by Joe Treasure
I might still.
Perhaps this is what they mean me to do, and taking my shoes and scarf was just to make me suffer.
I can see now down over the stable roof into the yard. And I can see the moorland road. And if I push myself against the wall on one side I can see the top of the vegetable field and on the other side the trees of the High Wood. But none of this clearly because of the dirt on the glass. And I can see that the walls are the colour of drying blood. I think of all the women who have been here before me since the endtime.
They speak to me as if they can guess my worst thoughts even before I’ve thought them.
‘Janet had a child before she was married and smothered it for shame.’
It’s not much of a room for pacing, though bigger than the rooms in our cottage. You can see where the roof leaks by the lines of moss growing down the walls. There’s a basin from the endtime, full of dry leaves and mulch from the ivy that straggles over it, and a bed with a straw mattress and a straw pillow and a wool blanket. There’s a mirror on the wall above the basin, but cracked and stained so it shows only pieces of my face. Between the pieces there’s the wall and the mildew trapped behind the glass in patches of green and yellow.
In one corner of the room is a walled space like its own little room, and the walls inside covered in flat brown stones cut square like the stones on the kitchen floor. I sit here at night to quiet the voices, and pace here sometimes, though one big stride this way and then that way is all it takes. A carved ridge runs round the walls at the height of my waist, showing like a half buried tree root. Such delicate patterns only the endtimers could make. I rub my hand along it for comfort. And there’s a shelf carved into the wall that I have made my secret place.
I don’t know what I mean by this. In the red room there are no secrets. Or else everything is secret. I have become a secret. Do they talk about me in the village? I think they are afraid to think of me. There is a whisper of Agnes, daughter of Janet, and heads turn about to see who listens. The Reeds could see my secret place if they took a step from the door and looked. But I have put a green beetle shell there, and a white feather that might be from a dove’s wing, and a round bottle stopper of glass that catches the light when I hold it to the window and draws lines of colour on the floor.
Was there a dove here to drop a feather? How did it get in? And did it die? Or did the feather catch in my hair as they dragged me down the moorland road?
Sometimes they seem to talk between themselves but know I’m listening.
‘That Sarah had a child by Brendan when she wasn’t much more than a child herself. Kept to her room for months while her belly swelled, studying the Book of Air. And Janet helped her have it in secret at the Hall. Then she and Brendan gave it to the scroungers. Janet told me this herself when she had a fever and thought it was her own dead mother mopping her face.’
My real secrets – my ink bottle, my pen, my book – I keep under my skirt where no one looks. The bottle is almost dry, but the empty pages still stare up at me, hungry for words. I will become mad if there is no more ink. If I don’t bleed.
If they forgot to feed me, if I knew no one would come, if they were all dead of some disease and only me left alive, locked in this room, and one piece of bread only, I would take one bite each day and try to live. And so with my ink. I should make myself not write until I must.
‘My father died when I was a child, and Roger came at night to our cottage and hurt me, and I thought if my mother died too I would be an orphan and live at the Hall, so I put hawthorn berries in her stew and she was sick until her skin turned yellow. For twenty years I’ve nursed her, but kept the cause hidden. I should be flogged to a rag.’
Sometimes at night the smell of sage rises from the herb garden all the way to my window to mingle with the honeysuckle blooming on the wall.
‘Poor Janet had a child born tiny, before it showed, and dead as a box. She buried it in secret, they said, and for weeks after lay staring at the wall. Then she took her brother Morton’s leather belt and put it tight round her neck. So they locked her in the red room to bleed four times – once for each book, till she should be brought to a right understanding.’
‘The Mistress goes to the Ruin every new moon and meets there with the Monk. They say you can see the teeth marks on her teats.’
‘Janet was locked up once and was never the same after. Old Jack her father died clutching his heart to lose her.’
‘It’s nice to have you back, lovey, it’s been too long.’
I’ll go mad if the voices don’t stop. If I don’t bleed. If I have no ink.
