The Offering

by McCleen, Grace

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  I jump. Margaret has put her head around the door. I roll sideways, obscuring the bible.

  ‘Need any tablets?’

  ‘No.’

  She sits down beside me, smelling of washing powder and disinfectant, and something else I never quite manage to identify that is softer, like skin, and rather fragile, like infants or old people. Margaret must be about fifty. She has thick wiry white hair that is always a little greasy at the roots, and though parted on the side sticks up at the back. She has the sort of body that could never be feminine – the shoulders are too hefty, the ankles, the hands – but it makes me feel safer than anything else I know. Her face could never be pretty either, her jaw is too strong, her nose too long, the lips thin and jutting, but it is the kindest face I have ever seen, apart from my mother’s.

  ‘So how d’it go?’ she says in her broad country accent.

  ‘He wants to hypnotize me,’ I say. ‘He thinks I’ve got dissociative amnesia.’

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘That’s a new one.’

  I smile. Then I stop smiling and hesitate before I speak again. ‘He thinks I can be rehabilitated.’

  Margaret looks frightened, and then I think she seems to brighten, and then I think she looks angry. ‘Well,’ she says finally, and her voice is firm but guarded. ‘That’s good news.’

  For a moment neither of us speaks. Then she says in a deeper voice: ‘What are you doing with that bible?’

  I feel my cheeks blush. There is very little that can be hidden from Margaret. ‘Seeing if I could read it,’ I say.

  She pulls it out. ‘Want me to put this back?’

  I nod.

  She takes it from me with a long look and I hear her replace the lid of the box, stand on the chair and stow it behind the books. As she gets down I hear her tights slither against one another.

  We are silent for a moment, then she says: ‘You can go into the lounge if you want, they’ve all gone to church so it’s pretty quiet.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘Are you going to have dinner?’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘A little bit.’

  ‘Any suggestions?’

  ‘The beef stroganoff’s all right but steer clear of the apricot pudding and custard; Carol’s cooking and she’s not particular about lumps.’

  I smile. ‘Then just the beef, please.’

  ‘She won’t be pleased, you know; she always knows when someone’s skipped her dessert.’

  At the door she stops and looks back at me. ‘No more reading. Promise?’

  I nod.

  She looks at me.

  ‘I promise, Margaret,’ I say.

  The Road through the Pines

  I am alone, the room is still. I feel great currents move above me. The world thickens and slows. I lie and watch the sky in the high window darken. Sleep comes and I am grateful.

  I wake to earth beneath my cheek, the smell of salt and of rain. There is sand in the earth. Birds are sitting in the black boughs above me. I have been here before. I remember.

  The birds are singing now and the sound scatters amongst the bushes. A sun is rising, winking over the sea. I can tell by the colour of the sky that the day will be hot. I get up and begin walking.

  The sand dunes give on to a road that winds through the pine trees. I do not know where I am going, I do not know where I have come from.

  I hear nothing but my footsteps and the waves on the shore. There is a pain in my chest that makes me stop and when I go on I feel very tired. I cannot tell whether this is how I normally walk. My feet make a scraping sound and will not obey me. They dangle from my legs, slowing me down. My clothes are clammy and cling to my body. My hands smell like iron, like the hole in the millwheel at the farm, where the rust ran and stained the granite in a brown line. The sun rose a little while ago. It spun itself out into skeins of light and the woods were still.

  Sometimes a car or a truck passes and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes someone in the car or the truck stares back at me. I see their faces get smaller and smaller. I suppose I must be getting smaller too. Just now something came scudding over, racing towards me too quickly for me to dodge. A shadow moves beside me and I hear moaning. Now I want to wake up.

  A car with letters on it pulls up in front of me and a man and woman get out. The woman comes towards me. She says: ‘Are you Madeline Adamson?’

  She has a badge on her chest but I cannot read it.

  She says more loudly: ‘Are you Madeline Adamson?’ I frown, then I nod. She says: ‘Are you all right, Madeline? Where have you been? Has anyone hurt you?’

  The man is talking on his radio. He says: ‘We’ve got her. Yeah. Wandering along the Head.’

  The shadow flashes across my mind again and I hear panting. The woman puts her hand on my arm and says: ‘Steady,’ but something rises up my throat, opens my mouth and spills at her feet. Orange liquid slips down the sides of her shiny black shoes.

  Suddenly I turn and kneel on the back seat as we drive away and stare out of the rear windscreen at the woods and the road and mile after mile of waving grass on the dunes. I watch fiercely though my face aches so much I think the flesh must slide down from the bones. I look hard and try to fix it all in my mind.

  The man says: ‘Sit down now, there’s a good girl,’ but I don’t. I watch till the sea is a blue scrap of paper, till the woods hide the dunes, and they too are lost in the curve of the road.

  Going Out

  Judgment Day has come. It is evening. The best time, Lucas says, to be hypnotized.

  He swings around as I enter the Platnauer Room: sharp, bronzed, navy-suited. ‘Madeline, how are we today?’

  We? Are there two of me now? Or were there always? But no matter. He and I are on the same team apparently, in name at least, and we share the same goal.

