The Flood

1

When Mary Miller was ten years old and not yet a witch, and Carsden was still a thriving mining village, she would watch her brother Tom playing football in the park with his friends. She was attracted, young though she was, to their swagger, to the way they rolled their shirtsleeves up like their fathers and shouted for every ball. She would sit by the goalposts between which her brother danced and would console him when he let in a goal.

At that time she had a doll called Missie Lizzie, and she would clutch Missie Lizzie to her tiny chest as if sustaining her. The sun shone low over long summer evenings and the rumble of the pit-head lulled her into near sleep. Smoke drifted over the park while locomotives slipped away over distant rails. There was a rhythm to everything in those days, as if some tune were being played behind a veil beyond which the young girl could not see. The trees beside the hot burn snapped their fingers, and the lapping of the burn itself added the final cadence to the symphony.

One evening Mary was sitting against the iron fence behind Tom’s goalposts, he having gone to the centre of the pitch to share in the half-time refreshments, and was falling asleep as usual with Missie Lizzie lying across her lap. The air was so clear that bird-calls seemed to carry to her ears from way over past the Auld Kirk and even Blackwood’s Farm, and these were the sounds to which she fell asleep. She was a small, skinny thing with long black hair tied back into a ponytail which fell tantalisingly down her back and which, consequently, her brother Tom in one of his moods would often pull. Every hair would cry out as if burning when he did this, and she would run crying to her mother who would tell her father who would scold the bully, perhaps even letting him taste his pit-belt. Then Tom would not speak to her for a day or two, and would give her killing looks. Not today, though; there could be nothing but innocence in the park on such an evening. She could almost feel the warmth of the hot burn behind her, bringing its murky deposits down from the pit-head to be washed into the River Ore and carried out to sea. In the winter, steam rose from the hot burn and people warmed themselves beside it, some even waggling their fingers or bared toes in the dark liquid to revive the feeling in them. Sometimes the burn was red in colour, sometimes black, and occasionally a clearer bluey-grey, but only when the pit was idle.

Mary had been sleeping for only a few minutes when she found herself edging towards wakefulness because of some sounds nearby. There was a rustling and a faint whistling behind her, then muffled sniggers and more rustling. She knew, as she opened her eyes, that something was behind her, creeping through the field across which the hot burn threaded its course, nearing the railings against which she now sat petrified. From her still bleary eyes she could just make out Tom in the centre of the football pitch. He was laughing and biting into a half-orange. He would save a piece for her. The sounds were coming nearer, but she was too afraid to scream. Her mother had told her of the goblins who lived in the hot burn and would eat any young children who wandered close to their home without taking an adult for protection. Tom had laughed and told her that it was all a fairy story to stop her from going too close to the burn and maybe falling in. But perhaps, she now thought, she really had strayed too close to the goblins’ home. Perhaps if she edged away now it would be all right.

Suddenly something growled immediately behind her and an arm, very human in design, snaked through the iron railings and snatched Missie Lizzie from Mary’s lap. She screamed and stood up. The boys were whooping and careering across the field, tossing the doll between them. Mary was horrified. She screamed a high-pitched squeal and squeezed between the iron bars, almost getting stuck but eventually forcing herself through. Tom was shouting at her as she stumbled through the barley, which prickled her legs terribly. She made relentlessly towards the two boys, who seemed quite keen for her to follow. They were older boys, older even than Tom, and she recognised both of them. They grinned at her and waved Missie Lizzie towards her, and she was bawling with the tears threatening to blind her. She held out her arms towards Missie Lizzie as she walked towards her tormentors. When she was too close, the boys darted around her and trotted a little distance away. They waved the doll and laughed and jeered at her, and all the time she could hear Tom’s voice angrily behind her as he tried to climb over the fence.

‘I want it back, I want it back!’ she cried as she reached out her arms. The doll, with its smiling stupid face and its red dress, was hanging high in the air now, was pinned by an adolescent arm against the deepening blue sky below which the hot burn murmured. She stood on tiptoe, ignoring the boy and his outstretched arm, and just touched Missie Lizzie’s foot with her fingertips. The doll was released, and a soft push in Mary’s back was all that was needed to send her toppling into the hot burn, screaming as she hit the water, taking in a choking mouthful of silt and heat and darkness. Her eyes stung as if sand had been thrown into her face. She knew that she should not be here. She gasped, feeling her hand breaking the surface of the water and touching the floating body of her doll. There was a swirling and a rushing and a bubbling of liquid. She had no right to be in this place. This was a warm dying place and dark. Her knees touched the gritty, yielding bottom, her hands in light and air and her body submerged. It was quite pleasant, really, to be away from the teasing boys and their cruelty. She began to give herself to the thick water. Then her hair was screaming, rough things clawing at it. There were goblins in the hot burn and she had disturbed their nest. She opened her eyes, but was blind. Then, hair screaming still, she felt herself rising from the liquid. Her hair was on fire, and suddenly she was in brightness and air and was being sick, spewing up all the silt and the darkness. She was dragged to the bank and her hair stopped screaming. Voices rushed into her ears as the water rushed out. ‘By Christ, Tom, that was close.’ ‘Aye, pulled her out by the pigtail.’ ‘She was down there a while, though.’ ‘Are you all right, Mary?’ ‘I saw them. It was Matty Duncan and Jock McLeod’s boy.’ ‘Is she all right there, Tom? Should we fetch your mum?’

