The Offering Read online

  Brendan does not touch it. He carries on staring straight ahead. He appears to have fallen into a trance. After another few minutes of not wanting to see the expression of pain on his face any longer and feeling in rather a stupor myself, I go into the corridor and sit down on a chair. I feel as hollow as a stalk, as though all the fluid has been drained from my body.

  A few minutes later I hear a voice say: ‘What’s the matter?’ and look up to see Sue’s sharp face.

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ I say. I wish she would leave. Then I say: ‘What’s the matter with Brendan? I’ve never seen him like that.’

  ‘There’s nothing the matter with him,’ Sue says. ‘Dr Lucas’s changed his medication, that’s all; he’s just having a grizzle. He’ll be fine in a week.’ She looks cross, whether with me or with Brendan or with Dr Lucas, I don’t know.

  ‘A grizzle?’ I say. ‘He was howling; Brendan never makes a sound.’

  ‘Brendan is fine, Madeline. Why don’t you go and watch telly?’ she says. ‘It’ll be time for your meds soon.’ She turns on her heel and sets off down the corridor. I watch her sensible shoes retreat.

  For the rest of the afternoon, as Pam sucks her string and twists it, as Miriam builds a castle of red blocks and claims they are yellow, as Eugene walks back and forth, hands in pockets, murmuring Latin, and Margaret strokes Robyn’s scalp with a knitting needle, I think of Brendan and those unearthly cries.

  Just before bedtime I realise where I have heard them before: on a misty day at the farm when from my bedroom I heard a hunt and the sound of a fox. My mother said: ‘Foxes are terrible; they kill far more than they need to.’ It did not make me feel better. I remember what my father told me: that no debt is repaid once but many times over, and the price for transgression can as easily be too high as too low.

  The Journal

  ‘What have you done to Brendan?’ I say. I know I shouldn’t have. It does not do to get overheated. Only amenable patients are candidates for release. Gods must be propitiated or they get sulky, the sky clouds over and the land becomes dark – but then I see him, with his shiny shoes, his perfect hair, his impeccable suit.

  ‘Why d’you say that, Madeline?’ Lucas says calmly.

  ‘He cried!’ I say. ‘Brendan never cries.’

  ‘Brendan is a little unstable at the moment due to a modification of his treatment,’ he says. ‘But it’s nothing for you to be concerned about.’

  ‘Well, I am!’ I say. ‘Whether I should or I shouldn’t be – I am concerned!’

  Lucas smiles. ‘And I’m glad to see that, Madeline, it’s a very encouraging sign.’

  ‘This isn’t about me!’ I say.

  ‘But that’s where you’re wrong, Madeline,’ he says. ‘This is about you; this is your session. And I’m afraid I can’t talk about Brendan during it.’

  I open my mouth.

  ‘Like yourself,’ he says, ‘Brendan has been the subject of misguided treatment. I am simply adjusting it.’

  I think of many rejoinders, but I do not voice any of them, only sit, feeling very hot, and mutter again: ‘I’ve never seen Brendan like that – and I’ve known him five years.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says, with a note of finality. ‘I can’t talk about Brendan with you. His case is private, as is yours. Now is there anything else you wanted to ask me before we begin?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘There is something. The programme – my programme: I don’t think it’s working.’

  ‘Oh?’ He raises his eyebrows. I hate it when he pretends to accommodate me, when he personifies patience.

  ‘I’m not getting stronger, I’m getting weaker. I’m sleeping less, I’m much more anxious, I feel sick pretty much constantly and some days the exhaustion makes it almost impossible to get up.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  I stare at him.

  ‘Now, Madeline,’ he leans backwards and interlaces his fingers. ‘Do you remember I told you when we started that it wouldn’t be easy?’ He holds up his hand. ‘Wait – that you would have to bear with it?’ He pauses, presumably to let his words sink in because as I open my mouth he begins to speak again. ‘Now I’ll ask you a question: do you believe I have your best interests at heart?’

  My heart beats strangely and I look away.

  ‘Don’t you think I’ve seen other patients struggle like you? It’s true you’re finding things difficult, it’s true you’re more anxious, but as far as I’m concerned these are positive signs; they mean you’re progressing. As regards the fatigue, Graded Exercise and CBT are both proven ways to treat it; it can take some people some time before they see any improvement.’

  ‘But I’m going backwards!’ I say. ‘I’m not even remaining stationary!’

  ‘You’re progressing, Madeline,’ he says. ‘You’re progressing in leaps and bounds!’

  I stare at him.

  ‘A great many of you are progressing, however it may appear on the surface.’

  Is that possible? I let myself consider this a moment.

  He rotates in the chair and inhales as if weary.

  ‘Madeline,’ he says, ‘real healing always makes the situation appear worse for a little while; it’s a well-known concept in the East. Real healing initially appears to be doing the opposite to what you think it should do. It’s the same with memory: the trick to recovering something – anything at all – is to look the other way, to act as if you never lost it. The less you pursue a thing the more likely it is to come to you. It’s like catching a wild animal. At the moment we’re not going to the heart of the matter, we’re concentrating on other ways of facilitating recall. And to that end, for the next few weeks I’d like you to immerse yourself as much as possible in those first months at the farm; I’d like you to bring your journal next time and, before you do, look over it.’

