The men arrived later that day, accompanied by Megan and Corky. By then two inches of snow had fallen. There was a slight hesitation when they reached the courtyard, as if they were still unsure of the permission now granted them to cross the threshold. No man had been inside the farm since it had passed into Jackie Nixon’s hands. They must have realised that this entry was a breach of some kind, that something was wrong.
They had rucksacks on their backs, and as many possessions as they could carry. The patrol dispatched to get them had obviously indicated that they would need to clear out of their settlement. They did not seem happy. Nor were the Sisters. Within the space of forty-eight hours it was yet another shock for them to endure. Those who had not yet gone out to work crowded round the windows and seethed about the violation of Carhullan’s first rule. Then they gathered at the fireplace and took down the yellow banner.
From the kitchen, Chloe caught sight of her husband and ran to the farmhouse door, and I watched her take hold of Martyn. The two embraced hard and awkwardly, as if they had been separated for years. Then he held her chin and examined her bruised face. The mothers of the boys ran out too, and took hold of their sons. They had finally been granted their wish. But the circumstances were bleak.
Jackie followed them out into the courtyard. She extended her hand to each of the men in turn. She spoke too quietly for those of us inside to hear, but she must have presented them with a briefer version of what we had listened to, because after a time the men became animated, and their voices were raised. Martyn had his arm tightly round Chloe’s shoulders. I watched his mouth working hard over the words he said. I stepped towards the door and from there I could hear his indignation. ‘We’re not going to be your hostages, Jackie. This is off the deep end. Who the fuck do you think you are to do this now?’ His wife was looking at the ground. To the side, the rest of the men stood in an uncomfortable group, waiting to see where this challenge would lead, their breath puffing white in the air. Only Calum appeared to be at ease, gazing around the buildings and up at the carved date-stone above Carhullan’s doorway, his long thin frame buckled slightly under the weight of his bag.
As Martyn continued, I could see Jackie’s temper beginning to fray. Her hands curled inward, forming loose fists. She was almost a foot shorter than the men in the yard but she was visibly fitter; she was squarely on her own turf, she knew it, and had been queen for too long to put up with any visiting unrest. There was a shoulder holster with a leather pouch slung across her torso–I had seen her wear it before on occasions, its outline showing under her clothes–and in it I could see the square edge of a pistol grip. Suddenly I felt nervous. I knew now that she had used it before.
Then I heard Veronique’s name spoken, and Jackie snapped. She made a sharp gesture with her hand, a slicing motion that cut Martyn off. I had never heard her shout, not in all the weeks at Carhullan, not even during a training session, when the heavy breathing of those on drill was brought to us on the back of the wind across the fell. The women lingering in the kitchen caught her dire volley of curses. They looked up and moved to the window again in time to see her step towards Martyn. His arm fell from Chloe’s shoulders as if he might be about to defend himself. She did not strike him but her ultimatum was clearly and coldly articulated. ‘I don’t have time for your shit. You’ll not be here in this place and come back at me. You’re a kept man. Remember that, Martyn. If you want to go, get out now. But all arrangements are finished, and that’s my fucking prerogative. You’re living on my land. If you leave, you’re on your own. Both of you.’
Chloe looked up then. Her face was twisted. She glanced at her husband and back to Jackie. Then she walked into the farmhouse, knocked past me and slammed the front door. It boomed against its frame, reverberating around the house. I heard her go into the parlour. There was a heavy thumping sound. I moved back to the window. Martyn was staring after her. He began saying something to Jackie, but she walked away before he could finish.
The men were shown into one of the outbuildings by the patrol. Then they were given breakfast at the long table inside Carhullan. As if foxes had come upon a group of moorhens on a lake, the kitchen emptied rapidly around them. When I passed Calum he was smiling inwardly, his hollow sunken eyes turned only to the food in front of him.
