Joe Treasure: The Book of Air

Oh, Caroline, you found out earlier than most.

I was on my knees, but still singing, when the other one came down with a shotgun, turning on our oak staircase – Abigail, hips swaying in her long skirt. And sick as I was, with the barrel pointing at my chest, I felt a shot of adrenalin, God help me – life prodding me in the heart. In the groin. It’s not over yet. You’re not sodding dead yet .

But what about Abigail? Why didn’t she pull the trigger? I’ve asked myself that. Or kick me out, at least? She could see I’d caught it. She would have recognised the signs. Why bring sickness into the house and tuck it up in bed?

They must have found Simon where I’d left him, curled up on the back seat of the Mercedes fast asleep. I know he’s all right because I hear Abigail talking to him. Come down with me, Simon, and I’ll boil you an egg . Her voice drifts up the back stairs from the lower corridor. Take this jug to Maud and help her fetch the water . She’s calm with him and kind and doesn’t ask him questions. You needn’t be scared of the chickens, Simon. They’ll lay you another egg tomorrow .

See, Caroline, she’s talking about the future. Strange word. We used to know what it meant, then suddenly we had no use for it. It’s too late for us, Caro. But if Si remains untouched, I suppose there might be one after all.

I’ve been to the Hall today to cook and clean, to fetch in water, keep the wood pile high, feed the geese. I went on as if everything was the same but nothing was the same. Roland came to find me in the kitchen while I was using the grinder – a machine from the endtime with a screw that holds it to the edge of the table and another that grinds the meat when you turn the handle, sending it out in little worms of lean and fat and gristle.

‘That’s a clever thing,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they were clever who made it.’

‘And when it breaks, what will you use then?’

‘Why should it break?’

‘Not this year or next. Maybe not in your lifetime. But when.’

‘I suppose whoever comes after will have to cut their meat small with a knife.’

‘And when all the knives have been sharpened away to nothing, what then?’

I shrugged. I don’t see the point in thinking about what might happen or not happen that can’t be helped.

‘We dig with metal spades, don’t we Agnes?’

‘Us that have them.’

‘And with wooden ones if not. So which are better?’

I told him I didn’t have time for riddles.

‘The metal ones, of course,’ he said. ‘But do we know how to make them?’

I said if he was just going to talk nonsense he should fetch more wood in, but he stood behind me, holding me at the waist. ‘Too cold outside,’ he said, ‘warmer here with you.’ He mumbled these words against my neck like a child, and I softened towards him. But his hands began to go their different ways, one up one down, until I felt their warmth inside as well as out.

I made to shake him off. For a moment I felt the force of his grip, so I gave him a prod with my elbow and twisted away from him. ‘Your sort can waste the day,’ I said, ‘but us cottagers must work.’ He scowled at me. I had spoken more bitterly than I meant to. He called me a preener. I said, ‘I needn’t listen to you, you’re just a boy.’ And he stalked off to sit in the murk. What had I done to deserve such language but save us both from shame? He might be a child still, but I am not.

They say Roland’s mother died while he was still struggling to be born and there was nothing to be seen of him but his head as purple and wrinkled as a cabbage fit only for pickling. And he had burdened the world for no longer than a week when they found his father face down in the river below the village, his coat snagged in trailing willow branches. He’d slipped from the bank reaching for hazelnuts. So they always told me, though I’ve never seen hazelnuts in February.

So Roland is an orphan and may live at the Hall and pass his time in book learning, except he has no taste for book learning and would rather mope alone. And I who long to master the secrets of the Book of Air must wash his sheets.

Are these thoughts mine? Here they are looking up at me in my own words. Am I angry, then? I am angry with mother sometimes. She is calling me now to feed the pig. I am angry with the pig who lies in straw and grows fat on my peelings. But the pig will have its throat cut to give us pork, and since the day she birthed me mother stands crooked for the pain in her back and hasn’t so much as sneezed without pissing herself, so why should I be angry?

And I have my book, this book which has no words until I write them, which lies open like a meadow on a summer evening for me to lie down in.

Today at the Hall, while I scrubbed and swept, the thought of it burned inside. Before I left the cottage this morning I put it in the box under my bed where I keep my father’s things – the wren he whittled for me when his last sickness began, his best knife, the silver chain his own mother once wore around her neck. The knife is from the endtime and is of great value. Its blades slide open on tiny hidden hinges. The chain is just as old but even more precious because it came from my grandmother who sang to me, but died when I hardly knew what death was. My father gave it to me when it took all his strength to reach it from his pocket. I love these things. But I have never hidden my box with such care as I did today.

And thinking of my book while I worked I felt as though a hole had opened in the sky and I was falling into it. It was all I could do not to tell Roland. I thought of following him to the stables and saying I have a secret, bigger than your father’s death.

But instead I chopped kindling for tomorrow’s fires and listened to the children in the schoolroom chanting from the Book of Moon, and the Mistress telling them that this was how everything will end for each one of them when the last breath rattles from their throats and they are lowered into the pit.

I knew that the older ones were in the study and I chopped faster so that my work would be done and I could join them. I never hear Sarah read from the Book of Air without a leap of joy.

When I reached the study I was in a sweat from chopping wood in spite of the cold. Sarah nodded that I should take my seat between Megan and cousin Annie. Roland was there, having bored himself with brooding. Megan smirked and giggled as I sat down, but Sarah silenced her and encouraged me with a smile.

The study is a temple, Sarah says. But the temple is not a place. Not this room in the Hall, across from the kitchen, with its ancient table smooth and flat for writing on and its big windows with the grass outside where the sheep graze after haymaking. The temple is a state of readiness, a balancing of the pen, a clearing of the mind like a field for planting.

She was explaining again about the four meanings of the Book of Air. That the book itself, and every utterance it contains must be read four times, each time different, to be truly understood. First as the story of Jane for whom everything was new, second as the story of the endtimers and their ancestors from creation to destruction, third as the story of the world and what makes it – fire, water, earth and air – and last as the story of our life in the village, how it must be ordered and endured. And that only when all four meanings can be discovered at once and held in balance, as our bodies when we are healthy hold the elements in balance, can we claim to be true readers of the Book.

She read a text for us to write, holding the page like a petal gently between finger and thumb to turn it. It was the story of how Jane met Rochester when his horse slipped on the icy road at dusk while she was out walking, and the spark between them was ignited. Though she had lived in his house for months, working as governess to the orphan child Adele, he had been away all that time and was only just come back. And so she helped him to his feet. And what do we learn from this? That women, though slighter than men, are stronger in character and must lift men up. And that life is a clash of elements, fire and ice, earth and air.