LUCKY HEATHER

This is a story about guilt and luck. Maybe they're connected. Perhaps you feel guilty if you're lucky, because it isn't something you've deserved or earnt. Or maybe you aren't like that.

I always go to Salisbury Market on a Saturday. Ask me if I'm a creature of habit, and I'll deny it – until you force me to examine what I actually do. Most Saturdays, I notice a woman there who tries to give me (and others) a sprig of lucky white heather. [She 's probably there every week, like me – but sometimes I'm unobservant.] I say, “give”, but I really mean sell. Not for a fixed price, but for what you think it's worth.

I avoid her, but it isn't easy. She establishes eye contact very rapidly, and isn't put off when I look away. The hand is out, and the glance is locked, and my only real refuge is that my hands are full of plastic bags, twisting tourniquet-like round my fingers with the weight of potatoes and broccoli and grapes and bananas. Can't stop. Won't stop. Head down and away. It isn't charity that scares me. I give the Big Issue man 50p, and tell him I'd never read the magazine anyway (which is true). I think it's the thought of buying luck. Do not ask for credit, as a refusal often offends. And I'm scared she'd curse me, if I came right out and said I didn't want the good fortune she's offering. If it is good fortune.

But this Saturday – there always has to be an exception to every rule, even for people like me who think they don't conform to rules – this Saturday, which was wet and grim and dismal and pure November (read Thomas Hood's poem if you don't know what I mean by that), I took pity on her. Not, perhaps, in the way she wanted. But that was important to me: to do it my way. To avoid the guilt I was feeling, without giving in to a demand that I thought was unreasonable, since that would only make me feel another kind of guilt. [For a non-Catholic, I seem to have a lot of issues about guilt – all of which, of course, I would deny.]

“I won't take your lucky heather, and I won't give you money, but I will buy you a drink,” I said. The rain was coming down, the market was deserted, the stall-holders were pushing up their awnings to make cataracts, before the weight of the water made them break. She looked at me – for real, this time, not just in the way she had before, which was like a fisherman tugging a line to strike the hook in the fish's jaw, and nodded, like a human being, and followed me into the Haunch of Venison.

It had to be the Haunch for stylistic reasons; it's the oldest, with the withered hand found in the wall. She went for a barley-wine, as my mother would have done, and we sat by the fire.

“Don't believe in luck, then,” she said.

“Don't do belief at all,” I said. “There are some things I know to be true, because I've seen them for myself, or the evidence is overwhelming, and I have no reason to doubt it. There are some things I think are true, on the basis of deduction. Finally, there are some things I hope are true. For instance, that my dogs will turn up at the end of the walk to have their leads put on.”

“Don't you have faith in them?” she asked, smiling slyly.

“Hope, beyond reasonable expectation, defines it better,” I said. “Have another.” She did.

“I don't believe in taking without giving,” she said. “It brings bad luck.”

“Like knives,” I said, “never give one, only sell it, even if only for a penny.”

“Like knives,” she said, looking at the fire as if she could see things in it.

“Why do you sell luck?” I asked.

“What do you know about us?”

“Roma? Sinti? Your own language, Indo-European, a very old form. Metal-workers. Some say, you were the ones that made the nails for Christ's cross, when all the rest refused, and that's why you wander.”

“How much good luck do you think we have?”

“On the evidence? Not so much you could afford to sell it.”

“Then what is it that we do sell?”

“Your bad luck?”

“You're sharp. You have a good imagination.”

“I need to,” I said, “I'm a storyteller.” There are many other things I could say about myself, all of which would describe some part of me: actor, director, writer, linguist, academic, dog-owner – but that's the one that always comes to me first, the one I'm happiest to use.

It was probably the one she was happiest to hear, since she smiled and said, “Now I know what to give you in return for my drink. A story.”

“I may be sharp,” I said, “but am I right?”

“What happens when you move things across, from one side to another?”

“They change their sign,” I said, quite automatically.

“Positive to negative, and vice-versa,” she said, smiling. “And when we sell those clothes-pegs, is that really what we're selling?”

“I'd never really thought,” I said, “we never used that kind at home – the sort you sell were the ones to turn into little dolls, with dresses or trousers...”

“You must be a good storyteller, to see all these things without having to be told.”

“But now,” I said, “I do want to be told.” And I put a third drink in front of her.

