The Book of Air

by Joe Treasure

  And while I was still wiping my tears I heard it – what Trevor had said. ‘Here’s looking at you kid.’ The man with hooded eyes looking at the woman, lifting his glass as Trevor had lifted his mug. I heard it for the first time. It was about looking and it was what we were doing, me and Brendan and Trevor and the others. Here’s looking. A text as deep as any in the Book of Air and as hard to understand, that’s the thought that came to me. I gasped at the strangeness of it. I sat among scroungers and wanted nothing better than this – to be wide awake dreaming, everyone together, the same dream.

  Jason

  There’s so much I never got round to telling you, Caroline. So much I kept from you. Because I was ashamed, I suppose. Of what? It’s hard to say. Shame isn’t logical. It’s a smell that clings to you and maybe no one else can smell it but it’s there anyway.

  It was Derek’s idea, the Jesus bus. Mum had taken me to the pictures as a treat for my tenth birthday, and McDonald’s afterwards. We’d seen Back to the Future and it scared the crap out of me. There’s this bit where Michael J Fox is trying to get his dad to make out with his mum at their high school dance and it’s just not happening. He’s got this photo of the whole family back in the future, and him and his sister start to disappear. And I thought that’s my life. Dad’s gone already. Who’s next? Mum? Penny? I could hardly eat my Chicken McNuggets thinking about it.

  Next day Derek came round. Mum was at the end of her tether, what with me moping and Penny acting up as usual and Dad not there to help. So Derek started in about this idea of his. He was going to buy an old double-decker, put some bunk beds in it and a kitchen and hit the road. There were other people interested, apparently. ‘How about it, Flo?’ he said, ‘Give up everything you’ve got and follow Jesus, like it says in the Good Book.’ If there was one thing my mum couldn’t resist it was the word of God.

  We’d never have gone if my dad had been alive to say no. Derek would never have dared suggest it. Our little terraced house wasn’t much but Dad had put a lot into it over the years. Derek didn’t have so much to give up. He owed more on his flat than it was worth. I heard Dad say once that Derek’s flat was under water. I thought of him in flippers and goggles, catching fish in a frying pan.

  They both worked on building sites in those days. Derek was theoretically a plumber, my dad said, by which he meant that he knew about plumbing in theory but was bugger all use in practice.

  He used to do the rounds with his pamphlets, and he’d stop off in our kitchen for a cup of tea. And then he’d get going on one of his stories about fighting communism in Korea and finding God.

  ‘Don’t mind Derek,’ my dad would say, ‘Derek’s a talker.’

  Finding God changed his life, Derek reckoned. ‘After that, it was no more boozing for me, no more taking the Lord’s name in vain, no more Korean tarts.’

  I wouldn’t have minded hearing more about the Korean tarts, but my mum would say, ‘Ah well, what’s done is done,’ or, ‘least said soonest mended,’ and offer him another Jaffa Cake.

  He had a way with words, Derek did, but as long as Dad was there he was just television, a programme you’d watch while it was on and then not think about until next time.

  Dad was a painter and worked for himself, which meant he worked for whoever would pay him the hourly rate. He loved paint – it was the icing on the cake, he said, the final touch that pulled everything together – all the different stages of the job, the plastering, the carpentry, the tile work – and transform them like magic into a room. People say if you can piss you can paint, but my dad was a craftsman. He’d cut a line along a glazing bar, hand steady as a surgeon’s. His gloss would settle on a door like dew on grass – without a single brush mark, the dimples fading before you’d stopped looking.

  He fell off a ladder and broke his neck. He was painting a ceiling at the top of a stairwell and had a heart attack, but it was the fall that killed him. Next thing I know we’re having prayer meetings in the lounge. That summer Mum put the house on the market and we caught the bus.

  It was all right for me, Caro, the Jesus bus. As long as we kept moving. I missed out on a few years of school and what might have gone with it – friends my own age, football. I never got any qualifications, but it didn’t hold me back. I made enough to buy this house. I got you. For Penny, though, it started too soon and ended too late. In her mind, I don’t know if she ever escaped. What was she learning all those years? Hard to imagine. Hard even for me and I was there for some of it.

