The Offering Read online

  The evening Elijah and I went down to the river, two larks were rising from the grasses and the dusk was like smoke. I stood by the water and did not recognize it. It did not glitter any more, but was sullen. The irises were dead. I began to walk back but had not gone far when Elijah began to bark in the long grass at the water’s edge. I parted it and saw a grating, clicking cluster of limbs as big as a football. There were pulsing throats, glistening arms and legs and heads, clinging one to another, eyes half closed and deathly. I stared, then I ran. I never went back.

  Shortly after this the illustrated bible also underwent a transformation. For some reason a number of things happened to other relics from our former life at this time: a picture of a stag that we had had for as long as I could remember fell and pierced itself on the coal scuttle; a clock belonging to my grandfather stopped working and cost too much to be repaired; a spring popped from the seat of the ancient chaise longue one evening when we were in the sitting room, startling us as much as if an arm had appeared from a grave. But it was the bible that left behind the biggest hole.

  We had moved the kitchen table beneath the apple trees that summer and my father read there each evening until it got dark. I had wondered what it must have been like for the bible to find itself in a real garden: for real seeds, real petals, real insects to be alighting on its pages; to discover that however brilliant its colours it could never compare to those that shifted and deepened, became warmer and colder, or changed altogether in the blink of an eye.

  ‘Now after these things it came about that the true God put Abraham to the test,’ read my father. ‘Accordingly He said to him … “Take, please, your son, your only one, whom you so love, Isaac, and make a trip to the land of Mount Moriah and there offer him up …” So Abraham got up early in the morning and saddled his ass and took two of his attendants with him and Isaac his son …’

  I think it was the first night we had had to light the oil lamp, or perhaps we had sat down a little later than usual, but for whatever reason this particular evening we could not see the words as clearly as we should have done.

  ‘Finally they reached the place that the true God had designated to him,’ my father read, ‘and Abraham built an altar there and set the wood in order and bound Isaac his son. Then Abraham put out his hand and took the slaughtering knife to kill his son. But God’s angel began calling to him out of the heavens and saying: “Abraham, Abraham! Do not put out your hand against the boy and do not do anything at all to him, for now I do know that you are God-fearing in that you have not withheld your son, your only one, from me.” At that Abraham raised his eyes and looked and there was a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up in place of his son …’

  The lamp cast an eerie light beneath the apple trees, whose shadows loomed monstrous overhead. Every so often a moth fell onto the table, reversed frantically, wings quivering, flipped over and died. I didn’t like to jump too often. I thought surely my father would move us inside, but he kept reading. I glanced at my parents. My mother’s face was closed up, the soft weight of her cheeks and downcast eyes making her look, as she often did when my father read the bible or spoke about religious matters, as if she was reverently asleep. His own face and neck were red from scrubbing.

  I was sitting beside him, staring extra hard at the page because I did not want to witness the death throes of one more moth, when I thought I saw something on the paper itself, but so small I could not be sure whether I was imagining it. The entity I saw was no bigger than a seed and almost transparent. What was more, it was moving. Was it one of the particles I had seen before? I wondered. This time there was one, not many. I blinked but the speck didn’t clear. Then I spotted another, rounding ‘thicket’ and passing through ‘slaughtering’. I wondered whether my father had seen them. My mother was sitting too far away.

  Suddenly, as if making up its mind about something, the first speck scurried to the edge of the page. I waited for it to drop over the side but before it did my father turned over.

  ‘Oh!’ I said.

  My father looked at me. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  On the next page there were three particles, each scurrying in different directions. This time I had to find out if I was imagining things. I said: ‘There’s something on the page.’

  My father looked closely, frowned, then blew hard. The specks seemed to know what was coming; they froze, only to scurry twice as fast afterwards.

  My father said: ‘What the—’

  ‘What is it?’ My mother leant over.

  My father swiped the page with his hand and the particles vanished, as if liquidized. I stared at him. He began to flick through the pages. There were one or more on virtually every page.

  ‘What are they?’ I said.

