The Pail of Water

"You are my sister
And I love you
May all of your dreams come true
We felt so differently then
So similar over the years
The way we laugh the way we experience pain"

Anohni









N.B. I apologise, there is one misleading error in the audio which I have not been able to successfully correct subsequently. In the scene where Geraldine is attempting to explain her child's transition, what I wrote, correctly was, "Jacqui. With a Q" but I have accidentally said "With a K", instead of a Q.  





Content Warning:
Transphobia, injury detail

Transcript

The Pail of Water

Christine is an old woman and she has been looking after Jack, a little boy, for several months now. It is nearing nine o’clock, the usual time at which Christine takes over from Geraldine, Jack’s mother. As the usual Tuesday time approaches, Christine drives to the house where Jack lives, through the town and out to the outskirts, where a winding lane delivers her to the house. The entrance is fenced gravel. The house is a large, detached house. 

            It is the morning and a quality of mist hides the middle distances, rises in ghost-like profusion from the lawns that separate the biggest houses from the road. Their half-obscured birdbaths and fruit trees stand like lost spirits, shrugging where they patiently wait, as though in some empty landscape, barren and abyssal. All is quiet, and beautifully so. The pillar box stands, lonely and stoic and red, in the expectant, early goldenness of the quiet street. Strange shadows hover on the hedgerows, on the fields the other side of them. From its slant and eastern angle, light falls on the lines of hawthorn hedge. Four pied wagtails, in a row, sit, twittering on a power-line.

            Christine likes looking after children, little boys in particular. Jack’s manhood is so far off, it is a kind of secret thrill to feel in her old hands his very smallness, to linger so close to his soft unrealised-ness. It is almost a kind of femininity, a paler, shyer cousin. She can perceive his reluctance, a certain wariness in those large brown eyes every Tuesday that she faces them. Something holds back a bond… he hasn’t yet grown close enough, comfortable enough with her to show her very much affection. In fact, he is almost frosty, his lips come together in a kind of disapproval whenever she enters through the front door and sounds out his name.  

A willow stands by the house; the driveway lies draped in its shadow. Christine approaches in her car, and sees that Geraldine is already outside, waiting for her. She is standing in front of the house in a shirt, striped red and cream tones. Tied about her neck, a light green cravat blows in the soft breeze. Christine waves at Geraldine but no wave comes back. Geraldine seems taut and wakeful, stiff with worry. As they turn, the tyres of Christine’s little blue car laugh on the stones.  

Only once the car is parked does the usual wave issue from Geraldine. 

“Hello, Geraldine,” Christine says, getting out.

“Hello, Christine,” Geraldine replies.

The meteorological appraisals, the How-are-yous, the How’s-your-husband are efficiently dispensed with. Christine hasn’t got a husband: but, for a long time now, this has ceased to bother her.  

“I need to talk to you, Christine,” Geraldine says, drifting into the way of Christine’s enthusiastic approach. Geraldine almost stops the old woman from entering the house, blocking her with her shape.

“Is anything the matter, dear?” Christine says.

“It’s about…” Christine knows that Geraldine is going to say It’s about Jack, but something withholds the name. “…Jack,” she finally says, and Christine doesn’t understand the look upon her face. 

 Christine tries to estimate what could possibly be wrong with Jack, tries to ascertain, based on past visits, what might be the matter with him. In the short space of time she has before the words leave Geraldine’s lips, Christine tries to work it out. If the little boy has died, or is ill, she wants to have prepared herself. Jack’s mother speaks:

“The thing is…Jack isn’t Jack anymore. He’s Jackie.”

Christine is relieved. She has known many children, children who have demanded far stranger, far more arcane modes of address than that. She has even known a child capable of answering only to the name “The Magnificent Thackery Midnight”. Bruce was his birth name, little Bruce who was obsessed with magic tricks, card tricks, animals birthed from hats. Illusions of any kind.

“I don’t mind calling him that,” Christine says. A smile folds away her eyes.

“Yes, but it’s Jackie as in Jaqueline. Jacqui. With a Q. Not quite as simple as I think you’re thinking,” mother says.

Christine doesn’t understand.

“What do you mean, dear?” she says. She feels impatient, but doesn’t allow her impatience to resound. At least, she thinks she doesn’t. 

Geraldine explains, calmly: “Jacqui isn’t a He, anymore, Christine. We have a daughter now, Jacqui. And we’d like you to understand that. It’s our daughter you’re looking after… no longer our son.”

