He still looks confused but he tears the seal and pulls out the contents. We both stare down at them.
A letter, in my granny's handwriting. The only letter she ever actually sent to her sister.
And a book. Granny Ivy's
Cooking Book
. Leather-bound, black, cracked across its thick spine. I shiver when I see it.
Rick passes me the letter. I start to read it aloud.
Dear Rose,
April 18
th
'76
Well, it's been over thirty years since I last saw you. I hope you're done with hating me by now. I hope you're still alive. I need your help.
You always said I was a menace when I had my spell book in front of me, and how right you were. The love charm on the third page, I'm ashamed to admit, is one I made determined use of back when we were young and both in love. I'm sure you always suspected that.
I enclose the book with this letter. I think it's time I put it aside for good and I want you to have it. Please keep it safe. Destroy it if you must, but I'd rather you didn't.
I've been thinking a lot about us over the last months, trying to imagine how different my life could have been with your love, and wondering whether you think of me at all. I've been using you as an empty vessel over the years, a blank wall to store my words. Letter after letter, and none of them sent. But now I've tied a knot that cannot be untied, have perhaps gone too far with my magics, and so I have purchased a postage stamp.
I'm sure you will have received news of me over these last decades, as I have of you. I'm sure you know that Edgar's dead, and that we had a daughter, and now I have a granddaughter. The most beautiful little pumpkin the world ever created. For her if not for me, please help me. I couldn't bear for her to hate me.
I won't spell it out for you, Rose. I flatter myself that we are still bound as sisters in our hearts, and so you will know what I mean when I say that I have put something in the oak tree that stands in our back garden. It's so strong, the oak, and guards us all so well, I'm sure it's the safest place, I just hope I haven't asked too much of it. I'd hate to watch it weaken and rot and know the fault is mine. If I die before you, and I believe that I will, then please come and get what I've hidden and take it far away. Bury it and then forget about it. By then I can't imagine it will matter much what happens to it. For now, I want it close to me, where I can deal with it quickly should I need to change my mind.
Maybe I'm worrying too much? Maybe I'm just a silly old woman with pretensions towards meddling in things that are really no more than hocus pocus? A little excitement to shore up the lonely evenings. I suppose only time will tell.
I'm particularly maudlin tonight. Memories of Edgar haunt me and the need to feel his warm, living skin beneath my fingertips has me doubled and writhing in my armchair. Who would have thought you could miss a person so much, after so long, that it has the strength to bend your physical form into such shapes of loss?
I'm not going to write any more now but my address is at the top of the page should you ever care to visit or write back to me. I would like that very much.
Love has always been the driving force of my life and this thing I have done, this final spell, though it may look like hate, it is in fact an act of love. I believe that.
Thank you, Rose.
Ivy
I look through the spell book and then push it across the table towards Rick. Tears scuff my vision and I can't make out his expression.
âThe last spell,' I say. He starts to read it.
A Ridding Spell
Perform this with humility, for the ripples spreading out from this spell, ripples that you will create by disturbing the natural flow of fate's waters, may reach further and cause more damage than ever you imagined.
Take something of intimacy from the one.
Nail clippings
A lock of hair
A scrap of well used handkerchief
Underthings
Any of these will suffice if imbued
with the one's bodily emanations.
Melt a good-sized piece of black wax until it is
soft and pliant
and shape from this the figure of the one.
Press that which you have taken into the wax
figure and allow to harden.
Paint over with tar. Layer upon layer.
Allow to dry.
Form a pouch from the thickest piece of blackest velvet.
Sew the figure inside it.
Take time to ensure there is no penetration
of light or air.
Secrete the pouch in a place no human eye will uncover.
And then wait.
It will not be long.
To reverse the spell
remove the pouch from its hiding place.
Snip the stitches with a blade of steel.
Release the wax figure and smash it roughly
until it is in a multitude of fragments,
returned to the world from which it was banished.
You will suffer poor health for some time afterwards
or forever afterwards.
I get up and walk outside. I have to put out a hand to anchor myself when I reach the tree so that I don't trip over its thrusting roots.
I've put something in the oak
. That mossy cleft had been my own hiding place too, a decade ago.
The plastic garden chair sags but holds my weight as I climb onto it. Rick appears beside me, still holding the spell book. He reaches a hand to steady me as I slip an arm inside the tree. I start to pull things out and drop them to the grass at my side. Bundles, soft and hard, wrapped in fabric and oilskin and plastic. I reach and remove until there's nothing left inside the nook and then I get down from the chair.
Mum's at the window now, shouting at me. She disappears and then she's at the door, rushing across the lawn in her slippers, stumbling and swearing and then by my side. She tries to grab me but I ignore her. I don't think she's even seen Rick.
I know what the first object is and I unwrap it from its pillowcase with barely a glance and lay it on the lawn. Mum snatches it up and starts to hurry away with it pressed to her chest but then looks down, falters and turns back.
âThis isn't mine. Who are these people?'
The next bundle. A silk bag, half rotted through. It spills a bright shower of gemstones over my feet. Quartz, carnelian and jasper. Amethyst and moonstone. Granny Ivy's cache of crystals. Mum bends and scrabbles to scoop them up then stares and lets them trickle back through her fingers to the ground.
