The Bluebell Wood

Copyright © 2013 by Caroline Cressey.

Library of Congress Control Number:          2013900374

ISBN:          Hardcover          978-1-4797-7507-1

                   Softcover            978-1-4797-7506-4

                   Ebook                978-1-4797-7508-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of ficti0on. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 06/05/2014

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Contents

Dedication

Prologue

Abbey

New Abbey

Ralph

Maeve

The Stella Maris Convent

Robynne

Lillian

Tessa

Sakya

Magdalena

Leah

Rosalinde

Jonquil

Major Royale

Francis

Ariel

Elvedina

Bobbie

Abbey

Ralph

Marghuerita

Abbey

Sister More

Robynne

Lillian

Tessa

Sakya

Sister More

Francis

Magdalena

Leah

Ariel

Rosalinde

Lillian

Jonquil

Francis

Sakya

Elvedina

Jonquil

Bobbie

Magdalena

Rosalinde

Ralph

Abbey

Sister More

Leah

Tessa

Francis

Sakya

Robynne

Abbey

Abbey and Sister More

Ralph

Marghuerita

Robynne

Abbey

Robynne

Abbey

Robynne

Abbey

Ralph

Lillian

Tessa

Sakya

Lillian

Abbey

Magdalena

Abbey

Robynne

Tessa

Robynne

Ralph

Abbey

Sister More

Francis

Abbey

Robynne

Abbey

Tessa

Abbey

Sister More

Abbey

Francis

Robynne

Ariel

Dunlyn

Francis

Lillian

Tessa

Maeve

Francis

Abbey

Abbey

Maeve

Jonquil

Robynne

Donegal

Maeve

Abbey

Maeve

Bobbie

Stella Maris

Epilogue

Main Characters (in alphabetical order)

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

(John Keats, Endymion)

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

(Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven)

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbows and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost they shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

(Dylan Thomas, And Death Shall Have No Dominion)

Much madness is divinest sense

To a discerning eye;

Much sense the starkest madness.

’Tis the majority

In this, as all, prevails.

Assent, and you are sane;

Demur,—you’re straightway dangerous,

And handled with a chain.

(Emily Dickinson, Much Madness is divinest Sense)

This book is set roughly in the 1990s.

Some imaginative license has been taken with regards to dates and times.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the innocent and the young, the women and the children, those who suffer at the hands of supreme powers through corruption, terrorism, greed, cruelty, sadomasochism, and indifference, those who suffer from oppression, hunger, thirst, malnutrition, under nutrition, abuse, disempowerment, helplessness, those who suffer at the hands of elemental nature and its catastrophic attacks, those who were denied their human birth rights of love, care, compassion, nourishment, water, education, purpose, and the chance for self-actualisation.

‘Suffer the little children to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’

Prologue

The bluebell (Endymion non-scriptus) is a wild European woodland plant from the family Liliaceae; its Scottish term is harebell. It is supposed to be a perennial herb and has a haunting, fresh, clean aroma. Its beauty lies in its blue carpeting of spring woodlands—also white or pink flowers, but supremely blue. It winters over as a bulb, as does the daffodil, and produces its own far more beautiful host of Endymionic flowers.

Endymion was a young shepherd whom Selene, the moon goddess, took away with her to eternal life so that she would always be able to enjoy and watch over his beauty. It is perhaps for some poets, such as Keats, a quest for perfection hindered by the distraction of physical beauty: yet truth is beauty, beauty is truth, and that is all you need to know. Keats also depicted Endymion as a personification of the plunging setting sun arising with the night as the man in the moon.

Yet before being carried away to eternal life, Endymion had to endure the lure of a life perplexed and wearisome, cloudy with fearful phantoms…

The chronicle told in the following pages may appear bizarre to some—children thinking, talking, seeing, and perceiving with the minds of adults. When adults attain maturity of thought and understanding, yet remember as a child, they see the world of their childhood through the eyes and minds of their full maturity; thus, they recount their story. The more people attempt to raise and maintain barriers between one another, the more they remain akin; and the greater the extent of so-called progressive societal changes, the more things remains the same. The higher the rate and quality of technological change for the few, the greater the devolution of life quality for the many. We have prolonged not only life but also suffering, through technological and scientific advancements accessed by the few whilst the masses continue to live and die in poverty and squalor.

They say that war can cleanse corruption from human lives, and that it externalises evil; even the subterfuge of espionage can be viewed as altruistic and sacrificial for one’s country, but statements like this probably depend upon the individual viewpoint and the side upon which a person is fighting. Externalising evil cannot necessarily be viewed as a cleansing action, though it, more honestly, portrays people, brings out the full force or weakness of one’s character, its goodness, or its evil. War merely does many hateful things, and it is never justified.

It pulls us into a psychological vortex. It exchanges one horror for another—the horror remains.

Abbey

The afternoon was bright. A young child, dress in hand, skipped beneath a pool of sunlight. The world looked silently and peaceably upon her, and the shafts of light caught the inward gleam of her eyes as her head tossed to and fro.

She was Abigail Westering. Her hair colour was between blonde and brown—almost colourless. She had pale skin with freckles over her nose and under her eyes that were widely spaced and squinting, giving her a faraway unseeing gaze, never quite looking at you. They flickered with an intermittent glow of iridescent green that was rimmed with blue; the pupils dilated not merely from myopia but also from fear. Her ears were squashed and tiny, as were her feet, from where Mother had bound them; her frame, thin and slight, though she appeared tall yet stooped, with painfully thin gangly legs, double-jointed limbs…

Father had once called her a ‘daddy-long-legs’.