  Over the coming days we found particles in all of our books.

  On Saturday my father came back from the town. The specks had a name: ‘book mites’. The bible would have to be destroyed. He said: ‘They must have been in the books that were here.’

  He was not himself for some days. He took the bible, along with our other books, to the bottom of the garden where he made a bonfire, but he could not bring himself to set light to it.

  My father’s hands were too big for the new bibles we bought and he turned the pages with vicious little flicks. My mother and I did not look up while he read; we turned the pages quietly and were extra attentive. But we could not make sacred that which felt secular. The words did not feel the same any more; they, like the land, had become alien to us.

  At the bottom of the garden the book pile gathered fungi. Foxgloves took up residence there; nettles, dock leaves. One afternoon, when clouds were flying and the garden was full of breezes and watery rustlings, I rummaged with a stick until I found the big bible. Snails had made shining paths across the cover and woodlice fell from the spine. Instead of gold leaf there was a spattering of white spots at the edges, and the pages were, if possible, even more wrinkled.

  My arms and legs felt so heavy that I sat down on the ground. After a moment, I tried to pull back the greaseproof page from the picture of the garden. It tore wetly. A curtain had been rent. The Most Holy was now Most Ordinary. Beneath the veil were no longer sword and tree, serpent and errant humans, but an old world slowly dissolving.

  Mutiny

  Today began as a particularly dreary one here at Lethem Park, the sun hidden behind banks of cloud, neither cold nor hot, dark nor light. Eugene wet himself; Pam ate clay and had to have her stomach pumped; Margaret taught me a new stitch; Robyn’s parents arrived to take her out for the day; Alice made Mary cry: nothing out of the ordinary at all.

  It only started to get interesting this evening in the dining room. I had been watching Brendan all day. He was pale, paler than usual, and sitting very still. When he came into the lounge I got up to go over to him but Margaret shook her head, she stopped Pam and Robyn going over too. I put my hand up to Brendan in our special greeting but he didn’t see; though he never looks at anyone directly, today he didn’t even seem conscious that I was there. It worried me, especially after what happened the other day. Brendan had The Cosmological Principle in front of him as usual but he wasn’t reading. He sat like a stone. How much longer would it be before he began to adjust to the new medication Lucas had put him on?

  It was at dinner that things kicked off. I should say that dinner was worse than usual – perhaps that was what did it. Carol’s gift to us this evening was a tray of watery carrots and peas that tasted exactly the same as each other, lumpy mashed potato, cabbage the consistency of wet tissue paper, and something that resembled meat. The gravy was congealed, the carrots cold, the cabbage sat in pools of tepid water and tasted vaguely burnt. The mince consisted of gristle in tomato sauce. I hid a lot of it in my napkin.

  The dining room was fuller than usual; I think that was the other factor. Lucas wants more than one ward to eat together – ‘like a family�
�, he said. I have ‘enjoyed’ (if I can use that word in conjunction with mealtimes at Lethem Park) the evening meal a lot less since. I am frightened of quite a few of the patients from the other wards: Ivan, for instance, once pressed his erection against me in the corridor; Kirsty the albino looks daggers with her unearthly eyes; and Jim – who does not frighten but revolts me – produces an inordinate amount of stringy phlegm that he coughs into his hand. But Brendan has been coping with the new meal arrangement less well than I. He finds all people extremely challenging, so to have been in a room with more than fifty must have been intolerable.

  He was sitting across from me, spearing a pea, which, once captured, he gazed at in horror for some minutes, before swallowing it with an agonized expression. Sometimes Brendan sums up my feelings about Lethem Park (and, I am sure, many other patients’) so eloquently that I can’t help laughing; he will pull a face or make a noise or a gesture that speaks volumes about a situation that is indescribable – if only he was aware of it.

  At the urging of Sue, Brendan reached for another pea, wincing as he did so. As he raised it to his mouth, our eyes met. Facial expressions worry Brendan, so I stopped smiling and raised my hand in our star-shaped greeting. Reassured by this, he acknowledged me with a series of rapid blinks before returning to the business of eating the pea. He was breathing heavily. His eyes were half closed and every so often he groaned.

