1. THE FIRST KISS

THE TALE OF SEVEN KISSES (1)

PROLOGUE

There weren’t so often times that the child could do what she was doing now. Most days there was work to be done, helping Ma with the flax, scraping turnips and scrubbing things that she’d always thought didn’t need scrubbing. But Ma was a harsh task-mistress and well up to using that cruel bunch of twigs on her back if she skived off.

Now she was at the pond where sometimes there were ducks cavorting but now there were none. And when she looked down into its placid depths she could see the girl. Not any girl, true, but herself. A reflection: she knew that much.

Smiling back up to her from the rippling waters she was a delight to behold.

“My Lord, my good Lord, bit ain’t I pretty,” she whispered in her ancient tongue, and she blew the prettiest of kisses to her own reflection.

But she wasn’t always going to stay that pretty. There was sickness abroad.

THE TALE

My name is Gwennie Goldfast, and I’m sure I must be dying. I’ve had what they call a good innings, and this must be the ending of it. Probably.

I know that I must be dying because they said, those who wrote in the dusty old magazines I’ve always been so fond of, that dying people have the most vivid dreams, and wasn’t I having those? Not at night but in the day time when I should be alert and awake.

At least, I truly think that I am, but the main problem is that I just about never remembered anything about bog-standard normal dreams, just that they are usually sparkly and colourful and filled with love and hope, but this one wasn’t. Neither could I forget it even though I tried.

I am seventy-two and have spent just about my entire life working in the town library until I was obliged to retire a couple of months ago because the council said that because Government cuts had become really quite draconian, the library must be shut down to help the council’s budget. But my life has been dedicated to that library, to the books, shelves and shelves and shelves of books. I’ve never, not in my seventy-two and a bit years, had a boyfriend or what you’d call a man friend in my later years, not married or wanted to marry. In fact it might shock you but I’m still what people refer to as a virgin. There has never been a moment in my life when I’ve had time for boys, or men.

In the evening, after work, I’ve always liked to read. No television for me, but the radio sometimes on quietly. The magazines, I read them because I was taught that I should when I was a school girl all those years ago and hungry for knowledge, the sort of magazine that appeals to people of a well-educated subset of the population. I can’t abide the glossy ones with pictures of celebrities in short skirts on the covers and page after page of news about their plastic lives. Those were a waste both of space and my time, but on the other hand a philosophical treatise about, for example, the well being of cats in Tudor England, a subject I was horrified to realise she knew nothing about until I read an article on that specific subject, they needed devouring and re-devouring until I knew the specific subject backwards. It’s what education is all about. Absorbing facts, truth, the past and its glories, and not sex.

With no work to go to and no library from which to acquire my reading matter I bought a Kindle, one of those electronic books that could in one slim plastic case hold the better part of a library, or the sort of library I chose to read.

Mornings were all the same in my flat, rise from my bed at six thirty sharp, breakfast on a croissant and coffee, which makes me feel truly international, and find myself lost in words. Magazine words, book words, though very few fiction words. Then along came one particular March morning which distinguished itself by being so very different from any other March morning that, afterwards, I shivered when I remembered it.

I had my electronic book and a mug of cocoa, a one-bar electric fire struggling to combat the cold, and my Kindle open on Chapter One of a new book set in Victorian Britain and concerned with the trials and tribulations and ill-treatment of small boys dressed in black-stained pants and cleaning chimneys. I was just tut-tutting about the way one knobbly-kneed half-starved little urchin was stuck half way up a chimney when a fire was being lit down below and his bones not discovered for over a century when it all began, it being the dream. The nightmare. Or the oddest of all realities: you judge.

And it began as the first knock rapped on the door. And it was that first knock on the door that convinced me that I must by dying if not actually dead. It had that sort of sound to it, a sombre hollowing sort of sound, and I shivered.

I opened the door hoping it wasn’t the man living in the flat upstairs but the creature that stood there was outrageous because her very existence was so impossible. She was human, yes, there was no doubt about that, but she was also filthy, dressed in rags that were the remnant of some very coarse material the like of which I don’t think I’ve seen before.

