The Offering Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Grace McCleen

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary June 2010

  The Quiet Room

  Genesis: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary January 2010

  Beginning

  The Garden in the Book

  Undead

  The Light

  A Condition of Complete Simplicity

  The Road through the Pines

  Going Out

  Exodus: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary March 2010

  Just So

  The Covenant

  Sediment

  The Farm

  The Tree and the Root

  The Gift

  The Price of Transgression

  The Journal

  Journal II

  Journal III

  Leviticus: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary April 2010

  Blades of Grass

  The Ability to Choose

  The Root of it All

  The Book in the Garden

  Mutiny

  The Agenda

  Black

  The Cost of Memory

  The Idea

  Without Blood

  Numbers: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary May 2010

  Episode, 2.30 p.m.

  Holy Darts

  Rain

  The Bird

  The River

  The Hearer of Prayer

  The Curse

  Synchronicity

  The Stranger

  The Serum

  Midnight

  Deuteronomy: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary May 2010

  The Land’s Edge

  The Road through the Pine Trees

  Epilogue: The Long Corridor July 2010

  The New Doctor

  Going Out

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Grace McCleen

  The Land of Decoration

  The Professor of Poetry

  About the author

  Grace McCleen’s first novel, The Land of Decoration, was published in 2012 and was awarded the Desmond Elliott Prize for the best first novel of the year. It was also chosen for Richard & Judy’s Book Club and won her the Betty Trask Prize in 2013. Her second novel, The Professor of Poetry, was published by Sceptre in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Encore Award. She read English at the University of Oxford and has an MA from York, and currently lives in London.

  www.sceptrebooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Sceptre

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Grace McCleen 2015

  The right of Grace McCleen to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicised Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica, all rights reserved.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 77001 8

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.sceptrebooks.com

  This book is dedicated to Ella

  Lethe: a river in Hades whose water, when drunk, made the souls of the dead forget their life on earth.

  PROLOGUE

  *

  Lethem Park Mental Infirmary

  June 2010

  The Quiet Room

  There has been a great deal of talk here recently about an event concerning myself and Dr Lucas, which took place from what I can gather in the Platnauer Room some two weeks ago. I presently find myself in the Quiet Room while Dr Hudson, who has taken over my care in Dr Lucas’s absence, devises an appropriate plan. I said to Dr Hudson: ‘I do hope that whatever happened will not prevent my release from Lethem Park, something Dr Lucas talked about on many occasions.’

  That was when Dr Hudson stared at me.

  People have been staring at me a great deal lately. I have become something of a celebrity. I am sure you could ask anyone on this ward who I was and they would say: ‘That’s Madeline Adamson.’ Then they would stare at me some more. Their eyes used to pass over me as if I were a chair or a cabinet; now they widen and darken, as if the chair had sprouted arms and legs, as if its arms had reached up to the fluorescent light like branches craving alms of the sun, and its legs twisted, tuber-like, into the carpet.

  This attention neither excites nor disturbs me. In fact, I cannot remember a time when I felt so peaceful. What is more, I am sure it has nothing to do with the cocktail of medication I have been prescribed; there have been periods before when I have been sedated and I was far from peaceful although temporarily stupefied. Now, however, I find I am contented to drift from one moment to the next and if several hours pass in which I have done nothing other than consider my hands in my lap or the birds beyond the window, it does not matter. I celebrate time, I press it into my hands. I receive it like water in a desert, yet when it slips through my fingers I do not mind.

  I think upon reflection this room should be called the Empty Room. It contains only a chair, a mattress and a sink. It is rather pleasant to occupy a room so unashamed of its own emptiness. Recently space has become pleasant to me; it lets in the light. For the past forty minutes or so I have been gazing at a block of sunlight high up on the opposite wall. The room is getting darker now but I do not move to switch on the light. They will switch it on soon enough. They will slide the panel across. They will say: ‘You mustn’t turn off the light.’

  And I will say: ‘Why?’

  I have just caught sight of one of the younger nurses peering in at me through the window in the door. I smile at her but she slides the panel shut. I wonder what startled her. People have been behaving so mysteriously recently, even Margaret. She doesn’t come into the room any further than she has to and seems almost anxious to leave. I am glad to say that in the last few days, presumably having observed that I am not exhibiting any signs of alarming behaviour, something of the old friendliness has developed between us again, though not perhaps the same degree of warmth.

