Megan had been right; the first winter was hard. The refreshing coolness of autumn gave way to bitter cold and damp. Early December brought freezing rain and low cloud. The farm fields were often lost in a mire of fog, and sleet drove down from the fells. In the worst weather the free-ranging animals were brought in to the byres. The cows seemed stupefied by the cold. But the goats did not care what kind of environment they were kept in. They chewed on everything in sight, even the wires of the farm pens, and gave plenty of milk. Lorry told me that a couple of them had escaped a few years back, and now there was a wild herd living on the other side of High Street. They were impossible to catch.
Jackie worried about the sheep most of all. They were not the main source of food and they were the most resilient of the farm’s stock, but she was loath to lose any of their number before time. I watched her bringing them in with a couple of collies, the dogs weaving skilfully at the edges of the flock. I could not imagine how hard it had been, training the sheep to remain faithful to a portion of the uplands. It was an extreme and difficult thing to do, almost a lost craft, and one of the oldest ways of farming in the region. Lorry told me that Jackie had stayed up on the tops with them for months, like a shepherd. And the yellow tunics had been made from the first few shearings. The wool had been carded and spun, and dyed the colour of the moorland lichen and gorse.
By then I had moved out of the main house and into one of the dormitories. A low wooden bed was quickly made for me and I kept my clothes in boxes beneath it, much as I had in the terrace quarter. But here, among the others, I felt happier and less confined. It did not matter that there was so little space or privacy, nor that I had so few material possessions.
Each little domestic burgess within the dormitory had its own personal touches: photographs taped up, a box of effects, borrowed books, candlesticks, and sometimes there were little wooden effigies made from thorn branches and wrapped with scraps of cloth. I had seen these left out by the Five Pins also. It seemed a pagan thing. There was no real talk of religion at Carhullan, except within the forum of the evening discussions. If there was faith of any kind then it remained personal; a discreetly practised creed. The votives were never mentioned and I could not guess what purpose they served.
The women in the dormitory were cheerful and practical; they let me sleep near the stove where it was warmest, keeping my spirits up when the temperature fell at night and I hunkered down under the covers, half dressed and inhaling as little of the frosty air as possible. They would call over to me, asking if I could still feel all my toes or whether some had snapped off, and they made me laugh despite the frigid discomfort. It was odd at first, so many women sleeping in the same room, but I was used to hearing close-by neighbours, and in a way I was glad there were now no walls to separate me from my fellow humans. Sometimes in the early hours I could hear two women together, moving under the sheets, whispering, and I listened until they were finished. It made me feel both lonely and reassured.
I had known it would be colder at this altitude than in the town. I could remember hoping for snow as I set off, but I soon realised there was less romance to the idea than I had imagined at the cooling end of summer. The reality was brutal. There was little insulation in the outbuildings other than a lagging of hay chaff in the lofts, and the stone walls glowed with dampness and cold. The wood-burning stove was stoked up in the evening, but if it had gone out by morning the air in the dormitory was gelid and painful to breathe, stinging the inside of my nose and throat, blocking my sinuses. I could not get warm until I had eaten a serving of oatmeal.
At the side of the building was a lean-to shower, with a rain-chamber above it. A back boiler heated it in the mornings and evenings, but only to the level of tepidity, and I became used to washing with furious haste, barely bringing up a lather from the slab of lanolin soap before rinsing myself and running back out to dry and dress. I washed my hair as infrequently as possible, and tried to shower at the end of the day when I was already hot from work. The pot-hole toilets were bitterly cold. I’d visit them after someone else had been, while the wooden seat was still warm.
There was a tradition at Carhullan, a custom that had been implemented early on, as soon as the numbers began to grow. Each woman was allowed to bathe indoors on her birthday. For up to an hour she could lie in the deep green-stained copper bathtub surrounded by hot water and steam, undisturbed, and look into the mirror opposite. When I heard this I realised how lucky I had been to have access to the indoor bathroom for the weeks I was recuperating. It now seemed like the most luxurious place on the whole farm.
I began to wear the yellow tunic as an undershirt, with my heaviest jumper and a waterproof over it when I worked outside. I still did not want to discard it and the warp and weft of it was tight and warming. As soon as I was well enough to do more than clear the plates and help prepare meals I volunteered to work, and I was placed with a contingent of women shifting and storing peat bricks. Swathes of turf had been cut and were drying under long canvasses stretched on the fells. With the weather turning it needed to be brought inside, to be burned slowly and aromatically through the winter months along with wood from the willow copse. There were even plans to heat tar out of a portion of it, and refine the distillation into paraffin oil. It was amazing to me that so much could be culled from our surroundings, and that such knowledge was put into practice by the women as a matter of course.
I was happy to help move the fuel but it had not been my first choice. I had asked Jackie if I could join her unit. After our talk before the meeting I felt sure that she would agree. The day I was deemed fit to join the others sleeping out in the converted barns, I went looking for her. I found her feeding the dogs in the courtyard, and told her I had decided that this was what I wanted to do at Carhullan. As usual her smile was crooked, pulling the unmarked side of her face upwards. She shook her head. ‘No, Sister.’
