The Carhullan Army

by Hall, Sarah

  All day, and into the night, there was a strange rasping call from the moors. I had heard nothing like it before. Finally I abandoned the others in search of the noise. I crept round the buildings and out onto the moorland, trying to identify the creature that might be making it. In one of the outer pens Jackie had begun clipping the sheep. She was sitting on a stool and had a ewe braced between her legs.

  Tufts of yellow and black fleece were caught on her vest. She looked up when she saw me stepping cautiously over the ground, cocking my head from side to side. She was smiling in her private, satisfied way. ‘They’re corncrakes,’ she said. ‘They’ve moved down from Scotland. I doubt you’ll find one though.’ She let go of the sheep. It scrambled to its feet and shook itself, bleating thinly. Jackie stood up and brushed herself off. ‘You know what else I’d like to see back here? Wolves. We’re still missing a big predator in the chain. But then I’d have the carcasses of these beauties all over my land. It’s all give and take, isn’t it? Don’t worry. We’ll be starting up again next week, Sister. Then you’ll have something bigger than a bird to hunt.’

  *

  A year after I had arrived at Carhullan, I lay in the wet autumn bracken, camouflaged and motionless, so close to the stags that I could smell the skunk of their piss as they marked their rutting grounds, the musk in their ragged stolls. I heard the clack and ricochet of their antlers as they lowered their heads and charged towards one another. Lying in the bracken foss, I felt stings in my groin and my elbows as ticks buried their heads. I rolled onto my back, pinched off mounds of skin to cut off the blood supply until they emerged, gorged and sluggish.

  I lost the ability to fear and panic. Instead I felt practical and causal. I had never known time to pass so acutely before. I sat out through the night with the patrol, watching the bitter glow of stars overhead, listening as the season exhaled and the layers of vegetation shrugged and compressed, like the ashes of burnt wood. On the hills I was aware of every corporeal moment, every cycle of light. I felt every fibre of myself conveying energy, and I understood that it was finite, that the chances I had in life would not come again.

  As my resilience grew, so too did my understanding of what we would face. Jackie had said that occupation of the town was possible. If it failed, we could evade capture long enough to damage the vital organs, and perhaps even hold out for a while in the hills. But eventually, when the Authority’s resources were consolidated, they would track us down and we would be caught. Then the payoff of our real training would begin. She pulled no punches about what she knew of the holding centres in the old industrial towns. She brought out a photograph and passed it round. It showed a firing squad. There was a wall in front of them with dark stains on, and at its base a slack, indistinct body. ‘There is no Hague here,’ she said. ‘There are no human rights laws in this country. You won’t get a trial. You won’t even be charged. They will try and break you. They will find out whatever they can, any way they can. And they will be merciless, I assure you. If you end up here, in this place, you will be held as long as they think you are useful. Then you will be shot.’ She nodded and her eyes moved across us.

  If detained, there were only three things that we were permitted to say. Our names. Which militia we belonged to. And that we did not recognise the legality of the government. Nothing else could be given in response to interrogation or to incentives. Not yes, not no. ‘All I ask is that you hold out as long as possible,’ she told us. ‘There will be a time to tell them about us. But not yet.’

  Jackie had said she would not put me back in the dog box unless I agreed to it, and a year after the captivity, I did. She came for me in the night, with three others, and I was dragged from my bed across the floor of the dormitory and over the courtyard. I made an attempt to escape, twisting up and throwing a few punches with a free hand. It was a reflex action and it did little good. The women paused. I took a hard kick in the belly that knocked the wind out of me. I was turned onto my stomach and my hands were bound behind my back. A bag was put over my head and tied at the neck. Someone pressed a thumb into the plastic, tearing a hole for my mouth.

  Within minutes I found myself back inside the iron enclosure, scratching at the knots of rope securing my wrists, trying to move oxygen smoothly into my chest, trying to calm myself. The ground was pliant and warm under my bare feet. A smell of fresh shit rose from the floor, as if it had been spread there for my arrival.

