The Offering Read online

  We stayed up late unpacking, the cool darkness lapping at our legs and arms. Every so often one of us would call from various parts of the garden or house: ‘Look at this—’ and the other two would come to look, or shout back: ‘What?’ and we would reply: ‘A secret cupboard!’ ‘The size of this attic!’ ‘This little thing in the wall—’ The house didn’t seem to mind the disturbance, its windows open to the fading light; its floors creaked with faux-serious groans, as if it were a sleeper half happy to be woken.

  I spent a long time cleaning out the stone kennel by the gate. I swept the floor of old hay, and then the walls and ceiling, which showered me in cobwebs and flakes of whitewash. I scrubbed the shed and propped the door open with a stone to dry.

  ‘Now we just have to find you some fresh straw,’ I said to Elijah, and in the hayloft over the wall I found some. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Look how comfy this is,’ making a hollow for him, but he stood in the doorway of the kennel with his tail between his legs. ‘You’ve never had a kennel before,’ I said to him. ‘Come on, I thought you would love it!’ But he did not want to sleep so far away from me, and in the end he slept downstairs that night, on a cardboard box that he flattened when he settled down on it with a contented thump, as he always had done.

  No one told me it was bedtime but eventually I went, unable to stop yawning. My mother sat on the side of my bed in the room I had been allowed to claim as my own, the one that looked down the drive. She had only a vest on and tracksuit bottoms, and her face and arms were clammy and hot. We could hear my father whistling in the courtyard and talking to Elijah.

  ‘We’re going to stay here, aren’t we?’ I said.

  She smiled and said: ‘I think we might.’

  Beyond the lead of the window-pane a new moon was rising. It made dark wicker of the pine tree, illuminating each of the branches and, because of its brightness, warping them too.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Which was it in Eden: the Tree of Life or the Tree of Knowledge?’

  ‘The one Adam and Eve ate from?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Tree of Knowledge.’

  ‘Oh.’ I stretched my hand and touched the windowsill. ‘Well then, maybe ours is the Tree of Life.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘The pine tree in the garden.’

  My mother bent and kissed me, a loud, boisterous smack, and I smiled at her.

  ‘I’m going to find God here,’ I said.

  Her eyes became deep then and she kissed me quietly on my forehead, a kiss that whispered, a kiss to seal me up.

  I woke that night many times and looked out at the moonlight flooding the courtyard like water. Unlike water, however, it didn’t pool in hollow places but turned them into islands, dangerous and dark, yet no more substantial than holes cut in card, and the light that came through them was so bright that it hurt my eyes. What would it be like to live by such light always? To move always in this night? To look out at it was part horror, part wonder, and each time I meant to turn away I found I could not because I believed it contained a principle that applied to all things, and I felt that if I could just understand it, I would be at peace for the rest of my life. I wished I was older so that I could understand, though later on, when I was older, I knew I had never been closer to guessing it than I had been that night.

  The next morning my parents slept in for the first time I could remember. I stood in the doorway of their bedroom, saw the sun falling across their vacant faces, then tiptoed down to the kitchen, hushed Elijah, who was bouncing on his front paws and whining, and let us out. I climbed the gate to the long field, Elijah going through it with a quick sideways flip, as if he had been slipping through five-bar gates all his life, and we stood in the grass. The land was glowing at the edges, catching light here and there as if someone were running with a burning branch and touching life into it. I felt that the morning was being presented to me, and each day, for quite a long time after that, waking up was like being given a gift that I tore open again and again. We each tore it in our different ways.

  My father cleared the water-pump of slime and we cheered as water cascaded into the trough. He sharpened an old scythe and began cutting the grass. He worked all day while we trailed behind him, binding the grass in sheaves, hardly able to see for flies, and each evening, as the sun gilded the hummocky shape of the mountains, he walked around the perimeter of the garden. ‘Look at the view! Smell that!’ He pointed, he lifted a flower to his nose.

  My mother and I followed, obedient, attentive. Then he sat, sipping cider. I was happy for my father, but he called the farm his estate and the garden his park; I resented the appropriation.

  ‘It’s all of ours,’ I said to my mother. ‘Isn’t it?’

  My mother and I cleaned the outbuildings, washed curtains, cupboards and floors. She gathered enormous bunches of flowers that she dried by hanging them from the beams in the kitchen. Each morning I washed in cold water, then took my breakfast into the garden and ate it beneath the tall pine. I walked in the fields, brushed my hands through the heads of the grass, broke my bread, sluiced my arms to the elbows and let the water dry on my skin. I chewed food more thoroughly than I had ever done before, till it was a fine paste, and walked around like a modern-day Crusoe with nothing on but my vest and dungarees, carrying a stick my father cut for me. These were the things the men of old did, I imagined (though not wear dungarees): the men who knew God. If God was to be found, then I was sure this was the place I would find Him.

  I say some of this to Lucas, but not all.

  ‘You mentioned feeling some frustration at your father’s appropriation of the new house,’ he says. ‘How were relations generally between you at that time?’

