Mary and her brother’s attempt to kill her rapist father has gone badly wrong. Mary wakes up concussed. Her brother is missing.
The Truth is Mostly Invented
They have laid me out on the table. The back of my head sits on a pad of cloth like an egg in a nest. Mister Lampard’s egg from his sailing days, big as my head, painted with negroes, that a whole grown henny could fit in. From an ostrich, which he told me was a bird a tall as a person with a bald pate and wings made out of hat feathers. He sold the egg when I was seven to buy Ma a new dress for holy days, saying she is a fine woman who deserves fine clothes. The dress was pretty enough, but she got blood on the back of it and didn’t say how, and though it laundered out mostly there remained a stain like the map of a far-away island. My head on the pad of cloth feels as hollow as that ostrich egg.
Pulled all the way up to my neck is a scratchy blanket. From the gin-sick smell of it, the blanket from Ma’s bed. I am listening with my eyes closed. I have surfaced from a ringing, thump-headed silence into scraps of talking that make no sense. Ma sobbing somewhere, and close to me, Mister Lampard’s voice, whispery. Neighbours, too, hushed as though talking in church when they shouldn’t. Sarah Foxwill and Sarah Moxy. Where are you? Arrested maybe, for clonking my father into the drink. Ma’s sobbing rises and falls like a November wind, and I don’t like that it stinks of something lost. The only words I can make out are Mister Lampard’s, because the Sarahs are practiced at talking under their breath, and the only sound they make is a soft sea-shushing. Mister Lampard’s whisper can no more hide itself than a cow can.
‘No,’ he is saying, ‘not that I know.’
‘The little one was out cold.’
‘Maybe. But it weighed anchor this morning.’
‘No, not a sign of him. Margret is fearing the worst.’
The words land on me like rain. Their cold meaning soaks into me. Moving makes my head punch itself from the inside. Your name comes out of me in a rush, with other words that unravel. Mister Lampard leaps to catch me — ‘Stop, little one!’ — and lays me back down, very gentle with my head in particular.
‘Shush now,’ he says, stroking my hair, ‘nothing to be vexing you,’ but his eyes say otherwise.
‘Mark,’ I say. Feeble as a snail.
‘Was Mark with you in the sail yard?’
The yes comes out of me like thin soup, no heft to it at all.
‘What happened?’
My thoughts crawl back. Ringing darkness. Before that? Splash in the water. Before that? You run across the stars with a giant hook in your hands. Before? Crack to the back of the head. Before? My father’s huge maw, grinning. My own eyes staring at me out of his face. My ankle tight in the manacle of his fist. And the two steps I took towards him. Had I stayed put —
I try to shake my head but even the smallest of side-to-side movements hurts like a fresh beating.
‘No?’ he says. ‘You can’t remember?’
And I so want that to be the truth. A person so stupid as to take those two steps towards a brute hanging for his life over the harbour wall deserves to have their head smashed open, and the brains spill out, and never to breathe again. But what has happened to you?
‘It’s all my fault!’
And Mister Lampard says, ‘No, Tyke, No, whatever you done, it was an accident.’
But now Ma comes roaring in, her face so close I can smell the drink in her.
‘Where’s Mark got to? What you done to my boy?’ Shaking my shoulders like I’m cream and she’s making butter. No word dares come out in the face of her fierceness. Which only makes her rage more, until I say,
‘Nothing! I done nothing!’
‘Nothing?’ she says. ‘You done something. It’s all your fault, you said, I heard you!’
Harder and harder, the shaking.
‘I done nothing!’
What you done to your brother?’ Her voice is a needle.
Then something happens in my head. One minute it’s so full of hurt I think it will explode like gorse pods. Next minute I can see her shaking that body on the table but I’m not inside it anymore. Her face, rosy as an apple, and that tight little mouth spitting words. When she says your name, I feel you on the other side of it, still attached to it, like an animal at the end of a long, long tether. You’re in the dark somewhere.
Ma is still blazing but Mister Lampard has her by her shoulders.
‘Leave it off, Margret, poor mite’s had such a knock, you’ll have no children left.’ He tears her off and lays me back down gently. She stands there, arms at her sides shaking uselessly with nothing to hold between them. When my body’s laid down he turns to her and she crumples to the floor, sobbing. If Mister Lampard didn’t stop her, I think she would have shaken me to death. When I fall back into my body, it has fallen, itself, into a long sleep.
