Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

Sometimes the voices make no sense. When they make sense it’s worse because I know then it can’t be the wind in the chimney or water leaking behind the parapet. And it can’t be rats nesting, though I can hear their squeaks and the scratching of their little feet.

A voice says, ‘My baby had a twist in its face and all its mouth gaping so I strangled it and said it came out dead.’ A voice says, ‘It was Milly stole Esther’s bantam but she told them it was the scroungers and I agreed for fear of Milly’s sharp nails.’ A voice says, ‘Back again dearie, where’ve you been?’

The voices say things about the Mistress. That she eats nothing but gorse and blackthorn. That she rocks in her chair alone in the schoolroom and rubs herself for pleasure with the Book of Moon.

I hear nothing of this during the day, only the shouts of the children coming to the schoolroom or the knocking of feet on the stairs. When the boards creak outside my door I know someone is listening for me or come with food for Brendan. They come with food for me too, the old women in their green veils. They unlock the door and put a bowl of stew on the floor and wait while I bring them my pot for emptying, but say nothing. I hear the horses, their hard hooves in the yard, and the cartwheels rattling.

It’s only at night the voices come.

‘It was me stole Esther’s bantam because Esther had my husband in the barn.’

‘I have scissors from the endtime that I use in secret to cut my hair.’

‘A scrounger came to me in my dream and had me, and I liked it.’

I walk up and down and hum and hold my hands to my ears, but then I stand still and listen because I can’t stop myself.

‘I love Samuel so hard I ache to think of him, why won’t Samuel love me back?’

When they brought me to the red room they took my shoes from me and my scarf, so I wouldn’t hurt myself they said. Now my feet are all splinters from pacing in the dark and my hair falls around my face.

‘They said I hid the gin jug after Annie’s wedding and was drunk for two days but it was a lie, I was sick with the earache and fell on the stairs. And the Mistress means to flog me, don’t let her flog me, I’ll come every night with candles and sage if you’ll stop her.’

They speak to me as though I can help them, as though I have power that they don’t have, but I’m locked up here and can do nothing, not even for myself, not even to get food when I’m hungry or water to wash in.

‘Clay comes to me at night in dreams and tells me he loves me, but by day he stares at the ground and scratches at his leg when I pass. If Milly fell sick of a cancer or slipped on the bank when the brook was in flood or ate poisoned toadstools would Clay love me best?’

My room has one window looking towards the moor. At first I could see nothing through it but a dim green light, the way a newt or a tadpole must see the sky when the pond is all weeds. But in the corner of one of the low panes was a hole big enough to put my arm through and I pulled away all the strands of ivy I could reach. I scratched myself on the glass and might have done worse if I’d taken less care. I might have killed myself like mother, without the pig to help me.

I might still.

Perhaps this is what they mean me to do, and taking my shoes and scarf was just to make me suffer.

I can see now down over the stable roof into the yard. And I can see the moorland road. And if I push myself against the wall on one side I can see the top of the vegetable field and on the other side the trees of the High Wood. But none of this clearly because of the dirt on the glass. And I can see that the walls are the colour of drying blood. I think of all the women who have been here before me since the endtime.

They speak to me as if they can guess my worst thoughts even before I’ve thought them.

‘Janet had a child before she was married and smothered it for shame.’

It’s not much of a room for pacing, though bigger than the rooms in our cottage. You can see where the roof leaks by the lines of moss growing down the walls. There’s a basin from the endtime, full of dry leaves and mulch from the ivy that straggles over it, and a bed with a straw mattress and a straw pillow and a wool blanket. There’s a mirror on the wall above the basin, but cracked and stained so it shows only pieces of my face. Between the pieces there’s the wall and the mildew trapped behind the glass in patches of green and yellow.

In one corner of the room is a walled space like its own little room, and the walls inside covered in flat brown stones cut square like the stones on the kitchen floor. I sit here at night to quiet the voices, and pace here sometimes, though one big stride this way and then that way is all it takes. A carved ridge runs round the walls at the height of my waist, showing like a half buried tree root. Such delicate patterns only the endtimers could make. I rub my hand along it for comfort. And there’s a shelf carved into the wall that I have made my secret place.

I don’t know what I mean by this. In the red room there are no secrets. Or else everything is secret. I have become a secret. Do they talk about me in the village? I think they are afraid to think of me. There is a whisper of Agnes, daughter of Janet, and heads turn about to see who listens. The Reeds could see my secret place if they took a step from the door and looked. But I have put a green beetle shell there, and a white feather that might be from a dove’s wing, and a round bottle stopper of glass that catches the light when I hold it to the window and draws lines of colour on the floor.

Was there a dove here to drop a feather? How did it get in? And did it die? Or did the feather catch in my hair as they dragged me down the moorland road?

Sometimes they seem to talk between themselves but know I’m listening.

‘That Sarah had a child by Brendan when she wasn’t much more than a child herself. Kept to her room for months while her belly swelled, studying the Book of Air. And Janet helped her have it in secret at the Hall. Then she and Brendan gave it to the scroungers. Janet told me this herself when she had a fever and thought it was her own dead mother mopping her face.’

My real secrets – my ink bottle, my pen, my book – I keep under my skirt where no one looks. The bottle is almost dry, but the empty pages still stare up at me, hungry for words. I will become mad if there is no more ink. If I don’t bleed.

If they forgot to feed me, if I knew no one would come, if they were all dead of some disease and only me left alive, locked in this room, and one piece of bread only, I would take one bite each day and try to live. And so with my ink. I should make myself not write until I must.

‘My father died when I was a child, and Roger came at night to our cottage and hurt me, and I thought if my mother died too I would be an orphan and live at the Hall, so I put hawthorn berries in her stew and she was sick until her skin turned yellow. For twenty years I’ve nursed her, but kept the cause hidden. I should be flogged to a rag.’

Sometimes at night the smell of sage rises from the herb garden all the way to my window to mingle with the honeysuckle blooming on the wall.

‘Poor Janet had a child born tiny, before it showed, and dead as a box. She buried it in secret, they said, and for weeks after lay staring at the wall. Then she took her brother Morton’s leather belt and put it tight round her neck. So they locked her in the red room to bleed four times – once for each book, till she should be brought to a right understanding.’

‘The Mistress goes to the Ruin every new moon and meets there with the Monk. They say you can see the teeth marks on her teats.’

‘Janet was locked up once and was never the same after. Old Jack her father died clutching his heart to lose her.’