My Name is E Read online

  Frederick Lightfoot was born in West Cumbria and educated at Sussex University where he studied English and Drama. Spent many years in London before returning to West Cumbria where he now lives with his wife and two daughters. He has done many jobs, a lecturer in English, Drama and Creative Writing. He has also worked as a qualified general and psychiatric nurse, the training for which he completed after his degree.

  He spent many years teaching drama and running drama workshops for people with Learning Disabilities and Mental Health problems. He currently works as an educationalist in End of Life Care, parts of which include working with actors to develop communication skills for staff and running workshops for people with advanced illness using narrative. He divides his time equally between writing and his teaching commitment.

  By the same author

  Migrants

  Immigrants

  Cry/Swans (single volume)

  Fetish and Other Stories

  Estuaries

  MY NAME IS E

  Frederick Lightfoot

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  PO Box 5725

  One High Street

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9WJ

  Scotland.

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  © Frederick Lightfoot 2011

  The moral right of Frederick Lightfoot to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

  ISBN-epub: 978-1-905207-78-7

  Cover design by Guilherme Condeixa

  Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sea, base greys, moving, writhing, at eye level and unseen: writhing, rolling, in excitement or turmoil? She, signing, stood there and intimated it was all depth and weight. Dreams, she shared, of depth and weight. A mermaid, I saw her, adrift and free. The answer – a whim to wind, tide and the moon – all water is subject. In the caverns, she painted, dancing, her drifting mime up and down the shore, the beloved shore – the sands corrugated, black speckled, dusted with millions of coal grains, dotted over with lug-worm casts – in the caverns, she boasted, there would survive the sweet drone, the groan of a single vowel. Smiled, she, and said, whispered but announced, my name is E. A tiny figure, small, faceless, drawn of lines and circles, she made in the granular sand and sang aloud E, her signature, that of the artist, though she would not look for credit. Smiled, she, wicked and a-wing, witnessing the drowning moment, E lost beneath the drape of sea. Again, the claim, the sea says, E, my name, E, Eeeeee. Vibration, no lip movement, one chord, the most common of all vowels, Phoenician E, Greek E, Etruscan E, Roman E, Silent E, Magic E. My name is, coastal is, writhing, ecstatic, E.

  Chapter One

  The last time I stood here I was twenty-five and pregnant and determined to kill someone. I remember so clearly getting off the bus and strolling through the village, surprised as one always is by both alteration and continuation. There were more houses, new houses, where before there had been prefabs, and little cul-de-sacs built behind old terraces, the old houses that had known so many raised voices and beatings, so much primitive noise.

  Walls don’t contain sounds, though, whatever ghost hunters might say. They deflect sound and it goes off diminishing, losing voice, until it is no more and the violence that birthed it is rendered ridiculous and slightly obscene in the transformation. I think it was that which stuck in my throat, all those dead sounds, those dead aggravated calls.

  By the time I’d followed the old, still familiar paths – the quarry rail-line across the bog land, navigated the old sandstone bridge with the coastal rail-line over it and the river beneath, then onto the dunes and finally the shore – the tightness in my guts was unbearable.

  As I stepped awkwardly down the shingle towards the amphitheatre of rock-pools the possibility had become a certainty. Someone was going to die. Someone was going to pay. It was a vendetta, a need for restitution and justice, and she was the reason, the person the sea named, E, but who was it going to be? Martha, Harold, Agnes, Mr Drake? They were all guilty, in one way or another, all culpable. In fact, as that roar got the better of me I had the fleeting vision of them all dead. Was I capable of being such a nemesis? I believe I was. Centuries of abuse could be rectified and the morality of the conscript, those born without any voice to their name, constituted.

  *

  From the moment Abby was born she was claimed and had to go and live in someone else’s home. Mother Sempie, the matriarch, Martha, claimed to have been too long alone, too long struggling against the senility and decay loneliness engenders – though still relatively young, Harold being born when she was still in her teens. She possessed Abby not with love but ownership. She watched over her in her crib, the bottom drawer of what had been Harold’s chest of drawers, the matriarch not wanting her home unduly disfigured, and told her tales, family stories, stories of feuds, vendettas and acts of revenge. She even told her the one thing that no one knew, the identity of Harold’s father. She laughed fiercely at the comedy of witness and told ever more daring things, the secret fantasies of her inner most thoughts.

  *

  You are a Sempie. She was told that until there could be no more doubt. It was a demand and an accusation. Of course, it wouldn’t have been the case if Martha had told the truth. But a Sempie it was. Semp-ie! Abigail Sempie who later Grace named Abby.

  *

  Never go back.

  The old maxim tends to hold true. Of course it’s something of a nonsense. How could such a thing exist anyway? Time erases the possibility. Looking at the sea today on this filthy, junk swept coast, could not be looking at the same filthy, junk swept coast thirty-five years ago, or twenty-five years before that, together making one lifetime at least. The weather, the tide-line, the herring gulls, the oystercatchers, the plastic barrels, the dead, will not permit it.

