Burntcoat Read online

  You’re not the woman I knew, Naomi, not my wife. What do you expect me to do?

  During the worst, he would shout and slam doors while she stared blankly. In the end I think he believed she was doing it on purpose, that she’d decided to vanish from her old life. He would stand in front of her, holding one of her books.

  This, this is who you are.

  He tried to take me with him when he left, bundling me into my Christmas coat and pushing me towards the front door. I struggled out of his grasp and ran back to Naomi and stood behind her.

  Come here, Edith, now.

  Naomi picked up a fire poker. She raised her arm. She was humming quietly, the notes minimal and off-key, like a church song. I was electrified and filled with horror. She’d given no sign of being roused by any kind of strong feeling since before the operation.

  You are fucking beyond me. Enough. Edith, come here, please.

  I didn’t understand the raised edge to his voice, the desperation. I shut my eyes and gripped the back of Naomi’s skirt. Some part of me knew I was making a bad choice, selecting someone who did not exist any more, and chaos.

  Fine. I’ll file for custody.

  The door shut.

  To check my mother would be able to cope with me, we were allocated a social worker. Her name was Cheryl Bone. Her hair was crimped and dry and she wore thick, buckled sandals. I hated her the moment she walked in. She followed us round the house asking questions, observing Naomi cook, noting how she dealt with me. She spoke in a grandmotherly falsetto.

  Do you think it’s appropriate to let Edith up into the loft by herself? Do you think her painting on the walls is appropriate? Are Edith’s shoes appropriate for wet weather? I’m not here to criticise, she said, I’m here to make sure we stay afloat. Imagine I’m a safe ship.

  This interference was met with Naomi’s remedial logic, my bellicose opposition, our swiftly developing protectorate.

  But paper is expensive and a waste, Cheryl. She’s made a gallery.

  If you tell Mummy you’re a ship it’s confusing because she’ll think you are a ship.

  Naomi was improving; released from my father’s expectations her progression was noticeable. Perhaps she understood the stakes were higher now. An unburnt piece of toast, a tin of ravioli heated in a pan, the gas flame turned off afterwards. Remembering that I had to go to school, that Monday was the start of the week. She asked for help completing benefit forms. She spoke to a solicitor, the bank manager. I might have been in danger, but it couldn’t be proved. The safety assessment showed me capable of a range of activities well above my age. The court proceedings ended, and I was allowed to stay with my mother.

  Some nights I crept into bed with her while she was sleeping. Her skin, and her smell, hadn’t changed.

  The truth is, life was harder. I had more responsibility and no guidance. School was difficult after the free, autodidactic state of home. The teachers were patronising, the lessons useless. After the first set of tests I was marked as educationally substandard. Naomi was called in and shown the paper. I hadn’t read the questions, or if I had I’d ignored them. Instead, the column of multiple-choice circles was pencilled in to create a man wearing big boots.

  I think Edith is learning other things, she told the headmaster. Can you test those?

  I was made to take the exam again, and passed. Naomi retook her driving test and passed. My father stopped paying maintenance. I hadn’t seen him for almost a year.

  The divorce went through. Naomi said one day,

  I don’t like this house. It’s wrong. It’s …

  She searched for a word, couldn’t find it. She found a cheap cottage on the upland moors, at the dead end of a narrow road flanked by rowan and gorse. Truss Gap. A place half done, half said. It was like a dwelling from a storybook, ingathered and overgrown, primed for disaster. Inside, the rooms smelled of clay and stone, soot and horsehair. The cottage had no mains electricity, but there was an old generator and a waterwheel, which often clogged with fallen branches and earth washed down the fellside. The garden contained two ancient apple trees and its flowers had been seeded by wild spores. A tall deer gate opened onto wilderness, marsh, ghylls, the end of the world. Close by, where the mountain rose, peat-black waterfalls hammered into bottomless pools. During winter the torrents were locked in frozen pillars, and in summer I swam all day, my skin chilled and lunar-white.

  The move was good for Naomi. She didn’t have to see people much, dress conventionally or struggle to behave. She planted vegetables and kept quail in a hutch, their tiny eggs like an ink-stained sky. But there was a deeper defrayal – a kind of accord, I think – in accepting jeopardy. The river swollen and roaring after heavy rain, the great, bullying wind at the head of the valley. She might be taken at any time; she knew it and was offering herself.

  Often I’m asked, what was my childhood like? Was it instrumental? I was measured against the mountains, everything was. I loved Truss Gap, and the vastness of what surrounded us. Underneath, the tow of the place was strong, frightening. Its immense, shifting plates, its scale of giants and Dire wolves. We slept to the sound of moving water and I would dream of the house being washed away, of being in a stone boat, swept into a dark, underground lake, that other place.

  Children adapt, fill the gaps. I was so little, and so able. I didn’t miss my friends. If I fell climbing trees and Naomi seemed baffled by my noise, by the red substance trickling from the gash, I would remind her to fetch a plaster. When girls from the village school came over to the cottage to play, Naomi performed the part of a mother, copying what she saw the others doing and saying.

  Would you like milk and biscuits, sweethearts?