  Pete said: ‘All right there, Brendan? Not feeling hungry? Why don’t you try some of the carrots?’

  I took another mouthful. Chewing was difficult: Pam was eating her own snot; Robyn was crying and, in the process, divulging the contents of her mouth, which Sue had just succeeded in feeding her; and Jim had begun to hack. I could feel the nausea coming like rain clouds travelling fast. The fork got heavier and heavier. I began to sweat. I propped my head on my hand and set my jaw hard. The nausea got worse, and my muscles began to feel sick, as if I had a temperature. I swallowed another forkful just as Jim coughed up a particularly large entity. I was just about to ask to be excused when Brendan let out a loud groan and brought his right fist down on the table. We all looked at him.

  He groaned again. The sound was like that of a cow: heavy, mindless, desolate. He brought his fist down on the table again, making the trays and cutlery jump.

  ‘Brendan, stop that, there’s a good boy,’ said Sue.

  She forked together some mince and presented it to him but he cuffed her hand away and the mince landed in Robyn’s face. Robyn began to wail. A number of patients were now mumbling and moaning. Sue seized one of Brendan’s arms and tried to reach the other. Brendan rolled his eyes, groaned again and brought his other fist down.

  Pete said: ‘Brendan! Stop that! Come on, eat up, your dinner’s getting cold.’

  Brendan’s eyes continued to roll. He took his dinner tray, lifted it high and brought it down with a stupefying crash, so hard that the water slopped out of my beaker. I looked around for Margaret but she was on the next table with Mary and Alice and Miriam. Pete and another male nurse jumped up and wrested Brendan’s dinner tray from him. He sat swaying for a moment, growling unintelligibly, then began to pound the table with his forehead, his body rocking back and forth to such an extent I thought he would topple back.

  ‘Stop it, Brendan!’ said Pete. ‘That’s enough!’

  Others had begun to bang the table too – bang and rattle and rock; holler and groan and wail. The din was overwhelming. My heart was beating hard. I sat, faint and shaking, and watched the nurses run up and down. Then, hardly aware of what I was doing, I began to bang too – and for the first time in an age I felt blood in my arms and my legs and my chest, air in my lungs, and either I could not hear other things or I was not aware of them except as one is aware of others in a throng, as part of oneself: one mouth, one fist, one song.

  The din grew, fists, trays, beakers rained down. Brendan’s face was flushed, his eyes half closed; there were beads of sweat on his forehead. He was rocking so wildly that Pete and the other male nurse struggled to catch hold of him. I saw Pete haul him up by the back of his jumper. The next moment Brendan’s dinner tray was flying across the room, catching a female patient in the face. Pete and the nurse grabbed his arms but before they could get them behind his back Brendan had upturned the water jug, his beaker and his chair.

  Others followed suit; soon the air was full of flying food, trays and one or two chairs. A glass of water and a portion of cabbage, potato and gravy landed in my lap, Mary got mince in her hair; the best moment of all was when Carol caught a tray of her own food in the face through the serving hatch. The men had by now secured Brendan’s arms and were trying to get him away from the table, but Brendan arched backwards, his legs kicking wildly. More nurses arrived. The kitchen staff ran to help out.

  The upshot of it all is that there were twelve patients removed from the dining room, one of them in a straitjacket. It is not a pretty sight to see someone buckled into a straitjacket, but as Brendan was carried off I have never seen him looking happier – if you could call the manic, wide-eyed expression on his face ‘happiness’. He struggled wildly, but the moment they won his eyes became glazed. A trail of saliva hung from his mouth, which gaped in the closest thing to a smile I have ever seen on Brendan’s face; I would go so far as to say he looked almost beatific. And though he had technically lost the battle, he struck me just then, carried off between Pete and two other nurses, as a victor, as some sort of idol – a pop star crowd-surfing, some sort of war hero, a football legend; a god.

  Even after our leader was captured it was some time before things quietened. I am sure the dining room has never seen the like.

