The Offering (2 page)

‘No …’

‘You feel different?’

‘I don’t feel anything at all.’

‘You don’t feel connected to the person you were then.’

‘Yes.’

‘So who are you now?’

I considered this for a moment. ‘Nobody,’ I said.

He nodded, then said: ‘Madeline, with your consent I’d like to hypnotize you. Despite the delay of adequate treatment, I think rehabilitation is a real possibility.’

A moment passed. I said: ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Rehabilitation. I know the idea must seem unusual to you after all this time.’

I felt a surge, as if I had taken a leap off the edge of something and been borne up. The sensation was painful in its intensity.

I said: ‘You won’t find anything.’

‘We’ll see. The only problem is that since so much time has passed we don’t have much to go on. There are no eyewitness statements, just the police reports, which I’ve looked over. Your father and mother have passed away?’

I nodded.

He took a pencil from a pot and began to sharpen it in a machine at the side of his desk. Presently he inspected the point and, apparently satisfied, opened the notebook. Then he asked me to tell him how it began, ‘the trouble’, he called it, the year I was thirteen; the autumn, the winter, the summer and spring. He said he wanted to know how it was before things went wrong, and how they went wrong, and how it felt.

He said: ‘Nothing is too bad to be talked about, Madeline.’ I don’t know why he said that.

‘It’s a long time ago,’ I said.

I was surprised to find that Dr Lucas, in spite of the flowers, in spite of the aftershave, has a fine, steady gaze. ‘I think you can remember,’ he said.

I said: ‘I need a drink.’

He allowed me to pour myself one from the water-cooler. When I sat down again he was still waiting. I made him wait while I drank, then I crushed the plastic cup and sat there a moment looking at it.

‘I’ve been through all this a dozen times with a dozen doctors!’ I said.

‘And none of them looking in the right place,’ he said. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Madeline,’ he said softly. ‘I can help you.’

Yes, I thought – and write that paper on amnesia.

He got up. ‘Have you heard of fugue, Madeline?’ I could no longer see him without turning my head, which I was disinclined to do, unwilling to give anything he did more attention than was absolutely necessary. ‘Fugue is a loss of identity, usually coupled with flight from one’s normal environment,’ he was saying. ‘In your case you’re still running.’

I fixed my eyes on the irises. The longer I watched them, the more sure I became that they were moving slightly, though I suppose they could not have, for there was no draught.

He came back to the desk and he said: ‘Look at me.’ With some difficulty I did so. ‘Do you want to stay here the rest of your life?’

Seeing as most of my remembered life had been spent here, it was not easy to say.

‘Let’s start somewhere,’ he said. ‘Anywhere. We can layer on the rest as the mind gives way.’

I put my head in my hands and leant forwards. I was trying to think how to explain what I knew. I felt my way back, but the threads were knotted. If I pulled here, a mass bunched there; I separated one strand, only for the others to tangle. I thought it must surely have begun the day I went down to the river. But then I thought it began the day Father came home without work. Then I thought perhaps it really began the day we arrived at the farm, rumbled up the track, opened the gate and stood looking around as if we had found ourselves in some enchanted land and didn’t care to find the way out again.

All these years, there have been things I cannot remember, blanks where the colours had faded or the lines had been wiped out, and there have been others that darkened even as I watched, like photographic paper left too long in developing fluid.

But I could draw you a map, accurate to the metre, of the track and the house and the sheds and the courtyard, the sheep-dip and the garden, the pine tree and stream, the brambles, the dairy, the barn. I could tell you that the house stood facing east, that the sun rose over the dairy and set over the barn, and that from my bedroom you could see the country around for more than sixty miles, as far as the blue mountains on clear days. But you could not see the garden, though it encircled the house on three sides like a snake.

I could tell you about the moon as it rose through the branches of the pine tree, describe the feel of the stair banisters, the sound when my bedroom window opened, the precise shape of the crack in the kitchen ceiling that appeared the day my father hit his head on the beam. I could tell you that the cobbles in the courtyard were a sundial if you looked down from above, with the front door standing at number twelve. That there was a rust-coloured line running from the hole in a granite millstone that stood beside the front door, and that maybe
this
was where everything began, because the stone reminded me of an altar and the rust of blood.

