The Offering (22 page)

‘What was the reason this time?’

‘The same as before: the islanders excluded him.’

‘I thought I read that he did find work?’

‘For a short time,’ I say, ‘but it didn’t last. He came home drained. My mother said he had been having a hard time with the men. One told him to do something one way, another told him something different. We were very poor.’ I listen to the rain. ‘It rained a lot too. It was the wettest year on record. It rained for two hundred and thirty-one days,’ I say. ‘And there were other things. There was the chimney.’

‘What happened to that?’

‘Lightning struck it.’ I look at him. ‘And there was the fire.’

‘Fire?’

‘In the roof. And the flood because the plumber fused the electrics.’

‘A whole catalogue of disasters.’

‘And there was no end to the stones in the ground. Nothing could be done with it. But the worst thing was the rain.’

‘Would you tell me about that?’

I inhale and breathe out very slowly. ‘It rained at the island for two hundred and thirty-one days,’ I say. ‘My father made notches on the dairy wall. The stream became a cataract, the garden was full of the sound of water. All day mist and cloud hid the mountains; when you entered a room it was like going into an underwater cave. My mother said it was like Doomsday.’

‘Your father took the opportunity to make alterations to the house,’ he says. ‘You’ve written for 10 February:

All day rain wraps us in grey blankets. The house is filled with rubble and the sharp tang of dust. They took the rotten skirting board off the walls and burnt it in the courtyard. He ripped out the cupboards around the fire with a crowbar and a sledgehammer and it echoed in the fields. When I came out he was hacking plaster from the kitchen walls and began brushing the cracks. Mum swept up. As often as she had made a clean space he dislodged more chunks. Then he ripped the sweeping brush from her and pounded the walls with it. Avalanches of grey powder fell to the ground.

I went and sat with Elijah in the kennel. Rain was coming down so fast it looked as if there were sparks coming off the cobbles.
When I came back he was repointing the walls, sweat running down his face. The trowel made a sound like broken glass. He lunged at the wall again and again. Mum was bagging rubble and the skin of her face was taut.

He looks up. ‘The pen presses so hard in one place, you’ve gone through to the next page.’

He looks at me, then begins to read the next entry.

11 February

When he came home from town today he started ripping the lino up. Mum was cooking dinner. She said: ‘Can’t it wait?’ but he said: ‘No time like the present!’ and wrenched even harder. The lino was stuck to the tiles with something sticky, it looked like tar.

They made a fire of it when the rain stopped. The yard was full of black smoke. The lino wouldn’t burn …

He goes on: ‘You’ve copied out a verse from the bible.’

When you come into the land of Ca’naan, which I am giving you as a possession, and I do put the plague of leprosy in a house of the land of your possession … they must clear out the house before the priest may come in … and they must tear out the stones in which the plague is
.

‘There’s another verse on the’ – he turns back – ‘17th.’

And if the plague has spread in the house, it is malignant leprosy in the house. It is unclean. And he must have the house pulled down with its stones and its timbers and all the clay mortar of the house and must have it carried forth outside the city to an unclean place.

He looks up. ‘Did you see the work your parents were doing as cleansing in some way?’

‘I don’t remember.’ I hate the sound of my words on his tongue.

‘Your mother is worrying you.’

Mum was sitting close to the woodstove with her eyes closed. Her face was grey and her hair was powdery and stiff. She looked like a little bird puffed up against the cold. She was holding a hot-water bottle that had gone cold. I made her tea and refilled the bottle. She said: ‘Thank you, my love.’

He raises his eyebrows. ‘And God keeps coming to you: “
When God comes everything goes away. I need Him now. I did not need Him before.
” How did you make God “come” to you, Madeline? Were you imagining Him? Was this some sort of meditation?’

The rain falls more heavily suddenly, like a handful of chippings.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘It was such a long time ago.’

‘“
It is pain and ointment
”,’ he reads, ‘“
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.
” There’s a whole literature written about just such experiences –Teresa of Ávila, for instance, pierced with the holy dart; Dame Julian of Norwich – have you read them?’

‘Julian of Norwich,’ I say. ‘“Smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love.” “Prepare yourself to wait in this darkness as long as you may.” “It is none other than a sudden stirring … leaping up to God as a spark from the fire,” “it alone destroys sin at its roots”.’

A nameless woman in a cell in the fourteenth century, the world ravaged by violence, the Black Death wreaking havoc across Europe, dissidents burnt alive. I am tired of his interrogation. I say, suddenly: ‘Where is Brendan?’

‘What?’ It is unlike Lucas to say something as undignified as ‘what’; I must have startled him.

‘Brendan.’

‘Brendan is where he has always been.’ His eyes glitter.

‘On our ward?’

‘Yes; haven’t you seen him?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I haven’t seen him for weeks.’

‘Perhaps you and he have been missing one another.’ There is the faintest suggestion of a smile on his lips.

I ask myself whether this is possible. I suppose I have not been to the lounge much myself recently. My anger subsides. I feel cold, and then profoundly tired. Does Lucas have an answer for everything, or do I keep overreacting and losing touch with reality?

‘Our time is up,’ he says. ‘Keep reading the journal.’

When I get up, my body is slow and extraordinarily heavy. He returns to his papers and I go back up the corridor to these walls, lie beneath the window and listen to the rain, dissolving the world within and without.

1 March

It is raining. It has been raining for weeks. Dad is home all the time. Mum is tired. Elijah is bored because it is too wet to go out. God comes to me nearly every day now. I need Him more and more. While God is with me I don’t think at all. I can’t think. It is impossible.

2 March

I feel strange, numb. Is numb the right word? As if I am dreaming. To begin with, after I had done it, I felt sick. The sickness hung around like a smell. Then it faded.

