Myrrh, p.1
Myrrh, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Cayenne
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Myrrh
Marian
Myrrh
Sandra
Cayenne
Sandra
Myrrh
Cayenne
Marian
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Marian
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Sandra
Cayenne
Sandra
Cayenne
Sandra
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Marian
Myrrh
Cayenne
Marian
Cayenne
Marian
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Marian
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Goblin
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Marian
Cayenne
Marian
Cayenne
Marian
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Cayenne
Myrrh
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
PRAISE FOR MYRRH
“Clever, insightful, and insidiously vicious, Polly Hall’s Myrrh is a terrifying and profoundly visceral exploration of social appearances, identity, and family. One of the most remarkable novels I’ve read in quite some time.”
Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
§
“Myrrh swirls with sharp prose and personality. A dynamite stick of a book, pregnant with pathos and nitroglycerin.”
Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker® Finalist, and author of A Light Most Hateful
§
“Nothing can quite prepare you for the gift that is Myrrh, which mischievously reads like an unhinged Rumplestiltskin, a Daphne du Maurier suckerpunch, a Catriona Ward whirlpool of vertiginous proportions. Remember the name Polly Hall. Her novel breathes life in the gathering gloom.”
Clay McLeod Chapman, author of What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters
§
“A festering account of the horrors women hold within their wombs, and the ones their daughters inherit.”
Lindy Ryan, author of Bless Your Heart and Cold Snap
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Myrrh
Hardback edition ISBN: 9781789095357
E-book edition ISBN: 9781803364971
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: April 2024
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organisations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© Polly Hall 2024
Polly Hall asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For my family
Myrrh
from Arabic ‘bitter’
Myrrh is harvested by repeatedly wounding the tree
to make it bleed tears of aromatic gum.
Maybe I was just born bad. But I was only taking what was rightfully mine. It might be easier for you if I told you I had a brutal, abusive childhood, or if I was moulded this way by neglectful parents or a husband who beat me senseless. You might find it easier to comprehend if I had been driven mad with grief by the loss of a child or endured endless cycles of poverty and torment. You might feel less uncomfortable if you could understand or pin a reason on why I did it. But I haven’t experienced any more hardship than most. My mundane existence was rather comfortable, nothing out of the ordinary. I was never marked out as the ‘problem child’ or tearaway; I rarely broke the rules. I didn’t torture animals or self-harm when I was a kid. My habits were no unhealthier than yours. You’ll scout over all the details of how, when, who and still be left wondering why.
I did something you could never imagine doing and that is what puts me on the other side of the wall from you. Not just a hard stone wall but a fragile wall of glass, cold to the touch and, for now, uncracked.
MYRRH
Myrrh thought about how branches of trees in the wind were like hair, but when it was calm those same branches looked like pencil sketches of capillaries in a dissected heart or lungs. We are trained to look at the surface and make assumptions on how things appear, she thought. We notice the cute button noses and skin tone; we congratulate friends on shedding pounds of flesh or having their hair cut and styled by a stranger; our eyes flick towards big tits or fat buttocks or bushy eyebrows or scars without even knowing we are doing it. All these noticeable things, these superficial things.
On the journey back to the coast she stopped at a petrol station because, although her fuel light had not reminded her that fuel was low, she liked to plan ahead and be prepared so she would not be put in a situation where, heaven forbid, she was stranded on an unfamiliar road with no means to go forward or back or anywhere at all. Who were these unprepared people who never checked that they had all they needed before a journey, the renegades who spontaneously crashed through life leaping like a monkey swinging from the treetops, barely grasping one vine before reaching towards the next? She needed a level of certainty but secretly admired the messy, chaotic, mindless rushed lives of others.