Jason
Voices and visions were all in a day’s work for Derek. He’d hear the word of God in the roar of the traffic. One day he told us he’d had a vision of a field bathed in golden light, a barn for worship, a river. ‘Almost a week ago now,’ he said. ‘Last Thursday it must have been because it was the day Lester found a crack in the cylinder head, and we prayed over the bonnet.’
Lester had been a machinist, but had mashed his hand and taken early retirement. Then his wife left him for a trombone player who used to busk on the embankment, and Lester caught the Jesus bus.
‘I took a walk along the canal,’ Derek said, ‘and asked for guidance. I saw the field floating on the water. I didn’t think to mention it. Not until this showed up.’ He held out the envelope, crumpled from sweaty hands and trouser pockets and smelling faintly of dung. ‘It’s been chasing us around the country. See all these addresses.’
It had come from a farmer called Lloyd Morgan. We’d met Lloyd at a revival meeting near Brecon. The date of the letter was the day of Derek’s vision. It had been written, Derek assured us, at the very hour of his walk along the canal. Lloyd Morgan was offering the Jesus bus and its weary occupants a place of rest.
It was a few days later, on that last trip, that they sent us kids off up the road in search of blackberries and we found the orchard and I saw this place for the first time, and I swore I’d have it, with Penny as a witness, and little Tiffany, whose mother was on the game. We stayed that night on the side of the road, near the church. From the top deck where us kids slept you could see the chimney stacks through the trees. ‘I’ll have it,’ I told myself as I went to sleep. ‘I will, though.’ If Derek could have visions, so could I.
I woke from a dream of apples. I was still getting dressed when the bus started up. We only had forty miles to go, Derek said. We’d be at the farm in time for breakfast. Before we’d picked up any speed we passed the gateway to my house and I saw it had a name – Talgarth Hall. And there was the lawn sweeping up to the front door, and there were the apple trees. We turned into a lane that ran along the side of the orchard. I had a glimpse of the stables and a last look at the back of the house, as we rose between fields to a moor where sheep grazed, then down into another valley. Settling into a seat near the front I watched the roads narrowing, the villages getting meaner and more sparse. Crossing a bridge, we joined a river and followed it upstream.
Lloyd was at the entrance to the farm, filling potholes. He gave Derek a sideways nod and led us on foot through the yard and up a track. We followed at a perilous tilt, the old panels creaking, Derek wrenching the gear lever into first as the gradient steepened.
The field Lloyd had in mind for us sloped down towards the river. He had us park at the top end, next to a stone barn with an iron roof. When Derek cut the engine, it coughed a few times and sighed and the silence closed in. You felt the bus and everything in it come to rest. A butterfly settled on the windscreen. You could hear birdsong and the water washing the bank where the river curved around the bottom of the field. For a moment no one moved. I felt their contentment crowding in on me. I knew things would never be the same. I’d lived through changes, Dad dying, then Derek saving our souls, and I had a premonition that this was next – a change we’d never recover from.
Derek called a meeting. He showed us the cold water tap by the gate post, told us w
here we’d be digging the latrines, outlined his plans for the barn, including a couple of sleeping rooms and a gathering place with a log-burning stove. He led us in prayer. To mark this new beginning, he said, he was going to baptise us all in the river. Not all in one go, but over the next few days, because it would take time for the Lord to make known to him what new names we should take. Each of us in turn would renew our commitment to Jesus, opening our hearts to his love. First, though, Derek himself would have to be baptised. He asked Walter if he’d mind doing the honours. ‘The oldest among us,’ Derek called him ‘our John the Baptist, if you will.’ Was I the only one who felt, following that thought to its logical conclusion, that Derek was getting above himself? They did it after breakfast, both of them fully dressed, standing with the water up to their waists. We gathered under the trees to watch.
‘From henceforth,’ Derek said, ‘I shall be called Caleb and this our field shall be known as Hebron.’ He held his nose and dipped down into the water and up again.
