Imagination v reality…

I’ve something for you. I clicked the link on the screen. Martina Inglis, the same but different. Different but the same.

She was sitting with not just a table but tables behind her loaded with fruit and ceramics, and space, and was that a balcony above her? under a roof that went back for ever and was mostly glass.

Sands of time be damned, she was saying. You look exactly the same.

After all these years. Have you sold your soul to the devil?

I’ve only half an hour or so, I said.

God, you really haven’t changed, she said. Nice to see you too.

I got in touch because I’ve this tale to tell you about what happened to me the other day, I said.

Okay, she said. Great. Knew you would. Knew you wouldn’t let me down. I’m all ears.

So I got home, I said, mid evening, just gone dark, I’d been for a walk in the woods, and I opened my front door and I could smell a kind of singeing smell, metallic, like someone had set something earthy like a lump of peat on fire somewhere in my house. I went through to the back then came to the foot of the stairs again. The smell was everywhere.

A lot of people are having weird olfactory sensations right now, she said.

Don’t interrupt, I said, there isn’t time. Let me tell you everything I can remember first and then we can talk for as long as I’ve left, I’ve to be at a hospital in an hour.

Are you ill? she said. You don’t look ill. Who’s ill?

So I went round downstairs putting all the lights on, I said, then I started to worry that maybe some electrical malfunction was happening in the walls so I went round putting all the lights off again. Then I went upstairs in the dark.

I opened my bedroom door.

There was someone in there, hunkered down behind the bed and rooting around in my wardrobe. I mean there’s not much to steal in my wardrobe. I put the light on. It was this person in filthy ripped sort of clothes, clearly a homeless person or someone on drugs who’d broken into

the house and all the shoes and boots I keep in the bottom of the wardrobe were out all over the floor and my father’s dog was sitting on my bed where she knows she’s really not allowed, and looking at me like it was me who was the intruder not the person going through my things.

And then I noticed there was another creature on the bed next to the dog, quite a large creature, size of a small turkey. Except it looked like it had no legs and no head.

Were you hallucinating? Martina Inglis said. A lot of people are having postviral hallucinations.

So I said to the dog, get off the bed this minute, you, and I said to the person, how did you get into my house? and she lifted herself off the floor out of the wardrobe and turned round and looked at me, it was just a girl, sixteen maybe, and her face and hands were smeared with dirt, her whole self looked like she’d been, I don’t know, stealing coal from a slagheap in a British film from the 1960s, and I could see she was putting one of her really filthy bare feet into one of my best winter boots, and she looked straight at me while she did it, insolent, and she said, this dog needs a lot more than you’re giving it, what kind of a beetlehead are you? I said, what are you, the dog police? and she said, new shoes. You have more shoes than your feet need, you won’t miss them, and I said again, how did you get into my house? She said, easy, with a dumb. Just share me the shoes, and the bird and I will leave you to God,

and right then the headless thing on the bed unfolded a head out of itself, it was a bird, it had been tucked into itself, into its own feathers, and its beak as it untucked it was amazing, as long as, well, longer than any bird-beak I’ve ever seen or could have imagined existed, long and thin and as delicately curved as, I don’t know, some very thin ceremonial sword, and it sat up next to my father’s dog who was still there on the bed and its bird face with that beak was like it was wearing one of the plague masks you see in pictures of when people wore them in Venice back in the centuries, so that the length of the mask would keep the germs at a distance, and it looked straight at me with its deep black eyes.

Oh my God, Martina Inglis said on my screen. It’s the curlew.

Eyes like little black lights, I said. Then it sort of struggled up, beat its wings, its wingspan was way too big for the room, it knocked the lampshade swinging, sort of leapt up in the air and settled itself on the

shoulder of the girl, she squared her shoulder to take the weight of it and she turned to me.

Can I have them or not? she said. Do I have a choice? I said. Where are your own? On the feet of the loper who took them off my feet. When? I said. When we were on the road, she said. You’re in a band? I said. I mean she seemed quite young to be on the road in a band. But she nodded.

I was in the Brotherhood of the Company of the Craft, she said.

I racked my brain but I’d never heard of them.

What do they sing? I said. Anything they like, I’m not with them no more, she said, they threw me loose. Never mind, my tools are my own, now I’m journeying.