Something hard, stitched inside black velvet. I try to tear the material and manage to create a hole large enough to force part of the object through. A crude wax figure, coated in tar and matted with hair. Mum tries to take it from me but I push her away.
âDon't touch it.'
And finally one of my old exercise books in a plastic bag, covered with Christmas wrapping paper. My name scribbled out. The pages are bulky and brittle, held together with staples and memories. A scrapbook. Photographs of my father have been glued inside. A page from a map book. A silver chain. I look at mum. She stands with her head down and her hand out, waiting.
I lay the book gently across her open palm and bend to gather up the rest of the items as she turns away and walks back inside the house.
Two Photograp
hs Of A Man Asleep
It was late evening. We'd been sleeping, fitted one inside the other like a Japanese puzzle box. Exhaustion made instant statues of us. Your mouth still fastened on my breast. My fingers curled into your hair.
I released myself and turned my head and saw the camera you'd bought me, laying on the bedside cabinet. The noise it made when I pressed the little button was enough to wake you.
Click.
You didn't open your eyes but you reached out a hand and pulled me back to rest beside you. You were smiling. You looked so beautiful.
I tucked the camera beneath my pillow. I kissed your eyelids. And we curled into each other and slept through the night, right through, until checkout.
I wanted just one more. One more, just for me.
I wanted an image that would slip between my ribs and wrap itself around my heart, whenever I became flinty with resentment. Paper defeats rock.
Click.
And then I wanted another one. When you were insecure, you'd get a certain look. Your uncertain look. Think of a child threatened with a slap if they don't do their sums correctly. Try as I might, I could never recall that look from memory.
Click.
It wasn't enough. I wanted more. I deserved more.
I wanted to steal a photograph for every mood, every occasion. Have so many images of you that I could stitch your smile into my pillowcase and sleep cheek to cheek with you at night. Turn you into a brooch and pin you to my blouse like a nametag. Cut you down the middle and jumble you up and recreate you. Make a collage of your body.
I wanted so many photographs that I could waste them, take them by the fistful and step out into a gale and scatter them, and not mind the loss.
Click.
Click.
Click.
There were surely times that you noticed. You must have noticed. But you never stopped me, and you never took the camera away. Why was that?
So I added to my secret haul over the years, stalking the perfect image the way a lepidopterist stalks the rarest butterfly, coveting, catching you in my black and white net, and then pinning you down for evermore.
The last time I saw you, I had my camera with me but it was empty of film. Maybe if I'd had the chance to take your photograph then it would have revealed something about your intentions. I could have studied it afterwards and found something in your expression, a coldness around your mouth, a distance in your eyes, that would have told me you were about to leave me.
Something that would have told me why.
10
I was twenty-three when I met him. Rick. Three months away from home and my mother. Three lonely months and still hollowed from the medication I'd weaned myself off. Still fighting the mornings.
Mum had prophesised another emotional collapse when I left her. She thrashed around the confines of my room as I packed, threatened to change the locks so that I would never be able to return. She couldn't understand why I'd want to risk breaking myself again on life when she made it so easy for me to stay with her and peep at the world from behind closed curtains. We could wait together for him, for my father, and I could keep her company. As Tommy drove me away from the house I vowed it would be for the final time. I was done with this island. This time I meant it.
I got a job in a cafe and phoned Tommy to give him my new address. I made him promise not to pass it onto mum and I put the phone down on him when he tried to talk to me about her. That still makes me feel guilty, though I'm not sure whether the guilt is more for him or for her. I've always seen them as a pair, I suppose. My screwed up version of family.
So I woke up and went to work and went home and went to bed. And then I woke up and did it all again. When I had free time I walked to tire myself out. If asked, I would have said I was happy enough, until I met him.
The teapot was hot and clasped awkwardly so that it pressed down on the pulse in my wrist. I rushed the last few steps to his table and released it with a hiss of relief, leaning too close, making him swing round. His fingernails, the longest I'd ever seen on a man, scratched a long thin seam across the soft freckles of my elbow.
We both apologised and he tried to take my arm and look at the mark he'd left on me, while I tried to wipe at the spilled water and step away. The cafe was busy and heads swivelled to follow my course, eyes only an hour or two open squinting questions and demands. He stood and dabbed at me with a serviette, helpless in his contrition but determined not to let me go until I'd accepted his offering.
Please, let me see. Use this.
The skin was already raised around the scratch, puffed and putty-white. The trail of red at its centre glistened with moisture but didn't bleed. I thrust my arm out quickly then pulled it back and turned to go.
It was just an accident. It's fine. See.
His watchfulness made me clumsy as I circled the room and cleared the tables. I was relieved when he left.
Later, at home in my flat with the radio on, trying not to hear the resentful whine of next door's daily deserted dachshund, I looked again at my elbow and saw in the shallow trench flecks of deepest blue. They floated below the jelly of the forming scab like glitter in a snow globe and sparked in the lamplight when I moved my arm.
The next time he came into the cafe I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt despite the heat and he didn't see the bandage beneath the cream cotton. My skin smarted with infection, the blue flecks drowning in a tumult of thickened flesh. He asked how I was healing and I pretended not to remember but then couldn't resist asking a question of my own.