  The first time it happened I had lasted four days. I took hold of myself and focused on what I had been told to do. I found the canister of water left at my feet, lifted it up between my soles and took the top off with my teeth. Its base was lathered with shit and I gagged as I brought it closer. I could not tip it on my knees to take a drink, so I manoeuvred it back down onto the ripe floor and worked to free my hands. The knots remained tight. In the small space around the stool I managed to slip my body through the loop of my arms, so my hands were now in front of me and I could remove the bag and reach down for the canister. I shook it. It was almost empty.

  Despair rose up in me, sick as bile, but I swallowed it back down. I concentrated, repeating the instructions I had been given. Talk to yourself. Sleep, even shallowly. Sing. Find patterns on the walls: flowers, birds, faces.

  For three days it worked. I saw letters drawn in the darkness in front of me. The words floated like red flares on the black. Then the water ran out and dehydration started to make me unstable. The same terrible images came walking back towards me, like prodigal ghosts, as if they had been waiting in the darkness of the corrugated coffin for me to reanimate them.

  The second time they came for me I made it to seven days in the dog box. I drank urine caught in the container when the water ran out. I ate the food thrown in on the filthy floor. I did not call out. It was nearing winter, and the air in the metal enclosure was freezing.

  On the seventh day I was dragged back across the courtyard to one of the small stone pens. The women from the unit interrogating me were dressed in dark clothing, masked. I thought I recognised Corky but I was weak and disoriented and could not be sure of anything. There were no apologies given. I was stripped, hit in the kidneys, and burned. One of them pushed a pipe a little way into me and told me I was a whore. They left me locked inside the pen, curled up and moaning on the floor, and another four women entered. Jackie was with them.

  She smiled down at me, a gentle, sympathetic smile, and I saw in her blue eyes that the love she had for me was that of a mother. In her hand was a plate of cooked breakfast: bacon, eggs and bread. The yolks bloomed. She crouched down, set the meal on the floor at her feet and sniffed loudly. ‘That smells so good,’ she said. Then she took a rasher of bacon and waved it in front of my face. I lurched for it but the others pulled me back. She put the crisp sliver back on the plate and licked the grease from her fingers. ‘Mmm.’ Her voice was soft and compassionate. ‘What’s my name, Sister?’ I looked up at her, pleading with her to stop. ‘If you tell me my name you can eat this. If you tell me the names of all of us here, you are free to go, right now.’

  It was no better and no worse than the treatment I gave the others, when the roles were reversed. It was no better and no worse than the treatment soldiers had always undergone in preparation for deployment. And Jackie saw to it that we were no different from them.

  She did not make monsters of us. She simply gave us the power to remake ourselves into those inviolable creatures the God of Equality had intended us to be. We knew she was deconstructing the old disabled versions of our sex, and that her ruthlessness was adopted because those constructs were built to endure. She broke down the walls that had kept us contained. There was a fresh red field on the other side, and in its rich soil were growing all the flowers of war that history had never let us gather. It was beautiful to walk in. As beautiful as the fells that autumn.

  FILE SEVEN

  PARTIAL CORRUPTION

  * * *

  It was not clear whose idea the gorse cuttings had be
en. One evening, at the back of that second winter in Carhullan, Jackie gathered us all together and told us it was time to begin. Some kind of preliminary, neutral marker was necessary before things kicked off, she said, as a way to make a link with the civilian population. But it was not her that issued the instruction to shear sections of whin from the moorland reefs surrounding the farm. It was decided quietly among some of the Sisters that this should be the signal, and a group went out the next day and brought back the first batch.

  That evening, after work on the farm was complete, the women who were not part of the unit busied themselves at the kitchen table tying the stems with rags of material torn from the tunics. All over the fell, every month of the year, the plant flowered with vivid buds, and there were plenty of blooms for the clippings. They kept on for two weeks, until the yellow fabric was used up.

