The Gift

Lahja sat, idly agitating a fraying thread of the woolly jumper she had been draped in that morning. She gazed listlessly in the direction of the sunlight glaring through the window, gently tugging at the loose thread. She held the inch or so between her thumb and forefinger, listening carefully for the position of her father’s footsteps; she did not want to be caught unravelling yet another garment. She knew it was painful for her father to see the disintegration of these memories but since her unravelling seemed to have its practical benefits he had allowed her that. Lahja’s condition had been exacerbated by the recent move, which had caused life to become increasingly unaccommodating. Boxes still lay strewn around, opened and half unpacked. There had been a short interim period of a few days since the move but Lahja could still smell the dust from disturbed objects from their past and it caught in her throat.

‘Lahja!’ her father hollered from the kitchen. ‘Lahja! Wind up the record player before you wind up in a tangle, I’m tired of hearing you fidget. If you’re not careful you’ll have no clothes left but an old potato sack!’ Lahja bristled with irritation but obediently slid down from her seat and gingerly edged around the boxes to the window ledge. She felt around until her hands lay upon the trumpet of the gramophone.  She slid her hands down the neck until she reached the turn handle and cranked it into life before moving the needle carefully with two hands across and down on to the disc. ‘Can I play now?’ Lahja was already into one of the open boxes as the ratatat sound of the snare and booming choir drowned out her father’s reply. She delved through the newspaper packing with purposeful hands until she felt the jewel encrusted frame. ‘I found her!’ Lahja clicked her tongue in acknowledgement of her success then clicked her heels together spinning around victoriously with a grin from ear to ear. She spun around again before stopping herself. Lahja made a grab for the nearest object she could find but found only handfuls of air. In a dazed panic she cried out as she failed to grasp her bearing.  She stopped still as she heard her father’s heavy footsteps hurrying through the house toward her. He scooped her up into his arms and held her, cradling her head in the hollow of his elbow, whispering words of comfort and calm into her ear. He started up the stairs to the loft. Lahja hugged the frame to her chest, safe in the comfort of the familiar. ‘Can Lore stay in my room? She won’t think we’ve forgotten she’s coming, will she? She’s coming soon, isn’t she? She’ll be too big for the baby clothes Mama made, won’t she? She won’t be a baby anymore. She’s a big girl like me, isn’t she? She can share my clothes if she doesn’t have any, can’t she? I know she’ll like them, we like the same things.’ Nodding his head slowly, her father listened to her chitter chatter as he ascended the twisting flight of wooden stairs, creak, creak, creaking as he steadily climbed up to the top, into Lahja’s bedroom and lay her on her bed. ‘Little Lahja, if your mother was here with us still,’ he whispered to himself, holding back a tear.

‘What? Hey…’

‘Hey is for horses, Lahja, I didn’t raise a forest pony now, did I? Or, did I?’ Her father took on a mock stern expression, furrowing his brow and wrinkling his nose simultaneously. ‘I think we need to inspect this one, in case she’s grown a tail!’ Lahja let out a shriek of laughter as he playfully knocked her off her feet so she landed on her behind bouncing up again off the mattress, giggling and gurgling uncontrollably. ‘I don’t have a tail! I don’t, I don’t!’

‘Lahja, Lahja, you want to mind the clothes you have, if you keep on with this unravelling you won’t have any left for yourself!’ He bent down and reached under the bed and reappeared with a large ball of wool of every colour of the rainbow, rolled up around a long wooden spoon. He pressed it into Lahja’s hands. ‘Do we look the same? Lore’s the same as me, isn’t she? I know I’ll see when she comes, but she’s the same, isn’t she? We have the same clothes and I know we like the same…’

‘Lahja! I’ve told you before, I keep everything your mother made, from baby to big girl, I keep it all. I know she sees us both and wouldn’t want you talking this way. Tie your string to your bed now, I have to busy myself with getting this house in order so we don’t uncover any more of your winding avenues or rabbit holes.’

