The Book of Air

by Joe Treasure

  ‘And she was one of them?’

  ‘One of who?’ Abigail asks, looking at Deirdre, then at me. ‘Who is the Elmbridge boy?’

  Deirdre is amazed. ‘You don’t remember? Where were you?’

  ‘It was the sundial I saw first.’ Django is still telling his story. ‘And he had this canvas bag over his shoulder, see. And what was in it? It says, here, in the fifth paragraph, look. A honey sandwich. And I saw that the prophecies were being fulfilled. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse evil.’

  ‘But Abigail, you must know about the Elmbridge gang, surely. Everyone knows. It was all their fault. They released the virus.’

  ‘No, Deirdre,’ I say, ‘that was never proved.’

  ‘Only because all the people trying to prove it kept dying.’

  ‘And you never knew this?’ Aleksy is intrigued by this fresh evidence of Abigail’s isolation. ‘They kept this from you? You were in a Cistercian convent, or how?’

  But Abigail is looking at me. ‘They’re saying Simon’s mother did this?’

  ‘No, not Simon’s mother. She was as much a victim…’

  ‘Oh come on, Jason,’ Deirdre says, ‘for God’s sake.’

  ‘As much a victim as anyone.’

  ‘And there I was, on the top deck of the number 68 with this discarded newspaper in my hand, and I started sweating. I’d been given a glimpse of the light that would lead us out of this darkness even as the darkness fell.’

  ‘So this boy,’ Aleksy says, ‘this boy who walked away unharmed from Elmbridge Farm. This boy is Simon? Your nephew?’ He’s looking at me and he’s having difficulty focusing on my face, or I am on his. His eyes grow and shrink and are their own size again.

  And Django is still talking. ‘It just felt like flu to start with, nothing out of the ordinary. But as soon as I got home I wheeled my bike out from under the stairs in my building and hung it from the light in the stairwell. I put a broom through the spokes and hung more things from it, so it was like a mobile – round things, saucepan lids, a clock. Wheels within wheels, see, like in Ezekiel. And the wheels were angels, and I heard their wings like the noise of great waters. Then I couldn’t stand up any more and Mrs Burgess from the ground floor flat put me to bed.’

  ‘You’ve had it.’ Deirdre stares at Django as if she’s just seen one of Ezekiel’s angels.

  ‘No one knew what it was. By the time I’d come through Mrs Burgess was past help and it was everywhere.’

  ‘You’ve had it, the blessing and everything, and you never said.’

  ‘You never asked.’

  ‘No one survived.’

  Aleksy nods at me. ‘Jason survived.’

  ‘No one at the beginning, though.’

  ‘Not many perhaps,’ Django says. ‘But not many saw the sundial. Saw it for what it was, I mean.’

  We’re looking at the newspaper cutting again, which shakes in Deirdre’s hands. I have to shut my eyes and take another look to be sure the shadow on the sundial isn’t moving.

  ‘Wait though, Django.’ Deirdre says. ‘This means you knew Simon before we got here? You knew him already?’

  ‘I’d never met him.’

  ‘But you had this picture of the Elmbridge boy in your pocket. And now here we are. And here’s the Elmbridge boy.’

  ‘We were guided.’

  ‘By you. You knew where to find him. You lied to us.’

  ‘I never lied. You assumed….’

  ‘I assumed you were telling the truth.’

  ‘I was led, Deirdre. We all were.’

  ‘You let me think you didn’t know where we were going. That this road, and then this road just felt right. And then this road. Until, hey look, a big house. Let’s see if anyone’s there.’

  ‘Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire.’

  I ask him, ‘How did you know where to find us?’

  ‘It was all there for anyone who wanted to know – back then when the internet worked – where you lived, what properties you owned.’

  For no reason I can see, Deirdre is weeping.

  ‘And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers.’ Django rubs Deirdre’s back, kneads her shoulders, rocks in sympathy with her. His voice is low. ‘I never lied.’