The afternoon drew on, the shadows lengthened. Sunlight mellowed to the colour of an orange peel, and a bluey coldness whipped the flaxen curls about her sensitive face…

She was entering the bluebell wood.

As the door of sunlight closed silently behind her, it left a disquieting though welcome cold that intensified the blue. She lowered herself on to the grass and shivered—shadows had given it dampness.

She started to gather the flowers. Nothing but the crisp snap of stalk, the suck of sap, broke the silence. The tangy greenness stained her fingers and she wrinkled her nose to the smell. Shadows lengthened still further and her dress, now filled with the freshly savaged flowers, was moist and pink as life flowed away in the clinging resin.

The darkness that had been creeping up on the child now lay heavy on her shoulders. She rubbed her neck and arched her back from all the stooping. Night breezes had begun to flutter and tremor about her; the blue of flowers became luminous—she could no longer see the green of grass. Blues merged into blues as she moved deeper into the wood—how happy she was with her afternoon’s work! Humming softly with a blank face, momentarily devoid of troubles, she beamed. She was happy to be left undiscovered.

Yet eyes had seen her—eyes belonging to a quivering body, a thrashing tail. The rhythmic swaying caught her attention first, then the eyes—oh, what eyes they were! Even fear froze on her lips as the moisture drained from her throat. In an instant, the ooze of flowers lay strewn upon the earthen floor…

The Siamese cat’s purring gravelled ominously into the skim of stillness. It watched the outlined figure fade upwards, a black bobbing shadow against the last of evening sun, the dark silhouette of arm splaying, flaying, and entering harshly the other world. Then the cat circled its body with her curl of tail and closed her eyes dreamily…

‘Mother!’ Abigail exclaimed. ‘The cat! The cat!’

Tears had begun to glisten and gather upon the bright apple cheeks, the pool of mirrored eyes.

The Mother waved the stalk vitrification of glass tiredly.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Abbey, I’m tired of hearing about it. Just go away and leave me in peace.’

Ignorant minds are moved by their fear and wonder to interpret their experiences in parables. Even in the light of highly technical knowledge, there are still many inexplicable things, even to the most intelligent of minds. Ultimately, it makes no sense to rationalise all things—for we are unable to create ourselves or even a reasonable copy—as yet. We still use mysticism, symbolism, and, of course, religion to comfort us when shadowy, misty apparitions and formidably uncontrollable natural events sweep through our lives with devastation. We still use childish interpretations, released from the limitations of early life and distorted beyond a mere humanity. The use of magical and fanciful interpretation softens the harsh edges of life, and sanction a love of personification. We still recite magical stories of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden, and never wholly grow out of remembering Peter Pan and Wendy in the Never Never Land, the Yellow Brick Road of the Wizard of Oz, or the Good Force of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Yet wild imaginations commend themselves, particularly to the psychically vulnerable, without probability or proportion. Digging beneath this superficial rendition of folklore, there emerges its true meaning and representation. There are resemblances and coincidences found in folklore and mythology throughout the world. In the beginning, perhaps we were one cradle of civilisation from which all these stories stemmed and perhaps similar explanations for unfamiliar phenomena will continue to emerge, so that we will not be threatened through alienation but reassured with magic instead. In this highly technological age, there are still astrologists, numerologists, tarot card dealers, and fortune-tellers—nothing has really changed. Conquests and migration continue to mix races and their ideas; in the midst of this terrible desire for separatism, we remain a melting pot, with little purity of race remaining.

Today, ethnic cleansing still involves the impregnation of women with the seed of the conquerors…

Especially for Abbey, this world of make-believe and folklore was important. The patterns of her nervous system, in the process of being laid down, had gone awry; she was in a constant flux of sensory misinterpretation and overload.

Thus, the moon and stars would, particularly for her, continue to retain their magic, imaginatively embroider upon the curtain of the night. For her the sun remained Apollic, Icarean, and the burning of his fine feathers still held metaphorical meaning. The sun, still flames, throws its prominences to thwart the weather patterns, and its cycle of emerging and disappearing sunspots will continue to throw satellite communications and computers into disarray, and the natural elements into deadly disarray, whilst the moon would continue to pull and draw the tides.

Hopefully, the bluebell wood would never lose its cool, fanning the flame of breeze and delightful glades…

The light glared; Abbey saw with wide-eyed pain and surprise, that it wasn’t yet dark after all. The lawn still smouldered as the sunken sun submerged into its slaying upon the horizon. Abbey sat upon the white stone wall, bamboo legs like straight sticks swinging alternately. Through lone conversations, she would arrive now into adulthood, looking down upon these things, at some understanding of what was happening. Mother could never explain things as well and as satisfactorily as she could to herself.

Father was an oilman, an oil tycoon or something; he was always away, and they never went with him. She and Mother stayed at home, and Mother complained that she couldn’t read books or listen to music any more. She splashed around in the drowning of her feelings, lashed out, ‘Abbey, will you please stop scattering your puzzles everywhere!’ Or: ‘Abbey, how many times have I told you not to leave your colouring pencils all over the floor, people will fall over them!’