  On the first night I went into the kitchen and watched them work. The tunics lay in a pile near the iron range. I had laid mine down with them. When more material was needed someone cut a lip in the cloth and tore a long thin bolster out of the weave. They all wore gloves but their hands were continually being scratched as the spines cut through, and every so often I would hear somebody suck in their breath. I’d see them remove a glove and squeeze at the flesh beneath. Then blood would come scrambling out of the puncture.

  I could not have said why exactly, but I liked watching the women work. The routine of their hands, the craft of what they were doing, was hypnotic, and the kitchen was filled with the heady scent of the blossom. I had always liked the plant; its sweet fragrance that intensified tropically in the heat of summer, the gouts of colour on the fellside. Its petals seemed inconceivably soft and bright against the dark static spines. I felt a calm anticipation too, as their hands moved, winding the bandages around the stalks. I knew that this industry heralded our actions; everything we had planned was about to start, and everything seemed right.

  When the brobbs had been securely fastened they were placed in loose hessian sacks and stored in the stables. In the morning those of us who had volunteered to ride down into Rith strapped them onto our saddles and slung them over the hot flanks of the ponies. We set out as the sun was rising. Across the higher ground the ponies left hoofprints in the thick crust of frost, and I watched the ice dapple and melt away as we dropped down into the valley. We forded the streams and picked our way through the old settlements, past the abandoned cars, and over troughs cut out by flash floods. We encountered no one else along the way, and as we tracked through the old county it felt as if we were travelling in a hinterland, a place of lesser and greater being. There was thunder, but the rain held off. By dusk we were at the periphery of the safety zone.

  We were careful not to be seen. We crossed the swollen brown water of the Eden after the electrical grid had powered down and darkness was spreading over the town. The flooding was worse around the bridge. We were miles from the estuary but sand had somehow found its way back upstream and it lay in swathes along the waterline. Lumber and tree trunks were stacked up against the buttresses, and those trees which had not been felled lay waterlogged and dying, with detritus snagged in their branches

  I and the others dismounted, and we hid the ponies in the ruined river cottages, took off the sacks, and rested them on our own shoulders. Then we made our way on foot along the broken road, retracing the route I had used to get away. At the edge of town we divided into patrols and went about our business.

  The settlement was the same as it had been when I left. Everything looked familiar, run-down and debilitated, still caught up in the failed mechanism of the recovery plan. Nothing seemed to have improved. The cyst-like meters hummed on the facades of buildings. Fetid rubbish was piled in open plots – electronics, prams, moulded plastics – and hundreds of vehicles lined the concrete aprons of the old supermarket. I saw a litter of feral puppies curled underneath a bus. They looked up with hungry solicitous eyes as we walked by, and growled. The lower-lying streets were under water and on the doors of the houses a red X had been dashed. We passed by the turbine factory. The gates were locked, and a heavy chain sat between their bars. There was a notice secured to the post. Closed until further notice.

  It was disquieting to be back there, at night, under the browned sky, creeping as silently as I had done when I escaped. The echo of blood pumping hard was loud inside my head. I felt as if something in me might burst. I wanted to hammer on the doors and drag the residents from their beds, I wanted to shake them out of their stupor and have them follow us to the castle in an angry mob, tear those within it limb from limb. But I did not. I moved like a spirit, divorced from the dimension I found myself in, unable to manifest, unable to reach out and touch the solid world.

  The others kept watch while I ghosted through the streets, leaving the wrappings at the doors of the occupied terrace quarters, in letterboxes, the cracks between bricks, and tied to the railings of the clinic; wherever people lived, wherever they suffered.

  It was hard to know how well they would be received by the inhabitants of the combined residences; what, if anything, they would discern from a spray of ribboned foliage left at the foot of their homes. It was a strange rustic token that made little sense in the dark cobbled streets of the town, but its texture was like a warning, and its yellow bloom was somehow hopeful. There was no way to convey our true intent, no printed matter that we could distribute among the people. The gorse gave nothing away. It was simply a coded gift, a curious blossoming of colour in the wet unlit corridors.

