‘Every year sheep get caught in the marsh, where it turns to bog. They’re supposed to be fenced off, but they get through the fencing.’
We listen, but there are no more cries.
‘I thought you were a city girl,’ says Michael.
‘I am. I know this place, that’s all. I used to stay a few miles away, in the summers when I was a child.’
‘On vacation?’
‘Not really. It was a kind of camp my mother found, for the summers, when she had to work after my father died. We used to sleep in old army tents. They didn’t do much with us, just let us out all day long. I spent the whole of one summer building a hide out of driftwood.’
‘That was why you came back here?’
‘No. It was the job.’
‘It’s a great place for kids.’
‘My children don’t think so. They want to get back to London.’
My legs ache as I climb the steep concrete steps up the sea-wall. They ache from gripping round Michael’s body. I had to spread myself wide to hold him between my thighs. It’s the sort of pain you carry with you all day, secretly, like news nobody else has heard.
‘See where the wall curves round? That’s where it is. You can’t see the bog yet.’
‘It doesn’t look far.’
It doesn’t look far, because the air has cleared to a startling clarity that says more bad weather is on the way. That tanker out on the horizon looks as if it could turn and steam into land in minutes. But it’s miles out. The green of the marshes has the metallic tinge it gets before rain. We’ll have to hurry. More weather’s coming, building up quickly, clouds chasing a small pocket of light and warmth.
TWENTY-TWO
‘There it is.’
On our left there’s the liquid, deceptive spill of the bog, a darker pocket in the surrounding marsh. When I come back here it always looks smaller. It expands in my mind between visits. I start believing in it again, the way I did when I was a city child filling up empty days out on the marshes. We’d have to make our camp-beds by seven-thirty, and tie up the flaps of the big green tents so the air could blow through them all day. Then we lined up for porridge and bread-and-marmalade, which we ate outside, at long tables full of splinters, unless it was raining. After that we lined up again to wash our porridge bowls, dipping them in soapy water, then in clear. We lived outdoors, tucking our bare, scratched legs under us for warmth when the mornings were cool. Sometimes we ate breakfast in a flood of sun, with bees floating high above our tables and the tents throwing shadows so sharp they seemed like cut-outs on the grass. We washed outside too, girls on one side of a canvas screen, boys on the other. The water was so soft that it turned blue at a drip of soap. There was one girl who always took off her vest to wash. We stared at the pink rosettes of her nipples, the white, blue-veined skin that swelled around them. She had red hair. When the sun touched it, it blazed out, extinguishing her.
My father was dead. Each morning I folded up my bread-and-marmalade and put it in the pocket of my shorts. There was a hut where we played table tennis when it rained, and a rough field for football and rounders. None of us knew how to play cricket. There was solitaire and French skipping and a row of battered Bobbsey Twins stories in the corner of the hut.
Nobody ever saw me slip away, except Jenny. Every morning I’d make sure I was seen fetching a bat or ball, choosing a book or taking my turn on the cleaning rota. Then I took the path that led to the sea.
My father was dead and the bog was huge, with room enough in it to swallow the whole world. I would stand on the edge of the sea-wall, looking down at the shivering reeds, the cotton grass, the pink flowers which rattled when the seeds were ripe in the pods. I touched my pocket where I could feel the bread-and-marmalade. I’d eat it corner by corner, making it last. I leaned out, hoping I’d be able to see my face in the surface of the bog. I wanted it to give something back to me.
It was all right when I was alone, but sometimes Jenny followed me, and she didn’t like me standing right on the edge. She always thought I was going to fall. She gripped my hand and tugged me back:
‘Come away from the edge, Simone! It’s dangerous. What are you doing?’
‘I’m only looking at the bog.’
‘It’s not a bog, anyway. It’s just part of the marsh. They don’t have real bogs here, only in Scotland and Irelnd. I asked Mr Hilbert.’
