The Power

by Naomi Alderman

  They sit with that.

  Roxy says, companionably and as if it has nothing to do with anything, ‘There was a bloke who stuck his hand down my pants when I was seven. Piano teacher. My mum thought it’d be nice for me to learn piano. There I was, on the stool, doing “Every Good Boy Deserves Fun” and, suddenly, hand in my knickers. “Don’t say anything,” he goes. “Just carry on playing.” So I told my dad the next night when he came to take me out to the park and, bloody hell, he went mental. Screaming at my mum, how could she; she said she didn’t know, did she, or she wouldn’t have let him. My dad took some of the boys round to that piano teacher’s house.’

  Allie says, ‘What happened?’

  Roxy laughs. ‘They beat the shit out of him. He ended the night with one less nut than he started it, for one thing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, course. My dad said if he had one more pupil round that house, and he meant ever, he’d come back for the other veg, and the meat, too. And not to think about leaving town and starting up again somewhere else because Bernie Monke is bloody everywhere.’ Roxy chuckles to herself. ‘Yeah, I saw him in the street once and he ran away. Saw me, right, turned, and actually ran. Bloody right, mate.’

  Allie says, ‘That’s good. That sounds good.’ She makes a little sigh.

  Roxy says, ‘I know you don’t trust them. It’s all right. You don’t have to trust them, babe.’

  She reaches over and puts her hand on top of Allie’s, and they sit there like that for a long time.

  After a while, Allie says, ‘One of the girls has a dad in the police force. He telephoned her two days ago to tell her she can’t be in this building on Friday.’

  Roxy laughs. ‘Dads. They like keeping their daughters safe. They can’t keep secrets.’

  ‘Will you help us?’ says Allie.

  ‘What do you think is coming?’ says Roxy. ‘SWAT team?’

  ‘Not so much. We’re only a few girls in a convent. Practising our religion like law-abiding citizens.’

  ‘I can’t kill anyone else,’ says Roxy.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll have to,’ says Allie. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  They mopped up the rest of Primrose’s gang after he died. Wasn’t any bother; they all fell apart after he was gone. Two weeks after Terry’s funeral Bernie called Roxy on her mobile at 5 a.m., and told her to come to a lock-up garage in Dagenham. There, he fished the big bunch of keys out of his pocket, opened it up and showed her two bodies laid out, killed cold and clean and about to go into the acid, and that’d be the end of that.

  She looked them in the face.

  ‘That them?’ said Bernie.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. She snaked her arm around her dad’s waist. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Anything for my girl,’ he said.

  Big bloke, little bloke, the two who killed her mum. One of them with her mark still on his arm, livid and branching.

  ‘All done, then, sweetheart?’ he said.

  ‘All done, Dad.’

  He kissed her on the top of the head.

  They went for a walk that morning round Eastbrookend Cemetery. Slow walking, chatting, while a couple of cleaners did the necessary in the garage.

  ‘You know the day you was born was the day we got Jack Conaghan?’ said Bernie.

  Roxy does know this. Still, she likes to hear the story again.

  ‘He’d been on us for years,’ said Bernie. ‘Killed Micky’s dad – you never knew him – him and the Irish boys. We got him in the end, though. Fishing in the canal. We waited all night for him, and when he got there early, we did him, chucked him in. That was that. When we was done and home and dry I checked my phone – fifteen messages from your mum! Fifteen! She’d gone into labour overnight, hadn’t she?’

  Roxy felt her fingertips around the edges of this story. It always seemed slippery, something fighting its way out of her grasp. She was born in the darkness, and with people waiting for someone: her dad waiting for Jack Conaghan, her mum waiting for her dad, and Jack Conaghan, though he never knew it, waiting for Death. It’s a story about the stuff that happens just exactly when you weren’t expecting it; just on that night you thought nothing was going to happen, everything happens.

  ‘I picked you up – a girl! After three boys, never thought I’d have a girl. And you looked me dead in the eye, and widdled all down my trousers. And that’s how I knew you’d be good luck.’

