Tender Morsels Read online

  She crouched, panting. From her own noises she knew she had become some kind of animal; she had fallen as low as she could from the life she had had before Mam died. Everything had slid from there, out of prosperity, out of town, out of safety, when Mam went, and this was where of course it ended, with Liga an animal in the snow, tearing herself to pieces with the wrongness of everything.

  With one last heave, her remaining insides dropped out of her. She knelt over their warmth, folded herself down, and waited to die.

  But she did not die there. The snow pained against her forehead and her knees, and the fallen mass of her innards began to lose its heat in the tent of her skirt.

  She tried to lift herself off it. At first her knees would not unbend, so she tipped herself forward onto her front . . . paws, they felt like, her front claws. And hoisted her bottom up from there.

  ‘Oh, my Gracious Lady.’ Her voice sounded drunken and flat. Between pink footprints, her innards lay glossy and dark red. Her feet were purple, blotched yellow, weak and wet with melting pink snow.

  She should go back to the house—that was all she knew. And so she laboured towards it, top-heavy, slick-thighed, numb-footed and hollow, glancing behind as if afraid the thing would follow her, along its own pink trail.

  Da snatched the door open as soon as she touched it. He stood there, hands on hips. ‘What’s a-matter with you?’ The air around him was clear and warm; in the crook of his arm, the fire flowed brightly up around the new logs. Would he even let her in?

  ‘Something,’ she said. ‘I lost. Something fell out.’

  ‘What do you mean, silly girl?’ he said crossly. ‘You went for a shit and you had a shit, as you said.’

  ‘Something else,’ she said uneasily. His scorn, as usual, made her doubt her word, made her doubt her memory. Here he was, same as ever; here too was the house, all familiar, ready to go on just as it always did. Look, there was her weaving, put aside perfectly neatly. Pick me up, it snapped at her. Continue with me; time is wasting!

  ‘Get in, get in!’ her father growled. ‘You are letting out all the warmth, standing there like a lummock.’ And he flapped his hand at her, sweeping her in without touching her—and no, this was not what she wanted either. It was good to be warm, but dying outside in the snow would be less wretched than the indoor life again, in all its shuffles and snarls.

  She washed and organised herself; really, she was quite similar to before, only somewhat softer and leakier and cramp-bothered. Her father kept his back to her, and hummed a tune under his breath. Slowly, slowly, she went about; slowly she began their meal, scraping the parsnip, pulling the dry-meat into its strands. Everything looked odd and felt odd in her hands, as if she had never done this before.

  Her father, still humming, went out to relieve himself. He spent a good while doing it. Liga peeled the last onion they had and chopped it up fine and glistering, like salt-crystals or jewels, only with that good rich smell.

  He strode back in, startling her and making her knife hover over the board. ‘Mekkin a stew, are ye? I’ll melt ye some clean water.’ He was inflated, glowing. She felt him take the pot and go out again.

  ‘Here we are!’ He thundered in and swung towards the fireplace, hooked up the pot of snow, bullied the fire. ‘Nothing cosier on a winter night: a nice hot fire, a bit of stew!’

  He stood and turned, pleased, hands on hips. Warily, she glanced at his face, which beamed on her. All sense that she could judge things aright had left her; he would have to show her again, piece by piece, and she would have to sit very still and alert, and learn as well as she could.

  Winter passed, night by long night and day by short day. Liga was kept busy following all her father’s rules. These seemed to change by the hour. He railed at her for sitting quietly by the fire; he grew irritable when she busied herself about him. He roared at her for oversalting the smoke-meat; in cold silence, he added salt to it himself. He nagged and banged about that her bloods did not come; when they did, he cursed her and called her filthy. He banished her to the truckle bed; ‘What are you doing down there?’ he said, outraged, when she went to it the next night.

  The best was when he went into the town and left her; he had now forbidden her to be seen there, even in his own company. ‘Especially that,’ he said. ‘Especially that. We don’t want people talking, how old you are now and all filled out like that into your bodice.’

