Singing My Sister Down and other stories Read online

  The king straightened. Seemingly dazed, he walked towards his family and attendants, who put out their arms to him, who drew him in among them. He bowed his head as if overcome, and their keening intensified. They led him from the room, slowly, in deference to the grief they imagined he carried. The nurse broke away from me to join the entourage. And the princess lay, lone, still, beautified in her high casket, abandoned in her musty rooms by all but echoes of the court’s wailing.

  I arrived near the very end of my babies’ dedication ceremony. The celebrant had just taken a handful of blue-ash from the stone bowl and was pressing a pinch of it to my wife Nella’s forehead, and to my brother Frand’s, who was taking my place. My little boy Aitha and his sister Heely lay on padded cloths to either side of the ash-bowl, lifting their heavy brocade robes into disarray with their small, strong legs, spoiling the gold leaf-work of their cuffs with their mouthings.

  Nella and Frand took up the babies for the final blessing. Frand turned, saw me at the door, and brought little Heely all the way down the temple to me. He pressed his forehead against mine to transfer the blue-ash, and gave me the baby.

  I walked towards the celebrant. All around me was my smiling family, but I could not smile myself. Dead-hearted I was, yet I had never been so conscious of my child’s weight in my arms, or seen so clearly the intertwining symbols carved into the arch over the celebrant’s head, or felt so fully the holiness of a temple occasion. Awe hung in equipoise with the horror within me.

  When Nella turned with Aitha she saw some of this. Her face changed; she looked freshly woken, curious as a bride. I touched her cheek as I reached her; I had so much to tell her.

  But it would have to wait. I took my place beside her, and held Heely as Heely liked to be held, against my heart and looking over my shoulder. She explored the braid of my palace coat with her tiny, slow-moving fingers, her head striving for steadiness, her breathing light and never quite even.

  The celebrant raised his arms and resumed his chanting, moving us all towards the high final point of the dedication. I held my baby daughter tightly, and closed my eyes to listen.

  ‘WRAP YOUR PA SOME lunch up, Sharon,’ says Ma.

  ‘What, one of these bunnocks? Two?’

  ‘Take him two. And a good fat strip of smoke. And the hard cheese, all that’s left. Here’s his lemon.’ She whacks the cork into the bottle with the flat of her hand.

  I wrap the heavy bottle thickly, so it won’t break if it drops. I put it in the carry-cloth and the bunnocks and other foods on top, in such a way that nothing squashes anything else.

  ‘Here I go.’

  Ma crosses from her sweeping and kisses my right cheek. ‘Take that for him and this for you.’ She kisses my left. ‘And tell him about those pigeon; that’ll give him spirit till this evening.’

  ‘I will.’ I lift the door in the floor.

  I used to need light; I used to be frightened. Not any more. Now I step down and my heart bumps along as normal; I close the lid on myself without a flinch.

  I start up with ‘The Ballad of Priest and Lamb’. The stairway is good for singing; it has a peculiar echo. Also, Ma likes to hear me as I go. ‘It brightens my ears, your singing,’ she says, ‘and it can’t do any harm to those below, can it?’

  Down I go. Down and down, down and round, round and round I go, and all is black around me and the invisible stone stairs take my feet down. I sing with more passion the lower I go, and more experimenting, where no one can hear me. And then there begins to be light, and I sing quieter; then I’m right down to humming, so as not to draw attention when I get there.

  Out into the smells and the red twilight I go. It’s mostly the fire-river that stinks, the fumes wafting over from way off to the right before its flames mingle with the tears that make it navigable. But the others have their own smells, too. Styx-water is sharp and bites inside your nostrils. Lethe-water is sweet as hedge-roses and makes you feel sleepy.

  Down the slope I go to the ferry, across the velvety hell-moss badged here and there with flat red liverworts. The dead are lined up in their groups looking dumbly about; once they’ve had their drink, Pa says, you can push them around like tired sheep. Separate them out, herd them up as you desire. Pile them into cairns if you want to! Stack them like faggots – they’ll stay however you put them. They’ll only mutter and move their heads side to side like birds.

  The first time I saw them, I turned and ran for the stairs. I was only little then. Pa caught up to me and grabbed me by the back of my pinafore. ‘What the blazes?’ he said.

  ‘They’re horrible!’ I covered my face and struggled as he carried me back.

