The Offering Read online

  God had blessed us, but I still had not found Him. I thought I had come close; all I needed was a little more intimate knowledge, a more personal proof. I searched for God in the fields and the woods but it was in the river I found Him, on a day of astonishing heat, when the light was strange and there was a void at the centre of things.

  Those first months were hot, people remarked on it. In the town holidaymakers fanned themselves at pavement cafés. The beach, when we drove past it one day – broad and golden, with high sand dunes rounding to the Head – was teeming with people. My father came home from work with his arms and hands so freckled you could hardly see the white parts. In the house even opening the windows did not bring in the breeze. My mother and I walked barefoot. Elijah got up only to gulp noisily from his water bowl, then flopped back down in the shade. Before the dew had dried each morning, the sun appeared to be pulsing. Small breezes faltered and expired. The horizon was hazy, the ground scorching. Only late in the day did the heat lessen a little, shadows ticking by at the base of the pine as the sun slipped lower, warmed lips and eyes, flared sudden through apple tree boughs, lit grasses and leaves and dragonfly wings, as if concealed within each was a living coal, and veins held not sap but blood; skeins of jewel and flame. The moment the sun sank quivering into the earth was an incarnation and things toppled backwards, laid low by its might. Wherever it is now, the light passes still, gilding the river that widens and quickens away from the fields and the hills, past the tower and the bridge and the town on to the quay, to the lip of the sea, to the point called The Head, where the currents run deep, and woods cling to soil that is sand, and silt rich with rain.

  I wouldn’t have gone down to the river if it hadn’t been for the heat, but neither would I have gone down to the river if they hadn’t warned me not to. I could climb trees, walk the lanes, sit in the hayloft, sleep out in the garden or upstairs in the dairy, but the river was forbidden. It wasn’t that easy to ignore, though. You could see it through the gap in the hedge at the bottom of the garden that was flanked by the sign warning trespassers – whether to stay in or keep out, I still wasn’t sure. When the sun shone, light glanced off the water; in the rain we could hear its voice.

  I was reminded of the river also because the garden itself was a source of some fascination. Creatures lurked there, leaves were shiny as if polished, colours richer than usual, so that they appeared almost luminous – yet in other places were darker than you would think they should be. There were box hedges that resembled humans and animals as clouds seem to do, and like clouds seemed to change imperceptibly in the time it took to look away and look back. There was an ancient schema palpable beneath your feet despite the long grass and the moss, its random shapes suggesting terraces and avenues, stones sleeping like the bones of a Babylon or an Atlantis.

  There were other things that seemed to have no business in the garden at all: palms, tropical plants, large-leaved and glossy, flowers we did not know the names of, the strange flesh-coloured orchids that smelt like the dead animals I had seen sometimes at the side of the road, attracting hundreds of flies. The orchids suggested things about the earth here, uncomfortable things, particularly in view of what we knew about the previous inhabitant: that nothing ever really vanished but only seemed to, and could not be forgotten for it was bound to reappear.

  What was most peculiar about the garden, however, was the conviction I had that I was being watched. I thought I caught the watcher occasionally in a shift of the treetops, in the movement they made before the wind came, but I couldn’t make out the watcher’s attitude. I didn’t know whether it was amused, or curious, or something darker; I remembered the vagrant’s words, and wondered once again whether the previous owner had killed himself in the garden. Odder still was that the experience of being watched was one of unease and, at the same time, familiarity, as if I had spent months in a room with a stranger but never been introduced. Was my uneasiness with myself or that which surrounded me, I asked myself. My father had said gods lived in this land. Was this why I felt so unsettled? Was it their bones I felt beneath my feet? Did their presence in the streams, the trees, the rocks, account for the certainty that I was being watched?

