Edith Jessie Thompson

They’re sitting around the flaking Formica table, a cup of tea a-piece, and the radio is playing “How Long Has This Been Going On” again.

Too long. It’s been going on too long.

Outside, the trains come rattling. At night, in bed with Percy, she’d lain awake and listened to the trains and wanted to take one, just hop on, and go anywhere away from him. Percy used to get on the ferry and go off to Paris, and leave her all on her lonesome. She’d always wanted so much more than Percy gave her, off to Paris to buy fabric and buttons but he never brought her anything back. Maybe if he’d bought her presents, all of the things she wanted, it would never have come to what it came to. Poor old Edith would have been his poor old wife forever. Poor old girl.

A train thunders past and shakes the café. It’s the train to London, but it never bothers stopping here. Edith imagines getting onto that train and going all the way to London, Buckingham Palace and tea at the Ritz. The tea in here is weak and watery, and the radio’s always playing the same song. She hates that bloody song.

When she sleeps, she dreams about grand old London town.

Across the table from her, the Greek woman hawks and spits straight on the floor. No class at all, these bloody foreigners. Her Freddy used to tell her stories about foreign places that he’d sailed to when he was in the merchant navy. She’d always wanted to go with him, off on an adventure. The Greek looks likes someone’s granny, with her grey curls and the rings on her fingers, but sometimes, when she looks real close, Edith can see flames reflected in Granny Christofi’s eyes. Gives her the bloody heebie-jeebies too. Granny smiles, but there’s never anything warm in her eyes but fire.

Bloody foreigners. Edith used to see them everywhere when she went to the pictures with Freddie, always while Percy was away. They used to sneak out to the pictures, giggling like school kids, and then back to Freddie’s car or, if she was feeling naughty, back to her bed, Percy’s bed, and let him touch her there. If she committed a crime, maybe it was that. That she let Freddie touch her in Percy’s bed and she liked it, she really did. Never did no wrong, but that. Never did no wrong, and since when was wanting something better a crime? Since when? Freddy was so handsome. He had such gentle hands.

The other two women speak English, but they huddle their heads together and whisper to each other, like witches. Edith always worries that they’re speaking about her, ripping her to pieces and then looking up at her with their razor-sharp eyes. Bitches, just judging her for listening to her heart like all the bitches on her street who’d been there when the bobbies came to get her. They huddle together over their blanket-wrapped bundles, and, every so often, Edith catches a glimpse of blueish lips and tufty hair. Never cries though, not even when one slaps the other’s hands away and bends down to tuck the bundle away in her bag under the table. She sits back up and the other one just leans against her, smiling up at the ceiling. Edith doesn’t know their names, but she wakes up in the dark with their elbows in her ribs and their hair in her mouth, tumbled together in the dark, all of them left there, and forgotten. In the prison, the man told her that death was a release. In the cell, he’d promised that he’d look after her, afterwards. Oh, God, why did Freddie do it? She never wanted him to do it. Where’s that man who said that he’d look after her now? Where’s he gone? Where have any of them gone?

Just like a man to let her down.

Maybe she let herself down. Maybe a well bought up girl would never have written those letters, 60 letters, and all of them S.W.A.L.K. She never did half of the things she said she did. It was like a fairytale, somehow, or one of those dirty books with the flimsy paper covers that she hid from Percy in the space between the bed and the wall. All silk skirts and no knickers. She never did half of those things…She just wished she could, wished she could have ground up a light bulb and fed it to Percy a little at a time in his grey porridge that he ate first thing in the grey morning already in his grey suit. She hated him, and she wishes that just once she’d had the guts to do what she wrote in her letters, to do something desperate and wind up with his blood on her hands.

Only not really. Just in her head. Just in her letters. Just to make herself feel better when the bastard was away.

Percy hadn’t liked finding out about Freddy, showed it with his fists, too, but, still she never meant for Freddy to do it. She never meant for that to happen. She never wanted it to. Just because she liked to imagine Percy bleeding from the mouth doesn’t mean that she ever wanted to lie there screaming while he bled all over the pavement. Now, sitting at the table with them, these horrible women, she doesn’t remember what she wanted, really, but she knows that it wasn’t that. Nothing here shines enough for her to check, but her cheekbone feels pulpy and sore, like rotting fruit. Like a fruit that’s rotting must feel.

She’d been able to see her face in the table that the bobbies sat her at, and asked her the same questions over and over again. Things about Freddy and Percy. They had her letters. They wanted to know why she’d written the things she did, and why she’d asked Freddy to do the things he’d done. Over and over, the same questions and, over and over, the same answer.

She never wanted him to do it.

Granny Christofi looks up from her tea. Her old face is slack and sad. Edith never wants to look like that, but maybe she won’t. She was only thirty years old, and Freddy always said that she was so pretty. Never going to look like that dried out bitch.

It’s difficult to tell what season it is, here. Outside the window, the sky is always grey and the trains don’t seem to follow any particular pattern. It could be a mild December or a wet June, but she remembers that through the bars she could see Christmas lights and tinsel in somebody else’s window. She spent her last Christmas not eating, not sleeping. She’d scraped at the mortar in the little cell with her fingernails. She’d thought about carving their names into the wall. FREDDY AND EDITH FOREVER in a heart.

She never did, though. She just sat there and cried. A face at the bars had told her that she was the first woman to have a noose around her neck since ‘07. It didn’t make her proud, not at all. She didn’t know how to stop crying.

Something splashes into her tea-cup. Could be a tear, could be the ceiling leaking again.

When she was a little girl, her Mum told her the story about the wise men who came to see the baby Jesus when he was still lying in his crib, padded out with sweet-smelling straw. Edith never really went to the country, but she images that the straw must have smelled sweet, under his little head and his little bum and his little kicking feet. When her mother set up the crib scene in the parlour, she always arranged those wise men just so, standing around that baby like points around a star. It wasn’t until later that Edith found out that they didn’t get there until later. Epiphany, they called it. Twelfth night, and that was when all the decorations came down. The miracle was already over, done for another year.

