Bridget Collins - The Binding

‘She buried it alive,’ Seredith said. There was no weight to the words, only a quiet precision that left all the feeling to me. ‘She couldn’t go on, she thought she couldn’t go on. And so she wrapped it up, one day when it wouldn’t stop crying, and she laid it on the dung heap and pulled rubbish and manure over it until she couldn’t hear it any more.’

‘Her baby?’

A nod.

I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn’t look away. The baby would have lain like that, curled and helpless, trying to cry, trying to breathe. How long would it have taken, before it was just part of the dungheap, rotting with everything else? It was like a horrible fairy tale: bones turned to pearl, earth turned to velvet. But it was true. It was true, and the story was locked in a book, shut away, written on dead pages. My hand tingled where I had smoothed out the endpaper: that thick, veined paper, black as soil.

‘That’s murder,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t the parish constable arrest her?’

‘She kept the child a secret. No one knew about it.’

‘But …’ I stopped. ‘How could you help her? A woman – a girl who killed her own child – like that – you should have …’

‘What should I have done?’

‘Let her suffer! Make her live with it! Remembering is part of the punishment. If you do something evil—’

‘It was her father’s, too. The man who came to burn this book. He was her father, and the child’s.’

For a moment I didn’t understand what she meant. Then I looked away, feeling sick.

There was the rustle of sackcloth as Seredith drew it back over the bones, and the creak of the box as she perched on the edge of it, holding on to the table to steady herself.

At last she said, ‘I’m not being fair to you, Emmett. Sometimes I do turn people away. Very, very rarely. And not because they’ve done something so terrible I can’t help; only because I know they’ll go on doing terrible things. Then, if I’m sure, I will refuse to help them. But it has only happened three times, in more than sixty years. The others, I helped.’

‘Isn’t burying a baby terrible?’

‘Of course,’ she said, and bowed her head. ‘Of course it is, Emmett.’

A breath. ‘You said, what books are … So every book,’ I said, ‘every book that’s ever been bound, is someone’s memories. Something they’ve chosen to forget.’

‘Yes.’

‘And …’ I cleared my throat. Suddenly I could feel the imprint of my father’s hand on my cheek, the stinging blow he’d given me years ago, as if the pain had never really faded. Never let me see you with a book again. This was what he had wanted to protect me from. And now I was an apprentice; I was going to be a binder.

‘You think,’ I said slowly, ‘you think I’m going to do what you do.’

She didn’t even glance at me. ‘It will be easier,’ she said, from a long way away, ‘if you don’t despise it. Despise books – despise the people who need help – and you despise yourself. Your work.’

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I won’t. It’s not …’

She laughed. It was so close to her usual amused snort that my stomach twisted. ‘Yes, you can. Binders are born, not made. And you’re a binder born, boy. You may not like the idea of it much now. But you’ll grow to understand. And it won’t let you rest. It’s a great force, inside you. It’s what made you ill, when … You’re stronger in it than most binders I’ve known. You’ll see.’

‘How do you know? You might be wrong—’

‘I know, Emmett.’

‘How?’

‘The binder’s fever gave you away. You will be a good binder. In every sense.’

I shook my head. I went on shaking it, even though I didn’t know why.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘what we do is very difficult. Sometimes it makes me angry or sad. Sometimes I regret – if I’d known what the memories were, I wouldn’t have—’ She stopped and glanced away. ‘Much of the time it doesn’t even touch me. But sometimes I am so glad to see the pain go away that if that were the only person I had ever helped it would still be worth it.’

‘I’m not doing it. It’s wrong. It’s – unnatural.’

She lowered her head, inhaling so deeply I saw her shoulders move. The skin under her eyes looked as fragile as the bloom on a moth’s wing: one touch and it would brush away and leave bare bone. She said, without looking at me, ‘It’s a sacred calling, Emmett. To have another person’s memory entrusted to you … To take the deepest, darkest part away from them and keep it safe, forever. To honour it, to make it beautiful, even though no one will ever see it. To guard it with your own life …’

‘I don’t want to be a glorified gaoler.’

She jolted upright. For a long moment I thought she would hit me again. ‘This is why I didn’t tell you before,’ she said, finally. ‘Because you’re not ready yet, you’re still struggling … But now you know. And you’re lucky to be here. If you had gone to a bindery in Castleford you’d have had your scruples beaten out of you long ago.’

I held out my finger and slid it through the candle flame, once, twice, slowing down until I could hardly bear it. There were too many questions; I concentrated on the pain and let my mouth decide. ‘So why am I here?’

She blinked. ‘Because I was the nearest. And—’ She stopped.

Her eyes slid away from mine. She kneaded her forehead, and for the first time I noticed how flushed her cheeks were. ‘I’m exhausted, Emmett. I think that’s enough for today. Don’t you?’

She was right. I was so tired that I could feel the world spinning. I nodded, and she stood up. I reached out to help her but she ignored me. She picked her way through the narrow space back to the door.

‘Seredith?’

She paused, but didn’t turn. Her sleeve had fallen back as she leant against the wall, and her wrist was like a child’s.

‘Yes?’

‘Where are the books? If you keep them safe …’

She held her arm out to point at the circular plaque on the wall. ‘On the other side of that,’ she said, ‘there’s a vault.’

‘Can I see?’

‘Yes.’ She turned, reaching for a key that hung round her neck; then her hand tightened on it. ‘No. Not now. Another time.’

I’d only asked out of curiosity. But there was something in her face – or something not in her face, something that should have been there … I pushed my tongue into the sharp space between two of my teeth and stared at her. Strands of her hair clung to her forehead, sticky with sweat. She reeled. I stepped towards her, but she stumbled back as if she couldn’t bear me to get too close. ‘Good night, Emmett.’

I watched her turn, bracing herself in the doorway as though she was fighting to stay on her feet. I should have let her go, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Seredith … What happens if the books burn? Do the people die?’

She didn’t look at me. She shuffled to the stairs and began to climb them. ‘No,’ she said. ‘They remember.’

I was so tired I couldn’t think. Seredith had gone to bed; I should go too. If only I’d gone to bed an hour ago, instead of sitting down next to the stove in the workshop … Sleep. I wanted to step right off the edge of consciousness. I wanted that darkness more than anything. I wanted not to be here.

I sat down. Or rather, I found that I was already sitting, cramped on the floor with my legs folded, my back against a box. I didn’t have the energy to find a better position. Instead I wrapped my arms round my knees, put my head down, and slept.

When I woke, the first thing I felt was a kind of peace. It was almost pitch-black – the candle had gone out – and I felt as though I were drifting, disintegrating painlessly in the subtle currents of the dark. Then some of what had happened came back – but small, too far away to hurt me, like reflections in a silver cup. I got up and groped my way up the stairs, yawning. I’d thought it was the middle of the night, and the greyish light streaming through the workshop windows made me blink and rub my eyes. It was still raining, although now it was a thin quiet mizzle, and the snow only clung to the ground in a few places, grimy and pockmarked. Seredith had been right about the thaw; the post would get to us at least once more before winter really set in.