Stray Bats Read online

  there is no feeling of rushing or that they are there to make money off you. quite a family feeling almost I would say altho in fact without the problems of some family gatherings! very welcoming and they attend to your every needs. the rest room is even better than what youd expect from home spick and span. the juice bar has an extensive range altho maybe some kind of translation like whats the *closest* juice to this concoction of our normal drinks so that we’ve got a clue what were ordering? tho pointing got me luckly quite a nice combo with a sort of chilli zing to it. made it hard to sleep but i had such good ideas for growing my business while i lay awake that I wdnt deduct anything for that.

  what they lose the half point for is i was almost certain when me and my friends undressed that they were laughing. i mean sure were neither of us supermodels but face it beside themselves which are like i don’t know mobile blankets - like looking at them you’ve got to wonder where they put those crazy arms when theyre not using them. at least its clear what all our bits do is all im saying. and im pretty sure I wasn’t mistaking those sounds and the way they swayed.

  anyway my friend and i agreed they did everything as promised and then some. i would recommend this place for anyone needing their body and their mind freshened up. yes its kind of confronting at first but when you walk out of there its like your old life is scrubbed away and you are ready for anything.

  oh signage getting there could be a bit more targeted and in more languages. in this day and age you shdnt have to be signlanguaging to locals to get to an advertised place.

  Passed Master

  I get up, thinking it’s early, but the sun’s beat me to it. It celebrates in a clean sky. The trees encourage it, standing in their line along the hill, flinging up their arms. Everything I look at promises something. I will bury you with that mongrel cross-faced cat who sickened and died alongside you.

  They’ll make me burn your clothes, but I’ll salvage something. Some garment that doesn’t speak of illness. I can hardly remember how you smelt before, it’s been so long since the days when you dazzled us.

  I’ll dig out your sage-green jumper, fire up the smokehouse one last time, hang it there awhile.

  I’ll put it on and go down to the beach, roll there in whatever the sea’s flung into the weed at the tideline. I’ll go up to the pine forest, embrace every tree, fungus and weeping resin and all.

  I had thought to bury with you that geode from my old collection, the one you said would be the best, and which I never sawed open, having tired of exposing secrets. To lay it under your hand, unprepossessing egg, all possibility yet and forever.

  Instead I’ll take a washed, worn stone from the streambed. You can hold that, on into the years, weighty, dense. Seeking inside itself, it would only discover more density, more darkness.

  Hand Magic

  Chop off your hands and put them into fire. (You can only cast this spell a certain number of times.) They will try to catch hold of the flames, then cease to strive. Keep the murmuring constant—any pause will result in surface imperfections; any serious interruption will mean a lifelong dependency on ordinary others—they’ll scorn you, too, for bringing this on yourself.

  Test the forged hands against a heart that you have damascened with many others, and honed to a resilient edge. It is unlikely that your own will be suitable unless it has beaten for two score years and ten.

  If you have proceeded correctly—and few enough workers do—in the course of testing, the fingers will sing a high, fine note above the forge’s growl.

  They will glow with a force greater than simple flame born of peat and bellows. They will obey the biology of bones and tendons, but be unconstrained by it. The hair singed off them will never grow back, although you will smell it, sometimes, in their creations.

  Now these hands are fit for blessing the most fragile of unions, the most peculiar. They are capable of firming the least element that can be firmed, as the parties, joining hands, leap into the light.

  Digs

  It seems I’m always walking in on some aftermath or other. A caped official. Broken wards roving about, wittering: Don’t come too close—some loose presence will adhere!

  I’m new to this cabal. They’ve put me in the high rise. So high that a hawk nests on the ledge below my window.

  I haunt the market where we used to browse. I watch the traders’ demonstrations. How slick they are! They could put a bit more heart in it. I turn over packets, pieces, vessels, tubing. Plans form that I suggest to now-imaginary you, and I lay the items back, so desolate sometimes that my legs almost give way.

  Last night the freshers had a party on the heights, throwing out random effects the way they do. My window was one of several holed and starred, the tower’s eyes blinded. So I can’t watch the hill road any more, hoping to see your car. This must mean, I say to my spread-out books, that she’ll never visit again.

  Getting There

  You always break something on arrival. Sometimes a whole window, into a ballroom full of shocked dancers, and then you must run, or explain, apologise or pull some magic out of the air to make amends. Sometimes only a cordial-glass falls from a manservant’s hand, and shatters on the slates as he stares.

  Or you startle an animal, suddenly there in their path. A deer is no problem, or any wild thing whose first instinct is to flee. But a horse with a cart attached, or any decent guard dog, and your adventures start most energetically. It may be some time before you can find the Cause, and begin striving towards the Ultimate End. Assure your own safety first.