The sky beyond the windows was heavy with rain. I could see the storm coming over the horse-chestnut trees, rolling faster than a person could run. I wanted to smell that air, be beneath those clouds, feel the dark spirit forms of the trees cover me.

I said: ‘It began with a book.’

‘A book?’ He picked up his pencil.

‘Yes.’

‘What sort of a book?’

‘A bible.’

‘Whose?’

‘My father’s.’

‘Go on.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘What was the bible like?’

‘Big.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Old.’

‘Yes …’

‘Inside the front cover there was a picture.’

‘What of?’

‘A garden.’

My father was a minister of God. He believed this world was a template of another, a stained-glass window in which we could see things to come, and we lived accordingly, looking for signs, living by shadows, moment by revelatory moment. In the evenings my father read from a large bible. My mother and I listened, hearing the pattern and keeping the time, sitting either side of him, for the bible was too old to handle and too heavy to hold. A red bookmark forked like a tongue hung from the centre of the bible and the edges shone dimly with greening gold-leaf. Mildew had peppered the pages, and time had yellowed and warped each one so that they resembled the waters of a lake, perpetually rippling away from itself towards the shore. The smell of the bible I remember most keenly. It was, after the cantankerous creak of the spine, its most evocative aspect: fusty, acrid, furtive; suggestive of things ravaged yet fecund with time.

I mention this book because its fate seemed to presage our own; I mention it also because in the front of it there was a picture. There were many others throughout in black and white but there was only one coloured plate and this was at the beginning. It was the best-preserved part of the book because of two greaseproof pages between which it curtained itself off as exclusively as the Most Holy. When lifted, the veils revealed a page thicker than the rest and shiny. The illustration was of a garden, and its hues were jewelled, as if in their newly created state the trees, fruits and animals were at the apogee of saturation.

It was curious in the garden. It wasn’t quite heaven and it wasn’t quite earth. Vivid fruits and exotic flowers grew there; fountains of water showered the foliage and shape-shifters lurked within it: chameleons, frogs, birds, butterflies. Globes that resembled small planets hung from the boughs of trees, and fruits and flowers glowed alike with an unnatural luminescence as if illuminated from within. The vegetation itself gave off a greenish phosphorescence that to my young mind resembled the light emanating from Heavenly Jerusalem. But in the darker colours lay something irredeemably earthy. There was a harmony in the way the scene arranged itself that suggested a theatre, each view giving on to a fainter one, and that on to a fainter one still, till the whole regressed into a ghostly vista of infinite depth like theatrical flats on a stage – yet the creepers and canopies cavorted in lusty confusion, the trees reaching sinuous fingers (frantically, ecstatically: I never could decide) towards the viewer.

Where the light did not reach, it was shady. It was shadiest of all in the bowers. In the darkest one of them all, you could make out a man and a woman. This was indeed what they were, but to begin with all you could make out was the paleness of their skin, an absence of colour in a scene that was saturated, so that at first glance they resembled phantoms, a place where the printer had forgotten to lay ink, holes in the fabric of creation – two human-shaped holes, and beyond them nothing but light. The woman’s head was bowed, the man’s lifted. Both faces were curiously devoid of emotion, yet they held animal-skin mantles around themselves and huddled together as if they were shivering, or as if they too were aware of the shocking impression their nakedness made. Their faces were blank, yet they were turning away from the viewer, writhing, as if willing him or her to replace the greaseproof page – or perhaps turning away from something else, for behind them, in the centre of the garden, was a clearing and a tall tree with a snake in its branches, and in front, hanging upon nothing at all, a sword with a gleaming blade.

