I had first heard about the farm at Carhullan when I was seventeen. Even then it had notoriety, a bad reputation. Its lamb was being sold in Rith, its vegetables and honey, and char when the tarn on its estate held them. The women living there traded every month in the border markets, with organic labels and low prices. When they arrived in town conversation about them picked up, the way it used to when the travellers came for the horse-driving trials.
They were a strange group, slightly exotic, slightly disliked. I could remember seeing them in Rith’s market stalls, setting up their tables, staring down the hostile looks of other farmers. They were odd-looking. Their dress was different, unconventional; often they wore matching yellow tunics that tied at the back and came to the knee. Seeing their attire, people thought at first they must be part of a new faith, some modern agrarian strain, though they did not proselytise.
They were always friendly towards other women, joking with them over the wicker trays of radishes and cucumbers, giving out discounts and free butter. With the men they acted cooler; they were offhand. People commented that they must be doing all right for themselves up there on the fell, if they were solvent and could still afford to drive a Land Rover all that way into town each week. When we went shopping my father told me not to buy anything from them. ‘Give that lot a wide berth,’ he would say, nodding towards the group. ‘It’s probably wacky butter they’re flogging.’ If I lingered too long near their patch he would hurry me back to the car, saying we were late for something. But if he wasn’t around, or if I had come with friends, I would go and buy homemade ice cream from the women. ‘Thank you, Sister,’ they always said when I handed them the money.
There had been a skirmish in the market once, not a fight exactly but a physical exchange of sorts. My father and I had only seen the end of it, as it broke up. There was the sound of scraping and a soft thump, and when I looked over I saw that three of the yellow-shirted women were standing over a young man. There were cabbages rolling on the ground around him. He was cursing them, calling them dykes. The expression on his face was one of shock and outrage. But their faces were utterly calm.
Among the locals, speculation about the lives they led was rife, and it was often cruel, or filled with titillation. They were nuns, religious freaks, communists, convicts. They were child-deserters, men-haters, cunt-lickers, or celibates. They were, just as they had been hundreds of years go, witches, up to no good in the sticks. A few years after they set up, the national papers got wind of the enterprise and Carhullan became moderately famous. Ambitious reporters made the pilgrimage up the mountain to interview the women.
It was one of the last working fell farms. And life there was hard. There were animals to deal with at the crack of dawn, there was lumber to shift, fields to crop. Some reports said the place was really a rustic health club, a centre for energetic meditation. As well as the agricultural efforts, there was other physical training; traditional sparring, eight-mile maintenance runs once a week. There were no men allowed, though some of the rumours said there were, and inferred what they were used for. The proprietors remained difficult to pin down on the subject.
Jackie Nixon ran Carhullan with her friend Veronique, a tall black woman from the American South. Jacks and Vee they were known as by the other girls. I had heard Veronique on the local radio station and she had the last hum of an accent, a soft drawl, when she talked. And it was mostly her who talked. She was the spokesperson, the one who gave interviews to the magazines and news crews. The place sounded utopian, martial or monastic, depending on which publication was interviewing, and what angle they wanted to push. Veronique’s other half was more reclusive.
The number of women grew each year, though no recruiting was ever done. There were some complaints from men, that their wives and daughters had been kidnapped, brainwashed, assimilated, and bent. There were police investigations, but no formal charges were ever brought. The girls who went there had simply opted out of their old lives. Each time I came across an article in the papers I would cut it out and keep it. I followed the progress of the farm, discarding the criticism, and searching through the text for a clue to its real spirit, its philosophy maybe, until the newspapers switched fully to issues of state, then downsized circulation, folded, and I heard nothing more about the place.
I don’t know what it was about Jackie Nixon that compelled me. Maybe it was because she was from my area, and that likened us. I felt I almost knew her. She was always depicted formidably; hard-cast, like granite. People in the region were wary even of her name, old as it was–stock of ironmongers, masons, and the bowmen of the North. In Rith it was issued like superstition from the mouths of those discussing her and her girls. ‘Jackie Nixon,’ they said. ‘She’s one of the Border Nixons. They were the ones who went out with bulldogs to meet the reivers.’ I watched for her at the market, but she never seemed to come down from the farm with the other women.
Before he died my father commented that it would take only a small twist of the dial for Jackie Nixon to become a menace to society. The more he spoke out against her, the more intrigued I became. I remember asking him across the kitchen table one morning what it was about her that he thought was so objectionable. ‘Don’t you think she’s some kind of heroine,’ I’d asked him, ‘like Graine Warrior? I mean, she lives up there completely independently. I’ve heard she doesn’t take any subsidies. The others must trust her to stay on. She must be an amazing person. I’d like to meet her.’ My father had raised his eyebrows high on his forehead. ‘I think she’s leaning on them lasses to do whatever she damn well wants, and she’s messing with their heads,’ he said, ‘like a cult bloody crackpot. And you, my girl, are to steer clear.’
I had two photographs of her. The first was from back when the project began. She was standing outside the heavy oak door of Carhullan with an arm around Vee; it was held awkwardly up across her friend’s shoulders because Veronique was much the taller of the two. The picture looked posed, agreed to, and as if the notion of what they were doing was a high-spirited challenge of some kind, like crossing the Atlantic in a coracle. The two of them were in their late twenties then and they looked full of vim and determination. The caption described them as partners and the article went on to speculate about whether or not they were lovers. They’d met at Cambridge University, it said, while completing postgraduate degrees; two like minds, two retro feminists. Before that Jackie had been in the military. Her rank was uncertain.
Jackie had tightly cropped hair, a lopsided face, and a broken jawline. Her eyes were the blue of the region’s quarried stone. If she’d had a softer appearance she would have been called bonny perhaps. As it was she was handsome, arresting. In the picture she was wearing a tank top and army surplus trousers. She looked both slim and stocky at once. The second photograph, taken five years later, had her turning away from the camera. Her hair was slightly longer, she was much leaner, and there was a deep frown on her face.
