Elsie
‘If you rest your head against his chest you can hear the beat of his heart,’ she said to the small group of villagers gathered around her. But because of the rumours of sickness, they did not venture near Elsie and her wooden man. She lovingly moved her head against the broad barrel of his chest and felt the thud, thud, like the knock on a door. The villagers exchanged smirks.
Even during ordinary times people had kept their distance from Elsie, she was twenty-three but had the face of a woman much older. People said she was a snob, a liar, a petty thief. People said she’d had a hand in the death of her parents, because when their farm had burned she’d been found, aged eight, untouched in her nightgown cowering in the chicken coop. They didn’t say that at the time of the fire, but they said it now.
After the fire, Elsie had been shipped off to an aunt in a large industrial town by the coast. The village forgot her until she returned a woman, having come into her inheritance. She bought a small cottage by the river, one she’d had her eye on as a girl. There she’d sit on the back step peeling carrots watching the waters of the river churn; she filled the front garden with wild garlic.
The architect employed her because she was skilled with her hands but he left her be in the model making workshop. People disliked her for her airs, and, I suspect, they distrusted her for having known a world beyond their remote village. She made them feel diminished. Theirs was a place of fierce pride.
That summer, when whispers of the sickness further afield began to weave through the streets, the mayor ordered the closure of the village gates. Although Elsie had not left the village for four years people suddenly skirted round her, crossed the road. In the queue outside the dairy, young boys, echoing their parents, whispered in chorus, ‘foreigner’. Elsie began to stuff her ears with cottonwool.
The wooden man had already been a project but she quickened her work, staying late at the shop after hours, talking to him, murmuring to him, as she varnished his limbs, as she crafted mechanical joints for each of his toes, as she wound up a spring so that he might have a heart that could knock against his rib cage. On the Thursday afternoon that he was finished they walked home. Tentatively, she took his hand.
In the weeks that followed, she was sometimes taken aback, hurt even, when he said something that she hadn’t planned for him to say. When he responded to her worries with too much joy, when his desires differed from hers. Sometimes his separateness put her on edge. She reminded herself that sameness wasn’t necessary for love. Having lived most of her life alone, she took time to adjust to living with another, to his habits, to his channels of thought, to his way of making eggs or his tendency to leave the tap running. At night she lay against his smooth wooden chest and listened and felt full. She liked it when he let her oil his skin. She liked it when they waded into the river together and fished for trout. She told him, with so serious a frown it verged on comic, that it was them against the world. The mood of catastrophe and narcissism suited their romance.
I hardly need to say that living with the wooden man further shredded her reputation. The architect was losing work anyway because of the lockdown, but he might have kept her on the payroll were it not for the wooden man. He didn’t want to associate with Elsie anymore so he made it publicly known that she was laid off.
Elsie and the wooden man ate a lot of wild garlic after that, and dug up the potatoes earlier, really, than they should have. But they were happy, they could spend more time together lazing under the sun. They were fortunate that the river brimmed with fish that year. Soon they hardly went into the village centre at all.
When someone in the village caught the sickness, some blamed Elsie and her bewitched wooden man. At night they came with stones. Elsie and the wooden man stood back from the window in the shadows and watched as the house was hammered and ricocheted with pebbles. One smashed window. It was the first time he had seen her cry, her old face looking oddly childish, contorted with sobs.
‘Do you want me to go?’ he asked.
Elsie vigorously shook her head, she pulled him to her and buried herself into him until morning. He lay awake, troubled, all night. Just before the dawn spilled in she whispered, ‘I want to disappear into you.’ She hoped the wooden man understood.
Elsie’s very ordinary mother had always said she had a sixth sense. Perhaps, that line was the seed from which her outcast daughter grew.
So Elsie knew before she reached the bonfire that her life was in pieces. They were celebrating the end of the lockdown. It was dusk. She had to force her way through the drunken leers, the hands grabbing and the thick shoulders, before she saw him being dragged towards the fire. She had been signing her name on the government register to announce herself healthy and untouched by the sickness. Like a fool, she thought, she had left him. He didn’t count on the government register, he wasn’t listed so he hadn’t come.
She tried to make him see her but he did not. Nor did he cry out. She realised that he had fainted. His limbs were limp and they dragged in the dirt. ‘No! No!’ she screamed and ran forward but was blocked by the bulk of the crowd. Some wore masks, or exaggerated fancy dress, some banged drums. The fire shot out sprays of orange sparks, it burnt with brutish crackles. The wind stretched the flames higher. Ashy smoke billowed from the burning pile.
The national papers the following morning announced that the villagers had tried to put out the flames; they wrote that the people had run to and fro from the river all night, with buckets, barrels, pans, anything they could get their hands on. They claimed that the village was grief stricken at the loss of a young female who, in a wild frenzy, after months of lockdown, had tragically plunged herself into the celebratory bonfire.
The Mayor gave a statement. He said that people needed to prioritise their wellbeing and recognise the toll that the sickness could take on the psyche. He said that Elsie’s name would be included on the plaque in the square for those who had been taken by the sickness. Of course, no one mentioned the wooden man.
Perhaps they really did try to put out the flames when they saw Elsie stumble forwards, drunk with grief and throw herself into the fire. The figures were silhouetted for a brief moment: two burning bodies in an embrace against the now dark sky, before the fire stole them.