Free Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter Page B

you stare at me,’ said Jen.
    ‘I don’t like it when you stare at me, either,’ snapped Marianne, furious.
    ‘Here, do I have to be friends with her?’ Jen asked her grandmother plaintively. Mrs Green watched a pan of bread cooking over the fire; the flames threw her shadow across the wall.
    ‘I dunno,’ said Mrs Green. ‘I’m not sure, nobody’s told me.’
    ‘What, the old man didn’t say?’
    ‘Nobody’s told me nothing except she’s to be looked after,’ said Mrs Green with a sigh. She stared at the girl and the child thoughtfully, considering; suddenly she issued a brusque and arbitrary order.
    ‘Give her a kiss. Go on. She’s real.’
    Melodramatic amounts of smoke billowed from the chimney, blackening the bread with soot. Jen gave an astonished caw and flinched. The flinch persisted until it became a shudder; shuddering, she drew back, crawling backwards across the table, out of both daylight and firelight off into the shadow. She drew back so far she slipped off the far edge of the table, turned tail and fled from the kitchen into the passage. Her bare feet thudded softly on the stone as they receded into the depths of the house. Mrs Green shrugged, emptied the contents of the pan of bread on to a wooden dish and began to scrape off the soot with a knife.
    ‘Anyone can make mistakes,’ she said. ‘Thought she might give you a kiss, see. Thought it might make you seem more natural.’
    Marianne perceived the child defined her as a witch, a definition which was in error but still reasonable from the child’s point of view. She felt a certain derisive pleasure. A dog came and nosed at her knee; she gave it the remains of her breakfast and the meal was over. Then the dog lifted its leg to urinate against the leg of the table and Mrs Green threw a dipperful of water at it, besides a volley of abuse.
    She decided Mrs Green’s position was that of a housekeeper or, perhaps, more properly, some kind of domestic matriarch. All day long, Mrs Green walked about the house inspecting things; the house was a camp on several different levels. Under the broken, moulded ceilings,the camp-fires of the ephemeral caravanserai flickered and reared and all appeared transitory though, if home was where the heart was, the children seemed sufficiently loved. The households were at work. Women prepared furs by various primitive methods, scraping away the flesh from the pelts with small knives. Others embroidered cloth with designs of cocks, roses, suns, cakes, knives, snakes and acorns. This seemed frivolous work to Marianne but it was carried out with as much concentration as that of curing the pelts; later, she found these designs had magic significance, though she probably would scarcely have believed this had she been told it the first day. Some old men were engaged in carving cups and platters from wood. Others had their hands up to the elbows in clay, for pottery. All the activity in the house was conducted in silence for there was little need to talk and very little to talk about, anyway. The adult men either worked outside with the horses or had gone to the woods, hunting.
    The small family groups lived in such close contact the children were held almost in common. If one fell down and bruised itself and started to cry, the first woman to hand would take it into her arms and comfort it. But two of the babies were very sick. They lay in withy baskets and weakly puked their milk. Mrs Green gazed at them with fear and sadness, while the mother of one of the babies kept one hand defensively on a talisman hanging round her neck and trembled to see Marianne. This woman was perhaps a year or so younger than she, certainly very young. She had snakes tattooed around her wrists; the tail of each snake disappeared succinctly into its own mouth. She wore no stockings or shoes. Her dress was made of a stolen blanket patterned with large dark blue and black checks, a dress as rectangular in design as a box, cut deep at the