The basic chores continued that morning, and in the afternoon the sleeping quarters were rearranged. More of Jackie’s unit were moved into the main house; there were now three women to a room, and the others were divided equally among the dormitories, like sentinels. Pallet beds were fashioned in the stables for the men. There was no heating system in there and no piped water, but they were given extra blankets and told they could wash in the bothy next door. Lorry checked them over individually, found them fit, more or less, though they were emaciated and lacking nutrients. The older man had kidney trouble, and Sonnelle set about making him some fennel tea. The boys had fared better since being excluded from Carhullan. Their mothers had seen to it that they were looked after, often taking them supplies from their own rations.
A sense of urgency came over the farm. People finished their tasks quickly and then returned to the main house, as if there might be some new word given there, a declaration of what to do next, an instruction from Jackie. But she was no longer around. No one saw her for the rest of that day. I wanted to speak to her about joining the unit, but there was no sign of her, and when I asked Megan, she just shrugged.
Shruti barely spoke to me as we cut down the trees and brought in the wood for the stoves. I knew she was upset, and that she thought me naive, too enamoured by Jackie. I tried a couple of times to begin a conversation, but her answers were short and evasive. Too much of the day had been wasted already, she said, and she didn’t want to be messing about with timber in the half-dark. I had become used to the timely and direct way that the women at the farm resolved their problems, so they would not impact and fester. But Shruti was more hurt than I had anticipated.
I knew there was no hope of her joining the unit. Though the girls teased her about her past, she had left violence far behind her and there would be no return to it, not even in the name of Sisterhood, or under the flag of anti-oppression. Instead the axe in her hand gouged down into the willow bark, again and again, without cutting a single straight line. Her breathing was ragged. Not knowing what else to do, I walked over to her and held her in my arms until the tension dissolved, the axe fell from her grip onto the crisp white ground, and I heard her crying softly.
That night Jackie returned to the farm and enlisted ten new volunteers for her unit. I was among them. More would follow in the next month, when any hope that she might not be serious about dismantling the farm and going out into the occupied towns was given up. I was surprised to see Lillian standing at the back of the group. I smiled at her and she shrugged. Jackie informed us that we would begin training the next day, and not to worry about the usual work patterns. Our Sisters would cover for us. She needed us for three straight weeks, she said, and then half a day every day until the campaign became active. There was an appalling formality to the language she used, leaving little room for us to speculate about her professionalism, and whether she would actually follow through. But she looked less tense, as if the return to her old occupation relaxed her.
There would be tests for stamina, endurance, physical and mental strength, map reading, and navigation. ‘We’ll start with the basics,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the rest yet. You’ll be split into smaller groups for the first few hikes. Then I’m going to expect you to train alone. You’ve seen how things run in the unit. When you’re up to speed you’ll be organised into patrols, like the others. When I’m not around you’re to follow the orders of those on the council. You know who they are.’ She did not thank us for stepping up or commend our example. And she did not single me out again. But there was a sense of pride in the way she looked us over, and that was enough.
For those three weeks we were pushed to our limits. We were woken each day in the black inhospitable dawn by members of the unit shouting at us to get up. We dressed, sleep drugged and assaulted by torchlight, took an early breakfast, and gathered in the courtyard. By then the weather was savage. The rain seemed too cold not to freeze but it remained soluble, fat and icy, soaking us to the skin almost every day as we walked. Jackie had instructed us to wear light-order dress, and any dry shirt or woollen jumper we were caught trying to put on over the layer of cold sweat would be taken from us. It robbed too much vital salt from the body, we were told. Movement would keep us warm.
The wind sheared off the fells around Carhullan. Above us, the sky was charcoal-coloured and disturbed, the clouds swirling in vortexes, ripping along their edges. Each new route saw us travelling further across the hills, from five miles, to ten, to fifteen, and the loads in the bergens that we carried got heavier as more equipment was loaded into them. Always the ridge would come first in the ascent, as if to stoke fire into our thigh muscles, and we would descend it at the end of the hike, shaking with exhaustion, often sliding on our backsides when our legs buckled.
