Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Ffydd (Faith)

Originally published in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History by Crossed Genres Publications

Abertawe, 1919

Always more work than hands willing to turn to it, even in your own bloody kitchen. "Is that the last of the milk, then?"

Chorus of complaint and sighs from my husband’s sisters. Lily and Iris and Violet have been looking after the home front, they’re not used to being ordered about like relief-workers, not to scrub and fetch and stretch a ration proper. Not that it’s not all the same war we’ve been fighting against. But.

I’d thought it would be less blood and worry, to be home again.

We fall silent as my husband edges into the room. Still a wisp, for all they’ve fed him since he’s been home.

Still not even a shadow of him to reflect in the spoons.

Trevor smiles, hesitant as always. Still the same crooked eyeteeth. Still his. Unshaven. Iris shattered all the mirrors in a fit of rage, or pique, I never entirely know with Iris. Though no mirror ever helped his hair before, it’s always been a hayrick. He looks like a naughty schoolboy.

He’s barely met my eyes since I’ve been home, my husband. As hard to bear as how he’s been lying beside me like a stone these last few nights. I’d been holding so fast to the memory of his eyes, the colour of that single word for what other languages slice up into blue and grey and green. But how can you divide the slate, the sky, the sea.

He’ll never see those eyes looking back from a glass again. And there’s not a word at all for what he is.

He’s changed, they’d written. (Not come home, no, they credit me that much, but…but could I stop myself thinking about what they wouldn’t say right out, till I had to tell myself I’d do no one much good working myself into a state. Better to think of it as seeing he’s fit to join me at the relief efforts. Even if the leaving felt like an admission of unseriousness of purpose, just because I’d a husband to go home to.) And it’s true. Not the sort of change one might have expected when a man’s been in gaol over his conscience, neither. That one could understand—sudden starts at nothing, weeping when he’d think no one could hear? Seen my share of that this past while.

But Trevor, Trevor’s is none of that.

How of a sudden he’s the one offering to butcher the hen who’d stopped laying—how he’d come back in with blood round his mouth. He’d not denied it. Couldn’t, wouldn’t, not if it’s simple truth. Just asks us to come clear in our own consciences, whether he’s still the boy they loved, the man they knew.

That there itself should tell us that.

Trevor’s looking round in that terribly polite way of a bloke who’s only dared come in with us cooking because he’s that desperate to see if the kettle’s on. When he clears his throat Iris slams the cheese-grater down in the bowl hard enough I worry for her knuckles. "Put it on your own bloody self, why don’t you? Ned manages."

Ned doesn’t manage and we all know it, we know that Violet will be acting as her brother’s lost arm for the rest of her days and the worst is she’d rather that than admit there’s barely a lad left to marry proper and live her own life instead. Iris has cut her fingers on the grater. Trevor is watching his sister’s hand as she sucks at her knuckle, teeth dimpling his lower lip till the blood beads. And, ah, the hunger in his eyes, until Iris finally says, abrupt and sharp, "Go see to the chickens then."

Trevor pushes out the back door into the courtyard without another word. I’m sure Iris doesn’t mean to be hateful, well, I’m almost sure Iris doesn’t mean to be hateful. I feel it low in my own stomach, our desperate fear of this uncharted future. Lily and Violet can see to the rest of our tea, or to Iris, whichever they please; I dust the flour from my hands and step out the back door after him.

It’s a bright day, as it goes. Not raining yet at any rate. Trevor’s sat on the step cuddling one of the hens in his lap. The cockerel’s watching him from the wash-line, clearly not on with the notion that this sudden threat to the back-garden flock has hold of one of its wives or daughters, however gentle the embrace. I wave a hand for the bird to get off the washing and it flaps down to peck at the bricks as if we’re the ones here on its sufferance. "I’ve not seen Iris this cross," I say.

"She’s missing William." Trevor looks up, then ducks his head back down as if he’d not meant to meet my eyes for even that instant.

"Suppose I can understand that." I pause, steel my nerves with as deep a breath as I can draw through the knot of my chest. "I’d have minded it, if I’d lost you."

I can see it on his face, that thought he’s not so certain I haven’t. I smooth my skirts and tuck myself down onto the step beside him, just enough room not to crowd though he still shifts away. The chicken in his arms gives a small chortle of uncertainty and he pats her soothingly. "Reckon we’re luckier than some," Trevor says.

Which I suppose is true, he could have been Daisy’s husband, to make it all the way through the war and then die of the 'flu. Nor the health of his body ruined, quite. It’s a scandal how those who refused to fight have been treated, the misery, the few who’d not come home, though of his own troubles Trevor’s said as little as the men back from the trenches with no words to explain to those who’d not seen.

