The Power

by Naomi Alderman

  Mrs Montgomery-Taylor sits downstairs listening to the polka on the radio, drinking sherry, slowly but unceasingly, little sips which couldn’t do no one any harm. She doesn’t care to see what Mr Montgomery-Taylor does up there in the evenings; at least he’s not catting around the neighbourhood, and that girl earned what she’s getting. If an interviewer from the Sun-Times, taking an interest for some reason in the small doings of this little home, had placed a microphone to her mouth at that moment and said: Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, what do you think your husband is doing to that sixteen-year-old mixed-race girl you took into your house out of Christian charity? What do you think he’s doing to make her holler and carry on like that? If she were asked – but who would ever ask? – she’d say: Why, he’s giving her a spanking, and it’s no more than she deserves. And if the interviewer pressed – What did you mean, then, about his catting around? – Mrs Montgomery-Taylor’s mouth would twist a little, as if she’d caught an odour of something unpleasant, and then the smile would return to her face and she’d say, confidentially: You know how men are.

  It was some other time, years ago, when Allie was pressed back, head cricked against the headboard, his one hand around her throat like this, that the voice first spoke to her, clearly, right inside her own head. When she thinks on it, she’d been hearing it distantly for a long time. Since before she came to the Montgomery-Taylors’; since she passed from home to home and hand to hand there’s been a dim voice far away telling her when to be careful, warning against danger.

  The voice had said: You are strong, you will survive this.

  And Allie had said, as he tightened his grip on her neck: Mom?

  And the voice had said: Sure.

  Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done. As he plunges, she knows that she could do it. That she has the strength, and perhaps she has had it enough for weeks or months, but only now is she certain. She can do it now and leave no possibility of misfires or reprisals. It seems the simplest thing in the world, like reaching out a hand and flicking off a light switch. She cannot think why she hasn’t decided to turn out this old light before.

  She says to the voice: It’s now, isn’t it?

  The voice says: You know it.

  There is a smell like rain in the room. So that Mr Montgomery-Taylor looks up, thinks that the rain has started at last, that the parched earth is drinking it in great gulps. He thinks it might be coming in through the window, but his heart is gladdened by the thought of rain even as he continues with his business. Allie brings her hands to his temples, left and right. She feels the palms of her mother around her own small fingers. She is glad Mr Montgomery-Taylor is not looking at her but instead out through the window, searching for the non-existent rain.

  She maketh a channel for the thunderbolt and setteth a path for the storm.

  There is a flash of white light. A flicker of silver across his forehead and around his mouth and his teeth. He spasms and pops out of her. He is juddering and fitting. His jaws are clattering together. He falls to the floor with a loud thump and Allie is afraid that Mrs Montgomery-Taylor might have heard something, but she has the radio turned up loud, so there is no foot on the stair and no voice calling. Allie pulls up her underwear and her jeans. She leans over to watch. There’s a red foam at his lips. His spine is curled backwards, his hands held like claws. It looks like he’s still breathing. She thinks: I could call someone now, and maybe he’d live. So she puts her palm over his heart and gathers the handful of lightning she has left. She sends it into him right there, in the place where human beings are made of electrical rhythm. And he stops.

  She gathers a few things from the room. Money she’d stashed in a spot under the windowsill, a few bucks, enough for now. A battery radio Mrs Montgomery-Taylor had had as a girl and had given her in one of those moments of kindness that serve to cloud over and obscure even the simple purity of suffering. She leaves her phone, because she’s heard those things can be traced. She glances at the little ivory Christ impaled on a mahogany cross on the wall at the head of her bed.

  Take it, says the voice.

  Have I done well? says Allie. Are you proud of me?

  Oh so proud, daughter. And you will make me prouder yet. You will do wonders in the world.

  Allie thrusts the little crucifix into her duffel bag. She has always known she must never tell anyone about the voice. She’s good at keeping secrets.

  Allie looks at Mr Montgomery-Taylor one last time before she levers herself out of the window. Perhaps he didn’t know what hit him. She hopes he did. She wishes she could have sent him alive into the scalding tank.

  She thinks, as she drops down from the trellis and crosses the back lawn, that maybe she should have tried to filch a knife from the kitchen before she left. But then she remembers – and the thought makes her laugh – that aside from cutting her dinner she really has no need for a knife, no need at all.

  Three images of the Holy Mother, approximately five hundred years old.

  Found in a dig in South Sudan.

  NINE YEARS TO GO

  * * *

  Allie

  She walks and hides, hides and walks for eighty-two days. Takes rides where she can, but mostly walks.

  To start with, there’s not much trouble finding someone willing to give a sixteen-year-old girl a ride, criss-crossing the state, covering her tracks. But as she travels north and as the summer turns to autumn, fewer drivers answer her stuck-out hitching thumb. More of them swerve, panicked, away from her, even though she’s not in the highway. One woman makes the sign of the cross as her husband drives on.

