Mulberry

Huddled in the darkness beneath her mother's coats, Lizzie luxuriates in the familiar comfort of her fear. The raid seems to have gone on forever this time, and the chatter and laughter and crying have all gradually subsided. Many people are asleep, many more pretending to be. There remains the murmur of a few whispered conversations, and something that might be someone sobbing, but barely enough to be heard over the noise of three hundred uneasy dreams.

Somewhere far above, yet more bombers approach, bellies open to spill uncaring death; down here there is only snoring. Hundreds of feet of earth and rock mask the grinding racket of the aeroplane engines, but the ground throbs in sympathy when the bombs strike, and the air in the tunnel thickens for an instant. Tonight that pulse has been as strong and regular as her mother's heartbeat.

It can be difficult to tell sometimes, here, but Lizzie is fairly sure she's awake when she notices the singing. It takes awhile to register: songs are commonplace in the shelters, something to keep people's spirits up, or sometimes to keep them down, like Annie Hughes' tearful lullabies for her boy John, dead seven months before on the beaches of Normandy, all of fifteen years old. Herself just four, Lizzie has no real idea what that means, but she knows it must be something terrible from the cracks in Annie's voice. Sixty years later she will remember that sound, and it will break her heart.

This singing is nothing like that.

Lizzie has seen and heard a lot for a girl her age, and taken it in her stride. Though she understands, at some level, that the war is a bad thing, it has never really felt that way inside. It is exciting and liberating, turning her city into a vibrant adventure playground. The blackout, the fires, the sirens are just thrilling decorations to spruce up her brand of normality.

Perhaps if she were a little older she would recognize and resent the privations, the rationing, her mother's struggle to maintain some kind of life for herself and her daughter in the face of the danger and loneliness; would wonder more about her vanished father and be frightened of the dark. But she isn't older, and she isn't afraid, and it all seems so ordinary, just the way things are. Has seemed so, until now.

As the song gently seeps into Lizzie's consciousness, strange feelings loom up inside her, horrible, treacherous things that she has no name for, dirty, messy, shameful. Emotions have always been bright and clear before, nice easy sensations that wash over her: happiness, sadness and anger corresponding neatly to laughter, tears and tantrums. Now they seem something else entirely, perilous, bewildering -- nauseating: her stomach clenches, tight and churning.

She sees herself in other times and places, doing things she doesn't understand with people she doesn't know. It is all fragments, making no sense, and later she will not remember the details, but for now each burns with agonizing urgency. The self she becomes in these instants is not always quite the same person -- she thinks in unfamiliar languages and acts in unfamiliar ways -- but Lizzie never doubts it is her.

She is stumbling across a battlefield, surrounded by the dead and dying, heavy skirts dragging in the blood-red filth, screaming: "All is lost! All is lost!" The sky darkens, and thunder rolls, and underneath it all is the song.

Dancing in the firelight to frenzied drumming and the sound of a fiddle, she spies her lover caressing another woman and only dances faster and harder, whirling like a dervish, laughing wildly, heart black with rage. She vows to kill him, and her promise is the lyric of the song.

She is giving birth, and it feels like a monster is clawing its way out between her legs, tearing her in two, and each time the agony eases for a moment it is only to return redoubled. Finally the monster rips free and then, just as she gasps towards that first breath of relief, it begins to feast on her flesh. Devouring her with huge, gleaming teeth, it sings.

Atop a tower of steel and glass, she stands surrounded by those she loves most in the world, and before her is a man with drool trickling down his face, slumped in a wheelchair. It is bitterly cold, and rain lashes them, and the man gazes up at her with his one good eye, pleading, and the last thing she hears through her weeping as she bashes in his skull with a rusty metal pole is that song.

She manages to make it to the platform edge before the vomiting starts, and lies there convulsing for what seems like hours, head hanging over. A putrid mess of bile and sour milk and powdered egg pours from her mouth to pool around the tracks below. Roused from a fitful sleep by Lizzie's retching, her mother strokes her hair and whispers words of comfort, but comfort is something Lizzie knows she will never feel again.

The tunnel is still pulsing with the distant explosions, but the singing, if it ever existed, is gone. Still, there is something. Lizzie doesn't know what makes her look to her left, into the darkness of the tunnel mouth, but then she can't look away. The creature holds her gaze, and grins. Sticks out a long, forked tongue. Winks and slowly, deliberately, turns away.

For a moment, the darkness seems to contract, squeezed down into something even blacker, to recede down the tunnel. Then distant sirens sound the All-Clear.
Posted by matt at April 14, 2004 04:32 PM