Broken Things (Salt Modern Fiction) Page 2

  So, I thought I’d recruit myself a hedgehog, or a fox, or at least someone else’s cat for half an hour a night, and I began to leave bread and milk in the shadow behind the stairwell.

  After a week, I found that I had come down to an empty saucer, and I was elated to have made contact with some other living thing, something with warm skin and a soul. I waited all day, patient and nervous, and when the sun went down at last, I sat in the dark beside my dish, breath bated, desperate for a friend.

  The green by the flats is raggish and hummocky as if it’s full of moles. The stairwell light had a timer on it, so once I had adjusted my coat and lit a fag and settled myself, it went off with a silent pop. All I could see for ages was the coloured tip of my Marlborough.

  Well, ten minutes more, and the bum on my jeans had soaked right through, but there was enough light borrowed from the streetlamps to see quite clearly, but colourlessly, as if everything is remade at night in bluegrey.

  There was a tiny tearing sound, like snapping grass roots, and a slim hand appeared in the lawn, quite suddenly, creasing turf outwards like a door made in several pieces. I sat, unbreathing, with the glowing end of my fag cupped in my palm, and watched a child unfold herself from the ground like a question.

  Then, she crept towards the dish of milk between us, and held it to her face like a cup, before she caught my eye and fled, quick as anything. When her little ankle vanished through the hole in the ground, and the grass was nearly flat, I put out my fag and gathered up the broken fragments of saucer, shaky and smiling.

  That day was knotted up with my probation officer, and trying to sort out a Social grant for a fridge, because you’re not entitled to money for one, not automatically, unless you’re a diabetic, which I’m not. I had a headache all afternoon; the daylight scrubbed my eyes raw. I could barely stand the wait ’til dusk.

  I left more milk out, and chocolate Hobnobs instead of bread. On the way to Tesco’s I stopped at the Oxfam shop too, and bought some little woolly tights and a jumper, and I left those on the grass as well. The following morning they were all gone, but there was a gift for me in their place: toadstools, arranged like a bouquet and tied up with slimy yellow ribbon.

  The second time that I saw the coffinwood child, she didn’t run at the sight of me. She was thin and white as a sparrow’s bone, but with those stripey tights on and a sweater over her bridesmaid dress, that almost reached her knees, she seemed less fragile, protected by the padding.

  She came out of the ground and stood before me, quivering like a taut, plucked string. I got to my feet very gently, and handed her a dish of vegetable soup. She sniffed at it for a few moments, blinking huge mauve eyes at me, until finally she risked a sip. Then she bolted it like a greyhound with a stolen hotdog. When she smiled, her teeth lit up her muddy face like a candle.

  She sang to me that night, sang in the wetblack language of soil. Although the words were senseless to me, I found myself seeing her story, or rather feeling it with the skin of my fingertips, because the songs were dark and buried and sunless.

  She sang about her coffinwood house, all made of splintered pine and mahogany and metal handlepieces, with a brass plate on the front door that read In Loving Memory. But the wood from coffins is narrow and sparse, and the silk from coffin linings is hardly enough to wrap a baby in. I learned what it is to be cold to the bone, and also the strange blind beauty of things beneath the ground.

  I spent the night behind the stairwell with the coffinwood child, trying to teach her English whilst she braided my hair into dozens of tiny plaits, sealing each at its tip with wet clay. Eventually I fell into a goosefleshed, shuddering sleep.

  After dawn, I woke up with a jolt; an ambulance man was lifting up my eyelid and shouting in my face. Someone had seen me sleeping, and thought I was a junkie, overdosed or dead already. They made me go indoors, and didn’t leave until my social worker arrived.

  She stayed ages. In the end, I ate beans on toast to please her, and promised that I would have a bath. When she’d gone, I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, squinting underneath the lightbulb. I was honest and dirty as a burrowing creature; I filled the tiny room with the scent of compost. I didn’t want to wash after all, and so I wandered back outside like a sleepwalker.

