The Offering (26 page)

After a while we came to a hill and sat down in the clearing at the top. The valley was brighter than daylight and I could see things that were a long way away. Elijah sat panting, his tongue flapping about in his mouth like a little flag, and he looked all around, the hairs above his eyes worrying this way and that. I put my hand on his head and he swallowed and started panting again and I couldn’t look at him. We sat there, looking out at the land, and it was all right for a while but there was a tightness in my throat and soon I had to get up and start running again.

We went on, through villages where all the houses were sleeping and past fields where I could hear horses tearing off mouthfuls of grass, and the road and the fields and Elijah and I were more real than daytime and people ever had been, and so was the night. Little weeds and flowers stood up against the sky as clearly as if they had been cut out of paper and there were things too strange and too beautiful to speak of and I knew I was growing more this night than I had done all my life and was finally touching the stuff behind everything, as I’d tried to before, and the land was letting me now because it was leaving and in the morning it would be no more than a husk.

Abraham and Isaac travelled for three days; Elijah and I ran for one night. There was no desert and no mountain; the sea was close and that was the place God had shown me because the moon was shining on the water. We stopped twice more but Elijah wouldn’t sit and stood looking back the way we had come, panting, and when he stopped panting he whined. I put my hand on him but he shook free and began whining again. Then I put my head in my arms and didn’t let myself think about what I had to do, only that soon it would be over. There was a stile beside us and, in the field beyond, gorse bushes. A breeze was blowing over that field and I knew it came from the sea. We began to run over the field, but my arms were so heavy and my legs had pains in them and I had to run and walk and then run again.

There were no more roads then but I still knew where to go because the moon was pointing and God was pulling, and whether they were both the same at that moment I couldn’t be sure. We came to grassland stretching to the horizon. The path was lined with stunted trees so I knew we were close to the sea. We followed the path and it led between hedges. Beyond was a field of colours – even in moonlight you could see them – small strokes of purple and pink, blue, turquoise and green, just like in the paintings by the Dutchman, and Elijah’s hackles went up. I will never forget the smell of that field. It was thick and brown and beige and sickly, like the carcasses I saw at the sides of the road. But it was sweet too, as if death itself grew here and had just burst out of the soil before it entered something else. I saw how long our shadows had become. We followed the furrows and when I looked around at the little dashes of colour, they seemed to be writhing in the light. I don’t know what grew in that field but halfway through it I began to run. I didn’t stop till we got to the top of a hill but the smell was still with me.

This time when I got up Elijah didn’t move. I patted him but he turned his head away. He was looking at me from the corner of his eyes, the little hairs above his eyebrows twitching this way and that, as if he was embarrassed by our proximity, as if he didn’t know me and I had become someone else. Something clutched me and I pulled at his collar. ‘Please,’ I said, and began to cry, but he wouldn’t move. I got up and began running down the hill and before I had got to the bottom he was with me again, and we ran faster, we ate up the ground, straight to the sea, and didn’t look back.

The land was flatter here, the trees were bushy and twisted, there was sand in the soil. In a few minutes more I heard it. We reached the road running straight along the bottom of the grass dunes that led into the pine forest and I saw the moon bigger than ever above the dunes, peering from torn layers of light and clouds like coloured paper, and the light was so bright that it flattened me and made me breathless.

I had forgotten how difficult sand was to walk through, or perhaps it was just this sand, this night. Elijah was behind me and wouldn’t come closer and I no longer called to him. We reached the top of the dunes and saw the huge beast breathing beneath us – breaking, unbreaking; ending and beginning – and we went towards it.

I knelt on the sand and looked up at the sky. I suppose I was waiting for You to show Yourself. I was waiting for a sign. I listened but I did not hear a sound. I watched but I didn’t see a thing. I listened and watched for ever so long. And so far I hadn’t felt tired, but right then I did.

‘
Where are You?
’ I shouted. ‘
Come out!
’

And there was no answer.