Though I knew it was going to be hard, I was not prepared for the extremity of it all. I had become fitter from working outside with Shruti, Chloe, and the others. But I was still slow, weaker than those who had lived for years in the harsh environment, and mostly I was towards the rear of the group. It was only sheer determination, the desire not to fail, that kept me on my feet. The times I sat down I felt so dizzy that I thought I might pass out, and I imagined I would be found days later by the unit, lying on the Northern tundra, stiffer than rock, my eyes plucked out by the crows. As on the day I had left Rith, I did not look back when we started out. It was better not to see the warm lamps of Carhullan, better not to think of the women on the farm, moving like insects below us in the fields. And Shruti, asleep in her bunk, asleep against her damp pillow, her body pulsing gently as she dreamt.
We were given rations to take with us: dried meat, salt, and water. There was little time to rest and eat, and wherever possible we were supposed to jog the courses. I pushed myself on, and only when I thought my heart would swell too much as it powered the blood through its chambers, that it would rupture against the bone, did I fall back into a walk. There was little talk between the recruits. Space opened between us as we moved, and only when someone sank to their knees and retched, or began to stagger, did a colleague assist. Those in the unit stood over us when we fell or sought temporary shelter in a stony lee. ‘Pick it up, Sister. Up on your feet. Show us who you are.’ Some days, people turned back. I came home late but I never let myself succumb.
My whole life I had loved the upland terrain, deriving simple pleasure from it as a child–the views, the changing colours of the slopes, the brackish rivers–and though for years I had seen it at only a distance, I had often thought of the landscape as I stood beside the conveyor at the factory; it was a place of beauty and escape. Now I stumbled across its gills and over its marshland, bending to meet the wind when it roared against me, and dragging myself up the scars by handfuls of heather and thorn bushes, by any firm hold. And still, I could not say it wasn’t beautiful. Despite its austerity, its vast and cowing expanse, and the agony of its traverse, it seemed more beautiful than ever. When we reached the walls of the farm and Jackie ordered us to turn round and climb the ridge one more time, and with sickening resolution we began back the way we had come, I did not fall to the earth and scream into the coarse brindle of the moor. If the mountains tested my limits, they also gave me satisfaction, they were the measure by which I gauged my resilience.
At night I would examine my feet, check that the bubbling mass of blisters was not infected, and each morning I would place the swabs of gauze we had been given between my toes. There were raw galls on my shoulders and lower back from the rubbing of the bergen straps. By the end of the three weeks I was carrying half my own weight, and I had begun to realise what a matchless device the human body was.
On the morning of the final march we gathered in the courtyard and waited for instruction as usual. I was barely awake and exhausted from the previous marches. Jackie came out, dressed in a military coat, and greeted us. ‘Long drag today,’ she said. ‘It’s an ordeal and it’s meant to be, so make sure you pace yourselves. I don’t want to have to bury any of you. Or feed you to the dogs.’ There was nervous laughter. She jerked her head to the side. ‘Now, don’t thank me, ladies, but I’ve a special bonus for you. Come this way.’
We followed her to one of the stone bothies. I had not been into it before. It was always padlocked and bolted. She took a key from the pocket of her fatigues and turned it in the lock; the hasp sprang back slickly and she pulled open the latches. She turned on the light. Before us there were stacks of stencilled metal boxes. Jackie stepped forward, hefted one down, and opened it. Inside, as I had known there would be, were the rifles. She handed one to each woman, and with it an ammunition pouch filled with heavy brass fobs. When it came to my turn, she opened another case, lifted out my father’s gun and smiled. I looked at the bad side of her face, the inert cleft running from her mouth to her ear. Then I took the rifle from her. It had been scoured of rust and repaired, and I knew it was still accurate enough to snipe deer.
There were no straps attached to any of the weapons. We were to carry them at all times, Jackie told us. Anyone seen putting their gun down en route would run the course again tomorrow. And again the day after if they dropped it. ‘And be warned, I’ll be coming along shortly to keep you company,’ she said. ‘Like the red light of morning.’
