Starling, p.1
Starling, page 1
Starling
Sarah Jane Butler
Fairlight Books
First published by Fairlight Books 2022
Fairlight Books
Summertown Pavilion, 18–24 Middle Way, Oxford, OX2 7LG
Copyright © Sarah Jane Butler 2022
The moral right of Sarah Jane Butler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Sarah Jane Butler in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, stored, distributed, transmitted, reproduced or otherwise made available in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
ISBN 978-1-914148-18-7
www.fairlightbooks.com
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Designed by James Lewis
For Mum, with my love
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Acknowledgements
About the Author
The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure.
—William James
Garlic. This was anciently accounted the poor man’s treacle, it being a remedy for all diseases and hurts (except those which itself breed).
—Nicholas Culpeper
Chapter One
Spring had come too early and frost had blackened the first buds. Under the soil the seeds and roots waited again, and Starling waited too. Everything to its time, Mar always said. Mar would leave when it was time to leave.
At least the van was warm inside. It smelled of woodsmoke, damp wool drying, onion soup.
Dawn was a way off and Mar was still asleep. Starling could hear her breathing, slow and steady below the pebble-dash rattle of the rain on the roof. It had rained ever since they’d arrived, a winter of rain, and the van wouldn’t make it out of the wood even if Mar said it was time. The mud at the start of the track had been axle-deep when they drove in, the puddles glittering in the Luton’s headlamps as they closed the gate behind them, twisting the blue nylon rope back over the post. They were miles from the nearest house, and safe for a while, she hoped.
‘Fate smiles upon us,’ Mar had said, and the bare dark trees had swallowed them up.
Starling slept on her left side, eyes part open, the mattress shaped to her hip, just below the narrow shelf that ran high along the van’s side wall. She fitted into small spaces. Along her shelf lay a line of pale shells, a hagstone ready to hang, a jay’s turquoise feather. Everything that mattered was in the small bag under her head.
She didn’t need to look to see Mar. She would be lying on her back, eyes closed, breathing evenly as a midsummer’s sea swell. Mar released her hair at night and it spread deep red across the pillow, hung in great hanks over the side, touching the floor.
Unlike Starling, nothing about Mar was small. She filled every space. Not that she was a giant – she stood a couple of fingers taller than most, and she carried no fat – but when she came into a room or stepped into a fire circle, people moved back. Only Starling fitted beside her.
*
Starling sensed a vibration out beyond the clearing. She opened her eyes wide in the faint light filtered by the curtains. Nothing. It was a nothing. She let out her breath slowly and sat up, pushed her hair out of her eyes and slid down to the floor. She let Mar sleep on.
It was probably a fox. She lifted the door so it wouldn’t creak as she opened it and stepped out, sniffed. Yes, a fox. She pulled her boots on and squelched across into the wood to pee, remembered she’d need to dig a new pit soon.
Back in the van she lifted the kettle. No water. Mar had been up late the night before and must have made tea to keep herself warm. Starling had lain in bed listening to her rocking in her chair by the burner. At about midnight the rain had stopped briefly and she’d heard Mar open the door and stand in silence, listening to the night noises outside – an owl’s cry, a badger’s claws clattering over a log, a fox’s scream. The whisper of a dark wood. Starling had turned over and slept.
She took the water container and headed out, long-tailed tits lifting out of the bare branches ahead of her like a crowd of excited children on a windy day. The high sky held a handful of light. This wind might blow in new weather, carry away the rain at last, but she didn’t think so. She stamped through the wood, swinging the container, watching a patch of blue sky grow and vanish over the hill.
She chewed on a pinch of early blackthorn flowers, enjoying their bitter crispness, and started to hum. When she reached the field gate on the edge of the wood, she climbed over, and left the container tucked in by the fence. Here, where the wood reached into the field, a small sheltered patch of grass held the sun and the first nettles had pushed up through the damp soil a week ago. Now they were knee-high, leaves unfurled, startling green against the earth. Starling pulled a bag from her pocket and cut a cloudburst of nettle tops into it. Slim pickings, but she could smell the green in them, the spinachy tang they’d give the day’s soup.
*
As she came back through the trees she saw fresh smoke coming from the chimney. Mar must be up; she must have found something to get the burner going.
A curl of white fell through the air. Starling caught it, and another, held them on her palm: two scorched fragments of printed paper falling like seeds, sowing letters on the wood’s floor.
She went in. Mar was folding up her bedding, completely engaged with the task. Every task matters equally. Starling placed the kettle on the burner, bent and opened its door. Paper spilled out, not quite burned through, the print blackened by the heat. As the air reached the scorched edge of the book, the words turned to flame and twisted up through the smoke into the flue, forcing Starling to pull her hand away.