It was around Epiphany that she’d started screaming and she couldn’t stop. Oh, Freddy, why’d you have to do that bloody awful thing? Why’d you have to do that to poor Percy? She knew what she’d written, but Percy’s only crime had been being a bad husband, and it’s never bad husbands who bleed, only bad wives. She was such a bad wife.

No, don’t! she’d said. No, don’t!

He had. Why had he, though? Because of her. Because he loved her too much not to.

Every so often, she’d hear someone screaming in the dark, and it would be a while before she’d realise that it was still her, still screaming, still carrying on.

Still there at the table with those other women, she can barely summon up a whimper for what happened to her, and what she did.

The night before they came her for her, she prayed, or, at least, she dreamed that she did. She’d prayed that, somehow, there’d be a miracle, and she’d go back to her mum’s house, and be quiet, and rest. She’d have liked to have slept without waking herself up crying. She’d have liked to close her eyes without nightmares. If anybody could have given her that, maybe it was worth praying for.

In the morning, the Doctor came, with his cold hands, and he stuck her with a needle. Everything was slow and sleepy after that. She couldn’t scream as much. It was like everything was happening to her underwater.

The rope rubbed like Percy’s hands around her neck.

When she was a little girl, she found a dead frog at the bottom of her mum’s garden, where her dad grew runner beans. She put it under a stone and left it there, and, the next time she went back, months later, there was nothing left but tiny white bones. In her cupped hands, under the table, she’s holding something so small, so sad she doesn’t have words for it. It’s been with her since the prison. It’s been with her since the rope. A little knot of cells and clots and her and Freddy and all of their love, and all of their sorrow too. What they made. What she lost. She closes her eyes and imagines the little frog resting between her two hands. The sum of so few tiny bones.

“Come,” says Granny Christofi. “Koimaomai. Now.”

She puts her hand on Edith’s arm. Edith wants to beg her not to touch her, but she never listens so, this time, she doesn’t tell her.

“Come on, dearie,” say the others, their coats already done up under their chins. “Baby’s got his bonnet on. Time to go home.”

Once, it was her and Freddy, when Percy was away but now, where they go, they go together. Back home. Back to their hole in the ground. She doesn’t know how they came to be tumbled together in the dark. In the end, nobody loved her enough to come and get her, not even her sister, not even Avis. She wonders where they buried Percy. She wonders where Freddy’s lying.

The stone is grey. The others go on down first and leave Edith on her own with her secret clasped between her hands. Sleep on, beloved, says the stone. Sleep on. At least she’s never alone in the dark. She’s warm and cradled between them and she can lie down in the wet earth with her thumb almost to her mouth and be quiet a while, and rest.

The Little Mermaid

She watches them running with her unmoving eyes and she whispers don’t drown, babies, don’t drown. If their plastic soled shoes were to slip on the stones then she’d watch them drown and sing for them, without sound, as their little souls rushed up to heaven. She has no soul of her own, and never did. Her people were as sea-foam. Souls or not, she aches to hold them in her metal arms, to press them against her unbreakable heart. They call her Lille Havfrue, but her people had no names for themselves. They were loved. It was enough. They live much shorter lives, these babies with their souls that show like candle flames in their eyes. Hot blooded, their hearts go racing, and they burn up and use themselves so quickly. She could have passed three or four of their lifetimes watching the in-out of sky fire against the tops of the waves and how terrifying had it been to know that there was another sky, far above theirs? How terrifying. How wonderful. Now, she can neither raise her eyes or lower the, now, but she can see the point, far away, so far, where there’s nothing to tell between her sea and their sky.

When she was born, they sung her name through all of the cathedrals. In the deep blue cold, bells held no sound, so they rang out their hearts instead. The sound they made was all of their joy at this newly discovered treasure. Their new princess. Her.

But none of it mattered to her. Her status was her pain. The clam shells that clung to her tail to show that she was the daughter of a king pinched. She would have traded them, if she could. She would have been common, because at least the common girls could swim upwards whenever they liked, skim the surface and feel the sunlight on the tops of their heads. All of their lives, she and her sisters had dreamed of the surface.

It is the nature of cold blooded things to yearn towards the sun.

By day, now, she catches the sun, keeps the warmth stored in her smooth brown skin, but no deeper. It lingers, a little, after dark, when the babies come with their edged tools. It takes metal to beat metal and, even then, the teeth barely scratch the surface of her neck, on the first bite.

It had been the fire, in the end, which tempted her. All of her life, it had fascinated her; she planted red flowers in a circle in her father’s garden, but she could have resisted if it had only been a question of the sun. The fire in the sky, though. In flashes, it mirrored something which she felt within herself, and for which she had no name. She was so tempted, and so young; sixteen years is barely a drop in three hundred. She had wanted it badly enough to disobey her father. She had wanted it badly enough to break every rule in the world.

What was it that the witch had said to her, all of those years ago? The sound of the saw makes it harder to recall.

Oh. Yes.

Desire is pain. Desire is pain, and she had wanted so.

She had no words for what she saw, for “ship”, “sails”, “mariner”, “prince”. The words had come later, but the words had not mattered. She had not needed any words for him. There he was. It was that simple. “Ikon” was another word that she learned later. Her people had never had a need for gods, but there he was anyway, as an image of her faith.

Faith is nothing but the desire for an end to pain.

Up on the great, whale-like thing that rode upon the waves, and not below them, she watched him, up there, against the sky, which they had filled with flowers of fire, all for love of him. She couldn’t look away. It was as though she had realised, suddenly, that there were two suns in the sky. He was that alien, and beautiful. He was that bright, with the sparks falling all around him and dying away to nothing.

Later, she could not say how long she had watched him for; it could have been five minutes or an hour before the storm blew in, and stopped the singing. The wind howled, and the rain fell. The sky-fire burned, brighter than the flowers had been, and more deadly. The storm had been so terrible, but she had not feared it. She was a cold-blooded creature with water already in her lungs. There was nothing about her that could draw fire. The babies on the ship had shouted and run, pulling on ropes, furling the ship tight in against itself. They couldn’t have known. They were so focused on the danger that they could see that they never imagined that there was danger that they couldn’t. For her part, she had never thought of those rocks as hidden. For her part, they had been in plain sight all along. The noise was like nothing she had ever heard, the ship grinding and dying upon the rocks. The water had dampened the sound, her whole life.