  It was very dull there in the cottage alone, but it was better than the adventure of his presence, which, even when he was silent, put such a press on Liga’s mind that sometimes she could not think at all; he made around himself a kind of frozen space into which she could only step wrongfooted.

  At the very end of winter, Liga turned fourteen, and no one noticed but herself. Then spring exploded in its usual celebrations, fat with clumped blossom and bursting leaf, raucous with birdsong. In April, her bloods stopped, and Da grew by turns wilder in his tempers and more silent in his sulks.

  ‘Bleed, girl, bleed!’ he shouted at her one night, turning back to her after he had had at her and fallen away.

  ‘I cannot make it happen,’ she said angrily.

  ‘I know that, curse you!’

  ‘I’d think you would be glad—you always say how dirty it is.’ And she crawled away to the truckle.

  His head loomed at her over the edge of the big bed. ‘Are you really so stupid?’ he said, as if astonished.

  And she supposed she was, because she did not know what he meant. She stared up at him, at the shaggy shape of her looming ignorance. She thought he might spit on her, so long and intense was his silence. But he only jerked out of sight, with a scornful noise in his throat.

  In late summer he brought home a preparation in a cloth, and boiled it up, and drew the foul-smelling liquid off the boilings into a cup. ‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘I have got it from a woman up town. She says it will give you strong bones.’

  Is there a problem, Liga wondered, with my weakling bones? There must be. She glanced stealthily at her arms on the table beside the dreadful tea, and waited unhappily for something to crack and crumble in her frame as she sat there, her mouth shrivelling with the drink’s bitterness.

  The thought of her bones seemed to preoccupy him all that evening: he looked upon her with dislike, though she went about very carefully.

  ‘I will go walking,’ she said, because she would be shouted at if she did not tell him. She said it from outside, already making for the trees.

  ‘You will not,’ he said, and got up from the table. ‘You will not,’ he said again at the door.

  Whyever not? her look said.

  ‘You will stay by the house tonight.’ And he was gone back in, to gloom at the table.

  ‘For what? There is nothing to do here!’ she said, but not loudly enough that he would hear and invent some nonsense work for her.

  Right out to the edge of the clearing she walked, and circled there quietly, so that he would not hear where she was but would have to come out and look for her. This he did, twice, before he trusted her not to go farther.

  Finally it was quite dark, and she had tired herself out with this form of taunting him, and with trying to read what he wanted and did not want. She heard him pull out the truckle with a great screech of the wood, and without thinking, in her disbelief and her relief that he would let her alone tonight, she went and stood at the cottage door. It was warm in there, and it smelled of his sweat and of the bones-tea.

  ‘Sleep in that tonight,’ he said. He blew out the lamp and flung himself in the marriage bed. And though this should have been a relief to her, yet he had made of it somehow a humiliation, so that she crept away to the truckle and lay facing the wall and wondering what it was she had done, or which well-behaved daughter he had seen in the town today that made her so unsatisfactory by comparison.

  Her own groan woke her in the middle of the night.

  ‘What is it?’ he said at her ear, clearly and instantly.

  ‘
My guts,’ she said.

  ‘What of them?’

  ‘They are twisting like laundry being squozen out.’

  ‘Thank the gods of all hearing,’ he said. ‘Thank the heavenly stars and the sun.’

  He lit the lamp and stood looking down as the pain tangled inside her on the bed, and drew itself tight. ‘Don’t you worry, my honey,’ he said. ‘It will all be over soon.’

  ‘Yes, I am dying,’ she managed. ‘And right glad to die, too.’

  He laughed—laughed!

  ‘And you so glad to see me gone.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Ah, no.’ And he stilled her head under his hand—she could not tell whether it was from annoyance or affection. ‘I will make thee a hot cup.’ And he was up and humming, waking the fire.

  ‘Don’t make me one like last night’s.’ The taste of it was still in her gullet, bitter, weedy. ‘That’s what has killed me, that woman’s poison. Strong bones, my arse.’

