These Our Monsters Page 10

  I at once recognised the voice to be that of Dr Agar. I turned to him and this impression was confirmed by the evidence of my eyes. He gave a thin smile.

  ‘I have been drawn here by the thread of which you spoke,’ I replied.

  He nodded thoughtfully. We reached the summit of the steps and entered the graveyard.

  ‘And what is it that you seek, Mr Stoker?’ he asked.

  I hesitated, unsure of the wisdom of confiding my thoughts. ‘To confront my demons,’ I said in manner which betrayed my uncertainty of purpose. We stood among the tombstones, looking down towards the harbour.

  ‘Perhaps you wish to conquer whatever you may have previously witnessed here,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I assented.

  Dr Agar turned to me. ‘If I may presume to offer you the benefit of my experience,’ he said in low voice, ‘I must tell you that there is nothing here to conquer. There are only stories; stories that we carry in here.’ At this point he reached up and prodded me quite forcibly on the temple. ‘We can none of us conquer what is inside our own heads. You can no more escape your demons than your demons can escape from you.’

  He then gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder and bid me good night. ‘It has been a pleasure making your acquaintance, Mr Stoker. When you return to Whitby you must do me the honour of paying me another visit.’

  He then turned and made his way back towards the steps. I did not follow him, remaining instead with my back to the church, watching the slow movement of the waves lapping at the harbour walls below. After some minutes, I saw a dark figure emerge on the West Cliff, hurry along to Dr Agar’s villa and disappear inside.

  Now back in our rooms, an idea is taking shape in my mind. I am not alone here, and as I open a fresh page in my journal, I feel my shadow’s hand guiding mine. It only remains for me to give him a name.

  Breakynecky

  Sarah Moss

  IF YOU ARE THINKING OF LEAVING, you should probably go soon.

  If you are thinking of leaving, perhaps you should have left, last week or last month or last year. The people who leave first usually fare best.

  The depths and surfaces of these waters cradle the bodies of those who left it too late to leave.

  Leaving does not make you safe, only safer. You leave when it is safer to go than to stay. By then, nothing is as safe as it was before, when you were little.

  It’s not that I don’t like it here. It’s not that I would rather have stayed. I know what happened to those who stayed.

  I would rather not have had to leave, that’s all. I would rather have been safe where I was, where we all were. Most people, you’ll find, would prefer to stay at home, until the dying starts and often for a surprisingly long time, an illogically long time, afterwards.

  You should go when you still have people left to leave.

  I often walk along the shore, here where the river widens to the sea. I started to say that if you close your eyes it seems like home – like my home, anyway, yours is different – but whatever you can do in your mind it’s not that easy to trick the senses into a return. It’s not my sea. Between the passing of trains, it can sound like home. The birds, I think, are almost the same as ours, they were born to cross the water the way we might cross a field, and of course the water itself is the same water and it sounds the same, rises and falls the same way on every shore of the world, and the wind, too, in your ears, but it doesn’t smell like home where there are turf fires always somewhere on the air and the warm breath of the gorse, and it doesn’t feel like home on your skin because the wind here comes from the east, comes over a different sea. We used to see the sunsets, at home, and even with your eyes closed a rising sky is different.

  Berwick. Here you are.

  It sounded so English. You couldn’t imagine them starving in Berwick. I thought of brick houses and coal fires, of roast beef, of pudding. Roofs over people’s heads and food on the table; we had nothing to lose. I could be someone’s maid, maybe, in a black dress and white apron, or get factory work, set hours and weekly pay. Take it, I said to Séan when they came asking for men, take the work and thank them on your knees. They paid his passage, whoever’s at the top, Mr Stephenson or his friends, though of course the money had to come out of Séan’s wages. Turned out my mother had a little put by. Enough, more or less. We’ll go, I said, we’ll cross the water, and Séan paused as if there was a choice.

  Anyway, step this way.

  We can start here, at the garden. Handy for the station, if you’ve come that way. Most do. You’ll have come for the castle but it’s the bridge you’ll remember later.

