The Lost Souls' Reunion (18 page)

‘You mean I have to get some mirrors?' I was confused.

‘No child!' Myrna threw back her head and let out an old woman's cackle. ‘Let me tell you the story of the gypsy and the long road.'

*   *   *

The card of the Long Road falls between Myrna and me on this night, as it did back then when Myrna told me of it and the gypsy who gave it to her.

‘When I left my home, Sive, I was not much older than you were when we first met. That is part of the reason why I took you to my heart. You had a special nature as a child. I talked a lot more than you did. In fact I chattered from sun up to sun down. I talked with the whole of life and it talked back. My world was large, on a lakeside.

‘Then it was taken from me, by war. I walked alone out into the world. The story of how is for another day, this is a happy day, not the time for such a story. I fell in with gypsies because they did not ask me to go away when I followed their caravan out of a town and down the long road into life. I never thought to look back or examine the way in detail so I could return along it. I was walking into forever from what I had known.

‘Many of the Soho women thought I was mysterious when I would not say where I came from. The truth is I do not know, Sive. It was a place by the lake and I left it young.

‘The gypsies gave me the room to grow into a woman. In the years coming up to that I learned from them about the herbs and then the cards. The woman who showed these to me let me sleep curled up beside her. I stayed close to her in the days, too, and she treated me like a daughter. None would harm me with her about, Sive. She was a fierce woman and I do not remember a day of that time when I went hungry.

‘Then the girl left me and the woman-time came. The fierce woman turned the cards for me and the card of the Long Road fell. She said it was mine and that it meant I would find no place until the very end of life. This caused her to cry because she had imagined that I would marry one of her own. But even the gypsy caravan was too much settling down for me, Sive. I had thirsty feet and eyes.

‘The next day I left because the woman said the shape that was on me meant she could no longer protect me from men's eyes. She gave me the cards and they have been my constant companions, my longest friends. She gave me the eyes for ghosts and taught me not to fear seeing them. “Fear the place where there are no ghosts,” she told me. “For there are no people living there either.”

‘I got on the road and I went as far as my feet would take me without sleeping. I walked on after sleeping and I slept out for many nights until I came to a town. At the edge of it was a house of women. One found me asleep in their garden and had me carried, still sleeping, into the house. When you sleep after days and weeks of walking, Sive, and little food, you sleep like the dead.

‘When you wake, you have a hunger that will not let you speak until it is satisfied. I woke on a soft bed with the eyes of three curious women on me. All I could say was food and all they could do was get some, for I would say no more until I was fed.

‘They brought it to the bed, and with it came an older woman who watched me from a chair in the far corner of the room.

‘I ate like there was no food left in the world. The women watched and when I finished they waited for me to speak and still I did not.

‘The gypsies had taught me to be wary of people who slept in beds under the one roof in the same place. They get, the gypsies said, so as they would do anything just to keep that one spot.

‘So the women took to asking me questions. Why were my eyes black? Where did I come from? Why was I alone? Where was my family? What money had I? How had I travelled here?

‘I did not know, Sive, and so I could not tell them. I could only say I had been on the long road for a long time. They pulled at the bedclothes and they pricked the blisters on my feet and they brought hot water and put my feet in it.

‘The older woman told them all to leave and they left as quickly as she asked. They seemed to hold fear for her. I did not. She was as fierce as the gypsy woman but no fiercer, so I knew how to be with her. The woman lifted off the nightgown the women had put on me and she looked at me long and hard and I did not feel ashamed, but I was shy and tried to cover myself.

‘She got fierce with me and pulled my hands away to look more and as she looked she asked, “Have you anywhere to go?” I did not and so that was how I came to stay there. “This will be your room,” the woman said and she told me her name but I do not remember it now.

‘I liked the room, Sive. It had dark green walls and pictures of places I had never been to. It had a soft bed, as I said, and the woman opened the wardrobe and there were four dresses. I never had more than one before that time. There were creams and powders and a dressing mirror. The woman said, “With the black eyes and pale skin you'll go well. But we'll get you ready first.”

‘She taught me, Sive. She taught me first by getting me to look through spy holes while the other women worked with the men who came each evening. Sometimes two women worked together but she did not let me look because she said, “You are one who works best alone.”

‘That has always been the way, Sive. She put her hands on my body to show me what I would do with the man and how. She showed me many ways and she gave me only kind men to begin with. But when I had been there for some time I learned this was a place where the women grew old while young.

‘I was shown many ways and I will tell you what I was shown, Sive, shown to satisfy the men who felt as if they loved me. There are other ways in the work, Sive, and I do not wish you to know them. You can have a life and a place, Sive, and love. I would have liked all three but I did not have the feet and the eyes for it. In my day the only way to have freedom was to do this work or the work of God. But God did not seem to want me.

‘The woman and I parted ways when I had been with her for five winters. I left with the spring as I had arrived. I did not want to stay and she said it was as well I went for, to tell you the truth, I was too good at the work for that small place, Sive. The other women grew to narrow their eyes at me. I was best, as she said, working alone. I always did from that day on.

‘Now, what you have wanted to know, I will tell you.'

Myrna said this before she said anything else, sensing my impatience to know only what was relevant to me, my wanting to have the old woman part of the story out of the way. It was only in later years that Myrna's story rang back to me and I was haunted with questions I wish I had asked. Instead I heard only this:

‘Sive. Feel like your fingertips have eyes. Use the eyes to see all parts of a body and then the body will fall away and you will have only eyes and spirit under the fingertips. Massage will tell you all you need to know, as will time. Never rush, Sive, even for the one who wants it all quickly. The time will rise the blood in them and it will tell you all you need to know.