Naively, I had expected her to be pleased. She had given the impression of beckoning me to her those past weeks. And, as if to keep my interest piqued, she had left another book on my bed, Lawrence’s Seven Pillars. I had read it quickly and left it propped against her bedroom door. Instead she seemed amused by my offer. ‘Ask me again in spring,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re ready to walk through fire just yet. Not while you think you’ve still got scores to settle. Besides, they’re going to want to see you pulling your weight here first. And I can’t use someone who isn’t built up. I can’t afford any accidents.’
In her hand was a plastic tub. The dogs writhed around her legs, yapping for the food. She emptied the red chunks out of the container into a trough and they butted heads over the scraps. I was taken aback. ‘Jackie,’ I said, ‘I understand what you did to me and why you did it. And I swear I’m not harbouring any bad feeling. I feel great.’ She looked at me, through me. ‘I don’t mean up here, Sister. I mean back down there. There’s no room for vendettas in what we’re doing. You’d be a liability. Chloe could do with some help at the gullies. You know where they are.’ I went away disappointed and confused.
The cutters looked up from the black trench when I arrived. They had scarves wound round their faces or hoods gathered into small openings to keep out the strong wind, and it was hard to see them properly. ‘Need some help?’ I called out. They were quiet for a moment and then one of them came forward. Under the wrappings of her head I saw her eyes, a rich sorrel, and the skin surrounding them was dark. ‘Sit,’ she said. ‘No, really, I’m fine to help you,’ I told her, ‘I’d like to. I’ve been doing nothing for weeks.’ Her eyes shone. She seemed amused. ‘Sit down. I need to wrap up your feet. Otherwise you’ll get trench foot.’ I glanced down at her legs and the legs of the others. All of them had plastic sheeting over their boots. I sat down on the coarse moorland.
She walked to a barrow that was half filled with slabs, and took out two old carrier bags from the canvas satchel hanging on it. She came back and knelt beside me, lifted one of my legs onto her knee and slipped the bag over my boot. She tied the handles at my ankle. Then she repeated the procedure for my other leg. ‘Got to look after your footwear,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bog out here when it rains.’ She reached into the pocket of her coat, fetched out a spare pair of gloves and passed them to me. ‘I’m Shruti. This is Chloe, Katrina, Fish, Lillian, and Maud. They’re all imbeciles. Just ignore them.’ The women cawed with laughter, shouted a few expletives, and started lifting the squares again. Shruti picked up a spade and passed it to me. She held her hands apart. ‘About this big,’ she said. Then she pointed to a row of dun slabs under a tent of canvas. ‘When you get bored you can help turn those ones.’ I couldn’t see her mouth under the tassels of her scarf, but I could see from her eyes that she was smiling.
The group of cutters was friendly. The women were hard working and used to each other, and they did not mind having me along with them. I liked Shruti as soon as I met her. She was kind, sombre looking under her work gear. She put me at ease and had a serenity about her that gave way from time to time to a droll wit. The other women always called her by one of her nicknames, Shrooms or Titty, and they teased her accent, but she gave as good as she got. ‘If you bunch of white-bread bints have nothing better to do than stand around all day copying me that’s your problem,’ she would say to them. ‘Take your time. Sister and I will keep things running.’
It was the tamer end of the banter at Carhullan. At first the jokes among the group seemed shocking and vicious to me; little was taboo, too impolitic or too rude, and they called each other terrible names, referred to their gashes and snatches, as if it was nothing to them to use such language. They insulted each other about their sexual proclivities, but no one seemed to take offence. I had heard the harsh way Jackie talked about the women at the farm, describing them as bitches and twats, and I had thought it was just her rough policy, but it seemed endemic to the place.
Shruti was about my age, and had come to Carhullan when she was twenty. There was a shiny patch of skin on the right-hand side of her neck that I saw when she took her outdoor clothes off for dinner. She wasn’t in my dormitory, so I had never seen her undress, but Nnenna, whom I bunked next to, told me the disfigurement ran on down her shoulder and breast, all the way to her thigh. She’d had acid thrown over her by a member of her family, a brother, an uncle, for some cultural transgression–a marriage refusal or an illicit relationship. But this was not why she left her home and headed north. She had been standing trial for a revenge assault. The charge had been downgraded, taking into account the provocation and the state of her mind, but she was looking at fifteen years’ detention. The Ministry of Justice had not managed to track her. Now, like the rest of the women up here, she had ceased to exist altogether, and that was fine by her.
It was a good group to be on the fells with. They worked outdoors all year between the gullies, the willow copse and the orchard, and they were bronzed and lively. Because I was new to them, and curious, they seemed to enjoy the opportunity to retell their stories, discuss old war wounds, and boast about their early misadventures. There were fewer victims at Carhullan than I had imagined. Often it was the women themselves who had committed a crime or were misfits: they had been violent, outspoken, socially inept, promiscuous, drug-addicted, and aware they needed some kind of system to bring them in to line. They all agreed that Carhullan was the best thing to have happened to them. That coming there was the best decision they had ever made. Not that they weren’t sick of the sloppy hare stews, the arse rashes, stinking loos, nipple-pinching showers, and lack of tampons.
