Mischief Acts, page 19
‘Watch this,’ Herne said, at a pause during that most free of nights, and he took my hand and pulled me upright so we could see the sky full of embers. I stepped back, and looked at his naked form in silhouette against the glow. Where he stood, beautiful before the bare trees all lit in shadow, it looked to me just as if he had antlers sprouting from his head.
TRUE LOVER’S KNOT
a canticle of moths
Brindled beauty, true lover’s knot,
Black hairstreak, clay fan-foot.
Oh puss moth,
My sprawler, my anomalous.
Blotched emerald, burnished brass,
Flounced rustic, maiden’s blush.
Oh gypsy moth,
My spectacle, my fern.
Water ermine, silky wave,
Marbled beauty, figure of eight.
Oh dew moth,
My confused, my rivulet.
Painted lady, merveille du jour,
Clouded silver, lunar thorn.
Oh ghost moth,
My streamer, my seraphim.
Dingy mocha, frosted green,
Beautiful gothic, copper underwing.
Oh fox moth,
My vestal, my brimstone.
Sallow kitten, mottled umber,
Tortoiseshell, wood tiger.
Oh leopard moth,
My grayling, my gem.
Tree-lichen beauty, delicate,
Star-wort, wormwood.
Oh heart moth,
My phoenix, my flame.
Dusty W. Small
11
NYMPHS
1968
Charm: Though a shy maiden shun me, if I sing this song, never will she leave me.
‘I am a strong swimmer,’ Carla says aloud. The pond is probably not very deep. But the dusk, and the silence of the surrounding wood, and the reason for standing at the water’s edge, alone, make it seem like the deepest water in the world. A black hole plummets beneath the filigree layer of duckweed. A chill spreads up, flowing out into the warm air.
‘For Mif,’ she says, and summons to her swimsuited breast all the dread and fear that her friend is feeling right now; the uncertainty, and the tiny bit of hope, like a shard of one of Mif’s crystals, broken off. What Carla is about to do might destroy that shard, or bury it in mud forever. But Mif needs to know. She said as much. And the police have been zero help, they have been infuriating and dismissive. Because, as Mif said, they are not mothers.
Carla is not a mother either, but she reminds herself that she knows how it feels to lose at least the beginnings of a child. She’s hardly thought about it in the last ten years, if she’s honest, but now she summons that too. She calls up all the darkest dramas, all the desperate moments of her and others’ lives, and all the drownings she can muster: Ophelia, Virginia Woolf, Eustacia Vye in Return of the Native, which is the one that gives her the deepest pang. She longed to be Eustacia, once, to be wild, desired, fearless and passionate; all the things she has failed to be. Then she adds Shell to that list. Shell, Mif’s frowning, tomboy daughter, is missing, lost out here in this unforgiving world. It works. The flood of grief pushes her two steps closer to the water’s edge.
Her toes are in mud now. There will be mud in the bottom of the pond. She will have to dip into it with her feet. She will have to rake it with her hands, push right in, down to the bottom. It will be the bravest thing she’s ever done, but it’s the right thing to do, for Mif.
Mif does not like water, and Carla is a strong swimmer – Pisces to Mif’s Gemini, water to Mif’s air. Mif reminded her of this when she showed her the book on Shell’s bed. Nature is my Hobby, such an innocent, wholesome title. Shell’s Magic Roundabout bookmark was tucked into a section called ‘Catching and Transporting Nymphs’. Carla had read with fascination, not understanding at all what a nymph was.
Because the nymphs of Odonata are aquatic for the whole of their lives, a search for them is relatively easy as it is always confined to such water areas as lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, canals and ditches. But although the nymphs of one species or another are likely to be present in these situations, it does not follow that a mere dip of the net will secure a specimen. Beneath the surface of the water all sorts of diverse conditions exist, and these are fully exploited by the various species to provide security and concealment.
The nymphs of the broad-bodied Libellula (Libellula depressa), for example, are frequently found either buried in mud or hidden beneath debris at the bottom of ditches and ponds. Those of the Common Coenagrion (Coenagrion puella) and Demoiselle Agrion (Agrion virgo) prefer to live their lives in clumps of waterweed, while those of the Hairy Dragon-fly (Brachytron pratense) cling tightly to, and flatten themselves against, the submerged stems of reeds.