Her dress clung to her like the dress of a rag-doll. Her stomach hurt and her eyes hurt and her head hurt, and she was shaking and crying and was afraid. She felt Tom touch her face, then she opened her eyes.

Her mother listened to the story and then told her to go upstairs and change; she would be up in a minute to help her. Mary left her mother with Tom and climbed the narrow staircase to the room where she slept with her brother. She had a small room of her own, but it was used more as a cupboard due to the dampness of its walls and its bitter cold in winter. The mumbled voices downstairs were too quiet to be truly calm. Mary began crying again as she pulled the ruined dress from her body and sat on her bed. She had disobeyed her mother. She had gone near the hot burn without an adult, and now she would never be forgiven. Perhaps her father would spank her with the heavy leather belt. She had disobeyed her parents, whom she loved, and that was why she cried.

She seemed to sit in her bedroom for a very long time, and she heard the front door opening and closing several times. She was trapped there. It was as if she had been told in school that someone was going to beat her, and having to go through the rest of the day in fear of the bell for going home. She stared at her dirty dress and sat and waited. Finally, a heavy noise on the stairs told her that her father was coming up. He opened the door and looked in on her. She was shivering, naked. He had the coal-dust still on him and his piece-bag slung over his shoulder. His eyes burned, but he came over and rubbed his daughter’s hair. He asked if she was all right, and she nodded and sniffed.

‘Let me get washed then,’ he said, ‘and we’ll clean you up and get you dressed.’

There seemed a conspiracy in the house for the rest of the day, with no one mentioning what had happened. Her father washed her and helped her into her good dress and she sat by the fireside while he read a book. They were alone in the house. Much later, after her father had made some toast and jam and she had said that she was not hungry and still had not been scolded, the front door opened and closed quietly and Tom came in. He sat at the table with them and drank tea. Then Mary’s mother came in, taking off her coat as she entered the living room.

‘By God, I told them,’ she said. Her face was flushed and her hands fluttered about her as she made a fresh pot of tea. ‘I told them.’

When the family were seated around the table, they began to talk. It seemed that Mary’s mother had gone round to Mr Duncan’s house and Mr McLeod’s house and had had words with each of them. Tom smiled twice as his mother told her story, but his father was quick to admonish him on both occasions.

Mary was made much of that evening, being allowed to stay up well past her bedtime. Neighbours came to sympathise and to find out just what Mrs Miller had done. These women sat with their arms folded tightly and listened carefully to their neighbour’s narrative. They looked at the girl and smiled at her. By bedtime, Mary was aware that she was not to be scolded for her part in events. She went to bed with a lighter heart, but awoke twice during the night from a nightmare in which she was drowning again, but this time the faces above her were grim and unhelpful. An old man watched her and even seemed to be holding her below the surface, while a boy stood behind him and shouted. This boy looked quite like Tom, but was a bit older. She could not hear what he was shouting, but she saw him hammering on the old man’s back. Then the hands of the goblins were upon her and she screamed through the water, waking up with her sheets knotted around her and her body drenched with sweat.

The following morning, Mrs Miller stared at the girl in horror. Mary’s hair had turned silver in the night.

2

Her mother wrapped Mary’s head in one of her own headscarves and walked with her down to the doctor’s. It was raining, and a fine mist swirled around the large house which served Dr McNeill as both surgery and home. It was early still, but Mrs Miller made it clear to the housekeeper that this was an emergency. The housekeeper looked at the weeping, frightened child for a moment, then told them to wait in the hallway while she fetched the doctor from his breakfast.

Tears had made raw red streaks down Mary’s cheeks. Her eyes were puffy and her face was confused. Her mother rubbed her shoulders, near to weeping herself. She tucked stray hairs back into the large headscarf and whispered what few words of comfort she was able to summon up from her common store.

Dr McNeill, white-haired and fifty, emerged at last from his dining room. He was buttoning his waistcoat, and had newly perched his half-moon glasses on his nose. Mary’s mother apologised for interrupting him. He waved her apology aside.

