by Alex Marwood
6 | Sarah
She stays sitting after she’s finished her ready-meal lasagne, finishes her glass and pours another, looks at her dining room with a social worker’s eyes for the first time in her life, with the home visit a few days away. ‘Christ,’ she says.
Clutter has built up, and she’s never noticed it. She’s never had a reason to eat a meal at the table, or to feed anyone else, so she’s been using the table as a filing system since she moved back in. It’s elbow-deep in paper and the floor’s not much better. The paintings have collected cobwebs and the furniture that lines the walls is grey with dust. Miss Havisham hoping to find herself an Estella, that’s what I’ll look like, she thinks. This is what happens if you hardly ever have guests.
She walks through the house with the same eye. On the wall in the hall, an oil painting of a warty old woman in a black dress and white lace bonnet. Hester Lacey, founder of the Finbrough Congregation. She saw Jesus down by the river and dedicated her life to making a nice house for him to come back to. The antique shops of the M4 corridor have filled with portraits of her as the Carpenter’s Estate houses have been sold off. They’re so commonplace now that even the charity shops are turning them away. She’s imitating a look of benevolence in this picture, but you can see that she had a heart of steel.
So many things she’s not opened, not looked in, in the two years since she inherited. She walks through to the kitchen – memories of ham salads made up and sitting beneath fly-screens on the table for silent post-church meals. Always a pan of brown soup waiting on an unlit burner ‘to warm us up’, brown earthenware bowls on the side. Oxtail. Almost always tinned oxtail, the smell a mix of abattoirs and laundry baskets. Sarah longs to be free of all of it. Dreams of a place as far from Finbrough as she can get, of open skies and open windows with no hum from the motorway, and a new beginning. A sense of purpose, she thinks, that’s what I need. Not to just be drifting through life doing a nothing job just to pay the heating bill.
I’ll get a skip, she thinks. I shall get a skip and just dump the contents of every drawer I haven’t opened since I’ve been back straight into it. That’s one of the main decluttering tips, isn’t it? That if you’ve not needed it in the past year, you don’t need it at all? I’ve been paralysed all this time, but I can’t go on living like this. Even if I wanted to, I can’t bring children – my own or anyone else’s – into this.
She gathers up an armful of papers and goes up to her father’s office in the attic. Out of sight, out of mind, and she needs to find the birth certificates – her own and Alison’s – to show the case worker when she brings the kids for their visit. Belatedly, it’s occurred to someone to ask her to prove that she’s who she says she is.
More dust. She feels ashamed. The room is lined with filing cabinets and the boxy old desktop computer sits on a big wooden desk. Otherwise, there’s nothing on show. No family photos, no paper clips, no paper. Everything put away, as though he knew he wouldn’t be coming back. He liked his secrets, Bruce Maxwell. Kept things separate – records here, the cash in the safe at the church – so that only he could really make it all add up.
She tries the drawers, looking for the folder she found it all in, two years ago. She opens the desk drawers first – a jumble of office-related bits and pieces, a whole drawer of blank paper. Another of paper that’s printed on one side, a single line drawn across the print with a pen. Her parents never recycled. Thought of it as a socialist concept. But they were thrifty.
Leaflets. The ones she handed out on the High Street every Saturday from when she was baptised at five to when she left for university. ‘THE WAGES OF SIN’. ‘WHO WAS HESTER LACEY?’ ‘YOUR BLESSED WATER: HOW TO USE IT’. In the bottom drawer, the Congregation’s own special brand of greeting-and-damnation cards.
It’s all well labelled, at least. He might not have wanted his congregation to know what he was up to, but he liked to be able to lay his hand on anything in a moment. Church accounts. Church history. Correspondence. The latter turns out to be a collection of yellowing letters from people responding to Blessed Water ads, and a folder of receipts from newspaper ad sales departments. The Membership drawer is poignantly sparse. She leafs through a couple of files. Copies of will bequests, details of addresses and phone numbers, little else. The occasional folder is stamped with the word DECEASED. After a point he must not have been able to bear to throw any more away, as the membership counted down to zero. The day he collapsed and died at the lectern in the Lord’s House Chapel, he was preaching to a congregation of thirteen. And only two of them were below retirement age.
