The Offering

by McCleen, Grace

  7 March

  After dinner today the lights came on and he began skimming the ceiling. He made noises as if he was being hit or was hitting someone. Mum was tracing her eyebrow with her finger, over and over. Her eyebrows were raised and her eyes closed.

  Suddenly he stopped making loud noises and made a small noise, like a child that has been hurt. When we turned he was standing below the lintel that ran over the woodstove, holding his head. A thin line of blood was trickling from it. Mum froze. Then she said: ‘Al!’ and ran to get a cloth. As she reached him, his knees gave way and he sat down on the milk crate. She put the cloth against his head and her hands were shaking.

  I felt sick because I remembered I had wanted something bad to happen to him. Then I noticed that a crack ran from the lintel across the ceiling to the stairs in the corner. I felt cold, looking at that crack in the ceiling.

  He couldn’t eat dinner. His wrinkles showed white through the dust. But he sat at the table with us and he waited till we had finished, then said: ‘Bible,’ and I fetched it. He took the bandage away to read and I saw a cut in his head, with what looked like black jam inside.

  The bible reading was about Achan, how one Israelite sinned and the whole nation suffered. We must have sinned again, because we are suffering. But which one of us has sinned? I don’t think it can be me or God would not still come to me. But I am not sure.

  10 March

  Dear God,

  The trees are misted in green, the earth is trickling and rushing, the land is being reborn but we are still locked in the cold. Why do You still come to me, God, yet punish us too?

  We were sitting by the woodstove one evening that spring when we heard a roar as if a train were going over the house. My father went outside and came running back in. ‘The chimney’s on fire!’ he said. When we got to the courtyard we saw orange sparks coming out of it, and flames. ‘Fill them!’ he said, and dumped two buckets on the pile of wet sand in the corner of the courtyard. My mother stood looking at them. ‘FILL THEM!’ he shouted.

  He ran and balanced a ladder against the house and began climbing it. When he got level with the roof he crossed to the wooden ladder with the metal clasps that grips onto the ridge tiles. He went along the second ladder with his whole body pressed to the roof. When he reached the chimney he lifted the bucket with both arms and tipped it into the chimney. We had been staring at him, without thinking, but suddenly we both ran to the sand-heap and began filling more buckets.

  ‘Bring them over!’ he yelled.

  I passed one to him at the bottom of the ladder and he ran up it, the ladder bouncing with each step. When he got to the roof he lay flat against the other ladder and climbed towards the chimney. My mother looked away. I saw him straddle the chimney and empty the bucket. He shouted down to us: ‘Bring it up!’

  My mother stared at him. ‘Oh Al, I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll go—’ I said. But they wouldn’t let me.

  He screamed: ‘COME ON!’ So she began climbing.

  I stood on the bottom rung to stop the ladder moving but it hardly made any difference. The bucket swung and the ladder bounced. When she got to the guttering he grabbed the bucket and began to inch back up the roof.

  ‘MORE!’ he shouted.

  I ran to fetch another bucket of wet sand and by the time she was at the bottom of the ladder I had it ready to hand to her. Her face was red and her eyes were staring. She said: ‘Thank you, my love,’ and went up again. She was going slowly, looking where she put her feet.

  He screamed: ‘COME ON!’ I closed my eyes and held the ladder so tightly that if it had been alive I would have killed it.

  After a while there was no more smoke coming out of the chimney and he came down, his eyes enormous, his face blotched red and white, running with sweat. We went inside and my mother sat down with a bump. Her eyes were black and there were white rings around them. I did not want to be around either of them any more and sat with Elijah in the kennel. He put his nose in my hand and I held it. It usually felt good to be close to him, but that night I could not feel a thing, only stared straight ahead.

  17 March

  Dear God,

  Today while he was out looking for work Mum washed all the bed linen and all the curtains and all the cushion covers. When I came downstairs a bit later I found her treading her clothes in the bath with only her pants on.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said. I did not like to look at her too directly.

