The Offering (18 page)

This afternoon I asked Mum when we would run out of apples and she said she thought there were enough to last all winter. I went up to the dairy and took an armful of apples and moved the others around to fill up the space. I put the apples in my pockets and went down the lane with Elijah. When we were a few fields away I threw them as hard as I could against a tree. Pieces of apple brain splattered against the bark. I went back to the dairy and did the same all over again. It felt good. It is a sin to hate my father but not to throw apples.

6 October

Dear God,

I made You come to me three times this morning. I wonder if You come to other people in the same way. I thought again about telling Mum. I don’t know why I didn’t. Anyway, she wouldn’t believe me. No one would. But I know it’s real. I suppose I wouldn’t know if other people had found You or not. I still think I am probably the only one.

We ate apples for breakfast, lunch and tea. I asked Mum whether they were the fruit Adam and Eve ate in the garden. She said she didn’t know but it was probably something more exotic. I said I thought it must be because no one could be tempted by an apple.

7 October

Dear God,

There is something wrong with Mum. Today while we were doing lessons she kept rubbing her eyebrow, running her finger over it again and again. Every time she looked at me she smiled. I wished she didn’t think she had to do that.

When I gave Elijah his dinner the man who is married to my mother told me to mix bread with the dog food. ‘And don’t give him any more,’ he said.
Elijah looked at his bowl and then at me. I don’t blame him. ‘At least you don’t have to eat apples,’ I said. ‘Think about that.’

In the afternoon we went preaching on the bikes. I felt sick as we rode down the drive and I felt sick when we walked down the tracks and knocked on the doors. It was farms mostly and the people didn’t want to know. It was hard concentrating at all in the end. The sickness was so bad I began to sweat. It got harder and harder to pedal. I had to tell them and we came back home. Mum pushed my bike for me and Dad pushed both of theirs.

‘We’ll soon have you right,’ she said.

But at home after she had given me Gaviscon she fell asleep at the table. Her face was grey and a little pool of spit formed under her mouth. Her eyebrows were raised as if they were clinging to something and her breath made the pocking sound. We used to find her asleep like that when we lived in the town.

At dinnertime he clattered saucepans but she didn’t wake. His eyes were hard and flashing. I thought she looked frightened. I helped him wash up, then Elijah and I went down to the stream. I found three crayfish eating others and killed them on the rock with the knife that has the red cross on it. I put the victims back into the pool but I think I was too late and one was already dead.

There was no point washing the rock because there will soon be more blood on it. I called Elijah and we came back up to the house. It was dark and she was still sleeping.

I just heard a scream outside. It is five past eleven. I’ve heard the noise before. Mum said it was a rabbit. The noise sounds like flesh and blood. It is terrible. When I asked what was happening to the rabbit, she wouldn’t tell me.

God, please don’t let her get ill again.

10 October

Dear God,

Today we had our first frost. It rose from the ground and stayed all day and it was so quiet I could hear the hooves of the horses trampling the stubble in the field.

This evening we went to the supermarket. Elijah sat by the door, whining to be allowed to go with us. It has been harder to leave him lately. ‘We’ll be back before you know it,’ I said. ‘Really.’ Mum and I sang on the way to town. The man who lives with us heard about some work in the supermarket. I hope he gets it, and stays out of the house.

He was all right again when we got home, lighting the fire, drinking his lager in the long, smooth, slow way he does. Mum looked happy. I went outside with Elijah and the moon was huge. I ran around the courtyard and it was as if I was saying something, only not out loud. Writing words on the night.

My father’s fist was red on the gearstick, which stuck and grated. His arm was resting on the window and the breeze came in sharp and chill. The frost had disappeared and the air was bitten and I could smell the land as if it had just been made; I could smell wild garlic in the hedges, and the earth, and the reek of silage and, once, the sharp tang of fox. ‘The nights are drawing in,’ he said. I looked at the river and saw he was right; the light was tired, and something tugged at the pit of my stomach.

My mother sang ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’ on the way into town in the car. She was cold and stiff but singing away, wearing lipstick and her favourite pink jumper beneath her coat. She had cut her fringe and it was skew-whiff but she didn’t seem to notice. The jolts of the car were making her voice shake, making it sound silly. I thought he might be driving extra fast on purpose, so I joined in.

