The Offering (16 page)

Others followed suit; soon the air was full of flying food, trays and one or two chairs. A glass of water and a portion of cabbage, potato and gravy landed in my lap, Mary got mince in her hair; the best moment of all was when Carol caught a tray of her own food in the face through the serving hatch. The men had by now secured Brendan’s arms and were trying to get him away from the table, but Brendan arched backwards, his legs kicking wildly. More nurses arrived. The kitchen staff ran to help out.

The upshot of it all is that there were twelve patients removed from the dining room, one of them in a straitjacket. It is not a pretty sight to see someone buckled into a straitjacket, but as Brendan was carried off I have never seen him looking happier – if you could call the manic, wide-eyed expression on his face ‘happiness’. He struggled wildly, but the moment they won his eyes became glazed. A trail of saliva hung from his mouth, which gaped in the closest thing to a smile I have ever seen on Brendan’s face; I would go so far as to say he looked almost beatific. And though he had technically lost the battle, he struck me just then, carried off between Pete and two other nurses, as a victor, as some sort of idol – a pop star crowd-surfing, some sort of war hero, a football legend; a god.

Even after our leader was captured it was some time before things quietened. I am sure the dining room has never seen the like.

We are presently rejoicing in our separate cells. I am still shaky and feel quite weak, yet I am exultant: a revolution has been born! We are buzzing, we are brimming, we are humming with life! None of us knew we had it in us – it is surprising what lurks only an inch or two beneath the surface calm. My only concern is whether Brendan will be all right. I have an urge to tap out a message of courage on the hot-water pipes in the hope that he will hear it. I also want to thank him because today, for the first time in years, I felt alive, and I feel part of this community as I have never done before – at one with every idiot, lunatic and basket case, who are now my brothers and sisters. How can that be after twenty-one years? But tonight I was not myself. In fact, I hardly know who I was.

I drift into sleep, thinking about Lucas and what he will do – because he will do something, I am sure. There hasn’t been this sort of disturbance for years, and that it should happen on Lucas’s watch, after his ‘improvements’, in spite of his new regime – indeed, because of it – will not go down well. His initiatives have failed; surely tonight was proof. The scoreboard in the lounge – how will the nurses fill it in now? They could give us black marks from here to eternity and it still wouldn’t be enough. And if everyone is in the doghouse the system collapses anyway.

No, Lucas will not like this. Reprisals will follow. The reaping will be grim. In which case I suppose I should revel in the moment and give no thought, just yet, to what we have sown.

The windows here are too high to see out of. I often think, when the sky is white and leaden as it is today, that they resemble the great sleepless eyes of classical gods, inscrutable in their vacuous watchfulness. There is something about those windows that reminds me of Lucas.

Buoyed by the events in the dining room, I have decided that I will suggest again the need for some adjustment to my regime when I go along to the Platnauer Room: namely, that the exhaustion makes it impossible to get up at 8.30 a.m., that Graded Exercise only aggravates my pain and muscle weakness; that going to bed at 9 p.m. is pointless because I don’t sleep but lie awake, jumping from sub- to semi-consciousness; that I can fill in CBT forms till I am blue in the face but the anxiety only gets worse. In order not to forget anything – because while I am with Lucas I find it hard to think – I make some brief notes so that I will present my case in the best way possible.

There is a change in the doctor today: he is cooler, there is no dazzling smile. He puts his head around the door and says: ‘Can you wait a minute?’

‘Yes,’ I say, and wait on the chair in the corridor.

I wait over five minutes, then he puts his head out again and says: ‘You can come in now.’

Inside there is no ‘Hello, Madeline,’ no ‘Good to see you, Madeline!’, no ‘How are you, Madeline?’ Instead he says: ‘Take a seat.’

Interesting. The god’s waters are ruffled. I think he looks a little sallow, a little dark beneath the eyes. Has he not been topping up his tan at the salon? Is there trouble at home with the Colgate wife? Is one of the perfect offspring sick? Or is this subtle change to do with
us
, his precious charges; are our paths more closely linked than I suspected? Can he not change a human being’s life irrevocably, and go home in his sports car to his jacuzzi bath, dinner and scotch, unscathed? Do we, on occasion, actually make him as miserable as he makes us? Are we perhaps threatening his hopes of the consummate performance, not behaving as decent lunatics should? Have there been comments, in-department asides? Have the staff expressed their reservations about his treatment of us?

