by Rebecca Wait
For Judith, there was a hairbrush made of carved wood to look like a hedgehog, and a skipping rope with purple-painted handles.
‘Honestly,’ Judith said to Megan as they sat on the steps behind the canteen. ‘A skipping rope? He’ll be getting me a doll’s house next.’
‘Or tin soldiers,’ Megan said. ‘Or one of those big hoops to push along.’ (They were doing the Victorians in History that term.)
‘He says modern society’s broken,’ Judith said. ‘He says people have lost their way. And now Mum’s taken away my Game Boy.’ She stopped. The loss was still too raw to talk about.
‘It’s pretty, though,’ Megan said, picking up the skipping rope to inspect it. ‘I love purple. You know my purple jeans? It matches them.’
‘You can have it if you want,’ Judith said.
‘Better not. He might ask about it next time he’s round.’
Judith’s mum was different now, bursting with energy, whirling round the flat, dusting, cleaning and polishing. Judith was amazed at how neat the place had become.
‘I didn’t know the carpet was this colour,’ she commented in honest wonder, but for some reason this made her mum snap at her.
Stephanie had also started insisting Judith take off her shoes at the door when she came home.
‘You’ve never made me do that before,’ Judith said.
‘It stops you walking dirt in,’ Stephanie said.
‘Since when do you care about that?’
‘Since always,’ Stephanie said firmly. ‘If you’re lazy about the small things, who’s to say you won’t be lazy about the big things as well?’
Judith had no answer for this.
On the days when he was expected, her mum put on her rubber gloves and apron as soon as she got back from the cafe and set to work, and if she had any time left after cleaning she would rush to the kitchen and set about chopping vegetables or baking a cake – he apparently had a sweet tooth.
On the days when he didn’t come round, her mum seemed to flag, and sometimes Judith would come home from school to find her sitting on the sofa staring into space – she didn’t even have the TV on.
‘Mum?’ Judith would say. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Just a bit tired,’ her mum would reply.
One night, when the whole flat seemed to be crackling with her mum’s excitement, Judith was surprised to hear he wasn’t expected. Her mum had made spaghetti carbonara, Judith’s favourite. They sat at the kitchen table for once, and her mum had even bought Judith a can of Coke.
‘Just as a one-off, OK?’ Stephanie said.
Judith nodded and quickly cracked it open before her mum could change her mind. She was hoping Stephanie had come to her senses and there would be no more of him. Perhaps this was their way of celebrating.
She realized her mum was staring at her. ‘What?’
‘There’s something I need to talk to you about,’ her mum said.
Judith saw her take a deep breath, her chest moving up and down beneath the thin blouse.
Stephanie said, ‘I want you to know something. I want you to know that everything I do is for us. For you and me. To give us a better life.’
Judith clasped her hands around the chilled can, making herself keep them there as long as possible before the cold became unbearable.
Her mum said, ‘There are some things you might not understand as a child. Things you might never have thought about.’
Was she talking about sex? Judith wondered. She very much hoped not.
Her mum said, ‘Sometimes you can’t see what’s really important until someone else shows you. Having a sense of purpose, for instance. A sense of community. Feeling safe and loved.’
Judith felt her face twitch into a frown, as though her facial muscles were one step ahead of her brain. Her mum sounded like she was reciting from memory, like the time Judith had had to learn that poem about a cat for school and perform it in front of the class. She’d been so nervous about forgetting the words or making a mistake that she’d rushed through it without any expression and got a rubbish mark.
Her mum said, ‘You might get used to managing without the things you need, and managing without people who care about you. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good way to live.’
Judith kept quiet. She was finding this difficult to follow.
‘If there was a way to be happy,’ her mum said, ‘wouldn’t you be mad to ignore it? If you have an opportunity for a better life, shouldn’t you take it?’
Why was she making everything into a question, Judith thought, but never waiting for an answer? ‘I like my life,’ she tried to say. The words felt too big for her throat. She took a sip of Coke, swallowing carefully. The cold burned.
‘We’re going on a special trip,’ her mum said. ‘A day out.’
‘With him?’
‘With Nathaniel, yes. There’s something he needs to show us.’
‘What?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Judith said. But her voice was so weak it seemed to dissolve in the air.
After
On the final leg of her journey home from the prison, Judith listened to her iPod and tried not to think about her mother. It had started to rain shortly after she’d boarded the bus, and now she watched the streaks of water travel down the window and remembered the end of the Ark, as she always did when it rained.
My mother sleeps a lot in the daytime, Moses wrote in one of his letters. Nobody mentions my father.
Judith disliked buses. If she had any money, she would take taxis everywhere. She distrusted what it did to your mind, being in a confined space with other people. It made you part of the group; allowed you to erase yourself.
A few years ago, sitting on the bus back to her gran’s one evening, she’d seen a girl being harassed by three men. It was around 6 p.m., not even dark, but the men were drunk. Perhaps later they blamed it on that, but in Judith’s opinion, alcohol only freed people to do what they secretly wanted to do sober.