‘Well,’ he said, patting Mary on the shoulder, ‘and what seems to be the trouble here?’ He knew the two of them very well, having treated Tom and Mary over the years for the usual run of childhood ailments. He knew that the mother was averse to seeing a doctor until the old cures, the myths and the herbs, had been tried and found wanting. So it had to be pretty serious for her to be here at this time of the morning, though things, it had to be admitted, did not look serious. ‘I think we’d be better off in the surgery, don’t you, Mrs Miller?’ He guided them through the unfamiliar geography of his home until they reached the large room, full of cupboards, glass jars, table, chairs, and examining couch, where he held his surgeries. Usually you entered this room from the waiting room, which was itself reached via a door at the back of the house. Mary thought that the present journey was a bit like being an explorer, coming upon some welcome landmark. She was glad to sit on the familiar chair in front of the big desk. The smiling man with the scrubbed looking hands sat across from her, and her mother sat nervously on a chair beside her. Her mother tugged gently at the headscarf, as if it were a bandage over a healing wound, and brought it clear of the girl’s head. The doctor, coughing, came from behind his desk to examine Mary’s hair. He stroked it gently while Mrs Miller explained about the incident of the previous day. He nodded and sighed several times before returning to his chair.

Mary’s eyes had wandered by now, the adults seemingly intent in their conversation, and she studied the strange jars on the doctor’s shelves. Some of them contained purple liquid and solid, jelly-like things. She would have liked to look at these things more closely, but a shiver held her back. Jelly was not her favourite dessert. One Saturday afternoon, while her mother had gone shopping along Kirkcaldy High Street, her father had taken Tom and her down to the beach. The sand was not white. Her father explained that it was all mixed up with coal-dust By the water’s edge were hundreds of washed-up jellyfish. Tom had prodded them with a stick, and sea-water had bubbled out of them. Mary had cried and her father had had to take her up to the promenade for an ice-cream, while, in the distance, Tom had explored with his stick the length of the tainted beach.

‘Oh no,’ the doctor was saying, ‘no, it’s by no means unheard of. You must know yourself, Mrs Miller, someone or other who has changed physically after having had a shock. Widows, people after a long illness, and others who have simply had a fright. Oh no, it’s by no means unheard of, and I’m not one hundred per cent sure that the process is reversible. Mary’s hair might remain like this for the rest of her days. She’ll get used to it, of course, and so will her friends at school. I don’t think there’s any physical cause for concern. There might, however, be psychological damage, latent or otherwise. Time will tell, just as time will heal.’

The thing in the purple liquid looked as if it had drowned in that jar. Mary could imagine it twisting and pushing at the glass, but being unable to escape, rising to the surface to find that a lid was holding fast above it. No air, only an intake of purple water and the darkness, the goblins, the swathe of darkness, the choking in the throat and the final urge. The lid not budging.

Mary let out a scream.

She went to bed early and her mother wiped her brow, telling her to try to get some sleep. The light was left on in the bedroom. Neighbours were still dropping in to enquire about her, but they were kept downstairs, and though Mary leaned out of bed with her ear to the floor, still she could not make out much of the muted conversations. She felt like a leper. The quiet in and around the house was funereal, and Mary hoped that she would die soon. She tiptoed into her parents’ bedroom and stole her mother’s vanity mirror through to her own room. In bed again she examined her hair and saw how it aged her pale face, how it seemed someone else’s hair, even when she pulled it. Not a girl’s hair, but the hair of an old woman, a woman no one would ever marry.

When she heard her father’s boots heavy on the stairs again, she hid the mirror under her pillow and lay down as if asleep. Her father entered the room quietly, his breathing desperately controlled, and touched ever so lightly her silvery hair. Mary jumped up and clung to him, the tears gurgling in her throat. He wept with her, sitting himself on the edge of the bed. ‘Great God Almighty,’ he said. ‘Sshh, sshh.’ He patted her softly, cradled her, and finally calmed her so that she was lying down again. He lay on his side beside her and told her that the two big boys had got a hiding from their fathers, and had been hunted by her mother besides. He told her that one of them, Matty, would be starting work at the pit in a few weeks and would get a thumping from him at that time, just to let him know what was what. He told her a story about a princess with long silver hair and about the prince who saved her, but he stumbled as he spoke, and Mary could see that it was not a real story at all, but one that he was making up and that had never been true. Sometimes her father treated her as if she were still a little girl. She was ten, she often told him, and did not believe in made-up stories any more. Stories had to be true; stories had to be real. Her father’s stories were those of a tiny child with a will to believe, and they seemed the only stories he had. He patted her hair again as if it were a kitten, then told her that she must try to get some sleep, for she would have to go to school tomorrow.

No, she thought when he had gone. She could not go back to school so soon. But it was true: the summer was already over. She would be ill. She would be ill until her hair turned black again. She could not go to school when she was so very ill. Her friends would visit her in her bedroom and would not comment upon her hair, because hair that colour suited someone so very ill.

When her mother wakened her with a shout next morning, Mary leapt out of bed and rubbed her eyes. She whistled as she dressed. Tom was still asleep, and she hit him with his own pillow, reminding him of the new term, and that he was starting at secondary school today and wasn’t he excited? He groaned with his head beneath his pillow.

