The Offering (13 page)

If I lie still long enough my body feels part of the ground. I go away and someone else comes. I don’t know whether I am sleeping or awake and when I get up my head is as light as a dandelion clock but my stomach is full.

I have eaten grass and tasted the soil.

30 July

Dear God,

I see trees now and know I never saw a tree before, just cut-out things that were flat and lifeless. Trees are as alive as people are! I feel bad that I ever cut the pine tree with my knife. Trees are alive – and they are bigger than people think. There is a halo that surrounds them. If you wait long enough the real trees come out. I showed Mum how I can close my eyes and walk amongst them without bumping into them.

Tonight I heard her ask my father if I should have company.

4 August

Dear God,

There are days here when the wind comes scudding across the fields and sap runs dark from the silver birches and glistens like snakes and a chord chimes deep in the earth. I think then that Your breath is in the wind and the fields are rooms in Your house and when I sit You have said: ‘Pull up a chair,’ and when I lie in the grass You cover me over. There are days here that feel like years, there are whole afternoons that pass by like dreams, there are hours on end when I can think nothing at all.

You can stack these things up, you can press them together, something will come of it.

7 August

Dear God,

There is a feeling that comes over me in bed, something passes through me like a current and I feel myself humming. I knew where we were the minute we arrived. I remembered. This land is old land, it was promised to us, and now it is ours.

8 August

Dear God,

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, of one thing over another. It isn’t ‘either/or’, or ‘instead of’. It is all things always, all things one.

Memory is a strange thing. It doesn’t always retain what we think it will. For instance, I can clearly remember the crack that appeared in the kitchen ceiling the night my father knocked his head on the lintel. It spread from the lintel to the stairs in the corner. But I remember nothing about my mother’s face the last time I saw her. I can remember the smell of the mussel soup she made the evening my father found work but not how the farm looked the night I ran away.

Last night I was wandering again. ‘Wandering’ is the word I use. ‘Walking’ suggests something purposeful and I have nowhere to go, though I look about me, which suggests I am expecting to find something. I am in a lane. It is early autumn, the afternoon is warm, the land lying in a comfortable torpor beneath grey skies. The breeze carries a smell of silage. I have the impression there are great distances either side of me beyond the hedge. The light is bright for the time of day and as I continue along the lane it seems to brighten still further, the sun a white aureole in a heavy bank of cloud. The road rises. A conglomeration of trees on the brow of a hill look familiar. I quicken my pace. A track turns to the left and appears to lead upwards. I begin to run. But the road slopes away, the trees are different, the track is not the same and I must go on again.

I am in a field. It is summer and I am sunburnt and find comfort in the greenness and moisture. The field leads down to a river. It is all rather ghostly. The place has its own sun and its own stars. White flowers border the banks. They are paler than the irises that lined the river at the farm, tall and fleshy, an absence of colour in the green that surrounds them, small apertures. The flowers seem to be in mourning but I do not know for what. I slip in amongst them.

I could stay here for ever. I could be happy here at the end of all things. There is no more searching, no more arriving or departing, no more longing, no more home – the very notion of home is meaningless here, as is that of time; before and after, here, there. I wade deeper amongst the long stems. I am tempted to eat the flowers and I know that if I did they would taste like honey and wild bitter-sweetness; as I approach the bank I am tempted to lap the river and I know that if I did it would taste intimate and holy, of saliva and soul.

I take my shoes and socks off and sit on the edge of the bank. In a while I might take a swim. Or I might stay here amongst the flowers and watch the river flow past. The pleasure lies in the ability to choose: I can wade in and let the water bear me up, or stay here for all time without so much as dipping my toe.

