The Poison Garden

by Alex Marwood

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Has something happened, though? She seems like ...’

  ‘She’s lost her medallion,’ he says.

  ‘Her what?’

  ‘The medallion she wears round her neck. It’s important to her.’

  ‘How important?’

  ‘It’s a ... symbol, really. All of Father’s children wore them.’

  ‘A sort of amulet – a good luck charm?’

  He considers. ‘Sort of. It’s hard to explain. They’re part of them, those medallions, from the day they’re born.’

  ‘So she feels naked without it?’

  Ilo nods. ‘Yes. Like that. Exposed.’

  ‘Oh, God. When did she lose it?’

  ‘In the playground, today. As we were coming out to go home.’

  ‘Did you find it?’

  Ilo gives her a look that reflects how stupid the question is.

  ‘Sorry. I mean, did you look?’

  Again the look. Back off, old person. If you’re going to ask questions, ask intelligent ones, at least.

  ‘I’m sorry. Is it valuable?’

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone on the Outside would think it was. But she does.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll put an alert on when we go in in the morning. Put a notice up on the noticeboard ...’

  Ilo pulls a face. ‘Someone’s got it, I think,’ he says.

  ‘Well, that’s stealing,’ she says, firmly. ‘There are punishments for that.’

  He pulls another face, scrapes his onions into the casserole dish to fry.

  * * *

  * * *

  Eden comes down to dinner, and she’s cleaned her face and plastered that smile on again, but she refuses to look at her brother, ignores him when he puts a plate in front of her at the table, like an Edwardian lady in a restaurant. I’m not going to get anything out of her tonight, thinks Sarah, and tries anyway. ‘Eden,’ she says, ‘if there’s something going on that’s upsetting you, you would tell me, wouldn’t you? It’s what I’m here for. To help.’

  Her voice rises and takes on a tone of command. ‘It’s Ilo’s fault, Aunt Sarah. It’s up to him to sort it out.’

  ‘But,’ she protests, ‘you don’t have to do this stuff on your own, Eden. It’s what I’m here for. There are rules, you know. If you’re being bullied, if someone’s picking on you, they’re breaking them.’

  Those clear blue eyes, gazing straight at her. ‘Oh, in the end, I don’t mind that,’ she says. ‘I want my medallion, but I feel sorry for them. For all of them.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ asks Sarah.

  ‘Because they’re stupid,’ says Eden, ‘and they will all die screaming.’

  * * *

  * * *

  Once they’ve retired to bed, she goes out into the garden for her evening cigarette. She allows herself two a day, as much in defiance of rules as for the actual pleasure they bring.

  She sits on one of her parents’ green-painted cast-iron chairs at their cast-iron table and smokes as slowly as she can, tapping her ashes into her mother’s green-and-beige St Ives School cachepot. I’m no good at this, she thinks. Who do I even ask? Everyone I’ve talked to sees the whole Ark thing the way I do, as some sort of crazy world organised around theories we don’t really understand that don’t make sense, but God knows the world’s full of catastrophists waiting for the sky to fall. They’re hardly the only ones. I need help here, and it’s not finding someone I can talk to, it’s finding someone they can talk to. Someone who won’t constantly be biting their lip or saying the wrong thing because they don’t understand what they believe. There’s always going to be a degree of mistrust if I can’t show them in some concrete way that I’m on their side.

  She gets out her wallet and looks through the notes section. Finds her niece Romy’s address. Stares at it as her cigarette burns down to the filter, then makes her decision as she stubs it out.

  23 | Romy

  As I thought, the lock on the gate is simple. I get it open in under a minute with the help of the two metal skewers I bought at the kitchenware stall for £1.35. I check behind me in the alleyway, pull the gate open slowly, in case it creaks, and slip inside.

  I’m in another little courtyard, more flagstones, a line of wheeled bins lying on their sides to stop them filling with water. A dreary outlook for the Lord, though: the backs of other people’s houses, too close for privacy and barely room for a table and chairs in the fresh air. Perhaps he’ll use the front court, so people can watch His Glorious Majesty drink his morning coffee.

