Sacred Country Read online

  Still, he sat on at the table.

  It was most peculiar, Irene thought. He sat there stiffly, as though he were afraid to move.

  Irene wrung out the dishcloth and absent-mindedly wiped her face with it. It smelled of cabbage, of carbolic soap, of the wretchedness to come.

  Livia’s Dictionary

  Mary floated in a new vision. The muddy edges of things had become distinct. Released by her new spectacles from a struggle of seeing, her mind found a new curiosity about what there was to understand. Miss McRae’s passion for Geography furnished her with words that seemed to come to her from far off: isthmus, glacier, fjord, delta, atoll. She did drawings of cloud formations and knew their names: cumulus meaning heap or pile, stratus meaning flat, cirrhus meaning a lock of curly hair. She learned that a stalactite was a mineral-filled icicle hanging from the roof of a cave and that drips from it built up beneath it and froze into a mound and then into a column, growing on and on upwards and called a stalagmite.

  Sometimes stalactites and stalagmites met. Then, it seemed to anyone entering the cave, that pillars had been built there to hold the roof up. ‘And this,’ said Miss McRae grandly, ‘is a quite extraordinary thing! Nature playing a marvellous wee game, children.’

  Mary’s drawing of atolls and clouds were stuck up on the classroom wall with gummed stars. They were blackly done. The firm lines caused Miss McRae to wonder whether Mary didn’t have an artistic talent she should nurture. But then she began to see that Mary loved all her schoolwork so fiercely she was jealous of anyone doing it more competently than her. Even Mathematics. In table tests, her hand would shoot up for every answer. She knew the Dry Measure chart before anyone else. She did sums with exaggerated care, her face very close to the paper.

  One day, she brought to school a book that had belonged to her grandmother. She showed it to Miss McRae in the icy playground. It was a Dictionary of Inventions. Mary said: ‘I always thought the world was finished, didn’t you, Miss McRae?’

  ‘Finished, dear?’

  ‘Yes. Long ago. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘But look: Sewing Machine. Thomas Saint. British. 1792. See? Revolver. Samuel Colt. American. 1835. Thermometer. Galileo. Italian. 1597. So before then, those things hadn’t been there at all.’

  ‘Well, that’s perfectly true, Mary. And this also means, of course, that there is a great deal yet to come, things we might not be able to imagine now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mary seemed excited for a moment, then suddenly anxious. ‘I don’t think my mother knows all this, though,’ she said.

  ‘I dare say she does, dear.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. I’m sure. Even if she knows there might be new things, she doesn’t know that before Thomas Saint, 1792, there wasn’t one sewing machine on the earth.’

  Miss McRae looked at Mary. Ever since that morning when she brought Irene Simmonds’s baby into class, she’d thought her odd, exceptional, one of those whose future you couldn’t see. She laid a protective hand inside a grey woollen glove on Mary’s head. ‘Run and play, dear!’ she said. ‘It’s too cold to stand about.’

  So she ran off, clutching her little Dictionary of Inventions. Miss McRae saw her wait her turn at the swing. She spoke to none of the children and no one spoke to her. When she got onto the swing, she didn’t sit on it as most of the girls did, but stood up and pushed her body out and up into the grey sky. Her expression was blank, unafraid. The chains of the swing ground against the fixings. Mary moved higher and higher.

  There was a swing at the farm. It was tied to the limb of a Scots pine. Sonny had made it for Tim from a tractor tyre and a length of rope. He’d tied two superfluous knots in the rope to ensure the boy’s safety. Sometimes, in an easterly wind, he glared at the tree, as at a mortal enemy.

  Timmy sat in the tyre as though in a bucket, kicking his legs feebly, one by one. He thought the tyre would swing just by being sat in. When this didn’t happen, he wanted to be pushed. If no one pushed him, he snivelled. Mary wanted him dead. With his goofy eyes and the way he gulped when he cried and the way his cheeks got slimy with tears, he was like a frog. Every day, Mary prayed he’d go back to being a tadpole and then to a blob of spawn and then to nothing.