Both picture cuttings were tucked into a metal box of possessions in my backpack, with my identification card and a few other personal effects. They were faded and creased, but I had kept them. If she was still alive, it would be her I’d have to address when I reached my destination.
And I could feel it already, that I was entering her country, her domain. It was a raw landscape, verging on wilderness. The thick green vegetation overrunning the lowlands was now behind me. Rock was beginning to show through the grassland; the bones of an older district, stripped by the wind, washed clean by fast-flowing becks and rain. There was heather, bracken, and gorse.
As I walked upwards on the scars I thought about her. In the early reports Jackie had always been depicted as a typical Northerner; obdurate, reticent, backlit. She seldom went on the record about anything, personal or otherwise. When she did, it was curtly expressed. Anyone coming to the farm needed good shoes, she said–boots, trainers–books, and nothing else. They should get their wisdom teeth removed first. Rarer still, she spoke about her beliefs. ‘It’s still all about body and sexuality for us,’ she was once quoted as saying. ‘We are controlled through those things; psychologically, financially, eternally. We endorse the manmade competition between ourselves that disunites us, striping us of our true ability. We don’t believe we can govern better, and until we believe this, we never will. It’s time for a new society.’
When it was suggested that she might be offering an empty alternative, a formula that had already been unsuccessful, she directed scorn at the governing politicians, asking if the environment they were creating was acceptable. She was often asked what it was that she had in her, making her do what she was doing, as if she were somehow afflicted. Interviewers commented on her impatience, her furious suspension of the conversation if the wrong questions were asked.
Jackie and Veronique were given plenty of titles, called plenty of things by different people in the years of Carhullan’s publicity. But as they had it they were simply libertarians. As they had it, theirs was a culture moulded from necessity, formed, as Jackie described, to spean the lambs before they became sheep.
And Carhullan was Jackie’s idea, that much was apparent. Her family were from the area, so she knew it like none of the other women ever would, though they worked the land every day, moving sheep and cows, panting across the rough terrain to break the eight-mile hour. This was her home turf. Her territory. She had either bought the place outright or taken it over because it was lying empty. Already by then people were heading into the town, driven out of rural habitations by the transport problems and the steepening fuel prices. Farming was considered a dying industry.
The buildings sat in total isolation, far from any conceivable thoroughfare. I knew I had hiked near there in the past, but I had never seen it. It was the highest farm in England, almost inaccessible, impervious to the flooding that would come in the years to follow, and the shifting of the water tables. It had a massive Westmorland kitchen, a cast-iron range, and any number of ramshackle outbuildings that would become dormitories. Until they wired it up, there was no electricity. It could be reached only on foot or by four-wheel drive via a convoluted upland route.
The land belonging to Carhullan covered hundreds of acres and took in moors, woods and fields. No one knew who originally enclosed it, but it had always been a private steading, not a tenanted farm belonging to the local lord. It was a vast, self-contained, workable place. Jackie had grown up in the valley below, and she must have wondered about its history, maybe trekking up the mountain and climbing in through the windows as a girl, lighting fires on the iron grill and sleeping there overnight. Finding the bones of martins and swifts buried in the soft floors of the byres.
Years later, looking at the photographs of her under the phosphorous Mag-lamp of our quarter, I imagined that she was visionary, that she had foreseen the troubles and the exodus from the villages and hamlets long before it became reality. She had sidestepped the collapse, and the harsh regime of the Civil Reorganisation. Every time I opened a tin and transferred the gelatinous contents into a bowl I thought of the farm’s bright vegetables on the market stalls the decade before. I imagined the taste of Carhullan’s crisp peppers and yellow lentils, the delicate flavour of the lavender ice cream the women made and sold.
At work in the New Fuel factory, with the noise of the conveyor deafening me, I had often imagined the benefits of being up there with Jackie and Veronique. The tedium of my job was excruciating: eight hours of standing on the concrete factory floor watching metal bolts roll past, knowing that the turbines were not being installed offshore, they were just being stored in the warehouse, cylinder upon cylinder, their blades fixed and static. There was a dead comb of them now built against the walls. I could get inside each grey shell, take out the lock-pin and turn the rotors smoothly with my hands. There were enough units to power the whole of the Northern region if they had been installed in the estuaries.
But for reasons unknown to us, there had been no green light for the operation, no deployment of the technology yet. Authority agents arrived at the factory and took inventories from time to time, as if about to ship the turbines out to the sea platforms constructed years before above the brown tides. The evening news bulletins broadcast still-reels of the New Fuel products, as if proving the recovery’s protocol was working. But it was all a bad joke. Every day the pieces were manufactured and assembled, then left defunct. And like drones we added to the vast metal hive.
At first I had been glad of the placement. Work at the refinery was much worse; the manual labour was filthy and jeopardous. Those at the vats quickly developed breathing problems, shadows on their lungs. There were complaints from them that the credits earned were not as high as they should be. But they were higher than anywhere else. And the products were being used–the unconventional oil, and the bios–if only by the government.
I had quickly realised our efforts at the factory were for nothing, and I hated the redundancy of it all. There was a pervasive mood of despondency in the hangar, joylessness. In the restroom the men and women taking shift breaks removed their face guards and tried to sleep for ten minutes before resuming work. Some went into the washrooom and cracked open ampoules of flex. They came back onto the factory floor with wide pupils and no coordination. There had been several accidents. The previous year I had seen a man’s arm torn off in the heel-blade of a machine. No one heard him shout out. He had simply picked the arm up with his other hand and walked towards the door of the factory, leaving a wet red trail. I saw him walk past. He stopped before he got to the exit and sat down and placed the amputated limb across his knees. I went over and knelt beside him. ‘I was a teacher,’ he said quietly. ‘I was a teacher. A teacher.’ There was a look of shock in his dilated eyes. I knew he could not feel a thing.