Some kind of groupie? She was way too young to be this homeless and druggy.

Nails, she was saying now, and spikes and all decoratives, I’m the fellow. What needs mended here? Not counting this poor dog you’ve broken. The break’s an inner crack, yours to mend, I can’t, but I’ll trade you a piece of house goods that need mending for a sleep under a roof, I’ve a tolerable hand, stew pans, lock, grate, kettle, candlestick, hinge, last a lifetime, you’ve my word, I’m good at knives, there’s many a person buried with a knife of mine for use in the next life.

She was high on something, God knew what. Either that or she’d learned her syntax off some old Poldark episode.

But the mention of a knife.

What’s your name? I said. Won’t if you don’t mind, she said. Best not to. She put her hand in the air, ruffling the bird as she did, jerked her hand upwards and moved her head as if she was holding a noose and the noose had just broken her neck.

Dear God, I said. Don’t be doing that.

So can I take these shoes or no? she said.

She’d managed to get her feet into my good boots and now she was marvelling at the zip fastener on one of them.

I told her she could have the boots provided she tell me who her parents were, where they lived, how I could find them so I could let them know she was okay, and a bit about her own story.

She said she’d tell me if I swore to give this poor dog its due. I told her I would. I told her she was quite right, it was astute of her, that I’d given the dog nothing she really needed apart from food and water. The girl nodded

and the bird sitting on the back of her neck glinted at me with its beak curved round down past the girl’s shoulders and chest like a festival sash or a line nobody was to cross.

She sat down on the carpet; the bird rose for a moment when she did and settled on her shoulder again.

Then she told me good luck to me trying to find her parents because they were well dead, and that her story was that she was good with horses.

She told me she’d got thrown out for fornicating. Then she went off on one, a long deluded story about a holy man she’d got involved with, called Loy?

or maybe Lloyd? who clearly worked in the same place as she did, and about how once he was called to put a shoe on a horse that had a sore leg that it wouldn’t let anyone near, it bucked and kicked and had knocked three people cold already. So the holy man took a very sharp knife and sliced the whole of the sore leg off the horse, and the horse stood there calm on its other legs and watched as the holy man shod the hoof of the leg he’d cut off then stuck that leg back on to the horse’s body and soldered it tight with a hot iron.

Oh he has the devil by the nose, Lloyd, she said. He can hold him far far off and keep him there with the length of his pincers, and the bird on her neck opened its beak and closed it like its own beak could demonstrate how.

She told me all this with a kind of clarity I wouldn’t have expected, or perhaps should only have expected, from someone so drugged out of their face on something or other.

The deal was, I said, that you were to tell me where your parents are and what your story is, and instead you’ve told me a lot of rubbish.

If I say it’s my story, she said, who are you to say it’s not my story?

You want to help me, give me shoes. Give me somewhere to rest in the dark, man.

You can stay here as long as you like, I said.

I’ll only stay as long as I need.

Would you maybe like to wash? I said. She asked me what month it was, and when I said April she said no, she washed in May. So I got her a blanket, took her downstairs, watched her cover herself with it on the sofa.

She settled down. The bird settled on her chest with its head turned backwards and its beak tucked into itself again. My father’s dog came down too. She lay on the floor next to the couch like she was with them, not me.

I sat on the other side of the room and waited till the visitor was asleep. When she was, I went online and typed in music Brotherhood of Company of Craft. But nothing came up, just some stuff about that old 70s band that won Eurovision and an American beer called Brotherhood. Then I thought how I could check to see if there were any photos of missing people online who looked like her.

I crossed the room to try to sneak a photo on my phone that I could forward to anyone who might be looking for her.

Below her neck there was this damage on the skin, a nasty-looking zigzag at the collarbone like an infected burn.

The bird with its backward head opened one black eye. The girl had one eye open and on me too.

What happened to your collarbone? I said. A beauty, she said. Clean line, when it heals. Delirious. Maybe it wasn’t drugs. Maybe it was an infection off such a bad burn.

I’ve some Savlon in the bathroom, I said.

Salve on, she said. I can do healing too, I’m taught. I can cure a lady with the cooling water, and a child with the bandy legs with it too, and a hot iron does good to any wound especially an angry mouth in a horse, if you’ve a horse with an angry mouth.