  There was a gap between the low limb of the pine and its higher branches. When Mary stood in the tyre, it was this gap she was aiming for. The gap was a test. This is what she believed. There would be others, but this was going to be the first test. If she could make the tyre go up into the gap with such speed and power that she and it flew vertically above the pine limb and down again on the other side, completing a circle, well, then anything she prayed for would certainly happen. In particular, becoming a boy would happen. It was just a question of time, a question of waiting until you could invent yourself and surprise everyone with your discovery, like Patrick Miller, British, 1788, who had invented the paddle wheel. Before, no one had dreamed of a boat with wheels, just as now, no one could dream of Mary Ward not being a girl. But, as Miss McRae had said: ‘There is a great deal yet to come, things we might not be able to imagine now.’ One day, she would be in a dictionary. But the tyre wouldn’t go high enough to reach the gap. It wouldn’t even get to the vertical point where Mary was upside-down.

  Mary asked herself if she was afraid. ‘You’re not afraid,’ she answered. ‘You need more practice.’

  On a Saturday morning, with the gap between the pine branches full of blue sky, Mary sat on the grass, stroking Marguerite’s neck with her finger. She was waiting for Timmy to get off the swing. It was December, yet the meadow looked shiny. Mary’s head ached with the brightness of everything. She yelled at Timmy to let her have a turn on the tyre. ‘It’s mine,’ he said.

  He sat in it, feebly rocking, like in a hammock.

  ‘One day soon, he’ll be frogspawn,’ Mary said to Marguerite. The bird opened its stubby wings and flapped them and Mary could feel a kind of shiver go through its body. Timmy sat up higher in the tyre and began his feeble swinging. Marguerite walked away from Mary’s hand, then made a little scuttling run towards the tyre. Timmy kicked out at the guineafowl and one of his wellingtons flew off and landed near it. Marguerite screeched. Timmy threw his head back and gave a foolish laughing scream. Then Marguerite did a thing Mary had never seen her do before: she flew up into the tree.

  Timmy went on with his shrieking laugh. He was more interested in annoying Mary’s bird now, than he was in sitting in the swing like a princeling. He climbed out and stood on the grass, looking up at Marguerite. Then he started running round in a circle, windmilling his arms and making bird noises.

  Mary got up and began to walk towards the swing. From somewhere beyond the field, she could hear her father call to them to come in for their dinner. Timmy didn’t hear. Mary thought, he’s in a world of stupidity. In that sagging space in the big bed, his brain is turning to dough.

  Mary stood on the swing. She called to Marguerite. She worked the tyre lazily backwards and forwards, calling. The bird looked peculiar up there. It was one of those creatures that forgot, most of the time, that it could fly and so never practised. ‘Come down, Marguerite,’ Mary said.

  The creature was agitated. It moved restlessly about. Then it ran along the branch and took off. It screeched as it swooped down. In a corner of her new vision, Mary saw Sonny arrive, shouting. Marguerite landed on Timmy’s head and pecked viciously at his ear. Mary drew in a breath so deep, it coloured red everything that she could see. The momentum of the swing died. She saw Sonny run like a bullet to his son and hit out at Marguerite with his cap. Marguerite flapped off, landing awkwardly on a mole hill, then scuttling towards the farmyard like a hen. Sonny picked up Timmy and held him, binding his ear with a handkerchief and swearing. Timmy screamed and screamed. Mary breathed her red breaths. He’s screaming himself to death, she thought. He’s returning to pre-invention, to before the paddle wheel and the gun.

  Mary:

  My father caught Ma
rguerite. He held her under his arm and put her in a sack. He tied the sack with bailing string.

  He said she was bewitched. He said that, out of my jealousy, I had made fierce a normally docile bird. He said God would punish me in ways I could not imagine.

  God was punishing me already in a way I could imagine because my father gave Marguerite to the Loomises to be killed and plucked for somebody’s dinner.

  What he wanted was for me to cry. When his rages made him go deaf, this was the thing that brought his hearing back.

  I refused to bring his hearing back. I ate my dinner, then I walked out into the yard and vomited it up. My mother watched me through the kitchen window. Her look was all in tatters. That morning, she’d begun on a patchwork and her sewing table was covered with cardboard shapes and bits of old curtains. Somebody, I thought, is soon going to have to mend her.

