‘It’s about a garden …’
‘No. It’s about Mary Tudor, and her massacre of the Protestants. Her garden is her graveyard.’ The angel seems to take great pleasure in telling her this, and rummages through her fruit bowl as he continues. ‘Yes, silver bells are thumbscrews and cockleshells were torture devices used for, well, you know.’ He gestures to his crotch. ‘And as for “pretty maids all in a row”, maid was the name for the guillotine.’
‘Oh.’ Mary’s face falls.
Gabriel looks pleased with himself. ‘And ring-a-ring-o’-roses was a song about the plague. My, my, the things parents get their children to sing about, eh? Anyway, down to business. You’re pregnant, congratulations.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Yep, you know, son of God, inside you. Perhaps the daughter of God if we’re, you know, moving with the times,’ and he laughs as though he doesn’t really think so. ‘Great stuff.’
‘Do I get a say in this?’
Gabriel laughs louder. ‘Sorry, I appear to have set fire to your tablecloth.’
I gave birth to her on a Friday, and she was gone by the Sunday. I wasn’t told what they called her; my mother said that it was best I didn’t know. She thought that naming things made you form a bond with them.
‘Like Adam and the world,’ she said.
I didn’t know what to say.
I used to wonder what would have happened if Mary had handed her baby to a stranger and told them to raise it. I think of Zeus and his many earthling children. I think of my mother, now, all these years later, acting like a child herself who no longer knows its name.
I step out of the gallery, surprised by how dark it is. The building stands right on the edge of the Thames. Blue lights are twisted along the front of the Tate into letters, which declare: ‘Everything is going to be all right.’
A man is taking a photo of it on his phone. It seems smug – this new version of a ‘message from above’ engineered by scaffolding, powered by electricity, shared on the Internet. Wireless technology, that’s our myth now. Telling ourselves stories that wrap around the globe. Viral whispers, buzz, buzz, buzzing.
I wonder where all the wires go.
I try one last time when I get to the nursing home.
‘Mum, about those adoption papers …’ but she’s not even listening. She’s looking at a pigeon sitting on the windowsill. Then she waves at a nurse walking by. Her nightgown flaps by her side.
‘Do you remember what I said?’ she says, suddenly, as though she’s just realised I’m there.
‘What about?’ I ask.
‘About my cremation,’ she says. ‘After I’m gone. I want an open-top cremation, out in the countryside – near the woods; they’ve made a law so you can do that now.’ She closes her eyes, breathing heavily. After a minute I wonder if she’s fallen asleep, but then her eyes snap back open. ‘Yes. I want four horses to draw the funeral cart.’ She sounds lucid for the first time in weeks. ‘I want to go out in flames with everyone watching …’ She laughs to herself. ‘You can set fire to my feet first, if you like.’
Little Deaths
Our town is full of ghosts.
We try to catch them during break. They struggle against our grip, shapeshifting. We shove them into wine bottles and jam jars, fish bowls and snow globes. Henry tries trapping one in a fruit basket but it slowly leaks out through the cracks, making a pool of ominous red that evaporates with a giggle. Henry always catches the most but he’s taller than the rest of us, so I call it cheating.
We give these ghosts to the teachers, who give them to the government, but I always manage to smuggle a few of them home. I have a hidden compartment at the base of my wheelchair that no one ever checks.
My mother and I sell some of these captured spirits at the market.
Ghosts in jars light up the streets on Saturday mornings, swinging from tarpaulin, ready to be sold as medicine and prayers. The priest-doctors weave between the stalls with tape measures, light meters and necklaces hung with IOUs. I write messages on the glass with the tips of my fingers and watch the mist disappear, never knowing if the air has swallowed it or the ghost inside has gobbled it up.
‘Can you hear me?’ I scrawl.
I look for the ghost’s eyes. I want to know if it can see me; if it’s peering out at the world through crackled fog. I wonder what it’s thinking. They come in all different colours, these ghosts. The purple ones go for the highest price: slippery poltergeists. Some sellers use food dye to make exotic rainbow spirits – the brighter the better – but often the colours split or the ghost is allergic, growing and growing until it breaks through the glass and out into the air with a sigh of relief. An aggressive little ghost balloon.
The fakers always get caught in the end.
At the market, the nearest priest-doctor starts haggling with Henry’s dad over a violet spirit in a marmalade jar.
‘I’ll give you three and a blessing,’ he says, and then catches me staring, so I scramble out of my wheelchair and pull myself under the counter. I can still spy him beneath the tablecloth but he can’t see me.
Government priest-doctors, like this one, believe that the ghosts are pockets of death which can be manipulated in labs, edited and liquidised. They claim that one of these days they’ll be able to use them to inject us with immortality. And then these ghosts that we accidentally birth inside ourselves, and hiccough out several times a day, will disappear for good.
Then we will be empty.
Right now, we are ghost hotels.
I prop myself up on dusty pillows and pull my homework out of my bag.
English:
How would you like to die? Please number your preferences 1–10, with 1 being the most preferable. You have a 1000 word limit. You will be marked on your ability to persuade.
Maths:
How much should your family and friends cry at your funeral? You have a limit of 1000 tears. Please share these out among those you expect to attend. Show your working.
Biology:
Draw a pair of infected lungs and label them correctly.
Philosophy:
What is death? What does it mean to be alive? Discuss.
I pick up a purple pencil and draw a pair of lungs that look like squashed sausages with tiny ghosts brewing at the base. I cough and clamp my hands over my mouth but an orange wisp escapes and I taste lemons.
Just a half ghost. Just a whisper.
Above me, my mother is starting to argue with someone I know she’ll refuse to serve.