  Allie bought a sleeping bag early on from Goodwill. It smells but she airs it out every morning and it hasn’t rained hard yet. She’s been enjoying the journey, though her belly is empty most of the time and her feet are sore. There have been mornings she’s woken just past dawn and seen the hard, bright edges of the trees and path drawn fresh by the morning sun and felt the light glittering in her lungs and she’s been glad to be there. Once, there was a grey fox that kept pace with her for three days, walking a few arm lengths away, never coming close enough to touch but never drifting too far away either, except to take a rat once, returning with the body soft in her mouth and the blood on her muzzle.

  Allie said to the voice: Is she a sign? And the voice said: Oh yes. Keep on trucking, girl.

  Allie hasn’t been reading the newspapers and she hasn’t been listening to her little radio. She doesn’t know it, but she’s missed the Day of the Girls completely. She doesn’t know that that’s what’s saved her life.

  Back in Jacksonville, Mrs Montgomery-Taylor walked upstairs at bedtime, expecting to find her husband in his study reading the paper and the girl suitably chastened on the subject of her misdeeds. In the girl’s bedroom, she saw what was to be seen. Allie had left Mr Montgomery-Taylor with his pants around his ankles, his member still partially tumescent, a bloody foam staining the cream rug. Mrs Montgomery-Taylor sat on the rumpled bed for a full half-hour, just looking at Clyde Montgomery-Taylor. She breathed – after a first quick gasp – slowly and evenly. The Lord giveth, she said to the empty room at last, and the Lord taketh away. She pulled Clyde’s pants up and remade the bed with fresh linens, being careful to step around him. She thought of propping him up in a chair at his desk and laundering the rug, but although she grieved for the indignity of him there, tonguing the floor, she doubted she had the strength for it. Besides, the story told itself better if he’d been in the girl’s room, delivering the catechism.

  She summoned the police and, when the men came, sympathetic, at midnight, she gave testimony. To have given a home to the wolf and succour to the rabid dog. She had photographs of Allie. That would have been plenty enough to fin
d her in a few days if, that very night, the calls had not started to this police station, and the one in Albany, and in Statesboro, and on through the country, spreading out, branching and re-branching, the calls lighting up the police stations like a vast and spreading web.

  In a town on the coast whose name she never knows, Allie finds a good sleeping place in the scrubby wood that skims the houses; a sheltered bank with a warm, dry place to curl up where the rock is curved under into a lip. She stays there for three days because the voice says: There’s something here for you, my girl. Seek and go fetch.

  She’s tired and hungry all of the time, so that a light-headed feeling has become part of her, pleasant in its way. She can hear the voice more clearly when her muscles are buzzing like this and it’s been a while since her last meal; it’s tempted her to stop eating in the past, particularly because she’s sure the tones of the voice, its low, amused rumble, are the notes of her own mother speaking.

  Allie doesn’t really remember her mother, although she knows she had one, of course. The world began for her in a bright flash when she was somewhere between three or four. She had been at the mall with someone, because she had a balloon in one hand and a snow cone in the other and the someone – not her mother, she’s sure of that, she’d know that – was saying, ‘Now you must call this lady Aunt Rose, and she will be kind to you.’

  It was in that moment that she first heard the voice. When she looked up into Aunt Rose’s face and the voice said: ‘Kind’. Sure. Uh-huh. I don’t think so.

  The voice has never steered her wrong since then. Aunt Rose turned out to be a mean old lady who’d call Allie bad names when she had a little to drink and she liked a drink most every day. The voice told Allie what to do; how to pick the right teacher at school and tell the story in such a way that she didn’t seem to be saying it artfully at all.

  But the lady after Aunt Rose was even worse, and Mrs Montgomery-Taylor was worse than that. Still, the voice has kept her safe from the worst harm all these years. She still has all her fingers and toes, though that’s been a near-run thing, and now it’s telling her: Stay here. Wait for it.

  She walks into town every day and explores every place that’s warm and dry and where they don’t throw her out. The library. The church. The little, overheated museum of the revolutionary war. And, on the third day, she manages to sneak into the aquarium.

  It’s off-season. No one’s minding the door so hard. And it’s only a small place, anyway; five rooms strung together at the end of a line of stores. ‘Wonders of the Deep!’ says the sign outside. Allie waits until the guy on the door has wandered off to get a soda, leaving a ‘Back in twenty minutes’ sign, and she flips open the little wooden door and walks straight in. Because it’s warm, really. And because the voice told her to look everywhere. No stone unturned.

  She can feel there’s something here for her as soon as she walks into the room full of brightly lit tanks with fish of a hundred coloured kinds patrolling the water back and forth. She feels it across her chest, in her collarbone, down to her fingers. There’s something here; another girl who can do the thing she can do. No, not a girl. Allie feels out again with that other sense, the one that tingles. She’s seen a little bit about it online, other girls saying they can sense if another woman in the room is about to discharge her power. But no one has it like Allie has it. Since she first got her power, she’s been able to tell at once if anyone around her had any at all. And there’s something here.

  She finds it in the last tank but one. A darker tank than the rest, without the coloured, garlanded and fronded fish. It contains long, dark and sinuous creatures waiting at the bottom of the tank, stirring slowly. There’s a meter-box to one side of the tank with its needle at zero.

  Allie has never seen them before, nor does she know their name.

  She puts her hand to the glass.

