The Book of Air

by Joe Treasure

  ‘Penny, I’m just trying to help you out. Christ, when did I become the enemy?’

  There was silence and I realised she was crying.

  ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘We’re moving out of London. There’s this community. They want me. I feel at home there. I need to move some stuff – mainly clothes, a bit of furniture – you know.’

  ‘So I should drive you.’

  ‘Stop trying to organise my life, all right?’ I heard exasperation, but something else as well, something I didn’t expect – panic.

  ‘Is everything OK, Penny?’

  ‘We’ve got it worked out, see. We just drive down with our stuff, stay overnight and drive back. Then I get the train down at the weekend with Simon. That’s it, that’s the way we’re doing it.’

  ‘We – who’s we?’

  ‘Me and Troy.’

  ‘Ah.’

  I was listening to silence again. Then the sound of breathing, quick sharp breaths.

  ‘Oh fuck off then Jason if that’s the way you feel. Fucking fuck right off.’

  A van pulled out from the kerb and I overreacted. For a moment I was straddling the centre line with a bus hurtling towards me. I jerked back to my own side of the road and slowed down while my heart rate settled.

  Why was I even listening to Penny? Why was I willing to consider lending her a car? I wasn’t even convinced she could drive. Probably Troy would end up driving, which would be better in the sense that he probably could drive and worse in the sense that he was more than slightly deranged.

  The phone rang and it was Penny. She was crying again. Or still crying from the last call. ‘Don’t be angry with me Jason. Just lend me the car, OK? I promised you would, that’s all, and I can’t go back on it. I can’t. This is the way we planned it.’

  There was more like this. What’s the point of going over it? I lent her the Nissan, that’s all. I wasn’t there when she picked it up. I’d remembered you had an appointment at the clinic, Caroline, for your first scan, and I’d promised to come with you. So I filled it with petrol and left the keys with my secretary and set off with you in the Mercedes. I didn’t hear until later that she’d shown up with Troy and that she’d looked sort of out of it.

  That got me worried. I googled the solutionists without any luck. So I added the word Kishar and discovered I hadn’t been paying attention. The Kishar solution in all its mutations was everywhere, bubbling just under the surface. BK Compton was revered and occasionally reviled. I found myself in chatrooms where people earnestly debated what kind of solution she had in mind. There were references to the book’s conclusion. So I dug out the copy of Kishar in Crisis Penny had given me and turned to the end. There it was, the very last sentence – Once we accept that we are the problem, it doesn’t take much to imagine the solution. But what did that mean? Even fans of the book couldn’t agree. Was it advocating population control? Should people stop breeding altogether? Should governments put hormones in the water like fluoride? In interviews, BK herself had always refused to elaborate.

  By next morning it was national news. The Elmbridge Farm suicide cult. Seven people found dead in a barn in Kent, the door sealed and a Nissan Pathfinder inside with its engine still running. Presumed cause of death – carbon monoxide poisoning. They’d left a cryptic note. The solution starts here.

  Within hours everyone knew about the solutionists. Pundits analysed the features of cult behaviour. A few warned that this might be the start of a trend, but most treated it as the end rather than the beginning of something. BK Compton was not available for comment.

  We’d seen our baby moving on a screen, but the deaths overshadowed our celebrations. I was sick with grief and guilt and unfocused dread. You tried to help, but had your own feelings to cope with – fury, mainly, that Penny had dragged me into this madness.

  I look at your picture now in its silver frame. The beach front at Brighton. I have no right to mourn you with so many dead, so much irrevocably destroyed. I do though, Caro. And what if I could have you back and the rest gone, or have the rest back – the whole ruined world – and you dead. What if I had that choice? It wouldn’t really be a choice, even if I was offered it. Death is OK. It’s always been OK. People die. They die young. Even children die. That’s nature. But what the solutionists did – that was something else.

  Agnes

  Dell has shown me such a treasure. Cat gave it her as a child, said it came from Janet who slipped it in her hand all those years ago while Brendan was seeing to his horse. Janet didn’t say, but Cat knew it was from Dell’s mother.

