'Tell us a story from your days, Mama Song' the old woman's kin beg, the night before they ride to avenge the killing of Little Jack. He had been riding over the Leigh lands a month back when he had been shot with an arrow right through his growing heart. Why he was travelling there no one could say, and the lad should have known better, but he did and now they were all suffering for it. He was an absence they were all feeling keenly. Pain floods in the fill the emptiness left when love is lost, and didn't Mama Song know it, being as old as the mountains and having lived through the Three Collapses too? Most of them had only known one and that was bad enough. Still they didn't know how to come back from this awful loss, and all had a fight in them that was rising like a bad spirit from an old bottle.
Now is the time to press play, to listen as you read.
'I can tell you a story, my own ones, but whether you listen is another thing entirely', the old woman says drily as she twists her tree root hands in her lap. 'If you think my heart didn't break when Little died, my dear ones, you'd be wrong. It just knows how to fix itself, over and over'.
She believes they are arming for this fight over a trifle, like some revenging Apache from a few hundred year back, with their slingshots and bows. She wants to ask, what makes one more any different? Jack is one of long stream of the dead stretching all the way back to eons before the Collapses. If one of the Leigh folk had rode onto their lands they would have done the same and it would have been that lot suffering. After the Third Collapse boundaries needed to be drawn clear as day. Resources were scant. But it should not mean that they be killing each other, only leaving each other alone, and coming together to trade when needed.
'You come to my hearth for stories and solace the night before you ride, and I only have one to tell, about heartbreak and how to fix it' she tells the room. Candlelight flickers through the old house. It is ragged on its foundations but she has a safe enough home here for now and they make sure it is so for her, because they need the elders as they hold in their heads all that was swept, scorched and squandered away.
'You may not know that I lost my first husband in the beginning of the First Collapse, when we were all choosing not to believe it was happening. My heart was breaking just like yours are right now over our dear Jacky.' She looks over at his brothers, who are quiet but shoulder to shoulder, as if to stop themselves falling either way. Grief was like that. It made the ground unsteady.
'Each day I moved as if my heart was underwater with the love I had lost. They say time heals but that does not help when you are caught in it.' She winces a little with the memory of it, and the hairs stand erect on the back of her neck as if his wet fingers brush her there. A drowned man, still under the river, like so many of them. Back then what was left of state services were failing, and they had all had begun to realise there was so little help to be had.
'I was so alone, my loves. Not like you all now, leaning on each other. Hell, I couldn't even see people right in front of me. I'd say as lonely as a cloud, like the old poet Wordsworth, which we have forgotten some, but the clouds were rolling and roiling and united in their front in those times. Half the landmass of the earth seemed underwater. Each day I would walk to the supermarket to see what they had, save a little for my children. The shelves were emptying out often, supply lines buckling as the transport systems failed. All a mystery to you, I know.' She accepts a hot tea, something green and that soothes on her throat as she talks, gathered this Spring too. She thinks of rows of boxed teas and packaged coffee, all kinds of sweet biscuits too. It all seems so long ago. She has forgotten how to miss it.
'And each day I walked past a man who sat on cardboard and blankets with his dog, singing and drinking cheap whiskey. I'm ashamed to say I never glanced his way like we would now, to help a soul. His world did not seem my world, as I still had a home to go to then, and besides my heartbreak felt unique to me as if no one else could feel anything like what I was feeling. But that time he was singing, and his voice was not a good one but it was cracking like the lightning and I couldn't help but stop in my tracks.'
She closes her eyes and begins to hum. The melody rises like a bubble and bursts on the ceiling. Some of them too their heads sideways as if to catch it with their good ear. She is not called Mama Song for nothing: she knows all the old tunes and has held them for the tribe when they were too busy hunting roo and doing all what needed to be done to survive. She is an archive of tunes, and sometimes jokes she is Mama Spotify, but no one knows what she means. So many things lost.
'And then his three legged dog hobbled over and placed his wet nose in my hand and it woke me up a little, the gentle touch of another living creature. I was standing there sobbing as the rain started again and he was still singing, but he saw me and stood on his wobbly feet and moved toward me and I let him. He put his arms around me and I was wrapped in both a strangers kindness and the song he was singing. Da-da-da-da-dun'.