“It was my grandmother it happened to, and she told my mother, and my mother told me, and my grandmother told me again, just to confirm it, not long before she died, when I was still young, and I've never had the children of my own to pass it on to, so that's your job, and you'd best do it well, or goodness knows what'll happen to you otherwise.

“Luck, luck, luck – when do people most need luck?”

I thought for a moment, though I knew I wasn't expected to give an answer. Larry Niven, a great science fiction writer, before he started writing technological fiction, invented the Breeding Lottery: only if you drew the winning ticket, could you have a child – so humans were bred to improve the genetic strain of luckiness! [Science fiction, in case you don't know, is when you re-imagine the world in the light of one deeply unusual idea; technological fiction is when you take that one idea and trample on it till it fills five hundred pages, and three sequels, thanks to all the tired devices of the trashier kind of story.] Napoleon said he would rather have a lucky general than a skilful one...

“In wartime, that's when they need luck.”

I thought about it quickly: she was right: a little too early, a little too late, which pocket do you keep your bible in, or your watch, or your tobacco tin – and then, perhaps, the guilt that it wasn't you... I stopped thinking, to listen.

“So they were glad to see us in the villages. Praying wouldn't do any good. They'd prayed for peace, and it hadn't stayed. They'd prayed for victory and it hadn't come. And God was always on the side of the big battalions, not the poor bloody private soldier. The Lord of Hosts, not the individual. So they bought from us: pegs, to be kept safe in drawers; white heather, so much better to take from a woman's hand than a white feather.

“And my grandmother was walking through the villages round here, calling on people she'd called on before, a bit of food here, a scrap of clothing there, not too much from any single one, for she knew they weren't rich. Never two nights in the one barn. That was always our rule, you know, to show we knew that all humans are wanderers. That was our act of worship towards the Maker who created us transient. Only the dead cannot move any more.

“Where was it exactly? Does it matter now? Broughton, perhaps, or Winterslow, or Farley – Pitton, even then, would have been too small – a high village, with views – and allotments – yes, allotments. You'll find out why. It was the start of July. A Sunday. She'd waited till church services were over – there four churches in the village, five if you count the second C of E one, and none of them with a good word to say for the pagan gyppos. Larks in the sky, getting closer to heaven than any other two-legged creatures in the village at that moment. So she made her way back through the barley-fields, mostly barley with a little winter-wheat – to Middleton, where the pickings were best, because the houses were closest to each other, and one could see what the other did or didn't. It wouldn't do for you to be less generous than your neighbour.

“Lunchtime. She could smell it. Even if it was summer, and not all of them were having a roast. There was boiled bacon, with cabbage cooked in the water, and carrots, and piccalilli, and home-made chutneys and pickles, and beetroot in vinegar. She peeped in through one window and saw it all on the table, with the proper Sunday service and Sunday tablecloth, and the serving spoons and the mustard-pot that had been a wedding-present (dark blue glass inside the silver). The family was all sitting round – except, of course, for the man of the house who was doing his bit in France. She knew she wouldn't go in while they were eating. Far too impolite. Hospitality demanded they'd have to invite her, when they clearly didn't have enough, and they'd resent it, and that would be an end. The door would stay closed to her after that. But if she came afterwards, there'd be the scraps and the end of the joint that it wasn't worth putting away, and some of the vegetables and potatoes – more than enough to make a meal from, and they'd not feel they'd lost anything, and by the time she'd done that round four or five houses the young bones she could just feel quickening inside her would have had a fair old feed. People will always be generous if they think it isn't hurting them.

“Then she noticed there'd been a disaster. A real, proper catastrophe. Someone had spilt beetroot juice on the damask tablecloth. At the top end of the table, where the lord and master sat, but it couldn't have been him, because... She couldn't see the chair itself, but she knew it must have been empty, because nobody else would have been seated there, even in his absence. She wondered why no one was running around agitatedly with salt and bleach and cloths to clean it up. They were just sitting and eating and getting on with their chatter. She moved along the fence a bit, so she could see through the other window, that would give her a view of the head of the table. The view it gave her was of Jack Smedley's head, face-down, blood streaming out of a ragged-edged hole just above his left ear, the one eye she could see wide open and staring.