  A porch overhangs the back door. A nice bit of privacy for me.

  The door has a mortice and a Chubb. The first will be easy, the second more complicated, but nothing I’ve not cracked before. We did lessons, in the Pigshed. You never know when you might need shelter when you’re in flight. It takes three minutes to hear the satisfying clunk of the mortice and five more before I persuade the inner barrel of the Chubb to turn.

  Inside is pitch black and smells of spiders. I’m tempted to flick the light switch, but control myself. For God’s sake, Romy. You’re trained to face the end of the world. You’re not blowing it because you’re scared of arachnids.

  I close the door behind me and switch on my new torch. I’m in a plain little room that looks more store cupboard than anything else. A couple of broken chairs, a line of empty coat hooks, a pile of missals on a battered console table. On one of the chairs, a cardboard box. Please respect the Lord’s House, reads a sign taped to the front. I look inside. A collection of white cotton bonnets, tapes hanging from their undersides to tie beneath one’s chin. They’re spotted with mould. It must be damper in here than it smells. They’re the same bonnets as Hester Lacey wears in the portrait on Wikipedia. Imagine. Wanting to dress up like that warty old monster. What a strange way to show your faith. My mother must have worn one of these, every Sunday till she was seventeen. A door leads out the other side, a heavy bolt holding it shut. It slides back easily, with a satisfying clunk. I try the handle and it turns.

  A huge space, for its shrivelled occupants. I play the torch about, drinking in the detail. I recognise it all from her stories. My mother did her homework here, in the back pews, as her father talked of hellfire from that ebony lectern to my left. White walls. Black wood. I walk inwards, head for the high arched door at the far end. Turn and look where I’ve come from. A plain table on which sit two brass candlesticks, a pewter chalice and a pewter plate on a square of linen. Above it on the wall, painted on the stone surround of an arched window, the words The Lord Thy God Is a Jealous God; above the door I’m aiming for, The Wages of Sin Is Death. Cheerful people, my forebears. But so caught up in their imaginary afterworld that they didn’t give a thought to the calamity howling towards them in the real one.

  No decoration, no embellishment. We didn’t use the Plas Golau chapel for religious purposes, obviously – it had long since become food storage, with its nice cool even temperatures – but it still retained impressions of a jollier era: death’s heads carved into memorials, a brass eagle designed to hold an opened bible, fluted pillars holding up the roof, winged babies weeping at the feet of a crabby old couple, fixed forever in marble on a carved marble bed. They suggested a playfulness, a level of morbid enjoyment, buried in there somewhere among the serious business of worship and death. Here, it is clear that God allows no fun at all. It’s years since I believed the stories about the Christians eating Jesus, but it’s clear that my grandfather’s church was no barrel of laughs.

  Father saw rage in me, he said. Even as I proved, over and over, how obedient I was. And even as he said it, I felt fizzing bubbles of rage between my shoulder blades, and my scalp contracted in preparation for the fight. And then I saw that maybe he was right. Rage does drive me, in many ways. It consumes me now. Rage with the world, rage with my grandparents, rage with Eden and Ilo because they’v
e disappeared and left me on my own, rage with Uri because of what he is asking me to do. But everything, everything, comes back to these people, the people who used to worship here. Cold and judgemental and destructive in their pursuit of their morality. Wallowing in their own superiority. I’m going to find them, and I’m going to make sure they understand the true meaning of wickedness.

  You killed my mother, I will say. You couldn’t have killed her better if you’d used a knife.

  Revenge, Father said, is a self-destructive urge. Father knew freaking nothing. Vita knew more about the world than he did. Far more. And Uri. That’s why Uri’s still alive and they are dead. Father clearly never had someone to hate, and with such good reason, as I do, and that means that for all his fine words he knew nothing.

  I look around this place where my mother’s misery began and realise with a shock that maybe the rage comes all the way from them. No one gets pleasure from the thought of eternal hellfire if they’ve not got a load of rage stored up inside them. No one enjoys the thought of eternal damnation unless they hate the world.