But I knew what it was. It was hard to get away without Jenny, but sometimes I managed it. Nobody else seemed to notice. As long as you came back at meal-times, and ate everything that was given to you, you could do what you wanted. A mouthful of gristly stew equalled an hour of freedom. We had our hair checked for nits once a week, when we had our baths. I never had nits or wet my bed.
I think the concrete edge of the sea-wall was sharper then. Perhaps it had been rebuilt not long before. I think there’d been flooding and the sea defences all along the coast had been repaired. When I stood there in my bare feet I curled my toes over the edge and rocked to and fro with my eyes shut, as far out as I dared. Then back. Rocking myself faster and faster in my own darkness, as if I was in my own womb. If the wind wanted to blow harder, it could take me. Every sound was clear, but I could never tell which direction it was coming from. When I was dizzy I’d open my eyes and the bog would swing towards me, bigger than the sky. And then I’d sit down on the edge of the wall and rub my wrists gently on the raw concrete, over and over, for a long time until there were red grooves in my flesh. No one ever saw them, not even Jenny.
The bog is not so big now. Jenny was right: it’s marsh really, but I still can’t call it that. It is a smooth, breathing bowl, a soup of water and vegetable slime. I point out the blackened, smooth spars of wood sticking up between tufts of cotton grass.
‘Is that it?’ asked Michael. ‘That’s the ship you were talking about?’
He is disappointed. It’s dinky, like the English sea, so grey and small. People from big countries run the risk of believing that they’re big, too. Big and inviolable. But they can drown in a puddle, just like everybody else.
‘Yes,’ I say. That’s the ship. That’s all you can see.’
‘How do we get down there?’
‘You climb down the wall. There are plenty of footholds. You just have to watch out for the barbed wire.’
‘Is it bog, right there where you step down?’
‘No. That ground’s soft, but you won’t sink. There, where it’s bright green, that’s where you have to be careful. It looks solid, but it isn’t.’
‘It’s not so big. How deep is it?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone’s ever been to the bottom. Or if they have, they haven’t come back to tell.’
‘People have drowned in there, right?’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘Let’s go down and take a closer look, since we’re here,’ says Michael. But I put my hand on his arm.
‘Michael, why did you come back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You do. It was you who did it. I would never have written to you.’
‘I can’t tell you.’
There’s complete silence between us, with a hundred sounds behind it. The hiss of the wind, a sheep’s docile cry, the sea, the tang of metal striking metal somewhere far off. A landscape of sounds, knit together.
After a while he says, quietly, ‘Why should you live like this as if I’m nothing?’ I wait it out. He goes on. ‘People respect you. But you should have stayed with me.’
I don’t reply, and he looks out to sea, at the bruise-coloured clouds.
‘Doesn’t the sun ever shine here?’
‘It’ll blow away. The weather changes quickly.’
‘I don’t like to be closed in,’ he goes on. ‘I can’t live with a locked door.’
I watch the sky, vast, loaded with weather, bearing it in from the west.
‘The first night I was in the hospital, I heard the ward door shut and the sound
it made. Muffled, like all the sounds in there. You know how a fire-door never slams. It squeezes shut like it’s taking all the air with it. I didn’t even know it was a door closing. I was going crazy. I had a lot of cuts and bruising on my hands and they’d been bandaged. I hit them on the bed-frame so I’d get some feeling out of them. But they’d given me a shot of sedative and I could have broken my hands and not felt it.
‘There was a nurse who kept coming by my cot. I could hear him singing out loud even though it was night-time and the ward was quiet. It was one of those songs that works its way into your head and digs in deeper every time you try to pull it out. I couldn’t make myself stop listening. Then I got frightened because he went away down the ward and I could still hear him singing, just as clear as if he was sitting on my bed. I breathed and counted and did all the relaxation stuff I knew. There was a clock on the wall and after a long time the hand jumped and I saw that only a minute had gone by. I began to think how many minutes there were in an hour. Then I started to count how many minutes there were until morning. I knew I was going to go crazy. I was too weak to get off the cot so I started to roll side to side, banging my head on the pillow to make it quiet. The nurse came by and he didn’t say anything, he just looked at me and made a note on my chart. I wanted to scream out to make him talk to me but I knew if I did they’d take me away. I thought of all those minutes of the night and the minutes of the day to come and more days and more days, a whole long reel of days spinning out with no one able to find the end.’
