The Limits of Enchantment Page 9

  ‘Mammy said I should know when it was right. But I don’t like to think of it. She told me stories and they scared me. I’m not going to invite it in. I’m too scared and I don’t mind who knows it. There’s a lot of it I just don’t care for.’

  ‘You might not have a choice about it.’

  ‘You’ve done it, haven’t you? What’s yours?’

  ‘Never tell. But I’ll help you, if ever you decide to do it.’

  ‘I’m not going to.’

  ‘All right. Now shut up about it.’

  Keywell had an ancient well in the village square. It had been bricked round in Victorian times so that the cold, pellucid spring water trickled and refreshed the shallow well and drained through a pebble floor. Very few people used it at all now for practical purposes, but its preservation was a matter of village pride. The amber pebbles shone like gold coins in the well, and the water was always sweet and clear.

  Two labourers in donkey-jackets and with newspapers rolled under their arms were chatting near the well. They stopped talking, watching as I lowered my bucket into the water. Then they both turned their attention to Judith. One lit a cigarette. Their gaze wasn’t at all lewd. It was an almost unconscious moment when their talk had been broken, mid-sentence, mid-word, even by the intercession of an attractive woman, and they barely knew that their communion had been abducted. I looked up slyly and saw Judith stretch her neck, basking under the scrutiny of the men.

  Look how she pulls them in, I thought. And how she rides it. And I loved her female power. Then I dipped my bucket in the water, but a shadow or a reflection I saw there made me yelp, and the bucket went clanging into the water.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Judith came over and reached in to grab the bucket from the shallow well. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I slipped.’

  I took the handle to share the weight and together we carried the bucket back to the cottage. I was still thinking of the shadow that reared at me from the well. It made me fear for Mammy, and for myself.

  As we walked Judith said, ‘They look at you, too, and it’s not vain to enjoy that.’

  I was puzzled for a moment, then realised she was talking about the men. ‘I said nothing of the sort!’

  ‘You didn’t say it.’

  ‘Do you read every thought another person has?’

  ‘Like you: not every thought.’

  Back in the cottage yard I primed while Judith pumped. She held the pump handle suggestively between her fingers and raised it up and down. ‘What does this remind you of?’ I narrowed my eyes at her and she said, ‘Oh you’re such a bloody virgin!’

  ‘What has that to do with anything?’

  The water began to spit from the spout. Judith pumped harder and the water flowed. ‘This young man. The bailiff. Is he a bit of all right?’

  I filled the kettle from the pump and took it inside. ‘I shan’t even answer that,’ I said over my shoulder.

  Judith hurried in after me. ‘All I’m asking is how much could he help you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think he knows something he’s keeping back. In fact I’m certain of it. Why?’

  ‘Well, there are things you can do to get him on your side.’

  I was slow to get her drift. ‘But that would be wrong! Wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Wrong? He likes you, and though you haven’t said it I think you like him. You have to make these things work for you for a change.’

  ‘Judith, I’ve never had a man. I don’t have your experience.’

  I meant it as a reproach but it only drew a smile. Then she said, ‘Know what? Your virginity is the most over-valued thing you’ll ever own.’

  ‘Well I’m not about to give it away cheap. When I give it I’ll give it to someone I want to have it.’

  ‘What if I said there was a way in which he could have you and not have you? What if I told you that? Would you go along?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘There is a way. But you’d have to play it out.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Kettle’s boiling, Fern,’ said Judith.

  12

  I heard the swing doors crash open and I looked up as the flame-haired specialist entered the ward at speed. He was trailed by junior doctors and medical students all in flapping white coats. Somehow he seemed like a big boat making a wake in the water of the hospital ward and surrounded by tugs.

  Mammy grabbed my hand. ‘This is him,’ she whispered. ‘He’s the one. The Mason.’ Mammy couldn’t help drawing back her teeth at this last word. She had a hatred of Freemasons for reasons I only dimly understood.

