Black Juice Read online

  ‘Samed,’ said Dot. ‘You are my best friend, but you don’t know when to keep quiet.’

  ‘Is there such a time?’ laughed Samed. He took his sunglasses from a child’s hand poked through the window, and tried to kiss the hand before it was snatched away.

  Dot tapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘We can go now,’ he said.

  wooden bride

  I’M IN DANGER. Up ahead, limousines, white horses, flower strewers, white-and-silver gift carts block the street. Here, brides and their families crowd. Irate mothers are shouting, fathers are giggling and some are trying to push forward; we brides stand motionless in First Position, like fence posts in a flood. But a few feet behind me, Gabby’s dad has started one of his hairy stories. In many a Composure class I’ve busted out laughing from one of those stories. But this is The Day; I can’t afford to come unstuck today. I have to get away from him, before the crowd jams up completely.

  I turn, and people make way for me. ‘Why,’ says Gabby’s dad in his always-surprised voice, ‘if it isn’t little Matty Weir!’ I steel myself for the joke he’ll toss at me, that’ll prod my mind in an unexpected spot and make me splutter laughter. But it doesn’t come, and I pass through. I lost Gabby’s dad for words! I won’t risk blushing by thinking about such a compliment now; I’ll store it away to tell Mother and Winke later, when I’m allowed to be myself.

  Here, I’ll duck into the Lanes district. I haven’t been through this part of town since they rebuilt after last year’s rat-hunt, but it can’t be that different, can it? And there won’t be a lot of people around; not many families in these poorer quarters can afford to bride-up a daughter.

  I gather up two handfuls of the beaded, white-tissue skirt. Last night’s rain has left all the flagstones gleaming, and the sun shows up every pore of them, every puddle and scrap of refuse. I tiptoe through.

  The slippers are made to last one day—this day. They’re folded out of varnished paper, with a twinkle in it. We had to go all the way to the markets at the Crossways to find a paperbinder who did shoes the old way with no glue, just sheer skill of folding and knowledge of a girl’s own foot and a girl’s own walk holding the creation together.

  Where am I, now?

  The crowd noise is fading behind me, though the bells still carol overhead. Oh yes, there’s the old Mechanics Hall, where Mother used to hold her mask-making workshops, so I turn right here to loop around the Orphans Home. I’m trying to hurry, yet stay Composed. I’m keeping my skin cool, all pores closed, as they taught us in School. I’ll come up to the side door of the church, by the Hospice there. It won’t matter to Mother and Winke; they can still come up the main way and do their nodding and smiling. That’s not the point of this, for me. I’m not quite sure what the point is—I couldn’t put it into words or anything—but it’s strong, and it’s not about getting the neighbours to admire me. The neighbours have nothing to do with it at all.

  What, have they moved the Orphans Home? Come to think of it, I did hear Gabby and Flo say something about that. Farther up the hill, for better drainage. But the lane looks much the same—maybe a bit of a curve downward, which I’ll have to compensate for when I get to Farmers Bar. Those bells, they’re wild, as if they’re shouting fire, or an attack on the town; they’re a test in themselves. But I’m prepared for that kind of test: I’ve got counting rhymes in my head; I’ve got breathing exercises; I’ve got six terms worth of Bride School resources to draw on.

  And then the bells stop, and the lane stops. And I stop. Farmers Bar isn’t here.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I say coolly, firmly. ‘No matter how ratty, a public house doesn’t move. They smoke out the cellars, and they scrub everything else down with disinfectant.’

  Then I remember: it was the Olds Home that moved, not the Orphans; they moved all the olds away from the dampness, for their arthritis or something. The Orphans Home should have been where it always was.

  Five lanes meet where I’m standing; not a soul stirs along any of them. Not a sound from any window or door.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say, counting furiously inside to keep my heart down. ‘I can go back the way I came.’

  But behind me are two lanes, and with all my revolving I can’t remember which one I came down.

  ‘The church is at the top of the hill, Mattild.’ There’s a shake in my voice, and I pause to do some breathing. ‘All you have to do is choose any lane that goes upward, and you’ll be there.’