‘What was the song?’
‘You don’t ask stuff like that. You don’t draw attention to yourself in there. Every word you spoke, you found you got a bigger pile of pills to swallow. Even if he’d told me I wouldn’t remember now. My memory’s fucked. I’m like one of those old guys who can tell you what kind of candy bar they stole from the store seventy years ago, but they don’t know their way home.’
We climb down, Michael first and me after him. The spikes of barbed wire have rusted up since I was here last. The sea gets rid of everything so quickly. It just shrugs off wire and concrete with a relish that’s almost joyful. I remember the sandbags there used to be, stained and heavy with the stitching split on the seams. Jenny and I wanted to build a house from them, but we couldn’t lift them.
It’s easy to climb down, and then suddenly the sea disappears, and most of the sky, and we’re in the shadow of the wall, on the sucking, marshy ground beside the bog. There’s a spar of wood sticking up, temptingly close. Just reach out and you can touch me.
‘They find bodies in the bog sometimes, hundreds of years old,’ I say.
‘In here?’
‘No, I read about it. They even found food in the stomach of one man. Grains of barley clogged together. I believe they planted them as an experiment and they sprouted. There was the body of a man who’d been hanged, with the noose still around his neck. They made a TV programme about him, and said it was probably a ritual killing. Listen – you know the song.
‘Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly,
Lavender’s green,
When you are king, dilly dilly,
I shall be queen,
Call up your men, dilly dilly,
Set them to work,
Some to the plough, dilly dilly,
Some to the cart,
Some to make hay, dilly dilly,
Some to cut corn,
While you and I, dilly dilly,
Keep ourselves warm.’
‘That’s nice. I never heard it before.’
‘You must have done. It’s very old. They had it on the programme and they said it comes from a matriarchal era when the Queen used to choose a Corn King every year. All year he feasted and slept with the Queen. Then after the harvest he was killed and they spread his blood in the furrows so the crop would grow next year. If they didn’t do it, the harvest would fail and everyone would die.’
‘Wasn’t the Corn King ever smart enough to remember what happened to the other guy the year before?’
‘He must have done. He must have known.’
‘You’ll have to teach me the words.’ Michael hums the tune, perfectly.
‘You knew it.’
‘No. So how come they were able to take the corn out of his stomach after all that time?’
‘The bog preserved him. He shrunk a little and he was dark-brown from the peat. He looked like leather. They only found him by accident, when they were cutting peat. There must be plenty more, but they don’t often find one.’
‘Why would they want to? Let the poor guys stay where they are.’
‘I know. It didn’t seem right, the way they were filming his body on a slab. It was too close up. But I think they buried him afterwards. I don’t believe they put him in a museum.’
‘Jesus, in a museum, Simone? You can’t be serious. This is a dead body we’re talking about.’
‘A very old dead body. It’s history, Michael.’
He laughs and I laugh too. It’s strange to think that the people who condemned him to death have disappeared. But you can reconstruct the face of the victim. If victim is the right word, and I don’t think it is.
‘You couldn’t call him a victim, could you? Because he must have known. He could have chosen not to be the King.’
‘I don’t think you choose about a thing like that.’
He was killed, but he’s survived when everyone else he knew has melted into air. I remember the forensic expert who built a model to show how the flesh must have hugged his bones when it was warm and living.
‘Were they thrown in the bog after they died?’ asks Michael.