It's then her daughter catches it, remembers it from when she was a little one and very poorly, and the song would nurse her to sweeter dreams. She would sing it to herself to her own sweet children, and on it passed to theirs. It was different, Mama Song said. There was no guitar to accompany it, just the voice. But she sings a line now, cutting through the fire smoke and thick sadness in the air for Little Jack.
"Tender is the ghost, the ghost I love the most'. The mother chooses that line because it feels right in her bones. It melts the icy air on the edges of the room, trembles the spiderwebs, and nudges at their collective memory of Mama Song's gatherings of singing and dancing, encouraging them all to take flight from the heaviness of their day to day existance.
'Yes, that's the one. I never liked it back then, the band'. She laughs, chuckling at an old memory of her old self and her selective tastes. Now she would give many things up to listen to any kind of radio at all. 'So he's singing and holding me as I cry, and the rain is thundering down and the dog is howling with us. And I found my voice in my broken soul and started singing too, and we were two sad and broken souls caterwauling and wailing out the song like it could save us, singing in loops and loops of song til our voices were hoarse, and he was dancing me around and people were staring at first, and then they were laughing and singing too, all caught up in this outpouring of grief and love we were all feeling in one way or another but had forgotton to share it.'
The men start to hum, and Little Jack's father has closed his eyes and is drumming out the imagined tempo on the table.
'And I know then that I am not alone, and that every single one of us shares this thing that connects us, even the Leigh's that you are so intent on murdering at dawn.' She holds her fist at her chest again. Thumps.
The tune starts to build now, begun by the smallest who has the sweetest voice, and is caught by the others, until they are all alive and trembling with the singing, a ragtag orchestra of what was left of the human world she was born into so long ago.
'Tender is the night lying by your side...tender is the touch of someone that you love too much'. She forgets the name of the band but it doesn't matter. They have unwittingly sewn themselves into this future and exist in the voices that sing now, in this moment, that loop and whirl and trip over each other, that grows and gather in volume, all the disparate voices, all the varying tones and timbres, until they all become song, one beautiful fucking song that will carry them through together, through this night and many others besides, because indeed love is the greatest thing that they have and murder has no place in that.
They sing this song over and over, until it is done, and they sink into the comfort of sleep. 'Oh my baby, oh my baby, oh why, oh why'. There is no answer but Little Jack is in the room with them singing and then sleeping too.
In the morning she wakes early and watches them sleep. Oh my babies, she thinks. Their shattered hearts, healing. She knows they won't go to war this dawn. The Leighs are saved a stretch of their own grief and she is filled to gladness with that.
Such is the power of song.
Strangest thing, I was at the shops this week and I walk past this guy who's leaning against a concrete pillar, totally ragged and clearly with no place to go, and he's got a bottle of whiskey and he's belting out this tune at the top of his lungs. I smile at him but he's lost in the song. I know the tune but I can't quite place the band. Something that has always been in the background but nothing I'd choose to listen to myself really. And the one line I can remember from it is 'tender is the ghost', and it's in my head all day until I get home and I can google it. So I do, and it's Tender, by Blur. I'd never properly listened to it before, and it's fucking beautiful, you know? And in the crazy way of things, I go and check what The Inkwell creative prompt is this week and it's 'Tender'. And so of course I think - well, that song's gotta be in it, surely? But how do I do that? And there's floods everywhere - we watch the news and it's like the apocalypse. So I imagine that, and what it must be like to lose everything, and suddenly this old woman comes to me, looking back at the past, remembering seeing this guy singing 'Tender' and it shifting her tender, raw, numb, isolating grief into connection and a kind of joy, and knowing she isn't the only one caught in this awful blackness. Because though that song is about a break up, it's also about connecting to feeling, and to people - there's such longing in it. Such human emotion. And there it is - the tenderness of grief, and how song can bring you into feeling, and life. Hope you enjoyed it. Oh and the collage is made by me from stock photos via the Adobe Express app.
With Love,
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