The Offering Read online

  I mention this book because its fate seemed to presage our own; I mention it also because in the front of it there was a picture. There were many others throughout in black and white but there was only one coloured plate and this was at the beginning. It was the best-preserved part of the book because of two greaseproof pages between which it curtained itself off as exclusively as the Most Holy. When lifted, the veils revealed a page thicker than the rest and shiny. The illustration was of a garden, and its hues were jewelled, as if in their newly created state the trees, fruits and animals were at the apogee of saturation.

  It was curious in the garden. It wasn’t quite heaven and it wasn’t quite earth. Vivid fruits and exotic flowers grew there; fountains of water showered the foliage and shape-shifters lurked within it: chameleons, frogs, birds, butterflies. Globes that resembled small planets hung from the boughs of trees, and fruits and flowers glowed alike with an unnatural luminescence as if illuminated from within. The vegetation itself gave off a greenish phosphorescence that to my young mind resembled the light emanating from Heavenly Jerusalem. But in the darker colours lay something irredeemably earthy. There was a harmony in the way the scene arranged itself that suggested a theatre, each view giving on to a fainter one, and that on to a fainter one still, till the whole regressed into a ghostly vista of infinite depth like theatrical flats on a stage – yet the creepers and canopies cavorted in lusty confusion, the trees reaching sinuous fingers (frantically, ecstatically: I never could decide) towards the viewer.

  Where the light did not reach, it was shady. It was shadiest of all in the bowers. In the darkest one of them all, you could make out a man and a woman. This was indeed what they were, but to begin with all you could make out was the paleness of their skin, an absence of colour in a scene that was saturated, so that at first glance they resembled phantoms, a place where the printer had forgotten to lay ink, holes in the fabric of creation – two human-shaped holes, and beyond them nothing but light. The woman’s head was bowed, the man’s lifted. Both faces were curiously devoid of emotion, yet they held animal-skin mantles around themselves and huddled together as if they were shivering, or as if they too were aware of the shocking impression their nakedness made. Their faces were blank, yet they were turning away from the viewer, writhing, as if willing him or her to replace the greaseproof page – or perhaps turning away from something else, for behind them, in the centre of the garden, was a clearing and a tall tree with a snake in its branches, and in front, hanging upon nothing at all, a sword with a gleaming blade.

  The most disturbing thing of all, whether owing to sympathetic or malevolent intent I could not decide, but made more disturbing by the void of the humans’ own faces, was that the trees and flowers, animals and birds, all seemed imbued with an anthropomorphic life force – or, as I thought then, were conscious, as trees and flowers and creatures could not be. The trees (an unlikely assortment of deciduous and evergreen, together with various vines) craned their boughs over the humans as if whispering, their leaves skimmed their hair, tendrils fingered flesh. One creeper had coiled itself around the woman’s left arm in a bracelet, another ensnared her partner’s right foot. Birds cocked their heads sideways and watched avidly. One flew up, calling. A small horse-like creature pawed the air; a peacock spread his feathers in a full hand of petrol-green fright; a lion laughed, or appeared to; a dog lifted its head and howled; and a chimpanzee, whose forehead was creased as if by all-too-human anxiety, covered its mouth as if at some horror too great to be spoken.

  When I was a child I thought it odd that the first thing the humans did after they sinned was to clothe themselves; after all, God knew what they looked like – and who else could they be hiding from?

  ‘Why did they put clothes on?’ I asked.

  ‘So they would remember,’ was the answer.

  ‘That they had sinned?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then they left the garden and wandered the earth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’

  I was told: ‘So they wouldn’t forget.’

  Undead

  How to describe Lethem Park? This is not easy.

