WALES 2022
TRAGEDY STRUCK THE BLYTHE family often and hard, like a river flooding the same sorry houses year after year. And it didn’t matter what defences we tried to build, there was no outsmarting this act of nature, or god, or the devil himself. It was human folly, or hubris, to think we could wrong-foot forces like seasons and time, to think we could build a dam against life and death. But that didn’t stop us from trying.
When I was eight, my father was killed on Christmas Eve by a drunk driver as he walked home from the pub. Pinned against a stone wall, crushed until blood wept from his eyes, until everything in him ruptured and burst. A tragedy, though not the first, and certainly not the last.
A few months later we buried his parents – our beloved Granny and Gramps. They died one after the other, a heart attack and a stroke, two dominoes too devastated to stay upright any longer.
To make matters worse, eight was usually around the age I began to remember my ultimate fate. The realization would come to me slowly, at first, the sense of a storm looming on the horizon, or maybe an atomic bomb, but not truly understanding the who or why or what . And then an image would break through – a knife to the chest, a garrotte round my neck, poison in my heart – and I would remember . I would spend the next six or eight or ten years wondering how and when Arden would strike again.
How and when I would die by their hand.
Grappling with my own impending demise was one thing, but doing it at the same time as losing half my family was quite another. Life after life, cruelty after cruelty, and the unbearable weight of being human was beginning to wear me down. The constant cycle of love and loss, as inevitable and natural as the rolling seasons.
But I would always try to build the dam anyway.
Two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, I sat in the hospital where my grandparents had died and watched my bald sister play the violin.
The last note rang out smooth as velvet. The polished maple was tucked beneath her pale pixie chin, the concentration on her face relaxing as she looked up expectantly.
‘Excuse me.’ Mum sniffed, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. She stood up swiftly and left the room, paisley scarf fluttering behind her. Without her lavender perfume, the room smelled hospital-stale.
Gracie rolled her hazel eyes, resting the violin in her lap. ‘Maybe I should have chosen a less melancholic instrument. The drums, perhaps. Or a ukulele. Do we think the nurses might decapitate me if I took up the banjo?’ I recognized my own resolute sarcasm in her voice – a little kid copying her older sister’s bravado.
‘Mum’s just scared,’ I said. ‘You’re her baby.’
‘I’m fourteen,’ Gracie retorted, as though this settled matters.
Gracie had been diagnosed with leukaemia about a year ago, when she’d finally got her endless bruising checked out. She’d been stoic, for the most part, though I had the distinct feeling it was to combat Mum’s cloying sadness. I understood it, of course, but I sometimes found myself annoyed that she couldn’t muster a brave face for Gracie’s sake.
In truth, the thought of anything bad happening to my sister was deeply painful for me too, even if I likely wouldn’t be around to see it. I’d loved a lot of siblings in a lot of lives, but Gracie was a firm favourite. Sharp, weird, bright in an entirely unique way. So alive . The image of her body lying empty in a cold, damp grave was so incongruous that my body folded in on itself whenever I thought about it.
And the idea of my mum up in that big farmhouse all alone – a farmhouse once filled with a family she adored – cleaved me in two. But it wouldn’t come to that. I wouldn’t let it.
Gracie nodded to the beige plaster on my upper arm. ‘How’d today’s injection go?’
The doctors were prepping my body to donate stem cells. ‘Nothing compared to chemo.’
‘In your infinite experience of chemo.’
I twirled my hair up into a bun. ‘It is quite famously horrible.’
And yet still a miracle. I had lived long enough to remember hacksaws grinding through bone, teeth gnawing desperately on sodden rags, all of it so brutal and so futile. Modern medicine was a wonder.
Gracie eyed my hair enviously. She used to have the same smooth copper sheets. ‘I am a bit bald, it has to be said. Though I’ve always been eccentric, so perhaps the protruding skull fits my persona. I might start carrying a scythe to really freak people out.’
A sudden sharp image came to me: a sickle propped against a dark stone wall.
It felt deeply, viscerally important, and yet there was no context attached.
These flashes of past lives felt like tiny splintered fragments of a gigantic mosaic, the full picture always beyond my reach. Like the twist of a kaleidoscope, rearranging the pattern every time I tried too hard to study it.
I remembered the last five or six lives in technicolour detail – the sights and smells and emotions, the cast of loved ones I’d left behind, every line of Arden’s new face. But the lives before that became less and less distinct the further back they went, until everything was smudged with fog.
Occasionally a new detail would come to me, stark and unmistakable, but I couldn’t recall how it fitted into the big picture of my curious existence. I knew there was a row of grim pyres by a bobbing harbour, an olive grove in sun-dappled Andalusia, a trader ship in the buffeting wilds of the Indian Ocean, but the specifics had been lost to time – or my own woeful memory.
And beneath it all, shrouded under several layers of love and fear and confusion and hurt and grief and anger … there was a why .
A why that had eluded me for centuries.
Over the course of a hundred lifetimes, I had considered this why from every possible angle, from the human and the mundane (a grudge, a rivalry, a bet) to the supernatural and the arcane (an ancient curse, a deal with the devil, a particularly malevolent bridge troll). There were glimmers of reason, of truth – such as when Arden had let slip, in darkest Siberia, that it was a deal made long ago that sealed our fate – but nothing solid enough to build that why into a robust structure.
And for whatever godforsaken reason, Arden would never willingly share our origin story.
I was so lost in my thoughts – absorbed in the blade-sharp image of a sickle propped against a dark stone wall – that I didn’t realize Gracie was talking.
