The Carhullan Army (15 page)

The first meeting I attended, though I had agreed in principle to speak, I was granted a pass. I heard Lorry and Jackie discussing me in the kitchen the morning before as I came down the stairs. Through the open door I saw that they were hanging a yellow swatch of cloth above the lintel. ‘Give her another couple of weeks,’ Lorry was saying, ‘until she gets her strength back. There’s no need to rush things.’ Jackie seemed less keen to have me sit it out. ‘It’ll be better if she’s still sick with it. Better for them all to see it in her. They need to see it.’ Lorry sighed. ‘That may be, but she needs rest. She’s still not sleeping through.’ Jackie nodded, and when I came into the room she told me curtly not to worry about speaking that evening, and she left the house.

Instead I sat quietly and listened to the proceedings. There was a brief request for people to stay off the growing furrows when they walked to the bothies; the plants were being trodden down and damaged. Soap was being used up quicker than it could be made again. One of the dogs was ailing and might need to be put down. After practical business the floor was opened up to other things.

If Carhullan appeared on one level to be efficient and united, it was also fraught on others. I could see that there were old areas of conflict, matters that had been worried at again and again by the inhabitants without resolution. There were several men nearby, I discovered, in a lower lying hamlet on the other side of the valley. They were involved with the farm’s running, but remained at a satellite location. Whether to include them at Carhullan seemed to be a matter of continual debate. How many of them there were I could not glean from the discussion. But one of the men was married to a woman at the farm, and I could not be sure where the others fitted into the scheme of things.

There were also two boys who had been born in the second generation that were now absent. They had been sent to the settlement at puberty, because of their sex. It was a startling piece of information, but I kept my mouth shut throughout the meeting. The laws of the place were still foreign to me. My heart quickened as I watched one woman stand, begin speaking and then quickly break down, saying through her tears that she wanted her son to be with her, that he was spending more time among strangers than with his own blood. He had just turned twelve. He had been moved to the settlement the day after his birthday.

*

The night I was due to speak I felt sick with apprehension. I was told that all the women would be present for it. And I could have the floor for as long as I wanted. I had been at Carhullan for almost a month and had met perhaps a few dozen of the Sisters so far, and though I’d begun to form relationships with some of them, others were still strangers. The thought of having to be articulate in front of so many people was terrifying. In the past I could barely hold up my end of an argument in front of Andrew. I imagined myself fumbling over the retelling of how the last few years had been in Rith. Or simply being struck dumb.

Jackie had said she wanted to see me before I spoke. She asked me to go to her room at the end of the landing an hour before the meeting. I’d glanced at the door many times on the way down the stairs but had not seen inside. Sometimes I had been tempted to knock on the door. But I never found the nerve. Since my arrival I’d laid down strict routines for myself, had tried hard to fit with the way of the farm, modestly helping out wherever I was directed, trying to find my skills, and not straying into any of the areas where it might seem that I was interfering.

Lorry and Ruth had allowed me to assist them in their tasks, and I had cut vegetables with Sonnelle in the kitchen, and cleaned the oak table after meals. I’d even learned how to paunch rabbits and cut strips from the aged carcasses hanging in the cool stone larder. Though my clothes were returned, and the tin with my possessions in, I still wore the yellow tunic over my jeans, and was uncertain about how long I should keep it on. So much at Carhullan was self-initiated, self-decreed, but I had not yet found my footing. In truth I liked the feeling of it, the rough texture on my arms, and I liked the brightness of it reflected in the windowpanes when I walked past. Every day I wore Megan’s necklace, tied at the base of my throat, like a charm.

Jackie’s bedroom was the largest upstairs and it overlooked the mountains to the west. Whoever had built the farm four centuries ago had fashioned for themselves a chamber of suitable status. When I knocked she did not call out, but I heard the squeak of a mattress and then her heavy-soled footsteps crossing the boards to let me in. She had on wire-framed reading glasses, and they tempered the hard aspect of her face, made her appear scholarly. I felt as if I had disturbed her, even though she had asked me to come. But she motioned for me to enter, and I went in.