While the water was still cascading from his hair, Walter began. ‘I baptise thee, Caleb, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. We thank you, Heavenly Father, that by water you have bestowed upon this thy servant the forgiveness of sin and have raised him to the new life of grace, for the sword outwears its sheath and the soul outwears the breast and the heart must pause to breathe and love itself have rest. Though the night was made for loving and the day returns too soon, yet we’ll go no more a roving by the light of the moon…’ He stopped and we heard the water tumbling over the rocks and watched the sand martins swooping in and out of their nests. Walter looked lost and cold.
After a moment, Derek said, ‘Amen,’ and helped him back to the bank where the women were ready with towels. Walter couldn’t stop shivering, so they piled him with bedding and sat him by the stove.
Next morning Derek had his breakfast alone. He appeared while the girls were washing up. I’d thought about who would be next. Walter, obviously, then Lester, then the women. The kids would be done in order of age, probably. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I could still remember the first time I’d been done – a humiliating experience at the age of ten to have to lower my head over the same pink bowl that Penny had been bathed in as a baby, and in our own front room with our new friends in Christ looking on, whoever they were.
‘I have prayed and fasted,’ Derek said. ‘I have sought guidance from the Good Book. I have looked in my heart where Jesus resides, my Lord and saviour.’ His eyes had settled. I turned to see who he was looking at. It was my mother. ‘Flo,’ he said, ‘the Lord who directs me in all my doings has removed the scales from my eyes. You are to take the name of Azubah.’ And my mother did something I’d never seen her do before. She blushed.
In the Book of Daniel, Caro, Azubah was Caleb’s wife. But if you’d been there you wouldn’t have needed to know that. I knew it, but I didn’t need to. Derek was coming on to my mother. In front of everyone. In front of me. There weren’t any couples on the Jesus bus. I’d never noticed before. There was no reason why I should have. It was the way things were. The kids were too young. As far as I knew, the grown-ups were too old. None of them were married – not to each other, anyway. There’d been a kind of equality in that.
I saw Derek’s game all right. He wanted my mother in a way that it had never occurred to me that anyone might want her. For this, the least of his crimes, I hated him.
I’d always been good – cheerful, eager to get stuck in and do my bit. Now I went on strike. Latrines were dug, the barn was kitted out for sleeping, an old sink was positioned under the water tap. Caleb was directing the construction of Hebron, and I wanted nothing to do with any of it. I slunk out of sight. I went up over the hill towards the woods, or sat by the river. Penny brought me scraps from the kitchen.
Walter was in the farmhouse, in bed with a chill. I climbed in the window and sat with him. I’d hear them calling for me. When someone came with food or a fresh hot water bottle, I’d hide in the wardrobe. Getting off the road was where we’d gone wrong, I was sure of that, and I sensed that Walter felt the same. I’d never thought much about Walter. Now he seemed like a frail lifeline, our only connection with the world beyond Lloyd Morgan’s field. I hung around his room for days. I tried to get him to talk, but he was rambling.
‘What did you mean, Walter, in the river, when you said we’ll go no more a roving?’
‘So late into the night,’ he said.
‘Yes, what did you mean?’
‘Though the heart be still as loving and the moon be still as bright.’
‘Do you think we should keep roving, keep travelling on the Jesus bus?’
‘BJ Chaudhry loved that one. The Isles of Greece – that one too – where burning Sappho loved and sung, where grew the arts of war and peace, where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung. Eternal summer gilds them yet.’ His eyes were moist with tears. ‘But all… except their sun… is set.’
I could only just catch the last of it. After that he stopped talking. Everything slowed down. I don’t know how long I sat there – an hour maybe. I thought he was asleep. For a while he made a noise in his throat like snoring. The intervals between the breaths stretched out, and out, and then he was quiet.
Next day I sat with the others for breakfast. My mother brought me bacon and eggs and some black pudding, which she knew I liked. She gave me a pleading look. ‘Be a good boy, Jason. This is our future now.’