  Then forgetting to bring them.

  My schoolmates were curious; their parents no doubt speculated about us. We’d arrived like refugees and had the look of mendicants.

  Is your mum an actress?

  Why does she talk like that?

  Is she handicapped?

  The village children were the sons and daughters of farmers; they were practical, sceptical. Naomi didn’t walk with calipers; she hadn’t lost an arm.

  She teaches, I told them. And to those I could trust, Kendra first, a half-truth. She’s got brain damage from an accident.

  Naomi didn’t return to work in any sustained way. She published one short novel in the following years, which was regarded as bizarre, lesser, as outsider art. It was written on brown baking paper, typed up by a local woman because Naomi could not operate the Olivetti she’d previously used – the positions of the letters confused her, and the sound of the keys was aggressive. Without any sense of triumph or retreat, she set up a writing workshop and set aside her own craft.

  What should I compare those years with? A civil life? It was ordinary; it was ours. Naomi and I grew round each other like vines that need mutual support to be upright. She signed official documents, the chequebooks. She held the licences. I drove us home on the concrete road when we’d been shopping, no higher than second gear. I wrote the number of bottles on the milkman’s list, learnt how to choke the generator to restart it. When we got important news, of a bereavement, or my gold gymnastics certificate, I would draw portraits with Naomi’s face in the appropriate expression, sad or happy, shocked. She would nod and try to remember it.

  On my birthdays I received a letter from my father, who had emigrated. The stamps were beautiful, flowers and buffalo, winter motifs. When it was legally permitted, I changed my surname to Naomi’s maiden name – Harkness.

  I’d like to say to Naomi, I understand. It’s taken half my life to appreciate that cold breath on the neck. Every day she must have felt it.

  And I would like to talk to you, properly, not with retrospect or yearning, the space that lies between us.

  I never brought you to the valley. I described it; the sheer granite slabs, the fast brackish water and luminous moss. You never took me home either. Between coordinates is where we existed. Perhaps that’s true fo
r all relationships. In the end, we want versions we can’t have, rearrangements in time. We want someone wise and scarred from the other side to say how it is, and what will happen, to be re-childed. I tell myself that the reasons are practical, companionable; it’s simply about having my hand held to cross a difficult stretch, the way Naomi would take mine to get across the gullies on the moor.

  Jump, Edith. It isn’t deep.

  This morning I sat looking at my phone, scrolling the numbers. Some I haven’t been able to delete. There are friends I should probably inform. I’m acting like a cat, slinking away to the roots of a quiet tree, squeezing into a hiding hole. Karolina would come immediately. She would board the train north, carrying her small bag with a nightgown, her pills, a book; she would have some matchless phrase. And Jonah, who I haven’t seen for years but whose photographs are still on the wall, of me, of Burntcoat while it was being converted. Jonah would laugh.

  Get out now, darling. At least you’re not pissing a hundred times a day and suffering a prick like rope.

  And then he’d weep like Lear. He will be the one to forge true old age; he’s escaped all the black dogs, all the predictions. For that, I’m glad.

  There are others in this situation; I could read the message boards and visit support groups. There are registered services, doulas to help relapsers through it – they do everything, from existentialism to excrement. Veterans like me are celebrated, not just for biological luck but for sagacity. So many became reckless once they knew they hadn’t beaten it, burning through the days, experiencing everything they could. Others became reclusive, obsessed with every cough, every headache, nerve-damaged, mind-damaged. Some are still enlisted in trials. I don’t share their disbelief. I’ve been asked about this too. How is it possible to live with fear and hope?

  I have no real interest any more, not in the thing itself. Its composition. Its character. Is it alive or dead? We are not separate; I continue, it continues. I admire its cleverness, and patience, storing away fragments in my cells, confounding biologists and immunologists. I’ve grown tired of waiting, I’ve told myself I would not wait, nor try to outrun it. You wouldn’t let me forget anyway. And I had work, such terrible fucking possession. Downstairs is the proof, my national obligation. There’s a burden to remembering, a duty no one really wants – all those names on the government list that have taken so long to embed. Now everything is finally happening, and I keep going to the studio to look, though the stairs are tiring and I shouldn’t waste my energy. I keep calling Sean, asking stupid questions about the iron pad, the bolting, as if the thing might topple onto whichever royal is doing the unveiling. It’s always like this before installation.

  Every time you ring me to check the charts I think they’ve pulled the funding or you’ve changed your mind again, Sean said to me yesterday. Stop fretting. Do you want to come to the site?

  I can’t.

  The steps are almost in.

  OK. Good.

  So, it’s a green light, then?

  Green light.

  Sean laughed.

  We must be setting some kind of record for lateness.

  Sagrada Família.

  Well, I’m not doing this again.

  Neither am I.

  Obviously. You’re about halfway up, by the way.

  You mean a third? H.

  Pedant.

