Mud Love
You will find her – where the Thames slaps the slip of the bank. Early, too early for the coffee kiosk at Putney Bridge. There’s a flask and glass jar, bouncing, belted to her hips. Her internal compass slows in the husk of dawn. A metal detector traces the skin of the river. Fingernails rinsed with dirt, finding the pulse of it, searching, before the tide rolls in.
Mornings, it’s easier. Evenings, elsewhere. Drifting through pubs with cracked-up walls. The barman will tell her to go home. He will call her a ‘ding dong’. No one wants to hear a girl with that voice sing. Homeward run across the bridge, keys serrated through knuckles in case a night stalking man closes in. She’ll still wake up earlier than the world. Down to the banks, to retrieve a history no one wants to keep. Histories thrown to the river that the water brings in.
Coins, shards of apothecary glass, smoking pipes. Collected to rattle in her glass jar. A 19th-century coin with the face of Queen Victoria sits on her windowsill. More plastic now, lurking. She sifts the city’s silken edges, takes what it carries. Specks of clay sprinkled upon her tender forearms, palms rubbing.
There has been a pricking beneath her skin. Her left tear duct itches, as do her wrists. She has patched herself with antiseptic cream to see if she can contain it. It’s been some time since she moved back down to London. Six months after clearing out the farmhouse, rebuilding the slate stone walls her father left wide. Dew caught by branch tips in the outgrown orchard. The seat of his armchair ripped, the table beside it clustered with pills like stars. She placed them into his sign of the zodiac: Pisces.
Today she found a baby’s dummy. Pink and broke, edges jagged.
“That’ll suit y’fine,” she hears him say, “could never keep’em quiet could y’pet.”
She wants to remember the stout man he was ten years ago, before he thinned down. She tries to unwind the ghost of him from her nerves. She keeps the dummy. Like a seashell, she hears him when it closes in on her ear.
The prickling along her arms has developed into a rash. Small, vicious mounds. Tiny spikes protruding out. Tight throat. Her housemate says it’ll be a post-COVID virus circulating. “We’ve had some super weird ones in A&E,” Laurie says, packing up for her shift.“Found any more bits of fun by the river today?”
She shows her the dummy, and Laurie makes a comment, hoping she’s not expecting because she’s drunk enough to damage the child already.
Her father was a drinker. A boozer, a union man who toured the pubs of Huddersfield with a bowler hat. His fancy hat, he’d say, replacing the sheer reddened burn of his scalp. Raised her like a son, not a girl. When her mother died, it was easier for her not to be a reminder. She wore baggy t-shirts, then sports bras that crushed her chest down. They got released at university, became a woman. Father never drank the same with her after.
“Bet your sly with men like she were,” he’d say after too many stouts, too proud.
She’d forgive him, let the hangover shovel the guilt for her. Shame she named me after herself, she always felt. Gaia – not much for him to go on.
He attempted motherhood like an empty clam, willing and open but exhausted of muscle. The needles flung around. The needle packs he’d buy in town, unable to thread through the eye to sew up her uniform and socks. He kept trying. The needles mounted. She’d sit down for telly after tea and find them sticking into her skin all about. He had been trying to darn. Old love Eddie across the road could tell, maybe she smelt the burnt toast and malt. Offered her services, told him she’ll help out: “Poor thing needs a woman around, even if she’s ‘ad two hips replaced. You go in’ter town dear, I’ll see to this haberdashery.”
The city’s sunrise is a pastel hue. Crushed raspberries, diluted in milk. She catches her thoughts, how the rising city sun pales in comparison to the beating fist of day encroaching the moors up north. The sky would thud crimson over the farm, soften with streaks of yellow. Her father told tales of the lord reaching out his hand to tear back the night sky.
“When ye see them yellow strips, that’s what that’s ‘bout. Nothing comes good of night lass,” he’d say, “for there to be a lord, there must be a devil too a‘bout.”
Night is easier for the devil to hide, she considers, letting the detector pulse above the fresh silt. There is more than one devil, plenty of them hidden, hurdling headlights like cattle. She can see them, skulking in the road after dark through the bridge traffic. Won’t go in water, they never learnt to swim, like her mother. They are faceless with elongated arms. If she runs at them, they disappear. She will always run at them, not for fear but rage.
She can feel rain, but no rain falls. She touches her face, her arms, she can feel the same pricking. It gets stronger until she is on all fours, breathing in agony. Splinters pulsing through her. She stoops with the pain to focus on a thin, pin-like thing propelling slowly into her eyeline. Between her brows, she pulls it out like a thick, unplucked hair. She looks at her arms, touches her cheeks. Tiny sharp pellets. Needles.
She watches as the pores on her arm widen. Soon, she can pick them out when they’ve come through enough, leaving nothing but whiteheads and specs of blood. Then her eyes. Out of her eyes comes a watery dirt. It is peat, too dark for garden soil. It is the peat she knows.
“Go on then,” she mutters into a cry, “Pa.”
She wretches as the needles drop to the banks. Her eyes clear as her face dries with the stale dribble of her bloodlands. Soon, a puddle. A puddle of needles and peat, her father and his farm lays silent beneath. She rinses her face with the dishwater she brings to clean the dross of others. I did love you, she whispers, kicking the heap into the morning tide of the river.