  So I set off. Actually, the silence—just the pat and shush of my shoes—is more alarming than the bells were. The silence means they’re inside the church—all the brides, anyway. The relatives will take a while to shuffle in. But I mustn’t think about that; I must just walk and breathe and count.

  Every lane deceives me; every lane curves. I set out confidently upward at every corner; I end up hoisting my skirts behind me so they won’t drag as I go down steps. Lanes keep ending at a wall, or a dripping mill-wheel, or they continue on the other side of an unbridged drain a trousered person could leap, but not me in my finery. I go back and forth, breathing, counting, intent on outwitting the Lanes. I try a new tactic, taking some downward streets in the hope that their curves will take me upward. No such luck; down and down they go. I’m so confused, I’m just starting to think I’m getting somewhere when I arrive—the lane does a quick turnabout and dumps me—at an arched gateway in the town wall.

  I stand there, counting, breathing, shocked. Beyond the gate, the water meadows and the market gardens stretch purple and many-greened among their windguards of black pines. Rubbish-stink streams from the pits farther east.

  Ha! said my dad over the whirr and clatter of his workshop. I was there to wangle money out of him towards my shoes. My daughter? Matty Weir? Miss Million-Miles-an-Hour? Miss Ten-Projects-at-Once, none of them ever finished? You haven’t a hope! You’re lucky to’ve made it through the first semester. They mustn’t have much of a crop this year. All this very cheerfully, as he zizzed the wooden bowl to a perfect curve on the lathe.

  And then Mother, wearing that face that makes you ashamed to have brought her down from the clouds where she dances and sings and brings such joy to so many people—that doubtful, older face: But are you sure about this?

  Which I was, I was. Tearfulness rises in my throat. My skin trembles, ready to give out. I was sure I was sure, until …

  An old woman in blue gardening clothes appears in the archway, carrying an enormous cabbage. ‘Madam,’ she says, and walks in past me.

  Madam, she said, not Miss. You see a bride, you don’t meet her eye. You say Madam to acknowledge her, but nothing more unless she speaks to you. Thank the Saints that woman came along.

  I breathe more carefully. My shoes are still good—perhaps a bit soft underfoot, but still good. I just need to walk out a little way beyond the arch to see which gate I’m at, to see my way back.

  I lift my skirts and go. I’m not far out among the fields before I can see the church’s twin spires. But I’m behind them; if I take any of the three gates I can see from here, I’ll be straight back in the maze. Better to go around on the outside to a gate that leads to straighter streets, like Silk Street or Jewellers Way. I shade my eyes and pick out a zigzag way for myself, along the broad earthen field-walls, between the water meadows and the moving leaves of purple sour-kale.

  I put out of my head the thought of Mother and Winke and all the other families in the church, sitting patched pink with rose-window light. I push away the vision of all the other brides, their upper bodies like snooty white flockherons at rest on a mist of white gorgeousness. I just walk, swiftly and calmly, trying to think of nothing.

  You see, said Mother doubtfully, as someone who had to go to Bride School herself, whose parents wanted it more than anything else in the world, I sometimes thought …

  It was as if her voice were funnelling stubbornness and resentment into my spine.

  You see, the kings and queens that it’s modelled on
, they’re just so long dead; they have so little to do with our lives now. They’re four revolutions ago—think about that! And what were those revolutions about?

  I spoke through gritted teeth. I don’t care what they were about—

  About people being able to relax, and move any way they wanted, and find their own path creatively. They were about freedom.

  She was in full flight and making perfect sense. I had to stop her before she deflected me. Which doesn’t mean, I said gaspingly—I had no control over my breathing, back then—which doesn’t mean the Straitened kings and queens were all bad. I mean, people must have let them rule because they believed the way they lived worked in some way, don’t you think? It’s not as if they revolted after six months—those royals had power for hundreds of years! If everybody hates you, you can’t last that long. I think I made a pretty good fist of it, considering I hadn’t even been to the Bride School Open Day yet.

  Mother was too smart for me. Dad just laughed at me. Once I got through the entrance tests, all I had on my side was stubbornness. I couldn’t explain it to myself any more than I could to them. I listened; I agreed; but I dug in my heels. It’s just something I’m Going To Do, I said. I’ve never imagined not doing it. I’ve always meant to. That was all I had.

