The Offering

by McCleen, Grace

  I stand, swaying a little, staring at him. I can hear someone breathing so laboriously it sounds as though they are gasping. My body does not feel solid but gaseous.

  ‘Madeline,’ he says, frowning, ‘why don’t you sit down for a moment on the couch till you come to?’

  He is about to take hold of me. I cast around for something and grab a yellow pencil from a nearby pot, a pencil that is sharpened to the finest of points.

  ‘Madeline—’

  He is coming for me, he is coming towards me. I must be ready. It is me or him.

  I fall on him and he topples backwards, his eyes wide, his mouth open, holding his neck. There is blood on my hands and my face and my chest, and then blood on the desk and the wall and the floor, blood spurting in a wide arc, high above my head; it is so unexpected and so spectacular that I stumble away from it, staring. I do not notice the body in spasm below me, the thrashing legs, the scrabbling feet. When I look down he has stopped moving.

  I look around. I must try to get out. I must try to find my way back to the wood. I run to the door and into a corridor. A person in overalls is coming along it. When they see me they drop the folder they were carrying and scream. There is shouting; I turn and begin to run the other way, but before I have got to the corner someone is pulling me backwards, wrestling my arms behind my back, pressing me onto the floor. I feel a sharp scratch and my limbs relax.

  The last thing I recall is travelling down a corridor that seems to go on for ever. I have to get back to the wood! I have to find the road! I must get home. But before I can call to mind why I must do any of this, my eyes close.

  The girl wakes in a wood with earth damp beneath her cheek. There is sand in the earth and birds in the black boughs of trees. The sound falls from the trees and scatters itself amongst bushes. The sun is rising over the sea, winking and spinning itself out into skeins of light. It is going to be a hot day. At the edge of the trees there is a road that winds between pine trees. She gets up and begins walking.

  EPILOGUE

  *

  The Long Corridor

  July 2010

  The New Doctor

  I said that Block ‘H’ was the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns; I hope to be the exception to that, but cannot be sure. Time will tell. In any case, I can now tell you for certain that the end of the long corridor, instead of a singularity, instead of an end-point, is another corridor just like it and rooms just like others; I should have known it. There is one difference, though: the rooms here are padded, have barred windows and electronic locks. They are called Quiet Rooms. They are all right, I suppose, for a while.

  I had another meeting with the new doctor today. Dr Hudson has taken over my care in the light of Dr Lucas’s absence. She has a plan. If I follow it to the letter she says she anticipates results. Hudson’s plan is called ECT – Electroconvulsive Therapy to be precise. It will help me, she says. Initially I had doubts. I remembered silly things I had read about ECT causing permanent brain damage, articles that said the overenthusiastic use of ECT had the same effect as a full-blown head injury. But these accounts are obviously unfounded; Dr Hudson says Electroconvulsive Therapy is an unfairly maligned, poorly understood and remarkably effective treatment for many intractable mental conditions.

  ‘Intractable meaning “incurable”?’ I said.

  ‘Not “incurable”; “challenging”,’ she said. ‘It’s all about effort in here, Madeline, just like anywhere else. If you want things to change you’ve got to try new things out.’

  I was not that convinced, but I respect Hudson; she is the only one who dares to talk to me in person any more; the others do so by intercom, CCTV or through the grated window.

  I did say, however: ‘I tried to work with Dr Lucas.’

  For a moment she looked at me with alarm. Then she blinked twice and said: ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about Dr Lucas any more, Madeline.’

  So now I do not.

  The weather broke earlier this evening. I got up and stood by the window and watched the rain stand still in the forked lightning, and as I watched I could not help thinking about my new therapy. I do not know what ECT will entail, but at the moment I cannot be apprehensive. I cannot explain the peace I feel; I wonder whether Brendan also found that.