The girl had bare shoulders, wore a black strappy top. It looked good on her. They’d say she was asking for it, obviously. When the bus stopped at traffic lights, the men moved in from their position at the back of the bus, two of them sliding into the seat behind the girl and the other taking the empty space next to her.
Judith watched carefully. The girl didn’t look round, but her body had taken on a rigidity, like a spider freezing when it knows you’re watching. They can still see you, Judith wanted to tell her.
‘Alright?’ one of the men behind the girl said.
He slid a finger, insolent and invasive, beneath the strap of her top and she shuddered.
Judith tried not to stare. She was acutely aware of the other passengers, a scattering of men and women, young, elderly, middle-aged. She waited for one of them to intervene, knew instinctively they would not.
‘Where are you going, darling?’ the man beside the girl said.
She replied too softly for Judith to hear.
He put his arm around her shoulder and she shrugged a little, a half-hearted attempt to shake him off, and then leaned away from him as far as she could, resting her shoulder against the window.
‘You got a boyfriend, love?’ the man said.
Minutely, the girl nodded.
‘Lucky bloke.’ His hand on her shoulder was slipping down now, over her exposed collarbone. She tried to pull away from him, but there was nowhere for her to go.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’
The men laughed, and Judith saw – as everyone else on the bus surely saw – that by acknowledging at last what was going on, the girl had sealed her fate.
‘Come on,’ the man said in a wheedling voice. ‘Be a bit more friendly.’
Judith had a bottle of vodka in her satchel which she was planning on smuggling up to her bedroom when she got back to her gran’s. For reassurance, she opened her bag and closed her hand around the cool bottle-neck. Then she got up,
and moved over to the group of men.
‘Leave her alone,’ she said to the man with his arm round the girl.
The two in the seat behind were looking away now, as if trying to absent themselves from the situation, but the third faced Judith belligerently.
‘Jealous?’ he said. The girl had managed to twist away from him whilst he was looking at Judith, ducking out from under his arm, and now it lay limply between them.
‘Go and sit somewhere else,’ Judith said to him.
‘We’ll come and sit with you, shall we?’ he said, turning to his friends, trying for a laugh.
And Judith, because she didn’t give a shit, swung the bottle into his face and broke his nose.
They’d almost pressed charges, which had amazed her. Her gran had been furious, and for once not with her. Judith liked to think afterwards it was the incandescent rage of this elderly woman that had diverted the CPS from its righteous course. Nevertheless, Judith felt herself more closely observed after that; she wondered if her gran suspected her of carrying within her the same seed of violence as her mother.
*
It was still drizzling when Judith got off the bus. She put her hood up and walked home with her head down. She felt rough, as she often did after a prison visit: that drained, pale feeling she associated with a temazepam hangover or with having cried for a long time. She wanted a drink, but her gran would be waiting for her in the kitchen when she got back, with her careful, ‘Was she well?’ and her ritual offering of cheese on toast. So there would be no opportunity to sneak upstairs for a while. I could ask for a sherry, Judith thought desperately. A soothing, medicinal sherry . . . ?
She was only metres away from the house when she spotted the woman at the gate. For a second, her heart flared in her chest. The spectre of bad news, the threat of catastrophe, was always with her. She saw it again, the bloodstain on the dirt floor. It seemed to follow her wherever she went; could leak into her eyes at any moment and turn the world red.
But the woman didn’t have the look of the police about her – too relaxed, the way she was leaning against the wall like that – and Judith hadn’t caught a glimpse of a social worker for years now, not since first going to live with her gran. Besides, she reminded herself, she was twenty-two now. Nobody was coming to take her away.
The woman was blocking the gate, so Judith had to stop and say, ‘Can I help you?’
The woman said, ‘Hello, Judith.’ She was wearing jeans; but fitted, expensive-looking ones in dark denim, definitely not the kind Judith wore. She had a confident, vaguely official air about her.
Judith had no choice but to say hello back and wait for more.
‘Grim day, isn’t it?’ the woman said, giving her a smile. ‘I’m glad I ran into you.’
Ran into me? Judith thought. You’re waiting outside my house.
‘You’re looking extremely well,’ the woman said.
‘Thanks.’
‘My name’s Jo Hooper,’ she said, holding out her hand. Judith took it: cool and dry. ‘I was hoping we could have a quick chat,’ the woman added. ‘Is there somewhere we can go, out of the rain?’
‘A chat about what?’ Judith said. If she really were being given bad news, she would rather have it out here in the rain, not in her gran’s sitting room over tea and cake.
The woman said, ‘Well, about you, mostly. I’d love to hear how you’re getting on. How’s your mum doing these days?’
And finally, the penny dropped. Judith pushed past her, but the woman pursued her to the front door and stood there whilst Judith struggled to get it open.
‘Go away,’ Judith said.
‘There are a lot of people out there who care about you, Judith,’ the woman said, her voice gentle and reasonable. It reminded Judith of Nathaniel and made her shudder. ‘People who’ve wondered about you over the years, and would love to know how you and your mum are getting on.’
Judith had unbolted the deadlock and was wrestling with the stiff latch.
The woman said, ‘Your mum was a victim too, Judith. Plenty of people would say she wasn’t responsible for her actions.’