I set out, my bag full, the rifle in one hand, and the weighted pouch in the other. As the sun was rising Jackie cantered past on one of the fell ponies. ‘Who’s sticky now, Sister?’ she called down to me, and laughed.
We had been given twenty-four hours to cover forty miles. We would make six circuits of the High Street range and we would walk through the night in darkness, tracking our way along the escarpment. It was the same distance as my journey from Rith to Carhullan. I had been told by the patrol then that it was impossible for me to have walked it all, and they had been right. This time I would prove them wrong.
There was no mutiny at Carhullan. If Jackie had anticipated there might be, and had moved her original unit into the house to protect herself, she need not have worried. There was no one to challenge her. And, under whatever law there was now, the place was hers. No one else could have held it together as she did. I was surprised so many of the women decided to go along with her plan. Deep down I had thought myself unusual, perhaps maligned with some kind of unnatural antagonism or need for leadership, for wanting to act in a way I had been programmed to think was wrong. But eighteen in all came forward. The older women in the colony were largely exempt. Jackie needed Ruth and Lorry and an experienced core of others in their original capacities. The farm had to keep ticking over, even if it was to be less a farm than a support system for the soldiers within.
A small group refused to train. Jackie respected their wishes as she had said she would, and she promised that when the time came she would escort them to one of the Pennine towns and see to it that they were set up, given a section number, and camouflaged from the Authority. Shruti was among them. We still spoke and often sat beside one another on the bench for meals, but we no longer met up alone, no longer sought each other out as we once had. Since the night of Jackie’s announcement we had not slept together, and though I was still attracted to her I knew it was for the best. I did not tell her what I was doing with the unit, and she did not ask. Our company seemed defined by a gentle sadness now, as if we had never really had the opportunity to fall out of love, and everything begun had been curtailed instead of aborted.
I might have walked away completely, avoided her around the farm, to make it all easier, for myself at least, attempting to convert the relationship into a mistake in my head. But she made a point of maintaining a bond. She offered to wash my clothes with hers, left flowers on the crate next to my bunk. There was more grace in her than I could have managed, and without hers I would have found none. It brought a gentle ache to my chest to have her hug me at the end of a dinner shift and then walk away to her bed, or rest a hand on my shoulder and ask if I was faring OK when she saw my cuts and bruises, my newly shaved head.
We could have made passes at each other and it would have ended with our limbs tangled again, our bodies spilling outwards, wet and arching. And if she had come to me with that in mind I would not have stopped it or pushed her away, though I knew Jackie would disapprove. Shruti held back, as I did. Instead, she offered me a quiet, spiritual friendship.
I returned from training one morning to find a small velvet bag on the bed. My fingers were staved with the cold and filthy, two of the nails were black, and I struggled to draw back the slender cord pinching the bag closed. I tipped its contents into my palm. It was an Edwardian necklace with green, white, and violet stones. I knew it had been Veronique’s, and it had come into Shruti’s possession after her death, when all her belongings had been shared out. In the bag, on a tiny scrap of paper, she had written a note. The day will come. Be strong. I did not know what to say when I saw her that evening, and so I said nothing, just smiled at her across the kitchen, and then went into the parlour room where Corky, Megan, and the others were drinking.
I tried not to think about the times we had been together. But I know I felt more for her after we had separated than in the weeks of our fervour and discovery. She was a revelation to me. And if it had not been for the teachings of Jackie Nixon, hers would have been the most profound lessons of my time at the farm.
Carhullan was not perfect. If it had once been close to it, running to a high level of courtesy and enlightenment, a society that celebrated female strength and tolerance, the balance had now tipped back. There were arguments between those in the unit and those still running the farm, who thought they now carried an unfair burden of work, that they were at the bottom of the hierarchy. Some in the other group continued to try to talk Jackie down from her position during the evening meetings, and she began to tire of it.
