Ghost Wall(14)

I lay down again in my bunk. She had had a life before that, the bog-girl. She had slept and woken, had sleepless nights, felt sun and wind and rain. She had learnt to read the sky, learnt the impossible dance of fingers plaiting her own hair behind her head, the movements just the same as the ones I’d been watching Molly make. There are few bog-children and so far as I know no bog-babies, so the people who come to us now out of the bogs must have been cared for, fed, must have been part of their families and villages until one day they found that they were no longer like everyone else, that sometime in the night something had changed. No-one knows how far before death that day might have been, whether one morning someone came to wake you carrying a rope, the blades already sharpened and waiting in the heather, or whether you had weeks or months to say your farewells, to get used to your status as a ghost. It would have been necessary not to think about it, I thought, to have tree-thoughts right to the end of thinking, and I found myself hoping they had something to hold, some talisman against the pain.

I knew they did not.

As the birdsong outside got louder I gave up, stifled a squeak as I rolled out of bed and trod cautiously towards the doorway. If he woke, I thought, if he caught me, he would either be pleased by my early rising, maybe even offer a moment of dawn companionship of the sort we had often shared when I was little and sometimes already up and playing quietly downstairs when he came in from a night-shift, or he would accuse me of sneaking around at night and get angry again. I ducked under the flap in the doorway and waited a moment – I could, after all, be going into the wood to pee, or getting a drink of water. Without a house, it occurred to me, it is much harder to restrict a person’s movement. Harder for a man to restrain a woman.

There was a light mist tangled in the trees and the sun still too low for shadows. The sky was pale, branches vague against it. I stepped into cold grass wet with dew and my sunburnt feet liked it. I wrapped my arms around myself and took a deep breath of cool air that smelt of green things growing. Birdsong, something high and excitable in a nearby bush and the blackbird I’d heard yesterday in the oak tree. No wind, the dawn still. I thought briefly, lightly, of going back to the water, but I knew I wouldn’t. Up onto the moor, I thought, sunrise, why not, although I knew that there’s nowhere to hide up there, that if he woke and came that way, after more rabbits perhaps, he would see me anywhere within a five-mile radius, even if that also meant he would see that I was alone and not consorting with men. Albeit in my pyjamas. Pyjamas might be half-naked. I shouldn’t be out here. My thoughts were beginning to flicker, my mind a bird against the window. It was often like that, the day after. Hush, I thought, go pee in the woods and then go back to bed, easy.

I passed the rabbits, hanging as if after a medieval execution, and the eviscerated fish. The soles of my feet were already hardening to the sticks underfoot. I went further than usual, checked repeatedly for witnesses, paused to listen for footsteps, for snapping twigs, before I pulled down my pyjamas and squatted. Flaunting yourself naked in the woods for anyone to see. You can’t see the colour when you pee on the ground but there was a strong smell, I needed to drink more. No paper; I shook myself and did an inadequate job with a leaf before waddling over the warm puddle and covering myself again. The brushed cotton hurt my skin. I looked away from the rabbits as I passed again, didn’t want to see the blue-white gleam of their severed spines. Mum did want them jointed, said a stew would be a whole lot easier than setting up a spit and also, she added quickly, surely more authentic, wouldn’t they have wanted to stretch the meat with veg just like people today? You could see Dad wanting to see small pink bodies skewered over the flames but the Prof said yes, almost certainly, not that the middens offer much of a clue about cooking methods but common sense has its place. Fine then, Dad said, Silvie can joint them tomorrow, show the lads how it’s done.

Hi Silvie.

Molly. Loo-roll in one hand, trowel in the other. Buttoned pyjamas with blue tulips on them, plaits undoing themselves in a haze of blonde. I glanced towards the hut. Shh, I whispered. Hello. I was just – I was in the wood. I know, she said, I get up early so I can poo in private, isn’t it horrible, I’m amazed it’s even legal. Shh, I said, yes, you’re allowed to poo in the woods, people’ve been doing it for millennia, you just make sure you dig a hole and fill it in afterwards. Yeah, she said, and people have been dying of cholera and dysentery for centuries, yay for nature’s way. Cholera was in cities, I said, it happens when sewage gets into the water supply, they’d have had more sense out here. Great, she said, they could die another day of infected hunting injuries and childbirth. Shh, I said. I’m going back in, enjoy the woods. Wait, she said, Silvie, what happened to your back, there? I pulled my pyjama top back up over my shoulder. Sunburn, I said, you’ve got it too. She touched my shoulder and I flinched. Not like that I haven’t, she said. It’s nothing, I said, it’s fine, I should get back, I don’t want him to – I’m still tired, should get some more sleep if I can, see you later.

I could hear him snoring from outside the door. I ducked back in and stood there waiting for my eyes to adjust, and then stepped cautiously, trailing my fingers along the splintery wall, until I could kneel on my bunk and ease myself down onto my front. This is not going to work, I thought, I can’t get through today, not like this, it’s too sore, it’s never been this bad before, but I knew that I could and would. It was not as if there was an alternative.