So few of those babies ever learned to swim.

In the churning, shouting mess which came afterwards, she searched for him. The water was cold, stole his glow and made it more difficult to tell which one he was. The babies screamed and fought, pushed and clawed at each other, and at the surface of the sea. What she knew was that the sea would take them, in the end. What she knew was that the sea would love them all, equally. Not for him, though. Not for him to be eaten by sharks and bottom-feeders, sink to the bottom as bones and, in time, become sand. In the water, his hair had become darker, not the bright gold that she had seen before, under the sun, but he was still finer than the others, no hair on his face, no marks on his hands. She took him limp into her arms. Though the land was not visible, she knew which direction to swim in. She knew the sea like the back of her hand, and she knew, instinctively, where it came to an end in fingers of sand.

She took him there. With him lying in her arms, his wet head against her breast, it was easy to think of herself as held.

On the sand, she lay with him. His skin was cool and moist to the touch. His heart had slowed to within an inch of its life, a slow thump-thump that echoes hers. He mirrored her, so how could she held but love him? She lay with him until she was gasping for air.

Don’t drown, baby. Don’t drown.

Before she left him, she bent, awkward and out of her element, to press a pale blue kiss to his cheek. It was all that she had to leave for him. The storm had swept away everything above the water, even the red flowers in her hair. It had swept everything except her, and, because of her, him.

He wasn’t dead when she left him. She was as sure as she could be. She was only young. He wasn’t dead.

The babies work hard, but it’s slow going. Her skin is thicker, now, and it holds on to the cold. In the winter, it can get cold, so cold by the water. Her and her sisters used to swim below the shadows of floating ice. She almost wishes that the babies would succeed, and separate her head cleanly from her shoulders. Maybe then there’d be a new one, maybe not, but, either way, it might take a long time remember everything she’s ever known, so it would be a while before she remembered how to hurt. Every movement of the baby’s saw sends a vibration through her right through her, so, she pretends that she’s humming, and she remembers what it felt like to make her last concious sound.

Please, she’d said. Please, and I’ll do anything. That was her first mistake. There should always have been something that she wouldn’t have done for him. There should always have been a limit. She was so very young. She hadn’t yet learned the value of silence. She didn’t yet know the danger of words. When she was younger, she’d had no word for “witch”. That came later. Back then, when all of this was happening, she’d seen her life only in terms of rules and suffering. Her and her sisters had whispered about a creature who lived a way away, in a cave before the drop-off, before the deep, dark water. She should have known not to go there. She had spent her seventeen years fearful of the vapour trails left by slowly circling sharks. She’d been told not to go there before.

She went anyway.

Desire is pain, remember. It is difficult to think clearly when you are in so much pain. Now, she feels no pain, only quiver and quake as the baby leans his whole weight onto the saw. The rasping vibrations make it difficult to concentrate, and all that she can think is witch witch witch witch witch.

But she hadn’t known that word, then. She’d gone there with her pleases and her promises, and the woman was there with her hands that moved like ghosts in the dark. Please, she said. Please and I’ll do anything. And it wasn’t until the witch smiled that she saw that every one of her teeth were small and sharp and white.

It never occurred to her to wonder what she was doing, not for a second, not even when the witch had told her about the price of love, and the cost of getting what you want.

Love made her stupid. The pain of wanting him made it hard to think. It must have, for her to go through what she did for him. The witch broke every bone in her tail. She would have screamed, but the witch had already taken her voice. She gave up her voice so that the witch would break every bone in her tail and give her legs. She couldn’t scream. Her voice was in a glass jar on the shelf.

The baby’s saw makes a deep cut in her throat, and she, she who hasn’t spoken in a hundred years, imagines her voice leaking out to him.

Be careful what you wish for, baby. Be careful what you do for love.

She doesn’t remember much of what came straight afterwards. She could feel her heartbeat in her ankles, and the tips of her new toes. The Witch conjured up a storm to blow her to the beach, but she nearly drowned, just struggling to the surface. The sea had no love for her. She had left the sea behind for a man, and the sea wouldn’t easily forgive her.

I’m sorry, she mouthed, but the water got into her mouth and tried to choke her.

No love, no love.

Folded up small behind her teeth to keep it safe, the witch had written the definition of a soul. Her people had no souls, and, without one, her human body wouldn’t last for long. Her bones would collapse in on themselves. Her heart would run dry and empty. She was dry and empty without the sea. On the sand, she stood naked and watched the waves come and go. The witch had told her that a soul was where two people touched. The sea had been in her her whole life. She missed it so much.

On reflection, she should have known. There she was, chafed and sore, red raw with love. Inside, where all of her life the sea had been, there was a gaping sort of emptiness. The bones that had been broken to make her new legs ached in her cracks. The new wound between her legs throbbed like a beating heart. She was an agony of wanting. She struggled to stand. A mammal is born knowing how to stand beside its mother, but she had been born knowing how to swim without sinking, and how to breathe the air in water. She had never known her mother.

‘Metamorphosis’ is a word for how much it hurts to change.

She heard the shout before she saw him. She had still been staring out to see, unable to quite tear herself away. She had been rocking, mimicking the motion of the waves. Heel-toe, heel-toe, and every movement the agony of broken bone. Now, she ever moves, but what she learned then was this: when in fear of dying, a creature would crawl on bloody stumps and jagged bones to get to where it thinks it needs to be to save its life. She had see the prince and fallen forward, crawled towards him on her hands and knees like an animal. She did not know the word for ’shame’.

She baby is getting tired now. She can tell. In the periphery of her vision, she studies him. He’s not so different from her prince, with his flaxen hair and his blue eyes so pale that they are almost colourless. The ocean is only blue because, very long ago, it learned how to mimic the sky. All of these babies look the same to her anyway.

