Beastings Page 19

  No. The child belongs to someone else. And the girl took it.

  The Warden said nothing.

  Harbouring a criminal is an act of criminality said the Priest.

  The Warden whistled through his teeth. A shrill sound designed to suggest incredulousness.

  That so.

  Yes.

  The things some people do. Well it looks to me like you could set and rest a while. I never turn a soul away Father – a bit like your place I imagine – and the tea’s made so why don’t you come in and rest and we’ll see what all this is about.

  The Priest gave a slight nod and went to enter.

  But the dog will have to stay outside I’m afraid. Rules of the house.

  It’s a working dog said the Priest.

  And a fine one I’m sure. But it’s council orders – and they pay my wages. Something to do with hygiene. Even in winter they have to stay outside. We’ve got a nice shed for them. We’ve had sheep and pigs in there and more besides. One fella stopped by on his way up to Hawes with five dozen ferrets. They went in there an all. Imagine how that looked.

  This dog has been deployed to track the scent of the girl said the Priest. I’ve been tracking her and the child for days and he’s led me right to your door.

  Well said the Warden. There you go.

  So are you going to save my time by answering this one simple question said this determined stranger of the cloth. Have you seen the girl?

  In the kitchen the kettle began to whistle.

  The Warden casually rubbed the end of his nose.

  THE ROCKS WERE arranged in a pile. A man-made monument of sorts. With her one eye and what little light the moon offered the girl saw that it was a miniature cromlech. A burial chamber maybe.

  Womb worn neck bruised and half-blind the girl climbed in there and tried to sleep but her perforated eyeball was pulsing and she kept pulling and picking at the gluey strings that were entangling her lashes. Her head howled and her abdomen burned. Fluids ran then dried then others ran again.

  The bairn had not made a sound for many hours.

  And then the ravenous hunger of the hunted was replaced by nausea and abject despair. The girl could have been presented with a banquet there in her cold stone coffin but she would no longer have been able to eat because the pain in her eye was turning her stomach. Nor would she have fed it to the baby as it was now nothing more than a heap in the corner with a slowing heartbeat. Her thoughts were becoming muddled. Trauma had divested her of logic; the baby was now an impediment. An inanimate thing by her side. It was a footnote to a wider predicament. Just something she had to carry. Purpose forgotten.

  A film had formed over her upper and lower eyelids – a grey membrane to shield the perforated ball from infection and the pain was only worsening.

  The girl took the dolly rag from her pocket and wedged it into her mouth. She chewed on it hard until her teeth ached and her gums bled and blood dotted the cloth and for a few moments it distracted her from the pain boring through her eye socket and into the back of her skull.

  Everyone will exist eternally either in heaven or hell.

  When she saw that streaks of pink were stroking sky in the far distance she crawled out from the chamber to shoulder the baby and walked over the next hump of valley flank.

  And there it was: the tip of a town creeping round the foot of a mountain one valley over. Through the haze she saw the suggestion of a sleeping stone citadel containing within it houses shops cafes; a place of life and light and electricity. Beyond it the shimmer of a lake two three or more miles away. A civilised corner of this wild cursed land.

  With one hand clamped over her eye and the baby on her back the girl let her body take her towards it – towards this new place.

  THE SMELL OF paraffin. Sweat streaks running down through the soot on his hands and face and neck.

  Behind him the bunk house and everything in it burned like a beacon as the Priest and the dog descended the pass propelled by their own momentum and the heat on their backs.

  Let no obstacle stand in the way of duty he said to the dog.

  IT IS THE animal that she sees first. A big dog zig-zagging its way down the valley with its nose to the ground. Then thirty paces behind it a triangular figure picking its way over the rocks below her. Too far away to identify.

  But she knows. She knows it is him.

  She knew he would come.

  He was always going to come.

  To exert his ownership over her. To claim her. To retain her silence.

  The child too. Any congregation child he saw as his.

  Wasn’t that how he came to own her life all those years ago – when her parents couldn’t manage and didn’t care and he saw an opportunity to own another person in all ways just like all the others before her and all the others yet to come?

  Seeing him the girl felt a strange sense of relief. She knew that he could not creep up on her from behind any more and in fact that was exactly what she could do to him. And that felt powerful. The hunted becomes the hunter. She had the upper hand.

  She could turn back and go the way she came. Just flee. Go now. Run forever and maybe never be found.

  But not this time. Not with the baby. The baby was hers now. She would set it free far away from that town half mad under his rule. Back there it wouldn’t stand a chance – not with the feckless Hinckley as a father and his dying wife as a mother. Soon she would be dead and buried and Hinckley wouldn’t cope and then the Father and the Sisters would intervene and before anyone knew it he would have his teeth in the child. Him. The Priest. Sucking the life out of the young to leave them spent and scared or silent. And on it would go.

  But not this time. No. This way there was still hope.

  This feeling was new and it was too strong for the girl. A feeling of possibility. Potential. A revelation.

  It was too great to ignore. For it is written: vengeance is mine – I will repay says the Lord.

  And that was when she realised how they all could be free forever.