There was something better out there. I knew what it was and where to find it. Even if it meant looking behind me, to a venue that had long been forgotten in the aftermath of catastrophe, and the desperate rush to subsist. Like those who had brought pictures of better times to their workstations and tacked them up on the panels of machines, I had kept Carhullan in my mind throughout the recovery’s dark years.
It had never been built with the outside world in mind. It was of another age, when utilities and services were unimaginable, before the light bulb had been dreamt of. They must always have known its potential, Jackie and Veronique. Within a year of it being inhabited the women had installed a waterwheel, harnessing a nearby spring. A year-round garden had been planted, and a fast-growing willow copse. There were sties, bees, an orchard, and a fishery at the beck shuttle of the tarn. There were peat troughs, filtration tanks. It was all grandly holistic, a truly green initiative.
It was, and had always been, removed from the faulted municipal world. It sat in the bields, the sheltered lull before the final ascent of the High Street range. There was a panoramic view of the surrounding valleys; it was the best lookout point for miles. The Romans knew it and they had raised a fort there that Carhullan’s byres and pens were later built around. And before the Centurions, the Britons had a site nearby; five weather-pitted standing stones which leant awkwardly towards each other, west of the paddocks. The Five Pins they were called. It was a place for pathfinders and entrepreneurs, empire builders, priests, and survivalists; those with the determination to carry stone thousands of feet up, over rough water and inhibitive ground, those who could rear livestock then slaughter it, those who had something so true in themselves that they were willing to dwell at the edge of civilisation for the sake of it.
That was what Jackie Nixon had had in her. It was a spirit bred from the landscape I was now treading. And, as I ascended the brant slopes, I wondered if her ideas had first been formed around the farm, all those years ago when she lay beds of kindling in the sooty range and drank water from the cold stream. It must have been put into her head early on, that after technology and its failures, after the monumental mistakes of the industrialised world, human beings could still shelter and survive in rudimentary ways, just as they always had. Independent communities were possible. Alternative societies. Something durable and extraordinary could be created in these mountains.
By the time I reached the lower bields I was exhausted. I had never carried so much weight such a distance before. The straps of my bag were making my skin raw and tender and my feet felt as if every tiny pliant bone in them was broken. I stopped briefly and put my damp vest and jacket back on. Immediately I felt cold. I walked on again. The water I had brought was gone now and my saliva was thickening up; when I cleared my mouth, it looked like cuckoo spit on the ground. I’d been expecting a clear fast-flowing stream or a gill from which to fill up the canister but had not yet come across one, and I didn’t want to wander off the thin sheep track. In the last hour, without really realising it, I had been talking softly, telling myself that it would be all right, telling myself to keep going.
The fell was covered with stiff gingery grass and droves of heather. Here and there my foot sank into small brackish wells, then sucked back out covered in mud. Every step was harder than it should have been. The smell of the grassland and peat was all around; open and bloody, burnt and aromatic. I’d been keeping the dry-stone wall I thought signified Carhullan’s land on my right as I climbed, and it had led me through bogs and swales, up over outcrops of rock and loose bluffs.
My father had told me as a child that it was the Vikings who originally built Cumbria’s dry-stone walls, and they had been more determined with their corridors than even the Romans. Here, now, I could believe it. In places the structures ran almost vertically upwards; each stone held tightly on to those surrounding it. They were modest, impossible feats of engineering. Over the years, while the district was occupied, they had been repaired and tended by farmers, shepherds, and hired hands, but some sections must have dated back a thousand years. A couple of times on the climb I wondered whether I’d been following the wrong wall, whether I might end up on the broad windy summits of the range, lost as the night came in. Now and then I thought I could hear the bleating of sheep, Carhullan’s hefted flocks perhaps, but each time the sound was fainter, and further away.
Looking ahead I judged that there was perhaps just one final hill to scale and then I would be able to see the farm and its outer fields. I decided to stop and rest, and think about what I would say when I arrived. Suddenly it seemed stupid that I had not considered a speech, some meaningful words of introduction that would secure my welcome. I shouldered out of my rucksack, lay it down on the moor, and sat on a broken lip in the wall. I had gained considerable altitude. Below me was the tapering valley, and beyond it, in the next dale, I could see the sleek corner of Blackrigg reservoir.
All around, the wind stroked the tawny grassland; the veld darkened and lightened in waves as the air coursed over its surface. There were belts of dark yellow underneath the parted clouds, the oblique late light of autumn evening. I could smell gorse, blossoming sweetly against its spines. After the confinement and industrial stink of the town, the factory metals, human secretions, the soots and carbons of the refinery, this harsh and fragrant expanse was invigorating. It was the smell of nature, untouched and original, exempt from interference. For all my weariness, it made me feel a little more alive, both human and feral together, and somehow redeemed from the past.
I would tell Jackie and Vee the truth. I’d say nothing more than I felt. That I believed in what they were doing, now more than ever. That I felt there was nothing for me in the society I’d left behind. I couldn’t condone it. I couldn’t live within it.
Suddenly there was a burst of movement at my side. Three deer bolted past, almost silently, their heads held erect, their hides the colour of the surrounding moor, white rumps flashing. The hooves became audible on the wind for a few seconds, a dull thudding on the ground, and then they were gone over the brow of the hill. Their swiftness was astonishing. They had broken cover only because of their speed, as if pieces of the ground had come loose in a rapid landslide. A few seconds later I heard the hollow barking of a stag behind me, and then it flowed past after the hinds, darker and broader against the terrain, its antlers cast high, its neck thick and rough with fleece. I stood up to see if I could catch sight of it rising over the next hill but there was no sign, just patches of October light drifting across the moor. They must have heard my approach, or scented me as they grazed, I thought.