  I suppose I could start by saying that Lethem Park is a maze of endless, slightly sloping corridors surrounded by acres of mature parkland. It was built to house wounded soldiers in the Second World War and an air of sickness still hangs about its grey passageways, whose sorry pot plants, automated pumps of air-freshener and Impressionist artwork cannot quite counterbalance their humming sterility. There is a pharmacy, a church, a shop, a large grassy area where we may graze if supervised, encircled by a twelve-foot electric fence; animals jump fences but humans seem to like them. I suppose without them there would be nothing to tell them who they are, what food to eat, what clothes to wear or what they should look like – and humans like to be told; they are obedient creatures. Of course none of us here cares much about those things so perhaps it is just as well we are fenced off. If we weren’t, what would there be to tell where us crazy people end and the rest of the world begins?

  Naturally enough, the word ‘crazy’ sounds exciting, but generally life at Lethem Park is a peaceful affair. So peaceful, in fact, that observing the progress along these corridors of various residents, the quiet mutterings and shamblings, the faces bleached of colour, eyes glazed, you would be forgiven for thinking that many of us had shuffled off this mortal coil for good. If death is a sleep, then this is a place of the deathlike, of sleepwalkers and ghosts; there is the odd wail, the occasional rattling of a chain, but it is soon forgotten; we have lost the knack of remembering, you see; we have very few markers of time past and present.

  Sometimes, when passing time in the lounge, standing at the end of the landing, looking down at the horse-chestnut trees, I wonder whether I have slipped out of time altogether. Each day there is just enough change to show I am alive yet not enough to differentiate that day from the next. Life descends to a level of such minutiae – the challenges of casting off; of determining whether it will be fine tomorrow, whether Alice has been cheating at Guess Who?, of determining whether it will be curried lamb or cottage pie, the Daily Mirror or Miriam’s scrapbook – that the monotony of each choice is matched only by the irrelevance of the decision.

  Now, I of all people appreciate the principles behind peaceful activities – which I suppose was what the Occupational Therapy team at Lethem Park had in mind when they decreed that patients’ days be interspersed with Coffee’n’Chill, Choc’n’Chill, mid-afternoon ‘Chill’ and bedtime ‘Chill’, at which time, along with the compulsory tea, coffee or chocolate, a nurse arrives with a tray of coloured pills in plastic beakers that we take as we would a sweet or a biscuit, pretending to choose, pretending our names are not written on the side of the cups in permanent black marker – but it seems to me we are slightly missing the point of relaxation; that many of us, far from being ‘chilled’, are on the verge of apoplexy.

  Once, in the Occupational Therapy room, in my first couple of years here, I was attempting to busy myself by drawing with chalk a bowl of artificial flowers, when I suddenly became convinced that I was dreaming. I got up, weeping, and ran down the corridor, looking for an exit, some thinner place where the fabric would burst if pressed hard enough, some chink through which I could tumble out of this amniotic sac and be birthed again somewhere else. That presupposes an outside, I suppose, an end; something different to this – a ‘that’; something else, something other.

  This morning I am sitting in one of the high-backed chairs in the lounge, gripping Wuthering Heights, unable to raise it from my lap because of nausea, unable to read because my eyes will not convert the markings on the page into thoughts, unable to speak because of an exhaustion too profound for words. This is a bad day. In a while, having done my hour here, I will ask if I can go and lie down. Someone will bring the wheelchair and take me to my room where I will get into bed (though I will not sleep) till dinnertime. Whereupon I will sit up,
try to eat something, lie down again and wait for bedtime (a term itself meaningless, so much of my time being spent in bed). Upon which, too sick to sleep, I will toss until morning. Whereupon, too sick to rise, I will begin another day. On very bad days I cannot wake up at all; sleep is a pit I fall into and clamber out of, again and again.

  It is sunny this afternoon but cold. All day Lethem Park has been slumbering beneath a thick layer of frost. Birds peck frantically at the ground; trees creak; what leaves remain shiver, I imagine. For we are unaware of these struggles here, cocooned as we are in our gauze of central heating, drugs, fitted carpet. With the humming of the boiler, we cannot hear the stillness that has wrapped the world beyond the window-pane. The seasons pass by like pictures in a book thumbed too quickly.

