The Carhullan Army (16 page)

‘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.

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.