The Book of Air

by Joe Treasure

  ‘So what was her life?’

  ‘Her life was what all lives must be.’ For a moment she looked lost – this wasn’t the schoolroom for me to be asking her questions. Then the familiar answer came to her. ‘Life is a fire that burns itself out.’

  ‘But there was no fire in her. It was smothered years ago. What did you do to her to make her that way?’ I was looking at the Mistress, then turning all about to shout at the others. ‘What did you do to her?’

  ‘Gently, Agnes,’ Sarah murmured. ‘These are private words.’

  ‘Every day, though, I have spoken to her – about the pig or the garden, about the coming rain or when the rain would stop – and felt I was blowing on embers, emptying my lungs to breathe a spark of life into hers.’ I didn’t know what I wanted to say, only that I must speak or be stifled by my thoughts. ‘The fire in her was gone out. Even before my father died, she was only half alive. What cruel thing happened to make her like that? Why did she never speak of it? And now she’s gone what will be remembered of her? Will we write her story? Jane is kept alive among us. If Jane why not Janet?’

  I stopped speaking because I knew that the next word would be my book. But I had already said more than I should. Sarah’s hand was tight on my arm and I saw in the growing light the fear in my neighbours’ eyes. If Jane why not Janet? The whisper of my words was like a breath of wind in the bracken. I saw Roland turn away, staring hard at some distant object. Beside him, Megan looked at me open-mouthed, not yet daring to be pleased. It was the old women who came, three of them moving forward from among the other villagers, Reeds now not women, though they had no time to dress and veil themselves. I felt Sarah’s reluctance to give me up. Then her grip loosened and it was the women who held me.

  ‘Where is Brendan?’ I said. ‘Brendan won’t let you take me.’

  ‘The Reader doesn’t concern himself with you,’ the Mistress said.

  ‘He loves me though. He’d tell you if he was here.’

  ‘These are wild words, Agnes. You must be taken care of while the madness is tamed.’

  They made way for me, my neighbours, shuffling aside with their eyes cast down. Only Annie pushed herself towards me. She put her arms round my neck and I felt her tears on my face.

  And where was Brendan all that time? In his chair by the fire, lifting the delicate pages of the Book of Windows? Or stretched out in his bed? Is he there now, ten paces from where I sit? I could shout out to him but would he come? I could call him silently, but even this close, tied as we are by our journey and everything we saw and everything we felt, would he hear me? I don’t think so, for all his studying, though I love him harder than I had thought possible.

  Jason

  I’ve been with Abigail to check some of the farms out along the England road. There were three dead in the house at Abbeymill, their bodies ripe and buzzing. We wrapped scarves round our faces and dug them a shallow grave behind the barn. They repaid us with a clutch of spades and rakes and hoes, three axes, some rolls of bailer twine and a good sharp saw, besides what we found in the kitchen – mainly knives and a haul of tinned food. At Higdon we rounded up some geese. Abigail enticed them into their house with grain, and we dragged the whole thing up on to the cart. There was the old woman shrivelled in her bed under a cloud of flies. Next thing I knew I was standing in a trench with Abigail leaning down to pass me a shovel. She said, ‘Where did you go?’ and I couldn’t tell her because I didn’t know.

  We stood in silence at the graveside. When I was a kid they used to say, I am the resurrection and the life. But what would those words mean now?

  ‘It’s sad,’ I said, ‘to be buried by strangers and no one left to remember you.’

  Abigail nodded. ‘Sadder still not to be buried at all.’

  ‘What will it be like for us?’

  ‘We’ll have family, friends, children.’