  I think for a moment. ‘He said I’d grown taller. Sometimes I found him watching me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘As if I – as if I was a stranger.’

  ‘Perhaps because you were becoming a woman.’

  ‘I don’t think so. We were just – more aware of each other.’

  ‘Can you give me an example?’

  ‘One night we chased horses that had broken into the garden.’

  We were sitting down to our evening meal at the table, which we had moved into the kitchen, when we heard something pass through the courtyard like a freight train. The ground shook, the dinner plates rattled. Through the window we saw a stream of black and white and brown bodies. Elijah was barking excitedly by the front door. My father opened it and the courtyard was filled with milling horses, enormous beasts with god-like thighs, feathered hooves and rolling eyes. We could hear more, too, in the garden. My father shut the door and came back inside and grabbed two saucepans.

  ‘We’ve got to stop them, they’ll trample everything!’ he yelled.

  We stared at him, then something flared in our bodies like matches and we followed as he charged through the doorway, shouting and banging the pans.

  We went right into the middle of the horses and the herd churned.

  ‘Get them down the drive!’ my father was shouting, his eyes as wild as the horses’ themselves.

  He ran around to the big gate and we heard him crashing through the undergrowth in the garden. Elijah had the time of his life, ducking and snapping at their hooves, driving the horses out from the sides of the courtyard, herding them into a riotous group. The horses clattered and surged, then picked up speed, thundering down the drive and shying left into the field at the gate that my father held open with a sheet of corrugated iron. We ran down to the bottom of the garden and pushed the corrugated sheets back into place and secured them with stones. We came back up to the house laughing, incredulous, exultant.

  Lucas is frowning slightly, perhaps wanting something else. ‘Were there any other “bonding” experiences?’

  I shift in my seat.

  ‘Anything at all you remember about your father and you?’

  There is a long pause.

  ‘One afternoon I helped my father in t
he garden. He was clearing the brambles and I helped him wheel them to the bonfire.’

  ‘How did that feel?’

  ‘I don’t know … unusual.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can you tell me about it?’

  The worst of this therapy is knowing Lucas will find out things I do not give him permission to while I am asleep.

  I sigh. ‘I really don’t know – it was – it was like … well, almost as if we had been introduced to each other.’

  ‘Introduced to each other?’ He writes this down.

  I remember the smell of my father that afternoon. It was acrid and thin, a sour smell, like I imagined an old woman would smell. He had never asked me to help him do anything. I put on the gloves he gave me and began hacking with the stick. Elijah sat on the grass to wait for me, chewing the underneath of his foot and wrinkling his nose like a mouse. The afternoon was cloudy and warm. Distances beckoned. There was an intimacy in our actions, a complicity neither my father nor I welcomed, but we bore with it nonetheless, an exchange of more than just briars. It was hard work, we panted, and afterwards we ached, but space was cleared. I was surprised at just how much.

  We went back up to the house, Elijah bounding behind us, particularly playful now I was his again, pouncing on my feet, but just then I wished he wouldn’t because I was trying to impress my father – as if I had just met him, as if he were a stranger – by a hundred little things: the way I swung my arms, the way I carried myself beside him, the small sniff I gave as we entered the courtyard: businesslike, workmanlike, slightly bored, adult.

  I tell Lucas none of this. He looks up. ‘And this experience made you feel closer to your father?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Did anything else happen that afternoon?’

  ‘No; not that I can remember.’

  But it did, perhaps the most important thing of all. Inside the house my father said: ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got something for you,’ and he went into the front room and came back with a knife.

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  As I went forwards to take it, Elijah had hold of my laces and I stumbled. I kicked him away because he had made me seem like a fool in front of my father – whom I always felt something of a fool in front of, as if I could not do the smallest thing without mishandling it in some way – and he yelped. I took the knife. I knew I was flushing. The knife was cold in my hand and heavy. I remember thinking that it seemed to have already lived a long time, much longer than me, and had done more things than I ever had. It had seven different blades and a red cross on the handle.

  ‘Picked it up in an antique store on the quay,’ my father said. ‘It’s a good one.’ He’d meant to keep it, but I’d worked hard. ‘Always cut away from yourself, see?’ He showed me. ‘And keep the blades turned in.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  ‘All right—’

  It was enough already.

  I went out into the garden and whistled for Elijah. He did not appear. The knife felt heavy and important in my pocket. I tried it out on the pine tree and it cut well, I hardly had to press down at all. I lifted the bark to my nose and smelt the tree’s blood.

  At dinner my mother was appalled.

  ‘It’s fine!’ my father said. ‘Quite safe; it’s a Swiss army knife. Anyway,’ he reached for the apple sauce. ‘She can handle it.’ He nodded in my direction (it was not an acknowledgment but as good as). ‘She’s a big girl, a country girl now.’

  ‘Can we finish here?’ I say. The painkillers are wearing off and sitting still is becoming difficult.

  Lucas looks at me. ‘I sense we’re coming to something; are we?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Not that I know of.’ I laugh quickly. ‘But of course, you’re the doctor.’

  We look at each other.