The cruellest part as that the prince could not remember drowning. He had no memory of her at all, but he thought that she was close to drowning and he had been told that he had been close to drowning once, too. He covered her new skin with a cloak, and, mistaking the agony in her eyes for something physical, he lifted her up into his arms. If she had known the pain that would follow, she’d have clawed his eyes out then and there. She was young and hopefully. She had no idea how much love can hurt, and she did not know that it is possible to die and yet go on living at the same time. She could not know how many people do that every single day of their lives.

When he asked her name, she could not tell him. The Prince was a learned man, and he named her after a spirit of the air and sea from a play that he had read, once. He was learned, which does not mean that he was not also foolish. He could not read the longing in her eyes, which was in plain sight all along.

There was a temple on the hill, he told her. The woman that he loved was there, and would provide aid. The woman that he loved, and who he was going to marry. The woman that he loved, and who he was going to marry, and who had saved him from a death which he could not remember. She had found him lying on the beach.

Until then, the Mermaid hadn’t known that a heart could break as surely as a bone. The sound echoed around the place behind her ribs where the babies kept their souls, so loudly that she was sure that he must have heard it. It was then that she knew that the witch had been right. He would never love her. He could never. She had been cold blooded, and he was hot. She would have frozen him to death and now he would burn her alive.

To be different is painful, sometimes too painful to be borne.

Behind them, the sea crashed against the rocks like the pounding of fists. When she was born, they sang her name through the cathedrals and now it was like the cathedrals were falling for want of her. In his arms, she cried piteously and he assumed that it was because she was grateful to be saved.

There is a reason that no creature on the face of the earth or under the sea is born with the knowledge of the day that they will die, but she knew. The Prince would share his soul with the temple girl, the one who had had the luck to stumble across his, already saved. The mermaid would have stayed longer, but she was a water-creature then and the sand had clogged her gills. He would marry the temple girl, and the mermaid would dissolve into foam on a wave and be seen no more by those who had always had the grave to love her. The witch had warned her, but it had never occurred to her that it might actually happen. She was young.

At least the girl at the temple had been beautiful. The mermaid had fainted clean away, to save herself the heartache of watching them look at each other.

That night, adrift in a strange white bed, wrapped in sheets as wide as a ships sails, she dreamed of her eldest sister. Her eldest sister was the most lovely of the sea kings daughters, with hair as long and curling as kelp strands, the pale gold blush of the first sun in winter. Her hair was gone, all gone. The new bare skin was delicately veined with blue, the sea under her skin. Unused to dreaming, the mermaid had reached out to touch her sister, but her sister had put up her hands.

The mermaid had asked her why she’d come, and, in the dream, her beautiful sister had smiled behind her raised hands. She told the mermaid how she missed her. They had all missed her so. The mermaid couldn’t help it; the tears rolled down her cheeks. She knew that she was seeing her beautiful sister for the last time. When she died, she would dissolve into seafoam, and she could wash against her sister’s skin forever, and never know her.

It hurts to imagining the things that you stand to lose.

In the dream, her sister held out something made in wood and metal, like the wreck of a ship. At the time, the mermaid hadn’t known the world for ‘knife’. The baby uses a ’saw’. His work is slow. She just wants it to be over, again.

It hurts to wait.

What she knows now is this: there is nothing you can do that cannot later be undone, but back then the knife had been bought with the long length of her sister’s hair. The witch drove a hard bargain, and it had taken a whole head of hair to buy a simple promise. Her sister had bent close to her and whispered to her what the witch had said; if she killed him with the knife, she could become a mermaid again. She could go back.

In the dream, her sister had kissed her, gently, her lips against hers. The mermaid had tasted salt. Tears are salty because the ocean was there first.

She woke up and the knife was beside her on the pillow. She lay and looked at it for a long time. She was afraid to touch it. It looked like an evil sort of thing.

It was an evil sort of thing. These are the things that people are drive to do for love, and loss of it. And all of this sacrifice for a man who had been in love with the wrong girl along. She couldn’t blame him. He was only a baby. But almost any creature on the face of the earth or under the water will fight to save itself from dying.

Every step was agony. The soles of her feet felt full of broken glass. Splinters of it had found their way into the centre of her heart. She kept going. It was her life or his; him in the ground, or her on the crest of a wave forever. If she killed him, she could go back. She kept walking. She cried and she didn’t notice it. She had to get there. The knife was heavy, so heavy, in her hand. She carried it. She had to. She looked back, once, to make sure that she wasn’t leaving bloody footprints on the white marble.

The baby stands back and looks at his work. Her head is nowhere near coming off her shoulders. She can feel the night-wind off of the sea in the deep, ridged groove that the saw has left in her neck. He rubs his thumb against the raw edges and, with her unblinking eyes, she begs him not to leave her, to stay and finish the job. He leaves her. They always do. Sometimes, they kiss her, but then they always leave her on her own. She just wants one to stay. The sky and the sea are the same shade of black, but she can still make out the white caps on the waves. Her sisters. Her beautiful sisters. The grief is always with her.

The end, when it came, should have come quickly.

The knife had made no sound when it slipped into the water and sank. She had heard herself make a little sound, a whimper, but she must have imagined it. The witch had taken her voice, and, now, she would keep it. She had slipped the nightgown from her shoulders. She had not waited. She had not given herself time to go back; she couldn’t kill the prince, which left her with no choice. She jumped. She had no choice at all. The water was so cold it hurt her, and, when she hit the surface, she broke into a thousand pieces, and those pieces broke into a thousand more, and their pieces too. The water was so cold that it smashed her into vapour and blew her back the way that she’d come. Something had caught her. It was like being held in a loosely curled fist.

Not seafoam, little one. Not yet.

For a long time, she waited. She was not a creature of the land, or a creature of the sea. She was of the air. She was the soft south wind and the ice on the surface of the water. She came to understand. Not always, but, sometimes, a soul is earned, not given. She had died, rather than kill him and, if she could not wish the Prince and the temple girl happiness then, at least, she wished them peace. It wasn’t a soul, not quite, but it was a flicker of light to draw herself in around. It was enough until they built the statue in the harbour, right where she had stood and jumped. It was made of metal and stone, like one of the new ships washed up on a rock. The wind swept her back the way that she’d come, all of those years before. There was a moment of impact, and then she looked out through those unmoving eyes for the very first time. She never expected to be this heavy.