“She didn't scream, of course. You learn not to. Tread on a man-trap, and you have to bite back the pain and try to prise it open before anything worse happens. Call out, and the keepers will have you. Stay silent, and you may get away with a limp.

“You know we tell the future, too, cross my palm with silver, tall, dark, handsome stranger, but in the War they never wanted that. Good to know you're going to meet the man of your dreams, even though it's up to you if you make a nightmare out of it. But knowing so-and-so is going to die – a day, a week, a month, a year ahead – how can you keep on writing letters? What is there to say about things you know for sure he'll never see? And a little kiss at Christmas is one thing if your old man's coming home, and quite another if he's going to stay in France for ever...

“Those that have it always say the second sight's a curse, and not a gift, because you cannot choose. When it comes, it comes. No bidding, no nay-saying. What you see, you see. When you must, you must. And my grandma had to – well, understandable with the young bones pressing on her bladder by now, and the shock she'd had and all. Lucky there was an outdoors one at the end of the next door garden. Brothers-in-law the men were, this was Tom Blackett's house, and everybody used the outside one when they had to, so she wouldn't have been surprised to find it occupied, but the door was half-open, so she pushed, because it opened inward (goodness knows why!) and it stuck. Through the gap, she could see a khaki-clad arm and a dangling hand, with thin rivulets of dried blood mocking the veins on the back of it. The buzzing of the flies was even louder than it should have been.

“She'd have liked to have run, but she couldn't, not in her state. Out of the back gate, anyway, and along the field path, skirting the backs of the other houses, not friendly ones, and down the hill on the road. At the bottom was a well-house, shared (more or less, provided it wasn't a long hot, dry summer), seventeen or eighteen of them in the village, before they started their own water-company in the thirties, with a stand-pipe out of sight where even the dirty gyppos could get some water without too much abuse. Behind the well-house, she thought, out of sight. But as she came down the hill, she saw a leg sticking out of the door, an army boot, a khaki puttee half unrolled, stains of mud, stains of blood, so she crossed the road into the allotments, only a few of them, not good land, just an odd corner no one else wanted, and there, behind a little tool-cum-potting shed she let everything flow out of her that had been waiting such a long time.

“All of them, she thought, all of them that were good to me, taken. All except Harry, whose shed this was. She leant against its sun-warmed wood and smelt the smell she'd smelt inside it three months ago, when... never mind, time to go, no staying here, no staying anywhere, that was the truth of it. Massacre in Middleton, and none of them knowing. Only as she went away from the allotments, towards Bentley Wood, she turned back – why? To admire the fine red flowers of the runner beans, perhaps, and their thick foliage? Only that let her see a hand poking out between the leaves at the bottom of the bean-poles, its fingers clenching into the earth, as if, in its agony, it wanted to dig its own grave. A hand that, even at this distance, she knew, because it was a hand she had known, and that had known her.

“When you have to sleep under hedges and in dry ditches under leaves, you learn there's not much difference between us and the soil. Earth and air and rain, that's all we are. That's what my grandmother said, and what my mother said, and what I say.”

“There's always the spark,” I said. “That makes the difference.”

“Always a poet, always an optimist,” she said. “I'm afraid there's many walk about nothing but clod. The spark goes out, you see. And what can you do about it?”

“I do what I can,” I said, “I pass on the flint and the steel.”

“But they have to strike it themselves. They have to provide their own tinder. And in the end, it simply burns them up. Though my granny tried, bless her.”

“How?”

“When her young bones was born around Christmas, she named her for all those she'd seen dead. Strange parcel of names it was, to be sure. When my father heard her full name, he almost laughed – so she told me – but then he went all quiet and said, 'You sound like a war memorial', so that was what he called her ever afterwards – Memmie. I suppose I thought it was 'Mammy' till she told me better.”

And just then, one of the big logs in the middle of the fire burnt through and collapsed with a crash, spitting out burning embers everywhere into the room, and sending the sparks flying upward. By the time we'd made sure that the big black Labrador on the hearth-rug wasn't actually smouldering somewhere, the woman I'd been talking to was gone.

I drink slower when I listen, faster when I talk, so I finished my pint in a leisurely fashion, then got up to go. That was when I noticed the little sprig of lucky white heather on the table. And that was where I left it, for someone who needed more luck than me.

Wildern, 9-12.15 3.xi.2008, 14.30-15.38 4.xi.2008