by Joe Treasure
‘I wanted to bleed. I wanted to so badly.’
‘And you did. I saw the feather. I see the stain on your skirt.’
‘I knew I wouldn’t, so I cut myself.’
I heard him breathing noisily in the dark and felt him pull away. He said, ‘This is worse.’ Then he asked me, ‘What will you say about this baby?’
‘Whatever you want me to say.’
‘Promise then.’
‘And you’ll make them let me out?’
‘Promise first.’
‘I promise.’
‘To say what I tell you to say.’
‘I’ve promised. What then?’
‘That you were made to. By a scrounger.’
‘Oh. But I can’t.’ I knew all in a rush that there would be a child, a child to grow up in the village and be scorned because she was a scrounger’s litter. I couldn’t let them think that. Her life must be more than mine, even if I must make mine nothing. ‘Please sir,’ I said, ‘something else.’
‘What something?’
‘That it was my fault. That I came to you while you were asleep. Or drunk on gin. That I milked you while you snored. Because your soul cried out to mine in your dreams. Because I am without shame like a sow in heat. Because I want… Because I want my child to be your child, to know all the secrets of the Book of Windows.’
‘There are no secrets.’ He pulled the veil from his head and I could see the dark outline of his face. For a moment he tugged at the neck of his shirt as if he couldn’t breathe. ‘The Book of Windows,’ he said, ‘has no secrets because it has no meaning. It was left to us to make us howl and gibber.’ He spoke so urgently, so angrily that I felt the warmth of his spit.
‘But all the highest wisdom.’
‘Listen to me Agnes. I have read it every way it can be read. Yes, they told us it was the highest wisdom of the endtime, strained and simmered to its essence, that it was the moment of blessing, the breath of all the dying endtimers brought together into one living breath. But I can find in it only the fever that killed them. They were raving who wrote it, parched with the heat of their own blood. What has been boiled and burned away is any touch of thought and all that’s left is ash. I know all the words. I have them in my heart. I say them over, slow and solemn. I bring them here to the darkness of the wood hoping for their wings to open like moths rising into brightness. I speak them to you, Agnes, calling to the spirit of Jane in you, watching for any answering spark, but nothing comes.’ He stared at the ground and I listened to the noise of his breathing. ‘You saw the pictures, Agnes, as I saw them. The scroungers sit and stare and in the time it takes a villager to plough a field or roast a pig they know more about calling than I’ve learned from all my years with the Book of Windows.’
‘But they can’t do it.’
‘No, they can’t do it, they can’t call and be heard, but they can hear the calling. They can see how the endtimers lived and what they looked like.’
‘But they can’t go when they’re called.’
He looked at me then and said ‘No’ and made such a hollow sound of it that for the moment my own sadness was swept away by his.
‘And now here’s one more thing you’ve tricked out of me,’ he said, ‘one more thing for you to babble about – that Brendan has searched his book to its bottom and found nothing.’
‘What trick? And what if you have found nothing? Why are you afraid? There’s no one to lock the door on you, to hurt you and starve you of water.’
‘You don’t know.’
‘You’re the Reader. You live in the turret at the Hall. The backstairs are yours, and the stables. You come and go as you like.’
‘Because, Agnes. Because of what I know. But what if I know nothing? Less even than the villagers think everyone knows?’
The shadows deepened around him and he seemed hunched under their weight. Tiny creatures crept and scurried between us, voles and stag beetles and ants, every one making its own sound. The air shifted and the slender boughs dipped and straightened. I seemed to hear a single twig and the soft fibres of a single leaf snagging on it. Then the wood was a heaving din as if a door had swung open and let the noise out, every forest creature rooting and nestling.
‘If I say, sir, that I crept naked into your bed when you were sleeping.’
‘No Agnes.’
‘If I say that I made you. That I held a kitchen knife at your neck and said either tell me all the secrets of the Book of Windows or give me a child that can learn them or I’ll slice you like a boiled chicken. And you said one of those I can’t do. And I said which. And you said the secrets are for those who give their lives to book learning. And I said, of the other two then, choose.’
