by Joe Treasure
I think I slept for a while down there in the darkness.
I said, ‘Hang pans on your fence that will clang when the children climb over.’ I said, ‘Peel a carrot for the baby to gnaw on, small enough for its little mouth, but not so small that it will choke.’ I said, ‘He will love you but only when you have stopped wanting him and then it will be his turn to blush and stammer, and the sight of his staring will make you think of nothing more interesting than field work that must be done and what you must cook for tea.’
There was light that came and went so quickly I thought I’d dreamt it. Then a low rumble of thunder. So it was lightning I’d seen, but too far off to bring rain.
I said, ‘Your father is dead and there is nothing to be thought about it except now it is you that must plant the potatoes.’
I said, ‘Sarah taught me to read the Book of Air and every utterance in it four times each time different, and was kind to me at my mother’s burial, and I would kiss her hands if she was here.’
I said, ‘There are four books but what if there were five?’
I said, ‘We contain air and are contained by air, but the air in the red room was breathed in and in out a thousand times before I was born and in all these years no one has taken a broom to its dust.’
I said, ‘Bring me water. Or turn the key and let me fetch my own water.’ I said, ‘This room is memory and I am lost in it.’ I said, ‘This room is mad and I am its only thought.’
Jason
The goat has begun squealing again and jerking its legs. A final desperate struggle. When Aleksy carried it into the yard, it seemed to have no strength left for squealing, but made an odd snoring noise, staring white-eyed at nothing. He’d wrapped the broken leg with strips torn from his own shirt. You could see the bent shape of it even so, and the angle where the shattered bone had broken the skin, and the seeping blood.
‘Deedee mustn’t see,’ Aleksy said. ‘You know how she is. She loves her animals.’
But Deirdre, standing at the kitchen door, held herself together, though the colour drained from her face. ‘Poor Esther. What happened? Did she wander on to the road? Stupid question. Sorry. No traffic.’
‘Bring a bucket,’ Aleksy said, ‘and a sharp knife.’
‘Funny word, traffic. So many words with nothing left to attach them to.’
‘And a bowl or saucepan. To catch blood.’
‘Yes, sorry. Knife, bowl. And you’ll want a needle and thread.’
‘Needle and thread?’
‘For afterwards. For stitching her up.’
‘Deedee…’ Aleksy faced her with the goat twitching in his arms. ‘Jason and I must kill the goat.’
‘Oh.’
‘For food. And all the goats one time or other. You know this. And pigs, and chickens.’
‘Just a knife then.’
‘And a bucket. And a bowl for blood.’
‘How did you say it happened?’
‘There was a trap in the wood.’
‘And you don’t think they’re out there?’ All her feeling for the goat has risen suddenly and spilled out in this question. ‘You still don’t think they’re coming for us?’
‘An old trap, Deedee. For rabbits. Rusted and forgotten.’
She turns in the doorway and retreats into the shadows.
Aleksy shouts after her, ‘Make sure it’s sharp, this knife.’
It knows it’s done for. When Aleksy lays it down, the legs flail, scrabbling for purchase on the flagstones, and the squealing starts. I kneel on its chest, the way Aleksy tells me, and feel it heaving against me and put more weight on it to stop its bastard noise. It’s Abigail who brings the knife and hands it to Aleksy. She sets down the bucket, while Aleksy squats, and she hands him a plastic ice cream tub. He puts it to one side of him and then to the other, and his face goes through its routine of involuntary grimaces. He’s feeling the neck with his free hand. The knife shakes and then seems to jump forward, pulling his arm behind it. Aleksy’s grunt is lost in the grunting of the goat. And the blood is on his trousers and on the stones and spirting at last into the ice cream tub. He takes the front leg and works it as if he’s pumping water. The back legs kick and the whole body struggles under me and lies still. I’m panting as though I’ve run a mile, and when I stand up my legs shake.
Aleksy kneels in closer with the knife and saws an opening from the neck to the groin.
‘Take hind legs,’ he says. ‘Hold her up, like this.’
I lift until only the head lies sideways on the stones. Abigail comes forward with the bucket, and the stomach and the intestines and all the neatly packed organs flop into it and rearrange themselves.