The trouble was no one ever came to fall over anything. The house breathed on with just the two of them entombed, week after week, month after month, the days unidentified. Abbey was supposed to have a teacher, but she no longer came to the house. Mother often screamed at her, and Abbey got used to the sting of her palm across her cheeks; she knew now that it was really for Father; and Mother scrubbed the floors hard, very hard, with the venting of her anger. Similarly, she polished the oak table, the piano, all the glittering and garnishing of silverware, on and on, hysterically unto physical exhaustion whilst Abbey surveyed solemnly, pondered the gathering of sweat beads on her mother’s forehead…

Interspersed with this were periods of chapelled and uncanny quiet and tiptoed calm. Abbey took all these things in, reflected upon them, and grew fearful of her helplessness, wanting to capture once more Mother’s stolen love of life. So she welcomed the departure of the scouring sun of summer, feared its falling of fire as the vaporous mass became engulfed by the horizon; again, she was grateful for the evening that clothed her mother’s sorrow; feared the night’s disguise of her mother’s tenuous tethering to reality…

Abbey lifted her eyes from her thoughts. Now you could no longer see the sheen of bluebells carpeting and encircling the tree trunks—the trees had become sinister and evil creatures. Inside the house, Mother was electrically red, an irradiated figure of colours alternating: blue for sadness, green for the coveting of Father’s love that had gone out of his heart, black for sickness, and mauve for despair, purple for suffering. Inside the house, Mother lay with wooden boards above her face, looking through to the shafts of moonlight cascading through the cracks, way out to the stars in yearning. Out there, at day’s closure, Abbey was travelling amongst the same skerry of stars…

Before this, Mother seemed only to ever eat chocolates. Every month, a box of chocolates and a bunch of flowers would arrive—from Father. Mother would put them in the same place, on the coffee table in the lounge. She left the lid open and would eat them with an oozing slowness reminiscent of Abbey’s bluebell picking. She ate methodically whilst gazing at the carnations (the flowers Father always sent) placed on top of the piano. In the evenings, Mother would sit on the sofa in front of these flowers, eating and staring past the stimulation of taste, to the flowers, and when they died, beyond them to the television; Abbey felt the chocolates slide down, watched in her mother’s eyes the reflection of flowers change with the days…

There was one night when Father phoned. Mother screamed and screamed at him in foreign tongues. Abbey crouched in one of the many crowds of the corners that she could choose from, clamping her hands over Mother’s trumpeting within her ears.

The next day, on schedule, the flowers arrived.

‘They’re roses, Abbey. Do you think it means he loves me?’

And so it was that Mother would ascend to new heights, her drinking continued with renewed vigour. Entering a world of polarities, she traumatised her soul, saw through the haze of vintage the billions of years’ darkness before the weary spirit’s travels reached the light: gazed with the eyes of her alter ego, denied truth and God. At the breakdown of the filter of associations, the childhood of Abbey became scattered across the retina of her mother’s eyes—her brain became pinpricked.

The spaces between these two worlds lengthened the sloth of misery, blue shadows of lethargy and weariness, purpled candled shadows of suffering thrown out across the sands of time, an elusive flute of happiness played out to the far extremes of undergoing.

Entering once more the gold powdering of sundown, the brown stupor of decanted brandy, the fragile receptacle of the mind, the tide of worn time, the sands of dove grey were going out of Mother’s life. Blasts of emotional destruction throughout the enclosure of the house intensified the night, the holding back of the winds of pain, from north and south and east and west. The world is a place of separation and evil, of corruption and deceit. It is a world that resists love, compassion, and caring. People kill others, not recognising that they are their brethren, that they even have need of brethren.

They kill themselves…

Many are the lessons children learn even before they come into the world, and certainly simultaneous with this act of supreme violence and revelation. The first of these lessons are common to all: a bursting through the protective fluids, a rising up from the aquatic waters of pre-naissance, of surfacing. The act of breaking the surface releases the pressure and the tension of birth; it destroys the baby’s world of muted sounds barely beyond silence; sounds are reinforced with booming then, as the waters bulge and tear apart from behind their caul of containment, and the veracity of sound splits deafeningly through the air, the rippled bathing of the skin by water, the dark cocooning, are replaced by the harshness of lights, the feel of cold air upon damp skin, the shudder and shunt of the heart and lungs as they readjust to the task of their first breath. The first gasp for air, that first sob of sorrow, is the steam train of a unique life, pulling out of the station…

. . . Thus, once upon a time, yet another tiny baby, too small for the world, came into it prematurely. The birth was long and arduous, both for Mother and child. The child was covered in unsightly scratches and bruising, was taken from the Mother before she had a chance to be distressed by this sight.

Notwithstanding this, the child cried lustily with health for three days on her own. There was no nipple, there was no bonding, and there was no skin on skin contact. The child did not smell the scent of her mother, did not come to know the grateful touch of her hand across her body—the stroke of intimacy.

‘Where is my child?’ cried the Mother. ‘Is there something wrong with her?’

‘No, my dear, do not fret. She is just a little traumatised from the birth, and we have kept her quiet. We want her to look her best, before you see her.’

On the third day, Mother and child were united, but it was not a happy one. The child’s cries had gone unanswered for too long. Her first lesson of life had been to expect rejection and to be helpless to do anything about this. She grew rigid with her screaming. She would not suckle.

The Mother looked for reassurance: ‘She does not like me, and she is so ugly,’ she whined. She put the baby from her.

‘Nonsense, my dear, babies do this sort of thing all the time. It is merely the colic.’

Baby Abigail (for so she was named) was taken away. Her mother did not attempt to suckle her child again. Eventually, Abigail suckled from a bottle given to her by the nurses. Later at home, a nanny would tend to her needs.