  I pressed my fingers through the bars of the long window by the exercise bike on the landing today, trying to feel the cold, and could not; like the souls it encases, the window is double-glazed. Yet I live for the moments when the natural world interacts with my own, for the sound of rain on glass, wind in the guttering, the smell of pine needles in the lounge at Christmas, the feel of a butterfly’s wings against my palm; for those moments when I can touch something beyond the boundaries of this world.

  Once, during a storm, I got as far as the fence. We were walking back from the post office, Robyn and Brendan and Margaret and I, with our weekly ration of sweets. The clouds that day reminded me of those at the farm when the apples turned bad and the lightning struck the chimney. They made my skin crackle and my hair stand on end. We were turning into the courtyard when I broke rank and began running towards the fence. As I began to run the heavens opened. Air seared my lungs, the gale pummelled me. I could taste iron and sulphur and soil; I was elbows and knees, a child in dungarees, my heart in my cheeks and my lips and my eyes. And for the rest of that day, after Margaret’s remonstrations, after the visit to the Platnauer Room – (‘How did you manage it?’ they asked. ‘Some days you can’t even walk to the lounge’; I wanted to, I said. I do not want to walk to the lounge) – after the removal of privileges, the talk about trust and responsibility, I felt it still, a gentle throbbing, not unlike, I imagine, a virgin must feel after her deflowering; a call to further forays. They did not let me go out again after that. Margaret seemed to take it even harder than I did. Why did I do it, she asked: I, who enjoyed walks more than anyone? Didn’t I think there would be consequences? I told her that at that moment I was not thinking of anything at all.

  I sometimes imagine taking these brothers and sisters of mine back to the farm. We would cram our mouths with wild strawberries, run naked through the long grass, bathe in the river and play in the wood. We would sleep beneath the sky, dew drenching our bodies, aching in cold and roasting in heat. I would ask the land to refine us, separate us from ourselves, sift the good from the dross and the wheat from the chaff, as it does for each of its children, the stones and the creatures and trees. First pleasure, then pain, which are one and the same, until we became impermeable as stones, as light as air, no more than process, an event, infinitely transferable. Undead. Like the soil under our feet.

  I would ask the land for release.

  At this moment the park as seen from the garden doors resembles a painting by Turner. A haze of golden moisture blurs the horse-chestnut trees and the spaces between until there is nothing left but a sea of light interspersed by gigantic shadows. It is, I suppose, quite beautiful.

  It is now the time of our mid-afternoon ‘Chill’. We have just been medicated. Pam, mousy hair short as a marine’s, huge-shouldered in her pink mohair jumper, is completing a jigsaw on the carpet in a pool of sunlight, laying the pieces in patterns of her own. Robyn – blue-veined, white-skinned, fragile as a bird, hair so fine I can see the skull gleaming through it – is moaning, a meaningless sound we would miss if it stopped. Eugene – rotund, ruddy, blond, sprinkled with eczema – is rubbing his groin with sausage fingers in an abstracted but vigorous way. Miriam is watching television, her eyes half closed and her mouth open, her tongue lolling loosely on her lower lip as if she has just stopped breastfeeding. Sue is reading a magazine, though not really reading it, I think, only passing the time. Pete the male nurse is playing snakes and ladders with Mary, and Margaret is knitting, her large hands almost obscuring the article she is making, which from what I can make out is white.

  As for Brendan, he is sitting on the floor, fingers in his ears, bent over The Cosmological Principle; page fifty-nine, no doubt, though it may be page sixty. His arms are extended like two small wings and I wonder, as I have wondered many times before, how he manages to keep them raised so long. I watch him read and rock till he comes to the end of the page, then stop. To turn over he must remove one finger from his ear. He sits thinking, jerks his head towards the book, then his elbow. He groans loudly, half rises and sits down again.

  Margaret says: ‘All right, Brendan?’