‘No Agnes.’ And he whistled as you would whistle a dog.
‘If I say I put the knife to my own neck and made you do it.’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
But the women were coming out of the shadows. I hadn’t thought that the Reeds answered to the Reader’s whistle.
‘Then you are nothing but a coward, afraid to stand up to the Mistress, afraid to do what even poor stammering Daniel found the courage to do when he claimed Annie, though the child wasn’t his.’
It was only then that I saw Uncle Morton’s limp and the solid shape of Peter under the straggle of leaves. And I felt their hands on me again, hands strong enough to wrestle a ram, to fell a tree with three blows of the axe.
‘You must go back to the red room, Agnes.’
‘Then I shall keep no secrets, not yours nor mine, but shout every secret from my window.’
‘And the villagers will bend to their digging and cover their heads to shut out your noise.’
‘They come to me at night.’
‘Who comes to you?’
‘I know I’m not the first. There was a child you sent to live with the scroungers.’
‘No one comes to you, Agnes.’
‘The child you had with Sarah that my mother helped her have, when your child with my mother was already buried in secret.’
I felt the sting of his hand on my cheek and against my ear, and would have fallen if the men hadn’t held me.
He spoke quietly, spitting the words. ‘There was no child, not with Sarah, not with Janet.’
Whatever I shouted then was caught in the scarf pulled across my face.
They hurt my feet dragging them through the woods. I am bruised with kicking and the force of their hands on me, my nails broken on branches, on doorframes and banisters.
I shall be here now until the baby is born. If the baby lives to be born. If I live to see it. I shall dwindle and sicken until my thoughts wander. When my baby is dead, they’ll let me out. When I’m broken. Like a sparrow searching for the air, hitting the walls until it’s too weak to fly. The daylight will hurt my eyes and every sound will scare me and I shall cower in the cottage like my mother, scratching a pig for company. They know my secrets now. Brendan knows all my secrets. I’ve given them up to him for nothing. Brendan doesn’t love me and never loved me.
All except my book. My book is what Brendan doesn’t know. The book is what no one knows because it’s beyond their guessing.
The ink pot is dry. I’m down to the last scratching. Without ink the book is nothing. If I don’t write and if no one reads, it’s nothing. A dream I must wake up from. Agnes daughter of Janet. This is how I write. This is not a text. What is it then?
Jason
Abigail finds me digging. I’m deep in my hole, puddling in murky water, levering up shards of blue-green shale. My life is no bigger than this hole. My mind is as dark.
‘Surely that’s enough.’
Her features are blurred in the bright air. I step sideways, lose my balance and stagger. My shoulder settles softly against the clay wall.
‘Rest, Jason. Drink some water.’
‘I want to get this done.’
‘And you will, but you must take care of yourself. Let me help you u
p.’
I rub my eyes. Her hand reaches down out of a rainbow of shifting light and I raise a hand to meet it. She steadies herself. Cradling a piece of rock, I hoist myself on to the ladder. Three steps up and I’m able to dump the rock at ground level and pull myself out. I stand clumsily. My boots are heavy with mud.
‘I have to get my strength back.’
‘But you push yourself too hard.’ Letting go of my hand, she pulls a cloth from her belt and wipes my face.
‘Is that blood on your skirt?’
‘I’ve been making jam. Now sit there and don’t move. I’m getting you water.’
I settle on the pile of rock and picture what has to be done – the stone lining, the brick flu, the timber structure – door towards the house, window facing the hills for privacy. Some jackdaws are squabbling outside the kitchen. Then Abigail is back with two cups and a jug of water, cold from the spring.
She asks me when I last saw Simon.
‘I don’t know. Breakfast I suppose.’