  ‘What’s horrible about them? Come along and tell me.’ And he took me right close and made me examine their hairlessness and look into their empty eyes, and touch them, even. Their skin was without print or prickle, slippery as a green river stone. ‘See?’ said Pa. ‘There’s nothing to them, is there?’

  ‘Little girl!’ a woman had called from among the dead. ‘So sweet!’

  My father reached into the crowd and pulled her out by her arm. ‘Did you not drink all your drink, madam?’ he said severely.

  She made a face. ‘It tasted foul.’ Then she turned and beamed upon me. ‘What lovely hair you have! Ah, youth!’

  Which I don’t. I have thick, brown, straight hair, chopped off as short as Ma will let me – and sometimes shorter when it really gives me the growls.

  My dad had put me down and gone for a cup. He made the woman drink the lot, in spite of her faces and gagging. ‘Do you want to suffer?’ he said. ‘Do you want to feel everything and scream with pain? There’s a lot of fire to walk through, you know, on the way to the Blessed Place.’

  ‘I’m suffering now,’ she said, but vaguely, and by the time she finished the cup I was no longer visible to her – nothing was. She went in among the others and swayed there like a tall, thin plant among plants. And I’ve never feared them since, the dead. My fear dried up out of me, watching that woman’s self go.

  Here comes Pa now, striding up the slope away from the line of dead. ‘How’s my miss, this noontide? How’s my Scowling Sarah?’

  Some say my dad is ugly. I say, his kind of work would turn anyone ugly, all the gloom and doom of it. And anyway, I don’t care – my dad is my dad. He can be ugly as a sackful of bumholes and still I’ll love him.

  Right now his hunger buzzes about him like a cloud of blowflies. ‘Here.’ I slip the carry-cloth off my shoulder. ‘And there’s two fat pigeon for supper, in a pie.’

  ‘Two fat pigeon in one fat pie? You set a wicked snare, Sharon Armstrong.’

  ‘You look buggered.’ I sit on the moss beside him. ‘And that’s a long queue. Want some help, after?’

  ‘If you would, my angel.’ Donk, says the cork out of the bottle. Pa’s face and neck and forearms are all brown wrinkled leather.

  He works his way through a bunnock, then the meat, the cheese, the second bun. He’s neat and methodical from first bite to last sup of the lemon.

  When he’s done, he goes off a way and turns his back to pee into the lemon bottle, for you can’t leave your earthly wastes down here or they’ll sully the waters. He brings it back corked and wrapped and tucks it into the carry-cloth next to a rock on the slope. ‘Well, then.’

  I scramble up from the thick dry moss and we set off down the springy slope to the river.

  A couple of hours in, I’m getting bored. I’ve been checking the arrivals, sending off the ones without coin and taking the coin from under those tongues that have it, giving the paid ones their drink and checking there’s nothing in their eyes, no hope or thought or anything, and keeping them neat in their groups with my stick and my voice. Pa has rowed hard, across and back, across and back. He’s nearly to the end of the queue. Maybe I can go up home now?

  But in his hurry Pa has splashed some tears onto the deck. As he steps back to let the next group of the dead file aboard, he slips on that wetness, and disappe
ars over the side, into the woeful river, so quickly he doesn’t have time to shout.

  ‘Pa!’ I push my way through the slippery dead. ‘No!’

  He comes up spluttering. Most of his hair has washed away.

  ‘Thank God!’ I grab his hot, wet wrist. ‘I thought you were dead and drowned!’

  ‘Oh, I’m dead all right,’ he says.

  I pull him up out of the river. The tears and the fire have eaten his clothes to rags and slicked the hairs to his body. He looks almost like one of them. ‘Oh, Pa! Oh, Pa!’

  ‘Calm yourself, daughter. There’s nothing to be done.’

  ‘But look at you, Pa! You walk and talk. You’re more yourself than any of these are theirs.’ I’m trying to get his rags decent across his front, over his terrible bald willy.

  ‘I must go upstairs to die properly.’ He takes his hands from his head and looks at the sloughed-off hairs on them. ‘Oh Sharon, always remember this! A moment’s carelessness is all it takes.’

  I fling myself at him and sob. He’s slimed with dissolving skin, and barely warm, and he has no heartbeat.