‘That’s ok, I follow the string, it’ll be ok if I follow the string because I find my way, I look for Lore then I find my own way back.’ Lahja set herself about untangling the end of the string to fix a knot around her bedframe. ‘I wish you did have some company, little Lahja, then you would see.’ He turned toward the stairs with hot, watery eyes. Glancing up to the sky, he whispered, ’make her see, please, if you still see us.’ As if shaking off an unwelcome thought, he picked up his pace and, adopting a merry smile, started his descent down the stairs. Calling over his shoulder her father called out, ‘…and behave yourself, little Lahja, or I’ll send you away to the forest ponies!’ He heard a faint giggle as he descended into the shadows.

Lahja waited until the sound of footsteps had faded into silence before sliding off her bed, clutching the spoon tightly in her small hands. She appeared to survey the room, looking for something she’d lost, or, perhaps to ensure she was alone. She gave her line a gentle tug to test the strength of her knot. When she was satisfied it was secure, she glanced in the direction of the frame on her bedside table before taking a step toward the door to the staircase. Before she could take her second step, the wool line became taut stopping her in her tracks. Lahja pursed her lips in disapproval, giving her face an air of maturity beyond her years. Tutting, she unwound a couple of arm’s lengths from the huge ball of wool to give herself some slack and headed into the darkness of the staircase.

The blurred light and shadows that had been Lahja’s limited but comforting vision of sight now faded into the pitch black; an all devouring sea of liquid black. Lahja’s ears pricked up as the first wooden stair creaked under foot as she paced down the stairs, every footstep laid down with an intent like a tiger hunting it’s prey. She dexterously twisted and turned the long spoon allowing the wool to unwind on her journey along the string, further and further down the stairs and through the darkness until she had nearly reached the bottom step, where she could make out a faint glow of light. Suddenly, the wool line snapped tight, halting her descent and provoking from her a sharp gasp of breath. This was just a minor setback, she thought as she scrambled back up the stairs along the string. She didn’t like being held up in the darkness with only the string as her point of reference. Panic was about to start its infectious creep behind her, but she had already found the source of the snag; a nail head, slightly protruding from the wood. Lahja lifted the string line from around the offending obstacle and breathed a sigh of relief as she descended once more. With her eyes set fixedly in the direction of the pool of light at the foot of the stairs, panic shrank away. Within the same heartbeat, Lahja suffered a sensory overload as she felt two distinct tugs on the string. Blood surged through her veins and every muscle froze. Black waves rolled before her eyes and she struggled to maintain consciousness, gripped by an icy, nauseous fear. Flight kicked in and, holding the string in one hand, she threw the spindle toward the light. Lahja chased after it, bumping down the steps on her backside following the line hand over hand in a frenzied race to reach the gladelike hallway.

The ball of wool had bounced off the bottom step and rolled out of the stairwell coming to rest by the open threshold. Lahja picked up the spoon and collapsed on the doorstep gasping for breath as the terror gradually dissipated, aided by the comfort of the fresh, warm breeze blowing in from outside and the relative light of day. When she had regained her fragile composure, Lahja tiptoed with slow, belaboured steps back inside the house, across the hallway and over to the doorway leading into the stairwell. Poking her head around the oak frame, she called up the stairs, first in a whisper, ‘Lore?’ then more confidently, ‘Lore!’ Her tiny voice was engulfed by the darkness. Silence eagerly responded. Lahja waited until she seemed satisfied that the only presence was the darkness and her own heartbeat. Her earlier fear seemed to become suddenly insignificant as her attention was caught by an unrecognisable inner thought or distraction ahead of her. She turned about and headed for the main room with a spring in her step; the terror of the recent episode already becoming a distant memory.