  ‘Well what would you call it?’

  ‘Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar and he laid it upon my mouth.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ She’s still arguing but the fight has gone out of her. ‘That’s just words. You don’t even make sense.’

  ‘It’s the only sense I can make. I saw Simon and I knew, and I was burned up with the knowledge. My mouth was on fire. I said to the angel, here am I, send me.’

  ‘Which means what, exactly?’

  ‘Which means we’re in the exact middle of a living miracle. I will give a child to be their prince, it says. And here he is, asleep upstairs in his bed. Which means this is written. Our lives are written. Doesn’t that make a difference?’ He laughs, and it’s an infectious shout of laughter.

  There’s something wrong with Django’s reasoning that I can’t quite put my finger on, and I don’t much want to anyway, because I find it’s so much easier knowing it all has a purpose.

  ‘They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. That… that is what’s written.’ Django is leaning out at the window, shouting up at the sky. ‘A new heaven,’ he says, ‘and a new earth.’

  And it feels new. Everything lifts and pulses with a vividness I’ve never seen before. I find myself inclined to laugh. ‘Look at this place, though,’ I say, ‘this house, that lawn, those trees. You can see why I wanted it.’

  Somebody must have moved first or we must all have felt drawn by the evening air because here we are on the steps by the front door. House martins wheel restlessly above us and the shadows on the grass are merging into one shadow. We cross the lawn to the orchard and wander among the trees, dividing and dispersing and regrouping according to some logic that I think would be apparent to me if I was sitting on a branch looking down. Then one after another we fall on our backs and watch the sky.

  ‘Let’s go for a spin.’ It’s Aleksy talking. I think he means this – what we’re already doing – spinning through space while we cling with our backs to the ground. But he says, ‘Let’s go for a spin in Jason’s beautiful car.’

  It’s a preposterous idea. But the car’s still there, by the front door, where I abandoned it in my fever. And here we are, and none of us with a better idea. So we run from the orchard and across the gravel drive and through the grass. Abigail is ahead of me and I see how lovely she is, moving with a swaying ease that takes her no effort. So much of Deirdre’s elegance is stitched together and slipped on like her dress. It’s all coded messages, referring to something other than itself.

  We reach the car and climb in, except Maud, who backs away shaking her head. Aleksy takes the driving seat with Deirdre beside him, her stockinged feet on the dashboard, Django and Abigail and me sprawled in the back, all of us laughing as the car jerks forward and we sink against the cushioned leather, breathing its luxurious smell. We curve round over the lawn and back to the drive, heading towards the house. The arch of the inner gateway passes over head and we’re in the stable yard, vibrated by cobbles. The horses whinny in their stalls, setting up a din in the hen house.

  Aleksy pulls us into a tight circle and just before we hit the stable door he brakes, throws us into reverse and forward again, and here we are back on the drive. The moon has risen to greet us. I think we might lift our weight off the ground and spin through wisps of cloud to join it. But instead we drift on to the lawn and down towards the corner where the grass breaks up into wilder growth and the brook runs among weeds and rushes. We bounce over the rough ground, and it seems nothing for such a vehicle to hop the brook, squeeze between saplings
and flatten itself under the lowest railing of the fence to reach the road which is its home. But Aleksy hits the brakes. We tilt into the brook and the car stalls.

  Deirdre stops laughing and Abigail is clutching my arm. We stare through the windscreen at the church tower and the dark space where the road disappears among trees towards everything we’ve lost and everything that threatens our existence. Then we climb out of the Merc in silence and wander back the way we came, spreading out now the car isn’t here to hold us together, Deirdre with an arm round Aleksy’s neck, Django going his own way. Abigail gathers up Maud and leads her towards the house. After a moment I find myself alone on the lawn and no reason to be here or anywhere in particular.

