The Ghost's Child Read online

  He went down to the beach most mornings, and she did not run to find him. Sometimes he disappeared at dawn and did not return until dark. She thought about the day a bird had brought to him a sardine in its curved beak. On evenings when Feather didn’t come home for supper, Maddy supposed he was dining with petrels and cormorants. Once, the thought would have been magical. Now it made her feel lost.

  She tried to make things different. She tried to make herself shiny in his mind. She was always laughing. She never complained about the afternoons she spent alone while he gazed at the sea. She tried not to ask too many questions or to say things she’d said before. She hoped that, if she were vibrant enough, he would forget his distractions and come to her. The plan did not seem to work. She felt like a ship buoyantly riding the waves while, under water, its hull is splintering on the reef. Feather laughed with her, and slept by her side, and saw she was vibrant and smiled to see it, and looked away.

  Together they were two cheerful souls racked by melancholy. Maddy kept herself alive: she read, she learned to cook, she played with Perseus and a ball of wool, she walked among the conifers. But she was living like a puppet, whose heart is merely wood.

  Then one afternoon, while she was mashing potatoes, Maddy felt a tremble – the same small tremble a river must feel when a leaf drops onto its surface and sends ripples to the distant banks. She stood still, her thoughts inside herself, and in an instant felt it again – the flick of a sparrow’s wing. She put down the masher, astonished. Her mind was bare: but her world woke up, shook itself, and stepped out into the light.

  She looked at the ceiling, and around at the room. She saw nothing ordinary, not a saucepan, not a chair, nothing she had seen a thousand times before, but only things startling and incredible. Without even trying, something miraculous had happened, and everything was different after all. She ran all the way to the beach, her skirts streaming behind her, fancying she could run forever, that she could leap higher than a tree. The tide was coming in, and Feather was investigating puddles for sea-bugs stranded by the waves. When he heard her calling he looked up warily, as if he might fly. Maddy took his hand and pressed it to her. She was puffing so hard she could hardly speak. “Feel,” she said.

  His hand left a damp print on her dress. She saw him understanding, a smoky kindling in his eyes. “A nymph,” he said. “A little elf. A tiny fay.”

  “Ours,” she said, and hugged him, and flopped into the sand, grinning at the sky. The syrupy orange sunlight pooled in her palms and poured out between her fingers. She and Feather had coasted far from each other: but this fay was a link, a grace, a clear light. It would be the best of them – them dauntless and together. The fay meant it wasn’t cruel to love Feather, for nothing so wonderful could come from something wrong. For the first time in a long time, Maddy was happy when she laughed.

  Matilda smiled down at her lined hands, squinting as if the beachside sun still tilted in her eyes. “How brilliant everything seemed at that moment,” she said. “How promising. I thought that, finally, I could bring Feather joy. I thought that finally, after all I’d taken from him, I could give something back.”

  The boy was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, stroking Peake’s head. The flames of the heater were casting a red hue on his chin and nose. “Are you hungry?” Matilda asked, suddenly remembering her manners. “I’ll make you some supper. There is soup and sausages, and some peaches for dessert.”

  “I’m not hungry,” said her guest, although it was a boy’s dinner time. “Maybe later. I don’t like peaches.”

  “Well, you needn’t have them. I don’t want to make you miserable.”

  The boy nodded, not interested. With one hand he smoothed down the dog’s peppy ears, which instantly popped up again. Without looking at her, he asked, “So did it happen like you wanted – did everything change that day?”

  Matilda paused, unsure what to say. She did not know how far a child should be invited into the world of his elders. With its hard laws and complicated outcomes, the grown-up world was not a good place for children. Yet she wanted to say aloud this thing she had kept under a dark cloak for endless years: she needed to speak it, and see it, and test how much it still hurt. And the boy was waiting, his fingers gliding over the dog.

