Beastings Read online

  THE FLIES WERE on the squirrel and if they had laid their eggs then they had not yet hatched. No maggots meant it had only been dead a few hours. It was face down. Splayed as if arranged that way for a display.

  She crouched to study it. Its eyes were still there – glassy but intact. There were no signs of disease; the fur and claws looked fine too. She checked its neck for puncture wounds. The signs of the stoat or weasel; signs that it had been a quick kill rather than a slow diseased death. There were no holes.

  The flies dispersed as she picked it up by its hind legs. As she did something about it shifted.

  Its entire stomach was ripped open and its entrails flopped out. A bizarre miasma of blues and reds and greys. They hung suspended like an absurd string of sausages in a butcher’s window. The stench hit her as she flinched and tossed the squirrel aside.

  Something had got there first and had a go but whatever it was had abandoned it. Grown bored. Found something better.

  She was tumbling down the pecking order now; scavenging from the scavengers. And even then she was too late.

  There had to be food. Water. Something. Anything. Anything at all.

  THE TWO MEN walked in silence and followed the sun from east to west and when it was at its highest they stopped and drank from a stream and the Poacher picked berries and wild rocket and the Priest ate a little and then they drank more water and carried on. The men no longer strode and the dog no longer strained at his lead but instead walked with its nose to the ground stopping only to paw at a wound behind one of its ears where the flies were feeding on an open sore.

  SHE PASSED SHEEP who turned in unison and fixed the girl and the child with their hooded eyes. They stared. Unfazed and blank. The girl stared back. When they determined she was neither a threat nor the farmer with something to offer them they gradually returned to nibbling at the grass.

  The girl watched them for a moment as they hungrily clipped the turf with their sharp neat teeth. They drew it in and then blankly ground it in a circular motion then repeated the action again and again. Each animal ate the grass in front of it then occasionally took a step forward to broaden its catchment. Their lives seemed blissfully uncomplicated. Their appetite for the grass was insatiable their movements perfunctory.

  Sheep needed to drink too. Didn’t they?

  There must be water nearby.

  There shall be.

  There had to be.

  And then it appeared before her: a darkening of the chewed grass first – a thin lush ridge on the upper hillside. Ten minutes away. The tiniest of slits barely perceptible to the eye. Five minutes away. Four minutes away. Breathless she became. It was visible now. A foot or so below the surface and bordered with green where the sheep had not eaten. A minute away. Water. She could hear it. Seconds away.

  She flopped down to it. A puppet with her strings cut. The first gulps were guilty ones; let the bairn suffer for a few more seconds. It slid down her throat like stony silk. Ice cold even in summer. She slurped at it and the more she drank the greater her thirst grew.

  Cold water to a weary soul is good news from a distant land.

  Nature provides.

  She untied the baby and made it drink from the can. Then she drank some more and washed her face. She drank until her belly was a barrel and then she belched and made the baby take more.

  It was a satisfaction of sorts. The world was not quite so yellow and the baby was breathing evenly now. Yet still she was starving.

  Nature’s cruel humour: the stream led somewhere. She followed it down hill and watched it widen foot by foot and within minutes the girl carefully climbed a small crag and turned a corner and there below lay more water than she could drink in ten thousand life times. Another lake.

  This one was much smaller than the last. The gentle sloping at either side suggested it was shallow; it was too small to host a steam boat and its shores too inaccessible to welcome the walkers in their droves. It sat like a puddle in the bottom of a shorter valley. A low wooded hill at one end and a short gravel shore at the other.

  Further along the water beyond the wood was a cluster of houses. Houses hold people and people possess food. The day was dwindling. She headed towards the low buildings.

  The baby mewled all the way. Its cries drifted out across the water. She walked quickly with her head down and chest heaving. Perspiring. Nearly spent.

  The white dead skin of the first burst blister had long rubbed itself away to reveal a raw sovereign of red flesh on her heel and with each step a stabbing now shot through her foot so strong that the girl felt it in her teeth. She was hobbling badly. The baby was crying and gasping and its breaths were becoming laboured and uneven again. Its mouth a wet circle of anguish. The trees grew taller or perhaps it was she who was diminishing.

  THE RED ONES with the white dots she knew were poisonous. They advertised their dangerous potential quite clearly; that was how they flourished. You didn’t need to be told to know. Even the slugs stayed away.

  Nature’s warning signs.

  But the small sand-coloured ones. They were OK. They were good. They were right.

  She was almost certain of that.

  Hadn’t they eaten them at St Mary’s as a treat in season – poached in milk and served on a heel of bread? Yes. One of the Sisters had picked them herself along with kale sorrel spinach wild garlic and great plate sized slabs of fungus broken from tree trunks. Those the Sisters kept for from themselves to flour and fry in butter. The girls got the smaller forage. It had been late summer or maybe the earliest days of autumn. Then she remembered. When it was warm. When it was wet. When the air was soon to be turning smoky.

  This time of year? Perhaps.

  She couldn’t remember. Her thoughts no longer sat in a line like stepping stones over a stream but instead were scattered far and wide and without formation like buttercups in long grass. Alone and disconnected from their nearest neighbours.

