“Become a bear,” I say.
And so he does. Around me are huge furry arms with claws, which squeeze. His snout is wet and his mouth displays many pointed teeth. Softly he growls and I fall asleep on my great bear. The smell of hot water bottle fur and his great heart beating lull me asleep.
I dream that Mr Nightingale is stewed in a pot and served up to the seamstress who embroidered his cloak.
II: Whitby
The Séance with Mrs Pigwittle
The train heaves and splutters to Whitby like a great beast through the moorlands, juddering and shaking. The morning air is crisp and bright and the moorland wild, ghost-haunted and dotted with electric blue wildflowers, like the eyes of imps. The sky is lapis lazuli blue, the colour of Goliath’s waistcoat, which is embroidered with forget-me-nots. His great hands grip a copy of The Times, the front page in bold lettering reads:
* * *
Jack the Ripper sends letter from Hell
to baffled Scotland Yard.
* * *
“Who is Jack the Ripper?” I ask.
Goliath looks at me carefully, peering over the newspaper. “He’s a very bad man.”
I stare out onto the moorlands. I can see a fox, the same colour as my hair, running through the grasslands chasing a rabbit. I put my finger to the window as though I am touching it.
“What does he do that is so bad?” I say, still staring at the fox, whose teeth now sink into the rabbit.
“He kills women,” Goliath says quietly.
The train chugs past the fox. He becomes an orange speck on the horizon.
“Why?”
“Because he enjoys it,” Goliath says sadly.
I jump on his knee and cuddle him, squashing Jack the Ripper in the process. “I love you. I love you, I love you,” I say, snuggling into his beard. The train pants and shunts along, shaking us like eggs in a basket.
It is then I think of the word love and remember my sisters are both dead. I think about my grandfather, the one who went mad, the one Goliath rescued me from. It seems like another world and yet it has only been a year, so Goliath tells me. When I think of my past I feel I have been awoken from deep sleep,
a
magic
little
coma.
* * *
I remember only pieces of my former life, like a half-done jigsaw puzzle. My name was Myrtle and I had two older sisters, Rose and Violet. We lived with our grandfather in a small terraced house in south London.
My grandfather worked as a butler in a great house for a Lord. While grandfather was at work, we were looked after by our neighbour Mrs Bumble, who had nine children and was pregnant with her tenth. We called her Bumblebee, because she wore a great yellow dress with black stripes and was as round as a ball. She had a sad and dreamy voice and was the kindest woman I have ever met. She would hold us in her arms and tell us the secret ingredients to her cakes and spin us round and round until we were dizzy. Her children were plump and pink and buzzed around her as though she was their queen, and all of them were boys.
I remember she would rescue worms and spiders, cupping them in her hands and putting them somewhere safe. Sometimes she would sing to us, her voice sad and fluttery like wings, or make us cakes with cream and jam in the middle and then wipe all our mouths with a damp cloth before grandfather came home. She liked us because we were girls. Her hair was the colour of honey and her eyes dark and sharp like burnt sugar. Full of sweetness.
One evening grandfather brought home a huge clock. He said it was a grandfather clock, so it was made for him. It was taller than grandfather and had a great face painted on it with impish-black eyes that moved from side to side, watching, smiling and chiming every quarter of an hour. Painted and coiling all around the clock were ladybirds: black and red and shaped like tiny hearts. I tried to touch them with my finger, but grandfather slapped my hand away.
“Do not touch! It is a very special clock.”
My grandfather loved that clock. He loved it more than anything. It sat in our front room next to his chair where he smoked his pipe. And he would sit for hours on end and listen to it ticking. Listen to its soft heartbeat. Rest his head against its wooden body, press his ear next to where its heart would have been. I wondered if it was stuffed full of angels beating their wings, trying to get out. There was something inside, something waiting.
A few days after he brought the clock home he told us he had been dismissed from his employment. He said that the Lord who he had worked for had disappeared and a new gentleman had taken over the house and no longer needed servants. He said we shouldn’t be worried about money because he had some savings and the clock would save us all. We didn’t understand what he meant.
I asked him, “How will the clock save us, Grandfather?”