Where we Belong (standalone)

It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.

She turns it towards the wall the moment she notices it’s there but Tallow can’t forget about the nameplate. Propped on top of the bureau, the flickering jaundiced light of the candle dances along the metalwork as Tallow gets up to blow out the flames. Eyes adjusting to the gloom, Scutcher can see her reach out to touch the edge before she tucks her hair behind her ear, brings her arm around her bare shoulders as though the heavy air reeking of sex and sweat has dipped several degrees in temperature. “You know this is f-cking creepy, right, Noodle?” Tallow whispers, something lost about the way she stands, exposed in the dark. “Why did you want it? I thought…whatever.”

Scutcher wishes that she would tell him what she thought, but she won’t and in return Scutcher can’t. Because he’d panicked, primarily; gotten so caught up in not wanting the girl at the fair to have Elon that he’d started to want Noreen’s plate more than anything, had wanted Noreen back so badly that for a few seconds it felt like a plate was going to be- if not enough- a start at least. He doesn’t see how it’s creepy at any road; just words soldered onto a plate. Shrugging, he sits up and motions to Tallow. It’s late and the mosquitoes seem to hover in place on the air like so many black motes of dust, moths trapped on the wrong side of the open window dive bombing into the glass, desperately reaching out for the light. Reaching out for his sister, Tallow only perches on the edge of the bed scratching at a bite on her legs.

“You have to get rid of it. It’s weird as sh-t and it aint,” she twines a strand of her hair around her fingers, battling with her words the way that he always does. “Noodle, it aint yours.”

“But I won her,” he says simply- and he did; fair and square at the stall, can’t figure out the meaning behind Tallow’s snort laughter. People laugh when they are happy; the kind of laugh that hurts in a good way right down deep inside but he doesn’t hear that too often. The other kind of laughter is crueller, harder and often- with Tallow- sadder. He can make out the whites of her eyes now, blue irises fixed quite pointedly on him.

“No you didn’t. You never did. And a lot of people at the fair thought it was a sh-tty thing you did takin’ that nameplate, you know.” Her bite begins to bleed and Scutcher can see it in the darkness, like an ink stain across her thigh. Doesn’t like to see blood on her because it reminds him too much of bad things; hurt, chaos,grief and fear when his sister is supposed to be safe. He swipes his thumb across her skin to wipe it away, feels her shiver, feels the fine wisps of light hair on her legs and has to marvel at her delicacy, before she continues, her voice a little softer and heavier than before. “It was obvious to almost everyone that the nameplate aint just a souvenir like a teddy bear or somethin’…it’s real nice. Like a proper memorial or somethin’”

“I know.” Or at least he thinks he does; not why it’s supposed to be such a bad thing why he has the plate. But it’s important because it has Noreen’s name on it. As time passes her name will be used less and less; so many have passed before her and so many will afterwards, it gets harder and harder to call to memory all the names of the dead tributes but there are places where Noreen’s name will be a fixed point; with her children, with Jack, etched onto Scutcher’s heart on the tip of his tongue and cast into metal on her nameplate. Her nameplate which is his. He won it fair and square.

“No you don’t. Of course you don’t,” Tallow says quickly, picks up his hand; her palm is a little sweaty, fingers sticky with lingering traces of saliva and come. “But I’m not being with you while it’s in here So you either get rid of it or we don’t do this no more.”

She wants him to choose, chews on the plump skin of her lower lip, “It aint yours but I am. For ever and for always. That’s enough.”

Tallow’s hand comes to rest in the curls at the nape of Scutcher’s neck and the choice is made for him. That’s enough, a fact without dispute. It is, isn’t it? Isn’t it? “Nod your head,” she whispers and he does, some small part of him saying that really, at the end of it all that it won’t be enough. Don’t leave me, Scutcher, Noreen had called out as she lay dying and he’d said never. Still says never even as Tallow smiles and balls a fist at his hip, inching closer on the bed.

“What should I do with it?” A flicker of panic, “You won’t make me throw it in the garbage?” He won’t see her with the peelings and the grain packets, Tallow’s cotton buds and the broken glass and china that their father will sometimes pitch at the wall to make himself feel better when he can’t get at Scutcher.

“I’m not making you do anything,” Tallow frowns. “Just take her home, Scutcher- back where she belongs.”

