She woke me by putting a hand on my forehead. I was lying on my back, finally able to unhook my joints and extend my body. The first sensation was feeling unfastened, so slack and comfortable that I could almost not come round, and if the hand had not stayed where it was, exerting gentle pressure, I would have drawn the soft layers of unconsciousness over myself again and fallen away. But she did not want that. She spoke a word and then a number and I reached towards them, half recognising them, but they slipped away.
I did not know how I had kicked away the iron walls and freed up enough space to straighten my legs and uncurl my back. My thoughts were slow to arrive and difficult to arrange. If the door of the dog box was open I could escape. If the pen was like a puzzle, somehow I had decoded it, made one sprung move, one solving turn, and the sides of the cage had released. I could sleep. The stool was gone and I was lying in the dirt. And yet it was smooth and there was the fragrance of soap.
I opened my eyes and for a minute had to fight the uncomfortable brightness. Above me the sky was whitewashed and cracked. It was a ceiling. A thin bar of sunshine ran the length of it, splitting into a pale green prism at one end that was too luminous and beautiful to look at for long. The last finger of a woman’s hand was sitting like a pink visor over my vision. As I turned my head to face her she took it away and I felt the plush of a pillow underneath my cheek. I was in a bed. I was inside the farm.
‘Long walk,’ she said. I waited for my eyes to focus on her properly. They felt scratchy, and sore, as if surgery had been performed on them. ‘We’re near where the eyries used to be,’ she went on. ‘It’s not clearly marked to scale on the maps. They call it a reservation null. Supposedly it stopped people from stealing the eggs.’ She gave a low laugh. ‘Not very helpful for visitors though, is it? But here you are anyway. Shangri-La.’
Her accent was close to my own, less town-bred and more mobile over its vowels. It was the county’s rural equivalent. I looked up at her face, finally able to see her. She was older of course, in her forties now, but immediately recognisable. Her jawline was thicker, though still slightly misshapen, crooked, with the smile worn higher on the left, as if she had always favoured the teeth on that side when she ate. On the lower inert cheek there was a strange fold of skin, a tucked-in line, like a suture tack. In the newspaper pictures I had never noticed it. Her hair was long; it reached her shoulders and there were colourless strands woven into it. It softened her features slightly, and it looked wrong.
But it was the eyes that gave her away. Jackie Nixon’s eyes were the colour of slate riverbeds. The photographs had never been able to moderate or alter their lustre. Even in black and white she looked out of the pictures clearly and coldly, and I knew that the territory had somehow gone into the making of her.
She was looking at me now with an expression both curious and patient, as if keen that we should communicate but conscious of my disability, aware that we would need some lesser form of exchange. She watched as my eyes filled up, her gaze flickering to the side of my face as the tears ran across the bridge of my nose, over my eyelid and down onto the cotton. I blinked and squeezed out the gathering fluid, embarrassed not to have controlled my composure in front of her. My brain suddenly ignited then. It was her. It was Jackie. Not three feet from me. Alive in the flesh.
I tried to sit up but an aching stiffness ran the length of me and I found that my arm had been knitted up into a gauze sling, so I could only use the other elbow as a prop. After a few attempts I brought myself ungracefully to an upright position. She did not try to assist me, but let me struggle against the soreness and the inhibition of the bindings. She was sitting on a wooden chair next to the bed, leaning forward, with her elbows on her knees, her wrists lopped over and crossed like paws. She had on fatigues and a long-sleeved vest. A thin silver chain fell down below her neckline. I wiped my eyes but the tears still came. The cut on my hand had been wrapped and it smelled sweet when I brought it up to my face, almost sickly, as if there was a floral ointment of some kind under the bandage.
Jackie lifted herself up a fraction, reached down and inched the chair closer in. ‘Don’t worry about it, Sister,’ she said. ‘You’re just hungry. You’re probably ready for some porridge now. I’ll get the girls to make you some.’ She smiled again, sympathetically, as if I were a child who had woken from an illness and would naturally be starving and eager for sustenance. The texture of her face seemed almost burned. There were smooth patches and areas where the skin looked crisp. She stared at me a while longer, then stood abruptly, scraping the chair back along the floorboards. She walked to the door, and though she was relatively short I saw her duck under the low oak beam of the lintel. Then I heard her boots on the stairs.
I found I was holding my breath. My lungs fluttered as I exhaled. I looked around. On the dresser next to the bed was a glass of water. The underlying thirst of the last few days had not left me, so I reached over, took it, and drank it down. My mouth nipped and stung as the liquid passed. The abrasions where I had bitten into the flesh had become ulcers; I could feel the sore little holes with the tip of my tongue. The sickness had passed, but there was a sulphurous taste at the back of my throat. I knew I needed something in my stomach. The rest of me was clean, but my mouth was furred and stale from the risen acid. I took stock of myself. I felt battered and bruised, weak rather than weary, but less confused, and less frantic. The delirium and fear of the metal tank where they’d kept me had gone, but I could sense them flashing around my brain, and I suspected that if I closed my eyes for long enough the terrible images and the feeling of restriction would come slipping back.
I tried to concentrate on the present. They had obviously washed me and dressed my injuries. My upper body was naked except for the sling and underneath the sheets I had on clean underwear from my backpack. The heels and toes of my feet were taped and when I moved them they felt moist and creamy under their stiff plasters. I pulled back the covers. I saw that my knee, where it had struck the rock, was dark purple and grey.
I could hear muffled voices downstairs, banging and general movement, doors opening and closing. Outside there were more sounds, dull thumps and the nickering and lowing of animals. I had met only a handful of the women so far, but I knew there must be more. The shapes framed against the skyline on the night of my arrival had not been a trick of the light or my eyes beginning their false projections. It was likely the farm had been evacuated before my arrival.
I climbed out of bed and hobbled to the window. Below, the courtyard was filled with slanting autumn sunlight. Brown leaves and tufts of fireweed were blowing across the granite slabs. Someone had left a book overturned on the stone steps to an upper door where a pulley hung from a bracket. Its pages fluttered. Two women were standing talking at the entrance of one of the barns. The strong breeze flattened their hair, parting it in white lines along their scalps. One held a box full of what looked to be root vegetables: turnips, carrots, cabbages. The other had a bundle of material in her arms. She shifted the weight a fraction and a tiny hand reached upwards from the folds. The woman next to her cradled the box of tubers and greenery against her hip, took hold of the little fingers with her free hand and leaned down to kiss them. It took a moment for me to comprehend what I had seen. My eyes were still watery and smarting, but they were not mistaken. There was a newborn at Carhullan.
The women below parted company, walking in opposite directions across the yard, and I looked out beyond where they had stood. Through the gaps between the outbuildings I could see the expanse of fields and ditches that I had been escorted through. There was a high three-walled enclosure where a dozen fruit trees were rocking in the wind. Grazing underneath the lowest branches were four white and brown goats. One of them was being milked.
Beyond that I could make out a column of about twenty prostrate bodies on the ground. They were dressed in shorts and their legs looked pale against the turf. After a while I could see they were moving up and down, alternating position every few seconds, their arms spread wide at first, then held tightly in at their sides.
When I turned back from the window Jackie was standing in the doorway of the bedroom. I had not heard her mounting the stairs. In her hands was a tray with a steaming bowl placed on it, a jug, and a dish of apple pieces. ‘You’re up. Good lass. Feel like a run, since you’re not pointing heavenwards any more? I’m about to send my unit out.’ I felt my eyes widen. ‘God, no,’ I said. She laughed a quiet throaty laugh. ‘That’s all right. I’m just fucking with you. First things first, we’ll get you mended.’ She nodded at the tray. ‘It’s poddish. With a little bit of sago thrown in. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was frogspawn, but we’ll not tell Sister Ruthie that. It’s her department and she doesn’t like much feedback.’
She jerked her head to the side, indicating that I should get back into bed, and I did so. Then she walked over to me and held out the tray. I took it from her with my free hand, gripping it unsteadily. The bowl and the jug skittered close to the edge. Feeling feeble and clumsy, I righted it and set it on my knees.
My stomach griped with hunger. The white substance in the bowl smelled starchy, and a little bit salty. It reminded me of the cones of popcorn that used to be sold in Rith’s cinemas when I was very young. There was an oily yellow pool in a crater in the centre of the mixture. In the jug was thick, creamy-looking milk.
Jackie sat in the chair next to me again. ‘Might taste a bit funny to you,’ she said, ‘but it gets better the longer you eat the stuff. That’s butter on it, for a bit of winter insulation. You look OK to me, but the girls here have to put on a few pounds this time of year or they start getting run down.’ I nodded, picked up the spoon, and began to eat. It was scalding hot and burned the roof of my mouth and the tender spots inside my cheeks, but I was too hungry to care. I worked air into the mouthful to cool it down and swallowed. Jackie leaned over and poured the milk into the bowl. As she did so her arm brushed past me. Her vest smelled of utility, like the proofed fibres of a cagoule. She put the jug to her lips and drank the last inch.
I felt self-conscious in the bed, eating so hurriedly, and only half dressed, with one breast covered by the sling and the other exposed. I was aware of how vulnerable I must appear, and had already proved myself to be. I’d been run through the mill because of it. We were now in civil proximity, Jackie Nixon and I, and the atmosphere was one of diplomacy, but I also understood that it had been her choice to incarcerate me initially; it was her voice I had heard in the darkness, committing me to my term in the hot, stinking shed.
She had been ruthless then. Now she was giving me a reprieve, making a truce perhaps. She was even waiting on me. Her actions were not designed to intimidate, but nevertheless I felt nervous in her company. She was a woman I had wanted to meet for a long time; a woman who was indigenous, who had built up an extreme rural enterprise and kept it going for almost two decades, while all around her things had broken down. Face to face, I could see there was a durability to her appearance, a worn and coarsened exterior. And she had poise, the look of someone in power, someone to whom others would bow.
