Having wings, she had discovered, could be quite neat, but no one else believed in them, so she had to keep them quiet.
That—having no one believe you—was nearly as inconvenient as living off-grid. It was especially bad when you suddenly had a living thing to look after and you urgently needed information, such as what to feed it. Milk, or cat food? Lilith called it the ‘beast.’
The inconvenience makes her furious. Lots of other things also make Lilith furious on a regular basis, I can tell you that. As her narrator, both telling her story and hanging around her innermost thoughts is a strange experience. Most people she finds annoying and flaky; she probably thinks even me, her narrator, is unreliable. Lilith is a furious woman.
About the only thing that calms her down is her knowing that she has beautiful hair. She wears it up most of the time, so it’s hard for her to appreciate it herself, except in those quiet moments, not quite everyday—although she’s trying to be more regular with her self-care—when she takes it down and brushes the cobwebs out of it. That’s cobwebs, not dandruff, she needs me to make that clear to you.
The drafts in this place, this hut, they make her furious too. She’s shivering now in the cold, North East winds. Not that you’d get anyone to care much about it; never mind come out to somewhere as remote as this to fix the windows or the gap under the door. She’s supposed to have some control over the spirits of the breeze as a harpy, but you wouldn’t know it, and that adds to her anger. Lilith also finds she has a lot of wind inside her, being a woman of a certain age, and she also snores very loudly, so it’s a good job she lives on her own.
Living in a hut at her time of life! Of course, she chose it, and now she blames all those documentaries about women seizing the opportunity to go and live in the wilds “to find themselves.” They all experience the romance of growing your own food and becoming at one with their own inner selves. That’s what inspired her.
Lilith has grown vegetables, but some of the things she’s made out of them have given her savage wind. Then the bloody chemist is so far away. Going there, you’re bound to see other people on the way. So much for solitude. It makes her furious.
I bet you want to know her back story. Well, you can want. A harpy comes and goes as she pleases. It’s nobody’s business what her business is. She’s only telling you this story because letting it all out is supposed to be a good way of dealing with anger. Honestly, people being nosey makes her so angry. Furious, in fact.
The beast is whining. It came in a cardboard box, but it seems to be chewing that box now. Lilith wants to go out and pick some comfrey and make a tincture and give that to the beast to calm it. She’s sure she’s heard about that before, but can’t fact-check it because there’s no internet here and she has forsworn the use of her mobile, but she doesn’t want to risk having a dead beast on her hands. Honestly, it’s so frustrating.
And what good is the beast going to be? She doesn’t think she’s going to be able to milk it, and looking at it now, it might be months before it’s got enough hair to use to spin and then knit a warming garment with. Maybe even years.
She can hear it chewing and makes a mental note to order a plastic basket for it. You can’t always respect your own environmental choices, even when you’re living in a hut. How angry does that make her? She’d like to fly off in a huff. But at this time of day, there’s lots of people going past, leaving work and picking up kids from daycare, and such. She should only be flying after dark.
So the beast gets told, in no uncertain terms, but not shouting, to stop eating the box, although a few minutes later, it’s clear that it’s taken no notice at all. Lilith thinks that’s so disobedient, she doesn’t think she’d have gotten away with that herself, certainly not with him.
But she doesn’t want to keep thinking about him, so that thought gets shelved straight away. There’s no time for reflection when you’re living on your own (the beast doesn’t really count) in a remote hut, struggling to be self-sufficient and environmentally authentic.
***
It’s getting dark, so she thinks she’ll go out for a walk. Well, not a walk, but a fly. It’s quite good on the evening of a warm day to be whooshing through the air. She still gets the hot flushes. She’s read people call them ‘flashes’ now instead, but it doesn’t quite sit well with her, that one. “Flashes” sound more like those blushes that used to rise in her whenever she felt so angry she could hardly think, when she was with him.