Christine listens to Geraldine. While she listens, she tries to get her face right, tries to write the right look of puzzlement upon it, as though her face were the paper on which she were penning a story. For description, for evocation of the child’s new state, words do not seem to suffice. They cannot bridge the gap between Jack and Jacqui. The boy waits within and Christine is lead to him. 

At first, he waits like a little ghost, in darkness. Something shines. Is it his eye? Christine approaches slowly, and hears that the house is full of a hush, an expectancy. The little boy is no longer a little boy but she cannot make her mind abide by Geraldine’s instruction. Towards him, she comes in silhouette, uncoloured and faceless against the morning. Closer, closer, to this spectacle, to its strangeness. In the gloom before her, she perceives the swing of a dress. She thinks she does: she knows she does. She calls out to the little figure, in the dress, at the bottom of the stairs:

“Jack…?” 

Geraldine is right behind Christine, approaching with her.

“Jacqui…” she corrects. 

A mother can call a child whatever she likes, Christine is not one to disagree with her authority on that. She accepts the correction. Still the shadows hide the child, his identity.

“It’s Christine, Jacqui. She’s come to look after you for the day…” Geraldine calls out.

The child comes forward. The shade of the upper overhang, the shadow of the banister, both retreat, revealing him. Jack has on a small, purple dress. It reaches down to his knees. The socks he has on are ribboned, clearly feminine, as are his buckled shoes.

“Good morning,” Christine says. She warms her greeting as best she can but she subtracts from it the name of the child. It feels so cold to address a child without some kind of epithet. His name is withheld within her, the old one confiscated, the new too alien. She combs her mind for terms of endearment. Poppet, sweetheart, darling…what keeps back these, why can’t she sound out one of these…?   

He grunts in reply. His brown eyes look bemusedly up at her. From his small distance away, he studies her. The child is shy but seems happy in his new clothes. Christine finds herself put in mind of costumes, dress-up…is this a kind of play, more involved, more tireless?

A small voice begins sounding, a very timid strain of song:

“Jack and Jill went up the hill…to fetch a pail of water…”

He is no longer looking up at Christine. He has swerved into his own world. He is singing a nursery rhyme he has learnt, been made to learn, or somehow picked up, to the bare wall. He seems to notice, reckon with, and cherish the new shadow he casts upon the plaster. Jacqui’s fingers wander down his profile, the moving outer slope of the dress. The dress is grape red, a little pinker than the violet it seemed at first.

“…Jack fell down and…Jill came tumbling after…”

The little voice mews, clutching uncertainly at a melody. Christine’s old mind fills in the words Jacqui’s young mind forgets, and omits.

***

Geraldine leaves the house. Within twenty minutes of her doing so, Christine and Jacqui also go out. It is a beautiful day. The mysterious morning has been unable to fully make known the beauty of the day ahead. With the approach of ten o’clock, the world’s eeriness is dissipating. Christine wants to correct the child, remove the dress from his body, replace it with his linen shorts and little shirt, his dungarees perhaps. But she can do little more than follow the swing of the purple dress through the stiff corn. The corn cracks. 

They climb two stiles, one upon entering the field, one upon leaving it. The woods beckon. Immediately, the shade encloses Christine and Jacqui in a thick hush. Their footfalls are muffled on earth and mud. The occasional twig crackles. She feels like a blind follower, allowing herself to be blindly led to some secret, sacred, unknown place by this boy in a dress. His parents now believe he is a girl, and so does he. Christine wonders, glancing up at the full and wavy ceiling of oaks, the sycamores that hat the wet and the moss below and the dark ground in shadow, where Jack’s idea came from, who put the idea into his head. She wonders, longing for the sycamore seeds to fall and twirl, trying to imagine them into motion, if perhaps Jack is right…can it be so? that he is a girl, that he has always been other than he appeared. 

            The path rises and they rise with it. They find themselves climbing an eyeless, slumbering head of land, like a clothed skull. About where the wrinkled forehead lies, lined, they stand. They stand, looking down over the tumbling brake. Beyond the treeline, the lake stilly lies, its waters and its lilies and its rushes. The daisy meadow is green and white. There is a bench. They sit. A rope-swing swings, seeming to Christine, unbearably lonely. A whisper in the world, a squeak of charity in the apathetic quiet. The tree branches are aloof, the sky aloofer, though brightening.     