  Elijah noticed it too. He would look around or sniff the air. Sometimes his hackles rose. Often the sensation was so strong that I turned, only to confront a tree or a flower, alarm spiking my scalp. That summer it occurred to me that the reason the first humans clothed themselves may well have been to shield themselves from such relentless curiosity, because in the garden I was made aware that what set me apart from my surroundings was my skin: it made me an object of alienation, of danger and perhaps of regret. Acute bodily discomfort prompted me to attempt to escape from my skin that fateful afternoon, dislodging the warning to trespassers at the bottom of the garden and stealing down to the river beyond.

  On the afternoon I went down to the river we had been battling Newton’s Third Law. My mother and I had missed lessons earlier and were making up for it later. But all I was conscious of was the sunlight falling across the kitchen table. It came in through the open front door, it flowed down each step of the stairs, making the banisters stand up like rotten teeth and the understairs black. It made aureoles of our hair and wiped out our hands and our faces. The light seemed too dense to simply be sunlight. The courtyard was erased, overexposed, bleached as white as marrow, as albumen, as skin without blood. Corners hoarded darkness as the ground hoards water in a drought. Against this whiteness objects appeared to be etched out; the shed doorways, the shadows cast by walls and trees and stones, had eaten away the blankness by means of some sort of acid. The light made other things seem imperfect. I closed my eyes against its brightness but all that happened was that the world appeared red-hot and in negative.

  Through the open door where Elijah lay, a breeze carried a sweet scent of dung. Distances lapped at the house like water, but in the kitchen there was only the stale smell of baking and yellowing linoleum, motes in the air, a sill spotted with spider-blood. A tap dripped, the clock shaped like a saucepan ticked, Elijah yawned piercingly, mournfully, then went back to panting. When I looked at my mother her hand had opened gently, her head was on her arms and her eyes were shut.

  Sweat slipped in rivulets down my back and pricked my scalp. The crotch of my dungarees chafed. My feet stuck to the cross-bar of the table, a rash I had developed on my stomach begged to be scratched. My body had been making its presence felt more and more lately. There were stirrings, wetness, vague pains low down. My breasts were swollen and tender; when I inspected them they looked angry. The graze of cotton across my nipples was painful and to touch them was half sickness, half pleasure, the sensation drawing me towards something. Were these changes evidence of God, I wondered? Was this awakening? Hadn’t I prayed to be wakened?

  That afternoon I tried to go back to Newton, but the light blotted out the words, made the pencil slide between my finger and thumb, my brain turn to felt. My mother’s mouth gaped a little wider. Her cheeks were flushed. I could see the dark whorl of hair at her crown. Her mouth furled and slackened, with a soft pock; ffff … pock; ffff … pock; ffff … A space opened between the rise and fall of her chest.

  I put back the chair and crept to the door. Elijah jumped up and capered around me, groaning and twisting with delight.

  ‘Shhhh,’ I said, and we slipped out.

  We went through the ivy-covered archway, past the orchard, the pine tree, the brambles, the stream. The sun on my head made me stumble. A strange pulse beat low in my body. Elijah was silent, running fast and low through the grass. We squeezed through the hedge and then we were racing, the fields spread out, the sky the colour of blue ink.

  The river glittered like hot metal but freshness came up from it like a smell. Its voice was deep-throated and mellow, and the shade of the trees along the bank was a cool palm on my head. There were irises growing down by the river, great clumps of white heads standing taller than my waist, and when I waded in amongst
them they towered into blue-black skies. That night when I went back to the farm with sunburn and freckles, and lay awake in the dark with the heat in my head and that other new place, and wondered whether what had happened was because of those flowers and those skies.

  I tore off my clothes and slipped in where the irises grew thickest. The water was cold at first and then it was cool; it held you still if you pedalled against it and swept you away with infinite ease if you didn’t. I played in the shallows but after a while I went to the deeps and hung there for hours while sound turned to silence and shivering to heat.