  He begins rocking again. After another few agonized minutes he removes his finger from his ear for a split second before reinserting it, shaking his head vigorously as if to say: ‘That wasn’t a good idea at all.’ Now he gets up and walks around the book with his tiny shuffling steps, his skeletal limbs resembling those of a mantis, making small movements towards the book as if it were a hot coal he must pick up without gloves. Then the desire to turn the page and the horror of doing so finally confront one another and he stands, prancing on the tips of his toes, his face twisted into a paroxysm of terror for a few seconds, before darting at the book and turning the page at the last moment. Once he has done so, his face fills with wonder and relief; he sits down and shuffles forward on his crossed legs, bending so far over the book you would think it would be impossible for him to read at all; but he is reading, his head is moving back and forth, and presently he resumes rocking as well. There is a joyful light in his eyes. The light will last until he has reached the end of the page, at which point they will once again cloud with terror.

  Brendan refused his lunch again today. He is more twitchy than usual. I suspect it is all to do with the arrival of Dr Lucas; Brendan is our weathervane, our thermometer, our canary in the mineshaft. Any slight alteration, he registers first. I wonder whether the doctor has made changes to his treatment too or whether he is just responding to the general alterations Dr Lucas has made.

  Of which there are many. No one is to be exempted from the dining room any more unless they are physically ill; Sue and Margaret are no longer supposed to touch us unless it is to restrain; a penalty system has been introduced with a board in the lounge, on which the nurses must make black marks if we are disobedient and red marks if we are good (Brendan has three black marks against his name, I have one); only those who accrue no black marks are allowed to go to the shop every Saturday (this does not include me because I forfeited my right to go to the shop when I ran to the fence); dinner is now to be eaten at a single sitting by multiple wards at once; and last, but perhaps most importantly, Dr Lucas has cut our meeting time with the panel every third Wednesday.

  I was astonished when I heard of this: appearing before the panel is our opportunity to voice our concerns with the board of doctors. Those patients who cannot voice their own concerns are represented by a nurse. Each of us used to get half an hour and though I always had reservations about how effective it was, as even then the doctors did most of the talking, at least it gave me the illusion I mattered; that in theory, at least, I could contribute to my own treatment.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I asked Margaret. ‘Who do we go to if we are worried about something?’

  ‘Dr Lucas,’ she said.

  ‘But he is the one devising our treatment anyway,’ I said. ‘Can’t we speak to one of the other doctors?’ We looked at each other.

  ‘Apparently not,’ she said.

  She seemed worried. What will things be like months from now, for this is only the beginning? I wondered. And then the concept of a beginning, like that of an end, loses all credibility. Here at Lethem Park i
t can never be other than Now.

  It is for this reason that if you asked me to tell you what Lethem Park is really like, I would not describe my fellow inmates, our everyday activities, our treatment or the doctors. I would describe the building itself. Mystics know that the visible is a husk from which the invisible, if attended to hard enough, can be unearthed. I know this to be true: the spiritual character of a place, and a person, can be known through its physical surface. Or am I deluding myself, existing as I do on a shirred margin between sanity and madness, truth and illusion, fiction and fact? In any case, in my attempt to communicate to you what this place is really like, I would tell you about the light: stark blue, insane yellow, ghoulish orange; fluorescent; man-made without exception. I would explain that even things that could be made of natural materials here – pillows, blankets, knives and forks – are synthetic. I would say that there are very few shadows, very few corners, very few places where darkness is permitted to exist; I would say that the light is excoriating, a lance to which we are the boil, and that beneath such light we appear sorry creatures indeed.

  I would say that the walls and floors are perfectly uniform, and whichever floor, whichever wall you encounter will tell you nothing. The walls are cool, their surfaces regular; you would not think anything so even could continue for such distances. The walls are pale green and sheeny. Rails run along them, sloping or rising gently at intervals. And the rails, like the walls – like the floors – appear to be interminable. They converge at points that widen as you draw near, that promise arrival, only to reveal further vortices, further distances, further vanishing points. Every so often there is a picture, framed in brown wood, no matter the subject or the style. Oddly, the pictures themselves are all explosions of some kind, the colours primary, vibrant, the compositions overblown and dramatic, usually flowers or fruit. Unfortunately the pictures not only fail to enliven, but their ghastliness serves only to emphasize the surrounding pallor, like blusher on a corpse.