Mar stood by the table, hands flat in front of her, leaning forward and looking out of the window. She straightened, pulled her hair up and tied it.
Starling reached for the tea tin and shook it, the last few leaves skittering inside. Mar picked up her empty mug and went out to wait.
Mar’s silences were volcanic. Since she last spoke, Starling had kept out of the van as much as she could, being useful, quiet and invisible, hoping the eruption would be quickly over when it came. Sometimes they were more smoke than fire. She never could tell. But this had been a long wait.
Hearing the creak of the metal chair outside as Mar sat, Starling turned to the bookshelf. It held all their books, battered from rereading and sharing and passing on. Sometimes they came back years later from a friend who’d say, Hey, you should read this, it’s awesome. Changes your mind, you know, makes you see things differently. Thought of you when I read it. And Mar and Starling would take it back and put it on the shelf like an old friend in among the others. Starling liked to take them all down sometimes, put them into a new order: alphabetical, or by colour, or by category, or by the way they made her feel when she thought about them when she wasn’t there. Mar didn’t care what order they were in. She barely read these days. Starling tried to picture what was missing. They were only words, but Starling needed words.
Even when she wasn’t brewing a silence, Mar spoke less and less these days. She measured out words carefully, as if she and Starling were running out of sounds, the way they were running out of tea. Starling wondered what Mar had been turning over and over last night in the darkening van, what was coming.
She poured water into the pot and went out to her.
If you sat silent long enough, you could hear the rain coming through the air two fields away, even before the blackbird warned you. Starling passed Mar her mug of tea and stood beside her looking at the brightening sky, clutching her warm mug.
Silence doesn’t lie.
She knew better than to ask Mar why she had burned the book and sent the verses spiralling up the chimney to rain down on the earth. We need no possessions. Truth lies within us. She watched the steam rise from her mug. Mar sipped her tea and closed her eyes, the sun pale on her lids.
The wind lifted the treetops and a handful of drops fell flashing from the branches onto the wet leaves at Starling’s feet. She drank her tea in quick gulps. Mar said nothing. Maybe she had used up all her words. She didn’t need to say more, after all. Starling wondered if Mar’s head was as full of words as hers was, chattering like the starlings she was named after. Mar spoke like a slow river, tried to teach her to flow with the day, to breathe, hear, see in rhythm with the natural w
Starling put her mug down, pulled out the kindling box from under the van and shook the twists of birch bark and tiny twig ends into one corner. Mar’s cheek twitched. She didn’t need to say anything. Starling knew it. Start your day as you mean to live it, in peace and stillness. She set off to gather kindling.
*
They were parked down a narrow track that would be grassy come high summer but right now was two runnels of thick mud. They were stranded. Their beautiful van hid in a clearing deep in the heart of an old English wood, smoke trickling out of the chimney. It could have been idyllic.
Mar had created paradise on the sides of her Luton. She was an artist, and her trademark was the kind of heaven that Henri Rousseau painted: luscious velvety and glossy leaves you could see the lifeblood running through, profusions of perfumed flowers, huge and singing with energy, but in Mar’s version every plant was native to the woods and fields they passed through, and twice as glorious and a hundred times more scented and vibrant. There were columbines, daisies, woodruff, and the herbs of the earliest spring were there too – nettles, cleavers, dead-nettles, wild garlic, dandelion leaves, hawthorn leaves, all shining in the low sun. Ground ivy too, though Starling dreaded the day they were reduced to eating ground ivy. The day she put more than a sprig in a stew was a sure sign the winter had gone on too long. It had its place, though, curling round the handle on the van’s rear door.
It was an advert for Mar’s work, though that’s not why she kept on painting it, filling in chip marks in a dog rose’s petal, refreshing the brilliant white of a snowdrop. One day she had transformed the bonnet into a wild and generous vegetable patch, hiding stories and friends in the shadows. The van seemed to be part of her, and while others tried to conceal theirs, pretending they were workmen parked up for a quick brew, Mar saw no need. And it was true, for years wherever they went people stopped to look at the van, and asked who painted it, where were they going, how did they live, and sometimes they asked to look inside. Time was, Mar used to let them look – she’d say Let them see that our van is more beautiful inside than any of their houses.
That was long ago. Starling pushed the kindling under the van and sniffed the air. ‘The garlic’ll be flowering if we get more of this sun.’
Mar tilted her face to the weak spring light. The low sun chiselled out the lines of her jaw, cheekbones and brow. She was splendid, a warrior whose energy burned inside her.
People who didn’t know them never guessed they were mother and daughter. Starling was used to their surprise when they found out. It wasn’t just the way they looked: Starling was dark and smart and snap-twig skinny, and as restless as her namesake next to Mar, stiller and stronger than a mountain.
