The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley

Author:Aliya Whiteley
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907389238
Publisher: Unsung Stories
Published: 2014-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

Part Three

I lie in a proper bed, blankets piled high against the cold, Bee beside me, and I think of the line.

The line is invisible, but it exists. It runs from the edge of the wood, through the centre of the campfire, to the graveyard. On one side there is William’s hut, the communal huts, the school hut and the fields, and on the other side there is the big house where Ted now lives with Thomas. And where I spend all my time, waiting for a miracle.

For the birth of this baby will be the miracle that will unite us once more. The line draws its strength from its invisibility. Nobody wants to talk about it and I am forbidden to mention it, so the line grows longer and stronger. William, Eamon, the farmers, the older men: they all think there will be no baby and they hate the idea that there could be hope. Because hope takes the form of a joining rather than a continuation.

We will meld to grow. Part human, part Beauty. Could anything be more wonderful, more terrifying? The offer of salvation in the form of a baby who is not a baby. I can finally begin to understand why men kill.

And yet Uncle Ted, the killer, stands firmly with us as a protector of Thomas, never leaving him, grim-faced whenever one of the others approaches. I don’t understand this change in Ted. But then, his motives have never been up for untangling. For all his calmness, I feel there is a mess of man underneath. He loves, he hates, he hides the emotions where he thinks nobody can see. And then his eyes burn and his lips draw up, like a threatened dog.

It has occurred to me that my mother was afraid of Ted, of what he might do to others if he thought they were drawing too close to something. To what?

It has been a long six months of consideration and revelation for me; and in that time Thomas has swelled, not to the front like the pictures of pregnant women in the books, but to the side, low on his hip, then pushing out his stomach and distorting his chest. He wears the dresses that once belonged to Miriam – she was a large woman – and still he cooks on, with no perturbation on his face. Thomas emits a serenity that affects all who spend moments with him.

It sneaks into my bland stories of the past, stories that have become more and more fantastical. I tell stories of fairies and goblins, and tea parties for trolls, while the real meanings pretend to be invisible. The goblins go to war or the fairies squabble over a golden crown, hidden deep in the woods. And meanwhile the meanings squat low, so low in the words, that Ted cannot complain.

William and Eamon sit on one side of the fire and we sit on the other, and everyone listens to my stories, long serials that go on night after night.

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