And now she never changes. The babies come and take their pictures and the sea changes from blue to green and grey and back again. An American girl-baby with long red hair and layers bundling her up against the winter cold clambers up onto the rock with her. For a moment, they are eye to eye, and then the baby tugs off a glove with her teeth so that she can rub her bare fingers against the cut that the saw left in her neck. Eye to eye, the mermaid remembers that tomorrow is the shortest day. Somebody takes a photograph and the baby kisses her forehead before she jumps down off the rock and goes on her way. With her unmoving eyes, the mermaid watches her go.

And don’t drown, baby. Don’t drown.

Medusa

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, roll up, roll up, and step this way! Yes, if you’re interested in the weird and strange, if you crave the bizarre and frightening, you’ve come to the right place! Yes, step inside and see freaks from the darkest corners of the darkest countries in all the wide world! Roll up, pay the toll, step through the curtained gate, and you’re there, my friends, in the presence of the freaks who haunted your childhood dreams, and haunt you still! Forget the pinheads, the mermaids, the wolf-children! Forget the boneless girl and the headless boy. You’ve seen all of those things before! Don’t waste your dime on things that you’ve already seen. Pay here, pay me, and step through the door. Do it now. Don’t miss the show! Roll up, roll up! Extinguish all smoking materials at the door. Forget what you think you know of the world. Roll up! Hurry, hurry, hurry, ladies and gentlemen. Come one, come all, and stand in her presence, if you dare!

You’ve seen the Bearded Lady! Now come see the Serpent Queen, the saddest girl in all the world!”

They kept her in the dark for so long that her eyes grew skin, closed forever, and, dawn-blind, she waits. She presses herself against the dirt floor of the cage, her palms and cheek and breasts and belly and cunt, and she listens, and she waits. They’ll come; they always come, one way or another, are led or sent. They all look the same to her, with their pale smooth skin and their fine, fly-away hair. Her hair lies dull and lifeless, blunt against the dark dirt. She is still, and so are they. The insects that she catches when they skitter across the floor are barely enough to keep her alive. She swallows them whole, and they pull at the stitches in her throat as they squirm the way down into her belly. They throw her cabbage leaves and spoiled fruit, things that stink of earth and rot. Khthon, she whispers. She forgets the exact meaning, but it had something to do with harvests and graves. In the dark, she is her own grave. Her healed over eyes make no tears. Once upon a time, there was ritual sacrifice, and it was babies that they left in the holes in the earth for her to find.

She licks her lips. Her forked tongue tickles the corners of her mouth and tastes the air. She tastes copper and shit and oil fumes. There’s a rat in the cage with her, somewhere, and she gropes for it. When she catches them, she swallows them whole. It reminds her of sex, her head thrown back, the undulation of breasts and throat as she forces it on down, and then the dead sleep that follows.

She misses this one. She sucks at her lips for the taste of the last one. There’s barely anything there.

Outside, the shouting starts again. In the old days, the good bad days when she was Guardian and Protector and Queen, there were prayers. She doesn’t understand the words, but she wonders if the meaning might be the same. Devotion, desire, and one day you’re fucking on somebody’s altar and you’ve signed your own death warrant. Some deaths take longer than others. All these years, she’s been waiting.

Something changes. A cockroach skitters across her face and up over her open-closed eye. It’s just trying to get away from the light. She presses her ear to the floor and listens to the trembling of footsteps in the dirt. She can’t see, but she knows what’s happening. If nothing else, she’s learned how long it takes for things to change. There’ll be a mirror, high on the wall. There’ll be a boy with fine golden hair. In her youth, her hair was golden too. There’ll be no sword. They don’t carry swords anymore.

What one god takes away, another finds a way to give.

Slowly, she sits up, but she keeps the palms of both hands pressed against the floor, the better to feel him with. She lifts her head and feels the whisper of a hundred forked tongues against her cheek. She whispers to them, and tells them to be patient. Obligate, she needs meat to thrive. They come to her like babies, toddling, their eyes unfocused. They see her blindness, and don’t realise how quickly she can move. A bead of venom forces past the rim of one blind eye and trickles warmly down her cheek. She wants him so much that she can taste it.

In the old days, they dug holes like graves and left the babies there for her, with words of ritual. They placated her with blood. They kept her at bay with tender flesh, easier to swallow whole, until their hero could make is way up to her mountain with mirror and sword.

Old story. Unsatisfying.

The sirens, though, were from the earth too, the earth’s daughters, and they taught their sisters how to sing. Khthon, they said, because even beautiful things must eventually come to rot beneath the earth. Gravedirt caked under her fingernails. In the dark, the years and years of dark, she taught herself to sing in harmony with herself, a hundred and one flickering forked tongues. She can’t see, but she knows that he’s watching her in the mirror, and she knows that men can’t resist this song without a mast to bind themselves to. He’ll turn. He has to. He doesn’t have a choice. The shouting outside gets louder, so she doesn’t have much time, before they come in here to find another one made stone, but not before she has his blood to warm her. There’ll be another one through the door any minute, come to see the Serpent Queen, saddest girl in all the world, with her blind eyes and her poison tears.

She stretches out her hands to him, and she sings, and she sways, and she smiles, and she waits.

Mary

“You can come in.”

“I do not mean to intrude, Ama. I just…I could not be alone today.”

“None of us should be alone, daughter. Not on today, of all days.”

” In the night, it occurred to me that women are creatures of fire, and the world will surely seek to smother us.  Would you pray for me, Ama? Would you cup your hands around my light and protect it, most blessed lady? Without him, I am so afraid to dwindle, and, dwindling, come to nothing.”

“Hush, love, and do not break your own heart, when there are others who will do it for you. Do not bloody your fists against walls which will not be brought down. Men are holding the pens and the keys to the gates. Your world is very closed now. We are closed in together.”

“Yes.  Yes.  My world is very closed.  My prison is in their words, and they will make me into an enemy, and then they will demolish me, unwind my fibres utterly.  Why?  Why am I a devil, when you so easily became their saint? Why hate me, and love you so much.”