  One of the eels shifts, turns and does something. She can hear it. A fizzing, cracking sound. The needle on the meter jumps.

  But Allie doesn’t need to know what the box is to know what just happened. This fish made a jolt.

  There’s a board up on the wall next to the tank. It’s so exciting that she has to read it three times, and keep herself under control or her breathing goes fast. These are electric eels. They can do crazy things. They give shocks to their prey under water; yeah, that’s right. Allie makes a little arc between her finger and thumb under the table. The eels stir in the tank.

  That’s not all electric eels can do. They can ‘remote control’ the muscles in their prey by interfering with the electric signals in the brain. They can make those fish swim straight into their mouths if they want to.

  Allie stands for a long time with that. She puts her hand back on the glass. She looks at the animals.

  That is a mighty power indeed. You would have to have control. Why, but you’ve always had control, daughter. And you’d have to be skilful. Why, but you can learn those skills.

  Allie says in her heart: Mother, where shall I go?

  And the voice says: Leave this place and go from here to the place that I shall show you.

  The voice always did have a Biblical way with it, just like that.

  That night, Allie wants to settle to sleeping, but the voice says: No, go on walking. Keep on. Her stomach is so empty and she feels peculiar, light-headed, troubled in her mind with thoughts of Mr Montgomery-Taylor, as if his lolling tongue were still licking at her ear. She wishes she had a dog.

  The voice says: Nearly there, my girl, don’t you worry.

  And out of the darkness Allie sees a light, illuminating a sign. It says, ‘Sisters of Mercy Convent. Soup for the homeless and beds for those in need.’

  The voice says: See, I told you.

  And all Allie knows after she crosses the threshold is that three women take her up bodily, calling her ‘child’ and ‘sweet’ and exclaiming when they find the crucifix in her bag because this is the proof of what they’d hoped to find in her face. They bring the food to her while she sits up, barely conscious, in a soft, warm bed, and that night not a one of them asked who she was and where she’d come from.

  There is very little attention paid to a mixed-race child with no home and no family washed up at a convent on the eastern seaboard in those months. She is not the only girl who beaches on this shore, nor is she the one most in need of counsel. The sisters are glad to find a use for the empty bedrooms – they are living in a building too large for them, built almost one hundred years ago, when the Lord was still calling women by the fistful to His eternal marriage. By the time three months have passed, they have put in bunk beds and tacked up a schedule of classes and Sunday school and given out chores in exchange for meals and comforters and a roof over the head. There has been a great tide in the movement of people, and those old ways have taken precedence again. Girls thrown out on to the street – the nuns will take them in.

  Allie likes to get the stories out of the other girls. She becomes a confidante, a pal, to several of them so she can match her tale up to theirs. There’s Savannah, who struck her stepbrother across the face so hard, she says, that ‘spider-webs grew on him, they grew right over his mouth and his nose and even his eyes.’ Savannah tells this story wide-eyed, chewing her gum enthusiastically. Allie digs her fork into the tough old stewing meat the nuns serve for dinner thrice weekly. She says, ‘What’re you gonna do now?’ And Savannah says, ‘I’m gonna find a doctor will take it out of me. Cut that thing right out.’ A clue. There are others. Some of the girls were prayed over by parents who thought a demon had possessed them. Some fought with other girls; some are still fighting here. One had done the thing to a boy because he asked her to: this story holds much interest for the girls. Could it be that boys like it? Is it possible they want it? Some of them have found internet forums that suggest that this is the case.

  There’s one girl, Victoria, who showed her mother how to do the thing. Her mother, who, Victoria says as simply as if she were talking about the
weather, had been beaten so hard and so often by Victoria’s stepdad that she hasn’t a tooth left in her head. Victoria woke the power up in her with a touch of her hand and showed her how to use it, and her mother threw her out into the street, calling her a witch. None of them needs an internet forum to understand that. They all nod, and someone passes Victoria the jug of gravy.

  In a less chaotic time, there might have been police, or social services, or earnest folk from the school board asking what was going on with these girls. But the authorities are simply grateful that someone is helping them out.

  Someone asks Allie what happened to her, and she knows she can’t give her real name. She calls herself Eve and the voice says: Good choice, the first of women; excellent choice.

  Eve’s story is simple, not interesting enough to be remembered. Eve’s from Augusta, and her parents sent her to relatives for two weeks and when she came back they’d moved away, she doesn’t know where. She had two younger brothers; her parents were scared for them, she thinks, although she’d never hurt no one. The other girls nod and move on to someone else.

  It’s not what I’ve done, Allie thinks to herself, it’s what I’m going to do.

  And the voice says: It’s what Eve’s going to do.

  And Allie says: Yes.

  She likes it in the convent. The nuns, for the most part, are kind, and the company of women is pleasing to Allie. She’s not found the company of men has had much to recommend it. The girls have chores to complete, but when they’re done there’s the ocean for swimming and the beach for walking, there are swings out back and the singing in chapel is peaceful and quiets all the voices in Allie’s head. She finds herself thinking in those quiet times: maybe I could stay here for ever. To dwell in the House of God all the days of my life is my one request.