Lake of Babies

The Lake of Babies

The blizzard had started the moment she entered the forest, and Mel stopped in front of the battered oak door, pulled down the snood of her winter coat and knocked. The thump-thwack of someone working inside was reason enough for her to knock a second time.

‘Enter,’ came a vexed woman’s voice from inside the rambling shack. ‘State your purpose and make it quick. No time for lollygaggers.’ She added.

‘Scottish, Aberdeenshire, if I’m not mistaken,’ Mel said, entering the shack and using all her weight to close the door behind her.

‘Mind your own,’ said Beathag, who was sitting behind a leather-topped desk that listed so heavily to one side that all her papers had gathered as one. Her brass nameplate read, Beathag of the sea. A roaring fire was set in the grate, so the inside of the shack was cosy-warm, considering the many gaps in the woodwork and the howling storm outside. As Mel stood close to the door, dried leaves and twigs eddied around her feet, but everywhere she moved, they followed her and eddied again.

‘Out with it, can’t you see I’m busy, or are you as gormless as you look?’

Mel looked at Beathag’s scruffy, black jacket coated with something she could only think was bogies, so she stood well back. The shack smelled of Christian Dior, her once-favourite perfume. She made a mental note to switch to YSL immediately.

Beathag brought the stamp down onto the inkpad with a thwack that jolted the table and Mel’s nerves at the same time, then she whacked the stamp onto a pristine envelope with an equally alarming thud, and the twitchy movements of the very elderly, though Mel thought she couldn’t have been older than fifty.

‘Busy-busy, out with it,’ said Beathag, her gaze fixed on her work.

‘Sorry to interrupt, but there’s no ink left on that block,’ she said.

‘Do I tell you how to–what is it you do?’

‘Anthropology, I’m an anthropologist,’ Mel straightened her shoulders as she spoke her profession. ‘It’s my life’s work.’

‘No time for ‘em myself; do what you say and say what you do. No apologies, that’s what I like about the French, they never bloody apologise, never have and never will. Catch the blighters red-handed and they still never say sorry.’

Mel tried with everything she had not to roll her eyes. ‘No, I’m an anthropologist, nothing to do with apologoes. Languages, I specialise in dying languages. And by the way, I don’t agree, if more people apologised, I wouldn’t need to be here.

‘Ach, better for all concerned, I reckon.’ .

Mel tried unsuccessfully to extricate her feet from the leaves, as they were now up to her knees and gaining height. ‘Rude,’ she murmured.

‘Sit,’ Beathag screeched.

‘There aren’t any chairs,’ said Mel, who looked around for a stool, a stump of wood or anything at all to sit on, except the floor, when a young man with dazzling blue eyes, a striking jawline to match his handsome face, entered the shack with a limp he’d not quite mastered, hobbled through the door towards her with an unfolded director’s chair that had seen better days, unfolded it for her and nodded for her to sit. Mel nodded and thanked him, then watched him leave and disappear behind a tree that sucked him into itself, and poof, he was gone. She looked askance at Beathag.

‘Vanity. The devil’s own work,’ she said with a lusty wink. ‘Everyone here gets a choice, good or bad, he’s nae the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he made his choice, and everyone gets their dues, you’ll see.’ Thud–Thwack.

‘So…?’ Beathag said with bitter boredom.

Mel scratched her head and decided she couldn’t help everyone, so she sat up straight and looked Beathag dead in the eyes.

‘It’s simple, but impossible,’ she began. Beathag sighed as if she was about to kick Mel out. ‘OK. Sorry, well, I need to get two people talking.’ She was about to shuffle the chair closer to the desk, but the ripping sound of the canvas kept her still.

‘Why? People talk too much as it is, a stupid idea to be honest.’ Thud–Thwack

‘Yes, perhaps, but I have a good reason, really I do…Mrs, Miss, Ms?’

‘Miss. And get this: a wise man speaks when he has something to say, a fool speaks when he has to say something. Or in this case, SHE…’

‘Marcus Aurelius,’ said Mel.

Beathag raised one black eyebrow, dropped her shoulders a few centimetres and looked Mel properly for the first time. ‘Go on. ‘Well, they’re the last two people on earth who know a particular language called Tse’hu. They live in a tiny village in South America. I can’t say where, I’m honour-bound to secrecy.’

‘That’s something at least,’ said Beathag. ‘What happened?’

‘They fell out,’ Mel said. Beathag stopped her annoying Thud-Thwak and threw her head back to accommodate a throaty cackle. ‘It’s not funny.’ Said Mel.

