Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (7 page)

Lottie had no time to scream. She stabbed at the closest – digit? – and hacked at it, feeling euphoria when a piece of the creature fell separate from the rest. The creature howled, muffled under the water, and the limb retreated to escape her, snatched away. Lottie kicked the cursed tendril away from her, back into the black pool.

Her laughter was not true laughter – just a desperate, gasping cackle – but the sound of it filled the cave. Then Lottie collapsed into sobs that joined the chorus of falling water droplets from above.

Drip-drip
.
Drip-drip
.

A plan came to Lottie. With a plan, she stole shallow breaths. Her sobbing eased.

She would stay away from the water.

Drip-drip.

She would teach their child his father’s Cherokee name.
Drip-drip.

She would teach their child that Waya’s family had lived in peace along the Etowah River before soldiers took them away.
Drip-drip.

She would feed their child the corn and hickory nuts Waya loved so much, alongside mama’s corn cakes.
Drip-drip.

Minutes passed, then hours, while Lottie made her plans for freedom that she would win at such an unfathomable cost.

“Lottie? You still here?”

When a voice came, Lottie shrieked. Hope swelled in her. But, no.

Not William. Not Waya.

Had she slept again? Her body was stiff against the stone.

Hours must have passed. Lamplight swayed in the passageway. The water had receded to a thin sheet. She smelled pipe tobacco. Her uncle’s shadow floated on the wall.

“We got to hurry, girl.”

Uncle Jim did not ask about William. He was not surprised her husband was gone.

“Waya,” she whispered to the ravaged cave.

“Come on, Lottie – my man’s outside waiting.”

As Free Jim reached for her, his two gold rings flared like droplets from the sun.

His pinky finger, a bloodied crust, was freshly sliced away.

Art by Daria Khvostova

1919
Swansea, Wales

Always more work than hands willing to turn to it, even in your own bloody kitchen. “Is that the last of the milk, then?”

Chorus of complaint and sighs from my husband’s sisters. Lily and Iris and Violet have been looking after the home front, they’re not used to being ordered about like relief-workers, not to scrub and fetch and stretch a ration
proper
. Not that it’s not all the same war we’ve been fighting against. But.

I’d thought it would be less blood and worry, to be home again.

We fall silent as my husband edges into the room. Still a wisp, for all they’ve fed him since he’s been home.

Still not even a shadow of him to reflect in the spoons.

Trevor smiles, hesitant as always. Still the same crooked eyeteeth. Still his. Unshaven. Iris shattered all the mirrors in a fit of rage, or pique, I never entirely know with Iris. Though no mirror ever helped his hair
before
, it’s always been a hayrick. He looks like a naughty schoolboy.

He’s barely met my eyes since I’ve been home, my husband. As hard to bear as how he’s been lying beside me like a stone these last few nights. I’d been holding so fast to the memory of his eyes, the colour of that single word for what other languages slice up into
blue
and
grey
and
green
. But how can you divide the slate, the sky, the sea.

He’ll never see those eyes looking back from a glass again. And there’s not a word at all for what he is.

He’s changed
, they’d written. (Not
come home
, no, they credit me that much, but… but could I stop myself thinking about what they wouldn’t say right out, till I had to tell myself I’d do no one much good working myself into a state. Better to think of it as seeing he’s fit to join me at the relief efforts. Even if the leaving felt like an admission of unseriousness of purpose, just because I’d a husband to go home
to
.) And it’s true. Not the sort of change one might have expected when a man’s been in gaol over his conscience, neither.
That
one could understand – sudden starts at nothing, weeping when he’d think no one could hear? Seen my share of
that
this past while.

But Trevor, Trevor’s is none of that.

How of a sudden he’s the one offering to butcher the hen who’d stopped laying – how he’d come back in with blood round his mouth. He’d not denied it. Couldn’t,
wouldn’t
, not if it’s simple truth. Just asks us to come clear in our own consciences, whether he’s still the boy they loved, the man they knew.

That there itself should tell us that.

Trevor’s looking round in that terribly polite way of a bloke who’s only dared come in with us cooking because he’s that desperate to see if the kettle’s on. When he clears his throat Iris slams the cheese-grater down in the bowl hard enough I worry for her knuckles. “Put it on your own bloody self, why don’t you? Ned manages.”

Ned doesn’t manage and we all know it, we know that Violet will be acting as her brother’s lost arm for the rest of her days and the worst is she’d rather that than admit there’s barely a lad left to marry proper and live her own life instead. Iris
has
cut her fingers on the grater. Trevor is watching his sister’s hand as she sucks at her knuckle, teeth dimpling his lower lip till the blood beads. And, ah, the
hunger
in his eyes, until Iris finally says, abrupt and sharp, “Go see to the chickens then.”

Trevor pushes out the back door into the courtyard without another word. I’m sure Iris doesn’t mean to be hateful, well, I’m almost sure Iris doesn’t mean to be hateful. I feel it low in my own stomach, our desperate fear of this uncharted future. Lily and Violet can see to the rest of our tea, or to Iris, whichever they please; I dust the flour from my hands and step out the back door after him.

It’s a bright day, as it goes. Not raining yet at any rate. Trevor’s sat on the step cuddling one of the hens in his lap. The cockerel’s watching him from the wash-line, clearly not on with the notion that this sudden threat to the back-garden flock has hold of one of its wives or daughters, however gentle the embrace. I wave a hand for the bird to get off the washing and it flaps down to peck at the bricks as if we’re the ones here on its sufferance. “I’ve not seen Iris
this
cross,” I say.

“She’s missing William.” Trevor looks up, then ducks his head back down as if he’d not meant to meet my eyes for even that instant.

“Suppose I can understand that.” I pause, steel my nerves with as deep a breath as I can draw through the knot of my chest. “I’d have minded it, if I’d lost you.”