  We are presently rejoicing in our separate cells. I am still shaky and feel quite weak, yet I am exultant: a revolution has been born! We are buzzing, we are brimming, we are humming with life! None of us knew we had it in us – it is surprising what lurks only an inch or two beneath the surface calm. My only concern is whether Brendan will be all right. I have an urge to tap out a message of courage on the hot-water pipes in the hope that he will hear it. I also want to thank him because today, for the first time in years, I felt alive, and I feel part of this community as I have never done before – at one with every idiot, lunatic and basket case, who are now my brothers and sisters. How can that be after twenty-one years? But tonight I was not myself. In fact, I hardly know who I was.

  I drift into sleep, thinking about Lucas and what he will do – because he will do something, I am sure. There hasn’t been this sort of disturbance for years, and that it should happen on Lucas’s watch, after his ‘improvements’, in spite of his new regime – indeed, because of it – will not go down well. His initiatives have failed; surely tonight was proof. The scoreboard in the lounge – how will the nurses fill it in now? They could give us black marks from here to eternity and it still wouldn’t be enough. And if everyone is in the doghouse the system collapses anyway.

  No, Lucas will not like this. Reprisals will follow. The reaping will be grim. In which case I suppose I should revel in the moment and give no thought, just yet, to what we have sown.

  The Agenda

  The windows here are too high to see out of. I often think, when the sky is white and leaden as it is today, that they resemble the great sleepless eyes of classical gods, inscrutable in their vacuous watchfulness. There is something about those windows that reminds me of Lucas.

  Buoyed by the events in the dining room, I have decided that I will suggest again the need for some adjustment to my regime when I go along to the Platnauer Room: namely, that the exhaustion makes it impossible to get up at 8.30 a.m., that Graded Exercise only aggravates my pain and muscle weakness; that going to bed at 9 p.m. is pointless because I don’t sleep but lie awake, jumping from sub- to semi-consciousness; that I can fill in CBT forms till I am blue in the face but the anxiety only gets worse. In order not to forget anything – because while I am with Lucas I find it hard to think – I make some brief notes so that I will pres
ent my case in the best way possible.

  There is a change in the doctor today: he is cooler, there is no dazzling smile. He puts his head around the door and says: ‘Can you wait a minute?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and wait on the chair in the corridor.

  I wait over five minutes, then he puts his head out again and says: ‘You can come in now.’

  Inside there is no ‘Hello, Madeline,’ no ‘Good to see you, Madeline!’, no ‘How are you, Madeline?’ Instead he says: ‘Take a seat.’

  Interesting. The god’s waters are ruffled. I think he looks a little sallow, a little dark beneath the eyes. Has he not been topping up his tan at the salon? Is there trouble at home with the Colgate wife? Is one of the perfect offspring sick? Or is this subtle change to do with us, his precious charges; are our paths more closely linked than I suspected? Can he not change a human being’s life irrevocably, and go home in his sports car to his jacuzzi bath, dinner and scotch, unscathed? Do we, on occasion, actually make him as miserable as he makes us? Are we perhaps threatening his hopes of the consummate performance, not behaving as decent lunatics should? Have there been comments, in-department asides? Have the staff expressed their reservations about his treatment of us?

  It is the ideal time to press my advantage. I take a deep breath. ‘I have a few questions, Dr Lucas.’

  He says: ‘Yes?’ That is all. I could actually like this Lucas; this faded shadow of the man.

  ‘Well,’ I say, unprepared for such humanness, ‘I’m concerned about my treatment. I don’t think it’s working, to put it bluntly – or, at least, working as – you may think; I don’t mean the hypnotherapy, I mean the other things …’

  ‘You think a lot, don’t you, Madeline? You like to know exactly what’s happening.’

  ‘I do,’ I say.

  ‘But we have discussed your concerns before. I hardly think they will have changed much in two weeks. I’m quite willing to listen to them but let’s do it later, shall we? Let’s get on with our work. That’s the important thing. We’ll come back to them, all right?’