She picked up her phone to see no new messages, so flicked through the photos from the past few days: the trees, the sunset, a lone figure on a bench looking out to a park, a blurry shot of a house, a street-name sign, the sky above the town and the rooftops dotted with resting pigeons. It all seemed so anonymous, so unfamiliar, so unlike her life by the coast. Did she expect a message from them, from him? An apology. Anything?
worthless
useless
She tried to remember the first time she had ever seen the sea and recalled it as a sound like trees in a storm, mingled with a scent like all things dead and alive at the same time, a preserved living-dead thing, and she felt drawn to it, but also wary of it; and there were spaces between the sounds, little pauses, like the white spaces between text on the pages of a book. And she wondered why people spoke of the sea like it was calming and restorative when it mostly destroyed things in it, on it or beside it, how it was filled with creatures munching their way through each other, currents grinding and crushing and mashing in an endless briny cycle.
When she returned home, she didn’t know whether she would tell anyone about what happened. Switching to practical matters, quantifying the trouble and upheaval of changing who she was, who she had grown attached to, but realising it meant nothing to anyone else. Didn’t everyone have a terribly complex backstory of their own? A life filled with stuff you just didn’t talk about?
As the fuel filled up in her tank she watched as an estate car, full of family, pull up to the pump beside her: two adults, two children, a bootful of holiday belongings crammed against the rear windscreen. One of the kids, a young girl of about ten, stared at her from the backseat. Myrrh looked away, then back again, ready to offer a smile, but the girl poked out her tongue and wrinkled up her nose. The girl had red hair and freckles that would’ve been brought out by the sun as she clambered over rockpools or darted in and out of the surf, ignoring her mother’s pleas of ‘Not too far,’ or ‘Don’t go in too deep’.
‘That’s not what I meant…’ The mother’s voice sliced the air like sharpened fingernails as she stepped from the driver’s seat and slammed her car door. The young girl in the backseat continued staring out her window at Myrrh.
The man in the front passenger seat sat motionless yet full of suppressed explosives. Myrrh imagined that inside him was a battalion of armour-plated locusts ready to spew out of his mouth, but he kept it shut because if he dared open it to speak the locusts would burst free and strip all the flesh off his wife, leaving her as just a pile of bones on the forecourt in front of her screaming children. That is why he remains silent, Myrrh thought, and why he keeps very still, because if he moves there is a possibility everyone will die and it would be on his conscience that he had let the killer locusts out to do what killer locusts do best.
Myrrh looked up at the flickering display of numbers on the petrol pump, aware of the oily scent filling her nostrils. On the surface, she probably appeared well-adjusted, rational, diplomatic even, but the goblin knew otherwise. She realised then that if she were that other woman – the mother of that family – driving home from a short holiday, she might consider driving herself and her offspring and husband, with his latent flesh-eating locust tendencies, off a cliff and down to the unforgiving rocks below.
Goblin smirked
Myrrh thought of all the people she’d like to put in the car with her if she were to drive off that cliff onto the rocks below and decided she’d need a bigger vehicle and wouldn’t it just be an act of kindness rather than murder, and through death she’d be associated with them forever, when in life she hadn’t been and the cruel irony of it all.
Goblin cackled
And Myrrh thought that one spontaneous act of passionate murder would not be enough to portray how much those people, who she had chosen to die with rather than have the choice to live with, had fucked up her life, and perhaps a more direct act, like stabbing or strangling or bashing their skulls in with a tin of baked beans, would be a more satisfying course of action.
The petrol pump noisily clicked and kicked back against her hand. She drew a breath to remove herself from her train of thought and finished paying at the pump. The woman from the estate car emerged from the kiosk, jogged quickly to the car, and launched plastic bottles of cola and bags of snacks onto her husband’s lap as she got back in the driver’s seat and started the engine.
pour it in their car
douse them with it
burn them all
Myrrh watched that family drive away toward their own cliff and their own rocks. She thought about their shared DNA and the inexplicable link between the girl’s red hair and the mother’s red hair and the constellation of freckles on their cheeks and their eyes, noses, mouths and those shapes that connected them. And she thought of the ways her own family tried to make those physical connections that were not there, grasping at the ungraspable, pressing heavily on jigsaw pieces with the wrong edges to try and make them fit, knowing that there was no way they would fit, because they were from different jigsaws with different-shaped pieces. But they carried on believing there was a connection because, if they didn’t, what or who would stop the goblins breaking free and wreaking havoc with cars and knives and tins of baked beans.