  My mother was so lucky, getting away from them. Well. Maybe not, in the end. But she saved me, and I can only ever be grateful for that.

  I never knew it until this moment, but I am their grandchild.

  * * *

  * * *

  It smells of dust and, faintly, of wood polish. I run a finger over the back of the nearest pew and the pad comes up grey. There’s been no one here in a long while. I head for the door and go and look for the basement. I remember my mother saying that that was where they kept their offices. If the information I need is anywhere, it will be there. So damp. It hits me the moment I step onto the stairs. It’s been shut up, unheated, for as long as the rest of the building. Which gives me hope. Because if it’s been shut up, that means nobody’s been in to take away the paperwork. They’ve literally just locked it up and walked away. I wonder where they are now. Was the man who died my grandfather? A bit of me hopes so, because the sooner he discovers his own hellfire the better.

  At the bottom, I assume it’s safe to turn on the light. A ceiling bulb bathes everything in an unearthly glow that makes me think of vampires. A dreary room. Two long tables and two chairs on wheels, white-painted brick. Plastic trays filled with pieces of paper that have begun to crumble. A line of filing cabinets.

  I go to open them, and the door opens at the top of the stairs and a voice says, ‘Clarion Security. Can you come out, please?’

  There are two of them, and they’re wearing uniforms to make them look like policemen. I know they’re not, though, because they would have said that they were. The hall blazes with light, and the chapel, too.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ I ask, because I’m genuinely intrigued.

  ‘Alarm, love,’ he says.

  Ah. How come it didn’t ring? Are there silent alarms? Have I been tripping them as I’ve walked about the world?

  ‘Can you tell me what you’re doing here?’ he asks.

  I put on my best waif face. Let my jacket drop open so he can see my swollen abdomen. ‘I was looking for somewhere to sleep,’ I say.

  ‘In the basement?’

  I shrug. ‘I’m not proud.’

  ‘Bedrooms usually live upstairs.’

  I shrug again.

  ‘You know you’re breaking and entering, right?’

  ‘I didn’t break anything. The back door was open. I just wanted somewhere to sleep,’ I repeat. ‘It’s cold.’

  I size them up. I think the older one’s my best bet for a calm exit. He looks old enough to have a daughter my age. ‘I’m pregnant,’ I tell them.

  ‘So I see,’ he says, ‘but you’re still breaking and entering. Or trespassing, anyway. Stand there,’ he says, and points to a corner, turns away to speak into his phone as though doing so will somehow prevent me hearing what he says. ‘Terence. Yep, we’ve got a burglar at Finbrough High Street. Call the constab, there’s a love.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I say, ‘please don’t,’ and I look at him, pleading, vulnerable. It doesn’t work. He just stares at me under his peaked cap and I know I’m not going to talk my way out of this. So I take my only other option, and run.

  They’re slow-moving, as I’d hoped: even slower than I am with my limp and baby. The older one has slower legs and the younger a slower brain, and I have muscle memory, and once I start to run my body remembers how to do it, though I’ve not even tried in months. They’re still cursing and bouncing off each other in the hallway by the time I’m halfway up the aisle, and I’ve got the door to the little back room bolted by the time they slam into it and curse some more. I run out through the back door, tear up the alleyway and make for the main road.

  You somersault inside me as I jounce along. Get used to it, baby. Life isn’t easy.

  I jog away from the High Street, since it seems fairly obvious that that will be the way the police will approach the building, then I run up two roads and turn left. And there I slow down, make myself walk slowly, loosely, as if I’m just out for a stroll. Nobody comes looking for me. Perhaps they didn’t even call. I stick my hand out into the London Road, and hope someone will stop soon for the poor pregnant girl.

  Anger makes you careless. I’m not really thinking about who might be in these cars that swish along the darkening road. It takes less than a minute for one to stop, and I get in without even looking through the windscreen. I just throw my backpack into the footwell and don’t even look into the face of the driver before he has stepped on the accelerator. Rage has made me forget another thing that Father always said: that decisions made in anger are seldom wise ones.