  I turned away from the yard and the puddle of sick and from my mother’s look. I went out into the lane and began to walk towards Swaithey. I didn’t dare think about Marguerite, her little wizened legs and her speckled sides. I put her into the past. Some of the past is visible and some of it isn’t and I hoped the bit of it with Marguerite in it would stay hidden. But I had this thought about suffering: I thought, if I suffer a lot, I will grow a man’s skin. If I suffer and refuse to cry, a penis will grow out of all that is locked away inside. It needs only time.

  After that bright blue day we’d had, the air got as cold as a knife. I could see the tower of Swaithey Church and the sun going down behind it, sliding away fast and letting the dark come on without any fight. In Geography, Miss McRae had told us that in Australia our night was their day. Australia has two tips to its shape like mountains. As I tramped on towards Swaithey, I imagined the sun arriving there and the bears in the gum trees blinking as it woke them.

  I was going to Irene. I wanted her to hide me away in a shelter of my own making. I hoped Pearl would be awake, doing a jigsaw. I hoped Irene would know why I had come without my having to tell her.

  The word Marguerite was beyond my saying.

  It felt like night by the time I got there. There were stars above the lane. I remembered Miss McRae saying: ‘This is what we call the universe, children,’ but I still had not understood whether the universe went away in the daytime altogether, or whether it just left us and floated over Australia like an airship. My mother could not look at the stars. They made her remember being a girl, lying in her bed.

  The light was on in Irene’s hall. When I knocked, I heard Pearl run to the letter box and try to open it and look out. Not many people came to see them, my mother said. People in Swaithey couldn’t bring themselves to show compassion. Only Mr Harker.

  Irene took me into the kitchen. I sat Pearl on my knee and helped her do her Knitting Nancy. She was using yellow and pink wool and there were quite a few holes in the little snakey rope where stitches had fallen off the nails in the cotton reel.

  Irene waited. She poured me a cup of tea and put a flapjack on a plate for me, tempting me to speak, like someone trying to tempt a bear out of a gum tree.

  After a long while of not speaking, she said she would make up a bed for me on the floor in Pearl’s room. I said: ‘Thank you, Irene,’ in a very clear voice and then when she came down I told her, in a quick rush to get it over with, that my bird had dived on Timmy and now it was in a sack, waiting to die. I didn’t cry. I only felt freezing cold. I held on to Pearl to keep warm.

  Irene came and squatted by my chair and stroked my hair.

  She told me my father’s rages were not his fault. Losing half his ear in Germany had damaged him, just like thousands of men had been damaged in the war. ‘At heart,’ she said, ‘he’s a good man.’

  ‘He’s good to Timmy,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Shall I take Pearl,’ she said, ‘while you drink your tea?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘don’t take her. We’re doing the Knitting Nancy.’

  Pearl’s room was very small. My bed was three settee cushions laid out next to the old cot she still slept in. Irene gave me a green eiderdown to cover me and a proper pillow. My supper was a marmalade sandwich.

  I had a kind of waking dream that my father came with the pony and cart and drove me home through the freezing dark. I kept listening for the sound of the wheels of the cart, but it only came in my mind and not in reality.

  I liked being there on the floor. I wanted to stay a long time and not go home. To get Pearl to lie down and be quiet and go to sleep, I told her a story about Joseph Montgolfier, French, 1782, inventor of the hot-air balloon. In my story, Montgolfier ballooned around the sky, looking for the universe and never finding it because his balloon travelled as fast as the sun. He found Australia instead and decided to stay there and then on his first night in an Australian jungle, surrounded by parrots and kangaroos all chattering and jabbering in a language he couldn’t understand, he looked up at the sky and saw it there, the universe, and thought, oh bother it, oh sacrébleu, it’s too far away to find. Australia’s better.

  There was quite a lot in this story that Pearl didn’t understand, but it sent her to sleep and that was the idea of it, to get her to sleep and start snoring, so that I could just lie there and listen to her, like you listen to the sea, not thinking of anything at all except the sound.

  In the morning, Irene told me about Mr Harker giving her the sack and going off to France. She said: ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Mary.’