‘Now water.’
Abigail goes to the corner of the yard, where a wheelie bin, fed by a truncated downpipe, brims from the recent rain.
Aleksy, still on one knee, looks up at me, his shoulders rising and falling. ‘Next time easier,’ he says.
‘You’ve done it before though.’
‘I watched my uncle maybe five, six times. Summers I helped on the farm.’
He helps me tie the goat by its hind legs to the stable door for the blood to drain, and I’m stirred suddenly with love for this short-legged bull of a man who knows things I don’t know. I ask him, ‘Was there fresh meat where you were… during the end times?’ The phrase comes to me from my childhood, to name a time for which there is no name.
‘Not so much.’
He isn’t ready to talk about it, and I’m glad because neither am I.
Abigail is back with an aluminium bucket trailing a wet rope. Aleksy washes his hands and arms to the elbow, then slops water into the cavity and over the skin, sluicing the stones at our feet.
Later I help Abigail prepare a stew with onions, tinned carrots and tomatoes. We gather round the kitchen table. Aleksy raises a glass to Esther whose life was cut short to give us strength and pleasure, and we drink to her in water cold from the spring. We eat the stew with boiled turnip. It tastes good. Deirdre eats hungrily and takes the scrapings from the pot. Simon pushes the pieces of meat to the edge.
I say to him, ‘Simon, eat what’s on your plate.’
Django says, ‘Simon’s a vegetarian.’
‘Simon will eat what the rest of us eat.’
‘Yes, but only the vegetables.’
‘There’s little enough food, God knows. He needs protein.’
‘Today is a new heaven, a new earth. Simon knows that better than any of us.’
‘Don’t speak for Simon. He can speak for himself. Simon, eat everything. You’ll get sick if you don’t eat.’
Abigail rests her hand on mine. ‘Jason’s right,’ she says, looking at no one in particular. ‘Simon must eat and grow strong. And when he’s hungry, that’s what he’ll do.’
We don’t stay long after the sun’s gone down. Our life together has narrowed to these basic forms. Only Aleksy lingers in the kitchen, slumped in an armchair by the stove. Abigail has given him the biggest bedroom, but I don’t know if he ever sleeps there. The monkey, who sat on his lap for a while searching his hair and beard for insects and morsels of food, has wandered off around the house. Abandoned, Aleksy would share a bed with any one of us, I suspect, or have us move all our beds together. Meanwhile he hugs himself in the glow of the fire, while footsteps creak overhead and the old timbers settle around him.
I’m woken by a sound that could be water singing in a loose pipe, but the plumbing’s drained and the taps are stiffening with disuse. I’m reminded of mating cats but can’t dispel the thought that the noise is human. It floats up from a lower room and pulls the hairs upright on my scalp. I put on a shirt and trousers and follow it down the half flight of stairs, along the passage, past the empty second floor bedrooms. I tread quietly, bare-footed on the oak steps, sliding my hand down the spiralling rail. It’s a kind of keening I can hear, a quavering song of panic. It comes from Abigail’s room, the room she shares with Maud, but there’s nothing of Abigail’s voic
e in the sound.
It was a kids’ room before, remember Caro, and we’d left it the way it was.
I stand in the open doorway while my eyes adjust to the darkness. Maud is in the pink bed in the corner and Aleksy stands over her with his back to me, talking. I cross the room, passing Abigail in the blue bed under the window, and she’s suddenly alert.
‘Jason, what is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
We listen to the murmur of Aleksy’s words and Maud’s response, a high note, fragile and unsteady.
‘Maud, it’s all right.’ Abigail gets up and stands beside me in her flannel nightie. ‘Aleksy walks in his sleep,’ she tells me. ‘It’s all right Maud, it’s only Aleksy.’
Together we approach the foot of Maud’s bed. She shivers under the quilt, eyes wide with fear. Aleksy holds the ice cream tub in one hand. He dips his thumb into the goat’s blood and smears a dark stain on her forehead. Her mouth stays open but there’s no sound.
Abigail leans her head towards me. ‘What’s he saying, Jason?’