  The specialist pulled up short at the foot of Mammy’s bed, as if at the last minute. There was something comical about the students and the juniors having to skid to a halt behind him. They too gathered round the foot of Mammy’s bed. The specialist wore a three-piece tweed suit and a red bow-tie that didn’t go well with his hair. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Cullen! How are we today?’ He said this to Mammy but his genial smile was addressed at me.

  ‘Am I to be on show again?’ Mammy said. ‘And I don’t know what you’re teaching these young doctors. They don’t even warm their hands before they touch you.’

  The specialist lifted Mammy’s chart from the hook on the bed. As he studied it I noticed the silver ring on his little finger. Mammy told me to look out for that. ‘Mrs Cullen hasn’t been sleeping too well, have you, Mrs Cullen?’ He attracted the attention of one of the junior doctors and tapped at some figure on the chart. The junior raised his eyebrows and nodded his head. Then the specialist passed the chart round for others to see.

  ‘This is how they treat you here,’ Mammy said to me, but in a loud voice. ‘They talk about you without you knowing what they’re saying.’

  ‘I was looking at your blood pressure, Mrs Cullen.’ He took out his pen-torch. ‘Do you mind if I shine this in your eye again? You won’t get cross with me this time?’ He looked over his shoulder at his students. ‘Mrs Cullen must have had a nasty experience with someone shining a light in her eyes so we have to be very careful. Not going to bite me, eh?’

  I looked at Mammy. I couldn’t tell if the specialist was joking. I thought not. He angled his light beam and gently pulled down the skin below her eye with his forefinger and began to murmur a kind of incantation. ‘Marrow aspiration results pending slight macular degeneration probably AMD no obvious Drusen but new nerve distension indicates possible cerebrospinal? We’ll see.’ He clicked off his pen-torch. ‘Thank you, Mrs Cullen.’ And with that he swept away with his tugs, the white coat tails flapping at his flanks and in his rear. The group proceeded along the ward and then skidded to a halt again at the far end as the specialist snatched up another patient’s chart.

  ‘Monster,’ said Mammy. ‘The monster. Did you hear that? Deliberate, that was. Just to set my teeth on edge.’

  ‘I think that’s how they talk about everyone, Mammy. It’s not just you.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. They could talk sense if they wanted to. He’s a monster. A Mason. Did you mark the ring? Did you mark it?’

  I looked up the ward. The specialist had finished debasing his next patient and was about to exit the ward by the doors at the far end. I got up and went after him.

  One of the juniors almost let the doors swing into my face but saved it at the last moment. ‘Excuse me!’ I cried. The specialist stopped and turned. His entourage all stopped and turned, half a second behind him in everything. ‘Can I ask you something? Can I ask why Mammy is wandering? Why sometimes she’s clear as a bell and sometimes she doesn’t seem to know which hospital she’s in? Can I ask that? Because no one seems to want to tell us anything.’

  The juniors and the students all went very still. I was conscious of several pairs of eyes peering at me as we all waited for the specialist to answer. I know he was taken aback. I know this because he made that motion of retracting his head and shoulders slightly, but theatrically, in a way that says: see how you have taken
me aback? Then he opened his eyes very wide, as if to apprehend my question better.

  ‘Are you Mrs Cullen’s daughter?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Miss Cullen, I know your mother thinks we’ve been injecting her with potions to make her ill, but what we’ve been doing is draining fluids from her bone so that we can make tests, and we won’t be able to say for sure until those test results come back.’

  ‘But why is her mind wandering?’

  ‘She cracked her ribs when she fell and this was because her ribs were weak. I suspect her bone is crumbling, and the calcium from the bone is getting into her bloodstream; from there it is circulating in her brain and causing this drifting.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s making the bone crumble?’

  All the heads turned to the specialist, to see how he’d answer. ‘You’re asking, aren’t you, Miss Cullen?’

  ‘Yes, I’m asking.’

  He sucked in his cheeks. ‘I won’t know for sure until I see the results, but I suspect your mother has cancer at an advanced level.’

