Short Fiction

 
THE CROSS BONES GATE
by Trish Gauntlett
 
In the old plague church hidden away behind the Tower of London we arrange ourselves into musical sections. Soprano, alto, descant, remnants of a long-ago school choir. Fitting our backs against the high, hard pews, we risk a glance at the women beside us. Who are you? Who were you then, when we were young? Do you remember me?

The music calls us to attention and we sing, sending our voices against the stone and glass, around the effigies of clerics and crusaders, into the sacred air. How can it be that we sound the same as we did then? After fifty years and worlds unraveled, we sound like schoolgirls, light, young and sweet. We sing our best for our ancient beloved teacher, as if she can hear us still. We soothe her soul with music and send her on her way. Peace at last. At last.

Afterwards, in the awkward balance of tea and conversation, we explore the past, gently disturbing the surface and moving on quickly in case we are revealed, discovered, exposed for all we have not become in fifty years. Who were you, when we were young? Head Girl, Prefect, favourite, troublemaker? Who are you now?

 And then we walk - my friend, my dear old friend and I, towards the Tower of London. She knows the city’s ancient secret places and tells me stories as we walk, until I feel the ghosts around us. When she isn’t looking I glance behind. But there is nothing. Of course there is nothing. We walk across the bridge and into Southwark. The tide is high and the Thames has risen above the shards of pots and glass tossed into it for two thousand years, from the time of the Roman city. Arm in arm we walk, long skirts swirling in the summer dust, talking in low, intimate voices. School days, children and men, England and Canada, old friends and new, homecoming and loss. Do you remember?

It is unsettling, the bubble of solitude Londoners spin around themselves. On the street, eyes straight ahead. On the train, eyes down. I try to pierce it with my easy North American smile. Who are you? But it's impenetrable and I sink slowly back into the same refuge of anonymity.

Past the Borough Market, under the bridge that carries trains from Blackfriars to Charing Cross we find a flower shop, a tiny cave filled with the scent of roses and laurel. The roses are beautiful, with wide, woody stems and invincible thorns. White for purity and girlhood, red for love and courage, yellow for joy and friendship. We could take an armful to commemorate this day. But we are not here for that. We choose one rose, dark pink with yellow petal tips. Pink for sympathy and gentleness. Yellow for remembrance. One strong and perfect rose for the women we are going to see. Remember me.

We slow our pace, away from the urgency of busy Southwark streets.

Turning into Redcross Way we find ourselves alone. The emptiness and silence of the street distracts me. I look at the old sign, cracked and weathered, from the London Underground. The entrance is bricked up, holding back a surge of human disarray. There are no echoes here of the sound and stress of the twenty-first century.

Then, with the smallest pressure of her arm in mine, she turns me and we are there. Unprepared, I see only what is right in front of me in a small, sharply focused field of vision. The Cross Bones Gate. The wrought iron stakes spill away tall and wide, covered in a tangle of ribbons, scraps of paper, toys, trinkets and flowers, whispers of grief reaching back eight hundred years to the women and children who lie here in this unhallowed earth.

It is unthinkably, impossibly small, this medieval graveyard, but here lie thousands of souls and among them the prostitutes, the Winchester Geese. Lured from the countryside by the promise of work and a better future, they were trapped here, in this notorious place of brothels, pits and prisons, placed outside the law of London by the Bishop of Winchester so that he could grow rich and fat from their misery. We are overwhelmed by the cruelty of their time and fortune; women in fifteenth century England, destitute, desperate.

We stare at the rubble beyond the gate. No peaceful, dreaming, mossy cemetery this.  Dead of disease, poverty, exploitation, shame, above them there is only unmarked, unkempt, broken ground. They were of no consequence, nothing more than chattels to be used, broken and thrown away. Thrown here, beneath the Cross Bones Gate.

We will never know their names. For them, eight centuries too late, the notes, the ribbons, the roses, the poems. And for their babies who sleep here too, the toys, the tears.

We tie our rose gently to the wrought iron gatepost and bow our heads, more in pain than in prayer. Lost in grief. Reaching for them.  

Across eight hundred years of indifference and neglect you struggle to the surface, reaching back to me, your thin arms straining against the bars of the Gate, hand grasping at air. I recoil, the silly, conjured romanticism of the rose falling away. This sudden rational ghost destroys my self- indulgence in the melancholy of the place. Don't touch me. Don't ask me to seek the parallels in my own time. I want the shield of history between us, the long, cold view, the oblique lens. I want you to stay in the past.

And you, betrayed again, destroyed, discarded, lost, dissolving into earth, send out one final empty prayer. Remember me.
 