When removed from the water, the weeds, mud or debris, some nymphs remain quite still for a short time and thereby escape detection, but if you wait patiently any nymphs present in the material will eventually betray themselves by moving.
She had just turned the page to scan the headings, ‘Preservation of Nymphs’, ‘Preservation of Nymphal Skin’, when Mif had closed the book on her hand.
‘She headed for water. I know it. She’s Scorpio – a water sign and an insect,’ Mif said, softly, even more softly than she usually spoke. Mif’s voice, with its trace of Australian accent, is like puffs of pale blue cotton wool, calm and soothing to Carla even as she explained a missing daughter.
Mif had combed Dulwich and Sydenham Wells parks, gone round and round the lakes. She had even walked all the way to Crystal Palace and climbed the fence around the fishing lake there. She had called the police. Twenty-four hours, they’d said. But Mif couldn’t wait that long. Who could?
It was only when Mif had left for the police station – to stage a sit-in, she said, until they bloody do something – and Carla had returned to her own flat two floors down, that she had remembered. The Dewy Pond, in the wood behind their block. Even though the Bearmott estate was built right into the edge of the wood, Mif never went in there, because she said she sensed a malevolent spirit amongst the trees, watching. She wouldn’t even know there was a pond.
So here Carla is, in the dusk, doing a policeman’s job for him. Searching. Maybe finding.
Ophelia, Virginia, Eustacia, Shell. She lets out a little shriek as she steps into the water, immediately skids sideways, and falls with an undignified splash. The water is so cold. But her heart does not stop. Gasping, she rights herself. It is only waist-deep, but the bottom is thick with mud, thicker than she ever would have imagined. She is sinking.
‘Mif,’ she says. This works better than drownings as an invocation. She wades, sinking in, sweeping away the duckweed with her forearms. The mud at the bottom is up to her knees. She steps high and wobbles, keeps moving, until the water is just below her nipples. There is a kind of scrubby island in the middle of the pond. She longs to haul herself out on to it, but she clenches her teeth and begins a circuit.
She’s getting used to the cold. She can still feel her feet, the mud is warmer than the water. She will keep wading, and when her breathing is a bit less like that of a panicked rabbit, then she will dip down with her hands.
A few steps on, her right foot comes down on something. Not stone, too soft, but not mud either. She jerks away, feeling her throat close up. ‘Mif,’ she mouths, and she forces her foot down again, a little to the side. More of the same. Images of crocodiles, sea monsters and water snakes flood through her mind. But she is in a pond, in London. And it is so, so cold. She takes in as much breath as she can and plunges down, then thrusts both hands into the mud. There is the soft thing. Her hands move along. A curve, a length, and then, unmistakably, fingers. Under the water, Carla cries out.
It takes several attempts, because her breath has gone and she is shaking, to get back down. She grasps the arm and pulls. She turns her face away as she drags up the body. She is aware of her own whimpers as she hauls it to the bank. It is someone else’s scene, it is somewhere beyond her, this pond and the bedraggled woman heaving and tugging and finally getting back into the water so she can push and roll the muddy thing up, on to the earth.
Shaking all over, finally, she looks.
It is not Shell. Shell is ten years old. This is a woman. She has round breasts, rounded thighs, long hair that is full of mud. The mud is smeared all over her, a deep black-brown so she looks made of clay. But she is not. Carla pants beside her, amazed she got her out. Horrified at what this means. Something terrible. Death. But the body twitches, a knee rises slightly. There is a gurgle, a cough, and the woman sits up and draws an enormous breath. The eyes that open in the black-brown face are dark green. Carla backs away.
The woman doesn’t cry, or wail. She must be in shock. Instead she pulls herself to the edge of the pond and sits with her legs dangling, splashing water up on to her arms and thighs, then on to her chest. She doesn’t seem to mind the cold. Carla picks up her dry shirt and gingerly drapes it around the woman’s shoulders. She isn’t even shaking, though Carla’s shudders have become more violent. She looks up with those dark green eyes, but her face is covered in mud and Carla can’t tell what she is feeling.