We were getting a trolley by the door of the supermarket when a man in overalls and builder’s boots passed by. My father said: ‘Excuse me, d’you know if there’s any building work around here?’

‘Masses of it down by the river,’ the man said. ‘They’re building a new cinema. Go and put your name down, they can’t get enough men.’

While my mother and I got groceries he went to find the site. We were at the checkout when I heard a slap and my mother jumped. My father said: ‘What’s the little woman got for me, then?’ He was holding an off-licence bag and he looked triumphant.

My mother flushed. ‘Did you get it? Did you put your name down?’ She looked like a little girl.

‘Aye, aye,’ he said, frowning now slightly, as if it was suddenly unimportant, because she had asked, all eager like that. He began swinging bags of shopping into the trolley.

On the way home my mother was loose and warm beside me. We sang ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’ again but this time it was easy, our voices were louder and we were laughing. My father beeped in time. ‘God provides!’ he said. But he hadn’t been so sure earlier.

I was allowed to give Elijah dog food without bread that night. They lit the woodstove. It was the first evening they had lit it. He turned off the light and opened the door and it made shadows in the room. He drank lager and gave my mother a wineglass full of it. I sat on the orange and brown carpet, and Elijah lay with his head in my lap, and for an hour or two everything was all right. My mother fell asleep at last but her face was rosy and looked peaceful, not dead and white. Sitting there with the flames flickering, I suddenly felt unusual, sort of powerful, and I had to go out.

In the courtyard bats were fluttering, the moon sailing. Blackness washed around us like water. There was white light and yellow light: white from the moon and yellow from the lantern high on the end wall of the house. Beyond the circle of light there was darkness; shed doorways gaped, fields were eaten up. I stood in the centre and raised the rope above my head.

Elijah’s ears pricked up. He yapped sharply and bounced on his front paws. The rope sliced through the light, a dark line flashing over cobbles and walls, vanishing and re-appearing, and his shadow leapt with it, writhing, twisting, up, up, up higher, like a fish on a line, hanging upon nothing, as God hung the earth, with only space all around, then dropped back to rejoin him, skittering stones.

The rope spun past the numbers at our feet. I banished them to infinity. There was fire in me; I was writing a word, tracing dark letters on the light. I began to run, the rope whizzing, up the steps in the wall by the sheep-dip, along the top, across the roof of the barn and down the stones in the corner. I ran up the plank at the other side, onto the garden table, along the wall, jumping from pillar to pillar, and as I went – wherever I went – I took the light with me.

Elijah chattered and yelped. I circled faster and beneath me my shadow hurdled the world. My steps rang over the land and returned to me from the eye of moon.

‘D’you see that?’ I shouted. ‘Do you see what I can do?’

The blackness seethed and shivered, it tossed and it muttered, but it couldn’t enter the circle because I was guarding it.

In the Platnauer Room I see many things. I see the frost on the gatepost at the farm, which came in the mornings and disappeared, leaving the shape of my hand. I see the forests of lichen on the apple-tree boughs that seem like something from the ocean floor. I see the way the mist lifts from the fields so that the world is full of the top halves of things. I see the way the sun breaks through the clouds and turns the world white with vapour as veil after veil of spirits rise. I see the little weed balls that catch in Elijah’s haunches and groin and his sweet underbelly where the domed ribs rise warm beneath my hand like the timbers of a living cathedral. I see a line of geese in the cold blue dawn wipe the eye clean and make the mind dumb.

I have gone back many times now. The light moves, the numbers descend, I slip lower. With each word I go back, I go deeper, I go down, unwinding the thread along the dark passage, gathering sticks on the floor of my mind, laying a trail for the one who comes after. The doctor treads heavily, he follows me hither and thither, getting hotter and more bothered; he does not let me stray far. I am a good animal most of the time. I walk at his pace, not pulling, not lagging, not darting away to sniff this or that. But just sometimes I think I might slip out of my leash and into the dark, and watch him continue – readily for a while, then more slowly, groping, stumbling, getting up again; calling my name; asking me where, asking me when, asking me why.