We sat around the kitchen table with mugs of nettle tea. Abigail poached eggs, dropping them one at a time loose in a pan of boiling water, while I sliced up a bowl of apples. And we talked about the day. Maud and Deirdre had milked the cows already and let the hens and geese out to scratch and peck on the lawn. I’d done an hour’s digging. Aleksy had been in the top field, hacking weeds. Django? It was anyone’s guess what Django had been up to, but here he was anyway, ready to eat. Abigail had given Simon a wash and dressed him in his long trousers and a woolly jumper and he sat for a bit, kicking the legs of his chair and humming between bites of egg before drifting out to play in the yard.
‘We have blades,’ Aleksy said, ‘knives, scythes, axes. But what about… you know, stones to sharpen them?’
‘Whetstones.’
‘Exactly, Jason. What about whetstones? Scythes you must sharpen all the time or the grasses don’t get cut, just…’ He made a whistling noise, dropping his arm from the vertical to the horizontal.
‘You want to go out this morning,’ Abigail asked him, ‘to find whetstones?’
‘Whetstones, yes, and whatever else. To take another look round the farms out on the English Road. I take the cart, if Deedee comes. I don’t handle the horse so good.’
Deirdre was distracted. I thought perhaps she hadn’t slept, or was concentrating on not losing her breakfast. She looked around the table at the rest of us, opened her mouth to speak, shrugged and said nothing. She was reluctant to go – that was obvious – but perhaps just as reluctant to lose her status as horse expert. Maybe being alone with Aleksy was a factor, but I couldn’t tell whether it was a draw or a deterrent.
‘So if you two go,’ Abigail said, ‘and Jason digs, Maud can wash clothes and bedding while it’s fine.’
Everyone seemed OK with that.
‘And Django, you could help me get more wood in.’
An ordinary morning. The kind of morning we’ve come to think of as ordinary. Except that Simon’s missing, and Abigail has pulled me from my digging to enquire about him.
‘So that’s the last time you saw him – at breakfast?’
‘What about Django? Has Django got him?’
‘Django went off by himself about an hour ago – to gather nuts, he said – and left me boiling the jam. Simon wanders but he likes to know where the grown-ups are.’
‘I heard him playing in the shed when I was crossing the yard. Since then I’ve had my head in this hole.’
Not quite true, now I think about it. I looked out later when Aleksy and Deirdre were pulling the cart from the shed, still with its awning advertising Deirdre’s shop and with empty boxes on it –the big horse so quiet, stepping back neatly for Deirdre to hitch it up, and the canvas flapping. Abigail and Django had paused in their work, Django resting on his axe, Abigail looking up from the woodpile. For a moment then I wondered who was watching Simon, but the dark trench claimed my attention.
‘Have you looked upstairs?’
‘I’ve been up and down, calling.’
‘He sometimes won’t answer if he’s busy with something. What goes on in his head, Abigail? Does he think about everything that’s happened?’
‘Children have ways of coping.’
‘What kind of a life is he going to have?’
‘Easier than ours. He’ll grow up into it. It’ll be what he’s used to. We’re still adjusting. He’ll know what his life is from the start.’
It calms me to hear her talk like this. ‘And he’ll be all right when we’re all gone?’
‘There’ll be others, surely. Other children.’ She blushes and looks away towards the moor.
‘Deirdre’s, to start with. You know she’s pregnant.’
‘She told you then.’ She faces me, with a puzzled look that says, why you, I wonder? ‘She asked me to keep it to myself for now.’
‘It’s sort of obvious I suppose. If you know what to look for.’
‘And you know?’
‘Caroline was pregnant. My wife. We were expecting a child.’
‘Oh.’ She takes my hand, calloused and flaked with mud and holds it in her lap. ‘I’m sorry, Jason. That’s hard.’
‘Not as things go.’
I’m conscious of what I’m not saying, not owning up to, while I’m accepting Abigail’s sympathy – that I didn’t discover Deirdre’s secret by looking. ‘I’m sorry, I’m muddying your skirt.’
‘That’s all right.’
The geese come waddling round the side of the house. They push their necks forward and run hissing at the jackdaws, who heave themselves into the air.
‘Can I ask you something, Jason?’
