The Offering (6 page)

‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said to Elijah, and stroked his head through the bars of the cage we had to leave him in, in a row of other cages, other dogs. He pressed against the bars, whimpering, his eyes dark, his tail tucked between his legs. It was very hard walking away from him.

We sat below the waterline where there were no windows, thinking this preferable to watching the horizon yo-yo, but both my parents were sick. My father was reduced to an ashen, mild-mannered person I had never encountered before nor since, swaying along the aisle, collapsing watery-legged into his seat. My mother did not move at all, only vomited into a plastic bag on her lap, then tilted her head back.

I wasn’t sick. I rode the waves of bile. It was a second-by-second thing, requiring herculean feats of concentration. This is God’s plan, I said to myself; we are doing ‘just so’; the devil was merely trying to dishearten us by sending winds and high water. Though I had to admit that the substance beyond the ship’s walls – which was making it splinter and creak and shudder and groan, which raised it higher than I thought possible, then removed everything beneath it so that it plummeted back into the bowels of the earth and grated sickeningly on what must surely be the sea bottom – did not feel much like water; and, if it was, God was not making a path for us to pass through but setting it in turmoil.

Towards the end even my faith wavered. I had to make a superhuman effort to open my mouth but at one point I asked my mother: ‘Are we going to drown?’

My father, unable to move either, said thickly: ‘No.’

My mother could not speak at all but she reached out her hand – hot, heavy and damp – and dropped it onto mine. Then she closed her eyes again and the night went on groaning and flickering and grinding. Three hours later we were spewed onto the foreign shore, though whether because of misdemeanour or divine plan I was no longer sure.

We came by darkness so we did not see how the dunes gave way to pines, how the pines gave way to gorse, the gorse to fields, and houses appeared. We drove through the night, my mother, my father and I, an eternal trinity – one all-powerful, one all-loving, one all-seeing, not much more than a ghost – while other ghosts trailed white fingers over the bonnet and our faces and the backs of our seats. We arrived at the bungalow we were to rent and the car came to a gravelly stop between pine trees swaying in the night sky, and we smelt real air for the first time, as if we had just been born, reeking of fields and night-time and the wild. We explored rooms fusty with orange and brown carpets, Elijah’s tail stiff with excitement – the kitchen with its white Formica and its silky smell of frying fat, the musty, modern hall, the anodyne sitting room and dining room – and we slept shuttered for the first time in complete darkness, with no streetlight, only that of the moon, heads of grass bending this way and that beyond the window, with no sounds but owls in a wood and a mysterious bang every now and then that I later learnt was a crow-scarer.

And when I woke the next morning and stood on the stoep and looked out at the rough grass, the ragged pines, the road shooting past – when I ran up the hill at the back and stood amongst the heads of grass and watched the sun being born – I was born along with it, the past as small as an image reflected in an eye.

I did not know where we had come from; I did not know where we had landed. I would not have known, if someone had asked me, how to get back.

I remember the strangeness of our first weeks on the island but I don’t know how to explain it or whether that strangeness accounted for what happened later on. The bungalow was part of it. It had peeling white window frames, a mustard bathroom suite, a gas stove in the kitchen, and in the hall a plastic runner yellow with age. For the months that we lived there, our cupboards and tables and chairs were crowded into the wide sunny front room like miscellanea in a junk shop, and these things reminded us, along with the locked room at the end of the corridor, that the bungalow did not belong to us nor we to it. But we read about Abraham, about how he was obedient, about the covenant God made with him:

‘Hear me, Asa and all Judah and Benjamin! The Lord is with you when you are with him, and if you seek him he will let Himself be found by you; but if you abandon him, he will abandon you.’ Then Moses came and related to the people all the words of the true God, and all the judicial decisions and all the people answered with one voice and said: ‘All the words that the true God has spoken we are willing to do.’ So Moses took the blood and sprinkled it upon the people and said: ‘Here is the blood of the covenant that the true God has concluded with you as respects all these words.’

‘The covenant applies to us too,’ my father said. ‘If we are obedient we will be blessed. But we have to give God our best.’

