The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [14]
And there at one end of the log was scattered evidence that it was used as a thrush’s anvil. On the flattest part of the trunk a bird had brought snails and with them in its beak, whipping its neck back and forth, had smashed them open. Smithereens of spiral shell, some with a frail foam of mucus still on them, made a constellation that John swirled with his fingertip.
But he couldn’t touch Mary, he remembered - the sweetest of his two wives, the lost child who loved him, so near in his thoughts he could reach out and touch her. ‘Mary,’ he crooned to himself. Time’s walls were the strangest prison. He couldn’t touch them or bloody his head against them, but they surrounded him without a gap, and kept him from his loves, from home, lost in a wood miles away from them. He stood up. ‘Mary,’ he said. ‘O Mary. O Mary. O Mary sing thy songs to me.’ He dug in his pockets: his pipe, a pebble, a square of paper and bit of old pencil. He sat down again, removed his hat, flattened the paper over its crown and wrote,
O Mary sing thy songs to me
Of love & beauty’s melody
My sorrows sink beneath distress . . .
After a spell there he had a new poem written on both sides of the paper, and then across for lack of room. He sat feeling whole for a moment, his mind serene and extensive, running through the poem, humming it. The wood surrounded him, its arms upraised, meeting the light. A fine rain had started to stutter onto branches and leaves.
Another poem, among thousands. It was comfortable to have them come singly, not streaming out in a fever. His flash company that had been the ruin of him quite. He remembered with a clench of his bowels his friends in the village avoiding him so as not to find themselves in a poem they couldn’t read and that brought the visiting strangers. Is it true, as I have heard, that you rustics perform the conjugal act in your pig sties? Still, it would please Dr Allen, he reflected. Another ornament to his thoroughly respectable establishment of lunatics.
John walked on, passing charcoal burners sitting inside their huts, ancient things of poles walled with cut turf, old as any dwelling probably. They had to spend days out there, making sure the fires didn’t catch, but slowly ate down to coal the wood piled under covers. The smoke that rose was sweet, much sweeter than at the lime kilns where John had worked off and on. He saw them look up and stare out of their darkness and risked a greeting doffing of his hat, but they didn’t move.
Then, half a mile away, in a clearing there were vardas, painted caravans, tethered horses, and children, and a smoking fire. A little terrier caught the scent of John and stood with its four feet planted, leaning towards him, as if in italics, to bark. An old woman seated near the fire, a blanket around her shoulders, looked up. John didn’t move or say anything.
‘Good day to you,’ she said.
‘Good day,’ John answered, and then to let her know he knew them, was a friend, said, ‘Cushti hatchintan.’
She raised her eyebrows at that. ‘It is. It is a good spot. You rokkers Romany then, do you?’
‘Somewhat, I do. I was often with the gypsies near my hatchintan, in Northamptonshire. We had many long nights. They taught me to fiddle their tunes and such. Abraham Smith, and Phoebe. You know them?’
‘We’re Smiths here, but I don’t know your crew. I haven’t been into that county, or had them here. This is a good spot,’ she raised an arm to gesture at it. ‘Plenty of land and no one pushing you off it. And the forest creatures, lots of hotchiwitchis to eat in winter. This is one commons that don’t seem to be getting ate up.’
John shook his head and answered as one weary elder to another. ‘It’s criminal what is nominated law now. Theft only, taking the common land from the people. I remember when they came to our village with their telescopes to measure and fence and parcel out. The gypsies then were driven out. The poor also.’
One of the