Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  “Right,” she said, since he was looking at her expectantly again.

  “So, um. If you feel like a bath . . .”

  • • •

  Hot food and water were pleasures so overwhelming they threatened to make her cry. The valley grew dark outside while the two of them sat at another table beside the range stove. The only light was the glow from the little chamber at its base where the wood burned. He hadn’t bothered with candles or oil lamps, he said, since it was just him in the house after dark with nothing to do. They ate tinned beans and crackers. Everything came from the town down on the main road, he told her, but he hadn’t been for more than a week and he’d given his rations of meat to the older people he kept an eye on in their remoter villages. He appeared not to have any notion what she’d been living on since her purchasing power ran out many miles and many days ago, and kept apologizing for not being able to offer things she remembered as distantly as dreams: fruit juice, ham.

  “You know,” he said. The speckled grime of his glasses had gone opaque in the faint gleam of ember-light. “There was a rumor going around that you’d died.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I can’t quite remember. I think Katya said she’d heard something about it.”

  “Well,” she said, holding a spoon close to her lips; even the warmth of the metal was magical. “Here I am.”

  “A lot of us felt really bad about it, you know. Not,” he added hastily, “you being . . . I mean, of course, no one wanted to believe that. But about what happened. I think we . . . I remember Kat facing up to Chloë and Dave a few times and telling them we’d all gone too far.”

  She said nothing.

  “I know I felt the same way. I’m not making excuses, Jess. Honestly I’m not. I was part of it and I went along with it so I can’t say I didn’t mean it. But afterward we didn’t all feel we’d done the right thing. We talked about it. A lot.”

  “There was always plenty of talking.”

  He chuckled nervously. “You couldn’t have stayed, though, could you? Not making excuses again, but it wouldn’t have worked, would it. I’ve done the baby thing myself a few times now. God. Imagine a baby at Trelow.”

  If they hadn’t thrown her out when she was pregnant, Iz thought, Gavin would never have become my child. He’d never have had to put up with me. He’d have grown up with people who understood him and loved him.

  “I could have done it,” she said. “I’d have made it work.”

  He looked down. There was a long silence.

  “Then I should ask your forgiveness,” he finally said. “Maybe that’s why God brought you here. So I can make up for it.”

  Iggy too had that perpetual bizarre conviction that everything was about her. Iz felt a pang of her old irritation at the self-absorption of fanatics, but swallowed it down. It was a trace of her former self, and she wanted nothing more to do with that person.

  “So. Do you forgive me, Jess? I’m asking humbly. I’ll understand if you can’t.”

  She glimpsed her sister’s unknown history like a ghost in the darkness of the house, waiting behind him. Why hadn’t she ever wondered about it? Because there was a tiny baby to occupy all her attention; and because her husband broke off the conversation if she so much as mentioned Iggy’s name.

  Forget me. The very last words her twin sister had said to her. Her eyes were maddened; she kept glancing up at the night sky as if she was terrified that someone was watching. Promise, Lizzie. Be Gawain’s mother and don’t let him know I ever existed. Don’t ever talk about me. Forget me. Promise.

  “It depends what you want to be forgiven for. Specifically.”

  “Were you a lawyer back there in London? Oh, all right. I know what you mean. Forgiveness is a selfish thing to want, isn’t it? Anyway it’s up to God to judge. But, look. I’m sorry I didn’t stand up to them. I am, truly.” He tried for a moment to meet her eyes and failed, guiltily. “We had a meeting. Ha. Of course we did. You can imagine how it went. Dave and Chloë said you’d sinned and you should leave the fellowship. All I’m trying to say is, I know now I should have been braver. Kat felt the same. So, that’s it. I’m sorry. We were too quick to pass judgment. I was.”

  “So now,” she said, stirring her small bowl of beans exquisitely slowly, releasing sensuous wafts of salt and sugar and MSG, “you don’t think I sinned?”

  His discomfort, like his fervor, was endearingly hesitant. There was something not quite grown up about him: half man, half teddy bear. “We were all so young. Weren’t we? None of us had any idea about . . . love. What Lil and I have, I know that’s blessed in the eyes of God. Marriage is a sacrament, isn’t it.”

  “Marriage is hell.”

  There was another very long silence.

  “I’m sure you and your wife are very happy,” she said, eventually. “Not because you’re married, though.”

  He poked around his bowl with the edge of a cracker. Every movement made soft murky shadows move. He seemed at a loss for words.

  “It’s so strange seeing you like this,” he said at last, not looking up. “I know everyone changes. We all have. You, though.” He laughed in halfhearted amazement. “Of all the people to lose their faith. I remember you arguing with Dave, saying we ought to be out preaching in the fields like the Methodists used to. Saying you’d be doing it yourself if it wasn’t for the fact that you couldn’t risk the sun touching you. I used to think how great you’d have been out there. Everyone would have listened.”

  Iz could see all too clearly how Greg must have fallen in love with Iggy. People tended to, the ones who didn’t find her completely laughable.