  Then there are times when a whole universe goes awry, skewed by your landing there. You must work at high speed, then, to achieve the End before the place reduces to meaningless fragments. Orientation, the location of a guide, the progress through the trials and interim gains to the Great Reward at the End—well, all your practice stands you in good stead, let me say. You hardly draw breath, traveling, placing, joining this to that, obeying the Cause at your core. And once all’s achieved, you’re out before there’s time for even a clap on the shoulder, a word of thanks.

  Don’t worry, you wish you could say, when you fall at their slippered feet among the shards of broken border. I will mend more than I shatter, I promise you.

  Costumier

  As a girl I loved glamours, shaping and sealing them to hide the form beneath, but also to use it. I remember a curved semblance, silk-dressed, vague-faced because I wasn’t yet much good with flesh. After long adjustments in front of the mirror I wore it along the main street, past the young prospectors queued outside the assay office. From inside, a wag sang “Maid of Athens”. My semblance sailed onward as I burned and groaned inside.

  At sixteen, when my figure had filled out but the warts had not yet sprouted, I threw together, with better instinct than skill, a flexible assemblage, clothing her in a striking print that at first glance looked like flowers but closer up was fighting cats. I put it on, and when the vegetable cart came by I went out to buy some swedes and lettuce. The old grocer crooned at me from his high seat. His pregnant wife looked me in the eye—she knew what I was, and I she.

  Ten years, then, of melting, moulting, moltenness. A kind of pupation, when clothes were for warmth, and glamours only for hiding in. While coven service destroyed my small ration of looks. While my family either died or tried to ignore me.

  Since then I’ve worn the garment of my calling. It neither flatters nor deceives. When still, I’m invisible inside it; in motion I’m revealed, the warp of me and the once-wept-over. I bear its weight without terror now, without embarrassment; I don’t disguise the patches or remove the stains. I don it each day almost without thinking, almost as if I wore nothing at all.

  Those Women

  and they never meet a man’s eye

  and they hide their bodies in voluminous sack-dresses

  and they are none too clean

  and they live
in hardly what you’d call a house

  and their cats their dogs their birds are of an unfortunate stamp

  and they go to their work in the night

  and they never smile except unexpectedly

  and they never eat or are seen to buy food

  and it’s always a nasty surprise to see them

  and they have no manners, goes without saying

  and they’re banned long ago from chapel

  and they were serially married, but so long ago no one remembers

  and they must be warned off, periodically, by the law

  and they have loose tongues and wild brains, almost broken

  and their eyes wander like dead leaves bobbing down a stream

  and they sit laughing in the empty square

  and their skirts trail in the dust and mud

  and they seem to have come from no family

  and their hair is nests and pennants in the wind

  and they will come for us in the end, you wait and see.

  Unchosen

  Her brothers stand along the wall as the brougham pulls away. This is recompense for the years they baited and scorned her: to leave them open mouthed, seeing that she’ll have quite another life, feeling the meanness of their own.

  They have never seen such a carriage, sleek and silver trimmed. Or such horses—the rich sound of city-shod hooves on the road, the fine gleam of well-fed, well-groomed haunches. They have never seen such a person as this fetchman, his slight form wrapped closely in figured black silk, his cane never used to support him, but only to prod dubious surfaces, or raise in command. He carries, besides the cane, an air conferred on him by his role, a muted version of his mistress’s glory, and it’s this that has kept the boys in the yard while he negotiated, that keeps them now behind the wall instead of running after the carriage, leaping to see her seated in the cushioned insides.

  And Mother? Her last glimpse of Mother was leaning in the doorway, arms folded, mouth shut tight, all her arguments conquered, and double-quick, with money. If the girl had any illusions of her mother’s affections, all are gone now. To hear her talk to the fetchman, you’d think her daughter was no more to her than a basket of eggs. Greed and rage mingled in her eyes, and she’d been so fearful of asking too little that she’d pursued the small fierce man to the carriage. He’d dismissed her, his cane tapping her hand that grasped the door.

  Wind gusts shake the carriage, adding to its rumble over the rough road. Her feet will never walk here again. Spits of rain stroke the window-view. Mother is jealous, she thinks in wonderment. Even Mother wishes it were she in this brougham being trotted away to the beldam’s house in the city. She will be herding those boys indoors now, to cut short the sight of her daughter’s grand luck. She will put them to all sorts of work and find a reason to beat one of them. This temper will last for days—and the girl need endure not a single shout, a single blow. Without lifting a finger or uttering a word, she has had her revenge, she has got the better of all of them, she has cast them off behind her.

  Kez the Gardener

  This is how I know our friend Kez: Where’s all me little mates? Then here she is, taking up the doorway, side-grinning Kez the Gardener—but there’s more to that job than it sounds.

  She makes for the fire, settles in the inglenook. Her coat smells of earth and dung as she warms. Master of the deadpan, the dry line and the telling pause, she stuffs her long pipe, tamping down the shreds. Those square-topped fingers look like nothing much, but their trembling is from working marvels, making our crops and our cattle thrive.

  We come and go, scrapping and scolding, and the most she ever does is lift a dark eyebrow at how the ungifted carry on.