  I cannot describe how good the water felt. The burden of my skin was instantly lighter. Mud billowed between my toes in mushroom clouds, pond-skaters dimpled the light on the surface, dragonflies hovered. I floated, the engorged sun tickling my eyelids, teasing them into an ecstasy of honeyed somnolence, till tears slipped from the corners, and when I opened them the fields had been changed to purple and blue. Around me the irises rustled their papery leaves. They unfurled their tongues, splayed wide their gullets and yawned down to the stamen, only to curve away, sting-like, in whorls of mottled flesh. They bore more resemblance to insects than plants, their palette of dark chocolate sigils a scribbled death’s head – and they were already dying when I found them, dry blades clustered behind each fluted head.

  The irises nodded and pointed. Upstream, the flowers said.

  ‘Stay,’ I said to Elijah, and he sat with a thump on my dungarees, his head on his paws, eyes accusatory. He whined as I swam off, a whine more like a chattering that resolved itself into a groan.

  I followed the flowers into the fields, further than I had ever been before, and where a plashing stream joined the river, I hung, while the current pummelled me. It was strange, treading the water, which seemed to be treading me back. After a while my body ceased to belong to me and the relief was intense. I could feel and not feel – or, rather, feel everything: the light, the branches, the water. I was wiped out, effaced, displaced, no thing in particular: a place, a process, a space through which other things passed. I was water, I was light; I was surely evaporating. For the space of a few seconds I was complete. It was what I had hoped God would do – was this God now?

  I was trying to think, to ask myself what was happening, but something unearthly was building – I was stretched taut, my heart thundered, light burnt me up – and then right at the summit all things subsided into absence, or presence, I wasn’t sure which – and even as I thought this I ceased to be aware of the thought and was aware only of stillness, the movement of trees, the bank bobbing, the water kneading me with its feet.

  Then bank, trees and water all went crashing away as wave after wave of something else washed over me. I buckled, gasped, went under and came up, then clung to the bank as darkness swallowed me up.

  When I opened my eyes I did not know how much time had passed. The sun was low and a breeze was stirring the irises, which made a sound like pages turning. It was a moment before I saw the eyes watching me, two slits in a head that sheered away abruptly. I jumped backwards, splashing, and the eyes slid away, and after them a long body, appearing first to the right of me, then to the left.

  I dragged myself out, shaking, my limbs leaden and slow. I ran back along the bank. Elijah saw me from a distance and ran up, whining and yapping. My teeth were chattering so badly now that my jaw ached, and if I had wanted to shed my clothes before, I wanted nothing more than to put them on again, though I was clumsy and stumbled. Elijah kept glancing up at me anxiously, the little hairs above his eyes pointing this way and that. I did not pet him. All I wanted to do was get away from there. As soon as I had pulled on my clothes I began to run.

  The light was different now, no longer white but golden and low. Sand martins were swooping, bobbing gnats auriferous specks in the air. We came up through the field, a stitch in my side and a heat low down in my body where God had entered me. Because that is what must have happened. Surely. God had finally made Himself known to me. I had felt Him – irrefutably. For a moment, perhaps several, we had been One. It was the fulfilment of my only desire. Why then was I so uneasy?

  We got to the gap in the hedge and squeezed through. As we ran back through the garden, the force of its gaze struck me more powerfully than ever before and the unease quickened into dread. I left Elijah gulping from the water-pump, his sides bellowing, and went into the kitchen. My mother was at the sink. She turned and stared at me.

  ‘Sorry—’ I said. ‘I went out …’

  Her eyes took in my hair. She said: ‘You went in the river.’ She seemed incredulous.

  ‘I didn’t mean to!’ I said.

  We looked at each other.

  ‘You’ve been gone hours.’

  ‘I’m sorry! I fell asleep; I think that’s what happened.’

  ‘You think that’s what happened …?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  We heard my father arrive. My mother turned back to the sink. She said: ‘Go and dry your hair.’

  ‘You’ve caught the sun,’ my father said to me at dinner. My mother’s face was empty. I couldn’t eat and asked to be excused.

