A Woman Clothed in Words by Anne Szumigalski Page A

Somehow she has got back into the house without even hearing the nightingales sing. She remembers the other house, the tall house in London. Almost in the city: Number Eleven, Nightingale Lane. She remembers her bed there, a small bed with brass rails. She remembers falling down the stairs. She cried but it didn’t hurt much really. She was a very little girl at the time.
    ~~~

    Brythyll at Easter Goes to the Church and Leaves Boy Outside in the Pushchair to Read

    The dark of the church reminds Bryll of water. This is what she wants to tell him when she finds him at last in his own lair. She had thought she was a hound chasing a rabbit, but that won’t do. This place is a cold lake, and she is swimming in it. She’s a trout after a minnow, or a minnow about to swallow a pike. This is what she keeps trying to remember. She must not forget the questions, the request. She must not let the smell of him, so glowing and near, distract her from asking.
    Where am I now? she’ll say, and where is it, where is the island you promised me? You said we’d live on an island far from the world, but it was just a room with a garden. I want the island. I want you to take me away. No-one will find us, no-one who can’t swim, that is. And there they are, Laurence and Boy and Nan swimming strongly, rhythmically through and over the water to the island of her mind.
    And then she sees him through the dim, stacking books in the pews, those books with slippery green covers full of hymns. Singing is not enough, he has once told her. What God needs is you, not your voice squeaking away. That means you are God, I suppose, she remembers saying over the pillows at him, naked as Jesus on the cross. And she had laughed. But had she really said that or was it simply one of those conversations you make up afterwards? After the event. The words you wish you had once said?
    She comes boldly near but he doesn’t look up. He doesn’t turn his head. How can he be unaware when she is suffocating with his presence? Well, he shall be startled, startled enough to drop the pile of books under his arm. Oh, he will say, it’s you. Come away to the island. Come where the dark surrounds us like water.
    Ah, she thinks, but the shore is where I have always lived, except for that one excursion, that is. It is the land of Laurence, of Boy whose mind she has invented out of shreds, of little Nan who has invented herself. Most of all it is that other church open to the sky. It is the boxful of bones and the crypt full of stories.
    When he looks up all she says is, I’ve come for you. You must bury the found baby. And she opens her jacket to show the small skull grinning from under her left arm.
    Why? he asks turning round, seeing her, looking coolly into her eyes. She was in her box and we broke into it, Bryll explains. Laurence found her. We need to hear the proper words. The baby needs to hear them. Bring holy water and a book, we have two candles. Bring matches too. Six o’clock, he says and turns away. She knows he is pretending he’s forgotten the room, the bed, the pillows, the promise of the island. Or he has taken someone else there and was done with her. So he has freed me, and Bryll smiles, knowing whatever he may think, she has him hooked in the mouth like a fish. He will never be quite free of her. She remembers the grandfathers’ fishing lessons. She begins to play him. She begins to bring him in.
    At last slowly while years and centuries pass, where continents vary and frogs become snakes and then birds which fly up and are lost in the sky, he lifts up his head and sees her. Lord lift up Thy countenance upon us: she has read this in the torn prayerbook in the crypt. Lift up your head and see me, I am here, she wanted to say Beloved, but not in this cold dark with the smell of dust upon the air.
    What are you doing here, he says mildly. Without much interest, it seemed, but she knew she could tell that he was startled beyond startle. He had not