  My stomach lurches and I stare at him. All thought of Brendan is momentarily forgotten. How did Lucas know about the journal? Were my possessions logged somewhere? But of course they are. In any case, he does know.

  ‘Will you do that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say faintly. What else can I say?

  ‘By the way, I was quite impressed with the journal,’ he says. ‘I would say that at the farm you underwent a conversion experience; some of the entries are astonishing, epiphanic, extraordinarily intense. Rereading them is your homework this week; I want you to remember what it felt like to be that thirteen-year-old girl – it’s vitally important. All right?’

  I say nothing.

  ‘All right? Madeline?’

  ‘All right,’ I say. I want to go. I want to curl up, bury myself in darkness. I want to be covered over.

  I want to rage, I want to weep, I want to retch. But most of all I want to sleep.

  It is a small book bound with string. The spine is split, the cover brown, wound with sellotape that is now flaking and yellow. Inside, stuck or pasted or pressed, there are leaves and flowers, dragonfly wings, sap stains, pollen, holly, dried berries, an empty chrysalis, a buttercup. On one page there is something that looks like blood, on another a brown smudge with green particles beneath the sellotape, which I see on looking closer and reading the entry is mussel soup. I lift the book to my nose but it is as scentless as a bone. There are three photographs: one of a woman in an apple tree wearing a coat that has emulsion paint on it; another of a man holding up sticks of giant rhubarb; another of a girl with her arms around a black-and-white dog. Everywhere there is very small, very crowded writing, an attempt to make the writing illegible to anyone but the author herself.

  On four pages there are no words at all. On the first there is a drawn map of the farm; on the second there is a drawing of a mouse; on the third a drawing of a bird. The last page of the four is coloured in black with a biro, so that when the light shines upon it, it is a dull red. The first pages of the journal are taken up with lists. This is the first entry:

  This is the journal of my fourteenth year. It hasn’t really begun yet but I already know it wil
l be the best year of my life. My task this year is to find You. The blazing arc of the sky tells me it is possible, the hills say it too, the fields swallowed up in the afternoon sun nod their heads. I step off into the arms of the air …

  I turn over the page.

  There are days here when the wind comes scudding across the fields and sap runs dark from the silver birches and glistens like snakes and a chord chimes deep in the earth. I think then that Your breath is in the wind and the fields are rooms in Your house and when I sit You have said: ‘Pull up a chair,’ and when I lie in the grass You cover me over. There are days here that feel like years, there are whole afternoons that pass by like dreams, there are hours on end when I can think nothing at all.

  You can stack these things up, you can press them together, something will come of it.

  ‘How much of it did you manage to read?’

  ‘The opening pages.’

  ‘You have to read more, all right?’

  He is flicking through the journal. The sight of his hands touching it makes me feel nauseous. I turn and look out of the window where I can see the horse-chestnut trees. It is sunny today, for the first time in ages, and Lethem Park has been transformed. It is hard to believe I might be free to walk where I want to soon. This is not an idle dream; he has said I am progressing. He has said the word ‘rehabilitation’ more than once. He has said: ‘distinct possibility’. I have not thought what I would do if I was released, partly for fear of destroying the possibility. I know that for some time I would be in secure accommodation, a sort of halfway house between this world and the next, but after that I don’t know. I have wondered whether I would be well enough to live alone. I believe that my illness would subside dramatically if I was no longer here – Lucas believes it is psychosomatic in any case, and if Lucas and I have unearthed the psychic stuff, then what will there be to stop me functioning as well as any other person?

  He says: ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A mouse,’ I say – or think I do. I swallow.

  ‘Yes, I can see it’s a mouse. Why is it filling the whole page?’

  I shrug.

  ‘There’s another drawing further on of a bird. Did you draw them for any particular reason?’

  ‘No – I don’t know; I can’t remember.’

  ‘And what’s this?’

  I look up again. I look away. ‘The Ark of the Covenant.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The Ark of the Covenant.’

  ‘The wooden chest that contained the tablets of the law? The one the Israelites carried through the wilderness?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say quietly.

  Lucas frowns. ‘Before we go any further, why don’t you tell me a little bit more about your beliefs, Madeline – or your father’s beliefs.’

  ‘Where do you want me to begin?’

  ‘The core tenets?’

  ‘Well … faith in Christ’s sacrifice … sin … redemption.’

  ‘Standard Christianity.’

  ‘More or less.’

  I hear his pencil scratching in the notebook. The lead is so sharp it makes a rasping sound. ‘Did you believe in the Old Testament too?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘The foundation of our faith really was the life-for-a-life principle or the Mosaic law: blood sacrifice, which itself formed the basis of Christ’s own sacrifice of his human life,’ I say.

  ‘Blood sacrifice?’

  ‘Blood was sacred,’ I say. ‘It contained the life and so belonged to God.’