“The world needs enemies, child, and men so rarely realise that we women, all of us, are the same, from the inside out, even when we are at our most different.  Be brave for me, and remember that we are no so very different, you and I. Both of us have loved and touched him.  Both of us were there.  Tell your story, child, and tell it to anybody who will lesson, for it is in the telling that we survive, and our bodies may become hymns. Ours was ever a spoken history.”

“Let men keep their books.  We’ll teach our secrets in whispers in the dark. But what if I can’t find the words. How can I speak, if I don’t know how?”

“Tell me, daughter. Tell it to me, now.”

“In crowds, in narrow spaces crammed full of people, he had a way of centring, closing. That was what I noticed about him first.  He would close his eyes and open them and there you’d be, the only person in all the world.  You know these things already, mother – these were the things which you gave to him, human things which warm to the touch. These were the things that you told him while you carried him.”

“I moulded him with my own two hands.  He was my life’s work.”

“You made him into the man that he was, that listener…that great listener.  He loved to listen to the way that people talked.   I have lain with him in the warm glow of lamps, and we have talked until we were out of words and I did not see God in him, but I looked into his eyes and I saw you there, and…”

“And?”

“And I thought that love was supposed to make things different.  I thought that the world was supposed to be remade by love.”

“Men don’t remake the world, child. They can’t. Not even him.  It’s a woman’s right, her skill – tear down the world, rebuild it in her own image, out of her own flesh and bone.  Little girls and daughters wait for men to change the world, but a woman is the world; her muscles are the earth, the softness of her belly is the sea and I am layers of rock and mountains around this tiny golden heart. Men need women to make life.”

“I’ve been thinking about this, about how he reached inside of me and left life behind in its wonder and glory.  Son of God, they call him, but he was yours first, wasn’t he, and made in your image. The mother is the plan. She is the root of all life.

“I wasn’t always a mother.  Remember that.  I was a girl and I was scared and it was very dark.  I could not look directly at it, the angel of the lord, Yahweh’s brightest light, his voice on earth, and his message to me.  I shaded my eyes with my hands and I listened and I obeyed.  I felt nothing.  Later, I felt like every inch of my body was burnt, raw.  Later, I was brimming over with feeling, but then, right then, in the dark, I knelt and I was terrified and there was no-one there to comfort me.  I bore my son in tribulation, like Eve did, once and I will lose him.  If the sun shines when they kill him, I will never forgive Him.  Let the world go dark.  Let the sky mourn for my broken heart. For what has been taken from me.”

“You didn’t know?  He didn’t know?”

“Women never matter, and they never need to be told, nor included.  Women sweep and cook and mend clothes and rear children.  A woman is quiet so that she can go on existing.  No woman is merely a woman; our existence is fraught and complicated..  A woman is bound in language; she is a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife.  Women are embellished and categorised  into silence and out of existence.  No, I didn’t know.  No, he didn’t know either, and, when he knew he didn’t tell me.  He couldn’t.  He couldn’t because I am his mother, and he loved me.  He loves me. He had to try and save me from the pain.”

“Is it time yet?”

“It’s not quite time.  Time yet to bind your hair with linen, wash your face with water cool from flowing under the ground.  You’re a maiden no longer, though it doesn’t show yet.  You’ll never make a wife now.  What ever made you think that you could be a wife for him?  There is no woman who is or has ever been a match for Him.  Eve knew it, and she was the first. She would have fought if she could, but she went into the wilderness in silence, and that’s been the woman’s way, ever since. It’s been passed down in whispers since then, and you never heard, did you?  You were never warned.”

“I just loved him.”

“I know that.  Believe me, I know.  I loved him too, from that very first moment when my body stood around him like an army, when my flesh bowed in around him like a prayer.  There were times when I wanted to carve him out of me.  To save us both the pain.”

“I thought you didn’t know?”

“I didn’t.  I didn’t know.  I had no idea.  And yet, I was a mother from that moment.  There is nothing more fearsome than the mother of a threatened child.  There is a particular sorrow reserved for the mothers of first born sons.”

“And there was nothing that you could do.  Would you have…didn’t you try?”

“And break my own heart?  The world surely broke it for me.  You said that women are like flame which flickers.  Well, if woman is a flame then man – the world which men built – is a strong breeze before a gathering dark.  Mary, I…”

“Three men came to you, didn’t they, chasing after a star?  Find me my star, mother and I’ll take this promise of mine far, far away where they won’t touch him.  Carry me out of this land, and far away across many seas. I will be gone. This is my promise, Mary: that though life dwindles, it renews and it goes on.”

Ida

It was a long ride down from the Wee Wah Lodge and into Manhattan on a weekend kindly given by Mrs Spedden when she didn’t need her maid so much. Even in early June, the weather there was hotter and harsher than anything Ellen Bird had ever been used to, back in Norfolk where she was born. The colours were all wrong too. Ellen felt a stab of loss in her chest, tucked under her right breast; she missed the summers in England. Not for the first time after, she was surprised by feeling anything at all, as if she’d breathed all of her feeling out in puffs of vapour in the icy air. As if she had no right to feeling at all, any more.

She hadn’t slept well since it had happened. Two months later, she still woke up struggling to breathe, and there weren’t enough sheets on the bed, ever, to make her feet feel warm. On the train, even in the oppressive heat of a New York summer, her feet didn’t feel truly warm. Maybe they never really would again? Perhaps that was the small price paid for her survival? If so, she would have given it again. She would have given anything to save herself from going into the water that night and, if that made her a coward then she was nothing that God didn’t make her, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t suffered, afterwards. It wasn’t like she hadn’t prayed for all those people, fifteen hundred and more souls, their bodies made of out of salted ice.

It wasn’t as though she hadn’t wept.

A woman asked her if she might take the seat beside her, close to the window, and Ellen rose to make way. Her overnight bag was tucked into the wire rack above her head, but she kept the large package close to her chest. She had carried it back from the middle of the sea with her, on her shoulders. She’d huddled in it on the deck of the Carpathia, away from the fearsome frost. She’d carried it all of that way, by then, and she would carry it a little further still. It was the least that she could do, when Mrs Straus had been so kind to her, in what time she’d known her. It hadn’t been very long, not in the grand scheme of things, but it might as well have been forever, for everything that had happened, and everything that Ellen had seen come to pass.