Chloe remained outspoken on the subject. ‘How do we know if what you say is true, Jackie?’ she would ask. ‘Where’s the proof of it, other than your word? I’ve seen no Authority monitors here yet. Has anyone else? You’re just hell-bent on this conflict. And you’re dragging everyone else along with you.’ Then she would turn on the room. ‘Why don’t you all wake up and see what she’s doing! Do you really think she can sneak little Stella back into town without anyone noticing?’ There was a zealousness to her when she talked, a desperation. Often she would work herself into a frenzy and storm out of the room, go looking for her husband in the stables. Jackie would close the door softly behind her.
The gatherings were finally suspended. I knew we were as guilty of failure and disunity as any other human society. I knew we were as defective.
The men did not belong. Though they had taken over some of the roles left open by those gone over to Jackie, they still ate their food separately and kept to themselves. They served their purpose, but their proximity seemed to engender discomfort in those who had never imagined they would have to share Carhullan with them. Dominic, Ian and the boys had offered to train with us, but Jackie turned them down, saying the dynamic of the group would be thrown out of whack. She did not want men in her army.
I began going to Calum. After joining the unit I went to him a few times, nights when I felt too tense to sleep in my bunk, or if I had drunk enough home brew not to care. I went after an exercise with the equipment, when the strange elation of accuracy, of lethality, lit me, made me want someone, and I went after the sickeners, to get rid of the images and echoes of what I’d seen and done in training; the forelegs of the dog we had killed splayed limp at its sides, the click of the knife slitting its windpipe and its ligaments.
He was obliging. He had chosen his own role and he fulfilled it whenever necessary. I knew he was essentially in Jackie’s pay, that he was given tobacco by her, and a secure place within the community, on the understanding that he would let any of her women fuck him if they wanted to. That he would continue to offer them excitement and relief, as he had always done. I knew he was the father of at least two of the children at Carhullan, Stella included. But there were no pregnancies now. He controlled himself, and kept himself clean. Jackie wanted no disease to infect her women, rendering them unfit.
Calum’s body was smooth and slim. His ribs jutted through his flesh and his hair reached past his shoulders. We did not kiss. He held my hips as I moved over him; he did what I told him. His grey eyes remained focused. He was an accomplished lover, compliant, and he knew what movements and words might kindle arousal in those seeking it. The pleasure from him was physical and limited. Those first few times on his pallet bed, I had closed my eyes and thought of Shruti. I saw her kneeling in front of me, circling her tongue until my nerve endings began to clench and spasm, or I thought of her eyes glazed over, her pupils dilated and staring into mine when she climaxed. And then, when I knew it was better not to keep her as a memento in such a way, when I knew I had to let her go, I blocked out those pictures of her dark body. I saw nothing but fragments.
The women new to the unit grew fitter. The marches continued. We were posted outside in holes overnight, told to keep still for days on end in bunkers dug below the heather banks. The women suffered hypothermia, sleep deprivation, strained tendons, boredom. We took on board whatever was instructed. The first rule of orienteering was to memorise all relevant coordinates. The second was never to fold the maps any other way but along their creases. Give nothing about the operation away, Jackie said. We were taught infantry skills, combat survival, basic medical knowledge. The hikes became longer, up over ice stacks on the summits, the bluffs along the ridge, and into the surrounding valleys.
In Ullswater there were groups of Unofficials living around the lake, and in the big empty houses. They looked ragged and poorly equipped. Breathing slowly, we tracked them through the iron sights of the rifles. We loaded the magazines in silence. Most of the guns were old; they had been used for army training before Jackie got hold of them, and there were only a handful of modern rifles with SUSATs that could be mounted for surveillance. This did not matter, she told us. We still had the upper hand–surprise. But we would need to prepare ourselves for strategic assassination.
