Алия Уайтли: The Beauty

I don’t place pebbles on my mother’s grave. I look for meaning in the crosses. They are letters too; they form words, if only I could read them.

‘Something is changing,’ I tell Doctor Ben.

‘Winter is coming and the mushrooms will die out in the cold.’

‘For a while.’

‘Sometimes,’ says Ben, as he stands and stretches out his old muscles, ‘you think too much.’

‘Thank you,’ I tell him again, and grin at him until he sighs and shoos me away.

The windmill turns, the fire jumps high and the river tumbles over the stones. It grows dark and the wild goats bleat in chorus, giving their sad farewells to the sun.

I am ready. The men and boys have eyes only for me. I don’t need to stand or wave my arms around. Attention is not held by the gimmick but in the kindness of my voice.

I tell the story of how we came to be.

In the beginning there was the Valley of the Rocks. Huge stones lay amidst tough grass as if thrown from the sky by a giant hand, wild goats browsed and for a long time nobody came. The Valley waited for its purpose to be revealed to it. It watched the turn and tide of the sea and measured the months that turned to years, decades, centuries. It did not suffer from impatience. It held tight to its implacability, keeping itself intact: stones, grass, goats.

People came and went. Nobody settled the Valley. Nobody felt welcome. The soil was hard and unyielding and the goats were too fast to catch. There were better places to live around the Valley, with fertile fields and running water.

Eventually, when every other place had been built over and dug up, people returned to the Valley and named it a place of natural beauty, simply because they had not attempted to beautify it. The rocks and grasses and goats were photographed and post-carded, until the experts came and said: These tourists are making the valley unstable. The Valley needs room and space and privacy if we are to keep it. The Valley did not care. It could not be kept – it had not been owned to begin with.

Everyone was sent away, and the Valley waited.

Then we came.

The first of us: Tim, Mick, Bernie, Andrea, Pam and Polly. They wanted to live a different kind of life, a better one. They moved into the Valley, and laid down the first tenets. Fresh air. Space for the kids. Growing our own food. Making our own goods. Getting electricity from the wind and water. Building homes out of mud and canvas. They fought a bitter war against the councilmen, but their struggle attracted others, like minds, and our Group swelled. The talents brought into the fold were many and varied: those good with paper, good with words, good with growing, good with building.

And so on, like a fish in a river, I wind my way through the past. I am slick and shiny in the delight of the tale. It unites us, of course, but it also excites us. These stories of our fathers and mothers are a gift to the Group cut and polished with my words, and it leads to a wild night and the cracking open of many cider jars. The victory dance is done – we are still here. We beat our feet on the Valley that waited for us. Half of us lie in the forbidden graveyard, but the rest of us go on. For now.

And even without women there is still, once the cider is thick and mellow in stomachs, love. Tenderness. Maybe not for the older men who refuse such things, but the teenagers turn to each other and disappear into the darkness just beyond the boundary of the fire to play their games, and that is good.

But tonight I am spent. I swim on to the end of the tale, where it becomes the open mouth of the world into which all such stories pour and intermingle. I let it trickle away through my fingers with the words – and so it goes on.

The noises of love come in the wake of my voice and I look around those who are left alone. Doctor Ben is not to be seen; perhaps he has gone for an early night. He looked old this afternoon, too weary to face another winter. I am beginning to know that look. Thomas is not here either, and that makes me uneasy. Thomas never gets lucky with the other teenagers – he is more likely to be mocked than sucked – and he never misses the end of a story.

I catch William’s eye across the fire and he frowns, pausing in his conversation with Hal and Gareth, the gardeners. I hear a cough close to my ear and turn my head to find Uncle Ted smiling at me, squatting to my level. It is a delight to see him at the campfire. Usually he keeps his distance, living wild like the goats. He brings logs and kindling every few days, and maybe rabbits or squirrels to eat.

Uncle Ted is always silent. Nobody ever hears him come or go and I can’t remember the last time I heard his voice, so it is a wonderful surprise when he says, ‘How are you, Nate? Good? All good?’

I pat him on the back. ‘Yes, good. You’re here, that’s better than good.’

‘Have you been to her grave today?’ he asks me.

So that’s why he’s here. He is my family, my last remaining blood. He mourns his sister as I mourn my mother, different facets of the same woman. I know he visits sometimes; I saw the handfuls of forget-me-nots last spring. Our paths never cross there and I would not want them to. Grief is better alone. It has a cleaner taste, a sharper edge, that way.

I nod. I say, ‘I’ve seen the mushrooms.’

‘Can they be cleared away?’

‘We don’t know. I could try.’

‘Don’t touch them,’ he says. ‘They’re not right. The animals stay away from them. They’re in the woods as well. Perhaps they spring up wherever there’s been a burial.’

‘You mean a – body? Other women?’

He nods.

I ask, ‘Why would they be buried in the woods?’

‘I don’t know.’

These unknown women, so close to us, faceless and erupting into yellow, bother me greatly. There is threat here, creeping towards our rocks. The mushrooms are not a good thing. They are not a beginning. I see in Uncle Ted’s eyes the same knowledge. ‘Thomas,’ I say. ‘Thomas and Doctor Ben. They touched the mushrooms.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘I don’t know.’

He gets up and walks over to William. The two gardeners shrink back. He is a tall man, and a big one. My mother was the same – a large woman, muscled, respected. She was an engineer who made the windmills work and the houses strong enough to survive storms. I’m reminded of her in the way Ted moves.

William and Uncle Ted talk, their heads together, in the way that people with power do. Then William beckons me over.

‘We’ll need to find them,’ he says, without pre-emption, and the hunt begins. We don’t involve anyone else. I start at Doctor Ben’s hut, find the empty sleeping bag on the pallet, then go to the communal hut to search for Thomas, stepping carefully around the lads in their ones and twos. He’s not there.

So we raise the alarm. William rings the bell that hangs outside his hut – the sound is heavy, thickening the night with dread. Search parties are formed. As William directs matters, Uncle Ted whispers in my ear, ‘Come with me,’ and I do as I am told. We leave the fire behind, and the huts. We walk past the gardens and the graveyard, up into the rocks, then down into the woods leading away from the sea. Ted keeps a steady pace within the circle of his torchlight and never stumbles; I find tree roots rising up to meet my feet, tripping me and taunting me in the dark.

‘Stay close,’ he says.

Of course I have been in the woods at night before. Often in summer in my school years we would take our sleeping bags and head out. ‘All the enemies had gone,’ said Miriam, ‘no boar, no bear, no wolf. If you see a pair of eyes in the night it’s an owl,’ she said. ‘If you hear a noise it’s a deer. Nobody ever got hurt by owls and deer, except mice and berries.’ Are the woods still filled with the birds and beasts alone? Or are there new eyes, new creatures springing up in the gap left when the world had women ripped from it?