Snake Ropes by Jess Richards

thought if I was an adult, a woman like her, with pain to bind us, she’d know how I felt. But I checked, and there was no blood.
    Soon I’ll be out there, on the other side of that fence and across a long stretch of water, in a place I can call home. I’ll hang my red rags off some other washing line, with no pink fence to hide them from view.

Mary

    I’ve come down to the south cliffs, and I’m looking out to sea at the three ancient cliff stacks called the Pegs. Them’ve stood there, just off the edge of this island, forever. Da always says, ‘Down the south and past the Pegs’ is the way him rows to fish, but I can’t see hims boat on the horizon. I want him to come back to shore now. If him could see on my face that I know about Mam and Langward. If him could catch at the tangles all stuck in my head, and know the right things to say. If him could … only him is never sure what to say when I’m brooding. Him gets to working rather than asking: him’ll wash down or mend, sandpaper or hammer, fix or get rid, anything to busy hims hands. We’re a silent pair, when I’m all in knots.
    The Pegs are five hundred feet high or more. Home for fulmars, not long back from the south, bougirs what’re gone till the spring and all kinds of small chittering birds. The Pegs look like giant pegs on a washing line, only the line them’re pegged on is deep down under the sea.
    I look straight down. The sea sucks and crashes, laps, then tongues, then slaps the bottom of the cliff. It’s a long way down, and so fast to get there. I step back. I wrap my arms around myself. This is where the gales blow the hardest. Sheep and cowshave been blown off these cliffs, when the winds rage high. This cliff is where –
    Dun want to think about that.
    I remember seeing Mam and Da go off for a walk on Da’s birthday one year, them walked away side by side, touching at each other’s fingers. For hims birthday she’d told him to put down the nets. She said there were to be a day of no work, and there were a wind blowing her hair when she said it. Him liked her to wear it down. Them were gone for near on the whole day and I stayed indoors, playing with Grandmam.
    Out there the sea’s too deep, too rough by the Pegs where the currents are thick. The waves swash round, pitch and surge. Folks say that a huge drowned dress is pegged to the bottom of the seabed. When Grandmam were alive, she told me the dress belonged to Sishee, a giant who were pegging it out to dry, years and years before the sea were even there. Sishee were singing a song made of pictures and no words.
    My head is murky, thick with Mam and Da and Langward and Barney. Langward saying Mam wouldn’t search for Barney means I’ve got to think even harder about what she were like, so my memories of her dun get stained. Or dun get
more
stained than them feel right now. I can remember Mam brushing my clean wet hair, holding it at the roots and brushing the ends so she dun tug and hurt me. She loved me. She loved Barney. She
would
have searched and searched for him. She’d have known the right questions to ask and the right folks to answer, and she’d have been better at it than me. I saw how swift she could unpick her threads when she’d used too many colours in a broiderie. She’d find the stitch just before she went wrong and start again from there. She would have found Barney by now.
    Everyone here thinking the tall men took the boys means no one does any looking. But now there’s me
and
that stinking tallman looking. Dun want to think about him, but I have to. Because what if him finds Barney first? I’ve no boat to follow him and I dun know the way.
    The clouds stretch out like threads and I dun know if it’s just my eyes getting strange from this cold feeling unravelling in my belly, or if it’s real. I reach in my dress pocket, pull out the moppet and whisper to it, ‘Barney, you said the tall man took you. But him can’t have done. For him wants to find you.