Around her, people nodded and dozed in the heat. Ellen closed her eyes but stayed awake, bolt upright in her seat, padded for comfort on long rides. She worked her fingers through the join in the edges of the brown packing paper, until she found the the fur, black as night and so soft. Sable, Mrs Spedden had said. Sable, which had once run free in Russia, and survived the cold twice over. When the steward had come, he’d suggested top coats and hats. It was wickedly cold up on the deck in the night. Ellen had helped Mrs Straus into her fur and her lifebelt before she’d put on her own coat. That was what you did. You helped your mistress, then you helped yourself. She’d still been fastening her buttons with clumsy gloved fingers as they’d made their way up onto the deck. All the way there, other maids had been brushing past them, bobbing heads in apology as they hurried down the halls. So many of those girls must have drowned, after they went back to boil water for tea. Nobody thought they were going to be out there for a very long time. Those other women thought that it would blow over and it never occurred to one of them that they might be sending those girls to their deaths. Mrs Straus had never cared for tea.

That ship was supposed to be unsinkable.

Between her glove and the cuff of her dress, Ellen’s wrist was bare. She’d never had the money to waste on a watch. That night on the deck she hadn’t worn a watch and so it had felt like eternity and no time at all, both at the same time. It had all happened too fast for her to truly understand it. It was the finest ship in the world, but it was a piece of fine work that unravelled to nothing but threads and pins in a matter of minutes. Gone, all gone.

People would like to talk about it, maybe: the bravery of some people and the cowardice of others…how quickly everything had fallen apart, there, right at the very end. They’d somehow make it loud and exciting, or dignified and solemn with the weight of some great history. It hadn’t felt like great history, at the time. What it had felt like, at the time, was knowing the date of her own death, down to the minute. What it had felt like, actually being there, was knowing that she could no longer believe in God as she had believed in Him before.

There had been children crying, and women crying, and even the odd man crying, and everything had gone to Hell. Ellen had been too frightened to make a sound, and Mrs Straus had taken her firmly by the hand and drawn her with her and made sure that she wasn’t lost. That was a brave woman, right there. That was a woman who had bore seven children, and lost one, and kept going. That was a woman who had sailed to a new world in her youth, and made her life there, and made it well. If Mrs Straus had been afraid then she hadn’t let it show. She had taken Ellen by the hand and drawn her with them, all the while following her husband, and never letting him out of her sight.

The band was playing. The band had been playing something that Ellen had last heard when people were dancing. Nobody was dancing then, but, all her life, Ellen would remember the song that they were playing. Mrs Straus had called it something in German, and Mr Straus had nodded his head.

Life boat no. 8. Ellen had turned thirty-one years old the day before entering Mrs Straus’ service, and two days before they left Southampton, but if she lived for forever and a day, she would never forget the number painted on the white wood of the boat. Eight. Her luckiest number forever. Women and children only, the officer had been saying. Women and children only, but he’d made an exception for Mr Straus with his grey whiskers, his hand holding onto Mrs Straus’ so tightly that, in their gloves, their knuckles must surely have been bone white. Ellen had already been in a seat on the far side of the boat, ushered in by the steward and Mrs Straus both. She couldn’t do anything but watch them, and try to hear them, over all the rushing noise of the people and the water.

Mr Straus had begged her, begged his Ida, in the end. He’d begged her to be a little selfish…To not always think of others. He had known, then, that he would not go in the boat while they were still women and children to take those seats, but he had hoped that Ida would go with Ellen, go on without him and live to go home and remember him as a hero to his children. He had hoped that Ida would go on without him, and live.

Ida Straus set foot in lifeboat no. 8. just the once. She’d lost her hat, somewhere in the chaos, so, when she swept the sable fur from her shoulders, her hair blew against her cheek in soft grey curls. She’d settled the fur around Ellen’s shoulders and said something to her in German, something that Ellen would never understand but never forget, either. I will not be needing it, she said, and stepped out of the boat and back onto the deck. The lifeboat started to lower, with a sick sway, and Ellen had lost the couple in the dark up above them, and she had never set eyes on them again.

The papers would repeat what Ida Straus had said next, said to her husband, when they held her up as an example of Jewish womanhood, of good wives. They’d report it word for word, as repeated to them by witnesses, but it came to Ellen mostly by the reading of her lips.

“We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go.”

It had become her story then, she supposed. The story of Ellen Bird, who was born in Old Buckenham, Norfolk, the daughter of a shepherd and his wife.

Ellen Bird, who survived the sinking of the Titanic.

She counted thirty five women in lifeboat No.8. Thirty five of them, and how many of them had left husbands or fathers behind? Some of them wore very fine coats, but none of them as fine as the fur that Ellen huddled in, the one that Ida Straus wouldn’t be needing any more, no matter how cold she got before the end. As they watched, the ship sank lower and the sky got darker still, and the man in the boat, the one in the uniform, he told them to row towards the light in the north. They rowed, hard as they could, but Ellen never saw a light.

From the dock, she’d thought that it was surely too big to move under its own power and, as she watched it tilt and swoon into the cold, dark water, she wondered at the fact that it had stayed afloat for as long as it had, at all. Ellen felt every crack and every sig of the great ship in her bones and yet it all fell apart so quick. The water rose and lapped at the polished deck and people ran and screamed, with nowhere to go. They watched from the lifeboats, so afraid that, at the last moment, the whole ocean would somehow open and take them all down with Titanic, punishment for the sin of pride, for imagining that there was anything in the whole wide world that God couldn’t sink, if he chose. The propellers had come right out of the water, like teeth, like a woman with her mouth open, and crying towards heaven for release. A release that would never come, because Titanic was going down, and there would be no saving her. The great funnels fell, which looked to Ellen for all the world like someone throwing up her hands in utter despair, and, not long after that, the lights went out, and the women on the boat watched what happened next by the sickly green glow of the flares. They watched as Titanic folded in on herself, with a great cracking, splintering sound, and sank finally below the surface, and died.