Lahja began tacitly navigating her way around the room. Guided by the wooden crates and cardboard boxes, she stalked the heavy, dark wood dining table in the centre of the room. As she descended deeper into the hinterland of her imagination, the more the faint sound of her father’s lugubrious whistling became the only sign of the present reality. She plunged her keen fingers into each packing box she happened upon, realising their contents with tactile sense and smell alone. They had moved in a hurry, evident from the order of the boxes’ contents. In one, Lahja would discover a hen cage and a tea set wrapped in old newspaper. The mix of smells of old newsprint, feathers and hen pellets propelled her swiftly on to the next potential treasure trove in which she found a photo album and box of necklaces that she rummaged through, passing the beads through her fingers before moving on. Lahja had much forgotten any memory of life before the move. It had come as a painful jolt, physically and emotionally. Now, all she mainly had were the images she made up in her head of what this new dark and blurry world might be all about. Amidst all the obfuscation, Lahja had clung to a sense of other despite losing herself. She took comfort in this presence she sought, although it frightened her in the dark. In the sea of boxes and fragmented memories, Lahja stirred her imagination with traces of recollection to form a tapestry as brightly coloured as the ball of her tangled ball of wool that edged her along in her search. 

In the next box she opened, she was met by the smell of lavender signalling the contents of clothes and linen. Lahja wondered about their past, before this house, as she delved through the box encountering swaddling clothing, tiny woollen blankets, shoes that fit, shoes that didn’t. She imagined another small girl or a baby in a different house, all these items seeming foreign in all but smell. She knew they had come from somewhere but discarded the thought, becoming frustrated in her mist, only to presently chase after another perplexity. Surely, she thought, Lore would come and play with her if she found the forest ponies. She would need to tempt them with something, sugar lumps, perhaps? This game, she thought, is exactly what all girls would love to play.

Her hobby horse was propped by the back door. Lahja had insisted it was placed there as a matter of priority as soon as they had arrived and started offloading the boxes from the automobile. Lahja could hold the wooden stick reigns and the spoon in such a fashion that the wool would unravel, streaming out behind her as it spun in her hands. In this way, she could gallop freely down the garden path and out the gate into the forest, rustling through the autumnal carpet as she went.

After a significant amount of time had passed, according to Lahja’s attention span, she tired with her galloping about and neighing. The ploy to attract a forest pony wasn’t going as she had planned and the wind was beginning to howl, sending the leaves dancing in spirals with irregular gusts. Lahja thought about tracing her steps back along the woollen line to the garden when another gust of wind stirred the branches of the trees above. As they swayed and creaked, a shower of leaves rained down around her and very faintly, from somewhere deeper within the wood she thought she could almost hear a whisper, ‘Lah-ja-aa…’ The garden was forgotten. Lahja’s head tilted to the side, straining to locate the direction of her name caller. She cried out, ’Lore! Come and play with the ponies with me!’ she waited a moment, the wind became still.

‘Lah-ja-aa…’ This time the whisper was clear and undistorted. Lahja galloped in the direction of the voice, her string streaming out behind her, unravelling length after length until there was no more to unravel and the last length flew from the spoon, flittering behind her carried on the breeze momentarily before floating down amongst the leaves. Lahja felt the slack and stopped still, feeling in vain along her spindle for the end of the line. ‘Lah-ja-aa…’ came the voice again, now from just ahead of her. The hobby horse and spoon dropped from her cold, clammy hands. The voice ahead was now her only guide and she proceeded forward, feeling like she was returning to something previously known, something familiar but forgotten. With arms outstretched to feel her way, Lahja half walked, half staggered forward in as straight a line as she could manage without the comfort of the string tying her to a more familiar world.

Without the string, Lahja was leaning forward unnaturally to feel her way, so when she stumbled, catching her foot on a root growing up to trip her, she took a tumble head over heels landing at the foot of an old, wisened, hollow oak tree. Lahja silently began to sob, tears rolled down her dirty cheeks and, at that moment, all she wanted was to go home and she screamed, ‘Ma-ma!’ Her own cry surprised her so much that she stopped wailing and was all but silent apart from her sniffles. A memory had returned, not as a recognisable image or sign but as a primal feeling, an instinct. The sense of other that had been haunting her withdrew and was replaced with a totemic sense of belonging.