  The mushrooms were growing in clusters in the damp moss and decomposing leaves in the shade. Their stalks were so thin they looked barely strong enough to support the elongated umbrella heads that reminded the girl of her dry nipples.

  She examined them. Plucked one and sniffed it. It smelt of the soil and little else. She bit the head. Watery flesh. Her body did not stiffen or react to repel or offer warning signs as it did when she had tried other non-edible foraged foods.

  Nature’s way. She picked and ate another then gave the baby the teat. The mushrooms could wait a moment. The bairn could not.

  It squeezed and tugged until her entire breast felt aflame so she pulled the child off it and massaged the nipple herself. She squeezed and pulled at it like it was the udder of the Shorthorn until a trickle of something yellow that looked like blister pus came out the end and then she put the baby back on to suckle and slurp.

  It sucked until long after she had gone dry again. Then she undressed it and checked for dirt stains but there was nothing. Like her the child’s body was no longer producing.

  Afterwards it screwed inwards again and stayed that way; its mouth a dry inverted hole and its eyes little more than anguished creases in its pale face. It gave the appearance of one who had been dipped in vinegar. When the girl gently shook it its distended tongue protruded lizard-like and then retracted again though its eyes stayed clamped shut and its breath remained a short rasp. She pressed her lips to its forehead and smelled the fine down on the child’s head. She breathed it in.

  They were in a delph of sorts an overgrown rock-lined basin marked with the scars of spent dynamite charges; an auditorium blasted into the slope of the woods.

  Cloudy pools of water gathered at the base of the depression and around it grew weeds and wild grasses and more aggressive ragwort and balsam whose hollow stalks were as thick as the girl’s wrist.

  Through the thick hanging ropes of ivy the sheer cross-sec
tion of the miocene rock was layered like the pages of a closed book.

  She pushed a way through the weeds to higher ground. To a wide flat ledge. The trees sat below her and around her.

  Laid across her palm the mushrooms were the height of her fingers. They were fragile looking things and already changing in colour from oatmeal to taupe as they began to dry and shrink and shrivel.

  She looked at them. Considered them. She needed something. Anything that produced energy. She was exhausted; near spent. There weren’t enough to do much damage. Vomiting at worst. There was nothing inside her to lose anyway. She could take the risk.

  And God said let the earth bring forth grass and the herb yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind whose seed is in itself upon the earth: and it was so.

  She would try them and wait a while and if they were good she’d mash some up for the bairn and then pick some more for her pocket tomorrow.

  Then hunger overtook reason and she found herself scarfing the handful and chewing them quickly. They tasted of the woods – fusty – the taste of dampness and mould and the moist Lakeland earth. Then they turned string-like and stuck in her teeth. She picked them out with a blackened thumbnail.

  The mushrooms sat in her stomach; part-chewed and leathery. But she craved more straight away. They seemed fine. The child could eat some later.

  She drank some water then scoured the carpet of the wood while she looked for somewhere to sleep for the night.

  The birds were roosting. All around the girl they were ruffling and preening and rearranging themselves in the amphitheatre of branches that surrounded this neglected cavity. Their chatter mapped a complex pattern of communication and the differing sounds of breeds interwove their own shrill languages with one another.

  She played with the baby a while but it was inactive and disengaged. It stared at her with heavy lidded eyes and when she waved and wiggled a finger in front of it the eyes just kept on staring.

  The girl leaned back against the rock and let the last of the sun’s rays move over her and through her.

  Tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

  The warmth of the child’s mouth spread through her when it sucked her dry nipple and the twilight lullaby of the birds seemed to be sung especially for her. For them; the two of them. Her and the child both. The baby seemed calm. Its blankets were grubby its face streaked with dirt and mucus had formed more flaky frosting around its nostrils but none of that mattered any more. What mattered was the music that the woodland was making and the warmth that spread through her breast and into her chest to fill her with a golden glow. She was free. They both were. There was hope yet.

  Because the birds were with the girl. With the both of them. Her and the child. They were on their side. She was sure of it. If they could survive then she could survive. The worms were with her too. And the trees and the clouds. Everything. Together they would guide the way.

  She picked up a handful of soil and held it. Rubbed it with her palm. Inhaled it. Breathed it deep. She tasted the forest with her nostrils. Smelled it with her mouth. Touched it with her eyes.

  The warmth in her made her consider the setting sun and the sun made her think of fire and fire reminded her of the matches she still carried in her pocket.

  Still clutching the baby the girl began to gather wood. She looked down and saw that her breast plate was layered in a soft tawny brown down and the child’s face was buried in it. She touched the not yet fully formed feathers with her hand to follow the downstroke and smooth the barbs of this delicate filigree of fibres.

  The child blinked up at her. The girl blinked back and this time she felt like a line of communication was open again. They were speaking with their eyes – she was sure of it. The child was communicating love and gratitude to her. It was recognising her as its protector. Its true mother. She was doing the right thing it seemed to say. Yes. She was acting correctly. Godly.

