It was at this point that he asked for the door to be closed, as an assortment of villagers – including Bess Small herself, her face full of gleeful disapproval, standing next to poor Alice Gifford – were now there on our doorstep, excited by the unfolding drama. Mr Noah closed the door. I stood between Manning and my mother. Manning pulled out a dagger and held it at my throat.
Mother undressed. She cried. I felt my eyes warm up too. Fearand guilt. This was all my fault. The fault of my physical strangeness, of my body’s inability to age.
‘If you say another word, your witchmother will be killed right where she is, before you or Marbas can see it different.’
Marbas. The infernal spirit who could cure all diseases. I was going to hear the name a lot over the coming hours, as that nightmare day unravelled itself.
My mother was naked. There by the table and the tin pottage bowls. And I saw Manning’s eyes feast on her, hating her for his own temptation. He stuck the tip of his dagger against her skin and pricked her, first on her shoulder, then her forearm, then near her navel. Little bulbs of blood.
‘Look at the darkness of the blood, Mr Noah.’
Mr Noah looked.
The blood was blood colour. Because it was ordinary human blood. But Mr Noah saw something else in it, or imagined he did, as he was impressed by Manning’s air of authority. ‘Yes. It is most dark.’
People only see what they have decided to see. I have learned this lesson one hundred times over, but it was still new to me then. My mother winced every time that dagger touched her, but to Manning she was faking it.
‘See her cunning? Mark the counterfeit of pain on her face. She has made some kind of trade, it would appear. The most unusual death of John Gifford appears to be the price of her son’s eternal youth. Quite a malevolent trade.’
‘We have nothing to do with John Gifford’s death. I helped thatch his roof. That is all. My mother never even knew him. She stays in the cottage most of the time. Please, stop doing that!’
I couldn’t watch any more. I grabbed Manning’s arm. He hit the dagger handle against my head, then his other hand grabbed my throat and he repeatedly struck the handle in the same spot as my mother wailed and I thought my skull might smash open.I was on the floor. Dazed and silent and wishing my body was as strong as an eighteen-year-old’s body should have been.
And then he, Manning, spotted another flea bite, this time on my mother, near her belly button, like a little red moon above a planet.
‘The same mark as on the boy.’
My mother trembled. Robbed of her clothes she could no longer speak.
‘It’s a flea!’ I said, my voice pained and desperate and cracked. ‘An ordinary flea bite.’
And I pressed my hands into the stone of the floor, to stand back up. But there came another stamp against the back of the skull.
And after that, everything went dark.
I sometimes repeat this in a dream. If I fall asleep on the sofa I remember that day. I remember the bulbs of blood on my mother’s skin. I remember the people at the doorway. And I remember Manning and his foot, stamping down, jolting me awake through the distance of centuries.
You see, everything changed after that. I am not saying my childhood had been perfect before this point but now I often want to climb back into that timebefore. Before I knew Rose, before I knew what would happen to my mother, before, before, before . . . To cling to who I was, right at the beginning when I was just a small boy with a long name who responded to time and grew older like everybody else. But there is never a way into the before. All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.
London, now
At lunch break I nip to the supermarket down the street and buy myself a pastrami sandwich, some salt and vinegar crisps and a small bottle of cherry juice.
There is a queue for the checkout assistant so I do what I normally resist and use the self-service checkout.
Like the rest of the day so far, it does not go well.
The disembodied female voice keeps telling me of an ‘unidentified item in bagging area’, even though the only items in the bagging area are the items I had just scanned.
‘Please ask a member of staff to assist you,’ she – the robot future of civilisation – adds. ‘Unidentified item in bagging area. Please ask a member of staff to assist you. Unidentified item in bagging . . .’
I look around.
‘Hello? Excuse me?’
There are no members of staff. Of course there aren’t. There is, however, a group of teenage boys all wearing variations of the Oakfield uniform (white shirts, and a few green and yellow ties) all in the queue, holding drink cans and packets of food and looking in my direction. They say something, identifying me as a new teacher. And then there is some laughter. I feel the most familiar feeling of all: that I am living in the wrong time. And I stand there, just staring at the screen and listening to the voice, my head aching, and my soul slowly wondering if Hendrich was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have come back to London.
*
