The Testament of Jessie Lamb

by Jane Rogers

  Jane Rogers has written eight novels including Her Living Image (Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Wroe’s Virgins (Guardian Fiction prize shortlisted), Promised Lands (Writers Guild Best Novel Award), and Island (Orange long-listed). She has written drama for radio and TV, including an award-winning adaptation of Mr Wroe’s Virgins for BBC2. Her radio work includes both original drama and Classic Serial adaptations.

  She is Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, and has taught writing at the University of Adelaide, Paris Sorbonne IV, and on a radio-writing project in eastern Uganda. She lives on the edge of the moors in Lancashire.

  www.janerogers.org

  By the same author

  The Voyage Home

  Island

  Promised Lands

  Mr Wroe’s Virgins

  The Ice is Singing

  Her Living Image

  Separate Tracks

  THE TESTAMENT OF JESSIE LAMB

  Jane Rogers

  SANDSTONE PRESS | HIGHLAND | SCOTLAND

  First published in Great Britain 2011

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  PO Box 5725

  One High Street

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9WJ

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this production may be reproduced,

  stored or transmitted in any form without the express

  written permission of the publisher.

  Commissioning Editor: Robert Davidson

  Copyright © Jane Rogers 2011

  The right of Jane Rogers to be identified as

  the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from

  Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN(e): 978-1-905207-77-0

  Cover image: Winter by Kirstie Cohen www.kirstiecohen.co.uk

  Cover design by Zebedee Design, Edinburgh

  Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

  For Wendy

  ‘Another kind of light and life

  Are to be mine …’

  Iphigenia at Aulis, Euripides

  Sunday morning

  The house is very quiet now he’s gone. I get up carefully without falling over and shuffle to the window. The light is partly blocked by gigantic leylandii in next door’s garden. No one lives in this row anymore. I lean my forehead against the window and peer down into the overgrown garden. The cold pane mists up straightaway with my breath, but I know it’s too far to jump. Anyway, there are window locks and no key. I shuffle around the room, keeping my left hand on the wall for balance, until I reach the door. I try it again, just in case.

  He’s left me cheese sandwiches and a plastic bottle of orange juice in the corner. He must be planning to be out all day. Well at least I don’t have to listen to him saying the same things over and over, or see him crying, or hear him pacing around the house in a restless fit. At least there’s space for my own thoughts now, and I have nothing to worry about but myself.

  I test the bike locks again. They are the clear blue plastic coated type, inside the plastic you can see silvery wire. He’s wound one three times around each ankle and locked it, like bangles. And threaded the third through the other two then looped it round and locked it. The circlets round each leg are too tight to slide over my ankles. I can only move my feet six inches apart. It makes me shuffle like a prisoner in a chain gang. I have to keep adjusting the circlets otherwise the one the joining-lock is fixed to pulls wider and the others get tighter and bite into me.

  He’s left me a bucket with a lid and toilet roll, but it’s hard to use because I can’t get my feet wide enough apart to squat properly. He has left me a pad and pencil for entertainment. And my sleeping bag and pillow are scrumpled against the wall. The wonky heating’s come on at last and I’m not so cold anymore.

  My brain has finally stopped behaving like a rat in a trap. It’s stopped hurling itself in all directions and chasing its own tail. After all, he can’t keep me here forever. All I have to do is sit it out.

  I have that strangely pleasant ache above the bridge of my nose from all the crying and now I don’t feel as if I shall ever cry again. I’m a bit stiff from sleeping on the floor, but all in all it’s not so bad. It could be worse. I shuffle all round the walls again, then over to the picnic table and chair he has placed in the middle of the room. I shuffle into position and sit on the chair. I write my name on the first page of the pad: Jessie Lamb.

  He wants me to think about what I am doing. Not that I am doing anything, now. I am suspended; stopped in my tracks. It almost feels like I’m not here anymore – I’m not that Jessie Lamb who was busily rushing towards her goal. If I spotted the bike-lock keys, dropped there, say, on the floorboards – would I pick them up and unlock my ankles? Would I figure out a way to get free? Maybe I’d just pretend I hadn’t noticed, and stay captive. In a way it’s a relief to be prisoner and to not have to think. To be passive, instead of active.

  He’s trying to give me a way out. So that I can blame him if I don’t do it, instead of facing up to being a coward.

  Is that what you want?

  What else could explain me so stupidly jumping in the car with him when he suggested going to check Nanna’s house?

  You thought he was making a friendly gesture; you wanted to make up.

  Yes. But he had already threatened to do ‘whatever it takes to stop you’. So, did you get into the car knowing you would be imprisoned? Is that secretly, what you wanted?

  Oh, I can’t be bothered with all this. Isn’t it bad enough to have him going on at you, without doing it yourself when he’s not here?

  The logical thing is to do as he’s asked; to think about it. Indeed. Write it down. Remember it, re-imagine it, gather it together. Because it’ll be proof – won’t it? – proof that you really are doing what you want. Proof that I, Jessie Lamb, being of sound mind and good health, take full responsibility for my decision, and intend to pursue it to its rightful end.

