Mistletoe Lane

He has told her to fossick in the hedgerow at the bottom of Mistletoe Lane behind the cemeteries. The new cemetery and the old one. That’s what they call them. New Cemetery and Old Cemetery. Helen doesn’t understand. They both look of the same vintage. The pleats and pleadings of the granite stones. The dustings of silver and amber lichen. The low shrubby birch trees that circle clusters of graves like a party game. Both cemeteries spill down the shallow slope below Hincombe Oakwood, separated only by a low drystone wall, three headless scarecrows flapping about in faded denim dungarees, and a rusting sculpture of what the village has agreed, after several years of indignant and family-rupturing debate, is surely a calf with three legs suckling its mother.

But they’re just the same, she says to Charles the shopkeeper as he hands her the grey metal bucket and the green cotton gloves. Aye, he says. But one’s old and one’s new. Which end of the lane has the best fruit, she asks. He winks. That’ll be for you to decide.

She opts for the longer walk, fossicking in the briars at the bottom of the lane behind Old Cemetery with her bucket on her left arm and her green cotton gloves pulled tight up her wrists and she plucks the fat brambles one by one, holding them up to her face, checking for worms, dropping the unsullied into the bucket, the pre-eaten into the grass wet about her feet. 

I’ll cook what you gather, he says. She laughs. A pie, he says. You don’t know how, she says. Aye, he says, of course I do. All the men around here cook. Well at least scrub your nails first, she says. He puts his arms around her. Pulls her in. I should go, she says. Before it gets dark. He spins her round. Releases her with a flourish. You’ll need flour, she says. And butter for the pastry. The pantry’s bare. 

She hums as she picks, a meditative hum, the cool damp of the wind on the back of her bare neck and the nettles rude about her calves. Plucking, examining, leaning in, scowling at the stings, stretching, leaning, plucking, examining.

The villagers that work in the fields are heading home. Carrying sticks and scythes and hoes and sacks. In twos and threes, they trickle down the outside of Old Cemetery and New Cemetery, none of them taking the central path past the scarecrows or the suckling calf. As they come closer, she waves. None of them wave back. She drops her hand, flushes. Refocuses her attention on the fruit.  

You’ll love it there, he says, heaving her suitcase up the steps of the bus. The light. The fresh air. And the river. The kingfisher is practically tame. I’m sure he’ll bring me a fish one day. She waits for him to choose a seat, sits down beside him, allows him to take her hand. I’ve never been away before she says, never this far. She doesn’t ask about the kingfisher. And later, when he points out the first blue flash of the bird on the other side of the bank as he drops his wormed hook into the smooth dark of the pool, she’s disappointed. She’d expected something more. Something imperial.

The lane is rank. Rank with dog piss and rotting leaves and fetid mud and sprays of mouldering funeral wreaths and a great mound of pig manure by the wooden style into the graveyard. She tries not to breathe through her nose. Her belly curls. Just another twenty minutes and she’ll have enough.

She shares the lane with a long row of squat corrugated iron sheds in blue green grey. Each shed has a padlocked door, a trail of irascible dandelion flowers about its front edge, and black hand painted signs with names and dates. Harrison 1924. Garvald 1919. Morecombe 1923. The blue shed has a different sign. God is dead 1917.

Her bucket is nearly half full. Dusk is skidding down the two cemeteries, swallowing the graves set by set.  She squints through the leaves. Spotting. Plucking. Inspecting. She moves slowly along the verge away, the sheds at her back, the dead on the other side of the wall behind the brambles, and behind her, the iron duct that runs the line of sheds at neck height pipes poison into a wide wooden cask barrel. 

She hums as she picks, picks as she hums and the rain picks up, heavier now, splattering her bare head, her metal bucket and behind her the poison duct pouts and strains, gargles and stretches and she picks and hums psalms and a Viennese chorus, plucking a harp with her plum stain gloves, the poison duct pulsing and bubbling. 

Bubbling. She stops, listens. Squeezes a handful of the red purple fruits between her gloved fingers. She feels it before she sees it. The subtle shift of the air. The smell of eggs. Sulphur. Sinister. Her eyes prick. She coughs, her lungs clogging. Turns to look.

The pipe is breathing. Great spumes of yellow breath spewing out and hunkering about the lane, shaping and shapeless, morphing and stacking, burying the corrugated iron sheds scrubbing out god is dead deleting Harrison dissolving Garvald.

She pulls her gloves off. Drops them in the bucket. She’s disorientated. Which way is the village? A new sound. Wheels in mud. A vehicle, then another, and another. In they come, nascent in the buttery smog, all of them long, low, glossed, black. Behind them a trail of villagers in dark suits and dresses, mud spatters about their legs, dismal hats, aloft their tattered black umbrellas.  

Helen is not in the lane. Helen is not picking brambles. Helen is buried in New Cemetery. Helen has been entombed since 1927. What’s left of Helen silts and filters through the peaty soil below the granite with her carved angel and the clinging lichens and a petrified bunch of lavender.