  She is good luck. Barring a few things, she’s always had good luck.

  How many miracles does it take? Not too many. One, two, three is plenty. Four is a great multitude, more than enough.

  There are twelve armed police officers advancing across the gardens at the back of the convent. It’s been raining. The ground is waterlogged, and more than waterlogged. There are open taps running at both sides of the garden. The girls have run a pump to bring seawater up to the top of the steps, and it’s a waterfall now, water gushing down the stone stairs. The officers aren’t wearing rubber boots; they didn’t know it’d be muddy like this. All they know is that a lady from the convent had come to tell them that girls were holed up in here and had been threatening and violent. So there are twelve trained men in body armour coming for them. It should be enough to finish this.

  The men shout out, ‘Police! Leave the building now, with your hands in the air!’

  Allie looks at Roxy. Roxy grins at her.

  They’re waiting behind the curtains in the dining room, the one that looks out over the back gardens. Waiting until the police are all on the stone stairs leading to the terrace outside the back doors. Waiting, waiting … and there they all are.

  Roxy pulls the corks out from the half-dozen barrels of seawater they’ve stored behind them. The carpet is sodden now, and the water’s gushing out under the door towards the steps. They’re all in one mass of water, Roxy and Allie and the police.

  Allie puts her hand into the water around her ankles and concentrates.

  Outside, on the terrace and on the stairs, the water is touching the skin of all the police officers, one way or another. It needs more control than Allie’s ever managed before; their fingers are on the triggers, they want to squeeze. But one by one she sends her message through the water, as fast as thought. And one by one, the officers jerk like puppets, the angles of their elbows fly out, their hands unclench and go numb. One by one, they drop their guns.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ says Roxy.

  ‘Now,’ says Allie, and climbs up on to a chair.

  Roxy, the woman with more power than she knows what to do with, sends a bolt through the water, and each of the police officers starts and bucks and topples to the ground. Neat as you like.

  It had to be only one woman doing it; a dozen convent girls couldn’t have acted together so quickly without hurting each other. A soldier had to come.

  Roxy smiles.

  Upstairs, Gordy’s been filming it on her cellphone. It’ll be online in an hour. You don’t need too many miracles before people start believing in you. And then sending you money and offers of legal help to get yourself properly set up. Everyone’s looking for some kind of answer, today more than ever.

  Mother Eve records a message to go out over the footage. She says, ‘I have not come to tell you to give up a single strand of your belief. I am not here to convert you. Christian, Jew, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, if you are of any faith or none at all, God does not want you to change your practice.’

  She pauses. She knows this is not what they’re expecting to hear.

  ‘God loves all of us,’ she says, ‘and She wants us to know that She has changed Her garment merely. She is beyond female and male, She is beyond human understanding. But She calls your attention to that which you have forgotten. Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses, for what you can learn from her. Muslims: look to Fatimah, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation.

  ‘You have been taught that you are unclean, that you
are not holy, that your body is impure and could never harbour the divine. You have been taught to despise everything you are and to long only to be a man. But you have been taught lies. God lies within you, God has returned to earth to teach you, in the form of this new power. Do not come to me looking for answers, for you must find the answers within yourself.’

  What can ever be more seductive than to be asked to stay away? What draws people nearer than being told they are unwelcome?

  Already that evening there are emails: Where can I go to join with your followers? What can I do here at home? How do I set up a prayer circle for this new thing? Teach us how to pray.

  And there are the appeals for help. My daughter is sick, pray for her. My mother’s new husband has handcuffed her to the bed, please send someone to rescue her. Allie and Roxy read the emails together.

  Allie says, ‘We have to try to help.’

  Roxy says, ‘You can’t help them all, babe.’

  Allie says, ‘I can. With God’s help, I can.’

  Roxy says, ‘Maybe you don’t need to go and get all of them, to help all of them.’