She raised one leg onto the chair, bringing the boot into the back of her thigh. ‘Well, where to start, Sister? I’m sure there’s a lot you can tell us. But you’ve probably got a fair few questions to ask too.’ She raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to respond. I finished the oatmeal first, unable to stop eating it, and set the tray to one side. The lethargy I had shrugged off came warmly back as the food hit my system, but I was determined to stay sharp. ‘How many of you are there?’ I asked. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Sixty-four,’ she said. ‘As of eight weeks ago, that is. You saw our littlest one out of the window I take it.’
She did not wait for me to confirm that I had before continuing. ‘She’s called Stella. The second generation is bigger than we’d imagined it would be. You’ve met the oldest of them already–Megan. She knocked seven shades out of you apparently. Bit excitable. We’ve not had anyone to try out the system on before you. She’ll no doubt apologise at some stage, or maybe she won’t, it wasn’t personal, was it? That tough little bitch is trained as well as it gets.’ I saw a shine in her eyes, the glitter of pride perhaps. ‘So, you’ll go to her if there’s a problem between the two of you. Don’t come to me with it. The way it works here is everyone resolves their shit at source, face to face. That’s just how we run things. OK?’ She crossed her arms and the chair creaked as she leant back into it. ‘All the births have been manageable, thanks to Sister Lorry. We only lost one, and that was before she came.’
I took a slice of apple from the dish on the tray and bit into it. It was sweet, crisp and full of juice. It was the most delicious fruit I had tasted for years. Jackie noticed the pleasure on my face. ‘Yeah, that’s an Egremont russet. Aren’t they lovely? It’s warm enough up here to get them now. We’ve a good crop this year. And look. They’ve cut it up for you in case you can’t chew, busted up as you are. They’re good lasses.’ She reached over, stole a slice and winked at me. ‘We’ll all be sick of them come December. But not the wine.’ She drew out the word, letting her voice hum over its cadence. It was a swift and playful change of tack, and her whole demeanour altered. I felt suddenly charmed by her. Then as quickly as it had arrived, the banter was gone and her face hardened again.
There was a fierceness about her, something amplified and internalised, an energy that my father would have described as Northern brio. Growing up in Rith, I had seen girls with this same quality. They had carried knives and had scrapped outside the school gates with little concern for their clothes and their looks, and there was an absence of teasing when they flirted with men. Jackie looked like a more mature and authentic version. Sitting beside me she seemed too inanimate for her voltage, too kinetic under her restfulness. It was as if her skin could barely contain the essence of her.
I wondered what the other women at the farm made of her. For all its equalities, and whatever formula the place ran on, it had been apparent from the first night that Carhullan operated a system of control; a hierarchy was in place, and Jackie Nixon’s orders were obeyed. She was the superior. The alpha. As she sat watching me in the bed, I thought about all those who had walked up the slopes, a decade and a half before, knowing her name. Over the years she must have achieved some kind of mystical status as one of Carhullan’s founders. I had still not seen the other.
It surprised me that they had not come in together to give me the low-down on the place. I swallowed the last piece of apple and wiped my mouth. ‘Where’s Veronique? Can I meet her?’ Jackie’s chin was resting on her hand. She dropped it an inch and pressed her knuckles to her mouth. Then she clenched her uneven teeth. A wave of tension ran though her forehead. ‘No. She’s dead, Sister.’
Jackie met my gaze for as long as it lasted. I could not hold her eyes. I shook my head and looked towards the window. ‘She’s been dead three years.’ There was an uncomfortable pause. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, looking back at her. I wanted to say more, but the grin she had on her face jolted me from making anything but the briefest of condolences. It was a terrible expression and I couldn’t tell if it was genuine or not. I thought that she must be joking, and at any moment she would apologise for having a black sense of humour and say that Vee was out on the farm with the others. But she did not. The smile held, becoming gross and manic. Her cold clear eyes held no mirth in them. ‘Life goes on,’ she said, ‘beloved or bastardised.’
I knew then that she was serious. I felt a shiver pass through the pores of my skin, though the autumn sun shone into the bedroom with a warm cidery light. The nipple of my breast felt tight and hard against my inner arm, and the flesh of my chest was suddenly chilly and damp. I tried to pull the sheets up around me but they were trapped under the tray.
Jackie observed my discomfort. Her face relaxed out of its grimace and she stood up. ‘You’ll see how it all works soon enough. We’re strict, but things are pretty straightforward. We’re all sticky up here. I know you know that, Sister, and I know that’s why you’re here.’ She paused, as if to let me register what she had just said, but her words seemed oddly confidential and coded, as if she was speaking to someone else, someone who knew more than I did about the place I had come to.
She went on with the cursory induction. ‘If you’re after it, your shampoo and roll-on are in the pokey with our soap supplies. I’m afraid they won’t last long once word gets out. We’re not a heavily deodorised institute. The hole is last on the left, spare paper’s in there. Three sheets max for a shit. Take a tub of Vaseline from the pokey too, and don’t forget to use it. Sister Lorry is going to come in and look you over later today. She’ll talk to you about getting that bit of rubbish out of you.’
Her attitude fell through another revolution again. She put her hands on her hips and stood squarely in the room. ‘Listen. I don’t care if you are a murrey, just don’t put it about, eh? I don’t need these bitches squabbling over new cunt. Not now.’ She licked the corners of her mouth and stepped towards the door. ‘It’s fine if you want to go back to sleep for a bit,’ she said, nodding her head, and it did not seem like I was being offered a choice. Then she left the room, closing the door behind her, and this time I could not hear her footsteps moving away.
Once she had gone I stared at the stripped knotted wood of the door panels. My shoulder felt sore again and I realised I was completely tense. I tried to relax. But somehow I felt upbraided. And I was perplexed by Jackie Nixon’s many faces. She had passed through arrangements of humour and pragmatism, lightness and invective, as she presented herself, as she covered those matters she wanted to discuss. There were gaps in her elucidation of the farm’s fellowship, and I wanted to know more. She hadn’t mentioned my gun, or the photographs of her I had kept in my tin. And she hadn’t apologised for my being locked up.
No. She had not welcomed me exactly. But what she had done, without my having to apply officially, was make it clear to me that I could stay at Carhullan. At least for the time being.
From the bedroom window I had been watching small groups of women running furtively up the ridge, scaling its steep sides and attempting to gain the summit without being seen by the two sentries stationed at the cairn. Some of them appeared to be carrying wooden shafts in their hands. Others lay back behind stands of gorse, waiting for a signal. It seemed an impossible objective, such extreme sniping, until one figure managed to cross a craggy overhang of rock, skirt the summit, and tackle the guards from behind. I wondered if it was Megan. Those who had broken cover and been picked off were made to kneel with their hands linked behind their heads.
Closer, in a field by the metal structure where I had been kept, another small group of women worked in pairs, each having to wrestle her partner to the ground. I could not tell if they were practising a martial art, or whether what they were doing was some kind of combined skill. At one point I saw Jackie enter the group and demonstrate a move. A woman stood up and volunteered to spar with her. They set their legs wide and gripped their wrists behind each other’s backs. After a brief engagement, and the vying of heels for ground space, the woman found her footing gone and I saw her body arc through the air before she was slammed onto the grass. I winced as her head rebounded off the turf.
I might have become bored with my convalescence were it not for the fascination of these activities. It was as if I had been granted access to a private training camp. There was a meticulous quality to the exercises being carried out. The effort put in was acute, and even when they were not engrossed in the action themselves the women remained vigilant and observant, squatting on their haunches in a circle around the arena. It did not take long to realise how easily they must have picked me off on the bields as I made my way up towards Carhullan, slowly and in full view.
There was constant movement in the courtyard below too. I heard the rumble of barrels being rolled on the wide uneven cobbles, and the chock-chock of wood being stacked. Sacks of feed were taken in and out of the storage sheds. At one point a pack of dogs spilled into the yard, their tails wagging stiffly. They roiled around and then were let out. Over in the paddocks, ponies necked against each other, or frisked their tails and cantered about as the high wind caught hold of them.
Jackie had not given me permission to leave the main house or walk around the farm, so I stayed put in the white stone bedroom, sleeping a little, then sitting cat-like on the wooden window seat and observing the drills and agricultural routines. I’d wrapped the blanket from the bed around myself, knotting it under the sling. My rucksack and its contents were still absent.
Once or twice I had walked quietly down the long landing to the bathroom, shyly passing door after door, afraid of running into someone else. I’d felt like a ghost moving through the quiet loft of the farmhouse, undressed and trailing a sheet; a wisp, little more than vapour. It was almost unbelievable to think of the crowded noisy terrace quarters in which I had lived only a few days earlier; where people streamed ant-like to and from work; where they queued to use the bathrooms and the oven; where they fucked and argued and cried, and the floors creaked under the weight of so many penalised bodies, and everywhere the atmosphere was of human pressure.
Towards evening Lorry knocked and came into the room. I had begun to feel edgy and discarded and I was pleased to see somebody I recognised, even though our previous encounter had involved a painful examination. In her hand was a folded yellow garment. She laid it on the bed, and told me to put it on whenever I was ready and wanted to come down. ‘Standard practice for new intakes,’ she said. ‘We’re a traditional bunch of so-and-sos really.’ In her other hand she held a black leather case, like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. As she opened it and brought out a wrap of instruments I thought about what Jackie had told me, that Lorry had been responsible for all the safe births on the farm. Like Jackie she seemed to possess authority and confidence.
