In a Valley of Stone

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem’d a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads


Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph ... whether it had any reality, I cannot say. – Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his Sister might die.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, April 1799


What is genuine? The genuine inner soul you say you want to discover? Nothing’s absolutely genuine! You aren’t the same person with everyone you know. You act out different roles.

Patricia Duncker, James Miranda Barry

I

December 1986

The figure runs out of the laughing mouth of the pub and into the path of three young men. One loses his footing and swears at the figure as it disappears around a corner. None of them could later give more of a description than that the runner was tall, strong and in no mood to stop and say sorry. But they are drunk, it is near closing time and you half expect a bit of trouble this close to Christmas.

The runner runs on. Up the street, into an alleyway on the right and through the network of paths, back gardens and parking places that lead to the edge of the town. The rain is icy and insistent, the kind of rain that shepherds dread, taking its toll of their lambs when it came in the spring. At this time of year it is to be expected, though not, it seemed, by the runner, who wears only jeans, a sweatshirt and training shoes. To the limits of the town, the way was streetlit; now the road is illuminated only by the occasional light of the moon and the hard, probing eyes of cars as they splash past the runner. The figure is gaining ground now, and the trees are trailing behind, left to watch with the houses, shops and harbour further back. One of the runner’s feet finds a rut in the road, where the tarmac has been torn and eaten away by the traffic and the unforgiving coastal weather. The foot turns and the ensuing shout would, to anyone who had been walking past on that Saturday night, signal an early end to whatever race this was.

But still the figure runs. Unevenly now, a little lighter on the left foot than before, but no slower. The rain is easing off, but the wind buffets the figure, sometimes to the side, sometimes head-on, depending on the direction of the winding road. Finally the figure reaches the top of the first hill and is still, only in the sense that it is no longer running. It bends forward, hands on legs, gulping at wet, icy breaths, shaking a sodden head and looking back to the half-hidden lights of town. The figure rights itself, clenches its fists, clutches at its head, lets out a howl and begins to run again. Its course is now the middle of the narrow road, presumably because neither edge can be trusted to offer a sure footfall. Twice this tactic almost proves disastrous as cars emerge from behind, horns blaring at the oblivious figure, headlights lighting up the alien eyes of startled roadside ewes. These monstrous intrusions don’t seem to deter the runner, who move a little to the right but otherwise continues its long, long journey towards the next village.

The only lights that give away the eventual approach of this huddled community come from the unwitting windows of people’s homes. These lamps, Christmas lights and fires would at any other time have seemed a welcome smile; tonight they sneer at the incomer. The runner staggers on through the place, soaked again by the returning rain. The figure looks left and right at the windows and in their glow the distinction between raindrops and tears is a meaningless blur. The runner’s right hand rips away at the blinding water, but the pace never slows. And again the edge of the community comes into view. The lights stutter out and the dark deepens. Again the road rises, steeply to start with and then into a gentle slope between the rocky shoulders of the valley.

Almost at once the weather abates. The road runs flat now, between grassy expanses and high, stone-strewn sides. A little way on, the runner cuts off to the right, across the grass and onto the high hillside. The figure’s feet are ensnared at almost every step by tussocks, rocks and rabbit holes, but at each stumble the runner recovers and continues upwards. The course is meandering, like a tack against a heavy headwind. Through the zigzags there emerges a line, insistently up and onto the hill brow, over to the edge of the cliff. Crossing this course is the coastal path, which the runner now joins, glancing again to the right and out to sea. The wind has resumed at the ridge and has ripped away the ragged storm clouds to expose the nakedness of the half moon. The harsh, cold light trickles across the waves, crawls up the rocks and clinging grass and comes to rest in the cliff’s crags and clefts. Into one of these the runner finally falls and slumps.

It is now half past two in the morning, three and a half hours since the figure left the pub in Porlock. Here, twelve miles along the coast, the figure crouches and screams on the edge of the Valley of Rocks. It isn’t clear how much this is from the pain bearing down or from some inarticulate anguish, but it is heard far out to sea. A night fisherman later reported a strange bird’s cry that had called time and again, then had fallen silent. Slowly recovering its breath, and with quieter cries now, the figure rises to its feet and begins to strip. First the shoes are kicked off and socks pulled from shredded feet and bruised ankles. Then the jeans and underwear, bloodied, are shrugged to the ground. The figure tears at the sweatshirt, ripping it along its seams, then rents the t-shirt underneath it. Such an old-fashioned word, but none substitutes for the way that the hands grip the neck of the garment, tearing downwards and outwards. After a few seconds’ struggle, the shirt is in tatters on the grass. And the moon looks in horror at the bandaged body beneath.

