The Offering (12 page)

He says: ‘What’s this?’

‘A mouse,’ I say – or think I do. I swallow.

‘Yes, I can see it’s a mouse. Why is it filling the whole page?’

I shrug.

‘There’s another drawing further on of a bird. Did you draw them for any particular reason?’

‘No – I don’t know; I can’t remember.’

‘And what’s this?’

I look up again. I look away. ‘The Ark of the Covenant.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The Ark of the Covenant.’

‘The wooden chest that contained the tablets of the law? The one the Israelites carried through the wilderness?’

‘Yes,’ I say quietly.

Lucas frowns. ‘Before we go any further, why don’t you tell me a little bit more about your beliefs, Madeline – or your father’s beliefs.’

‘Where do you want me to begin?’

‘The core tenets?’

‘Well … faith in Christ’s sacrifice … sin … redemption.’

‘Standard Christianity.’

‘More or less.’

I hear his pencil scratching in the notebook. The lead is so sharp it makes a rasping sound. ‘Did you believe in the Old Testament too?’

‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘The foundation of our faith really was the life-for-a-life principle or the Mosaic law: blood sacrifice, which itself formed the basis of Christ’s own sacrifice of his human life,’ I say.

‘Blood sacrifice?’

‘Blood was sacred,’ I say. ‘It contained the life and so belonged to God.’

I am hot and my muscles are beginning to feel nauseated, a sensation I have tried to describe to various doctors. I wrap my arms around my chest in an attempt to wrest the sickness out of them; sometimes holding them tightly like this dissipates the feeling.

‘The law requires nearly everything to be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood no forgiveness takes place.’

‘Is that taken from a particular verse?’ he says. ‘It sounds like—’

‘Hebrews, chapter nine, verse twenty-two.’

‘That’s the New Testament.’

‘Yes, but the principle of a life given to buy back life runs through the whole bible; Christ’s crucifixion was a blood sacrifice. For all mankind.’

He inhales, frowning. ‘And was that what God was like to you? An Old Testament God of vengeance and retribution? Or was He a New Testament God of forgiveness and love? I know He was very real to you, obviously, because half your journal entries are addressed to Him, but how did you see Him?’

I suddenly notice I am breathing heavily. I attempt to do so less audibly. ‘Both,’ I say, ‘all of those things. At different times.’

He turns a few more pages and raises his eyebrows. ‘Where were you when you drew
this
?’ He holds up the page on which I drew the map of the farm.

‘In the hayloft,’ I say. ‘There was a small yard bordering our land, with some run-down sheds and a hayloft. I climbed up to the top of the bales.’

‘It’s incredibly detailed …’ He turns the page, then puts the journal aside. ‘You sold the farm quickly, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. Well … it was hardly a sale at all, really, more of a handover.’

He looks up. ‘Do you think your father would have sold it even if everything had gone according to plan?’

It is quite a long time before I answer. ‘No. He intended – we intended – to stay there forever.’

‘And do you think you ran away because you couldn’t accept what was happening to your mother?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say, and suddenly the sickness in my limbs is too much. ‘Can we finish here?’

But he is saying: ‘You see’ – he puts his fingers to his lips – ‘I thought you would have been anxious to stay with her, not run away. There’s something there that isn’t quite right. There’s something I’m missing. In most cases the primary cause of dissociative amnesia is some sort of trauma. In your case the psychosocial environment is massively conflictual – there must have been dozens of uncomfortable emotions and impulses you were feeling.’

‘I don’t know—’

‘Well, I know you don’t remember feeling them now, but here in the journal there are some very agitated entries. Can you remember experiencing some of those emotions?’

‘I remember being angry at my father,’ I say.

‘And for you and your father, anger is a sin,’ he says. ‘And do you think he was ever aware of your feelings towards him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And were there any sexual compulsions?’

‘No—!’

