The Offering (24 page)

‘I am here,’ I tell her. ‘I am waiting.’

For the last week I have left my bed little. Margaret has been trying to tempt me with board and card games. She has taken to bringing in desserts on days when Carol is not cooking but I cannot eat them. So she has sat with me, knitting something small and white, looking up every now and then.

Unable to wake properly, I find myself wondering whether days are ending or beginning. My bed becomes a tiny raft, a woven casket. There is no part of it that I have not explored. I see the sun change position in the sky and the shadows slither sideways on the wall, then slip back underwater. It is surprising how often my thoughts come back to the same thing: that very soon now I will be home.

The girl and I wander. Sometimes we see somewhere we recognize. The girl and I go running. Wind chafes our ears, sun burns our cheeks, we run so fast the air hurts us inside. We go into the fields. Elijah is there. His coat is shining and he looks as he used to. I am so happy to see him. The sky is mottled and pearly, like a shoal of fish, the hour always noon. The fields lead down to a river. The girl and I stand on its banks. She seems to be asking me something but I do not know what. Soon, she says. Then the light swallows her up.

When I leave the girl I don’t know where I am or sometimes how long I have been away; today I asked Margaret whether I was thirty-two or thirty-three; yesterday I stood in the doorway of my room, wondering whether I had just been within or without; the day before that I do not remember at all, though apparently in the night I was groaning again.

‘It’s to be expected,’ Lucas tells me. ‘The present gets hazy as the past resurfaces.’

Margaret has interceded for me; for the moment Lucas has permitted me to stop the exercises. Now, most days, I ride up and down on waves of sleep. This afternoon I found myself walking down to the river. The fields were lost, washed pale in the evening sun, its light so low that the river was one long swathe of white, the swallows golden arrows in the air. The irises were smaller than I remembered, or perhaps I was bigger. They were happy to see me and I them. I slipped in where they grew thickest. The water and I are in love. We want only each other. I float, I dissolve, I am absolved, we become one. From the corner of my eye I think I see other eyes watching. But nothing can trouble me.

I see my mother standing on the bank. I call to her and she wades into the water. She smiles and comes towards me, her breaststroke clumsy, her head and shoulders juddering with the effort to keep afloat. Periodically her chin dips below the water, then by a process of great splashings she manages to raise herself an inch.

I swim under her and buoy her up. I try to show her how she can breathe easily and let the water bear her up, how she can bob for hours with hardly any movement at all – things I have discovered here in my sleep. Then I become aware of the eyes a second time, gliding in and out of the irises, and I wish the creature or person would come closer; come closer, or disappear altogether.

‘Let’s get out,’ I say, because I suddenly feel that the gaze of the thing is unclean.

She tries to swim with me but stays where she is. She clutches at me and her weight drags me under. She lets go and I come up choking, my nose burning. We try again, me alongside, half pulling, half pushing with one arm, but her body is too heavy and begins to sink. Her limbs thrash faster, she is spluttering.

She is drawing away from me – I think for a moment she wants to – and then I see that the current is taking her. I hold on to her and try to reach the bank but I am not strong enough. The eyes that were watching are larger now, the pupils dilated. Their avidity is horrifying; they seem to be feeding off our plight.

Things are happening fast now. The river is widening, there are woods either side of us, I see sand dunes. The sky clouds over and it begins to patter with rain.

I call: ‘
Hold on to me!
’

I try to swim towards the bank, but her arms are choking me, her body is heavy – astonishingly heavy, as if the world were condensed into her shape. I go under, I resurface. We try again but I am not strong enough. The current is getting faster, the bank retreating. I try to show her again that if she panics all is lost; I show her how to let the water bear her up, but it is no use, and the harder she struggles, the faster she sinks.

‘It’s just a dream,’ Margaret says, when I wake weeping.

Evening sun, the gentle type that comes only in very early summer, slants through the window. The rain hung on so long, right through April and half of May, but now suddenly everything is different; we have had four days of brilliant sunshine and already I cannot remember how my room feels in a downpour.

‘You shouldn’t touch me,’ I say.