  To start with at least we had Walter, which was better than nothing. We’d sit in class on the top deck and he’d say, ‘They are all gone into the world of light,’ and he might be remembering old friends from his missionary days, or he might be doing English. English was the poems Walter had learned at school. There weren’t any books on the bus, apart from the Bible, so he did it all from memory – Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Kipling, Masefield. He recited bits of Shakespeare but never told us they were speeches from plays. We’d get no warning that a poem was on its way. It would just start coming, and something in the sound would tell you – the first rhyme or just the way the words knocked against each other. We learned from Walter that the quality of mercy is not strained, and that the child is father of the man, and that the old order changeth, giving place to new. Then he’d get back to history – or geography, which was history with maps drawn on the blackboard – and we’d learn how the old order of British rule had given place to shabby arrangements about which there was nothing interesting to say.

  He lived in the past. He was sentimental about a British working class that no longer existed. He admired doers – men who got their hands dirty or fought in the front line or understood the customs of the Punjab. And he’d get misty-eyed over Indians who’d worked with him in Jalandhar. One in particular, called BJ Chaudhry – a name that would come falteringly to his mouth, followed by silence or a growl of throat clearing.

  Mornings on the Jesus bus we studied Walter’s brain. We listened. We wrote things down. We answered questions to show we were awake. Then we were free.

  Free to get up to no good, usually, until someone collared you to clean the bus, or scrub a bucketful of spuds, or help Derek with the chemical toilet, which was just for emergencies but filled up pretty quick even so. I learnt fast and was good with my hands, so I’d be sent on the roof to patch a leak, or underneath with gaffer tape and wire hangers to keep the exhaust pipe from rusting off. When Derek had a job on – fixing someone’s boiler, say – he’d take me. I spent half my childhood up a ladder or with my head in a cupboard or my arm down a drain. Plumbing was Derek’s trade, but we’d turn our hands to whatever would earn us folding money.

  We kept moving. Stopped where we could – lay-bys, backstreets, patches of waste ground, windswept moors where sheep grazed and sullen ponies stared into the rain. There’s only so long you can park a double-decker bus with a stove-pipe poking out the window before someone’s hammering at the door, telling you to move on, or sniffing around with awkward questions. But wherever we showed up, there were people to welcome us, odd jobs for us to do. We were on the grapevine, you see, Caro. Celebrities for Christ. We’d done what they talked about doing – we’d given all that we had and followed Him. That was worth a food basket, or five quid over the odds for unblocking a sink. We were the Jesus bus and a donation was the next best thing to getting on board.

  The grown-ups had taken to complaining about it – all this moving. They’d grumble when they thought we couldn’t hear. It began to come up during prayers. Derek would open the Book in search of guidance. Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it. But where were we to look for Nineveh? I will live in thy tabernacle forever. And wasn’t the Jesus bus our tabernacle? Cheryl, who was Tiffany’s grandma, hated the cold. It played hell with her veins. She’d been a streetwalker, she told us, before she let Jesus into her heart, but she’d never done drugs, not like her daughter, Tiffany’s mum, who was still on the game rou
nd King’s Cross, God help her. All that standing was murder on the legs. And you couldn’t wrap up warm, even when it was freezing, or they’d never see what was on offer. They shall enter into my sanctuary. Tiffany would have a different life, thanks to the Jesus bus, Cheryl said, but it was hard even so, not to be able to put your feet up by the fire of an evening and watch a bit of telly. And the Lord appeared unto him and said, Go not down into Egypt. Dwell in the land which I will tell thee of. Yes, but which land was that?

  It was all right for Derek. He liked driving the bus. He liked wrestling with the gearbox on the hills. It took muscle to turn the steering wheel. He’d get called a thieving gyppo, like the rest of us, or a pikey, or an asylum, but he got respect too. He was a prophet with plumbing skills. What more could you ask for?