I shook my head. I’ve no horse, I said.

She closed her eyes. Pity, she said.

The bird on her chest on the blanket closed its eye too.

I closed my eyes now onscreen to Martina Inglis, exactly as if I was saying the words the end.

I counted to five.

I opened them again.

Martina Inglis was sitting in the blank space looking back at her screen with me on it and she was as wide-eyed as a child.

And that’s it. That’s all. I said.

No. But something must have happened next, she said. What happened next?

I don’t know. She’d gone by the time I got up, I said. The blanket left neat on the couch. The dog at the door looking mournful. She took the boots. She took the Savlon. I was glad she took the Savlon. Someone needs to have a look at that burn.

But the bird, the bird on her shoulder, she said. It’s the curlew. Isn’t it?

I don’t know, I said. I’ve no idea. To be honest it looked like an impossibility. Such a long beak, how could any bird have one that long and not break it every time they tried to eat anything?

That girl in your house, she said. She’s a personification. Isn’t she?

No, I said. It was a person.

A vision, she said. Of the person who made the Boothby Lock. Isn’t it?

No, it was someone completely out of it on something, I said, someone talking mad drug language, and she broke into my house and stole my boots because someone had stolen hers. Also, I still can’t get the birdshit out of the carpet.

Martina Inglis was hooked.

She rubbed her face with her hands, put her hands over her mouth, took them away again.

A girl. I mean, why not? Why would we ever imagine not? There were a few, I bet, there must’ve been a few. But I bet there weren’t many. Stew pans, locks, hinges, good at decorative.

She shook her head.

And thrown out for fornicating, well that would definitely have happened. There were smithing apprenticeship rules, fornication’s one of the actual forbiddens in the rules, no fornication allowed if you’re apprenticed. Also. That burn mark you saw. What shape was it?

Like a bird’s open beak, I said. A greater-than sign in maths. Bright red, very inflamed, across the collarbone and chest.

The V-brand, she said. It was for vagrants. Vagabonds.

She was definitely on the streets, I said.

Ordinance of Labourers 1349, Martina Inglis said. Then various Vagabonds Acts in the next two or three hundred years. They burned the letter V into the skin on the chests or the faces of people who didn’t have a job, or didn’t belong to the parish. The parishes never wanted to have to pay for anybody extra so they burned all sorts of letters on to people. The letter V was for anyone homeless, anyone wandering, like wandering players, I mean actors, and dancers and performers, entertainers. They branded what they called Egyptians, that’s where the word Gypsy comes from. Basically anyone remotely foreign-seeming. They could even be hanged.

Yeah, but this isn’t history, I said. It’s now. It was some poor girl off the street right now. I literally saw her flinch when she put the Savlon on the burn.

History too, she said. Happening right now. Do you think maybe she wasn’t saying you choose, all along she was actually saying new shoes ?

I shrugged.

And the poor laws were specifically there to fix people’s localities, she said. They couldn’t rove around with impunity. They were forced to work where they’d been registered. The laws first came in because of the Black Death, because so many people died that the local workforces were really depleted. And then there was the Enclosures Act, taking common land away from common usage, so people couldn’t graze animals or find fuel easily any more. Enforced workforce trick. Then a population explosion made vagrants even more plentiful. Even more people to be publicly branded with hot irons, perfect example to keep everybody else in their place.

V for vanquished, I said.

Victimized, she said.

Visitor, I said.

Versus, she said.

Past v present. Us v them, I said.

VIP lane, she said.

Ha, I said. V for that programme called V from the 1980s where power-mad aliens who land in a spaceship in cities all over the world pretend to mean us well then reveal themselves as monsters.

I don’t think I saw that, she said. But V for victory, yay!

Voltage, I said.

Velocity, she said.

Virus, I said.

Vaccine, she said.

V for virtual, I said. Nice to talk to you, albeit virtually.

No, don’t go, she said. Not yet. V for neck.

For what? I said.

For V-neck. And V for the Korean pop star.

Who? I said.

V, she said. From BTS.

From what? I said.

They’re gender neutral, she said. Like one of my kids. They’re what we used to call a pop group and they’re changing the world one song at a time. So I’m told. They’re definitely very dancey.