  ‘Yes, why?’ she panted.

  I couldn’t think of a reply.

  We hung it all on the line, then I played catch with Elijah in the courtyard. When I came in she was clothed and asleep by the cooker. Her head was back and her mouth open.

  When he got home his eyes were dark. He looked at Mum, then at me, and we were both embarrassed. I went outside again and he went into the front room. I think he was frightened.

  18 March

  Dear God,

  There was mist this morning. The sun didn’t come until noon and then quickly slipped behind the hills. We went shopping in town. We drove very slowly on half throttle and at the garage put one pound’s worth of petrol in. Dad wasn’t sure if it would get us there. Mum was crying. I was saying silently over and over: Help us, please help us.

  Perhaps You heard me; coming home, we found coal in the road.

  I remember one afternoon that spring I had a stomach pain and my mother sat with me and gave me paracetemol. ‘Can you stay here if I go to sleep?’ I said, and she said she would. She put her hand on my forehead and almost looked like her old self again. The unsleepy self, the self that wasn’t frightened of everything, the self that was like a grown-up.

  When I woke it was evening and she had gone. Down below in the courtyard I could hear a short rasping noise. It was lighter than it had been for a long time, the rain had stopped and the sky was clear. I went to the window and looked down. My father was wheeling a barrow of turf. I asked him where my mother was.

  ‘Eh?’ he said, in the infuriating way he had of pretending not to hear, and I repeated the question.

  ‘She went for a walk!’

  My heart beat hard. ‘How long ago?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  The cuts of his spade rang in the air again. I pulled on my jeans and ran downstairs. Outside, the air was warmer than it had been, almost balmy. I could smell the earth and the vegetation, and it frightened me. I began to cry as I ran down the track. By the time I reached the bottom and turned into the lane I was gasping and couldn’t see properly.

  Halfway down the lane I saw her and Elijah coming towards me. Elijah raced up, bending his body and groaning in happiness, then ran back to my mother, as if wanting to bring us together. I ran up to her and hugged her so hard.

  She laughed and said: ‘Anyone would think I’d been gone a fortnight.’

  ‘Where did you go?’ I said; I was taking in her eyes and her skin and her hair. I couldn’t look enough at her.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said, not smiling any more, wiping my face.

  ‘I don’t know—’ I said. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and she looked deep into my eyes.

  That was the problem: sometimes she seemed perfectly all right. For the rest of that evening I didn’t leave her side.

  28 March

  God, she is sick again. I know it though no one has said. I heard him talking to her in the bedroom tonight. ‘You have to make an effort,’ he was saying. ‘You’ve got to try.’ My stomach was lurching. I got out of bed and knelt and prayed.

  After a while I was just saying the same things over and over and no amount of hand-wringing made it feel any more real or any more powerful.

  I got back into bed and put the pillow over my head and made You come to me. But You wouldn’t.

  This has never happened before.

  29 March

  She didn’t come down to breakfast today. I asked Dad whether I could take her some but he
said to let her rest. I asked if I could see her but he said she was sleeping. All morning I sat by the woodstove.

  Please, God, by everything You have made, make things as they were. Make her get well.

  30 March

  Dear God,

  In the afternoon we went to the doctor’s, a small surgery outside the town. I had to stay in the waiting room and Elijah had to stay in the car. Dad was leading her by the arm when they came out. She was wearing her best pink jumper and she was very pale but she was smiling. She said: ‘All right, my love?’

  I snuggled up to her. I kept so close. I almost carried her to the car. ‘What did the doctor do?’ I said.

  ‘He’s given me some tablets,’ she said. ‘He says I’ll feel better before too long.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, and something leapt up inside me, like Elijah when he is happy, and it went on leaping all the way home. We went to a chemist and got tablets for her and I held her hand. Dad kept clearing his throat. Perhaps now he is sorry for having been horrible to her.

  She was happy for the rest of that day, smiling, not tired at all; we made chocolate pudding and chocolate sauce. But the more I studied her, the more I saw bad signs: that she was smiling too hard and her eyes were too wide.