At the breakfast table her mother sat with a beautiful shawl around her shoulders. Mary sat down and took a bite from a slice of toast on her plate. Her mother smiled warily.

‘How are you this morning, pet?’ she said. Only then, in that scalding second, did Mary remember: the hot burn; her silver hair; her illness. She spat out the grey lumps of toast and ran upstairs to be sick.

3

Mary learned quickly the rules of the game. To defeat the disability she had first to ride with it and make a casual joke of it in company, never admitting the pain inside, turning it to her advantage. In this way, she soon found her friends to be much the same as ever, and discovered that people accepted her, though with pity.

There was still some suspicion, naturally, though few doubted the ability of a shock such as she had had to turn a person’s hair white. Actually, some black did reappear in her hair. She became accustomed to brushing it in front of her new mirror. In a school full of nonentities, she found her identity easier to achieve than most. She was a kind of celebrity. Her mother did not take her back to see Dr McNeill and his purple jars.

Two weeks after school restarted, however, there was a horrible accident at the pit. Matty Duncan had been working there for a single day. On that first day he had been knocked almost unconscious by Mary’s father. He had expected it, of course, and assumed that would be the end of it. He went to work on the second day with a careful smile on his shifting face. He was a wage-earner now. His parents were pleased that some more money would be coming in, and Matty himself was only too glad to be out of school at long last and in his rightful place beside the other men of the village. He watched the wheel turning above the pit-cage as it creaked and brought the iron cage to the surface. He stepped in with the others and muttered the usual comments with them, careful to be respectful at all times. He descended into the scoured earth, slipping below ground level, deeper than the open-cast quarry, deeper, it seemed, than everything in the world. The descent took an age, the ropes creaking and shuddering. Matty thought of his first wages, and then, with a horrible opening of some door which he quickly closed, of the many days and weeks and years he could spend descending this shaft. A lifetime of burrowing, of coughing and spluttering and getting dead drunk on a Saturday. No, he thought, that’s not for me. This was just pin money. When he had saved enough he would go to England, or even America. He would not be trapped into living an underground life like the poor buggers around him. First things first, though. Before he began saving he had to buy himself a record-player and a motorbike and get together some money for a holiday at Butlins with Tarn Corrie.

The cage jolted to a stop. Someone pulled the gate back and they stepped out into the cold, dripping darkness. As he walked along the tunnel, Matty’s head was full of other things he would do with his money. Cigarettes. Beer. No problem.

There was a rumbling from ahead. He peered in front of him, shining his torch along the tunnel. He moved to the front of the pack, showing his keenness. The others were mumbling.

‘By Christ,’ said one of them, ‘that could be a cave-in up ahead.’ They moved forwards a little, and the rumbling grew louder. Much louder.

‘Get back to the fucking cage!’

They were running, and suddenly Matty was at the rear of a line that scurried too slowly towards the light at the end of the shaft. He could not get past the older, lumbering men. The bags over their shoulders slapped against the sides of the narrow passage. Great shadows were being cast everywhere, as if their pit-lamps were searchlights shining into the night sky. Then the light was brighter, a sudden eruption of daylight. Matty turned towards the rumbling and the fireball hit him full in the face and body, before flying up the shaft towards the ascending and empty cage.

They stood around the young man’s body. Their backs and hair were singed, some badly, but the boy had taken the brunt of it. His whole front was black, charred as if he had spent an infernal lifetime digging coal. The smell of burnt flesh was overpowering. His hair was nothing, a few curled and brittle stalks. His face had melted back to the raw flesh. One man retched quietly in the corner while the cage descended and a crowd at the surface shouted anxiously through the smoke down the echoing shaft of sunlight.

‘The boy saved my life,’ said Mary’s father later. ‘I was right behind him when he fell. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been me. I knocked him out one day, he saved my life the next. It doesn’t seem right somehow.’

It was after Matty’s death that the rumours began and Mary, who had survived a drowning and whose hair had turned silver overnight, found herself as marked by the accident as did the miners with their scorched backs and their memories of that hot, crisp smell.

4

Mary’s hair turned no darker and no lighter. She grew up like her friends, and in five years seemed to have put the events of her childhood behind her. Her eyes took on glints of female knowledge and her speech modulated to the knowing tones of those who stood against the wall of the village café to discuss dating and pop music. Mary’s hair was thick and long, and her eyebrows were as dark as her eyes. She had a sensual quality which many boys admired, and her boyfriends were many. Never did she think back to that night when she had told herself that no boy would ever look at her in her ugliness.