How do you even know any of this at our great age? I said.

I move with the times, she said.

Talking of which, I said.

I mock-looked at my wrist, where there was no watch.

She nodded. She gave me a serious look across the virtual between.

Thank you, Sand. For your V for visitor imagination, she said.

I told you, I said. It was a real person in my house, really stealing, really wasted, really filthy, really strong-smelling, really hurt, and with a burn on her collarbone that was really weeping.

Martina Inglis nodded again.

I could actually smell that earthburnt smell, she said.

That’s a symptom, I said.

And I can see her now working the bellows on a forge, I mean I can see her clearly.

That’s another symptom, I said. You should take a test.

You’ve literally unlocked something, she said. Not just for me. In me.

That you’d do that for me. I’ll definitely sleep tonight. She said she was a healer, didn’t she? You’ve gifted me a kind of healer. God. I feel weirdly…

dimensional. How did you do that?

All the best, I said.

I put the cursor over the leave button and pressed it. The screen asked me again. Was I sure I wanted to leave?

I was.

I think I may’ve been waiting for you all my life, Martina Inglis was saying.

Bye, I said.

I clicked her off.

I switched off the computer.

On my desk next to the screen there was a printout of a painting by William Blake.

In it there’s a child standing in a room with a shut door behind it. The shut door takes up the whole picture. The child is thin, off-centre, has clasped hands as if begging or praying, but it’s an upright child, not subservient, looking out of the picture right past the heads of anyone looking at the picture as if there’s something right behind us, something awful, or awe-ful.

The child is saying, without saying anything, the word please.

Across the door behind the child, blocking any getaway, there’s a dog much bigger and more substantial than the child and its snout’s in the air like it’s howling.

Is it dangerous? Is it benign? It’s a bit like a massive draught excluder so who knows? All we know about it is its sheer size and the silent howl that’s coming from it and passes between it and the child.

There’s no getting out of that room. Light is coming through into it from somewhere else but in wedge-shaped shafts like these shafts are forming yet more bars to the door.

A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate / Predicts the ruin of the State.

What I didn’t tell Martina Inglis (I uh edited it out) was how I’d also seen that girl go over to the mantelpiece in my bedroom and take the clock my father once gave me off it, the green lacquered clock his mother’d bought in a Woolworths between the wars, and walk in my boots with the clock held away from herself all the way to the window then drop it out of the window so it smashed on the pavement below.

Then the pieces of that clock and I swear I saw this happen had risen by their broken selves into the air and floated up from the street below back to upper window level where they hung outside the house separate in the air but magnetized towards each other as if they might rearrange themselves back into clock-shape – more, as if they were longing to.

Which is what they then did, forming a new clock from the pieces of the old one, the new one patterned with sealed-over cracks like a glazed and aged ceramic.

She’d leaned out the window and reached for the new-old clock, carried it back across the room and put it where it’d originally been on the mantelpiece.

Then she curled asleep on the floor under the bookshelves, her bird a couple of shelves above her on a row of paperbacks with its beak tucked backwards into itself, my father’s dog asleep with her head on her paws next to her like the dogs who look after the people on the street who live in the doorways of shops.

It didn’t look comfortable for the sleeping girl, on the floor like that, so I imagined her downstairs on the couch under a warm blanket instead, though still attended by the creatures.

Of course, there was no girl there, or bird.

There was only me and my father’s dog.

I put a bowl of the dog’s favourite brand of dog biscuit, of which I can only afford two days a week’s worth, down by her head. I glanced at the cracked clock, saw how late it was. I cleaned my teeth, got into bed, put the light out, head on the pillow, thinking about the word. Brand. Brand new.

Brand loyalty. Brand recognition. Brand name. Firebrand.

The letter F was what they burned on to people if they were fighters or fraudsters.

The letter S for slaves. You could claim as your own slave anyone who’d been idle in your parish for more than three days, have them branded with the letter S on the face after which you could legally force them to work for you for no money.

The letter B for blasphemers.

The letter T for thieves.

The letters SL if they were seditious libellers or people who challenged out loud the established order of things or encouraged insurrection against it.

The firebrand in the fire on the forge with the letter V on it glowing white in the heat.

Marked for life.

Forge or forget.