Sophie Crawford studied English at Cambridge before going on to work across music and theatre. Below is an extract from her first novel on queer culture and folklore.
Email: s.u.crawford@gmail.com
Hope
1
Hope screamed when the email came in. A woman standing at a dripping bus stop turned her head sharply at the sound and Hope walked a short way off. The rain was blurring the screen but she could make out the words:
‘Save the date for Julia and Leah’s wedding!’ She cupped her hand over her phone to keep it from the downpour and tried to click the link to the invitation.
‘Open, for fuck sake.’
Her finger prodded desperately at the unresponsive screen as rain jewelled its surface. She ducked her head as a sudden flurry came down over her shoulders and neck. Making for cover she ran under the damp leaves of a lime tree. She fished a glove out of her pocket and wiped her phone screen. It went blank and then reloaded.
‘You’ve replied “attending” to Julia and Leah’s wedding!’
She stared at the message and then pushed her fist into her mouth. She stopped breathing as her teeth met her knuckles.
It was 10:35am. Still dripping Hope studied the biro-ed sign in times on the sheet at reception, she tried to smudge her entry so if you squinted it might look like it contained a nine. She turned it upside down and hoped the woman behind the desk wouldn’t notice. Upstairs she walked directly into a meeting where people were sat in a circle of chairs.
‘Sorry the trains were – ’
‘Oh hi Hope, we’ve just started if you’re ok to take notes?’
Her trousers clung damply to her legs and her presence seemed to be making the pad of paper on her lap wilt.
‘Always giving you the boring jobs eh Hope,’ Woodbank smiled over at her. His jowls folded softly at his shirt collar. He’d recently dyed his hair blonde and insisted everyone refer to him by his surname.
She was praying for an uninterrupted hour in the office to dry off when Katie came in. She had immense breasts, manicured nails and a preference for unicorn mugs. She was saving up for a Lord of The Rings tattoo. Hope found herself bewilderingly attracted to her.
‘Hope do you know anything about banishing ghosts?’
‘Umm potentially? Why?’ Hope turned to Katie who was emanating a passion for mornings. The overhead lights picked out the individual pencil strokes of Katie’s eyebrows.
‘Woodbank has been laughing at me but I think there’s a ghost in the basement. Have you been down to storage?’
‘Not for a while.’ Hope swung on her wheelie chair. She’d never got the hang of the fact that at this job the chatting seemed to be so much more important than the actual work.
‘Well I was down there yesterday and I swear to god I heard this voice say “hello” and I replied “hello” back, and then it came again “hello” and I know there’s a ghost down there.’ Katie waved her palm at each greeting. ‘And I spoke to the duty manager, but I’m not allowed to burn sage or light a candle or anything because of the smoke detectors, so I need to find another way.’ Katie brought her hands together and looked expectantly at Hope.
‘I mean I can have a look – ’
‘Because the thing is, and I know Woodbank will make fun of me, but I just think if I was a ghost I’d like to be put to rest.’ Katie tilted her head and smiled.
‘Sure. Umm well I have another part time job at the Association for Folklore and Magical Customs, there are quite a lot of books there on ghosts so I can check?’
‘That would be great.’ Katie beamed. ‘I know it’s a ghost you see because someone crawled down there last summer and killed themselves.’
‘In the storage room?’ Hope stopped swinging on her chair.
‘Yeah they broke in and did it.’
‘Oh wow, um ok.’
‘I wonder if there’s a police report I can look at. I think if I knew their name that might help with putting them to rest.’ Someone powered up the photocopier nearby and it began exhaling noisily in their direction.
‘Um yes maybe. I’ll see what I can find in my other job too if that helps.’ Hope was struggling with her facial expression, frowning seemed natural in the context but Katie had not stopped smiling.
‘That would be great, thanks Hope. I’ll tell Woodbank you believed me. He’s been taking the mick out of me ever since I told him.’
Katie pushed out of the door and Hope returned to her spreadsheet. She tried not to think about the person who had chosen to kill themselves in the windowless, bare concrete of the storage room. She clicked on her emails to distract herself and saw the message again:
‘Please save the date for the celebration of Julia and Leah’s wedding!
It will be held at Asheath Farm, Devon on 1st August.
Thursday: drinks and pizza party on the farm!
Friday: 2pm service, dinner and dancing!
Saturday: Pool party and BBQ!’
Hope wondered if it was possible to carry out exorcisms on your own email account.
‘What did you do to your hand?’ Anna had cocked her head sideways and was staring at Hope’s hand, that was currently passing her a glass of wine in a sweaty pub.
‘Nothing, it was just something on the way to work.’
