Beastings Page 5

  She walked for an hour and then another hour.

  The baby dozed and then it awoke and plucked and tugged at her earlobe and twisted its fingers in her hair.

  She was following a path that ran alongside some grazing fields in the lowlands. The meadow slowly rose upwards towards a sky that had cleared to a deep blue. She fixed her eyes on a copse and headed towards it. Beyond that she could see the hazy outline of mountains; layer upon layer of fading shapes silently stacked. From here they looked impenetrable. Imprisoning.

  When she reached the trees the girl followed a shallow slow-moving chalk runnel a way in then when she felt she was far enough out of sight she stopped and unwrapped the baby.

  The child looked pale and bloodless but it lay on its back and kicked its legs and tried to grab fistfuls of the space above it. She knelt and took a long drink from the stream. She washed her face and neck and hands and then sat the baby up and cupped and spooned some of the stream into its mouth. This seemed to enliven the child.

  It was cool and still in the trees and the way the light came down in shafts through the lattice of branches was like being in a church. It felt like a hallowed space in there and the way the sun illuminated patches of the copse’s floor reminded her of a stained glass window and she didn’t want to break the silence by moving or even breathing. She inhaled until the church became a copse again and the sweat on her back dried and became a cold metal disc.

  The runnel was no more than a foot across and six inches deep – a river in miniature. She lay on her side by it and watched the flow carry leaves and bugs and she imagined that it was a great torrent. She knew that she may have to cross such a river and for a moment the thought of her powerless against nature scared the girl.

  She sat and pulled blades from her hair then took the piece of ham from her pocket and tore a strip off and chewed it slowly. It was salted and smoked and delicious and she ate some more.

  She chewed a smaller piece and mixed it with her saliva until it was a pink mush in her mouth then she put it on the spoon and tilted it into the baby’s mouth who it took it hungrily and swallowed it straight down. She did it again. Once twice then again. She did exactly what she had seen nesting birds do with their young. As good a guide as any.

  Colour returned to the baby’s cheeks and the girl gave it some more water then took another long drink herself and then lay back in the grass and dozed – dirt scalped and skin scratched. Tremble spent and nightmare haunted.

  THERE HAD BEEN mice under the nursery floorboards and walls. The girl heard them that first night and every night afterwards – skittering and scratching in the early hours always when the house was still and the silence amplified their movements.

  They sounded like nails scratching at the inside of closed coffin lids. That’s what she saw when she heard them: the final frantic moments of the buried living.

  Such things used to happen. One of the Sisters had told her so.

  Once the mice had woken her just before dawn each morning the girl lay on her side shivering under her blanket and waited until the baby started babbling. Then she stood and the skirting boards and walls were silent and it was as if she had imagined the incessant insistent scratching. A house awaiting death or something as hugely significant. That’s what that place had been.

  She focused on the baby because the baby was lightness. The baby was magic.

  The baby was hope.

  It loved the girl and the girl loved it as if it were her own and soon she formed a routine that only strengthened that bond.

  Hinckley’s wife with her permanent exhaustion and worsening cough was too ill to show the child any attention. She spent the day with her head turned away and rising only to do her ablutions. The girl suspected she cared for her child no more than she did for her brooding uninterested husband.

  But the girl. The girl the child liked. The bond grew until her breasts started to swell and her stomach stirred with new feelings and she could taste bitter new flavours in her mouth. They were not unpleasant just different. Unexpected.

  She took to sleeping with the child curled up next to her on the nursery floor – the child pressed into the pit of her arm – and when it awoke and cried she didn’t mind because the bond had strengthened further still and when its mother showed disdain she made sure to take the baby to the nursery and to shower it in kisses and when the father turned up dusty and tired or drunk and angry she made sure she stood between him and the baby so that no harm might come of it. Better her than the baby.

  And the more time she spent with the child the less the girl had thoughts about St. Mary’s and the Sisters and everything that had happened there; things so unspeakable that they blurred with her nightmares to form a painful unreality in which she had begun to live almost permanently. Those nocturnal awakenings. Father at her like that. Under the blankets and up the shirt. Pawing and tearing so sleep could only ever be a broken thing that kept her in a perpetual state of fatigue and confusion when day-time dozing was considered sinful and punishable by another visit from Father. So it had gone. And for this she was expected to be grateful.

  Think of your poor siblings next time you’re shedding those tears said the Sisters. Up there with those un-Godly beasts. Those wicked wicked people. No. You were the lucky one girl. Silence is virtuous and anyway don’t your ears work alright? He said faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ. Give thanks to the Lord for His steadfast love endures forever.

  Though the past lived on in nightmares she tried not to think on these matters any more. Her new chores didn’t allow for reflection. The grate had to be emptied and cleaned and the ashes disposed of and then the hearth swept. Then the fire was to be built and lit and the same in the kitchen. It was her job to keep them going. This she did sleepily – her forearms aching from the buckets of coal she had to fetch in.