  2 April

  This morning we went into town to buy wallpaper to decorate the bedrooms. In the shop I began to feel ill; the lights were too bright, the music was painful, the world suddenly seemed to be like a nightmare, concentrated inside this wallpaper shop. I asked if I could go back to the car.

  ‘Don’t you want to choose the wallpaper for your room?’ Mum said. It’s a big deal because my father is paying for wallpaper. But I didn’t want to choose it and I didn’t care whether I have wallpaper or not.

  On the way home I felt so sick I couldn’t move or look at anything. Mum looked worried, and all through the bumps and the potholes and the cattle grids she kept her hand on my knee.

  At home she sat on the side of my bed and rubbed my stomach. When I went to sleep she didn’t go away. She sat there all afternoon. It was wonderful.

  5 April

  Dear God,

  I wish she had never taken the new tablets. She comes into rooms and goes out again, she stares for hours into space, she sets lessons for me and can’t mark the sums. She doesn’t look at me in the same way. It is as if she doesn’t know me.

  This afternoon I went out to the field where the big pines grow. Rain was coming. The electric wire sang like the wind. I screamed at You and I shouted, but the sound was tiny and blew away.

  It was not enough – what I did. You want more. I know now what I have to do.

  The Bird

  When I went under today I saw my mother.

  She is standing at the kitchen window, sunlight in her hair. She is washing plates slowly, laying them to rest on the draining board as carefully as if they are sleeping children. Towards the end of our time at the farm she did everything in this new, careful way.

  I stand beside her, wanting her to look at me, but she doesn’t. She is smiling gently at something else. After we finish she says: ‘Let me put on my trainers, kid, and we’ll go for a walk.’

  She goes upstairs, and when she doesn’t come down again I go up and find her curled on the bed with her eyes closed. I can smell the acid of her breath and hear the ‘pock, fff; pock, fff …’ and I lie down beside her, and begin to cry.

  The room is filled with shadows, those of leaves and trees passing over the ceiling with the strange, dream-like nature of daytime shadows; the second-hand, fabricated nature of them; seeming to move too boisterously, too theatrically, for the objects casting them. The garden is waking again, the sash is open a little. I can hear many birds singing.

  I gaze at my mother for a long time. Her forehead is clammy and her hair smells sweet and meaty, coiled in oily slicks on her head. I gaze at her so long that my tears dry and I begin smiling – I smile so much that I think I might break into a laugh. I draw the blankets around her and kiss her once, very softly, in the middle of her head.

  Then I hear a voice. The voice is saying: ‘How did you catch it?’

  The voice is a pain in my head. I rub my ear and burrow closer to my mother but it continues. ‘How did you catch the bird, Madeline?’

  It is as painful to answer the voice as waking from an exhausted sleep. And what is it talking about? What does it want from me? Why won’t it leave me alone?

  ‘The bird you drew in your journal.’

  I look at my mother. I want her to wake because it is so rare to find her like this and for it to just be her and me. I want to wake her because I feel sure I will not see her again. But she is so tired – she is always so tired – and I don’t have it in my heart to disturb her.

  ‘Why are you crying, Madeline?’ says the voice.

  ‘Oh,’ I whisper, and I am crying again. ‘It’s just my mother.’

  ‘What is she doing?’ The voice makes no attempt to speak quietly.

  ‘She’s sleeping!’ I hiss.

  ‘We can come back to your mother later, Madeline, but right now we need to find something out,’ says the voice. ‘We need to find out what you did with the bird you drew in your journal. Do you remember that, Madeline? Do you remember drawing it?’

  ‘Yes! Can you be quiet?’

  There is a pause, then the voice says, only slightly more quietly: ‘Do you remember how you caught it?’

  I wipe my face. I tell her: ‘I’ll come back soon, I promise. I know where to find you now.’ My mother doesn’t stir. She looks so peaceful. I am grateful for this but at the same time I want her to wake up so that I can say goodbye.