‘Are you all right?’ she asks, though of course the woman is not all right. ‘I’ll take you home, we can clean you up. I live just over there.’ She points through the trees to where her block stands, just beyond the wood. ‘You can use warm water instead,’ she adds hopefully, for the woman is still splashing herself, revealing skin with a greyish tinge. Carla holds out her dry shorts. ‘See if you can get these on.’ She will have to walk home in her swimsuit, but this is a crisis, it will be an act of heroism.
The shorts are bright blue, almost turquoise. The woman eyes them with curiosity, then stands and takes them from Carla. She pulls them on, over her broad thighs. They are far too small on her large frame. They resemble bikini bottoms.
‘Sorry,’ Carla says. ‘It’s not far, I promise.’
But the woman seems delighted with them. Carla helps her into the shirt and does up the buttons, her shivery fingers fumbling against the woman’s skin. She is a head taller than Carla. It makes it tricky to feel protective over her, especially now that, in Carla’s small clothes, she looks dressed for the kind of party Carla does not get invited to. The risqué kind, with acid-laced punch, and liberal amounts of pot, where by the end everyone is paired up, saliva-swapping on beanbags.
‘Let’s go,’ she says. She holds out a hand to show the way, but the woman takes it in her own, for comfort Carla supposes, and they walk, an odd, muddy couple, through the dappling trees, towards Carla’s flat. Unlike Mif, she has never felt as though anything was watching her in the wood, but for those few, long minutes, the self-conscious sensation is intense.
The woman is hesitant on the stairs, but Carla coaxes her up to the third floor. ‘I’ll run you a bath,’ she says, as she unlocks her front door. ‘You’ll feel better.’ Though so far, the woman seems better than she does. She looks strong, her long broad body flexing as she peels off the shirt and shorts in the bathroom. She sits in the running bath, turning the water silty, and gives Carla a toothy smile.
‘What’s your name?’ Carla asks, vainly adding pink bath salts to the murk.
‘Libellula,’ the woman says.
‘Gosh.’ Carla dips her hands in the warm water to rinse off some mud, and wishes she were in the bath herself. She is still shivering. ‘Can I call you Libby, then? Or Lula?’
‘What you like.’ She has a slight accent, Russian perhaps. Her voice is deep. ‘Where is Effra?’
‘I don’t know any Effra,’ Carla says, wondering if this might be the woman’s assailant. She averts her eyes from the large round breasts, the dark nipples. Lula rakes her matted mane over one shoulder as she lies back in the bath, and plucks something black from one of the clods of mud. It looks like a tadpole, but before Carla can be sure, she pops it in her mouth and swallows.
‘Okay. I’ll leave you to it, then.’
‘Okay,’ Lula sings.
Should she call the police? Ask them to look for an ‘Effra’? Mif said they’re bloody useless, and she tends to agree. She’d be handing over a vulnerable woman to a bunch of incompetent men. And they might like the look of her. It wouldn’t be sisterly. But is Lula vulnerable? Every fact of the situation screams that she is. Carla just rescued her from a pond, where she would presumably have drowned, and she was naked, and so presumably either put there by a man or driven to try and drown herself, by something a man has done. Just like Eustacia Vye.
On the other hand, Lula does not seem very upset. Memory loss is one possibility. Madness of some kind – trauma-induced, or just general madness? It’s up to Carla to figure it out, before she goes calling any emergency services. Or should she call Mif, for advice?
In a horrible rush like bile to the throat, she remembers the actual crisis: Mif’s lost daughter. She dials Mif’s number; no answer. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she calls to Lula, then, uncertain if she should leave a woman with a recent history of near-drowning alone in a bath full of water, she pokes her head round the bathroom door. ‘Will you be okay if I go out for a minute?’
Libellula’s hair, now mostly free of mud, is spread out over her shoulders in a dark brown cascade.
‘You can run fresh if you want,’ Carla says, looking at the mud-coloured bathwater.
‘Don’t be crazy,’ Lula says. ‘This is great.’
Shock, Carla thinks. The woman is bound to act strangely. She should be calm, and kind, and help her through.
Two floors up she knocks on Mif’s door. Nobody comes. She leans there for a moment, picturing Mif’s crumpled face earlier that day, and berates herself for having forgotten about Shell so entirely that she’d actually thought she could ask Mif for help. Mif must still be at her sit-in at the police station. She should be there for her, take along some tea, join in with some chanting. While she wouldn’t normally, she would do it for Mif. But she can’t do that and look after Lula.
