The Offering Read online

  I can’t go out to the fields because it is wet. Besides, I have found You, there is no point in looking for You any more.

  29 September

  Dear God,

  The world still seems dark today, as if it has been unplugged. In the afternoons after Mum and I have finished lessons I go down to the stream. In the stream there are small animals. I call them crayfish. Mum doesn’t know what they are either. They are like small grey shrimps. There are pools in the stream, dams and waterfalls I have made, marked with stones. They smell of ponds and mud and saliva. Clouds and shadows move upside down in them. Beside the largest pool is a stone. It is made of the same stone as the millstone beside the front door, and when the sun catches it, it flashes colour like a diamond.

  I was patching a leak in the dam of the top pool when I saw one crayfish carrying another. I’ve never seen that before. The one underneath was hollow and looked white. I wondered whether they were eating each other. The more I watched the surer I became. I fished them out and separated them on the rock but couldn’t be sure whether I was hurting them as I had to pull them apart. I put the white one back in the water and he sank, then puttered along the bottom.

  I was shaking. It made me sick having to touch them even though I was using a stick. I didn’t know what to do with the other one. Why should he go back into the water just to eat someone else? He was walking on his side on the rock, making his way back to the water. I took my knife and crushed him with the side of it. I did it quickly and pressed very hard because I was frightened. I pressed so hard there was immediately nothing but grey juice.

  I sat back and suddenly felt dizzy. I wiped my hands on my jeans, though nothing was on them, and I had to get up and walk around before I could go back to the stream. For a minute, after I had cried, the day got brighter again, as if someone had plugged it back in.

  I washed the rock and wiped the knife clean. I looked for the hollow crayfish but couldn’t find him.

  I am going to go down to the stream tomorrow, and if I can, I will save another life.

  I remember that clearly, every detail. I turn over and lie on my back because my heart is beating hard, because I am torn between reading on and getting this over with, between stopping here and putting it off.

  1 October

  Dear God,

  We have spaced the apples like he said but the badness seems to travel anyway. Today when Mum and I went upstairs in the dairy we found sagging patches of scented brown flesh. Mum said: ‘It must be the weather.’ She looked frightened. She said: ‘We’ll get rid of them.’

  We took the apples and hurled them over the fence at the bottom of the garden. I had to stop Elijah bringing them back. Then we rearranged the others and put them in the places where the bad ones had been. We went inside with more apples in our jumpers and she set me lessons. When I had finished I helped her. All afternoon we peeled and cored and baked and stewed and fried apples. Then we began on the potatoes.

  ‘The nights are drawing in,’ he said, coming in from clearing brambles. He was soaked through. I didn’t think we needed to clear any more but he is always doing something even if there is no point to it. He didn’t have to say that, either: ‘The nights are drawing in’ – it made my stomach turn, it made me frightened for nothing.

  ‘Fantastic!’ he said at dinner. ‘Food from our own garden!’ But he was just pretending to be jolly. The blackness is there, I know. I’m watching him. It came out when I said I was full and couldn’t eat any more. ‘We don’t have any waste in this house!’ he said. So I wasn’t allowed to leave any of my stewed apples – though usually he is telling us to keep leftovers for tomorrow. He makes up his own rules.

  If I never see another apple in my life it will be too soon.

  3 October

  Dear God,

  The blue has finally come back. When I get up the sunlight is like a needle over the rim of the hills and there is a mist of water at the corners of the window-panes. The air feels clean. Breezes have taken away the smell in the kitchen.

  We went preaching today with apples and potatoes in our lunchboxes. We ate lunch in a lane. The man who is technically my father thanked You for giving us the apples and potatoes. I wondered whether I should say ‘Amen’ because I would be lying. He made noises when he ate, smacking his lips, and I hated him. There was a little bit of ham, which I saved for last, to take away the taste of the apples and potatoes. We didn’t get to share any verses from the bible except with an old lady who we thought might have been deaf.