  He lays his hand on my head and I let go of him. His face, even without hair, is the same ugly, loving face; his eyes are the same eyes. ‘Come.’ He leads the way off the punt. ‘It doesn’t do to delay these things.’

  I follow him, pausing only to pick up the carry-cloth in my shaking arms. ‘Can you not stay down here, where we can visit you and be with you? You’re very like your earthly form. Even with the hair gone—’

  ‘What, you’d have me wander the banks of Cocytus forever?’

  ‘Not forever. Just until – I don’t know. Just not now, just not to lose you altogether.’

  His hand is sticky on my cheek. ‘No, lovely. I must get myself coined and buried and do the thing properly. You of all people would know that.’

  ‘But, Pa!—’

  He lays a slimy finger on my lips. ‘It’s my time, Sharon,’ he says into my spilling eyes. ‘And I will take my love of you and your mother with me, into all eternity; you know that.’

  I know it’s not true, and so does he. How many dead have we seen, drinking all memory to nowhere? But I wipe away my tears and follow him.

  We start up the stairs, and soon it’s dark. He isn’t breathing; all I can hear is the sound of his feet on the stone steps, which is unbearable, like someone tonguing chewed food in an open mouth.

  He must have heard my thoughts. ‘Sing me something, Scowling Sarah. Sing me that autumn song, with all the wind and the birds in it.’

  Which I’m glad to do, to cover the dead-feet sounds and to pretend we’re not here like this, to push aside my fear of what’s to come, to keep my own feet moving from step to step.

  We follow the echoes up and up, and when I reach the end of the song, ‘Beautiful,’ he says. ‘Let’s have that again from the very start.’

  So I sing it again. I have to break off, though, near to the end. The trapdoor is above us, leaking light around its edges.

  ‘Oh, my pa!’ I hold his terrible flesh and cry. ‘Don’t come up! Just stay here on the stair! I will bring you your food and your drink. We can come down and sit with you. We will have you, at least—’

  ‘Go on, now.’ He plucks my arms from his neck, from his waist, from his neck again. ‘Fetch your mother for me.’

  ‘Just, even—’ My mind is floating out of my head like smoke. ‘Even if you could stay for the pigeon! For the pie! Just that little while! I will bring it down to you, on the platter—’

  ‘What’s all this noise?’ The trapdoor opens. Ma gives a shout of fright seeing Pa, and yes, in the cooler earthly light his face is – well, it is clear that he is dead.

  ‘Forgive me, wife,’ says his pale, wet mouth. His teeth show through his cheeks, and his eyes are unsteady in his shiny head. ‘I have gone and killed myself, and it is no one’s fault but my own.’ He has no breath, as I said. The voice, I can hear in this realer air, comes from somewhere else than his lungs, somewhere else, perhaps, than his body completely.

  Ma kneels slowly and reaches, slowly, into the top of the stair.

  ‘Charence Armstrong,’ she weeps at him, her voice soft and unbelieving, ‘how could you do this?’

  ‘He fell in the Acheron, Ma; he slipped and fell!’

  ‘How could you be so stupid?’ she tells him gently, searching the mess for the face she loves. ‘Come to me.’

  ‘As soon as I step up there I am dead,’ he says. ‘You must come down to me, sweet wife, and make your farewells.’

  There’s hardly the room for it, but down she comes onto the stairs, her face so angry and intense it frightens me. And then they are like the youngest of lovers in the first fire of love, kissing, kissing, holding each other tight as if they’d crush together into one. She doesn’t seem to mind the slime, the baldness of him, the visibility of his bones. The ragged crying all around us in the hole, that is me; these two are silent in their cleaving. I lean and howl against them and at last they take me in, lock me in with them.

  Finally we untangle ourselves, three wrecks of persons on the stairs. ‘Come, then,’ says my father. ‘There is nothing for it.’

  ‘Ah, my husband!’ whispers Ma, stroking his transparent cheeks.

  All the workings move under the jellified skin. ‘Bury me with all the rites,’ he says. ‘And use real coin, not token.’

  ‘As if she would use token!’ I say.

  He kisses me, wetly upon all the wet. ‘I know, little scowler. Go on up, now.’

  When he follows us out of the hole, it’s as if he’s rising through a still water-surface. It paints him back onto himself, gives him back his hair and his clothes and his colour. For a few flying moments he’s alive and bright, returned to us.