“Yes?” I asked, politely,` “can I help you?”

The answer that came back to me from lips that must have been painful to move because they were so sore, was impossible for me to translate. If it was in English it was in a dialect that had never crossed my path despite the thousands of readers I had spoken to at work. But if it meant anything it might, just might, have sounded like yes.

“Well?” I asked, “who are you and where are you from and do you know me? I mean, have we met? The library, maybe, though it’s a shame it isn’t still there, but you can blame the council for that.”

I suppose she may have replied, but instead of uttering a single word she gasped and fell to the tiled floor just outside my door, and she lay so very still I knew without checking that she must surely be dead.

It was then when I saw her face, grimy and pretty, that I remembered something, maybe a dream, maybe a truth from a long forgotten past, of me, and it was me and not another waif, standing by a duck pond and smiling at my own reflection. Yes, and blowing a kiss at it.

And, you know, this soul lying on my doorstep was no child but a woman aged by a harsh life, and she in a way I couldn’t understand, was me.

Her rough and ragged clothing fell to one side to reveal a huge egg-sized grey-black growth like something from an agonizing nightmare, oozing with blood-stained pus, on her begrimed belly, and it looked like several others almost pulsed barely hidden by the rest of her filthy vestments.

I was at a loss as to what to do. I clearly needed help, or at least my visitor did, but my flat was on the second floor and if I was to get anyone to help us I had to go and find someone. But in order to go anywhere I had to step over the filthy lump of flesh and old rags that was blocking my doorway and the staircase leading down.

Then the dream, and it must have been one of these, changed. My visitor remained where she was but everything else in the world, including my two-room home in a block of flats, the tiled entrance, everything with which I was familiar became something else.

I looked around me, desperate for something familiar with which to connect myself to the world I had suddenly and most unexpectedly found myself in.

But I was far from being alone like I had been in my flat. There were people walking hither and thither, men carrying rough wood from the woodlands that I could see all around where there had been a busy town mere moments ago. A crude cross daubed on the roughly carpentered door of a shack on the opposite side of a muddy, potholed track from where I was standing, and two young urchins, probably still short of being in their teens, wheeling a cart, and pausing where I was staring in stupefaction at the way a familiar world can change in a fractured moment and become so alien.

I looked back at the sad and shockingly filthy woman lying almost at my feet, and couldn’t help shaking my head.

Then one of the lads moved to her, right up to her and actually stood in my space. Not next to my space but actually in it, yet I felt nothing as one leg seemed to pass through mine. It was worse than being eerie it was so unreal!

“Do you mind!” I snapped, “do you very, very mind!”

But he ignored me as if I wasn’t there as the two lads heaved the stinking body of the woman, who looked old but probably wasn’t even forty, onto their cart and trundled off with it. And as he head rolled to one side I saw a glimpse of my careworn self, half my age, but dead.

I had to follow them. I had no control of my own body, though it was probably curiosity more than anything less real There was me in my smart pleated tartan skirt and silky blouse, and there was my surroundings, drab, untidy, filthy, with an air of almost tangible sorrow all around.

The contents of the cart was wheeled to what was surely a freshly dug and enormous pit and unceremoniously emptied into it. There was my woman, I called her my woman though all she’d done was knock my door and, reminding me of a me in a dream, die there in front of me with gigantic boils and oozing swellings on her flesh, and two other bodies, all just as still, all just as disfigured as her.

And then the pit, the lads, the cart, the mud, the filth and air of gloom that had pervaded the scene were all gone, and I was standing a hundred yards from my own flat door, in front of a street sign that read PLAGUE PIT LANE.

My skirt, my blouse, my skin, all were fresh and clean as I turned and because I could I blew a kiss at the sign, and wandered swiftly back home because the day was chill, but it was not quite the way I’d come.

© Peter Rogerson 10.03.20