  It’s a picture of a woman, pale and faintly coloured but so beautiful and so skilfully made she might be alive, her hair loose and flying as though the wind is blowing right through the cracked glass. The frame is silver and carved with lilies. I’ve seen treasures like it at the Hall, some on the shelves in the turret.

  ‘Is it my mother?’

  ‘Not your mother, no. It’s from the endtime. No villager could make such a thing.’

  ‘I thought so.’ She was disappointed, but not too much. I could tell she had more to show me. ‘I loved it as a tot, kissed and snuggled it in my bed. Later, though, I found something else.’ She turned it over and fiddled at the back of it. At last she lifted out a thin piece of wood and a sheet of paper, fine but rough down one edge, and with writing on both sides. It didn’t make sense at first. I’d never seen paper like it that wasn’t part of a book. Then I understood.

  ‘Oh Dell.’ I didn’t know what else to say. It disturbed and excited me to see it, to know the Book of Air was spoiled and that Sarah had done this in secret for her baby daughter and known it all these years and told no one. ‘Oh Dell. It’s beautiful.’

  And it was. It was the colour of milk, with tiny delicate letters, quite black and each one perfect. Stroking it I could feel where the letters lay, something like the scales on a fish. I thought at first this was the paper itself, but the margins were butter smooth, so it must be the ink made this small roughness. I saw then there was a line drawn in the margin against some of the words. I read them aloud, while Dell listened.

  ‘The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass. That bitter hour cannot be described. In truth, the waters came into my soul, I sank in deep mire, I felt no standing, I came into deep waters, the floods overflowed me.’

  Dell said, ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It’s a page from the Book of Air, and this text she’s marked for you to study.’

  ‘But all what you said about it, what does it mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure what it means. I don’t understand all of it, but it’s about Jane’s sadness.’

  ‘And Jane’s my mother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who then? What’s Jane to me?’

  ‘Oh, Jane is everything. Our first Governess.’ I saw there was a lot to explain. ‘She wrote the Book of Air. This is a hard text, though, and must be read four ways like any text in the book, so Jane’s sadness is only one part of it. This text is about water. Because water, like earth and fire, brings death as well as life. And even air, the most precious, can be poisoned with disease. And they must fight with each other, as fire boils water, and water quenches fire. And here, you see, Jane’s hope is quenched – like a flame by water.’

  ‘But what do I care about these four meanings? One meaning would be enough if it was meant for me. What did my mother mean by it?’

  ‘Oh, but of course.’ I saw it then, Sarah’s purpose in pulling this page from the book. ‘She meant her own sadness to be losing you, to be losing her love, her hope in life.’

  ‘And all that’s in this paper, among these marks? How can you know, from so long ago and her not here to tell you what she meant?’

  I could see Dell didn’t understand me – she has no sense of writing, of how powerful and beautiful it is. ‘It’s what the writing says,�
�� I told her, ‘and the meaning she found in the writing – a fifth meaning, you see, just for you.’ I thought of how I might explain this. Of how I might understand it myself, what Sarah had done with a single stroke of her pen. ‘Like a message,’ I said, ‘but written in ink.’

  ‘I get it. It was her way of passing me the word.’

  Dell smiled and I saw in her face for the first time her mother’s loveliness. And I was filled suddenly with such longing that I couldn’t sit with her, but walked out among the ruins. For want of the broad fields of my childhood rising up on to the moors where the sheep graze in summer, I looked up at the sky and imagined myself rising into its emptiness. There were faint clouds misting over the moon and I told myself that this was the same moon that shone right now over the village, and that however far you travelled it would be there just the same, but offering no comfort. I wept then for the sadness of things and thought myself a page torn from my own life, and my life like the Book of Air spoiled for ever.