  I consider how to respond to his question: that I was too exhausted to get up before three, then sat in a chair, clutching the pieces of a jigsaw? That I have attempted more stretches and felt worse than ever? That for days I have been troubled by the dream and that his relaxation exercises have done nothing but trouble my already unsettled mind?

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘Good, good!’ He seems to be in even better spirits than the first time I saw him. ‘Up you get.’ He pats the couch.

  I tell myself to ignore the pat and lower myself onto the couch while he busies himself at the side of the room. A High Priest preparing the instruments. And I am the first fruits, I suppose; the first in his experiment with amnesia, at any rate. To distract myself from this unhappy thought I look at the ceiling, automatically scouring it for marks, and as usual finding none. There is not one stain, one cobweb, one minute fissure or crack; all is pristine and unrecognizable. I wonder what is above the ceiling, in the space between it and the next floor. I try to imagine how dark it is there, how cold or how warm, but my thoughts remain fixed where they are.

  Here is the light. He moves it to the left, then to the right. ‘Can you see that comfortably?’ he says. ‘Good. Now keep following the light.’

  Despite my best efforts, my chest is rising and falling quite dramatically.

  ‘Nothing bad is going to happen to you, Madeline,’ he says. ‘Remember, you can come back whenever you want to.’

  ‘How?’ I say.

  ‘Your subconscious will know. It doesn’t need your conscious attention. We leave it at the helm every night when we sleep. Have you ever thought of that? It knows how to keep us safe.’

  I consider telling him about the dream but do not.

  ‘Now,’ he is saying, ‘I’d like you to follow the light and count backwards, slowly and clearly, from one hundred. Are you ready?’

  Am I?

  Why are you doing this? I ask myself. The answer comes immediately: to get out. Why do I want to get out? To go home. Where is home? I don’t know. Then how will I know when I find it?

  My heart begins hammerin
g so hard I think I will have to get up, and then I remind myself that people make homes. Perhaps I could make one. It occurs to me that all this seems laughably childlike. But then that is Lucas’s point, isn’t it: I am an emotional child. I decide that, although what I want may be impossible, I would still like to try.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘All right. In your own time …’

  ‘Ninety-nine …’

  ‘… ninety-eight …’

  ‘… eighty-one …’

  ‘… sixty-two …’

  ‘… fifty-five …’

  ‘… forty-four …’

  ‘… thirty-six …’

  ‘… twenty-six …’

  The words are footsteps leading me back. There will soon be no words and no light. The words begin to blur and I begin to wander.

  I turn up the track and push wide a gate to stand in a sun-drenched courtyard. Blue distance whispers around me. There is the garden, the gate shrouded in ivy. Here is the house. I step under the lintel and turn right into the kitchen.

  ‘Nineteen …’

  ‘… eighteen …’

  ‘… seventeen …’

  ‘… eighteen …’

  ‘Where are you?’ says a voice.

  I make myself look around: there is the dog’s basket in the corner, his shape still inside it; there are the boots by a woodstove, one toppled sideways; dried flowers hang from beams. In the corner, stairs lead upwards. I climb, slipping deeper.

  ‘Eighteen …’

  ‘… seventeen—’

  ‘… sevent—’

  It happens at the last moment. I go out.

  My hand touches wood, a latch clicks upwards, a door opens. White light streams out.

  The voice asks: ‘Where are you?’

  I say: ‘I am home.’

  EXODUS

  *

  Lethem Park Mental Infirmary

  March 2010

  Just So

  My father was a minister of God; he was also a man in constant search of a home. This may seem strange, considering the Christian belief in the transience of all earthly resting places and our ultimate reunion with an immaterial one, but people who are idealistic are rarely satisfied with the fulfilment of their ideal in one dimension and yearn for the realization of it in every other.

  Big hopes were laid upon the move to the island, however, because God had shown him, clearly, he said, that this was where we should go.

  ‘What about work?’ my mother said.

  God would provide.

  Where would we live?

  We would rent somewhere until we could find a place to buy.

  Why there, why the island?

  People needed to hear the message, he said; it was virgin soil.

  But there was another reason: my father disliked towns. He stood in the marketplace every Saturday, with his placard above him and my mother and me beside him (me a little behind, if I am honest), shouting about the downfall of civilization and the return to the bucolic, and the people surged around him like water. Whether it was their continued indifference or the strain placed on his nerves by working amid chimneys and traffic and streets, I remember the wistfulness with which I occasionally found him dwelling on that picture in the front of the large bible, and the hunger with which he pored over the maps in the back of the promised land.

  The illustrated bible had been a bequest to him from his own father whom I remember as very old and very tall, with pale skin – skin I and my father inherited – upright as a ramrod at the age of eighty, dressed like a cleric with a shock of bright white hair. This strange and rarefied man married late in life, raised my father single-handedly after his wife died early, and for the next thirty-five years the two of them lived an extreme and ascetic life at odds with the burgeoning industrial city around them; that is, until my father’s thirty-sixth birthday, when he saw my mother at a charity book fair, liked the look of the soft, pallid creature, and began to court her in a manner befitting his honourable nature.