I had not known what to expect of her private space. When I’d looked in on them, the dormitories were small and crowded. The bunks were sometimes separated by curtains, but mostly through the day they were left open, even if shared by two women, and they were immaculately tidy. The beds were made, many with matching khaki blankets – army surplus I guessed – or carthens, and the floors looked swept. On the first visit I had thought perhaps they would be strewn with items of clothing and bedding, that a natural dishevelment would prevail, but it was as if they had been prepared for an inspection. I did not know if this was on my account, whether Jackie had prearranged it, knowing that she would be taking me there that day, or if this was one of the expected standards at Carhullan. Military neatness.

Her bedroom was not as chilly as the rest of the house, though the window was wide open. There was a cast-iron grate in the corner of the room. It was empty and there was no wood stacked beside it. The temperature was still falling on the mountain, but it was not yet cold enough for Jackie to need the heat, and perhaps she never did. Every wall was lined almost from floor to ceiling with books. Where they would not fit on the shelves they sat in loose piles or were slotted into the gaps above the rows. They seemed to absorb the light and distort the angles of the room, and probably went some way towards insulating it.

Her bedroom was as tidy as the barns, but it contained much more. It was Carhullan’s library. Suddenly Megan’s boast of having read all the farm’s books seemed worthy; I stood in the centre, surrounded by them. ‘Are these all yours?’ I asked her. ‘There must be thousands.’ ‘Yes and no,’ she said. ‘I brought most of them. But they belong to us all. It’s quite a collection now. You fetched nothing up with you. Do you want something to read?’

She sat down in the chair by her desk, pushed a stack of written papers back against the wall, and removed her glasses. She handled them with great care, folding them back in their case gently, as if they were the most precious thing she owned. I couldn’t remember the last time I had read a book. Even though there had been enough time between work shifts – the only public television now ran during the hours of allocation and it was pitiful and full of propaganda – I had never found true solace in reading; I had never turned to it as an escape. ‘Honestly? I wouldn’t know what to ask for,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know what I’d enjoy really.’ She nodded. ‘OK. There are a couple of things I’d like you to look at though.’

She stood and walked across the room, bent to one of the lower shelves and searched out a thick volume. On the cover was a grey photograph. I could not see what the picture was, perhaps a man in a long coat carrying something, but the image was hard to make out from where I stood. She opened it and removed a thin pamphlet from between the pages and then she handed it to me. ‘Why don’t you start with this?’ I took it from her and looked at it. It was flimsy and old. The sheets had been stapled together in a couple of places and the words looked typed rather than printed. Its title was ‘The Green Book’. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Let’s just say it’s a limited edition,’ she replied.

Jackie put a hand on my shoulder. I could almost feel a current passing from her body to mine. ‘Look. You know why you got the hood, don’t you? Well, you’ll never go back into the box without first agreeing to it. I promise you that. If you read this, it might give you a way of dealing with it. It might give you some context. And some company.’ Her voice remained gentle, but I felt a flutter of panic in my chest at the thought of ever returning to the blackness, the stench, and the abrasive metal sheeting in that tight solitary space. There were moments in daylight when I closed my eyes and I could still see the iron-jawed woman carrying me off, still feel the rotting shrunken dog held in my arms. And when I woke from my dreams I sometimes thought I had not yet been released from the cage and I’d yell out in the dark of the room.

I held the pamphlet in my hand. I wasn’t sure what Jackie was asking of me, or telling me to do, past reading it, but I knew there was a subtext. I felt she was again crediting me with more understanding than I possessed, expecting more of me than I knew how to give, and I felt out of my depth. She took her hand away from my shoulder, stepped back, and lowered herself into her chair again, folding the energy of herself away. I was standing above her and through her thin hair I could see several raised red marks on her scalp. ‘Sit down, Sister,’ she said. ‘We’d better have a quick run over matters before tonight. There are things you need to know.’

Her bed was the only other place to sit, and I could not move to it, so I remained standing. I already knew there were tensions at work in the farm. It had not taken long to realise the smooth operation of the smallholding countered an opposing gravity, and that something separated the women in their beliefs. It was why the meal shifts always contained the same faces. And why some of the relationships had broken up. ‘Is this about the defence council?’ I asked her.