  Here in the Quiet Room the events of my day are the changing hues of sunlight, the appearance of birds, the sensations on my skin. My sleep has become lighter, like waking; my waking deeper, like sleep; and, for some inexplicable reason, my body has been returned to me; its plethora of symptoms have miraculously subsided, and we are one. As with all good things, of course, my new health has come too late; now that I could easily walk to the lounge, now that I could be around my fellow patients without feeling in the slightest bit nauseous, I am not permitted to; now that I could fulfil Lucas’s exercise regime to the letter, he is dead. Not that I miss any of these things very much.

  The only thing that does sadden me is that I no longer see Margaret. She doesn’t work here but came to visit a few days ago. I asked her to come in and sit with me but she just stood at the grate.

  She said: ‘I’m sorry, Madeline, not without someone here, I can’t.’ She looked frightened.

  I said: ‘I’m still the same person, Margaret.’

  She smiled quickly and said: ‘Of course you are.’

  Then she told me she was looking after my things for me and that she thought it wouldn’t be long before I could come back to the ward. She also said that she had heard good things about ECT and I should try to go along with Dr Hudson.

  I said: ‘I am sorry, Margaret,’ and I meant it.

  Her eyes filled then and it was a while before she spoke. Finally she said: ‘You haven’t hurt me, Madeline, you hurt yourself.’

  ‘It was so good to see you, Margaret,’ I said. ‘Will you come back?’

  She said that she would and she told me to take care of myself and not to give them any problems, and I promised I would not.

  Going Out

  Abraham went out without knowing where he was going. Many souls within these walls go out too, every day, without knowing their destination. May God, if He exists, guide them.

  At four o’clock today I will have my first ECT treatment. I must admit that I started the day with a degree of trepidation but as it wore on the anxiety modulated into a gentle sense of grief. All in all it has been a strange afternoon; I feel I am packing and setting out again for a new country, like my father and my mother and I did all those years ago. A couple of hours ago I thought again of the day my mother and I first found the farm, how happy we were, and since then, all afternoon, things have been bursting into my head, little snippets I may never remember again – the night we chased the horses through the courtyard, preaching in the lanes on the long balmy mornings, the afternoons when Elijah and I lay in the grass. What happens to these moments if no one remembers them? Do they cease to exist?

  The end of my journey is a room at the end of a corridor. At fourteen minutes to four I set out, escorted by a male nurse. We pass through double doors and beyond these find ourselves in a high room with an enormous white light in the ceiling. I have never seen anything as big or as bright as this light. I lie on a table beneath the white light and straps are attached to my arms and my legs. A woman with soft hands dabs my temples with what feels like water and gives me something to bite on. The water trickles into my hair like oil. I am an offering to the great white light. I trust the god will find me acceptable.

  My heart is beating extremely quickly. I hope it will soon quieten. As they move around me, talking softly, I find I am standing on the banks of the river again. The fields of forgetfulness lie behind me and the evening sun is setting. It is at this moment that I wish Margaret were here.

  But I am not alone: I look and see the girl standing beside me. I see her slim shins, the gold of her hair, the freckles on her nose.

  ‘Don’t leave me again,’ I say to her, and she
promises she won’t. The girl takes my hand and looks back at the water. She is asking me something; I understand now, and nod.

  We wait beneath the light, two human-shaped holes, with nothing beyond us but clear, shining space, and it strikes me now for the first time that there is something beautiful about these lacunae, about absence in general, an erasure so extreme. We are no more than openings – yet look what shines through us! We are ‘not’ – and yet we are infinite.

  The girl closes her eyes. I follow her example. There will be words and there will be light. The words will blur and we will wander. We will go down a road, we will turn up a lane, we will round a corner. We will go further than we have ever gone before. We will see a line of trees, a track that looks familiar, a road sloping upwards. The trees will turn out to be those that we know. We will walk towards them. And sooner or later, one way or another, we will be home.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Carole Welch, my fantastic editor, and to Celia Levett – the best copyeditor I have ever had. Thank you to Claire Gatzen for helpful suggestions and last-minute edits, and thank you to my agents Bill Hamilton and Rob Dinsdale – Bill for advancing advances and Rob for detailed and careful editing.