CHAPTER ELEVEN The Debt #2
That the successor should come of her own will if her will could be arranged, and otherwise by any means not in breach of the standing precedents.
That until the successor stood at Ilmarren, the obligation was carried, and the term of the carrying was the term of the debt.
And at the bottom, two makers’ marks side by side, the way two people sign something.
One was my mother’s. It was dull, chalk-white and dead, thirty-four years spent.
The other one was shining.
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This is what happened in my body, in order, because order’s the only honest way I have of telling it.
Nothing.
That first. For some number of seconds there was nothing whatsoever, the sort you get when you put your hand on a hot pan and the hand knows before you do, and there’s a gap before the knowing reaches you.
Then my ears went. A high thin note, my own, nothing to do with the slates, climbing up underneath the room.
Then my mouth filled with water. Which is absurd, which can’t happen down there, and that’s still what it was: the flood at the back of the throat you get about four seconds before you’re sick.
Then my knees.
I didn’t sit. I went down onto the archive floor like a coat sliding off the back of a chair, and my shoulder hit the leg of the reading ledge. I’ve a lump of scar there still. I didn’t feel it that day, or the next.
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And what was in my head wasn’t the bargain at all.
It was a Tuesday when I was nine.
I have no idea why. I’ve turned it over for years and I can’t find a reason.
A Tuesday around March. My father was out on the boat, and Samuel, who was ten and had been given the job of getting me to school, had decided on his own authority we weren’t going.
We went along the shore road instead, as far as the second headland.
It was cold. He found a dead gull and made it talk.
The voice he did was so stupid, it was so stupid, a pompous clerical sort of voice, the gull complaining about the state of the tide tables, and I laughed till I was sick in the marram grass and he held my hair back with whichever hand wasn’t holding the gull.
That. In the middle of a green-white room at the bottom of the sea, with the terms of my conception cut into a slate over my head.
A dead gull and a stupid voice, and my brother at ten in a coat miles too big for him, holding the bird up by one wing.
Sitting there with my shoulder against the ledge, I knew why it had come.
That morning was mine. Nobody had arranged it. There wasn’t a slate for it, or an instruction, nothing written down nine months and eleven days before I existed. A boy who should have taken his sister to school and didn’t. That’s all it was.
I was trying to find one. That’s what I was doing on that floor.
I was running back through my own life at a terrible speed, looking for one single hour nobody had provided for, and I’d got as far as a dead gull on a shore road in March, and then I couldn’t be sure of that either.
Because why was he like that? A boy of ten doesn’t make a bird talk for his sister unless somebody’s taught him what she’s worth, and who taught him, and who let him be raised in that house, and what did they think a brother would do to a child who was meant to be raised untaught and unmarked, did they count on it, did they count on him, did they.
I sat on the floor and made a noise like a hinge.
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Threnn crouched down in front of me.
She didn’t touch me. She put one hand flat on the stone beside my knee, so it was there if I wanted it, and said, “I’m not going to say anything, because there isn’t anything.” And then she kept her word. People mostly don’t.
The slates rang. Out in the racks whoever had been moving about all morning went on moving about.
“Read the fifth line again,” I said, eventually.
“Miss Angel.”
“Read it.”
“That the successor should come of her own will if her will could be arranged.”
“If her will could be arranged.”
“Yes.”
“They wrote that down.” My voice was coming from a long way off and didn’t sound like mine, and I remember noticing that with a sort of distant professional interest. “They sat in a room and wrote if her will could be arranged, and then somebody made a fair copy and somebody filed it, and this morning a boy carried it down a stair on a tray and he was bored, Threnn. Did you see his face? He was thinking about his dinner.”
“I saw his face.”
“I wasn’t even born.”
I got a hand on the ledge and dragged myself up far enough to see the slate again. That was a mistake.
“Threnn. Look at the date on it and tell me.”
Threnn looked at the date.
“Nine months and eleven days before you were born,” she said.
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I’m going to try and say this once, properly, and then leave it alone, because I’ve never managed to make anybody understand it and with most people I’ve stopped trying.
It wasn’t the being owed.
I could’ve carried the being owed. I was raised by a man who told me at eight that my mother’s death was my fault. I’ve carried heavier than a debt, and uglier, and built a life alongside it.
It was the sequence.
She made the bargain. Then she conceived me. In that order. Nine months and eleven days.
Which means every argument I ever had with my father, and the fever that December, and a wooden fish with an appalled face, and the harbour steps and the comb, and Wren’s bar and Mara’s kitchen and Liora’s house on the cliff, and a dead gull on a shore road in March, thirty-four years of a life I’d believed was at least mine, at least that, the one thing nobody could get their hands on, all of it was the raising of a successor.
Untaught and unmarked. To specification.
I’d always taken it for granted there was a child first, and then whatever came after.
There wasn’t. First there was a slate.
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I got out of the archive. I don’t remember the stair.
What I remember is coming out into the lower quarter, where the rose light comes up off the vents, and the ordinary evening business of the city carrying on round me.
People carrying things. Somebody laughing on a terrace overhead.
The light breathing its seven breaths a minute, and the great slow shapes crossing in the dark.
It all looked exactly the way it had at midday and I couldn’t bear it.
I got to the rail above the vents and put both hands on it.