The first battle for survival had been won, but the trauma of her birth was to stay with her. The wildness within her continued to cry out for what she needed…

Later, the downgrading of her mother’s sanity meant that the succession of nannies did not last beyond the suckling and the incontinence of the child—the Mother had enough sanity to keep nannies for this purpose. Bouts of inebriation left the final young girl pelted with Bohemian crystal and running for her life. The bored narcissistic Father had long ago left the marital home for everything but essential meetings and tasks. The child Abigail formed for herself a world filled with the in-between-ed-ness of things, beyond the limpid skies of Mother’s drunkenness that strengthened to the blood red of her anguish, the downslide of despair—rushing out to the loss even of this, the vacuum, the bath of acid, the dry well of her existence. The clamour and the militia of Abbey’s en-brained voices flung arrows of hurt into the twilight, but were lost on the Mother, who cast glances back into the regret of past, camouflaging the degeneration of her life into an animal existence: drinking voluminously, head falling low in the lingering of dew, defining an arc of sadness before sinking breast-wise once more…

Abbey’s life became an imaginative fantasy, colours and patterns, rhythms and silences…

. . . Abbey gazed at the whiteness of the ceiling. Outside, the noises of the day continued beyond high wicker fences; cement mixers churned their creamy paste, metal grinding on metal motors pulsed and throbbed; light peeled the scales of darkness from her eyes…

Downstairs, Abbey pondered the chocolate box, the rhythmic tick-tock of the clock, and the silence that was no longer pent up but released, burst. The sun was losing its merciless power now, waning to the calm before the upsurge of winter gales. Beneath the table and the chairs, beneath every piece of furniture, one thousand rustlings, millions of lives watched her, keen whites from the shadows, the deadly nightshade of anonymous eyes.

Abbey knew that Mother lay upstairs in her bedroom. With animal instinct, she dared not go in search of her. From the vale of her death, Mother would wage telepathic war upon her. She wished her hands were large enough to block the sky. There would be many tomorrows of weeping in this blindness of a cage. Abbey was perched only precariously upon the tip of logical thought. The hurt was reaching up into her reason, the curlew was crying.

The house remained empty. No one came; sunrise and sundown followed one another in a frightening succession of silences. With nightmares following nightmares came the nights; the little lives never gave up their vigil of watching her, whites of reflected life through their eyes within the mirror: perpetual torment of rustlings, breathings, and clicks clicking. Outside, life throbbed on and on, slants of sunlight slashing the gloaming of the interior. The telephone had died, strangled upon the end of its flex—something within the room made it sway hypnotically.

The vacuumed air slowly leaked away. Abbey gasped as one who finds it hard to breathe or find the reason for living. Each day was a protracted convulsion, an entity without future. Films of white dust collected, spiders subtly webbed the cornices. Mooted particles danced in the haze of sunlight. Man is created to be great but physically is as dust, the spirits within the dust being what is important, whilst white clouds built up in the suspense of blue. Days of arrowed rain coming more frequently, hollowed beating upon the drum of window panes as autumnal fruits fructified…

Abbey felt there was nothing left inside of her—merely the mechanical pumping of her heart, and a sting behind her eyes where she had tried, too hard for too long, not to cry. Existence was now but short fitful bursts of sleep and a waking, aching sleep that left her wide, dry-eyed. Time, that place where all thoughts are born and die, where memory is ice upon the frozen past, and rustling lives, robbed her of the last stronghold of her being, vanquished her.

Her shell of cognition slowly became puckered with holes…

So lapped the waves upon the beach of Abbey’s desertion; fresh opacity of fog swirled through the inner reaches of her limbic system; emotion became as heavy as ivory. Tight pains were brought to bear upon her chest, and fresh diamonds found their way on to her face as snail trails; she knew not how they came there.

She tugged tiredly at the pendulum of her grief. Her medusa hair coiled in occasional un-ravellings in the wake of her betrayal. Her mouth filled with the acid of anxiety, ate away at the predatorily vulpine dog rose of her slow starvation. The windows, like squares of her mind, absorbed her reflection. The feel of the many spirits of her being rose up through the echelons of her consciousness as the dolphin breaks wave in conjunction with the ship’s prow. She was haunted by numberless hallucinative islands, a singing, ringing in her ears; there was the soft padding of her feet upon the carpet, the deep-throated ripples of the pigeons in the fir trees…

. . . These were the things she remembered. The mechanisms for coping had gone terribly wrong; with colours blurred and senses heightened, she moved in realms of complexity and terror, hyper-stimulated into withdrawal. With her hands placed over her ears, she screamed for protection. The instruments of sound, sight, and touch co-mingled, without orchestration. The result was an unbalanced, unregulated, cacophony.

It was all she could do to blot it out. Blot it out with sleep, the wanderings of the spirit unchecked, the solar winds within her head creating cyclical periods of light and darkness, cruel consciousness and blissful unconsciousness, voices that melted into music…

. . . Then sleep, ah, sweet sleep, it would slice through the tearing of cerebral fibres and bring with it the silence of angels.

One day, the singing in her ears ceased. The drape of pathological sleep swept slowly aside. She was lying in a bunk bed in a cool room with bay windows. The sun was weakly filtering through the sub-autumnal scarcity of leaves outside the window. There were three other girls in the room.

She lay there for what seemed a long time. The sun arose imperceptibly, a furnace of yellow glory. Nothing stirred, save the gentle wavering of the curtains, bringing a soft breeze to her face. All about her were the breaths of dormant life sighs.