The figure pauses to shout words at the sea, bellowed so strongly that they threaten to burst the throat that sounded them. Spittle shoots out, lost in the spume far below. The words disappear in the crashing of the waves and the keening of the wind. The figure begins to undo and unwind the bandage from below its breasts. Once, twice, three times round the slowly loosening body. Then a pause to cough, forcing the bare, stark ribs against their constraints. And then she – for there can be no doubt of her sex – continues to unravel herself. Once, twice and three times more, her hands and the bandage cross her body. And at every unwinding, the belly beneath seems to spring outwards, reaching out to the sea and the moon.

Stripped of the bandage, the runner stands, five months pregnant, more a girl than a woman. She shivers violently and her skin, rapidly cooling in the freezing night air, raises every follicle in its futile attempts to warm itself. Suddenly she is pulled down, bent double with an extreme pain. She fights at it and stands again, crying and shouting incoherently. But again some force compels her to bow to it, to scrape her knees on the rocks beneath her. Blood, as if from some slowly dying sacrifice, trickles down her thigh, faster than the tears drizzle her cheeks. Her mouth is set in a rictus, wide-mouthed, her eyes clamped shut. Each hand makes a fist that hits out at the pain. Gradually she composes herself, moves closer to the edge and looks down. Once more the pain hammers her to her knees, but this time she is on her feet in a moment. Stretching up her arms, looking up at the sky, she prepares herself. A quick lowering of the head and arms, a flex of the legs, feet and hips and she dives into the sea.

II

January 1987

The night after they buried the girl, the boy sits on her bed and speaks for the first time that day, to her. He hears nothing, so he goes back to his bedroom and puts his clothes on. He leaves the house and walks five miles, through the rain, to where she is now lying. He vaults the railings and walks over to the grave. There he lies down, brushing the flowers to one side, careless of the wet mud on his clothes, hands and face. And as he speaks to her again, he begins to dig. Just a small tunnel, using one hand. The tunnel becomes deeper and deeper. When the ground meets his shoulder, he stops and falls back.

‘Where are you? Why didn’t you talk to me? I could’ve made it better – whatever it was. What am I going to do now without you?’ After a long silence, he shouts, ‘Please answer me! Talk to me!’ The only sound is the rain on the trees and in the growing muddy puddles around him.

The rain wakes him around dawn. He gets to his knees and scrapes most of the mud off his body and arms, then tries to rearrange the scatters wreaths, as if remaking the girl’s bed. Keeping to the hedges and back lanes, the boy makes his way home. He’s left the back door open, so he makes very little noise as he walks into the kitchen. He kicks off the wellingtons and shrugs off his clothes, pushing them into a corner behind a pile of boots.

He walks into the shower room beyond the kitchen and turns on the taps. The pipes shudder and bang and his mother’s voice comes from upstairs. ‘Mark, is that you? What time is it? Put the kettle on, will you?’ The boy steps back from the shower and into the kitchen. He fills the kettle and switches it on.

Back in the shower room, he stands in front of the mirror. He wipes away the condensation and sees a black, streaked mask, with white eyes staring at him. He turns away and steps into the scalding water. By the time he is clean, his mother is in the kitchen. She has seen the trail of wet, muddy footprints and found the pile of soiled clothes.

‘Where on earth have you been? These are filthy.’

‘Out for a walk.’

The boy’s mother drops the clothes to the floor and hangs her arms helplessly. ‘Please don’t go out like that. Not now.’

‘Sorry.’

III

July 2006

It was a bad evening to start with. Sharon wasn’t there to open up, so I had to spend the first hour behind the bar serving an old man and his Jack Russell. When she finally arrived, her story went on so fast and so long that I just smiled tightly and disappeared upstairs.

Liz was slamming plates around and Helen was sitting facing the wall in a pose of self-absorption, all the while clearly furious with her mother. I counted to five and asked Liz what was wrong. ‘Ask your daughter.’ But I got nothing out of Helen. Dinner passed in a thick, angry silence and Helen got up to leave. ‘So when will you be back?’ asked Liz. ‘When I’m back’. The door slammed behind her. I decided the bar was the best bet and went downstairs.

Business was painfully slow. We’d hardly clear enough to pay the staff, and Sharon had managed to fill the pipes with dregs from the barrel. I smiled patiently at the bemused barmaid while I pumped a few more pints of my profit into a bucket. The night wore on, punctuated by tedious stories and unfunny jokes from the few regulars who’d come in that evening. I paced out my Pils bottles, carefully hiding the empties as usual behind the full ones, safe in the knowledge that I’d be bottling up the next morning and could get rid of the evidence. Once I’d closed the door on the last customer and had had a final drink with Sharon, I went back upstairs. Liz was off to bed long before, so I sat down to wait for Helen. I poured myself a glass of red wine and put the television on.

