‘What are you doing?’ he growled.
Standing there with a load of runner beans wrapped in newspaper like a bunch of flowers, the pointy ends sticking out.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Looking at your cats.’
‘Not my cats,’ he said again, shoving the clumsy bundle at her. And he walked behind her to the door, like a dog with rising hackles seeing her off the premises.
13
It was dark when I got back. I lit the lamp and made coffee, put the beans into my vegetable box, spread out my coat to dry. Not my cats indeed. Silly man. The rain was soft and constant like people whispering. I was reaching the stage where I could distinguish the small differences between the sound it made running down the rock, the pitter-patter on leaves, the sucking of the earth. I’ll fry the runner beans with spring onions and wild garlic. All night the dripping of leaves. They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old. I loved that poem. I sat on cushioned otter-skin. Mad in the woods. Slowly, as I shouting slew and slaughtered – in my most secret spirit
Most secret.
grew a whirling and a wandering fire –
*
I fell asleep and dreamed about a green boy who came and stood at the edge of the clearing and smiled at me. He looked terribly ill. He was ragged and his face, gaunt and plague-spotted, had a sickly drowsy leer of a smile, so pretty.
‘How could you not remember me?’ he said.
Only I wasn’t fully asleep. Somewhere between. I’ve gone off the rails, I thought. And then I was a little bit more awake, and I knew that things were starting to go funny with me again, it was exciting and I started breathing much faster. It was going repeatedly through my mind, I remember, I remember, of course I remember you, how could I ever forget? And a very old dream came back, more than just vivid or bright, a dream of a whole new order more memorable than many a real thing, coming out of the nether and piercing through the little core that I am or was: a boy dying on a bed with a ray of light streaming out of one eye, piercing through the darkness up to infinity. And I realised it was not the first time that I had dreamed this dream, though I wasn’t conscious yesterday that I had dreamed this same dream countless times before.
When I woke up in the morning finally, just as the light came creeping in, I felt ancient. Not that I was stiff or tired or anything, at least not more than usual. In fact I was wide awake and alert. It was my soul that felt ancient. My soul, whatever that is. But the grief of the boy’s dying was older still, stuck on a moment in time, eternal. I kept thinking about the green boy and the boy with the light in his eye, thinking how funny that they were real before I was born, because they were always there, even before I knew about them. They just were. And how it could be that way back then, when I was – what? – younger than fourteen because it was definitely before I first came to Andwiston that I first dreamed him, that I had woken up one day with this boy inside me. One sleep that had changed everything, and on his behalf a dreadful grief that crashed the world. Could it be so true and real even though nothing had actually happened? It was just me waking up on another ordinary day.
‘It’s just one of those nightmare things,’ my mum had said when I tried to tell her about it.
But it had seemed more than that. It left a sore in my chest, and Johnny made it better.
I got up and lit the lamp. There was the newspaper that the runner beans had come wrapped in, lying open and wrinkled on the ground, and I saw the headline: Human Remains Found In Mudslide Chaos. I read in the paper about a body coming down in a slurry of mud, how all the road was blocked. And all the while I never knew a thing about it. When I read on, I saw that the dead man’s age did not match my particular dead man, and that made me wonder. Who is this, come clawing back up through the sad grey mud? My teeth chattered like mad things, and in the back of my mind a little voice said: You really did it, you made yourself into a witch. Witch, what witch? Which old witch, the wicked witch, ding dong she’s dead, green face and pointy hat, skinny like a snake, massive-girthed in black, long dangling jugs and toothless mouth, vile filthy hag sitting on your chest, wise woman gathering simples, a basket of herbs, la belle dame sans merci, wild-eyed, crowned with the moon, well my pretty, a bite of this apple redder than blood, the chin that meets the nosetip, bentbacked, stick, warts and all, claw-nails, cloven foot.
That’s me. A poor sinner if ever I saw one, said I, standing outside myself. I met the bad kind once, eye to cold eye, Phoebe Twist reaching into the freezer for a packet of fish fingers. Ah, Phoebe Twist! A shock of the unseemly at the back of the shop on Holland Park Avenue, her face lavishly coated with whitish powder that had accumulated in the networks of wrinkles running into the hollows of her cheeks, like silt in a delta.