Or, rather, performing.
‘“… and I thought of how it feels to hold you, each season of you,”’ she proclaimed, holding a leather-bound poetry book in her pale hands. ‘“Our love blossoming afresh, year after year, century after century, new flowers from old roots, an eternal seed from which life will always bloom.”’
Something in me prickled with recognition I couldn’t quite place. ‘What is that?’
Love blossoming afresh, century after century?
A strange turn of phrase, for the average poet.
Gracie shrugged dismissively, tossing it on to the bed beside her blanketed legs. ‘Some poetry book? Becca brought it for me on her last visit.’ Becca was Gracie’s equally macabre best friend, who wore exclusively black and talked in an exaggeratedly low voice to disguise her natural chirpiness. ‘She did this whole care package thing. It was a bit tragic.’
‘Yes, but what’s the book?’ I angled myself to get a better look at the cover.
Ten Hundred Years of You.
My heart went unnaturally still in my chest.
‘It’s a viral sensation,’ Gracie said scathingly. She eschewed popular culture out of principle. ‘Honestly, what was Becca thinking? I have cancer, not bad taste. Speaking of which, I’m honoured that you’re still wearing the necklace.’
Gracie pointed towards the black ribbon around my neck.
My hand went to the ugly ‘jewellery’ she’d made me a few weeks ago. The pendant was a discarded chicken wishbone, and it still smelled vaguely of roast thyme. It was completely disgusting, but I could tell by the triumphant look on her face as she handed it to me that it was a challenge. I had to pretend to love it and wear it all the time, even though it was a literal carcass. And if I took it off, she’d guilt-trip me for months.
I bit my lip, trying to forget about the strangely apt poetry book. ‘Yes. It’s beautiful.’
She pressed her lips together, trying desperately hard not to laugh.
A sudden metallic clatter echoed from the corridor, as though a supply trolley had overturned, and I jerked in my seat. My nerves had never been quite the same since the front lines of the Great War – as if being hunted like an animal through every existence wasn’t fraying enough.
I watched the doorway for a few moments, half expecting Arden to appear amid the commotion, but no murderous silhouette materialized.
‘What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get out of here?’ I asked my sister, voice rattling slightly, like the brittle bars of a cage come loose. ‘Because you are getting out of here, Gracie. I promise.’
The absurd thing was that I genuinely believed it.
‘Why the obsession with things we might do in the future?’ Gracie smirked. ‘You’re such a daydreamer.’
‘You say that like it’s some fatal disease.’
She gave me a pointed look. ‘I found your extremely tragic list. The things you’re going to do when you’re an adult, as though adulthood is some mythical state.’
My cheeks warmed. I’d kept such a list in every life I could remember, filled with things I’d do once I broke the curse and finally lived . Because if you can imagine a future, then surely, surely, it must be real, must be possible.
‘I’m an optimist, all right? So what are you going to do when you’re free of this?’
Gracie considered the question, fiddling absently with her violin strings. ‘Go to the cemetery.’
‘Why?’
I expected her to say something profound, like visiting our family graves, or paying respects to her ward friends who hadn’t made it.
She stroked her chin. ‘One of my old teachers died. He once called me “unsettling”. I’d quite like to deface his tombstone.’
Once my shocked peals of laughter had subsided, I checked my narrow gold wristwatch and jolted at the time. ‘Shit, I’m going to be late for work.’
I grabbed my backpack from the faded linoleum floor and stood reluctantly. My vision pitched and blurred. Needles made me woozy, but it seemed a pathetic thing to complain about given what Gracie was going through. It also made very little sense. I’d once had my torso blown open by a grenade, but god forbid a trained medical professional should suggest a blood test.
Flipping the sheet music on the stand beside her bed, she adjusted her thin blue blanket, picked up her violin and said, ‘Bye, Bran Flakes.’
Even though I was Evelyn right down to my marrow, her pet name for me was one of many reasons I felt so at home as Branwen Blythe.
Tossing my backpack over my shoulder, I gave Gracie a kiss on the forehead. ‘Love you too, Porridge Face.’
‘You can’t take the piss out of a leukaemia patient’s complexion!’ she yelled after me. ‘You insensitive motherfucker!’
I looked back at her briefly before I went, love inflating in my lungs like a balloon.
Gracie had been the only thing that kept Mum and me sane after Dad died. She was too young to understand the gravity of it, and so spent the ensuing few months telling awful made-up jokes and performing dramatic soliloquies in a Venetian mask, foxtrotting around the living room in my mother’s highest heels as we wept by the fireside. She was simultaneously human sunshine and darkly gothic. One of her first full sentences was ‘The shadows are very quiet today.’
There was a whole six-month period when she dressed in stripes and performed as a mime morning, noon and night. Her teachers wanted so sincerely to be angry, but her cartoonish facial expressions and carefully choreographed routines were impossible not to laugh at.
A born performer. A pristine strangeness.
It seemed so unfair that someone so full of life could be sucked clean of it by a brutal disease. Yet while I had lost a lot of people in a lot of lives, I could save her.
A rare power. A gift in a lifetime of curses.
I just had to survive long enough to do so.
I turned eighteen in exactly two weeks. The stem cell procedure was slated for four days’ time, after my final cell-boosting injection. I was the only relative whose tissue matched Gracie’s – without me, she’d have to go on a national register with a waiting list as long as the River Wye.
If Arden found me before the procedure, there was every chance my sister would die too.