  The police force all across the state gets worse after the video of what Allie and Roxy did goes up online. They felt humiliated, of course they did. They had something to prove. There are states and countries where the police are already actively recruiting women, but that hasn’t happened here yet. The force is still mostly male. And they’re angry, and they’re afraid, and then things happen.

  Twenty-three days after the police tried to take the convent, a girl arrives at the door with a message for Mother Eve. Only Mother Eve; please, they have to help her. She’s weak with crying, and shaking and frightened.

  Roxy makes her a hot, sweet tea and Allie finds her some cookies, and the girl – her name’s Mez – tells them what’s happened.

  It was seven armed police officers, patrolling their neighbourhood. Mez and her mom were walking home from the grocery store, just talking. Mez is twelve and has had the power for a few months; her mom’s had it for longer; her little cousin woke it up in her. They were just talking, says Mez, just holding their grocery bags and chatting and laughing, and then suddenly there were six or seven cops saying, ‘What’s in the bags? Where are you going? We’ve had reports of a couple of women causing trouble round here. What have you got in the damn bags?’

  Mez’s mom didn’t take it too seriously; she just laughed and said, ‘What are we gonna have in here? Groceries, from the grocery store.’

  And one of the cops said she was acting pretty cool for a woman walking in a dangerous area; what had she been doing?

  And Mez’s mom just said, ‘Leave us alone.’

  And they pushed her. And she hit two of them, just with a little tickle of power. Just a warning.

  And that was it for the cops. They pulled out their nightsticks and their guns and they started working, and Mez was screaming and her mom was screaming and there was blood all on the sidewalk and they mashed her on her head.

  ‘They held her down,’ says Mez, ‘and they messed her up. It was seven on one.’

  Allie listens to it all very quietly. And when Mez has finished talking she says, ‘Is she alive?’

  Mez nods.

  ‘Do you know where they’ve taken her? Which hospital?’

  Mez says, ‘They didn’t take her to a hospital. They’ve taken her to the police station.’

  Allie says to Roxy, ‘We’re going down there.’

  Roxy says, ‘Then we have to take everyone.’

  There are sixty women who walk down the street together towards the police station where they’re holding Mez’s mom. They walk quietly but quickly, and they’re filming everything – that’s the word they’ve passed around the women in the convent. Document everything. Stream it if you can. Put it online.

  By the time they arrive, the police know they’re coming. There are men standing outside, holding rifles.

  Allie walks up to them. She holds her hands up, palms towards them. She says, ‘We’ve come here peacefully. We want to see Rachel Latif. We want to know she’s receiving medical attention. We want her sent to a hospital.’

  The senior officer, standing at the door, says, ‘Mrs Latif is being legally detained. By what power do you ask for her release?’

  Allie looks to the left and to the right, along the phalanx of women she’s brought with her. There are more women arriving every minute. There are maybe two hundred and fifty here now. The news of what’s happened has passed from door to door. There have been text messages; women have seen it online and left their houses and come.

  ‘The only power that matters,’ she says, ‘the common laws of humanity and God. There is a badly injured woman in your cells, she needs to see a doctor.’

  Roxy can feel the power crackling in the air around her. The women here are hyped up, excited, angry. She wonders if the men can feel it, too. The policemen with their rifles are nervous. Something could go bad here very easily.

  The senior police officer shakes his head and says, ‘We can’t let you in. And your presence here is a threat to my officers.’

  Allie says, ‘We’re here peacefully. Officer, we are peaceful. We want to see Rachel Latif, we want a doctor to treat her.’

  A great muttering rises up in the crowd then falls silent, waiting.

  The senior officer says, ‘If I let you see her, will you tell these women to go home?’

  Allie says, ‘Let me see her first.’

  Rachel Latif, when Roxy and Allie are brought to the holding cell to see her, is barely conscious. Her hair is matted with blood and she is lying on the cot in the cell, hardly moving, her breath a slow, painful rattle.

  Roxy says, ‘Jesus Christ!’

  Allie says, ‘Officer, this woman must be taken to a hospital immediately.’