Anna took her glass and held Hope’s hand flat on the surface of the small round table between them.
‘Hope those are teeth marks.’
‘I may have bitten my own hand.’
‘Did you put germolene on it?’
‘I didn’t break the skin, and I know for a fact that I am not rabid.’ Hope studied the purple crescent indentations.
‘Is hand biting your new thing? A more extreme version of biting your nails?’
‘I got Julia and Leah’s invitation,’ Hope said sliding her palm away.
Anna wrinkled her nose ‘Oh shit. I did see that.’
‘Are you going?’
‘I have known Leah for a long time.’
‘So that’s a yes then.’ Hope took a sip from her glass. Around them women in crisp shirts and tights were stood wide legged, crowding the tiny tables with bottles of wine.
Anna shifted on her high stool, her recently bleached hair made it look as if her head was emitting light. ‘There’s going to be a pool party Hope!’
‘I cannot believe you are being swayed by the pool. Julia is getting married. It is hell.’ Hope kept her eyes focused on a woman with a crooked nose nearby, she was goading a noisy redhead, her glass held loosely in her hand.
‘It’s a lesbian wedding Hope, everyone’s going to have at least one ex there. I mean Jesus, even Leah and I got together once. I bet if you come you’ll meet someone, some closeted, hot cousin.’ Anna wrapped her small fingers on the table.
‘Genuinely the last lesbian wedding I went to had maybe three dykes in attendance and they were all going out with each other. Everyone else was a straight couple. I have absolutely no idea why they invited me.’
‘Leah’s always been very big on peace making.’
‘No part of me is getting on board with this.’
‘You know it was just the Save the Date they sent through today – what do you think you’ll do when the actual invitation arrives? Bite off a toe?’
2
Shortly after Julia had broken up with her, Hope had got a part time job at the Association for Folklore and Magical Customs. She had stopped doing gigs around the same time and started wearing sunglasses regardless of the weather. She took them off inside but outdoors she had persuaded herself that they made her invisible.
‘You’re not famous’ Anna had said when she first saw her in them, ‘and it’s not sunny. It looks like you’re pretending to be blind.’
She had seen the job advertised in a magazine Anna had bought as a joke. It was called ‘That’s Life! – Fate and Fortune’. They’d gone away to the seaside and sat watching the rain meet the sea in a grey wall. Weary of dragging over the details of Julia’s callous actions Anna had picked up the magazine and started reading it to Hope. It was around 80 percent problem pages with responses from agony aunts with different skill sets. They could read your dreams, your aura, your horoscope, your tarot, give you past life regression, talk to angels, do magic and contact your dead pets from beyond the grave with the use of a psychic horse. Hearing the worries of women writing in from Surrey and Dorset had pulled Hope out of her gloom. She had taken the magazine with her after they returned home and pored over it. On the back pages were adverts for plus size velveteen gowns, psychic phone lines and a part time job at the Association for Folklore and Magical Customs. It was possible that Hope was the only person to apply.
Anna was bewildered when she told her about the job, Hope had never expressed an interest in Folklore and had made a point of keeping her days free for music. Now Hope was turning down gigs and always wearing dark glasses.
Hope’s sister, Angela was not pleased about her job either. She was in the midst of a long engagement with Geoff, a serious Christian and folklore and magic was apparently one breath away from devil worship.
‘Please just don’t talk to him about it’ she had said. ‘He got really upset when mum mentioned it and locked himself in the toilet for ages.’
‘I don’t understand the big deal – I’m just sat in an office.’
‘It’s not just an office Hope, it’s full of mad books and god knows what else. It’s bad enough when he comes to mum and dad’s without you adding effigies and pagan rituals.’
‘I’m not actually doing any of the stuff.’
‘Yes but surely all your members are. I’m going to have to beg a priest to marry us as it is, it’s just so short sighted of you to not see how this would affect us.’
‘We are literally Jewish, surely that’s a bigger problem than the fact I occasionally sell tickets for talks on changelings.’
Angela had chosen that moment to walk out and slam the door.
Hope’s family were very pro couples. Geoff believed he knew the date the world would end and the rapture would occur, but he had a pulse and gave Angela someone to sit next to at dinner so her family approved. When Hope had started going out with Julia the family had been awash with relief. Finally, someone to bring to Friday night dinners, someone to introduce her grandmother to.
‘It’s fine, it’s fine she can be a boy or a girl or a whatever, she doesn’t need to be Jewish,’ her grandmother had been tripping over herself when Hope had told her she had a girlfriend. ‘Julia, that’s a good name, Julia.’