‘Washed… something. Washed in blood… I don’t know that last word. Lamb, presumably. Washed in the blood of the lamb.’
‘Is that Greek he’s talking, then, or Hebrew?’
‘It’s Polish.’
‘You know Polish? I’ve never heard it spoken.’
‘A bit. Building site Polish.’
‘It’s all right Maud,’ she says. ‘We won’t let him hurt you.’ She touches Aleksy gently, just above the elbow. ‘Come on, Aleksy, it’s done now, washed and sorted. Everything’s all right. Time for bed.’
He turns an ear towards her. Then he breathes in sharply and makes a sudden movement, both arms flying. The ice cream tub rises and tilts, slopping a dark stain across the quilt. Maud starts making noise again – a kind of pulsing hum. Aleksy’s jabbering. So I give him a slap and he wakes up. ‘Christ, Aleksy, look at this mess.’
There’s terror on his face. He blasphemes in his own language. Abigail lifts the tub gently from his hands and he lets her, watching it go. Then he hugs me so I can hardly breath.
‘Aleksy, go to bed.’ Abigail’s voice is quiet but commanding. ‘Take him to his room, Jason, then help me with this. It’s all right, Maud. It’s all over.’
I put my arm round Aleksy’s shoulder and steer him through the door and across the landing. The sky clears as we enter his room and the bed is flooded with cold light.
‘I was dreaming, Jason.’ It’s an apology.
‘I guessed.’
‘I was dreaming that we stood in this garden and there was such food and we stood in the eyes of God, my five brothers and I, and my father home from prison and the twins still alive in their cot.’
‘And the words?’
‘Words?’
‘Washed in the blood…’
I watch him search his memory, draw the vision back from the darkness. ‘We were all priests. All my brothers, all humanity.’ He’s sorry to be awake. ‘And so here we are. And why here? Why us?’
‘No reason.’
‘You got it and survived? No one survived.’
Hear that, Caroline? He speaks like it’s over. It’s time to draw a line between what was and what is.
‘Later maybe, Aleksy, as it went on, people… some of us… built up some kind of immunity. There’ll be others out there somewhere.’
‘But you got it for sure – sweats, staggers, blessing…?’
‘I got it.’
‘You painted? Constructed some beautiful thing?’
‘I sang.’
Aleksy whistles through his teeth. ‘I don’t hear you sing now. And yet you sang. And the rest of us untouched.’
‘We always knew there’d be some.’
‘The immunes, sure. Rumours. But who believed them?’
‘Everyone.’
‘We needed someone to hate. Not so many left to choose from. Russians, Muslims, bankers… dying like the rest.’
‘We had the soldiers to hate. The militias. We had every murdering bastard waiting in the shadows to steal what we’d stolen for ourselves.’
‘Not big enough, not…’ – he makes an expansive gesture – ‘… grand enough. The soul in pain demands an enemy worthy of hatred.’
I find I don’t have much to say about the soul.
‘And so it was us, after all – me, Deedee and Django, Abigail and poor dumb Maud – all immune. We carried the infection of life and we never knew.’
I leave Aleksy’s room. Across the passage, Deirdre’s door is ajar. She sits up in the four-poster bed, pulling the hair from her face. The monkey squats above on the canopy, tasting its own fleas. Just inside the room, a hand reaches up from the shadows and pushes the door shut – Django’s hand.
By the time I get back, Abigail has settled Maud to sleep in the blue bed and pulled the blood-soaked bedding on to the floor. I bundle it up and carry it down to the yard. The shapes of the buildings are beginning to show against the grey sky. I walk into the top field to calm myself, picking my way between the neat rows of Aleksy’s planting.
Agnes
Days pass, so many that I lose count. I am terribly afraid.
There is something I haven’t written. Something that happened with Brendan when we visited the scroungers. This book, that pulls all my secrets out of me and tells them back to me in my own words, had no words for this. And what words will it find, even now?
