I took the flax to a weaver, who helped me soak and break out the fibers. I whipped these through a series of combs, then refined and spun them into yarn, which I decided I would sell to the weaver in bulk instead of trying to weave them into linen myself. I baked the leftover flax seeds into a bread, I planted the rest. Another month passed. The weather turned sour. I moved to a different village. It was autumn, then winter.
What I’ll say about time is that even the coronation of a new king could not punctuate its droning hum down corridors of bare trees, across the crystallizing surface of ash-flecked lye frozen over every morning, steam rising off my back as I washed, every day more hunched and sore and—I’ll use this tempting, modern word—happy.
Is that how I used to use that word?Happy? To describe the vigor of a blister popped, infected and gnarly? To explain the sensation that washes over me when I reach a new city’s walls, see the bloodstained stones and naked prisoners on parade, kept in stocks, shitting like dogs—the sense of disgust I feel from allthe barbarity and how it comes from a place of twisted kinship, as if to say,I was once like you and you will one day be like me, not with vitriol but filled with a pain I know so well that it inverts into the tastiest, richest dish? Then yes, happiness. There’s no greater reminder of what it’s like to be alive than to have nothing and to be whipped, hung, drawn, and quartered. God, how good would it feel to be stretched like that. After living in this world for so many years it’s hard not to feast on this, our one shared reality and all its violent unfairness. I envy them, almost, as I watch life pulled from them like thread from a spool—that rush of aliveness, one last hurrah. I had always wanted to die happy, and now I was happy.
Which is all to say how unprepared I was for the shock of naked sadness that came over me, years after the new king’s coronation, when I was given an unexpected letter. A messenger of no affiliation approached me one night at an inn and pressed the note into my hand. It was addressed to me, from no one, and inside the folded paper read only one single word:Scarborough.
The word rattled a jar in the back of my mind.
I caught the messenger at the bar. He hadn’t darted off into the night. He was sipping an ale.
“Who sent you?” I demanded.
“Friend, all I know is the name on the envelope,” he said. “Ah—but I’m glad you caught me—I nearly forgot.” He reached into his satchel and riffled through envelopes and scrolls. “I was supposed to give you this too.”
He handed me a clear bottle. It was empty and slightly tarnished. There was no label and it was strangely light, too light to be glass, and it was bendy, made from a material almost like wax, but more solid. I was transfixed.
“Strange, isn’t it?” said the messenger. “I have to admit, I spent some time admiring it myself. It’s like a kind of rubber, but translucent, super light and unbreakable. Bouncy glass, I call it.”
“No, there’s a name for it,” I said. “I know this.” A sudden tremor came over me, a hidden revulsion. The bottle felt so familiar. My fingers wrapped around it like it was second nature and squeezed slightly. The material bent inward, snapped back. There was a word—but a fit of tears came over me. I excused myself and went back to my table, ignoring sideways glances and raised eyebrows. I sat with the crumbled bottle before me, watching the warbled reflections of a dozen candles flickering in its surface, in this material I could no longer remember the word for. A word that time forgot.
In my early days of grief, I spent most of my time in hysterics like this, traveling aimlessly. I would wander in a kind of dawdle you couldn’t even call traveling. I wouldn’ttravelto York, I would simply keep walking until I ran into a wall and it would be York’s splendid walls. I’d collapse and cry and this was acceptable because most people have at least one or two things to collapse and cry over. But York would prove too close to the pain, too filled with memories like the worst kind of drunkenness and I’d flee because I craved Simon. Not a place, not a thing. I craved Simon. I would say it out loud. In pubs, in streets, in fields, sometimes in the arms of men who weren’t him. I’d whisper it into voids, I’d press my lips into nooks and crannies and say I crave Simon. “I crave you,” praying he might hear—no—prayingtohim, God just an eavesdropper, the moon my only intercessor. I’d whisper my recitations and run a lock of Simon’s hair across my lips. Wehad exchanged these once, cut and tied with thread, and I had laughed him off at the time.
“What am I supposed to do with it? Wear it?” I had put the lock of hair on top of my head and wiggled it around, pretending it was a tiny ponytail.