Derek stood up and said that everyone had been baptised except me, and today it was my turn. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘you shall be called Tarshish.’
I knew he meant to humble me. I said, ‘Who’s Tarshish when he’s at home?’
And Derek said, ‘You know, Tarshish son of Javan son of Gomer son of Japheth son of Noah who built the ark and lived for nine hundred and fifty years.’
And I said, ‘Bugger that, I’m not changing my name to Tarshish.’
And Derek got in a strop. ‘You wanna watch it son,’ he said. ‘I’ve had my eye on you, and I reckon you been pitching your tent towards Sodom.’
‘That’s a lie,’ I said, ‘a fucking lie and you know it.’
For a moment I thought he was going to hit me. But he closed his eyes and started praying. ‘Dear Lord Jesus Christ, if it be thy will, cleanse this child of his foul words and foul thoughts and whatever else he’s been getting up to.’ He took a deep breath, while the wind touched the leaves with a dry sound. Then he opened his eyes and said, ‘Come on Lester. Lloyd. Let’s get on with it.’
I turned to run, but Lloyd was standing in my way. I felt his meaty hands on me. Then my legs were lifted off the ground. I saw faces swing past – Granny Cheryl with one hand over her mouth, little Tiffany squirming on her lap, Penny frowning. I saw my mother’s eyes, large and sorrowful, before her head dropped. They carried me into the river and held me upright while I kicked about to find my footing.
‘I baptise thee, Tarshish,’ Derek said. And the rest of it. Then he pushed my head under the water and held it there and, swear to God, Caro, I thought I was done for.
That night I stole an old bike out of Lloyd’s tractor shed. Penny was waiting for me by the farm gates at the end of the track.
She said, ‘I knew you was gunna leave.’
I didn’t say anything – just scowled and shrugged.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t need to if you knew already.’
‘Take me with you, then.’
‘There’s only one bike. You’d go too slow anyway. And the police would stop us.’
She started to cry. ‘If you go, what’ll I do?’
‘You’ll be all right, Pen.’
‘I won’t though.’
I left her crying on the edge of the road. The wheels had stopped turning and the Jesus bus was sinking into madness – I knew that. But I left her anyway.
Agnes
I know what women they are that speak to me at night. I know how I hear their voice
s. I have waited for the sun to rise so I could write this.
I was so frightened in the night that I crawled under the bed, though there was hardly space for me. The dust had gathered undisturbed and I must push my face against it, fearing the touch of mice and spiders.
Before, lying in bed, I was almost used to the talking if it was only stories of the next door children stealing from the garden or questions about how to please a man with kissing. But someone had started again about mother’s dead baby, which I can’t bear to think of. I clamped my teeth and said shut up shut up shut up until my voice was sore and the words lost their meaning. I battered my head on the mattress, afraid it would be the wall next and my skull would be mashed like a turnip.
And so I rolled on to the floor and went sliding headfirst on the splintery boards until even the greenish glint of moonlight was blocked out and I took more dust in at my nose than air.
But the voice came even closer than before. My hand found a hole in the floor the size of a saucer, and when I put my face to it, it was like a whispering at my ear.
I knew then that if I went to the window and looked down towards the yard and waited long enough I would see movement in the shadows and it would be a woman slipping from the end of the yard out into the field, or a woman crossing from the field into the yard. They might see each other in passing and say nothing but goodnight. Or nothing at all, each keeping the other’s secret even to herself, a secret for the women of the village to keep from men and children and from the Mistress and all those who lived at the Hall.
It was the voices from the Grace Pool I could hear, coming up through the hidden pipe.
I put my mouth to the hole and caught the smell of smoke and sage.
I said, ‘I’m thirsty, they don’t bring enough water.’ I said, ‘Open the door. The key is in the lock, which I know because no light comes through the keyhole, and I hear only the key turning not the scraping of it in or out.’ I said, ‘I’m not mad but this room will make me mad.’