‘I don’t know. And then they found another, or two more, I can’t remember. When the food in their stomachs was analysed, it showed they had all eaten the same thing. They must have been fed a ritual meal before the killing.’
‘It’s hard to believe that. That they would feed them.’
‘No, think about it, Michael. People get bacon and waffles and syrup before they’re put in the electric chair. I think we still do it nowadays for the same reason they did. It’s not a favour, it’s a ritual. If you feed someone everything they want for their last meal, then they won’t trouble you after they’re dead. They won’t come back.’
‘So what did they get to eat?’
‘Grains and berries, and alcohol. The forensic evidence showed that they were killed immediately after eating. But you can’t know what really happened. I mean, what they thought was happening.’
‘No,’ says Michael. You can’t know that. Once you’re out of the situation, you can’t judge it. You don’t know what the pressures were.’
We are right on the edge of the bog now. A small, cold rain has begun to fall, pocking the surface.
‘You say there’s a whole ship down there?’
‘I think so. The bog pushes it up a bit, then it sucks it back again.’
‘Is it safe to go across?’
I glance at him. ‘That depends.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘On your weight. On how much rain there’s been. All kinds of factors. Do you want to try it?’
But he has hold of my arm, gripping it as tightly as Jenny did, thirty years ago. ‘I’ll go if you go,’ he says.
‘No, I don’t want to.’
His touch prickles at my arm. With Michael you always know there’s a body inside the envelope of clothes. He makes you know it. I take calm, slow breaths, and look away, along the empty marshes which are hooded by coming cloud.
‘Don’t you want to try?’ asks Michael.
‘No, I don’t want to try.’
‘OK. Here I go.’ Still gripping me, he moves forward, his trainers squelching onto softer ground. ‘I better take these off.’ He bends down and pulls off the trainers, throws them onto the ground behind us, holding onto me all the while. I stare at his long white naked feet, and the dark hairs sprouting on the soft flesh of his toes. I watch as the feet begin to move. I brace myself.
The bog takes him casually. One minute it is him feeling the bog, the next the bog is feeling him. His foot goes down, astonished, through a surface that suddenly isn’t there. He loses balance and jolts forward, pulling me with him. But the instinct to fling out his arms and save himself is stronger than the will to hold me. I step back.
The bog doesn’t catch him. He doesn’t fall face down. The jerk of my arm brings him backward so he falls on his knees, his hands deep in slime. But not too deep. He struggles out, though the bog pulls at him like a host with a visitor who wants to leave too soon.
‘Shit,’ he says. ‘This stuff’s worse than I thought.’ He tears off a tuft of grass and scrubs at his hands. I watch a troop of bubbles roll up to the surface of the bog. From deep down, the bog knows something’s going on. It sends up a little spasm of regret for what’s escaped it, burps a few more bubbles, then settles back to digest what it’s already caught. We sit on the damp ground, not touching.
He’s fine. There was never any danger. The bog is shallow, like a bad dream that evaporates in daylight. But my clothes are wet with sweat. I look up and the bog is quiet and smooth again. There’s even a butterfly on the reeds, its wings blowing about like sweet-papers. It ought to get out of the rain before they are torn and it can’t fly any more.
‘I’m so hungry,’ I say.
‘I think I have a chocolate bar in my pocket.’
‘Chocolate!’
‘Yeah.’
He picks out a half-eaten bar from his inside jacket pocket. The silver paper has melted into the chocolate. He picks this off, gently, dexterously. The chocolate has been soft but now it’s hard again. He breaks it in half and offers me my share. Four squares of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. I lick it first, then scrape off a few crumbs with my teeth. The pleasure is so intense that I shut my eyes. I suck and swallow, and the sugar rushes into my blood. And then it’s gone. Michael has two pieces left.
‘You were really hungry.’
‘I’m all right. I swam too far, I got tired.’
‘Jesus, I forgot about that. You were swimming so far out I thought you’d never come back. Here, you have this.’ And he holds out the rest of his chocolate to me.