Anyway, she gets ready for her flight—not that there’s much preparation to do because all you really need to do is step outside and launch off in the direction of your planned destination. Or just set off with no real plan. There are several places she could go from here. It’s not far to the sea, for instance. She thinks she’ll go that way and try to avoid people.
It is cool, very pleasantly cool, and she’s swooping towards the smell of the sea, but the sun is setting now and the light is very poor. She finds herself going quite fast—a single flap of those great wings of hers sets her going a long way, particularly when there’s a little wind. External wind, that is. She didn’t remember the trees on this route, and they do seem to be coming towards her very quickly.
Lilith feels her heartbeat raise a little and then suddenly feels the sharp crack of branches, small at first but then getting larger, coming into contact with her wings and then her body. It’s like a crowd of people all coming at her with tiny but lethal ornamental daggers. That was a dream she’d had, and the crowd was, of course, headed up by him. Then there is a thick, thwacking sound, and she feels herself falling, the wings folding in and disappearing as she does so. For a moment she doesn’t quite know if she’s alive or not. And then...
‘Are you feeling a bit better now?’ It’s a woman’s voice—quite young, kind, concerned. Lilith is sat on the edge of something, a pavement perhaps, and she has her head low, between her knees. Her legs are awkwardly akimbo to accommodate the bowling ball weight of her head, and she’s looking up at the young woman who says, ‘Perhaps you had a dizzy spell?’
Lilith feels for her wings but can’t seem to locate them. She wants to stand up and get away as soon as possible, but she’s keen that the woman doesn’t see the wings—no one must see them.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I’m fine now, thank you for your help. I’ll be on my way.’
But as she tries to stand whilst saying this, there’s an audible escape of air that she can’t stop. She hopes that one didn’t smell too much. At least they’re outside. Then she’s suddenly conscious of a terrible shooting pain in her ankle, just excruciating, and it floors her, literally, she can’t get up. In fact, Lilith stumbles, and the young woman catches her awkwardly by her elbow and takes some of her weight, so she finds herself again on the pavement. Yes, it is a pavement, there can’t be any doubt now, a real, tarmac and concrete-edged pavement. Not a wild track in the wilderness.
‘I think you need a lift home,’ the young woman says.
Lilith is panicking inside, but trying to keep her cool otherwise. ‘I have got an awful pain in my ankle, but I don’t want to trouble you for a lift. I live so far away.’
’Do you want to go to hospital?’ the woman asks.
‘Oh no,’ Lilith is definite about that. The last thing she wants is to be around people, and since it’s so remote here, she might need to be airlifted. ‘I just want to go home.’ And she’s just realized she’s slipped into a trap now and will have to accept the lift. She can’t just fly off in front of the woman. Bugger her kindness; it’s making Lilith really angry.
***
Back at the hut, it’s more difficult than ever to be independent with a swollen ankle, and it’s getting late. She bandaged the ankle up a bit and thought about preparing a poultice, but trekking out so far to get the ingredients, well, she feels she’ll be much better off just sitting with her foot up.
There is some bread, so she has a bit herself, and some calming tea. She gives the rest of the bread to the beast, which has almost chewed the entire one side of its cardboard box. Thankfully the food and the dark - Lilith tries not to use the light so as not to draw attention to herself - result in the beast calming down and soon Lilith can hear it snuffling and snoring, and for a moment she thinks what a cute noise that is. And that’s not a word that she’s used often in her life, believe me.
It’s light when the sound of knocking and a voice wakes her. She’s fallen asleep in the chair with her leg up on the table, so it takes a while to clamber up in response to the noise: bloody people! She hears shouting: ‘Lil, are you okay? I’m coming in.’ It’s so annoying usually to have her name shortened like that, although this morning she has other things to occupy her head. She recognizes it’s Hester’s voice as she struggles up. At least the pain in her ankle feels substantially better than last night as she puts weight on it. That anti-inflammatory spray must have worked well.
Hester has let herself in by this time. ‘Oh, Lil, it’s good to see you up. I heard you’d hurt yourself, are you okay?’ She’s looking at Lilith’s ankle and around the hut. Bloody interfering woman. Probably checking up on her.