I wondered how Veronique had died, and whether Carhullan’s midwife and medic had tried and failed to save her. Perhaps there had been an accident, something too wounding to treat. The thought of it saddened me.
I wanted to ask Lorry for all the information I had not managed to get from Jackie during our brief exchange. Of the women I had met so far she had been the most amenable and kind, and I knew she had objected, at least on medical principle, to me being tossed into the dog box. I decided not to try my luck on the subject. I was not in a position to pry and I did not know how much inquiry was acceptable yet and how much would be discourteous. I had seen already that the place ran reasonably smoothly and with considerable collaboration among the women. I was still an outsider.
‘You’re looking bright,’ Lorry said. ‘Considering.’ She sat down on the unmade bed. ‘I hope you’re OK with everything. I know it must have been a blow, getting slung in the box right off like that.’ She shook her head. ‘Jackie wanted to be sure–we thought we were off the radar by now.’ She smiled at me, and the crease in her brow deepened. ‘She probably wanted to see what you were made of too. She can be a bit of a sod that way. But it is her department.’
Lorry had on the same long skirt that I had seen her wearing previously, and a woollen cardigan that looked baggy, stretched out of shape at the cuffs and elbows. I shrugged as best I could in the gauze sling. ‘Someone shows up armed and with a picture of me, I likely would have done it too. She thought I was an assassin or someone sent by the Authority, right? And I was supposed to confess in there? I would have confessed to it if I’d thought it was the way to get out.’ Lorry chuckled and gestured for me to sit on the bed next to her. ‘You would have, if it had been the truth.’
She ran another quick check of my shoulder and then lifted the dressing on my hand. I saw a row of neat black stitches in the flesh. ‘No tetanus shots here, I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘but I irrigated, so you should be OK. Just keep an eye out that it doesn’t start to go green.’ I nodded. ‘There are no shots down there either any more,’ I replied, ‘At least, not for free.’ She glanced up at me and I noticed the caramels and greens that made up the strange marbling of her irises. There was more grey spun into her hair than I had seen in the dusk outside. ‘No, I know that,’ she said. ‘But they do have the means to inoculate against some things, don’t they? The utter bastards.’ Her tone was quietly aggrieved, but she was still smiling kindly, tacitly, and I could see the criticism was not directed at me. It was bitter sympathy that she was expressing.
My eyes stung and began to fill with tears again. I felt like hugging her, or putting my face in her lap and crying myself quietly back to sleep. Exhaustion had left me too sensitive, too emotional. I bit my lip, caught hold of myself. She took a glass jar out of the case, unscrewed it and gently thumbed a waxy salve over the cut. It smelled of honey and witch hazel and stung a little. ‘Yes. We’re up to speed on the Authority’s anti-breeding campaign. But, you know, it might be good if you talked about it to the other women during one of our meetings. If you feel you want to. We’ve reached a bit of an impasse on the subject.’ She taped a new patch of lint over my palm. ‘So, now then. What do you want me to do about it?’
I had been undressed, washed and administered to, presumably by Lorry herself. It was obvious that she knew my situation, as Jackie did, and I was glad of it. Sitting there with her rough hands on my arm I felt understood. On the face of it Jackie had seemed convivial, but there was something calculated about her manner, a note of restraint perhaps, that went with her position. The woman tending to me now had a different role. She was a healer. I realised that in her years at the farm Lorry must have dealt with every kind of female complaint, every kind of harm to the body. I did not have to explain myself to her or inch in to a difficult topic. I did not have to try to justify my discomfort, as I had to Andrew.
Since the regulator had been fitted I’d felt a sense of minor but constant embarrassment about myself, debilitation almost, as if the thing were an ugly birthmark. I knew others around me were fitted too, and on the surface they seemed unchanged and able to accommodate the intrusion. Now, in Lorry’s company, the device felt exactly as it was: an alien implant, an invader in my body, something that had been rejected all but physically. It was like a spelk under the skin; it had stopped pricking, but I had not for one day forgotten it. And I was not wrong to hate it.
‘I want it gone,’ I told her. ‘Really, I don’t care how much it hurts. Just get it out.’ I rubbed my arm above the blanket. There was so much more to say. I wanted to talk to her, wanted to tell her how bad it really was, all that had been done to me. I managed a short outburst. ‘There are fourteen-year-olds with these things in, you know. And grandmothers. What right have they got to violate them?’
Lorry sighed and clapped her hands on her thighs, squeezing the meat of them with her fingers. ‘Yes, I know. Listen, don’t worry. It’ll be fine. I can’t promise you a wonderful time while I’m down there, but I think you’ll cope.’
As she stood I noticed a kink in the way she raised herself, a favouring of one hip. I had guessed her to be in her fifties perhaps, but now I was not sure that she wasn’t older. ‘I’ll go and get ready,’ she said. ‘We might as well get on with it and get it over. You just sit tight.’ She paused at the end of the bed, then took hold of the folded yellow cloth and shook it out. It was one of the tunics I had seen the Carhullan stallholders wearing all those years ago. ‘Ha! Just like old times!’ she said. ‘It’s going to be good to see someone wearing this again. You know what, I’m looking forward to it. What we need is some of the old passion back.’
It was not until the next day that I finally made it downstairs, into the massive kitchen of Carhullan. I was sore from what Lorry had done to release the hook and the wire, still bleeding and cramping a little. Up in the room she had given me a draught of something sweet and syrupy which made me drowsy and thick headed, apologising when she handed it to me for the homespun nature of the sedative and explaining the difficult choices necessary when dispensing their meagre store of painkillers and anaesthetics. She apologised again, and said she hoped I wouldn’t suffer too much. Last year she’d had to remove a finger on one woman’s hand after an accident at the oat mill–it was mostly gone anyway, crushed to hell–and even that call had been a tough one. In the end the woman had gone without. They used the old wooden-spoon method a lot. Teeth got pulled that way too, she said. But that was the nature of things at Carhullan. Supplies were limited.
Then Lorry had set to work. She’d been quick and determined about me, forcing my knees apart when I tensed and resisted, and she’d given me a soft rag to put in my underwear to absorb the flow afterwards. But still I felt stretched and scoured. I had tried to sleep for the rest of the day. She’d left another draught beside me on the dresser and sometime during the night I’d woken with a deep griping in my belly and I’d taken it and it had knocked me back out. In the morning there had been dark brown blood on the sheets. I’d bundled them up and gone down to the bathroom to clean myself, and I’d put the stained cottons in the old copper bath to soak. In the mirror opposite the tub I had looked deathly pale. It was odd to see my reflection after days of not looking. I almost did not recognise myself.
Towards midday Lorry had checked me out again, given me new presses. ‘You’ll do, but take things easy, OK?’ she said. ‘Let yourself heal. And I don’t just mean physically.’ I had tried to get her to stay on a while and talk to me, but she’d excused herself, saying she was really busy; a couple of the ponies needed looking over, and she had a sow to dispatch. She was also the farm’s vet and butcher.
I did not want to remain confined much longer upstairs. I had begun to feel like a bird that had flown accidentally into the rafters through an open window, then lost its bearings and been unable to leave. Though I half expected her, Jackie did not come to see me again, and there were no more initiations or welcomes, no more meals brought to me on trays, just the muffled sounds of people below and outside getting on with things, signalling my exclusion. The second herbal analgesic had worn off, leaving me thirsty and quaking, and I was aware of how empty my stomach was again. I knew the decision to leave the room was now mine alone. Hunger rather than courage would drive me out. It was late afternoon when I finally found the desperation to move. By then the spasms in my abdomen had lessened and I felt able to face all those who must know about my presence but had yet to see me in the flesh.
The woollen tunic seemed strange when I slipped it on, like a rough borrowed shirt, an item taken temporarily from a friend until wet or damaged clothing might be returned. In its weave was a mustiness, and the lingering scent of someone else–I did not know who–perhaps the last person to have worn it, whenever that was. But it was comforting to have been given it, and as I fastened its ties in a knot at my back I began to feel less solitary, less alien. I knew this was the first official step towards inclusion.
I came nervously down the stone stairs, barefoot and careful on the cold steps. There was a door at the bottom of the hallway and a hum of activity in the room beyond it. I opened it to find upwards of thirty women sitting on benches at a long wooden table, taking a small meal of dark brown meat and kale.
They turned when they saw me and stopped eating, and for a long minute I endured their full scrutiny, uncivil and raw. I scanned the rows for a face that I could recognise–Megan, Lorry or even Jackie–but there was no one I could quietly implore to rise and seat me, introduce me, or serve as my guide in this unfamiliar realm.
Facing me were women of all ages, some with grey in their hair, some with long braids, and others with eccentrically cropped styles. They were mostly dressed as the women I’d met on the moors had been, practically, with thrift and a certain bespoke artistry. Some had overalls that seemed extreme and invented, tribal almost. Others had panels and shapes shaved into their heads. They wore straps of leather around their wrists and upper arms, and stone pendants: their smocks and shirts were cut down, resewn, and there was a small girl among them with her face painted blue, and blue stains on her jumper. No one else had on a yellow tunic. The bright item I was wearing suddenly seemed more like a convict’s uniform than it did my banner of belonging. I tried to smile and greet them but my mouth was paralysed. All I could do was remain still, silently waiting for someone to tell me what to do.
I heard whispering along the bench. Then, one by one, they stood up, as if about to change shift. I thought perhaps they were leaving, because my presence had somehow triggered offence, because I was not wanted here. But instead they picked up their knives and began knocking the handles on the tabletop, quietly at first, then louder. They looked straight at me and banged down on the wood, and the plates in front of them jumped and clattered. Bits of food spilled off the earthenware onto the scrubbed oak. The knives flashed silver in their hands. The little girl leapt up and down on the bench.