I could see the sense of that, but wondered how we would know God was blessing us. I supposed it would be when my father found work and we found a house.

My father said: ‘We were chosen to come here, the need is great.’

But that I was not so sure of – because hadn’t we also chosen? Hadn’t our need been great?

The island may have been virgin territory as far as
our
god was concerned but others had got there before Him: the bungalow was full of idols. There was an etiolated plaster Virgin, two wooden crucifixes and a picture of a bedraggled and remarkably tranquil Christ, looking heavenwards, opening his tunic with a delicately curved finger to reveal, in the midst of his deathly-white chest, a bleeding heart ringed with thorns. We discovered the last on the second evening when we turned on the lights in the sitting room. The overhead bulb was dim but in the corner the heart glowed blood red. Coupled with the pathetic, almost coquettish face above, it was both sickly and horrifying. Even my father seemed shocked. Then he laughed, went to the picture, turned it over and pulled out the plug. The heart glowed for a second, then faded; the picture was just a picture again. In relief my mother laughed at herself, but her face was flushed.

There were hundreds of gods in this place, my father said; the island was full of them, gods of the streams and the hills and the trees. We took the bleeding Christ and the other idols to a tin shed that stood at the side of the bungalow beneath the pine trees. He caught my eye as we closed the door on Him and I felt obscurely guilty, as if we were shutting a child in a room and turning out the light.

The first time we went into the town we left Elijah in the kitchen. It was unusual for us to leave him behind and perhaps what happened on that occasion was because we should not have done. It was a breezy day in early April, the country rolling and green and spattered with gorse. There were bungalows along the road, some new houses and one or two old cottages.

‘People don’t have gardens here, they have fields,’ I said. It was true; there were small, mown fields attached to the houses with fences around them, as if there was too much space to be accounted for.

‘Plenty of land, you see,’ my father said.

Halfway there my father stopped to get petrol and when he went to pay he took the small pocket bible we kept in the glove compartment; we saw him open it while he was talking to the garage attendant. The attendant shook his head slightly and turned away as my father spoke. We saw the affable nod my father gave, his hand raised in farewell. He swung into the car as if he had just found a winning lottery ticket.

‘Petrol in!’ he said. ‘On we go.’ Not long after that he began to sing, and we joined him, honking the horn at the chorus.

After another ten minutes the town appeared, shimmering on the far side of an estuary, two steeples pricking sun-clotted clouds. On closer inspection it turned out to be brown and shabby, and with an uncomfortable familiarity like the smell of boiled beef and cabbage in dark passageways. It was a peculiar combination; seafront and wild west, the buildings square, blockish, painted peach, brown, turquoise, dark green, pale blue, purple, burnt orange; the signs on them read McCalls’s Medicine Hall, Centenary Stores, Campbell’s Trading, Joe’s Whisky Bar. I had never seen such ugly buildings nor such odd ones. In the window of a tobacconist’s a raffle was advertised; in the newsagent’s electrical goods were displayed; at a greengrocer’s a cage of chickens squawked just inside the door. Was this what living near the sea did, I wondered: make everything strange and wild and unplaceable?

My father bought a parking ticket from the newsagent’s and we parked on the quay. I had never been to a town on a quay, nor seen a railway on one either, and I had certainly never seen all three together. Beneath iron sleepers the sea breathed in and out. Shielding my eyes with my hand I followed the land as far as I could. At the vanishing point, a finger of rock beckoned. It looked like the heel of a shoe, but my father said it was called the Head. I could just about make out a dark forest there.

My father said he was going to get some money from the bank.

‘Why don’t you start here?’ He gestured at the quay and thrust the pocket bible at my mother, who blinked, then said: ‘Right.’

She and I stood on the quay. A woman with a bag walked by and my mother said: ‘Good morning. Could I share a verse with you from the bible? It has such an inspiring message.’

The woman didn’t stop walking, though she did turn her head. My mother looked around. We approached a man with a stick who waved us away with a scowl. ‘Go ’way with ya!’ he said, and spat on the ground. He seemed to think we were someone else.