A breeze picked up. Elijah felt it and stood restlessly. He was looking away, his ears close to his head, his tail between his legs, shifting from paw to paw as if they were hot, drawing up first one and then the other. I began to cry and I pulled him to me. He was trembling. I could see the whites of his eyes. I buried my face in his fur and my whole body shook. Then I parted the fur at his throat, took the knife and cut sideways.

He tottered backwards a little way and his hind legs folded. Then his front legs did too and he toppled onto his side, watching me, while the sand darkened around him. Then one eyelid drooped a little as if it was exhausted.

Above me I could see millions of stars in the gaps between clouds that were bruised and beautiful. Below me I could hear the sea’s washing and heaving, washing and heaving, as if it could never be rid of itself.

When I looked back Elijah’s mouth was slightly open as if he were savouring the air, but his eyes were glassy and did not see me. I picked him up and walked towards the sound of the sea. The waves kept pushing me back and I kept pushing forwards. I went in as deep as my shoulders, then began to swim out. When I could swim no more, I let him go.

When I got back to the beach, the first light was coming. I sat on the sand for a long time, then got up and began walking.

I am walking through pine trees, it is bright all around me. Pale mushrooms and ribbons of fungi sprout from tree trunks, the air is sweet and damp, the soil sandy beneath my shoes. Moonlight presses itself into the mossy clefts of roots, crawls into the tight whorls of night-time flowers
—

—
and right down in the hollows of the trees – in the roots and the cracks and the crannies, in each cleft and clump, in the coloured mosses and the ribbons of fungi and the bright beetles and bugs – there is light. And each blade and each leaf and each tree is illuminated.

Someone is moaning. The sound frightens me. I run deeper into the wood but a voice follows me. The voice says: ‘You’re coming back. You’re coming back to the room, Madeline, you’re regaining consciousness.’

Who is this person? How does he know my name? What room is he talking about? I don’t want to come back to a room; I have to find my way to the road that runs through the wood, the road that will take me back to the farm. I
have
to find it.

‘Madeline, can you hear me?’

I run faster, my breath catching and hurting inside.

‘Madeline—’

The person is moaning again. It is an ugly sound. I wonder where this strange person is. I race faster, hurdling fallen trees, but the wood is thinning out, the sky is getting lighter, until they are both no more than gossamer, and I do not see a road but a shadow.

‘You’re coming up, you’re waking, it is safe to wake up. On the count of three you will be back in the room.’

Grains shift before my eyes, I am moving through something heavy, heavier than the sand at my feet. I see a lamp-lit room, a figure at my side – a figure writing – a man.

He looks up: ‘You’ve done so well, Madeline. So well. What a breakthrough.’

What is he talking about? Who is he? Where am I? I do not know this place. Then I look down and begin to shake: I do not know this body.

‘Lie there as long as you need to,’ the man says. ‘We will be processing what you have uncovered, it’s all going to be dealt with. I didn’t anticipate these results – not at all! The issues that have surfaced will need considerable work, the dissociated material will need integrating.’

I sit up and topple off the couch.

‘Steady!’ the man says. ‘What are you doing?’

I stand, swaying a little, staring at him. I can hear someone breathing so laboriously it sounds as though they are gasping. My body does not feel solid but gaseous.

‘Madeline,’ he says, frowning, ‘why don’t you sit down for a moment on the couch till you come to?’

He is about to take hold of me. I cast around for something and grab a yellow pencil from a nearby pot, a pencil that is sharpened to the finest of points.

‘Madeline—’

He is coming for me, he is coming towards me. I must be ready. It is me or him.

I fall on him and he topples backwards, his eyes wide, his mouth open, holding his neck. There is blood on my hands and my face and my chest, and then blood on the desk and the wall and the floor, blood spurting in a wide arc, high above my head; it is so unexpected and so spectacular that I stumble away from it, staring. I do not notice the body in spasm below me, the thrashing legs, the scrabbling feet. When I look down he has stopped moving.