  SO SHE TRACKED him. She stalked him.

  Her eye pulsed and wept and her stomach growled and the baby lay inert beneath the overhang of a crag where she had left it but she felt energised for the first time in days.

  She watched as the Priest followed the mountain stream downhill. He was three hundred feet or so below her and the stream was flowing strong from the residual seeping of the bogs and marshes up top and the previous day’s downpours.

  The sound of the water reached her up on the hillside. It would help her. Mask her movements. She moved quickly hunched treading lightly.

  And then he stopped where the water widened into a pool. Small but dark and deep. The girl stopped too and ducked behind a rock. She watched as he called the dog and it returned to him. He secured it and then he untied his cape and raised his robe over his head. He looked around and then unbuttoned his shirt and vest and belt and then slowly removed his trousers. Then his underwear.

  That was when she started running. Over rocks and down shingle slopes. Through a snatch of bracken then over more slate and shingle. The flat stones moved and shifted underfoot but the Priest did not hear her. The Priest did not turn and the Priest did not look behind him.

  She ran towards that white form and saw his skin almost unnaturally pale and hanging off him; his buttocks negligible – nothing more than two frowns at the top of his thin legs.

  The girl moved with purpose. She gave herself to the mountain and trusted it for once to let it take her. Guide her. Protect her. Her vision was impaired and her balance was bad but she knew she would not fall.

  No. Not this time.

  For once everything was on her side. The mountain the stream the rising sun – all had conspired to help her.

  She ran closer and the noise of the stream increased: the sound of
crisp lines of water breaking on smooth rock. The same sound that had filled the valley for ten thousand years. The sound that had sculpted the land.

  She ran with her arms wheeling and her hair bouncing. Only her thighs and calves acted as brakes.

  The Priest stepped carefully into the water and then scooped it on his legs and scooped it on his torso and scooped it on his hair and face. She was close enough to see moles on his back now and his thin red hair and the mottling and dimpling of his disgusting flesh. He wobbled forward comically and stooped to steady himself on rocks and the girl thought how vulnerable he looked. How insignificant the Priest suddenly seemed.

  How she thought could just one man – one human form – be responsible for so much.

  The noise when it came rose from somewhere deep inside her. It was part scream part gurgle and it coursed up through her chest and ripped at her throat. It was primeval it was elemental. Animalistic. She felt it in her entire body. In every cell.

  It was louder than the moving water. A banshee’s howl than ran down the valley. This time the Priest heard her.

  He turned. Wide-eyed and shin-deep. The dog barked. Once twice. Again.

  She saw: his concave chest and the curve of his ribs. His penis small and blue and retracted from the ice cold water. His tight scrotum shrivelled like a single walnut. Those thin lips that had worked at her and those elongated nostrils that had sniffed at her. She saw: strands of red hair stuck to a brow that was still dirty from soot and smoke. She saw: the ghost the monster the beast the devil.

  A rock. A sharp triangular rock filled her hand.

  He scrambled out of the water towards the wailing girl but he could not get his footing and he stumbled.

  She went to strike him.

  She went to strike him but she let go of her rock at the last moment.

  She threw it. She hurled it. The rock.

  It hit him above the eye. The sound of stone on bone.

  Sickening.

  He didn’t fall – he buckled. The Priest’s legs gave way first and he went to steady himself on the ground then he crumpled sideways like a felled tree. The girl stood over him.

  He hadn’t made a sound.

  She looked at the Priest supine and naked. She took it all in: his hairless shiny shins and the flickering of his lidded eyes; his odd shaped chest neither rising nor falling his limp wrists bent inwards and his fingers curled. Again she looked at his nubby penis so small it seemed incapable of the damage that it had done.

  There was no cut. There was neither gash nor wound on his forehead. There was no blood. Only the rapid flowering of his bruising and swelling brow.

  But he was dying. She was certain of it. A blow like that could kill anyone. He that had ruled her life and corrupted her life and poisoned her life was in the final throes. And his life – it would soon be over. Because his breath was in his mouth now. He was chewing on it he was gagging on it he was tasting it. His heart was slowing; his system shutting down like night candles being snuffed across the town. And she had done it. She had done this.

  The Priest’s feet were still in the stream. The water rushed by.

  The dog looked on blankly.

  13.

  SHE ENTERED THE unfamiliar town via a back track that took her down some winding stone steps each slick with damp dawn algae. She clasped a cold metal hand-rail. The flat terrain and clean lines and corners of the buildings felt strange and unnerving after the undulations of the fells. Front gardens were kept trimmed and road signs seemed to be planted or bolted everywhere she looked. Words and arrows and symbols of a sanitised existence. Here the wildness of the fells had been tamed and contained by concrete and cobbles and tarmac and the lives of its inhabitants preserved and framed beneath glass and curtains made of net.

  The town was a picturesque jumble of forms – pretty white stone cottages and grey slate municipal buildings amongst spires and parks. It flanked a narrow river with a hump-backed bridge crossing it. In the distance beyond it: more hills more mountains more sky.

