Writer Wednesday | Barleycorn by Jennifer Williams

Huge thanks to Jennifer for letting us post her short story here on Un:Bound. Find out more about Jennifer at her blog The Liars Club.

Barleycorn

By Jennifer Williams

I suppose that for Paula that summer was the start of everything. And the end.

It was the school holidays, and we had been shipped off to the countryside for a few weeks to stay with relatives in Sittingbourne. I was a skinny 12 year old, who looked about nine at the most, and Paula was fifteen, with the confidence and the figure of someone much older.

It was a summer of waiting for me; I remember that vividly. Waiting for Paula to “put her face on” every day before we could venture outside, waiting for my own body to catch up so that putting on makeup might make some difference, waiting for life to start. It was hot and I was bothered. There are few people as grumpy as a twelve year old girl who feels that adolescence owes her something.

Paula had started meeting up with one of the local boys from the village down the road. Jim, his name was, dark hair, dirty trainers. We would skip out of the house, our mothers and aunts murmuring vague instructions about dinner times from behind their blackjack hands, and run down to the fields behind the house. Jim would be waiting down there, and we’d run right into the wheat, shrieking and laughing with the sky a blue tent above us.

Well, Paula and Jim would be giggling, skipping hand in hand. I would trudge behind them, dodging around the long stalks and sighing. It was early summer and the wheat was still pale green, I remember. That day, the one that comes most vividly to mind when I think of that time, the sun was fierce, stronger than I had ever felt it in London, I was sure. Sweat prickled on my back and on my forehead, and as I followed the couple through the wheat I sneezed repeatedly. Countryside germs, I thought.

We came to a hole in the crop. A circle in the field had been systematically trodden down, flattened into a little hidey hole. Paula and Jim sat down immediately, chattering away about what was in the charts, and the disco at the church hall on Friday. They shared a stick of Juicy Fruit. I sat down, sighing some more. Waiting, waiting. I had a comic book shoved in my back pocket so I began to flick through it, forsaking the hot day for the Bash Street Kids.

Eventually, I noticed the tone of the conversation going on opposite me had changed. When I looked up, Paula and Jim were both throwing me furtive glances, their heads close together. I wondered what I had missed while I had been engrossed in the Beano.

I pointedly ignored them and went back to my comic, but eventually they both stood, muttering about going to look at something, back in a little while, just stay here. I rolled my eyes at them both, and they disappeared into the tall stalks, hand in hand.

When they had gone, I sat there working myself into the sort of vicious, self pitying fury you are only really capable of when you’re a kid. I knew very well I was an unwanted guest on their afternoon, but I had no choice. Our parents didn’t know about Jim, and expected Paula and I to want to spend every minute together doing “girl stuff”. I had tried a number of times to stay indoors when she went out, hiding upstairs in the bedroom reading or drawing, but an adult would always seek me out in the end, and I would be expelled out into the fresh air. Make the most of it, they’d say. You’re not in the Smoke now. Don’t I bloody know it, I thought.

I didn’t want to be there, and they didn’t want me there, so of course they abandoned me at the first opportunity. It didn’t make me feel any less shitty about it though.

I was so absorbed as I sat there mentally consigning their bodies to the boiling fire of a million suns, it actually took me a second to react when the man appeared at the edge of the circle. He had slipped in and sat down before I had gathered myself enough to look up, let alone run away.

Now I wasn’t stupid. I knew all about strangers and men with vans and invitations to see puppies, but the man was just so odd that I was stopped in my tracks.

“Hey, kid,” he said.

He was as skinny as a stalk, like a filleted earwig, my Nan would have said, and he wore a dusty pinstriped suit that made him look even thinner. He had a long pointy face, with a sharp nose and narrow green eyes. His hair was strawberry blond and stood straight up like he’d had a shock, and I could see what looked like a curl of corn silk caught in it. He had freckles on his face and on the backs of his hands.