Abbey slipped from her bed with soft rustlings of sheet muted by blanket, and moved barefoot to the window. The sun was unexpectedly bright. Abbey felt her eyes ache with retinal anxiety, and she barred the light with her fearing arms. On a tall chest of drawers, a clock registered the time—a quarter to six. Looking back at her sleep crumpling of bed, she started to remember.

She remembered the train doors, slam, slam, slamming the length of the platform, someone waving goodbye to her. A jolt of movement, and she had begun her journey towards a new life. She looked back at the hand that waved, watched its feeble perseverance—the hand diminishing, smaller and smaller, losing its colour. Dutifully, she watched it as one watches the single star that fades into the dawn sun, but with empty eyes. Before the train rounded the bend, it had dropped to the dictates of gravity, abandoning its gesture of futility.

The disinfected cleanliness and endless matching corridors of the hospital lay behind her now. Lying in limbo, they had put a thermometer into her mouth, listened and tapped her chest, had given her tablets. They had plied her with seemingly vast quantities of food, endless and overwhelming questions. She was numb, increasingly unable to speak, finally even to comprehend in the surge of her mounting fear.

There was no simple answer to what had happened to Mother.

‘Poor child,’ they said, ‘she is so thin, and she needs love.’

Love? That thing Father gave Mother? No. Abbey did not think so…

They had passed beyond the confines of the station now. The train was beginning to pick up speed. Roofs of black slate shone, glistened, and reflected the watered downpour of light as far as Abbey could see. The rain was still falling softly as it had done so throughout the night.

Suburbs followed upon the industrial complexes: block after block of flats replacing the grey factories, offices, brightly lit signs; then, neat outer suburbs of box houses replaced these with their regular handkerchiefs of grass, the smear of pollution still grieving against the brick walls…

Then, as a shutter, the country, pure and real! Towards midday, the sun burst out through the clouds, the patch of blue intensified as they delved deeper into pastures and coppices. Abbey sat back and watched the telegraph wires as they grouped and parted, grouped together and parted, mesmerically ensnaring the ability of her eyes to wrench them from their rhythmic stimuli. Fields followed fields, hawthorn gave way to blackberry, blocked intermittently the view of cattle in lowland pastures, sheep upon the hills, horses rearing heads of alarm, the imagined flare of nostrils. Hamlets passed in blink time, streams glittered transiently in the warm entice of sun, rivers entwined their paths with that of the train and the brain, drum drum, drum, drum. Dear patient noble Nell is dead, whilst her bird still flutters in its cage.

Abbey read from the leather-bound book that was part of her newness—new uniform, new hat, new scarf, new gloves, new satchel, new exercise books, new pens, new pencils, new crayons, new haircut.

New Abbey

New eyes with which to see the world; it changed when you did, for people saw you according to how you were presented and the emotions consequently coloured the landscape—after all, the vagrant sees the filth and grime of the same streets the millionaire, with his latest girlfriend, cruise through to view the monolithic architectural beauty that the former could not see until he was able to raise his vision beyond his situation…

Abbey’s eyes and thoughts slipped deeper and deeper into the books she ‘read’ as she was handed from insecurity to insecurity. She was the spiderling (daddy-long-legs), weaving an inner life from the thought patterns emerging from the fragile necessity for form, order, control, and predictability.

There was nothing she could be sure of.

She was hit when her mother hit her. Obvious, yes, but she was also hit when her father hit her mother and her mother hit her father. Ralph was her father. A man tall, slim, good-looking, debonair, and aloof, wearing the white sun hat and white suit he had worn before the aeroplane took off for the Bananas. (Abbey had misheard; it was Bahamas—Mother shrieked her mistake through the alarming and uncontrolled wave of the next full glass.)

Mother’s words hit as blows. Thoughts and feelings were soft, penetrating, and bruising as blows to flesh; your words of incongruency left you inflicted with self-harm—adults, in their sophistication, could not comprehend the dense journeying of your spirit into the matter of the soul, let alone your tousle with the rigours of language. Abbey knew that her body was borrowed, and her emotions had been taken beyond the realms of life’s disembodiment—the axing of props that were self-esteem.

These were the ways she would see things.

Sleep, the wandering of the spiritual light: earth people and those of the sun walking hand in hand, a particle of celestiality making its way towards a god, running with a sea of voices into oceans of happiness, learning incidents and events of co-creation and, with its development, surrendering of superficial needs.

So Abbey died with her mother. Pupa, chrysalis, butterfly, she, now, as twilight struck, would be hurled on to un-foreseeable platforms where her life would be played out without her permission…

Fields, houses, and blurs raced by. In the mirror of the train window, she was watching a part of her own death. ‘No, no, no!’ she cried out, but not beyond the barrier of her lips.

Abbey formed her fear.