  Riding home on the cart I ask her where she grew up and she says, ‘West of here.’ There’s a hint of Welsh in her accent but some London as well. She’s hard to place. We’re both watching out for signs of life, signs of danger. We glimpse a couple of survivors dodging into a barn and feel them watching through the slats as we pass. Young or old, male or female? Hard to tell. Further on there’s smoke rising from the corner of a field and a smell of roasting meat. A head appears from behind a wall and we hear voices. Then our view is obscured by trees. A soft wind dries the sweat on my shirt and stirs the branches overhead. In the distance one of the church bells is going – faintly and without any pulse. I hear the sound filtered through birdsong. I lose it and find it and lose it again, so I think it’s only in my head, until it’s unmistakably there, an uncertain heartbeat. It has me listening to the birds – soft hoots and cries and elaborate repeated trills. A fantastic jumble of sound that ought to be cacophonous but is utterly, bewilderingly beautiful. And so much of it, coming from so many directions at once that you forget to notice. I hear it like a building, one course laid on another, up and up, but so light that it floats. I’m lightheaded, I think, from the day’s work. And at its centre now this metallic resonance. And something else scurrying round it – Django’s clarinet.

  I asked him yesterday what kind of music this is that sobs and wails and isn’t quite jazz and isn’t quite anything else, and has its own way of tugging at you. I asked him if it was gypsy music or what, and he took the reed from his mouth long enough to smile and say ‘If you like’ and started up again.

  At the far end of the wood we reach the church in a burst of evening sunlight. I pull the horse to a stop and get down. Abigail follows me into the porch. I lift the latch. When I open the door, the monkey scampers out and chatters off among the gravestones. There’s that Anglican smell of hassocks and musty hymn books. Beyond the pews, beyond the chancel rail, Django is sitting on the altar, legs hanging, the flared end of his clarinet making shapes in the air. Behind him, in the stained glass, bodies in loincloths rise from their graves to join God or to be pitchforked into everlasting torment. I turn the other way, towards the tower, pushing through the velvet curtain. Between a rail of cassocks and a stack of chairs the bell ropes dangle, and there’s Simon in a haze of dust jumping and swinging.

  ‘All right, Si?’

  ‘I’m…’

  ‘Django taking care of you?’

  ‘Django says I’m…’ His neck tightens and he sucks in breath through his nose. He’s doing his w-face, which makes him look as if he’s about to hoot like a baboon.

  ‘Whizzing through the jungle?’

  ‘Not that.’

  ‘Walking on the moon?’

  ‘Not that either. Django says I’m…’ And his neck tightens again.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Abigail asks him. ‘Did someone feed you?’

  Simon lands on his feet, totters but stays upright, and walks over to Abigail. ‘You have to listen to me.’

  Abigail smiles at this. ‘You have big lungs for a little boy.’

  ‘I’m not little. Django says I’m… wonderful.’

  Abigail’s still taking this in and Simon is looking at her with big solemn eyes, when Deirdre pushes through the curtain. Aleksy follows, gasping for breath.

  ‘Did you see someone?’ Deirdre turns from me to Abigail. ‘Is that why you rang the bell?’

  Abigail asks her who she means, who we might have seen.

  ‘Looters, scroungers. You didn’t see them?’

  ‘No,’ I tell her, ‘we’ve seen no one.’ Abigail looks at me, surprised at the lie, but I’m not inclined to feed Deirdre’s fears. ‘It wasn’t us rang the bell. It was Simon.’

  ‘Well I hope you’re going to smack his bottom,’ Deirdre says, ‘teach him a lesson he won’t forget in a hurry.’

  Abigail takes her hand and she stops moving about. ‘There’s no harm done, Deirdre.’

  ‘Maybe not, but you shouldn’t ring the bell, do you hear, Simon? Not unless there’s danger. Tell him, Jason.’

  ‘Hear that, Si?’ I said to him. �
��You shouldn’t ring the bell.’

  Simon’s fighting to say something. His lips are open and I can see his teeth. He feels the injustice but can’t defend himself. He’s glaring at me, trying to say my name.

  ‘And there is harm done, actually, Abigail,’ Deirdre says. ‘My journal’s gone missing.’

  ‘It’ll turn up,’ I tell her.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Either it will or it won’t, but there’s not much we can do about it.’

  ‘But someone’s been in my room, going through my things. It gives me the creeps.’

  ‘Who – who’s been in your room?’

  She gives me a withering look. ‘Well obviously I don’t know who.’

  Simon hasn’t given up yet. He’s shaking with fury. He points through the curtain, and I see it’s not Jason he’s trying for, but the other J.

  ‘Was it Django?’ I ask him. ‘Did Django tell you to do it?’