I blinked fast and involuntarily in the racket. The sound rang through me as if I were made of glass and might shatter if it continued, so brittle and thin was my spirit. I was rooted to the floor, afraid to move forward, unable to turn and leave, not knowing whether to ask for mercy or somehow stand my ground against them. The drumming went on and on, and I felt its tattoo echoing in the hollowness of my body.
I knew then that I was nothing; that I was void to the core. To get here I had committed a kind of suicide. My old life was over. I was now an unmade person. In the few days that I had been at Carhullan nobody had called me anything other than Sister, though they had seen my identification card and knew my name, and I had shouted out my story over and over from behind the metal walls of the dog box, trying to engage their sympathies, trying to tell them who I was. The person I had once been, the person who had walked out of the safety zones and up the mountain, was gone. She was dead. I was alive. But the only heartbeat I had was the pulse these women were beating though me.
It was not until the first of them left the table, came forward and took hold of my neck and kissed my mouth, while the others continued to knock their cutlery, and when the woman next to her followed suit, and the next, and the next, that I began to understand what was happening. I realised what the noise was. It was not a clamour intended to drive me out or to let me know I bore some kind of stigma. It was the sign of acceptance I had been waiting for. It was applause.
The following morning Jackie waited for me after the breakfast shift, gesturing for me to get ready, and I hurried upstairs to put on warm clothes and went out with her onto Carhullan’s land. After my appearance in the kitchen, my boots had been given back to me together with my clothes, cleaned and dried and folded. I had the use of the indoor bedroom until otherwise notified, Lorry had told me, until I got well enough to handle something less luxurious. Then I’d be moved out into one of the dormitories. ‘Make the most of it while you can,’ she said. ‘It’s no fun dotting over that stream to take a piss in the middle of the night. Believe me, I know. I did it for years. And the other girls will keep you up gabbing, I have no doubt about that.’
I noticed the other women watching as Jackie and I passed by on our way out of the farmhouse. They had not been unfriendly; I had shaken hands, learned a few names, but for the time being they were mostly steering clear of my company.
We did not go far. My legs were still sore and I was light-headed from days of undernourishment. I apologised to Jackie for my condition when I had to pause and rest, but she said not to worry. ‘You’ll be right soon enough,’ she told me. ‘Back when I served, I saw people come out of the box and never get well. It kills your head. You’re stronger than that. Keep eating what they give you. And keep taking butter on it, like the others do.’ I warmed at her compliment but I knew it was too generous. At least once or twice a night the terrors of that confinement woke me in a sweat, and I would cry out as if still trapped there.
As we walked around the estate’s inner fields, she listed the illnesses that I should watch out for, and could probably expect to get. Anything that brought a fever with it was a real problem, and I should tell Lorry immediately. Anaemia was a risk. When she heard I didn’t eat red meat Jackie scowled and shook her head. ‘That’s going to have to change, Sister. I’m going to get Ruthie to give you liver this week. It’ll do you more good than anything else.’
There were gastro-sicknesses occasionally–the outside toilets were old and bugs got passed around. I should clean up well after myself, she said, put the sawdust mix down after a shit, boil my cloths clean every month, and adhere to good rules of hygiene, though it would mean braving the cold outdoor showers every day. Some of the girls had warts; not much could be done about that. Constipation; after four days something had to be done about this. There was a bit of cockie about, she said–I did not know what she meant but I made a note to ask Lorry later. Women had thrush. There were ring-worms. Parasites. I’d get giardiasis if I drank anything other than water piped from the well. Even then it might happen. It was an inconvenience. But eventually I’d be immune, she said.
We crossed the soft earth furrows. The small irregular trees I had been marched past on entering Carhullan were sago palms; they thrived better in the new humidity of the summer than the traditional plants did, Jackie told me. Corn and rye too. There had been years when the wheat crop had failed completely, and they had been hard years to endure. The oats and the potatoes seemed to manage in the wet conditions. These were the farm staples.
We collected a batch of eggs from the quail coops, then ventured a little way out onto the fell, and Jackie showed me how to set the hillside snares at the lips of the burrows. ‘Can’t eat rabbits too often,’ she said. ‘Not enough nutrition in the buggers to do you any good–but they’re OK for filling up the gut now and then, and that’s half the battle won. They make you fart like nobody’s business, the table empties pretty quickly on smoor night, I can tell you.’ She said this seriously, smiled a crooked smile a moment later, and caught herself chuckling. Then her face altered, recomposing itself. She would not allow levity to remain with her long.
The next morning I felt stronger and we went higher on the mountain. The November sky was ash-blue and the clouds moved fast above us. The wind never let up on the fell. Though it was in the lee of High Street, Carhullan was still exposed. The shapes of the trees on the ridge were distorted; they leaned hard to the east. I turned to look at the farm and felt the air kiting at my back. From above I could see why the walls and hedges of the growing plots had been built so tall around the farm, and why the central house stood protected by its barns and pens. It was savaged by the elements. But the upland weather felt cold and clean, and I relished it.
Jackie wanted to show me the hefted flocks; the farm’s first true success, she called them. They were close to the summit of High Street. As we climbed upwards her hair blew lankly around her face, across her eyes and mouth, but she did not bother to fasten it back, as if the feeling of it were inconsequential. Under her body warmer her arms were bare, slightly reddened and chapped. She was more lean than brawny and I could see that for all her middle age she was still strong, still vital. When I looked down at my own hands they seemed pale in comparison, and starkly veined.
I fought for breath as she talked. ‘The lambs are threatened by seagulls now as well as the corbies,’ she said, ‘even this far inland. They come and pluck out their eyes and their arseholes, anything soft they can get hold of. There are no fish for them to catch, so the bastards come for my heafs. I have to sit up here in lambing season and scare them off. I’m a bloody scarecrow, Sister, that’s what I am.’ Her voice was not loud, but it carried well outside, and even in the strong breeze, with me falling behind, I could hear every word.
We were heading into a small half-valley tucked away at the bottom of the ridge. I caught up with her. ‘Sister, you see that river over there?’ she asked me. Her arm was raised, indicating a small waterway ahead. I nodded. ‘That’s Swinnel Beck. It feeds the mill further down. I once saw a hare get stranded on a piece of ground in the middle. It was grazing there and then it started to rain like murder, a really bad flash rain, you know the kind we get now. The thing froze right where it was. It didn’t move. And the water rose up so fast it cut it off from the banks.’
She paused, then spat on the ground and wiped her mouth. ‘Christ! I’ve got a bad stomach today. It’s all Ruthie’s bloody garlic. She goes howking through the woods for the wild stuff. That crazy bitch thinks it keeps us protected from everything on the planet and douses the scran with it any chance she gets.’ She held a hand to her chest. ‘I need some goat’s milk or something to settle myself. Come on, let’s away back.’ She turned on her heels, abandoning the walk. ‘What about the sheep?’ I asked her. ‘We’ll do it tomorrow,’ she called over her shoulder. I followed after her, back down the slopes. ‘So what happened to the hare? Did it drown?’ She glanced back at me. ‘No, no, it did not, Sister. It swam to the banks and got the fuck out. All animals can swim if they have to.’
We walked on a few more paces, with her a little in front. The mountain air was buffeting past us. Suddenly she swung round and I almost walked into her. She put a hand on my shoulder and leant forward as if pushing me away. Her eyes were rocking with water. ‘There are girls here in love with me,’ she said. ‘I only have to put my hand on them and they want to lick me out. I can’t even look at them.’ She cocked her head to the side and squinted back towards the river, and I passed out of her focus. I could feel my face burning. I did not know why she had chosen to say this to me, or what to say to her in reply. I did not know why she left her hand on my shoulder so long. Her eyes, usually oily and flammable, were glassy and clear. There were times I’d felt sure her temper was about to ignite, though it never had. Now she looked rinsed of her energy. I said nothing and waited for her to snap back to life, knowing she could disarm me as suddenly as she could make me her ally.
On the way back to the farmhouse we passed through the paddocks and stopped to stroke the manes of the ponies, and the deathliness seemed to leave her. ‘There’s no written constitution here,’ she said, rubbing behind the ears of a small brown mare. ‘We thought about it for a while, when Vee was alive, setting out something formal. But it wouldn’t have worked in the end. We’d have been paralysed by it, I’m sure of that. Constitutions are hard to change. And we’re going to have to change.’ Her fingers worked through the mane, pulling out the tangled knots. ‘I can’t say that I didn’t expect I’d have to fall back on myself during all this. People might think I’m an extremist, but it’s for everyone’s sake. They’ve not tried to cut my throat yet.’
She laughed her low inward laugh, swung a leg up onto the pony and mounted it. I watched as she heeled the mare gently in the flank and took off at a brisk canter across the field. She rode without much grace, her back slouched over slightly and her legs drooping long. Travellers at the horse-fairs in my youth had ridden with postures similar to hers, I remembered, bareback and untidy, but with similar control.
She turned the animal about a few times as if testing it, and brought it back. ‘Cumbrian fell pony,’ she called to me. ‘Bonny, eh? They’re the hardiest of all the breeds. They’re even tough enough for me. It’s how we get to the towns when we go down on rec. Saves diesel. And they like a good run out across the tops.’ For a moment she looked as if she might be about to spur the pony into a gallop, but she reined the animal in with her knees and slid off, then bent down and felt along the length of one of its legs.
I knew she was not trying particularly to impress me, but right then her capabilities seemed unlimited. I felt that if she told the mountain we were standing on to get up and move it would. There was something remarkable about her company, electric almost. I wondered if that sensation would ever fade, if one day she might walk into the room as just an ordinary woman. I knew it was unlikely. The other women responded to her with respect; I could see it. As she checked over the animal I tried to picture her as a gentler woman, less martial, less dominant, before she had enlisted, or as Veronique’s partner. But I could imagine no other woman than the one in front of me.
