The Offering (19 page)

‘I understand,’ I say. I am beginning to sweat.

‘But your subconscious doesn’t. Not yet.’ He looks at me: ‘Madeline, I need you to bear in mind that if things go on like this we may have to resort to pharmacologically facilitated interviews.’

‘What?’ I say.

‘Drugs will make it easier, for you and for me.’

I should have expected treachery. ‘I don’t need drugs!’ I say.

He crosses the room and settles all six foot six of him in the black leather chair, crossing his long legs, the brogues glinting malignantly. Upside down in them I can see the whole room, right down to my white face peering back; even in the brogues I look stricken.

‘Well,’ he says virtuously, ‘for the time being we’ll persevere. I sometimes liken this sort of work to felling a tree: nothing seems to be happening – then suddenly – timber! – and the whole thing comes crashing down.’

I close my eyes.

‘Where have you got to in the journal?’

‘October.’

‘You have to read more, all right?’

‘All right.’

He frowns again. ‘You ran away,’ he says. ‘You were an obedient child, you were uneasy when you were absent from the farm, and yet you ran away. What caused you to do something so uncharacteristic?’

After some time I open my eyes: ‘I was upset, I suppose.’

‘Well, obviously. But why run away? I understand the crisis with your mother – but you were so close to her, so why didn’t you want to stay? Why run away, Madeline? Why run away?’

I look away. ‘Does everything have to have a logical reason? I was upset … I don’t know … It was so long ago!’

As I speak, I sense something behind me and the sensation is so strong that for several seconds I do not turn my head.

Then he says: ‘Madeline—’ and when I do turn to look at him I jump violently. He is leaning forwards, almost touching the hem of my skirt, and his voice, while still excited, is different; fervent and low. He says, smiling gently, in a soft voice: ‘What if I told you I don’t think you’re the quiet girl everyone believes you to be?’ Then, in an even softer voice: ‘That I don’t think you’ve forgotten anything at all?’

I see his lips form the words, I hear them, but I cannot be sure whether he spoke or I only imagined it, and for a moment – the kind that happens in our worst nightmares, in which what we have been ignoring turns, by some lightning stroke, into the very apotheosis of horror; or, worse, in some essential way into ourselves – I am sure that I have always known him; he is the fear in the dark, the creature in the corner, the depthlessness of great distances, the eyes in the garden, the voice of the river, the figure in clouds, the blood on the stone. But what does he
want
from me?
What has he
always
wanted?

As if a switch has been flicked we are back. I can hear our breath and the ticking of the heating in the pipes and a door closing somewhere along the corridor and distant voices, all reassuring in their familiarity, yet at this moment nothing but sounds on a pre-recorded reel. I can see the lamp and the iPad, the desk and his chair, but they are no more than shapes on a screen – and even Lucas, for one dazzling moment, is also something I have constructed, or am reflecting: me and not me. I am not his patient, he is not my psychiatrist. We are not sitting in a lamp-lit room in an asylum for the mentally insane in the heart of the English countryside; we are antagonists locked in an age-old struggle, shadows in a show played out across the cosmos, before an invisible audience, at no particular time and in no discernible place, to prove or disprove a point of eternal doubt.

I sit back and so does the doctor, who seems to be taking his cue from me. I am winded; he blinks as if waking, collects himself, frowns and begins to shuffle papers. He does not appear to know any more than I do what just happened.

‘Keep reading the journal,’ he says brusquely. ‘That’s the most important thing for now.’

The girl leads the way, I follow. She is always near now; to slip inside her as easy as slipping into a fast-running stream. I do not have to court or to coax; sometimes it is I who ask to stop and wade back towards the bank, where I sit shivering.

‘I don’t understand,’ my mother said quietly.

She was blinking. We were sitting in the car in the supermarket car park. She was afraid and I felt sick because I could see how hard she was trying not to show it.

‘Neither do I!’ he said. ‘All I know is I’ve just been down to the building site and there isn’t any.’

