Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

I clung to Gideon’s neck and Brendan told me not to be afraid, it was only Col. I had never seen a scrounger, not to look at, only once or twice a ragged creature running in the shadows. This one called Col looked human I suppose as he climbed out of his hole on his stiff joints, except that his eyes moved about like a dog fearing to be stepped on. Brendan gave him a fresh joint of pork and Col gave Brendan a bag of leaves. ‘Tobacco for the pipe,’ Brendan said. It seemed a poor bargain. I know what labour goes to fattening a pig, and Brendan stood knee-deep in leaves.

I wanted to ask the scrounger if he grew this tobacco himself and where he grew it. But the door was already shut against us and I heard barring and bolting from inside. These scroungers, I thought, steal from us and steal from each other and live in loneliness and fear. And they are as far from planting a crop as I am from flying, and yet here is this tobacco that burns sweeter than any leaf in the village.

I was thinking about this, and thinking what a small mystery it was compared with the size of the forest and the quantity of broken walls among the brambles, and the height of some of them that rose through the trees towards the canopy of winter branches, when Brendan laughed. He must have seen the way I looked about, because he said, ‘Does it frighten you to be so far from the village?’

‘A little.’

‘And excites you a little?’

‘Yes.’

He was in the saddle again and prodding Gideon back on to the path. ‘And does it make you wonder, Agnes?’

‘About what?’

‘About everything. Why did they build so high? Did you see, Agnes, even their roads were made to climb above the forest. I was told as a child that calling was so common among them that they could sit, each in his own tower, and know the thoughts of all the others. Is that possible? Did they sense each other like birds that wheel all one way and then another without warning? Was that how they were killed, do you think, Agnes – not by a fever that lurks in the blood and travels from one body to another in sweat and stale breath, but all at once, in a single convulsion of minds, each agitated beyond endurance by the knowledge of his neighbours’ suffering?’

He looked so young, asking these questions, as young as Roland, and he asked them so eagerly that I laughed, and he laughed too.

I had no answers, but I had my own questions. ‘Were the four books known to them, or were they only for us who came after? And if so, what did they live by? Were the scroungers all villagers once, as they say, and why did they leave to live so desperately? Or were they made to leave, and for what offence?’

And we both laughed again as if we’d witnessed a wedding and were giddy with dancing, though our laughing made no sense.

‘This is where we stay,’ Brendan said. We’d turned in at a doorway wider than any in the village. It led it into a barn high enough for hornbeams to grow tall, and near the frame of the roof pieces of sky where the glass of the endtimers had long ago broken for the wind to blow in. We passed window frames large and square like no windows at the Hall with broken angles of glass at their edges. I saw odd letters carved above them among the ivy and the shadows of other letters. The windows opened on rooms you couldn’t see the end of for the darkness or things growing that love the darkness.

We came to a broken window that was boarded, and a boarded doorway next to it. Brendan climbed down to knock.

‘We’ll eat here,’ he said, ‘and they’ll find us a bed. They call it the O.’

We heard bolts grinding and the door opened. A scrounger looked out at us all smiles, and there were more scroungers inside. Brendan took me by the hand and pulled me in. He pointed at me and said my name and people said, ‘Ho there.’ He pointed at the man who stood by the door and said, ‘This is Trevor.’ Then he pointed at a girl and said, ‘And this is Trevor’s girl, Dell.’ It seemed strange for Brendan to be naming people as though they were just that day from their mothers’ wombs but no one else found it strange because they laughed or smiled and made space for us to sit.

To the back of the room there was a window with no glass and thick bars across it, but the light came mostly from higher up where parts of the roof and walls were missing.

The girl called Dell gave me a cup to hold and filled it from a jug. I’d say she was my age or more, but not a woman yet because her hair was loose and unscarfed. We sat, me and Brendan and Trevor and more scroungers. We sat on chairs, some of wood, some iron, some cushioned with the stuffing spilling out of them, and everyone was talking and Dell filled everyone’s cups. Across the room a man sang. He worked with his hands at a curved box and I heard the notes of his song and other notes that rose from his fingers.

Brendan gave Trevor a sack of eggs and a paper of butter and a loaf and he passed them to Dell, all the time laughing and talking. I saw Brendan hand something directly to Dell – a delicate cup no larger than a goose egg with flowers marked on it, a treasure from his shelves, and I saw her blush and stare sideways before slipping it in her apron and turn back to her work, and Brendan turn the other way to laugh at something Trevor had said. For a while it was as if there was no one in the room but Brendan nodding and smiling in his place and Dell in every other place with her jug. Then I put the cup out of my mind and the room filled up again with talking.

Sometimes the scroungers talked to me or Brendan and sometimes to each other, but I could make no sense of what they said. I wondered if this was French they were speaking or German that Jane learned to speak. But after a while there were words I knew like friends that walk at night from the shadow of a tree.

When I had emptied my cup, Trevor spoke to Dell and she would have filled it again, but I asked for water instead for fear of getting drunk. I was drunk already, I think, on the strangeness of everything. Trevor nodded at me, holding his own brimming mug in the air between us, and said, ‘Here’s licking a chew kid,’ and I thought lick and chew must be his words for drinking. But he said it again when Dell filled his mug, and this time I heard ‘Here’s luck and achoo kid’ as if he meant to bring luck by sneezing.

When it began to grow dark, Trevor said something to Dell. She put her finger to the wall, and lamps hanging from the ceiling flickered and glowed like little moons. Trevor saw that I was startled to see them work without oil or tallow. He leant towards me and said it was the Jane Writer. I felt suddenly warm to him, to think that Jane was with us. I know Jane is in everything and everything in Jane, but I felt I had left the Book of Air a long way behind, and it comforted me to meet it again so unexpectedly.

I said the words back at him – ‘Jane Writer’ – and he smiled and nodded, his face shining with pleasure.

‘Here though,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you.’ He rose, not quite steady on his feet, and led me out into the big room where we walked among the trees and undergrowth. There was a noise like a swarm of bees. We moved towards it, and it was louder, like cartwheels on a dry road. I was a little frightened to be here in the dark with a scrounger, and the mystery of the Jane Writer ahead of us. He unlocked a door and I was almost deafened with the sound. I don’t know what I expected to see. Not this monstrous yellow beetle that squatted, shaking and growling, on the floor. Holding Trevor’s arm, I edged back and eyed the thing from behind his shoulder.

‘It can’t bite,’ he said with a laugh. ‘It’s a machine is all it is. Drinks like buggery, mind.’ He chained up the door again and he led me back the way he’d come. ‘Dell and I keep the old girl going with petrol,’ he said. ‘From the underground tanks. Not everyone’s got the lungs to suck it out. Or would know what to do with it if they did.’