  I am hot and my muscles are beginning to feel nauseated, a sensation I have tried to describe to various doctors. I wrap my arms around my chest in an attempt to wrest the sickness out of them; sometimes holding them tightly like this dissipates the feeling.

  ‘The law requires nearly everything to be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood no forgiveness takes place.’

  ‘Is that taken from a particular verse?’ he says. ‘It sounds like—’

  ‘Hebrews, chapter nine, verse twenty-two.’

  ‘That’s the New Testament.’

  ‘Yes, but the principle of a life given to buy back life runs through the whole bible; Christ’s crucifixion was a blood sacrifice. For all mankind.’

  He inhales, frowning. ‘And was that what God was like to you? An Old Testament God of vengeance and retribution? Or was He a New Testament God of forgiveness and love? I know He was very real to you, obviously, because half your journal entries are addressed to Him, but how did you see Him?’

  I suddenly notice I am breathing heavily. I attempt to do so less audibly. ‘Both,’ I say, ‘all of those things. At different times.’

  He turns a few more pages and raises his eyebrows. ‘Where were you when you drew this?’ He holds up the page on which I drew the map of the farm.

  ‘In the hayloft,’ I say. ‘There was a small yard bordering our land, with some run-down sheds and a hayloft. I climbed up to the top of the bales.’

  ‘It’s incredibly detailed …’ He turns the page, then puts the journal aside. ‘You sold the farm quickly, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Well … it was hardly a sale at all, really, more of a handover.’

  He looks up. ‘Do you think your father would have sold it even if everything had gone according to plan?’

  It is quite a long time before I answer. ‘No. He intended – we intended – to stay there forever.’

  ‘And do you think you ran away because you couldn’t accept what was happening to your mother?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, and suddenly the sickness in my limbs is too much. ‘Can we finish here?’

  But he is saying: ‘You see’ – he puts his fingers to his lips – ‘I thought you would have been anxious to stay with her, not run away. There’s something there that isn’t quite right. There’s something I’m missing. In most cases the primary cause of dissociative amnesia is some sort of trauma. In your case the psychosocial environment is massively conflictual – there must have been dozens of uncomfortable emotions and impulses you were feeling.’

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Well, I know you don’t remember feeling them now, but here in the journal there are some very agitated entries. Can you remember experiencing some of those emotions?’

  ‘I remember being angry at my father,’ I say.

  ‘And for you and your father, anger is a sin,’ he says. ‘And do you think he was ever aware of your feelings towards him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And were there any sexual compulsions?’

  ‘No—!’

  ‘You were very isolated, Madeline. You didn’t even have any other children to bounce things off … The religious dynamic meant that sex was probably viewed in a very delimiting light; it would have been natural to feel uneasy about sexual matters as you reached puberty with no one to talk to.’

  ‘No. It was all totally – of no interest to me.’

  ‘Are you sure there aren’t any feelings that troubled you?’

  ‘Not that I can remember.’

  ‘A lot of forgetting there—’

  ‘I didn’t even know what sex was,’ I say, then wish that I hadn’t.

  ‘Then when did you find out?’

  ‘Afterwards …’ I close my eyes. ‘I need to finish now.’

  He inhales and then gets up. ‘Bring the journal again next week. I’ll expect you to have read more. Don’t think it’s unimportant. Remember what we’re working towards here.’

  ‘I do,’ I say. This is one thing I have not forgotten.

  Journal II

  I can hear the central heating and Pam snoring and the night nurses talking in the corridor. Moonlight is filling the room. I bring a chair to the window; turning on the light will only arouse suspicion and I do not want to be disturbed. On my lap lies the journal. It’s just words, I say to myself. How bad can words be?

  This is the journal of my fourteenth year. It hasn’t really begun yet but I already know it will
be the best year of my life. My task this year is to find You. The blazing arc of the sky tells me it is possible, the hills say it too, the fields swallowed up in the afternoon sun nod their heads. I step off into the arms of the air …

  … If everything in the world was offered to me I would not exchange it for an hour here or a day, though there is no time here and no hour but now. The days are a pendulum, swinging back to where they began, repeating endlessly, never done. There is no choosing here, one thing over another. It isn’t ‘either/or’, or ‘instead of’. It is all things always, all things one …

  … When You made the world You must have decreed there be a little more light here than anywhere else. The light here erases me. Each day I ask the light to erase me a little bit more. I have asked my mother if you can be blinded by sunlight.

  I wake to light and go to sleep in it.

  The trees are misted in green, the earth is trickling and rushing, the land is being born again but we are still locked in the cold. Why do You come to me, God, yet punish us too?…

  … 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 …

  … Halfway down the lane I saw her and Elijah coming towards me. Elijah raced up, bending his body and groaning in happiness, then ran back to Mum, as if wanting to bring us together. I ran up to her and hugged her so hard …

  … God in heaven, forgive me. Forgive me …

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

  Journal III

  The moon is here again. It is blazing like fire along the sheets and pillows, lighting the wall behind me, filling my eyes and my ears until sleep has gone; it is as if the moon wants me to read. I get up, take the journal and sit in the chair by the window.

  I have asked my mother if you can be blinded by sunlight.