  Sean was a monumental mason before he went to art college. There’s not much he doesn’t understand about memorials, commemorating the dead, and there are almost no technical hurdles he can’t overcome. I once asked him if he believed in spirit, whether it informed the way he installed pieces. We were raising the Scotch Corner Witch by the side of the motorway. It was the largest project either of us had undertaken, two years of collaboration and a doubled budget, half the capital swallowed by the foundations. Hecky, we had pet-named her. The rain was almost horizontal, stingingly cold, and we could barely see the Hi-ab. The pack road, built to get the wagon and the forklift onto the island, was disintegrating. The sunken concrete plinth had been very slow to set; it was vast and deep. She’d been over-engineered and comprehensively insured, a forty-foot structure, dangerously close to traffic. She’d been wet-cut, burnt using techniques I’d only just mastered, varnished and tarred. The blackened timbers of her skirt seemed to be bleeding evilly in the rain.

  I have a feeling, about her …

  Do you mean she is monstrous? Sean had shouted at me as the key-wood was lowered, his hood blown off, his face red and streaming. She better had be!

  There is art, the item, or the concept. And there is the story of art, which is not its interpretation, not its meaning.

  I was twenty-nine when I bought Burntcoat. I’d just won the Galeworth medal, and a staggering amount of money. The Witch had been standing at the Scotch Corner junction for a year, her controversy also rampant. Hecky had divided the nation. She was magnificent, unique, a testament to the creativity of the north. She was an eyesore, an obscenity; there were petitions to remove her. The commission had been unprecedented and windfallen – I’d been interviewed along with several artists, all men, all with solo exhibitions and pieces in the Royal Academy shows. Without a gallerist, I’d developed a practice in artist-run spaces, and abroad, surviving on Arts Council grants and occasional patronage. Sean had mounted big industrial-estate art, and after Japan the Malin Centre had paired us and continued to support me for off-site work. He’d installed two of my sculptures in the private park at Hadrian – native oak and hazel, burnt using an adaptation of shou sugi ban. Their scale was unusual for a woman, it was said, unusual even for a land-artist. With only weeks to prepare, I was invited to apply for one of the largest public art commissions ever conceived. She was not dreamt, like Mendeleev’s table, though she seemed in my mind an element, absolute. Sean knew what I wanted to do, and how to do it.

  In the interview I was asked if my proposal was realistic, whether it would exceed the funding, who my influences were. My answers were brief, disengaging. González, Gentileschi, Oppenheim – her Bern fountain with its tufa and lichen, I said. I did not anticipate success, so had nothing to lose. It was a panel of four judges, three were women – one an arts officer I knew to be progressive, more of a scout, one a historian, and there was a woman I did not know, dressed in grey plaid and moleskin, who looked suited to hand-start the propeller of a biplane. I don’t know what tipped the balance. My age and sex. My incongruity. Perhaps it was because I knew the road the piece would be gatekeeper of, the desolation of the summit, its storms. Hecky herself; she seemed undeniable.

  These model sketches, the male judge said, are really compelling, but, how shall I put it, very strong meat. Is she – squatting?

  No. She’s unfurling. The junction island is covered in gorse and gorse flowers every month of the year. It’ll look like she’s rising from the flames.

  So she’s being punished? Doesn’t that send a bad message?

  She’s rising, I repeated. She’s not supposed to be mystical.

  The man scowled.

  OK. But this Asian process you use. Isn’t the wood going to rot, in a maritime climate?

  Not for half a millennium.

  I watched his eyebrows ride high on his forehead. It was more or less the truth.

  They’ve found prehistoric spears here with burnt tips, I explained. They’re more resilient. So it’s not really a ‘foreign’ technique.

  I was trying, and failing, not to sound arrogant. The historian was nodding.

  I just don’t see how this type of thing can be achieved. It’s enormous. It would horribly overrun. And the attention would be … well, very difficult to manage. We’ve already had the bishop’s cursing stone to contend with.

  There was a snort from the woman in plaid. She leant forward, peering through her winged designer glasses.

  If I may, William. Ms Harkness. How would you feel about the council owning the drawings and models? I think that might provide some fiscal surety. Would that be fair?<
br />
  It’s fine by me, I said.

  There was no way of knowing what would come, what I was signing away. I had no idea that this was Lady Ingrid McKenzie, whose father had built a munitions fortune and whose grandfather had deposed a prime minister. She donated to national galleries. She owned the land surrounding the site.

  There we are. And I for one would like to hear more about your techniques, native or otherwise.

  Learning the practice had been revolutionary, and Japan was astonishing. Shun had met me in the airport with instructions to stay at the Meeting Point – I would never have found my way out. I was jet-lagged and disorientated; the signage was impossible, my rucksack was huge and heavy and I lumbered through the futuristic arrivals hall. On the bullet train, the towns flew past. I’d been told about punctuality, and the timing was exact. Another train, a bus, nature was repeated in the architecture. After a formal introduction, Shun spent the journey talking about his years in California, where he’d studied business and economics, and where he’d tried pot and Birkenstocks. As we passed through the landscape he pointed to the red flying gateways. They were everywhere.

  The residency was designed as immersive, life and craft together. I stayed in a tiny house a short walk away from Shun’s family and his workshop. The grandfather house. It was immaculate and compact, the rooms no bigger than four mats, the timbers original, black and alligatored. The house was raised above the ground and seemed to hover in the electric-green forest.