The Offering (25 page)

The pain wasn’t bothering me any more. I began to sob uncontrollably, the sound ugly, absurd. ‘Don’t tell him!’ I said.

She knew who I referred to; she said she would not. She spoke in a low voice. She said once again: ‘Let’s get you a hot-water bottle.’

She settled me in bed and smiled at me in that new way again and I wanted to run after her when she went out. I curled on my side and sobbed till I slept.

When I woke it was night and the pain made me writhe. I slipped back into a fitful sleep in which I continually dragged resistant clothes onto my wet limbs though when I looked down I was still naked. I woke and lay panting in the darkness. There was no longer any room for doubt: I had found not God, but sin. Possibly the very sin my father had warned about. Uncleanness, immorality, unnatural desire. The root of it all.

I got out of bed and knelt on the floor. ‘
Forgive me.
’ I buried my face in the blankets. I screwed my eyes up. I wrung my hands till they shook. ‘
Forgive me
.
I didn’t know.
’

Or
had
I? Why had I jumped up when my mother found me, as if she had caught me red-handed? Why had I never told her about God’s visitations? Was it simply because she would not have believed me?

Yes
, came the answer.
Yes, yes!
But I could not trust it.

Another day began. The sun went on shining, the cows went on chewing. Birds went their way, leaves shimmered, fields were awash with insects and grass. Another day began – and it did not.

Resistance perpetuates that which is resisted. If blood is shed, sin, so the law says, can be forgiven. But shedding blood is itself a sin – and a memorial; an act of worship to the god who made sin, a covenant to time indefinite between humans and gods and that which is higher than them, that says: ‘This is important. Remember this.’

Memory is a burden synonymous with sin, a coming again and a judgment. Atonement cannot help but replicate itself, a snake with its tail in its mouth, and recreate the past in the present. But forgetting is erasure, a rupture. If sin was not remembered there would be no need of redemption – so it must be, by flames and incense and prayer and blood. And without time there would be no remembrance, and no forgetting. The two things are one, the heel and the head, pleasure and pain, kernel and husk; the incarnation of God as man the same as a god dying in place of man; to be forgiven only to be condemned, to be forgiven again. So the pendulum swings. There is no redemption as long as there is remembering, no release but repetition, no end but addition. The law is simple, though there are different ways of expressing it. But sometimes it is impossible not to rail against it, not to try to step out of the circle, whatever the consequence.

It is only gradually that I realize Brendan will not be returning to us. I don’t think Margaret or any of the nurses know any more than me. I am sure that is the way Lucas wants it; he will keep the final decision secret till the end. I don’t know what he has done to Brendan but I know it is Lucas who has had him taken away. I ask Margaret whether Brendan is in Block ‘H’ but she says she doesn’t know. I know it is Lucas who has made Brendan disappear because it is Lucas who has been shamed by Brendan’s behaviour. And so he sent a message: disobedience will not be tolerated. Eye will be for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life.

‘Brendan needed some time alone,’ Lucas tells me today when I ask him.

‘But where is he?’

‘Somewhere where he can best be cared for.’

‘What does that mean?’

He doesn’t answer.

‘Can I see him?’

‘No. Not at the moment.’

‘Will I see him again?’

‘I don’t know, Madeline; that depends on the trajectory of both your treatments.’

I stare at Lucas. Will it work – his magnificent regime? Will he really succeed where others have failed? Or will he be beaten by the sheer weight of our imperfection, our inveterate helplessness?

‘You’re still resisting,’ Lucas says to change the subject. ‘What is this sin that’s too terrible to talk about, Madeline? You know it will come out under hypnosis.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘so it doesn’t matter if I don’t talk about it.’

But I am not thinking of the doctor any longer but of the girl. I have not seen her for three nights. It is unbearable to lose her so soon after finding her again.