  The planet is round, though, the universe round, science proves impossibilities. Time must be round, probably a spiral. Points of likeness, of shimmer, of recognition, line up. The seer looks across them. Looking is greeted by a sigh. Is it repudiation, resignation, despair or wistful pleasure? Of course, it’s impossible to say, unless you get closer, much, much closer, within better hearing distance, which really would be something.

  So, I did the impossible. I disregarded the maxim, even though I steadfastly believed its truth, and returned, but I came as an invader. I came with a mission, a mission to correct time. Looking across these waves then – hard to believe it was thirty-five years ago now – I remember saying, I was born here – uttering the phrase aloud with slow, mannered syllables, making that declaration of origin, of beginning, into something of a challenge: a challenge for me, certainly, but more specifically, a challenge for all those I had never really left behind.

  Of course, they would not have guessed I had any purpose at all, would not have imagined it even possible, though if they’d only had the ski
ll to hear, the sea whispered the clue.

  *

  We usually ended up here. It was one of Abby’s favourite places, not the only one, but special. Not that she ever felt particularly safe here, the beach is too exposed for that to be the case, but it’s such an ugly shoreline very few people ever ventured here.

  It is one long expanse that stretches in either direction like a long straight road. A narrow stretch of shingle attaches to a filthy strip of sand. Where we went – because that’s where the interior quarry rail-line joined the coastal rail-line – there is a great bowl of rocks and rock-pools where we often watched giant crabs scuttle for shelter. It looks like the archaeological remains of an amphitheatre. The sand is corrugated and dark, flecked with coal dust. The shingle has lines of seaweed and flotsam.

  The short tract of land on the seaward side of the coastal rail-track is composed of sand-dunes and tough scrub. It isn’t difficult jumping down onto the shingle from it, but climbing back can be fraught. The bank is at least five feet high and has only been worn away into pathways in a couple of places, and they are forever collapsing or filling with rubbish.

  The litter used to bother Abby. I don’t know that it was because she was a tidy person; such notions didn’t exist then, not around the dilapidated little farmsteads we understood as home. I think it was more the fact the litter was so outlandish. It suggested a life going on somewhere completely alien and hidden to us. The fact that that life was vulgar in some way we never questioned for a moment. Why an empty plastic barrel should announce such a thing I don’t suppose I will ever understand; but understanding is so often like that, intuitive and prejudiced.

  Of course we knew what attracted her, the roar that signalled her, and the persistence that guided her. It was the sea. That thing that was moving, writhing, sounding from some indefinable depth, spelling out her name, the only name she would have for herself.

  Name, hers, E.

  *

  By the time Martha rescinded her claim Harold and Agnes were two children better off with another on the way and so were not best pleased to be landed with a deaf-mute, particularly one so reviled by the matriarch. Once the realisation hit home that her secrets had fallen on such infertile ground Martha was consumed by rage. When the nurse came round to confirm in her most diplomatic, concerned tones what was patently obvious to everyone, that Abby had never heard a single word of the family saga and was not ever remotely likely to repeat them, Martha flew into a fit of temper and flung her entertaining cups – the ones with saucers, produced for the nurse’s benefit – right across the room, fortunately before any tea had been poured.

  She went on to lash at everything within reach, condemning a tongue in brine she was pressing and a flank of bacon she was about to hang to the green flags of the kitchen floor. At first the nurse tried to reason with her, ridiculously pointing out the obvious that it must have been something of a shock. With that Martha rounded on the messenger and glared at her as if it were all her fault. The nurse found Martha’s close attention more frightening than her previous eruption. She began to excuse herself, saying she had a number of visits to see to, she was also in the middle of immunisations, but promised that the doctor would call and someone from education, but she had only just begun to button her coat when the matriarch screamed at her to get out. The nurse defended her dignity for just a few seconds more, but as that merely resulted in a barrage of the previous injunction, she decided it was better to beat a hasty retreat without another word, leaving the child to the fury of the woman who had claimed her.

  For a while Martha simply gazed at the back of the door through which the nurse had gone, and then slowly she rounded on Abby. Her eyes burnt with hatred. Her expression suggested betrayal. Abby had simply viewed the scene with amusement, tickled by the nurse’s embarrassment, fleeting pluck and then hasty retreat. She had seen it all before. The matriarch was renowned for her temper. She had seen worse when Martha claimed Harrison the butcher was trying to undercut her, or Addison was overcharging for the use of his boar, but she had never experienced it. Martha had treated her like a favoured pet, something to stroke and feed with occasional tid-bits, though she was never unduly pampered. She had certainly never seen Martha eye her like that before, with malice and distaste.

  Instinctively Abby backed away, aware that something had irrevocably changed in her master’s manner. At that movement Martha smiled vindictively. She began to mouth things towards Abby, things she now knew the child couldn’t hear, couldn’t interpret. In all likelihood it was yet another family secret, possibly something very near to Martha herself, something very near indeed, but she was no longer gloating, pleased with herself for confessing to an infant, but tormenting herself with it. – Was that the insult, the complaint, that the child had made a fool of her and her confessional game? Or was it altogether blander than that? – As she began to mouth at her, mixing her last confession with threats and expletives, Abby scurried across the floor trying to find some place of safety in the kitchen.