In the locked storage room she had a twelve set of automatic pistols, three Barrett rifles, light mortars, grenades, and enough explosive to take out those constructions upon which the Authority depended and the people were held to. The butcher’s bill would be kept to a minimum. No civilian would be intentionally hurt. In time she would teach us the handling of everything she had stowed away, all the armaments she had acquired, through whatever underground network, whatever solicitous means. She was careful not to waste live rounds, frugal with the reserves of diesel for the Land Rover and the decommissioned Bedford. To get close to Rith we used the ponies, and kept under the cover of darkness once the domestic grid went out, moving like raiders around the periphery.
I enjoyed riding the ponies. They were compliant and hardy creatures, and they tackled the rough ground, the steep gradients and swollen waterways, with stamina and surefootedness. I had never been nervous around horses. I had always been able to approach them in the fields around Rith, and I found that I was a comfortable rider. I fitted and felt right with the animals. It was apparent that Jackie had a genuine passion for the ponies. Once or twice she rode out along the range with me. When we got back to the farm she complimented my skill. ‘You’re good at this, Sister. They recognise confidence and loyalty: I trust those my ponies trust.’ She told me that, years ago, her family had been breeders. ‘The mountains made them naturally small,’ she said to me, patting the dark glistening flanks of the mare she was unsaddling. ‘The Romans broke them first, up at the Wall. They crossbred them. They were used as pack animals back then. But we made them fast. It was us who raced them. And now, they’re going into battle.’
By the end of spring we had been taught which plants and roots were edible, which could keep us alive longer up on the fells, and which were purgative. The upland snows had thawed and the rivers were high and fast, full of meltwater and dirt. The unit was given a new test of fitness.
On the banks of Swinnel Beck, Jackie stripped out of her clothes and stood naked in front of us. Megan, Corky and the others who were familiar with the drill followed suit. I saw Jackie’s body for the first time. It had been heavily employed over the years, put through exertions since she was seventeen years old, and it showed. She was full-breasted, and her nipples were damson red, but the rest of her seemed to be made of wire and tightly stretched bands. Spurs of bone pressed up against the skin at her joints. There were deep dimples in her shoulders, craters within the sinew, and across her back were a series of dark purple circles.
She picked up her rifle and an ammunition pouch, lifted them above her head, and strode into the brown racing water until it took her off her feet. Then she swam across, her head ducking under the current a few times, gasping as she surfaced. The thin dark hair lengthened around her shoulders and covered her face. She climbed out of the river, thirty feet downstream but safe on the opposite bank, and the sound that left her mouth was feral. One by one we went into the river after her. I felt the cold burn of the water as I stepped into the torrent, felt it pulling me along as I struggled into the depths.
On the crossing Benna went under and did not resurface. Her hand broke through the brackish wash once and then was lost from sight. Six of us ran a mile down over the bields, naked and barefoot, to a narrow culvert under a pack bridge. We found her lodged between two boulders, bloated with water, her face caved in where it had struck against the rocks. The river surged past her white body. At Jackie’s command we carried her cousin’s corpse back up the mountain and propped it against a dry-stone wall. She made us sit in a semi-circle, and we faced the body for an hour. ‘This is what it looks like,’ she said. ‘This is what it looks like to be nothing. Don’t fucking forget it.’ I saw nothing in her expression that indicated the woman had been her relation. It was terrifying, and admirable.
Jackie handed Megan her service pistol and gave her instruction. The butt of the gun looked bulky in Megan’s small hands, but she manoeuvred it lightly. The girl hesitated for a moment. Then I saw a reptilian dullness creep into her eyes. She cocked the hammer, aimed and fired. The muzzle jumped back and her arm absorbed the recoil as it had a hundred times. A watery slip of blood emerged from the hole in Benna’s forehead. There was absolute silence in the group. Only the rushing of the beck could be heard as it sounded out rocks and hollows on its course. We buried her in the cemetery plot by the Five Pins. There was no ceremony.
