The Carhullan Army (18 page)

They still called me Sister. Corky, the woman who had brought me in to the farm with Megan, had told me then I would have to ask Jackie for my old name back, and I had not forgotten it. I could have inquired whether this was true, whether it was another of Carhullan’s rituals, but for some reason I did not want to find out. When I thought of it I remembered too much of what had passed and I was content to have the others call me by a name they often used for themselves too.

Time passed quickly with the routine of work. The days were measured equally; by the length of daylight and the quantity of lumber or peat moved. I did not mind the repetition. It shaped me, and was the apparatus with which I restored my confidence. The days when something unusual occurred were more unsettling. One morning there was a buzz in the kitchen, rumours that information had been picked up on an Authority transmission. As I was about to leave the farmhouse Jackie swaggered in and took one of the small russet apples from the counter. She threw it up in the air, caught it in her teeth and bit into it. Then she climbed up onto the table between two of the women, her boots cracking apart the empty plates as she walked the length of oak. She was acting crazily. I had seen her behave theatrically before – she had once taken a turkey from the hook of the marble game table in the meat house and made Ruthie waltz with it in the courtyard before letting her resume her plucking – but I had never witnessed such flamboyancy.

She spread her arms out, the bitten apple in one hand. ‘The King is dead!’ she announced. ‘Killed in active service – God bless his bloody bones. Long live the revolution.’ The mouths of the women fell open. It was rare to hear news of the outside world; rarer still for it to be of such magnitude. Jackie knelt and kissed the woman nearest her, almost pulling her out of her seat. I watched as she jumped down off the table and left the room, the brown apple fastened between her teeth. I followed her down the hall, and heard her laughter outside the front door. It was laughter that sounded loose and wrong. There were the fumes of whisky in the passageway; she had either been drinking through the night or early that morning.

*

We were stacking peat bricks when the group of men from the settlement approached; five of them, bearded, and thin about the face. Walking over the grassland in the drifting rain they looked like apparitions, the ghosts of the navvies who had walked the region decades ago, tall and slender and dishevelled. I could see immediately that they did not have the vitality of the Sisters and I wondered in what conditions they lived, whether their existence was poorer, and how much they depended on the women for their survival. As they picked their way across the bields, I wondered why, knowing they would be excluded from the mainstay, they had come to this place. I did not understand their affiliation. Even if they had followed their wives or girlfriends, to have stayed nearby, whether through love or weakness, or even habit, seemed ludicrous. But, like the rest of us, there was no turning back for them now.

Already I had become accustomed to seeing only women, and it was strange to watch them approach our group and shake hands, and for a few couples to exchange embraces. Chloe kissed one of the men and he held her hips. Shruti introduced me to them. Their names were Ian, Richard, Calum, Dominic and Martyn. They had heard I’d arrived, they said. A few of them thought it had been a wind-up. Nobody new had ventured to the farm for years and they thought anyone trying to leave town would certainly have been picked up. I nodded but said nothing. Then, one of them, Martyn, asked if a load of peat could be spared for their fire. If so, they would take it back to their settlement. In return they would help repair the fishery nets, which had been damaged by the high water of the last month. Or honour one of their other existing arrangements.

It was a polite request. I wasn’t sure what I had expected the men to be like or how the women would act around them, whether the tensions of the evening meetings, where there was often a storm of scorn and disapproval directed towards their gender, would translate into unease or resentment. But it was not the case. Lillian and Katrina gave them some pieces of fruit they had in their pockets. The conversation was amicable; it had an undertow of negotiation to it but it seemed there was an old alliance at work, and even some flirtation.

In their presence, the dynamic on the fellside altered subtly. I felt as if I were watching two species of animals drinking shoulder-to-shoulder from the same stream, aware and alert to each other, but only temporarily compatible. No assistance was needed at the tarn, they were told, but the group would help them bring back the peat when they were finished for the day. The men glanced at me and agreed to come back later. Martyn leant forward and kissed Chloe again. It was a soft, intimate kiss.