‘I know,’ she says, but doesn’t take her hand away.

After a few minutes she goes back to her chair and takes up her knitting again.

‘Margaret,’ I say. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Fire away.’

‘It’s a strange question.’

‘All right,’ she says, but I still don’t ask her for quite a long time.

‘Could you forgive someone for killing you if it was unintentional?’ I say.

Her needles stop moving. ‘What sort of question is that?’

I smile shakily. ‘I told you it was strange.’

She puts the end of wool in her mouth to moisten it, then threads it through the needle, takes up one of the knitted pieces of clothing that are lying on her lap and places it edge to edge with another.

‘Madeline, you’re not meant to be thinking about this sort of stuff, you’re supposed to be taking it easy.’ She continues to line up the edges, then begins to sew the pieces together with loose yet perfectly measured stitches. She is frowning hard, as if I have greatly displeased her, but after a minute she says: ‘Does this person know they killed me?’

I feel a surge of affection for her. ‘Yes,’ I say.

She stitches right the way down one side of one edge and realigns the next, and I watch the white thread loop and reappear as gracefully, as easily, as water beneath her hand.

‘Then yes,’ she says. ‘I’d forgive them.’

There is a great heat in the room, between us and around us. It is difficult to think for the force of it.

‘What if that person was your child?’ I say, and my voice is breathy and barely there. She is very still for a second, then begins stitching again.

‘Then it wouldn’t matter whether they had meant to kill me or not; I’d forgive them anyway.’

I stare at her, then look away and close my eyes because I don’t want to cry again. I hear her break the wool thread with her teeth and say: ‘There!’ She holds up the joined pieces and I see it is a small cardigan. It must be for someone’s baby because Margaret doesn’t have children of her own.

‘It’s lovely,’ I say.

She looks at me, then lowers the knitting. She sighs as she gazes at me. ‘You and your questions,’ she says.

I nod – but at this moment I am happier than I have been for a long time. She has said she would forgive me; if it was unintentional, she would forgive me.

‘We didn’t mean it, did we?’ I say to the girl, as I slip back into sleep.

She shakes her head. But then she turns away and for the rest of the evening I cannot make her look at me.

‘And again your father found work?’

‘Yes, a man came to the farm and said he needed work done on his farm. He didn’t live far from us. He wanted a cowshed built, there were months of work, my father said. After all that time when my father went looking for work, it was right on our doorstep.’

‘And things improved again?’

‘Yes. Almost immediately. That night, I thought my mother would get better. She sat by the fire and stroked my hair and seemed like herself again. That night, for the first time I slept all the way through. After that she stopped taking the new tablets.’

Dr Lucas puts down his pencil. ‘Madeline, the material we’ve uncovered presents us with a bit of a problem. The final fugue is becoming more and more out of character: you consistently chose to act, not to run away from the situation, this time to the detriment of your health. For example,’ he picks up the journal: ‘“
I have bad dreams. I have seen yellow eyes. I have seen an animal in the middle of the night get up from the chair and lean over my bed. I do not know what he wants.
”

‘That sounds pretty disturbing. Do you remember this dream?’

‘No.’

‘Do you still have it?’

‘No.’

‘And this, for example: “
I am waiting. I wait in the fields, in the house and in the garden. I wait in the lanes and in the fields. Hear me. Save us again.
” You believed your father finding work was a result of God hearing your prayer?’

‘Yes.’

‘You still believe it?’

‘Oh, no; I did then.’

‘And how long did God’s “help” last?’

‘Till early summer, the beginning of June.’

‘How can you be so exact?’

I flush.

‘Wasn’t it only a week or two later that you found your mother?’

‘I need to lie down,’ I say.

And he lets me.

It is easy to offer a life up but not so easy to return it. The first man lost life for humankind, and the second gave it back, though at the last moment he famously asked: ‘Lord, Lord, why have you forsaken me?’ A sign, if one was needed, that not all offerings are accepted, not all bargains honoured.