They were all in their thirties, but they had the frisky spirits of girls. They took up handfuls of the peat bog and threw it at each other, and got through the days of heavy manual labour in the half-light of winter with high morale.
I liked them, and I liked being with them. There was a camaraderie on the moors and in the dormitories that I had never experienced before. It went beyond tolerance or the absence of men. It was the sense of basic usefulness and dependence, feeling active and real and connected. Only half the girls were local to the county. The rest were from further afield: London, Glasgow, Birmingham. One woman, Katrina, had even come from Russia. If they had been raw or ragged when they arrived, abused or abusive, now, years later, they were older, reconciled, comfortable to be who they were. ‘There’s nothing like this place for rehabilitation,’ Shruti told me. ‘It’s working with the land that does it. Getting back to basics.’ The key to it, she said, was communing with the actual ground and not being divorced from reality any more. It was therapeutic; it gave a person perspective. ‘You’ll see, Sister,’ she said, and squeezed my arm.
By the end of the first day, after hours spent shovelling the black loamy earth, laying it out, and stacking the already hardened bricks, I felt more satisfied than I could recall feeling before. I did not mind the cold air and the rain. Working in the kitchen had not been as natural to me, and when I had helped Helen with Stella I had been slightly uncomfortable, as if my hands were the wrong shape to hold the baby. I rested more than the others, my arms and back aching, but I kept at it until dusk, until Shruti slapped me on the back and said it was time for food. ‘Think it’s mutton tonight,’ she said, pulling a face. The plastic wrapped round my feet was grotesque with mud, and the gloves I had been given wore a thick layer of black so stiff I could not bend my fingers. I looked back as we wheeled a final barrow load to the farm and admired the rich gaping seam in the earth that I had shovelled.
To celebrate my first official day of labour, the cutters arranged for a musical session after dinner. They took a bottle of Jackie’s whisky from one of the storerooms and passed the dusty decanter around, letting everyone take a tug on it. ‘You thieving mutts,’ she said dryly when she came into the room, but then she waved them off. I had never liked whisky but I drank from the bottle with them. It was a little sour, and the smoke and soil notes brought to mind the earth I had shifted that day.
The accordion was brought out and a violin, and the women sang an old prison ballad. I had never heard it before but the tune was similar to the Border songs I had sometimes listened to in the pubs after walking with my father. It was lovely to hear and I felt moved by it, and I didn’t want them to stop singing. Some of them sang solo verses. Toward the end of the song Jackie stood up. She was unabashed and she sang confidently, her voice strong and melodious, and for some reason I was surprised by it, not thinking her capable perhaps.
The lyrics of the verses had begun to bleed together, there were so many of them, but, perhaps because it was Jackie singing, or perhaps because the accordion and fiddle suddenly let up and allowed her to sing unaccompanied, I remember the words of hers: ‘In a female prison, there are sixty-five women, and I wish it was among them that I did dwell.’
My sleep that night was as deep and as restful as it had ever been, and I dreamt of nothing. The next day I woke up so stiff I could not bend my legs. But I got up and got dressed. It was like that every day for the first month. I hobbled to the kitchen and took a place on the bench with the others and I ate the bread and eggs, the black pudding or oatmeal, ravenously. The days passed by the same, and only the weather changed, from filthy rain and heron-grey skies to cloudlessness and the white abeyance of frost. One day, on the way out to the gullies, Shruti passed me a handful of walnuts and dried fruit from the bowl on the dresser, and told me it was Christmas.
For all their differences of opinion and different roles, the women at the farm were a tight community, respectful of each other and mutually helpful. Within the work groups there were firm friendships. But those in Jackie’s unit seemed locked together in a way the others were not. They had an almost unspoken bond, and they could often anticipate each other’s moves, arriving in the kitchen at the same time, laughing privately about something. Even in the biting wind and rain, the flurries of hail and the squalls, there was no let-up in their training. As I stacked the dark, charred-smelling squares on the agricultural barrow, I could see the women running the ridge carrying heavy bergens, their hair and clothes drenched, mud caking their legs and sprayed up their backs. On the steep ascent some of them would turn and vomit, or stumble and fall, but they never stopped. They got up or were lifted by another and carried on. And Jackie was always with them, not beasting them as a drill sergeant would, or shouting slogans, but simply running alongside the last woman in the pack.
Sometimes the unit went missing for a few days. We would see them rounding the summit and then they would disappear. By dark, if none of them were back at the farm, Ruthie knew not to waste their servings. In the bitterest spells they camped out in the stone bothies on the top of the mountain range. They would choose the worst days to decamp, always in gales, mist, ice, or in pouring rain. The masochism of their regime was alarming. It was as if any hardship or obstacle was useful to them. It could be harnessed, turned to their advantage, used to build resilience, and they always met it head on.