I have been thinking about what is inside our bodies, what makes us up, how we seem to be just the same as an animal. Where does the life go? When we die what happens to us?

3 March

There is sticky stuff on the kitchen tiles. All day while Dad plastered the hall, Mum cleaned them in the barn but it won’t come off. They can’t get rid of the stuff of this place, it can’t be chipped or washed or melted off.

Mum sat hunched over, bundled up in clothes. The cement froze as she worked. I brought her cups of tea and toast. Dad wouldn’t stop and he made her feel guilty when she did. He wouldn’t let me clean the tiles in case I broke any. I sat with Elijah in the kennel and put my face in his fur.

‘Next summer we’ll go to the beach,’ I said. ‘We didn’t go this year.
Next
year,
next
summer, when it’s nice and hot, we’ll go to the beach, and we’ll forget all of this ever happened.’

She cooked sausages and beans for dinner. He hates that sort of food. At the table I noticed her hands were still dirty. They were also covered in little cuts. Her hair was flattened and oily. He glared at her. Then he said suddenly: ‘Don’t you have a hairbrush?’ My heart beat so fast then that I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to hurt him a lot.

After I washed up Elijah and I went running in the dark. Our breath was hard, it tore at the air and our feet beat on the road. I could see the whites of Elijah’s eyes. When we came back my legs were shaking. I didn’t want to go into the house so I went into the garden. There was wind amongst the tall trees and the rhubarb leaves and the cold stink of cabbage.

God, let him find work again, if not for him for us.

4 March

Dear God,

This morning at breakfast he prayed to You to forgive us our sins and direct him to work, then went into town to look for more work. His shoulders were hunched up when he went off in the car, as if to protect himself. I suddenly saw my father as a child for the first time and I felt sick with sorrow for him. It is confusing when I stop hating him.

I began hating him all over again when he came home: he pulled down the kitchen ceiling and told Mum to get out of the way. To eat dinner we had to wipe the rubble and dust off the table. When I blew my nose tonight the tissue was black.

When we went to bed, a sea of rubble was covering the floor. Elijah stood by the front door and just looked. I had to clamber over it to give him his food. He kept licking the empty bowl when he’d finished, pushing it around the cobbles, but I couldn’t give him any more because there was no more to give.

The kitchen does not look like a room any more. It looks like a hole. I am not sure what my father is doing. He doesn’t seem to want to remake things, just pull them down.

5 March

Last night lightning struck the chimney. All day in torrential rain he tried to put it up again but the fire still wouldn’t draw and smoke was coming out of the windows.

This afternoon we went gathering wood on the mountain. Mum was very tired. We could see the island all around, the towns, the river, the bridge and the long golden beach we had passed last year, fringed with green firs. It didn’t look that far away, perhaps a few miles.

‘This summer we’ll go there,’ Mum said. ‘Would you like that?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

6 March

Today a man came to do the plumbing. I was in my room reading when the lights went off and I heard my father shout: ‘
Hold it!
’ When I went down there was water running down the hall walls behind the fuse box and he was standing on a chair, ramming towels against the ceiling. The man came running downstairs, stared, then turned around and ran up again. After a minute the water stopped but the lights didn’t come back on.

Tonight Dad was silent and sat by the woodstove, looking at his hands. The plastering in the hall is ruined, and the bathroom floor. He’d saved up to pay the plumber, and now the plumber has destroyed the electrics.

7 March

After dinner today the lights came on and he began skimming the ceiling. He made noises as if he was being hit or was hitting someone. Mum was tracing her eyebrow with her finger, over and over. Her eyebrows were raised and her eyes closed.

Suddenly he stopped making loud noises and made a small noise, like a child that has been hurt. When we turned he was standing below the lintel that ran over the woodstove, holding his head. A thin line of blood was trickling from it. Mum froze. Then she said: ‘Al!’ and ran to get a cloth. As she reached him, his knees gave way and he sat down on the milk crate. She put the cloth against his head and her hands were shaking.

I felt sick because I remembered I had wanted something bad to happen to him. Then I noticed that a crack ran from the lintel across the ceiling to the stairs in the corner. I felt cold, looking at that crack in the ceiling.

He couldn’t eat dinner. His wrinkles showed white through the dust. But he sat at the table with us and he waited till we had finished, then said: ‘Bible,’ and I fetched it. He took the bandage away to read and I saw a cut in his head, with what looked like black jam inside.

The bible reading was about Achan, how one Israelite sinned and the whole nation suffered. We must have sinned again, because we are suffering. But which one of us has sinned? I don’t think it can be me or God would not still come to me. But I am not sure.

10 March

Dear God,

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

We were sitting by the woodstove one evening that spring when we heard a roar as if a train were going over the house. My father went outside and came running back in. ‘The chimney’s on fire!’ he said. When we got to the courtyard we saw orange sparks coming out of it, and flames. ‘Fill them!’ he said, and dumped two buckets on the pile of wet sand in the corner of the courtyard. My mother stood looking at them. ‘FILL THEM!’ he shouted.

He ran and balanced a ladder against the house and began climbing it. When he got level with the roof he crossed to the wooden ladder with the metal clasps that grips onto the ridge tiles. He went along the second ladder with his whole body pressed to the roof. When he reached the chimney he lifted the bucket with both arms and tipped it into the chimney. We had been staring at him, without thinking, but suddenly we both ran to the sand-heap and began filling more buckets.

‘Bring them over!’ he yelled.

I passed one to him at the bottom of the ladder and he ran up it, the ladder bouncing with each step. When he got to the roof he lay flat against the other ladder and climbed towards the chimney. My mother looked away. I saw him straddle the chimney and empty the bucket. He shouted down to us: ‘Bring it up!’

My mother stared at him. ‘Oh Al, I can’t,’ she said.