‘I think you’ll find it is.’ Beathag could hardly breathe for laughing.

‘Everyone laughs, but this is the most beautiful language I have ever come across. It sounds like exotic birds, like nothing you’ve ever heard. I’ve been studying them for twelve years, and I returned last year to make the documentary that they’d finally agreed to, after years of research, promises, broken promises, planning, cajoling, flattery, all sorts of tactics…’ Mel was off like an F1 driver, her voice raised to a crescendo, her fingers shaking, and her armpits in a fiery rage.

‘All very nice. Ach, thanks for that lassie, but what’s it got to do with me?’ Beathag’s bored gaze wandered above Mel’s head, who assumed she was once more on the verge of throwing her out.

‘Well, the thing is, they’ve stopped talking to each other. They’ve fallen out! It’s a catastrophe, a real loss to mankind. I have to do something. Please, I’ve come a long way to see you.’

‘Everyone does, it’s a buggering long way on purpose.’ Beathag folded her arms and grinned so maliciously that Mel shut her mouth and stared at her feet, thinking of the best way forward.

Beathag snapped the dry inkpad closed and placed the stamp on top of it, where it slid to the lower end of her desk. She reconsidered its angle and moved it a few millimetres to the middle. She then took the envelopes she’d stamped and lined them up symmetrically beside the stamp. After some deliberation, she moved the pile of unstamped envelopes next to that, although both piles were exactly the same, and stood above her desk to inspect whatever was so important to inspect. Then she strolled around the desk twice, stopping both times with her back to Mel, who had to uncross her legs to accommodate Beathag’s turn, and sighed deeply into her chest.’

‘You should mind yourr ayn bezness,’ said Beathag in a broader Aberdeen accent, then swivelled round to look down on Mel from her position of altitude, and switched back to not-so-Scottish. ‘Have you considered that, although they might share a common tongue, these two individuals might have private issues that have nothing to do with you, or anyone else except themselves.’

‘Not really,’ said Mel, who corrected herself quickly. ‘Well, considered, yes, but dismissed on the grounds of...’

‘Furthermore,’ Beathag dismissed Mel’s procrastinating with a wag of her finger, giving a good show of the grime under the nails, which was attached to hands that were all knuckle and bone.

‘Furthermore?’ said Mel.

‘Yes, what was it, oh, yes, and furthermore…’ but Beathag had clearly lost her train of thought and had to do another couple of rounds of the desk to regain it. Mel sat quietly and, with mounting irritation, watched Beathag banging her fist on her forehead. ‘Furthermore,’ she repeated. ‘It’s none of your bloody business.’

‘You said that,’ said Mel, who began to rise by pushing on the wobbly hair arms.

‘I am reiterating the necessaries,’ said Beathag, and I haven’t said I won’t help you yet, so stay seated and quiet.’

Mel stared up at the Beathag’s snotty jacket and then down at her scuffed brown brogues, which flapped open at the toes, and she wouldn’t have been a bit surprised had they asked for a good spit and polish. The place was beginning to turn her mind, so Mel made silent plans to slip away the next time Beathag turned her back, but Beathag must have sensed Mel’s intention, so she sat down at her desk again, facing Mel.

‘It’s a bampot request. Most of you lot come here for yourselves, selfish reasons, or something they cannae get from their god or the internet. Something they need to disinherit, re-inherit, disown, regain, reconstitute, re-invent, lose, etc., etc., but always it involves something for themselves. Why do you want this? What’s it to you?’ Beathag put her head in her hands for a minute or two, then sat up. ‘Ach, wait, I have it, you want to be famous. Aha, that’s it, you want to be The Woman That Saved a Language! You want to cover yoursel in glory and have articles written about you in what’s it called? Anthropology Monthly, or the like. See, I was right, I am always, always right!’ Beathag pointed a triumphant finger at the crumbling ceiling and sat back with a satisfied grin.

Mel shrank a little back from fear. Beathag became scared of her. The dank, mouldy smell of the cabin unsettled her because it was the same smell as the home of one of her two quarrellers. Exactly, right down to the cow dung and corn husk mound in the corner.

‘Over a woman?’ said Beathag.

‘Beg your pardon?’ Mel was dragged back to the present.

‘Their fight. Over a woman, was it? Ha, of course it was. Always is, that sort of thing between men,’ Beathag ambled around her cabin sniffing the air, then her armpits one by one, shrugged and homed in on Mel like a jackal.