She did not really notice that Carsden was slowly fading in strength as she grew. It was the most insidious and subtle of changes, and she was not alone in ignoring the fact and its consequences. The miners were looking around them for other, productive pits. The mine at Carsden was proving difficult. The seams of coal were fragmented and thus hard to mine at a keen rate. Economics became a new word on the lips of the women shopping in the recently opened supermarket. This was 1968. Far away there was talk of revolution and radical change. The world was slipping and sliding on the edge of a new era of communication. Carsden slept longer and deeper than most. The houses were still furnished in the non-style of the late 1950s, and the men and women still wore the same period clothes. They talked about and thought the same things as they had always done. There was little place for discussion and change in a place which was concerned with survival at the most basic level. Soon, however, it became clear that the good days, such as they had been, were over, even for communities like Carsden who refused to accept that this was the case. The local colliery was mined out. Kaput. Nothing could be said which would have improved things, and nothing would have been said in any case, so nobody said anything. They just muttered under their breath conspiratorially, blaming everything that came to hand in cold, dull voices — everything except themselves.

The lie of the land was indeed the cause of it all, so the local paper said. The strata of rock around the village had been squeezed into awkward layers through the course of millennia, to the point where seams were narrow and often only ten or so feet long anyway. The National Coal Board said that coal was more expensive to mine in Carsden than its selling price per ton.

So people looked to the elements and cursed the economics which had robbed them of their livelihoods. Coal was the life force, the king of the land, and when the king died there was nothing left but the anarchic struggle to find new jobs, the rush to emigrate. And emigrate they did. Many of Carsden’s younger inhabitants just packed up and moved the twelve or so miles that would ensure them a job in light engineering or electronics. The older ones, the unemployable ones, were left to watch the first wave of children move out. They had to realise that a bus ride would now separate them from their grandchildren. Drained of these lives, the old town became dry and cracked and hardened, its buildings seeming to frown at every passing car.

Moving, however, caused problems for the emigrants.

They found it hard to make friends in the pioneer New Towns. They had been born in Carsden with their family around them like a tribe. They had been educated there, had met their friends at school there, had married there. Suddenly they were in strange territories, where the harling was white on the walls and the shopping centre was under cover and spacious and little factories opened up all around the houses offering work on production lines. There seemed no security in these kinds of job. These were readymade societies all right, but they lacked the essential womb-like warmth which had been the mainstay of the old village. Suddenly neighbours did not know one another. There was room only for cold nods of the head in passing, and the occasional argument when a party or a television was too noisy. Still, the streets were relatively clean, and the facilities were good, if impersonal: created for rather than by the community.

And all this caring was in place of something opaque, intangible, something the migrant families knew they missed but were unable to express in words.

Soon a few of the earliest colonists had even straggled back to the village, to ponder the imponderable and wheel the baby’s pram round to the parents’ house again at weekends. They all had similar tales to tell of life outside Carsden: it was an unfriendly world. The furthest most of them ever travelled thereafter was to Blackpool in July.

Still, the trend was towards getting out, and if they could not get away for ever then they got away at weekends, visiting the same growth towns they had despised and spending their money on the week’s food from the vast, spotless supermarkets. They bought knick-knacks from the large stores, and drank in pubs promising something better, more upmarket than those back home.

Buses departed on the hour to Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes, and Mary watched in fascination the sunken faces that rode the red vehicles towards the coast or the interior. Their eyes were pink and vacant, their skin sallow. The old ones wore cheap clothes and chatted mindlessly about the television and the neighbours. The young families snapped at each other like lions beneath a parched tree. The teenagers were dressed as the magazines told them to, but their hair was lank, slick. Their voices were loud as their eyes grinned at the pathos around them into which they were so keen to grow. They could be seen like this any Saturday, sitting with the rest in the tight seats, jerking whenever the driver changed gear.

This was the Carsden Mary inherited when she was fifteen and at the vital stage of growth. Her father sat in his chair much of the time. He had been made redundant a short time before and was bitter, cursing his inability to make manifest his innermost feelings. Mary’s mother still crocheted shawls and clothes, and they still sold well. They were well made. But even she was suffering, was going blind slowly and making mistakes she would not have made five years before. Mary saw all this, but thought little of it. She was a teenager, and had to be out of the house straight after the evening meal in order to go down to the park for a smoke and a chat with some boys and friends of hers. If she had to go near the murky trickle of water that had once been the hot burn, she did so with scarcely a thought, laughing off any remembrance of the day. She would chat in the grocer’s with the new Asian family, despite her father’s protestations, and would buy sweets from Mr Patterson at the Soda Fountain, though there was a better selection at the supermarket. She made choices consciously now, for she was growing up.

And she was still close to her brother Tom, who was working in a light engineering firm in Glenrothes but stayed at home still, being just seventeen. She would be leaving school in nine months or so. The prospect excited her, though Tom shook his head when she enthused about it. He looked less cheerful now than when he had still been at school. A gradual process of disaffection had led him to argue a few times with his father. Mary did not usually understand the cause or substance of these fights, but would take Tom’s side against the wheezing, ruddy-faced man anyway, and then feel guilty afterwards. Her father would be in a sullen mood for days, and she would make him cups of tea and try to smile him into cheerfulness. She thought that she might like to be a nurse one day.