The others working in the gullies told me that what the unit got up to while away from Carhullan was more extreme and depraved than the behaviour of the old British Army Specials. That what they did out there amounted to torture, either to themselves or to the livestock. They would often come back covered in gore, carrying deer heads and pelts. They liked to parade the trophies around in front of the others. ‘How long have they been training?’ I asked Shruti. ‘Oh, maybe three years,’ she said. ‘That’s when Jackie got serious about everything. You know, if they weren’t on our side I’d really worry. But since they are, I sleep much better in my bed. Doesn’t mean they’re not complete maniacs though. You’ve got to be crazy to put yourself through that.’
It was true. When the unit returned after a few days away many of them were bleeding, dirty, and blood-poisoned. Lorry stitched them back up, and they would be given extra rations of food. There was a subtle rift between the unit and the workers. It was not expressed in hostile terms, but in small separatist gestures–a line at the dinner table, a preference for drinking alone in the parlour room. I supposed it was typical of any community. I saw less of Megan while I was out loading the fuel. In her mind I was probably in another set now. I wore her necklace, only taking it off to shower. Other than my wedding ring it was the only piece of jewellery I possessed. She teased me when we saw one another in the kitchen, saying I’d gone for the soft option, but otherwise she left me to those I was stationed with.
They still called me Sister. Corky, the woman who had brought me in to the farm with Megan, had told me then I would have to ask Jackie for my old name back, and I had not forgotten it. I could have inquired whether this was true, whether it was another of Carhullan’s rituals, but for some reason I did not want to find out. When I thought of it I remembered too much of what had passed and I was content to have the others call me by a name they often used for themselves too.
Time passed quickly with the routine of work. The days were measured equally; by the length of daylight and the quantity of lumber or peat moved. I did not mind the repetition. It shaped me, and was the apparatus with which I restored my confidence. The days when something unusual occurred were more unsettling. One morning there was a buzz in the kitchen, rumours that information had been picked up on an Authority transmission. As I was about to leave the farmhouse Jackie swaggered in and took one of the small russet apples from the counter. She threw it up in the air, caught it in her teeth and bit into it. Then she climbed up onto the table between two of the women, her boots cracking apart the empty plates as she walked the length of oak. She was acting crazily. I had seen her behave theatrically before–she had once taken a turkey from the hook of the marble game table in the meat house and made Ruthie waltz with it in the courtyard before letting her resume her plucking–but I had never witnessed such flamboyancy.
She spread her arms out, the bitten apple in one hand. ‘The King is dead!’ she announced. ‘Killed in active service–God bless his bloody bones. Long live the revolution.’ The mouths of the women fell open. It was rare to hear news of the outside world; rarer still for it to be of such magnitude. Jackie knelt and kissed the woman nearest her, almost pulling her out of her seat. I watched as she jumped down off the table and left the room, the brown apple fastened between her teeth. I followed her down the hall, and heard her laughter outside the front door. It was laughter that sounded loose and wrong. There were the fumes of whisky in the passageway; she had either been drinking through the night or early that morning.
We were stacking peat bricks when the group of men from the settlement approached; five of them, bearded, and thin about the face. Walking over the grassland in the drifting rain they looked like apparitions, the ghosts of the navvies who had walked the region decades ago, tall and slender and dishevelled. I could see immediately that they did not have the vitality of the Sisters and I wondered in what conditions they lived, whether their existence was poorer, and how much they depended on the women for their survival. As they picked their way across the bields, I wondered why, knowing they would be excluded from the mainstay, they had come to this place. I did not understand their affiliation. Even if they had followed their wives or girlfriends, to have stayed nearby, whether through love or weakness, or even habit, seemed ludicrous. But, like the rest of us, there was no turning back for them now.
Already I had become accustomed to seeing only women, and it was strange to watch them approach our group and shake hands, and for a few couples to exchange embraces. Chloe kissed one of the men and he held her hips. Shruti introduced me to them. Their names were Ian, Richard, Calum, Dominic and Martyn. They had heard I’d arrived, they said. A few of them thought it had been a wind-up. Nobody new had ventured to the farm for years and they thought anyone trying to leave town would certainly have been picked up. I nodded but said nothing. Then, one of them, Martyn, asked if a load of peat could be spared for their fire. If so, they would take it back to their settlement. In return they would help repair the fishery nets, which had been damaged by the high water of the last month. Or honour one of their other existing arrangements.
It was a polite request. I wasn’t sure what I had expected the men to be like or how the women would act around them, whether the tensions of the evening meetings, where there was often a storm of scorn and disapproval directed towards their gender, would translate into unease or resentment. But it was not the case. Lillian and Katrina gave them some pieces of fruit they had in their pockets. The conversation was amicable; it had an undertow of negotiation to it but it seemed there was an old alliance at work, and even some flirtation.
In their presence, the dynamic on the fellside altered subtly. I felt as if I were watching two species of animals drinking shoulder-to-shoulder from the same stream, aware and alert to each other, but only temporarily compatible. No assistance was needed at the tarn, they were told, but the group would help them bring back the peat when they were finished for the day. The men glanced at me and agreed to come back later. Martyn leant forward and kissed Chloe again. It was a soft, intimate kiss.