‘You’ve seen the girls out training, haven’t you?’ she asked. ‘That’s my unit. It’s what they’ve chosen to do, and they’re good at it. There are some here who disapprove of us having a defence council. It’ll get talked about in the meetings–you’ll see. We all get along though, at the end of the day. Everyone has a specific role in this joint. In the copse. Or the dairy. Or the fishery. Each to her own corner of expertise. We’re a bit like a monastery that way.’ She snorted. ‘But not in other ways. Now, let’s go, I need that milk.’
She did not try to describe Carhullan as any kind of Utopia. Even on my first day in the house, when she had referred to Shangri-La as I lay recovering in bed, it had been with a note of irony. She was visibly proud of the place. But I wondered how much she felt she might have failed in her original plan, how much she might have had to compromise. Perhaps she had tried to leave behind her past, as the others had, and found that she could not, that even in this most remote of places she could not escape human conflicts. She excelled in managing them. I wondered how much the absence of her partner had affected her. I did not understand her grief, with its dark humours, its tripwires and awkwardness, but I knew she must have suffered in the bereavement.
I waited for her to finish with the pony. I reached out and put my hand on the forelock of the creature and it nudged against me. Its coat was coarse and greasy, but it smelled sweet and there was something pleasant about the odour, something reassuring.
She did not come for me the next morning; nor the one after. I was disappointed. Instead of walking with her, I hung round the kitchen, helping Ruth and a woman called Sonnelle prepare the evening’s food. I drained the bowls of Carlins that had been soaking overnight and tipped them into a huge cast-iron pan on the stove, ready to boil. Their black eyes shone. I’d not eaten them since I was a child. The stitches in my hand had begun to itch and feel tight, and when the cooks were done with me I went to find Lorry and she took them out with a pair of scissors. I did not know where Jackie had gone, or what she was doing, and when she found me the following day she did not say anything about her absence, merely continued familiarising me with the farm’s layout and calendar. Much of it revolved around food, growing it, harvesting it, consuming it.
We entered the soft air of the greenhouse. The panes had crosses taped over them to keep the cracked glass in place. On the building’s roof were three solar panels, and the interior was warmed by a circulating hot-water system. It had cost a fortune back when she bought it all, Jackie said. But it had been worth it. The women ate tomatoes from May to September. There were soft fruits that came out of season, soya beans and citrus. ‘The Victorians called places like this forcing houses,’ she said. ‘It’s not hard to learn from the past and apply it to the present, Sister. That’s all we’ve done.’ In the corner of the structure, a woman was bending down behind a rack of seedlings. She righted herself and smiled at us. Her pale haunting eyes were familiar. ‘This is Benna. My green-fingered cousin. What would I do without her?’ ‘You’d get rickets,’ the woman replied, and Jackie smiled.
In the stone outbuildings hung racks of smoked char and trout, sides of beef, mutton, venison, and pork. There were straw drays of eggs. They tried not to waste too many bullets on the local deer, Jackie told me. Usually that meant her or Megan or one or two others went after them in the winter, when they were easier to pick off. Whichever sharpshooter got the kill also got the tongue, prepared in vinegar and thyme by Ruthie. ‘It puts a spring in your step,’ Jackie said, rocking up onto her toes. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
We crossed the courtyard into another small stone building. It was the slaughter room. Lorry was already inside, steeling a blade and preparing to skin a deer. It hung from its bound back legs on an iron hook, limp through its full length, a young hind. I put my hand on the fleece of its belly. The body was vaguely warm. There was the coppery smell of blood lingering in the enclosure and the fust of animal hide. It was all done too quickly to turn my stomach, a few fast shaves of the bowing knife, a hissing cleft, the pale blue and burgundy sacks of organs removed from the cavity of its belly and dumped into a bucket. Only the undigested grassy cud bothered me, its green fronds twisted together and steaming on the cool stone floor.
Lorry took out the tongue and gave it to Jackie, who placed it on the scored game table, took up a smaller knife and slit it neatly in half. She pinched the scrap and put it into her mouth. Lorry shook her head. ‘I take it you got this one, then,’ I said. Jackie swallowed. ‘I did,’ she replied. ‘But it was your Number Five that dropped it. I thought the mechanism might have fused, but it’s cleaned up all right. Good scour and a bit of oil. So. Go on. Fair’s fair.’ Her mouth lifted at its good side but she held her poise. The invitation was serious. I looked down at the puckered strip of meat on the marble slab. I knew if I thought about it too long I’d never manage it. Whatever minor challenge was being issued, I did not want to fail.
The tongue was softer than I thought it would be and tasted of soil. I did not chew but forced it down whole. My throat made a clucking sound and I brought my fist to my lips. The two women laughed loudly and Jackie took hold of my elbows and shook me. ‘Hell’s tits! Revolting, isn’t it?’ She reached into a side pocket of her fatigues and took out a hip flask. ‘Here. Quick. Better give it some alcohol before it starts tasting your breakfast.’ Lorry laughed harder and leaned on the red-smeared marble for support. I felt my stomach pitch and I shook my head and walked into the fresh air of the courtyard.
It was not just game that was hunted at Carhullan. Crayfish and snails were collected from under the beck rocks and the garden’s leaves. A local delicacy, I was told. They were fried with butter and garlic on the big griddle of the range. The vegetable plots were extensive. They were tended every day by a group of women who were more worried about insect netting than anything else they ever had been in their lives, Jackie said. And they were happier for it.
What was not taken and used fresh was pickled or dried, preserved for the harsher months when less was growing. Nothing edible in the vicinity went unharvested. Nothing was wasted. There were full casks of autumn nuts, apples, and mushrooms. The glass jars on the larder shelves looked old and domestic–saved from the time before the mass importation began. There was a small dairy where the milk was strained, separated, and churned, made into cheese and butter. Nearby, in the meadows, were the beehives. The honey was speckled with black. It tasted floral with a slightly tropical note from the gorse blossom and the heather. Lorry used it as a mild antiseptic, I discovered, and when it was available the royal jelly was divvied up among everyone. Meals were small and basic, but mostly they managed, Jackie told me.
The driest of the sheds contained salt and sugar, oils and seeds, provisions brought up in great quantities before the place became autonomous and sustainable, though some of the containers looked new and when I saw them I began to suspect that Jackie’s visits to the town were perhaps raids, and that she lifted items out from under the Authority’s nose from time to time. In the terrace quarters we had been told that our rations were low because of stealing that had gone on while the food was en route, but no more details were ever given out. When I told Jackie this she said the first rule of population control was that enemies of the state had to be played down, never described as a serious threat. Otherwise people might get ideas. Though the Authority seemed forceful and despotic, with the bulk of the army gone the country was weak. It would only take a small uprising to punch holes in the fabric of government, she said.
The crates of fruit were laid out carefully, with none of the pieces touching, so that blight and mould could not spread. Anything rotten would be given to the animals, or composted. It was a serious and honest existence at the farm. There was no external support system. Carhullan had burned its bridges the day the women failed to show up for the Civil Reorganisation. They were on the blacklist, illegals. But the more pressing concern was how to survive.
One hundred years ago, Jackie said, I could have walked up the fells and found the same sort of industry as this, with the same severe penalties for mismanagement. There was a purity to the existence, a basic sense of solvency, that the country had long since discredited. And I could already see the satisfactions of such a way of life. After so many months of tin openers and foil packaging, reconstituted food and dependence on the foreign shipments, this was as honest and raw as I could get.
‘It’s incredible,’ I said to her as she lifted the latch on the door of the largest byre. ‘You own all this.’ She paused before going inside. ‘No. We’ve never owned anything, Sister. The lands of Britain belonged to the Crown, ever since the Norman Conquest. The government has always had the power to nationalise land, and declare it state-owned. It never did until now. Crisis management. That’s how they’ve been able to move people into those rat holes they call quarters. The flood zones just got the ball rolling, made it all seem reasonable. A wet run for the real thing.’ I stared at her, amazed. She shrugged. ‘No one knew about any of that. And ignorance leaves people vulnerable, doesn’t it?’
She pulled open the wooden door of the barn and it grated on the ground. A slanting light fell in through the narrow windows. Inside, under tarpaulin covers, were the Land Rover and the army wagon. The huge deep-treaded tyres of the Bedford stuck out from under its sheeting. Next to these was a substantial supply of diesel in heavy plastic containers and metal drums. I was right to have assumed Jackie Nixon had predicted the economic spiral. She had removed from civilisation those things that she needed to assist her enterprise, her brave new world, and then she had become self-reliant.
She sat on a drum, crossed her arms and pointed at me. ‘I’ve seen a lot of what’s gone on, Sister, just as you have. I’ve even been down to the so-called capital. It’s in a bad state. You would not believe it if I told you. But I’m not interested in London. London’s finished. We’re no longer the nation we were. If you think about it, there’s no central command. We’re back to being a country of local regimes.’ She paused, put a hand to her face and rubbed her jaw. ‘Sister, you’ve been on the inside, I want you to tell me everything you can about Rith. I want to know exactly how the Authority operates. And I want to know where the weaknesses are.’
There were two meals at Carhullan: breakfast and dinner. And most evenings there was a gathering of some kind in the large downstairs kitchen. If the generator was switched on there was power for the CD player, bickering about whose turn it was to select the music, and if not, those with instruments usually played for a while. There were a couple of guitars and a fiddle, a flute, and an accordion. Some of the women could sing very well, Benna among them, and I liked it when the tallow candles were lit and the musicians played.