  ‘There’s nothing more to tell!’ I say. ‘We went back to the house, my father said he was pleased with me.’ I shrug.

  ‘All right,’ he says closing the notebook. ‘Let’s wrap it up for today. Good work, Madeline.’

  The Price of Transgression

  Lucas was sent to us. I heard it outside the meeting room today. I heard the words ‘efficiency’, ‘targets’, ‘priority’ and ‘results’. In short it seems the powers that be deemed our little backwater in need of a shake-up and decided Lucas was the man for the job. When the door of the meeting room opened I pretended I was resting on a chair as I often do during my turns along the corridor. Sue, Margaret and Pete came out and went in the opposite direction without seeing me. I heard Margaret say: ‘Well, if he wants twice the results he’ll have to employ twice the manpower.’

  After that the nurses from the other wards came out too and they all looked hot and dazed like Sue and Pete and Margaret, and it occurred to me, as it has before, that we patients might not be the only ones riding the shockwaves of the phenomenon known as S. Lucas. Since he arrived there has been meeting after meeting and I have heard the nurses complaining about the paperwork they have to take home.

  However, while the nurses may be feeling the pressure it is in us patients that the effects are most readily visible. Our hour with Lucas is our day of reckoning, the time for personal interaction with the purveyor of our fates. The sinners are cast off to his left and the sheep are gathered to his right: sinners, in this case, meaning those who are failing to respond to Lucas’s choice of therapy. The ‘punishment’ is generally an increase (or a decrease) in our medication and additional therapy.

  Some of us deal better with it than others. This afternoon when I enter the lounge Brendan is sitting on the edge of the sofa, blinking, his face very white. Sue comes round with the tray of tablets but he won’t take his beaker. Pete puts his hand on his shoulder and says: ‘Take your tablets, Brendan, and then we’ll put on the science programme you like.’

  Brendan scratches his head hard and begins to rock. Pete moves towards him but he lashes out at him and rocks even faster.

  I try to catch Brendan’s eye but can’t.

  ‘Take your tablets, Brendan,’ Pete says, but the beaker remains on the tray and the rocking continues.

  Pete sits down gently beside Brendan, closes his hand around Brendan’s and tries to open it to place the tablets in it. So much for Lucas’s new rule, I think. Brendan starts to groan. The groaning gets louder.

  Pete says: ‘Brendan, stop playing now, take the tablets, there’s a good man.’

  Sue takes Robyn, who is also sitting on the sofa, by the arm and leads her to the other side of the room. She herds the rest of us over too. Then Pete takes hold of Brendan’s arms while Sue picks up the beaker. The rocking persists for a split second. The next, the beaker’s contents are flung skywards, Sue stumbles backwards, nursing her wrist, and Pete collides with the coffee table.

  Then Brendan leaps up and begins to cry. Not ‘cry’ in the usual sense of the word, admittedly, but there are tears, and his face is contorted. The sound he makes, though, is not a spasmodic sobbing but an astonishing wail, a wail that makes me feel cold and reminds me of something I have heard before, a noise that grows as he raises himself on his toes and subsides as he descends, then continues monotonously with weird oblivion, self-sufficiency and abstraction, that makes me think not of a human weeping but an animal howling. I haven’t heard Brendan make this noise in the five years he has been here; normally he makes no sound at all apart from the odd grunt. To see him cry, albeit in this unusual manner, is as shocking as if he had just come up to me, clapped me on the back and said: ‘How are you, Madeline?’ It is so shocking that my stomach lurches and for a moment I just stand there.

  After she has collected herself, Sue says loudly: ‘Brendan! Stop that! Come and sit down!’

  Pete is saying: ‘Come on, Brendan, there’s a good man. Look, here’s your book!’

  But Brendan carries on making the piercing din.

  I find myself walking towards him. My heart is beating hard and I don’t know what
I am going to do or even if I should try to do anything at all. I don’t even mean to go up to him.

  ‘Sit down, Madeline,’ Sue says.

  But I don’t. I stand in front of Brendan and watch his chest swell and his arms strain. The noise is like a wall of water, but instead of trying to get it to stop I stand there and submit to it; I go along with it. I suppose I agree with it. It is immense. I seem to be tottering. My body is encased in heat. And then something strange is happening to me too. My own eyes are filling. It is as natural as falling asleep but strange too because I never cry. I keep listening, looking at him, my chest filling till it feels as if it will shatter, and Brendan keeps caterwauling and rising up on his toes.

  Then without warning the noise stops, and he drops with a thud onto the sofa as if the strings that are holding him up have been cut, his arms still stiff at his sides. Sue stops shouting, Pete stops talking. Sue hovers but thinks better of speaking; Pete beckons to Mary who is sitting beside him to come away. Brendan sits staring at nothing, his mouth gaping, the same expression of horror on his face. I know he won’t look at me but I think he knows I am present, I think he has become aware of me while he is crying because I have given him attention in a way that no one else has, so I stay where I am.

  ‘D’you want your book, Brendan?’ Pete says gently. He fetches The Cosmological Principle.