The most disturbing thing of all, whether owing to sympathetic or malevolent intent I could not decide, but made more disturbing by the void of the humans’ own faces, was that the trees and flowers, animals and birds, all seemed imbued with an anthropomorphic life force – or, as I thought then, were conscious, as trees and flowers and creatures could not be. The trees (an unlikely assortment of deciduous and evergreen, together with various vines) craned their boughs over the humans as if whispering, their leaves skimmed their hair, tendrils fingered flesh. One creeper had coiled itself around the woman’s left arm in a bracelet, another ensnared her partner’s right foot. Birds cocked their heads sideways and watched avidly. One flew up, calling. A small horse-like creature pawed the air; a peacock spread his feathers in a full hand of petrol-green fright; a lion laughed, or appeared to; a dog lifted its head and howled; and a chimpanzee, whose forehead was creased as if by all-too-human anxiety, covered its mouth as if at some horror too great to be spoken.

When I was a child I thought it odd that the first thing the humans did after they sinned was to clothe themselves; after all, God knew what they looked like – and who else could they be hiding from?

‘Why did they put clothes on?’ I asked.

‘So they would remember,’ was the answer.

‘That they had sinned?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then they left the garden and wandered the earth?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did they do that?’

I was told: ‘So they wouldn’t forget.’

How to describe Lethem Park? This is not easy.

I suppose I could start by saying that Lethem Park is a maze of endless, slightly sloping corridors surrounded by acres of mature parkland. It was built to house wounded soldiers in the Second World War and an air of sickness still hangs about its grey passageways, whose sorry pot plants, automated pumps of air-freshener and Impressionist artwork cannot quite counterbalance their humming sterility. There is a pharmacy, a church, a shop, a large grassy area where we may graze if supervised, encircled by a twelve-foot electric fence; animals jump fences but humans seem to like them. I suppose without them there would be nothing to tell them who they are, what food to eat, what clothes to wear or what they should look like – and humans
like
to be told; they are obedient creatures. Of course none of us here cares much about those things so perhaps it is just as well we are fenced off. If we weren’t, what would there be to tell where us crazy people end and the rest of the world begins?

Naturally enough, the word ‘crazy’ sounds exciting, but generally life at Lethem Park is a peaceful affair. So peaceful, in fact, that observing the progress along these corridors of various residents, the quiet mutterings and shamblings, the faces bleached of colour, eyes glazed, you would be forgiven for thinking that many of us had shuffled off this mortal coil for good. If death is a sleep, then this is a place of the deathlike, of sleepwalkers and ghosts; there is the odd wail, the occasional rattling of a chain, but it is soon forgotten; we have lost the knack of remembering, you see; we have very few markers of time past and present.

Sometimes, when passing time in the lounge, standing at the end of the landing, looking down at the horse-chestnut trees, I wonder whether I have slipped out of time altogether. Each day there is just enough change to show I am alive yet not enough to differentiate that day from the next. Life descends to a level of such minutiae – the challenges of casting off; of determining whether it will be fine tomorrow, whether Alice has been cheating at
Guess Who
?, of determining whether it will be curried lamb or cottage pie, the
Daily Mirror
or Miriam’s scrapbook – that the monotony of each choice is matched only by the irrelevance of the decision.

Now, I of all people appreciate the principles behind peaceful activities – which I suppose was what the Occupational Therapy team at Lethem Park had in mind when they decreed that patients’ days be interspersed with Coffee’n’Chill, Choc’n’Chill, mid-afternoon ‘Chill’ and bedtime ‘Chill’, at which time, along with the compulsory tea, coffee or chocolate, a nurse arrives with a tray of coloured pills in plastic beakers that we take as we would a sweet or a biscuit, pretending to choose, pretending our names are not written on the side of the cups in permanent black marker – but it seems to me we are slightly missing the point of relaxation; that many of us, far from being ‘chilled’, are on the verge of apoplexy.

Once, in the Occupational Therapy room, in my first couple of years here, I was attempting to busy myself by drawing with chalk a bowl of artificial flowers, when I suddenly became convinced that I was dreaming. I got up, weeping, and ran down the corridor, looking for an exit, some thinner place where the fabric would burst if pressed hard enough, some chink through which I could tumble out of this amniotic sac and be birthed again somewhere else. That presupposes an outside, I suppose, an end; something different to this – a ‘that’; something else, something other.