She might walk away now, into oblivion. Could she gain control and cup her life in her hands, travel down the slippery slopes of solipsism and secluded memories, down the dichotomy of perceived recollections, without being able to heal the erosion of implacable and revenant times past? Her being reflected fragmentally; God no longer burned in the dusk of the cathedral—just her voice now, echoing brokenly in the attempt to regain reality, shattered holistics within flowing uncontrollability of movement…

She could walk away from pain, and the avenues of faces, travel lunar-wise, past the lure of gravity, maybe a silken thread about her waist, orbiting the satellite’s dark side where there would be no winch back into the pain, suffering, and mundaneness of reality? Or would she be struck down by the dervish of death, the body’s temple never truly sundered until mixed with the sands, the sea, the sky…

Father had returned to the Bahamas and South America, Mother… yes, Abbey could walk away, but wherever she was, fates flinted weapon would still spear her, unless she could hot-wire psychic holes, congealed from winter; bind the ineffectiveness of stitched rational wounds of sanity; reincarnate with blood vaporised from the teeming ground…

The train reached the end of the line, the doors opened with less finality than the slam of departure. Seeing her uniform, the ticket collector pointed to where she needed to go for the bus that would take her ultimately to the school, the star of the sea, the Stella Maris Convent, her home now, for no matter what mansion Father lived in it would never be home.

A further hour on the bus, until the destination town was finally reached; it was late now, past nine o’clock; this was the end of the line.

Abbey moved sideways and crossed the street. Ahead the double gates of the school where she was supposed to arrive at were locked, but there was an open side gate, giving way to a concrete driveway, sloping beneath her feet, thence to a courtyard. The somehow familiar hum of a four-storeyed building rose and seemed to curve over her. She entered this building by a side door into dimness. There was a short flight of stairs with linoleum; her feet clattered resoundingly through unseen passages. Releasing, the suitcase, it sighed as it reached the ground.

Abbey groped with palms flat against the walls. Her fingers begged for lights as she waved away through the realisation of passages, up and down steps, more small flights of stairs. Then the corridor widened and bore away to her right. Double stained glass windows, vast and shimmering in the full moonlight, made her breath sob from her anxiety of shadow. With vision, yet hazy from all the confusion, the surrealism, she nevertheless continued to move forward until her slight frame was bathed in the light from another source—that of a frosted glass door, once more to her right…

Someone was moving about in the room. Like a tall sentinel, this person hummed tritely as she bowed, picking up books, sifting through papers, tidied. Abbey moved away, further down the corridor and back into shadow. The potential of numerous doors opened out on either side. All the rooms were in darkness. Abbey tried a door, and it yielded to her.

It was a library, filled from floor to ceiling with tomes: interrupted moonlight framed by casement windows cascaded on to the solid shapes of the bookcases and desks, the books themselves. Abbey picked up one caressingly in her hands, leafed its delicate tissue-papered illustrations. It was Peter Pan in the Never Never Land, where children never grow out of innocence and into the guilt of sin and knowing, where time was comprised of nothing between the Alpha and the Omega, where galaxies clothed with muslin are thrown from omnipotent fingertips, where worlds (physical and material) are seen in their veritable states as frozen light and crystal realities, as millions of galaxies, trillions of universes, all tinkling with tubular existential music, like smarties…

‘And who might you be then?’

The disembodied voice rang out from the doorway that was now in shadow, beyond the barrier of light. It rang with almost a playful curiosity, a faint hint of amusement—yet nevertheless with a potential for reproach. Abbey whirled about within her dream, barricaded herself with the lids over her eyes, and remembered the pantheric and glittering eyes of the Siamese cat:

‘Come.’

The woman held out her hand. It was soft, warm, and white within Abbey’s own. The woman flicked a switch in time with her veil that instantly lit up the whole regalia of Minotaurean passages. They walked together, feet clattering irregularly, the woman’s voice spurting conversation into the muteness of air.

‘My name is Sister More—who might you be, hmm? And why are you here so late? Now, let me think, I am trying to recall the names of those not present for supper this evening (the veiled woman seemed to be speaking her thoughts aloud) . . . There’s the Tibetan child Sakya, I’m expecting her on the morning train, Campion is meeting her… But you’re definitely not her. Then there’s Leah from Jerusalem… no, she’s here, . . . Jonquil from Ireland, Magdalena from Romania, and, of course, the Royale girls, but they’re always late, their parents are almost as rebellious as they are, shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t arrive until Monday from France—and in any case, I know them all.’

The veiled woman continued to count and dismiss various names from her large, soft, and expressive fingers and tossed her head dismissively. Abbey found herself watching the woman with intense preoccupation. She was spellbound: the lilt of her voice, the soft ‘t’s’, the clip of precision in her pronunciation. Abbey sensed a goodness within her that surpassed the effusive utterances and tear-stained jerky embraces of her mother. This woman glided: her movements were graceful and soothing. Her face was grave and kind. Her voice was without the many varied and confusing emotions Abbey was used to… and yet somewhere behind the absence of loneliness, anger, hate, grief, self-loathing, despair, and finally self-destruction, Abbey sensed something profound. It was something to do with calmness, serenity, self-control, and the smile that had left this woman’s countenance free of the lines that had tortured her mother’s younger face.

‘ . . . Perhaps you’re Elvedina—no, she’s arrived, so Eleanor tells me, so has the new Cooper girl Elaine, such a pretty little thing, her sister Robynne has been here for years… Abigail Westering, you might be her, Lillian—no, her father has already dropped her off… yes, you must be Abigail!’

When Abbey did not reply, the faint hint of reproach crept into the benignity of Sister More’s voice—the playfulness became a reproach, for this morose child was not playing the game.

‘Ah, here’s a suitcase and a satchel! They wouldn’t be yours by any chance… Abigail Westering—I shall assume that you are she.’

