The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace Read Free Book Online Page A

She must have known that I was watching her, a youth who’d never seen a woman naked and so close.
    I see you smile and brighten up as if you think I’ll tell some tale of how I dropped my head, perhaps, and took the woman’s other nipple in my mouth. Or, throwing down my dumpling, put my one good hand upon her knee. Hard luck. You have ignored the state that she was in, the ulcers and the dirt, her thinness and her poverty. What I said about her eyes – quite clear, and grey, and unabashed – has made you think of sex. Me, too. She was a beauty in decay. And I was cold and wet and far from home and frightened of the night.
    She was obsessed with food. She went on talking with the baby tugging drily at her breast: “When my husband was still here we’d eat so well. Lobsters, coalfish, ebb meat. We never ate the same thing twice. Baked eel. Baked guillemot. Seakale. Goose eggs. Have you had those? Have you had mussels roasted in hot stones?” She told how her husband and her two boys would scour the sea shore for its fruits, how they would search the cliffs for nests, and harvest reeds, and club the seals to death. Once they found a whale, a rorqual, on the beach. There was meat and hide enough to feed and clothe a hundred men. And fat for light, and bones for fuel, and ribs for making huts. They took the surplus – the whale, the eggs, the kale, the tasty saltland rabbits – to the markets at the villages around, and they came back with meat and milk and cheese and beans and beer.
    “On market days we had a feast,” she said. And then, one day when they had gone to trade at the village where the stoneys lived, they did not return. The dog came back. But not her husband or the boys. She waited. She was waiting still. Who knows what happened to them? She went herself to the village. “I’ve never seen such things,” she said. “Such wealth. Such homes. But the people there …” She mimed some spit. “They had no time for me. I came back here. I had this child, poor thing. I do the best I can. I have the dog. I do a little trade. But I never caught a fish. No one taught me how. I never clubbed a seal. I couldn’t climb a cliff for eggs. So I make do. I found a dead fish on the shore today, its eggs were swollen in its pouch. This slott has been a treat. And then? Perhaps my family will come back and we’ll eat well again before we die.”
    I asked her, had she seen a ship. She shook her head. She hadn’t seen a ship. All she’d seen that day was me, emerging through the heathgrass with a look of terror on my face. I’d looked so frightened of her dog and so burdened with the rain that she had no choice but to offer help.
    “And that?” she asked. She nodded at my severed arm. “What happened to the rest?”
    What happened to your husband and your sons? I thought. The same, no doubt. If I could lose an arm for a dozen scallops, then they could lose their lives for whale meat, rabbits, kale.
    “My arm?” I said. “I lost it at my birth. You know what mothers are. Mine couldn’t wait and pulled me out, and snap. It came away. You don’t like that? Then, let it be an animal that tore it free. Half dog, half gull. No one knows its name. One bite.”
    Why tell the truth when lies are more amusing, when lies can make the listener shake her head and laugh – and cough – and roll her eyes? People are like stones. You strike them right, they open up like shells.’

11
    ‘W E ALL SLEPT well enough. The dog was reassuring and the baby far too weak and underfed to do much else but suck and doze. I spent the morning on the marshes by the shore. There was no hurry to get home – by ‘home’ (so far) I mean the village, not the smoky hut. And there was samphire in abundance, a little past its best, but a favourite of the woman and a gift from me.
    When I returned there was a single horseman waiting in the grass beyond the hut. The woman with her baby and the dog was talking to him. He gave her something