When I wake again I am in my own bed. It is half dark, and I cannot tell if that means morning or night. There is talk downstairs, low and halting, and every now and then the sound of a spoon on a platter, which makes me think it must be supper-time - the end of the day, not the beginning. At first I don’t know why I’m in bed at supper-time, and think maybe we’ve been bad. I put my arm out to flop across your body to wake you and ask you. Cold blanket. Strange feeling in my head. Sore lump at the back of it. I remember.
When they know I’m awake, the questions begin. Mister Lampard in charge so Ma doesn’t get into a rage. He calls me to the downstairs room. Stands me in front of him. Ma holds herself at the door, looking out onto the street and vibrating. Very gently he says,
‘What was your fault, Tyke?’
I can’t say about our murder plan, following you down to the dockside, moving when I should have been still.
‘Being born!’ says our mother from the doorway,
‘What were you two doing?’ says Mister Lampard, ignoring her. ‘Why did you go out in the middle of the night?’
How can I say?
‘It was a game,’ I say.
‘What game?’ says Ma. ‘What game? What game?’
There’s no name for this game. Nothing comes. Mister Lampard tries again.
‘What happened to Mark?’
This is the question I want to ask them. If they’re asking me, then you’re lost. Mister Lampard, waiting for an answer, begins to blur.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s a lie!’ says Ma. ‘Look at those eyes.’
‘How did you hurt your head?’
Hand on my ankle, tug. The truth is impossible.
‘I fell over.’
‘Did Mark fall over?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was anyone else there?’
My father hangs off the side of memory, eyes like my eyes, burning into me, telling me to tell the truth. I shake him off. Say, again, again, like another lump of moss on the path,
‘I don’t know.’
Mister Lampard turns to our mother and says,
‘Margret, we’re getting nowhere.’
Afterwards, she only wants rid of me. She doesn’t want to see me, she says, stay out of her way. Under the covers, the air grows hot. Tears run into my mouth. Later, I take myself down to the harbour. Stare at the fishing boats all tucked up for the day. Go along the side of the dyeing shed, scouting for clues. Nothing at all. No big hook. I stare down into the water for a long time, but its surface fidgets and the depth is stirred up like clouds. The rest of the harbour glints back at me with a sea kind of knowing.
The sea takes things away and brings things back, and sometimes what wasn’t there when you looked before floats in on a friendly tide, or the sunk thing fills with air and rises, or the drowned thing rafts, or the lost thing flops back onto the beach it was stolen from, days ago, weeks ago. Those next days and weeks, I walk along the foreshore looking for any little piece of you. But always there’s nothing, and I go back home through the alleys with my eyes on the ground, hoping no one will speak to me. Once or twice I look up by mistake and catch somebody startling when they see me, thinking I’m you. I never had a scrap of clothing that wasn’t yours. And I see their disappointment, too, when they see it’s only me. I wish I was you, too, so I wouldn’t have to look at Ma looking at me with that wish in her eyes.
Ma sleeps as much as she can. Every night someone from the village comes in to see how she is, and brings something for supper. They stay and talk to Mister Lampard. He is guarding Ma like a pie that needs cooling off, too hot to be cut up and served, though everyone wants a portion of her. I am always sent up right after we’ve eaten so they can speak their minds. I listen through the boards. Have I remembered? Am I maybe too scared to say? Sarah Foxwill says maybe you slipped into the harbour and drowned, but your body got tangled up in the rope when the Dutch ship weighed anchor. Got snagged and dragged out to sea. Will we have a service? Prayers have been said for two Sundays now but if the body has been dragged out to sea, never to return, then a service —
Dragged out to sea. Young men are snatched away to sea all the time in the big cities. When the Dutch ship sailed, might you have sailed with it? Taken by my father for punishment, or for revenge?
I ask Mister Lampard where it was going and he says the West or East Indies. He’s been to the East Indies. Furnace hot, he says. Months away. Markets full of foods that don’t look edible. Bright-coloured birds, reds, yellows and greens. I tell him I think you might have been taken onto the ship. My words vanish like the kind of snow that won’t settle. He puts his meaty hand on my shoulder and says,
‘We all want Mark to be alive, Tyke.’
Ma’s taken to her bed like crying’s a sickness. She’s sure you are drowned. I say nothing to her, for fear of her smacking me to Kingdom Come.
Then your shoe appears. Mercy Hindwish finds it, washed up on the beach, soggy, already growing green fronds like the fishing boats do. Ma knows, and I know, that it is your shoe, but neither will say so. Mister Lampard knows it is your shoe and your death becomes as real to him as the stone step at our door. The whole of Fishtown starts chattering. Where would the boy go with only one shoe? They are waiting for you to wash up on the shore any day now. Not knowing you’re on the way to a land where it’s summer forever and the birds are too bright to hide.
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