The Book of Air

by Joe Treasure

  ‘Simon, Simon, what have you done?’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Deirdre comes round from the yard with Aleksy.

  Through the flames, I see Abigail pushing a wheelbarrow of windfall apples up through the grass from the orchard. ‘Did we need a fire?’ She rests the wheelbarrow, draws a sleeve across her forehead and tucks the stray hairs under her scarf.

  ‘It’s not your fire, then?’ Aleksy asks her.

  I’m listening to that two-note call again, faint above the spitting and cracking. ‘It’s too early for a fire,’ I tell him, ‘and it’s too sodding late for a cuckoo.’

  The cuckoo stops and there’s a giggle. Then the same two clarinet notes, a little falling tune.

  ‘That bastard, I should have known.’ I look up at the house, at the open bedroom windows.

  Aleksy steps in front of me. ‘A fire, Jason. Not such a big deal. A bit of petrol, maybe, siphoned from your car.’

  ‘He burned the books. Look.’ The edges curl and shrivel. Black flakes drift up and scatter. The immensity of it catches in my throat.

  ‘Books.’ Aleksy shrugs and makes a puffing noise. ‘Maybe these are not so important. You got penicillin on your bookcase? You got sausages? We got to eat, old man. We got to feed ourselves and stay warm. We don’t got to read. Punish the boy if you like, but don’t make a meal of it. He’s five years old. He burns your books, so give him a slap, give him a hug. He don’t do it no more. Now we get back to work.’

  ‘This is nothing to do with Simon. It’s Django’s going to have to pay for this.’

  ‘Pay, of course. Give Django a shovel. He can spread the cowshit on the field. Hear that, Abigail. Django works tomorrow or he don’t eat.’

  I hear the sound of a sliding sash and see Django stepping through the landing window on to the roof of the portico, naked apart from his clarinet. ‘The people that walked in darkness,’ he says ‘have seen a great light.’

  ‘Come down here and say that, you fucker.’

  ‘And a little child shall lead them.’

  Maud, who has just appeared at the corner of the house, covers her face and walks to join us with her eyes on the ground.

  ‘We grope like the blind along a wall,’ Django says, ‘feeling our way like blind people. The sun shines but we stumble about in the dark. The world is full of life, but we’re dead.’

  ‘You will be!’

  ‘Your graven images are all vanity. Your delectable things will do you no good.’

  ‘Yes, but they were my graven images, fuckwit, not yours.’ He turns his back on me, turns his skinny backside to climb in through the window. I shout after him, ‘They were my delectable things.’

  Aleksy puts his hand on my arm to calm me. ‘Mine, yours. What does this matter?’

  ‘It matters to me. Mine, not Django’s. My house, my books.’

  ‘By what law? A dead law for dead people.’

  ‘I worked for this house.’

  ‘And now we all work for it. Maud, look, with her milking. Abigail in the orchard. Me, I help you fix up the roof good. Django, even, making a fire. Maybe we cook on it.’

  ‘We didn’t need a fire. There’s a stove in the kitchen. We needed books.’

  ‘Why we need these books? Who said about books until now? The world is full of books and no one to read them. We need books, we write our own. The world is ours now. No one to tell us to read this or that.’

  ‘See, Jason.’ Django comes down the steps from the front door, easy in his nakedness. ‘A new heaven and a new earth.’

  Maud blushes and stares at the grass.

  ‘No, Django. The same heaven, the same sodding earth. And everything we ever knew and ever remembered, where is it? Not on Wikipedia anymore.’

  ‘No, Jason,’ Aleksy says, ‘you are right. Not on Wikipedia, but here – head and heart.’ He puts his forefinger to his temple, then his hand to his chest. ‘This is where we know things. Let’s go help Maud with the cows.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then sleep. You work too hard.’

  ‘I don’t need sleep. I need to sort out that bastard.’

  ‘It’s done now, Jason,’ Abigail says. ‘Spilt milk.’

  ‘See, Abigail agrees. We’ll find more books later, my friend, when the planting’s done and all the fruit is in.’