She traipses back down the stairs. There are some new graffiti on the walls at the fourth floor. She wonders how they get in here, and why they bother if it’s just to paint a flower, a butterfly. There are plenty outside.
Lula is lying on her sofa, naked and still quite wet by the looks of things. Carla pulls towels out of the sideboard, embarrassed now that she’s stored them there, but Lula doesn’t comment. She drapes them over Lula, and wonders if she should rub her dry, warm her up. It feels too intimate somehow, given Lula is smiling at her again.
‘Do you want something to eat? Drink? Do you want to tell me – what happened?’ she asks, nervous in the blaze of those green eyes. Lula’s hair is dripping, soaking the sofa arm. There is a small pool of water on the floor. Carla mops it up.
‘It’s lovely here,’ Lula says and wriggles, so the towels fall off her.
‘It’s okay if you don’t remember. Or if you don’t want to talk about it. Take your time.’ Carla pats her broad hand. At least she looks less grey, now. She’s almost got a glow.
‘Don’t be crazy,’ Lula says again, grabbing Carla’s hand and pulling her to sit on the sofa.
It’s unnerving, being wedged in beside a large naked woman. But this is a crisis. She’s doing her best.
‘Really, it’s lovely here.’ Lula wraps her arms around Carla, who feels a little like a bug, caught. Give her whatever she needs. Human warmth.
It is nearly midnight when there is a knock at her door. Mif is beaming. ‘Look what I’ve got,’ she says, and Shell peeps round from behind her mother before running up to Carla.
‘Oh, thank God.’ Carla hugs Shell hard, and her eyes fill with tears as Mif smiles and smiles at her.
‘Hey,’ Mif soothes, and comes to join the hug. ‘It’s all right, Honey Bee. She’s fine. We’re all fine. Jimbo had her the whole time, that bastard. Playing at being a father when it suits him.’
Tears stream down Carla’s face. ‘I got in the pond to look for her, in the wood.’ Her sobs are muffled against Mif’s shoulder.
Mif pulls back to look at her. ‘Seriously?’ Carla is still wearing her swimsuit under her dressing gown, and Mif reaches out and pings a shoulder strap. ‘You got in a pond, for us? I don’t know what to say. You’re the best friend in the world.’
Mif is beautiful even in her weariness. Those words, spoken in her soft voice, set Carla off again. Mif squeezes her tight, holding on even after Shell wriggles out from between them.
‘Nobody in the whole universe would do that for me. Jimbo certainly wouldn’t. Thank you.’ Mif kisses her, right on the lips. ‘Thank you.’ Then she does it again.
‘Mif,’ Shell calls. ‘Can we go home now.’ She has never called her ‘Mum’ in the three years Carla has known them. Mif says it’s good for her sense of independence.
‘Shall we have a cup of tea, to celebrate?’ Mif asks, looking over Carla’s shoulder, into the flat. ‘Or I’ve got that ouzo left?’
‘Actually, there’s someone here.’ Carla sniffles and smiles, ready to tell her own story of the evening, but Mif frowns.
‘Sorry, I didn’t realise.’ She lets go of Carla. ‘We’ll go home. I’m on the stall first thing, anyway.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Carla says, ‘it’s not like that.’
But Mif is already at the stairwell. ‘Another time,’ she calls, and follows Shell away up the stairs.
Carla waits, in her doorway. Mif has never kissed her on the mouth, in gratitude or celebration, or anything else. Carla’s admiration for Mif is not just about her beauty; she has reminded herself of that many times. Yes, Mif is tall and slender and golden where Carla is short and stocky and dark, but it’s only because they’re so different that Carla can’t help noticing so much how Mif looks.
Still, that kiss was stirring, and surprising. Could she be part of the zeitgeist, after all? She pictures herself with Mif, wandering through a field of flowers and hippies, someone strumming a guitar under a tree, the sun bronzing their shoulders, their fingers entwined. Free love, Mif whispers in her ear, then kisses the lobe. But it’s ridiculous. Carla is not sexually experimental. She’s not even sexual, since Geoff. The summer of love and all this liberation that is supposedly in the air has made her feel inadequate, not free. She is not the adventurous type.