  This afternoon I asked Mum when we would run out of apples and she said she thought there were enough to last all winter. I went up to the dairy and took an armful of apples and moved the others around to fill up the space. I put the apples in my pockets and went down the lane with Elijah. When we were a few fields away I threw them as hard as I could against a tree. Pieces of apple brain splattered against the bark. I went back to the dairy and did the same all over again. It felt good. It is a sin to hate my father but not to throw apples.

  6 October

  Dear God,

  I made You come to me three times this morning. I wonder if You come to other people in the same way. I thought again about telling Mum. I don’t know why I didn’t. Anyway, she wouldn’t believe me. No one would. But I know it’s real. I suppose I wouldn’t know if other people had found You or not. I still think I am probably the only one.

  We ate apples for breakfast, lunch and tea. I asked Mum whether they were the fruit Adam and Eve ate in the garden. She said she didn’t know but it was probably something more exotic. I said I thought it must be because no one could be tempted by an apple.

  7 October

  Dear God,

  There is something wrong with Mum. Today while we were doing lessons she kept rubbing her eyebrow, running her finger over it again and again. Every time she looked at me she smiled. I wished she didn’t think she had to do that.

  When I gave Elijah his dinner the man who is married to my mother told me to mix bread with the dog food. ‘And don’t give him any more,’ he said. Elijah looked at his bowl and then at me. I don’t blame him. ‘At least you don’t have to eat apples,’ I said. ‘Think about that.’

  In the afternoon we went preaching on the bikes. I felt sick as we rode down the drive and I felt sick when we walked down the tracks and knocked on the doors. It was farms mostly and the people didn’t want to know. It was hard concentrating at all in the end. The sickness was so bad I began to sweat. It got harder and harder to pedal. I had to tell them and we came back home. Mum pushed my bike for me and Dad pushed both of theirs.

  ‘We’ll soon have you right,’ she said.

  But at home after she had given me Gaviscon she fell asleep at the table. Her face was grey and a little pool of spit formed under her mouth. Her eyebrows were raised as if they were clinging to something and her breath made the pocking sound. We used to find her asleep like that when we lived in the town.

  At dinnertime he clattered saucepans but she didn’t wake. His eyes were hard and flashing. I thought she looked frightened. I helped him wash up, then Elijah and I went down to the stream. I found three crayfish eating others and killed them on the rock with the knife that has the red cross on it. I put the victims back into the pool but I think I was too late and one was already dead.

  There was no point washing the rock because there will soon be more blood on it. I called Elijah and we came back up to the house. It was dark and she was still sleeping.

  I just heard a scream outside. It is five past eleven. I’ve heard the noise before. Mum said it was a rabbit. The noise sounds like flesh and blood. It is terrible. When I asked what was happening to the rabbit, she wouldn’t tell me.

  God, please don’t let her get ill again.

  10 October

  Dear God,

  Today we had our first frost. It rose from the ground and stayed all day and it was so quiet I could hear the hooves of the horses trampling the stubble in the field.
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br />   This evening we went to the supermarket. Elijah sat by the door, whining to be allowed to go with us. It has been harder to leave him lately. ‘We’ll be back before you know it,’ I said. ‘Really.’ Mum and I sang on the way to town. The man who lives with us heard about some work in the supermarket. I hope he gets it, and stays out of the house.

  He was all right again when we got home, lighting the fire, drinking his lager in the long, smooth, slow way he does. Mum looked happy. I went outside with Elijah and the moon was huge. I ran around the courtyard and it was as if I was saying something, only not out loud. Writing words on the night.

  My father’s fist was red on the gearstick, which stuck and grated. His arm was resting on the window and the breeze came in sharp and chill. The frost had disappeared and the air was bitten and I could smell the land as if it had just been made; I could smell wild garlic in the hedges, and the earth, and the reek of silage and, once, the sharp tang of fox. ‘The nights are drawing in,’ he said. I looked at the river and saw he was right; the light was tired, and something tugged at the pit of my stomach.