  I told her I would take Pearl to school with me. She could do her Knitting Nancy under Miss McRae’s desk. She could look after our silkworms.

  Irene said Miss McRae would never allow this, but I said: ‘Miss McRae looks like a fir tree, but inside she’s kind.’

  Irene kept shaking her head and saying no, no, so I told Irene a thing I never told my mother or father, that I was Miss McRae’s best pupil, with my drawings of clouds on the wall and thirteen stars against my name on the star chart and that I had no friends at all.

  ‘Well,’ said Irene, ‘it’d only be for the mornings …’

  So I began it the following day, taking Pearl to school with me while Irene went to Mr Harker’s and set to work polishing everything for his return from France. I told Miss McRae this was a temporary arrangement, that Pearl could be a silkworm monitor and that if she wasn’t allowed to be there, I wouldn’t be able to come to school. She shook her head, just like Irene had done, turning it from side to side, so that little thin hairpins fell out of her grey bun, but then she found a small chair and desk and put it by hers and sat Pearl in it.

  ‘Luckily for you, Mary,’ she said, ‘I was born in a lighthouse, or I would not be the kind of person I am.’

  I stayed at Irene’s for a week. My father came while I was at school and told her this would be best and gave her ten shillings for my food.

  In my life to come, I would sometimes remember it, my week at Irene’s when I couldn’t say the syllables of Marguerite’s name.

  I remember the feel of my body, trying to grow its man’s skin between the settee cushions and the green eiderdown.

  I remember Pearl’s love of the silkworms.

  I remember the marmalade sandwiches.

  I remember Irene at the bedroom door, saying: ‘Goodnight, my doves, and dream of princes.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  1955

  ‘The Last Loomis’

  Learning to yodel was far more terrible than Walter had imagined.

  Pete said it was a sound born in the mountains, where a man could hear his own echo. He said it was a shame there were no mountains in Suffolk.

  Walter tried to teach himself by copying Jimmie Rodgers. Then, on his parents’ wireless, he heard a Canadian singer named Hank Snow, known as ‘The Yodelling Ranger’, making that same easy, high-spilling sound and he said to Pete: ‘This confirms me in what I’m doing.’ Snow sang a song so sad, it made Walter’s spine ache. The song was called ‘I Don’t Hurt Anymore’.

  Custome
rs to the Loomis shop sometimes caught an unexpected burst of Walter’s yodel-practice coming from the yard and the Misses Cunningham, in particular, were not at ease with it. ‘You know, Amy,’ said one sister to the other, ‘I think Loomis must be killing things more slowly, in a way that makes them sound human.’

  The task was so hard. Perhaps it would kill him? It was like trying to put fizz into something still. It was difficult for Pete to believe that all this struggle had arisen from a night of rain and booze. He warned Walter not to push himself. He became aware that the boy was running a fever that refused to abate. In the cow-sheds, he could see Walter’s head steaming. His neck, above the collarless shirt, was plum red.

  ‘Give that yodel a rest,’ Pete advised, ‘or it’ll burst your brains.’

  But he had forgotten Walter’s devotion to things. ‘Of course I can’t give it a rest,’ Walter said, ‘not till I’ve got it.’

  But he couldn’t get it. Not quite. He could master a kind of warble, a little trill at the back of the throat. The great swoop up to a falsetto that Rodgers and Snow achieved so effortlessly remained beyond him. He could hear it inside him. In his fever, he sometimes felt that he could even see it, as a bouncing light above the trees.

  Then he heard a new song on the radio, Slim Whitman singing ‘Rose Marie’.

  Pete told Ernie: ‘That’s going to be the death of your boy, that “Rose Marie”.’

  Grace advised her son: ‘We’ve all of us got only one voice, Walter, and you’re hurting yours.’

  But he’d bought the record now. He wore out four gramophone needles, playing it over and over. The ease with which old Slim Whitman sang it reminded him of a waterfall. He had dreams of mountains. The word ‘whippoorwill’ (its meaning unclear to him) kept patterning and punctuating his thoughts. He remembered Pete’s tales of ice storms and prayed for one to come and cool him. The morning arrived when his fever was so thick and deep that he couldn’t move.