‘Of course you can.’
‘How come Simon’s skin is so dark?’
The question takes me by surprise. I mean, Caro, if someone had asked me something like that in normal times, before the virus, I’ve had said, how come you’ve got shit for brains? But Abigail so obviously means no harm by it that I try to give her a serious answer. ‘Random – that was what Simon’s dad called himself… Random was West Indian. I mean that’s where his parents were from.’
‘From India.’
‘Not Indian Indian. From Jamaica or Trinidad or somewhere. You know – Afro-Caribbean.’
‘You mean they were from Africa?’
‘Originally, I suppose. Their ancestors were. Would have been taken to the West Indies as slaves. But Random was from Peckham.’
She looks blank.
‘That’s in south London. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?’
‘Sorry. You must find me very stupid. I’ve seen Indians. There was an Indian family in the village near our farm. But I’ve never seen an African.’
‘What kind of a life have you had, Abigail?’
‘A simple enough life, I suppose. Simpler than yours. We had a tractor and running water and hot water for washing and cleaning. But we kept to ourselves and ate mainly what we grew.’
‘Did you watch telly? Use the internet?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘But you went to school?’
‘We weren’t to talk to strangers. But the grown-ups taught us things. And when I grew up I taught the younger ones.’
‘Like Maud.’
‘I did what I could for Maud.’
It’s like watching a bird settle on a branch, hearing her talk. You don’t move. You hold your breath almost. Challenge or probe, show too much curiosity, and the wings flap, the branch dips and rises, and she’s gone.
But I ask anyway. ‘Did you have children?’
‘No.’ She looks at her hands. ‘Not yet.’
‘And did Maud never speak?’
‘She was chatty enough at one time.’
‘And what happened?’
She hesitates, drinks from her mug. ‘It’s not my story to tell.’
‘I’ll wait for Maud’s version, then, shall I?’
She looks at me to see that I’m joking and she l
aughs. She’s inclined to cover her face – I feel the impulse in her hand – but instead she turns away, and I see how the laughter lightens her and how young she is.
I’m wondering which of us will be first to let go of the other’s hand and get on with what needs doing. Then we hear the cart on the drive. It’s moving faster than it should. We’re halfway across the yard when the horse comes round the side of the house, dragging the cart at a speed that tilts it on to its outer wheels at the turn. The geese scatter. The jackdaws flap from the stable roof, making their harsh noise. Deirdre pulls sharply on the reins and the horse rears up.
Aleksy is slumped beside her. Deirdre’s shouting, ‘He’s hit, they shot him, he’s losing blood.’ We’re all over him, trying to help him down – Deirdre above him on the cart, Abigail lifting his legs, me pulling at him, taking the weight. And Aleksy’s thumping me, pummelling my shoulder. ‘Not me. The boy. See to the boy.’ I pull away and he stumbles to the ground, cursing in Polish.
I get on the cart and fling the cardboard boxes aside. And there’s Simon in a foetal crouch. He rocks from side to side, humming to himself.
‘What is it, Si? Where’d they get you?’
Abigail is beside me, straightening Simon’s legs, feeling for damage, touching his arms and fingers.
I lift his hand gently from the side of his head. There’s a gash above the ear, muddied and bleeding – not a bullet wound.
‘Is it your head, Si? Does it hurt anywhere else?’
He’s crammed with words that won’t come out.
I carry him into the kitchen, following the trail of Aleksy’s blood. Aleksy is sideways on a kitchen chair, his good arm clinging to the back. Deirdre has cut the shirt sleeve from the injured arm. For a moment the wound is bright and open like a mouth, blood pulsing out of it. She’s knotted a tea towel above and winds it tight with a spoon. Abigail has pushed aside jars of jam to make space on the table for her sewing box. She pulls out pin cushions and reels of thread. She has a sheet over her shoulder. Maud comes up from the cellar with a bottle of brandy. They’ve got stuff stored away I don’t even know about. The kettle’s already rattling on the stove.