‘Please,’ she said to Goblin. ‘Please stop.’
burn them all
burn it all down
CAYENNE
It all starts with a look. His eyes are not as dark as mine. We are different creatures. However, I know we will end up together. Fate. He is the one who lifts me up from the gutter and I cling on to that hope. Those long lingering gazes as if we can read each other’s minds. Caught in a whirlwind, feet-sweeping exhilaration. His attention excites me, the way he sticks his nails under mine when we hold hands, the lingering squeeze of his hand on my thigh, always at each other’s side. I want to breathe him in, to consume him. I want to feel the cut and burn of his promises on my body.
He keeps me poised on a precipice. You’ll never want for anything. You are the love of my life. We will live happily ever after. He has all the silky, smooth words to wrap us up in.
Princess. He rarely uses my actual name. I am his princess. Does that make him my prince? Or my knight in shining armour, saving this damsel in distress from her predicament? It’s all twinkly lights and forest glades. It’s soft moonlight and skin.
MYRRH
When Myrrh was a teenager, she thought of all the things she would like to shout at her birth mother when they eventually met. Her moods ricocheted between longing and rage, fictitious meetings like those sickly reunion programmes she found difficult to watch on television. She became the adopted daughter she was expected to be, and each time she moved further away from her beginning she felt that ugly churning prompted by the goblin. On top of all the troubles heaped on her teenage self, confusion spilled down her cheeks in hot tears of unspoken angst towards her biological mother:
Why did you not plan your future? My future? Why did you not keep me? Why did you not have an abortion? Do you love me? I don’t love you. I don’t care if you’re dead. I won’t know when you die. You are not my relation. Who are you anyway? I am your child. I am not your child. I’m not sorry for the choices you have made that omit me. You are everything I expected and more. You are a disappointment. Why did you sleep with him? Why is it not black and white? Am I black or white? Why can’t you fit the picture I have of you in my mind? Do you think of me? Where have you been? Have you tried to find me? Where is my father? Who is he? Why didn’t you stay together? Who is he with now who fulfils him in ways that you never did? Where do I come from? Who the fuck am I?
CAYENNE
‘Yes,’ I gasp. He is holding my face in his hands and I am crying happy tears. The question is barely out of his mouth before he receives my answer. ‘Yes,’ I say again and kiss him.
I am surprised but try not to let the gratitude dip into desperation. He wipes the tears from my cheeks with his thumbs. I feel his rough skin graze against mine.
‘You are happy I asked, aren’t you?’ he asks.
I kiss him over and over on his lips, his face, the palms of his hands.
‘I’m more than happy,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a dream come true.’ Am I acting too needy?
Is it a dream? This man is asking me to be part of his family. All of us together. Me, him, his daughter, a family. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I look around the room and have already decided what colour to repaint the walls. I have already catalogued in my mind the things that must go.
CAYENNE
‘Have you been in my room?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I reply and turn to face her. She has a peachy doll face that helps her get away with far too much. But there is a hard edge there. She gets that from her father.
‘Oh right, funny…’ She sniffs and wipes the back of her hand across her button nose. ‘My hairbrush has moved.’
Is she accusing me of something?
‘Are you accusing me of moving your stuff?’ I ask. It comes out too harsh so I laugh to soften the words, make light of it. But inside my tummy turns on itself.
‘Just wondered,’ she says. She is sidling around the kitchen, moving ornaments from the dresser and tracing her fingers along the shelves before inspecting them. She inhales long and loud. ‘Those flowers look rank.’ She gestures to the row of pelargoniums I have added to the windowsills.
‘I think they brighten up the place.’ I won’t let her dampen my mood.
‘It’s like an old people’s home.’ She doesn’t laugh and slumps down at the kitchen table.
I carry on stirring the sauce in the pan. She is happy enough to eat what I cook every night and leave her soiled empty plate on the table for me to clear up after her.
‘When’s Dad home?’ she asks.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say. But when I turn she is gone and the sauce has split. I’ll have to start over.
