Forge

Forge

by

Mehreen Ahmed

Okay, if in the next twenty-four hours, King George didn’t turn up, I was going to paste a poster on every wall for a missing cat. I was certain that someone would know where the cat went. Then, when I looked at the ocean, the big waves somersaulting, I thought who could survive this? What if King George drowned? I felt trepidation. That’s what must have happened; maybe he fell accidentally and the cat died. Why would it go out on a treacherous day like this? There was no sunlight visible all day at all—“Oh! King George, please don’t do this to me. Please, please come back, my pet, I miss you.”

The many glaring lights fixed on mirror’s frame somewhat enhanced my image, backstage. Where I saw a masked face in white make-up paste? A make-up artist, my childhood friend, Tia, from Cinnamon Farm, diligently applied colour dust with a small sponge on to my dark skin. 

“You really have very soft skin,” she whispered into my ears with a smile. 

I smiled back, asking. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” 

“Can’t really tell,” she said. 

Moving her attention to my eyes now, she whispered. “Eye make-up was the hardest to do. 

Take a look.” 

Backstage, was where it began. It was me, a little girl growing up in an orphanage. I had vanished into my small body as I grew into this stranger, a new person in a new body, a makeover. Limitless openings lay before me. All I had to do was to choose correctly. I was the source and a repository of my prowess, enabling me to forge progress into a brighter future which was the only way out of this miserable, shackled orphanage.

Tia held a close-up mirror before me. It mirrored a vision of my own mind, of a stream, of oppression, and of my captivity. One summer’s day, the winds were rough, and revved up like a car in the hands of a novice driver; the door rattled in the early hours of the dawn, I screamed out of fear, and held on to the flimsy bed frame, a shy five-year-old, I sat by the tall windows and looked outside at the weeping willows. 

I had a glimpse of a face I could not recognise anymore. While it was me all along that I was going to look for a job. I took off one afternoon, cloaked in a sooty black coat, never to return to the orphanage. I was to have a baby out of a wedded relationship. Well then, I knitted a sweater for my little unborn. A sea-farer, he would become just like his father. That future didn’t hold out much promise for either of us. My womb was its new home, this child my own flesh and blood. I loved 

him just like the cat. I braved today’s fowl weather, to look for a job which would have freed me from this dungeon and my child. I returned all battered, feeling light. 

This was a haunted place. The sprites made me commit an unbelievable crime. I called out to my child, I’d killed. Water in the well went round and round. Fate threw me into this hell. My life came unhinged; I felt claustrophobic; this home was meant to be a shield. Evil spirits were all around me. I was too weak to break through them. No one believed me when I told my mates who vamped each other. We used our mates as a means to an end. Our protector selling us to the sailors wasn’t a free choice because we weren’t free. Those evil spirits fenced us around those deathly rings.

What did we do to deserve this treatment? We were only orphans. Oh, why us? Surely, it would be us, the easy targets by the sea. No one was there to protect us. A sailor’s wife—there was a wife for him at every port, I wasn’t so sure then. I later found out, there were me and others, elsewhere. A storm did rise darkly in the evening sky. By the window pane with the same rattling bolt, I sat alone looking at Melancholy Bay. With my husband alone, I wished to share a life of joy without a contestant. But others loved him just the way I loved my cat and my baby in the same vein. But he married me. He could’ve just broken in and out of my life like those waves breaking on the seashore. He had paid an orphanage mate for such services and left laughing jolly out of those heavy oak doors. 

 ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ I heard my baby’s tight cry from far, afar. Heaven knows. I saw him flying up in the sky doing a somersault in the night fog. ‘Why? Mama why? It cried—I was hungry. The hunger pains were terrible. You didn’t feed me enough, though. You took that pillow and you pressed it down until the last breath slithered out of me. I’m now with those dark sprites.’

‘Come on baby. Come now. Mummy didn’t do that on purpose. You must know that by now. I was made to do it, can you understand? Those ghouls had a hand in it. They killed you. Did they tell you? I wish I could do this to myself, instead, but my hands were tied,’ I looked out at the crimson sky cracking up in splendid, severe lightning of fire-works. The sky didn’t mind. I ran along the mountain path, my baby following close behind. It stopped and breathed its last.

 I married a sailor. In God’s name, in the white Chapel Hill across the graveyard and behind the grey mossy walls orphanage church. There was endless booze; his friends swam in it, not even in the ocean so much. Fish were caught in the muddy waters: barramundis and pints of ale for wedding dinner. Luckily, a white bridal veil was still in the orphanage attic. Mates said. “The veil must have been left for brides of Christ by my dark sprites, in jest.” The veil cast a blight on my wedding day.

Still, I felt blessed, because I thought this was my ticket to freedom, I had found love at last. Until I found out how he screwed me over. Big time and yes, big time. My child would probably grow up to be the same as he learned the ropes to traverse the thousand seas. He too would go away like his Father did at sixteen. My husband saw and learned from all his drunken mates what they did at the end of a day on every port as soon as the ship threw deep anchors and hid under masses of water—punting and selling wives at the auction.

Who was this? King George? Was this its grin, its leisurely walk? I saw it in the close mirror and everywhere, trotting by me and across the globe, to some really terrifying places. King George sat right here in the middle of this living room for I, hadn’t moved at all. There were never any close mirrors. In these sullen lights, I saw my missing cat. I saw his regal posture along the contours of the 

mountain; at my friend Tia Magnolia’s Cinnamon Farm. Or in both the light and dark places of the mind; it had travelled far and wide to visit every life on every corner of the earth—Lore Fountains or The Lost Lover’s Cafe. In that terrifying orphanage, he was the only beacon that shone through. In the heart of it, King George had always been there.

All the way back in my father’s house, the horror of battling a shameless step-brother of mine—through past, present, or future, King George had been present, all those times and now. King George turned back and grinned at me. In hindsight, it was my oversight that I had lost it, I became blindsided by side-lining it; that I could always touch it, and write my stories into its fur, instead, I grieved and sought it out everywhere. Killing my own was a feline torment. I pulled those posters off the wall where its long shadow fell instead. The walls were inked in the killers’ name in clear black. This grievous harm was the ghouls’ doing; the fat cat curled up in my lap—self-indulgent, spoiled, lapping up milk, an attention seeker, now rested squarely.

King George, this elusive poetry of my imagination; my mad pursuit to find the right words. However, every moment the words lit up, I burnt them to a cinder and resurrected them from its ashes because my small voice prompted me to face reality. Ultimately, this ubiquitous, spirited cat led me to deliverance from the manacles of my mind. Two divergent roads forged to make way for the new; I weaved white fabrics in Bridgeman Brew dressing up the brides of the crew.