Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

SITTING ON THE lavatory, bent over, elbows on her knees, head in her hands, Merrily was holding the first sentences in her head.

People say death is like sleep.

I just hope they’re wrong. Sometimes I think I must be very close to death and I hate sleep more than anything .

It wasn’t the original, that was clear. There was no address, and – she’d looked at the bottom – no signature. Mrs Morningwood, or somebody, must have copied it into a computer.

When she came out of the downstairs bathroom, a bit fresher, Mrs Morningwood had returned and was stripping off her old Barbour, hanging it in the whitewashed hall, fluffing up her hair – the first conspicuously feminine thing Merrily had seen her do.

‘You’ve read it?’

‘I had to stop. Had to … go.’

Mrs Morningwood nodded, and Merrily went back to the desk in the living room.

You wouldnt know me Muriel. Theres nothing of me no more I am so thin and my head feels like a rotten egg sometimes and what can you do with a rotten egg except get as far away from it as possible. But you can’t, can you, if it’s inside your head day and night and all your dreams are addled. (See, I remember all about eggs. They were the good times.)

Merrily looked up.

‘This is a girl?’

‘Poor little darkie.’

Mrs Morningwood came over to the desk. Brought out a small leather photo album and began thumbing through it.

‘It was what people called her. Almost a novelty in the 1970s, a black girl in these parts. Mixed race, actually. Used to come here on holiday with her parents, in a caravan on a farm at Bagwyllydiart. There .’

The photo, its colours faded, showed two girls sitting together on a five-bar gate.

‘That’s … you?’

‘Frightening, isn’t it?’

The young Muriel, willowy and lovely, linking arms with the other girl, who was laughing so hard that her face was fuzzed and her white hoop earrings had ghosts.

‘They were from Coventry. Black father, white mother. They didn’t appear one year and then we heard the parents had broken up. Learning later – from the poor kid herself – that she was being interfered with by the mother’s new man. She’d’ve been fifteen or sixteen. Ran away a couple of times, finally hitch-hiking to just about the only place that had good memories for her.’

‘Here?’

‘Twenty quid in her pocket. Got picked up by the chip man – there was a chap in Monmouth ran two or three fish-and-chip vans, came out to the villages one or two days a week. He recognized her, picked her up, gave her a job in his shop in Monmouth, let her sleep in the room over the top. Until his wife found out.’

‘Oh.’

‘It was probably quite innocent. She’d never have told, anyway. He was there when she needed help. Upshot of it, she turned up at our door, ended up moving in. Would’ve been on the streets otherwise.’

I’m sorry to keep on at you but you were always strong and I dont know anybody else I can tell who wouldn’t just hate me more .

‘You didn’t try to contact her parents?’

‘So she could go back and get fiddled with again? Not a chance, darling. She asked us not to, anyway, and she was sixteen or seventeen, we knew that. Besides, I was going to London, had a job lined up with a distant relative, theatrical agent. She filled the space.’

Mrs Morningwood took the photo back, put it in the album, left the album on the desk and went back to the hob.

‘House was only half as big then. I suppose she was here nearly a year. My mother found her a post as housekeeper – not live-in. Farmer called Eric Davies whose wife’d walked out because she couldn’t stand the isolation and Eric’s refusal to take a day off. Go on – read the rest.’

I’m writing this now because theres times when I still think I can get rid of it if I want to. Like Oh its not that bad it’s only your body and look at the money your getting .

‘I take it this is not about Eric Davies.’

‘Hardly. That came later. We exchanged letters for about a year. Most of them more coherent, I have to say, than this one. She was actually an intelligent girl, resourceful. Adaptable.’

‘So this is referring to the Master House, is it?’

Mrs Morningwood chose a wooden block from the log basket, wedged it into the fire and talked about the Master House commune. Two or three couples there originally, but there was always room for more bodies in the five bedrooms and outbuildings. Then two of the women left and one of the men. Eric Davies, meanwhile, had been made aware of gossip – he was in line for chairman, or president or something, of the local branch of the NFU and someone had discreetly pointed out that perhaps Mary Roberts was not good for his image, middle-aged farmer with a little darkie on the premises several hours a day.

Merrily said, ‘Mary Roberts?’

‘I don’t know where she got the name Linden from. Perhaps she thought it sounded pretty.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said. ‘You’re absolutely sure about this?’

‘Soon as I saw the girl with the builder. Look at the photo again. Look at the eyes.’

The eyes were blurred in the picture, but the size and the separation … well, maybe.

‘If I had one of her a couple of years later, even you would be in no doubt. Fuchsia, the first time I saw her and Barlow, they weren’t here to work, just look around, so not in overalls. She was even wearing the same kind of clothes as Mary had. Highly coloured. As if she’d seen some old photos of her mother and gone out of her way to recreate the image. Barlow was asking about the house and I tried to help him – rambling on in a state of slight numbness, trying not to keep staring at the girl. Hell of a shock, Watkins. Like seeing a ghost.’

‘Did you say anything?’

‘No. I needed to know if she knew. Needed to get her alone. The name, you … that was the clincher. Mary’s few possessions included a decrepit, much-thumbed paperback copy of Titus Groan . Mervyn Peake? Leading female character?’

‘Fuchsia.’

‘Pretty conclusive.’

‘And did she know?’

‘Never got her alone to ask. Barlow came back alone some days later telling me she’d been troubled by something in the house. Wouldn’t go into details.’

‘You didn’t tell him you may have known Fuchsia’s mother?’

‘Of course I didn’t.’

Mrs Morningwood bit her lip.

‘You’d better tell me the rest,’ Merrily said.

When you dont go to bed no more because they come to you in your sleep thats pretty bad isnt it. And when you wake up it’s like your body is not yours no more, it’s their’s. They can make your arms and legs move about and make you see what nobody should have to see. Well thats when you think you must be getting close to the end of this sick life and thank God for that .

‘I’d actually wanted her to come to London with me,’ Mrs Morningwood said. ‘I was working for a magazine by this time, making better money – in the process of moving to a flat in Clapham. But, for reasons I didn’t know about at the time, she declined. I … didn’t make proper arrangements for the forwarding mail so may have missed a couple of letters from her. And then that one arrived … five months after it was posted.’

‘That does not sound good. At all.’

‘I phoned my mother straight away, and of course it had all gone wrong – Mary had been staying away for several nights at a time, and then a whole week. Having taken up, it emerged, with one of the Master House people. And taken various drugs, obviously. Possibly, judging from the letter, LSD or mescaline.’