  He nods emphatically.

  Deirdre snorts with annoyance. ‘Oh for God’s sake, Jason, if you’ve got nothing useful to contribute…’

  ‘Look, everybody,’ Aleksy says, ‘I understand this. Deedee’s journal. It’s personal. We can respect that, Jason, yes? We can promise, each one of us, if it comes into our hands, not to look, not to read. OK?’

  He’s looking at me, so I make a submissive gesture and say, ‘Yes, obviously.’

  He turns to make eye contact with Abigail.

  She says, ‘Of course. We’re not to read it. What is it, a newspaper?’

  There’s a pause while this sinks in, that Abigail doesn’t know what a journal is. I hear the monkey clambering on the roof. Beyond the curtain the clarinet is still bleating and bubbling.

  Abigail looks self-conscious. ‘An old one, I thought, maybe, that Deirdre likes. Is it something else?’

  ‘It’s just a kind of notebook,’ I tell her. Then I ask Aleksy, ‘What about Django?’

  ‘Here we go,’ Deirdre says. ‘It’s always the same with you.’

  ‘I only said…’

  ‘You just can’t stand that Django’s happy and you’re not. That he’s full of life and you’re… the opposite.’

  ‘I only meant…’

  ‘What about Django? Like a child who thinks he got the smaller piece of cake.’

  ‘I meant, what about asking him…’

  ‘Django would never take something of mine without permission. He’d never take anything. I’ve never met anyone less interested in things.’

  ‘What about asking him not to read it if it turns up, like Aleksy said – that’s all I meant – the same as he asked all of us. Jesus Christ.’

  There’s more I want to tell her, if I can get my thoughts in order, but suddenly she’s crying. Abigail gathers her up, one hand around her shoulder, the other smoothing her hair. She catches my eye and I decide to say nothing.

  Between sobs, Deirdre says, ‘It’s not about that. There’s nothing for anyone to read. I haven’t written anything yet. Not anything. That’s what I can’t bear – that my whole life is just a blank.’ For a while she weeps against Abigail’s bosom. Then she pulls away and starts talking more clearly. ‘It was a present to myself for my birthday. I went on a course called Writing the Spirit, and the teacher said write every day, keep a journal. So I bought it and it was so beautiful and I wanted something really significant to happen – not just, you know, went for a lovely ride, Pedro lost a shoe, blah, blah. I wanted to have a significant thought. Then people started getting sick and I didn’t want to write someone died in our village today – not on the first page, like the first ever thing I wrote. And we were all scared. I was so scared it made me sick. People said you have to eat. They said eat fresh fruit. My mother phoned to tell me they were saying on Facebook to eat ginger. And I didn’t want to just write that, about eating ginger. It was meant to be about my life, and my life had been suspended while these horrible things happened. Then my mother died, and that evening I opened the book and was about to write, my mother’s dead, but I stopped and wondered who am I writing this for? Because suddenly everyone was dying, and I didn’t know who’d be left to read it, who’d be left who knew or cared anything about me.’

  It’s quiet for a while. The clarinet’s stopped. The light is going. If there’s birdsong still it doesn’t reach us through the walls. We stand in the heavy indoor silence thinking or not thinking. And it’s not like silence used to be. It has no meaning. It’s like the silence of cattle. We’re just waiting for the next thing, whatever the next thing might be. And I’m back at Abbeymill Farm, the dead with their sunken faces and the flies drunk and reeling. I’ve no patience with Deirdre and her journal. The smallest loss is a window on catastrophe – by now we all know this – it’s everybody’s story but she claims it as her own.

  Abigail touches Deirdre’s face. ‘I know, love,’ she says, ‘I know. There’s nothing left but work. At least we still have that. Animals to feed, water to carry. That’s all there is. It’s what will save us – doing it, and having it to do.’

  Deirdre hugs Abigail and kisses her and rests against her for a minute. She makes to leave through the curtains into the body of the church, then turns and puts her finger to her lips. Django is lying on his back on the altar, apparently asleep. Abigail smiles and I see that Django is to be endlessly indulged and I am forever to be thought mean-spirited and envious for not falling in love with him. Even Abigail, in the end, will take his side, and my anger will turn inward until there’s nothing in my head but the stink of death and flies swarming because there’ll be no one else who sees what I see.