‘You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,’ Shruti said to me as they walked away. ‘Nobody will care. And it’s a fair old slog over the pass.’ I shrugged and said I didn’t mind. I was tired, but I was curious to see where the men resided and how they lived. And I did not want to be separated from the group. I had grown used to eating meals with them, listening to their loud, exuberant conversations and mock insults. Shruti observed me for a moment with her dark placid eyes and smiled. ‘Yeah. OK then. You come too.’
The rest of the day the women worked quietly and quickly, switching into some higher gear. At about two o’clock the men came back. They had a couple of rucksacks with them, some old fertiliser bags, and a wooden shoulder hod. They fitted as much peat in as would go and between us we carried it round the side of the ridge, to a lower knoll, then up and over it.
On the other side was a grassy plain. It was flanked by bracken and gorse. We walked for about forty-five minutes, and as we began to drop down into another valley to the south I heard the sharp call of a bird of prey. I looked up and saw a single hawk turning broad circles in the air above us. It was a haunted stretch of land, windswept and barren, the bracken was dark red and dying on the slopes of the hills on either side, but the slender path we followed was trodden down, and clearly used often. Through the cut of the pass I could see another mountain range, in the heart of what had been the national park. Several rocky needles stood out against the horizon and behind this was a jutting mass of pikes. Once my father had probably told me their names, but now I could not remember. It was hard and rugged country. I wondered who was left out there, which abandoned souls might also be trying to survive away from the tight restrictions of the safety zones, lost from sight like us, in the mountainous territory of the North.
Calum walked beside me on the path for a while and asked a few questions about Rith, about oil supplies, and whether conscription had been introduced yet for the civilian men. He had left for Carhullan when it looked likely it would be implemented. He’d not been down towards the town for seven years. ‘I’m a lover, not a soldier,’ he said. He laughed when he told me this and his gums looked red and inflamed. I was careful with my answers, more guarded perhaps than was necessary, but I felt a little on edge around him, suddenly uncertain how to behave, and his grey eyes seemed too keenly fixed on mine.
He smelled strongly of sweat and tobacco. There was little to smoke at Carhullan. Now and then a carton of cigarettes turned up and was quickly divided. Jackie had a supply of Golden Leaf, though I rarely saw her rolling any, just now and again when she returned from a training drill, or when she had a glass of whisky to accompany it, and I wondered if perhaps he traded with her. His hair was brown and collar length and the tendons in his neck were raised and knotted, faintly purple under his skin. I could tell he was underweight, that his diet was poor. Even so, he looked healthier than the silverflex addicts in Rith.
Martyn had fallen in to step with Chloe. Between them they held a heavy sack, and from time to time they leaned into each other and kissed.
The path dropped down and became broader, volcanic looking, a riverbed of dark glassy rock. Then the ground flattened off. To the right were three small stone crofts with turf roofs. A faint wraith of blue smoke curled from a chimney stack. Standing outside was another man–older, white haired–two boys and a dog. The youths came forward when they saw us, embraced the women in the group, and then, after a moment, turned and embraced me. I was startled by the gesture and almost pulled away when the first boy put his arms round me. I had never met them before but they seemed to accept me as one of their familiars. They had something of Megan’s candour about them, her blunt affection. They were small and wiry; one might have passed as barely ten years old, but already around his eyes there was mottling and signs of aging.
We unloaded the peat bricks, stacked them in a lean-to, and went inside the largest of the cottages. The boys and the old man remained outside and I heard the dog barking from a distance, as if they were leaving the settlement.
It was more basic inside than the farmhouse: a single room, with a table and chairs, a small sooty fireplace under a hood, and two ladders on opposite walls leading up to alcoves where there were flat beds. There was no electricity and only two slit windows. The low structure was full of elongated shadows. Red cinders glowed in the fire’s cradle. The place smelled of clay, charcoal, and animal fat, and there was a musky odour too that I couldn’t place, something mushroomy and decayed, like a forest’s interior. Underfoot it was soft. There were no boards. The women at the farm often decorated rustically, with flowers and green cuttings, bowls of fruit, or they made spirals with pebbles on the mantels and window seats in the parlour. But here there was little in the way of ornament. It was utilitarian and sullen.
There was an awkward pause and one of the men gave an airy bronchial cough. Then Calum seemed to liven up. He filled a metal kettle from a barrel of water and hung it on a curved rod over the fire, asking who wanted tea and pulling off his jumper. As he raised it over his head I saw his stomach, hairless and deeply corniced by his ribcage. Underneath, his T-shirt was faded and torn and there were pale yellow stains under his arms. No one answered him. There was another silence before Martyn and Chloe stood up and walked towards the door of the croft. The other women exchanged glances. ‘Oh come on. No need for niceties,’ Chloe called back. ‘We’re going to have to leave in a few minutes or it’ll be dark.’ The two of them disappeared and I heard a few softly spoken words, laughter, then the door of one of the other cottages opened and closed.