  They built the garden a few years ago, in the shadow of the castle. You see the war memorial with the names in alphabetical order, which is the kind of arrangement of grief possible when the disturbance that takes husbands and brothers and sons is far away. There will not be many memorials, at home. Starvation is not heroic. People lose humanity before they die, better not to remember and anyway there were few left to recount the names and none to carve the stones.

  Come over, here in the sunshine, a day very much like Séan’s.

  Step up to the polished stone and trace the names with your fingers. Remember those over the water whose names are written nowhere, those left unburied at the roadsides and on the floors of their houses, those whose faces I could name and those I saw later, on the way to the ship. It is grand to have the name of your beloved written in stone and set up in the garden for remembering the Queen’s jubilee. It is grand to be able to do your remembering on public signs, to have people bring red flowers still after a hundred years and not let their dogs piss on your monolith, which is pretty much, as far as I can see, the only outdoor place in England that isn’t a convenience for dogs. There’s a woman letting her Labrador through the squeaky metal gate; in Séan’s time they had the gallows right there. He joined the crowd just once, stood right at the front because it was Patrick they were killing, Patrick who came over with us on the boat, and Séan wanted him to see a friendly face at the last. It was not as if we hadn’t seen people die before, plenty of them, both of us, but though they were all going before their time there’s a difference between the sins of omission and the sins of commission, between starving half a nation while looking the other way and tying a man’s hands, putting a rope around his neck, and dropping the ground beneath his feet.

  The dog doesn’t like me – they usually don’t – and the woman tuts and huffs, reroutes herself to give me a wide berth as if it’s the dog who tells her where to go.

  Climb the castle mound.

  There’s a path worn across the grass, mostly by teenagers who come up here in the evenings to smoke and drink, thinking themselves out of sight and brave, too, for haunting the ruins at dusk. As the sun sets and the bottle passes they start trying to frighten each other with stories older than they know: the old man in the tell-tale red cap who lures travellers to his cellar in bad weather. You can’t stay out here in this, he says, why don’t you come in and wait till it passes, I was about to put the kettle on anyway. And you go in, because why not, because what do you have to lose, because you need shelter and something to eat, and then he’ll smash your skull so your blood runs into the ground on which his house is built. They consecrate their homes with strangers’ blood in this land, have done time out of mind. Beware the eager host, the goblin red-cap. And the inevitable woman in white, who can be heard and seen sometimes over your shoulder but vanishes when you turn to face her, although why this should be frightening they do not say. Poor woman. People don’t make a nuisance of themselves, living or dead, for their own pleasure. Wouldn’t we all rather be at rest? It’s a fine day and they’ll probably be up here later, the young ones, but for now we have the sunny grass and the tenacious tree to ourselves. It should be too steep for trees, and goodness knows what bones and stones its roots grasp below my feet, but here it is, pale blossom under a blue sky. It was not here, back then, has sprung since from some apple core
or plum stone chucked into the grass at the end of a picnic. In those days I saw the ground roiled and stabbed, the earth’s innards spilling down the hill, turf and trees looking on from the other side of the water and the river itself disturbed, the tides and fish unable to find their old ways up into the land. The young people have left crisp-packets and empty glass bottles; under them, under all, other vessels emptied by other drinkers keeping, or not, watch over the crossing. Roman pots, Rhenish glass, jugs and cups holding the touch of fingers and lips long fallen to dust, gone into the earth from which the blooming tree grows.

  Stop, close your eyes, sun yourself.

  Sun meant rot, meant blight, meant blackening leaves and hunger. Easter brought hope and summer, fear.

  You can climb up to the door-hole and peer in if you want to but there is nothing to see. Shadows and bare ground, bulging stone.