  But as his heart passes the rim, he stumbles. His face closes. He slumps to one side, and now he is gone, a dead man taken as he climbed from his cellar, a dead man fallen to his cottage floor.

  We weep and wail over him a long time.

  Then, ‘Take his head, daughter.’ Ma climbs back down into the hole. ‘I will lift his dear body from here.’

  The day after the burial, he walks into sight around the red hill in company with several other dead.

  ‘Pa!’ I start towards him.

  He smiles bleakly, spits the obolus into his hand and gives it to me as soon as I reach him. I was going to hug him, but it seems he doesn’t want me to.

  ‘That brother of mine, Gilles,’ he says. ‘He can’t hold his liquor.’

  ‘Gilles was just upset that you were gone so young.’ I fall into step beside him.

  He shakes his bald head. ‘Discourage your mother from him; he has ideas on her. And he’s more handsome than I was. But he’s feckless; he’ll do neither of you any good.’

  ‘All right.’ I look miserably at the coins in my hand. I can’t tell which is Pa’s, now.

  ‘In a moment it won’t matter.’ He puts his spongy hand on my shoulder. ‘But for now, I’m counting on you, Sharon. You look after her for me.’

  I nod and blink.

  ‘Now, fetch us our cups, daughter. These people are thirsty and weary of life.’

  I bring the little black cups on the tray. ‘Here, you must drink this,’ I say to the dead. ‘So that the fire won’t hurt you.’

  My father, of course, doesn’t need to be told. He drinks all the Lethe-water in a single swallow, puts down the cup and smacks his wet chest as he used to after a swig of apple-brandy. Up comes a burp of flowery air, and the spark dies out of his eyes.

  I guide all the waiting dead onto the punt. I flick the heavy mooring-rope off the bollard and we slide out into the current, over the pure clear tears-water braided with fine flames. The red sky is cavernous; the cable dips into the flow behind us and lifts out ahead, dripping flame and water. I take up the pole and push it into the riverbed, pushing us along, me and my boatload of shades, me and what’s left of my pa. My solid arms work, my lungs grab the hot air, my juicy heart pumps
and pumps. I never realised, all the years my father did this, what solitary work it is.

  WE SET OUT IN the depth of night, having held ourselves still all evening. Hloorobnool was poor at stillness, being only in her fifties. But our minder was a new man; he likely thought she rocked and puffed and raised her trunk like that every sunset. We could all have reared up and trumpeted, no doubt, without alarming that one. But our suffering was close to the surface; better to keep it packed into a tight circle than to risk rampage and shooting by letting it show.

  With the man gone to his rest, Booroondoonhooroboom set to work. She used her broken tusk on the gateposts, on the weak places where the hinges had been reset after Gorrlubnu’s madness. Pieces pattered to the ground as softly as impala dung. She worked and she sang, drawing the lullaby up around us. Before long we were all swaying in our night-stances, watching Booroondoon with our ears and our foreheads as well as our eyes.

  And then she had done loosening.

  ‘Gooroloomboon,’ she said, and Gooroloom came forward. The two of them lifted aside the chained-together gates, and there between the gateposts was a marvellous wide space. We had not expected it, somehow – though had we not all said, and planned, and agreed? Ah, it is a difficult thing, the new, and none of us like it much. We swayed and regarded the open gate. We were accustomed at the most to circling these gardens, with an owda on our back full of tickling peeple, and our mahout on our head.

  It took Booroondoon, our queen and mother, still singing very low, to move into the space, to show us that bodies such as ours could move from home into the dark beyond. And as soon as the darkness threatened to take her, to curtain her from our sight, it became not possible for any of us to stay.

  And so we moved, unweighted, from the gardens; Hmoorolubnu took my tail, as if that small thing would hold her steady in this storm of freedom. Zebu groaned at us behind their rails, and a goat on the stone hill lifted its head and gave brittle cry. But our bearing is the sort that soothes others; we move with inevitability, as the stars do, as the moon swells and shrinks upon the sky. We brushed aside the wooden gatehouse as if it were a plaything we had tired of, and the other animals remained calm. Gooroloom tumbled it to sticks, and our feet crushed it to dust. Above the dark and swollen river of our rage, my delight in our badness hung briefly bright.