‘You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,’ Shruti said to me as they walked away. ‘Nobody will care. And it’s a fair old slog over the pass.’ I shrugged and said I didn’t mind. I was tired, but I was curious to see where the men resided and how they lived. And I did not want to be separated from the group. I had grown used to eating meals with them, listening to their loud, exuberant conversations and mock insults. Shruti observed me for a moment with her dark placid eyes and smiled. ‘Yeah. OK then. You come too.’

The rest of the day the women worked quietly and quickly, switching into some higher gear. At about two o’clock the men came back. They had a couple of rucksacks with them, some old fertiliser bags, and a wooden shoulder hod. They fitted as much peat in as would go and between us we carried it round the side of the ridge, to a lower knoll, then up and over it.

On the other side was a grassy plain. It was flanked by bracken and gorse. We walked for about forty-five minutes, and as we began to drop down into another valley to the south I heard the sharp call of a bird of prey. I looked up and saw a single hawk turning broad circles in the air above us. It was a haunted stretch of land, windswept and barren, the bracken was dark red and dying on the slopes of the hills on either side, but the slender path we followed was trodden down, and clearly used often. Through the cut of the pass I could see another mountain range, in the heart of what had been the national park. Several rocky needles stood out against the horizon and behind this was a jutting mass of pikes. Once my father had probably told me their names, but now I could not remember. It was hard and rugged country. I wondered who was left out there, which abandoned souls might also be trying to survive away from the tight restrictions of the safety zones, lost from sight like us, in the mountainous territory of the North.

Calum walked beside me on the path for a while and asked a few questions about Rith, about oil supplies, and whether conscription had been introduced yet for the civilian men. He had left for Carhullan when it looked likely it would be implemented. He’d not been down towards the town for seven years. ‘I’m a lover, not a soldier,’ he said. He laughed when he told me this and his gums looked red and inflamed. I was careful with my answers, more guarded perhaps than was necessary, but I felt a little on edge around him, suddenly uncertain how to behave, and his grey eyes seemed too keenly fixed on mine.

He smelled strongly of sweat and tobacco. There was little to smoke at Carhullan. Now and then a carton of cigarettes turned up and was quickly divided. Jackie had a supply of Golden Leaf, though I rarely saw her rolling any, just now and again when she returned from a training drill, or when she had a glass of whisky to accompany it, and I wondered if perhaps he traded with her. His hair was brown and collar length and the tendons in his neck were raised and knotted, faintly purple under his skin. I could tell he was underweight, that his diet was poor. Even so, he looked healthier than the silverflex addicts in Rith.

Martyn had fallen in to step with Chloe. Between them they held a heavy sack, and from time to time they leaned into each other and kissed.

The path dropped down and became broader, volcanic looking, a riverbed of dark glassy rock. Then the ground flattened off. To the right were three small stone crofts with turf roofs. A faint wraith of blue smoke curled from a chimney stack. Standing outside was another man – older, white haired – two boys and a dog. The youths came forward when they saw us, embraced the women in the group, and then, after a moment, turned and embraced me. I was startled by the gesture and almost pulled away when the first boy put his arms round me. I had never met them before but they seemed to accept me as one of their familiars. They had something of Megan’s candour about them, her blunt affection. They were small and wiry; one might have passed as barely ten years old, but already around his eyes there was mottling and signs of aging.

We unloaded the peat bricks, stacked them in a lean-to, and went inside the largest of the cottages. The boys and the old man remained outside and I heard the dog barking from a distance, as if they were leaving the settlement.

It was more basic inside than the farmhouse: a single room, with a table and chairs, a small sooty fireplace under a hood, and two ladders on opposite walls leading up to alcoves where there were flat beds. There was no electricity and only two slit windows. The low structure was full of elongated shadows. Red cinders glowed in the fire’s cradle. The place smelled of clay, charcoal, and animal fat, and there was a musky odour too that I couldn’t place, something mushroomy and decayed, like a forest’s interior. Underfoot it was soft. There were no boards. The women at the farm often decorated rustically, with flowers and green cuttings, bowls of fruit, or they made spirals with pebbles on the mantels and window seats in the parlour. But here there was little in the way of ornament. It was utilitarian and sullen.