  She had found safe havens there before. Her memory was full of them. There was the space between the back of the small horsehair settee and the wall with the embossed flowers. There was only room enough for her to crawl in and no space to move, so she simply lay there, often with her eyes closed, touching the flowers, inhaling the dank rug that covered that half of the room, feeling the coarseness of the cloth of the settee against her. She didn’t daydream there, didn’t imagine vast open spaces, plateaux with sunshine, but was content in the confinement as it was.

  It was the same in the lid of the enormous Singer sewing machine the matriarch produced from time to time. Occasionally Abby sat in it and paddled as if it were a boat, an ancient wooden galleon paddled by hand, but the seas were always stormy and she invariably looked for a port, any creek or cove large enough for her vessel. More often than not, though, she twisted and contorted herself until she was entirely contained in the lid, and she liked nothing better than to be able to pull over a covering, a pillow-case or tea-towel, so she was completely hidden. She liked the fact that the light still came through so she could see her own snakelike shape, and she loved the sense of her own breathing, even and moist in the confined space.

  Indeed, the smaller the space the better. The matriarch often found her coiled around the bars of a stool or under a heap of sheets, her head under a pillow, her eyes peeping out now and again as if she were navigating some vehicle into ever narrower spaces. She imagined her bed was surrounded by four walls and she had to stay there forever, her food appearing mysteriously through a tiny hatch. She never thought for a second she might be bored, her imagination, which was as subterranean as her behaviour, would sustain her – which when the time came to need it, I hope it did, but by then the spaces she sought were far greater.

  Of course, no matter her contortionist’s acumen, her mole-like skill, she never uttered more than a syllable; purrs and grunts of delight or frustration depending on her level of achievement. So there is no reason that it should have come as such a shock to the matriarch when it was indicated and confirmed that Abby couldn’t speak because she couldn’t hear. After all she was five years old, in fact nearly six, when the nurse came to inform her of the outcome of the audiology tests they had conducted in the surgery. Martha had been against any investigation into Abby’s lack of speech, and had somehow managed to keep all professionals at bay. She told the health visitor, who insisted on it, that it was simply a matter of time. Harold had been a late speaker. All her children were slow off the mark – by which she was presumably claiming Abby, as she had no other child than Harold. The health visitor was not to be gainsaid. It didn’t matter that Martha lost her temper and accused her of being an interfering busybody, adding it was better before the war when people could get on with things themselves. The tests were carried out, the result scarcely in doubt. Abby was deaf and had not acquired speech. Perhaps the matriarch had simply refused to believe what was patently obvious, and though
t as long as she could deny the evidence then everything would be all right. Her acquisition could remain her pet. The truth of it was presumably in the speech she made as she descended on Abby in that small kitchen, but Abby was never one to repeat that.

  Abby had managed to entangle herself amongst the legs of the table, but Martha seized her and dragged her out, and whilst holding her firmly with her left hand began slapping her with the right, across the buttocks and thighs, all the while ranting at her as if she had wilfully deceived her. All round the small kitchen she beat her, barging her into the furniture and the grate, so that her body would be bruised for weeks, and the only sounds Abby made were mute screams of incomprehension.

  Agnes was feeding chickens when Martha threw Abby across the yard, sending her skidding over the black cobbles towards the dung-heap, scattering the chickens as she did. Martha evidently thought it better to bring her to the rear of the house where there was less chance of the neighbours seeing – Harold having acquired all the land behind a small row of houses. Martha held herself upright and declared, as if she were personally accusing Agnes: ‘‘Your bitch is deaf.’’ When Agnes made no reply Martha marched up to her and glared at close quarters, repeating: ‘‘Did you hear me? Your bitch is deaf, a deaf-mute.’’ Agnes evidently didn’t know how to respond and simply stood there squinting at Martha as if the sun were blinding her, though in reality it was a dull, cloudy day, the cobbles beneath her feet covered over with a grimy patina of mud. Martha threw up her hands with impatience, and made to leave, but before she turned away Harold appeared on the steps. She didn’t hesitate but called to him with as much sarcasm as she could muster: ‘‘Your Shaughnessy woman has done you proud and spawned an imbecile, just like I told you, but you wouldn’t listen to me. Well, I hope you have the stomach for it, because I don’t.’’ Harold gazed with the same vagueness as had his wife, his expression denoting nothing of what he was thinking, except perhaps the fact that the matriarch didn’t frighten him, even if she had once. Infuriated by his silence Martha screamed: ‘‘I warned you, I wouldn’t care if I hadn’t warned you.’’ Harold gave a barely perceptible shrug, kicked his clogs against the frame of the door as if he needed to kick off mud, though he hadn’t made it into the yard, and disappeared back indoors. Martha rounded on Agnes, defying her to comment, then when Agnes said nothing, screwed up her face and said: ‘‘I thought not.’’ With that she took herself back out of the yard and was gone.