Hope had never introduced a girlfriend to her family before, none of them had been lasting enough. But as Julia’s name started to seep into her speech, her parents’ ears pricked up. Soon they were casually mentioning that maybe she’d like to bring Julia over some time, nothing big, she could just come over. Maybe she could come for shabbat dinner, it could be so small, just a soup and little something. Hope put it off. She knew that when the time came for Julia to meet her parents there would be nothing minor about the event.
The date of Julia’s visit had been set three weeks in advance. From then on Hope had received calls at intervals from her mother and father about what Julia could eat, what she liked to drink, what kind of an eater she was – is she a big eater or a birdy eater like your grandma? Would she like a full cholent or wish she was eating a boiled egg? Next there were questions around her allergies: Was she ok with dust? Cats? Candles? What about polish? Could she use soap?
When the day arrived, Hope went to her parents’ to help cook. The table was covered in chopping boards, carrots were in various states of dismemberment, four pots were boiling on the stove, one containing a whole chicken carcass, though Hope had repeatedly told them that Julia was a vegetarian. Her father was sat monotonously chopping a parsnip, she found her mother battling a table cloth with an iron, when she saw Hope, she promptly burst into tears.
Hope had flinched through the entire meal while Julia had been seemingly unaffected. She had bourn Geoff’s dull sermons, ‘It’s all just question of faith – if you boil it down.’
Her father’s increasingly drunken questions: ‘So Julie, what do you make of this government? No no! I’m asking Julie!’
Her mother’s jumbled attempts at conversation: ‘So Julia you…is that, am I, what are you…is the, did you have the soup?’
Her sister’s pointed career questions: ‘That’s what you’re doing now – but where do you want to be in, say, five years time?’
Her grandmother’s literary quizzing: ‘But what do you think of Soames in the Forsythe Saga? Do you think he’d be put in prison today?’
And her great uncle’s open hostility: ‘What? Did you say your family were Polish? How many jews did they kill in the war?’
Hope had done what she could to shield her, but it was a force too strong to be reckoned with. There had been reviews from the extended family after it was done. Her aunt had called her.
‘Well, I heard from your mum that you have a lovely new girlfriend. I hope we get to meet her soon. And did I tell you that we met a rabbi at our friends’ the Rosenblums the other night and you know what – she was a lesbian.’
Her Australian cousin had sent her a message.
‘Hey Hope! Great news on your girlfriend – mum sent through a picture! Good work!’
Her American cousins had sent a video of their two young children intoning in unison: ‘We are glad to hear you have a girlfriend called Ju-li-ah. We can-not wait to have her in the family.’
No amount of pleading from Hope could reduce the spread of the news worldwide.
When it had ended they hadn’t sat shiva with her.
‘You need to forget her,’ her grandmother had said.
3
Hope skidded her bike to a halt by the Chinese supermarket and locked it onto the railings. The sun had begun to shine weakly and people leant on the metal fence that surrounded the undulating, locked garden of Fitzroy Square. In the year Hope had been working there she had never seen anyone in it.
She ran down the steps to the basement of the Royal Anthropological Society to a door marked ‘The Association for Folklore and Magical Customs’. The room smelt stale and sweet and had no windows. There was a glass panel in one of the walls which filtered light thinly from another office with access to the sun. It was the light equivalent of only breathing recycled air. She hurled her bike helmet down, snapped her computer open and clicked the video meeting link, pulling off her jumper and arranging her hair as it loaded. Her boss came onto screen. She mouthed for a moment in silence before unmuting.
‘Oh sorry I’m always forgetting. Let me know if I break up and I can move room.’
Hope began opening up different tabs on her computer as her boss talked.
‘So there’s the presentation on dybbuks coming up and there’s a call for papers for the Dublin conference – they’re asking for work on charms, fairies, sin eaters and burial so can you do a post about that?’
Hope was on google maps looking at Asheath farm in Devon. The photos showed a sagging, thatched roof and roving pigs. She wondered how they factored into Julia and Leah’s pizza party plans. She realised there was silence at the other end of the line and clicked back to the call, her boss’s drooping cheeks were staring back at her.
‘Sorry I think I lost you for a bit there’ Hope said ‘I got as far as the sin eaters and then you cut off – can you say that again?’
Hope had two point five jobs. She worked as a temp in the office with Katie and Woodbank one day a week, at the Association for Folklore and Magical Customs three days a week and picked up any music teaching she could. She liked the Association for Folklore and Magical Customs best because apart from her weekly video call with her Yorkshire-based boss, she was left completely alone. The drab office was lined with copies of the Magical Customs journal and shelves of books on hares, witches, eggs, encyclopaedias of superstition, nursery rhymes, dances, magic. The rest of the basement and the two floors above her were occupied by anthropologists. The top of the building was a flat lived in by private inhabitants. In the evening Hope would see their light on as she left.