It is the ideal time to press my advantage. I take a deep breath. ‘I have a few questions, Dr Lucas.’

He says: ‘Yes?’ That is all. I could actually like this Lucas; this faded shadow of the man.

‘Well,’ I say, unprepared for such humanness, ‘I’m concerned about my treatment. I don’t think it’s working, to put it bluntly – or, at least, working as – you may think; I don’t mean the hypnotherapy, I mean the other things …’

‘You think a lot, don’t you, Madeline? You like to know exactly what’s happening.’

‘I do,’ I say.

‘But we have discussed your concerns before. I hardly think they will have changed much in two weeks. I’m quite willing to listen to them but let’s do it later, shall we? Let’s get on with our work. That’s the important thing. We’ll come back to them, all right?’

I do
not
like him. I can think of nothing to say, except ‘Fine—’ rather hotly.

And then I see he is flicking through photocopies he has made of my journal, and when I see this, I forget my questions anyway. ‘When did you do that?’ I say.

‘The xeroxes? Oh, a long time ago,’ he says. ‘Now what are we to make of this?’

And he begins to read aloud.

29 August

Dear God,

I have made a discovery: I can make You come to me. You came to me in the river. You filled me with Your spirit and I was wiped out. Now I can make You come back.

I have not told anyone. I was going to tell my mother but I like it that it is a secret between You and me. Perhaps You wouldn’t come any more if other people knew.

I was afraid the first time You entered me because it was so sweet. It is pain and ointment, and while it lasts I am not here and I am no one.

I was afraid to begin with but I’m not any more. I wish when You come You would stay longer. I wish You would stay for ever. But perhaps I couldn’t live if You did. God, when You come it is so sweet! It is so sweet I think I am going to die of it.

‘Very mysterious; you’ve marked the entry with a cross.’

‘Have I?’ I look steadily at my knees.

‘Yes. Don’t you remember what that was about?’

‘No,’ I say, and I hold his gaze, then look away towards the window. ‘It’s a long time ago, you know.’ I too can be inscrutable.

He flicks through the rest. ‘The crosses become more plentiful towards the end of the journal, then almost cease altogether in the last two months. What does that indicate?’

‘Perhaps they were good days,’ I say. I put on my most helpful face, and I am pleased with myself, because this is
my
agenda and it is called: ‘Appearing to be Cooperative’.

‘They must be epiphanic from the terms you use to describe this one.’

‘Perhaps they were,’ I say. ‘Children get excited about all sorts of things.’

‘Do you have these experiences of God any more?’

‘No.’

‘Just this one year at the farm?’

‘Apparently.’

He flicks on. ‘But the crosses seem to coincide with events taking a turn for the worse. In the next entry your father loses his job again; that wouldn’t make sense, God appearing to you and then punishing you. Rather a confused deity, I think.’ He raises a dark eyebrow.

I shrug and once more hold his gaze, and presently I see I have won because he sighs loudly, taps the photocopies and says: ‘Are you reading this?’

‘Yes,’ I tell him.

‘Good. Keep it up. I’ll expect you to have read to the end of September by next Friday. Now, hop onto the couch.’

‘I have some questions I want to ask—’ I say.

‘We have only an hour, Madeline. I really don’t want to cut short our facilitated recall time. It’s by far the most important part of your recovery. Let’s address these questions next time, all right?’

‘But—’

I stare at him. He looks at me enquiringly. And just like that, he has won once again, and I must submit.

I settle myself by the window and take out the journal. It is best not to think about it. Just begin. After I have read my quota, after I have taken myself back, gone as deep as I am able, I will go into the lounge and drink a draught of institutionalized oblivion from the waters of Lethe. This place, at least, is good for something.

10 September

Dear God,

Something has happened. It doesn’t make sense. I thought You were helping us. Tonight when he came home Dad said he had no more work. It was horrible at dinner and afterwards he said Elijah had to sleep in the kennel from now on. (I put extra dog food in his supper when they weren’t looking.) The blackness is back. I’m sure of it. Dad is trying to hide it but I can tell.