  ‘Madeline,’ the voice says. It will not give up. ‘Tell me about the bird. Do you remember?’

  I get up and tiptoe to the door but I can’t go through it, and I stand with my head bowed.

  ‘Do you remember how you caught the bird?’ says the voice.

  ‘It caught itself,’ I say quietly.

  ‘How did it do that?’

  I inhale. ‘In the bird-feeder.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  I take one more look at my mother, then go through the door and close it very softly. I am now standing on the landing at the back of the house, looking out of a sash window. ‘In the garden,’ I say, gazing down.

  Beneath the window, the garden is buzzing and chirruping, greener than I ever remember it, and I see that the winter has passed and the garden is like it was in the picture in the bible. I remember the strange animals in the picture, and how each of them was a little human. And then I turn and see at the end of the landing what appears to be a large crow.

  It comes walking down the corridor in its odd, wide-gaited fashion, its footsteps rasping on the wooden boards, and my blood feels cold. When it steps into the light cast by the window, however, I see it is not a crow but the doctor, with his hands behind his back and his black lucent hair and his black piercing eyes and his shiny blue suit.

  ‘Why did you do it, Madeline?’ he says.

  I didn’t do it; she did it – the girl, I mean to tell him, but perhaps he knows already. ‘She had to,’ I say.

  ‘For forgiveness?’

  ‘Yes.’ I wipe my eyes and turn back to the window but I cannot see the garden any more for tears.

  ‘How did she catch it?’

  ‘She found it,’ I say.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the bird-feeder. The top had come off and the seeds were far down. The bird was stuck, head first.’

  ‘What did it look like?’

  ‘It was speckled and dark. Very soft. Very beautiful.’

  ‘What did she do then?’

  ‘She went out to the garden and put the bird in her jumper. It wasn’t difficult. The bird was too tired to do anything. She thought it might even have been sleeping. Then she worried that it was dead.’

  ‘But it wasn’t dead?’

  ‘No. Just exhausted.’

  ‘Where did you – where did she
take it?’

  ‘To the bottom of the garden. And she prayed it wouldn’t die before she got there, because she had heard that birds’ hearts are not very strong.’

  ‘She took it to the stone by the stream?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she killed it?’

  Yes.

  She took the knife her father had given her, because she had pleased him, on an afternoon that seemed so long ago now, the knife with a red cross on the front. The bird was warm and weightless. She cut its throat. She lifted it and the head wobbled. The eyes were half closed.

  The River

  Wherever I am now, the girl is too. When it is quiet I hear her voice. We are no longer strangers. At night she comes closer, I feel her touch on my hair, she peers into my face, she is curious to see what she has turned into. In the morning I find her footsteps around my bed. It is good to have found her again. Others are pallid things beside her. She has come to help, knowing I am in trouble. She says she will show me what to do when the time comes.

  ‘I am here,’ I tell her. ‘I am waiting.’

  For the last week I have left my bed little. Margaret has been trying to tempt me with board and card games. She has taken to bringing in desserts on days when Carol is not cooking but I cannot eat them. So she has sat with me, knitting something small and white, looking up every now and then.

  Unable to wake properly, I find myself wondering whether days are ending or beginning. My bed becomes a tiny raft, a woven casket. There is no part of it that I have not explored. I see the sun change position in the sky and the shadows slither sideways on the wall, then slip back underwater. It is surprising how often my thoughts come back to the same thing: that very soon now I will be home.

  The girl and I wander. Sometimes we see somewhere we recognize. The girl and I go running. Wind chafes our ears, sun burns our cheeks, we run so fast the air hurts us inside. We go into the fields. Elijah is there. His coat is shining and he looks as he used to. I am so happy to see him. The sky is mottled and pearly, like a shoal of fish, the hour always noon. The fields lead down to a river. The girl and I stand on its banks. She seems to be asking me something but I do not know what. Soon, she says. Then the light swallows her up.