“Hello,” I said, for something to say.

He nodded at me. Pulling a packet of tobacco out of his inner pocket, he began to roll a cigarette.

“I’m John Barleycorn. What you doing out here, kid?”

I shrugged a shoulder at him, watching his long fingers as they twiddled a cigarette into existence. John Barleycorn? What sort of name was that?

“Time was, kids used to come out here and sing songs about me,” he said. The man called Barleycorn pulled a thin, silver lighter out his pocket, lit his fag, and took a long drag. “Sing songs, drink beer. Carouse.” He grinned at the last word, and his face lit up like the sun.

“I’m just here with my cousin,” I said, feeling like I should say something at this point.

“Oh yeah?” he said, and he narrowed his eyes further. “Where is she then?”

I shrugged again. He held out his packet of tobacco to me, and I shook my head. Who offers fags to a 12 year old?

“Looks to me like she has better things to do,” he said. He paused and blew a long tendril of white smoke from the corner of his mouth. “Looks to me like she’s off playing grown up games.” This time when he smiled it crept up the side of his face like a rat inching along a wall.

I felt the anger bubble up inside me again. I knew, on some level, what she was off doing, of course I did, and it was like a slap in the face. My bony knees and shapeless jumpers, always waiting.

“If her mum knew what she was up to…” I spat.

John Barleycorn nodded slowly, as if I were speaking great wisdom.

“I know kid, I know. Thing is though, I don’t get people out here anymore, drinking and singing my name, or pouring the first cask on the corn. What they’re up to out there, it kind of serves the same purpose to me, you know?”

I had no idea what he was on about.

“Blessing the crop,” he said, like that explained everything, “Although of course, what they’re messing with is powerful stuff. People don’t realise now, but there was a time when if a young lady wanted a baby, or to put a bit more fire in their young man’s belly, well they’d come on down to the corn field.”

The midday sun made his golden hair glow, like a sunset, and his eyes looked greener the longer I stared at them. I felt oddly sleepy.

“Fire in the belly?” I asked, my voice slurring just a touch.

“Sure,” he nodded. “Here,” he leant forward suddenly, his smile now conspiratorial. “I could make her catch, you know. Give her more than she bargained for.”

I could smell his tobacco and it made me think of odd things; worms burrowing in the earth, plants thirsting for water, the slow turn of the earth. I like to think now that perhaps I didn’t really know what he meant, that he was hypnotizing me somehow, or maybe I dreamt the whole encounter. It doesn’t change what I said though, and the spiteful sentiment behind it.

“Yes” I said firmly. “She should… she should be taught a lesson.”

John Barleycorn laughed.

“There’s no better lesson to be learnt.”

He stood up to leave then, pinching his cigarette firmly between his thumb and forefinger. Then he seemed to remember something.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” He reached into his pocket again and this time he brought out the biggest, reddest strawberry I had ever seen. “For you, young lady.”

He placed it in my hand, and then with a brief wave he was gone, back into the wheat stalks. I watched them for a minute, but they did not move again. John Barleycorn was gone.

I ate the strawberry on the way home, walking back through the field by myself as the sun set. Sure, I thought of all the stories about taking food from strangers, but a strawberry was a strawberry, wasn’t it? I couldn’t imagine there was anything sinister about it.

And besides, it was the best strawberry I’d ever eaten.

The next day, I had my first period. That month, Paula’s stopped.

I hope what I said had nothing to do with what happened to Paula. I mean, how could it? There are plenty of wandering weirdos in London; I’d obviously met the country equivalent. I hope it had nothing to do with me, because it was not a good time to be a pregnant teenager with no husband. She went away to a special home, and I didn’t see her for the best part of a year, and when I did see her again she still looked much older than her years, but not in a good way. She had to give her baby up, and her parents could barely look at her for the shame of it.

I hope it had nothing to do with me. But I remember the taste of that strawberry, and I have to wonder.

The End