He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn’t mind.
“What’s your part in this?” Brown demanded.
“Favours are a useful currency,” said Reynardine.
“You’re working for them because favours are a useful currency?”
Reynardine yawned clownishly and rubbed his eyes. Black paint came away on his knuckles. “I work for myself,” he muttered. “I’m freelance.”
Brown looked down at her hands. She had never been good at anything. There had never been any work that she’d been able to make her own. She raised a hand to the moonlight, and the brass ring winked at her.
“I want what I lost,” she said.
“You should do this just because they asked you to. You came from these people. You owe them everything,” Reynardine pointed out.
Politely, she disagreed. She was vastly outnumbered, she knew that, but that didn’t mean she would budge. There’s a reason the Yoruba were famed as warriors.
Reynardine was amused.
“Do this and I’ll restore what you lost,” he said. Brown was suspicious. “How? Why?”
Reynardine stood and looked down at her. His gaze was very wild indeed; it seemed to have no focus. She came very close to flinching.
“How?” she asked again. “Why?”
Reynardine made some answer, but it was muffled because he was walking into the ground; the earth covered his head.
Brown worked for days. She didn’t know how many days — afterwards she would only ever be able to recall that time as a pause between two breaths she took. In between she ran through the twelve fountain pens. More appeared. She ran through blocks of paper, and more was provided. Occasionally she would feel a hand, a hand that was not her own, passing over her hair, as if blessing her. The words didn’t come easily. She put large spaces between some of them for fear they would attack one another.
She’d thought she didn’t have any stories, but in fact she had too many.
She put down things she didn’t know she knew. She wrote about a girl who babysat herself while both her parents worked and worked for not enough pay. The girl didn’t answer the door or the telephone because no one was meant to know she babysat herself, and besides, it might be the Home Office, and then they’d all be deported. So that she would not be scared, she pretended she was a spy and wrote secret spy notes on pink paper. She posted the spy notes out of the living-room window; she sent them spinning down onto the heads of passersby, who picked them up and didn’t understand them. They’d look up, but the girl had disappeared from the window — no one was supposed to know she was there.
Brown wrote about another girl who lived in a city that men were forbidden to enter. This girl knew nothing but the city and the stern stretch of coast that surrounded it, and she thought that men were just a funny story, and she didn’t expect that she was missing much.
She wrote about an Okitipupa village boy who was nobody’s boy, and earned money for himself by taking care of other children. She wrote about the afternoon nobody’s boy returned to the village in despair, having mislaid four of his ten charges and roped the remaining six boys to his waist with a long piece of scarlet rope and a great many strong knots. He had spent two hours looking for those four boys, and was just on his way to the first of the boys’ parents to confess what had happened when, in a moment like a nightmare, the missing boys jumped up from the shallow pits they’d been lying in, boy after boy shaking the earth with unearthly cries.
There was more, much more, and she put it all down, though she didn’t see what good it could do. She put it all down for the ones who had said, Tell us.
Here are your stories, then. Have them back.
Reynardine came then, and he smiled at her, and he took all her stories away.
What did Reynardine leave behind?
A man she knew.
He slumped against the wall of her room, with his legs stuck out in front of him. His eyes were open, but when she spoke to him, he didn’t look at her. He didn’t breathe. His heart didn’t beat. His lips were blue. Brown lay down with him, and she tried to give him breath, and she asked him if he was dead.
“I don’t know,” Reynardine answered from the doorway. “Probably.”
And Brown turned to him and cried out: “Reynardine! Reynardine! What have you brought me?”
Reynardine tutted. “I brought you what you lost.”
“But he’s still lost! You tricked me.”
“Listen,” said Reynardine. “Have you considered joining him?”
Brown sat listening, thinking. She held her man’s hand, and she didn’t feel able to let go just then.
“I dare you,” Reynardine said, “to be lost together.”
She wasn’t as worried as she could have been. She had recently been visited by people long deceased. They had seemed well enough, and had even been so bold as to make demands of her. She accepted the dare.
Reynardine snapped his fingers, and she stopped living.
Stiffly entwined in each other’s arms, the two lovers were moved to Père Lachaise sans coffins, and at dead of night. Reynardine took care of that. He was owed favours and he made the arrangements. It’s said that Reynardine is monstrously cruel, but sometimes, to a woman who takes him at his word, he can show kindness.
The first moment in the tomb was the most forbidding. The silence, the stillness, the dark.
Then they realised: They were together, and there was no one else. She felt his lips tremble against her forehead. After that he became courageous and brought his arms down around her. He kissed her closed eyelids and he kissed her mouth and he kissed handfuls of her hair and he kissed her elbows. She placed her brass ring on the palm of his hand and closed his fingers around it. He opened his hand and the ring was gone. It had not fallen, unless it had fallen through him, and if so, it had left no mark. No more counting kisses.
Reynardine had thrown a candle and a box of matches in with them. They didn’t need the candle. . In the darkness they learnt to waltz. Then they lit the candle anyway — why not? And they let its flame warm their stone house for a little while as they danced on behind their locked door.
Mary Foxe saved my life once. She has a vested interest, of course — if I go, she goes. But she didn’t do it as if she had a vested interest. She did it as if she cared. It was nine, maybe ten, years ago. Before Daphne. I was working late at night, trying to get something down about a boy at war; he’d signed up to be a hero and had all sorts of ideas about standing aloof from both his equals and his superiors. I couldn’t yet tell whether this kid’s stupid ideas were going to get him killed, or whether he was simply going to be slapped down and made useful in some minor way. It was not a story about me — in France I learnt to do exactly what I was told. I’m talking about the Marne — frontal assaults; don’t blink, don’t think, just do. I looked around my study and everything was just too damn cosy. The anodyne calm. The gentle, sputtering dance of the fire, and the books that towered all around me, their spines turned out. I couldn’t write down the echo of an exploded shell. I couldn’t smear the smell of the trench across the page. I couldn’t do this thing so that anyone could see what I meant. The things that had happened — things I laughed at when they crossed my mind — you can’t hold on to them too long, unless you want to go crazy. The dead don’t trouble me — dead is dead. It’s the ones who took impact and lived. Joe Persano: Shrapnel put his left eye out, and he refuses to wear an eye patch; a glass eye rolls slightly in the crumpled hole left for it. Tom Franklin has no hands. Ivor Ross’s right trouser leg is empty and half his mouth is puckered up for a sour, perpetual kiss. And here I am, whole. It got so I had a pistol to my head, there in my cosy study, and I wasn’t at all sure that I’d taken it out of my desk drawer myself. I must have been holding it, but there was no feeling in my fingers; the gun seemed to be floating, held up by Joe’s ill will, Tom’s, and Ivor’s. The gun’s nozzle pushed at my skin, as if trying to find the correct part of my skull to nestle against. Death like the insect, menacing the tree. .