The Carhullan Army (6 page)

The woman from the other quarter in our building was standing outside when I reached the terrace. I startled her as I came up to the door, the bag slung over my shoulder. She held a hand to her neck and apologised for crying out. In her other hand was a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. She waved them. ‘Been saving these till I needed one,’ she said. ‘Thought you were on days this week. I heard you go out this morning. Clump, clump, clump. Bang.’ I shrugged. I wanted to get inside before the grid was turned on and I would face the scrutiny of light bulbs. I hitched the bag further behind me. She seemed distressed somehow, and unaware that she was blocking the doorway. Her face in the grey atmosphere was agitated and twitching, though she was standing rigidly. ‘What are you doing out here?’ I asked her. She snorted and shook her head. ‘Nothing. What is there to do? Can’t get our tea on yet, unless we want a cold lump. Can’t find out which poor cows have won the baby lotto. I hate this time of day. It makes me crazy.’

She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I can’t believe it. Sometimes I wish they’d just dropped a bomb on us after all. Put us out of our misery. Don’t you wish that?’ She looked at me and then looked away into the alley opposite. ‘It would be OK if I couldn’t remember how things used to be. We went to Portugal every year. We used to fly.’ She laughed bitterly and then began to cough. With brisk motions she took out a cigarette and lit it.

For a minute I felt a rush of sympathy and I wanted to befriend her, confide in her, and tell her what I was planning to do, the way I had not been able to tell Andrew. We’d never talked properly since she and her family had moved in. I had heard them through the walls, the muffled conversations, voices pitching and subsiding, the bouts of morning and evening coughing, and I’d heard them together at night, he louder than she. In our shared bathroom their footprints muddied the shower tray along with ours; their hair stuck on the enamel sides and clotted the plughole.

Some residents in the old sandstone quarters had made the best of things, abandoning privacy, opening up the house rooms like one big happy family. All our doors were kept shut. I barely knew the names of the other residents. They were so close by, so familiar, but they were strangers.

I knew it was a stupid thought to have had, spontaneous camaraderie with this woman I did not know, and I abandoned it almost immediately. I told myself I was just feeling it because I was conscious of where I was heading soon, and I had ideas in my head about it all. But I had to remain discreet. Nobody else was to know anything.

The woman looked at me again with an annoyed expression. ‘Oh, it’s all right. I’m just in a bad mood,’ she said. ‘Turns out I’ve got TB. That new bloody strain. Aye, so. I’m away into quarantine probably and the kids will have to contend with their father. They say there are some drugs that will help. But I know it’s not true. Besides, I’ve got no money. Who the hell has? Oh, but they’ve given me this – for all the good it’ll do!’ She reached into her coat pocket, took out a faith card, and tossed it to the ground. She rolled her eyes. ‘These bloody Victorian houses. I might as well put on a corset, sleep in the coal shed, and have done with it, right?’

She took a draw on the cigarette. I told her I was sorry, said goodnight, and went inside to the bedroom. I put the gun in the cupboard and made sure the barrel was fully covered by my overcoat. The cartridge boxes I placed under the bed next to a stack of magazines. It was too tiny an area for hiding anything but I had little choice.

For the rest of the week, I was filled with paranoia. Every time Andrew got in and out of the covers, I imagined him kicking the shells and scattering the metal casings across the room. There would be no hope of denying any knowledge of them. Our possessions were few and all were accounted for. In the nights that had followed I seemed to wake with a start every hour, reaching down to touch them, making sure they were properly stowed, praying he would not find them.

But now I was safely away, beyond exposure and explanation. I was alone. Here in the empty Lakeland village I couldn’t have explained to anyone exactly how secure I felt, even if there had been someone around to listen to me. The village reverberated with silence, with human absence. There was not a soul to be found and I liked it. It had been so long since I had felt that. Even on the Beacon Hill above Rith I could see people moving in the streets and I knew they were close by. Here I was breathing air that no one else’s breath competed for. I was no longer complicit in a wrecked and regulated existence. I was not its sterile subject.