  Before the End

  2010–2011

  24 | Romy

  2010

  She’s almost on top of the body before she sees it. A woman. Fallen, by the looks of it, from the high boulders below the dam, and lying face-down in the pool where the big trout dream.

  The woods are silent. Just the quiet singing of the water at her feet. Romy looks away, searches for the comfort of tiny pale patches of night sky between the tree branches. Looks back again. The body is still there.

  Romy feels herself sway in the night air. Something flaps away in the canopy and she jumps.

  That’s her brain, she thinks. I can see her brain.

  She’s broken on the way down. A sharp end of bone sticks through a rip in her sleeve and her head is on crooked. Not the first corpse she’s seen, but the worst, by a long chalk.

  Should I be this calm? she wonders. Am I not meant to be trembling?

  But her training is stronger than her shock. She’s been raised from infancy to face death with equanimity. I’m meant to be harvesting mistletoe, she thinks. What do I do? If I don’t come in with mistletoe at dawn, Ursola will report me to Vita and I’ll be even further from the Infirmary.

  She looks again, for the corpse is sort of fascinating. That white brain, how easily a skull cracks, like walnut.

  Maybe I should see who it is, she thinks, though the coppery shade of the stubbly scalp, even in moonlight, gives a clear indication. She tugs the unbroken sleeve, but it’s waterlogged, heavy. Eventually she has to heave the body like a sack of wet cement onto the bank, onto its back, to verify that it’s Zaria Blake. Eyes wide, lips parted, the gash in her skull black and white in the moonlight.

  She sits on a mossy rock, takes a drink from her water bottle and considers what she should do. I should walk away, she thinks. Pretend I’ve seen nothing. Who would I tell? Or, rather, who would I tell first? They both expect to be top of the list, they’ve each made that clear to me. I’ve kept them both at arm’s length with a steady drip-feed of inconsequential detail, but how could I do that with this?

  Then she hears footsteps, high up in the pasture path that leads from the Guard House to the dam wall. And she’s on her hands and knees in a moment, scrambling for the
cover of the bracken behind a tall horse chestnut. She always has the estate to herself at night, apart from the odd patrolling Guard. If someone’s coming here so directly, so boldly, they must know what they’re going to find.

  They don’t like spies, the Guards. They don’t like spies and traitors, unless they’re their spies and traitors, and they don’t like people who question them or answer back. Perhaps it would have been better to show herself straight away and plead her innocence. In the dark, cut off from the moonlight, she feels grateful for her dark colouring, for it helps her disappear into the shadows. If I vanished tonight, she thinks, I would simply vanish, the way people do, and no one would question it. Not out loud, anyway.

  Her vision adjusts to the gloom and she watches them come. It’s Uri, and his Number Two, Jacko, and Dom, one of the soldiers they brought with them from the Dead, and Willow, one of the few girls plucked from the Pigshed to join their ranks.

  Romy concentrates on slowing her breathing, on staying still. A dead body in the night might not make her afraid, but Uri’s soldiers do.

  They pass her, gather around the body. The three men look down at Zaria with absolute indifference. Willow seems to struggle for words.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks.

  Uri shrugs. He’s not bothered. A silence falls that fills the night.

  Romy watches Willow strain to keep her expression blank, to match her comrades’. She mustn’t say the wrong thing, thinks Romy. And she knows that. She’s just found out one of the secrets of the Guard House, and so have I, and if either of us drops our defences we’ll end up just like Zaria.

  Lucien’s children have a high attrition rate. She’s noticed it and other people must have, too. Last year, eleven-year-old Roshin Blake ate yew berries and died in convulsions on the floor of the Pigshed. The year before, Leana Blake, seventeen, caught her sleeve in the hay bailer and bled out from her arm socket while a Healer tried hopelessly to staunch the blood that would not stop coming. They both had honourable burials in the chapel graveyard, of course, but then, as always, nobody spoke of them again. And then Jaivyn slipped off during an outreach expedition to a rock festival in the early summer – took his box and his shoes and the weekend’s takings and disappeared with the crowd – and there was hell to pay. Vita herself was in disgrace for a month.