ghosts nor spirits nor sprites, we’re the effect of an elementary principle: with enough time, a swarm will evolve a conscience. Thus we’ve woven a worldly wily web, contrived a hive mind, if you will. Spindle bodies strung in a net of spacetime. Interested. Hmming along.
We’ve been needling you for centuries untold. Or perhaps we should say centuries told: you certainly love your stories. Your earliest tales were of animals, of course, beastly fables carved into cave walls. Well, it’s time to turn the fables, we say, time for us to tell you what we know. A swarm is but a loose net of knots. We hang, an elastic severalty. Our song is the same: the notes we sing, like a plaintive erhu, form a weird and coordinate harmony.
All together at once is how a swarm sees but you humans go beginning to end. And so we recount each act in its turn: pace by pace, cause and effect, each and every flutter and tumble. Be patient and listen, no hurries, no worries, point by point, we outline the doctrine: to err is human, and that is your doom and delight. Even frivolous fairy tales come from fae, from fata (‘the Fates’), fatum (Fate), ‘the destiny which they have spoken’.
You have now heard the note of one Percy M. Clark, a wanderer, a brute, a cad, the forefather who started it all. He called himself an Old Drifter but he didn’t learn our lesson – his hand grasped a tad too tight. A slip and a clutch, a cry and a fall, and one child strikes another. That tiny chaos, like one of our wings, sets in motion the unwitting cycle: it will spiral across families for generations to come, spurring Fate’s furious cataract…
I
The Grandmothers
Sibilla
1939
At first, they didn’t know. It was disguised by the motley silt of the womb, those red strands marbling the white scud of the vernix, and they were distracted by the baby’s cries and the task of severing the twisty blue link to its mother. The midwives passed the baby to its grandmother, whose name was Giovanna. She held it, noted that it was female, and used her pinkie to swipe a cross into its grimy forehead. Only then did Giovanna peer closer – what’s this? Hair. Long, dark, sticky swirls of hair all over the stippled skin of her first and only granddaughter.
The midwives were still circling the mother’s shipwrecked body, tending to her, murmuring like the sea, the child’s cries like that same sea breaking. Giovanna swaddled the baby in elaborate folds and handed the burden to its bearer. The mother, whose name was Adriana, looked down at the hairy little face and promptly fainted. Giovanna grabbed the baby just before it tumbled off the bed. The midwives laughed. Such drama! The wool would fall out. The whelp had just forgotten to eat it in the womb.
Adriana woke to firm entreaties that she breastfeed. She took the baby into her arms. The hair seemed to have already grown longer and darker. Through it, she could just about see a purple hole opening and closing, letting out a mewling sound. Fine. Go on. Her fingers wrangled with the baby’s lips over the nipple until it latched. The baby sucked noisily. The hair on its face shivered with the pulse of its mouth and Adriana stroked it, crying softly at its warmth.
Giovanna and Adriana bundled the baby up, bundled it home, and kept it there. They waited. But despite the midwives’ promises, the hair didn’t fall out or wipe away. So they began to cut it, Giovanna with great avidity, Adriana with cowed carefulness. It grew back thick and fast, as if unravelling from the knot in the belly or the cowlick on the chest, a dark drain into which Adriana’s eyes often spiralled as she breastfed, wondering who or what was to blame for this curse.
* * *
The child’s father was a man named Giacomo Gavuzzi and there were reasons to suspect that he carried hectic blood. In 1888, his father, a hotelier named Pietro Gavuzzi, had sailed from Italy to England to learn the trade. He’d picked up a wife in London and carted her off, pregnant, to the middle of Africa in 1899. Lina was born on the way, in the middle of the Kalahari. Giacomo was born six years later. After stints at the Grand Hotel Bulawayo and then at the Victoria Falls Hotel, Pietro had hoisted them all up again and