Standing opposite the gutted church, in the wet deserted roadway, something unassailable crept over me. I felt the arrival of a new calmness, an assurance of my own company. The only noises, other than the movement of wind through the trees and the trickles of water, were the animal sounds of my tongue moving in my mouth, and my boots grating on the ground as I adjusted my stance. I was aware of my own warm predominance in the environment, my inhabited skin, my being. I suddenly felt myself again, a self I had not been for so long. I remembered how I had experienced the same feeling in this place when I was young, when I had been here walking, before the restrictions.

The hikes had always been long and steep. ‘Get on, lass, just over that brow,’ my father would call back when I lagged behind, aching and winded. ‘You’ll live,’ he would shout back to me. ‘You’ll live through it. It’ll not kill you.’ It was here that I had first understood I was stable on my feet, capable of direction and distance and stamina. It was here in the blue fells that I first knew I was strong, and that I had it in me to be stronger.

Now, once again, I was in that landscape, where human beings had always journeyed to feel less and more significant than they were. Where the mountains stupefied and emboldened them, bringing them high and to the edge of what they thought themselves capable. As I stood and looked in the direction of the summits I felt properly dressed in my own muscles, and ballasted by my sense of physicality, as if I belonged outside, away from the crowding, the metered artificial lighting, the ethics of a lost society.

Ahead of me the hills were disappearing under heavy cloud, another front of rain was moving in, obscuring the horizon. I took a deep breath, picked up my rucksack and put it on. Inside its material the butt of the gun rested firmly against my back. I didn’t know how good a shot I might be – it had been years since I aimed through the sights – or even if the gun still worked. But I was pleased to have it, pleased that I could offer it to those at the farm.

I walked through the settlement and began upwards towards the fells. On the howse there were delicate purple harebells growing in the grass between limestone outcrops. It was too late in the season for them, but at that moment they were the loveliest thing I had seen. As the clouds drifted down, thunder rolled again, sounding loud in the hollows of the mountains, and after a moment or two, rain began to run down the soft cambers of the sky. I stopped, put the bag down, and stripped off to the waist. I put the damp bundle of clothing into the top of the rucksack, tied its neck, shouldered it, and walked on. The clean October air passed over my skin. Rain snaked down my shoulders and arms, dripping off my breasts. I knew I must look peculiar. But there was no one around to see me. The driver of the van was long gone, back to his lonely life at the draw-off tower. The closest human beings to me now were the women of Carhullan. By the end of the day I would be with them. I would be one of them.

I had first heard about the farm at Carhullan when I was seventeen. Even then it had notoriety, a bad reputation. Its lamb was being sold in Rith, its vegetables and honey, and char when the tarn on its estate held them. The women living there traded every month in the border markets, with organic labels and low prices. When they arrived in town conversation about them picked up, the way it used to when the travellers came for the horse-driving trials.

They were a strange group, slightly exotic, slightly disliked. I could remember seeing them in Rith’s market stalls, setting up their tables, staring down the hostile looks of other farmers. They were odd-looking. Their dress was different, unconventional; often they wore matching yellow tunics that tied at the back and came to the knee. Seeing their attire, people thought at first they must be part of a new faith, some modern agrarian strain, though they did not proselytise.

They were always friendly towards other women, joking with them over the wicker trays of radishes and cucumbers, giving out discounts and free butter. With the men they acted cooler; they were offhand. People commented that they must be doing all right for themselves up there on the fell, if they were solvent and could still afford to drive a Land Rover all that way into town each week. When we went shopping my father told me not to buy anything from them. ‘Give that lot a wide berth,’ he would say, nodding towards the group. ‘It’s probably wacky butter they’re flogging.’ If I lingered too long near their patch he would hurry me back to the car, saying we were late for something. But if he wasn’t around, or if I had come with friends, I would go and buy homemade ice cream from the women. ‘Thank you, Sister,’ they always said when I handed them the money.