  I felt a pricking behind my eyes. I saw a shadow in the water in the well. I saw the thing that had settled on Mammy. I saw why the fight had gone out of her. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘You can ask me anything any time,’ he said. ‘Any time.’ I don’t know if it was because he saw my eyes on it, but he unconsciously fingered the silver ring on his little finger. He dropped his hands to his side, turned and marched on, drawing his entourage with him.

  One of the junior doctors hung back slightly, offering me a small smile and a quick levitation of the eyebrows. Perhaps this was meant to be sympathetic or a gesture of completion, but I gave him a look that said: And you can fuck off. Anyway he did, hurrying to catch the migration from ward twelve. I went back to Mammy.

  ‘Did he tell you anything?’ she said.

  ‘No Mammy.’

  After I left the hospital I got up to the A47 and stuck out my thumb for a ride. A motorcyclist pulled up. He had to take his helmet off before I realised it was Arthur. ‘Fern!’ he shouted. ‘What a coincidence!’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Well get on the back then!’

  I didn’t much fancy it. His motorbike I mean. It was a heavy, dirty-looking thing, apart from the chrome that was polished to a wink and the badge on the petrol tank proclaiming a Triumph. Arthur saw my hesitation. ‘Hang on,’ he said. He dismounted, lifting his long leg over the saddle and coming round to the rear of the bike. He had a pannier at the back and he opened it to pull out a black leather jacket like his own, and a spare crash helmet. He offered them to me. ‘That’s you sorted.’

  Still none too keen I took the leather jacket from him. There was something on the back. In a white gothic-scripted arch it read ‘Ratae Motorcycle Club’, and underneath that was a death’s head in a crash helmet. I held it up in front of me.

  ‘I can’t wear that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why hasn’t yours got a silly skull?’

  ‘I don’t ride with that club any more. But it won’t matter for you.’

  ‘What’s Ratae?’

  ‘It’s Roman. It was the Roman name for Leicester. Are you getting on or not?’

  ‘I’m not wearing that. I’ve just come from the hospital. You can’t go home from a hospital wearing a skull on your back. It wouldn’t be right.’

  Arthur’s jaw fell open. He looked down the road, as if he wished he hadn’t got into this. ‘Okay, you have mine and I’ll wear that one.’

  But then I felt foolish, so I relented and put on the death’s-head jacket. Arthur said the helmet had been there for an old girlfriend of his. It fitted well enough. I told Arthur I was afraid I’d fall off, but he said if I wanted I could put my arms around him, so I did that. We went speeding away down the A47 so fast that the wind squeezed tears from my eyes, so fast that I thought that this must be what it’s like to fly. I folded my arms around Arthur and I could smell the petrol and the oil of the engine and the warm skin of the nape of his neck. My grip on him was so tight that when he drew up outside my cottage he had to prise my arms free. He lifted me off the bike and my knees knocked together. I’d never been so afraid. I went through the gate without a word of thanks to Arthur.

  ‘Fern!’ he shouted. ‘I want the jacket back. And the helmet.’

  I turned round and took off the jacket. The death’s head grinned at me. I took off the helmet and my head was aching where the helmet had dug the hairgrips into me when I’d pressed my head against Arthur’s back. My neck dripped with sweat. I handed the gear back to Arthur, still without a word.

  ‘You all right, Fern?’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said, nodding. ‘Mmmm.’

  Then I went inside and drank two huge glasses of water.

  13

  Those few days I remember as endless shuttling to and from the hospital, afternoons and evenings fanning out like a pack of cards, interchangeable days, so that when I looked back I couldn’t tell one from another. The only marker I had was the ride to and fro. Arthur on his motorbike would keep turning up by coincidence. He would drive me in and I would arrive at the hospital looking like someone shot out of a circus cannon; and then he would insist on hanging around until he could rocket me, wide-eyed, home.

  I was amazed he kept up the pretence of ‘just passing’. I don’t know why he didn’t come out with it and offer to take me in on a regular basis, but no, we had to keep up this game where I would be on the soft, grassy shoulder of the A47 with my thumb in the air and he would cruise to a halt on his popping and gurgling Triumph going, ‘Here we are again Fern!’, and I would go, ‘Gosh, here we are again.’ After a while I stopped handing back the helmet and the black leather death’s-head jacket and just kept them. He didn’t object. In fact one evening I got halfway down ward twelve still wearing my grinning death’s head on my back. Then I remembered to take it off. It didn’t seem appropriate, what with the state of some of the people on the ward. I mean it looked like some of the patients.