I had begun to put more names to faces. The otter-haired woman in Megan’s patrol was Cordelia. Everyone called her Corky. I had smiled at her a few times across the room, but she remained distant, perhaps suspicious of me. Most of the women were Caucasian; there were a couple of Asians, and a black girl called Nnenna, who had been the most recent arrival at Carhullan before me. The rest of her family had been deported. The mother of Carhullan’s newborn was Helen. Every time I heard a new name I said it a few times to myself in order to remember it. Katrina. Sil. Tamar. Corinne. Maia.
People came and went, to and from the dormitories, so it often seemed chaotic and crowded, but there were always routines in place to ensure everyone was fed and comfortable. The apple cider was in plentiful supply and it was wonderful to drink. There were batches of sloes from the year before that had been turned into a sweet spirit. I was passed a cup of the purple syrup. I soon realised it was what Lorry had dosed me with before taking out the coil, and when I smelled its aroma of cloves and berries, it brought back that memory and I couldn’t sip it. I handed the cup back to Sonnelle and she shrugged and drank it herself.
The atmosphere lightened after the dinner shifts. The work of the day was done, though the unit was still on duty, and Jackie posted a four-woman patrol every night to keep a lookout over the surrounding area. I found this out from Megan one evening when she wasn’t on the night watch. She did not mind usually, but the temperatures had dropped in the last few weeks, and she was glad not to be out in the boggy dark, she said, freezing her arse off.
Megan was fourteen years old. She was the most confident girl I had ever met. Where some of the other women held back at first, glancing at me across the room, and leaving space around me as if I were a frail being in need of air and insulation, she was not so shy about finding a spot on the bench beside me. She shoved the women closest to me along the wooden seat and straddled it. Her arm rested against mine as she sat down.
‘Took your time getting up, didn’t you? Nice togs. I never had to wear one of those,’ she said, tugging the strings of the tunic. There was a directness about her, but no trace of hostility in her smile, and I knew in her mind I had ceased to be a problem. Then, as she had done on the moors, she reached up and touched my hair. ‘God. It’s so fluffy it could blow off, like a dandelion clock.’ ‘Yeah, well, maybe I should get a buzz cut like you then,’ I replied. She reached up and rubbed her own scalp. Under the ginger bristles the blue tattoo stood out. Up close I could see the intricacy of the line pattern. It looked Celtic. I wondered who had done it for her at so young an age. ‘I had lice last year, didn’t I? So, it had to go.’ I pulled a face. ‘Not very nice for you.’ She shrugged. ‘I like it like this. I’ve got a good shaped head. The Sisters are all copying me now. You should do it.’
I liked Megan’s company and I was glad of it. She was tough and easy in equal measure. She was keen to tell me her story, and proud of her status as the oldest of the second generation. Her blood-mother had walked up to Carhullan, bruised from her father’s fists and seven months pregnant, she told me, instantly putting my own journey to shame and confirming the rumours I had heard that the place had in part been a sanctuary for abused women. Megan’s tone became prideful. Her mother had been beaten once too often by him, and fearing not only for her life now but for the baby’s also, she had stolen his car and driven the breadth of Ireland. She had taken a ferry from Dublin to Holyhead and buses from there to Kendal, where she had had a cousin, holding a suitcase of nappies and a stuffed toy on her knee. Then she had made her way on foot, up through Mosedale and over the pass, to the Sisters at the farm. She had thought it was a convent.
She’d died in labour–this was only just before Lorry’s time–and she was now buried in the small graveyard, by the Five Pins. ‘Is that where Veronique is too?’ I asked. Megan ignored the question and continued outlining her own biography. ‘I’m multi-mothered,’ she declared, and went on to say the women had all raised her among themselves, as a community daughter. She had been an experiment in a way, she told me. ‘To see what they could do without the influence of nem.’ ‘What’s a nem?’ I asked her. ‘It’s men turned around and made to face the other way,’ she said. ‘Ha-ha-ha.’ She delivered the explanation flatly and tonelessly, as if reciting a standard expression of which she had become bored. ‘So, have you been a success?’ She shrugged nonchalantly, and without shame or uncertainty reached up to my hair again and felt a lock of it.
She did not seem like any teenager I had known. But neither was she fully an adult. There were qualities of youth about her; a greenness to her personality, but she gave the impression of practical maturity, durability. I could see the strong influence of Jackie in her. She handled weapons with skill, I had witnessed it myself, and she had easily ‘neutralised’ me on the fell. But she was playful and open too, and fiercely considerate. At dinner she gave me one of the three potatoes on her plate in order that I be better sustained for winter. She was worried that I might find it too hard in the first year. It was colder up here than in the towns.
Two of her fingers were still taped together. ‘That’s from bringing you down off the wall,’ she said, holding them in front of me. They looked swollen and blue but she seemed not to register the pain as she retied my tunic. It was clear that there was no remaining dispute between us over my introduction to the farm. She had just been doing her job. I wondered what schooling she had had and when I asked her if she could read and write she looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘I’m not backward,’ she said. ‘I’ve read every book here.’ I had not seen much literature at Carhullan–there were a few volumes on the alcove shelves in the parlour next to the kitchen–well thumbed and cracked through their spines, mostly classics. But Megan’s statement sounded boastful, as if it had been some feat or other.
We ate our food and then she began to interrogate me. ‘Which do you like best, prick or pussy? Everyone wants to know. There are bets on.’ I imitated the blasé shrug she had just given me. ‘Not much of the former up here, is there?’ I said, and she grinned.
Megan was curious about my life, and my experiences in a society that she had never been part of. But she was not bemused or awed, or afraid of its ugly side. There seemed to be little attraction or repulsion to the outside world. It was more a question of pragmatism. What she had learned at Carhullan had been second hand and subjective. She had watched the towns from afar, and it seemed she had not been taught to despise or fear, or wish for some other way of life, some earlier existence. When I told her about the recovery efforts she described the government as temporary and misguided. I knew they were not her words and I was not sure how much she comprehended of the system in place, or whether she realised she still fell under its power. She talked about the Authority as if it were bad weather, something that had to be taken into account, and could be endured, until it passed.
If she had been created on a philosophical specimen dish then her genetic beliefs had been altered to make her more resilient and assured of herself, more companionable to her own kind. She had not been exposed to a world of inferiority or cattiness, nor male dominance. She was, in a way, an idealised female. When she spoke of the outlying world it was with disapproval but not with trepidation, and I could not help wondering whether she might be more vulnerable or more fortified because of it. There was something gallant about her. She considered that most of the women left down in the zones were in need of her assistance. They were like slaves, she said. They needed to be freed. And I had been very sensible to come here. She admired me for it. ‘You should shave your head like mine though,’ she told me at the end of our dinner together. ‘That fluff won’t last.’ I laughed and said I would think about it.
Towards the end of the second week she found me in the kitchen helping those cleaning the plates and rinsing them in the sink. She handed me a piece of blue stone looped at the ends with wire and attached to a lace. She had on a similar necklace. ‘You don’t have to wear it if you don’t like it,’ she said. ‘There won’t be any offence.’ I thanked her and asked her to fasten it behind my neck but she refused, saying it would be inappropriate and that I should do it myself. She moved back into the crowd and began drinking with the rest of the women. In the corner I saw Jackie watching me, a bottle of spirit stowed next to her on the hearth, the contents glowing in front of the flames.
Not all the evening meetings were given over to entertainment and carousing. There were formal discussions and debates that ran to order. There were at least two of these a month I learned. I could remember hearing some of the debates in the old Houses of Parliament on my father’s radio. They were torrid and wasteful affairs, conducted by obtuse politicians, interrupted by jeers and barracking, and filled with disparaging comments. In the weeks preceding the collapse they had ceased to be broadcast and the public had been left to speculate about whether the dysfunction had increased and paralysed the mechanism altogether, or whether representatives were belatedly getting down to the business of trying to prevent the country’s ruin. Not long after that, the Thames flood barrier had been overwhelmed and tidal water had filled the building.
At Carhullan things were startlingly different. Disagreements were expressed through uninterrupted statements and anyone butting in forfeited her right to speak that night. Women took turns to put forward an idea or a problem, one after the other, and then there was a rebuttal or agreement. Occasionally something might be put to a vote. The speakers presented their views concisely or at length, depending on who was speaking and what was being said. Meanwhile a hush from the others was expected. The room listened. Whoever chaired the meeting did so with a firm but fair hand. Jackie did not host the gatherings, but she had an almost presidential right to comment, to approve or veto. The influence she carried was quiet and pervasive. It was not that she out-argued her opponents. She did not have to. It took only a slight nod from her for an appeal to be granted. Usually she accepted whatever was being said. If not, her disagreement would be carefully couched and resolute. Over the next months I would find that there were only a few women willing to go up against her in earnest about the running of the place, or challenge her fundamentally on the nature of what it was she was doing with her unit.
The first meeting I attended, though I had agreed in principle to speak, I was granted a pass. I heard Lorry and Jackie discussing me in the kitchen the morning before as I came down the stairs. Through the open door I saw that they were hanging a yellow swatch of cloth above the lintel. ‘Give her another couple of weeks,’ Lorry was saying, ‘until she gets her strength back. There’s no need to rush things.’ Jackie seemed less keen to have me sit it out. ‘It’ll be better if she’s still sick with it. Better for them all to see it in her. They need to see it.’ Lorry sighed. ‘That may be, but she needs rest. She’s still not sleeping through.’ Jackie nodded, and when I came into the room she told me curtly not to worry about speaking that evening, and she left the house.