Yet the key things, I do not remember. But it is not just I who have the monopoly on amnesia: forgetting is the precondition of existence; we forget to stay alive, filter the necessary from the unnecessary, the bearable from that which can’t be borne; whether or not we are aware of it, we leave what we have to the dark. Memory perpetuates pain and forgetting removes it – at least consciously. Lucas believes that if truth is thwarted one way, it will find another way out. I think he too has difficulty remembering, or at least remembering that which he chooses to ignore.

There has been no mention, by Lucas or any of the other staff, of the events in the dining room. In this case the ‘least said, soonest mended’ philosophy seems to have been adopted; I wonder whether it was a new initiative. There have, however, been reprisals. Lucas has revoked his decree that we eat en masse and now when our ward eats, we are by ourselves as we used to be in the small room adjoining the lounge. Moreover, owing to the fact that everyone has accrued so many black marks for their involvement in the fracas, the scoreboard in the lounge has been wiped clean and we all have a new start. That includes even Brendan. Though we haven’t seen him since.

‘Where’s Brendan?’ I asked Margaret yesterday. Her cheeks were red and she had a scratch above her right eye.

‘In his room with Pete,’ she said.

‘What’s Lucas done to him?’ I said.

‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘he’s just taking things quietly.’

I asked her if I could go and see him but she said he would be sleeping and I could do it tomorrow. No one else seems to miss Brendan. They have forgotten their leader entirely, though the effects of his uprising are still being felt: Miriam has been singing hosannas, Pam and Robyn painted a picture together, and altogether the ward has been more peaceful. It is nothing short of miraculous, what our little demonstration has accomplished! A little rebellion goes a long way here, and this one will sustain us, I should think, for quite a while.

As for me personally, I do not seem to be doing so well.

‘You’re resisting, Madeline,’ Lucas tells me as I come round today. ‘I need you to understand that the work we’re doing is of the greatest benefit to you, though it may feel difficult.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘If I am resisting, I’m not aware of it.’

Lucas is frowning, looking at me with the air of an army officer reassessing the defences of a fortified city; apparently I am not proving to be the easy conquest he thought. I have reserves he knew nothing of.

‘Whenever we get close to the night you ran away your subconscious veers off,’ he says.

He closes his eyes a moment and rubs the bridge of his nose. I consider raising my questions again, regarding the efficacy of the regime. I even consider asking how Brendan is. But Lucas is playing his part – the caring therapist – and I must play mine. I must not arouse suspicion because Lucas has an agenda and I am part of it: he stands to win or to lose depending on the result of my treatment. His agenda is called: ‘An Experiment in Amnesia Disguised as Helping a Patient’. My case, like Job’s, has interest merely for the amount of light it can shed on issues of sovereignty – for what are men such as Lucas but pastors of the mind, and as such the guardians of humanity? And what better than to allow the omnipotent one to believe I am a malleable idiot ignorant of his personal point scoring?

In any case, I have an agenda too, entitled: ‘Release’. Everyone has an agenda, it’s just a question of who reads whose first. If, however, I am to be a pawn deployed to prove or disprove some point of theory – which will, when it is masterfully researched and illustrated, be filed away on a shelf somewhere – then it is crucial to let the mover believe the pawn
is
a pawn and oblivious to his intent.

‘I know you have my best interests at heart, Dr Lucas,’ I say. I feel a pain in my temples as I do so, somewhere between an itch and the feeling I used to get when I travelled in cars, a sort of toxic fatigue akin to nausea.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘It’s important that you know it’s perfectly safe to access information here because this is where it can be dealt with. In the wrong environment it would be disastrous.’

The worst of it is that Lucas could simply be one more projector; I do not know whether what he shows me is truth or my own imaginings. He wants to resuscitate me, reintroduce me to what I once was. Or does he? Is this another shadow, a smokescreen for more private interests, and do the waters he wakes me from part only to reveal another, deeper slumber, more profound than any I have previously known? Is it wiser to dream along with him in this sleep of the soul than to wake to one more profound? Must I go deeper to get out? And do not think I have not asked myself what would happen if I were to wake and find beyond the visible, on the inside of this husk, no meaning at all.