Haweswater (26 page)

With only months left until its anticipated demise, the building has finally been saved. Janet breathes out, tension flooding away. For her, the mission to preserve a separate learning centre for the children of Mardale, rather than have them amalgamated into other schools permanently, has been of the utmost importance. It has seemed essential to the memory of the village. To Hazel Bowman and the teachers before her, the children themselves, to the efforts of so many. A tribute to the fact that learning has been such a loved and brilliant thing in Mardale. And essential for her own sense of achievement, for winning a small battle in this vast, already-won war. For future hope. Another shiver, flowing along the streamway of the first. Her own scent in the room.

The door latch lifts and her mother enters the kitchen. She has not worn the face she has on now for almost two decades. It is flat with the countering of agony. She moves swiftly to her daughter and clasps her shoulders firmly, gently, and from this rare, maternal gesture her daughter knows already that Jack Liggett is dead. Suddenly there is silence, overwhelming all else and blanketing the voice of her mother. She cannot hear her own screams until Ella tells her to stop them. And until her body stops breaking open an hour later her mother holds her, with arms that once held so many rupturing bodies, remembering how it is done, exactly, effortlessly. As if she has never stopped doing it. But this time it is her own issue, broken and dying.

In the shimmering calm, Ella takes her scissors from the dresser drawer and cuts off her daughter’s hair, without ceremony. As if she knows instinctively that it must be done.

There are some people who are born containing a residue of sorrow, blackbrae, the dark slope, this disposition is called in the north, as if in a past life they have been party to tremendous suffering, or because they are fated to endure the slip down into some kind of torment. As a child, she often dreamed of drowning in darkness, like the Swindale pools, and she woke holding her breath, with something awful at the back of her mind, her heart struggling to move blood. As if she had always known that sorrow was coming, sometime in the future, that it would be incorporated into her life. So now it is familiar to her, horribly known, and she meets it head-on and accepts it. She closes her eyes, opens them again. Sleep is evasive when she wants it, times like this unbearable, sunny afternoon, though at points it engulfs her in an exhausting, narcoleptic tide and she lies down wherever she is, surrendering to its wishes. Loss of consciousness is perhaps
her worst enemy. It will trick her with its powers of neglect, its forsaking of memory. It will bury the knowledge of loss until that quick awakening hours or minutes later restores the taste of death again, fresher than ever. For a second, he might still be living. Then the truth, rushing above like the rain when they first touched. Jack Liggett is dead. Each new day, he is dead, rawly and again. She cannot bear the multiple imparting of ill tidings that come on the brink of no-man’sland, between waking and dreaming. The mind locked into a repetitive nightmare of having to realize truth. It is better not to sleep if she can, to remain faithful to the pain of now, to the one, all-consuming sorrow.

She shudders on the bed, turns to face the ceiling. The sore on her shoulder tingles. She has been in one position too long. Her stomach begins to heave from lack of protein, from the long absence of substantial quantities of food, from days of sub-standard nourishment. Saliva rushes in her throat, agitated by the acid in her gullet. Then her belly finally relaxes. It seems massive now under her dress, in comparison with her limbs, which are thoroughly wasted.

There is blood in one of her eyes, and its pupil is dilated to fill the iris, an eclipsed planet. The corners of her mouth are torn from the pressure of the instrument which has been forced there, from the extension of her cries. On the bed there is a wooden spoon with deep marks in the handle, from where her mother has inserted it between her teeth, forcing her head back. To save her tongue, to allow her the ability of language in the future, if she can ever crawl her way back to civilization. On the ceiling a crawling fly, the noise of it moving to the locked window is deafening. A precise roar. Her good eye tracks it, loses sight of it as it comes to land on her forehead. To drink from the pools on her face.

Her mother keeps her away from the village, a mile from their new cottage. She is an aberration, after all, a creature of singular horror, with splitting skin and a face like a bruise. Not only the madness of brain-fever, but she is with child. A
sick, insipid breeder, lunatic mother. Ella Lightburn stands her ground in public, her reputation allows her some dignity, and in return discretion. Nothing is said to her face.

There will be no asylum, no madhouse sanatorium for Janet Lightburn. Her mother will not have her sent to the workhouse for unmarried mothers in Penrith. Delinquency, if that is what it is, and immorality will be kept within the family walls, though it is whispered about in Bampton, over the tops of the garden walls and on the slow, rattling bus to town. The gossips and tattle-tales in the rural suburbs are still feeding off the carcass of her love for the Waterworks man. It is not an auspicious start for the Lightburn family in the village of Bampton.

But she is quiet on the bed now. Her fits have subsided, and in the aftermath, her tongue traces her mouth’s walls. There are splinters deep inside her cheeks from the spoon. There is the sound of running water in the room next door, where her mother is preparing a basin to clean her daughter’s fresh wounds and the old ones.

The fly roars off her face. She turns again, faces the window, away from the bare room, the broken red eye spinning backwards and forwards. The bedroom has been emptied of furniture and fixtures, now having the appearance of a cell rather than a cottage dwelling. This is her mother’s doing. There are no tools with which to wreak havoc on Janet’s body. Her fingers are tied together with pieces of cotton, three fingers broken. She has no energy left to strip them off with her teeth, though later, when the grief becomes too much again, pitching her upwards, her ungodly moan intensifying into a wail, she will chew them away and the smallest fingernail on her left hand with them. Her feet and hands have been tied to the bedposts over the last few days with cord. If she remains quiet, she will be released to use the washroom. If not, her mother clears away the drenched sheets from under her. So, of sorts, it is as if she has already been condemned to a hospital, to the relentless care of Ella
Lightburn, and consumed by dementia, though her writhing and cries are the most accurate and natural expression of her sane grieving, if only her family could know it. If only it could be understood that way.