  Kezzy oh Kezzy the children cry, and she cries their names back, takes them up, kisses them and sits them on her knee, wreaths their heads in smoke.

  Kez oh Kez, come home now off the hills! Bang the door and stamp there. The tea’s in the pot and the bread’s ready to cut, and I want to see your everlasting boots, your snaggle teeth, and your slow wink over the children’s heads.

  Tower View

  In the middle of the window, where the far hill meets the sky, sits the house you stole me from. You make me stand and watch it as you brush out my hair every morning. You bind my ankles with the slippery gold; you swaddle us together in its silk.

  Hunters arrive in their different seasons. They ride about, loosing death from their bows. Their horses’ hooves make what sounds like a heartbeat, hidden by the forest’s green cloudbanks, or shown for what it is through the leafless winter haze.

  A pierced bird falls from its grace silently. A stag may run many miles, dragging its red trail, never crying out.

  Whenever I make to speak, you gag me with gold. You mask my face, wind the golden cape a little tighter, and laugh. You pin my arms to my sides with bonds I grew myself.

  You are mine now, you say. Oh youth oh beauty oh love we are one.

  You make me lie down with you. You wait for it to be true. Wait on, old woman, old witch. You must wait a long time—until I am dead and rotting in this shroud of gold—before you may feed on me.

  Pounce

  Ha! How funny was it that he pounced right then, hey? Just when you were wishing aloud that someone would come along and fix things with us and Biddy’s mob. And we were right up on the peak of the cliffs—we couldn’t’ve got closer to the sky without actually flying.

  And wasn’t he repulsive? So sudden—where’d he come from? And then he tilted at us, deeper than a body should be able to. Shudder. And, God, his get-up—that concert-coat and creaking shirtfront, that monocle lighting his screwed-in eye! And the voice on him, so low and ingratiating—how did we even hear it, with the wind rattling our hair at our ears?

  So odd, so horrid. All our little worries were just creeping out of our mouths, bringing us together, bringing us relief and the first inklings of hope. Then there he was, wrapped and dark in our path like a landed insect, springing older fears inside us.

  Invitations

  I’d be glad to raise your dog from the dead. How piteously you ask me! I’d put my hand on his brow and in an instant have him bounding up on you, licking away your happy tears. If only my own hound’s hackles hadn’t risen whenever this one came near. If only my ears weren’t full of the scandal you’ve been spreading about me. If only my wife, brutalized all her youth by such as you, had not been further shamed by your mates every time she passed the town hall steps. But all these things are true.

  I’d join you for a pint at The Admiral in an instant, man, if the fever had not this town by the throat. If I were not being fetched day and night to houses of stone and mud and rubbish wood, to pull people back from the brink. If there were not decent hardworking beasts needing repair and attention everywhere I turn about the countryside. But this is how it is.

  Sure and I’d turn myself into the kind of man you’re comfortable with, if these hills were not overrun with forces that mean us ill. If the sky didn’t boil at night with the battle you can’t even see. If I weren’t so spent, holding back the new shapes our enemies devise to slip past my slim defences. But all these things are so, and I must turn you away. I will meet your eye, I will refrain from harsh words, I’ll not even insult you with a shrug. But this is the way the world is, and I dismiss you into your grief, as you and all your like have left me to mine, time and time again.

  Rabbit’s Foot

  Here, she said, you see these amulets? You see how they get? Dust clings to them, and handling depletes them. With the brush, you see? Tidy the fur, get into the corners. With the smoother ones, a little polish with the rag, but lightly, to take nothing from them.

  She put me to work by the window, where everyone could see I was hers now. I prayed none of my friends would pass and make fun of me through the glass. I picked out the amulets one by one, neatened them, put them on th
e fresh cloth in the fresh basket.

  How will they get strong again, I asked her, the ones that are faded?

  I’ll see to that, she said, when they’re clean. I couldn’t see what she was up to over there, shuffling and clinking among her books and boxes.

  I worked on, the wintry sun on my forehead and on my work. They were chips of amber and flint, they were knotted wool-scraps and beaten flax tied with red thread, they were thumb-dolls and beads on rings of hair. They were little parcels of cloth, paper, leather, ingenious fastenings—cord, weed, word—which I left undisturbed. They were felted pieces with herbs and grains pounded in; they were webs wrapped around mysteries hard and soft, round and cornered, prickles coming through.

  And then there was only the paw left, which I’d been avoiding, nudging it aside for the others. And then I’d be done—And what will she have me do next?, I was wondering as I picked up the paw.

  It burned a hole in my hand. The hole drank the rest of me. On the other side there were wolves, and all I had was rabbit-magic, the fearing sort, the fleeing. There was a storm of lightning, no thunder no cloud. My teeth sang, and there were snappings at my tail—

  And a snap that was the old woman’s fingers, and there was the windowpane, bubbled and bright, and there the street outside. I smelled my blood and my skull, and the breath whistling through its halls.