We lost our bargain with God one day in June. Each day that summer the sky was clear in the morning but by afternoon great masses of sulphurous cloud had built up and the sun was no more than a brassy haze. I began to think the earth held some sort of badness that rose with the heat and clouded the sky like steam on a window. There wasn’t a breath of air. Flies buzzed, died and piled up at the windows.

My father worked at Skinner’s farm every day. He came home with pickles from Mrs Skinner or wine from Mr Skinner and tales of his charismatic employer. At dinner my parents began to talk about making a tearoom in the dairy again, about renting the barns as holiday cottages. My mother wallpapered and painted while I sat and watched or pasted sheets for her. It was good to smell the paint and glue, to see the rooms transformed after so many months of darkness into airy chambers.

But I felt leaden, weighed down with something or other. My nose bled every day that summer and I got tired of leaning over the basin to let it drip, so I began swallowing the warm, meaty clots. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty, I wasn’t sleeping much either. From the vantage point of the earth, a person poised on the edge of a black hole would appear to remain there indefinitely, whereas from the vantage point of the black hole, he would be swallowed up instantly. Apparently at some level, time, as we are accustomed to think of it, does not exist and we live in an eternal present; of all the days of our year at the farm, the afternoon we lost God is the clearest, as if it were happening still.

There was a pain at the base of my stomach that morning that made me sweat. My mother gave me indigestion tablets but they didn’t work. She was going through old rolls of wallpaper upstairs, seeing which lengths would do for the end bedroom. I was drinking water at the kitchen sink, trying to take away the pink chalky taste of Gaviscon. Beyond the window I could see cows lying down in the field. I watched them tumble heavily to their knees, then fold their legs up. I watched their mouths moving slowly in circles. My hands shook, my eyes were muzzy and my legs weighted down as if the blood had coagulated there. I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I got up and went into the garden.

I went down through the grass to the apple trees. I could feel the garden’s eyes. I knelt, then lay in the grass. I curled around the pain and tried to comfort it; when that failed I tried to smother it, but I couldn’t. I began to move my legs back and forth. The pain grew greater, the sun more piercing, the kaleidoscope of light and shade above me more dazzling. Sweat slipped down my spine. The pain became so intense that I began to pray. Then I put my hand between my legs, and I made God come to me.

The pain spoke this tongue; it grew greater for a minute, then began to subside. I curled up more tightly, blocking out thought and sound and sight. The pleasure mounted, suddenly flowed over – and for a moment the pain went away and I was nowhere.

‘Madeline—’ She was standing over me.

I scrambled to my feet, my face burning. I thought I would vomit and I didn’t know why. Her expression frightened me. She was afraid – of me or what I had done, I didn’t know. But as suddenly as the horror appeared on my mother’s face, it vanished.

She said: ‘My love – you’ve got your period.’

I looked down. My hands were bloody. My heart beat hard and infinitely slowly. I stared at my hands as if they did not belong to me.

‘I didn’t know,’ I said.

I don’t know why I said it or what I referred to. I could hear crickets in the grass. I looked up. I felt as if I were pleading with her, racing towards her, trying to reach her before something happened – I didn’t know what, or even whether it already had; I felt I must reach her but I was too late.

‘Let’s get you cleaned up,’ she said, and we walked back to the house. I don’t remember thinking anything but it was as if I was falling, as if the world I knew was rending a little more with each step.

She was very kind. She sat me on the side of the bath. She took my dirty clothes, fetched clean ones, painkillers. But she did not touch me and her smile was firm. There was a stillness between us; it filled the little bathroom to bursting. Each movement was painful. I kept trying to get a glance at her face but she wouldn’t look back at me. She had never avoided my gaze before; and she had never
tried
to be kind to me.

‘It’s all right, isn’t it?’ I said. I sounded slightly insane. ‘Everything seems different!’

‘Of course it’s all right.’

She smiled again, but I began to cry and threw my arms around her waist. ‘I was going to tell you!’ I said. I buried my face in her stomach. ‘I can make God come to me.’

She felt stiff and cold. She took my arms from her waist and smiled the new smile, level and firm. She said nothing about God, only: ‘Let’s get you a hot-water bottle. It helps the aching.’