For a few weeks training was suspended and an atmosphere of unity returned to the farm. The heat and humidity of the summer arrived, but it seemed less claustrophobic at this altitude, broken up by the wind. The grass grew tall on the moorland around us, and it was the exact colour of the fawns that grazed in its swathes. There were deer everywhere. Jackie told me that it was a temporary spike; their numbers would probably dwindle again in a few years, when disease and starvation knocked the population back. It seemed hard to believe. Everything was in abundance. Moss and lichen thrived, and the place was almost exotic with foliage. Buzzards circled the warrens, and hawks fell in long stoops towards their prey on the slopes. Without the human cultivation of the previous decades, I could see that true wildlife had returned to the Northern mountains. We were living in the wilderness.
Only the fields around the farm looked neat and tended, shorn one by one of their arables. The women worked hard to bring in the crops, as they had every year, as if this harvest was no different from the previous ones, though it was the last. We laboured together. The meadow grass was scythed and taken in carts to the barns. I was shown how to sharpen the leys, and how to tie haycocks. Across the fields, next to Shruti, I saw Helen, dressed in a long blue cassock with the baby in a sling across her back. She was bending over the rough, like everyone else. They called it booning, and no one in the community failed to pitch in during the high season. Even Chloe helped, though she stayed close to Martyn and the other men.
All day, and into the night, there was a strange rasping call from the moors. I had heard nothing like it before. Finally I abandoned the others in search of the noise. I crept round the buildings and out onto the moorland, trying to identify the creature that might be making it. In one of the outer pens Jackie had begun clipping the sheep. She was sitting on a stool and had a ewe braced between her legs.
Tufts of yellow and black fleece were caught on her vest. She looked up when she saw me stepping cautiously over the ground, cocking my head from side to side. She was smiling in her private, satisfied way. ‘They’re corncrakes,’ she said. ‘They’ve moved down from Scotland. I doubt you’ll find one though.’ She let go of the sheep. It scrambled to its feet and shook itself, bleating thinly. Jackie stood up and brushed herself off. ‘You know what else I’d like to see back here? Wolves. We’re still missing a big predator in the chain. But then I’d have the carcasses of these beauties all over my land. It’s all give and take, isn’t it? Don’t worry. We’ll be starting up again next week, Sister. Then you’ll have something bigger than a bird to hunt.’
A year after I had arrived at Carhullan, I lay in the wet autumn bracken, camouflaged and motionless, so close to the stags that I could smell the skunk of their piss as they marked their rutting grounds, the musk in their ragged stolls. I heard the clack and ricochet of their antlers as they lowered their heads and charged towards one another. Lying in the bracken foss, I felt stings in my groin and my elbows as ticks buried their heads. I rolled onto my back, pinched off mounds of skin to cut off the blood supply until they emerged, gorged and sluggish.
I lost the ability to fear and panic. Instead I felt practical and causal. I had never known time to pass so acutely before. I sat out through the night with the patrol, watching the bitter glow of stars overhead, listening as the season exhaled and the layers of vegetation shrugged and compressed, like the ashes of burnt wood. On the hills I was aware of every corporeal moment, every cycle of light. I felt every fibre of myself conveying energy, and I understood that it was finite, that the chances I had in life would not come again.
As my resilience grew, so too did my understanding of what we would face. Jackie had said that occupation of the town was possible. If it failed, we could evade capture long enough to damage the vital organs, and perhaps even hold out for a while in the hills. But eventually, when the Authority’s resources were consolidated, they would track us down and we would be caught. Then the payoff of our real training would begin. She pulled no punches about what she knew of the holding centres in the old industrial towns. She brought out a photograph and passed it round. It showed a firing squad. There was a wall in front of them with dark stains on, and at its base a slack, indistinct body. ‘There is no Hague here,’ she said. ‘There are no human rights laws in this country. You won’t get a trial. You won’t even be charged. They will try and break you. They will find out whatever they can, any way they can. And they will be merciless, I assure you. If you end up here, in this place, you will be held as long as they think you are useful. Then you will be shot.’ She nodded and her eyes moved across us.
If detained, there were only three things that we were permitted to say. Our names. Which militia we belonged to. And that we did not recognise the legality of the government. Nothing else could be given in response to interrogation or to incentives. Not yes, not no. ‘All I ask is that you hold out as long as possible,’ she told us. ‘There will be a time to tell them about us. But not yet.’