And so Abbey continued to be propelled along. They were outside now, and Sister More was switching on a floodlight, jangling keys, unlocking doors. Despite the briskness that had replaced Sister More’s quiet warmth of smile, Abbey remained comforted by the swish of her long black skirts, the continued flick of her veil, the click of her sensible black shoes upon the passages and stairs. They walked back up towards the road and into another, taller, four-storeyed building whose access was gained through an archway made from a door built into a wall. Inside this second building, Abbey continued to be propelled up further flights of stairs until she met Sister Eleanor…

Thence to the room where she now found herself, and into the bed she had just crept out of to view the sun…

Looking back on all of these experiences behind the mask of these cognitive and psychological challenges, Abbey pondered the sun’s rising on all people’s sorrows—there was this, all that had past and was to come, had she but only known. Sunshine, cosmic vibes, the mind travelling with speed into pictures that made the earth strange. Upswept into the duller reaches of memory, her lone insecurities surfaced: iconic reflections she knew of instinctively within the substance of her fear, without seeing. It unnerved her to realise how easy it was to form these images of disquiet from condensed and frozen light, and the colours, turquoise, blue-green, her sustaining; purple, the suffering she tried to reject; yellow, for the strange and unknown, one foot into madness; and red, the anger and the violence… Father’s words were worse than smashed bodies on the roadside that she had seen once: orange, for autumnal tranquillising before a peaceful death; mauve, broods; blue, saddens; green, envies; white, purifies; maroon, for chastity; brown, for the world of the physical and the material…

Abbey watched the skies. She was up there, feeling the winds from the cumuli, a world of clouds and angels stretching into infinity, islands within the air currents, parts of her being that she visited only in her unremembered dreams, or travelling counter-orbit, back hundreds, thousands, millions of years…

To the time when there was no time.

Her last recollections were of being laid gratefully between the sheets, the soft murmurings of Sister More and the other woman, Sister Eleanor, outside the door, this soft authoritative lilt of the woman who would rescue her from her loss of identity…

Now, below Abbey, the town still slept. Out and far into the distance, bathed in the brume of seas mists, was the dawned morning. The horizon deepened with red as the sun rose, strengthening the red brick colours of the tiled roofs aligned beyond the battered bareness of a deserted football pitch. Immediately below her, sharply angled to her view, lay a garden, neat and trim, with a swing and crescent of a well-tilled flower bed, spangled with carnations: to the right, lush evergreen of yew tree, spreading vastness deeply cold over the glittering dew grass…

Occasionally, a car skimmed the silence. The sun had lifted itself well above the rooftops now, a furnace of yellow glory—how quickly and imperceptibly it moved! Abbey remembered, looking out from her bedroom window on to the bluebell wood thence to the stars that she never saw move. She had watched them with intense concentration, knowing that when her gaze faltered, she would lose the vision of it forever, and yet the heavenly bodies would still be there. She wished now to be always able to see the stars through the yellow smouldering power of the sun. The impulse to dedicate her life to this task was almost overwhelming…

Then, quite unexpectedly, the fear passed away; as she made her way back to the bed, it left only a yearning, a peace that was wanting in her heart, an understanding of what had, and would, happen to her. Back with his head laid upon her pillow stared the beaded eyes of Bertha. She wished she were a teddy bear, with no thoughts, no nightmares, no sorrow, no struggle, nothing. She picked up the bear. It ‘baaed’ in obedience as she rocked and waited, rocked and waited, as she would for the next thing that would happen to her.

‘Oh, Jesus, through the most pure heart of Mary, I offer thee the prayers, works, sufferings, and joys of this day, for all the intentions of thy divine heart.’

Arising from the estuary, a gust of wind blew in through the open window. It swept wisps of hair from Abbey’s face. The coolness built up in waves over her body. The smell of fear emanated from the sweat that had evaporated…

She had seen a programme once—a baby thrust into the arms of refugee tent dwellers. The Mother was being chased by men on motorbikes, and they were billowing the dust of the furious savannah in their wakes. The baby’s name had been Rogation, after the Sunday on which she had been born. The child had grown up with the refugee tent dwellers, and she spent most of her adult life attempting to find her mother…

She never found her. She had pulled the elastic of hope tight, tight, until it went beyond contractual strength. She had spread her being upon alien sands, a shoreline on the Baltic Sea, a lonely, wind-wrought, gust-filled place of desolation, of gull cries in the bleak sun that failed to warm the harsh waters that Abbey felt herself empathetically enter in her despair. Thus, the young woman surrendered Rogation, the myocardial fibres, the elastic of her broken heart, to the loss of her physical life.

When would the time come when Mother and child were united?

Abbey was drowning amongst the driftwood of her needs. Sometimes her body seemed to melt or trail behind her. Ghosts crowded her fragile eggshell of an ego. Life lost its dimensions, became the lightness of snowflakes. She needed someone else in the mirror, staring back at her. These were the backs of her days in limbo swelter…

Throughout the day, the school’s establishment of a fresh routine swirled and eddied about her. There was no tranquillity to enable tentacular sensitivity to withdraw, to allow passage from the conscious, preconscious, and subconscious. Her body flinched from the metaphysical and emotional blows; magnets gathered together her brain filings, all the plains of her life integrated into time and its perpetual flux, her soul merging with its ghost…

She had never been officially told that her mother had gone; as for Father, he had never been there, certainly never in spirit. To Abbey, he was a disturbing alien…

Ralph

His first notable childhood memory was his asking of Mother what the pigeons in the fir trees were saying when they cooed from the pine trees’ dank and invisible interior. Mother was at the sink, clad in brilliant yellow rubber gloves, washing ‘the smalls’. Maybe this was why he had brought the house with the bluebell wood and the fir trees, with the pigeons cooing from its branches.