  I don’t know, I can’t read people any more. I can’t see what’s underneath. When I was a child I was a great reader. I looked for the message inked high in slow-turning clouds, the thing in the ground, in the air; there in the beat of the line. Now when I look for a sign I’m not quite so sure. Things cast long shadows, they threaten to gesture, but finally pull back, withholding revelation.

  Lucas could not read me. I remember this much. Those who cannot read cannot see. I was raised to do both.

  GENESIS

  *

  Lethem Park Mental Infirmary

  January 2010

  Beginning

  The new doctor has taken an interest in my case. It has been gravely neglected, he says, much misunderstood. He has a plan. If I follow it he anticipates good results. But let me describe him.

  He roared into a parking space beneath the startled horse-chestnut trees two weeks ago in a low-slung sports car. A door like a wing rose up. Two lucent brogues appeared on the gravel. The door swung down, the brogues advanced. I wat
ched it all from my window.

  His name is Dr S. Lucas, he is over six feet tall, speaks with a booming voice and has a laugh that rings down corridors. He has blue-black hair that is swept straight back from his brow and piercing black eyes. Staff and patients part before this person like the waters of the Red Sea, from which he emerges without a drop adhering to his sheeny suit. I have seen more than one of the younger nurses blush in his presence.

  I met him on Friday. He was sorting papers at the desk when I knocked at the Platnauer Room and he came towards me, extending his hand. ‘Madeline,’ he said. ‘Come and take a seat.’ It was as if he had been waiting to meet me for ever.

  The room smelt of emulsion and aftershave. I saw it had been renovated. A table lamp cast a note of sophisticated intimacy over the new carpet, leather upholstery and gilt-framed photographs of young children and wife, smiling Colgate smiles. On the desk was an iPad, notebook and bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils. A vase of white irises stood on the sideboard. The sight of them made me uneasy.

  ‘You like the flowers?’ He was looking at me enquiringly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, but in truth the smell (or was I imagining that?) was making me giddy.

  ‘I believe in bringing nature indoors,’ he said. ‘We are only just beginning to realize the therapeutic benefits of being in nature.’ He launched himself back into the leather rotating chair and flipped open a brown folder. ‘So, how are you?’ He flicked through the papers in the folder, which presumably concerned myself.

  I considered this, then replied: ‘I don’t know. I’ve been here too long to know things like that.’

  He smiled slightly as if I had made a joke, though that was not my intention. He said: ‘Yes, twenty years is a fair stretch by anyone’s standards.’

  ‘Twenty-one,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry, twenty-one. You’ve been round the mulberry bush, haven’t you?’

  He was referring no doubt to the plethora of therapies I have undergone since my admission at the age of fourteen, suffering from a depression (so they deemed it) that made normal functioning impossible, as well as periodic episodes of violent psychosis – ‘psychotic breaks’, the doctors call them – in which I lose consciousness and, apparently, my identity, and when I re-enter my body have no recollection of anything I have said or done. Thanks to medication, they occur now only once or twice a year.

  ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘in spite of the attention your case has received, I believe the doctors who treated you have been misguided. We are not dealing with a breakdown here, bipolarity, hysteria or even catatonia; it was an event that brought you here; something happened the night you ran away. When the police found you, you were dishevelled, incoherent. Over the next few weeks you stopped speaking, eating and sleeping.’

  He leant back in the seat, the black leather creaking appreciatively. ‘I’m writing a seminal paper on amnesia’s long-term effects, Madeline. I think you’re suffering from dissociative amnesia. Something happened that was too traumatic for your mind to process. So it effectively erased it. Your current illness is symptomatic of such repression. Do you remember anything at all about that night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you feel the same person as that teenage girl?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘You feel different?’

  ‘I don’t feel anything at all.’

  ‘You don’t feel connected to the person you were then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So who are you now?’

  I considered this for a moment. ‘Nobody,’ I said.

  He nodded, then said: ‘Madeline, with your consent I’d like to hypnotize you. Despite the delay of adequate treatment, I think rehabilitation is a real possibility.’

  A moment passed. I said: ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Rehabilitation. I know the idea must seem unusual to you after all this time.’

  I felt a surge, as if I had taken a leap off the edge of something and been borne up. The sensation was painful in its intensity.

  I said: ‘You won’t find anything.’

  ‘We’ll see. The only problem is that since so much time has passed we don’t have much to go on. There are no eyewitness statements, just the police reports, which I’ve looked over. Your father and mother have passed away?’

  I nodded.