I’ll take the lot down there, she thinks, and leave them in the office. She still has a key, of course; several. But she’s not set foot in the place since her father’s funeral and has only the vaguest idea if anyone is there at all any more. It always looks shuttered and neglected when she walks past on market days. Maybe they realised it was all over, and sold up and cleared out the safe and got the hell out of Dodge, and the Lord’s House is just going to rot there until the resurrection. She hopes so, for their sakes.
Property. A whole drawer. A collection of folders containing lease agreements for all the church’s long-sold houses. ‘The tenant agrees that this agreement will terminate with one calendar month’s notice on the return of Our Lord Saviour Jesus Christ,’ they begin. Maybe I should frame one of these, she thinks, and put it in the downstairs loo. They’re curios now, souvenirs of a flock that genuinely believed they were maintaining property for the return of the Lord. Nothing more.
And then she spots the drawer marked Personal, right down at the bottom in the corner, and her attention slides away.
Here they are. Her family, in paper and cardboard. A dozen folders. House (she puts the deeds away safely, at last). Insurance. Health (they had, it seems, private health insurance, despite the NHS and the protection of God). Car – spare keys, ownership documents, service record. Their old Volvo still sits in the garage, untried, untaxed and unloved. She doubts it would even start without help; she’s never needed to use it as she has a car of her own.
A folder with plans for their funerals makes her blush with guilt. It would stand to reason that they would leave these things, and she never even looked. They’re stark, and brief. Her father organised her mother’s funeral and spoke there about death and unending hellfire. But it looks as though he did consult her file, for she remembers well the moment when the Congregation started marching on the spot while singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. She looks at her father’s file. He wanted ‘Amazing Grace’ and an oration from a man who she knows to have been dead for the past four years. Ah, well.
And then she finds the name files. Barbara. Bruce. Sarah. Alison.
She checks her own first. It’s old stuff. Exam certificates, a confirmation photo, a birth certificate. School reports, for God’s sake. And a photograph of her wedding to Liam, the bride looking both in love and terrified, and Liam looking – oh, God, why didn’t she see it then? – sly. Nothing after. Sarah’s record-worthy life ended, as far as the Maxwells were concerned, with her wedding to a heathen. She wasn’t thrown into the outer darkness like her sister, but they clearly didn’t think anything would be worth recording afterwards. They didn’t even have this photo out on display, as normal people would. She takes her birth certificate and puts it on top of the cabinet.
She opens Alison’s. It’s thin. So thin she thinks for a moment that it is empty. But no: there are three things inside. Her birth certificate. Her GCSE certificate. Her first passport, bought for a school trip to Flanders when she was fifteen. The tales of dormitory shenanigans that leaked back to her parents were so scandalous that Sarah was never allowed to go anywhere overnight when it got to be her turn.
She runs her thumb over Alison’s face, remembers the pudding-basin haircuts, the snaggly teeth because the Maxwells didn’t believe in orthodontics or other types of ‘playing God’. Which i
s worse, she wonders, being the elder and having to forge your own way blind, or being the younger one, who catches the flak for their predecessor’s mistakes?
Well, I suppose only one of us is dead.
And then she feels guilty again, because nobody deserves death just for being foolish.
And those kids don’t deserve to be left hanging because of the circumstances of their births, Sarah.
Stop it.
She bends to slip the file back into the drawer and her eye is caught by something lying on the bottom. The corner of a photograph. She pulls it out. A little shot taken in one of those passport booths in the post office, just the one, cut off the end of one of those strips of four. Alison and her baby. That’s Romy. She recognises the wrinkled skin, the tuft of black hair, the almond eyes. A little bigger than that one time she saw her, when Alison brought her home for a failed thirty-second visit, but undoubtedly her.
