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Back The Redemption of Galen Pike Save as PDF
Chapters (19)
  1. The Quiet
  2. On Commercial Hill
  3. Jubilee
  4. The Travellers
  5. Myth
  6. Bonnet
  7. First Journeyman
  8. Precious
  9. The Taking of Bunny Clay
  10. Miracle at Hawk’s Bay
  11. In the Cabin in the Woods
  12. The Coat
  13. The Redemption of Galen Pike
  14. Wicked Fairy
  15. Creed
  16. Nothing Like My Nightmare
  17. Sibyl
  18. Notes & Acknowledgements
  19. Note on ‘Bonnet’

I had never seen her up close before and it was ages since I’d seen her in town; years since I’d happened to be there when she’d paid one of her rare visits to the shops in the Hauptallee. She looked, to me, neither young nor old. She was slender and tall and her brownish-greyish hair was very straight and soft-looking. Her eyes were grey and the skin of her face was pale from living in the woods. She still had on her black coat from being outside but the buttons at the front were open and I could see her smock underneath. It was dark and rough looking and loosely woven and hung in folds from her shoulders and behind the folds I could see her shape. I thought of Trude. Trude with her starched white blouse and her straw-coloured plaits and the stingy kisses she’d sold to me in the cave above the weir. My face had grown suddenly very hot, I could see it in the mirror, red and burning beneath my short dark hair that was still damp from the rain. Behind us I could see the bed, the white pillow and the flowery eiderdown that had been cold when I’d touched it, and I could feel Magdalena’s breath, very quick and warm on the back of my neck. She smelled of milk and woodsmoke.

‘You?’ she whispered, bewildered, amazed.

A rose-coloured flush had spread into her waxy face and her mouth was open. I didn’t know what to say. Her eyes were wide and her face was taut and very still and she was staring into the bamboo mirror at my reflection as if she had seen a ghost. I swallowed and waited and she said it again – You? – and then her arms came up around me and quick as snake she reached past me to the dresser and snatched up the little fist-sized box that was on top of the cloth and sprang away from me.

‘Get out,’ she said softly, clutching the shiny black container against her open coat, hugging it and pressing down with her thumbs on its lacquered lid as if her life depended on it, and then her voice rose and she shouted at me at the top of her lungs, to get away from her, right now, and never come back, to go back through the woods the way I’d come, back to my wife and my baby son, she didn’t want to see me ever again, she didn’t need me anymore, everything was fine now just the way it was and if I ever tried coming back to her ever again, she would kill me.

The Coat

The Coat