  “And instead it turned out to be Ruth. Who’d have thought. Shy little Ruth. You remember what she was like. God.” Iz was about to agree, glad of the change of subject, but fortunately Greg went on before she could. “Oh no, of course you don’t, she came after you left. But honestly. I remember her telling me she was trying to find courage to take the veil. Now look at her. Thousands hanging on her every word.”

  The spotty leftie moron. Iz felt a dreamy bafflement that Ruth too was part of the shadowy story rising from its grave before her. She was tired. She wasn’t at all sure who she was; she was hovering between her own identity and her sister’s imaginary history, between the living and the dead.

  “She’s a powerful speaker,” Iz said.

  “You’ve heard her?”

  “On TV. Clips. She’s . . . magnetic.”

  “I don’t get news anymore. Just rumors. Everyone’s talking about her, though. One of the old gents I look after calls her a prophet. I told him I used to live with her, that she left the top off the toothpaste and had a thing about head lice. And her surname is Shenley-Baverstock. Did you know that? We used to give her such grief about it. He doesn’t quite believe me.”

  “The newspapers call her a prophet too.”

  “Do they?”

  She couldn’t actually remember. It sounded familiar. “I think so.”

  He slumped his shoulders. “She’s not preaching the gospel either, though, is she.” The look he gave her was almost pleading. “She’s not spreading God’s word.”

  “Not really. No.”

  He put down his last cracker as if he was too distraught to eat.

  “What happened to you?” he said. “What went wrong?”

  Abruptly, she felt the old misery sneak into the room. She’d eluded it for days, zigzagging through the lanes, but now it had caught up again. It began to sniff closer, circling her in the obscurity beyond the weak glow from the stove. Greg was too wrapped up in his own timid disappointment to notice.

  “I did terrible things,” she said. I’m sorry, Gavin.

  “Jesus’s love doesn’t change, no matter what you do.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Don’t you? Really? A
re you telling me you don’t believe the promise of the gospel anymore?”

  “I’ll never again,” she whispered, not to him, “tell anyone that what they believe is wrong.” Forgive me, Gav, love. Gavin had inherited none of Iggy’s fire and fury. Perhaps that was where it had gone wrong. If only he’d insisted. If only he’d shouted and argued like his mother would have, shouted them all down tirelessly and relentlessly until they all gave up and agreed with him. All right, Gav, have it your way, your imaginary friend really is outside the back door, go and talk to her if you want, all right all right all right. Then he wouldn’t have had to run away.

  “Wow. You really have changed, then.”

  But she was suddenly tired of him, of everything. The dreadful ache found her and latched on. She said she had to go and lie down. The room he’d half cleared for her upstairs had been the older children’s bedroom, separated from his by a thin mold-spotted partition. She buried her face in the dank pillow the way she used to when she was trying not to wake up her husband with her nocturnal rituals of grief, but it was very quiet in that snowbound valley at night. He must have been able to hear her sobbing through the wall.

  • • •

  Greg was out all the next day. She slept through most of it, after being awake all through the night. At some utterly dark hour she’d been convinced her sister was calling again. Lizzie. Help. “I’m coming,” she whispered back. “I’m nearly there.” But when she woke in the daylight she felt in no hurry to leave. It was a delicious luxury not to stand up, not to have to carry anything, not to be cold and in pain.

  Greg was out helping. That was how he’d decided to pass the trial he thought he’d been sent: looking after the weak and the old. “Like we used to say at Trelow,” he’d explained. “You bring what light you can to your corner of the world, wherever it is.” He was allowed to have diesel for his tractor on condition that he keep the road to and from Okehampton at least partly clear, and he was given food as long as he also took supplies to the remaining villages along that road where those who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave had gathered to try to survive the winter together. While he was gone, she lay in bed, wondering hazily how she’d ended up in that room with its peeling striped wallpaper and its shelf of painted model airplanes and its rectangle of glum light slowly crossing the carpet. She kept seeing and hearing other things, with the intensity of hallucination. Most of all she kept coming back to that Halloween night, her sister appearing out of nowhere at the door. They hadn’t answered the bell at first in case it was kids demanding chocolate. She remembered the baby’s quiet milky eyes, so strangely unconcerned that his mother was leaving him, that she was dying. She remembered Nigel giving in late that night, gruffly tender: At least we’ll be giving the poor kid a proper life. We can give him a proper name for a start. He’d thought it would be like adopting a cat but with more paperwork. It was like that, at first. She remembered that winter, many nights blending into one in the recollection: she’d get up at some ungodly hour and go to him and find him awake and perfectly silent, perfectly calm, little head turned toward the window. Wonderbaby, she and Nigel called him. They sniggered at their exhausted friends with their clingy, colicky children. Six years later her husband was slamming doors and saying If only we’d never taught him to fucking speak. Or was it she who said that? She was here in this bed because she was on her way to find him, and yet she remembered signing him up for every weekend activity on offer just for the sake of extra hours without him in the house. She remembered sitting at home on the sofa during those extra hours, thinking about the fact that she was legally manacled to a man with the sensitivity of a brick. She listened to her heart fluttering as she lay in the clammy bed and wondered what it would be like if it stopped.