“I don’t know, it’s just something lovers are supposed to do,” Simon had said. Then he asked for a lock of mine, and I let him take it. I felt his hands comb through my hair, gently gather a small collection—less than he had given of his. He cut with sacred precision.
“We’re lovers,” I said.
“We’re lovers,” he said.
I would repeat this aloud to myself in the silent rooms of inns and churches, treasuring the dark coil of his curl more than my sword, my coin purse, my knife and holster, wishing I had more of him, a fingernail or a tooth, his whole body, his eyes. What was he seeing now? Was he off in an even more ancient past or some fantastical future, some mundane future? What was his commute like? What was his status on WhatsApp? The last photo he had posted to Instagram? What was his favorite sandwich, drink, holiday destination, film? Did he still like cabbage and venison? Thyme, chamomile, and sage? Did he still hum little songs I had never bothered to ask the names of? These were all the thoughts and old words that flooded my mind now, in the fifth year of the reign of King Edward II, as I held the letter in my hand with its single word:Scarborough. I rubbed the surface of the strange not-glass bottle and remembered the smoothness of Simon’s skin, the marbled bend where his hip met his rib when he lay on his side and I’d trace it with my tongue, my hand, our breath our only clothes.
I let out a cry that made patrons drop their flasks, that sent horses running from their posts, a wail like a roar like the dragon I was.
It took a month of aimlessness and ale before I made it to Scarborough. I wandered a long time and often not in the right direction, as if hoping I could trick myself and end up there on accident, not wanting to stir up hope inside me, or fear, or guilt, or anything. Still, nothing could prepare me for the memories of the region—recognizing particular trees along the roads, how the wind bent around the castle on the cliffs and blew down to the rocky walls of the town below, the briny air and constant wet.
I got a job at the Peasholm ferry trading hall, unloading cargo, sorting and cleaning fish—I say job but what was that? I showed up and money was there, not a lot and not enough, but there and easy, as common and precarious as beads of water on a cobweb. I kept a room at the White Boar Inn and each night expected a knock at the door but nothing came. What was I expecting? I’d pick fish scales from my fingernails in silence and try not to look out the window at the faraway hills and imagine our old smallholding out there. In the eerie quiet, as waves slumbered in the harbor below, I said Simon’s name out loud and waited. I analyzed the handwriting ofScarboroughand wondered if it was his. I allowed myself these delusions only because I had survived so many years of elemental living—seeing magic only in dried herbs, bloodletting, and idol worship, free from dragons, angels, time travelers, love. I could allow myself this desperate, unanswered whisper.
“Simon.”
The whole town hung in this stasis. Scarborough Castle was in the middle of a siege, which didn’t mean anything bombastic, just more silence surrounding the complex and frustrated fishermen unable to trade up their catches. Occasionally there’d be a sharp yelp in the middle of the night from the bluffs and I’d wonder: Was I supposed to have done something? Was a whole world of sequence and history happening without me? I felt excluded, but for once, I felt peace—again, pain as happiness, the brutality of the world and its loneliness my succor.
“George?”
It was the next morning. I was sitting on Merchants Row eating bread and cheese on a lunch break when the town vicar saw me and stopped in his tracks.
“I can’t believe it,” he said.
I stood and we shook hands even though I was filthy and stank of fish guts. The vicar was cheery and round as ever, dressed in his same old robes. He patted my arms and looked me up and down.
“How long has it been?” he said. “It must have been years—I don’t know how I recognized you but the name just came to me. You’ve got to come to church tomorrow—or even tonight, for evensong. Do come.”
I was amazed he remembered who I was. Simon and I had met the vicar at church that one time all those years ago, then seen him a few more times only in passing. If we had ever held conversation, Simon would have done most of the talking. I’m sure our names were on a registry somewhere, but Scarborough was an increasingly transient place, no other townspeople hadrecognized me. I must have been looking at the vicar questionably because there was an anxiety in his voice as he filled the silence between us.
“Are you here alone?” he asked. “Is your lord here as well? I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the name of the man for whom you were a squire, if I remember correctly.”
I blinked and stammered. I almost corrected the vicar but stopped myself, unsure what to say. “Simon,” I said. “His name was Simon. And yes, I was his squire. He was my lord, you’re right. He was. Everything to me. He’s not here. He’s gone.”