  Let’s pick our way back down the hill, careful over tussocks, pausing as the wind pushes us back. There are men down at the waterside in bright yellow jackets, remaking the path after winter’s storms. The English made our men build roads, even when they could barely stand for hunger and it took hours to move a few rocks: roads going nowhere, roads to take dead feet to abandoned villages, roads to the sea for people whose houses had been pulled down over their heads. These yellow-jacketed men don’t need hours, or rocks. The smell of burning oil drifts up the castle mound and the sound of their yolk-yellow machine hammers the afternoon, rattles the teeth in buried skulls. The gate clangs again behind me: another woman, another dog.

  The hammering stops and you can hear the water now, and after a shocked silence the rising notes of a curlew, the mew of sandpipers between the rocks and then the keening chorus of gulls. Traffic, somewhere, always. It’s always cold along here, always folded into the shade between the hillside and the bridge, the spring always late in reaching these bushes. I pass around the castle’s foot, turning as ever to salute the Breakynecky Steps. They rise – or fall – between the sky at the top of the hill and the shore at our feet, see? Hundreds of stone steps dropping like a waterfall, impossibly steep, ruined now but still an invitation of sorts, worn by seven hundred years of human feet hurrying from boats to the castle keep, bringing visitors and weapons and urgent messages, supplies of food and clothes. Nimble, fast. No, no broken necks in my time, not that I saw, and caged off now for the safety of the general public who know no better, who cannot resist sneaking up to fall down, who long, privately, at the backs of their minds, for a little breakynecky. The general public who yearn, just occasionally, for the vertiginous, for gravity, who crave a slip, a flight, a final snap and smash, whose feet know the way to the edge.

  I could do it, up and down. Running, even. Sometimes I do. Sometimes someone sees me, a fleet figure, a flicker of shade, up there where you are not allowed to go.

  There’s another woman with another dog, or perhaps, who knows, the same dog, coming the other way, her eyes too drawn to the breakynecky steps. Not the dog. Dogs have no death wish.

  I slip out of the woman’s way, through the cold stone tunnel and up the steps to the bench. The men kept watch here almost a millennium, walking up and down to stay awake, boots pacing the limestone slow as a sleeper’s heart crossing the night, there and back, there and back, gaze brushing the dark river for an unguarded light or a shape darker than water, for the flutter of a cloak, for outriders and mischief-makers. Vikings, Scots, English: choose your enemy. We used to see the cobles from here, the salmon boats, laid out on the foreshore like fish spread to dry. The castle used to stand implacable against the sky, turreted like the stained glass Jerusalem in the church windows. And her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. I don’t know what colour jasper is. Some kind of sunset, the flames of a clear coal fire. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it. Not all the kings of the earth bring glory and honour. Not all nations are saved. Murderers, you might recall, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone. Some nations, you might think, some kings, are more murderous than others.

  And here’s the bridge, the miracle of Victorian engineering, like most of Victoria’s miracles standing on the blood and bones of those who built it. You passed over it on the train, but of course you can’t see a bridge while you cross it. Here’s the duck’s eye, fish’s eye view. It rises over us like a cathedral, as if a boy could stand under it and sing, as if prayer might drift like incense under the arches, and indeed the smell of tar comes on the wind from the workmen downriver. Always there’s been work along here, all the years hammering and pounding, breaking rock and gouging earth, hacking trees, rabbits’ burrows sliced open like houses in a war and worms exposed like spilled guts. In the end they had to use dynamite on the castle, had to invade their own town. It could almost be a joke. You could feel the charge in the earth and in your bones, the air rang and buildings jerked right over the other side of the town, though it was only the latest bombardment of many. The English have to assault themselves when no-one else will do it.

  Come back down to the path. You hear trains before you see them, down here, or maybe, since the water is loud against the pilings and the gulls are loud in the air and the curlews loud on the rocks, you feel the trains. They’re not much, compared to the bridge. The bridge needs the old trains, the dragon trains breathing fire and winging their way across the land. Stephenson imagined this bridge for shrieking and roaring, for the opera of steam and iron pistons and a whistling cry of the sort a person might hear by night as a presentiment of death, not the coy slither of red and grey in which the engine looks the same as the carriages. Few of the trains stop here now, now the coal has gone and the salmon and the herring, now they don’t make pantiles or grow grain or spin wool, now there’s nothing to send.