Jackie had said she would not put me back in the dog box unless I agreed to it, and a year after the captivity, I did. She came for me in the night, with three others, and I was dragged from my bed across the floor of the dormitory and over the courtyard. I made an attempt to escape, twisting up and throwing a few punches with a free hand. It was a reflex action and it did little good. The women paused. I took a hard kick in the belly that knocked the wind out of me. I was turned onto my stomach and my hands were bound behind my back. A bag was put over my head and tied at the neck. Someone pressed a thumb into the plastic, tearing a hole for my mouth.
Within minutes I found myself back inside the iron enclosure, scratching at the knots of rope securing my wrists, trying to move oxygen smoothly into my chest, trying to calm myself. The ground was pliant and warm under my bare feet. A smell of fresh shit rose from the floor, as if it had been spread there for my arrival.
The first time it happened I had lasted four days. I took hold of myself and focused on what I had been told to do. I found the canister of water left at my feet, lifted it up between my soles and took the top off with my teeth. Its base was lathered with shit and I gagged as I brought it closer. I could not tip it on my knees to take a drink, so I manoeuvred it back down onto the ripe floor and worked to free my hands. The knots remained tight. In the small space around the stool I managed to slip my body through the loop of my arms, so my hands were now in front of me and I could remove the bag and reach down for the canister. I shook it. It was almost empty.
Despair rose up in me, sick as bile, but I swallowed it back down. I concentrated, repeating the instructions I had been given. Talk to yourself. Sleep, even shallowly. Sing. Find patterns on the walls: flowers, birds, faces.
For three days it worked. I saw letters drawn in the darkness in front of me. The words floated like red flares on the black. Then the water ran out and dehydration started to make me unstable. The same terrible images came walking back towards me, like prodigal ghosts, as if they had been waiting in the darkness of the corrugated coffin for me to reanimate them.
The second time they came for me I made it to seven days in the dog box. I drank urine caught in the container when the water ran out. I ate the food thrown in on the filthy floor. I did not call out. It was nearing winter, and the air in the metal enclosure was freezing.
On the seventh day I was dragged back across the courtyard to one of the small stone pens. The women from the unit interrogating me were dressed in dark clothing, masked. I thought I recognised Corky but I was weak and disoriented and could not be sure of anything. There were no apologies given. I was stripped, hit in the kidneys, and burned. One of them pushed a pipe a little way into me and told me I was a whore. They left me locked inside the pen, curled up and moaning on the floor, and another four women entered. Jackie was with them.
She smiled down at me, a gentle, sympathetic smile, and I saw in her blue eyes that the love she had for me was that of a mother. In her hand was a plate of cooked breakfast: bacon, eggs and bread. The yolks bloomed. She crouched down, set the meal on the floor at her feet and sniffed loudly. ‘That smells so good,’ she said. Then she took a rasher of bacon and waved it in front of my face. I lurched for it but the others pulled me back. She put the crisp sliver back on the plate and licked the grease from her fingers. ‘Mmm.’ Her voice was soft and compassionate. ‘What’s my name, Sister?’ I looked up at her, pleading with her to stop. ‘If you tell me my name you can eat this. If you tell me the names of all of us here, you are free to go, right now.’
It was no better and no worse than the treatment I gave the others, when the roles were reversed. It was no better and no worse than the treatment soldiers had always undergone in preparation for deployment. And Jackie saw to it that we were no different from them.
She did not make monsters of us. She simply gave us the power to remake ourselves into those inviolable creatures the God of Equality had intended us to be. We knew she was deconstructing the old disabled versions of our sex, and that her ruthlessness was adopted because those constructs were built to endure. She broke down the walls that had kept us contained. There was a fresh red field on the other side, and in its rich soil were growing all the flowers of war that history had never let us gather. It was beautiful to walk in. As beautiful as the fells that autumn.