            Padding footsteps and panting breath. A beautiful bloodhound’s soggy, heavy approach turns both Christine and Jacqui’s heads. The bloodhound sidles up and wreathes himself through Chrstine’s legs. Christine loves dogs and speaks their language. She offers a hand. Jacqui is scared of the animal’s heaviness, frightened by its badgering playfulness, its unpredictability. He stands on the bench and his frighted eyes make their unignorable appeal to Chritine. She is his guardian, a friend, when he allows her to be. She consoles him, assures the child he has been heard. The dog whimpers, half-barks. He seems almost to peer up Jacqui’s dress. There is an air of investigation in his glossy, baggy eyes. Jack cannot be mistaken for a little girl, Christine thinks. His hair is not yet long enough to fool the passerby, the kind who shoots only a cursory glance his way. His expression is still boyish. The dog’s owner walks past, empty and aimless like a phantom, hidden in a coat-hood. Christine fails to determine the sex. Without the need of a summons, the dog follows in his owner’s wake, the wake of that glum and silent walk. The canine feet fall soundlessly: his buckled collar shakes. Bounding happily away, he is the reddest thing in the world.

***

They go on, Christine, Jacqui. He is at ease in his new apparel. He wishes to be a girl and a girl he seems to be as he weaves the trees. Their beautiful, rugged apathy makes no complaint. Indeed, Jacqui seems to belong, his girliness belongs among these trees and their indifference. They shower him with summer, they shake upon him a summeriness, like invisible snow, that Christine cannot help but find autumnal. Of course she finds the light beautiful, the beams that break through. Holy form is given to those spots of un-obstruction, shafts glow on the tawny floor. An aged oak, that fell long ago, is perfectly horizontal and has now almost become the woods in which he lies. Jacqui climbs uncertainly onto that broad barrel-width trunk. He grabs onto the hold offered by a patch of nearby hazels. Like him, they are only a few years old. 

            Now it seems that Christine is the one withholding affection. Every offer of play that reaches her from the child she pretends she doesn’t see. She looks elsewhere, sensing a spectre. Someone is walking with them. Her ears prick. She hears a voice. She wheels around, sees nothing, only her short shadow wheel with her:

“Jack and Jill went up the hill

To fetch a pail of water…”

            The voice is soft. But it rings out with confidence. A net rays out, Christine finds herself caught in it. Whose voice is it?

“Jack fell down and broke his crown

And Jill came tumbling after”

            Jacqui stumbles on through the wood. He mutters to himself, in quiet obliviousness. 

***

Their adventure does nothing to bring them closer to one another. In fact, by the time they have trapsed home and crossed the mat, Christine feels further away from the little boy than ever before. They are home and yet she thinks and feels him, still, to be in some wood, lost, where the darkness is, where the scrolls tightly tie themselves. Christine stands in the doorway. She casts her gaze across the room like a stone. She never could cast stones. Whether to skim, or maim…to assassinate. Seated on his usual spot, staring at the television, is this boy called Jack, wearing a dress. His face seems, to Christine, haunted, his smile empty. Is he mentally ill? Is he spiritually ill? Is he sick? Is he an imposter? a changeling? Standing in the jamb of the open door, Christine begins to hate this little boy. She speaks counsel to herself, admonishes herself: how could she hate a child? she is misunderstanding her own emotions. But having allowed herself the first drip, she cannot stop ensuing drips. Hatred. Each further iota boats more allure than the one that dripped before. The drips fill her with feeling, fill her up, “fit to bust” as her daddy might have said, and so might she. 

            Jacqui sings to the wall. He stands before it, and he sings to it.

            “Jack fell down…broke his crown…broke his crown…”

***

Christine ponders it all evening; she ponders it all, all evening. She drinks so rarely she is practically teetotal, but she unearths an old bottle of whiskey she had kept in her cupboard for almost a decade. The bottle is gathering dust. Even the search is shameful, she feels, even the desire to seek it out is shameful to her. The sound of the bottle clinking against other bottles, against crockery, against an old zucchini spiraliser, is the most shameful detail of all. The cork plops from the lips of the bottle, and a column of deep, rich smell invisibly leaps from the liquid inside. It lingers on the air. She daintily, only very daintily pours. Half a finger of whiskey suddenly lies in the bottom of the glass. She is terrified of it. She takes her first sip, reluctantly. It is almost painful, almost burning, the instant at which it hits her. But, within a few seconds, her body has found a way through the alarming pang of sensation, and she is in love again, her body is in love. Along all its length, from its depths, night-cries, life-cries, leap! 