She had a boyfriend too: a friend of Tom’s, though a year younger than him. She was not sure that she liked the boy, but he was older than her so she persisted with him. He would talk with Tom about emigrating, and Tom would listen keenly. When Tom said one evening at the dinner table that he was emigrating to Canada, Mary ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom. Tom sat the whole evening at the kitchen table talking with his parents. His father brought out a bottle of whisky and two of the good glasses so that they could discuss things in the proper tones. Tom’s mother was pale and silent. She studied her hands for most of the evening. The boy looked at her hands, hands capable of intricate weavings, and felt about to give in to their silent pressure. But this was not a decision that he had made easily. He had gone into it with various people, and had been in touch with an old family friend, Jimmy Gallacher, who worked in Canada and would put Tom up and see that he got a job in one of the sections of his own factory. A Scot, it was said, could always get a start in Canada. All Tom wanted now was the chance to try. He needed his parents’ consent, though, or the leaving would be all the harder. His father conceded to most of his points, while Mary coughed out her sobs as she sat in the bathroom.

That night, when Tom finally went to bed, having made sure that Mary had her back to him before he changed into his pyjamas, the whole house felt as though it had gone through a death. The air was full of a choking intensity.

There might have been a coffin on the table in the front room.

As soon as Mary heard the unmistakable creak of Tom’s bed and the rustle of the sheets being pulled up to his chin, she turned and sat up.

‘Are you really going, Tom?’ His hands were confidently behind his head, supporting him on the pillows. He had the look of a person who needed to do no more thinking, the look of a person who would not allow himself to go to sleep for some considerable time.

‘It looks like it. Will you miss me?’

‘Oh, Tom,’ she said, but could find nothing else to say, nothing that would have made any sense. It was a strange, tongue-tied feeling.

‘Well, that’s good,’ he said. ‘If I’m missed, it’ll make trips home all the nicer, won’t it?’ He chuckled. Mary hurried from her bed and knelt on the cold linoleum at the side of her brother’s bed. She was crying softly, the tears dredged up from some last ineffable source. His hands were in her hair, patting her, comforting her. He was struck dumb in a pleasing way. He had always been her big brother, but had never realised just what the bond entailed.

They sat together in silence for a time. Mary’s sobbing eased eventually, and a little later Tom thought that he had found some words for his little sister.

‘We’ve all got to make this decision sooner or later, Mary. You’ll have to make it yourself when you decide to leave home and get married or whatever.’

‘I’ll never leave here,’ she said, her eyes searching his for some weak point. Tom shook his head.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’re fifteen. You’re not a baby any more. You’ll want to leave soon enough when you see what it’s like outside of school. Suddenly you’re not special any more. Your friends have all gone off to become mature adults in boring jobs. You’ve not got enough brains to get a really good job, one that would take you away from the area. So what’s left? The pits are closed. This town is becoming a dump. I’m not going to stay put in a dump. Not me. Maybe I’m not going to make anything of myself in Canada, but I’m not going to make anything of myself here either, so where’s the difference?’

‘But you’ve got us!’ Mary whispered in anger and frustrated love. Tom was silent for a moment, his eyes forced finally to turn away from those of his fiery sister.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but what happens when that’s not enough? When that’s not enough and I’m too old and weighed down to do anything about it? You won’t always be here...’

‘But I will, Tom, I will.’

‘... and Mum and Dad haven’t got more than ten or twenty years left, have they? Everybody dies, Mary. It’s the only fact of life.’

‘You’re sick!’ she shouted. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Maybe I am,’ he said, closing his eyes.

Mary ran to the window and stood there, her blurred eyes staring out on darkness. The night was still. She used to be able to see the winding-wheel at the colliery from this window, but now it had been dismantled. A good home had been found for it in a mining museum in the Lothians.

An old man was shuffling past uneasily below her. He stopped and leaned against the lamp-post, seemed to gasp for breath, then finally forced himself to move off again, his shoes dragging over the pavement. Tom was speaking behind her. He was approaching the window. She did not want him to look out. She turned and went to hug him, and there they stood, in an embrace of silent childishness, until Tom’s feet got cold on the linoleum and he persuaded Mary to get back into bed.

5

It was a strange time, that autumn. Mary’s father was drinking quite heavily, though her mother tried to hide the fact from everyone and succeeded only in hiding the truth from herself. Hugh Miller would sit in his chair until the early hours of the morning. Then he would say that he was going for a walk and would not be seen again until late evening, dead drunk usually and shouting along the length of the street about the treachery of the National Coal Board, the dirty tricks, the cruelty of it all. Mary, horrified and in her nightdress, would watch him from her bedroom window. She would watch her mother, hair falling to her waist in preparation for bed, having to leave the house and manoeuvre the roaring drunk around the lamp-post, which threw a garish orange glow over the proceedings, lending to them the hazy quality of something happening on a screen. Mary would watch them weave their way into the house, would hear her father retching into the toilet bowl or the sink. Tom would breathe heavily, pretending sleep, his pillow over his head. Mary was sure that he saw it merely as a ploy to stop him from leaving, and this seemed to make him all the more determined.

