and all the while I sit opposite him and watch him eat it without filling the empty bowl I’ve put in front of me.

Him gets up from the table, hims hands thump down.

I look up at him, say it louder, ‘Tell me tell me tell me.’

Him leans over me, says, ‘Forget Barney and get on with your broideries. What’s wrong with you? You’re skittering in some kind of madness and you’ll
not
be pulling me in there with you!’
Him gets hims coat and stamps off outside, hollers that him is off to the peat pits to do something useful, and the door bangs shut behind him.

Even without him here I keep on saying, ‘Tell me tell me tell me,’ because now I’ve been saying it all day long, I really
can’t
stop. The words are in my ears and my mouth and my head.

I keep saying it and the bells ring out, but Da still isn’t back. I say it at the moppet but it just stares back at me, all wonky and silent. I put the moppet on my pillow. The moppet rushes the sound of the sea into my ear, but I keep whispering till I fall asleep.

I’m locked in my bedroom, being punished for the rice.

Mum said, ‘I would never have dared waste food. Never.’

I said, ‘It’s not a waste. There’s always loads of rice because someone keeps leaving it outside our gate and you let Dad out to bring it in, but we never talk about it. I ask, but you won’t tell me.’

She said, ‘I don’t want to talk about rice, and you, you’re giving me a headache – what do you mean, hungry?
I’m
hungry, my family only had two rooms, between six of us – no room in there for me, not for anything I might be
hungry
for … broken hand-me-downs—’

I said, ‘I’m not a child. You’ve moved the age. It was eighteen. I
am
eighteen.’

She said, ‘It wasn’t. It was
always
twenty-one. You’re too immature to leave home. You’re making me feel nauseous. Is this what you want? That rice is disgusting. Congealed. I feel sick.’

How often she tells me how I make her feel.

She yanked me into the kitchen, handed me a bucket and a cloth and walked out. I cleaned the rice off the table and it took a while because it had set like glue. I wasn’t sure what to do
with it all, so I took the grille off the drain just outside the back door and pushed it down there. It filled up the drain and there was still some rice left. So I filled the bucket from the well and poured it in. It glugged through the rice, which sunk a bit in the drain. Not enough. So I wrapped my hand in a towel and pressed it down to make room for more, and the towel felt like a slug. I poured more water in, and more rice, more water and more rice, till all the rice had gone.

The drain might be blocked.

Mum came back into the kitchen with Dad when I was looking at how shiny the table was. Neither of them spoke. They both hauled me up the stairs, one arm each, pushed me into my bedroom and locked the door.

I didn’t speak either. Because it doesn’t matter. It happens all the time.

I stare out of my bedroom window. On the hill in the distance is the tall building with the bell tower. Sometimes it seems newly constructed, perfect. Other times, when the wind blusters and the sky turns charcoal, it’s more like a ruin, the ghost of a house.

My bedroom is the smallest room in our house. There’s nowhere to hide things, even if I managed to steal anything of use. In here, I have: my books, a single bed, one table, one chair, my old dresses of Mum’s that she’s taken in, my rags, a tiny pair of nail scissors and a hairbrush.

Other rooms, I’m kept away from. The room Mum builds furniture in has hammers, saws, screwdrivers … all the tools she needs to create furniture of beauty and function, but the same tools I’d use to break my way out.

The high fence outside, the fence that runs all the way around our house, has only one gate. The gate is kept padlocked. And
Mum has the only key. It swings from an old charm bracelet that she never takes off her wrist.

She said for years I could have my own padlock key when I was eighteen. That she’d get Dad to go to the smithy and get one cut for me. And I’ve counted the passing of years and months and days, imagining my eighteenth birthday, when I’d walk to the gate, my hand outstretched, my fingertips clasped on the key, unlock the padlock and walk away.

But my eighteenth birthday was three months and twelve days ago and I still haven’t been outside. Because Mum changed her mind. So she told me she’d never made that promise. She said, ‘I just wouldn’t. Doesn’t even
sound
like me. I’d worry too much. You don’t want me to worry, it fills me with …’ She held her chest, as if she couldn’t breathe. Then she narrowed her eyes and said, ‘You wouldn’t want to make me feel like that.’

After her mind had changed, and my birthday had gone, I tried to dig my way out under the fence with a bread knife. In five weeks I’d only dug down about a foot, a tiny bit at a time. I hid the hole under a plant pot.

Then a stormy wind blew the plant pot over and the knife went blunt and my mother found the hole and cried and raged in her room and my father disappeared in there with her, and when they came out they hid the knives till they realised that meant I couldn’t cook, so they gave me just the one, watched me chop vegetables with it, and then took it away.

By the time they trusted me enough to give me back the knives, or didn’t want to watch me making their meals any more, I’d decided to steal the padlock key when she was sleeping. The night I made my first attempt, their bedroom door was locked.

It was locked the next night, and the next, and the next.

The night after that, I tried again, but a small square of white
paper was pushed out under the door, and it said in her handwriting: ‘I’m cleverest.’

I realised then, she’d decided to think of everything.

One night last week, I saw my twin sisters steal down the stairs to the basement. The next night, I went down the stairs. At the back of the basement are three rooms: one for the coffin-building, one for the office where my father writes all the deaths in his book and the other for the preparation of bodies. In the coffin-building room there was a hole that the twins had started to dig in the back wall. It had been boarded over, roughly. My mother’s handwriting was smeared in pink paint over three planks she’d hammered across it: ‘Morgan. You will never think one step ahead. I know you better than you think.’

I didn’t bother telling her it was the twins. When they were really small, the twins joined in my games. Before they learned that they could play more interesting games when alone with each other. The babies they’d been when I carried them, one in each arm, the toddlers they became, one attached to each of my legs, have now become inseparable. In my parent’s eyes, they are obedient little girls. In mine, they are far too quiet, and they tell one another’s lies a little too well.

I went into their room and asked them about the hole in the basement. They gazed up at me, holding hands, and said in rehearsed voices, ‘It was a tunnel. For
you
. It was meant to be a surprise.’ When I told them I didn’t believe them, they looked at each other’s eyes in silence, the kind of looking that they can get lost in for whole days, or until they get hungry.

Since then, I haven’t thought of another escape plan to try.

Other than the one I’ve got now.

The one where I annoy my mother so much she’ll
want
me to leave.

But I can’t annoy her tonight because I’m locked in my room till my family get hungry and remember that no one else wants to cook. I don’t mind being in here, because my books are locked in with me.

I am reading reading reading, locked in the stories.

I’m a wicked daughter, a drunken witch, a terrible scientist, a king with a severed hand, a resentful angel, a statue of a golden prince, the roaring wind, an uninspired alchemist, a fantastic lover who has only one leg, a stage magician with glittery nails, a shivery queen with a box of Turkish sweets, a prostitute wearing poisoned lipstick, a piano player whose hands are too big, a raggedy grey rabbit, a murderer with metal teeth, a spy with an hourglass figure …

I am eighteen years old and my real life is here locked inside these books.

My pretend life is here, locked in, with my family.

I breathe on my bedroom window and write in the condensation:

WITCH REQUIRED,
PREFERABLY WITH BROOMSTICK.
ENTRAPPED FEMALE IN NEED OF
ESCAPOLOGY LESSONS.
PLEASE APPLY WITHIN.