The Offering Page 20

  I look at my hands for some moments. I say: ‘I was coming downstairs, my mother was crying, my father was standing at the table holding a piece of paper – a letter.’ And I see him again, standing so still.

  ‘Who was the letter from?’

  ‘Mr Skinner. It said that the job my father had done was shoddy. It said a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages. My father said he’d done a good job; he always did a good job. And it was true: my father was the best worker.’

  ‘Did your father get the money that was owed to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a contract?’

  ‘No, just an agreement.’

  ‘Wasn’t he paid in instalments?’

  ‘Yes. We got the first one, I think, but that was all.’

  ‘It makes me sick,’ my father said, and then he was quiet, and I sat down on the stairs as if I had been winded. It was unlike him to refer to his feelings in any way.

  He went through the front door, saying he was going to knock Skinner’s wall down, and my mother ran after him and put her arms around him. I saw my father’s face over my mother’s shoulder and it was horrifying.

  He got into the car and my mother begged him not to go. But he said it stuck in his throat: that all the scrimping and saving, all the hours wondering where the next job was coming from, trying to get the place finished on a shoestring, was nothing in comparison with this. The car roared down the drive.

  My mother came back to the house. Her feet made a sluggish sound on the stones. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. I suddenly saw how she would look as an old woman. She went to the table and put her head in her arms and I stood beside her.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. I began to cry. ‘It’s my fault.’ It terrified me that she didn’t look up.

  The Stranger

  4 June

  God in heaven,

  Forgive me. Forgive me. I didn’t know what I did.

  9 June

  Dear God,

  I asked her this morning: ‘Are we really going to have to move?’

  She said: ‘I don’t know.’

  Please don’t take the farm from us. Please punish just me instead.

  10 June

  Dear God,

  Her voice is thicker, her movements heavier. She looks at me as if she has never seen me before, as if I were a stranger, and I cannot bear it. I do not want to know whether she still loves me or not.

  11 June

  Dear God,

  He has put the farm up for sale and taken more things into town to be sold. She sleeps all day in bed. I have done this to her. I have done this to us all. It was me all along. You and I alone know this.

  I sat in the kennel. Elijah licked my hands and face. Perhaps he knew it was me. Perhaps he knew all along and that was why he was afraid.

  When I woke he was watching me. He watched me all the time I slept, I reckon. Then he butted my hand and we went back up to the house with him close to my side.

  Elijah still loves me. Perhaps he is the only one. He will always love me, no matter what I have done. Until I die, or he does.

  The Serum

  Lucas is flicking something, tapping it with his finger. I turn my head and see a needle.

  ‘It will ease facilitation,’ he says. ‘At this point it’s necessary, Madeline. We’re so close but you keep sheering away. It will make things easier, I promise.’

  I open my mouth but he is already injecting me.

  I can still see him and the Platnauer Room, though when I try to raise my head I cannot and everything is heavy and slow.

  ‘It wasn’t much more than a few days later that your mother took the fatal overdose, is that right?’ he says.

  I nod.

  ‘In your journal you say very little. What do you remember of those last days?’

  I close my eyes.

  ‘Madeline?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Was it you who found her? I think it said in the notes—’

  I don’t know whether it is because I am drugged or because I am so tired but the doctor does not appear to me to be human any more but a machine. Machines are relentless.

  ‘I found her on the bathroom floor,’ I say without opening my eyes. There was a pool of vomit by her head.

  ‘And you called your father?’

  I nod.

  He lowers the back of the couch and begins to move the light.

  ‘I want to go back to that night, the night you found your mother and she was taken to hospital. The night you ran away with Elijah. From three hundred. When you’re ready.’

  I take a very deep, very slow breath and attempt to follow the light with my eyes.

  ‘Two hundred and ninety-nine … two hundred and ninety-eight … two hundred and ninety-seven … two hundred and ninety-six …’

  I feel I am speaking through a mask. My eyelids get heavier, the world closes above my head, reappears, then closes once more. My eyelids kiss and become one.

  I stand on the banks of the river. The field with white flowers lies behind me. I know that this time I will have to do more than dip my toe. I will have to go fully under. I wade out into the water, and this time I am alone, and it is into the dark.

  Midnight

  The house was feverish, the walls clammy, the windows empty-socketed. The moon shone through the branches of the apple trees. A smell of burnt grass and fermenting flowers came in through the open window.

  ‘What time is it, Madeline?’

  ‘Twelve o’clock.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘My bedroom.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m kneeling, talking to her.’

  ‘To your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t your mother in hospital?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then how are you talking to her?’

  ‘In my head.’

  ‘What are you saying to her?’

  ‘I am telling her that I am going to save her.’

  Only I could save her because only I knew why she was dying, and I knew it would have to be more this time; I knew the offering would have to be the first fruits; my best; because the transgression was severe, so were the consequences. To begin with, I couldn’t think what I could give – and then I did. And when I did, I didn’t move for the longest time.