  My mother sang ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’ on the way into town in the car. She was cold and stiff but singing away, wearing lipstick and her favourite pink jumper beneath her coat. She had cut her fringe and it was skew-whiff but she didn’t seem to notice. The jolts of the car were making her voice shake, making it sound silly. I thought he might be driving extra fast on purpose, so I joined in.

  We were getting a trolley by the door of the supermarket when a man in overalls and builder’s boots passed by. My father said: ‘Excuse me, d’you know if there’s any building work around here?’

  ‘Masses of it down by the river,’ the man said. ‘They’re building a new cinema. Go and put your name down, they can’t get enough men.’

  While my mother and I got groceries he went to find the site. We were at the checkout when I heard a slap and my mother jumped. My father said: ‘What’s the little woman got for me, then?’ He was holding an off-licence bag and he looked triumphant.

  My mother flushed. ‘Did you get it? Did you put your name down?’ She looked like a little girl.

  ‘Aye, aye,’ he said, frowning now slightly, as if it was suddenly unimportant, because she had asked, all eager like that. He began swinging bags of shopping into the trolley.

  On the way home my mother was loose and warm beside me. We sang ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’ again but this time it was easy, our voices were louder and we were laughing. My father beeped in time. ‘God provides!’ he said. But he hadn’t been so sure earlier.

  I was allowed to give Elijah dog food without bread that night. They lit the woodstove. It was the first evening they had lit it. He turned off the light and opened the door and it made shadows in the room. He drank lager and gave my mother a wineglass full of it. I sat on the orange and brown carpet, and Elijah lay with his head in my lap, and for an hour or two everything was all right. My mother fell asleep at last but her face was rosy and looked peaceful, not dead and white. Sitting there with the flames flickering, I suddenly felt unusual, sort of powerful, and I had to go out.

  In the courtyard bats were fluttering, the moon sailing. Blackness washed around us like water. There was white light and yellow light: white from the moon and yellow from the lantern high on the end wall of the house. Beyond the circle of light there was darkness; shed doorways gaped, fields were eaten up. I stood in the centre and raised the rope above my head.

  Elijah’s ears pricked up. He yapped sharply and bounced on his front paws. The rope sliced through the light, a dark line flashing over cobbles and walls, vanishing and re-appearing, and his shadow leapt with it, writhing, twisting, up, up, up higher, like a fish on a line, hanging upon nothing, as God hung the earth, with only space all around, then dropped back to rejoin him, skittering stones.

  The rope spun past the numbers at our feet. I banished them to infinity. There was fire in me; I was writing a word, tracing dark letters on the light. I began to run, the rope whizzing, up the steps in the wall by the sheep-dip, along the top, across the roof of the barn and down the stones in the corner. I ran up the plank at the other side, onto the garden table, along the wall, jumping from pillar to pillar, and as I went – wherever I went – I took the light with me.

  Elijah chattered and yelped. I circled faster and beneath me my shadow hurdled the world. My steps rang over the land and returned to me from the eye of moon.

  ‘D’you see that?’ I shouted. ‘Do you see what I can do?’

  The blackness seethed and shivered, it tossed and it muttered, but it couldn’t enter the circle because I was guarding it.

  The Cost of Memory

  In the Platnauer Room I see many things. I see the frost on the gatepost at the farm, which came in the mornings and disappeared, leaving the shape of my hand. I see the forests of lichen on the apple-tree boughs that seem like something from the ocean floor. I see the way the mist lifts from the fields so that the world is full of the top halves of things. I see the way the sun breaks through the clouds and turns the world white with vapour as veil after veil of spirits rise. I see the little weed balls that catch in Elijah’s haunches and groin and his sweet underbelly where the domed ribs rise warm beneath my hand like the timbers of a living cathedral. I see a line of geese in the cold blue dawn wipe the eye clean and make the mind dumb.

