Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

‘What words are there for Janet?’ I said it quietly at first but then again louder so everyone would hear. ‘What words for my mother?’

The Mistress looked at me sharply across the pit and spoke sharply too. ‘We’ve said all the words that are to be said.’

‘So what was her life?’

‘Her life was what all lives must be.’ For a moment she looked lost – this wasn’t the schoolroom for me to be asking her questions. Then the familiar answer came to her. ‘Life is a fire that burns itself out.’

‘But there was no fire in her. It was smothered years ago. What did you do to her to make her that way?’ I was looking at the Mistress, then turning all about to shout at the others. ‘What did you do to her?’

‘Gently, Agnes,’ Sarah murmured. ‘These are private words.’

‘Every day, though, I have spoken to her – about the pig or the garden, about the coming rain or when the rain would stop – and felt I was blowing on embers, emptying my lungs to breathe a spark of life into hers.’ I didn’t know what I wanted to say, only that I must speak or be stifled by my thoughts. ‘The fire in her was gone out. Even before my father died, she was only half alive. What cruel thing happened to make her like that? Why did she never speak of it? And now she’s gone what will be remembered of her? Will we write her story? Jane is kept alive among us. If Jane why not Janet?’

I stopped speaking because I knew that the next word would be my book. But I had already said more than I should. Sarah’s hand was tight on my arm and I saw in the growing light the fear in my neighbours’ eyes. If Jane why not Janet? The whisper of my words was like a breath of wind in the bracken. I saw Roland turn away, staring hard at some distant object. Beside him, Megan looked at me open-mouthed, not yet daring to be pleased. It was the old women who came, three of them moving forward from among the other villagers, Reeds now not women, though they had no time to dress and veil themselves. I felt Sarah’s reluctance to give me up. Then her grip loosened and it was the women who held me.

‘Where is Brendan?’ I said. ‘Brendan won’t let you take me.’

‘The Reader doesn’t concern himself with you,’ the Mistress said.

‘He loves me though. He’d tell you if he was here.’

‘These are wild words, Agnes. You must be taken care of while the madness is tamed.’

They made way for me, my neighbours, shuffling aside with their eyes cast down. Only Annie pushed herself towards me. She put her arms round my neck and I felt her tears on my face.

And where was Brendan all that time? In his chair by the fire, lifting the delicate pages of the Book of Windows? Or stretched out in his bed? Is he there now, ten paces from where I sit? I could shout out to him but would he come? I could call him silently, but even this close, tied as we are by our journey and everything we saw and everything we felt, would he hear me? I don’t think so, for all his studying, though I love him harder than I had thought possible.

I’ve been with Abigail to check some of the farms out along the England road. There were three dead in the house at Abbeymill, their bodies ripe and buzzing. We wrapped scarves round our faces and dug them a shallow grave behind the barn. They repaid us with a clutch of spades and rakes and hoes, three axes, some rolls of bailer twine and a good sharp saw, besides what we found in the kitchen – mainly knives and a haul of tinned food. At Higdon we rounded up some geese. Abigail enticed them into their house with grain, and we dragged the whole thing up on to the cart. There was the old woman shrivelled in her bed under a cloud of flies. Next thing I knew I was standing in a trench with Abigail leaning down to pass me a shovel. She said, ‘Where did you go?’ and I couldn’t tell her because I didn’t know.

We stood in silence at the graveside. When I was a kid they used to say, I am the resurrection and the life . But what would those words mean now?

‘It’s sad,’ I said, ‘to be buried by strangers and no one left to remember you.’

Abigail nodded. ‘Sadder still not to be buried at all.’

‘What will it be like for us?’

‘We’ll have family, friends, children.’

Riding home on the cart I ask her where she grew up and she says, ‘West of here.’ There’s a hint of Welsh in her accent but some London as well. She’s hard to place. We’re both watching out for signs of life, signs of danger. We glimpse a couple of survivors dodging into a barn and feel them watching through the slats as we pass. Young or old, male or female? Hard to tell. Further on there’s smoke rising from the corner of a field and a smell of roasting meat. A head appears from behind a wall and we hear voices. Then our view is obscured by trees. A soft wind dries the sweat on my shirt and stirs the branches overhead. In the distance one of the church bells is going – faintly and without any pulse. I hear the sound filtered through birdsong. I lose it and find it and lose it again, so I think it’s only in my head, until it’s unmistakably there, an uncertain heartbeat. It has me listening to the birds – soft hoots and cries and elaborate repeated trills. A fantastic jumble of sound that ought to be cacophonous but is utterly, bewilderingly beautiful. And so much of it, coming from so many directions at once that you forget to notice. I hear it like a building, one course laid on another, up and up, but so light that it floats. I’m lightheaded, I think, from the day’s work. And at its centre now this metallic resonance. And something else scurrying round it – Django’s clarinet.

I asked him yesterday what kind of music this is that sobs and wails and isn’t quite jazz and isn’t quite anything else, and has its own way of tugging at you. I asked him if it was gypsy music or what, and he took the reed from his mouth long enough to smile and say ‘If you like’ and started up again.

At the far end of the wood we reach the church in a burst of evening sunlight. I pull the horse to a stop and get down. Abigail follows me into the porch. I lift the latch. When I open the door, the monkey scampers out and chatters off among the gravestones. There’s that Anglican smell of hassocks and musty hymn books. Beyond the pews, beyond the chancel rail, Django is sitting on the altar, legs hanging, the flared end of his clarinet making shapes in the air. Behind him, in the stained glass, bodies in loincloths rise from their graves to join God or to be pitchforked into everlasting torment. I turn the other way, towards the tower, pushing through the velvet curtain. Between a rail of cassocks and a stack of chairs the bell ropes dangle, and there’s Simon in a haze of dust jumping and swinging.

‘All right, Si?’

‘I’m…’

‘Django taking care of you?’

‘Django says I’m…’ His neck tightens and he sucks in breath through his nose. He’s doing his w-face, which makes him look as if he’s about to hoot like a baboon.

‘Whizzing through the jungle?’

‘Not that.’

‘Walking on the moon?’

‘Not that either. Django says I’m…’ And his neck tightens again.

‘Have you eaten?’ Abigail asks him. ‘Did someone feed you?’

Simon lands on his feet, totters but stays upright, and walks over to Abigail. ‘You have to listen to me.’

Abigail smiles at this. ‘You have big lungs for a little boy.’

‘I’m not little. Django says I’m… wonderful.’

Abigail’s still taking this in and Simon is looking at her with big solemn eyes, when Deirdre pushes through the curtain. Aleksy follows, gasping for breath.

‘Did you see someone?’ Deirdre turns from me to Abigail. ‘Is that why you rang the bell?’