  We restless ones mass, sometimes, there at the hinge point, the portal where the sea touches the river and the bridge strikes the land, where they built the castle over the fort over the oldest dwelling place, and where they broke the castle for the trains. It’s dangerous, I said, when Séan showed me why we were here, and he thought I meant there’d be men hurt and killed in the work, but that danger was too obvious to say, we all knew that, that was why they had us come over for it. I meant that it’s dangerous to go digging and smashing a place where people have been in fear, where they’ve been shut up and hurt, where bodies have been broken in the name of money and land, these seven centuries. Of course when you bring down the walls they might land on your head but you know the masters have thought of that, included the loss of a few men in their plans. They hadn’t thought of those they were disturbing, the ancient ones who were still there when the navvies came with their dynamite and picks. Ah, that old stuff, Séan said, and sure these are men of science, Mary, none of that, do you know the trains will be running all the way to London, Edinburgh to London in one day? I’d have to have been deaf not to know that, the times he said it. Sure, I said, even so, you’ll want to watch what you’re about.

  And it was the stones that took him, of course, a few weeks later. They, his mates, were a long time finding me, hours in which he was dying and then dead and I didn’t know, hours in which others, his workmates and the bosses, knew what had happened to him and to me, and I, elbow-deep in steaming smalls at the laundry, thinking that perhaps if I caught her in a bright moment Mrs Hadfield would let me nip out to the market before it closed for some bacon for Séan’s tea, did not know. They were waiting for me when I came home, Mick and Iain, standing at the door as if already before the coffin with their heads bowed and their caps in their hands, silent. I knew, really, as soon as I saw them there, felt my heart drop to the cobbles under my feet as the bright day wavered around my eyes and ears. A cat crossed the street, a fat tortoise-shell I hadn’t seen before. They stepped forward. Mrs O’Driscoll, Mick said, Mary, we’ve bad news for you, and I found myself sitting not even on my
doorstep but on the street, legs folded under me because it was too late, now, to run to him, to sponge his face and say the words to carry him over, because there was nothing I could do for him. I heard a great cry rise in the late afternoon warmth, between the walls and the sunny roofs. Ah, they said, come now, Mary, come into the house. He didn’t suffer, Mick kept saying while Iain lit the stove and set the water to boil, you must know that, Mary, it came so quick, he never spoke or moved after. Yes, I said, yes, thank you, and in my head I saw the rocks, the great walls set also in the blood of working men seven hundred years ago, shocked and tumbling. Stones should not fly. Rock is not meant for the air.

  Dust we are and to dust we shall return.

  And the walls came tumbling down.

  Later, towards sunset, after I’d persuaded Mick and Iain and the kind and curious neighbours to leave me, I came down here. I came past where they were already building the station on the site of the Great Hall, setting the platforms in place of the gallery and laying the rails over the flagged floor and the fireplace in which oxen had been roasted. Waiting and fire, still, metal and flames and the slow passing of time. The Jubilee Garden was then a ravine with a millstream through it, and I climbed down the side of the water and then over the rocks on the shoreline, between the falling castle and the rising bridge. I had seen Séan’s body by then. They wouldn’t uncover his face. I knew what I was looking for and after a while, the sky dimming and the birds settling for the brief night, I found it.

  The sun had been so bright that the marks had already dried iron-red, the colour of the peats in summer. I began to gather the stones but I couldn’t lift all of them and there had been very much blood, pooled and still dark where it had run down into the damp shade, sticky on my fingers. I knew that, that a body can spray and trickle and pour more blood than seems possible for its size, but still I tried at least to map the boundaries, to see where my husband’s blood had not been spilt, to find the margin of unspotted ground. There was hair, too, on the big rock, and I crouched and then knelt, grasped it in my arms, felt it crush my breasts and graze my breastbone and ribs as I strained to raise it.