  I didn’t realise it, but my social worker hadn’t actually left; she was outside, talking on the phone in her car. She must have seen me walking round the back of the stairwell, I suppose.

  There was no coffinwood child when I went there to look, when I shouted down into the patchy turf that I wanted to come and live with her. If she’d teach me her life underground, I said, then I would get her dry clothes, dry blankets, stuff with which to build a better house. I’d steal chocolate for her, and milk for her baby brother.

  But she ignored me; the green between the flats rang with the noise of her ignoring. Please, I called to the coffinwood child, Come and be my friend and I’ll share my life with you! But all the coffinwood child did was to fill the housing estate with silence.

  I hadn’t any spade for digging, but still I clawed with my fingers where the grass used to fold like a door in several pieces; I dug until my social worker called for the police to come and make me stop.

  Ascension

  WHEN HEAVEN WAS ready for her, Victoria was not afraid. The call had been low and soft as the onset of winter, and whispered by the pigeons on the green outside her flat. There is holiness everywhere, and Victoria had been blessed by heaven to see it a little earlier than the poor, precious people of the world.

  Victoria had been preparing herself, all these months, as she plaited her hair in the evenings and listened at the open window for the liquid speech of birds; as her breath turned to vapour and her lap grew wet with dew. She tried not to sleep, for it was only the weakness of flesh that made her sleep; but even so, from time to time she would start awake, catch her head as it toppled forward. Then, she would wash her face at the sink, and repent.

  Victoria kept her vigil all through November; she read the first signs of the end-time in the coded blooms of fire in the night, and the week when the man two doors to the right had begun to wear gloves outside. She was not foolish, however; she understood full well that the reds and blues in the sky were fireworks. Even so, it pleased heaven that some things in the world were both themselves and something else at one and the same time, like the gentle family of rats that lived with her to test her charity.

  They had come to love each other: the playful tumbling rat-children and their patient mother with her dark, wet eyes. Rats are by their nature close to angels: the thoughts of God himself are echoed in the tremble of their whiskers. Victoria and the rats had watched the ebbing of the month through the window, and they all prayed together when the nights grew dark. Their prayers would blend at nightfall, and drift out into the sky, or else collect in the air near the ceiling like fragrant smoke.

  The second sign had come when the housing officer had knocked on the door and tried to persuade her to close her windows and turn on the heating. Victoria loved the housing officer, of course she did, but then she did have the sanctity of her home to consider. In the end, the housing officer had wet her ankles, standing in the melting frost of the grass as she tried to see past Victoria and into the flat.

  She informed Victoria that several tenants in the block were having problems with vermin. She said it very carefully, even put her hand through the window and laid it on Victoria’s shoulder, in case the news should shock her. Victoria smiled, gazed into the housing officer’s eyes with love until she began to blush and pulled her hand back outside. Victoria’s love followed her across the grass to the car park, and the mother rat chanted a benediction as she went.

  She heard the third sign on the morning TV, as it fed dully through the wall from next door, in the sing-song droning of voices and adverts. She poured herself one last, flat glass of lemona
de and sipped it slowly as she sat at her window. Last summer, as Victoria had felt the coming of the call from heaven, she had endeavoured to become as insubstantial as she could; still, these things could only be accomplished by stages.

  Until September, she had lived upon tins of clear soup, but when the rats had come to watch over her she knew that it was time for her to drink only lemonade. Only transparent things are truly pure, and life is all pollution; to achieve true serenity one must become as ice. When she eventually finished her drink, it was night again, and Victoria sat at her window and watched as microscopic angels inscribed patterns of frost on the inside of the pane.

  After that, all that passed her lips was water, as for three days more she remained in the shell of her body, in the shell of her little council flat on Wellington Green: three days entombed. The rats grew thoughtful, and perhaps a little sad, for they knew that their time of quiet kinship was at an end; still, they did not grudge Victoria her call.