  Mammy sometimes seemed to think that the nurses in the hospital were keeping her there against her will. Their starched uniforms reminded her of another place. The institutional hospital beds did, too. As did the all-pervasive smell of antiseptic.

  I arrived every day determined to cheer up Mammy with some little piece of news, but it was exhausting since my time was spent travelling back and forth to see her and worrying about the rent. I did everything I could to help pass the time. I washed her and I groomed her. I even cut her hair for her, and carefully trimmed her fingernails and her toenails, but even that caused a panic in her mind about how I might dispose of the clippings. She became terrified that ‘enemies’ or ‘Masons’ might get hold of the clippings and use them against her. I had to ask a nurse to find me a jar to keep the hair trimmings and the nail clippings. Mammy made me promise to take the jar home to the cottage and keep it on a hidden shelf, which I did.

  Sometimes Mammy was clear: ‘Have you made that gal her wedding cake?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Pull your chair up. Closer, that’s it. Put your ear to my mouth. I want to whisper because I don’t want all these fools hearing everything I’ve got to say. Now then, this is how you bake lots of love into a cake …’

  And sometimes Mammy was rambling, and either way it was easier for me just to pull my chair up and lay my head on her bed and listen.

  ‘All your life, Fern, it’s been there all your life, only you don’t know it. Though you shall know it on the day you Ask; because when you look back you’ll see it was listening, listening from the very edge of your life.

  ‘And we few don’t talk of it. One doesn’t tell another. That’s the way of it. Talking it out will offen kill a thing, you must know that, Fern. Listening is what you do. You will listen to yours and yours will listen to you. You’ll see, my pigeon, you’ll see. Can you loosen these straps for me, Fern?’

  I would lift up my head and say, ‘There are no straps, Mam
my.’

  She might look down and move her feet a little under the bedsheets. Then she would seem confused. But would then resume, and though she rambled I never thought to stop her. ‘You can believe it or not, you’ll come to know it whatever you or I have to say. One day you will Ask of it, and if it recognises you, well, there’s an end to it. Though it may also turn you down flat, and there’s no use sighing, for if you can’t you can’t.

  ‘Though you’ll pay. Oh yes, you will pay. I’ve paid in my time. I’ve been sick. I’ve had the terrors. I’ve cacked my pants and I’ve suffered. But I wouldn’t want it any other way. There’s not a one who would. When you’ve seen, you won’t want to breathe for fear of losing the glory of it. You would die tomorrow and say, well, I’ve seen that.

  ‘But you do it for the help, and the help must come. Something’s worrying you, isn’t it Fern? Something you’re not telling me? You must be ready to Ask. That’s how we get help. Oh, there are so many things I haven’t told you! An’ I’ve left it too late!’

  ‘No you haven’t, Mammy. You haven’t left it too late.’

  ‘Three times, maybe, if you’re lucky. I never heard of a call more than three times, because it nearly kills you, and it’s worse each time. But it’s then you need most help, when you’re caged around, that’s when you do it. When you must.

  ‘And when you’re ready, Fern, I’ll be there. I’ll make the way straight. I know how. Don’t you worry. Mammy will be there for you. Mammy will make the path straight.

  ‘You must also attend to the mistress. Though you should know some have gone mad and some died. It’s not for the weak-minded. In any event you’ll want to choose the cusp of the first or last quarter. I was attacked in my bed last night, Fern.’

  ‘What, Mammy?’

  ‘One of those men got in here from the other ward. I fought him off. They came and trussed him up in a straitjacket. Then they strapped me down again because they said I’d let him in. This is what they’re saying. To make out that I led him in here. They’re making out it was all me. The doctor is a Mason. I’d get out Fern, I’d leave by the windows, but look at the bars.’