  The other policemen are watching the senior officer. More and more women are arriving outside the building every minute. The sound of them outside is like a crowd of murmuring birds, each one speaking to her neighbour, each ready to wheel at a secret signal. There are only twenty officers in this station. There’ll be several hundred women outside it within one half-hour.

  Rachel Latif’s skull is cracked open. You can see the white bone shattered and the blood bubbling from her brain.

  The voice says: They did it without provocation. You’ve been provoked. You could take this station, you could kill every man in it if you wanted.

  Roxy takes Allie’s hand, squeezes it.

  Roxy says, ‘Officer, you don’t want this to go any further. You don’t want this to be the story they tell about you. Let this woman go to a hospital.’

  The police officer lets out a long, slow sigh.

  The crowd outside grows noisy when Allie re-emerges, and even noisier when they hear the approaching sirens of the ambulance, nosing its way through the crowd.

  Two women hoist Mother Eve on to their shoulders. She holds up her hand. The muttering grows silent.

  Mother Eve speaks through Allie’s mouth and says, ‘I am taking Rachel Latif to the hospital. I will ensure she is cared for properly.’

  The noise again, like grass stalks blowing. It rises up and dies away.

  Mother Eve splays her fingers out, like the sign of the Hand of Fatima. She says, ‘You have done good work here and now you can go home.’

  The women nod. The girls from the convent turn and walk away as one. The other women begin to follow them.

  Half an hour later, when Rachel Latif is being examined in the hospital, the street outside the police station is entirely empty.

  In the end, there’s no need for them to stay in the convent. It’s nice, it overlooks the sea and it’s got a certain homely feel to it, but by the time Roxy’s been there nine months Allie’s organization could have bought a hundred buildings like it and, anyway, they need somewhere bigger. There are six hundred women affiliated with the convent in this little town alone, and satellites springing up across the country, around the world. T
he more the authorities say she’s illegitimate, the more the old Church says she’s sent by the Devil, the more women are drawn to Mother Eve. If Allie had any doubt before this that she has been sent by God with a message for Her people, the things that have happened here have left her in no doubt. She is here to look after the women. God has appointed her to that role, and it is not for Allie to deny it.

  It’s spring come round again when they’re talking about new buildings.

  Roxy says, ‘You’ll save a room for me, won’t you, wherever you end up?’

  Allie says, ‘Don’t go. Why would you go? Why back to England? What’s there for you?’

  Roxy says, ‘My dad reckons it’s all blown over. No one cares what we do to each other, really, as long as we don’t get any honest citizens involved.’ She grins.

  ‘But really,’ Allie flattens her lips, ‘really, why would you go home? This is your home. Stay here. Please. Stay with us.’

  Roxy squeezes Allie’s hand. ‘Mate,’ she says, ‘I miss my family. I miss my dad. And, like, Marmite. I miss all that stuff. I’m not going away for ever. We’ll see each other again.’

  Allie breathes in through her nose. There is a murmuring at the back of her mind that has been quiet and far away for months now.

  She shakes her head. She says, ‘You can’t trust them, though.’

  Roxy laughs. ‘What, men? All men? Can’t trust any of them?’

  Allie says, ‘Be careful. Find women you trust to work with you.’

  Roxy says, ‘Yeah, we’ve talked about this, babe.’

  ‘You have to take it all,’ says Allie. ‘You can. You’ve got it. Don’t let Ricky take it, don’t let Darrell take it. It’s yours.’

  Roxy says, ‘You know, I think you’re right. But I can’t take it all sitting here, can I?’ She swallows. ‘I’ve booked a ticket. I leave a week on Saturday. There’s stuff I wanted to talk about with you before that. Plans. Can we talk about plans? Without you going on about how I should just stay?’

  ‘We can.’

  Allie says in her heart: I don’t want her to go. Can we stop that happening?

  The voice says to Allie: Remember, sweetheart, the only way you’re safe is if you own the place.