The Carhullan Army (12 page)

Lorry had on the same long skirt that I had seen her wearing previously, and a woollen cardigan that looked baggy, stretched out of shape at the cuffs and elbows. I shrugged as best I could in the gauze sling. ‘Someone shows up armed and with a picture of me, I likely would have done it too. She thought I was an assassin or someone sent by the Authority, right? And I was supposed to confess in there? I would have confessed to it if I’d thought it was the way to get out.’ Lorry chuckled and gestured for me to sit on the bed next to her. ‘You would have, if it had been the truth.’

She ran another quick check of my shoulder and then lifted the dressing on my hand. I saw a row of neat black stitches in the flesh. ‘No tetanus shots here, I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘but I irrigated, so you should be OK. Just keep an eye out that it doesn’t start to go green.’ I nodded. ‘There are no shots down there either any more,’ I replied, ‘At least, not for free.’ She glanced up at me and I noticed the caramels and greens that made up the strange marbling of her irises. There was more grey spun into her hair than I had seen in the dusk outside. ‘No, I know that,’ she said. ‘But they do have the means to inoculate against some things, don’t they? The utter bastards.’ Her tone was quietly aggrieved, but she was still smiling kindly, tacitly, and I could see the criticism was not directed at me. It was bitter sympathy that she was expressing.

My eyes stung and began to fill with tears again. I felt like hugging her, or putting my face in her lap and crying myself quietly back to sleep. Exhaustion had left me too sensitive, too emotional. I bit my lip, caught hold of myself. She took a glass jar out of the case, unscrewed it and gently thumbed a waxy salve over the cut. It smelled of honey and witch hazel and stung a little. ‘Yes. We’re up to speed on the Authority’s anti-breeding campaign. But, you know, it might be good if you talked about it to the other women during one of our meetings. If you feel you want to. We’ve reached a bit of an impasse on the subject.’ She taped a new patch of lint over my palm. ‘So, now then. What do you want me to do about it?’

I had been undressed, washed and administered to, presumably by Lorry herself. It was obvious that she knew my situation, as Jackie did, and I was glad of it. Sitting there with her rough hands on my arm I felt understood. On the face of it Jackie had seemed convivial, but there was something calculated about her manner, a note of restraint perhaps, that went with her position. The woman tending to me now had a different role. She was a healer. I realised that in her years at the farm Lorry must have dealt with every kind of female complaint, every kind of harm to the body. I did not have to explain myself to her or inch in to a difficult topic. I did not have to try to justify my discomfort, as I had to Andrew.

Since the regulator had been fitted I’d felt a sense of minor but constant embarrassment about myself, debilitation almost, as if the thing were an ugly birthmark. I knew others around me were fitted too, and on the surface they seemed unchanged and able to accommodate the intrusion. Now, in Lorry’s company, the device felt exactly as it was: an alien implant, an invader in my body, something that had been rejected all but physically. It was like a spelk under the skin; it had stopped pricking, but I had not for one day forgotten it. And I was not wrong to hate it.

‘I want it gone,’ I told her. ‘Really, I don’t care how much it hurts. Just get it out.’ I rubbed my arm above the blanket. There was so much more to say. I wanted to talk to her, wanted to tell her how bad it really was, all that had been done to me. I managed a short outburst. ‘There are fourteen-year-olds with these things in, you know. And grandmothers. What right have they got to violate them?’

Lorry sighed and clapped her hands on her thighs, squeezing the meat of them with her fingers. ‘Yes, I know. Listen, don’t worry. It’ll be fine. I can’t promise you a wonderful time while I’m down there, but I think you’ll cope.’

As she stood I noticed a kink in the way she raised herself, a favouring of one hip. I had guessed her to be in her fifties perhaps, but now I was not sure that she wasn’t older. ‘I’ll go and get ready,’ she said. ‘We might as well get on with it and get it over. You just sit tight.’ She paused at the end of the bed, then took hold of the folded yellow cloth and shook it out. It was one of the tunics I had seen the Carhullan stallholders wearing all those years ago. ‘Ha! Just like old times!’ she said. ‘It’s going to be good to see someone wearing this again. You know what, I’m looking forward to it. What we need is some of the old passion back.’