We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads

Home. It means more than just words of an address; Scutcher has a house but he doesn’t have a home in the sense that he used to. Before his father’s leg had been amputated, there had been a first house with conifer trees piercing the sky that Tallow would scramble up, masking the heavy odour of pigs with the scent of pine needles. They lined their boots up on the front porch, wiped their feet on the mat before going in the house and Dad had framed their pictures- Tallow’s neat little charcoal etchings and Scutcher’s exuberant but ultimately dire attempts- besides the staircase. Tallow and Scutcher would slide down the stairs wrapped in their blankets, make believing snowy peaked mountains, sledges and something Tallow called a ‘yethi’ through the whistling gaps in her teeth. It was always warm, smelled of pork stock simmering on the stove and Mom’s preserves. It was home and it has slipped away forever.

Wonderful things are always the most fleeting, but sadness seems to last a lifetime.

He couldn’t say where he belongs now- save for perhaps those brief moments clutching at Tallow, but that feels so transient it’s hard not to grow weary from the speed that time falls away like leaves in autumn. As for where Noreen belongs- it seems presumptuous to even try and guess. Part of him hopes that there were conifer trees in the yard of her memory, boots lined up and boiling jams but she’d told him about her parents and that wasn’t what a home was.

Her babies are with Jack and maybe that is where home is for her. But like with him and Tallow, you can’t find permanence with people- they move around, growing and shifting, pulling you close one moment and then hiding away in a frigid distance because someone might see. Noreen needs to find her home in a corner of the world that will be hers for forever. It doesn’t have to be four walls but it has to last. Scutcher is determined that she should have that.

Taking him longer to come up with the idea than perhaps it should, Scutcher thinks of the garden and can’t imagine why he didn’t before.

He’s still keeping it; watered and weeded, staving off the slugs that chew on the lettuce leaves and flowers. In the week, Scutcher pours a small amount of beer into a shallow jar and the slugs, attracted to the alcohol, fall in and drown. It isn’t a pleasant way to die- not just the drowning, but by how enticed the slugs are to the beer. Enough to make the difficult crawl up the length of the mason jar and to fling themselves in, as though diving off a cliff into oblivion. Do they know they are going to die? Do they even care?Perhaps for a few fleeting seconds it’s worth it. When he gets to the garden there are at least fifteen, sunk to the bottom of the jar, limp and lifeless, throws the jar of dead worms out into the thicket, between the brambles.

There is no sign that anyone else has been through the garden in quite a while, but Scutcher checks for tracks religiously as he walks the length of the garden; he had hoped that Jack would have taken the babies by now- like Noreen said she would have done. Sometimes he slows down if he has to pass the Lexington place, hovers by the window and tries to imagine up the babies- if they already look like Noreen or if they are something else entirely- hers without being her. But he’s always been lacking in imagination really- Tallow made up most of the games when they were little. There are no track marks in the soil apart from the indentations of his own thick work books; they’ll come when they are older and can appreciate it more, Scutcher can wait.

Sometimes he looks out for delicate footfalls, women’s prints- she had such tiny feet and hands, if Tallow’s delicacy made him marvel then Noreen was something else entirely. As fragile as flower petals, an embrace might have broken her but she’d still taken an agonising time to die- dragged kicking and screaming towards death, away from her babies and a million miles away from the slugs willingly dropping into amber in district ten.

But of course he can’t find her footfalls, he chides himself, she’s on the air now, in the heavy scent of the lavender and the fine wisps of dandelion fluff spreading out into the sky like motes of dust and mosquitoes. And one day, when the dust is settled and the tulips come up for the spring, bursting to life with color he’ll see her again- he isn’t sure how, but feels as though it is something that has to be. A fixed certainty, the way that day follows night and winter gives way to spring. Taking up hammer and nail he marks the place for her, on one of the thick conifer trees that lines the clearing, twisted with briars. Like her daughter. Deep down Scutcher knows that she’d remembered him no matter what anyone said.

Noreen Lexington.

The tree stands prouder for bearing her name. This place is hers, it seems to say and it always will be. Tallow was right to make him take her here; it had been vain to think that he could keep her when people didn’t belong to others. They belong to no one but themselves and the earth belongs to them, the way that trees dig their roots deep into the earth, twisting up and knotting in tight- doing their best to never let go. This little patch of district ten is all her own. He sits on a log, facing up to the tree bearing her name and is content to just be for a few lingering seconds.

The garden holds its breath, heavy with a pregnant pause and ready for her to come back to it. And she will. At some point she’s going to come home, sit with him on the earth and smile the kind of smile that’s enough to make the sun emerge from behind heavy rainclouds. Scutcher can wait- for forever, the way he’d said he would.

Like an unfortunate King's and his Queen's
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.