‘You were very isolated, Madeline. You didn’t even have any other children to bounce things off … The religious dynamic meant that sex was probably viewed in a very delimiting light; it would have been natural to feel uneasy about sexual matters as you reached puberty with no one to talk to.’

‘No. It was all totally – of no interest to me.’

‘Are you sure there aren’t any feelings that troubled you?’

‘Not that I can remember.’

‘A lot of forgetting there—’

‘I didn’t even know what sex was,’ I say, then wish that I hadn’t.

‘Then when did you find out?’

‘Afterwards …’ I close my eyes. ‘I
need
to finish now.’

He inhales and then gets up. ‘Bring the journal again next week. I’ll expect you to have read more. Don’t think it’s unimportant. Remember what we’re working towards here.’

‘I do,’ I say. This is one thing I have not forgotten.

I can hear the central heating and Pam snoring and the night nurses talking in the corridor. Moonlight is filling the room. I bring a chair to the window; turning on the light will only arouse suspicion and I do not want to be disturbed. On my lap lies the journal. It’s just words, I say to myself. How bad can words be?

This is the journal of my fourteenth year. It hasn’t really begun yet but I already know it will be the best year of my life. My task this year is to find You. The blazing arc of the sky tells me it is possible, the hills say it too, the fields swallowed up in the afternoon sun nod their heads. I step off into the arms of the air …

… If everything in the world was offered to me I would not exchange it for an hour here or a day, though there is no time here and no hour but now. The days are a pendulum, swinging back to where they began, repeating endlessly, never done. There is no choosing here, one thing over another. It isn’t ‘either/or’, or ‘instead of’. It is all things always, all things one …

… 
When You made the world You must have decreed there be a little more light here than anywhere else. The light here erases me. Each day I ask the light to erase me a little bit more. I have asked my mother if you can be blinded by sunlight.

I wake to light and go to sleep in it.

The trees are misted in green, the earth is trickling and rushing, the land is being born again but we are still locked in the cold. Why do You come to me, God, yet punish us too?…

… The rope spun past the numbers at our feet. I banished them to infinity. There was fire in me, I was writing a word, tracing dark letters on the light …

… Halfway down the lane I saw her and Elijah coming towards me. Elijah raced up, bending his body and groaning in happiness, then ran back to Mum, as if wanting to bring us together. I ran up to her and hugged her so hard …

… God in heaven, forgive me. Forgive me …

… – and right down in the hollows of the trees, in the roots and the cracks and the crannies; in each cleft and clump, the coloured mosses and the ribbons of fungi and bright coloured beetles and bugs – there is light. And each blade and each leaf and each tree is illuminated.

The moon is here again. It is blazing like fire along the sheets and pillows, lighting the wall behind me, filling my eyes and my ears until sleep has gone; it is as if the moon wants me to read. I get up, take the journal and sit in the chair by the window.

I have asked my mother if you can be blinded by sunlight.

Trees are alive – and they are bigger than people think.

Elijah and I made a house …

I begin to cry.

‘Keep going,’ says a voice.

I have found God.

We have cut down the big pine.

‘It’s no good,’ I say.

‘Keep going,’ says the voice. I think it is the moon.

What does it mean to be sorry?

… without blood it is impossible.

I am going to save her.

I lean my head against the wall. ‘I can’t,’ I say.

‘You can,’ says the moon, ‘and when you have, you will see me face to face.’

I shake my head. ‘It’s too difficult.’ Even breathing is difficult now, as if my chest has been laced up too tightly and cannot expand.

‘If you do this you will be free,’ says the moon.

I get up. I walk one way and then the other. I press my forehead against the wall and close my eyes. But then I go back to the chair and open the journal, and this time I do not get up.

13 June

Dear God,

This is the journal of my fourteenth year. It hasn’t really begun yet but I already know it will be the best year of my life. My task this year is to find You. The blazing arc of the sky tells me it is possible, the hills say it too, the fields swallowed up in the afternoon sun nod their heads. I step off into the arms of the air.