  He was a believer, Derek, I’m not saying he wasn’t. But God’s plans had an uncanny way of falling into line with his own convenience. So when his back started playing up and it got hard for him to steer the bus along those backstreets and country roads, his revelation at Bible study shouldn’t have been such a surprise. But it got everyone’s attention. Even in mum there was a shift from one kind of stillness to another.

  Mum. My mum, Penny’s mum. She was there, more or less, on the bus with the rest of us. And she did her share of the work, though maybe not so much mothering. It seems to me now that she held the bus together. Arguments ran aground against her silence. She wasn’t calm, exactly. She was a light bulb that flickered from time to time as though it might go out. The less she said the more the others waited. ‘What do you think, Flo?’ someone would ask. ‘I’m right though, Flo, aren’t I?’ And they’d wait while she flickered off and on again. If I ever doubted that there was a world of the spirit more real than this one, I only had to look at her. For all his visions, Derek seemed too heavy-footed to get anywhere near Heaven. My mother was already halfway there.

  So who was looking out for Penny? It wasn’t so bad as long as the bus kept moving. But everything changed when we parked in Lloyd Morgan’s field and the tyres went soft and the weeds grew.

  Agnes

  The worst thing has happened. I thought the worst would be a flogging, or to be sent from the Hall and never study with Sarah again, but this is worse.

  Mother is dead and I am locked in the red room.

  I’m not the first. Were there others when I was young? Before I can remember, there were others, I know that for certain. Before I was born. I dreamt just now that they spoke to me one after another while I lay in bed.

  Yesterday I was with Brendan at the O. We’d been gone from the village for two days and I thought we would come back and find everything the same.

  I was comfortable against Brendan’s back as we came near the Hall and lost in my own thoughts. But something was wrong. I felt it in his body even before he spoke. He pointed and there were flecks of light away on the moorland road.

  ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘If something’s happened, Janet will tell you.’

  I slid to the ground. Brendan took me by the wrist and held me hard. ‘Remember, Agnes. Tell no one. Trust no one.’

  I nodded and he let me go.

  What gives a cottage life when work is done and the candles are out? When you walk past on the street what tells you all is well with your neighbours? Do you feel the warmth of their breathing or hear through the walls the snorts of sleep? I don’t know if the silence I heard was truly different, but I knew I was alone. When I opened the door to our cottage it was the pig I thought to hear first, but heard nothing. I stood in the kitchen, wondering. Someone came in at the back and I thought a scrounger was come to murder me. Then he spoke and it was Roland. ‘Everyone was looking for you,’ he said, ‘but they’ve gone now to the moor.’

  ‘Then someone is dead.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Where does my mother say I was?’

  ‘You should come with me. Most people have set off. The men will be digging.’

  ‘I can’t hear the pig. Listen, Roland. She roots around in the straw under the staircase. Did mother leave her out in the yard?’

  He looked at the floor then and told me, ‘Your mother is dead and the pig strung up in Morton’s shed with its throat cut.’

  ‘Dead of what cause?’

  ‘You should come with me to the moor. They’ll be finished digging soon enough. You know she must be buried by daybreak.’

  ‘You go,’ I said, ‘and you can tell them you found me sick and I’ll be there soon.’ I couldn’t be with Roland. He was angry with me, and I couldn’t blame him. He had more reason to be angry with me than he knew. I wanted not to be with anyone.

  When he was gone, to quiet myself I went and sat in the murk. It’s a mournful place and fitted my mood. I stared out through the glass towards the broken walls of the ruin where they say the Monk once lived. The river beyond it was dark and the birch trees looked pale against it. I thought of drowning and wondered how my mother had died. I heard the warblers in the reed bed and the wind hushing them, but I had no one to hush me. No one to say, Sleep Agnes, let the old day rest behind the hill. And so I pulled the door closed to be more alone. It moved as stiff as an old dog and whined like a dog too. I knew then that the murk hadn’t always been like this, scabbed with rust and mossed over, yellow tendrils straggling across its floor, the leather chairs dry and cracked showing their insides of twisted wire and wool like a ewe caught in a hedge. It once gleamed like a scrubbed kettle and people sat happy in it. Perhaps it even moved, as people say, all by itself, its metal wheels carrying it out along the drive and over the bridge into the village, to the cottage where I used to live with mother and must now live alone. Or out past the ruin and into the forest towards the towers of the endtime and the O where the Jane Writer hums.