  “Lying on the beach that afternoon,” she began carefully, “I really believed the fay would give Feather reason to look away from the horizon. Reason to change himself, although I did not want him to change. How doltish love and loneliness can be, sometimes. I thought that, because the fay filled me with joy, it would do the same for Feather. I must not have understood anything about him – or even about life, for life doesn’t work that way. I learned this that very day, when I stood up to leave. I brushed the sand from my dress, and held out my hand to Feather. But he shook his head and told me that he wished to sit a while longer on the beach, alone. I could go, he said. But he preferred to stay.”

  Dismissed, she had walked home in a kind of dumb shock, her arms lank by her sides, the gleam of the fay dulled. In her mind hulked a truth like a massive, rusty, untolling bell. Nothing – nothing she did, nothing she could do, nothing built or invented, no one born or unborn – could make Feather turn away from his horizon.

  The boy made no comment, but kept his eyes on Peake, his teeth pushed into his lip.

  “At first,” she said, “I could hardly bear to look at Feather. I wanted to scratch him, to wound him, to cause him some kind of illness. Around me hung a fog of shame, as if I were guilty of a crime. I told myself he was an unfeeling and heartless man … but I never believed what I said. Feather was not a bad man. He was a kestrel, an eel, a lacewing. He begrudged nothing else its life, but his life belonged absolutely to him. This is how wild things are. This is what I had loved about him in the first place. And that is why I forgave him. That is what kept me loving him.”

  Expecting protests, Matilda glanced over her glasses; but the boy ignored this mention of his least-favourite sentiment and tickled Peake under the chin, echoing in a pleased humming voice, “A kestrel. An eel.”

  Matilda smiled at him, and looked aside; when she spoke again, it was mostly to herself. “As the days passed, I saw there was no sense in regretting the way things were. Instead, I began to think of how they might be. Feather, I decided, could have the great heaving ocean: the miniscule fay was something for me. Feather wanted whatever it was he sought on the horizon: I wanted the fay. It would be ours, but it would really be mine. As soon as I decided this, I began thinking about the fay all the time. It was a kite in my mind, high above every thought. I gave it a thousand different names, trying to find the right note. I couldn’t help wondering what it would look like – fair and willowy, or dark like me? I hoped it could be both, like a lark’s tail. At night I lay awake brooding on all the things I needed to know. There was so much I would have to teach it. I knew mathematics and geography and the correct way to address a queen, I knew how to follow an animal’s tracks and how wagtails build their round nests, but there were a thousand simple things that were inexplicable to me. How could I teach it to be wise? How could I save it from making mistakes? What are the instructions for living an honourable life? I was often doubtful, and sometimes afraid – but mostly I was blithesome. Nothing was made right, because of the fay: but everything ceased to be awry. Nothing was sour or spoiled any more. Now, when Feather was gone, I talked to the fay. And it listened to me, I believed – it fluttered and spun and swirled. I dreamed of how its voice would sound, of what its first words would be. I wondered if it would like me, if it would like the cottage and the forest and field. I secretly worried that it would prefer the beach – that it, too, would spend its days tramping the shore like a poor creature in a cell. But I didn’t really believe that: I knew the fay was mine. I saw us sitting under trees, I saw it asleep in my arms. I felt the beating of its blood, the tenderness of its skin. I think I fell in love with it, that tiny, invisible thing.”

  The boy didn’t look up fro
m stroking the dog; he asked, “Did you love it more than you loved Feather?”

  “Feather was beautiful,” Matilda said, “and I really did love him. But the fay would have been the most beloved thing in the world.”

  But then, one day, the little fay stopped spinning. Maddy was threading blue stalks of lavender into a vase when the ripples inside her broke on the river bank, and faded into stillness. Limp stems of lavender fell from her hands, water spilled from the vase to the floor. Maddy dived frantically into herself as the fay sunk soundlessly down. In the blackness, she couldn’t see it. In the slick grief already pouring from her heart, she couldn’t catch the tiny gold body. “No,” she cried, “no, no—” but the little fay was dying, was already dead. Its flimsy winged body wafted over and over, and soon disappeared in the dark.