‘Yes it is,’ she said. ‘But it’s not just about that. Listen, the beauty up here is that we can disagree, we have the space, we have the time. And we do disagree, Sister. Especially when it comes to the outside world.’ She sighed and crossed an ankle over her thigh, held the knotted laces of her boot. ‘But I don’t blame the Sisters for shutting it out. Truly, I don’t. They’ve come up here to make a better life, and not make the same mistakes. They’ve … Let’s say they’ve washed their hands of the past.’

Her expression darkened. ‘Fine. Yes. Women were treated like cunts back down there. Like second-class citizens and sex objects. They were underpaid, under-appreciated. Trust me, I know all about being told you aren’t suitable for a job. Fifty per cent of the world’s female population was getting raped, the fanatics had the rest bound up in black. We were all arguing over how women should look and dress, not over basic rights. And in this country, women have treated each other just as poorly. Fighting like cats and dogs. Competing for men. Eating our own young. No solidarity. No respect. No grace, if you want to call it that.’

She let go of her bootlace and spread her arms wide. ‘And here, we’ll we’ve more or less cracked it, haven’t we? Everyone’s employed. No one’s made to kneel in a separate church. No one’s getting held down at bayonet point. We’re breeding. We’re free. Why would anyone want to risk this, Sister?’ I gave a small brief nod, but I don’t think Jackie noticed. ‘And the government down there now? Well, it would be madness to interfere with it and draw attention to what we’ve got here, wouldn’t it? Sheer madness. Too much of a risk. What possible kind of campaign could we run? Surely it’s better to just bolt the door. Hole the fuck up. And pray to be left alone.’

There was a smile on her face. It was not derisive but it seemed somehow mannered, and patronising, as if she were acknowledging a moderate and rudimentary opinion presented by a child, like the reciting of a basic commandment:
Thou
shall not kill
. Her sympathy was so great it almost looked like disappointment.

Suddenly, she leant forward on the chair. ‘What do you think, Sister? Do women have it in them to fight if they need to? Or is that the province of men? Are we innately pacifist? A softer sex? Do we have to submit to survive?’ I was still standing in the middle of the room. I felt the air around me, wide and open at my sides, and wished I had something solid to touch. ‘Yes, of course we have it in us,’ I said. ‘Ah. Attacking or defending though?’ I frowned and thought for a moment. I could not tell if she was seriously engaging with me, or just warming me up for what might occur in the kitchen. ‘Both,’ I said. ‘But it depends what scale it’s on. I think women are naturally just as violent. Especially when we’re young. But we’re taught it’s not in keeping with our gender, that it’s not feminine behaviour. Men are forgiven for it. Women aren’t. So it’s suppressed. We end up on the defensive a lot of the time. But I think we’re capable of attacking when it’s something worth fighting for.’

Jackie nodded. ‘All good points, Sister.’ She sat back and recrossed her legs. ‘Then let me ask you this. When you went in to get that tag fixed up your tuss, why didn’t you fight then? Why did you let them do that to you?’ Her brow was lifted and heavily lined. She had summoned up incredulity and I did not know if it was for effect or if it was genuine. I felt as if I had been punched in the gut, and I gaped at her, appalled by her ruthlessness. I had become used to her bad language, her often taciturn moods, but the onslaught when Jackie Nixon launched a hard line of enquiry was impossible to withstand. I could feel my back teeth clenching and grinding over each other, a prickle in the ends of my fingers. I did not know if I was upset or angry. ‘What choice did I have?’ I finally managed to say. ‘It’s the law. I was surrounded by the system, and …’ I stumbled over my words, ‘… and they have these places where those who refuse are sent. I’ve heard about them.’

She nodded again. ‘Yes, I know they do. They’re in the old county prisons. It’s a scandal.’ There was an undertone of sarcasm in her voice. ‘So, tell me. Was it fear that stopped you? Fear of reprisal? Fear of what else they might do to you? Sister, how bad does a situation have to be before a woman will strike out, not in defence, but because something is, as you say, worth fighting for? Weren’t you?’ I searched her blue eyes for compassion, then I looked away. The bedroom window was lit by the red western light of the setting sun. The withers of the fell wore the same vivid stain on them. I could see women walking over the fields towards the main house. I had no worthwhile reply.