And of the other, only, Someone took offence.

Lily’s husband comes out of the toilet at the bottom of the garden, nodding at the door with a wry grin beneath his bristling moustache; "I’d not go in there for a bit, aye?"

Dear Herbert. At least he’s not mentioned the chicken. Yet. Instead he pauses in the act of pulling open the back door to squint at his wife’s young brother with a keen eye for a sorry state: "Trying to grow out your whiskers?" Trevor reaches up to brush his dusting of stubble, and Herbert laughs, not unkindly. "Never mind, lad, you’ll get the knack of it someday. Lil? What’s on for tea, then, love—?"

Trevor’s not smiling back when I look to him from the closing door. "Ah, 'nghariad, he didn’t mean anything by it, you know Herbert." He’s shaking his head, small, but enough to make me shiver from it. "Hm? What is it, what’s the matter?"

Trevor looks at the cockerel. Meets its eyes, square on. It tilts its head at him, jerky, puzzling—takes a step towards Trevor, another, until he can reach out a finger to chuck it under the beak. "I did this to the prison barber," Trevor says, so low I want to ask him to repeat it. "The mirrors, he was frightened of me, and I looked at him, and…" A bone-deep shudder. "I could have told him to slit his own throat and he’d have done it. I could smell the blood inside his skin…"

This man who’d paid near two years of his life to witness with his body that to raise a hand against another is never the way—"What did you do?"

He looks up, picture of misery. Scratch of nails on the bricks as the cockerel takes wing. "Asked him for a short-back-and-sides."

The smile startles out of me like the flapping cockerel. "Not enough ruddy brilliantine in the world to make that look right with you."

He sets the hen down onto her feet on the cobbles, leaving her to make her unsteady affronted way back towards the coop. "Wouldn’t know, would I."

Can’t but put my arm round his shoulders, can I, my husband, my Trevor. "Come back in?"

Lily is the only person in the kitchen now, mopping at a spill of jam on the table with a furious glower on her face. "Why do we marry them, I ask you?—Not you, bach," she adds when she sees I’ve her brother with me, small fond smile for the ridiculousness of our lives. (Hard sometimes not to be envious of Lily, thirty soon and married to a house-holder. Do we claw at each other because we’ve not got all that we wanted? Or do we retreat into our separate troubles?) "Trevor, I was talking with Helen and we’re thinking that even if Meeting can’t spare the money to send the both of you back over to the Continent I’m certain they’ll at least be able to help you sort out what you mean to do for work and all?"

Been weighing on her mind something terrible, what her brothers are to do with themselves now. Though Ned’s his soldier’s pension, small token for it all but more than anyone would grudge for my husband. Trevor half-turns from where he’s gone to wash barnyard-smelling hands under the tap. From his face he’s picturing what even Friends will be able to do to find positions for anyone from this notorious family of conchies and suffragists. "Not the civil-service I don’t think," Trevor says. The irony, that he’d have the vote now if he’d not chosen to go to prison. "Go back to helping Aled-mawr maybe?" (And how long will it be that we’re still calling his uncle that, when will we forget the why of it now Aled-bach rests in Flanders?) "Or Da."

"You’re wasted as a builder or a baker and you know it," I say.

Lily’s pinched look speaks to how she’s more than ready to see any of the men in her life find bloody something already. Thread of normality to pluck at, as if one small worry can displace all the greater. I take Trevor’s hand and tug him towards the stairs. I can hear the denial of tears in Iris’s voice in the front-room where Violet must be giving her as much of a talking-to as I imagine Violet capable of. But upstairs all is still, just quiet breathing from the room where Trevor’s aunt’s been looking after Lily’s girls and poor Daisy’s little Rhys. As well to have got them all down at once, Nora’s still not been up to much after the 'flu. We creep past that door, and then the bedroom that Iris still shares with Violet, and Ned’s ajar and a shambles, to our own scant refuge from care.

Suppose we can get on with setting up house on our own now the war is behind us. Suppose we all can, except Iris. Funny how that’s not even occurred to me till just now, where she’d go. We’re all still travelling on the rails the past laid down when the train’s lost its bloody wheels. I’ll be organising another march for the vote next.

We’ve still not got electric in the bedrooms. I strike a match for the lamp and set it back beside the basin, doesn’t altogether chase aside the grey dim of a day that’s never going to go fair but enough for this. The dressing-table arches into an accusing void where a mirror ought to be. I’ve been fixing my hair in the largest shard Iris missed, sliver now of myself standing alone at the edge of the bed beside my husband.