***

He has been in her life, only so briefly. The time, in all, that she has known that little boy in a dress, is scarcely more than a moment. A three-month moment. But she feels almost that he is a lover, that he is a spouse; these rocks their union has so unexpectedly hit cause her pain. She feels in agony, beneath the starlight. Buses comfort her. At two in the morning she walks, barefooted, to the bus stop, and waits for one to come. Moonlight falls on her nighty. Her mobile phone is with her. In her hand. She had learned at last to text but the effort it requires of her is monumental. Her wrist spasms a little; in the air. Her fingers tap invisible keys, she is imagining writing something. She is sure that it remains unwritten. A bus roars past the bus stop. The vehicle is being returned to the depot after roadside maintenance. It is not in service. A second bus comes by and the driver sees Christine. You can see his eyes, in the driver’s seat. You can see the probes of feeling in the front panel, long before it ever gets to you. The driver gets out, helps her. Out of the darkness, he offers her a hand, a hand to steady her in her disarray, her disorientation beneath the stars. Why, she inchoately wonders, is she not in bed…? Why can she look up and see the stars, and find them ugly. 

***

She is ill for four days. On the fifth day, she rises from her bed, and she walks. She walks because it seems to her the thing to do. The morning is coming up…it is early. She remembers plenty, though she knows that she cannot remember everything. She looks about for the whiskey bottle, not to drink from it but to confirm how much she drank, to verify a little of what has happened to her, but she cannot find it. What has become of it? It frustrates her.

She is hungry, but for some reason she is unable to realise that her hunger is for food. She believes that her hunger is for something else. Light. The morning. She is hungry for the morning, for the light. She recalls that morning when she walked with Jack, when she discovered him, modified; when she walked with him, modified. Now the morning is modified. The male sun comes up, and the sun is wearing a dress, its dress flaps like a flag, like a cape, over the world. On the street, the postman passes her and she is a stranger to him. He stares after her progress, alarmed. The highstreet is quiet in the early hours. Hushed and golden with its waking, it is almost beautiful. The telephone box is almost beautiful. She passes the bus stop where she sat, that night, ghost-like. By the bus-stop, behind the back of the small shelter, is an empty whiskey bottle. But she doesn’t see it.

            She goes on. She imagines a steering wheel before her. She imagines that she can drive away, drive anywhere. She would drive to Jack’s house, Geraldine’s house, confront them, beg their forgiveness. But the sins are all internal, and the forgiving cannot be done by them.

            Not much about the world is changed from that first morning. The sun is slanting from the east. The shadows are long. There is mist in the streets, a summered mist. There is a chill in the air, just a tickle. There are wagtails; they do not wag their tails. 

            On.

***

She isn’t the first to find him. The night has left something awful in the street, sprawling, awkward, crumpled, dropped like an acorn, in the black of an alleyway. There are fagbutts on the ground. Though the fagbutts lie in the ground, it is clear that they have been extinguished on flesh. The man has been beaten. His is so dazed that he does not see the people standing over him; if he senses them, he has no way of acknowledging them. The man is in a pink dress, striped stockings. His head is shaved; his wig is beside him. He cannot reach for it, he is too weak. His arms are blackened. A blouse folded up, half-way up, reveals blackening elsewhere, everywhere. A river of blood lies like a thread beneath his left eye; the eye is fat, swollen, shut though it is open, unable to open. He is asleep though he is not sleeping. It is plain to see that, by violence, by this battering, by hatred, his humanity has been degraded. In its degradation, it shines stronger than ever, it burns more luminously than ever before. In its ankle fetters, beneath its soiled rags, in the ash and muck of the street, it is almost beautiful. Its beauty hurts to look at. 

            Christine reaches in her pocket for her phone but it is not there. It is at home, open, on the dresser. In reply to what she wrote that night, five nights ago, she has a text from Geraldine. It is two days old. Christine is going home. She is hurrying home, her eyes full of tears, in the morning. The morning is white on her tears. People see her running face and their hands cry out at her, but she runs through them. They are like trees. She is going to return to Geraldine, to her child. It is not too late to return.

            She clings to sanity. She has not heard her voice in many hours. It is furry, damaged, when it speaks, when it reads the sign over a new framer’s. She sings to reacquaint herself with herself, with the voice she knows to be hers. The voice? Or the spirit behind it…? She is a whistling phantom; she walks with herself and longs to run from herself, not recognising herself, not recognising what comes out of its mouth, as she sings:

Jack and Jill went up the hill  to fetch a pail of water.
 Jack fell down and broke his crown 

and Jill came tumbling after.
 
 

Then up got Jack and said to Jill,
 As in his arms he took her,
 “Brush off that dirt for you’re not hurt,
 Let’s fetch that pail of water.”
 
 

So Jack and Jill went up the hill
 To fetch the pail of water,
 And took it home to Mother dear,
 Who thanked her son and daughter.