I look around. I must try to get out. I must try to find my way back to the wood. I run to the door and into a corridor. A person in overalls is coming along it. When they see me they drop the folder they were carrying and scream. There is shouting; I turn and begin to run the other way, but before I have got to the corner someone is pulling me backwards, wrestling my arms behind my back, pressing me onto the floor. I feel a sharp scratch and my limbs relax.

The last thing I recall is travelling down a corridor that seems to go on for ever. I have to get back to the wood! I have to find the road! I must get home. But before I can call to mind why I must do any of this, my eyes close.

The girl wakes in a wood with earth damp beneath her cheek. There is sand in the earth and birds in the black boughs of trees. The sound falls from the trees and scatters itself amongst bushes. The sun is rising over the sea, winking and spinning itself out into skeins of light. It is going to be a hot day. At the edge of the trees there is a road that winds between pine trees. She gets up and begins walking.

I said that Block ‘H’ was the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns; I hope to be the exception to that, but cannot be sure. Time will tell. In any case, I can now tell you for certain that the end of the long corridor, instead of a singularity, instead of an end-point, is another corridor just like it and rooms just like others; I should have known it. There is one difference, though: the rooms here are padded, have barred windows and electronic locks. They are called Quiet Rooms. They are all right, I suppose, for a while.

I had another meeting with the new doctor today. Dr Hudson has taken over my care in the light of Dr Lucas’s absence. She has a plan. If I follow it to the letter she says she anticipates results. Hudson’s plan is called ECT – Electroconvulsive Therapy to be precise. It will help me, she says. Initially I had doubts. I remembered silly things I had read about ECT causing permanent brain damage, articles that said the overenthusiastic use of ECT had the same effect as a full-blown head injury. But these accounts are obviously unfounded; Dr Hudson says Electroconvulsive Therapy is an unfairly maligned, poorly understood and remarkably effective treatment for many intractable mental conditions.

‘Intractable meaning “incurable”?’ I said.

‘Not “incurable”; “challenging”,’ she said. ‘It’s all about effort in here, Madeline, just like anywhere else. If you want things to change you’ve got to try new things out.’

I was not that convinced, but I respect Hudson; she is the only one who dares to talk to me in person any more; the others do so by intercom, CCTV or through the grated window.

I did say, however: ‘I tried to work with Dr Lucas.’

For a moment she looked at me with alarm. Then she blinked twice and said: ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about Dr Lucas any more, Madeline.’

So now I do not.

The weather broke earlier this evening. I got up and stood by the window and watched the rain stand still in the forked lightning, and as I watched I could not help thinking about my new therapy. I do not know what ECT will entail, but at the moment I cannot be apprehensive. I cannot explain the peace I feel; I wonder whether Brendan also found that.

Here in the Quiet Room the events of my day are the changing hues of sunlight, the appearance of birds, the sensations on my skin. My sleep has become lighter, like waking; my waking deeper, like sleep; and, for some inexplicable reason, my body has been returned to me; its plethora of symptoms have miraculously subsided, and we are one. As with all good things, of course, my new health has come too late; now that I could easily walk to the lounge, now that I could be around my fellow patients without feeling in the slightest bit nauseous, I am not permitted to; now that I could fulfil Lucas’s exercise regime to the letter, he is dead. Not that I miss any of these things very much.

The only thing that does sadden me is that I no longer see Margaret. She doesn’t work here but came to visit a few days ago. I asked her to come in and sit with me but she just stood at the grate.

She said: ‘I’m sorry, Madeline, not without someone here, I can’t.’ She looked frightened.

I said: ‘I’m still the same person, Margaret.’

She smiled quickly and said: ‘Of course you are.’

Then she told me she was looking after my things for me and that she thought it wouldn’t be long before I could come back to the ward. She also said that she had heard good things about ECT and I should try to go along with Dr Hudson.

I said: ‘I am sorry, Margaret,’ and I meant it.

Her eyes filled then and it was a while before she spoke. Finally she said: ‘You haven’t hurt me, Madeline, you hurt yourself.’