  But I’ve already lunged at Django and knocked him to the ground. I hear him say, ‘Mind my reed,’ see the instrument fall in the grass. Then my hands are round his neck. I want to stop his mouth, fix him so he can’t smile. His legs squirm and kick. I feel his fists on my shoulders and against my head. My mind goes blank. There are other hands on me and I’m rolling on the grass and there’s blood coming from my nose.

  ‘These books,’ Aleksy says, angry and breathing hard, ‘they tell us how to make power from wind?’ His face hovers low over mine, not quite in focus.

  I shake my head.

  ‘How to make a machine to grind corn, maybe? How to irrigate in a dry season, how to kill greenfly or blight?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t know. They tell stories.’

  ‘Stories? What stories?’

  ‘I never read them. They were my wife’s.’

  ‘All your life, you never read them. And you’re alive still and she’s dead.’

  I stand up, leaving Django coughing into the grass, shake myself free of Aleksy’s hand. Maud stands apart, humming to herself. Abigail is holding Simon against her, stroking his head. She looks at me sadly and I’m stung to a new fury that she should blame me for Django’s crime.

  I walk rapidly towards the orchard where the sun is setting among the trees.

  I hear Deirdre say, ‘He’s right though, Aleksy. He’s right, Django. Look at all you’ve burned. What a waste. What are we going to do now on winter evenings?’

  Aleksy laughs. ‘Milk cows same as summer. Chop wood so we don’t freeze. Save candles.’

  ‘And when the cows are milked?’

  ‘What you like, Deedee – play party games, make babies.’

  I turn and stride back towards them, shaking with rage. Abigail is on her knees, tending to Django’s bleeding lip. She’s pulled her apron off and laid it on his lap. I’m glad to see them all shrink from me as I approach, to know they respect my anger if not my rights.

  ‘That’s it, Django,’ I tell him, ‘I want you out of here.’

  No one argues. They can see I might do anything. Even I don’t know what I might do. I’ll take them all on, smash up the fragile order of things. I want Django gone. I’ll give him five minutes to get dressed and pack some clothes, I’ll let Deirdre and Abigail stuff food in his bag if they want, but I won’t stop until he’s off my land. Because of what he’s done. Because the others can’t grasp the horror of what he’s done. Because I can’t find the words to explain it to them.

  And it happens, just that way, because I say it must. No one argues. I watch him walk off into the woods in his tight trousers and stripy blazer, stepping lightly like a boy on a camping trip, fearless of hunger or of having his throat cut for a decent pair of boots. The others watch too, keeping their thoughts to themselves. I turn from the front door and Abigail’s behind me in the hall, studying my face. And I see that I’m being managed. We’ve lost your books, Caroline. Django, who I never trusted, has burned them. I should at least feel vindicated, but I find myself diminished.

  I walk past Abigail and take the main staircase to the second floor, and the half-flight to our bedroom. The door’s wide open, wedged to stop it banging, and to let Simon in. Whatever books were on the shelves are gone. I go to our bed, where I sleep alone, and pull all the pillows off. It’s still here, your copy of Jane Eyre. This at least I’ve still got. It’s nothing much to look at – a cardboard cover the colour of pondweed. But yours, loved by you since childhood, and all I’ve got left of you. Now I’m on the bed, I’m not sure I can get up, not sure I want to. My body shakes, gripped by the memory of
sickness. I hear the murmur of voices and then nothing but the sound of my own breathing.

  Django’s out there somewhere, and others like him, skulking in the woods, hiding in ditches, scuttling through atriums and shopping malls, bedding down where the roof doesn’t leak with their valuables held close and one eye open for snatchers.

  Agnes

  I was sick five days they say, sweating with fever. I rode hard in my dreams. At every turn of the road I met Brendan, his eyes puzzling over the strange tilt the world had taken and me rushing backwards from the sight of him to swing away through the trees, like the Monk, with my heart torn out of me.

  And how many days before that, dragging through the forest, blinded by rain, all the time thinking I would never find the O. And I would have stayed lost, that’s certain, if a woman leading a mule cart hadn’t spoken to me kindly. What she said I couldn’t tell, but when I said I was looking for the O, she smiled, showing me the few teeth she had left, and nodded for me to climb on her cart, a wild-looking woman with an unsteady walk, wrapped in rags. She let me nest among her vegetables, and I saw nothing until she shook me awake and we were here.