  The horse has pulled the cart a few steps and is munching the grass on the roadside. The monkey is jumping on the roof of the goose house, setting the geese scratching and hissing.

  ‘You found geese,’ Aleksy says. ‘I’ll ride with Jason. We’ll set them down in the top field. Come, Rasputin, leave the birds alone.’

  I lift Simon on to the cart and we move off. The women cross the lawn towards the house – no longer a lawn, with no reason to keep the grass down. The shadows of the orchard trees reach out towards them. Maud, crossing with buckets from the spring, waits for them by the front door. As we turn in through the gate, I hear the reassuring murmur of Abigail’s voice and I see the gentle way she and Maud touch each other’s arms and hands. I want to be soothed by the sight of it but I’m too angry to be soothed.

  Agnes

  I think I will become mad. I am already mad. They were right to put me here. I hear sounds. I am afraid to write what I hear. More than sounds – women whispering, breathing. I lie in bed and can’t tell if the voices are outside me. I touch my mouth to see if it’s me talking. I put the pillow over my head but the voices are louder. They are inside the walls or under the floor. What I took for a dream is no dream, or I’m asleep and can’t wake up, or I’m dead and this room is the Book of Death.

  Sometimes the voices make no sense. When they make sense it’s worse because I know then it can’t be the wind in the chimney or water leaking behind the parapet. And it can’t be rats nesting, though I can hear their squeaks and the scratching of their little feet.

  A voice says, ‘My baby had a twist in its face and all its mouth gaping so I strangled it and said it came out dead.’ A voice says, ‘It was Milly stole Esther’s bantam but she told them it was the scroungers and I agreed for fear of Milly’s sharp nails.’ A voice says, ‘Back again dearie, where’ve you been?’

  The voices say things about the Mistress. That she eats nothing but gorse and blackthorn. That she rocks in her chair alone in the schoolroom and rubs herself for pleasure with the Book of Moon.

  I hear nothing of this during the day, only the shouts of the children coming to the schoolroom or the knocking of feet on the stairs. When the boards creak outside my door I know someone is listening for me or come with food for Brendan. They come with food for me too, the old women in their green veils. They unlock the door and put a bowl of stew on the floor and
wait while I bring them my pot for emptying, but say nothing. I hear the horses, their hard hooves in the yard, and the cartwheels rattling.

  It’s only at night the voices come.

  ‘It was me stole Esther’s bantam because Esther had my husband in the barn.’

  ‘I have scissors from the endtime that I use in secret to cut my hair.’

  ‘A scrounger came to me in my dream and had me, and I liked it.’

  I walk up and down and hum and hold my hands to my ears, but then I stand still and listen because I can’t stop myself.

  ‘I love Samuel so hard I ache to think of him, why won’t Samuel love me back?’

  When they brought me to the red room they took my shoes from me and my scarf, so I wouldn’t hurt myself they said. Now my feet are all splinters from pacing in the dark and my hair falls around my face.

  ‘They said I hid the gin jug after Annie’s wedding and was drunk for two days but it was a lie, I was sick with the earache and fell on the stairs. And the Mistress means to flog me, don’t let her flog me, I’ll come every night with candles and sage if you’ll stop her.’

  They speak to me as though I can help them, as though I have power that they don’t have, but I’m locked up here and can do nothing, not even for myself, not even to get food when I’m hungry or water to wash in.

  ‘Clay comes to me at night in dreams and tells me he loves me, but by day he stares at the ground and scratches at his leg when I pass. If Milly fell sick of a cancer or slipped on the bank when the brook was in flood or ate poisoned toadstools would Clay love me best?’

  My room has one window looking towards the moor. At first I could see nothing through it but a dim green light, the way a newt or a tadpole must see the sky when the pond is all weeds. But in the corner of one of the low panes was a hole big enough to put my arm through and I pulled away all the strands of ivy I could reach. I scratched myself on the glass and might have done worse if I’d taken less care. I might have killed myself like mother, without the pig to help me.