‘Well, yes, as it happens, or so I believe,’ said Mel.

Beathag put up her palm to stop Mel talking, sat and stamped ten more envelopes with the invisible ink. ‘It was you, wasn’t it, you were Beathag?’

Mel sighed. Her face grew red from the neck up, and she fell back against the torn canvas of her chair.

‘Possibly. Probably, but I can’t be sure.’

‘Ach, you can be,’ Beathag waved her stamp in a threatening circle towards Mel’s nose and gave another cackle that turned into a heavy cough and then a five-bar sneezing session, each a little louder and more raucous than the last, ending in an eruption that blew some of her envelopes to the floor.

‘Let me,’ Mel gathered them up and put them onto the desk, which annoyed Beathag so much she started shaking.

‘Look, now they’re all mixed up, you’ve mixed them up, and I’ll have to start all over again. Why don’t people just mind their own, keep it out?’ She tapped the side of her nose and rolled her eyes like a teenager.

It’s only a few, Mel thought, her frustration almost getting the better of her. ’Do you think you may be able to help?’

‘Shhh,’ Beathag gave Mel a look. ‘Thinking! I don’t always say yes. In fact, I’m not famous for my, erm, generosity of spirit.’

‘Funny job to have, then, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘It’s not a lifestyle choice, Dearie, I can assure you of that.’

‘No, sorry, don’t suppose it is,’ Mel glanced around the cabin, the mantle over the fire was cluttered with papers, cups, a pile of plates and furry green things growing in glass jars with their own ecosystem.

‘So, now, back to you,’ Beathag said, eyeing Mel through narrowed lids. ‘In an ideal world, which of course this is not, what on earth would you wish for?

‘In an ideal world they’d be talking to each other, though, as you point out, this isn’t an ideal world, so, as I have heard, you can grant the weird and improbable…’

Beathag rolled her eyes and scratched her knobbly scalp through a fine layer of straggly hair and inspected her fingernails, orangutan-like, ‘You do like a song and dance, get on with it.’

‘More people. More people to speak Tse’hu. It would be wonderful. There would be so many more Tse’hu speakers and then the world would not be deprived of this unique and beauteous language,’ Mel caught her breath and sat back to think of the dizzying array of renowned anthropology journals and worldwide networks and university lectures she’d be invited to chair and smiled inwardly, finally pleased that she’d never taken her mother’s idiotic advice to become a lawyer, after all.

Beathag stared Mel dead in the eye and smiled with something edging towards maleficence, ‘Right. Bugger off now and come back tomorrow. I need to think about this in detail. Be here early because I have a couple who were polite enough to make an appointment and not just barge in. They will be here on time, and I have to prepare.’

‘Where will I go?’ Mel looked around the shack, as though it might offer an answer. ‘This place is miles from anywhere, and I might not find my way back tomorrow…’

Beathag interrupted Mel with a shooing wave, ’Not my concern. I don’t do B&B, so be off with you. You’re boring me now.’ Thud–Thwack.

Mel stood, perplexed and shaky on her legs.

‘Still here?’ Said Beathag.

Mel backed out of the shack as if Beathag were royalty and disappeared into the darkness of the forest.

‘And don’t return by the lake, take the wooded path,’ Beathag shouted after her.

*

Mel returned to the shack just after dawn, having wandered around so as not to go by the lake entrance as instructed. Although a little annoyed by Beathag’s attitude, she was also more than a little wary of her.

As she grew closer to the shack, Mel heard faraway mumbling, which soon grew into babble and then distinctive, familiar chatter when she stopped dead as the shack came into sight. She held her stomach to stop vomiting as she gasped at the huge lake beyond the shack, with Beathag standing proudly, arms crossed and smiling with her stubbly chin up, nodding towards Mel, then at the lake of men; old men; all exactly the same as her two Tse’hu subjects, their very same tribal appearance, identical sour faces, and all arguing vehemently in their birdlike, sing-song language. Everyone stopped talking when they spotted Mel. All eyes went wide and round and took on a sparkling quality that Mel couldn’t fathom.

‘There you go, Dearie, not a dying language anymore, eh?’ Beathag gave a wide, satisfied and slightly evil grin. ‘Now hurry up and get rid of this lot, that poor childless couple will be here soon, and they need my full attention, off you go, Lassie. Always a chore, never a pleasure.’

Mel’s knees melted to jelly, along with her dreams of prominence and academic status and, of course, celebrity.