  I have gone back many times now. The light moves, the numbers descend, I slip lower. With each word I go back, I go deeper, I go down, unwinding the thread along the dark passage, gathering sticks on the floor of my mind, laying a trail for the one who comes after. The doctor treads heavily, he follows me hither and thither, getting hotter and more bothered; he does not let me stray far. I am a good animal most of the time. I walk at his pace, not pulling, not lagging, not darting away to sniff this or that. But just sometimes I think I might slip out of my leash and into the dark, and watch him continue – readily for a while, then more slowly, groping, stumbling, getting up again; calling my name; asking me where, asking me when, asking me why.

  Yet the key things, I do not remember. But it is not just I who have the monopoly on amnesia: forgetting is the precondition of existence; we forget to stay alive, filter the necessary from the unnecessary, the bearable from that which can’t be borne; whether or not we are aware of it, we leave what we have to the dark. Memory perpetuates pain and forgetting removes it – at least consciously. Lucas believes that if truth is thwarted one way, it will find another way out. I think he too has difficulty remembering, or at least remembering that which he chooses to ignore.

  There has been no mention, by Lucas or any of the other staff, of the events in the dining room. In this case the ‘least said, soonest mended’ philosophy seems to have been adopted; I wonder whether it was a new initiative. There have, however, been reprisals. Lucas has revoked his decree that we eat en masse and now when our ward eats, we are by ourselves as we used to be in the small room adjoining the lounge. Moreover, owing to the fact that everyone has accrued so many black marks for their involvement in the fracas, the scoreboard in the lounge has been wiped clean and we all have a new start. That includes even Brendan. Though we haven’t seen him since.

  ‘Where’s Brendan?’ I asked Margaret yesterday. Her cheeks were red and she had a scratch above her right eye.

  ‘In his room with Pete,’ she said.

  ‘What’s Lucas done to him?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘he’s just taking things quietly.’

  I asked her if I could go and see him but she said he would be sleeping and I could do it tomorrow. No one else seems to miss Brendan. They have forgotten their leader entirely, though the effects of his uprising are still being felt: Miriam has been singing hosannas, Pam and Robyn painted a picture together, and altogether the ward has been more peaceful. It is nothing short of miraculous, what our little demonstration has accomplished! A little rebellion goes a long way here, and this one will sustain us, I should think,
for quite a while.

  As for me personally, I do not seem to be doing so well.

  ‘You’re resisting, Madeline,’ Lucas tells me as I come round today. ‘I need you to understand that the work we’re doing is of the greatest benefit to you, though it may feel difficult.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘If I am resisting, I’m not aware of it.’

  Lucas is frowning, looking at me with the air of an army officer reassessing the defences of a fortified city; apparently I am not proving to be the easy conquest he thought. I have reserves he knew nothing of.

  ‘Whenever we get close to the night you ran away your subconscious veers off,’ he says.

  He closes his eyes a moment and rubs the bridge of his nose. I consider raising my questions again, regarding the efficacy of the regime. I even consider asking how Brendan is. But Lucas is playing his part – the caring therapist – and I must play mine. I must not arouse suspicion because Lucas has an agenda and I am part of it: he stands to win or to lose depending on the result of my treatment. His agenda is called: ‘An Experiment in Amnesia Disguised as Helping a Patient’. My case, like Job’s, has interest merely for the amount of light it can shed on issues of sovereignty – for what are men such as Lucas but pastors of the mind, and as such the guardians of humanity? And what better than to allow the omnipotent one to believe I am a malleable idiot ignorant of his personal point scoring?

  In any case, I have an agenda too, entitled: ‘Release’. Everyone has an agenda, it’s just a question of who reads whose first. If, however, I am to be a pawn deployed to prove or disprove some point of theory – which will, when it is masterfully researched and illustrated, be filed away on a shelf somewhere – then it is crucial to let the mover believe the pawn is a pawn and oblivious to his intent.

  ‘I know you have my best interests at heart, Dr Lucas,’ I say. I feel a pain in my temples as I do so, somewhere between an itch and the feeling I used to get when I travelled in cars, a sort of toxic fatigue akin to nausea.