‘You demonstrate a remarkable ability to believe that you influenced the course of events,’ he is saying, ‘acting out some redemption allegory in which ordinary incidents became extraordinary and are studied for their greater significance – in this case God’s assumed disapproval. This isn’t uncommon in dissociative amnesia: the individual believes he can make things happen, create change, cause thought and reality to conjoin; it’s called synchronicity. The cause and effect relationship is sometimes immediate, sometimes delayed, but nevertheless assumed to be connected because the events themselves may be unusual. In your case your religion provided a fertile ground for such imaginings because, as things turned out, they seemed to corroborate your world-view: God listening, punishing, rewarding, exempting from punishment. But you give significance only to that which reinforces your theory, Madeline; that’s why you need to share your memories, air them. Now I am going to ask you again what you remember about your mother’s death. Perhaps it will help to talk about the days leading up to it.’

I look at my hands for some moments. I say: ‘I was coming downstairs, my mother was crying, my father was standing at the table holding a piece of paper – a letter.’ And I see him again, standing so still.

‘Who was the letter from?’

‘Mr Skinner. It said that the job my father had done was shoddy. It said a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages. My father said he’d done a good job; he always did a good job. And it was true: my father was the best worker.’

‘Did your father get the money that was owed to him?’

‘No.’

‘Wasn’t there a contract?’

‘No, just an agreement.’

‘Wasn’t he paid in instalments?’

‘Yes. We got the first one, I think, but that was all.’

‘It makes me sick,’ my father said, and then he was quiet, and I sat down on the stairs as if I had been winded. It was unlike him to refer to his feelings in any way.

He went through the front door, saying he was going to knock Skinner’s wall down, and my mother ran after him and put her arms around him. I saw my father’s face over my mother’s shoulder and it was horrifying.

He got into the car and my mother begged him not to go. But he said it stuck in his throat: that all the scrimping and saving, all the hours wondering where the next job was coming from, trying to get the place finished on a shoestring, was nothing in comparison with this. The car roared down the drive.

My mother came back to the house. Her feet made a sluggish sound on the stones. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. I suddenly saw how she would look as an old woman. She went to the table and put her head in her arms and I stood beside her.

‘Mum,’ I said. I began to cry. ‘It’s my fault.’ It terrified me that she didn’t look up.

4 June

God in heaven,

Forgive me. Forgive me. I didn’t know what I did.

9 June

Dear God,

I asked her this morning: ‘Are we really going to have to move?’

She said: ‘I don’t know.’

Please don’t take the farm from us. Please punish just me instead.

10 June

Dear God,

Her voice is thicker, her movements heavier. She looks at me as if she has never seen me before, as if I were a stranger, and I cannot bear it. I do not want to know whether she still loves me or not.

11 June

Dear God,

He has put the farm up for sale and taken more things into town to be sold. She sleeps all day in bed. I have done this to her. I have done this to us all. It was me all along. You and I alone know this.

I sat in the kennel. Elijah licked my hands and face. Perhaps he knew it was me. Perhaps he knew all along and that was why he was afraid.

When I woke he was watching me. He watched me all the time I slept, I reckon. Then he butted my hand and we went back up to the house with him close to my side.

Elijah still loves me. Perhaps he is the only one. He will always love me, no matter what I have done. Until I die, or he does.

Lucas is flicking something, tapping it with his finger. I turn my head and see a needle.

‘It will ease facilitation,’ he says. ‘At this point it’s necessary, Madeline. We’re so close but you keep sheering away. It will make things easier, I promise.’

I open my mouth but he is already injecting me.

I can still see him and the Platnauer Room, though when I try to raise my head I cannot and everything is heavy and slow.

‘It wasn’t much more than a few days later that your mother took the fatal overdose, is that right?’ he says.

I nod.

‘In your journal you say very little. What do you remember of those last days?’

I close my eyes.

‘Madeline?’

I shake my head.

‘Was it you who found her? I think it said in the notes—’

I don’t know whether it is because I am drugged or because I am so tired but the doctor does not appear to me to be human any more but a machine. Machines are relentless.