I sat back down on the wall. I wanted to take off my boots and look at my feet, expose them to the cool air. They were sore at the heels and under the toes and my socks felt as if they were sticking wetly to blisters that had already ruptured. When I’d hiked with my father this was the ritual always performed at the end of every trip. We would sit on the bumper of his car and wrench off our boots and the air would soothe our skin.
There was probably another mile still to hike, but I decided it would be better to patch any abrasions before continuing. Putting my boots back on would hurt, but it would be worse if I kept on with open sores, and I didn’t want to spend my first days at the farm limping around, seeming incapacitated and weak. The women there must have come through much hardship, having survived for so long in that place. And I was determined to match their resilience, in spirit at first, then physically.
As I leant down to unlace my boots I felt myself pitching forward off the wall as if it had given way underneath me. The ground rushed up. There was no time to get my hands down to break the fall and I landed hard on my shoulder and face. My kneecap cracked against a slab of stone. A jolt of pain shot the length of my leg and another through my mouth. For a second I lay there, stunned, my cheek sunk in the wet ground and the blond grass swaying indistinctly across my field of vision. Then everything slowly came back into focus. An inch from my eye a spider was belaying down one of the stems on a pale rope. Its legs pedalled precisely on the descent.
I drew a shallow breath and as I did so my collarbone and back protested. All the air had been knocked out of me on impact, but my lungs had been strangely airless even before I hit the ground. I fought with my diaphragm to let oxygen pass, trying to stem the panic of being winded. I couldn’t find and use my arms so I pushed against the ground with my chest, trying to raise myself. But I could not move. I was like a landed fish.
As I made an effort to get up again I heard a voice, not far away. ‘Keep her down. Lock on tight.’ I felt the pressure on my back increase. I stopped moving, and tried to say something, but it came out as nothing more than a cough. There was the gory taste of peat in my mouth and blood that ran from inside my nose. I lay still and looked into the moor grass. After a moment my lungs began to calm and fill, but my heart was hammering. In front of me the spider reached the base of the stem, cut itself free, and disappeared into the undergrowth.
‘Check the duffel,’ another voice said, closer to me this time. Curling my fingers I felt the warm skin of a hand that had both of mine pinned together behind my back, midway up my spine. There was the sound of ratching and zipping, nails scrabbling quickly between the nylon folds of my bag. I heard the soft brush of clothing as it was brought out of the rucksack, the thump of my canister as it was dropped on the ground. Then there was a pause. ‘She’s got a bastard gun. Look.’ The grip tightened on my wrists. A hand was placed on the back of my head and my face was pushed further into the damp earth. ‘Shit. Good girl, eh?’ I heard the last contents of the rucksack being turned out, the boxes of bullets being unwrapped from a bundle of T-shirts. Then the casings were rattled against the cardboard edges. ‘No. Bad girl. Ready to get her up?’
The voices were women’s. I could not tell how many were present, they were muffled and low, but I could hear that they were efficient. ‘Yes. In a minute. Lynn, go and secure the ridge.’ There was the sound of someone running. Then the hand on my head tightened into a fist. It took hold of a clump of my hair and lifted my face out of the wet earth. ‘Anyone else with you?’ The voice was louder now that my ear was out of the mud, and it was precise, leaving a small pause between each word. I moved my tongue against the roof of my mouth and my gums and spat out a mouthful of dirt. The inside of my cheek was stinging, and I knew I’d bitten it in several places. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I walked here alone. From Rith.’
There was another pause. ‘When was this?’ ‘Today,’ I replied. There was a snort. The voice next to me had remained level, but now a note of annoyance entered it. ‘Almost forty miles? No, you didn’t.’ I realised the inaccuracy of what I had said, and corrected myself. ‘There was a man who gave me a lift part of the way. He said he worked at the reservoir. I got out at Rosgill.’ Another pause. My head was lowered back down. No more questions were asked.
For a long time it was quiet. Then a dry whistle sounded across the fell. I could hear my possessions being shaken one by one and stuffed back into the bag. I was still being held down but the grip on my scalp had relaxed. The hand lay flat there, and at one point I thought I felt fingers combing gently through my hair. Then I felt another set of hands patting me down, reaching underneath me, pressing my hips and ribs, my ankles. Pain started to arrive properly in my mouth, my knee, and along my collarbone. I tried to cast the shock and discomfort away and get a clear reading of the situation. It must be them, I thought. They had found me first, before I’d seen the farm.
I was disarmed. I hadn’t expected such an aggressive meeting and I wanted to explain myself, but all the things that passed through my mind were submissive and desperate, a reiteration of the position I was already in, so I did not speak. My shoulder was aching but I held as still as I could, was as compliant as I could be. They continued their search. I heard the small bag with my soap and shampoo inside being unzipped and investigated. There was a metallic rattle and the lid of the tin where I kept my few small personal items was popped off. Papers rustled.
For a time the women were so quiet it was as is they had disappeared, as if I were being held down by some supernatural force. The wind hissed through the grass. Then I heard dull footsteps coming towards where I lay. I could see a pair of broken leather boots. Grey tape had been bound round the toe and sole of one of them and it looked like a dog’s muzzle. The hand on my skull was taken away. I twisted my head upwards as best I could and strained to see. The figure standing above was holding out a piece of paper to whoever was squatting over me. ‘Jacks,’ she said. ‘Ages ago.’ There was another long pause. From the corner of my eye I saw a hand gesture being made. Then I was released.