By the time they’ve established how Hester knows about the fall (‘it’s a small, tight-knit community, and it’s good we share information about each other to keep everyone safe and looked after’) and Hester has helped make tea and they are both sitting down, Lilith has calmed a little from her fury. Although she really can’t stand a do-gooder normally, it’s helpful today to have someone to be with her, although the struggle to hold in her normally fulsome early morning farts is nearly killing her.
‘… so glad you’re okay, you know. We all feel partially responsible for you living here,’ Hester is saying when Lilith re-engages with the conversation. ‘I've been meaning to properly say how grateful we are that you’re so diligent clearing away all your bedding and keeping the bathroom so clean.’
Lilith murmurs something about it being nothing, whilst simultaneously getting more angry about all the cleaning and tidying she has to do, and how pathetic that bloody small hoover they have is, and why can’t they spend some of their grant money on a better one…
‘… just have to make sure nobody knows there’s anyone actually living here in the hut, you know, because it’s really only for the Women’s Support Group to use for meetings …’
Lilith has tuned out, thinking she hears the beast stirring, and praying that Hester doesn’t hear it, because an animal would probably result in more questions and visits. When is Hester ever going, because the beast needs feeding and taking out, painful as that’s going to be on her ankle.
Thank God, the woman is at last standing up to go. Lilith gets up too. Then Hester suddenly starts and makes one of those indefinite verbal affirmation noises, as if she had really forgotten about the additional reason for her visit, and holds out a letter.
‘It’s really no problem passing on your post, either. I know you’re trying to stay as anonymous as possible.’ Hester gives a warm smile, slightly condescending, Lilith thinks, as she hands over the envelope. ‘And don’t worry at all about the gas and electric bills—we're very happy to meet them until you get sorted out with your ex.’
Who the fuck still handwrites letters? And who knows she’s here? Actually, Lilith knows instantly who it’s from.
Hils is so old-fashioned with her formal letters, and addressing Lilith as ‘my dearest stepmother.’ Lilith has often wondered if this polite tediousness is a consequence of being given such a bloody stupid name in the first place. Who calls a baby Hilda? Probably one of Hils’ dad’s stupid ideas, and Hils’ mum would have had no say in it even if she didn’t like it. He’d probably got a maiden aunt called Brunhilda that he wanted to remember, and didn’t give a toss about the consequences for the child. Typical, Lilith thinks.
***
Anyway, later Lilith decided to give the letter and the envelope (and the stamp?) to the beast to eat so that she herself wasn’t wasting the earth’s precious resources as Hils had done by writing to her. She got the beast out of the box and fed it the treat. It looked so delighted that she gave it a rub around the ears.
At least Hils had respected Lilith’s decision to live a remote and wild life; she even mentioned it in the letter. Hils had noted that she avoided contacting Lily via social media for that very reason. Lily—she'd always shortened Lilith’s name, without asking, probably because she’d had to do that with her own name. That had annoyed Lilith at the time, but now it seemed a little quaint and familiar to her. Goodness, ‘quaint’ and ‘familiar’: those were new words for Lilith to think too. What was happening inside her head? Even I, as the narrator, find these changes quite discombobulating.
Something was glimmering a bit, in her head, Lilith thought. She might go for a fly around later, when the light was fading and after she’d walked the beast. Now that she knew that he was going to agree to a settlement, so at least there was some money on the way, things might be a bit easier for her. Hils had said she had ‘had it out with him’ and even Hils acknowledged he was still ‘a total b*****d'—her words, not Lilith’s, and note the charming use of asterisks, which had actually made the edges of Lilith’s lips curl upwards a bit as she read it. That’s the first time she’s smiled at all in this story, by the way. She’d even let out a little fart of relief, perhaps even joy.
Hester had said there were no meetings scheduled in the hut today, so it wouldn’t bother anyone else if it ponged a bit. She doubted the beast would mind at all, it might even enjoy it.