It’s a terrible photo. They both look unwashed and ungroomed and cold and wet.
She moves the files aside to see if there are any more. There are envelopes. A dozen, two dozen, her sister’s handwriting. They hang open, the letters visible inside.
She takes one out, unfolds the letter. It’s been torn from a spiral-bound book and written with a pen that’s caught and blotted on the paper. The handwriting is kiddish, with circles over the ‘i’s and multiple underlinings and exclamation marks.
7 May 1996
Dear Mother—
This letter is to wish you a happy birthday!!!. I know the chances are that you won’t read this, but I’m sending it anyway. I do wish you a happy, happy day, whatever you do, and send my love to Father and Sarah as well. I’m so sorry about the window. It was a stupid thing to do! I promise to pay you back and hope you will forgive me one day.
I’m enclosing a photo of me and Romy, your granddaughter. She was born on November 11th and she’s nearly six months old. We took this in the photo booth in Reading when we went up to register her birth, so it’s quite out of date now. I wish you could see her. She’s so sweet. She rolls over all by herself and drags herself over to her toys, and she’s such a sunny little soul. She smiles at everybody . She’s on purayed food now and she loves carrot and potato and chicken and rice especially. She sends her love to her nana and her grandpa and her Auntie Sarah, and wishes she could meet you all.
We’re living at Riverside Caravans off the London Road. We’ll have to move on when the summer season begins in June, though, as the rent will go up then. Social Services say they are looking for somewhere for us to go, but it will probably have to be a bed and breakfast as the waiting list is really long. But my neighbur Magda says I can work on her Chai Tea stall at the festivals in the summer, so that might work as she says I can take Romy with me and lots of people do. Anyway, we will be here till the end of May and would love to hear from you. Caravan 23. I don’t have a phone, but you can call reception and leave a message.
With lots and lots of love,
Your daughter,
Alison
She slips it back into the envelope, looks at the others, some browned and faded and some, God knows, practically brand new, the handwriting maturing but still familiar. She was writing to them. All these years, she was writing to them, and one or other of them was just slinging them out of view into this drawer. Why didn’t they just throw them away? Did they want me to find them one day, now it’s too late to do anything? Subconsciously, at least? Or maybe they just didn’t care. Were keeping them for themselves, as souvenirs of their righteousness, or as some sort of twisted gesture of contempt.
She reaches back into the drawers and gathers them all up, counts them. Seventeen. So if they came annually, on Barbara’s birthday, she must only have given up shortly before Barbara’s death. As she stands up, the interior of the room, the view of the garden below through the dormer window, suddenly swim, and she has to reach out and grab the cabinet for support. Adrenaline. Cortisol. Some change in her blood pressure, because as she was standing her mood changed from sadness to absolute rage, and that rage has made her giddy.
She died. My sister died in slow terror on a summer’s day in Wales. I will blame them for this for the rest of my life. Wicked, wicked old people, to do this to their child. To all the children. Their hearts are made of granite and they deserve to burn.
She takes the letters downstairs to read, because she needs a glass of wine. She knows, now, what she will do, however much she fears it.
Before the End
2001–2002
7 | Romy
June 2001
‘Cyanide.’
‘Cyanide?’
Somer laughs. ‘Not enough to kill you. Just the grass in the middle of the circle. You really wouldn’t bother to try to poison people with fairy-ring champignons. They’d have to eat half a ton to get a proper dose.’
‘Ohhh-kay,’ says Romy.
‘There are loads of more effective ways,’ says Somer.
‘Yew berries,’ says Romy. She studies the pharmacopoeia every day, what she can understand of it. She’s only five, after all, and, though the Plas Golau children are quite advanced in their reading, there are limits. But she wants to be a Healer, like her mother.
