Nature’s Bastard by Carys Crossen

My great-grandmother's attic was devoid of dust and full of skins. For the women in my family, cleanliness was, if not greater than godliness, then certainly on a par with it. My earliest memories are of an orgy of scrubbing, sweeping, washing, dusting, mopping, polishing, bleaching – have I forgotten anything? Oh, yes, ironing. My grandmother held the implacable belief that a clean house was the sign of a respectable woman, a mark of distinction. It was a belief she instilled in her daughters, down to their (clean) fingernails. My mother and aunts scrubbed the kitchen floor as regularly as their neighbours headed to confession to bore the priest.  

Yet my great-grandmother and my grandmother and mother after her, kept the skins in the attic, despite forever grumbling about moths and shedding and the smell. I rather liked the smell, the fustiness of fur and the tang of leather and the indescribable, faint stink of wild animal. But I was an outlier.  

The skins were animal skins. Although my grandmother regularly threatened to skin people alive if they dripped tea on the tablecloth or tracked mud upon her floors, to the best of my knowledge she never made good on this curse. There were no human skins, not even skin crumbled to dust in that attic. There was sealskin, sheepskin, fox fur, ermine, camel hair, rabbit fur, ostrich feather boas and more. There were cashmere jumpers as soft as butter, leather jackets as supple as willow wands and even sable.  

It was the family inheritance, the dowry of the direct female line. Every woman born into our family added to it, even as the animal rights movement and vegan lifestyles grew in stature. Heaven knows why – no-one ever wore any coats or jumpers from the attic. My grandmother and mother positively despised the collection of garments. And yet it was permitted to grow in the attic like a monster from a fairy tale, or the family hunchback, possessed of unnatural long life.  

From my earliest years, one of my delights was to drape myself in furs and leather. The pleasure was keener for knowing it was forbidden. I would wait until everyone was occupied in cleaning the bathroom or hoovering the bedrooms, and make my way, silent as a cat, up the attic stairs, avoiding triggering the cacophony of creaks embedding in the old wood. Once safely ensconced, I would glut myself and my senses. I would sniff the leather, caress myself with feathers, spread the fur coats upon the floor and roll upon them.  

If I remained undiscovered, I would open the windows, heedless of the weather, gulping in refreshing deep breaths of air perfumed by rain or, in spring, by the crab apple tree that gnarled its way upwards in the garden. I would gaze upon whatever greenery was dabbled across the landscape, the clouds scurrying across the sky, the sundry birds who deigned to visit.  

Then I would turn, always, to the coats. Not the sheepskin, nor the camel skin, nor even the rabbit skin. My delight was the fox fur, the sealskin, even one I suspected of being bearskin. Forepaws into the sleeves, squatting like an ape, I’d cover myself in furs and transform myself into a beast.  

I’d prowl about the attic on all fours, snarling, growling, gnawing at bits of wood, imagining blood spurting from severed veins and the piggish squeals of my victims, a pleasing contrast to their usual sneers of your mum’s a slag and bastard. One time, when I was feeling especially bold, I clambered out of the window and leapt into the crab apple tree, skinning my feet and jarring my legs. The fox fur protected me from the lashing twigs. I scrabbled down and headed for the woods that bordered my grandmother’s house.  

I leapt over the tidy brick wall that demarcated the boundary between the garden and the woods and ran over the leaf litter, pretending I was a fox after rabbits. I did find a rabbit actually, near the dirt path through the trees. It was dead, only for a short time, its exposed flesh still pink beneath the flies that clustered.  

I was crouched above it, watching the flies in fascination, when two girls came skipping along. All beribboned dresses and white cotton socks and hair in fussy plaits. They took one glance at me and fled, screaming and shrieking worse than the starlings in the treetops. I watched them go, sniggering to myself, before I turned back to grandmother’s house and my inevitable punishment.  

I caught merry hell off grandmother when she saw the state of the fox fur. It was worth it. That was the summer the rumours of the beast in the woods began. They grew more grotesque and outlandish each and every year, and I thrilled to hear them.  

#  

There were no wedding dresses in grandmother’s attic. The women of my family have an unfortunate predilection for men who will buy them furs and diamonds, but not white dresses and plain gold rings. The result was a slew of what my grandmother termed ‘natural’ children and what the neighbours called ‘illegitimate’ children and what the local children referred to as bastards. That’s the reason I’m called Gillyvor.  

My father scarpered as soon as the second line appeared on the pregnancy test. Of course, by the time I was born, the stigma of being born a bastard had faded and I never felt my father’s absence. Nonetheless, the other kids at school still jibed and sneered and eyed me askance. I’d never marry, they’d crow, as if it were some sort of punishment. None of the women from the creepy house by the wood on the hill ever married. No-one would have them.  

After the stories of the beast began, a beast that went on two legs but was not human, their taunts lost a little of their venom. Aren’t you afraid to live by the woods? I was asked, time and again. I shook my head, no.  

‘I’m friends with the beast,’ I told everyone. ‘It won’t hurt me.’  

It was true. I wasn’t afraid of the beast. The only thing I was worried about was being scrubbed to death on Sundays.  

#  

My mother and aunt and grandmother and great-grandmother clutched at respectability as a prisoner might clutch at iron bars. Where other women might have found religion, they discovered floor wax and dusters. It was their road to absolution, and I could have tolerated it if they were not so determined that I should be as clean as their precious carpets. Have you washed your hands and face? Clean your teeth, your shoes, your fingernails, comb your hair. No man will ever love a girl with dirt on her face... The house rang with admonitions. I think they believed that their sins could be scrubbed away, that they could wash themselves and their garments as pure as ice.  

