Stargazing

OK, so as constellations go, I’m not the easiest to find. Those three sisters never stop spinning and the heavens are cluttered with myth all proudly twinkling away. Don’t think I don’t know that they’re trying to push me out. I may be an old gal now but there was a time, my dears, when I was the centrefold of the skies.

It started on the morning of my thirteenth birthday when I went to fetch the letters. The post-boy fainted away at my feet. I gave him a little kick, but he wouldn’t stir. The next day there were a group of men gathered at the gatepost; they wept when I went out to hang the washing. Apparently this was love. More and more of them kept showing up; Dad had to go down to chase them off the veggie patch where their tears were killing the turnips. My little brother played in the puddles that formed and my mother washed her face in the salt water which she said she found very refreshing.

Word must have got around, because soon there were finely dressed gentlemen in the crowd who pressed gifts of bright jewels and ropes of silver into my palms like kisses. Dad took these from me and wrapped them in his handkerchiefs, storing them away under the floorboards and behind the brickwork in the cellar. Safely hidden for a rainy day.

Poets posted sonnets through the door, which my mother said made useful kindling, and artists presented me with portrait after portrait, all slightly different from the image that I saw reflected in the salt lake that their tears had formed at the bottom of the hill. They got huffy when I pointed this out, but said that it was impossible to reproduce such perfection, especially as I kept moving about all the time.

Breasts and hips started to swell under my cotton frock and the crowd grew with them. When I walked to the bakers in the village, they cut up the turf on which my feet had rested and posted it off to Paris and Munich where it was put on display in the city squares under one of my portraits. They cut down the damson tree in whose branches my brother and I liked to play to make carvings of me playing in a damson tree. At night two young men crept into the milking shed to slice the udders off our cow, because my pale hands had gripped them. The flesh was cured and sold at a great price to make a leather pillow for an African prince. My father had to dig me my own privy in the back kitchen; they would have drunk my piss if I’d let them.

But they never touched me and, though they came in their thousands to press their suit for my fair hand, swore oaths, presented me with proofs of their eternal devotion, I think they liked me better behind the garden fence to my father’s house. Contained and safe as a vase on a mantelpiece. Unreachable; unspoilt.

Soon we were stranded on a mere postage stamp of brackish land with only the gathering throng of weeping men for company. The village was abandoned; three harvests had failed and now the only thing that would grow were glassworts and cordgrasses. Pink footed geese started to winter at the lake. My throng of admirers sang ballads of the birds that flew from distant lands to witness my beauty and then killed and roasted them over their braisers and campfires.

My family began to starve. The men still brought their gifts: golden cups, fine linens and beautiful dresses (our house heaved with buried treasure), but not one of them thought to bring me an apple or a slice of bread. My brother walked the crowds, exchanging locks of my hair for scraps of food, so that soon I was quite bald. The poets crooned over the ethereal turn to my beauty and the wives and daughters who had accompanied their men to our hillside cut their hair and starved themselves to get in line with this latest fashion. I was a hairless bag of bones and still they worshiped me. The nights were filled with tattered minstrel’s songs and the sounds of men’s keening sighs as they stared up at my darkened window. We could get no sleep. In desperation, my father built a boat out of portrait frames and set sail on the salt lake, his pockets filled with a selection of my most expensive gifts which he hoped to exchange for food in some distant town. He was mugged before he reached the horizon; the testicles which had produced such a daughter were ripped from his body and carried off by the crowd. He limped home, howling and empty handed.

I ran into the garden pleading for help, but I could not make myself heard over the cries of delight, the bawling, the odes of their own composition. I screamed abuse at them, kicking at the scraps of sea lavender that had sprung up in what was left of our lawn, and they laughed and danced as they sang.

The morning that my mother died, the Raja arrived from India, bringing ships of bright flowers across the lake. He had heard about me kicking the sea lavender and decided that I must be fond of flowers. The men distributed the blooms between them, opened the gate and poured though to the house. They wound jasmine round the window frames, stuck lilies in the chimney pot and threaded ox-eye daisies through the keyholes. Some bright spark (I suspect the poets) laid a path of cut roses from the door to the gatepost. I had not eaten for sixteen days. I staggered out of our house of mourning and a rose thorn rooted itself in my heel. The wound quickly became infected and stank to high heaven. The artists gathered around my death bed, their faces muzzled with lavender water, to paint my final breaths.

My family tried to bury me alongside my mother, but my body was dug up three times and pieces of me cut off and carted away, until only my stinking foot remained. This, my father wrapped up in the very best of his handkerchiefs and dropped into the now unused privy in the back kitchen. Safely hidden for a rainy day.

They refused to forget me though, those weeping men. They missed their days on the hillside I shouldn’t wonder; it must have been fun for them: singing, weeping, loving and camping. All boys together. It was some old greybeard that first wished me up here. My pinkie finger, which he’d severed with his own front teeth, quietly rotting in his top pocket. One piece was never enough. So they got the old gang back together and put me in the sky.

And here I am, butcher-birded on a handful of stars for all time. Thankfully the distant sun representing the fatal thorn burnt out a couple of centuries ago and so I’m finally able to wriggle my toes again, but I’m never quite comfortable; they never could get the image of me quite right. The circlet of stars around my middle cuts into my ribs and the bolts through my nipples suggest a symmetry that has me lurching to one side. It’s cold up here; the unmarked void between my hips seems to channel the breeze.

They’re still not listening. Occasionally they still point me out and it’s nice to be looked up to. I’m the excuse for a cheap date. Arms creep around the shoulders of some poor girl; lips wet against her ear.

‘Look up there. Just by the horizon, do you see it? The loop of stars with the three next to them. That’s the most beautiful girl in the world. Everyone who saw her fell in love, but no one remembers her name.’

And then they turn and look at the girl. I know that look. I scream my warnings and my curses across the black night, but nobody hears a word.