  After the dark, it snowed; Victoria had known it would, for that is the way of heaven. The windowsill and the green outside were thick with whiteness so cold and so flawless that it made her quick with joy. She took her leave of the rats; they bowed their tiny wise faces to the carpet. The very smallest of the children begged a liberty; he tiptoed right up to Victoria and softly bit the hem of her garment. She forbade him not.

  The coming of the snow was the final sign. Victoria went into her spare room, and she wound her unclothed body in an arctic swathe of net curtain, and when the sun went down, she trod on bare feet into the perfect square of snowy grass outside her window, and she lay down upon it, waiting for the stars to take her with them.

  God

  GOD IS EVERYWHERE. You can find God in the most unlikely places. That’s what the pastor used to say, at the born-again church; then he said that I had a devil in my heart, so I quit going after that.

  There are far too many churches in Norwich anyway: the old ones made out of stone with dead angels in the churchyards, the little ones in houses, and the big community hall things where they all put their hands up in the air. Buildings full of people, all praying at the tops of their souls’ voices. It’s bloody deafening.

  I wouldn’t like to be God, I always thought, with all those people shouting at him and talking in tongues. It’s bad enough for me, walking down the street with all that praying making racket on the airwaves. There are so many, more than you’d think, pleading and wheedling for a favour. Between six and eight in the evening most of them are children, saying grace at dinner tables and then kneeling by their beds. Hundreds of little voices whisper all at once, begging for sleep, reciting words they barely understand. Gentle Jesus meek and mild. Some of them are terrified.

  The worst though, the very worst are the prayers for the sick. Cancer is the one that makes them cry. Lord, heal him; Father, pity me; save me, now and at the hour of my death. My bus stop is right opposite the hospital, the Community one, and I can’t get into town unless I stand there every day, sick and reeling with the begging and the curses from the geriatric beds. I insulate my ears with cotton wool; that deadens it a bit. I daren’t leave the flat on Sundays.

  A month ago, there was a massive thing at the cathedral; people came in on coaches, and they celebrated the war, or the dead, or something. Those Anglicans chant in unison, don’t they, and the noise is so compressed, so dense, that it’s louder than when you turn on the stereo and it’s accidentally been turned up to full volume, and you jump like you’ve been shot. Louder than that.

  Even out in Bowthorpe, where I live, the shouting and the praying was so awful that I just wanted to bury my head. When the phone went, I picked it up but I don’t know who it was or what they wanted, because the receiver resonated with everything else and there was a feedback whistle so high that even when I screamed I couldn’t hear my own voice, let alone anyone else’s.

  Well, I thought I was going to lose it any moment, so I heaved the phone out of the wall to shut it up, and I put on my big thick duffel coat. I got my special headphones (nobody speaks to you if you’ve got headphones on), and I plugged my ears with new cotton wool and masking tape, then I put them over the top. I trailed the wire into my pocket so it looked as if I was listening to something.

  After that I ran. I went away from town as fast as I could, and whenever I had to stop and catch my breath, it was a little bit better. I didn’t really have a plan, but I followed the direction where it got easier every time, until I found that I had come to the allotments. I went in the gate and started walking along the path between the oblongs of vegetables and sheds. It’s best where there are least people, because the prayers echo in all their skulls and make it worse.

  On the edge of one patch there was a bonfire. I bet they aren’t allowed to make fires. There are probably rules. Even so, there was one there that afternoon: weeds and newspapers spat and cussed in the flames like a pissed old man. That was where I came across God.

  God isn’t what you would have expected. He wasn’t all powerful, and mighty, and omniscient and all that; He was just a little baby, the oldest baby in all the universe. He had a plastic clip on His umbilical cord and He was all washed over with blood and mucous as though He had had a diffi-cult birth and His mother had bled to death. He was crying. I was a bit taken aback.

  Then it all went quiet, suddenly, just like that. The people at the cathedral had all finished their prayers and were shaking each other’s hands and nodding to each other as they left. The relief was unimaginable; I felt like a puppet with the strings cut. I sat down on the path; it wasn’t too damp. God was still wailing.