Some poisons are useful, in smaller doses, as medicines. Like digitalis, from foxgloves, for failing hearts. And for its own dark ends? Well, you never know when you might need poison. When the hordes come over the hill, poison might be their only salvation.
‘Belladonna.’
‘Deadly nightshade.’
‘That’s right. Don’t ever eat a berry unless you’re sure what it is,’ says Somer.
‘I know,’ says Romy, and rolls her eyes. Grown-ups repeat themselves, constantly.
‘The largest organism in the world is a fungus,’ says Somer. ‘In Oregon. It’s two and a half miles across.’
‘No!’
‘Yes!’
That’s bigger than the whole of Plas Golau, with its woods and fields and little reservoir, its house, its kitchen gardens, the rough-grazing pasture where the altitude gets higher and the soil gets thinner, its patch of open moorland. Further across than Romy’s entire world. ‘A honey fungus,’ says Somer. ‘We have to root them up the second we see them. They kill trees.’
Romy stares at the fairy-ring, thinks about the thing growing beneath. Quietly, creeping outwards, root by root by root, taking over the world, killing it off.
‘Come on,’ says Somer. ‘Time’s a-wasting.’
* * *
* * *
She loves these afternoons with her mother. Knows they won’t last forever – adulthood comes early here. And it will come earlier for Romy, because Somer has been blessed with a second child. And not just any child: Father’s child. Of all the women at Plas Golau, he has chosen to make her the latest mother of his offspring. Romy is proud. So proud. It’s rare to have a brother or a sister, and a brother or sister who could turn out to be the One is so special that sometimes she has to squeeze herself in bed at night to control her excitement.
It’s nice to escape the summer heat, but Romy’s glad they don’t have to go deep into the woods. They’ve shared so many ghost stories, hunkered down beneath their blankets while storms howled around the dormitory rafters, that she’s nervous of the outer edges of the estate, the band of tangled wildness that’s been left to grow around its walls. Deep below them runs a peat-rich stream, the outlet from the reservoir, tumbling on down the hill over boulders deposited in the Ice Age, its rocks slippery. And the woods are full of bracken, and bracken means adders, everyone knows that.
‘So remind me,’ she asks as they clamber on, ‘who is Jesus again?’ She likes to cross-question her mother about the world into which she was born. She likes to tease herself with detail of the lives the Dead lead. Make herself horripilate with fear or howl with
laughter. Make herself feel lucky.
‘He’s the son of God.’
Romy frowns. ‘But I thought God didn’t exist?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So how ...?’
‘By making it up,’ says Somer. Having left religion behind her, she has left it completely. The only thing that matters to them is survival. When the end comes, they carry the future of the human race. There is nothing more important.
‘Mm.’ Romy thinks of her new sibling, conceived not only with the Leader’s blessing but with his seed as well, and shakes her head wonderingly. She doesn’t know who her own father is, of course, but it doesn’t matter, really. How people were on the Outside is not how they are here, and as he didn’t come with them he’ll be lost to them anyway when the End comes.
‘So basically,’ she asks, ‘they thought Jesus was the One?’
Somer pauses and lays a hand on her swollen abdomen. Smiles a smile that gazes into the future, a modern madonna in a flaxen tunic. ‘I suppose,’ she says. ‘Of course, the difference is that the One is real.’
‘And our baby could be the One, couldn’t he?’ Romy asks proudly, though of course she knows the answer. The baby is Lucien’s, and only one of Lucien’s children can be the One. Everyone knows that; it’s the Prophecy. But to be related even to a could-be-the-One is madly exciting.
‘Could be,’ says Somer, with false modesty. ‘But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’
Romy spots a clump of saffron chanterelles clustered around the roots of a noble beech tree. Cries out and points.
‘Oh, well done,’ says Somer.
‘So your mother and father think Jesus is going to come back?’ continues Romy. ‘Like a zombie?’
‘Haha. Yes, I suppose so.’