  It was still early and the girl carried with her the bairn and a leather bag slung over one shoulder. In it there was a knife snare wires fishing hooks string. A thin blanket.

  But no food. The remnants of cooked meat and dried fruit and flapjacks were gone. She had eaten them. They had given her the strength to get off the fell.

  The bairn had not taken any of it. Its mouth was incapable and its skin was of a strange colouration.

  She had not disposed of him. The Priest. She had thought about burying him but that would have required a spade and energy and time and she had none. So she threw his clothes over him and untied the dog and walked away.

  The food had made her even hungrier. All she could think about was more food. More meat more fruit more flapjacks – and help for the child.

  Sleep and warmth and some milk was all it needed. It was just tired. Yes. There would be help for them here in the town. Yes. The streets were alien and felt strange underfoot. They wouldn’t know her here though; they’d think the bairn was hers. She’d get her eye looked at and find a bed for the night. Maybe a bath for the pair of them and she would get their clothes and blankets washed and then in a day or two at the most they would be on their way.

  They were just tired. So very very tired.

  She gravitated towards the heart of the town – towards that space in the centre and as the girl walked heads turned from those who were up and about early.

  They saw a wild-eyed bog girl in her rags. Shuffling stooped and limping – one eye like a small bruised turnip with a scrap of cloth in one hand and a package with a grubby head lolling at her shoulder. Pink scratched welted flesh.

  Raw torn cuticle strips. Discoloured teeth and crooked limbs.

  Sunken eye shadows grey.

  Tattered boots. Chewed lips.

  Bone angles.

  THE GIRL WITH the red hair who had been sent on the morning’s errands saw her hunched on the steps. She recognised something in her. A sympatric familiarity. She saw a need.

  Desperation decorated this girl on the steps; it hung from her bones the way she slumped with her head down and her parcel cradled. Dirty and done in. The splattered landscape drying up her legs.

  The girl with the red hair approached her with a bag of bread in hand.

  Hello.

  She looked up and saw the bread. She smelled it – warm and fresh and yeasty. She barely saw the girl with the red hair. All she saw was the bread.

  Do you –

  She reached for a barm cake and before it was out of the bag it was in the girl’s hand. Then it was in her mouth – balled up in in there – stuffed and wedged and moistened and chewed.

  Her eye was swollen shut and weeping a purulence that had run and crusted on her cheek. This sorry girl gagged on the bulk of the bread and flour dusted her dry lips but then she put her stout grubby fingers into her mouth and pulled out a wet remnant from her gums and dropped it into the parcel.

  Only then did the girl with the red hair see that the parcel was a baby and the baby was not well. Not well at all. The moist chewed bread fell on its face and sat there like a bird dropping. The baby did not respond. The girl scooped up the morsel and then ate it herself. Swallowed again.

  Then she exhaled and looked at the girl standing before her who spoke.

  Are you alright?

  The girl rearranged her parcel. Primped the blanket with a sense of purpose that the red-haired girl found unnerving.

  Your child she said again. Perhaps he is hungry. Is it a he?

  The girl did not respond. Instead she eyed the bread again.

  You should come with me. We can help.

  You could have a bath she said.

  Get warm she said. Get fed.

  You and the baby she said.

  Rest a while.

 
It’s safe.

  Come.

  THE COLD WATER kept him alive. It numbed his feet and forced his blood to slowly circulate and kept his slowing brain alive when all it wanted to do was shut down. Close everything. Kill the signals. But the stream water saved him. The mountain saved him. The swirl of the beck had a rhythm and the Priest’s heart locked onto it and it kept beating. It followed the continuance of water over rock and it kept him alive and then when it was ready it shocked him into consciousness.

  He awoke with a prayer on his lips. The words sat there before his tongue pushed them out into the world:

  One mediator between God and men he rasped. Christ Jesus.

  The Priest turned his head to one side. Saw rocks and dirt. His shoes. His clothes were upon him but he was not in them. They were blanketed haphazardly.

  He could not feel his feet. The sound of running water. He could not feel them. He could not feel his legs. Panic. He was paralysed. This was it. God had done to him what he had done to the dying Poacher.

  An eye for an eye.

  He flinched and spasmed and brought his knees up to his chest. He looked down and saw his feet still attached to his legs. He tried to move his toes. He used his brain. He willed them. They moved. Small and white and distant like maggots. He stretched his legs back out and licked his lips. He was thirsty. His head pounded. He propped himself up onto one elbow and looked around.

  She did this.

  The girl.

  Her.

  Gone.

  The dog untied.

  Also gone.

  He touched the tips of his fingers to his brow and felt around the curve of his skull. The flesh there had formed a swollen layer that was tender. He pressed gently and it felt unnatural. Nausea moiled in his stomach. But there was no cut and there was no blood.

  It was a miracle.

  He saw her coming at him again – screaming – the rock raised like a native with a spear.

  He retched a dry heave.

  Like a banshee.

  In full voice she was. Like a banshee. Only in front of him would she show she had a voice though. That she was capable of making sounds and that sometimes those sounds became words and sometimes those words became sentences. Became speech.