‘I’ll make another brew.’ She reached for Mar’s mug, watched a blackbird skip into the winter-bare bramble patch. A squirl of dead leaves lifted from the ground and fell again. She tried to concentrate on them. She tried to keep her feet still, and counted her breaths in and out, felt the energy of life breathe in, the toxins of her negative thoughts snag and fail to flow away. But the sun was shining. She gave up and tiptoed back to the van. Mar would be there for hours, pulling the energy of the land to her.
Starling had wood to cut.
*
Out on the edge of the woodland Starling placed her hand on the trunk of the fallen oak. Its bark was harsh and resistant even after months of rain and sun. Standing tall on the wood’s edge, it had been first to feel the gales two autumns past when the wind had turned and driven in from the east. The storm had caught the oak’s westerly roots by surprise, and one vast gust had filled its canopy of golden leaves and toppled it, ripping its roots from the earth as it fell. When a wind comes from a strange direction, even the greatest trees can be caught. Starling thanked it for the warmth it would give them. They had to keep the burner alight. Its smoke above the trees was a signal to anyone, but they had no choice. The winter had gone on too long. They needed to move on, draw the fresh air of the road through the van. Their breath alone set condensation running down the windows, and under the smell of Mar’s herbs and the soup pot there was a mustiness, the signs of damp creeping into their mattresses and clothes. The air coming in through the windows was as moist as the air inside, so there was nothing for it, the burner stayed lit, and they’d have to leave soon before someone found them. Starling looked out across the fields through roots that splayed like dirty sunbeams against the grey sky.
They were doing no harm, but even if the sun came and dried them out, they would never be allowed to stay. They never were. The bailiffs would impound the van. Mar and Starling had no fuel, and there was no one left to give them a tow, no one to lend them a few quid to get a couple of gallons to see them on their way. No one to protect them against a rock through the window.
Beyond the roots, on the horizon, a row of trees ran high across the rim of the field, swaying in the wind. Rooks exploded into the air above them, circling, climbing and twisting above a single figure walking from left to right. Starling crouched and watched until the walker passed under the trees and out of sight, waiting for the rooks to drop. She measured in her mind the thick branch that lay by her knees. It should last a while, and oak that had lain a couple of years would give them good lasting heat.
She unzipped her coat and felt in the lining for her phone. She hadn’t turned it on for weeks, saving its last charge. She thumbed the volume all the way down, though she knew it wouldn’t ring. She had no credit, and it was months since she’d last used it so she’d been cut off. But Mar’s hearing was like an owl’s and you never knew. The screen brightened, and Starling peered at the last message she’d received, almost a year ago.
Hey Star, are u nr? Come see us. Gotta floor if u fed up with mud.
Where was Luc now? She’d no way of knowing if he was still at the address he’d texted her. She turned the phone off and pushed it back into its secret pocket. These phones serve for surveillance and control of fools. They suck people in with promises of friendship that mean nothing. See these hands? These eyes? They are where truth lies.
Luc had given Starling the phone not long before he left, an ancient Nokia good only for texts and a call if she had credit. She touched her pocket and picked up the bow saw.
Each trip out here she risked someone hearing the saw. At first its teeth struggled to settle into the gnarls of the bark, but soon the sawdust piled on the dark soil and she let her mind empty as she worked. That was the good thing about chores: the pull and push tugged the thoughts out of her head if she let them.
She used to long for quiet, a moment of silence with no shouts, dogs barking, kids crying, hammering, clanking of pans and starter motors. Now that she lived in silence she missed the racket of a full camp.
Starling sawed enough logs to last a week. They were her offering and she let the bark cut into the skin on her hands as she shouldered the first length, shifted her weight and started back towards the van. Rain hissed across the field towards her, and by the time she had carried all the logs to the pile, she was soaked.
*
Starling could hear the sound of Mar moving around inside the van, her feet shifting the boards of the floor, the clank of the cookpot lid. They were coming to the end of their winter supplies, but Mar could always make something to eat. Last week Starling had caught a pheasant and they’d make the stock last a while yet. The nettles would be good. Still, they were both thinner than they’d been a month ago. This was the hardest time. But they’d keep going.
It would be easy to walk away, get a job, a floor, a room, always have a meal that filled you on the table, and more in the cupboard where it came from. But such a life held no meaning – what was the point of living as if you were not part of the land? Of buying a sauce in a jar that tasted of chemicals? Of never smelling the cold jade of midnight in February or the feel of a pike nudging your leg in the river in June? You might as well not live. The real world was here. If Starling and Mar wanted to eat, they had to know where the first dandelions would come up in January, how to save seeds and nuts in autumn, how to make jam and salt meat for the lean months. They were survivors. More than survivors. We are women who live needing nothing, needing no one. We are women who live in full connection with our mother earth. We will never betray her.