  Then there was Hinckley’s tea and his eggs and his toast to have ready before seven and his bait box prepared for when he left. Bread and cheese and boiled eggs and anything else left over from the night before.

  There were logs that needed splitting. There were always logs that needed splitting. Lifting and hefting. Gathering.

  Those late spring mornings when Hinckley started work early he had her doing all of these chores before he was up and washed and dressed and at the table to eat in silence.

  Which suited her.

  It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

  The mornings were light and she tried not to think of winter – of the dark days ahead and the cold water washes and the frosted fractals on the windows. Just like at St Mary’s. St Mary’s she tried to forget about. She was here now and at least Hinckley wasn’t on her like Father had been. There were no other girls either and for this she was thankful. For the girls in St Mary’s were broken and if they weren’t then that changed soon enough. Father and the Sisters saw to that. Friendships were not encouraged either as they detracted from attention to Him. Friendships encouraged camaraderie which led to dissent.

  And there was the baby now.

  The baby just about made it worth it.

  When she washed and changed it it began to grip the girl’s finger and when she made a dolly rag out of an old bit of cloth and dangled it over the cot its eyes opened wide and it smiled and gurgled.

  Mrs Hinckley was in her bed most days – nerves they said – and when her husband was gone the girl would put a blanket down in front of the range and she and the child would roll and wrestle there on the floor and she would tickle it until it urinated with excitement then she would clean it and dress it and start again.

  Only on her good days would Mrs Hinckley take the child in her room – on her bed – and even then only for half an hour or so because after that she would be exhausted and she’d ask the girl to take the child and close the door behind her and later she’d not even b
e able to eat for the fatigue.

  The afternoons were the best. In the afternoons the bairn got sleepy and the girl would take a break from her chores and move a chair to the front door and she would sit there on the step and watch the sky and look up at the mountains and people would walk by and nod their heads. Or she would go to the nursery window from which she could see the lake if she opened it wide and leaned out far enough.

  Soon the mountains were already green with dense summer foliage and where they weren’t green they were grey with rock falls and protruding crags because the fells were pitted with the signs of industry too: from the holes hewn by Neolithic clans making axe heads to trade around the country through to the dynamite-blasted quarries and mines dug in the pursuit of slate gypsum and graphite. Then beyond these fells into further valleys the mining of lead and copper and zinc and barite and haematite and tungsten too. Up there on the fells there was still evidence of old lime kilns; the dwellings of those that tended them now little more that ramshackle heaps of fallen rock.

  Hinckley worked with stone. A mason. Walling and paving and fireplaces mainly. He was on a team that would get sent out with chisels and mallets to wherever the work was. Most of it was around the town or the hamlets that skirted the fringes because beyond it there was nothing but fells and hills for miles around and the farmsteads were too poor to need much doing. Town was where the money was. Occasionally he did gravestones on the side. His calligraphy was revered his hand steady. He made a wage. Just enough for the house and food and the coal man. Clothes for the child. Medicine for the wife. Beer sometimes. He took it when he could afford it – and when he took it it was to excess.

  Two Saturdays after the girl arrived and a routine had been established he fetched up drunk and back-handed her when she brought him burnt dropped scones. After that he lurched upstairs and the girl heard the bed creaking and the sound of Mrs Hinckley coughing and groaning. Her face burned.

  The wine of violence...the poison of serpents. The cruel venom of asps.

  The following morning he said nothing to the girl. Just ate his eggs in silence and ignored the cries of his child.

  WHEN SHE AWOKE she didn’t know how much time had passed but the trees looked the same and the sky looked the same and the baby was still trying to grab the space in front of its face with its small curled fingers so she sat up. The girl played with the baby for a few minutes. She rolled it in the grass and tickled it with ferns and twirled a twig which it followed with wide glassy eyes then it grimaced and discharged and she was glad because she was able to clean it off with grass and leaves and water from the stream.

  As soon as she had finished cleaning it the baby did more and it was runny this time and almost green so she wiped and washed it again. She dressed it wrapped it and re-tied the sling. Then she stood and went back the way she came.

  At the edge of the copse the girl stood in the trees a ways and looked out across the fields and at the rolling hills and mountains beyond. They were hazy shapes that appeared to be shifting – those great broad backs of creatures whose heads were hidden in the earth and whose pointed tails snaked away to form unseen valleys. Future destroyers of civilisations.

  Soon the fields would give way to those hills and then the hills would become mountains and she knew she would have to go through them and she would have to take the most obscure tracks if they weren’t to find her.

  She turned and walked to them.

  THE GIRL PASSED two old cottages at a distance and entered a young evergreen plantation of firs pines and spruces. She imagined it would one day be a great dark forest that crept south to cover an entire hillside and then in the next century – or the one after that – people would flock there to sunbathe and eat picnics at the dam further up the valley but for now it was a series of ordered saplings no more than twelve or fifteen feet in height and laid out on a grid.

