Алия Уайтли - The Beauty

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

‘What?’ says Oliver, the biggest of the Group, the sheepdog with long tangled hair forever in his eyes. ‘What?’ he repeats.

I say again, ‘I don’t know.’

There must be other words than this, but I can’t find them. There is a hole of dread into which my voice has fallen; I can feel my insides being clawed, raked by the nails of my terror.

‘When are they coming back?’ says Adam, and Jason echoes, ‘When?’ They are yapping puppies, black and tan, who may grow fierce one day.

I don’t have any words for this.

Other men come to us. I can’t explain it; the instinct is strong not to go into the woods. We gather on the edge. Someone calls, ‘Hello?’ and the sound is swallowed by the trees.

‘It was Hal and Gareth,’ says a voice behind me that I place as Keith D, the fiddler. ‘They killed one of them. Splattered it to bits. Now the Beauty won’t come back.’

In the aftershock of these words a feeling is forming – a muttering, a tumult such as I have not felt before. ‘They should be punished,’ says Paul, with a sword of a voice, and others agree. The Group surges back from the woods, towards the hut. I go with them, trailing behind. I know what’s going to happen and although I would like to persuade them from this path, I am dumb.

‘It needs a law!’ William is shouting. He stands in the doorway of Hal’s hut, blocking the crowd’s view of the remains of Belinda. ‘It needs due process! We cannot simply decide they’re guilty. Guilty of what?’

‘Murder!’ shout the teenagers.

‘It’s not murder to slice up a plant,’ says William, but his face betrays him and the crowd sees it.

Then, from behind him, come Hal and Gareth. They push him to one side and stand, chins up. ‘We deserve to be punished,’ says Hal. ‘We did it. I had to be free. My mother wouldn’t have liked it.’

‘Do what you like,’ says Gareth, only his clenching fists giving away his feelings. ‘I’m only sorry I didn’t do my own as well. But I couldn’t. I’d do all the rest, but not my Barbara.’

‘It’s murder!’ calls Adam, and Jason repeats, ‘Murder!’ The crowd is building up to something that I do not want to see. It would forever infect my stories.

The bell rings.

It is deep and strong. Uncle Ted stands beside it, on the porch of William’s house. The crowd turn to him, fall into silence for him. He looks like a leader.

‘A beating,’ he says. ‘That’s the punishment. Ten strokes each with this.’ He holds up the stick that usually sits in his belt. ‘I’ll do it. Then none of you are to blame and it’s all done with. I’ll do it by the fireside, in plain sight, where the Beauty can see it.’

He walks to the fire, and stands beside it.

The crowd move towards him, bringing Hal and Gareth with them. I go back to the hut instead, where Doctor Ben is still kneeling over Belinda.

He glances up at me. ‘Look,’ he says.

Outside there is a sound, a meaty thud, followed by another, then another. I put my hands over my ears and turn my eyes to where Doctor Ben points. The mess of Belinda’s head is grey, turning black. There is a glimpse of white. Ben moves the grey strands with his forefinger and more white is revealed. It is a jagged piece of bone, curving away. The remains of a skull.

I take my hands from my ears. The punishment is over. The crowd is making strange noises, like the call of birds at daybreak. I go to the door and see the Beauty returning, with my Bee, lovely Bee, coming for me. My body gets hard for her, even as tears start to form in my eyes.

All the delicate thoughts are gone. My whimsies, my long lithe strands of seasons and stories. Gone.

Uncle Ted seeks me out as night falls. He finds me in the graveyard. His Bonnie and my Bee stand next to each other, humming, while we look at what remains of the graves. The ground is freshly turned over, teeming with worms. If I wasn’t here the nighttime animals would be feasting.

‘Are you glad they’re back?’ I ask him.

He doesn’t reply.

I ask, ‘How are Hal and Gareth?’

‘They’ll heal. I was soft on them. Made it look good for the crowd.’

‘You think the younger ones would have…’

He says, ‘Don’t you?’ Ted shrugs, stamps around the grave of my mother. The sky is clear and it will be a cold night. The pinkish cast of the clouds makes everything soft, hazy, like another world.

‘No,’ I say softly. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Maybe I know men better than you do then, for all your stories. I know what they’re capable of.’

‘How do you know?’ And then I understand; I can finally put into words what’s been bothering me since that night in the woods. I say, ‘You knew the mushrooms grew only on the graves of women because you buried women there. In the woods, when I was taken. You led me to the place where you had put women in the ground.’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘Why didn’t you bring their bodies to the graveyard instead?’

‘The idea was to keep them out of this place, Nate. Don’t you get it? I didn’t find them dead. I found them alive. And I killed them.’

‘You–’ It makes no sense to me. ‘But why would you…’

‘Three of them. They were heading straight for us. We’d just buried Teresa the week before, the last of our own women. I couldn’t risk more of them turning up, making us all feel for them, just to lose them. Just to die.’

I say, ‘Maybe they weren’t sick!’

He gives me a pitying smile. ‘All women were sick. Think about it. Why were they wandering through the woods alone if they hadn’t been thrown out of their own town? They’d been sent out there to die by their men.’

‘You don’t know that,’ I whisper. Do I want to hear more? No. Yes. ‘How did you…?’ My eyes fall to the stick on his belt and he rests his hand on the knobbed end.

‘No, I did it kindly. Took them out one at a time, said they needed to be blindfolded to come to us, that we had a cure and needed to be careful about who knew our location. Then I strangled them, quick. They died with hope, which was a gift, wasn’t it? I told them a good story, made up on the moment. Worthy even of you.’

‘Uncle,’ I say. I hold up my hands. ‘No more.’

He kicks at the worms with his boot. ‘Some of us are born to be free on the wings of imagination and some of us are held down by the chains of reality, isn’t that right? No doubt you’d find a better way of saying that. I do the groundwork so you can have your head in the clouds. I don’t want praise for it. I do it gladly, for you, for the memory of your mother. I told her I’d keep you safe. Keep you happy.’

‘I can’t be happy. Not now. Not after today.’

‘Melodrama,’ he tells me, not unkindly. He adjusts his belt. ‘You’re proving my point. This will mean something to you and that’s fine. Weave the deaths and the beatings into your tales and grow from it. However you want to use it. It means nothing to me.’

‘Those women meant nothing to you?’ I ask him. I picture his hands on their soft necks, their eyes covered, their heads thrown back.

‘Nothing that I’m going to tell you,’ he says, and stomps away. Outside the gate his Bonnie waits for him, follows along behind him, not touching him. That is how he likes it, at least in view of the others. Untouchable Uncle Ted.

I am with Bee, in Bee; it is my only solace, my comfort, my distraction. What did I do before it? How can we need something so badly without knowing that the need exists?

Time has swept clean the cobwebs of panic that trailed across our faces when the women started falling sick. We thought we would all get sick. Men too. Why wouldn’t we? We lived in equality, didn’t we? It never occurred to us that the disease would not consider us all equal. There were days of hysteria. Hysteria, the sickness of the womb. And yet somehow William kept us together, even as only the women died.