‘What’s the use?’ her father cried. ‘What’s the use, eh? Where’s the reason in it? They’ve shut the pits and they’ve shut this and they’ve shut that. What’s a man supposed to do? No bloody use to anyone. That’s me.’ Mary’s mother would whisper with patient vehemence at him, and having got him into bed at last, a basin at his side, would look in on Mary and Tom, both of whom would be lying in shade and in heavy silence, a lack of even breathing, which would confirm their mother’s worst fears.

In the morning the pattern would be repeated. Mary grew sullen. A lot of things were to blame apart from her father’s new-found dependence. Some of it had to do with a large prevailing mood in the town. Teenagers there had been brought up in the Sixties, had been told of the good life to come. Now, the Seventies approaching, they were being shown something else, and were seeing at last that behind every promise lay the bad news. There seemed nothing left to hope for. Everything was slipping further and further away. They talked about nothing else at school. Yes, they discussed jobs and career prospects, but behind it all was the greater knowledge that somehow the decline of the town was pulling them down with it, as if the town and its offspring were a single, inseparable unit.

And as they came to consciousness, so did Mary come into womanhood. She sat in her silent room after school, sometimes toying with homework but more often just staring at the walls and at the posters pinned there, posters of the pop groups who had come to represent the now untenable dream. She cried for no apparent reason. She began to have nightmares, the gist of which would be forgotten on waking. She saw the day near when Tom would be leaving: 6 January 1969. It was so close.

On Christmas morning Mary brushed out her long silver hair for some considerable time. She sat cross-legged on her bed with her mirror wedged in her lap, and watched the waves of static wafting strands around her as if she were sea-blown. A carol service was on the radio. Mary hummed along. She did not want to go downstairs because her father and mother would be there and last night her father had screamed at her mother and had slapped her. Mary had heard it through the bedroom floor. She could not face having to look at either of them or trying to speak to her father. Tom had been away all night at a friend’s. He was home now. He was downstairs, where no one was speaking. The radio was loud in her room so that she would not hear the shouting, should there be any. This was the last Christmas before Tom left for Canada. She had looked at Canada in an atlas at school. It was huge, colossal really, and the towns and cities had good names. Some people there spoke French, but Tom could not. Why was he going to Canada when he could not speak French? It was far too late to put the point to him, so Mary brushed her hair and hummed carols instead.

Her mother shouted up the stairwell, her voice neutral. Lunch was ready. Mary felt as if she had just eaten a plateful of toast, yet she had to go down. There was no excuse.

She walked downstairs into silence. Her presents were the only ones left beneath the tree. Her father smoked in his chair. Tom, lying across the settee, was reading a book. Her mother could be heard singing softly in the kitchen. The large dining table had been ornately set. Mary drew out one of the chairs and sat down. There were six presents beneath the tree. There would be two from her mother and father, one from Tom, and three from her two aunts and one uncle. Her grandparents had died in the war. A whole generation had been erased.

Her mother brought in a steaming tureen of soup. ‘Here we are then,’ she said, and Mary thought that the smile on her bruised face was the saddest thing she had ever had to bear.

On Boxing Day, Mary’s mother went to visit her sister in Leven, taking an overnight bag with her. Mary feigned illness and would not be persuaded to go. Tom had arranged to meet with some friends, as had Mary’s father, so her mother left the house alone. The door clicked behind her. Mary did not expect to see her again. She saw it as her final leaving, and she did not blame her. When her mother returned the very next afternoon, no one but Mary was surprised.

But by then she was too distraught to be glad. Two months later, the family had their first letter from Tom in Canada, and Mary told her mother that she thought she was pregnant.

‘Please don’t tell Dad,’ she said through her tears. Her mother remained silent for a long time.

‘I’m not going to ask who it was,’ she said eventually. ‘Just answer me this: can he marry you?’ Mary screwed up her eyes and shook her head. Her mother sat examining her own hands. It was not an easy life. First her husband had taken to drink, then she had to watch her only son leave for a distant country, and now this. Her son and her daughter. She knew immediately when it had happened. Boxing Day. The whole house had been changed somehow when she had walked into it on the afternoon following. She should have guessed. People had always said that they were very close, even for brother and sister. Unnaturally close. She should have known. She stroked her daughter’s silvery dark hair and contemplated telling her husband the news. Would he guess what she had deduced?

As it turned out, Mary’s father said nothing, just drifted further into his own numbed world where nothing, it seemed, could hurt him. Mary’s mother was not surprised by this. She had always seen herself as the stronger of the two. He often called her “the battler” (in the earlier years of their marriage at least) and she supposed it was true enough. Resilience, she had found, was needed in plenty. She went to church regularly, and knew that every trial was something more than it seemed — a higher test and a kind of judgement. She prayed to God at her bedside on the evening after she had told her husband the bitter news, and she made him get down on his knees too.