  Feather, of course, was nowhere to be found. Maddy stretched out on the cool floor, her face pressed to the polished wood. The tears that slipped down her cheeks made a puddle under her. With deadly silence, despair tore through the ground, ripping open a depthless crevasse. She looked into this ruined world and saw nothing but grit and shattered rubble. She could not speak, or draw breath. The walls, the table, the ceiling thinned. The flowers strewn about her wilted from purple to grey. Her agony was a rope tied around her neck. Maddy knew the pain would drown her.

  She climbed to her feet, straightened her dress, and walked out into the garden. It was a clear sunny day, and bees were bumbling on the air. Birds called each other from tree tops, the cat was sleeping on the grass, and far away a young fox barked foolhardily. The sun kept shining, the breeze kept blowing, the earth kept turning round: only she had stopped.

  Maddy walked along the path in naked brown feet, to the end of the garden where reeds grew and dragonflies sailed. Then she picked up the biggest rock she could carry, and leapt into the pond.

  Down through the freezing water she went, the rock her greatest friend, plunging like a hound dashing after a scent, racing for the bottom. She closed her eyes and let the water streak past, raking back her long loosed hair, hauling at her sleeves. Its blackness and gaunt coldness made her think of the unseen side of the moon. Weeds swiped her face like ghostly hands wiping away laughter and tears. She felt the rock thud into the muddy bottom of the pond and knew all she had to do was hold on.

  She kept her eyes closed, cradling the rock, and let the water find her. She could follow the fay easily if she merely waited and was brave. If she stayed here, in the arms of the pond, she would never again have to find her way to the end of another lonely day.

  And then something warm and living touched her lips: startled, Maddy opened her eyes. Through the murk and knotty weeds she glimpsed a seal’s sleek skin, the arrowheads of a wing. Feather scooped her to him and kicked strongly for the sky. They broke the dark surface trailing cat tails of clammy slime, gasping with the cold.

  He dragged her spluttering from the water, and lay her on the grass. Maddy would never forget the feeling of crisp lawn at her shoulders, the leaden weight of her waterlogged dress. She lay limply, blinking at the sky, understanding that its blueness was a threat and a promise. No matter how wretched her life became, the sun would rise, the sky would glow. Everything was here for her, but none of it needed her. She sank in the grass, soaked and trembling, while all about her continued the beautiful world she no longer trusted and would not forgive.

  “The fay is gone,” she told Feather.

  “I am sorry for your loss,” he said.

  Maddy did not even flinch. She looked at the sky, at the coasting clouds. Her thoughts were ice floating on a flat sea. She didn’t look at Feather when she spoke, but she was thinking of him. “I will know, now, how it feels to long for something you don’t have.”

  Feather said nothing. He pulled a shard of grass from the earth, and looked away. The shadow of the forest brushed the lawn, a blackbird plucked a rattling beetle from the air. In a voice terse with hopelessness he said, “None of this is what I wanted. None of it is the way it should be.”

  He stopped, and sighed, and wiped his eyes. Maddy felt sparer than air.

  He picked her up and carried her inside, took off her wet clothes and put her gently into bed. He lay down beside her, and after a time she slept. When she woke, it was night, and where Feather had been the cat now lay ranged, its lime eyes regarding her peaceably. The sheets were undented, tucked up to the pillows. Maddy knew that this was her room now, that she would never sleep beside Feather again. She curled around herself, staring into the dark. Already her heart had begun its life-long mourning for her fay. She would learn to live with this, sometimes to even forget it: but it would stay with her forever, like a bad deed or a scar, a gnarled thing she could hardly ever bear to contemplate.

  It wasn’t until much later that it occurred to Maddy to wonder if Feather had dived into the pond to rescue her that day – or if he’d been there already, swimming alone, drifting in the unlit depths.