  That evening I stayed outside till the air was thick and soft, and the light was fading like smoke through the apple trees. I sat in the long field with Elijah, gazing at nothing. He was anxious and quiet beside me but for some reason I did not want to touch him. My heart beat strangely and I throbbed in the new place, too, that till this afternoon I had not known existed. God, I said, is this You?

  At about eight o’clock we began to walk back. As we passed the sheep-dip by the corner of the house I heard them.

  ‘She needs company!’ my mother was saying. ‘She needs something to do!’

  ‘You’re supposed to be teaching her!’ my father said.

  ‘It’s not enough!’ I had never heard my mother speak so forcefully. ‘She’s growing up, she needs friends, people – a life!’

  ‘Then we’ll find a school if that’s what you want!’

  ‘It’s not what I want!’ she said. ‘It’s not what I want!’

  I felt sick and leant against the wall. It was their first fight since we had come to the farm and it was about me. They went on, talking about responsibility, decisions, ‘input’, a word my mother seemed to like. At last I could not listen any more and went down to the kennel with Elijah.

  When I went back to the house my father was gone and my mother was sitting at the table. She said nothing. I sat down opposite her.

  After what seemed like forever, she said: ‘D’you have any idea how dangerous what you did today was? If something had happened to you no one would have known.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  Elijah looked at me from the doorway.

  ‘Promise you won’t do it again,’ she said.

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘You just walked out!’ She didn’t seem to believe it; I could hardly believe it myself.

  We were silent a moment. Then I said: ‘There was a snake in the water. I didn’t think snakes could swim.’

  She did not seem to have heard what I said, and when I looked up her eyes were terrible.

  ‘I didn’t mean to …’ I said, tears in my voice.

  She got up and said: ‘I’m going to bed.’

  There was nothing for it but to follow her up.

  It was still light outside my bedroom window. I undressed gingerly, my skin already red. The sheets hurt and I threw them off. I wondered if I should try to tell my mother what had happened, but did not know myself.

  The sky became inky at last, but not black. The night that came was blue like the day and the land moved under the light. A breeze came in through the window.

  ‘What happened?’ I said, and did not know how to answer. Then I said: ‘I found God.’

  God had rewarded my persistence. I got up and knelt by the bed.

  ‘Thank you for choosing me,’ I said. I supposed my life was complete
.

  That night I dreamt of a green snake that wound in and out of milky flowers. The heat burnt again in that new place.

  ‘God—’ I cried, and woke; put my hand there, and touched it.

  The Book in the Garden

  According to my father, a law spanned all creation, from the baby in the womb to the earth and the planets, the interaction of forces both centripetal and centrifugal. The law was simple, though there were different ways of explaining it: ‘You reap what you sow’ was one; ‘A life for a life’ was another. My father said if a sin was committed, the universe would know, the earth would remember and the perpetrator would reap his rewards in due season. It was not possible, he said, for it to be any other way. Seeds fell to the ground, died and sprang to life again, flowers bloomed and withered, all things returned whence they had come from and began again. There were plants, he said, that, when opened, displayed the teeth of dead men. There were fields whose soil was red with blood; the sea returned its cargo sooner or later and so did the earth.

  I wondered about the farmer who had lived at the farm before us; I had walked amongst the trees in the garden and tried to guess which one he had chosen. The action begged questions: if punishment was indicative of crime, what was his? More worryingly, had the score been settled or was there some deficit still awaiting payment?

  I went down to the river once more that summer to make sure nothing had changed; however, some things already had. The heat had gone and the land was divesting itself of greenness; the sky was no longer blue but overlaid with a luminous film of copper, and the sun was a blind spot pulsing behind high banks of cloud. My body was different too. I had been ill for days after I came back from the river; sick and shivery, my skin agony to touch. I lay draped in wet towels as it turned purple, then red, then peeled off. I had to cover myself if I went outside after that, and those parts that clothes did not cover, my mother did with copious amounts of sunscreen.