The door opened some time after one. My first instinct was to hug her and put her to bed; instead I glared. ‘What time do you call this? Why didn’t you phone?’ ‘What’s it to you?’ came out almost as if scripted. And the conversation that ensued was predictable. Until, that is, Helen came to within an inch of my face. It must have been so red, my eyes bloodshot and my mouth spitting and stinking of alcohol. She slapped me hard and spat at me. I gripped her arms, at first just to stop her repeating the slap. But my hands turned from restraints into instruments of torture. I gripped harder and harder, shaking her to the rhythm of my shouts.

When Helen finally ripped herself from my grasp, the marks on her arms cried out. There for Liz, the neighbours, friends, social services, the police to see were his red fingerprints, turning to purple. And Helen’s betrayed eyes were looking straight into mine. Her mouth was open but no sound came out. Instead only her eyes spoke. How could you have hurt me like this? Do you hate me so much that you want to kill me? What are you going to do next? I raised my hands to placate, to cradle her, to begin the slow process of saying sorry again, but she shuddered and shrank from me. I was a monster and she had to get away. ‘Don’t you dare!’ she finally shrieked and jumped away, then staggered off to her bedroom.

I sat for an age, staring at the wall, drinking the remains of my bottle of red wine. Then I screwed my face up into a silent cry and tore my shirt off. I reached for anything I could and I smashed it. And I went out.

I had drunk even more than usual and had difficulty finding the lock in the car door. Carelessly, I scraped at the paintwork in my efforts to turn the key, then pulled at the door so hard that it seemed I would pull the car round with it. I hit my knee on the steering wheel as I threw myself into the driving seat, then slammed the door shut. The force of slamming the door brought the plastic handle off in my hand and I swore as I threw it onto the passenger seat. Again, I struggled to put the key into the ignition and I banged my fist on the steering wheel in frustration. The horn’s single shout had one of our neighbours at her curtain. Once it was in, I turned the key again and again, making the engine grind and scream as it was forced to start and re-start. I stamped on the clutch, wrenched the gear into reverse and floored the accelerator. The car slammed forwards and hit the post in front of it. I pulled again at the gear stick, pressed my foot on the accelerator and the car lurched backwards into the street, hitting the opposite kerb. Another curtain opened in a nearby window, then was rapidly pulled shut.

I still hadn’t turned the car lights on, so the noise had no obvious source for the observer to see. Once more I pulled on the gear stick, as if I wanted to rip it from its socket, then the car shot forwards, taking the wing mirror off our neighbour’s car. Only when I was beyond the streetlights did I think to turn his headlamps on, just in time to avoid a parked van. Time and again the car scraped against the high hedgerows, or the wheels crunched into roadside stones and kerbs. I could hardly see to drive, as I screwed my eyes up to rid myself of my tears and the sight of my terrified daughter. After half an hour of winding lanes and the moor-top ‘A’ road, I reached the remote car park, by the cricket pitch at the centre of the valley. I pulled on the handbrake before I had fully stopped, and the car skidded to a mad angle at the centre of the tarmac. I threw open the door, kicking at it with my right foot, then staggered out.

There was a good moon that night, or I’d have found it hard to walk anywhere. Following the light up the slope, I zigzagged along. Every few steps, my foot found a hole or a hillock and my ankle twisted or I fell to my knees. And every time I quickly regained my balance, driven on and up to the brow of the hill. I must have looked like a tormented puppet, forced to its feet time and again by an unseen pair of hands. I kept my eyes on the ridge above, not caring where I was walking. And when I reached the ridge, I turned to the left, onto the path. I looked at the landscape, back and forwards at the promontories. I stopped and turned, then walked along the path in the other direction. A few minutes later, I stopped and looked down at a small, rocky ledge. I dropped to his knees and then onto my backside. I slid onto the outcrop, clutching at the grass all the time to slow my descent.

Once down, I rested against the cliff’s slope, breathing heavily and coughing after the effort. Slowly my breathing eased. My eyes were now fixed on the moon and its reflection on the mirror-calm sea. On another occasion, and to anyone else, this would have been a beautiful sight. I was blind to this. I was staring beyond the light and the dark. And then I began to shout. ‘Where are you? Sarah, where are you? I need to talk to you.’ There was no response. Only the hiss of the water on the rocks below and the slight breeze in the singing grass answered my cry. Again I shouted out to sea, until my voice grew hoarse. I began to plead. ‘Please help me. I can’t do this without you. I don’t know what to say. Everything I say is wrong. Everything I do just makes her hate me more. Please come back.’

The one-sided conversation went on until the moon was gone. I slumped and crouched for what seemed like an age. Finally, accepting that I wouldn’t get an answer, I turned to climb back up. And in doing so, I leant back. Too far, and I began to lose my balance. I tried to clutch at the grass on the slope but my fingers missed and my feet slipped and I fell.