‘When he asks for something, do not give it to him twice. Vary each movement and make him ask again and again. Still do not give him what he asks for. That is the way of women who work with men. For a woman who loves a man I would say do the same, until the point where you wish him to know you as you know him. Open to him only when he has been to all your openings and explored. Tell him your deepest heart in the moment when he has given you all he has. Match his giving and you will invite more. Never give too much. The man will lie back and expect and in my work that is what they pay for, but in love there are two working together.

‘Hide parts of yourself as if you do not have them and they will be forgotten. When you love you must reveal or you will lose yourself in love to all that he reveals. He must know who you are to love who you are. Pray for quiet days with rain and for days of sunlight, pray for cold days and days of warmth. In all these days you will know him in different ways.

‘Do not hide the woman in you. A woman is all you are. Show him possibilities and he will take them. Encourage his tears and you will hear his laughter. Take the whole of him and do not look for anything else. To do otherwise is the one sure way of killing love.

‘Last of all, Sive; do not lead the way. Do not let him lead the way. Let love do that. It has all the experience and you do not. Let the one you love know the shadow in you and he will know the whole. You cannot speak for him. Speak of yourself in love and walk away from any man that tries to do it for you. Walk and don't look back. But there are moments, in union, when you can have one voice.

‘This is a new world, Sive. I watched it grow. This is a world when a woman can love a man equally and you are in it.'

‘I feel all of that as you speak it,' I told Myrna and the night growing round us. I could hear her smile. ‘Even with all I feel, I feel the call from him stronger. I hear him at night even. He is not young, there is hardly any life left in him.'

‘It is the same love,' Myrna said. ‘He does not feel it any less or more than you do. But he has lived longer than you without love. He feels desperation. The last years are on him and he is given this to contend with. Poor man.' She clucked her tongue against her teeth. ‘Lucky man. You are wrong to say he has no life, Sive. He has plenty of it. Plenty there waiting. It is the life in him that loves the life in you.'

I felt afraid that she might say what we did was wrong, to love in such a way.

‘He is old, Myrna. Is it wrong?'

Myrna reached for my hand and held it to her, ‘The old can be young and the young can be old. He is who he is. You are who you are. You will have the time together that you are meant to have. Then it will be over.'

‘Do you watch us with your cards and eyes for ghosts?'

I was fearful, suddenly, at the thought that our moments together might not be our own.

‘No, Sive!' Myrna laughed. ‘You are living for one thing and you have your own way to go for another. I know you as I would know my own daughter. I have the eyes and ears and heart you have, though they are not what they were.'

She shifted her hips off the now wet grass and I heard the dry creak of them and put my moist hands on them and they softened under my touch.

‘No,' Myrna said, giving my hands back to me. ‘Don't waste this on me.'

On the way home I was silent, as was she, but there was no easiness in the lack of words and we did not see the magnificence and violence in the death of the day, in the blood-red sunset. We did not look up, only down at our feet and the next place they would land on the walk home.

We did not hear the high and free sound of my mother's laughter in the wood.

At the door of the house Myrna placed her bony hands on my shoulders before meeting my gaze with hers and planting her thin, dry lips on my forehead.

‘We should call this place by a different name,' she whispered. ‘For all new things are happening here. Solas.'

Though it was the hottest of summers, in this house with its thick walls full of secrets, it could still be cold. We had tea and sat by Myrna's fire. The flames licked me to sleep.

It was not until Carmel burst in with high colour on her cheeks and Eddie behind her, that I woke and felt the pinch of the creeping cold. For the fire had long since gone out and we were in the middle of the night.

Myrna woke too and more tea was made and a conversation begun, though I could not help but think of my early start.

Eddie stayed as he stayed each night, on blankets by the fire. Though he could have gone in beside Carmel. He had asked Carmel to marry him and she had grown down and silent at that. It had not been mentioned again.

We knew my mother's fear and the reasons for it. We knew she had only seen one marriage.

22 ∼ As It Was in the Beginning

‘A
S IT WAS IN
the beginning so shall it be in the end.'

Jonah whispered into the ear of his stranger-father and wished, with all of his strangled heart, there was a way of knowing if what he said was heard.

For every time Patricia Cave lashed out at her son she told him why it was happening.

‘This is because your father left us.'

Often.

When he went hungry, he was reminded it was his father's absence which left them without a provider.

When he missed school so much they forgot who he was and filled his seat with a more financed child, his mother wept and said it was his father who had sent orders for him to go to this school and she could not afford it.

He was sent instead to one that did not demand fees, closer to home, and he was sent home for having no uniform and for his lack of hygiene, homework and schoolbooks.

Jonah Cave, sad, strange, tall, ghostly, unwell Jonah Cave, was the one everyone could hurt. It stopped when they realized to touch him was to land a week's coal tar scrubbing and soaping from the hard hands of irritated mothers, who had to rid them of nits and the like.

It was best to leave him be, and leave him be they did – only their shouts covered the distance between them and the thin bag of bones and eyes that Jonah Cave grew into by an early age. He never lost the look.

When he came home from school his mother Patricia Cave was either passed out on the floor or well on the way to it, or wrapped up in a blanket and staring at the television and talking to it.

He would search the house for money and find coins with which to buy his own food. One day a block of Calcia cheese caught his eye, the bright, healthy girl on the bright healthy blue box. He imagined if he ate it, he ate her happiness and her eternal summer sky. This is what he ate – the girl's happy cheese – and imagined her inside him, bringing bright blue to him.

Happy melted on white bread, happy chunks with bread and milk, there was not always enough money for happy unless he got to it before Patricia's foray to the same corner shop. The shop's supply of vodka spirit and Calcia cheese were reserved almost solely for the bony inhabitants of 45 Peter's Road, a house the newly formed residents' association complained of as their first act of togetherness. Its lack of order and maintenance let the whole road down.