  Bit by bit, the zigs and zags of the field-walls work me farther from the town. The spires turn, and the façade comes into view, the rose-window with the Saints’ linked crowns above it. But it seems to be moving farther away, not closer. The fields’ silence takes over, plopped more silent by fish, creaked more silent by breeze-shifted cabbage-leaves, startled quieter by a burst of bird out of reeds. Always there are people at middle distance or beyond, bending to the water, to the feet of the plants, wading in mirages.

  This gentle, shoe-protecting walk is tiring after a while. I’m glad when I reach my friend Yakkert’s village, with its wide, flat path, where I don’t have to carry my skirts to protect my hems. My hands feel raw from that, after two years of oiling and gloving them, two years of keeping them safe from cuts and callouses.

  People are laundering at the water-race on the common. At tables outside the house-doors, children and old people are picking over dried cornsilk to make their votive dollies. ‘Madam,’ says anyone I pass near, and they lower their eyes. They all know me, and I them. Two years ago I used to come out here to fish the race regularly; I’ve made so many dollies with these people, I could do it in my sleep. But none of them will greet me by name while I’m dressed like this.

  My skin feels thin, ready to perspire. It’s not that I care whether they talk to me. I can come back tomorrow and they’ll be as friendly as ever. I sit on a stump and Yakkert’s cat, Biddy, comes up to me. A cat’s not to know you can’t approach a bride, is she? I give her a bridely stroke of the head, instead of wrestling her over and pushing my face into her belly-fur, as I usually would.

  Yakkert’s mother passes in front of me and leaves a pottery cup of cool tea on the next stump. She knows I’m supposed to save my mouth for bishop’s cake and wedding wine. But she wouldn’t—no one here would—think less of me if I drank that tea.

  Which isn’t the point, I tell myself as the circle of sky on the tea-surface stills from its rocking. Besides, it’s enough that she’s put it there. I don’t have to actually drink it to get the benefit.

  I stand up and check my skirt-hems. At the back, the edges are grey-brown and damp from brushing the dew and the ground. And the outer edge of one shoe is sodden, in spite of my careful walking. I’ll have to walk differently, oddly, so it doesn’t get any worse. I could take the shoes off and go barefoot and faster. I could bundle up my skirts and run, and probably reach the church before the brides leave. Why can’t I find it in myself to do that?

  Because it would be me, Miss Matty Weir, who never finishes things, who never does things quite right, who’d be running. It would be the person everyone expects me to be, the person everyone thinks I am.

  I gather up some skirt into my sore hands, and walk away from the village. You just keep up the Bridal Gait, Mattild. Though it be among weeds and the trickle of leaking watergates, instead of across petals and floor-wax, you step and step until you get where you said—through six terms of homework and gown-fittings and gossip and abstinence-from-all-fun—where you said you were going to go. You might not get to smell the incense, or hear the pure drone of the Wedding Song from the choir, or see the visiting bishop in his magnificent tarnished ancient robe, his rings all over carbuncles. But you set yourself on this path to becoming someone not Matty, someone cool and unflustered, remote, with impermeable skin. And you’ll get there—with measured steps you’ll get there.

  ‘Madam,’ say a string of gardeners’ children. Each carries a puppy in one hand and a basket of sorted eggs in the other. The sun has lost all its morning kindness, lifting into steam, killing off the breeze. It stings through my sheer sleeves and on my neck, which is usually covered by my mess of hair. My skin feels cool, though; I’m keeping it that way.

  The bells shout again. In the church the brides will be losing some of their Composure—they’ve only the photographs to go, and then they can all fall away down the porch stairs, blessed and brilliant and allowed to laugh now, to wreck their dresses, to show their legs, to hug their families. The feast awaits in flower-stuffed halls around town: many-storeyed white cakes, powder-blue wedding cachous, flavoured violets, glazed fruit, clove-studded meats, saltcrusted heart-biscuits.

  Paths go off to right and left, among dank slabs of mirror whiskered with rice. But no path seems to lead to the mound of the town—not straightly, anyway. But I’ll get there, even if not straightly. The bishop must stay for the feasting; if the worst comes to the worst he can bless me among flowers, between mouthfuls of cake, with cake-cream on his beard.