  He laughed that she had borrowed his way of talking. He went at the water-boiling with clanking gusto. She wished she might be well, to witness the spectacle of him doing this for her. Tremendously disappointed, she was, that she would die soon and not have pain-free time to look back on this and appreciate his kindness, to say to herself, See, he was not such a bad man; look what he did. She gasped and he set the door wide so that she could breathe better, and she marvelled at his doing so, and at the blossomy, bosomy, rotting night, stirring outside in its blanket of summer warmth.

  But in from that night kept sidling the thin black witch who was the pain. It lifted Liga and clasped her and made her dance against its iron, and dropped her, and wandered away—and then turned back, suddenly urgently interested again.

  Liga clambered and slid from moment to moment through that night, waiting for the pain to reach the pitch where she would break apart and it would all be over. The very house was gone from around her—her very father was gone. He was a bee caught in her hair, singing. He was hands all over her, patting and laughing. ‘Thank that muddy old hag,’ he said. ‘It is just as she said, after all.’ Which made no more sense than anything else had, this night.

  Dawn came, and he strode out to meet it and stand in the first light before the sun rose and sweated up the world again. With him gone—just then, right then—the crisscross of bands gave out that had held Liga to the iron-witch’s ribs, and she felt, deep within, a movement of some significance. Whereupon she knew, like falling to the bottom of a well, ’Tis a babby! And then she fell through that well-bottom—which was thin and crumbly, and how had it ever held water?—into a second well: And that before, that was something of a babby too, come out in the snow.

  Up she got, out of the truckle, and squatted beside it, holding on to its wooden edge. She was excited. She wanted to see it. It was coming. She would have a baby. Now the pain was not so much pain; it was more like machinery working, a body doing its job, something going right instead of wrong.

  Down it worked its way in her. Her muscles knew, and squeezed it down, her own baby that would make her a mam and respectable, that would look to her for care and loving.

  It turned some corner in her, through exquisite levels and points and presses of pain. She was weeping with the joy of the small arriving thing that knew nothing, that would be her companion and her plaything.

  Now it was at the door of her—she would split like a berry-bead and spill out, baby and innards and all. She put her hand down there and felt the bulge, at once hard and soft. She was in between pains, and the house was scarcely big enough for her breath and her heat; the world was scarcely big enough.

  ‘And are you done, then?’

  Liga shook at his voice.

  He came in, stamping off mud.

  She tried to stop the baby, but it had been poised to rush out, and so it rushed out, with a quantity of wet noise.

  He heard it too. ‘Is it out? Are you done?’

  Clumsily she bent over it, and tried to see it without him seeing—she must claim just this first look.

  She had been all prepared to love it, but there was not very much to love. She had never seen a baby so thin and wizened. Its face was just creases, thick with down. It had the finest, darkest, sourest lips, disapproving anciently, godlikely, distantly. It had the look of a lamb born badly, of a baby bird fallen from the nest—that doomed look, holy and lifeless, swollen-eyed, retreated too far into itself to be awakened.

  She gathered up the baby in her two hands, its unliving heat. She turned, holding it as far out as the cord would let her. She didn’t know why she was showing him, offering it to him—to him, of all people, and so tremblingly. Maybe she imagined he would mourn with her?

  ‘Give it here,’ he said disgustedly, coming at her big and heavy, alive and full of will. He took the baby and went to turn away with it, but the cord dragged it off his hands.

  She caught it. ‘It’s still attached,’ she said. She was beginning to shake hard.

  ‘Well, cut it, cut it!’

  She thought he meant her to cut up the child. ‘It is already dead.’

  ‘Oh, you!’ He swung from foot to foot in his exasperation. ‘Don’t you look at it. Give it me. Don’t you go getting moon-moody on me; don’t imagine this is anything more than you bleed out every month.’ He took it again, more carefully this time, and tried to interpose his shoulder between her face and his hands.