My mother’s eyebrows went up and she smiled uncertainly. ‘But you put your name down …’

‘I
know
!’ He passed his hands over his hair, stared ahead for a minute, then got out and slammed the door. We followed him into the supermarket.

He took a basket and gave it to my mother, who hurried after him.

I said: ‘Can I wait here?’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Stay on that seat by the door.’

On the seats I leant my head on my hands and tried to think clearly. The people on the island didn’t like my father because he was different to them; there
was
work but he wouldn’t get it. If God wanted to help us He could. So we must have displeased Him; we must have broken the covenant, been disobedient in some way. I just didn’t know how.

When I opened my eyes two girls were staring at me. My stomach flipped over. I tried to think what I had been doing; I had been passing my hands back and forth over my head. I put my hands in my lap. One girl whispered to the other and they walked away, laughing at me.

I pulled my jacket down over my dungarees. I noticed for the first time that the cuffs ended above my trainers; I saw that my socks showed. A voice made me turn.

He was at the checkpoint, saying: ‘How can it be that much? It’s on special offer!’

‘No,’ said the cashier. ‘Not these; the ones next to them.’

My mother was smiling but the smile was fixed, as if she wasn’t actually smiling at anything in particular.

‘Well, take them off, then!’ He was red in the face. ‘I don’t want them at that price! It’s daylight robbery!’

The bags of shopping sat heavily beside our feet on the way home. The evening air came in through the window, smelling of silage and cold. Suddenly the fields and the emptiness and the road stretching out endlessly in front of us made me want to run.

His face was set like stone but his body seemed to be pulsing. My mother touched her cheek. She put out her hand to hold on to the dashboard when we hit a pothole. I was glad I was sitting next to him, between the two of them. She was like a bird, trembling. When I looked at her I felt a pulling in my stomach and I wanted to touch her. He was pulsing with rage beside me but when I looked at him the pulling in my stomach was even stronger and I didn’t know why.

When we next went into town we saw some builders. My father stopped the car. ‘Any work, boys?’ he said.

‘What was that?’ one shouted back.

‘Any work?’

‘Not that I know of,’ the man said. He had hair as black as coal and pale blue eyes. He reminded me of a wolf. He gazed at my father and then at the car.

My father said: ‘There seems to be quite a bit of work here.’

The man laughed, a light blow-away sound. ‘Ah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But we’re just about full here.’

My father laughed then. ‘There’s— six of you,’ he said, ‘and there’s a lot of blocks there, boys.’

‘So there are,’ said the man. The blue eyes barely blinked.

‘Right,’ my father said. ‘Well. Just thought I’d ask.’

‘Aye. No harm in asking,’ said the man.

My father started the car but the engine stalled. He started it and it stalled again. He started it and it stalled once more. He started it again and gunned it hard, and we drove away with a ripping sound of tyres on tarmac. When I looked back at the man he was smiling and so was another.

My father whistled through his teeth on the way home. He swerved to miss all the potholes. A car overtook us just before we turned off the main road, flashing its lights. ‘POLICE’, it said on the side. The exhaust wasn’t rattling, so I guessed it could have been about there being no seatbelt.

My father didn’t say anything but his eyes were glinting and I knew he was afraid. One of the officers got out of the car and walked towards us. When he got up close he peered at us, then looked back into the car and said to my father: ‘You know it’s illegal to drive without your tax disc on display?’

My father said he did but he was waiting to register the car and for that he needed the car to be weighed and other information to fill in the form. And he was – he’d been waiting weeks for a letter giving him an appointment to have the car weighed but it hadn’t come. The man glanced up the road and then back at him.

‘I’ll give you five days to get it sorted,’ he said. Then he turned and walked away.

My father sat staring at the steering wheel for a minute, then got out and slammed the car door shut. He called the policeman. Through the back window my mother and I saw them speaking. The policeman shook his head and flicked his fingers. He carried on walking back to his car and got out some papers. He nodded once in the direction of the town, his expression dangerous, on the edge of something, then got into his car and drove off.