  I didn’t think I could do it. And then I remembered Abraham and Isaac, how You saved Isaac, and I thought You might do the same again. Then I thought I had ruined it by thinking that, and didn’t let myself think again until I saw the sea.

  I stood up and put in my pocket the knife Father had given me. I took off my trainers and went downstairs in my socks. I pressed my body against the front door so the key would turn smoothly and I stepped out. The courtyard was brilliant and the cobbles still warm. I put on my trainers and went down to the kennel and my legs felt as though they had lost their bones and become nothing but flesh.

  Elijah jumped up when I let him out. He made groaning noises and grinned at me, bending from side to side. He must have thought I was going to take him for a walk. The moonlight caught his fur like oil on water and his eyes shone, and I knew suddenly that I was right, I would never find anything better, not if I searched my whole life. That here was my best.

  I latched the kennel door and stroked his head. Then we went running down the track, with a smell of bindweed and thyme, a stitch in my side and the knife in my pocket, the blade turned inwards.

  DEUTERONOMY

  *

  Lethem Park Mental Infirmary

  May 2010

  The Land’s Edge

  I don’t know how long we ran but the moon was as bright as the sun and the air was white like fire all around me. It was like running through water, the moonlight dappling and flowing over everything, stroking my arms and legs, and everything seemed clearer than it had ever been before, the grass standing up white in the light and the shadows blacker than tar. Elijah’s shado
w moved beside me, passing over the land like a cloud, and his breath kept me company.

  Sometimes I couldn’t see the road for the light so I looked straight ahead, but my feet knew where they were taking me and whenever I began to think I closed my eyes and concentrated on not falling. The land fell away either side and the only sounds were my shoes and Elijah and me panting: heh, heh, heh; in, in, out. As we ran, it seemed to me the land was closing itself behind us, folding up like a book, and wherever we ran, there it was beneath our feet, but wherever we had been, there it was not; and I knew it was vanishing and would not come back.

  We ran down to the bridge and along the river. The moon was making a pathway there, showing us the way to go, and we followed it. It was the largest, brightest moon I have ever seen, it blinded you if you looked straight at it, it was like a hole cut out of black cardboard and beyond it nothing but white light. We came to the Viking Settlement and turned left. I could hear Elijah panting and my own breath and the sounds of my shoes, but after a while the sounds disappeared and there was nothing to show I was running at all, and I didn’t feel that I was, only floating. Sometimes I would stop and when we stopped Elijah would put his ears up and look back at where we had come from with his eyes wide and darting.

  After a while we came to a hill and sat down in the clearing at the top. The valley was brighter than daylight and I could see things that were a long way away. Elijah sat panting, his tongue flapping about in his mouth like a little flag, and he looked all around, the hairs above his eyes worrying this way and that. I put my hand on his head and he swallowed and started panting again and I couldn’t look at him. We sat there, looking out at the land, and it was all right for a while but there was a tightness in my throat and soon I had to get up and start running again.

  We went on, through villages where all the houses were sleeping and past fields where I could hear horses tearing off mouthfuls of grass, and the road and the fields and Elijah and I were more real than daytime and people ever had been, and so was the night. Little weeds and flowers stood up against the sky as clearly as if they had been cut out of paper and there were things too strange and too beautiful to speak of and I knew I was growing more this night than I had done all my life and was finally touching the stuff behind everything, as I’d tried to before, and the land was letting me now because it was leaving and in the morning it would be no more than a husk.

  Abraham and Isaac travelled for three days; Elijah and I ran for one night. There was no desert and no mountain; the sea was close and that was the place God had shown me because the moon was shining on the water. We stopped twice more but Elijah wouldn’t sit and stood looking back the way we had come, panting, and when he stopped panting he whined. I put my hand on him but he shook free and began whining again. Then I put my head in my arms and didn’t let myself think about what I had to do, only that soon it would be over. There was a stile beside us and, in the field beyond, gorse bushes. A breeze was blowing over that field and I knew it came from the sea. We began to run over the field, but my arms were so heavy and my legs had pains in them and I had to run and walk and then run again.

  There were no more roads then but I still knew where to go because the moon was pointing and God was pulling, and whether they were both the same at that moment I couldn’t be sure. We came to grassland stretching to the horizon. The path was lined with stunted trees so I knew we were close to the sea. We followed the path and it led between hedges. Beyond was a field of colours – even in moonlight you could see them – small strokes of purple and pink, blue, turquoise and green, just like in the paintings by the Dutchman, and Elijah’s hackles went up. I will never forget the smell of that field. It was thick and brown and beige and sickly, like the carcasses I saw at the sides of the road. But it was sweet too, as if death itself grew here and had just burst out of the soil before it entered something else. I saw how long our shadows had become. We followed the furrows and when I looked around at the little dashes of colour, they seemed to be writhing in the light. I don’t know what grew in that field but halfway through it I began to run. I didn’t stop till we got to the top of a hill but the smell was still with me.