I close my eyes. I try to remember that evening but can see only parts and the parts that I see I may have imagined. I need help. I need someone to intercede. I ask the girl whose journal it is to come to me now and stand in my place, to go back and relay the narrative for me. As it was – as it still is, for her, at this moment; which is the same moment I occupy, I suppose, just a different version of it. There is no one else to ask.

‘Help me,’ I say, ‘because what I am doing, I am doing for both of us.’

She is silent. I give up talking to her and go over and over the words on the page, trying to feel my way back. I don’t know how much time passes. I know I want more than anything to close the journal and sleep. But giving up is not an option. Nor is sleeping. Not any more. The way out is through.

At last, she comes. I feel a softening somewhere, a layer giving way. Fibres part, the fog thins, and finally I see clearly – too clearly – the kitchen, the woman, the man and the girl I find so hard to believe was once me, I once her.

My father came in. He said: ‘No more work.’ He filled the kettle and turned the tap off. ‘There’ll be more in a while.’ He plugged the kettle in. His eyes were very bright and very black. I knew what it meant.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘There’s ground to be cleared,’ and he went out.

My mother smiled. She said: ‘Why don’t you go and help him?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He’ll get more work.’

She looked up from wiping the chopping board. ‘I know he will, love.’ She seemed surprised.

‘Good. He always finds more work,’ I said.

She rinsed the chopping board under the tap. I looked at her closely but her face was clear and she seemed to believe what she said. ‘Go out and help him, he likes it when you offer.’

I looked carefully at her. The flesh above her eyes was tight. Her hair stuck out at odd angles. I leant against her and breathed in its smell. Then I held her arms to her sides and she laughed. ‘I can’t stir like this, and you know how your father hates lumps in his gravy!’

I took my arms away. ‘It’s not his gravy,’ I said. ‘It’s our gravy. Why is everything
his
?’

As she strained the potatoes in the sink a cloud of steam rose, whitening the window as if a giant had breathed on it. It made me nervous, thinking of a giant, like the gods that had lived in this land before, the ones my father said were dead. What if our God was not strong enough to protect us from them?

‘Mum, are you okay?’ I said.

She turned. ‘Yes, my love. Why shouldn’t I be?’ She smiled again, then went back to pouring the potato water and tripped over Elijah who was sniffing hopefully at the frying pan. She said: ‘Take him outside, will you?’

I called Elijah and we went out. It was hot but there was no sun and the sky had clouded over. We went into the garden. I could hear him before I saw him. There was the silky splice of the spade in the earth, then a gravelly chink, as if the spade had struck china; then an angry metallic bang as the stone landed in the barrow. I felt the noise in my chest. It made me feel feverish and shaky. I began picking up the stones. I didn’t want to say: ‘Shall I help?’

He pretended not to notice. After a minute he said with a smile that looked tortured: ‘Soon have this cleared.’

His face was red, his mouth a hole. When he pushed the spade into the earth he made a noise like a roar. I hated him when he was like that. I wished
I
could make noises; I wished he had to listen to
me
. So I shouted as I lobbed a stone into the barrow, and he stared at me and said: ‘What are you shouting for?’

I shrugged but my heart was beating hard. ‘You do,’ I said.

I smiled quickly but he knew I did not mean the smile. His expression darkened. He bent back over the spade.

Elijah did not get scraps at dinner that night. He sat on his back legs, watching us, one ear up, one ear down, asking questions with his eyes.

‘It won’t hurt him, he’s too fat anyway,’ my father said.

‘He’s not fat!’ I said. ‘Since when has he been fat?’

‘And I think it’s about time,’ he said loudly before I had finished speaking, ‘that he started sleeping in the kennel. That’s what it’s there for!’

I stared at him. ‘He always sleeps in the house,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with him sleeping here?’

He didn’t answer, just carried on spearing his potatoes, then took a swig of tea. Mum didn’t look up.

I took my dish to the sink because I couldn’t bear to have Elijah gazing at me any more and because I couldn’t bear to sit opposite my father, and because I was feeling hot and tight.