She listened to music as she worked and that afternoon she had the volume turned up high enough that she didn’t immediately hear the knock on the door.
‘Hello?’ She called out. The anthropologists were a collection of quiet, nodding people in scarves, Hope had never found out any of their names and they had never entered her office. Once one of them had tried to speak to her while she made a cup of tea, he’d been small and grey haired and spoken so quietly it had been impossible to hear him over the roar of the kettle. She’d nodded to him the few times she’d seen him since, but then he had vanished into the walls along with her chances of making any friends.
A voice came through the door.
‘There’s a visitor for you.’
Hope leapt up and swept her bike helmet and coat off her desk. At the door was a dark-haired anthropologist who gestured to the stairs where Hope could see legs stiffly descending. She had never had a stranger turn up at her office. She was fairly certain that association members were dissuaded from coming in case the sight of the carpeted cupboard burst the illusion created by the Fitzrovia address.
The woman slowly appearing was breathing hard, her mouth open as she clutched the railing on the stairs. Her hair was long and white, straggling dryly at her shoulders which hunched unevenly. The skin around her eyes was suffused with blood and her dark jumper was stuck all over with food and flakes of skin. She was followed by a man dressed in brown with long, dirty nails. His scalp shone through the dark strands of hair that hung limply around his neck. His nose took up most of his face and he seemed to be perpetually snorting.
‘I sent you a message saying I would come by.’ The red eyed woman said passing Hope into her office. ‘I’m Sadie Few.’
‘Oh yes! Of course.’ Hope said trawling her mind for any recollection of an email or shakily written letter. She heaved her chair from behind her desk for the woman to sit on.
‘I’m afraid there isn’t much room in the office.’ Hope said apologetically to the snorting man.
‘That’s my son’ Sadie said, sitting comfortably, ‘he’ll be alright in the corridor.’ The snorting son began to pace, Hope noticed how long his nose hair was. Maybe it had somehow grown up into his sinuses and that was what he was always working to dislodge. He began to hum and Hope found it difficult to concentrate when the tune was punctuated by such a-rhythmic snorting, it would have been so easy for him to at least get it on the beat.
‘I brought this.’ Sadie held out a shiny, cheap book. There was a shaky illustration of a butterfly on the cover.
‘Oh thank you!’ Hope said, if she could just sound effusive enough maybe she could make them go away.
‘It’s taken me around fifteen years but I thought you’d be interested in having it for the library. And it seemed apt considering the recent events.’ Sadie flipped the front cover open. ‘She was my aunt, Charlotte Few’ Sadie said pointing to a black and white photograph ‘a talented lepidopterist as well as a fenland folklorist.’
‘Just wonderful.’ Hope said ‘I love the cover.’ It looked like a drawing a child would throw away.
‘Yes my son did that when I finished the book last year. He used to be very good at art at school.’
Sadie looked troublingly as if she was settling in for the afternoon. Now she was launching into the tale of her aunt’s travels across the fens, how complicated it had been when she died, how there had been such a row. Hope knew the anthropologists would not save her, the snorting son’s pacing and humming was showing no sign of abating. She took the book from Sadie’s hands and clutched it to her chest.
‘Thank you so, so, so much! It’s so great for the library.’ She turned it over and saw the self-published mark ‘And thank you for getting it printed especially.’ She walked towards the door. Sadie made no move to go.
‘Can I give you a journal to take away with you?’ Hope said in a desperate plea ‘You can have two!’ or 58, no one has ever read them, she thought. Sadie rose heavily and as she laboured up the stairs she told Hope how awful it had been when she heard Ian had died.
‘Such a loss.’ Sadie said. Hope nodded solemnly wondering who the hell Ian was.
‘Do you know when the ceremony will be?’ Sadie asked, clutching the bannister. Hope gaped.
‘Oh! No, no I don’t, but I’m sure if you send me an email I can find out.’
‘Probably won’t be for a while, like I said it was an awful business for my aunt, of course she was such a special case. The main thing is it gets done for Ian.’ Sadie’s son grunted behind them.
‘Well thank you so much for coming in!’ Hope said with violent brightness as they reached the top of the stairs. ‘It’s so nice to have visitors, and thank you again for the book, I cannot wait to read it.’ Sadie and her son lingered as Hope backed away down the stairs. ‘Have a lovely rest of your day.’ She tried to make her voice quieter as if she was fading away – travelling far into the distance, they stayed solidly staring at her. She got back into her office, threw the book on top of a filing cabinet and wondered how long they would wait upstairs blocking her exit.