  There was another reason for our move, however. I know that my father held towns, or more particularly people, responsible for my mother’s periodic lapses into listlessness, sleepiness and weakness, which could last for months on end, leaving her immobilized and us perplexed. It was said to be to do with her heart. In the quiet of the country my father felt sure she would become stronger.

  I was a town child, a pale child, a child who read books. Grass growing through concrete, trees with fences around them, a bird-feeder that hung in our backyard and which my father filled religiously, jars of tadpoles on windowsills: these were all the country I knew. I had never smelt wild garlic or heard an owl on winter evenings or seen a badger or a weasel or a stoat. I had never heard a rabbit scream or watched the sun rise over a cornfield, never gone mushroom picking at dawn or found the windpipe of a fox, discarded like a party streamer, in the damp furrows of a field.

  I don’t remember disliking our town but I do remember feeling hungry while I lived there, though not for food. After school Elijah our dog and I went to the wasteland where a spiked metal fence separated the houses from the power plant. We played fetch amongst the scrub grass, jumped from discarded girders, ran through plastic piping and climbed concrete blocks from which steel rods protruded like twisted sinews. When it rained Elijah and I sat beneath a flyover that stretched like a monstrous rainbow from one side of the motorway to the other. The concrete was grey, the sky greyer. Drips from the roof made puddles in which petrol flowers bloomed. We went there sometimes when my mother was asleep in bed or when my father was in a black humour. Elijah rested his head on my knee and I cupped my hand around his nose. I think we both dreamt of better times and places.

  Despite our excitement at moving, despite the promise it gave, I think we were all a little fearful. Abraham went out from his own country to the place God would show him, he did not ask questions, he did ‘just so’. But it is dangerous to set out without knowing where you will arrive. A deer can run only on its own territory; alien land gives it up to its pursuers, which is why deer are carted from place to place and hunted, as men used to be. But if my father was daunted he gave no sign of it. He said: ‘God will show us the way.’

  Two and a half months before my thirteenth birthday, we drove to the coast and took a ferry. We heard the blare of a horn, unearthly in the darkness, and saw a door like a mouth swing down. We rattled up a ramp into an iron gullet. Inside there were pink walls, seats red as viscera, flickering fluorescent light. The beast smelt of diesel, carpet freshener and the tang of stale vomit.

  ‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said to Elijah, and stroked his head through the bars of the cage we had to leave him in, in a row of other cages, other dogs. He pressed against the bars, whimpering, his eyes dark, his tail tucked between his legs. It was very hard walking away from him.

  We sat below the waterline where there were no windows, thinking this preferable to watching the horizon yo-yo, but both my parents were sick. My father was reduced to an ashen, mild-mannered person I had never encountered before nor since, swaying along the aisle, collapsing watery-legged into his seat. My mother did not move at all, only vomited into a plastic bag on her lap, then tilted her head back.

  I wasn’t sick. I rode the waves of bile. It was a second-by-second thing, requiring herculean feats of concentration. This is God’s plan, I said to myself; we are doing ‘just so’; the devil was merely trying to dishearten us by sending winds and high water. Though I had to admit that the substance beyond the ship’s walls – which was making it splinter and creak and shudder and groan, which raised it higher than I thought possible, then removed everything beneath it so that it plummeted back into the bowels of the earth and grated sickeningly on what must surely be the sea bottom – did not feel much like water; and, if it was, God was not making a path for us to pass through but setting it in turmoil.

  Towards the end even my faith wavered. I had to make a superhuman effort to open my
mouth but at one point I asked my mother: ‘Are we going to drown?’

  My father, unable to move either, said thickly: ‘No.’

  My mother could not speak at all but she reached out her hand – hot, heavy and damp – and dropped it onto mine. Then she closed her eyes again and the night went on groaning and flickering and grinding. Three hours later we were spewed onto the foreign shore, though whether because of misdemeanour or divine plan I was no longer sure.

  We came by darkness so we did not see how the dunes gave way to pines, how the pines gave way to gorse, the gorse to fields, and houses appeared. We drove through the night, my mother, my father and I, an eternal trinity – one all-powerful, one all-loving, one all-seeing, not much more than a ghost – while other ghosts trailed white fingers over the bonnet and our faces and the backs of our seats. We arrived at the bungalow we were to rent and the car came to a gravelly stop between pine trees swaying in the night sky, and we smelt real air for the first time, as if we had just been born, reeking of fields and night-time and the wild. We explored rooms fusty with orange and brown carpets, Elijah’s tail stiff with excitement – the kitchen with its white Formica and its silky smell of frying fat, the musty, modern hall, the anodyne sitting room and dining room – and we slept shuttered for the first time in complete darkness, with no streetlight, only that of the moon, heads of grass bending this way and that beyond the window, with no sounds but owls in a wood and a mysterious bang every now and then that I later learnt was a crow-scarer.

  And when I woke the next morning and stood on the stoep and looked out at the rough grass, the ragged pines, the road shooting past – when I ran up the hill at the back and stood amongst the heads of grass and watched the sun being born – I was born along with it, the past as small as an image reflected in an eye.

  I did not know where we had come from; I did not know where we had landed. I would not have known, if someone had asked me, how to get back.