My father said that one sin was the most insidious of all. There were many names for it: ‘uncleanness’ was one; ‘immorality’ another; ‘the root of it all’ was a third. His favourite, however, was ‘unnatural desire’, which posed the question whether it was the desire itself that was the problem or only the type – and how you could tell the difference, I never knew. An earthquake is natural though it swallows a town, a pig though she eats her own piglets, a whale when it skins a seal as it tosses it in midair. ‘The root of it all’ suggested it was precisely because the desire was natural that it was dangerous, being not only innate – and hence surely irreproachable – but insidious and hidden from view; extensive, encompassing everything, yet couched in obscurity.

The girl that discovered the root of it all is not with me any more. These are not her calves, her belly, her breasts, her skin, her eyes. Her skin is smooth and flushed, freckled with sunlight. Her legs are strong, her knees grubby, her body scentless except for the scent of childhood, subtle as the smell of grass or a dog’s fur in the sun. Her breasts are not breasts but tender swellings, her body does not have hair but the merest coat of down. It is hard to believe I was her. Perhaps that is why I don’t look at those parts of myself any more though an arrow of hair points the way; I know from experience that signposts can be misleading.

I just caught the smell of the girl then: mealy, faintly grimy. I have been remembering her smell more and more. She and I are definitely strangers; I smell of sanitization, sometimes perspiration, and once a month menstrual blood. One day I will not even smell of that. I will smell of old age, a soothing smell, faintly sickly, reminiscent of infancy, with its potions and lotions and talcum powder. Then I suppose for a brief time I will smell of death, the final smell of all.

I still look a little like the girl. I have that dreaded virginal air about me. My gait is unworldly, disgustingly modest, and there is no point in make-up here. My hair is too shiny, too unadulterated, my skin perversely smooth, unmarked by life, by lust, by pollution, by stress, by childbirth or sunlight, and my clothes are those of the retarded: thick, long-sleeved, high-necked, knee-length, ankle-length; trainers, laced shoes. I used to loathe clothes and wanted nothing more than to tear them off; now, despite their ugliness, I cannot be parted from them. It was a question of skin – or perhaps of clothes – that started it all.

I was determined that we would keep the farm, that I – single-handedly, if necessary – would make God favour us, rain down blessings, keep us from harm. I prayed almost constantly, carried my pocket bible everywhere, recited psalms, and continually examined my thoughts to see whether they befitted a servant of God. Two weeks after we moved to the farm God apparently rewarded my efforts and brought my father work the other side of the island, helping to build a lifeboat house. With the first money he managed to save my father bought another car, a classic car, and one in such bad repair that the door fell off two days after he brought us home in it, and because he could not afford to get it fixed, it sat in the courtyard.

‘What was wrong with our old car?’ my mother said. But there was never a good reason for any of the cars my father bought – and invariably sold at a loss, some time later.

With my father in work, my mother and I did not leave the farm for weeks except when we went with him to the supermarket on Friday nights. I didn’t mind – at least I didn’t think I did; I made a lookout tower upstairs in the dairy from which I could see the drive and at the first sound of wheels on the track Elijah and I ran to the bottom of the garden, Elijah bounding over the grass with his ears pricked as if it was a game. It was and it wasn’t. The challenge was to get to the stream by the time tyres crackled over the courtyard gravel. It was only ever the postman, but I waited, heart pounding, until I heard the car door slam and the engine start up again. I knew there was something wrong with me; the children on the quay had taught me that. The less people saw me, the better. One evening I heard children in the field next to our garden. I watched them play tag for hours through the hedge, not making a sound, until I was stiff and cold.

In spite of my father’s belief that people were the reason for my mother’s depressions, I think my mother did mind the lack of contact. In the mornings she gave me lessons at the kitchen table. Neither of us wanted to do schoolwork but if we gave up we both felt guilty. In the afternoon she busied herself around the house or garden. Sometimes when she was supposed to be doing something I found her looking at nothing. If she saw me she nodded, tapping something as if she had just made a decision, then returned to making curtains or weeding the herb garden or planting vegetables or making tea. Once I saw her standing at the gate at the top of the drive, just standing there, not leaning on it or shading her eyes, her face blank, her arms at her sides. When she saw me she jumped, then laughed, put her arm around me and we walked back to the house. Then there was the afternoon when I came in from the fields to find the kitchen dark and empty. I climbed the stairs to see her sitting on her bed, her palms turned upwards in her lap. Several minutes went by and she did not move. Then my father’s car pulled into the courtyard and she blinked and got up.