I can see it on his face, that thought he’s not so certain I haven’t. I smooth my skirts and tuck myself down onto the step beside him, just enough room not to crowd though he still shifts away. The chicken in his arms gives a small chortle of uncertainty and he pats her soothingly. “Reckon we’re luckier than some,” Trevor says.

Which I suppose is true, he could have been Daisy’s husband, to make it all the way through the war and then die of the ‘flu. Nor the health of his body ruined, quite. It’s a scandal how those who refused to fight have been treated, the misery, the few who’d not come home, though of his own troubles Trevor’s said as little as the men back from the trenches with no words to explain to those who’d not seen.

And of the other, only,
Someone took offence
.

Lily’s husband comes out of the toilet at the bottom of the garden, nodding at the door with a wry grin beneath his bristling moustache; “I’d not go in there for a bit, aye?”

Dear Herbert. At least he’s not mentioned the chicken. Yet. Instead he pauses in the act of pulling open the back door to squint at his wife’s young brother with a keen eye for a sorry state: “Trying to grow out your whiskers?” Trevor reaches up to brush his dusting of stubble, and Herbert laughs, not unkindly. “Never mind, lad, you’ll get the knack of it someday. Lil? What’s on for tea, then, love–”

Trevor’s not smiling back when I look to him from the closing door. “Ah, ‘nghariad, he didn’t mean anything by it, you know Herbert.” He’s shaking his head, small, but enough to make me shiver from it. “Hm? What is it, what’s the matter?”

Trevor looks at the cockerel. Meets
its
eyes, square on. It tilts its head at him, jerky, puzzling – takes a step towards Trevor, another, until he can reach out a finger to chuck it under the beak. “I did this to the prison barber,” Trevor says, so low I want to ask him to repeat it. “The mirrors, he was frightened of me, and I
looked
at him, and…” A bone-deep shudder. “I could have told him to slit his own throat and he’d have done it. I could smell the blood inside his skin…”

This man who’d paid near two years of his life to witness with his body that to raise a hand against another is never the way – “What did you do?”

He looks up, picture of misery. Scratch of nails on the bricks as the cockerel takes wing. “Asked him for a short back and sides.”

The smile startles out of me like the flapping cockerel. “Not enough ruddy brilliantine in the world to make
that
look right with you.”

He sets the hen down onto her feet on the cobbles, leaving her to make her unsteady affronted way back towards the coop. “Wouldn’t know, would I.”

Can’t but put my arm round his shoulders, can I, my husband, my Trevor. “Come back in?”

Lily is the only person in the kitchen now, mopping at a spill of jam on the table with a furious glower on her face. “Why do we marry them, I ask you? – Not you, bach,” she adds when she sees I’ve her brother with me, small fond smile for the ridiculousness of our lives. (Hard sometimes not to be envious of Lily, thirty soon and married to a house-holder. Do we claw at each other because we’ve not got all that we wanted? Or do we retreat into our separate troubles?) “Trevor, I was talking with Helen and we’re thinking that even if Meeting can’t spare the money to send the both of you back over to the Continent, I’m certain they’ll at least be able to help you sort out what you mean to do for work and all?”

Been weighing on her mind something terrible, what her brothers are to do with themselves now. Though Ned’s his soldier’s pension, small token for it all but more than anyone would grudge for my husband. Trevor half-turns from where he’s gone to wash barnyard-smelling hands under the tap. From his face he’s picturing what even Friends will be able to do to find positions for anyone from this notorious family of conchies and suffragists. “Not the civil-service I don’t think,” Trevor says. The irony, that
he’d
have the vote now if he’d not chosen to go to prison. “Go back to helping Aled-mawr maybe?” (And how long will it be that we’re still calling his uncle that, when will we forget the
why
of it now Aled-bach rests in Flanders?) “Or Da.”

“You’re wasted as a builder
or
a baker and you know it,” I say.

Lily’s pinched look speaks to how she’s more than ready to see any of the men in her life find bloody
something
already. Thread of normality to pluck at, as if one small worry can displace all the greater. I take Trevor’s hand and tug him towards the stairs. I can hear the denial of tears in Iris’s voice in the front room, where Violet must be giving her as much of a talking-to as I imagine Violet capable of. But upstairs all is still, just quiet breathing from the room where Trevor’s aunt’s been looking after Lily’s girls and poor Daisy’s little Rhys. As well to have got them all down at once, Nora’s still not been up to much after the ‘flu. We creep past that door, and then the bedroom that Iris still shares with Violet, and Ned’s ajar and a shambles, to our own scant refuge from care.

Suppose we can get on with setting up house on our own now the war is behind us. Suppose we all can, except Iris. Funny how that’s not even occurred to me till just now, where she’d go. We’re all still travelling on the rails the past laid down when the train’s lost its bloody wheels. I’ll be organising another march for the vote next.

We’ve still not got electric in the bedrooms. I strike a match for the lamp and set it back beside the basin, doesn’t altogether chase aside the grey dim of a day that’s never going to go fair but enough for this. The dressing-table arches into an accusing void where a mirror ought to be. I’ve been fixing my hair in the largest shard Iris missed, sliver now of myself standing alone at the edge of the bed beside my husband.

His shaving-soap’s not been touched since he’s been home, or nearly – he’d have
tried
, surely, but I can guess how that had gone, without having the sight of his face in a glass. Trevor’s brows crease into a dark question when I reach to pick it up. “No, Helen, why…?”

“Herbert
is
right, you know, you’re a bit of a sight. I
think
I can help you get tidied up?”

The frown is deepening into a proper scowl. “Hardly an invalid.”

“We have to do
something
with you, can’t go about looking as if – as if you’re about to run off to the hills to paint yourself
blue
.”