  WHEN FINALLY I REACH THE GATE I WANT and step out of the meadows, the town streets are empty, dim and very cool. The higher I climb, the more flower-petals are gummed to the flags, the more constant are the gusts of chatter and music channelled along the lanes. I know exactly where I am and how to avoid those halls, the sight of food, the cries of brides with unpinned hair. My leg aches from my toe gripping the loose shoe; my hands are stiff from carrying the netting skirt; my arms cramp from lifting all the expensive cloth.

  The church is stripped of its usual pennants and garlands. The church square, too, is bare of all decoration. Of all the people who choked the streets this morning, only the photographer is left, folding his black cloth on the church steps.

  I rustle across the square. All those Posture, Carriage, Masque and Step lessons play themselves out in me as if I have no will of my own. The boned bodice holds my back right, and my face is rightly wooden, empty of anything—weariness, anxiety, relief, determination, anything.

  The photographer glances aside from his equipment case. He sees the stained edge of my skirt and pauses.

  ‘Mr Pellisson,’ I say in my cold, rehearsed Bride-Voice.

  ‘Madam.’ His gaze remains lowered.

  ‘I require your sponsorship. Is the bishop within?’

  ‘He is, Madam.’ He closes his case with a soft, rich click. Wordlessly he precedes me up the steps.

  The church is very dark, its air like cold water. It seems much larger than usual, cleared of all candles, all votives, banners, flowers. All the cosiness is gone, and the building’s ribs rise naked to separate the high lattice windows. A vein of light runs up the central aisle, a carpet of white petals. Someone is sweeping them from the altar towards us; he slips into a side-aisle and murmurs ‘Madam’ as we pass.

  We reach the altar. All the monstrances with their yellowed Relics have been taken away, all the cloths and vases and prayer-trees. The only ornament is the Saint-Crown on its purple cushion on the altar, two palace guards in ceremonial black like statues either side. The only scent is of cold marble.

  The photographer opens the brass altar-gate for me. The cold strikes straight up through my damp paper shoes.
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  We skirt the altar and enter the vestry, which is smaller, warmer, carpeted, and full of the cedar smell of vain old man. The lace trim on the hem of the bishop’s under-robe—well, none at my School could afford such stuff. I mustn’t meet his eye, mustn’t look for the outer vestments, the thorned mitre. I must keep my eyes on the red carpet, the expensive hem, the gilded paper slipper-toe.

  A plain wooden kneeler is pushed in front of me. Pellisson’s hand plucks a leaf from the beading near my hem and withdraws.

  I kneel, and the bishop starts the blessing: Witness: To the holy basilica of All Saints comes this young woman, beloved of the town of Mountfort-among-the-Waters … He doesn’t need the vestments, this man; the words vest him, vest all three of us as beautifully as the robes would. He shapes his voice to set the small, padded vestry singing.

  … before witnesses that she has undergone instruction and proven herself constituted of such purity of body, austerity of practice, modesty of habit and restraint and moderation of temperament as befits …

  How many times have I read those words in the liturgybook? How many times have I stopped and said to myself, That isn’t me. I’m just not like that, moderate and pure and austere. I’ll never make it through; they’ll stop me way before the Day when a bishop would say those words over me. ‘What were you thinking, Matty?’ they’ll say, and laugh, and send me to the cashier to claim back the rest of the School fee. Yet here I am, relaxed in the flow of the holy words, firm in the rightness of this, taking the blessing and knowing—as I haven’t known for two whole years, as I didn’t even know this morning, darting out of the house because I hadn’t the patience to wait for Mother to dress Winke’s hair; as I didn’t know pacing the Lanes and counting—that it’s mine to take, that I deserve it, that I’ve earned it. I’ve made myself a Bride; out among the fields today, alone and without instruction, I wedded myself to the severe and lovely ways of the old dead kings and queens at their height, when all the people loved them. And now the bishop’s thumb is dipping into the sacred oil and ash—ash that once, centuries ago, was actual kingly or queenly matter—and he’s whispering to himself the final and most secret words, in the language of the Straitened times, and applying history to my brow.