  “You don’t look too good,” Greg said, when he came back.

  “I’m all right.” She was still in bed, though.

  “I should have tried to pick up some medicine. I can get some tomorrow. There’s a chap farther up the road, I gave him a couple of boxes of aspirin the day before yesterday.”

  She didn’t feel ill, she just felt odd. This business of being transformed into a different person was very disorienting.

  “I don’t want to be a burden,” she said.

  He laughed cheerfully. “I’ve been wondering all day how to persuade you to stay for a while. Needn’t have bothered, really. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “Why not?”

  “You, madam, are sick.”

  “I’m only tired. It’s been a hard trip.”

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like west of here? Everyone’s gone, except along the main road, and if they catch you anywhere near that they’ll stick you in the back of an army truck and ship you back up to London. You’ll need to carry a lot more than you’ve got in those two panniers if you’re going to walk over the moor. I know you’re a tough cookie, Jess, but you’re in no shape to try that. Look at you.” He seemed pleased.

  A useful side effect of appearing ill was that he didn’t expect her to say much. He talked about what he’d been doing, and about what he used to do before the snow came and his family left, and about his family. He didn’t wait for her to answer in kind, which was good, because she was increasingly hazy about which of her memories she was having and which she was only pretending to have, which family was hers and which her sister’s. He was happy to leave her alone, or to pull up a plastic desk chair and sit across the room from the bed, hands in his pockets, chattering away undemandingly. He was, she thought, nice. She didn’t realize you could lie in bed and talk or listen to someone nice; it wasn’t a word you could ever have applied to her husband (she thought she remembered having a husband).

  “So, you must have been married for a while? Back in London?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Based on what you said last night. It sounded . . . personal.”

  “Oh. Yes. Yes, I was.”

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Lil and I have our ups and downs. It’s hard with her being so far away. They used to bring letters down the main road but that all stopped a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Can’t you call?”

  “There’s no power. It’s amazing what you lose without electricity. A chap up the road has a propane generator, I can charge up a phone on that occasionally, but I don’t feel like I can keep asking.”

  “Mmm.”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure . . .” He sniffed and reached out to pick up one of the painted models from a shelf, turning it around in his hands. “Last time I called, Jules cried on the phone.”

  She didn’t even try to work up some sympathy for him. What did other people’s children matter, compared to her boy?

  “Lil said I should join them there,” he said. “In Leicester. Says.”

  An icicle dripped outside, pinging every few seconds on an upturned bucket, like the tick of a clock slowed to a quarter speed.

  “I know I should have, shouldn’t I? But . . . my work’s here.”

  Food smells rose slowly from below. Cooking took hours, traveling took days. She listened to the world stalling. Ping . . . ping . . .

  “Are you awake?”

  “Mmm.”

  “I should let you go back to sleep.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “Ought to get some food down you, though. Are you hungry at all?”

  “I could eat.”

  “The thing is— You can’t just do the easy thing, can you? This is a test. We agreed I was going to stay here as long as I was needed. Maybe if spring comes and they can get the power back. . . . It’s definitely been a bit warmer the last couple of days. Listen to that, that’s something melting.”

  They both listened. It was getting dark.

  “Though Lil said things are getting difficult up
there too. Everything’s really expensive. Supply problems. And, you know, people just not going to work. You had that big march in London a couple of weeks ago, didn’t you? Did you go?”

  “Mmm. No.”

  “I can just see you in there pitching stones at office windows. I heard it turned into a pretty big riot.”

  “Yes.” She did remember. So had she been there? Or just watched it on TV? “It did. They set fire to things.”

  “God forgive them.” He put the model back. “It’s— You know the verse. Without vision the people perish. They know they want something different but they haven’t seen the truth yet. False gods. It’s all been prophesied. All they have to do is open the Bible and they’d know what’s happening. God. To think that our generation would be the one to see this. . . .”

  She thought about telling him that he didn’t know anything at all, but she didn’t want to be hurtful.

  “I said that to Lil. I mean, this is the heart of it, down here. This snow, and the angel appearing right over Trelow. . . . She had to take the kids. They’re too little still. But we should all have stayed if we could. Shouldn’t we. I mean, this is where God touched the world again. Think of all the millions of people who wish they could be here.”

  She shuffled under the clammy sheets. “I don’t remember an angel,” she said.

  “You don’t? I thought that was the one thing everyone knew about. That photo, and all the videos.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That.”

  “You don’t think it’s an angel either.” His voice had gone flat.

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “It just means ‘messenger,’ you know? Everyone thinks it has to be white robes and silvery wings with a harp, but actually why wouldn’t God’s messenger to us be black? The world’s full of sin.”

  “That’s true.” She’d spent hours, days, nights staring at that photo, the slightly fuzzy picture apparently snapped on a phone by a man walking in the woods. Everyone in the world had seen that photo. Unlike everyone else, though, she hadn’t been staring at the black monstrosity facing the camera; she’d stared at the blurry image of the person with their back turned, blocking the monster’s path. She’d convinced herself it was her son.