The Carhullan Army (24 page)

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.

It was not clear whose idea the gorse cuttings had been. One evening, at the back of that second winter in Carhullan, Jackie gathered us all together and told us it was time to begin. Some kind of preliminary, neutral marker was necessary before things kicked off, she said, as a way to make a link with the civilian population. But it was not her that issued the instruction to shear sections of whin from the moorland reefs surrounding the farm. It was decided quietly among some of the Sisters that this should be the signal, and a group went out the next day and brought back the first batch.

That evening, after work on the farm was complete, the women who were not part of the unit busied themselves at the kitchen table tying the stems with rags of material torn from the tunics. All over the fell, every month of the year, the plant flowered with vivid buds, and there were plenty of blooms for the clippings. They kept on for two weeks, until the yellow fabric was used up.

On the first night I went into the kitchen and watched them work. The tunics lay in a pile near the iron range. I had laid mine down with them. When more material was needed someone cut a lip in the cloth and tore a long thin bolster out of the weave. They all wore gloves but their hands were continually being scratched as the spines cut through, and every so often I would hear somebody suck in their breath. I’d see them remove a glove and squeeze at the flesh beneath. Then blood would come scrambling out of the puncture.

I could not have said why exactly, but I liked watching the women work. The routine of their hands, the craft of what they were doing, was hypnotic, and the kitchen was filled with the heady scent of the blossom. I had always liked the plant; its sweet fragrance that intensified tropically in the heat of summer, the gouts of colour on the fellside. Its petals seemed inconceivably soft and bright against the dark static spines. I felt a calm anticipation too, as their hands moved, winding the bandages around the stalks. I knew that this industry heralded our actions; everything we had planned was about to start, and everything seemed right.

When the brobbs had been securely fastened they were placed in loose hessian sacks and stored in the stables. In the morning those of us who had volunteered to ride down into Rith strapped them onto our saddles and slung them over the hot flanks of the ponies. We set out as the sun was rising. Across the higher ground the ponies left hoofprints in the thick crust of frost, and I watched the ice dapple and melt away as we dropped down into the valley. We forded the streams and picked our way through the old settlements, past the abandoned cars, and over troughs cut out by flash floods. We encountered no one else along the way, and as we tracked through the old county it felt as if we were travelling in a hinterland, a place of lesser and greater being. There was thunder, but the rain held off. By dusk we were at the periphery of the safety zone.