Slowly I knelt and ran the back of my arm across my face, wiping away the filth. The bones to the left of my collar felt cracked and pushed out of place, but I tried to block out the sensation and stop my eyes from watering. ‘Come on. Get up on your feet.’ It was the woman who had gone through my things that spoke. Her tone was as even as it had been throughout, but the voice seemed less taut now, less officious. I stood, keeping my weight on the knee I had not jarred, and as I looked at her I knew for certain she was one of Carhullan’s residents. She was about my height. She was my size, and my sex, but she looked almost alien. Her face was brown and lined, and the eyes in it were pale green, careful but indifferent. On top of her head the hair was short, it looked oily and separated, like an otter’s pelt. At the back it was longer; she wore it pulled away and tied at her neck.
She had on rough black trousers made of canvas or denim, a long thermal with holes in the sleeves and a padded body vest, the kind the old walking shops used to sell. Under her clothes she looked compact and athletic. The flesh between her bones was spare and seemed whittled back, dug out, but not unhealthily so. She was honed. There was a quality about her that seemed so vital and distinguished, so memorable, that I felt I might be gazing at someone I had met before, or had seen on the news a decade ago. More than anything, she appeared native.
In her hand she held the straps of my rucksack. ‘It’ll be better if you carry this in,’ she said. ‘Are you going to be able? You all right after that?’ I nodded and she passed me the bag. She held it out with a straight arm as if it weighed nothing but when I took it from her it felt as if it had doubled in weight since the walk. I had a ridiculous thought that perhaps she had loaded stones from the moor into it along with my possessions. In her other hand she still held the tin box. Grimacing, I slung the bag onto my back again.
I turned round. The other woman was much younger, no more than a girl, sixteen at most. She looked too slight to have held me down, though her face registered no such concern. Her head was shaved, with only a few days’ worth of red bristle on her scalp. There was a primitive blue tattoo on the raised skull around her ear. A thin piece of leather was wound several times around her neck. Her clothes were equally worn and practical, but they looked like burlap or hemp, homemade. She was as aloof as the other woman.
I glanced down and saw she had the rifle loosely trained on me. She held it low on her hip, casually, cradling the stock. I had not heard her load it, or test the mechanism, though I guessed she might have. She was obviously confident with its handling and unimpressed by what she was holding. She seemed to be waiting for direction of some kind. I looked back at her elder, who unzipped the body warmer, put my tin box inside and zipped it back up. ‘Fifty–fifty who spooked the deer,’ she said, ‘but you were downwind, so I’ll bet it was us.’ She said this slowly and with deliberation, as if making a basic point, or speaking to a young child. Her lips were rolled inwards. It was an expression that could have been a smile, or it could have signified derision. Behind her a third girl was running back across the moorland. As she approached she nodded to the otter-haired woman and then ran past. ‘Right. Away in then,’ the woman said to me. ‘You can tell us your name if you like, but you might as well save it for Jackie. She’ll be the one you have to ask it back from anyway.’ I felt myself being nudged forward by the gun barrel.
Nothing more was said as we walked. I fell slightly behind the two of them. The pace of my escorts looked leisurely but it was brisker than I could manage. I tried to keep up, but the weight on my back made me slow and clumsy; my knee was swelling and stiffening, and I stumbled over the uneven ground. From time to time they adjusted their stride, falling back a few paces, not enough to allow me to catch up properly, but I could see they were keeping me in their range. Their hostility had lessened, but they were making no moves to be friendly, to find out anything about me, nor were they inviting me to ask about them. A sense of disappointment began to creep through me.
It was not the reception I’d played out in my mind so many times when thinking about Carhullan. I’d seen myself striding up to the farm, looking fit and fierce, being welcomed, not with awe or amazement, but with quiet admiration by the girls working outside. I’d imagined an immediate sense of unity, the way it had felt to form a group of new friends at school, with everyone suddenly aware of the collaboration and trust involved. And there would be Jackie and Veronique, standing at the great oak doorway, just like they had in the photograph, as if that’s where they had always stood, and would always stand.
But fifteen years was a long time to be left alone in the wilds. And in that time so much had passed. There had been terrible events, and responses that were almost as extreme. Though I had lived in it I often barely recognised the residual world. I wondered what they knew of this. How must it have been for them, detached and unaided as they were? Perhaps aware of the changes going on. Perhaps oblivious to them. As we walked I began to realise that I had come to a place now as foreign and unknown as anywhere overseas, as anywhere of another age. I wanted to press them for information, ask questions, and tell them about conditions in the towns. I wanted to try to negotiate, or ingratiate myself. But I didn’t. Suddenly I was too tired, too weary almost to move.
Rain blew in from the summit of High Street, colder than before, soaking my face and clothes again. I tried to fasten my jacket but my fingers felt awkward and would not cooperate, so I held it closed over my chest. I peered into the squall. There was still no sign of the farm or even the outbuildings. All I could see were drifts of rain and the relentless brown withers of fell, appearing then disappearing. The adrenalin of the encounter had worn off. I had walked more than twenty miles to escape. And I had gambled with my life. Now I felt numb, and close to seizing up. All I wanted was water to drink, and to take the bag off my back, lie down, and go to sleep. It took all my energy to put one foot in front of the other and remain upright.
Ahead, the girl and the woman paused, but they did not look round at me. I wondered if they could hear my dry, laboured breathing, and if it had concerned them. I’d slowed almost to a shuffle as I moved between the limestone boulders and thorn trees. Before I could reach them they stepped forward again and the gap between us widened. It was a calculated move designed to keep me separate but corralled, and they repeated this behaviour all the way across the fell. Finally, I felt tears of exhaustion and self-pity stinging my face. I wanted them to stop, and take hold of me, and tell me it would all be fine. I wanted them to say that I had done well, that I was here now, with them, and it was all right. But they didn’t. The fell wind blew damp and cold between us. They were moving me along impersonally, as if I were an animal they were stewarding, as if I belonged to a different species.