  The seasons make no difference to pine trees. In autumn they keep their swarthy needles as the days shorten and the sunshine weakens. Winter, with its livid clouds and squalls, suits the draughty gloom of the pine trees’ darkness, their majestic austerity. Their thick white roots impoverish and harden the soil, so only the toughest weeds may take hold. In spring when the grasslands surrounding the pines are speckled with bright wildflowers, the forest remains craggy and colourless but for red-capped toadstools, sepsis-yellow fungus. No animal eats the acrid needles, so apart from wasps in their high, thrumming nests, nothing makes its home in the branches. No Dreamtime creature prowls the shadows, no sprite skitters, no thylacine sniffs from tree to tree. Nothing is born or hunted here. The conifer forest is alive, and yet it is not. It is an unaltering landscape, a live painting. It is a living thing that doesn’t draw breath.

  One day, a day like any other, marked a year since Maddy and Feather had come to live in the cottage behind the picket fence, in the pine forest’s sharp-smelling shade.

  Maddy made a cake to mark the occasion, and invited Feather to share it with her at his favourite place, the beach. He lifted his head, smiling uncertainly. “A picnic?”

  “Yes, why not? We’ll bring a blanket to sit on, and some sarsaparilla.”

  “I’ve never been on a picnic,” Feather said. “We should have had a picnic every day.”

  Maddy imagined the two of them dining like foxes in the forest. Throughout the warm and windless days since Feather had hauled her from the pond, bulbs had sprouted, the roses had bloomed, pollen had powdered the air. A new generation of birds had been hatched and taught to fly. The nights were clear and frostless, the afternoons balmy and long. Everything in nature had filled the days swooning voluptuously into the arms of life. But through all this time Maddy and Feather had lived as quietly as foxes live, huddling up in their separate darknesses as foxes do. They had been kind to one another, they had held each other’s hand – but each had used their empty hand to nurse their yearning heart. They talked to one another, but never about important things – never about a lost winged dream, not about unseeable mysteries that lay beyond the setting sun. They both knew that you can talk and talk, but when the talk is done and there’s nothing else to say, the thing that you long for is still not there.

  Sometimes Maddy felt they were both very old – older than the trees that barricaded them, older than the planet. Sometimes she felt they were two ancient creatures who had tumbled from the stars and who’d learned to live where they had landed as well as they could.

  It was a still, mauve evening, and the tide had brought the ocean high up the sand. Oyster-catchers veered over the shallows while silver gulls stood around on one leg. The green water was choppy, like a bicycle ride on a rough path, sloshing over the pitted rocks and fetching up sticks like a dog. The sunset was coloured mango-pink and red; the sand was marbled and pale.

  Feather spread the blanket in the shelter of an overhang, and he and Maddy sat down. After the terrible day of the pond, Maddy ha
d been ill for many weeks. She had wept and wept for the perished fay, had felt she would go mad with pity for the poor lost thing. She had found little to say to Feather, to whom the fay was a nothing returned to nothingness. But it was Feather who had tended and soothed her, and challenged her to live: and eventually Maddy had listened, though not before grief had made her thin and sunken-eyed, and chilled by the slightest gust of cold. She tightened her shawl around her shoulders, and looked about at the water and grainy cliffs the way she looked at everything now – as if she’d never before encountered such things, and wasn’t sure what to make of them. She saw that the sea-birds were watching Feather, and that for her sake he was disregarding them. He cut wedges from the cake and toppled the slices onto plates. Maddy poured the sarsaparilla and they sat together in convivial silence, their elbows occasionally touching, enjoying their sweet-toothed feast. In silence they watched a dun crab struggling over the fringe of the blanket, and chuckled when a tiny white gnat skated the surface of Feather’s drink. The gulls observed them intently from afar, swallowing their greed. Feather finished his piece of cake, and cut himself another. Maddy shaded her eyes and searched the horizon for a raft or bobbing wreckage, for a tidal wave. As always, she saw only an immense panorama of restive emptiness, blue as a kingfisher’s mantle, forbidding as a wasteland. Distantly she wondered if Feather thought of the ocean as his enemy or his friend. She turned to him and asked, “Do you remember the day I found you on the beach with the pelican?”