Instead I sat quietly and listened to the proceedings. There was a brief request for people to stay off the growing furrows when they walked to the bothies; the plants were being trodden down and damaged. Soap was being used up quicker than it could be made again. One of the dogs was ailing and might need to be put down. After practical business the floor was opened up to other things.
If Carhullan appeared on one level to be efficient and united, it was also fraught on others. I could see that there were old areas of conflict, matters that had been worried at again and again by the inhabitants without resolution. There were several men nearby, I discovered, in a lower lying hamlet on the other side of the valley. They were involved with the farm’s running, but remained at a satellite location. Whether to include them at Carhullan seemed to be a matter of continual debate. How many of them there were I could not glean from the discussion. But one of the men was married to a woman at the farm, and I could not be sure where the others fitted into the scheme of things.
There were also two boys who had been born in the second generation that were now absent. They had been sent to the settlement at puberty, because of their sex. It was a startling piece of information, but I kept my mouth shut throughout the meeting. The laws of the place were still foreign to me. My heart quickened as I watched one woman stand, begin speaking and then quickly break down, saying through her tears that she wanted her son to be with her, that he was spending more time among strangers than with his own blood. He had just turned twelve. He had been moved to the settlement the day after his birthday.
The night I was due to speak I felt sick with apprehension. I was told that all the women would be present for it. And I could have the floor for as long as I wanted. I had been at Carhullan for almost a month and had met perhaps a few dozen of the Sisters so far, and though I’d begun to form relationships with some of them, others were still strangers. The thought of having to be articulate in front of so many people was terrifying. In the past I could barely hold up my end of an argument in front of Andrew. I imagined myself fumbling over the retelling of how the last few years had been in Rith. Or simply being struck dumb.
Jackie had said she wanted to see me before I spoke. She asked me to go to her room at the end of the landing an hour before the meeting. I’d glanced at the door many times on the way down the stairs but had not seen inside. Sometimes I had been tempted to knock on the door. But I never found the nerve. Since my arrival I’d laid down strict routines for myself, had tried hard to fit with the way of the farm, modestly helping out wherever I was directed, trying to find my skills, and not straying into any of the areas where it might seem that I was interfering.
Lorry and Ruth had allowed me to assist them in their tasks, and I had cut vegetables with Sonnelle in the kitchen, and cleaned the oak table after meals. I’d even learned how to paunch rabbits and cut strips from the aged carcasses hanging in the cool stone larder. Though my clothes were returned, and the tin with my possessions in, I still wore the yellow tunic over my jeans, and was uncertain about how long I should keep it on. So much at Carhullan was self-initiated, self-decreed, but I had not yet found my footing. In truth I liked the feeling of it, the rough texture on my arms, and I liked the brightness of it reflected in the windowpanes when I walked past. Every day I wore Megan’s necklace, tied at the base of my throat, like a charm.
Jackie’s bedroom was the largest upstairs and it overlooked the mountains to the west. Whoever had built the farm four centuries ago had fashioned for themselves a chamber of suitable status. When I knocked she did not call out, but I heard the squeak of a mattress and then her heavy-soled footsteps crossing the boards to let me in. She had on wire-framed reading glasses, and they tempered the hard aspect of her face, made her appear scholarly. I felt as if I had disturbed her, even though she had asked me to come. But she motioned for me to enter, and I went in.
I had not known what to expect of her private space. When I’d looked in on them, the dormitories were small and crowded. The bunks were sometimes separated by curtains, but mostly through the day they were left open, even if shared by two women, and they were immaculately tidy. The beds were made, many with matching khaki blankets–army surplus I guessed–or carthens, and the floors looked swept. On the first visit I had thought perhaps they would be strewn with items of clothing and bedding, that a natural dishevelment would prevail, but it was as if they had been prepared for an inspection. I did not know if this was on my account, whether Jackie had prearranged it, knowing that she would be taking me there that day, or if this was one of the expected standards at Carhullan. Military neatness.
Her bedroom was not as chilly as the rest of the house, though the window was wide open. There was a cast-iron grate in the corner of the room. It was empty and there was no wood stacked beside it. The temperature was still falling on the mountain, but it was not yet cold enough for Jackie to need the heat, and perhaps she never did. Every wall was lined almost from floor to ceiling with books. Where they would not fit on the shelves they sat in loose piles or were slotted into the gaps above the rows. They seemed to absorb the light and distort the angles of the room, and probably went some way towards insulating it.
Her bedroom was as tidy as the barns, but it contained much more. It was Carhullan’s library. Suddenly Megan’s boast of having read all the farm’s books seemed worthy; I stood in the centre, surrounded by them. ‘Are these all yours?’ I asked her. ‘There must be thousands.’ ‘Yes and no,’ she said. ‘I brought most of them. But they belong to us all. It’s quite a collection now. You fetched nothing up with you. Do you want something to read?’
She sat down in the chair by her desk, pushed a stack of written papers back against the wall, and removed her glasses. She handled them with great care, folding them back in their case gently, as if they were the most precious thing she owned. I couldn’t remember the last time I had read a book. Even though there had been enough time between work shifts–the only public television now ran during the hours of allocation and it was pitiful and full of propaganda–I had never found true solace in reading; I had never turned to it as an escape. ‘Honestly? I wouldn’t know what to ask for,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know what I’d enjoy really.’ She nodded. ‘OK. There are a couple of things I’d like you to look at though.’
She stood and walked across the room, bent to one of the lower shelves and searched out a thick volume. On the cover was a grey photograph. I could not see what the picture was, perhaps a man in a long coat carrying something, but the image was hard to make out from where I stood. She opened it and removed a thin pamphlet from between the pages and then she handed it to me. ‘Why don’t you start with this?’ I took it from her and looked at it. It was flimsy and old. The sheets had been stapled together in a couple of places and the words looked typed rather than printed. Its title was ‘The Green Book’. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Let’s just say it’s a limited edition,’ she replied.
Jackie put a hand on my shoulder. I could almost feel a current passing from her body to mine. ‘Look. You know why you got the hood, don’t you? Well, you’ll never go back into the box without first agreeing to it. I promise you that. If you read this, it might give you a way of dealing with it. It might give you some context. And some company.’ Her voice remained gentle, but I felt a flutter of panic in my chest at the thought of ever returning to the blackness, the stench, and the abrasive metal sheeting in that tight solitary space. There were moments in daylight when I closed my eyes and I could still see the iron-jawed woman carrying me off, still feel the rotting shrunken dog held in my arms. And when I woke from my dreams I sometimes thought I had not yet been released from the cage and I’d yell out in the dark of the room.
I held the pamphlet in my hand. I wasn’t sure what Jackie was asking of me, or telling me to do, past reading it, but I knew there was a subtext. I felt she was again crediting me with more understanding than I possessed, expecting more of me than I knew how to give, and I felt out of my depth. She took her hand away from my shoulder, stepped back, and lowered herself into her chair again, folding the energy of herself away. I was standing above her and through her thin hair I could see several raised red marks on her scalp. ‘Sit down, Sister,’ she said. ‘We’d better have a quick run over matters before tonight. There are things you need to know.’
Her bed was the only other place to sit, and I could not move to it, so I remained standing. I already knew there were tensions at work in the farm. It had not taken long to realise the smooth operation of the smallholding countered an opposing gravity, and that something separated the women in their beliefs. It was why the meal shifts always contained the same faces. And why some of the relationships had broken up. ‘Is this about the defence council?’ I asked her.
‘Yes it is,’ she said. ‘But it’s not just about that. Listen, the beauty up here is that we can disagree, we have the space, we have the time. And we do disagree, Sister. Especially when it comes to the outside world.’ She sighed and crossed an ankle over her thigh, held the knotted laces of her boot. ‘But I don’t blame the Sisters for shutting it out. Truly, I don’t. They’ve come up here to make a better life, and not make the same mistakes. They’ve…Let’s say they’ve washed their hands of the past.’
Her expression darkened. ‘Fine. Yes. Women were treated like cunts back down there. Like second-class citizens and sex objects. They were underpaid, under-appreciated. Trust me, I know all about being told you aren’t suitable for a job. Fifty per cent of the world’s female population was getting raped, the fanatics had the rest bound up in black. We were all arguing over how women should look and dress, not over basic rights. And in this country, women have treated each other just as poorly. Fighting like cats and dogs. Competing for men. Eating our own young. No solidarity. No respect. No grace, if you want to call it that.’
She let go of her bootlace and spread her arms wide. ‘And here, we’ll we’ve more or less cracked it, haven’t we? Everyone’s employed. No one’s made to kneel in a separate church. No one’s getting held down at bayonet point. We’re breeding. We’re free. Why would anyone want to risk this, Sister?’ I gave a small brief nod, but I don’t think Jackie noticed. ‘And the government down there now? Well, it would be madness to interfere with it and draw attention to what we’ve got here, wouldn’t it? Sheer madness. Too much of a risk. What possible kind of campaign could we run? Surely it’s better to just bolt the door. Hole the fuck up. And pray to be left alone.’
There was a smile on her face. It was not derisive but it seemed somehow mannered, and patronising, as if she were acknowledging a moderate and rudimentary opinion presented by a child, like the reciting of a basic commandment: Thou shall not kill. Her sympathy was so great it almost looked like disappointment.
Suddenly, she leant forward on the chair. ‘What do you think, Sister? Do women have it in them to fight if they need to? Or is that the province of men? Are we innately pacifist? A softer sex? Do we have to submit to survive?’ I was still standing in the middle of the room. I felt the air around me, wide and open at my sides, and wished I had something solid to touch. ‘Yes, of course we have it in us,’ I said. ‘Ah. Attacking or defending though?’ I frowned and thought for a moment. I could not tell if she was seriously engaging with me, or just warming me up for what might occur in the kitchen. ‘Both,’ I said. ‘But it depends what scale it’s on. I think women are naturally just as violent. Especially when we’re young. But we’re taught it’s not in keeping with our gender, that it’s not feminine behaviour. Men are forgiven for it. Women aren’t. So it’s suppressed. We end up on the defensive a lot of the time. But I think we’re capable of attacking when it’s something worth fighting for.’