My mother laughed. She said: ‘Let’s try up here.’

We walked towards the boats. Their masts towered into louring clouds that rolled away over the glittering water. We walked to the edge of the quay and my mother held onto my jumper, though I asked her not to. The rusty boats stank, their bellies rising and falling with the lazy swell. The hulls were deep throated and hollow, the boards sodden, teeming with lobster pots, buckets and slime-streaked slabs. On board men were killing eels. Their hands were covered in blood and appeared swollen. I watched the bulging fingers straighten the eels, saw the flash of the knife, the skirmish, then the sudden stillness. Heads went below, guts to the side. The split eels, suddenly motionless, showed pink as babies’ gums. There was a perfection to the movement; one eel replaced another, which was itself split in two, different yet the same; the board cleared, the board bloody; the eel one, the eel two. When the men and the eels didn’t change positions at all, the action seemed to replay itself. When they did, when an eel was awkward or the men raised their hands higher, the action seemed infinite.

I felt dazed, my thoughts heavy and slow. I turned to my mother – and that is when I saw the group of children watching from the quayside. They were my own age, twelve perhaps or thirteen, three girls and a boy. One of the girls had pale skin and black hair, and she was watching me, not my mother nor the fishermen. I asked my mother again, in a low voice, not to hold onto my jumper, but she wasn’t listening. She hailed one of the fishermen.

‘Hello! Could we share a verse with you from the bible?’ The man flicked a glance at us but didn’t answer. My mother repeated her question. She looked round to see if there was an easier way to communicate and decided there was not. ‘Did you know,’ she called, ‘that Jesus died for you?’

From the corner of my eye I could see the girl with black hair whispering to another. They weren’t smiling but there was a light in their faces, an avidity, as if they were pleased with themselves. As if they had found something good.

The fisherman said: ‘Sorry, lady.’

My mother called back: ‘Couldn’t I share this passage with you?’ She beamed as she held the bible aloft. One of the men shook his head very slightly. ‘Well, have a good day,’ she called. They didn’t reply.

As we walked away from the boats she was flushed and still smiling, though the smile was a little fixed. She said: ‘Would you like an ice cream?’

I glanced at the children. ‘Won’t he mind?’ I said, meaning my father.

‘Oh, don’t worry about him,’ she said. Her eyes were very bright. It was unlike her.

We passed right by the children and went into a peppermint-green building with darker green squares on the end of it called Sheila’s.

My mother seemed happier. She said: ‘What do you fancy, my love?’ She looked at me. ‘Madeline?’

The door had tinkled. A surge of blood passed through me, first hot, then cold. The children had followed us. They were sitting at a table by the door.

I stared hard at the ice creams. ‘Vanilla,’ I said.

My mother said: ‘Don’t you want something else?’

‘No.’

She looked at me in surprise, as if I had hurt her.

‘Thank you,’ I said in a low voice.

She said: ‘One strawberry and one vanilla, please.’

In the reflection of the ice-cream cabinet I could see the girl with black hair, her gaze fixed on me. Her eyes were blue and her skin was pale. She was pretty, and she was smiling as if I was amusing or a novelty of some kind. My chest felt tight.

My mother handed the cornet to me and I immediately became aware of the way I held it. ‘Thank you’ suddenly seemed a foolish thing to say. I tried to think of some other word but suddenly all words seemed foolish. My mother was about to sit at a table when I said: ‘Let’s go outside.’

I crossed the road without waiting for her and stood by the car. I felt sick, as if I had run a long way. When she reached me my mother said: ‘Don’t ever cross the road without waiting for me again.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I still could not bring myself to begin the ice cream.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

We got back into the car. I turned and looked out of the window. The children had come out of the shop. They didn’t have ice creams. They had gone in just to watch me, as if I was some weird animal. When they looked around for me, I ducked down in the back seat. I wished Elijah was there. No one ever laughed at him.

I listened to my mother eat her ice cream. Then she turned around and said: ‘Give it to me,’ and I handed her mine.