  Jason

  Django’s back. Abigail came to my room at dawn to let me know, while I was still in bed. She asked me not to be angry. I was too weak to argue with her. My temperature’s been up these past few days. These fevers come and go like aftershocks and I pay them no attention, except they slow me down. She told me Django wants to apologise to me for burning the books. He acknowledges that he had no right to do it without my permission. He knows what he did was wrong. Perhaps he said these things. Abigail wants me to believe that he said them, anyway.

  She sat on my bed and felt my forehead. ‘You’re warm.’

  ‘Just a bit. I’ll be all right.’

  ‘You push yourself too hard.’ Then she rested her hand against my chest. ‘And there’s so much sadness and trouble in you.’

  ‘In all of us.’

  ‘Yes. It’s not just our bodies we need to take care of.’

  It was nice to be touched by Abigail, to feel the tension ease in me and my resentment at Django loosen its grip.

  He’d turned up with food apparently – mushrooms and blackberries – and asked if he could cook, to make things right between us, all of us eating together as a gesture of reconciliation. Those things he probably did say. They sound like Django.

  He’s laid the table in the dining room and got a big fire going and lit candles. I don’t know what kind of sense this makes. Django’s a pyromaniac. So as a punishment he gets to light candles – from a meagre supply that we can’t begin to replenish until spring. But to please Abigail, and because I haven’t the strength to fight, or the means to win, I sit with them, while Aleksy raises a glass of water to the cook and to peace in all our hearts and to the sown wheat.

  While Django is serving dinner, Aleksy leans towards me. ‘We all lost things,’ he says. ‘It makes us grip tight to what we got left. Your books. Deedee’s wallet. I understand.’ He pulls something out of his pocket. It’s a pipe. ‘This I carry with me always. Maybe I never see tobacco again.’ He shrugs. ‘Even so.’

  Django’s stew has an earthy smell. There are a few woody carrots chopped up in it and a small amount of rice and a lot of herbs and two kinds of mushrooms. The mushrooms have been delicately sliced and lie in cross section on the plate – pale flat ones and smaller darker ones with pointed caps and stringy stalks.

  Their fibrous texture makes me long for meat. Deirdre sits beside me in a low-cut dress with flimsy straps to remind us all of a lost world.

  We talk about the day’s work and what must be done tomorrow. Aleksy has some news. One of the two sows, which he found rooting in the wood and enticed home with a bucket of milk and peelings, is definitely pregnant. There’s a surge of optimism. I listen to the others talking and begin to feel better. With the first frost we’ll slaughter one of the cows and roast joints of beef. Next year, if we survive the winter, we’ll have potatoes and parsnips and we’ll grow tomatoes in the greenhouse. And by the autumn there’ll be bread if we live that long. And sooner than that we’ll make a churn if the cows keep giving milk, and fry our mushrooms in butter, and our eggs too if the hens and geese keep laying, and we’ll experiment with better ways to make cheese, hard nutty cheddar that will sit in the cellar with the apples and feed us like kings all through next winter. Our ambitions grow extravagant. I begin to talk as freely as the others. I eat Django’s strange stew and feel my resistance slide away.

  It’s a warm evening and the fire is hot so Maud opens the windows and we watch the glow of the sun and the shadows drawing lines across the lawn. Our laughter blows out over the valley, is inhaled back into the room, drifts out again to settle in the undergrowth where the remains of human habitation are slowly rotting. Purple leaves stir at my elbow and I sense some creature scratching among the roots. A single leaf brushes the branches as it falls. Settling softly, it shrinks and dwindles into mulch. I wonder that I can hear so sharply and see so acutely into the shadows, bending my vision over the window sill, watching time accelerate, but I find it’s not so surprising after all because my head has floated away from my body and time jumps randomly at every pulse.

  Aleksy laughs with his mouth wide open, his head pushed forward, the lips drawn back from the teeth. Beside me, Deirdre makes high gasping noises that remind me of the monkey, and I wonder if it is the monkey, chattering somewhere among the trees, and Deirdre has opened her mouth not to laugh but to express astonishment at Aleksy’s teeth, which are like the teeth of a horse. Sitting with her back to the fireplace, Maud laughs with her hands across her mouth because her head has imprisoned such monstrous secrets that no sound can be trusted not to let the cat out of the bag.