There was an awkward pause and one of the men gave an airy bronchial cough. Then Calum seemed to liven up. He filled a metal kettle from a barrel of water and hung it on a curved rod over the fire, asking who wanted tea and pulling off his jumper. As he raised it over his head I saw his stomach, hairless and deeply corniced by his ribcage. Underneath, his T-shirt was faded and torn and there were pale yellow stains under his arms. No one answered him. There was another silence before Martyn and Chloe stood up and walked towards the door of the croft. The other women exchanged glances. ‘Oh come on. No need for niceties,’ Chloe called back. ‘We’re going to have to leave in a few minutes or it’ll be dark.’ The two of them disappeared and I heard a few softly spoken words, laughter, then the door of one of the other cottages opened and closed.

Calum stood looking at me from the fireplace. His hair was ruffed up on the back of his head where he had lifted his jumper over it. The bone surrounding his eye sockets was too prominent and his face was long. He had raw, equine features. I held his gaze for a few moments, then looked away. Somebody made a joke about conjugal visits and the others in the group began to move around the room, seeking each other out and pairing off. It was not a casual procedure but there seemed to be little discussion or etiquette. Katrina and another woman headed out of the croft cottage with men, leaving Shruti, Lillian and me with Calum and Dominic. I could still feel Calum’s eyes on me, resting expectantly, curiously. I felt stupid not to have known what was going to occur. The back of my neck tingled and I felt a flush of heat. I wanted to stand up and leave, but I knew I could not.

The kettle began to shrill from the fireplace and steam rattled its lid. Its pitch carried on for a minute, and then Shruti stood and walked round Calum, picked up a cloth from the table, and removed it from the iron hook. She took it to a dusty sideboard and poured water into two cups and brought one to me. I took it from her, grateful for the gesture and the calm surrounding her. Lillian nodded and smiled. ‘Well, it looks like I got the best end of the deal this time. Lucky me.’ She walked to one of the ladders and began to climb up. The two remaining men followed after her.

‘Want to drink this outside then?’ Shruti offered. I nodded and we made our way to the door. ‘I can’t really believe it,’ I said to her quietly. ‘Yes you can,’ she replied. She latched the door closed and we sat on a low crop of wall beside the crofts. I could see the boys and the dog further down in the valley, bending over in the furrows of a ploughed parcel of land. The elder was pulling a large container towards the edge of the field. ‘What are they doing?’ I asked, more for something to say than out of genuine interest. ‘Turnips,’ she replied. ‘For the sheep. And for us.’

She nudged me. ‘Look. Chloe and Martyn are married,’ she said. ‘They’re pretty tight about it. He doesn’t sleep with anyone else. Nothing wrong with screwing your husband, is there?’ I sipped at the hot water. It tasted of iron. ‘No. Of course not. Why doesn’t she live down here with him though?’ Shruti smiled again and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s between them. Just something they decided, I suppose. That’s how they work it. Maybe he’s not her main priority. They see enough of each other to get by. And, well, Martyn is a good guy. There have been blokes who set up a tent outside the farm, and then a week later they were gone. Not exactly what you’d call loyal or flexible. But I suppose it’s understandable. Would you stay?’

I leaned back against the croft wall. It was uneven and uncomfortable, digging into my spine in several places. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘So what about Calum and the others?’ Shruti sighed. ‘A couple of them came here with women, I think, and then stayed on and adjusted. Calum didn’t. I don’t know what brought him exactly, avoidance of the real world perhaps, but he’s been here a long time. Longer than me. He feels useful.’ She took hold of my arm. ‘Look, they don’t just stay on for the reason you’re thinking, like our little harem. It isn’t like that at all. They don’t want to be in town any more than we do. They farm as well and we help them out because we can. Maybe there were romantic ambitions to start with, but not any more.’ She paused. Her dark eyes looked almost apologetic. ‘It’s strange maybe. But up here it’s difficult. You think you might be programmed a certain way but you soon find out you aren’t. You just make do. And yeah, of course Calum likes it. I would too.’