Lahja had stumbled across her rabbit hole in the hollow of this tree that towered before her, but it was not the discovery she had imagined as she felt her way on hands and knees, crawling down into the darkness. The hollow led steeply down into the earth, down to the roots of the ancient tree. Lahja had ceased to think and was functioning no longer on her curiosity but on instinct alone, something gripped her, drawing her ever deeper down to the roots. She did not have time or space to imagine what she would find before she fell out of the tunnel into a hollow in the earth. The hollow was bathed with an intense white light, illuminating the roots running like veins around the walls of the chamber. The whiteness stung Lahja’s eyes and felt hot on her skin. She screwed up her eyes tightly shut to shield them from the contrasting intensity. Lahja rose from her knees, realising she could stand up straight and opened her eyes to a narrow squint. She was not prepared for what she saw. She was not prepared for seeing anything. It was not a blurry light or shadows that greeted her, and it was not a liquidy pitch black either, but her sight. Lahja could see and was staring at a silver blue image of a small girl with wavy blonde hair, blue eyes and mud smeared face, wearing a woolly jumper, just like hers. The girl stood framed by the roots of the hollow, swimming in mirror-like silver, azure and green light that glimmered and shimmered as if a reflection in water. No sooner had the revelation occurred in Lahja than she felt a tremor in the earth. Her single thought was of her mother, she saw her clearly in her mind’s eye and she knew where she had come from and that she had to return. The light faded into black as Lahja struggled to squeeze up and out of the hollow. She clung to leaf, twig and root and pulled herself free as the earth swallowed the space behind her. Clawing the earth in desperation, she emerged into the light of day in a flood of tears and dirt, collapsing onto the bed of grass that spread out across the forest floor where dead leaves had recently laid before.

In Lahja’s memory, this was her first sight of spring. She was overcome by the new life in and around her. She pulled herself to her feet and bounded back toward the house that she could now see in the not too far distance. She ran passed her hobby horse and discarded wooden spoon that she had gripped so tightly in the darkness but now lay abandoned on the grass. She rushed around the moss covered rocks, through the wildflowers and clover with a beaming smile spread across her mud smeared face. She glanced to her left and right, breathing in and absorbing the forest as she ran. Lahja reached the gate and with one last look behind her she caught a glimpse of the shake of a pony’s white tail as it disappeared into the greenness. Lahja ran through the garden and into the house, shouting for her father to come and see. Through the kitchen into the main room, she made a beeline under the dark wood table for the hallway that led up to the stairs and up to her bedroom. Lahja burst through the door and stopped suddenly and, gaining an unusual composure, paced slowly across the creaky boards and picked up the frame on her bedside table. Lahja stared into the silvery stone encrusted frame. A small girl stared back at her; a small girl with blonde wavy hair, blue eyes and dirty face with a woolly jumper, just like hers. Lahja threw the mirror down in shame. She reached into her pocket and felt around for the sugar lumps. It was as if she had woken up from a dream and been disappointed with the reality that greeted her. With her realisation had come loss, loss of a little girl that she had longed to play with. A tear rolled down her cheek and she suddenly felt alone and afraid. Lahja began to hastily untie the woollen string from her bed frame, as if to hide something foolish and childish. She started to draw up lengths of wool and wrap them in a ball, following the line to the top of the stairs as she wound. Lahja called down into the darkness, ‘Where’s Mama-aa?’ Her voice was swallowed up by the darkness. She remembered her mother was dead. Silence responded as Lahja felt two sharp tugs on the string ahead of her, followed by a young girl’s whisper, ‘Lah-ja… Lah-ja…’

C L Breslin 21/12/12