Calum stood looking at me from the fireplace. His hair was ruffed up on the back of his head where he had lifted his jumper over it. The bone surrounding his eye sockets was too prominent and his face was long. He had raw, equine features. I held his gaze for a few moments, then looked away. Somebody made a joke about conjugal visits and the others in the group began to move around the room, seeking each other out and pairing off. It was not a casual procedure but there seemed to be little discussion or etiquette. Katrina and another woman headed out of the croft cottage with men, leaving Shruti, Lillian and me with Calum and Dominic. I could still feel Calum’s eyes on me, resting expectantly, curiously. I felt stupid not to have known what was going to occur. The back of my neck tingled and I felt a flush of heat. I wanted to stand up and leave, but I knew I could not.
The kettle began to shrill from the fireplace and steam rattled its lid. Its pitch carried on for a minute, and then Shruti stood and walked round Calum, picked up a cloth from the table, and removed it from the iron hook. She took it to a dusty sideboard and poured water into two cups and brought one to me. I took it from her, grateful for the gesture and the calm surrounding her. Lillian nodded and smiled. ‘Well, it looks like I got the best end of the deal this time. Lucky me.’ She walked to one of the ladders and began to climb up. The two remaining men followed after her.
‘Want to drink this outside then?’ Shruti offered. I nodded and we made our way to the door. ‘I can’t really believe it,’ I said to her quietly. ‘Yes you can,’ she replied. She latched the door closed and we sat on a low crop of wall beside the crofts. I could see the boys and the dog further down in the valley, bending over in the furrows of a ploughed parcel of land. The elder was pulling a large container towards the edge of the field. ‘What are they doing?’ I asked, more for something to say than out of genuine interest. ‘Turnips,’ she replied. ‘For the sheep. And for us.’
She nudged me. ‘Look. Chloe and Martyn are married,’ she said. ‘They’re pretty tight about it. He doesn’t sleep with anyone else. Nothing wrong with screwing your husband, is there?’ I sipped at the hot water. It tasted of iron. ‘No. Of course not. Why doesn’t she live down here with him though?’ Shruti smiled again and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s between them. Just something they decided, I suppose. That’s how they work it. Maybe he’s not her main priority. They see enough of each other to get by. And, well, Martyn is a good guy. There have been blokes who set up a tent outside the farm, and then a week later they were gone. Not exactly what you’d call loyal or flexible. But I suppose it’s understandable. Would you stay?’
I leaned back against the croft wall. It was uneven and uncomfortable, digging into my spine in several places. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘So what about Calum and the others?’ Shruti sighed. ‘A couple of them came here with women, I think, and then stayed on and adjusted. Calum didn’t. I don’t know what brought him exactly, avoidance of the real world perhaps, but he’s been here a long time. Longer than me. He feels useful.’ She took hold of my arm. ‘Look, they don’t just stay on for the reason you’re thinking, like our little harem. It isn’t like that at all. They don’t want to be in town any more than we do. They farm as well and we help them out because we can. Maybe there were romantic ambitions to start with, but not any more.’ She paused. Her dark eyes looked almost apologetic. ‘It’s strange maybe. But up here it’s difficult. You think you might be programmed a certain way but you soon find out you aren’t. You just make do. And yeah, of course Calum likes it. I would too.’
She let go of my arm. We were quiet for a moment and I could hear muffled noises coming from the croft opposite. I did not know which of the women had gone into that building, but her voice was high and abandoned. Then I heard the man climaxing. The situation was still uncomfortable, but my body responded and I felt a bloom of heat between my legs. I pictured the occupants together, two faceless forms, moving steadily against each other, moving in a local and exaggerated way. I saw the man pulling out, hard and glistening, and imagined the soft slippery space in her closing again.
A sensation of breathlessness came over me. I had not felt anything like passion for months. Since the incident in the cruiser I had not wanted to. If Andrew had recognised the trauma in me he did not broach it. He left me to myself. We had not slept together for months and if he had made arrangements with anyone else I had neither known about it nor cared. The women at Carhullan knew more about me than he did. Maybe it was the clear air, the days of physical exertion, or the sense of freedom and exchange between the residents, but here I suddenly felt ready for this part of myself to be opened again.
Shruti sat quietly, not saying anything, staring straight ahead. She was resting cross-legged on the wall, holding the chipped cup in her hand. I glanced over. Her dark hair was tucked in loose curls behind her ears. The patch of flesh on her neck looked shiny and faintly raised in the outside light. She was slight, fine-boned, but curved. If she had not been there with me I might have walked away, alone, back across the pass to the farm, leaving the women to their pleasures. But she was next to me. There was a peaceful containment to her, as always. I wondered what she was thinking, whether she was moved too.
Something about the tiny hamlet seemed rationally sordid, oppressive, and melancholy. It was unlike anywhere I had known. And I did not understand what had stirred in me, or why the proximity of others coupling had excited me in this environment. All I could think of was the movement of those within, the cries I had heard. I was no different from them.
