Ghost Wall

by Sarah Moss

Not blindfolded, but eyes widened to the last sky, the last light. The last cold bites her fingers and her face, the stones bruise her bare feet. There will be more stones, before the end.

From deep inside her body, from the cord in her spine and the wide blood-ways under the ribs, from the emptiness of her womb and the rising of her chest, she shakes. A body in fear.

Exhaled breaths hang like spirits above each person’s head, slowly dissolving into the air.

She has been one of them, ordinary.

There is an art to holding her in the place she is entering now, on the edge of the water-earth, in the time and space between life and death, too late to return to the living and not time, not yet, not for a while, to be quite dead.

You court it, she’d say, you go just one step too far, what do you expect?

Sulevia’s a local deity, said Dan, Jim was talking about her the other day. Northumbrian goddess of springs and pools, co-opted by the Romans, said Molly.

We had stopped on the ridge there to eat our sandwiches and I’d half closed my eyes, imagined hearing on the wind the Aramaic conversations of the Syrian soldiers who’d dug the ditches and hoisted the stones two thousand years ago.

This is what there was, this is what’s left.

The Wall was only a ditch, that first day, but at least it was a Roman ditch, a physical manifestation of Ancient British resistance still marked on the land, and you could see Dad drawing strength from it.

You move differently in moccasins, have a different experience of the relationship between feet and land. You go around and not over rocks, feel the texture, the warmth, of different kinds of reed and grass in your muscles and your skin. The edges of the wooden steps over the stile touch your bones, an unseen pebble catches your breath. You can imagine how a person might learn a landscape with her feet.

Doesn’t it feel strange, I heard myself ask, putting your fingers exactly the way someone put hers only she’s been dead for a few hundred years? Louise smiled, as if it was fine for me to join in. Not to me, she said, not anymore, anyway, I’m always trying to do what dead people tell me.

Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, we or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.

Museums. My father regarded them as temples, the bone-houses of our ancestral past.

He likes dead things. She pulled a strand out of her basket and started winding it around the spokes again. I’d like to make things be alive again, she said, like Louise does, let visitors see that people’s tools and jewellery and games are still here even when the people aren’t. And I wish I was better at this, I like the idea of making things the way people used to.

But some of the bog bodies, I thought, must have been someone’s first attempt. It would have been a skill to learn like any other, the art of taking someone into the flickering moment between life and death and holding them there, gone and yet speaking, moving still, for as long as you liked.

Light blinds you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside.

one of the things you learn in my line of work is that there’s no steady increase in rationalism over the centuries, it’s a mistake to think that they had primitive minds and we don’t.

Dad didn’t like this interpretation, didn’t want an Irish lineage, or Welsh or French. Roman Catholics praying to some Italian god, foreigners coming over here, telling us what to think. He wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night.

Water can’t get farther than skin, unless it’s bog water in which case it will permeate skin and preserve it like leather forever, so that the surface outlasts brain and blood by two thousand years. Leather shoes, to protect living skin. Leather belts, to make it sore. Dad’s fingers, dark with blood, dropped the rabbit’s innards on the grass.

Rowans were often planted at doorways and boundaries, meant to deter evil spirits or maybe to invite good ones, I couldn’t recall. You find them often by the ruins of old cottages up on the moors.

Evil spirits, ghosts, like the bog people Dad loved who could now exist only as victims, as the objects of violence.

Her hands had been bound for two thousand years.

She had had a life before that, the bog girl. She had slept and woken, had sleepless nights, felt sun and wind and rain. She had learnt to read the sky, learnt the impossible dance of fingers plaiting her own hair behind her head, the movements just the same as the ones I’d been watching Molly make. There are few bog children and so far as I know no bog babies, so the people who come to us now out of the bogs must have been cared for, fed, must have been part of their families and villages until one day they found that they were no longer like everyone else, that sometime in the night something had changed. No one knows how far before death that day might have been, whether one morning someone came to wake you carrying a rope, the blades already sharpened and waiting in the heather, or whether you had weeks or months to say your farewells, to get used to your status as a ghost. It would have been necessary not to think about it, I thought, to have tree-thoughts right to the end of thinking, and I found myself hoping they had something to hold, some talisman against the pain. I knew they did not. They are all found empty-handed, unconsoled.

Without a house, it occurred to me, it is much harder to restrict a person’s movement. Harder for a man to restrain a woman.