Jackie nodded. ‘All good points, Sister.’ She sat back and recrossed her legs. ‘Then let me ask you this. When you went in to get that tag fixed up your tuss, why didn’t you fight then? Why did you let them do that to you?’ Her brow was lifted and heavily lined. She had summoned up incredulity and I did not know if it was for effect or if it was genuine. I felt as if I had been punched in the gut, and I gaped at her, appalled by her ruthlessness. I had become used to her bad language, her often taciturn moods, but the onslaught when Jackie Nixon launched a hard line of enquiry was impossible to withstand. I could feel my back teeth clenching and grinding over each other, a prickle in the ends of my fingers. I did not know if I was upset or angry. ‘What choice did I have?’ I finally managed to say. ‘It’s the law. I was surrounded by the system, and…’ I stumbled over my words, ‘…and they have these places where those who refuse are sent. I’ve heard about them.’
She nodded again. ‘Yes, I know they do. They’re in the old county prisons. It’s a scandal.’ There was an undertone of sarcasm in her voice. ‘So, tell me. Was it fear that stopped you? Fear of reprisal? Fear of what else they might do to you? Sister, how bad does a situation have to be before a woman will strike out, not in defence, but because something is, as you say, worth fighting for? Weren’t you?’ I searched her blue eyes for compassion, then I looked away. The bedroom window was lit by the red western light of the setting sun. The withers of the fell wore the same vivid stain on them. I could see women walking over the fields towards the main house. I had no worthwhile reply.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult, I know. You think I’m cruel. You think I’m a royal bitch. Maybe I am. Shit, I won’t lose any sleep over that. I just want to get to the bottom of why these things go on. I’m a dark fucking tourist, Sister, I like going to these places. It’s interesting to me. I’m interested in what holds people back. And what doesn’t. And how far these things extend.’ She paused. ‘I’ve got one more question for you–would you mind hearing it?’ I looked at her again. She had one hand on her hip and the other was resting on the tabletop holding her chin. She looked restful now. The vibrant dismay and the actor’s posture were gone. I shook my head. ‘It’s fine.’
‘Suppose you had that old gun I’ve fixed up. Suppose you had it in your hand and the doctor asked you to lie back and open your legs wide. Suppose if you said no, he was going to make you. Would it make any difference, that gun?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, it would.’
Downstairs there were tallow candles burning on the windowsills and the table. The paraffin lamp had its wick turned up and it threw out a buttery light from the hook in the middle of the ceiling. The wind had picked up; it moaned across the courtyard and rattled the farm’s window frames, and the sound of it in the hollow of the chimney breast was mournful, its register almost human. Orange flames blew through the iron fret of the range, reaching out towards the wood stacked in the recesses and glinting off the firedogs. The dinner plates were gone, the table had been pushed back against the wall and the benches set out in front of them ready. Those who could not sit on chairs stood to the back or squatted on the floor. Sixty-four women. Sixty-five, now that I was there.
I took my place in front of them. They faced me, quietly, patiently. Some sat with arms around each other, or arms hooked through the legs of a partner. If there had been talk or banter earlier in the gathering when they first arrived from the fields and the dormitories, it had lulled the moment the stair door opened and Jackie and I entered the room. In the candlelight the women looked gaunt and sculpted, their eyes shadowed. They did not look like girls, middle aged and older women. They seemed to be sexless, whittled back to muscle by toil and base nourishment, creatures who bore no sense of category, no dress code other than the one they chose. Their differences in age dissolved against their bones. I knew they were strong, resilient, perhaps braver than I would ever be.
My voice trembled as I began to speak, but the words came more easily than I thought they would, and I did not feel afraid. The heat of the fire at my back warmed the red embers inside me. I knew they already understood something of the conditions in Rith, and the events of the last few years, but I talked about everything. The floods. The collapse of the market and the recession. The state of emergency declared and the Civil Reorganisation. I described the terrace quarters, the deprivation, sickness, the Authority abuses. I told them what had happened to my marriage with Andrew. And then, without knowing I would, I described my own humiliation, at the hands of the doctor, and the monitors in the back of the cruiser.
I took the metal device from my pocket and held it on my open palm. Then I passed it to a woman in the front row. She looked at it for a long time and handed it on.
After I had finished speaking I felt airy inside, and my mouth was dry. My forehead ached and I realised that I had been holding it in a furrowed expression for almost an hour. I rubbed it with the heel of my hand.
The room remained silent. I invited questions, but nobody raised a hand or called out. Then from the back of the room Jackie told me that a discussion was not going to be opened that night. It was the privilege of each new speaker, she said. During the next meeting, I might be called on to continue, and if there was anything I wanted to close with now, the floor was still mine. I thanked them all for listening. I half expected them to clap, or shout out something, moved perhaps by what they had heard, but there was nothing. Just the darkly cast eyes turned on me, and my hands clasped over my belly. It seemed anti-climactic.
The gathering broke up. A swell of noise rose as women filed out and began to talk among themselves. Those who had been sitting on the cold flagstones rubbed their rumps to warm up. Some of the women stayed in the kitchen, as usual, to drink cider, and Lorry brought me a glass. ‘You did well,’ she said. ‘Not easy the first time, but you did well.’ I shook my head. ‘All I did was tell them what they already know. They’ve probably heard it all before. Their stories are probably far worse.’ Lorry lowered herself onto one of the benches. I sat with her and drank quickly to the half-way mark of the glass. ‘No, that’s not true,’ she said. ‘You’re of interest to most people. We all got out before things really deteriorated, more or less. It’s hard to appreciate it when you’re up here. It’s still hard to believe of this country. I think some of them still imagine things are the way they were when they left. We thought we were unlucky when we came. But we weren’t.’
I shrugged. She was being kind and I knew it. ‘Anyway. How’s your shoulder?’ she asked. ‘A lot better now, thanks,’ I said. ‘It only hurts when I roll onto it at night.’ Lorry ran her hand along my collarbone. ‘It’s good it didn’t break or dislocate. Never would have healed right without being set, and you’d have been left with a weak spot.’ Her eyes in the flickering of the candles glimmered between brown and topaz. They looked flawed and lovely. She cleared her throat and her tone became more confidential and earnest. ‘Jackie’s picked up the Authority’s communications before, out on patrol. She’s good at tracking frequencies; hell, she’s had years of practice at it. There are things we’ve known for a while. But it’s quite another thing to hear what they are doing from someone else, first hand. It makes a difference.’
She stretched her legs out in front of her, under the long pleated skirt, and placed her elbows back on the table behind her. I had never seen her not looking tired, but she often stayed up late in the kitchen. ‘So what’s your story, Lorry?’ I asked quietly. ‘You mean why did I come here?’ I nodded. ‘Oh well, it was a long time ago now. I was in my forties, divorced, and pissed off at work–everyone in the health industry was back then. It was in bits, about to go bust. I was doing more bloody paperwork than anything useful.’ She paused, took a sip of her drink. ‘You were a doctor?’ She shook her head. ‘Nurse.’
She took another sip and continued. ‘There was one little atrocity too many for me to stomach I suppose. Domestic abuse. I was on duty. Nothing I hadn’t seen before. But…I had to hold this little girl together while she told the social worker her father had attacked her and her mother. He’d just got back from service in South America. He had Clough’s syndrome and wasn’t being looked after. Not a very popular diagnosis with the Ministry of Defence, you see. He was in the next room, yelling away; he’d had a go at himself with the knife too.’ Lorry paused and then grimaced. ‘Angharad, her name was. I remember it. Poor little thing. Six pints of blood she took and it all pissed away out of her. I suppose that was my tipping point. You just know when the world is about to break apart. I think you just know it, don’t you?’
She patted me on the leg and smiled. ‘I’m glad you came, Sister. But be careful, won’t you? And be sure about what you want. Jackie is a brilliant woman, but she has her demons. She’s seen more terrible stuff than everyone here put together. She’s had to do things you couldn’t even imagine. Some days I pity her. Other days…oh well.’ Her voice trailed away. She lifted her glass and drained it.
I stayed up with her and a couple of other women. They were careful not to ask me too much about anything I had said, as if it were out of bounds, or they were keen not to pry. Instead, perhaps to show camaraderie, they swapped memories of what had been topical in the years before they had come to the farm. There had been a spate of poisonings in London. House prices had started to drop as the insurance companies refused policies. The Red Paper on climate change had been published. Funding for the new Windscale reactor had been approved. And another wave of terrorist attacks had hit. It was news almost two decades old.
I drank more cider from the flagon before it was put away in the pantry. After the tension earlier, it felt good to drink until I was unsteady on my feet and the evening’s events blurred with the halos of the candles. A woman called Carla brought me a spoonful of her latest batch of lavender cream. It was homemade, she said, and it was great on chapped skin. She rubbed some on the backs of my hands, circling my knuckles, working the lotion in. The aroma of the flowers and the motion of her thumbs pushing into my palm and in between my fingers made me feel drowsy and loose inside. I closed my eyes and felt my head fall forward. After a few minutes I heard Lorry telling her something quietly, and though I didn’t want her to stop she took her hands away from mine.
The tallow wicks and the paraffin lamps were blown out and the women drifted back to the dormitories. It was only when I stumbled upstairs to bed that I realised nobody had given me the coil back. Somebody had kept hold of it as it was being passed round.