Anyone with any sense would have given up on me after a decent interval. I was wilful, capricious and possessed of a deep and abiding love of dirt, grass, leaves and all that was wild and filthy. I never wore shoes willingly, not even in winter. But no-one in my family seemed to have to ability to learn from experience or the experience of others. Hence why daughter after daughter fell for honeyed words, furs and false hearts. Why woman after woman was deserted and left to wander home with red eyes, a fancy coat and swollen belly. To spend her life with her arms in the sink without any arms to sink into.  

It was the family curse. Those skins up in the attic, lurking there, never quite shucked off but never donned properly again. Loathing and love comingled until one felt much the same as the other, until the hearts in question no longer distinguished between different emotions.  

I vowed I would be the one to break the curse. Mother and Grandmother didn’t make it easy. Matrimony and its vital nature were drummed into me from as soon as I could comprehend the notion. I was encouraged to smile at the boys, learn to cook, not to go about with mud on my legs. So, I rolled in dirt, never ever smiled and every meal I prepared was either charred or frozen.  

As I grew, I spent more and more time in the woods. The weather and the seasons could not keep me inside, so my mother and aunt didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of doing so. Even when the snow blotted out everything but the oldest, most gnarled trees, even when the rain flayed the skin from my face, I would don one of the skins and roam the woodland. I would imagine I was a bear, or a wildcat, or a fox or wolf. In the summer I would romp in the streams and pools wrapped in the sealskin, pretending to be a selkie.  

My mother and aunt, faithful to the tents of respectability continued their quest to socialise me, decking me out in pastel frocks and round-toed shoes for classmates’ birthday parties, or forcing me into colour-coordinated skirts and blouses for shopping trips. Don’t slouch! Don’t scratch! Smile! Don’t smile – your teeth look... sharp. I set my sharp teeth and endured. Until one birthday boy stuck a hand up my skirt.  

I thumped him till he howled for mercy. Then I escaped out of an open window when his parents tried to corner me and fled for the attic and my skins. I spent a full weekend in the woods that time. I slept in the embrace of a willow and raided local houses for food, wrapped in the rabbit-skin or ermine.  

I even saw the birthday boy, strolling along, gorging on fish and chips. I dropped from a branch onto the path before him, shrouded in black fur. He fainted dead away. I nicked his chips and feasted handsomely.  

The next day, a group of men with shotguns entered the woods, searching for the beast, driven on by the birthday boy’s hysterical ramblings about how the beast had attacked him, ambushed him from the treetops, snapped at him with teeth as long and hard as screwdrivers. Reluctantly, I stumbled back to the house, trying to stay upright. I had gotten used to walking on four legs.  

#  

My pounding the birthday boy bloody resulted in my banishment from all subsequent childish parties or get-togethers, despite Mother’s pleading. Mother was mortified, apologising to whoever would spare a moment for my behaviour. I tried to argue that the filthy brat had brought it on himself, but it came out all grunts and snarls. Besides, Mother and the villagers assigned blame to me with a speed that made my fingers curl into claws. From then on it was only a matter of time.  

I waited until I was sixteen and free of any obligation to live with family before I made my move. I sat through the stiff little birthday celebration Mother insisted upon. Myself, her and my aunt sat at the table staring at the sixteen candles on the cake. I grunted my thanks. Mother chided me for not speaking like a lady.  

Dusk, sunset, the daylight gate. Neither day nor night, betwixt, between. I made sure mother was deep in her twice-weekly bathroom clean before I made my move. The last time I saw her she had her head down the toilet bowl, checking for marks.  

The attic. I nuzzled and rubbed against each and every fur and skin, growling and whimpering out my love for them. But I took only one. The fox fur, my favourite, my darling, my second self. I liberated myself from my neatly pressed skirt and blouse, those confounding itchy tights, the flowery underwear and stood flayed, naked.  

Then I slipped into the fur and dropped to all fours. Out of the window, headfirst down the crab apple and over the wall and into the woods.  

#  

I hear things, even in the woods. Tales of the beast, a beast with the mind of a human. Of the corpses it leaves in its wake, of the blood it drinks, how it howls at the full moon, screeching like a woman in labour. About how it’s not a fox, nor a human, but some monstrous melding of both. Hence its given name: Nature’s Bastard.  

Is that what I am? Legally, yes. My parents were unmarried when I was conceived, carried, born. Old-fashioned, but accurate. But am I Nature’s Bastard, a mingling of two creatures, two worlds? Part human, part animal? I am not a fox, or a wolf, or a bear. I have bare skin, ten fingers, ten toes, blunt teeth. Yet I don’t act like a human. Speech I have mostly forgotten. Companionship I find with the birds, the trees, the babbling of the stream and the murmurings of the breeze.  

Truthfully, I don’t much care. I am simply the thing that I am, and I answer to no name and to no-one. I am Gillyvor, Nature’s Bastard.  

………………..

Carys Crossen has been writing stories since she was nine years old and shows no signs of stopping. Her fiction has been published by Mother’s Milk Books, Cauldron Anthology, FlashBack Fiction, Honey and Lime Lit and others, and her monograph ‘The Nature of the Beast’ is available from University of Wales Press. She lives in Manchester UK with her husband and their beautiful, contrary cat.