Gone, all gone, and fare thee well, Titanic. Fare thee well.

There was such screaming, afterwards, such horrible noise. One of the men in the boat wanted them to row back, to pick up some of the poor souls who’d gone into the water, so cold, and some of the women agreed with him, but most didn’t. Most were fearful of being dragged under by the sheer weight of people scrambling to be saved. Ellen herself was too terrified to say a word, and, in the end, they started to row again, away from where Titanic had been, pulling towards the light.

Rowing, Ellen sweated under Ida Straus’ sable fur, and it took such a long time for all of the screaming to stop.

Pennsylvania Station was cramped and noisy, such a flood of people. Ellen stood still, the package clasped against her chest with one arm, and let them pass around her. She didn’t have it in her to force her way past them, through them. She’d done all the surviving that she physically had in her. There had been over two thousand souls on board when they’d left Ireland, nothing between them and America but all of that water. She’d never expected it to be so cold, the water. People had told her that they’d pulled nine people out of the water, but three of them had gone too far to be saved. Their bodies were already solid ice, and they died on the deck of the Carpathia. Rescued, they were, but never saved.

What she wanted, when she came out of the station, was a breeze, a gust of fresh air to blow away the train and the dreams and the smell of other people. The air was muggy and heavy. She wished that it would rain to cool things off. Rain was a good thing in summer, and a million miles away from the dry, dry cold which haunted her. Walking, the package was cumbersome. One handed, she shifted it against her chest so as not to drop it. It would be wrong to drop it now, so close to the end of her pilgrimage. As she walked down 7th Avenue, it occurred to Ellen that this would have been her home, if she’d come here with the Strauses; that she would have come to know this place well. Instead, Ellen had come to this place like any other migrant, and known that she could not go home. America was her home. She had been delivered. She had been given to a new world.

She was bringing the fur back. She was returning it to its rightful place. In her little room back in Tuxedo Park, she’d kept it folded under the bed, and, occasionally, she’d removed it, buried both of her hands in the soft thickness of it and remembered the little boat, remembered the rowing, and the praying, the soft sound of some woman behind her weeping for her man, lost at sea. Pull for the light, the man had said but the only light that Ellen ever saw was the one behind them. The Titanic’s lights, which, one by one, flickered, and went out. When she touched it, she remembered those things, but she also remembered the kindness in Ida Straus’ face and the iron in her handns when she’d pushed Ellen down into Lifeboat no.8, and gotten out herself, and gone back to her husband’s side. A paper that Ellen had seen called it heroism, Mr and Mrs Straus and what they’d done. They’d talked about radiance over all humanity, like something bright. Like the sun rising. To Ellen in the boat, all it had looked like was love, pure love. Simply that.

Mrs Spedden had checked for Ellen, found out that Mrs Sara Straus Hess lived at 154 West 22nd Street. As she turned the corner, onto the street of large, redbrick houses, Ellen rehearsed what she was going to say to Sara Hess, who had been Sara Straus.

Good afternoon, Ma’am. My name is Ellen Bird and I was in Mrs Straus’ service when she boarded the Titanic, and this was hers, and she gave it to me, and now I’m giving it to you, because its too fine a thing for me and if she’d lived then she wouldn’t ever have seen it with a person like me. I’m sorry that your mother died, Miss. I’m sorry that your father died. They were good people, Miss. They were good people, and they saved me, God bless them. They saved me.

On the doorstep of the house, Ellen paused. She set her overnight bag down by her feet, and she straightened her hat, and the plain collar of her dress. She hugged the fur against her like something very precious. Brown packing paper crackled. She reached up, knocking on the door with three raps on the brass knocker, shone to within an inch of its life. A shiver went down her spine, turned the sweat between her shift and skin cold. It had been two months, and still no sign of Ida Straus’ body. They waited as long as they could to bury Isidor, longer than they should have but, still, Mrs Straus had not come home to New York City.

As she stood on the doorstep, listening to footsteps coming towards her from inside the house, Ellen wondered if she was going to spend her whole life thinking about Mrs Straus and the hundreds of others who were never going to come home, if she was going to spend her whole life, however long she had left, just thinking about them, and pulling towards the light.

Scheherazade

Here it is: he killed the girls because he couldn’t trust his wife. Three thousand girls who went to his bed virgins and left in the morning both married and dead. Because of a kiss given to another man. Because of a kiss.

Those are the facts. The rest is the story.

Here it is: I’m telling you the story of the story of how you save your own life.

It’s harder than you think to tell a good story.

You have a few minutes, so make yourself beautiful. Take care, you who have carried water and swept dirt floors. Now is your time for dancing, dancing girl. Now is your time to paint your palms with henna and bind your hair with ruby for royalty, pearl for wisdom, and both of them protect. Be straight backed and downward gazing. You can learn to be a wife. You were your poor father’s poor daughter and here you are, veiled like a bride, enough gold for a King’s ransom. Just remember: even in the dark, the moon and stars know where they are. Know where you are. Do not lose sight of what must happen here. Go carefully. You know this palace like the back of your hand. They cannot touch you. They cannot know you. You are promised to a king, and you have been promised before, all of these one thousand nights.

Your body will recognise him by now. There is a place for his head in the crease of your thigh. Look how your body is already mimicking that of an honest wife. His beard is soft like a boy’s. His eyelids are heavy and smoky with kohl. A story, he’ll say. Scheherazade, you tell the most beautiful stories in all of the world.

Your stories are what they are. Open your eyes wide, so that they reflect his marrying eyes right back at him. He has to want you. He has to need you. You’ve lasted two years and seven months and nine nights and three hours longer than any of the others. Tonight, tell him the story of the woman who knew her duty, and the king with marrying eyes…of the poor man’s daughter who told stories so beautifully that she broke men’s hearts and saved the world.

And married a king.

Tell him that one. Save your own skin, and let them go, the three thousand girls that you loved so well, sight unseen…the ones who came before you. Release them, so that, one day, they can come creeping back to him in the reproachful eyes of his daughters.

Make it count. This one is your killing stroke. This is your story, as well as his.

Nobody else must die here, daughter. Nobody else must die.