The whole of life, I thought, is doing harm, we live by killing, as if there were any being of which that is not the case.

I felt Dad’s gaze on me and knew with a shiver what he was thinking. My daughter. Break her and stake her to the bog, stop her before she gets away. They weren’t dead, the bog people, not to those who’d killed them. They had to be pinned to their graves with sharp sticks driven through elbow and knee, trapped behind woven wooden palings, to stop them coming back, creeping home dead and not dead in the dark.

We’re seeing if we can make a ghost wall, said the Prof, sitting back on his haunches. I was telling your dad, it’s what one of the local tribes tried as a last-ditch defence against the Romans, they made a palisade and brought out their ancestral skulls and arrayed them along the top, dead faces gazing down, it was their strongest magic.

But it’s a powerful idea, isn’t it, and it speaks to the importance of human remains to the culture.

Does he ever even ask her what she thinks, Molly went on. No one asks her what she thinks, I thought, she thinks as little as possible, what to have for tea tomorrow and will the washing powder last another week, if you want thinking, my mother is the wrong person to ask.

Mad play, the building of a wall where there was nothing inside, the conjuring of animal spirits on a summer’s night.

I brought the small heads one at a time in hands cupped as if to receive the body of Christ, the blood and bones of my fingers and palms a final brief protection. There had been minds there. Sheep cry for their taken lambs, even rabbits know alarm and need. I raised each one as a sacrament to the ghost wall, found myself bowing my head as Dad set them in place.

Why not, after all, make ceremony for the animal dead, for those we have deliberately killed. There is still a dying.

Children’s bodies were not their own, we were all used to uncles who liked to cop a feel given half a chance and mums who showed love in smacked legs.

Haven’t you been listening, people don’t bother to hurt what they don’t love. To sacrifice it.

Like you, I thought, it smells like you, but I didn’t say so. I like it, she said, I’m the midsummer queen, thank you.

I don’t care if they’re not planning to hurt you, you don’t humiliate people like that. Especially not you, though ’course that’s why, you’re young and vulnerable and they think no one’s going to stand up for you. Well, they’re wrong there. And I’m sorry, Silvie. I’m sorry they thought they could ask you. She put her arm round me. I didn’t cry. I rested my head on her shoulder, breathed her in. Stay with me, OK, she said, just stay near me and I won’t let them do anything, I promise. She stroked my hair. Don’t, I said, it’s filthy, I probably smell. You don’t smell, she said, anyway, everyone smells a bit in this heat.

I can’t, I said, I’m sorry, Molly, I’m sorry but I can’t defy him, not over this, he’s been thinking about this stuff for years, the bog people. Shaking came from deep inside. I can’t. Dad—Your dad’s not God, she said, he can’t do anything he likes to you, however fascinated he might be. I know, I said, he’s not, it’s OK, I’ll be all right, they did ask. Oh, Silvie, she said. Oh, Sulevia, goddess of the groves.

I know that, I just wish—I couldn’t even say it. I wish I didn’t have to be tied up in front of everyone. I wish my father didn’t want to put a rope around my neck, and since he does want to it doesn’t make much difference whether he does it or not. Maybe it was like that for the bog people, I thought, maybe the worst part was being chosen and everything after that was inevitable.

I remembered her arm, the marks you get if you resist when someone’s trying to hit you, if you make him have to hold you down. Better just to take what’s coming to you anyway.

He had seen me looking at Molly, wanting to touch her hair and her feet. He knew.

You lead her, Bill, said the Professor, after all, she’s your sacrifice.

Here I am, then. So kill me.

She too would have seen the evening’s raven homeward bound, and perhaps she would have held its voice in her mind against the pain, would have envied it the coming day. The stones came.

It’s over, Silvie, said Molly, we’re looking after you now.

I laid my face against her hair and thought that as I breathed in I could still somehow catch inside me the scent of her bog myrtle crown. Stay with me, I said, please, just tonight. She moved away and pulled back the worn brown duvet cover on the bed for me. Lie down, she said, I’ll be on the outside, you’ll know I’m between you and everything else, and then she curled around me, her bare legs cradling mine, her fingers at rest on my belly, her breathing warm on my shoulder, and I lay watching the full moon and then the dawn through the ivy-framed window of Trudi’s cottage the rest of that short summer night.