Ghost Wall(13)

I went into the hut, knelt on my bunk where no-one could see, and took off the tunic. Even if there had been light, the tender places on my skin were of course at the back, not where I could see, but I ran my fingertips over what I could reach, mapped skin with skin. It was bad. It was a shame, I thought, things hadn’t happened the other way around, the belt before the stream, because the cold water would have helped me now. Although of course if I hadn’t gone into the stream in the first place I probably wouldn’t have needed cold water. Unless he’d found some other reason; some days I just knew he needed to hit me and however carefully I trod, sooner or later I’d give him cause, but this time I thought it really was what I’d done that had made him angry. I should have known, I thought, I should have gone further away, I should have kept my bra on, he wasn’t wrong about that, and what if one of the boys had come along? The flap over the door opened. Mum, outlined against the sky. Are you all right in there, Silvie, only your dad’s asking for you, please don’t keep him waiting now. I’m fine, I said, I’m coming, just a minute.

You start by peeling off the rabbit’s skin. Cut off the paws, Dad said, like this, and run the blade around here. Slice along the leg. Bring this cut to join it. Up the middle of the belly, usually you’d go around the neck but since we’re planning to use the skins we’ll go up like this. Do the forelegs. Then it’s easy, peel it like a banana. Might have to tug a bit, mind. Then you can cut the head off at the end, easier with a metal blade for that, see, to get through the spine. I’d seen him do it before, albeit with kitchen shears and what he called his ‘hunting knife’, as if we lived somewhere where men were regularly dismembering animals in the course of daily life, like the American frontier in the nineteenth century or, I suppose, Iron Age Northumberland, but the boys were visibly shaken. What was that, Dan? said Dad. Dan shook his head but I’d heard him: I’m not gonna puke, I’m not gonna puke, think about Gran’s roses. There was blood now, all right, and the smell of it. You’d think that dismembering something would get easier as the creature becomes less like itself, but with rabbits that’s not the case: a skinned rabbit looks disturbingly similar to a decapitated baby. Or so I imagine. OK, said Dad, then you just slit up the belly and pull out the guts. Intestines, see, lungs and heart, think that one’s the liver.

I watched Dad’s hands. Skin, I thought, his skin and my skin, the tanned skin of his belt, the soft furred skin of the rabbit, our surfaces, our barrier between blood and air. Water can’t get further than skin, unless it’s bog water in which case it will permeate skin and preserve it like leather forever, so that the surface outlasts brain and blood by two thousand years. Leather shoes, to protect living skin. Leather belts, to make it sore. Dad’s fingers, dark with blood, dropped the rabbit’s innards on the grass.

Dan puked.

Oh dear, said Dad, it’s usually the ladies being squeamish, isn’t it, you’d think a lad’d have more guts. So to speak. Right, so that’s how you do it. We can joint them later if that’s what Alison wants, have to see how she’s going to cook them. OK, you lot get to work on those. Silvie, don’t forget to pick up the lights.

Dad left. Dan tried to scrabble leaves over where he’d been sick. The smell rose in the sunshine. It’s all right, said Pete, sit down a bit. Jesus. Nearly vommed myself. He glanced at me. Is he always like that, Silvie? I mean, sorry, I know he’s your dad and all but. Like what, I said, a show-off and given to brutality, yes, actually, mostly he is, sorry. I could see Dan and Pete exchanging glances, almost see the words cross the air between us: what is he like to live with then, how is your home and your life? So’ve you done this before, Dan asked, with the rabbits? I’ve helped him do it, I said, though not with stone tools. I think it gets easier but anyway we’re going to have to do it, aren’t we, so we might as well get started. I picked up a blade and a rabbit. It was only the heat of the day, of course, that made the rabbit still warm, that gave the impression that I was hacking at the paws of a living being. It was not flinching, only springing back as I cut through nerves, scraped on bone. The eyes were beginning to dull. I still didn’t know how the men had killed them.



Inevitably it was hard to sleep that night. Without a proper pillow I couldn’t lie on my front without twisting my neck too hard, and Dad must have done some backhand or changed hands so the belt had wrapped around both sides; the tree thoughts had worked and I hadn’t noticed at the time, but he always liked symmetry. It hurt to lie on either side as well as on my back. I thought of the tree, the smooth pale bark under my palms, warm to my forehead. Rowans were often planted at doorways and boundaries, meant to deter evil spirits or maybe to invite good ones, I couldn’t recall. You find them often by the ruins of old cottages up on the moors. I pushed up onto my hands and knees on my straw sack, let my head hang down to ease my neck. Evil spirits, I thought, ghosts, like the bog people Dad loved who could now exist only as victims, as the objects of violence. There had been a new book out the previous year, one with colour photographs. She was a young teenager, Dad had said, about your age they think, though she was small and she’d have walked funny, she was crippled. Looks as if she’d had rough treatment for a good while, when they X-rayed her they found all sorts of old fractures that had healed up before death. How do you think she died, Silvie? He’d pushed the photo in front of me, the bones of arms and legs coming through the skin, leathered torso fallen over ribcage and pelvis, but an expression still, just about, on her bog-tanned face, long hair still braided as she must have braided it that last morning. Eyelids, still, eyelashes, over empty sockets. The rope around her neck, I said, she was strangled, but of course I knew that the bog people rarely had only one way to die. Aye, he said, mebbe, at the end, but could be she was still alive when she went in, this one was staked, look, through the upper arms, those holes are where the sticks went, seems they cut off that foot too though no knowing if that were before or after death, also there was a proper blow to the head, look, here on the next page. And these cuts here, they were before death. He looked up at me, touched my forearm in its school uniform shirt and my shoulder. They’d be about there and there, see, not enough to kill, just done for the pain like, and this one on her face, there, for the shame of it maybe, folk watching. My forehead, along the hairline. Yes, I said, I see. Her hands had been bound for two thousand years.