‘This needs all our strength, Hugh,’ she said, but his words were slurred and he collapsed his head on to the bed after a few moments and wept himself silently to sleep. Mary’s mother raised her own head towards heaven and prayed with even more intensity. Strength was needed, Lord, strength was needed.

‘But our reserves are not limitless, Lord. Help us in our need. Help Mary to get over all of this. She is a young girl. Forgive her if you can. Bless my son and my husband, Lord. Both are good men at heart. And dear Lord God, please let the baby die at birth. I beseech thee, let the baby die. Amen.’

6

If the unthinkable had happened, then for Mary’s mother the worst had yet to come. For some time her husband had been friendly with George Patterson, a bachelor of forty who owned the town’s dusty and outdated sweet shop. They often went further afield in their drinking bouts, travelling to Lochgelly or Kirkcaldy for an evening’s entertainment and having to walk the sobering miles home after missing the last bus. In early April, with the town already knowing, as it inevitably would, that Mary was pregnant, and her mother stressing the need for her still to sit her exams, Hugh Miller was walking home with his friend George Patterson.

It was midnight, and enshrouded in a light mist the two men were unevenly trudging the grass verge towards Carsden. They had spent the evening in Kirkcaldy, and had gone down to the promenade after the pubs had closed in order to sniff the sea air. Hugh had sat on the sea-wall and had told George about the many occasions when he had walked with his children along the sands and bought them ices in the now defunct café. Having told his story, and having missed the last bus, they had begun to walk out of town along the main road. They tried hitch-hiking, but were too drunk for anyone to have wished to stop for them, and both knew it. By midnight they were halfway between the two towns. They had become separated to the sight by the mist, but kept up a shouted conversation, the substance of which was lost to the wind and the bitter cold. A car came towards them from Kirkcaldy. Its lights caught George Patterson, and it slowed a little. He jumped from the road on to the verge and waved the car past. It was picking up speed again when George heard Hugh say something out loud and then there was a sickeningly dull and heavy thud. The car stopped. George Patterson could see its red taillights through the mist and ran towards them. At the side of the road lay his friend.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ the driver was saying as he stood above the body in apparent horror. ‘I mean, he just jumped out of nowhere. For Christ’s sake.’

‘Hugh, Hugh man, are you all right?’ Patterson’s breath was heavy as he crouched unsteadily beside his friend.

Mary’s father was able to raise his head a few inches from the frozen ground.

‘I loved her, though, George,’ he murmured, and then coughed a little and was dead.

For Mary’s mother it was almost the end. The girl herself seemed almost too numbed by what had already occurred to be able to take in this latest tragedy, and her mother knew that Mary needed her strength. Indeed, it was that thought alone — that Mary needed her mother’s strength — which kept Mrs Miller from plunging into madness and hysteria. Instead she offered up increasingly bitter prayers to her Lord God and would receive mourners, many of whom were more interested in the condition of the daughter, with a smile like a bar of iron. Mother and daughter came closer and closer together during the arrangements for the funeral, the aftermath of the burial and the approaching birth. Tom could not be contacted, having apparently gone to the far north with a lumber squad, but Mrs Miller hoped that he would not come home in any case; not, at least, until the baby was born. She had forsaken her needlework altogether, but would still make up one of her famed herbal remedies whenever anyone asked her to. Fewer and fewer people did. They had money enough to live on, she told Mary. Mary herself sat her exams, did poorly, but had her father’s death taken into account come the final marking. She stayed at home all the time after that, and so was safe from the few wild and cruel rumours that flew around. Her father had committed suicide, it was said by some, and had done so because of the shame of his daughter’s pregnancy. The lad whoever he was — was to blame, said some, running away from his responsibilities. Then people remembered Matty Duncan, remembered the small witchy girl who had survived a drowning and who had sent a fireball on Matty to destroy him. Matty’s father was the source of these new pieces of evidence. Mary was all bad luck, some agreed. But Matt Duncan shook his head. Luck did not enter into it. She had power: power over the elements, perhaps even power over her own brother and father. The bitter-cold mornings spent shopping in the town were enlivened by these increasingly speculative discussions, while all around Cars den was decaying and altering, as the boards went up across another shop’s windows, wire mesh across the newsagent’s, and the snooker hall closed down for ever.

Sandy was born in the middle of September. When she was released from hospital and was home, one of the first things Mary did was to take the tiny boy to his grandfather’s still fresh graveside in the town’s cemetery. She held him in her arms and looked at the gravestone of shining grey and blue marble. Her mother stood beside her, a hand on her shoulder, and no tears were shed while the sun shone overhead and the baby lifted his face to the sky to gaze at the brightness. Crows chattered in the distance. The baby realised their presence and searched for a movement. He frowned when there was none. Afterwards, they walked back to the house in silence. The past had been somehow erased. The future could begin.