[Requiem/Lizzy James] Blood

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

(OoC: Response to the September challenge - but extended to both the physical need for blood & the emotional dependence on blood ties, both by birth & embrace)

Never let anyone tell you blood falls cleanly. For every visible spot, there's a hundred smaller spatters, splashes, tiny pinpricks smaller and more elusive than a money spider. For every deliberate choice, every action writ large and ugly, a cascade of consequence, a footprint trail that at one moment skips artlessly and at another drags laggardly, hastening and holding back those many other prints that run parallel.

And always, obsessively spiralling, satellites falling earthwards - it returns to blood.

Not always the simplicity of the literal good old red stuff, of course - although literal has its place.

Let others obsess about the niceties of some sweat-smelling, piss and perfume encounter with fear of discovery. I'll take sustainability under the skies, a sheep flock on my own land. A deep hunger is a dreadful thing for sure, if you can't control it - but only a fool wouldn't have a slaughterhouse scrubbed down and legal. I'm sure there are those who cavil and cringe at a killing feed - but it can be quick and clean, less distressing than any other slaughtering method thanks to the Kiss. There's no waste - blood for me; neat cuts of meat for the freezer, organic lamb that will later be delivered mail-order; sheepskins and fleeces processed and sold on to those crafty types. It makes traditional butchery look wasteful and callous in contrast, I think... if you think otherwise, you've never smelt the shit-stained panic and claustrophobic inevitability of a production-line abbatoir. Not that I always kill - the smallest sip is usually sufficient - but when I do, it's productive.

I wish I could claim the same neatness for the less literal bloodspatters, those fractal and frustrating consequences.

Picture a girl. Maybe six or seven years old. It's a familiar scene, no doubt you've seen it already in those retrospectives, even if the faces were different in the actual photo you saw. She's stood a little apart, glaring at the camera and determined not to make this picture-perfect. Behind her, one fat-cheeked toddler is hefted on the hip of an eight or nine-year old girl, his twin clinging to her skirts. Stretching behind them, softened and silenced into greys, one of the ubiquitous alleyways running between the yards of the back-to-back terraces that once filled the East End.

That younger girl, face like a smacked bottom - that's Cathy. You wouldn't know it to look at her there - but she became a great-grandmother. I suppose that makes me, there in the middle with jam fingerprints on my skirt, a great-great-aunt.

Cathy also became a great letter writer. People wrote so much more then. Fat letters dropping onto the mat, full of life, we had such hunger for those. Such fear of the knock on the door and the other, thin, envelope. Maybe that was why we wrote - a fierce and age-old territory marker, yelling I'm still here. Catch-as-catch-can can't-catch-me.

Our mother received the other envelopes, in time. Not on our dad's account - he'd have been too old for conscription anyway, but he'd already gone on ahead, lungs never right after the Great War - but for the rest of us.

The wording was so terribly of its time. So very buttoned-up and tuned down: "The [insert force] regrets to announce that your son [insert rank] [insert name] has been killed in action. Letter to follow."

That was what the one for George said. The one for Harry just said missing in action - never did know, for sure. Those nasty thin envelopes had arrived just days apart - twins, you know. They'd signed up together on their 18th. Same regiment. Same battlefield.

Cathy wrote to tell me. Mum...well, she wasn't free and easy with pen and paper at the best of times. And losing your own flesh and blood - well, ink spilling out on a page just doesn't cut it.

The last telegram, of course, was worded a bit differently - because I wasn't conscripted. Well. Not as she'd have understood it. I'd first written a couple of years previously - back then, when hunger made my hand shake, and a reader might have thought I was crying - that my husband was ill. Took bad, and medically discharged. And I'd resigned the WLA to nurse him. That  I'd write when I could. And I did. When I could.

He told me to write that. My sire, I mean.

There was a sense to it - with Gerry in the army & me in the women's land army, we couldn't just go missing, not from where we were then. He'd have been AWOL. I'd have been...well, whatever they called it when women cut & ran. Hardly being up against the wall, but it would have been noticed, questioned, niggled at. We had to distance ourselves. A staged retreat, not a rout.

And there was a truth in it, after all - blood loss without visible injury doesn't leave you being fit to fight. Best way to fudge the papers for a medical discharge, you know - getting medically discharged. This was all before the twins...well, you know.

You have to wonder - and god alone knows, I have, I do, whether it would have been different if strings had pulled so it just seemed Gerry had been given his marching orders, and I'd upped and followed or something like that. If a telegram had gone home when the boys turned 17, saying we were dead or missing somewhere in France - instead of just cooped up convalescent and nursing, safe in Blighty. Maybe they'd have stayed home a year or two longer for Mum's sake.

Instead, it's another spatter, another stain. Spit, spot, gone. Although I sometimes wonder, given all the ways our retreat could have been covered - did Harry really die? Or did one of us happen to him? Did he beat his own retreat, out there in the mud?

But I saw the counterpart from the last telegram. I don't like to think about that night - but I remember waking after sunset the night after, still weary and heart-sick with fear and panic, the air still acrid with smoke and dust.

It was pinned to the inside of the door, waiting for me, a scrawl across it in my sire's hand - 'Sent 0900. Do NOT contact further.'

Mrs Baker. The ARP regrets to inform that your dtr E James, son in law G James both killed in air raid. Letter to follow.

Oh, I was angry with my sire at first. Screaming and biting and kicking angry, that he could tear that last link away, from Cathy and Mum and me, when the boys were truly dead AND gone. It needed to happen - of course it did, and with hindsight I can be amazed that he gave us two years - it was only wartime prohibitions on non-essential travel that even made that much possible. But right then, I just wanted to make him hurt as much as I did, blood of my blood.

After that, I think I stopped caring for a long time. It was easier to just be angry with anything else that threatened the domain than to stay angry at my sire. There was a relief to being released to prowl and to hunt, to track down and take whatever action was necessary, so we could build something better, brighter, fairer.

The bloodstains and spatters are always there, it seems.