  This time when I got up Elijah didn’t move. I patted him but he turned his head away. He was looking at me from the corner of his eyes, the little hairs above his eyebrows twitching this way and that, as if he was embarrassed by our proximity, as if he didn’t know me and I had become someone else. Something clutched me and I pulled at his collar. ‘Please,’ I said, and began to cry, but he wouldn’t move. I got up and began running down the hill and before I had got to the bottom he was with me again, and we ran faster, we ate up the ground, straight to the sea, and didn’t look back.

  The land was flatter here, the trees were bushy and twisted, there was sand in the soil. In a few minutes more I heard it. We reached the road running straight along the bottom of the grass dunes that led into the pine forest and I saw the moon bigger than ever above the dunes, peering from torn layers of light and clouds like coloured paper, and the light was so bright that it flattened me and made me breathless.

  I had forgotten how difficult sand was to walk through, or perhaps it was just this sand, this night. Elijah was behind me and wouldn’t come closer and I no longer called to him. We reached the top of the dunes and saw the huge beast breathing beneath us – breaking, unbreaking; ending and beginning – and we went towards it.

  I knelt on the sand and looked up at the sky. I suppose I was waiting for You to show Yourself. I was waiting for a sign. I listened but I did not hear a sound. I watched but I didn’t see a thing. I listened and watched for ever so long. And so far I hadn’t felt tired, but right then I did.

  ‘Where are You?’ I shouted. ‘Come out!’

  And there was no answer.

  A breeze picked up. Elijah felt it and stood restlessly. He was looking away, his ears close to his head, his tail between his legs, shifting from paw to paw as if they were hot, drawing up first one and then the other. I began to cry and I pulled him to me. He was trembling. I could see the whites of his eyes. I buried my face in his fur and my whole body shook. Then I parted the fur at his throat, took the knife and cut sideways.

  He tottered backwards a little way and his hind legs folded. Then his front legs did too and he toppled onto his side, watching me, while the sand darkened around him. Then one eyelid drooped a little as if it was exhausted.

  Above me I could see millions of stars in the gaps between clouds that were bruised and beautiful. Below me I could hear the sea’s washing and heaving, washing and heaving, as if it could never be rid of itself.

  When I looked back Elijah’s mouth was slightly open as if he were savouring the air, but his eyes were glassy and did not see me. I picked him up and walked towards the sound of the sea. The waves kept pushing me back and I kept pushing forwards. I went in as deep as my shoulders, then began to swim out. When I could swim no more, I let him go.

  When I got back to the beach, the first light was coming. I sat on the sand for a long time, then got up and began walking.

  The Road through the Pine Trees

  I am walking through pine trees, it is bright all around me. Pale mushrooms and ribbons of fungi sprout from tree trunks, the air is sweet and damp, the soil sandy beneath my shoes. Moonlight presses itself into the mossy clefts of roots, crawls into the tight whorls of night-time flowers—

  —and right down in the hollows of the trees – in the roots and the cracks and the crannies, in each cleft and clump, in the coloured mosses and the ribbons of fungi and the bright beetles and bugs – there is light. And each blade and each leaf and each tree is illuminated.

  Someone is moaning. The sound frightens me. I run deeper into the wood but a voice follows me. The voice says: ‘You’re coming back. You’re coming back to the room, Madeline, you’re regaining consciousness.’

  Who is this person? How does he know my name? What room is he talking about? I don’t want to come back to a room
; I have to find my way to the road that runs through the wood, the road that will take me back to the farm. I have to find it.

  ‘Madeline, can you hear me?’

  I run faster, my breath catching and hurting inside.

  ‘Madeline—’

  The person is moaning again. It is an ugly sound. I wonder where this strange person is. I race faster, hurdling fallen trees, but the wood is thinning out, the sky is getting lighter, until they are both no more than gossamer, and I do not see a road but a shadow.

  ‘You’re coming up, you’re waking, it is safe to wake up. On the count of three you will be back in the room.’

  Grains shift before my eyes, I am moving through something heavy, heavier than the sand at my feet. I see a lamp-lit room, a figure at my side – a figure writing – a man.

  He looks up: ‘You’ve done so well, Madeline. So well. What a breakthrough.’

  What is he talking about? Who is he? Where am I? I do not know this place. Then I look down and begin to shake: I do not know this body.

  ‘Lie there as long as you need to,’ the man says. ‘We will be processing what you have uncovered, it’s all going to be dealt with. I didn’t anticipate these results – not at all! The issues that have surfaced will need considerable work, the dissociated material will need integrating.’

  I sit up and topple off the couch.

  ‘Steady!’ the man says. ‘What are you doing?’