  It felt strange to be walking in the young wood. It made the girl feel tall and over-sized and strong and she felt good about this. She pretended she was gigantic; a fearless ogre hounded by the villagers who mistook her lumbering size and eternal silence as a sign of danger. Something to fear. They would flee her presence. No-one could harm her.

  Soon she left the wood and crossed a grassy plain and was following a steep track up a hillside. The track climbed at taut diagonals through a series of cutbacks and she bent her back and dug in. She felt exposed on the hillside so the girl walked quickly until the path rounded a corner and then seemed to fade into scrublands. It just ended.

  Her heel was sore. It was burning. Every step shot a pain up the back of her leg. She stopped to remove a boot and found there on the ball a large perfectly round blister had formed. It was white and dappled like the surface of the moon.

  She manipulated the liquid inside it for a moment and felt something fleshy give beneath her thumb. A creaking of liquid. She did not burst it.

  The girl put her boot back on and walked until she passed the edge of more pine trees – older and sturdier this time – then she plucked a needle from one and sat on a log to remove her boot again. The log was a fallen pine now soft and pliable and rotting.

  Another memory from before the Sisters took her in; another memory from up top: the sensation of shadows. Less a memory then and more of a feeling. Adult shapes in a cold stone room. Pushing and pulling. Raised voices. Her father striking her mother – she could picture neither of them – then things being tipped and upended in the commotion and her brothers and sisters fleeing – five or seven or nine of them – then the feeling of rapid movement. Of motion. Hands grabbing at her hands – cold and dry – walking on little legs then freewheeling down a hill to the town with women dressed in black and white and a man who looked like something out of a nightmare looking down at her then placing a hand on her head and saying it’s alright you’re with us now it’s alright you’re with God now.

  Remember not former things. And ancient things consider not.

  She kept the baby on her back as she crossed her foot over her other leg and leaned in. She compressed the blister to push the pus into one corner then stuck the needle into the tight bubble. A jet of hot yellow liquid leapt out and droplets splattered her hand. There was more of it than she expected. Then the blister went loose like a deflated balloon; like the reflection of the moon in running water – again the moon – so she dabbed at it with her sock then put it back on and tied her boot tighter and carried on.

  4.

  THE POACHER SAW that the Priest walked with purpose. His was not the gait of one of these weekend hillside wanderers who had taken to turning up in town in the warmer months nor was it that of natural-born countryman such as a herdsman or farmer or gamekeeper or poacher.

  He saw that the Priest worked on town-time and was a watch-wearer and although he was not sensibly pacing

  himself his energy reserves seemed limitless. The Poacher preferred to let the land do as much of the walking as his legs – it was how he was raised: work with the mountain and not against it. Let the land carry you where it can. Seek shelter when it is needed for it can always be found. Eat when hungry for a meal is always close by. Rest when tired. Do not travel with undue haste for you will fall. You will get there when you get there.

  But the Priest seemed to almost take pleasure in making it hard for himself. To the Poacher he seemed intent on taking the shortest rather than the easiest route and in that respect he was like Perses bounding across boulders and slipping clumsily down banks. He was practically panting at the trail. Unbending in his mission.

  He had to admit to being impressed with the Priest’s stealth and stamina. He seemed unnaturally driven. Fuelled by an inner force. God the Poacher supposed. Christ almighty he thought. The man had barely stopped to take water. Keeping up with him was not a problem of course but the Poacher did wonder at what point the Priest would run out of steam – and then what?

  He did not want to b
e saddled with helping the Priest back down to the town. That he did not want.

  The Poacher watched as his companion stumbled over stones and fought against uneven ground occasionally grunting and panting.

  You might want to think about slowing up a little bit there Father he said.

  And you might want to think about speeding up a little bit there replied the Priest.

  I can go as fast as you like but it’s you I’m thinking of. You’ll wear away your heels away at this rate.

  The Priest did not respond.

  It’s just that I know these valleys well Father.

  Again the Priest did not respond so the Poacher repeated himself but this time louder.

  I said it’s just that I know these valleys well Father. And I know there’s only so many routes a dumb lass with half a mind could take. What I mean is we can go as fast as we like but with Persey here we’ll flush her out soon enough so we might as well take our own sweet time.

  When there was no response the Poacher started whistling one of his favourite drinking songs to fill the awkward gap that widened between them.

  I’d prefer to enjoy the silence said the Priest.

  The Poacher looked at the back of the Priest’s pale thin neck – a neck that unlike his had not seen sun this past season. He looked at the Priest’s neck and thought how easy it would be to snap it with some snaring wire and then he idly wondered whether the punishment for putting a man of God in the soil was greater than that of a common man and then he thought of all the different ways he would dispose of a body out here if he had to. Of course pigs were always the best way. Any countryman knew that a half dozen hogs could do to a body in half a day that which time and the elements and the scavengers would take half a year or longer to do. Because it’s the bones and the skull that are the tricky parts. And the teeth. Especially the teeth. The hogs can’t munch through them. Too small. So the smart man would stick around to collect the hog scat afterwards and then spread it far and wide across the land.