  He took a pencil from a pot and began to sharpen it in a machine at the side of his desk. Presently he inspected the point and, apparently satisfied, opened the notebook. Then he asked me to tell him how it began, ‘the trouble’, he called it, the year I was thirteen; the autumn, the winter, the summer and spring. He said he wanted to know how it was before things went wrong, and how they went wrong, and how it felt.

  He said: ‘Nothing is too bad to be talked about, Madeline.’ I don’t know why he said that.

  ‘It’s a long time ago,’ I said.

  I was surprised to find that Dr Lucas, in spite of the flowers, in spite of the aftershave, has a fine, steady gaze. ‘I think you can remember,’ he said.

  I said: ‘I need a drink.’

  He allowed me to pour myself one from the water-cooler. When I sat down again he was still waiting. I made him wait while I drank, then I crushed the plastic cup and sat there a moment looking at it.

  ‘I’ve been through all this a dozen times with a dozen doctors!’ I said.

  ‘And none of them looking in the right place,’ he said. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Madeline,’ he said softly. ‘I can help you.’

  Yes, I thought – and write that paper on amnesia.

  He got up. ‘Have you heard of fugue, Madeline?’ I could no longer see him without turning my head, which I was disinclined to do, unwilling to give anything he did more attention than was absolutely necessary. ‘Fugue is a loss of identity, usually coupled with flight from one’s normal environment,’ he was saying. ‘In your case you’re still running.’

  I fixed my eyes on the irises. The longer I watched them, the more sure I became that they were moving slightly, though I suppose they could not have, for there was no draught.

  He came back to the desk and he said: ‘Look at me.’ With some difficulty I did so. ‘Do you want to stay here the rest of your life?’

  Seeing as most of my remembered life had been spent here, it was not easy to say.

  ‘Let’s start somewhere,’ he said. ‘Anywhere. We can layer on the rest as the mind gives way.’

  I put my head in my hands and leant forwards. I was trying to think how to explain what I knew. I felt my way back, but the threads were knotted. If I pulled here, a mass bunched there; I separated one strand, only for the others to tangle. I thought it must surely have begun the day I went down to the river. But then I thought it began the day Father came home without work. Then I thought perhaps it really began the day we arrived at the farm, rumbled up the track, opened the gate and stood looking around as if we had found ourselves in some enchanted land and didn’t care to find the way out again.

  All these years, there have been things I cannot remember, blanks where the colours had faded or the lines had been wiped out, and there have been others that darkened even as I watched, like photographic paper left too long in developing fluid.

  But I could draw you a map, accurate to the metre, of the track and the house and the sheds and the courtyard, the sheep-dip and the garden, the pine tree and stream, the brambles, the dairy, the barn. I could tell you that the house stood facing east, that the sun rose over the dairy and set over the barn, and that from my bedroom you could see the country around for more than sixty miles, as far as the blue mountains on clear days. But you could not see the garden, though it encircled the house on three sides like a snake.

  I could tell you about the moon as it rose through the branches of the pine tree, describe the feel of the stair banisters, the sound when my bedroom window opened, the precise shape of the crack in the kitchen ceiling that appeared the day my father hit his head on the beam. I could tell you that the cobbles in the court
yard were a sundial if you looked down from above, with the front door standing at number twelve. That there was a rust-coloured line running from the hole in a granite millstone that stood beside the front door, and that maybe this was where everything began, because the stone reminded me of an altar and the rust of blood.

  The sky beyond the windows was heavy with rain. I could see the storm coming over the horse-chestnut trees, rolling faster than a person could run. I wanted to smell that air, be beneath those clouds, feel the dark spirit forms of the trees cover me.

  I said: ‘It began with a book.’

  ‘A book?’ He picked up his pencil.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sort of a book?’

  ‘A bible.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘My father’s.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘What was the bible like?’

  ‘Big.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Old.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Inside the front cover there was a picture.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘A garden.’

  The Garden in the Book

  My father was a minister of God. He believed this world was a template of another, a stained-glass window in which we could see things to come, and we lived accordingly, looking for signs, living by shadows, moment by revelatory moment. In the evenings my father read from a large bible. My mother and I listened, hearing the pattern and keeping the time, sitting either side of him, for the bible was too old to handle and too heavy to hold. A red bookmark forked like a tongue hung from the centre of the bible and the edges shone dimly with greening gold-leaf. Mildew had peppered the pages, and time had yellowed and warped each one so that they resembled the waters of a lake, perpetually rippling away from itself towards the shore. The smell of the bible I remember most keenly. It was, after the cantankerous creak of the spine, its most evocative aspect: fusty, acrid, furtive; suggestive of things ravaged yet fecund with time.