Eventually, through the gloom and darkening cloud, I could make out the shape of the farm. It looked smaller than I had imagined it. The outbuildings sat low on the ground, huddled around the main house like stone wind-breakers. Only the long slate roof and upper storeys of the central structure were unobscured by byres. The night was quickly closing in and from the top windows shone a dozen soft lights, loose glowing ovals like egg yolks. I was so tired that I had been almost oblivious to the surroundings on the final leg of the walk, trying not to amplify the pain in my shoulder and knee with every step taken. It was only when I heard dogs barking in the distance, and I looked up, after an hour watching the spry beards of grass passing slowly underfoot, that I saw the settlement.
It was almost lost in the shade of evening and the long shadow cast by the summit of High Street. Against the dull brown massif it looked like the last place on earth, defended and extraordinary, an outpost where all hopes and energies, all physical means, had been consolidated and fortified. It was Carhullan; the place on which I had pinned all my hopes for a new existence. As I peered through the swale of damp fog I was struck, not by the audacity of such a dwelling, cut into the high fells, but by its seclusion, the emptiness surrounding it, and the sheer girth of the landscape around its foundations. Looking at the paucity of illumination coming from the farm and the diminutive proportions of the settlement, I felt the shift of currents in my stomach, the gathering of nervousness.
In a country now so dependent on urban arrangements, the extremity and lunacy of this location were inescapable. In that moment, Carhullan could have been the gatehouse to Abaddon. But it did not matter. For better or worse, there was no turning back now. Even if the women had released me, I was too weary and sore to think about a return journey. I knew my options were reduced to this place alone.
As we approached the farm a ripe smell of silage began to grow stronger. It was an odour both offensive and rousing; that got right to the back of my nose and throat and smelled of decayed grass, fish and animal waste. The pungent tang of husbandry had long since been gone from Rith. Instead the air was filled with petrochemical emissions and the rot of uncollected rubbish. The agricultural spread held faint memories of the county in its old incarnation at this time of year, with sprays of yellow fertiliser jetting over the earth and heavy, silted tractors working behind the hedgerows.
We passed through a stone gate and the moor suddenly gave way to black turned earth, deep furrows of soil. It was soft and uneven to walk on, the limp piles yielded richly under my feet. After the austere expanse of the fells the farmland seemed peculiarly cultivated. In a small pasture to the right there were several rows of oddly shaped plants that looked like small palm trees. Next to them were taller growths with frothy white and purple flowers; I recognised them, they were Carlin peas, like the ones my father had grown. To the left was a little humpback bridge. I could hear the spatter and hiss of water in a rocky channel nearby but could not see the upland beck that I knew rose close to Carhullan and drove the waterwheel, powering the electrical generator. We passed three triangular-shaped hutches. At first glance they seemed empty. Then I made out the creatures kept inside, about six small birds in each, with stippled plumages.
My two guides stopped when they reached the first of the stone pens, waiting for me to catch up. I stumbled forward, hoping that I would not be seen arriving too far behind them. They looked straight ahead, towards the walls. I hesitated a few feet away from them and waited for instruction. They seemed to be rocking gently in front of me, from side to side, as if to music I could not hear. After a moment I realised that I was swaying on my feet. Nausea swelled in me and the back of my throat tensed and lifted. I leant to the side to vomit but could do no more than bring up a mouthful of sharp bile. I retched again, dryly.
I glanced upwards. The woman and the girl holding the gun had turned and were observing me. I folded over at the waist, put my hands on my thighs, and waited for a spell, making sure I wasn’t going to be sick again. I spat a few times to clear my mouth, and tried to concentrate on breathing deeply and evenly, but I knew I was in trouble, that I had pushed myself beyond the limits of my fitness. When I’d bent over, the rucksack had slipped on my back, and it now rested heavily against my head, digging into my neck. I stood and it dropped back into place, pulling hard against my shoulders and sending a hot lacerating pain through my damaged collarbone. A sound left my mouth, a half moan, half whimper. My eyes swam to find focus, and unsettlement rippled in my gut. I felt desperately ill. Then the dizziness overwhelmed me and I lost my balance. I began to fall forward.
‘Hey. Hey. She’s going. Megan!’
I heard the voice only a second before I felt one of them take me by the arms. The grip was firm, insistent, and in my disorientation I found myself leaning against the support, unsure whether I was kneeling or sitting or lying down. It was the younger woman, the girl who had held me down. She had sprung forward in time to catch me and now she was keeping me upright. She said nothing but held me steady for a minute, then cautiously she took her hands away and stepped back. The older woman picked the rifle up off the ground where it had been dropped.
There seemed to be no one waiting for our arrival. We had not been greeted at the farm’s periphery. None of the other women had been out in the fields as I’d expected they would be. Through a gap in the pens I could see that the farm’s courtyard was also deserted. I listened for the sounds of talking and laughter coming from nearby or inside, anything to indicate that an interested crowd might be gathering, a welcome committee. But there was nothing. Even the dogs that I had heard a quarter of a mile away were quiet, silent rather than muffled, as if they had been taken inside. I wondered again how many women were left, whether just a handful ran the place now, a skeleton crew of some kind, rather than the eighty strong that had once lived and worked here.
The lights were on but the place was still and empty. It was apparent that we were waiting for something or someone. The two had turned their backs to me. From their posture they were making it clear that if I was going to faint again they were not going to catch me. I was responsible for my own conduct and I would have to summon the strength and coordination to keep my balance. I squeezed my eyes closed, opened them and blinked rapidly several times, fighting to maintain concentration and alertness. I knew that I had to remain standing, that for all their coolness and detachment they wanted me upright, aware of what was happening, and capable of representing myself. But I craved unconsciousness, and was close to passing out. What I wanted to do was give in, let the blackness and numbness claim me. I wanted to crumple to the floor and stay there until the sickness and pain and exhaustion passed, leaving me ready to face this strange and desolate community.