  The girl breathed in deeply and felt her lungs slowly fill. Two balloons inside her. They kept expanding. Her chest and shoulders opened up and the scent of the woods made her synapses pop and tingle.

  She wondered why she was standing so went to sit down.

  The last shafts of the sun were radiating with an increased intensity now. She felt it on her face and in her feathers. She thought of fire again then remembered the matches again and she stood once again.

  There was dead wood everywhere. Brittle branches for kindling. She quickly gathered a pile and placed it on the ledge. The birds were still singing. They were approaching a final flourish for the day but cutting through the chorus was the warm thrum of a wood pigeon somewhere uphill.

  She considered the tangle of branches gathered before her and the shapes the sunlight created in shadows behind it. Another wave of warmth washed over and she put the child down then turned away and violently vomited a watery brown slop. It splattered onto the ground – the taste of earth rejoining the earth.

  The girl wiped her mouth and then lay back to bask in the sun. She listened to the wood pigeon’s call. It was even and comforting. The sound of summer. The sun on her face. Scintillation.

  She opened her eyes and remembered the fire again and searched for the matches again. Looked at the woodpile. Closed her eyes. Basked in the sun. Listened to the wood pigeon. Scintillation.

  Thoughts seem to skirt her peripheries but by the time they were close to becoming tangible entities or linear considerations they were already drifting away. Forever just out of reach.

  The present moment was a jigsaw. The girl saw only one piece at a time.

  Then she was on her back and the ground was alive with life. Squirming with worms and grubs and larvae.

  She clung to the earth. She wanted to be naked and rolling in it. Wanted to burrow in it. Bathe in it. She wanted to crawl through the soil and consume it – to join the other creatures and be part of the process and do what the noble worm does and enrich and aerate her surroundings. She wanted to hold the soil up and squeeze the juice from it – to taste the life rub it through her hair through her downy feathers. Wanted to be buried head first in it with only her feet protruding.

  The girl understood that the world was round and she was clinging to the side of it. Everyone was. Even the Sisters believed that now.

  She listening to the rustle of life around her again. The burrowing and the scratching and the skittering and the scuttling. She heard the slow groan of the tree roots beneath. Heard the unfurling of a balled-up beetle. The reedy click of a hatching moth’s wings. The rasp and sigh of something unseen. She sighed and contributed her own noise. Became a part of it.

  She turned her head to one side and wished she was not alone; wished she could share this. The ground reciprocated by bending to the girl in a conversation of whispers. Each weed and leaf and blade moved to accommodate her. The insects came to greet her. The spiders and ants rustled through their jungle to bask in the light that was bursting out of her. All creatures in the woods and on the fells above were turning to her. Bewitched and entranced. The rabbit and the hare. The fox and the badger. The squirrel and the vole. The stoat and the mouse and the rat and the weasel. All of them. From their burrows and branches and sets and holes they turned to her and the golden child. Burning in the night. Two creatures on fire.

  For the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them.

  The child.

  She turned to it and saw a soft crown of light around the baby and she saw its edges blur. The baby was vibrating. The baby was golden too. The sunlight spread through the girl; honey filled her veins and tiny bubbles popped and fizzed at the base of her neck.

  She pressed a hand to the child and stroked its cheek.

  The girl looked at it with love
then watched as coarse black hairs sprouted across its face. The hair grew as if at high speed. It reminded her of the breeze across the lake’s surface or how she imagined the sea to be when she reached it.

  The child was part of this too. The child was a creature. Part of the landscape. Part of the continuation of growth. The cycle of life.

  Soon they would see that sea. She wondered what it would smell of and what it would taste like. And would it be bigger than Lake Windermere?

  First they would rest up in a faraway town so big that they could slip down the side streets and back alleys unnoticed and there would be food to forage in abundance and then when they were rested and fed they would walk the rest of the way to the water. Then they would cross it. Somehow they would cross it. She felt sure that this was possible now. All they had to do was get through the mountains first.

  Or perhaps the water would part for them. Probably this would happen. The test would be to get to the sea and then He would do the rest. Lift up your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it that the people of Israel may go through the sea on dry ground.

  There they would walk on until they found an island and they would make it theirs. And so the waters would close behind them.

  The thought of the child growing up in her care was less of an abstract concept now.

  She saw a bold and beautiful young lady who would look after her in later life and maybe the child would grow into a woman who was strong enough and clever enough and beautiful enough to pick a man with which to start a new civilisation. With God’s will she would choose one and they would do as she told them. And in the future everything would be different.

  The matches were still in the girl’s hand. She turned the box over. There was a picture in miniature on the front. A delicate drawing of couples dancing in an opulent ballroom. Elegant women in billowing dresses of varying colours were being lifted and swept across the floor with grace by men in top hats and tails. Their noses cocked into the air. The men had moustaches and the women had clear white skin. In the background was a band – a string quartet – and above them hung a cut-glass chandelier. Everyone looked clean and confident. Their faces flushed. She saw all this because the girl was there with them. She was in the scene sitting off to one side. She could hear the music she could hear the chatter she could hear the squeak of expensive leather.