  Trevor says I was lucky. There are some on the road, he says, who would have stripped me of everything, or roped me with the dogs and set me to work till I was all bone. But this pelting rain had likely driven them to shelter. Even a tracker would find the scent bleared and the trail washed from the road.

  I understand more of what they say now than before, though there are still words I have to guess at. They asked me why I came without Brendan. I told them I am punished and sent away from the village for something I did. I haven’t told them what. How would I say? I haven’t told them I killed Brendan, if that’s truly what I’ve done. He was their friend. More than that, I think he was Dell’s father, though perhaps she doesn’t know it.

  I see more of how they live at the O. Every night there’s eating and drinking. Singing often, too. So every night is like the village at the end of a wedding, except different people from one time to another, not always the same neighbours. I see that all this pleasure is work for Trevor and Dell. People come with animals for cooking and other things they call gear or tat and Dell gives them some of what’s in the pot and fills their mugs. And later those who want are put somewhere to sleep.

  Dell lets me help her in the kitchen, though I’ve hardly the strength to shell peas. I asked her today how many scroungers are there. She didn’t understand. ‘The villagers that you call planters come to forty,’ I told her. ‘Fifty maybe.’ I showed with my fingers in case she didn’t know her numbers. ‘People die and there are babies so it changes, but maybe fifty. So how many scroungers?’

  She shrugged. ‘As many as there are people in the world. Because that’s all we are, us you call scroungers.’

  ‘So how many does that come to?’

  ‘Cheese, Agnes, no one can tell that.’ She put her hand on my forehead then to see if my fever was still up.

  ‘But if you had to guess.’

  ‘See, Ag,’ she said, sitting by me, ‘it’s this way. There are some we know. More we don’t and never will. Some live nearby, catching and cropping. Some live by dealing, moving on to find in one place what’s wanted in another. Some we see regular when the weather changes. Some once and never again. Maybe they tell us their names and we remember. Or else we know them by something they brought one time – a strong pan or a sack of partridge eggs. They might tell us their racket. They might not. It doesn’t matter. If they’re hungry or need a bed they come to the O.’

  I think of the O as a circle and always room inside. Like the letter. I tried to explain this to Dell, but she didn’t understand. She told me O is short for O Tell Do, though not many call it that. ‘But its real name,’ she said, ‘is O Tell Do Lucks, which no one calls it except Trevor. When he’s drunk, or sad about Cat.’

  ‘Who’s Cat?’ I asked her.

  ‘Cat was Trevor’s girl. Lovely she was, and sharp as a knife. She was born at the O and always lived here. It was her mother’s, and then hers when her mother died. Cat raised me from a baby. Then she got knocked up. She’d carried before, Trevor says, but always lost them. She cried out all day long when it was her time, then all the night after, but not so much. By morning she was dead, and the tiddler dead inside her. Now it’s just Trevor and me.’

  Later Dell came to see I was warm in my bed. She asked who’d sent me away and why.

  I told her the Mistress. ‘But she didn’t really send me away. She locked me in the red room, a room at the Hall. And I escaped.’

  Dell looked me up and down and asked me, ‘Have you had your minstrels?’

  I told her I didn’t understand.

  ‘Your rag time,’ she said. Then I wept and that was all the answer she needed. ‘And for that you’re sent out?’

  I cried harder to see myself as Dell saw me, punished and rejected for what any woman might come to.

  She shook her head and said, ‘That isn’t right.’ She put her arms round me then and rocked me this way and that saying ‘shush’ and ‘poor rabbit’.

  It was cold so she got under the blanket with me and it was nice holding her close and being held.

  After a while I asked her what would happen here to someone in my case.

  She shrugged. ‘Anything. Or nothing. There are some men who’ll care for a child but more who talk big while you’re giving them what they want, then first sign of trouble they’re gone.’ A shudder passed through her. I looked in her face and her eyes were wet.

  ‘Oh Dell,’ I said, ‘sweet Dell, you’ve had a baby.’

  ‘If you call it that. A tiddler the size of a carrot.’

