The Offering (20 page)

About four o’clock we heard the crackle of tyres in the courtyard. My mother jumped up, turned the grill down to one and put the kettle on.

His face was dark when he came in. ‘Anything to eat?’ my father said.

‘Coming up.’ She put the frying pan on the stove.

He pulled out a chair at the table. She said: ‘How much did you get for the dresser?’

‘Two hundred.’

‘The hallstand?’

‘Seventy.’

‘The tools?’

‘About a hundred and fifty.’

‘The mirror?’

‘There!’ He threw the receipt on the table and stabbed the receipt with his finger.

She laid two pieces of bacon in the pan. He rubbed his hand over his face. ‘I did the best I could. That’s it. There’s nothing else to sell.’

I saw her shoulders rise a little. She said quietly: ‘You know what I think about that …’

He looked at her as if she had slapped him. ‘If you’re on about that car!’

She turned around and said in a low voice: ‘You’d have us live on thin air and that car sits there rusting!’

‘I won’t get anything for it!’ he said.

‘And whose fault is that?’

She turned back to the pan quickly and her voice was thick and small like a child that’s been disappointed and about to cry. ‘There’s five hundred pounds tied up in that car!’

He strode out and we heard the car start, the tyres ripping up the gravel, and she dropped into a chair by the grill and bowed her head, the spatula still in her hand.

I went and stood by her and after a while I touched her shoulder. She pressed her lips together and poked the bacon but for once she didn’t speak to me. I went into the garden and leant against the pine tree.

2 November

Dear God,

Today the sky is as white as a fist. I can see the bones of the trees and the skeleton of leaves like wire mesh. Only the tall pine remains green.

I see now that summer was fooling us; it wasn’t the truth. Green covered everything, heat made things hazy. Now I can see my breath, I can hear my steps, and there is nowhere to lie down and be covered over because everything is bare.

3 November

Dear God,

Mum can walk Elijah. She can cook. She can light the fire and change the beds and do the washing and peg it out. But she doesn’t look right. She looks empty.

Today we went walking, her, me and Elijah. The sun was low and the land was sepia, like an old doily. I took the little camera, but she couldn’t bear to have her photo taken and shielded her face. These late afternoons – when the trees and hedges are browning and the sun seems only a little higher than the earth, and the hedges and fields glow darkly as if they are burnished – give me a shifting feeling in my stomach. The bottom halves of things are lost in shadows, like a room in firelight, and the top halves – telegraph wires, twigs, the distant outline of hills – are raw and exposed, their tips pink and gold. The land is dead; it has stopped, and needs someone to wind it up again.

We spoke little while we were walking but I put my arm through hers. The only sounds were the gravel beneath our shoes and the scuffling scrape of Elijah’s paws.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘Yes, darling,’ she said.

‘Only lately you seem sort of – tired again.’ I didn’t know which word to use. I said: ‘Are you tired?’

She said she was fine, that she got a bit tired sometimes but she was fine. Then she looked at me and, for what seemed like the first time in weeks, really saw me. ‘I hope you’re not worrying about me.’

‘No,’ I said, and I smiled quickly at her, but suddenly I couldn’t breathe. ‘Just so long as you’re okay.’

‘I’ve never been better,’ she said, and to begin with I was so relieved I thought I would cry, but then my stomach began churning again.

When we came back up the track she seemed thankful the walk was over; her movements were loose, she laughed at Elijah trying to get a leaf off his nose. But the feeling wore off when she realized we were home, and she became awkward and quiet again and her smile got stiff. Where does she want to be, then? Not here, and not somewhere else either.

4 November

Dear God,

Today they cut down the tall pine tree. I don’t know how she held the chainsaw and didn’t cry. I cried with rage. We have done something terrible.
Already this place is not as we found it. The Tree of Life has been cut down. Or perhaps it is
not
the Tree of Life after all but the Tree of Knowledge. But if that is the case, then what have we learnt?

I step into the girl. ‘Don’t leave me,’ I say.

The girl’s heart is beating hard and slow. She knows she has to speak.

‘Can’t you cut one of the other trees down?’ she says. The man’s eyes are furious. It has to be that tree because it is too close to the house, he says, and it might fall in a storm. ‘The tree is alive!’ the girl says. But he isn’t listening.

He shouts to the woman and she puts the saucepan of mince on the side of the stove and takes off her pinny. I see for the first time that he
likes
the woman watching him when he is angry; that if she were not there he might not be angry at all.

Elijah, the girl and I stand on the wall by the dairy and watch. The girl keeps her hand on Elijah’s collar.

The chainsaw chugs into life and peters out. The man rips the cord again and again. As the motor catches, rooks reel away, cawing, into the still white air. Elijah flattens his ears. I don’t know how my mother stands so close to the noise. I feel the first bite into the trunk. I see the tree shudder. He is wiggling the saw, bending it backwards and forwards in the wood. He doesn’t need to do that.

His face is red, his mouth a gash. I loathe him. He roars louder than the chainsaw. The chain screams lower as it bites into the wood and higher as it comes away again. For a long time nothing seems to happen. Then the pine yawns, it tilts; there is a splintering sound and a crash, and when I look again there is great stillness and a space in the trees where the sky comes in. The girl did not look away at all. Now she is perfectly still except for her chest, which is rising and falling.

The woman holds the trunk while he cuts. Her face is red. She sits on it, then wraps her arms around it, but whatever she does the tree still moves. He shouts: ‘Hold it STEADY! Come ON!’ I think perhaps he is mad. The closer the woman gets to the saw, the sicker I feel. Suddenly the girl is running down to them. He tells her to stand back. The girl’s hands grip the knife inside her pocket and
I
feel its coldness.