Inside the settlement walls, a door opened and shut. There were footsteps on the courtyard flagstones and I saw a figure walking towards us. The silhouette grew more distinct, then, from the middle of the buildings, a broad-waisted woman emerged. She had on a floor-length skirt and a waxed coat. Over that she wore a sleeved plastic apron, like a vet’s. She paused for a moment in front of the otter-haired woman and the girl whose name I now knew was Megan. They murmured a few words together and the woman nodded.
As she stepped towards me I felt a last rush of panic. I was not ready to meet her. I was not composed, not cognitive enough. The long hike had taken its toll and she would surely think the worst of me for arriving in this state, for being too weak. But as she came into view I saw that it was not Jackie. Nor was it Veronique. I did not recognise this woman. She was middle aged, perhaps in her fifties, and stout. Her hair was long and loose, falling in thin dry curls to her waist. There was a deep groove above her nose where her brow pinched in. It was the mark of a perpetual frown, an expression that seemed to be worn perhaps even when she did not mean for it to be present. On her apron there were dark pragmatic smears.
‘Take off the bag, please,’ she said to me, pointing to my rucksack. ‘Go on, it’s OK.’ I pulled the straps off my shoulders as slowly and carefully as I could, and tipped it to one side, catching it in the crook of my good arm. Then I let it drop to the floor. She could see from my face the distress caused by the manoeuvre. Her eyes were bright hazel and fast, taking in my level of discomposure and processing what she saw. ‘Right. I’m going to check you out. I know you’re hurt,’ she said to me. ‘Do I have your permission?’ I did not reply. She kept her eyes locked with mine. I saw kindness in them. After a few seconds of her gaze, I nodded. She stepped in again and took hold of my jaw, opening my mouth gently but firmly. With her other hand she placed two fingers on my tongue and patted down. She turned them and touched the roof of my mouth, then brought them back out. I winced as she brushed past the bitten rim of my cheek.
‘When did you last piss?’ she asked. I shook my head, then remembered. ‘This morning,’ I said. My voice sounded cracked and hoarse, as if I had grown older since I set out. ‘Have you thrown up?’ I nodded. ‘Well, you weren’t carried so your feet can wait,’ she said. There was a lilt at the heart of her accent, perhaps Westcountry or Welsh, but my mind was too disordered to place it. She sighed. ‘OK. Now I’ve got to have a go at that shoulder. I’m sorry.’
Before I could respond her hands were working over my throat, pressing along the line of my clavicle, and in the hollow under my arm. She took hold of my wrist and elbow and raised them up. I tried not to shout out but the pain was too vivid and I made a strangled noise that sounded shrill and bird-like. She held tighter and moved the arm in a wide circle. The bone from my breastplate to my shoulder cuff felt as if it were grating and splintering as it rotated. I was crying openly now at the agony of her manipulations and though I tried to pull back, the force of her grip kept me from freeing myself. ‘No, no, no,’ she said, simply, as if talking to a stubborn animal. When she was done she placed the arm tightly back at my side, bent it up at the elbow, and pushed my hand between my breasts. ‘Keep it held like this,’ she whispered, almost too quietly for me to hear. Then, raising her voice to its previous level, she said, ‘Yeah. It’s fractured.’
The examination was over. As I waited for the throbbing in my arm to subside, Megan picked up the rucksack from the ground by my feet. Her eyes met mine briefly, then looked away. I saw that the blue tattoo above her ear ran all the way round her skull, down the median of her neck, disappearing at the hem of her jersey. I looked hard at it, focused on the ornamental border to distract myself from the pain. I imagined the blue ink line running on under her clothes. I followed it as it snaked down her spine, across her ribs and her hip, down her leg and under her foot. I pictured the line continuing on and spilling into the blue twilight, like a river into a lake. Gradually the pain lessened. When I looked at her again she was shrugging the rucksack onto her back. It seemed huge on her slender frame, like an absurd beetle’s carapace. She slipped between the outbuildings. A metal latch lifted and a door creaked. After a few moments she came back without the bag, and carrying instead a plastic container of fluid.
The woman who had inspected me in the half-dark took a few paces back and sighed heavily again. Her frown had deepened. She looked worried. She put her hands on her hips and her head dropped forward. ‘It’s not recommended,’ she called out. ‘Not bloody well by me!’ From behind her, in the shadows of the courtyard, I heard another voice. ‘Give her the water. Then put her in the dog box. She’s fit enough.’
The women from the moor took my arms. As they led me away round the thick outer wall of the farm I glanced up towards the fells. There was now so little daylight that the horizon had almost disappeared. I squinted into the distance. The ground had lost its definition and the summit of High Street seemed to bleed into the deep teal of the night. The elements were combining darkly, but for a second or two I thought I saw a long row of black outlines, human figures, standing on the ridge against the sky. I could not be sure of it. But in that one glance, before I was pushed inside the narrow iron structure, there seemed to be a ring of people on the hillside above Carhullan. There were too many of them to count.
What followed was unbearable. I was kept in the metal tank for maybe three days, though I received no confirmation of how long it had been from the women who had left me there. By the end I had lost all track of time, and I did not know whether I had added the hours together correctly, or if I had forgotten some moments in between. There was no way to measure, no way to count.
The darkness was absolute. I only knew that the sun had risen by the temperature change inside the corrugated walls, the warming of the vault’s iron sides and the smell of urine and sweat growing stronger in the heat. The dimensions of the cell were tiny, perhaps two feet square, and barely wide enough to sit in, let alone lie down or stretch out. In it was a single broken wooden stool. Its seat was flat and hard, too small to rest on comfortably. A single pole ran from the cross piece to the ground. It had not been hammered down securely, so the chair rocked and tipped in its shaft, moving whenever my weight shifted. Every few minutes I would have to adjust, and if I had drifted into shallow sleep I’d wake with a start, panicked by a sensation of falling, or by the clanging echo of the metal partition as I fell against it.