  Agnes

  I went with Dell this morning to fetch water from the river. I work with her every day now. When my limbs ache and my head is fogged from labour I find I can forget my troubles. Dell loads the bowls and bottles on a cart and wheels it through the forest paths. Their name for the river is the canal, and a strange looking river it is, as straight as a furrow and edged with bricks, except where its walls have tumbled in. We walked beside it for a while in search of blackberries, pulling the water cart among the ruined towers. Here and there the flow is held up by great walls where the endtimers built bridges and left no space underneath for the water, so it must find its way through cracks and crevices to spray down like piss buckets emptied from cottage windows.

  When we’d filled our pans with blackberries, Dell said she had something to show me. She took me off the path towards a building that stands high as the Hall, though breached near the roof. She pulled aside a crumbling piece of iron that left its red stains on her, and there was a break in the wall, enough for us to crawl through on our bellies.

  We stood up in a vast room. A staircase rose curving towards patches of sky. We walked among aspens, stepped over rusting roof beams and branches where woodlice lived. The air had the forest smell of dank earth and thick unweeded growth. The deep din of the woodland was dulled by the walls, but a startled jay rose up with a clamour and a pair of squirrels leapt away out of sight. Climbing things covered the walls and straggled above us from the galleries – ivy and bindweed and long flowered honeysuckle. Dell took a handful where she stood and pulled it aside. And I caught the stink of mildew. There were shelves tightly packed with what I took at first for narrow boxes, each a different colour, each with the faded marks of writing that I strained to read, turning my head to follow the run of letters. She reached out a hand, pulled a box from the shelf and gave it me. An edge of it split and broke into layers like onion skin. And I saw at last what it was, what they all were, what I think they had been all along to my eyes, while my mind had said this wasn’t possible – a flood, a dizzying bee swarm of books, an orchard branch so laden you’d fear it would break.

  Not four books only, then, with the Book of Death. Not five even with my own secret book. Not ten or twenty. As I pulled aside more strands of ivy, I saw enough for every person in the village each to have one. And more than that – more than I knew how to count.

  I reached for another and opened it, stiff and cracking, to a page as ridged as a barley field when the wind blows. Another would hardly open, lying damp in my hands, its edges ripe with mould. I found pages on which the ink had faded almost to nothing, pages that were more hole than paper, and a nest of mice that fell squealing among the roots at our feet and scattered into corners.

  But my eyes had found a text. And in another book a second text. And every text was a voice speaking through my voice.

  ‘The world seemed getting larger round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst.’

  ‘Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only – finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all.’

  ‘I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and it had all been a mistake to think you just died.’

  ‘You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight and a half years ago.’

  ‘And this also, said Marlow suddenly, has been one of the dark places of the earth.’

  ‘As she unfastened her brooch at the mirror, she smiled faintly to see her face all smeared with the yellow dust of lilies.’

  ‘Agnes. Please, Agnes. What is it? What are you mouthing on about?’ Dell’s voice came to me as if from another place, though she stood beside me, pulling at my arm.

  ‘All these books,’ I said. ‘No one knows. They think. The Mistress says. Everyone says.’

  ‘But what are they? Why do they matter?’

  ‘These people, these thoughts. All this time they’ve been here waiting. This sadness and hoping, this darkness and dust of lilies, this rushing into the wind. And they’ll go on waiting, and being found and being lost again. As if they don’t mind – to be read, not to be read.’ Truly, I didn’t know what I meant.

  And still my mind is a whirl of questions. What are these books? What is this book I write in now? Did everyone among the endtimers have her own book to tell her own story in, as I have mine? Who allowed them this? The child in my belly pushes up against my heart. I breathe fast and shallow but find no air. The world is not as I thought it was.

  ‘Who says these words, though, Agnes?’

  I couldn’t answer.

  Jason

  I slept – perhaps just for a moment – and dreamt that Walter, wandering through the house, peered in at our bedroom and found me and Abigail having sex. He blessed us in the name of Our Lord BJ Choudhry. Then there was a child, a little girl. And it was our child, Caro, yours and mine.