  I didn’t really want to talk to God right then, so I rolled a cigarette instead. When I had smoked it halfway down (I lit it with my lighter in case it was rude to use the bonfire), God stopped crying, quite gradually. He had the hiccups. He rolled over from His back to His side so He was facing me. We looked at each other, God and me.

  God was incredibly small, like the premature miracle babies you see on the news sometimes, that fit inside the palm of the doctor’s hand. I felt a bit sorry for Him. He kept curling His tiny fingers into fists and then opening them out again. His skin was red, and thin as nylon tights; through it little blue veins pulsed. God’s knees were bent right up against His tummy and His feet were crossed at the ankles. His scalp was soft with feathery black down.

  Well, by then the evening was getting chilly, so I put my hood up and shifted in as close to the bonfire as I could without getting singed. The night turned black by degrees until the only light was from God and the fire. It occurred to me that the leaves and stuff that were burning should have broken down to ash by now and the fire should have been just a smoulder. Instead, it was as blazing as it was when I came wandering in here. I think that He is meant to have played that trick on someone else before.

  A baby in fire light: there’s a curious thing. When eleven o’clock had come and gone I risked taking off my earphones. The praying had gone down to a few despairing sighs and was as peaceful as it ever was. The fire roared. God whimpered and chewed His fingers, His eyes, blue as blankets, were fixed intently on me. I sat and smoked, my face dry with the heat. The city started filling up the sky with the glow from zillions of streetlamps.

  I had begun to doze where I was, sitting up, when God finally spoke. Pick me up? He said, and raised His arms a little towards me. I rubbed my face and answered What? I wanted to be dead certain that I had heard Him. Please, said God, Pick me up.

  Well, I said to God, There’s a lot of people who think they need you. I gestured vaguely toward the city and the cathedral. And then, you turn up here, tiny and crying. I’m sorry, whispered God. I’m sorry. It’s not my fault. Please pick me up. I’m so frightened.

  I sighed hard at that and began to roll another fag. God looked at me with His great pale eyes and His bloodstained face and began to weep, not like a baby but like a person, like anybody. L
ike me. God is a baby and is oh-so scared.

  Just then a single voice from a single prayer crystallised like frost in the air between us. Make it end, said a woman. Please just make it end. God put His fists into His eye sockets and sobbed. I’m sorry, said God. I’m so sorry, and the woman and her Creator each recited their pain. The woman dwindled her prayer into silence. God hid His face for an hour.

  I began to pick up twigs and bits of leaf from the ground and feed them into the fire. Eventually, God said, Pick me up? Pick me up, please? And His little voice was as old and exhausted as bones. I felt sadder than anything in all the world; too sad for tears; too sad for breathing, almost. I looked at Him and said, Why should I pick you up?

  To care for me, said God from the guts of the fire. Because I am a little baby and because I am sorry. Please pick me up. Please love me. I am a little baby and I am so frightened. Take me home with you and love me. I’ll be good. I’ll not give you trouble. Pick me up? Pick me up, please? And God cried and pleaded and said He was sorry; and He was, you could tell He really did mean it.

  It was just before the dawn came that I reached into the fire to rescue God. He was too slippery to keep hold of, especially when I began to bleed. My coat caught light and I tried to get a grip on God and He just said, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and I tried and tried to save Him until I lost consciousness. Just before I did, I could have sworn that I heard Him laughing.

  High

  FOR TODAY, IF you like, I’ll be a girl. I’ll have two hands for you, and, let me see, I’ll have brown hair, long hair that isn’t brushed and flicks into my eyes unless I hold my head to the side. If it makes you happy then I’ll be seventeen years old. I will wear ice-washed jeans; I’ll carry a windproof lighter, which I stole. I’ll even have a name if you want. Why not call me Sarah. I’m not changing my eyes though; I’m keeping those.