The container of water had been placed at my feet, before the door was closed and barred. When I reached to pick it up my head grazed against the rusty corrugation and I had to crane my neck to the side and put my hand on the wall to guard against the patches of sharply torn metal. It was the first fluid I had had for hours. I unscrewed the lid, upended it and drank thirstily, taking down great gulps of liquid until I choked. It was too much. My stomach heaved and I brought it all up in a bitter wash that spilled over my chin and down my clothes. For all my thirst, I knew I had to moderate my intake, making sure only to have small resting sips. After each drink I shook the bottle and tried to estimate how much water was left, how long it would last. No food was brought.
Every hour the containment became worse. I suffered cramp and had to move position constantly, rubbing my legs to try to stop them shaking. The muscle spasms in my thighs and calves felt uncontrollable. I had taken my legs to the point of convulsion after the long walk; they were starved of protein and the space to recover. My back ached from its carried load and the strain of being kept vertical after such exertion, from being bent and contorted as I tried to sleep leaning against the corners of the enclosure. I was desperate to sleep, and could not. The cell would not allow it. I tried curling in a ball around the stool, with my face on my hand, but the ground was damp and filthy; it reeked of piss and shit. I didn’t know if it was animal or human. I was terrified that it was from other hostages, others who had come here. I tried not to believe it, I told myself there had not been people in here, kept like this for whatever terrible reason, but deep down I knew that there must have been.
A few hours after I began to drink the water I felt the urge to urinate. I banged on the iron walls and called for someone to come and let me out, but it was futile. No one responded. No one even denied the request. Outside there was no sound, just the oboe of wind through the grass, and the strange nocturnal pitch of the moorland. After another hour my bladder began to burn and feel distended and I knew there was no other option but to relieve myself in the narrow space. I undid my trousers and crouched as best I could. Holding the water container on the seat of the stool, I tried to open my legs and squat back, but I began to shake violently again and the hot stream ran down my ankles. It happened every time I tried to piss. Finally, towards the end, I did not attempt to keep myself dry and clean. I let the neck of my bladder release while I was sitting on the stool and urine soaked over the wooden slat, down the legs of my trousers and onto the ground.
In the constant darkness I became confused about where I was. At times the room seemed bigger, wider. At times I felt that I could stand up and walk over to the other side, with my arms outstretched, or that I could even run the length of it, as if I were in a wide marble palace. I woke and thought I was back in the terrace quarter and I reached for the Mag-lamp next to the bed, only to cut a gash in my knuckles. Each time I came out of my reverie banging my hands or head against iron, the air forced from my chest as the walls rushed in.
I woke to the assurance of my blindness and hunger. In the pitched void images began to flicker. I saw faces I knew and did not know, visions of murder and rape. There were maggots multiplying in the wounds I had sustained. I tried to pick them out only find myself tearing at pieces of my own skin. I had never been claustrophobic in Rith’s over-populated tenements, or as I crawled into the dead hubs of the turbines in the factory. But in the rancid air and relentless black of the dog box I felt hysteria boiling through me.
In the bouts of ragged sleep my bearings failed. I dreamt that my coffin was being buried in the peat gullies on the bields where I had lain face down, tasting the hag, my hands fastened behind my back. I dreamt that I was crawling through underground tunnels, pulling at cords of roots, only to have the soil cave in on top of me, filling my mouth and ears, the holes where my eyes had been. And I dreamt I was in the mouth of an iron woman. Her teeth were closed around me, and she was carrying me back to her den of wrecked metal in the mountains. I heard the creaking of her legs as she strode, like panels of metal beating in the wind.
I called out for someone to come, for someone to help me, please. When they pushed me inside I had not struggled, only tried to explain myself to the two women. I’d told them I had come because I believed in them. Because of how I felt inside. Because there was a coil in me, fury in me; something clawing to get out. I had come because what was left of the country was the disfigurement of its sickness, the defects left by its disease, and I would not let it infect me.
In the hours that passed I tried to find better, more accurate words to tell them why I had come, and who I was, who I wanted to be. I babbled to whomever I thought was waiting outside the narrow corrugated door. I pleaded with them, begged for their trust. I refused their silence, their abandonment, dreading to think I had been forgotten and left to die. There had been a mistake, I said. There had been a misunderstanding. I was here because I was like them. I asked forgiveness for not coming sooner. I battered the sides of the enclosure until I could smell my own blood turned loose over my arms, its scent like lead.
It was not torture. It was not torture because there was no one hurting me, no one peeling away my nails and salting the pulp beneath. The only presence in the iron box was my own. I began to understand that I owned the abuse; I was the only persecutor. They were not killing me slowly, methodically, with scalding instruments and wires. They were letting me break apart, so I could use the blunt edges of reason to stave in my mind, and the jagged ones to lance open the last blisters of sanity. I thought at times I might still have been lying on the fell, my skull cracked open on a lichen-pale rock as the deer raced past. I thought I must be dreaming all this up, waiting to be found. Then I thought of nothing.
There was the smell of fresh food. On the ground there was a warm heap of something. I had put it into my mouth before I realised it was shit.
I heard Andrew’s laughter outside. I heard him knocking on the side of the enclosure, saying there was a letter for me waiting at home. The evening lottery had selected my number for reproduction. We could try and conceive now if I still wanted a baby. My mother walked towards me holding a lit taper. Both her breasts were missing and there were pegs along the mastectomy scars, holding the incisions closed. It was not the woman in the photographs I had been given when I was five years old, but the woman who had put her fingers in my mouth, testing to see how long I could withstand this place. She reached between my legs and brought out the decayed dog I’d seen in my father’s garden. I held it in my arms and it felt like a piece of wet leather.
In the end I knew that if they left me much longer, I would not survive all the deaths of myself that it was possible for me to create.