*

It was not until the next day that I finally made it downstairs, into the massive kitchen of Carhullan. I was sore from what Lorry had done to release the hook and the wire, still bleeding and cramping a little. Up in the room she had given me a draught of something sweet and syrupy which made me drowsy and thick headed, apologising when she handed it to me for the homespun nature of the sedative and explaining the difficult choices necessary when dispensing their meagre store of painkillers and anaesthetics. She apologised again, and said she hoped I wouldn’t suffer too much. Last year she’d had to remove a finger on one woman’s hand after an accident at the oat mill – it was mostly gone anyway, crushed to hell – and even that call had been a tough one. In the end the woman had gone without. They used the old wooden-spoon method a lot. Teeth got pulled that way too, she said. But that was the nature of things at Carhullan. Supplies were limited.

Then Lorry had set to work. She’d been quick and determined about me, forcing my knees apart when I tensed and resisted, and she’d given me a soft rag to put in my underwear to absorb the flow afterwards. But still I felt stretched and scoured. I had tried to sleep for the rest of the day. She’d left another draught beside me on the dresser and sometime during the night I’d woken with a deep griping in my belly and I’d taken it and it had knocked me back out. In the morning there had been dark brown blood on the sheets. I’d bundled them up and gone down to the bathroom to clean myself, and I’d put the stained cottons in the old copper bath to soak. In the mirror opposite the tub I had looked deathly pale. It was odd to see my reflection after days of not looking. I almost did not recognise myself.

Towards midday Lorry had checked me out again, given me new presses. ‘You’ll do, but take things easy, OK?’ she said. ‘Let yourself heal. And I don’t just mean physically.’ I had tried to get her to stay on a while and talk to me, but she’d excused herself, saying she was really busy; a couple of the ponies needed looking over, and she had a sow to dispatch. She was also the farm’s vet and butcher.

I did not want to remain confined much longer upstairs. I had begun to feel like a bird that had flown accidentally into the rafters through an open window, then lost its bearings and been unable to leave. Though I half expected her, Jackie did not come to see me again, and there were no more initiations or welcomes, no more meals brought to me on trays, just the muffled sounds of people below and outside getting on with things, signalling my exclusion. The second herbal analgesic had worn off, leaving me thirsty and quaking, and I was aware of how empty my stomach was again. I knew the decision to leave the room was now mine alone. Hunger rather than courage would drive me out. It was late afternoon when I finally found the desperation to move. By then the spasms in my abdomen had lessened and I felt able to face all those who must know about my presence but had yet to see me in the flesh.

The woollen tunic seemed strange when I slipped it on, like a rough borrowed shirt, an item taken temporarily from a friend until wet or damaged clothing might be returned. In its weave was a mustiness, and the lingering scent of someone else – I did not know who – perhaps the last person to have worn it, whenever that was. But it was comforting to have been given it, and as I fastened its ties in a knot at my back I began to feel less solitary, less alien. I knew this was the first official step towards inclusion.

I came nervously down the stone stairs, barefoot and careful on the cold steps. There was a door at the bottom of the hallway and a hum of activity in the room beyond it. I opened it to find upwards of thirty women sitting on benches at a long wooden table, taking a small meal of dark brown meat and kale.

They turned when they saw me and stopped eating, and for a long minute I endured their full scrutiny, uncivil and raw. I scanned the rows for a face that I could recognise – Megan, Lorry or even Jackie – but there was no one I could quietly implore to rise and seat me, introduce me, or serve as my guide in this unfamiliar realm.

Facing me were women of all ages, some with grey in their hair, some with long braids, and others with eccentrically cropped styles. They were mostly dressed as the women I’d met on the moors had been, practically, with thrift and a certain bespoke artistry. Some had overalls that seemed extreme and invented, tribal almost. Others had panels and shapes shaved into their heads. They wore straps of leather around their wrists and upper arms, and stone pendants: their smocks and shirts were cut down, resewn, and there was a small girl among them with her face painted blue, and blue stains on her jumper. No one else had on a yellow tunic. The bright item I was wearing suddenly seemed more like a convict’s uniform than it did my banner of belonging. I tried to smile and greet them but my mouth was paralysed. All I could do was remain still, silently waiting for someone to tell me what to do.