  I remember the print-outs from your scan – those shadowy images that told us we were going to have a girl. By the following morning we’d stopped looking, and could watch only the repeated footage of paramedics carrying the bodies from the outhouse at Elmbridge Farm, and interviews with the neighbours who’d observed suspicious comings and goings, and the mother of one of the dead, weeping for her baby girl who’d shown such promise as a gymnast. They’d found incongruous pictures of Penny in her Random days – party girl Penny Farthing – and one with a dead-eyed look that hinted at drug abuse. There was nothing of Troy but a blurred picture of a student in a mortar board with a sneer for whoever held the camera.

  Meanwhile the Nissan had led the police to me and I was telling them everything I knew. The journalists were all over our building, pumping the staff and the other residents for gossip, crowding the gate to press their lenses to my windscreen. The only way I could protect you was to let you stay a prisoner in the flat, while I attended to business. At first it looked as if they meant to cast me as an accomplice – the one who’d supplied the weapon. But it didn’t take them long to spot the ironies. A property developer with a gas-guzzling SUV in the middle of a stand-off with environmentalists – I looked less like an accessory than the prime target. So off they went to cosy up to the Urban Diggers and get the dirt on the crazies, the environmentals, the nutroast nutjobs. They were desperate for more on the family connection, but they never found the Jesus bus. The only thing Penny and I had in common was a mysterious past – we’d both popped up from nowhere.

  For a couple of days Simon gave them a new angle – the Elmbridge boy found wandering with an uneaten sandwich in his satchel and a scrawled note pinned to his coat saying taek care of mi boy its not his falt. And I got the full measure of the state of education in Hebron, and a fresh stab of remorse for leaving my sister there. For me Simon’s survival was a miracle. I’d waited for the call to identify the body of a child and here he was alive and unharmed. And you were heroic, Caroline. You hated Penny for
what she’d done to me, but you took Simon in without a murmur.

  Then the Elmbridge Cult was lost in a blizzard of fresh news – a mystery virus causing panic across the south east. The reporters knew it was a mystery. They could sense the panic. They could more or less count the dead. Beyond that they knew nothing. The virus had been brought into the country by migrant farm workers. It had been spread by asylum seekers released from a detention centre near Dover. It had mutated in the intestines of an ibex goat smuggled into the east end for religious purposes. A leaked document from the Ministry of Defence allowed some smart investigative journalist to make the link between the Elmbridge suicide cult, government zoologist Dr Troy Phelps and a top secret research project. But factions remained loyal to earlier theories, or cohered around later ones, however mystical or bizarre.

  Meanwhile the view from our flat over Blackfriars Bridge was transformed from one day to the next like a film fast-forwarding through seasons of change. Like waking up to snow, we saw one morning the bus stops abandoned and the roads clogged with cyclists in surgical masks. Another day it was nothing but ambulances. When the roads emptied and even the cyclists were gone, who knew whether they were at home avoiding contagion, or sick already? But not everyone had caught it, because suddenly they were sitting in cars in furious gridlock responding to rumours of food to be found in the west, or safety in the Scottish Highlands. That’s when the armoured vehicles appeared and the soldiers, to set up their checkpoint on the bridge. And we knew that the vans and trucks they waved through were loaded with the dead. Dogs prowled and congregated, indifferent to traffic lanes and military authority, but not to the marksmen sent to shoot them and to shoot the shoppers who looked too much like looters, until the shoppers who survived were all looters, any system of retail having broken down. And the streets were left to scavengers, and unsupervised children, and people wheeling corpses on supermarket trolleys, and to snarling clusters of survivalists dressed in ill-sorted uniforms and body armour, and to strange eruptions of emptiness and silence – and, distinct from all of these, the sudden gatherings of awestruck onlookers, little pockets of order, as one after another succumbed to the condition’s strangest symptom.