There had been a skirmish in the market once, not a fight exactly but a physical exchange of sorts. My father and I had only seen the end of it, as it broke up. There was the sound of scraping and a soft thump, and when I looked over I saw that three of the yellow-shirted women were standing over a young man. There were cabbages rolling on the ground around him. He was cursing them, calling them dykes. The expression on his face was one of shock and outrage. But their faces were utterly calm.

Among the locals, speculation about the lives they led was rife, and it was often cruel, or filled with titillation. They were nuns, religious freaks, communists, convicts. They were child-deserters, men-haters, cunt-lickers, or celibates. They were, just as they had been hundreds of years go, witches, up to no good in the sticks. A few years after they set up, the national papers got wind of the enterprise and Carhullan became moderately famous. Ambitious reporters made the pilgrimage up the mountain to interview the women.

It was one of the last working fell farms. And life there was hard. There were animals to deal with at the crack of dawn, there was lumber to shift, fields to crop. Some reports said the place was really a rustic health club, a centre for energetic meditation. As well as the agricultural efforts, there was other physical training; traditional sparring, eight-mile maintenance runs once a week. There were no men allowed, though some of the rumours said there were, and inferred what they were used for. The proprietors remained difficult to pin down on the subject.

Jackie Nixon ran Carhullan with her friend Veronique, a tall black woman from the American South. Jacks and Vee they were known as by the other girls. I had heard Veronique on the local radio station and she had the last hum of an accent, a soft drawl, when she talked. And it was mostly her who talked. She was the spokesperson, the one who gave interviews to the magazines and news crews. The place sounded utopian, martial or monastic, depending on which publication was interviewing, and what angle they wanted to push. Veronique’s other half was more reclusive.

The number of women grew each year, though no recruiting was ever done. There were some complaints from men, that their wives and daughters had been kidnapped, brainwashed, assimilated, and bent. There were police investigations, but no formal charges were ever brought. The girls who went there had simply opted out of their old lives. Each time I came across an article in the papers I would cut it out and keep it. I followed the progress of the farm, discarding the criticism, and searching through the text for a clue to its real spirit, its philosophy maybe, until the newspapers switched fully to issues of state, then downsized circulation, folded, and I heard nothing more about the place.

I don’t know what it was about Jackie Nixon that compelled me. Maybe it was because she was from my area, and that likened us. I felt I almost knew her. She was always depicted formidably; hard-cast, like granite. People in the region were wary even of her name, old as it was – stock of ironmongers, masons, and the bowmen of the North. In Rith it was issued like superstition from the mouths of those discussing her and her girls. ‘Jackie Nixon,’ they said. ‘She’s one of the Border Nixons. They were the ones who went out with bulldogs to meet the reivers.’ I watched for her at the market, but she never seemed to come down from the farm with the other women.

Before he died my father commented that it would take only a small twist of the dial for Jackie Nixon to become a menace to society. The more he spoke out against her, the more intrigued I became. I remember asking him across the kitchen table one morning what it was about her that he thought was so objectionable. ‘Don’t you think she’s some kind of heroine,’ I’d asked him, ‘like Graine Warrior? I mean, she lives up there completely independently. I’ve heard she doesn’t take any subsidies. The others must trust her to stay on. She must be an amazing person. I’d like to meet her.’ My father had raised his eyebrows high on his forehead. ‘I think she’s leaning on them lasses to do whatever she damn well wants, and she’s messing with their heads,’ he said, ‘like a cult bloody crackpot. And you, my girl, are to steer clear.’

I had two photographs of her. The first was from back when the project began. She was standing outside the heavy oak door of Carhullan with an arm around Vee; it was held awkwardly up across her friend’s shoulders because Veronique was much the taller of the two. The picture looked posed, agreed to, and as if the notion of what they were doing was a high-spirited challenge of some kind, like crossing the Atlantic in a coracle. The two of them were in their late twenties then and they looked full of vim and determination. The caption described them as partners and the article went on to speculate about whether or not they were lovers. They’d met at Cambridge University, it said, while completing postgraduate degrees; two like minds, two retro feminists. Before that Jackie had been in the military. Her rank was uncertain.