 
 
                                                                                    

Poetry

BENDING STARLIGHT
 
If it is true that starlight bends around dark matter
Around what once was there and is forever gone
Then I must say that science proves the loss of you
Light bends away and round you
in that great emptiness
through which the particles of time and space
entangled
turn precisely when the others turn
Is this the only way to know that you are there?
I stop and turn not knowing why
Or walk an unplanned path
Or stumble on a secret conversation
And in those moments when the road not taken
Stretches impossibly behind me
I wonder if you too have turned and we are still entangled
twisting and turning in perfect parallel
and you are out there somewhere bending starlight.


TWO
 
I am cheaply bought with this uncommon currency,
the language of the heart.
And you lay down two words, dear one,
to purchase my surrender.
I sleep, eat, breathe them, as if they are all I need,
as if they are the Holy Grail, the secret room within the sphinx,
as if they are all temples and all gods.
Two words, by chance, from you to me.
What was the cost to you?
A breath, a heartbeat passing in a moment, unconsidered, gone?
Or like the widow’s mite, tiny and worthless in itself,
made priceless by the risk of giving all and gaining nothing,
did those words contain your hopes and dreams?
Were they the highest price that you could pay
for cloth of such uncertain measure?


SURFACES
 
You draw my portrait,
eyes darting like a wading bird
into the liquid space between us,
hands flashing at the easel,
head cocked in quick, dispassionate appraisal.
Fixed in your close, unwavering scrutiny,
I am still. Pared down.
Examining myself as nothing more than planes and angles,
lines and shadows, void beneath.
Still. I am still.
What passion can I force into my flat, dark eyes
to trouble your detachment?
What ripple on my quiet surface
to tip your charcoal out of balance,
make you draw against your will,
surprise you with a small, anarchic flourish,
so you will see beyond quiescent black and white?


MARS

I sent my name to Mars
etched by electrons on a microchip
fixed on a robotic ship.
 
When I was young in London leaning from the attic window in the row house
with bluebells on the bomb shelter
watching the rag and bone man work the street with horse and cart
leaning out as far as safe to see the towers in Battersea power up
and lift their coal smoke in the air,
high into the London air,
my only thought of Mars was when there was a glint of stars through London smog,
stars, stars, stars like storybooks.
There was no thought of planets.
 
When I was young in Africa dreaming on the clear night sky
before sputnik, before Apollo,
before one small step, one giant leap,
before we said the word space as often as we say the word earth,
when I was young my only thought of Mars was Gustav Holst.
Red, cautionary music, menacing, percussive, advancing, the Bringer of War.
 
When I was young I did not dream that on this day I would be saying that I sent my name to Mars.
I did not dream of robots, microchips, electrons.
My dreams were earthbound;
wolves beneath my bed,
willows in water,
violets in springtime,
sixpence in sweet shops,
new shoes, perhaps this year, new shoes.
 
And all this time my name was growing, changing, shifting, reaching outward, upward
reaching for the wider world, the sky, the stars,
aiming for the day when it would slip the bonds and ride a silver ship through time and space
to land, red, cold and small under two moons
millions and millions of miles from where my name was written first and spoken first
when I was new and young
a child of Strawberry Fields,
a child of England,
a child of Earth.

 
In 2018 & 2020 NASA offered the opportunity to send our names to Mars on board  the InSight and Perseverance Landers. More than 2 million people responded. 

EMPTY SPACE
 
Why should we save this Earth when Saturn's sky rains diamonds?
Jupiter's aurora shifts in purple, yellow, turquoise, brighter, older than our Northern Lights.
Titan's tides hide secret oceans, trapped beneath red ice.
On Mars, Olympus Mons, watchtower of alien gods, is higher than two Everests.
Why should we save this Earth when out there,
out there is the stuff of dreams, the building blocks of life?
Except, except
we cannot breathe in space
and this is no small thing when diamonds fall
and symphonies of rainbows fill the sky.
We cannot cry or shout or whisper.
We cannot not sing.
 
There are no trees in space.
No Sitka spruce measuring its branches one by one against the open sky.
No shore pine sending all its life and purpose to the top.
No sun-bright, evergreen arbutus, with its fractal green and orange bark.
No sacred cedar, shaping house and history, clan and culture.
No oxygen.
 
Trees hold the power of life and death for us and we for them, in equal measure.
Now is the time to throw ourselves against the ancient justice of the woods
and promise transformation, restoration, conservation.
 
Trees do not take sides.
They do not choose redemption.
They simply live or die, often by our hand.
Why should we save them? Why protect this Earth?
On Saturn, Jupiter, Titan, Mars, all planets and all moons, not one tree grows.
 
Although we do not ask for grace from trees,
they give it. 
And we can breathe.
We can cry and shout and whisper.
We can sing.