Bridget Collins - The Binding

I put down the lamp and looked about me. There was a drawer balanced on a pile of boxes, full of broken tools waiting to be repaired or thrown away, and a row of glass bottles filled with dark liquid that looked like dyes or ox gall for marbling paper. I nearly tripped over three fire-buckets of sand. On the table there was a humped parcel wrapped in sackcloth, and some tools. I didn’t recognise them; they were thin, delicate things with edges like fish’s teeth. I brought the lamp closer. Next to the bundle there was another cloth, spread out to cover something. This was where Seredith worked, when I was upstairs in the workshop.

I reached out and unwrapped the bundle, as gently as if it was alive. It was a book-block, neatly sewn, with thick dark endpapers threaded with white, like tiny roots reaching through soil. The blood sang in my fingertips. A book. The first book I had seen, since I’d been here; the first since I was a child, and learned that they were forbidden. But holding it now I felt nothing but a kind of peace.

I brought it to my face and inhaled the smell of paper. I almost opened it to look at the title page; but I was too curious about what was under the other bit of sacking. I put the block down and drew back the cloth. Here was the cover Seredith had been making. For a moment, before I understood what I was seeing, it was beautiful.

The background was black velvet, so fine it absorbed every glint of light and lay on the bench like a piece of solid darkness. The inlay stood out against it like ivory, shining softly, pale gold in the lamplight.

Bones. A skeleton, the spine curled like a row of pearls round pale twigs of legs and arms, and the tiny splinters of toes and fingers. The skull bulged like a mushroom. They were smaller than my outstretched hand, those bones. They were as small and fragile as a bird’s.

But it wasn’t … it hadn’t been a bird. It was a baby.

‘Don’t touch it.’

I hadn’t heard Seredith come into the room, but some distant, watchful part of me wasn’t surprised to hear her voice. I didn’t know how long I had been standing there. It was only when I stepped back – carefully, as though there was something here I was afraid to wake – that I felt the stiff chill in my joints, the pins-and-needles in my feet, and knew it had been a long time. In spite of my care I knocked my ankle against a box, but the hollow sound was muffled by the earth beyond the walls.

I said, ‘I wasn’t going to touch it.’

‘Emmett …’

I didn’t answer. The wick of the lamp needed trimming, and the shadows jumped and ducked. The bones gleamed against their bed of black. As the light danced back and forth I could have made myself believe that they were moving; but when at last the flame steadied they lay quiet.

‘It’s only a binding,’ she said. She shifted in the doorway, but I didn’t look at her. ‘It’s mother-of-pearl.’

‘Not real bones.’ It came out like mockery. I hadn’t meant it to, but I was glad, fiercely glad, at the way it cut through the silence.

‘No,’ she said softly, ‘not real bones.’

I stared at the shining intricate shapes on the velvet until my eyes blurred. At last I reached out and pulled the cloth down over them; then I stood looking down at the coarse brown hessian. Here and there, where the weave was loose, I could still see the smooth edge of a femur, the nacreous curve of the skull, a miniature, perfect finger-bone. I imagined her working on them, crafting tiny shapes out of mother-of-pearl. I shut my eyes and listened to my blood pounding, and beyond that the dead quiet of walls and earth.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you do.’

The lamp murmured and guttered. Nothing else moved.

‘You know already.’

‘No.’

‘You know, if you think about it.’

I opened my mouth to say no , again; but something caught in my throat. The lamp-flame flared, licked upwards and then sank to a tiny blue bubble. The dark took a step towards me.

‘You bind – people,’ I said. My throat was so dry it hurt to speak; but the silence hurt more. ‘You make people into books.’

‘Yes. But not in the way you mean.’

‘What other way is there?’

She walked towards me. I didn’t turn, but the light from her candle grew stronger, pushing back the shadows. ‘Sit down, Emmett.’

She touched my shoulder. I flinched and spun round, stumbling back into the table. Tools clattered to the floor and skittered away. We stared at each other. She had stepped back too; now she put her candle down on one of the chests, and the flame magnified the trembling of her hand. Wax had spattered the floor; it congealed in a split second, like water turning to milk.

‘Sit down.’ She lifted an open drawer of jars off a box. ‘Here.’

I didn’t want to sit, while she was standing. I held her gaze, and she was the first to look away. She dumped the drawer down again. Then, wearily, she bent to pick up the little tools I’d knocked off the table.

‘You trap them,’ I said. ‘You take people and put them inside books. They leave here … empty.’

‘I suppose, in a way—’

‘You steal their souls.’ My voice cracked. ‘No wonder they’re afraid of you. You lure them here and suck them dry, you take what you want and send them away with nothing. That’s what a book is, isn’t it? A life. A person. And if they burn, they die.’

‘No.’ She straightened up, one hand clutching a tiny wood-handled knife.

I picked up the book on the table and held it out. ‘Look,’ I said, my voice rising and rising, ‘this is a person. Inside there’s a person – out there somewhere they’re walking round dead – it’s evil, what you do, they should have fucking burnt you.’

She slapped me.

Silence. There was a thin high ringing in the air that wasn’t real. Automatic tears rose in my eyes and spilt down my cheeks. I wiped them away with the inside of my wrist. The pain faded to a hot tingling, like salt water drying on my skin. I put the book down and smoothed the endpaper with my palm where I’d rumpled it. The crease would never come out entirely; it stood out like a scar, branching across the corner. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’

Seredith turned away and dropped the knife into the open drawer by my side. ‘Memories,’ she said, at last. ‘Not people, Emmett. We take memories and bind them. Whatever people can’t bear to remember. Whatever they can’t live with. We take those memories and put them where they can’t do any more harm. That’s all books are.’

Finally I met her eyes. Her expression was open, candid, a little weary, like her voice. She made it sound so right – so necessary; like a doctor describing an amputation. ‘Not souls, Emmett,’ she said. ‘Not people. Just memories.’

‘It’s wrong,’ I said, trying to match my tone to hers. Steady, reasonable … but my voice shook and betrayed me. ‘You can’t say it’s right to do that. Who are you to say what they can live with?’

‘We don’t. We help people who come to us and ask for it.’ A flicker of sympathy went over her face as if she knew she’d won. ‘No one has to come, Emmett. They decide. All we do is help them forget.’

It wasn’t that simple. Somehow I knew it wasn’t. But I had no argument to make, no defence against the softness of her voice and her level eyes. ‘What about that?’ I pointed to the child-shape under the sacking. ‘Why would you make a book like that ?’

‘Milly’s book? Do you really want to know?’

A shiver went over me, fierce and sudden. I clenched my teeth and didn’t answer.

She walked past me, stared down at the sacking for a moment, and then slid it gently to one side. In her shadow the little skeleton shone bluish.