The Last House on Needless Street(48)

‘You are probably promising yourself that you will never do such a thing again. You are thinking that you gave in just this once … And maybe that will prove true. But I do not think so. Yours is an old sickness, which has been in our family for a long time. My father – your grandfather – had it. I hoped that it had died with him. Maybe I thought that I could atone for it. A new world, a new life. I became a nurse because I wanted to save people’s lives.’

‘What is it? The sickness.’

She looked at me and the beam of her attention was like a warm sea. ‘It makes you want to hurt living things,’ she said. ‘I saw that, the night that I followed Father to the old place, the tombs under the iliz. I saw what he kept there …’ Mommy put her hand over her mouth. She breathed hard into her palm.

‘What is iliz?’ It sounded bad, like the name of a demon.

‘It means church,’ she said. ‘Iliz,’ she said again softly, as though her tongue were remembering. I had never before heard her speak anything but English. I understood then that there was another, shadowy her, made of the past – like a ghost and a living person bound together.

‘Did you like it there?’ I asked. ‘Do you miss it?’

She shook her head, impatient. ‘“Like”, “miss” – these are soft words. Such places just are. It does not matter what you feel about them.

‘In this country, all the people are afraid of death. But death is what we are. It is at the centre of things. That was the way in Locronan. In the iliz the ankou was carved on the altar. We left milk by the graves for him to drink, with one of his many faces. The cemetery was the heart of the village. It was there we came to talk, to court and argue. There were no playgrounds or parks for children. Instead, we played hide and seek among the gravestones. Life was conducted amid death, side by side.

‘But those two things can lie too close together. The line between them fades. So when the people heard the sounds from the iliz at night they said nothing because that was the way of things. When the dogs went missing, they said, “That is the way of things.” Death in life, life in death. But I did not accept that.’ She paused. ‘One morning the boy who slept with the animals, Pemoc’h, did not come to the door for his cup of milk and his crust of bread. I went to look for him. He was not in the stable. There was blood in the straw. All day I hunted for him. He had no one to care what happened to him, except me. I looked in ditches in case he had been knocked there by a passing car, and in the hen-house in case he had fallen asleep among the warm bodies – and, oh, many other places. I did not find him.

‘My father found me in the grain store in the afternoon and cuffed me round the ears. “There is the cooking and the laundry. You should not be idle.”

‘“I am looking for the boy Pemoc’h,” I said. “I am afraid that something has happened to him.”

‘“Go to the kitchen,” my father said. “You are neglecting your duty. I am ashamed.” My father looked at me. I saw that behind each of his eyes there burned a tiny candle.

‘When he went out that night, I followed him across the field, into the village, into the graveyard, to the place under the church. And there I saw his true nature.

‘What did you see in the church?’ I whispered. ‘Mommy, what?’

‘I saw them in the cages.’ She did not look at me. ‘Father’s pets. I saw what had become of Pemoc’h.

‘On Sunday, I denounced him in the church. I stood up before the congregation and I told them all what he had done. I told them to go and look, if they did not believe me. They did not go to look. So I saw that they already knew.’ She paused. ‘They preferred to close their eyes, to lose a stray dog, even a stray child, every so often. It had always been so. It was the way of things. People who have lived together for many generations share a special kind of madness. But when I spoke the truth aloud, they were forced to act at last.

‘I woke that night to fire. There were five of them, with kerchiefs over their faces and torches in their hands. They took me from my bed, dragged me outside. My father, they bound to his bed. Then they set the house alight. The ankou wore my father’s face that night.

‘I dropped to my knees and I thanked them. But then the world went black. I think they hit me on the head. The next thing I knew was that we were rattling along the road in my father’s van. It still smelled of his tobacco. They drove me through the night. By morning we had reached a town. “You are insane,” they said. “Tell your tales to the cobbles and the mud. We good men have no time for them.” And then they left me there, on the streets of that strange town. No money, no friends. I did not even speak the language, only the old tongue.’

‘Why did they do that?’ I wanted to hurt them. ‘That wasn’t fair!’

‘Fair!’ she smiled. ‘I had broken the silence of Locronan. I understood their actions.’

‘What happened to you?’ I asked. ‘What did you eat and where did you sleep?’

‘I used what I had,’ she said. ‘My face, my health, my mind, my will. I had some talent with helping the sick, and a neat stitch. So I did not fare as badly as I might have done. But anyone may kick a stray dog in the street, and that is what I was, until your father came through the town. I would be in that place still, but for him. He brought me here.