  The afterbirth came out, a great soft rag to her startled, wincing parts.

  ‘Is that all of it?’ he almost shouted, clawing for it, the child held like waste meat in his other hand, its head preoccupied with its ancient thoughts.

  And then he was gone, taking everything dripping with him, and Liga was too glad to be rid of him to do more than kneel there, a drizzling mess, and stare at the fact that it was over, stare at the messed floor.

  ‘Muddy Annie Bywell,’ she realised aloud, out of nowhere, a few nights later.

  He was whetting his knife-blade before the fire, the pipe between his teeth with no leaf in it, just clamped there for habit.

  ‘What of her?’ he said, as easily as he ever said anything; the rhythm of the sharpening did not change.

  ‘“Thank that muddy old hag,” you said, that night. Did she give you that horrible tea? To bring out the babby?’

  ‘She did,’ he said. He paused, wiped the blade on the rag across his knee, tested it, and pointed it at her, and at his own next words, as if that made them more true: ‘And well rid of it, we are.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ said Liga. ‘She knows, is what I’m saying. What we did.’ She did not even mean ‘what you did’; he had brought her as low as that.

  ‘She knows nothing.’ He waved the knife and reapplied it to the stone. ‘And what she says, no one believes, so it is as good as no one knowing. Why else would I go to her? Think on it.’

  Liga thought. She could hardly imagine. ‘There are people who take what Annie says very serious, every word.’

  He gave a quick snort between sweeps of the blade. ‘Women and God-men, and who cares what they think?’

  ‘How much did it cost?’ she blurted.

  He glowered at her. ‘A lot and don’t ask. A lot.’

  With her fingertip, she drew around a knot in the tabletop quickly, several times. Then she folded her arms, glanced at him twice. ‘It might have been nice.’

  ‘What might of?’

  ‘A babby. The babby.’

  ‘Ha!’ Sweep, sweep. ‘You saw it. It were a monster.’

  ‘’Twere not! Just undercooked, that’s all.’

  ‘I told you not to go moony,’ he said around the pipe, concentrating on the edge’s perfection. His face and front, his knees and shins, were orange slabs before the fire. His eye and his lower lip gleamed, and the knife’s light danced on the wall.

  ‘It might have been a granddaughter for you,’ she said, just to hear how that sounded.

  ‘Why should I want one o’ they? I never
wanted a daughter.’ And he laughed as if she were someone else, someone not that very daughter sitting opposite him, someone who would laugh along with him. ‘I wanted sons,’ he said, with a flick of his eyes. ‘A man wants sons.’

  Of course he does, thought Liga, and that must be where his rages come from, that disappointment. But—

  ‘A son,’ she said. ‘With a son you cannot do’—another flicked glance from him made her falter—‘what you did on me. What you do.’

  He looked at her narrowly, then widened his eyes. ‘Naw,’ he said, as if explaining to a stupid person. ‘That is what you have a wife for.’

  He almost laughed, almost snorted, almost spat—all three at once—as if her stupidity were not to be believed. Then he returned to his knife, and sharpened on.

  Life went its dogged way after that. Liga worked and listened and reflected, and when her bloods came in November, for the second time since the night of the dead baby, she put Da’s relief together with the memory of his looming head—Are you really so stupid?—together with the events of the summer, and she realised that one was a sign of the other. No-bloods was the sign of a baby coming; bloods were the sign of no-baby.

  She bled again, three times. At the third, Da said, ‘Mebbe we have ruined you for babbies, wi’ that mudwifery, wi’ that tea.’ He was cheerful for several days.

  But the next month, as winter loosened its grip on them, she knew it had happened again, from her tiredness and faint illness, from the feeling of significance budding low in her belly. And she knew also what she would do, to keep this baby, to see it safely born in its own time.

  When the next rag-time came, she took her rags when she went out to check the snares. She killed the leveret that was snared, and the older buck rabbit, and bled them onto the rags. Then she tied the cloth to herself.