I began to see images of Shruti in my mind. I imagined reaching over to her and unzipping her coat, lifting up the layers she was wearing and touching her nipples, taking them into my mouth, feeling the shape of them against my tongue. The dull ache in me intensified. It was gently painful. I set the cup of hot water down and stood up, looking into the valley below, and I took a few deep breaths.
The sky was darkening, but a band of pearly light edged the horizon. A low winter moon hung in the sky above it, shining with minor luminescence. It looked stranded and frail. The wind was cold against my face and neck, taking little bites and nips at my ears. I thought about how it would feel on my skin if I had stripped inside the croft, if I had lain down, naked and exposed in the draughts in the unwalled alcoves, and I imagined how a warm body would have felt covering mine. I was thirty-one years old. I was standing in a place that had taken millennia to grow. I knew it would cast me off without registering my existence. Suddenly I wanted to matter more than I did.
I turned and looked at Shruti. Her face was unreadable, her eyes drawn back. I did not know what it was that had overcome me. All I knew was what was impossible to return to, what my body felt, and what I wanted then.
She saw it in me. She stood up and gently pulled me a few paces back towards her, into the shelter of the cottage. Her arms dropped to her sides and she waited. I looked at her mouth, at the small, bowed shape of it, and then I leant towards her.
She broke away and led us round the corner of the building, so that we would not be seen by the others coming out. We kissed again, pushed against each other, and unfastened and lowered our trousers to our knees. When I touched her she was as wet as I was. Then our mouths were quick and gentle, our tongues copying whatever our fingers did. She broke off only once, to bend and push my jeans down further so she could open my legs, and bring more moisture out. The air blew around us, coldly on our legs and waists, and the sensation of it cooling the glaze where our hands moved was more erotic than anything I had ever felt. When I closed my eyes I could still see the white slit of moon in the violet sky.
When we were finished we pulled up our trousers and walked back to the front of the building. No one else had emerged. I picked up the cups of water, passed her one and we drank. They were still warm.
The journey back up the pass seemed much shorter without the load of peat to carry. The light was fading fast, and the rust-coloured bracken on the banks looked like a tide of scrap metal. It was a clear evening and the starlight was bright enough to cast some illumination on the path. On the way the women joked about what they had done. Lillian, the girl who had gone upstairs with Dominic and Calum, laughed when Chloe asked her who she had ended up with this time. ‘Didn’t have to choose,’ she said. ‘These two girls were very generous and abstained. Want to know what it’s like being with two men? It’s like being with one man, only twice as good. Nothing has to wait its turn. Except for them.’ Her laughter tapered off into the twilight. Chloe seemed subdued. I had watched her and Martyn with curiosity as we left the settlement. He’d held her hand tightly, leant his face into her wheat-blonde hair, and asked her quietly to stay the night, but she had refused, and pulled away.
Shruti and I were also quiet. I don’t know if she had been surprised by what had occurred between us. I don’t know if I was either. We walked together on the path and a couple of times our hands brushed and once she took my fingers briefly and squeezed them. ‘Look,’ she whispered. I directed my gaze where she pointed. An owl was flying over the grassland, sweeping down towards the ground and then up. Its white, clock-like face hovered gracefully, while its wings worked hard and silently in the air. For a second I caught a reflection in its eye, a weird flash of yellow-green, like a battery light flaring on then off again.
My mind felt clearer and more focused than it had in months. I could see the details of the moor as we walked over it, the sprigs of heather and the pavements of limestone. I had not felt so sharp since the morning I’d left Rith. I was conscious of other life forces beyond us, out on the hillside, hunting with nocturnal vision, watching for movement.
The ridge separated our group from the pass. The others had picked up their pace, trying to get to the farm before darkness overtook us and the last supper shift finished, but I stopped for a moment and let them go on ahead. I stood still as they walked away, willing them not to turn and call for me to hurry up. When they were far enough not to hear I turned and walked back the way we had come, keeping my tread light and rapid, watching the outline of ridge as I did so. After a few minutes I paused and knelt down in the coarse swathes and kept still. I heard the voices of the others getting fainter and then there was nothing, only the gusts of wind hawing through the grass and past rocks, the low hum emitted from the mountains. I flattened myself on the ground and waited.
It was cold lying down but I did not move to get up. I pulled the hood of my jumper over my head and kept my eyes turned to the earth. Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen. The last blue smuts of light faded and in the murkiness the lamps lit in Carhullan gathered their energies and formed a beacon in the distance. Under my hands I could feel the beginning of a frost tautening the stems of grass, and the sting of thistles on my palms. I remained still.
Then I heard gentle cracking footfalls on the ground nearby, snapping down the heather root, and the wisp of fabric rubbing against itself as the patrol stole past. There was a murmured command that was lost in the wind before it reached me. I waited another minute before moving. Keeping low on the moorland I crept after them, pausing every so often and hugging the earth. I strained to hear the slightest sound and if I heard nothing I stopped and extended myself in the foliage until I was sure that they had continued on. Wetness soaked into the fibres of my trousers and they began to feel heavy on me as I moved. The broom and gorse scratched me when I crawled beside it, but exhilaration pumped through me and the sensations felt exact and good.