The punishments are of her own worst volition. She leaves her mother little choice, attempting to gouge out an eye from its socket or cut away her throat with saved metal. The injuries are a testament only to her sorrow, the bindings simply an outcome of her misconduct. A desperate attempt to preserve the life of an unborn child and the bonny exterior of a daughter.

A twist in her belly, this time of another kind. A gentle, insistent kick. A ripple. In the liquid of her womb. Through the window the sun is bright and warm on her face. It refuses to indulge such things as grief and torment, human sorrow. It is the worst of all castigations. A blinding reward. Anti-sympathy. A brilliant orb that will not desert the sky in solidarity, as she wishes it would. Though this will be the last of her own blinding energy.

Had she not been pregnant, Janet Lightburn might have taken her own life in the first months after the death of Jack Liggett. The grief she suffered from left her mute and self-harming. She beat her own face and breasts constantly to create another type of pain, one which would override her internal anguish. She broke bones in her fingers, externalized her despair. But the bleeding inside would not stop. Her heart haemorrhaged itself empty, filled again with love and hate and longing for Jack Liggett. Her mother met the fierce end of her mourning with compassion and practical care. It was a rare time when the two women met truthfully and naturally, balancing each other in some respects. Ella felt a purpose and an unconditional role in Janet’s life. But there was a hole in her daughter and through it poured despair. Its flow could
not be stopped. And, in truth, Ella was not able to grasp the core of that despair, to turn it over in her hands and understand its existence. Though she never spoke ill of Jack Liggett again – that much she knew to be essential.

Janet had given herself up to the man, without fully realizing the consequences of it, without knowing or understanding the route she had taken to get there, so that she could not return. The struggle to reach him had been intense and had left yawning blue voids in its wake, the valley, her family, the past. It was political and personal suicide, where meaning had shifted form. Because he was the meaning of it all, in that remote point far out from herself, far out from all she had known and been or stood for. All that she had given up was eclipsed by his face. In his death, there was nothing to show for the long battle, nothing except herself, given up and remote. Purposelessness and impossibility rushing past. No resolution to the troubled affair. She had not been able to live it solvent as she had with the other days of her life, each and every one. Her sacrifice was null and void. And so, she was left alone, stranded, a solitary in that distant place where they had once struggled and fucked and vaulted against the walls together and it had not mattered that they were lost. It was a place where only their being together made sense. In his absence there was no reason to that place, the terra nullius, and yet she remained there, severed, pounding against the void to get out. There was no way back. She screamed and wept for him until vomit jerked from her open mouth.

In the long weeks after his death, sorrow finally destroyed itself, until even the last shards of misery deserted her and she sat back, took her nails out from under her skin and let her hand stop banging down. She began to implode. She went unwashed, functioned without care. She refused food and gradually the bones jumped out of her face. She became all skull, her cropped hair shattered over her scalp.

She had made no mention of her pregnancy to the family, but her mother felt it. As she held her daughter in those first
raveling moments at Whelter Farm, her mother, the green-winged angel of death, she knew it. A gentle swelling against her. A hidden bump, perhaps no more than four months of development then. She placed her hand on Janet’s belly as she rocked with her, asked for no confirmation. As the hair fell away from her daughter’s head and the shears worked in her hands, Ella began her prayers for the unborn child.

In the initial days of Janet’s mourning, the most violent period, Ella became afraid her daughter would strike her own stomach during the fits, induce miscarriage, either purposefully or not – though she did not dwell on it, could not afford to dwell on it. But Janet did not smash at the foetus. She cut and broke and harmed the outer reaches of her body, her face and hands, kicking her feet at windows, rocks, but leaving the vital section of herself alone.

As she wasted, her mother held food to her mouth. She must think of the life of her unborn child. She slapped her daughter, forced morsels of milk-soaked bread into her mouth, she held her close. But her daughter was gone. Samuel and Isaac stood by, in the doorway, unable to summon the strength for such bloody-minded exhibits of love and care. They watched Ella nurse her, checking her stomach daily for marks, combing the short clumps of blue-blonde hair which came out in her hands from her daughter’s tearing.

When the baby arrived a month early, in late April, Ella thought her daughter might turn back towards them. But she did not. She nursed the child with her eyes averted and would not name her. Samuel and Ella called the girl Miriam, registered the surname of Lightburn, and sealed the infant tight within the family. She would have been the last child to be born in Mardale, would have held that sad, saturated honour, if the family had not moved to the next valley. A month after Jack’s death, the Lightburns left the village and moved to a sprawling farm at the edge of the Bampton commons. The Shap doctor called by regularly to see the infant, pronounced it healthy on each visit, but did not know of any
treatment for its mother, other than incarceration. He confessed that he had always suspected such a proclivity in the girl, his brow furrowing, remembering in particular details of the incident which had left her head severely scarred. But he supposed that now they were away from the scene of the tragedy, things might improve in their own time. Yes, in time. If they did not, he would prepare the papers, regretfully, of course, but he would do it. And Ella curled her hands into fists at her side to prevent herself from throwing the doctor through the door.