For the rest of the day the sound the tree made when it fell stays in our heads and the stillness it leaves stays in the garden.

5 November

Dear God,

In the garden there are piles of stones that look like skulls; where there used to be trees there is sky; the earth is rent, we have exposed its insides. Of all the things we have done I think this is the worst.

Now there are gaps, places where the colour has vanished, holes in the ground and the earth and the sky. We have lifted off the colour and now see the bare paper beneath. Are we covering something over or revealing what was underneath? What was underneath was nothing: what we found underneath was white; in the stones of the ground, in the heart of trees, in the space where the trees stood. The heart of things is only whiteness. Inside the darkest hole, beneath the deepest root, it’s there, gleaming. We scrape away, chisel back, burrow down – and we are blinded by light.

6 November

Dear God,

My mother is disappearing. She gazes at nothing, is silent, falls asleep. Each time she sleeps I feel sick and sit by her chair till she wakes. It’s no good doing anything while she sleeps because I can’t concentrate.

There was something wrong with my head today. The sky was like steel and the wind seemed to have sand in it. I didn’t want to go downstairs and find out how she was, so I made You come three times in bed, then took a sandwich and went down to the stream and separated thirty-five crayfish.

It doesn’t seem to be doing any good, separating them, because each day there are just as many murderers as there are victims. I think I will have to keep on killing them for ever because they don’t stop eating each other. The dam I made to keep the hollow crayfish away from the feeders isn’t working either. Some of the shells have slipped and now there is just a waterfall. It occurred to me for the first time today that I might have it wrong: that maybe the crayfish are mating, not killing each other, or maybe they are ferrying sick relatives around like ants do. In which case I have been killing the heroes instead of the villains; in which case there were never any villains to kill at all.

This evening we read about Moses, how without blood it is impossible to be forgiven:

For when every commandment according to the law had been spoken by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of the young bulls and of the goats with water and scarlet wool and hyssop and sprinkled the book itself and all the people, saying: ‘This is the blood of the covenant that God has laid in charge upon you,’ and he sprinkled the tent and all the vessels of the public service likewise with the blood. Yes, nearly all things are cleansed with blood according to the Law, and unless blood is poured out no forgiveness takes place.

What have
we
done wrong, God? Why won’t You forgive us? Even if You don’t tell me I am going to keep writing to You. It is an act of faith. But it is also because I don’t have anyone else to write to.

7 November

Dear God,

It is too cold to be outside now. The sky throws a strange light onto the land. It is gloomy, yet bright enough to make my eyes water. All day long the sun shines fiercely through a blanket of grey. It is like being underwater. Things feel as if they have been wound down so much that they have almost stopped.

This morning they cut down three more trees. He said the wood would last all winter. I didn’t want to see the trees fall and took jam sandwiches down to the kennel. I made as many as I could when he was out bringing up the wood.

The sky was icy beyond the kennel door. A hard wind was blowing and there were little bits of hail in it. I ate the sandwiches and gave Elijah the crusts. I was going to make You come but in the end I didn’t think even that would make me feel better, so I curled up in the hay with Elijah and listened to him chewing his bit of wood.

On the way back to the house I noticed that the millstone had split. I asked Mum if she had seen it. She came to look.

‘Well, I never,’ she said, ‘it must have been the frost last night.’

After dinner I went and looked at the stone again. It had split in a straight line, right along the stain.

8 November

Dear God,

They are arguing again.

‘You won’t adapt!’ she is saying.

‘I’m doing my best!’ he shouts back.

I am huddled beneath the blankets in my bed. I had my fingers in my ears but now I am writing.

I just heard my father say we would have to think about selling the farm. I thought of going back to the town and then my brain wouldn’t let me think of it any more.

Please let us stay in this place. It is ours! You gave it to us, remember?

9 November

Dear God,

I had a dream last night. I saw a stone raised up in a high place. The place was flat, level with the sky. The sky was pale and white and so was the stone. The stone was stained red.

I remembered the dream when I was kneeling by the stream, killing crayfish. I was taking them from the pool and putting them on the stone. The blood was on my hands and the blood was on the stone. I separated the victim from the rider, released the victim, and took the rider’s life. I did it again, and a third time, and then I sat back. I looked at the stone and I looked at the knife. I stood up and I felt dizzy. Suddenly it was obvious. Suddenly I knew what to do.

I don’t know how long I stood there. Then I began to walk back to the house. I stumbled and got up again. Sweat was coming down from underneath my hair though the wind was cold.

Lucas is reading:

17 November

Dear God,

I have waited a whole week and he still has not found work.
I cannot do it again
. Please let it be enough.

He frowns. ‘What are we to make of that?’

I am silent.

He inhales. ‘There is the drawing of the mouse, then this.’

18 November

Dear God,

I can hear Dad snoring along the landing. The night is icy the other side of the pane. I couldn’t eat dinner tonight. Mum thinks I have some sort of bug. I don’t want to sleep in case I see the mouse again.

19 November

God –

You heard me! Your law is perfect. Your law is true. He came into the kitchen whistling. He looked as if he had been running. He had found work on the other side of the river. He said: ‘I knew it would turn up!’ He had a bunch of flowers for Mum and fresh mussels. Mum’s eyes filled. She cooked the mussels with wild garlic and butter and they laughed at dinner and her face looked like it used to. His was shining with cider.

Now I am in the long field. The air is cold as fire and the sky is blue.
I have saved them.
I cannot believe it. All around the land is full of colour, it is quiet and at ease. It has been wound and set ticking.

‘What happened between this journal entry’ – he turns the page – ‘and this one? Why is the intervening page coloured with biro? – coloured so densely I can hardly see the paper.’

I consider Lucas, but am glad to say that he is not appearing in any strange guise today; he is behaving himself – or maybe it is my mind.