  I did not think of him often now, but when we passed through the street in which I had once been sectioned, I imagined Andrew sleeping upstairs in that room of huddled boxes, salvaged possessions, and consolidated existence. I did not know whether he would be alone or with someone else. I had been gone for a year and a half and it was doubtful that anything of mine would be left in the quarter. He was not a sentimental man. Most likely I had been reported and struck off, my remaining things examined by monitors and anything deemed useful removed. No one had come looking for me. For all I knew, I had disappeared utterly; perhaps I was even thought to be dead. Whatever my fate, Andrew no longer had a wife.

  I pictured him picking up the corsage on the way to the refinery that morning, feeling the sharpness of it in his palm, and wondering about it, wondering what it meant. He would no doubt toss it back down on the step, leaving it for the other family to bring inside, or he would throw it onto one of the refuse piles at the end of the street. But he would hear that identical bundles had been found throughout the quarters. And he would realise, as many others would, that no gorse grew within the periphery of Rith, not even on the slopes of the Beacon Hill. It was a plant that flourished only in the uplands now, that had been brought in from the old Lakeland district. It was a message from without.

  For two weeks we made night runs into town. We were not caught. We did not remain there long enough to witness the cuttings’ discovery, or reveal ourselves in the process of delivering them. Instead we went quickly to where the fell ponies were tethered and rode back along the mountain tracks to Carhullan. We never went to the same street twice. And we never gave any other indication of what was coming. As I worked, I knew that Jackie was not far away, making her count, timing the movements of the Authority.

  The castle loomed above the town on the small hill opposite the Beacon, and within its barracks was the Authority’s headquarters, and the records of all those living within the official zones. Since the flooding of the Solway City it had become the central command post of the region. In the smaller Pennine towns there was a moderate Authority presence, enough monitors to maintain order, to oversee work details and the distribution of rations, but here lay the region’s main chamber of power. To strike it would be to sunder the chassis that held everything together. Jackie’s plan was not to hit and run, or to create havoc. She was planning a coup. We were going to hold Rith for as long as possible. Once word got out, once more ammunition had been taken, vehicles an
d supplies, then the other settlements would fall, she said. There would be mass uprising, a groundswell. The tide would turn against those who had abused their power for the last ten years. We would be the first place to declare independence, but others would follow. It was not about defending Carhullan any more; she was now fighting for the whole of the Northern territory.

  As I walked through my hometown, remapping it in the darkness, my blood would slow and I would think about her vision and her courage. I would think of her standing in silhouette by the kitchen fireplace. We were on the cusp of a great moment in history, she had said, turning from the flames to face us. ‘We’ve become used to change always happening elsewhere, haven’t we? We’ve become used to waiting, hoping to be saved, hoping those in charge will reform and reform us. It’s the sickness of our breed. And it has become our national weakness. Sisters, no one is going to help us. There is only us. So why not here? Why not now?’ She had held a fist at her side, and white spittle had gathered on her lip. ‘Remember this as you go down there,’ she had urged us. ‘Revolutions always begin in mountain regions. It’s the fate of such places. Look around you. Look where you are. These are the disputed lands. They have never been settled. And those of us who live in them have never surrendered to anyone’s control. Nor will we ever.’

  At night the heavy doors of the castle’s entrance were closed, opening only to let blue cruisers crawl in and out. Near the fortified walls, on the other side of the road, was Rith’s railway station. Once a week freight arrived, brought up from the ports to the South; shipments of food and medical supplies. The clinic lay half a mile away, in the shell of Rith’s elegant old hospital. And at the head of the town were the vast grey cylinders of the Uncon oil refinery. Everything was surveyed and marked out. Nothing would be left to chance.