‘I found her on the bathroom floor,’ I say without opening my eyes. There was a pool of vomit by her head.

‘And you called your father?’

I nod.

He lowers the back of the couch and begins to move the light.

‘I want to go back to that night, the night you found your mother and she was taken to hospital. The night you ran away with Elijah. From three hundred. When you’re ready.’

I take a very deep, very slow breath and attempt to follow the light with my eyes.

‘Two hundred and ninety-nine … two hundred and ninety-eight … two hundred and ninety-seven … two hundred and ninety-six …’

I feel I am speaking through a mask. My eyelids get heavier, the world closes above my head, reappears, then closes once more. My eyelids kiss and become one.

I stand on the banks of the river. The field with white flowers lies behind me. I know that this time I will have to do more than dip my toe. I will have to go fully under. I wade out into the water, and this time I am alone, and it is into the dark.

The house was feverish, the walls clammy, the windows empty-socketed. The moon shone through the branches of the apple trees. A smell of burnt grass and fermenting flowers came in through the open window.

‘What time is it, Madeline?’

‘Twelve o’clock.’

‘Where are you?’

‘My bedroom.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m kneeling, talking to her.’

‘To your mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t your mother in hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then how are you talking to her?’

‘In my head.’

‘What are you saying to her?’

‘I am telling her that I am going to save her.’

Only I could save her because only I knew why she was dying, and I knew it would have to be more this time; I knew the offering would have to be the first fruits; my best; because the transgression was severe, so were the consequences. To begin with, I couldn’t think what I could give – and then I did. And when I did, I didn’t move for the longest time.

I didn’t think I could do it. And then I remembered Abraham and Isaac, how You saved Isaac, and I thought You might do the same again. Then I thought I had ruined it by thinking that, and didn’t let myself think again until I saw the sea.

I stood up and put in my pocket the knife Father had given me. I took off my trainers and went downstairs in my socks. I pressed my body against the front door so the key would turn smoothly and I stepped out. The courtyard was brilliant and the cobbles still warm. I put on my trainers and went down to the kennel and my legs felt as though they had lost their bones and become nothing but flesh.

Elijah jumped up when I let him out. He made groaning noises and grinned at me, bending from side to side. He must have thought I was going to take him for a walk. The moonlight caught his fur like oil on water and his eyes shone, and I knew suddenly that I was right, I would never find anything better, not if I searched my whole life. That here was my best.

I latched the kennel door and stroked his head. Then we went running down the track, with a smell of bindweed and thyme, a stitch in my side and the knife in my pocket, the blade turned inwards.

I don’t know how long we ran but the moon was as bright as the sun and the air was white like fire all around me. It was like running through water, the moonlight dappling and flowing over everything, stroking my arms and legs, and everything seemed clearer than it had ever been before, the grass standing up white in the light and the shadows blacker than tar. Elijah’s shadow moved beside me, passing over the land like a cloud, and his breath kept me company.

Sometimes I couldn’t see the road for the light so I looked straight ahead, but my feet knew where they were taking me and whenever I began to think I closed my eyes and concentrated on not falling. The land fell away either side and the only sounds were my shoes and Elijah and me panting: heh, heh, heh; in, in, out. As we ran, it seemed to me the land was closing itself behind us, folding up like a book, and wherever we ran, there it was beneath our feet, but wherever we had been, there it was not; and I knew it was vanishing and would not come back.

We ran down to the bridge and along the river. The moon was making a pathway there, showing us the way to go, and we followed it. It was the largest, brightest moon I have ever seen, it blinded you if you looked straight at it, it was like a hole cut out of black cardboard and beyond it nothing but white light. We came to the Viking Settlement and turned left. I could hear Elijah panting and my own breath and the sounds of my shoes, but after a while the sounds disappeared and there was nothing to show I was running at all, and I didn’t feel that I was, only floating. Sometimes I would stop and when we stopped Elijah would put his ears up and look back at where we had come from with his eyes wide and darting.