I heard whispering along the bench. Then, one by one, they stood up, as if about to change shift. I thought perhaps they were leaving, because my presence had somehow triggered offence, because I was not wanted here. But instead they picked up their knives and began knocking the handles on the tabletop, quietly at first, then louder. They looked straight at me and banged down on the wood, and the plates in front of them jumped and clattered. Bits of food spilled off the earthenware onto the scrubbed oak. The knives flashed silver in their hands. The little girl leapt up and down on the bench.

I blinked fast and involuntarily in the racket. The sound rang through me as if I were made of glass and might shatter if it continued, so brittle and thin was my spirit. I was rooted to the floor, afraid to move forward, unable to turn and leave, not knowing whether to ask for mercy or somehow stand my ground against them. The drumming went on and on, and I felt its tattoo echoing in the hollowness of my body.

I knew then that I was nothing; that I was void to the core. To get here I had committed a kind of suicide. My old life was over. I was now an unmade person. In the few days that I had been at Carhullan nobody had called me anything other than Sister, though they had seen my identification card and knew my name, and I had shouted out my story over and over from behind the metal walls of the dog box, trying to engage their sympathies, trying to tell them who I was. The person I had once been, the person who had walked out of the safety zones and up the mountain, was gone. She was dead. I was alive. But the only heartbeat I had was the pulse these women were beating though me.

It was not until the first of them left the table, came forward and took hold of my neck and kissed my mouth, while the others continued to knock their cutlery, and when the woman next to her followed suit, and the next, and the next, that I began to understand what was happening. I realised what the noise was. It was not a clamour intended to drive me out or to let me know I bore some kind of stigma. It was the sign of acceptance I had been waiting for. It was applause.

*

The following morning Jackie waited for me after the breakfast shift, gesturing for me to get ready, and I hurried upstairs to put on warm clothes and went out with her onto Carhullan’s land. After my appearance in the kitchen, my boots had been given back to me together with my clothes, cleaned and dried and folded. I had the use of the indoor bedroom until otherwise notified, Lorry had told me, until I got well enough to handle something less luxurious. Then I’d be moved out into one of the dormitories. ‘Make the most of it while you can,’ she said. ‘It’s no fun dotting over that stream to take a piss in the middle of the night. Believe me, I know. I did it for years. And the other girls will keep you up gabbing, I have no doubt about that.’

I noticed the other women watching as Jackie and I passed by on our way out of the farmhouse. They had not been unfriendly; I had shaken hands, learned a few names, but for the time being they were mostly steering clear of my company.

We did not go far. My legs were still sore and I was light-headed from days of undernourishment. I apologised to Jackie for my condition when I had to pause and rest, but she said not to worry. ‘You’ll be right soon enough,’ she told me. ‘Back when I served, I saw people come out of the box and never get well. It kills your head. You’re stronger than that. Keep eating what they give you. And keep taking butter on it, like the others do.’ I warmed at her compliment but I knew it was too generous. At least once or twice a night the terrors of that confinement woke me in a sweat, and I would cry out as if still trapped there.

As we walked around the estate’s inner fields, she listed the illnesses that I should watch out for, and could probably expect to get. Anything that brought a fever with it was a real problem, and I should tell Lorry immediately. Anaemia was a risk. When she heard I didn’t eat red meat Jackie scowled and shook her head. ‘That’s going to have to change, Sister. I’m going to get Ruthie to give you liver this week. It’ll do you more good than anything else.’

There were gastro-sicknesses occasionally – the outside toilets were old and bugs got passed around. I should clean up well after myself, she said, put the sawdust mix down after a shit, boil my cloths clean every month, and adhere to good rules of hygiene, though it would mean braving the cold outdoor showers every day. Some of the girls had warts; not much could be done about that. Constipation; after four days something had to be done about this. There was a bit of cockie about, she said – I did not know what she meant but I made a note to ask Lorry later. Women had thrush. There were ring-worms. Parasites. I’d get giardiasis if I drank anything other than water piped from the well. Even then it might happen. It was an inconvenience. But eventually I’d be immune, she said.