Why did they always wheel this line out, Judith thought, as though it were a defence and not the most damning thing of all? She opened the door and flung herself through it, allowing herself the small luxury of turning back at the last minute. ‘Why don’t you fuck off?’ she said to Jo Hooper. Then she slammed the door.
II
The Ark
1
They’d been waiting all morning in the schoolroom. All week, they’d been waiting, but these last few hours seemed the longest. The mist had crept up on them sometime before daybreak. The moors were hidden from sight and only the tops of the forest trees were visible. The world was white and its walls looked solid.
‘It’s cloudy, like heaven,’ Abigail had said at breakfast.
Moses had kept quiet. He didn’t think heaven would be so cold and dark.
As they waited, they discussed the newcomers.
‘They’ll look different to us,’ Ezra said.
‘How?’ they asked him.
‘They just will,’ Ezra said. ‘They’re from Gehenna.’ When he saw them all looking at him, he added, ‘They’ll be impure.’
‘What does that mean?’ Abigail said.
Ezra said, ‘Impurity has its own colour.’ He sounded like he was repeating something the prophet had said, so no one could argue with him. Ezra was the son of the prophet and Ruth, so he was especially close to God. Sometimes, before he could stop the thought, this made Moses feel sorry for God.
When they heard the car, the children crept out of the schoolroom to get a better look. It was hard to see much through the mist, but Moses caught a flash of bright-red hair in the back seat before the prophet got out of the car and sent them away. Moses hadn’t even known hair came in that colour.
In the kitchen of the big house, when they were finally allowed in, Moses stared at the girl’s hair until she caught him looking and scowled. He wondered if red hair could be a mark of the devil. No one had spoken about it, but he wouldn’t judge. He carried his own mark.
The red-haired girl hardly said a word during lunch. Moses knew this because he was sitting next to her. He had jumped in quickly before Abigail and Mary and taken the seat beside her.
‘Moses,’ Abigail said, ‘she doesn’t want to sit next to you. She’s a girl. She wants to sit next to us.’
They all looked to the girl for clarification, but she provided none, so Moses stuck out his tongue at Mary and Abigail and stayed where he was.
When the sisters had stomped away, Moses tried to get the girl’s attention by using her name. The prophet always said that names were important. The girl’s name was Judith, which Moses liked; it wasn’t in the Bible, but it was holy. Judith the slayer. The prophet had told them the story once. Sometimes killing was necessary, even glorious, if done in the name of God.
He said, ‘Judith, I like your hair.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Judith, would you like some orange squash?’
Still nothing. Moses studied her carefully. He said, ‘Judith, I could get you a whole glass of orange squash if you want.’ When this too got no response, he added kindly, ‘Don’t you have orange squash in Gehenna? It’s very nice.’
Finally, the red-haired girl turned to him.
‘Shut up,’ she said.
Moses didn’t speak for the rest of the meal.
That afternoon, they left to go back to Gehenna.
Moses followed his mother from the dining room to the kitchen and back again as she cleared up.
‘When will they visit again?’ he said.
‘I don’t know, sweetheart,’ his mother said. ‘Soon, I think.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Probably not tomorrow, Moses.’
‘Next week?’
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘If all goes well and they let God fully into their hearts, they might come and live wit
h us here forever. Just be patient.’
‘Forever?’ Moses’ eyes were wide. ‘From Gehenna?’
Ruth’s entrance in a clatter of plates and cutlery prevented him learning any more.
‘You shouldn’t answer all his questions, Rachael,’ Ruth said to Moses’ mother. ‘You’ll encourage him to whisper.’
Moses went outside, ashamed to have got his mother into trouble. The mist was beginning to clear and the other children were playing Jericho on the moors, but he didn’t think they’d let him join in. It was always Ezra or Mary who started it, but the others didn’t help, not even Peter, his own brother.
He went instead towards the forest to show them he didn’t care. The others thought the devil was hiding in the darkness but Moses knew better. The devil was everywhere, and he was no more likely to approach you in the forest than out on the moors, or in your bedroom.
The forest belonged to him. Even in the daytime, it was dark. The branches at the edge were so thick and so close to the ground that you had to bend down and crawl in between the gaps. Inside, the branches began to thin and die because no light could reach them. Moses liked to watch the little wiggles of sunshine trying to work their way through near the tops of the trees; they soon faded and fell apart.
He pushed through to his usual clearing and sat down on a tree stump. Judith and her mother would be out in Gehenna again by now, back in the town. Moses tried to picture them there and failed. He had never seen a town, but he knew they were places where lots of people lived together in houses like the big house and the small house. There was killing and stealing and everyone was full of sin. In Gehenna, they lived without purpose and without truth.
Some days, when he had walked as far as he could across the moors and reached the highest point, he would stand and stare down into the valley. He knew the town was there because that was what he’d been told. On the clearest days, he thought he could almost see the outline of houses. Eventually, Peter and Ezra and Jonathan would join their fathers and go and work in the town amongst the sinners. But you had to be strong to do that, complete against the devil. Moses could never leave.