The patrol was only twenty feet ahead of me. The spines of a whin bush cut into my scalp and my wrists where my coat had dragged up, but I held still. We were close to Carhullan now. I heard a quiet clicking noise, as if someone was slowly turning the dial on a safe. I kept my eyes covered. Then they moved forward again and I could see the four of them silhouetted in the lights of the farm. I drew myself out from under the bush, rolling to the side. Its needles had hold of my clothes and I unfastened their grip cautiously, biting my lip as I handled the thorns, and I began after them again.
They had reached the courtyard gate. I heard raised voices coming from inside. At ease, the patrol went in. I had a wild feeling then, not of triumph but of satisfaction in what I was doing, the stealth, the patience, and being the last person on the moor that night. I moved to the wall of the courtyard and inched down.
As I got closer to the gate I could hear Shruti’s voice. Mild alarm rang in it. ‘She was with us, all the way. I thought she was. Didn’t you pass her?’ I heard another voice, Corky’s, clear and scornful. ‘No. You were all out getting laid. Your heads are full of quim spit and you didn’t notice she was gone.’ I heard Chloe chip in then. ‘Fuck off, Cordelia. You don’t have to follow us around all the time like the bloody inquisition. It isn’t your job.’ ‘No, fuck you, Chloe, but apparently I do, since you can’t keep it together. Now I’ll have to go back out there with Lynn and find her. Which is going to go down a real treat, isn’t it? You want to tell Jacks the probie’s out there, probably with a busted ankle and exposure, or shall I tell her?’ ‘Be my fucking guest.’
Before the argument could escalate further I walked between the outbuildings and into the yard. ‘It’s all right, I’m here,’ I said. ‘Sorry, I got a bit turned around in the dark. That’s all. No damage done.’ The group stared at me, caught between astonishment and annoyance. Corky was shaking her head slightly. ‘Turned around. Funny. I didn’t hear you calling after the others, Sister.’ She narrowed her eyes. I could tell she did not trust what I had said. Beside her I could see the relief on Shruti’s face. I smiled to show her I was fine. ‘Any chance of dinner or are we too late?’ She rolled her eyes and jerked her thumb at the front door. ‘If we’re quick.’ I felt her hand pressing the small of my back as we went through into the house. I heard Corky’s voice behind us, and it was discomposed for once. ‘A nice report this is going to be. I’m not sure who looks worse, you lot, us, or her.’
They had already begun clearing the table but Ruthie had saved our portions; she had five bowls sitting on the skillet of the range under a cloth. ‘Carrot and ginger,’ she said. ‘And you can bloody well wash them up after. I’m done for the night.’ The women all went to her and kissed her and made a fuss and when they let her go she left the kitchen, feigning exasperation. I sat with the group and we spooned down the soup and ate the leftover oatcakes, which had gone cold. Though the lighthearted mood had evaporated after the spat with the patrol, I still felt mildly elated. I apologised to them again for my disappearance but Chloe shook her head, saying it wasn’t my fault, she just hated being spied on by the damn unit all the time, as if she was the enemy in some war game.
While they talked about the health of the two boys in the settlement, I tore a cake into pieces and swabbed the last of my soup with it. I wondered where the patrol had been watching from while we were at the village and whether they had seen Shruti and me behind the cottage. I knew it didn’t matter. The women obviously made trips to see the men as and when they wanted; it was standard practice. Half the women at the farm were in relationships, and everybody’s business was known: who was arguing, who was solid, and who had begun sleeping with a new partner. But I was still a fresh face, and I couldn’t help feeling exposed.
As we were scraping out our bowls, Jackie came into the kitchen and sat on the bench a little way down from the group. She rested her head on her hand and watched us, her fingers massaging the folded cleft above her jaw. Her presence did not seem to affect anyone else greatly, but I was edgy and excited, the way I always was when she was close. I wondered what the unit had reported of the afternoon’s events. She had not exactly issued an order for me to be celibate during my induction, but she had warned me not to cause trouble between the women. I wasn’t sure how she would react to news that I had gone with them to the crofts and been late coming home, or that I’d given her patrol the slip.
She cupped a hand over her nose, rubbed it, and sniffed loudly before speaking. There was something about her timing that always seemed disconcerting and meticulous. ‘Martyn’s well, is he?’ she asked. Chloe looked up from her dinner. ‘He’s OK. Better than he was.’ Jackie nodded. ‘And the slake’s all in now, is it?’ I could not help reading a slight note of rebuke into the question, as if Jackie did not wholly approve of Chloe’s visits to her husband. It was Lillian who responded. ‘Yeah, just about, thanks to Sister. We’ve turned another step in case we need it. Be better to dry it inside but we’re full up already as it is. It’s been good having another pair of hands this year.’
Jackie’s pale piercing eyes ran over the group. When they reached me they stopped. She stood up, still looking at me. ‘Well done,’ she said. The comment was not directed at the others, and I knew she wasn’t talking about the peat.