  ‘And it died?’

  ‘A trader came wanting breakfast and I’d puked up in the meat pot and I had nothing to feed him. Trevor made out it was dogs broke into the kitchen, but the trader guessed it was me. He slapped me up, kneed me in the belly.’

  ‘And did Trevor know? I mean, about the baby?’

  ‘Not until after, when he had to mop me up.’

  I thought how much easier than hers my life had been, everything neat and ordered.

  I asked her if she ever thought about how she might have lived if Cat and Trevor hadn’t raised her.

  She said, ‘All I know is what Trevor told me. I was brought here as a baby by Brendan and a planter girl, a sad-eyed wisp called Janet, who maybe was my mother but didn’t say.’

  ‘Not your mother, Dell. My mother.’

  ‘Janet was your mother? Then I’m sorry she wasn’t mine too, so we could have been sisters.’

  I knew then I must tell her what I could about her parents. That the man she called Brendan was truly her father – she wept at that and said she’d always felt it – and that her mother was the best and most beautiful woman.’

  ‘Still alive, then,’ she said. ‘So why did she ditch me?’

  ‘Oh, she would have kept you and loved you, I’m sure of it, if they’d let her.’

  After a while Dell slept and so did I. When I woke she was gone. The morning light was thin through the trees and I heard them outside, Dell and Trevor, talking and chopping logs for the cooking.

  I hear them now, and last night’s sleepers stumbling down the stairs, laughing or cursing and calling for food. And I feel so sorry for myself. Once I had a cottage and my own little room in it that I kept neat and clean. And I had a mother who loved me in her way. I had Sarah to read me texts from the Book of Air. I had Roland, who knew almost everything about me. In time we would have married. I would have led him to his bed at the Hall and it would have been our bed. But he chose Megan because I let this book fill me with wrong thoughts, and I let Brendan trick me into thinking I loved him, and because I lost my way. I miss my father. I think of his treasures hidden in the cottage – the knife with the sliding blades, the wren he carved for me, the silver chain – and think I shall never see them again.

  Jason

  I didn’t see Penny for three or fo
ur years – not until I was about to start work on the old maternity hospital in Bermondsey. I loved that project – beautiful Victorian brickwork and one spectacular wall of smoked glass spanning the gap between the north and south wings. High-ceilinged, big-windowed spaces, accessed directly from a glazed atrium, the old dark corridors carved up into en suite bathrooms. It was going to be perfect. Never happened, of course. What happened was the virus. And people lost interest in luxury apartments, along with the whole money system, the whole property thing. But we weren’t there yet. We had no idea what was about to hit. We were all still scrabbling to get ahead. I thought the worst thing we had to deal with was Brexit, starting with a lot of jumpy foreign investors scared that London was dropping off the map. And I figured I could ride that wave.

  The atrium was going to be built on what had been the hospital garden, a patch of ground bounded on three sides by the walls of the building and open to the west to catch the afternoon sun. We were ready to start on the foundations when the protestors moved in. They called themselves the Urban Diggers. Their literature said that they were planting for a sustainable future. They reckoned my proposed extension would bury one of the last green spaces in the borough and they were asserting their right as citizens of the planet to grow vegetables. Bivouacs sprouted overnight. The Diggers walked between them with watering cans.

  I ventured on to my own property, introduced myself, and asked to speak to their leader. They said they didn’t have a leader but would delegate some people to meet me. I invited their delegation to my office. They countered with the One World Cafe on the corner – breakfast at seven. I suppose they thought I’d be a walkover at that hour of the morning, seeing I was a member of the idle rich.

  I was tempted to tell them to go fuck themselves, but I wanted to work something out so I could get on with the job.

  I made sure to get there early. I watched them through the window dodging the morning traffic, three of them and a kid. When they pushed open the door, I realised their secret weapon wasn’t vegan omelette and camomile tea at the crack of dawn, but Penny. There she was in a headscarf, cotton dress and rubber boots, reinvented as an Urban Digger, chin forward, ready for a fight. The kid was Random’s, I could see that. A white-haired woman held him by the hand and waited while he raised his foot over the threshold. Trailing after them was a beautiful Asian girl.