IV

July 1974

It is warm. The children lie at angles to each other on the beach, dark with wet sand. Around them range the ditches and ramparts of a mighty fortress. They have decorated the walls with shells and have placed stiff seaweed stalks on the towers. All that remains to build is the tunnel entrance, long and deep. The boy is digging from within the stronghold, while the girl is burrowing from two arm’s lengths away, outside the walls. Work is in its early stages: each handful is carefully extracted and placed on a pile beside them. And all the time they dig, the children talk.

‘You need to dig deep.’

‘I know that. I am digging deep. But it’s cold and my fingers hurt.’

‘Stop being a baby. Ow. Something’s stuck under my fingernail.’

‘Baby.’

‘No, It really hurts. Look.’

The girl lifts her hand out and seems to rise and jump in one movement into the boy’s castle walls. She crouches next to the boy and shows him a piece of shell protruding from under the nail of her right forefinger. ‘See,’ she says, ‘It really hurts. Pull it out for me. I can’t.’ The boy, still extracting himself from between his piles of sand, looks over at her hand and pulls a face.

‘I don’t want to. It will hurt you.’

‘It hurts me now. Please pull it out.’

The boy crouches next to the girl, his side encrusted with drying sand. He bends his head over her hand, applying his smaller fingers to her longer ones. He brushes away the sand and quickly pulls. The fragment comes out, followed by a trickle of bright red blood. Before it can fall on the beach, the boy takes it into his mouth, sucking the finger. ‘There,’ he says, ‘Now you won’t die. I’ve sucked the poison out.’

The girl slowly pulls her finger back and stares very seriously at the boy. ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘It doesn’t hurt any more. Thank you for saving my life.’ She goes back to her work, using her other hand until the right hand is better.

Slowly the piles of wet sand grow. Gradually the children’s arms disappear further into the dark, wet holes they have dug. Then the girl feels the sand give way in front of her fingers. She continues to grab at the sand and brings the handful out. Then she lies as flat as she can on the beach and thrusts her hand as far as possible towards the interior of the castle. Her invading hand meets the boy’s welcoming fingers and the two hands grip each other. The boy and the girl lie there for a few minutes until the girl says, ‘We’re kings now.’

‘What?’

‘Me and you. Kings in our castle.’

‘Don’t be silly. You can’t be king. You can be my queen.’

The girl tries to tear her hand out of the tunnel, but the boy holds onto it. ‘Alright,’ he says, ‘You can be what you want. But it sounds silly, King Sarah.’ ‘I will call myself something else, now I am a King’ says the girl. ‘I will be King Arthur and you will be King Mark.’ They laugh, loosening their grip, and begin to build the defences for their new tunnel.

A little way from this, a man and a woman lie side by side in the sun. Sometimes sleeping, sometimes laughing and talking. Their fingers stray across each other. The woman smiles and she clutches the man’s hand. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘We could be very happy here.’ ‘Yes,’ says the man, ‘I think you’re right.’

V

July 2006

[Mark.]

There was a voice in his head, and it was saying his name.

‘What?’

[Mark, it’s me. Sarah.]

‘No, you can’t be Sarah. You’re dead. Does that mean I’m dead? I fell.’

[No, you’re not dead and yes, this is me. Sarah.]

Then silence. Mark opened his eyes. He was in a warm, darkened room. Something hurt. He couldn’t move. His mouth was dry, his throat hurt and the words he had heard himself say sounded crusty. He closed his eyes again and slept.

‘Mr Dawson?’

‘Go away Sarah. That won’t work either.’

‘Sorry, Mr Dawson, I’m not Sarah. My name is Caroline. How are you feeling?’

‘So I’m not dead?’

‘No. You’re in hospital. In the recovery room. You’ve had a fall and we had to sort your leg out. You’ve also had a bit of a bang on your head, but we don’t think anything is broken. So how are you feeling?’

‘Sorry. I’m so sorry.’

Mark began to cry, a soft moaning that hurt his raw throat. The nurse put her hand on his shoulder.

‘Don’t you worry now. You’re alright.’

‘I thought my sister was here. She keeps talking to me, but she’s dead.’

‘There’s no one in here except you and me.’

‘So I must be mad. Or I am dead.’

‘No. You’re alive, but you’ve bashed your head. Maybe that’s why you’re hearing things. Or maybe it was a dream.’

‘Yes, a dream.’

Mark slipped back into sleep.

[For God’s sake, Mark, wake up.]

‘Go away. You’re a dream. I’ve hurt my head.’

[OK, so I’m a voice in your head. But I’m talking to you now and I’m not going to stop.]