His shaving-soap’s not been touched since he’s been home, or nearly—he’d have tried, surely, but I can guess how that had gone, without having the sight of his face in a glass. Trevor’s brows crease into a dark question when I reach to pick it up. "No, Helen, why…?"

"Herbert is right, you know, you’re a bit of a sight. I think I can help you get tidied up?"

The frown is deepening into a proper scowl. "Hardly an invalid."

"We have to do something with you, can’t go about looking as if—as if you’re about to run off to the hills to paint yourself blue."

That’s got me a smile, at least. Both of us that proud streak all the way back to when it was the Romans we were wanting out of our country. When I come back in from fetching hot water from the bath Trevor’s sat himself in the chair at the dressing-table, gazing absently at the blank-faced oval of the missing mirror as he twirls in his fingers the white feather of cowardice that chit had handed him, when the shame ought to have been hers. "Suppose I ought to get on with learning, yeah. Blind men can do it, after all."

I’m not going to tell him what I’d seen a blinded man do, in one swift moment when his nurse had set down the razor. I dampen the brush and draw it in sturdy swirls across the face of the cake of soap. How many times I’d watched my new husband do this in those few blissful months before the review-board and the letters from the ambulance-corps and the decision we’d made that even this service was still complicity in the act of war. Better to go to prison, than make it one bit easier for someone else to kill in our names.

(He’d come to see me in my sentence over the demonstration and when we were only stepping out, but I’d not been let to visit him. Barely given leave to write, he was. Should have been there to meet him—should have been there with our baby in my arms. Should, should, should. First casualty of war.)

Trevor closes his eyes as I touch the lathered brush to his face, as if he can’t bear to look at me. (No, he’s just imagining how to guide his own hand without a glass.) "Smells nicer than the barber’s soap," he says.

"Keep yourself still, do you want to lose an ear?"

I have a go at pulling the safety-razor in a slow stroke down his cheek. At least he’s young enough never to have even tried to fuss with a cut-throat for himself, father a sensible enough man to have started his sons straight on the newest miracle of modern invention. Trevor reaches up to join his fingers to mine on the handle, easing the angle. "More like…"

And then it’s just the soft rasp of the blade against whiskers, his patient submission to a necessity he’d never have asked of me. Not a drop of blood spilt, when I’ve finished. I’m proud of that, I believe.

We’ll sort what’s to be done for his hair when it comes to it.

Trevor’s still not looking at me even as he wipes his chin with the flannel. "Can imagine Ned’s first go at shaving," he says.

It had involved muttered words that I’m ashamed to admit I knew and Violet on her knees in the bath quietly sweeping up bits of the one mirror in the house that Iris wouldn’t get to break. (We try not to think badly of Ned, that if he’d felt led to run out and bloody enlist it was his to say. But I know we’ve all thought it. As well we’re not Ireland, I can only think what he’d be off about.) "Ned’s still Ned," I say. "More’s the pity."

"Least he can walk down the shops and go to a barber. Be happy to see him, call him a hero and all." And at last he lifts those great slate-coloured eyes to mine, moody as a storm coming in over the water. "You deserve better than this, Helen, you should leave me."

I’ve seen this look before, in Rouen and Cologne and the streets of my own city. Glaring limbless men feeling themselves useless, dangerous, unmanned. Women who only stared at nothing our innocent eyes could see. The children who’d given up hope of love or bread. "Stood up in front of Meeting and promised, we did. Not forgotten that?" I can’t but tch at him, the look dawning in those glorious eyes. "I love you, Trevor, always have, since you brought me the sandwiches. Though why you brought me a pot of tea when I was chained to a bloody railing—"

He’s laughing in a way could have been sobs, only the flash of those dear crooked eyeteeth as his mouth turns up with every breath tells me which. "Ought to have known you’d be that stubborn."

His lips taste of soap when I lean forward, soap and old iron and the promises we’d made to one another in that naive conviction that the world couldn’t really be so mad as all that. Bother being proper anyway, his cool hands warming against my skin as we sort our way out of suddenly too many clothes (could have been my Nain’s old corsets, catch me outside of a shirtwaist ever again) until at last at last we lie tangled in touch, the old bedstead singing our joy to the rest of the house and half the bloody street for all that we’re minding it. Thinking only, this. I want this. I want you.

And, in the sudden breathless quiet after, somewhere from down below a voice sounds like Iris shouting that we can bloody well shut it. Trevor rumbles a chuckle and buries his face in my neck. Barest hint of teeth brushing my skin, before he sighs, and tucks his head against me, with a murmur: "Wi wedi golli di." I have missed you.

O, Lord, I have my husband back, and he is himself. Whatever else he may also be, he is himself, and we shall re-learn what that means, to us both, together.