‘They are calling, Godfrey, Godfrey, Godfrey,’ Mother had replied in a gentle sing-song voice; she did not turn and face him, though he stood there for quite a few moments. Though he believed faithfully everything his mother told him, Ralph pondered the ridiculousness of this reply, but what most disturbed him was they should call out for his baby brother, Godfrey, and not for him.

Ralph’s second noteworthy memory was around the same time.

His elder brother, Edward, had been crying for some time, and Ralph had been unable to understand why it went on for so long. When Mother had told him it was because Edward had failed to get good marks at school and, in fact, had come bottom in mathematics, he remembered even then, smiling secretly to himself, in the knowledge that this would never happen to him.

Ralph had rarely cried as a small boy: brief tearful outbursts of rage and humiliation perhaps, if he was defeated at some task, or his will and desires were thwarted. He used to stare detachedly at his elder brother’s bouts of quiet tears, his younger brother’s primitive squawking, then shrug his shoulders dismissively and walk away.

It was when he was seven years old that Ralph knew for certain that he would surpass his brother in matters of the intellect and academia. It gave him a warm glow of intense satisfaction, reinforced by his mother’s endless remarks of praise to the family and her friends. Often when they were out together, she would speak highly in the presence of some person or other, stroking the fine black hair that flopped attractively over his pale high forehead and deep blue-green of eyes. ‘This is my son Ralph, my second-born,’ she would say, ‘and he is very clever.’

His father was (irritatingly) somewhat less forthcoming with praise—indeed, Ralph recalled with a mild degree of outrage that his father had once remonstrated against him when he had laughed at Edward’s inability to balance a chemical equation and write a description of the associated physical and chemical changes with molecular numerical alterations. His father had called him lazy, because it was always Edward that helped Father outside, not himself. His father spent too much time with Edward, talking and walking with him in the beautiful garden of their home, for which Father had won prizes. Ralph could not understand why someone inferior to him (Mother had told him that this was the case) should receive an inappropriate amount of attention. It made him restless and irritable, especially if Mother was not there to comfort him with eulogies, though this was rare. Ralph’s need for such comfort was quickly resolved by his ability to rally his own resources of self-esteem promotion—besides, there was always someone else to reinforce his views—and a parade of different teachers, as he grew older, being prominent among them.

It was also at seven years of age that Ralph first realised that he was somewhat different from others around him. Godfrey had been born when Ralph was seven years old. Father had been hoping dearly for a girl. Mother had insisted that their third son should be called Godfrey (Ralph called him ‘god’ as he rolled his eyes to his pinioning peers), after the family surname on her mother’s side.

Godfrey was a colicky baby, who cried for long periods, required breastfeeding seemingly constantly (Ralph was disgusted by this process), and who smelt of the digestive outpourings of his mother. Mother was constantly tired. She complained frequently that she was getting no sleep at all…

Ralph adored his mother. She was tall and graceful, long heavy black tresses of hair that she curled up into a bun. Her complexion had the translucent whiteness and the cold smooth feel of marble. There was a halo of invisible light about her that gave her the feel of a goddess. She was strong, lithe, and as invincible as the huntress Diana (in his childish eyes), whose skin was, as Mother’s, luminously reflected by the full moon. Like the goddess Diana, Mother, too, was surrounded by faithful dogs of hunting and prey—Amelia the pointer (Amy for short), Roberta the Old English sheepdog, and Folly the tanned springer spaniel. When she graced the gardens with her presence, Ralph’s mother was en-toured by this canine fan club…

The birth of his new brother was greeted with joy by everyone, despite the fact that Father had wanted a daughter very much, and even Edward had been disappointed. Mother, so Ralph thought, had not wanted another child. She had always behaved towards him as though he was the epitome of what she had always wanted in a child. This had consoled Ralph in the long days of Mother’s pregnancy, days in which Ralph had time to get used to the prospect of having a sibling with whom to vie for his mother’s attention. Through it all, Ralph had been sustained by the reassurance from his mother that he would remain special and first in her affections.

Yet the truth was that Ralph did not like sharing his mother’s attentions, and, whilst Edward had presented minimal problems, the birth of Godfrey had meant a drastic curtailment in the time that Mother had for him. It was all right for Edward, he had Father, but for Ralph, there was no substitute. He remembered the first occasion (vividly) when Mother had, distractedly, not heard him. Mother, Father, and Edward had been gathered around the cot, endeavouring to catch a glimpse of Godfrey’s first smile. Either Mother had not heard, or hearing had made no response, neither had anyone else. The occasions were becoming more frequent, and when Ralph responded in anger, the family (including Mother) reciprocated with what he took to be the vestiges of dislike, the commencement of bad feeling, perhaps hatred…

Today was a warm summer Sunday morning. The sun graced the face of Godfrey, made him soporific and floppy with sleep. The bells were chiming matins, far away in the distance, across the flat expanse of the flood plain. Ralph was in his bedroom, reading Homer’s Iliad. He read of Agamemnon’s anger, his ‘dark heart filled to the brim’, eyes ‘ . . . like searing fire’, the anguish of Achilles, ‘his heart in his rugged chest pounding, torn…’

Ralph had no Athenian goddess to descend and curtail his rage. He felt himself mesmerised by the Gregorian chiming, the call to worship against a backdrop of more than silence, a silence imbued with sacred peace… Homeric words of apposition to this atmospheric feel of calm and solitude, jumped out