The Thirteenth Tale

Introduced distortions. In the intonation, maybe. Or the vowels. And sometimes extra bits, added to camouflage rather than to carry meaning.

Air. Water.

A puzzle. A secret code. A cryptograph. It wouldn't be as hard as the Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mycenaean Linear B. How would you have to go about it? Take each syllable separately. It could be a word or a part of a word. Remove the intonation first. Play with the stress. Experiment with lengthening, shortening, flattening the vowel sounds. Then what did the syllable suggest in English? In French? And what if you left it out and played with the syllables on either side instead? There would be a vast number of possible combinations. Thousands. But not an infinite number. A computing machine could do it. So could a human brain, given a year or two.

The dead go underground.

What? I sat bolt upright in shock. The words came to me out of nowhere.

They beat painfully in my chest. It was ridiculous. It couldn't be!

Trembling, I reached to the edge of the bath where I had left my jottings, and drew the paper near to me. Anxiously I scanned it. My notes, my symbols and signs, my squiggles and dots, were gone. They had been sitting in a pool of water and had drowned.

I tried once more to remember the sounds as they had come to me underwater. But they were wiped from my memory. All I could remember was her fraught, intent face and the five-note sequence she sang as she left.

The dead go underground. Words that had arrived fully formed in my mind,*leaving no trail behind them. Where had they come from? What tricks had my mind been playing to come up with these words out of nowhere?

I didn't actually believe that this was what she had said to me, did I?

Come on, be sensible, I told myself.

I reached for the soap and resolved to put my underwater imaginings out of my mind.

HAIR

At Miss Winter's house I never looked at the clock. For seconds I had words, minutes were lines of pencil script. Eleven words to the line, twenty-three lines to the page was my new chronometry. At regular intervals I stopped to turn the handle of the pencil sharpener and watch curls of lead-edged wood dangle their way to the wastepaper basket; these pauses marked my 'hours.'

I was so preoccupied by the story I was hearing, writing, that I had no wish for anything else. My own life, such as it was, had dwindled to nothing. My daytime thoughts and my nighttime dreams were peopled by figures not from my world but from Miss Winter's. It was Hester and Emmeline, Isabelle and Charlie, who wandered through my imagination, and the place to which my thoughts turned constantly was Angelfield.

In truth I was not unwilling to abdicate my own life. Plunging deep into Miss Winter's story was a way of turning my back on my own. Yet one cannot simply snuff oneself out in that fashion. For all my willed blindness, I could not escape the knowledge that it was December. In the back of my mind, on the edge of my sleep, in the margins of the pages I filled so frenetically with script, I was aware that December was counting down the days, and I felt the anniversary crawling closer all the time.

On the day after the night of the tears, I did not see Miss Winter. She stayed in bed, seeing only Judith and Dr. Clifton. This was convenient. I had not slept well myself. But the following day she asked for me. I went to her plain little room and found her in bed.

Her eyes seemed to have grown larger in her face. She wore not a trace of makeup. Perhaps her medication was at its peak of effectiveness, for there was a tranquillity about her that seemed new. She did not smile at me, but when she looked up as I entered, there was kindness in her eyes.

'You don't need your notebook and pencil,' she said. 'I want you to do something else for me today.'

'What?'

Judith came in. She spread a sheet on the floor, then brought Miss Winter's chair in from the adjoining room and lifted her into it. In the center of the sheet she positioned the chair, angling it so that Miss Winter could see out of the window. Then she tucked a towel around Miss Winter's shoulders and spread her mass of orange hair over it.

Before she left she handed me a pair of scissors. 'Good luck,' she said with a smile.

'But what am I supposed to do?' I asked Miss Winter.

'Cut my hair, of course.'

'Cut your hair?'

'Yes. Don't look like that. There's nothing to it.'

'But I don't know how.'

'Just take the scissors and cut.' She sighed. 'I don't care how you do it. I don't care what it looks like. Just get rid of it.' 'But I-'

'Please.'

Reluctantly I took up position behind her. After two days in bed, her hair was a tangle of orange, wiry threads. It was dry to the touch, so dry I almost expected it to crackle, and punctuated with gritty little knots.

'I'd better brush it first.'

The knots were numerous. Though she spoke not a word of reproach, I felt her flinch at every brushstroke. I put the brush down; it would be kinder to simply cut the knots out.

Tentatively I made the first cut. A few inches off the ends, halfway down her back. The blades sheared cleanly through the hair, and the clippings fell to the sheet.

'Shorter than that,' Miss Winter said mildly.

'To here?' I touched her shoulders.

'Shorter.'

I took a lock of hair and snipped at it nervously. An orange snake slithered to my feet, and Miss Winter began to speak.

I remember a few days after the funeral, I was in Hester's old room. Not for any special reason. I was just standing there, by the window, staring at nothing. My fingers found a little ridge in the curtain. A tear that she had mended. Hester was a very neat needlewoman. But there was a bit of thread that had come loose at the end. And in an idle, rather absent sort of way, I began to worry at it. I had no intention of pulling it, I had no intention of any sort, really… But all of a sudden, there it was, loose in my fingers. The thread, the whole length of it, zigzagged with the memory of the stitches. And the hole in the curtain gaping open. Now it would start to fray.

John never liked having Hester at the house. He was glad she went. But the fact remained: If Hester had been there, John would not have been on the roof. If Hester had been there, no one would have meddled with the safety catch. If Hester had been there, that day would have dawned like any other day, and as on any other day, John would have gone about his business in the garden. When the bay window cast its afternoon shadow over the gravel, there would have been no ladder, no rungs, no John sprawled on the ground to be taken in by its chill. The day would have come and gone like any other, and at the end of it John would have gone to bed and slept soundly, without even a dream of falling through the empty air.

If Hester had been there.

I found that fraying hole in the curtain utterly unbearable.

I had been snipping at Miss Winter's hair all the time she was talking, and when it was level with her earlobes, I stopped.

She lifted a hand to her head and felt the length.

'Shorter,' she said.

I picked up the scissors again and carried on.

The boy still came every day. He dug and weeded and planted and mulched. I supposed he kept coming because of the money he was owed. But when the solicitor gave me some cash-'To keep you going till your uncle