I don’t know how long I wanted to find You – a long, long time. Something in the light here says that I might. It’s wild, it comes from beyond the rim of the world, and the world is new and I feel a tugging in the pit of my stomach I can’t find a place for.

We have come to this place that it seems to me You have made for us. We were obedient so You remembered us. You remembered Your covenant.

If You come to me I will be ready, I will do whatever You ask. You will not have to ask twice, You will not have to remind me.

22 June

Dear God,

Elijah and I go into the fields and it is like I am seeing things for the first time. I don’t know names any more, I just see shapes and colours.

In the mornings I wash in cold water. I take my breakfast into the garden. I don’t eat indoors any more. I read my bible and think about the words till they are like pebbles on my tongue. All around me the garden rustles and sways. It watches, it tries to distract me. As I look at it, green becomes greener, the flowers glow like little lights. Who knew flowers could do that?

At night when I take off my clothes there are seeds in my socks, there are stains on my knees, my nails have soil beneath them and my hair smells of sky.

9 July

Dear God,

I know which shoots in the hedges are good to eat now. There are some that are sweet and some hot like pepper. I see when it is going to rain and what the clouds are called. My skin is changing, my eyes are becoming clearer. It feels like my heart has stopped and started again and is beating with a new rhythm. My lungs have become bigger, I can feel them stretching. My legs and arms are becoming strong. Soon there will be nothing left of who I was.

10 July

Dear God,

We go walking, Elijah and I. Often we run. The land opens out beneath us. Wherever we run, there it is, and wherever we don’t, there it is not. It is as if we are creating it, moment by moment. We stay out till it gets dark and the chill winds come.

11 July

Dear God,

There is so much light here! Sometimes I can’t see the road for it. When You made the world You must have decreed there be a little more light here than anywhere else. The light here erases me. Each day I ask the light to erase me a little bit more.

When we come in at night the light is in my face and in Elijah’s fur, you can smell it, and I am full, as if I have drunk the light up. I am full and yet I’m weightless. My arms and legs are heavy but I am as scattered and insubstantial as air, as chaff, as the water drops from the pump in the yard. I feel I have been breathed in and out by something much bigger than me. I have asked my mother if you can be blinded by sunlight.

I wake to light and go to sleep in it.

24 July

Dear God,

There is a place on the earth where I sit, at the base of the oak tree in the long field, and it feels as if I am at the centre of everything, of all time too, and I am nowhere, but somewhere better than anywhere else.

In the long field Elijah and I lie down and the grass covers us. The grass feels warm and busy. When the wind moves it I feel it is talking to me. I remember the verse about the Holy Spirit moving through the upper room like a stiff rushing breeze, giving the apostles the tongues of the spirit. If the grass is filled with Your spirit I speak its language. The grass says ‘always’, the grass says ‘now’. Each blade is the same but it is different. Each blade has an eye. I pass through the eyes and see a world in each one.

The grasses talk and they sing and they look out. And the grasses cut, God, they cut deeply.

26 July

Dear God,

I will find You, I’m sure, it’s just a matter of time. Each day I try to get beneath things. I wear almost nothing, my dungarees sometimes, that’s all. My skin is the only thing between us now. I feel the earth with my feet, with my hands and my knees. I press my cheek to the soil. I run my hands over things – the trunk of the big pine, the horseshoe above the barn door, the place where the water comes through the pump, the granite millstone with the red streak of rust. I’m printing myself here, planting myself, building up a record. I am a blind person learning to read and a deaf person beginning to hear and a lame person learning to walk. I am dumb, making words with whatever I find.

I am waking. I wake again and again.

28 July

Dear God,

In the long afternoons Elijah and I lie in the garden and I don’t know whether the house is travelling or the clouds, I don’t know whether the earth is pulsing or the palms of my hands. I look at the sky so long I think it might be the whites of my eyes and the clouds are the spaces inside me. I am gone, I am nowhere, nothing at all, a hole in the fabric of things.