  ‘Say it, Maud,’ I tell her, loud in her face. ‘Just blurt it out.’ And she looks at me amazed as if I’m the one who’s mute.

  Time lurches forward. I know this because Django is sitting on the floor beside the fire, playing his clarinet. He blows into the flames and his notes scatter with the ash. Another lurch, and he’s back at the head of the table with his bowler hat on and we’re eating his blackberries. My spoon tilts and the berries scatter across the tablecloth. I hunt them down among the vegetation – the stalks and blooms that interweave in repeated patterns across the table to where Abigail sits watching me with open-mouthed surprise.

  I’m drunk. I look at my glass, lift it to my nose and sip, but taste nothing but water.

  ‘It’s time you all knew about Simon.’ Django says this, and I’m surprised because no one knows more about Simon than me. ‘Look, everyone,’ he says, ‘there’s something I want to show you.’ He takes a scrap of paper from the pocket of his deckchair blazer and unfolds it. It’s from a newspaper – a photo and a column of print. ‘Someone left the paper on the bus. It was turned to that picture. I saw at once.’

  The cutting passes around the table. It’s from another time – an age of buses, an age of newspapers piled in their thousands at tube stations, commuters thronging the escalators, millions of words printed morning and night. The picture swims up at me in bright colour then settles back into shades of grey. It’s Simon, my Simon, standing outside a pub, and a policewoman holding his hand. What’s this new trick? Cleverer than a bunch of flowers – Django’s pulling bits of our past out of his pocket.

  Deirdre peers at it. ‘But that’s…’

  ‘Yes.’ Django nods eagerly as if it’s the lesson for the day and she’s the first to get it.

  ‘That’s… the boy. The Elmbridge boy.’

  ‘Of course. Now look what’s above his head.’

  ‘In this house? The Elmbridge boy?’

  ‘Yes. In this house. But look.’

  Aleksy leans across to pull the paper from Deirdre’s hand. ‘What is it, Django?’

  ‘It’s a sign.’ He’s immensely pleased with himself.

  ‘It’s a pub sign, Django,’ I tell him. ‘We all remember pub signs.’

  ‘It’s the sundial.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the name of the pub – the Sundial.’

  ‘There are no accidents.’
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  ‘There are accidents all the time.’

  We’re locked in this argument, Django and me, and it already feels as if lives depend on it – Simon’s life and mine too, maybe. But so far no one else knows what we’re talking about, and I’m not even sure I do. The ground is shifting under us and we’re all scrabbling for a foothold. Except Django, who seems to have swallowed every candle in the room and to glow with the accumulated light.

  ‘I will cause the sun’s shadow to move ten degrees backward on the sundial.’

  ‘Yes, Django, it’s in the Bible. I could find the page in about thirty seconds. Listen, all of you – just because it’s in the Bible doesn’t mean it means anything. Anything’s in the Bible if you look hard enough. So there’s a sundial in Isaiah, and here’s a sundial. So what? The shadow on this sundial isn’t going anywhere. It’s a picture somebody’s painted of a sundial because that happens to be the name of the pub.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was a miracle, Jason.’ Django gestures towards me for everyone’s benefit, because my anger is a count against me, a warning that I might lose control of myself again and go for his throat. ‘I said it was a sign. And why is it so important to you to deny it?’

  ‘I’d like to know this, actually.’ It’s Aleksy grunting his way into the argument. ‘Why is this so important to you that you get all excited – that this is a sign or not such a sign?’

  ‘Not to me. It means nothing to me one way or the other. It’s Django’s cutting. I say we put it on the fire with the books.’

  Deirdre has taken it back from Aleksy and is studying it. ‘It is our Simon. Look Aleksy.’ She holds it for Aleksy to see and looks at me bewildered. ‘Our little Simon is the Elmbridge boy?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’m relieved that’s he’s our little Simon – that’s two reasons not to lynch him.

  ‘So his mother…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was your sister.’

  ‘Yes.’