My father got back into our car. He said: ‘This country is run by lunatics!’

My mother said: ‘I don’t know what he’s on about – you can’t get the car weighed before it’s taxed, and you can’t get it taxed before it’s weighed. They must know that.’

My father started up the engine again and he had the sort of stillness about him he got sometimes, as if something were gripping him. He was sitting slightly skew-whiff in the seat. I didn’t have to look at his face to tell how he was feeling – each of his hands was angry; the little gold hairs jutted out from the backs of his fingers and his knuckles were white on the wheel. My mother was looking straight ahead, the skin tight over her eyes, her eyebrows raised in tiny triangles. Her mouth and nose were pink and almost quivering. After that I didn’t look at either of them but straight ahead at the road, which twisted between hummocks of gorse and hills and fields and brown-and-cream bungalows.

When we got home she had fallen asleep and he took tea out to her. I decided to call him ‘Dad’ again.

25 October

Dear God,

It seems that everything Dad liked about this place in the beginning he hates now. The roads aren’t ‘fantastic’, they’re riddled with potholes; people don’t ‘give it to you straight’, they haven’t got any manners; this isn’t our long-lost home but a holiday gone sour. That’s what he said today: ‘It’s like a holiday gone sour.’

So what does this mean? It means You – or we – have broken the covenant. Which is it? How? And why?

Mum didn’t take her coat off today. It’s hard for her to stay awake in the cold. We didn’t do lessons because she hadn’t prepared any. She didn’t do anything but sit with a cup of tea, her hand around the handle, gazing at nothing.

I read the bible in my room, killed more crayfish in the stream and made You come to me because I was bored.

26 October

Dear God,

This evening we read about Abraham and Isaac again. Afterwards Dad prayed and said that he had faith and asked for forgiveness and to be directed to work. He said he knew that this was a test, and we would come through it. For a minute, after he had finished praying, he looked peaceful. Then Mum asked whether she could light the woodstove and his face clouded.

The first match went out. She struck another and it happened again. He stared at her; she was blinking. He stood behind her and she struck a third and her hand was shaking and the match died. Then something snapped in him and he yelled: ‘What’s the matter with you?’

She bowed her head. He snatched the matches from her, his eyes flickering, struck one and it flared first time.

‘Are you
all right
?’ he said, and it was as if he had barked at her. His eyes bored into her, and then just when I didn’t think I could bear him looking at her like that any longer he took a bottle of White Lightning into the study.

My heart was beating so hard it was making me feel faint. I didn’t go to her because I knew she didn’t want me to have seen, so I went outside. Elijah was lying in the courtyard, chewing his stick. He jumped up when he saw me and we walked to the gate. I climbed over, he slipped through, and we kept on going.

I didn’t know where we were heading. I couldn’t see because I was crying. Elijah glanced at me anxiously every now and then. He butted my hand and pressed against me, and I curled my hand along the side of his nose and held him there.

27 October

Dear God,

Today I thought about Abraham going up to the mountain with Isaac again. I know that Abraham had great faith and didn’t really have to kill Isaac, and I know that the story foreshadowed You and Christ, who really
was
sacrificed, and wasn’t saved at the last moment by a ram. And I know You are allowed to test us whenever You like. But was it right, God, to test Abraham like that?

1 November

Dear God,

He has gone into the junkyard in town with things to sell. I am sitting at the kitchen table doing sums and Mum is sitting by the grill. We have our coats on. There is not enough wood to light the woodstove and coal is too expensive. We are allowed the grill on number one but Mum has it on number two. She is supposed to be peeling apples but the apple lies half uncoiled in her lap. Her eyes have a film over them like the glassy sea in Revelation. When she notices me looking, the film slides away and she smiles, but the film comes back. She is like one of the hollow crayfish I see in the stream, but I can’t save her because I don’t know what is sucking her dry and making her empty. I can’t set her free.
You
can do that, God, but for some reason You are not. God, why are You punishing us if You come to me? Perhaps it is
not
You who comes to me. I thought it was, but now I’m not sure.