On one occasion she decided the two of us were going out.

‘Where?’ I said.

‘To town.’

We locked Elijah in the kennel, where he whined pitifully, and got the bikes out of the shed. I asked if we could bring him and tie his leash to my handlebars but she said it wouldn’t be safe. We set off singing as loudly as we could. We laughed and sang until we reached the top of a steep hill just outside town, then my mother’s feet started to turn the pedals more slowly until finally she gently toppled sideways into the hedge. We walked the rest of the way and she couldn’t sing any more because she was tired. Once we got into town she went straight to a café and ordered two cheeseburgers with fries and cokes.

‘What are you doing?’ I said.

‘You’ve got to live a bit, love,’ she said.

‘Can we afford it?’

‘I’ve got a secret hoard.’

I doubted this; my mother could hardly save anything from the housekeeping and there was no other source of money. The cokes trembled as she took the tray. She couldn’t pierce her can so I did it for her; she had never had fries and wondered where the vinegar was. We held hands across the table and felt like children on an adventure. Anything was possible that day. We bought a disposable camera, some carrot seeds and two cheap tennis rackets, then rode home. A long line of cars built up behind us, going up the hill out of town; my mother fell into the hedge again and we walked half the way back.

We went into town three more times and then stopped going. I wasn’t sorry; it felt dangerous, what we were doing. I hated the evasive answers at dinner when my father asked: ‘What did you do today?’ but my mother seemed to feel the loss. In the coming weeks she and I made excursions: to a wood to pick mushrooms, to fetch milk from a garage two miles away, to find a cove upstream where we picnicked. The journey was always more important to my mother than what we had to do there, and the length of it mattered more than our arrival.

God had blessed us, but I still had not found Him. I thought I had come close; all I needed was a little more intimate knowledge, a more personal proof. I searched for God in the fields and the woods but it was in the river I found Him, on a day of astonishing heat, when the light was strange and there was a void at the centre of things.

Those first months were hot, people remarked on it. In the town holidaymakers fanned themselves at pavement cafés. The beach, when we drove past it one day – broad and golden, with high sand dunes rounding to the Head – was teeming with people. My father came home from work with his arms and hands so freckled you could hardly see the white parts. In the house even opening the windows did not bring in the breeze. My mother and I walked barefoot. Elijah got up only to gulp noisily from his water bowl, then flopped back down in the shade. Before the dew had dried each morning, the sun appeared to be pulsing. Small breezes faltered and expired. The horizon was hazy, the ground scorching. Only late in the day did the heat lessen a little, shadows ticking by at the base of the pine as the sun slipped lower, warmed lips and eyes, flared sudden through apple tree boughs, lit grasses and leaves and dragonfly wings, as if concealed within each was a living coal, and veins held not sap but blood; skeins of jewel and flame. The moment the sun sank quivering into the earth was an incarnation and things toppled backwards, laid low by its might. Wherever it is now, the light passes still, gilding the river that widens and quickens away from the fields and the hills, past the tower and the bridge and the town on to the quay, to the lip of the sea, to the point called The Head, where the currents run deep, and woods cling to soil that is sand, and silt rich with rain.

I wouldn’t have gone down to the river if it hadn’t been for the heat, but neither would I have gone down to the river if they hadn’t warned me not to. I could climb trees, walk the lanes, sit in the hayloft, sleep out in the garden or upstairs in the dairy, but the river was forbidden. It wasn’t that easy to ignore, though. You could see it through the gap in the hedge at the bottom of the garden that was flanked by the sign warning trespassers – whether to stay in or keep out, I still wasn’t sure. When the sun shone, light glanced off the water; in the rain we could hear its voice.