When the pictures stopped, when the dream faded and all the light was gone from the wall, I couldn’t wake but must sit with the silence churning. Brendan’s voice was quieter than the pulsing of blood. I felt his breath warm on my neck and his arm around me. He felt huge to me then, like the man dark as an eggplant who sang a kiss is still a kiss. If I had thought of Jane. If I had made a space in my mind for her, as Sarah had taught me. But Sarah was far away. And I was somewhere deep inside myself where I could see nothing and think nothing, but could feel every hair on my skin, and the weight of him shifting in his fever and my own chair pushing sharp against me. And I knew only the strength of his hands and his kisses passing down into me like breath into a reed. Was it pain or pleasure I felt? There was pain, certainly. For him as well I think. I heard the suffering in his voice. But sweetness too at last – to hold him, to hush him into stillness. And a time between, when I was no longer Agnes but a field at seed time and all the horses of the village breaking in to trample me and scatter the starlings, and I was the pressed earth and the stones brittle from the winter frosts and the wings rising and wheeling.
Afterwards we walked in silence to the O, and Dell took me by the arm and showed me where she sleeps. I was glad to be in her company for that time, and away from Brendan. I longed to be with him, but I found myself afraid, because I felt there was a river inside me that might rise and burst out in a flood. It calmed me to talk to Dell, though she has such a strange way of talking that I understood only part of what she said.
There was a litter of kittens in a box by her bed. She told me they would live at the O and their mother would teach them to kill mice and rats. We played with the kittens, hugging and stroking them, and Dell hugged me too and stroked me. And I saw that living with Trevor and no one else she knew even less of mothering than I do. I liked to feel her hair, which was beautiful and dark with tiny curls so you could rest your face against it like a pillow. She asked what it was like to live among the planters and I said it was the only life I knew, and that we lived the way we had been taught to live by Jane, our first Governess, and Maud and Mother Abgale who gathered at the Hall at the endtime with those I have heard called the Moons. And she asked why this name, Moons, and I said it was because they came through the blessing and lived until it was their proper time to die, when their page had turned, as set down in the Book of Moon.
For a while we lay together in Dell’s bed. And it soothed me to hold her and be held. I had envied her a little, though I am ashamed now to write this, because Bernard attended to her so closely. But I h
ad quickly come to love her and take comfort in her company. How I long now to feel such warmth. Even to talk to another person. Even to breathe the air outside this room. I can wait and wait but I won’t bleed. Another life stirs in my belly, feeding off the little food I get. There are plums in the orchard, but I’m not there to pick them. Who now lets the geese out in the morning and shuts them up at night against the fox?
Jason
The house creaks and murmurs in its sleep but I’m too agitated to rest. I go down to fetch some tools from the cupboard in the hall – pliers, an adjustable spanner – and climb the stairs again to the bathroom. Your bath floats, sleek and pale against the crimson walls. It reminds me of candles and scented oils, Caro, and your delicate breasts showing above the foam. But it’ll have to go. We need it in the yard for the cattle to drink from. It’s no use here, three flights up with no running water. It won’t take me long to disconnect it – hot and cold, waste and overflow. Aleksy can help me shift it in the morning. No point being sentimental about plumbing. But I hesitate anyway.
The virus got you early, Caroline. People said the best were taken first and I believed them. The average sinners would muddle along behind. And who’d be left? Aleksy was right about the immunes. We began to hate them without knowing who they were, without having any reason to believe they existed. After the first wave of deaths, we sensed the scale of the disaster, and the rumours began. It was impossible to tell who out of all those so far untouched might be actually immune, but people were accused anyway. A doctor on his way home after a sixteen-hour shift on a fever ward was attacked by a mob in a hospital car park. His death was applauded in chatrooms. Ha ha, not so untouchable now you smug fucker!
I feel the distance between me and the others – Aleksy, Deirdre, Django – Abigail even, and Maud. It comes to me with sudden force. Who are they to squat in my house? They’ve never been touched by the blessing, not one of them, never felt its power and sweetness. I’d go through it all again – I would, Caroline – to feel that exultation. I travelled on the Jesus bus, I spread the word of grace abounding to all sinners, but I was a creature of sullen clay until I lost control of my limbs, here in my own hall, and felt the first stirrings of divinity. And now they come snivelling round my house like the end of time is their loss. I’ll take Abigail’s gun to the lot of them. Ha ha not so untouchable now!