  I underline my name on the pad. The question is, where to begin? Where does my story begin? With my own beginning, I suppose; the day I was born.

  No way am I writing 16 years!

  No, but it needs to begin at the beginning. Before that terrible feeling of pressure came into my head insisting that I must do something, I must do something, I must do something or else explode. That I must find the thing I was destined to do.

  I’ll set it down exactly, everything that happened, I’ll set it down perfectly honestly, so there can be no doubt in anybody’s mind, least of all mine, about what I want to do and why.

  The testament of Jessie Lamb.

  Chapter 1

  I used to be as aimless as a feather in the wind. I thought stuff on the news and in the papers was for grownups. It was part of their stupid miserable complicated world, it didn’t touch me. I remember sitting on the fence at the level crossing above Roaches one evening, with Sal and Danny and some of the others. It was dark, especially either side of the railway, because of the steep banks of burnt black heather. We looked down at the bright windows of the pub in the valley bottom, and the small yellow eyes of cars running along the road. Everyone except us was indoors and we were up there in the windy darkness, facing the black mass of the moors rising up on the other side of the valley.

  A train roared past, going to Huddersfield, and the hot draught of it almost blew us off the fence. Danny said we should try walking along one of the rails, like balancing on a tightrope, and see who could get the furthest. ‘Just jump off if a train comes,’ h
e said, ‘there’s only one an hour.’ Sal climbed down from the fence and began to teeter along the rail, arms outstretched. I could barely make her out, she blobbed into darkness as she moved and I couldn’t tell if she was really overbalancing or if my eyes were just joining her up to the rest of the dark. She swore so I knew she’d fallen off, and then each of the others tried, and we were counting loudly in a chant. ‘One and two and three and OUT!’, seeing who could be the first to make it up to ten.

  When it was my go I realised I couldn’t even see the rail, only feel it through my soles, and I got my balance and looked up at the green signal light far ahead along the track. There was a kind of roaring filling up my ears. I don’t know if it was the wind up there or my own blood, or the way the others were yelling and laughing. But I felt as if I could do anything, anything at all, and nothing would have the power to hurt me. I told myself if I could do 20 steps that would prove it. On 21 I jumped down from the rail and as I climbed onto the fence a train came hurtling out of the darkness behind me and gave a deafening blast on its whistle. And the thought just popped into my head: I could fix it, MDS. I could make everything in the world OK again. But because no-one asked me to, I simply wouldn’t bother.

  That’s almost like the daft things you believe when you’re really little, like I used to believe I could fly. I believed it for years, but it had to be kept secret. I knew if I ever told anyone or showed it off to anyone, I’d lose the power. And if I doubted it, and tried it out just to see, I’d lose the power – so I didn’t. I believed in it. I knew I would be able to fly when there really was a need. Which, fortunately for me, there never was.

  I remember things that make me ashamed now, like driving home from the caravan at Scarborough with Mum and Dad, and all the roads around York being clogged up because of a mass funeral at the Minster. Dad had forgotten to check online. And I was impatient to get home and call for Sal. We were stuck behind the traffic for two hours. I remember staring at all the miserable people in their cars and saying ‘Why can’t they just stay at home to mourn? The women who’re dead won’t care!’

  I thought it was normal, that’s the thing. When you’re little you think everything is normal. If your mother had a pointed head and green ears you’d think it’s normal. Only when you grow up do you realise that not everybody is like that. Gradually you can even come to learn that the time you are living in is strange too, that it hasn’t always been like this. The more you feel uncomfortable and unconfident and want to find a way to be like everyone else and fit in, the more normality runs away from you because there isn’t any such thing. Or if there is, you have to find someone else who’ll agree with you what it is. Which I seem singularly unable to do.

  Back then, before, Sal agreed with me. Together we knew all the answers. And we thought it was normal for women to die. Or, even worse than that, almost that they might have deserved it, because they’d done something shameful. I thought that if you died it must be at least a tiny bit your fault. There must be something bad in you, to attract such a fate – and especially with MDS, because you had to have had sex.

  The first person we knew who died fitted that exactly. Caitlin McDonagh in year 10. I’m not counting teachers from primary school or women Mum and Dad knew, because they were adults, and adults (to me then) were all old and liable to die. But Caitlin started crying her eyes out in History, and they took her to the office and she never came back. Her best friend told us she was pregnant, and we imagined her with her sleazebag boyfriend who was about 20 years old, and it seemed like just desserts. Except they came into school and gave us all Implanon implants a few weeks later, even though most of us hadn’t even got boyfriends, so that no matter what bad thing we did, none of us would get punished like Caitlin.

  Sal and I were curious but it didn’t touch us. Not until – well, not until the day she heard about her aunty. We were in her bedroom with her clothes scattered across the floor and both of us trying not to listen to her mum’s anxious voice on the phone downstairs.

  ‘Did you see those doctors on the news last night?’ Sal asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘They showed what MDS does to the brain. It kind of makes holes come in your brain. They said women who get it, their brains will look like Swiss cheese.’

  ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘Yeah, they gradually lose bits of their brain, they stop being able to balance, and they forget stuff.’

  ‘D’you think it hurts?’

  ‘They didn’t say. Some of them die really fast. After only three days of being ill.’

  We agreed that knowing it was coming must be the worst part. Who wants to know their brain will turn into Swiss cheese? We sat in silence for a while. Sal had lots of clockwork toys in her room, she used to collect them – and we wound up a nun and a Lisa Simpson and raced them across her desk. The nun won. We entered a letterbox pencil-sharpener and a toy car as well. It’s harder with four because you have to wind them up and hold one ready in each hand without it unwinding. I told myself if the nun won again then they would find a cure to MDS. But Lisa fell off the edge of the desk and the nun and the letterbox collided.

  ‘Maybe we’ll never have children,’ said Sal.

  ‘When the youngest people who’re alive today get old – ’

  ‘They’ll be the last people on earth.’ It had been on the news for ages, but it was the first time I could really see it. ‘As we get older, there won’t be any children.’

  ‘They’ll have to close the schools.’

  ‘All the things children need – they won’t make them any more.’

  ‘Nappies, baby clothes, pushchairs.’

  ‘It’ll be so weird.’

  ‘And when we’re old, everyone’ll be old. There’ll be no one going to work.’

  ‘No shops or bin men or buses.’

  ‘Nothing. It’ll all just grind to a halt.’

  Sal turned on the telly. There’d been a riot at some holy place in India. Too many women had tried to go there to pray and someone had panicked, and lots of them were trampled to death. She turned off the sound. ‘There doesn’t seem much point in doing our homework, does there? If we’re about to be extinct.’

  We thought of all the things that would be pointless; university, work, getting married, building, farming, mending the roads.

  ‘There’d be nothing to do but try to keep ourselves amused until we died,’ said Sal. ‘It wouldn’t matter what we did. Nobody’d care.’

  I started to worry about how there’d be no-one to cremate or bury the last corpses. Then I realized animals would probably eat them. ‘The world will be really peaceful. No more cars or planes or factories – no more pollution. Gradually, plants will take over cities – ’

  We thought about our houses slowly falling to bits, the doors blowing open, the roofs caving in, birds and animals nesting there.

  ‘Some other species will dominate,’ said Sal, and we began to argue about what it might be. All the animals in zoos etc would have to be let out before the last people died. Which would probably kill off a few of us even sooner. And those animals that could adapt to life in their new territory might take over. There might be wolves again in England, and bears. Tigers might live off untended herds of cows. Tree branches would spread out over roads, and hedges would grow huge and wild, and weeds burst through the tarmac. After a hundred years the world would be one great nature reserve, with all the threatened species breeding again, and great shoals of cod in the sea, eagles nesting in old church spires. It made me think of the garden of Eden, how it was supposed to be so beautiful before Adam and Eve messed things up.

  ‘But just imagine never holding a baby in your arms.’ Sal turned up the TV; that advert for dancing yoghurt pots was on, we always sang along to it in high squeaky voices, so we did.

  Then her mum came upstairs in tears and told Sal it was her aunty. I didn’t even know her aunty was pregnant. All I could think about was the smell of burning w
hich wafted in when her mum opened the door. A harsh burnt sweet smell that caught in your throat – it was the chocolate cake we’d made which her mum was meant to be keeping an eye on. I said goodbye awkwardly and went downstairs. Their dog Sammy was whining at the back door so I let him in, and I turned off the oven. There wasn’t any point in looking, you could tell it would be cinders. I didn’t feel anything about her aunty. I simply didn’t care. I thought, I wonder what will happen next? As if the human race and its fate was nothing at all to do with me. As if I was on a bicycle, free wheeling very fast downhill, in the smooth blackness of night.

  Chapter 2

  At that time Mum and Dad bickered constantly between themselves and when they got a chance they’d snarl at me as well. I suppose they must have been worried about MDS but I don’t remember them talking about it much. What I remember are endless petty rows. You’d wake up in the morning and there was this mood right through the house like the smell of gas. They’d manage everything without speaking, politely moving out of each other’s way, talking to me with exaggerated friendliness. They’d keep it up, sometimes for days on end, and then stop for practically no reason. Dad’d do something, pour Mum a glass of wine and hand it to her with a little bow, or ask her if she wanted to watch a DVD. And suddenly everything was OK again. Because they’d decided. The only night of peace was Tuesdays; Mum had an evening clinic and Dad and I always had tea together.

  Tuesday night in the kitchen.

  Dad’s got all his ingredients out, in a neat row along the counter, and he’s weighing and measuring them onto separate plates. He’s got one of those old-fashioned sets of balancing scales with a metal dish on one side and little brass weights that you add in a pile, on the other. Mum gave it him for Christmas and he loves it. The weights are smooth and chunky and fit together in a neat tower. Mum says he cooks like a scientist. He won’t cook something if he hasn’t got the exactly right ingredients.