  I remembered that in the pictures there were closed carts, much like this, that moved with no horses to pull them.

  Then it came to me that while I was off enjoying strange pleasures my mother was left alone to die. It was as though a hand reached inside and squeezed the breath out of me. I knew I was to blame. I hunched over with the pain of it, resting my head on the wheel. I rocked back and forward again, hitting my head to see if one pain would drive out another. When I stopped, I felt the broken skin and saw the stain of blood on my finger. And I found I was angry. Wasn’t it always like this, Janet sapping the joy out of everything, making me feel bad? Why had the earth taken my father and let her live on, sad and useless?

  After a while I took the moorland road and came on the villagers gathered for her burial. The men had done digging the pit and were laying the kindling for the fire. Faces turned to me as I walked through the bracken. The torchlight moved on them so that they seemed to scowl and grin and scowl again.

  Mother’s body lay beside the pit, wrapped in a sheet. I walked towards her and the villagers moved aside, but when I came close Peter stepped up to block my way. His coat smelt warm and mealy from baking bread. Morton limped to join him all cow dung and stale milk. I said I wanted to see my mother, I wanted to see her face before they shovelled earth and stones on her. Peter looked away and said something I couldn’t hear. I pushed at him but he held me. He mumbled about the pig, and spat into the bracken, and said she wasn’t fit to be seen.

  ‘What, though, about the pig? Why is the pig killed?’

  It was Morton who answered, his face near mine. ‘Janet cut her own throat, Agnes, as she sat with the pig for company.’ It was an unkind thought that didn’t need saying. I thought it was bad luck for Annie to have a father like that, and worse luck for me to have no father at all, and now no mother either.

  I said I wanted to look at her, and I would. I knelt to pull the sheet back and saw her dead. One eye stared at nothing. The other eye was gone and the whole side of her face eaten away – the flesh like summer fruit ready for stewing, and what teeth she had left showing like plum stones.

  I felt someone kneel beside me and saw it was Sarah, and was glad to have her, so
kind and beautiful, beside me, and to feel she had forgotten our quarrel. She helped me to my feet and held my arm to keep me from falling. The men were airing the flames with leather bellows. The Mistress stood at the pit to say the words of the Book of Moon and all the voices in the village stumbled after, low with dread. When they said goodnight to the stars, the sound roared in my head. A mist came over my eyes – not tears, but as if I saw nothing but my own blood. When they spoke of air, my lungs emptied and all the air departed from the moor and I thought the world was done with breathing.

  They passed round fennel tea to stave off sickness. But my mother had drunk fennel tea as often as anyone in the village and she had died anyway. Her body was leaky and stiff but would have limped on if her thoughts hadn’t killed her. No tea could protect her from her thoughts. I waved the bowl aside when it reached me.

  The men lowered her into the pit and watched while the fire singed her sheet and smouldered and dwindled and I watched with them. The smoke caught in my throat and made my eyes water and when I could see again the fire was gone and the hole had sunk into blackness. Everyone fell to coughing. Some coughed to keep death away but I coughed because the wind blew against me and my mouth was full of ash. The only fire now was in my head – to think I would never see my mother again, to think I had wished her dead, or wished myself away from her which was as bad. The wind had carried off the smell of burning and brought in its place the sweetness of heather. I saw the dark shape of the hill against the sky, heard a blackbird and a meadowlark, felt the villagers’ impatience to be gone. It was time to gather wood and carry water. But I couldn’t stop myself from speaking.

  ‘What words are there for Janet?’ I said it quietly at first but then again louder so everyone would hear. ‘What words for my mother?’

  The Mistress looked at me sharply across the pit and spoke sharply too. ‘We’ve said all the words that are to be said.’