Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

‘Is that Greek he’s talking, then, or Hebrew?’

‘It’s Polish.’

‘You know Polish? I’ve never heard it spoken.’

‘A bit. Building site Polish.’

‘It’s all right Maud,’ she says. ‘We won’t let him hurt you.’ She touches Aleksy gently, just above the elbow. ‘Come on, Aleksy, it’s done now, washed and sorted. Everything’s all right. Time for bed.’

He turns an ear towards her. Then he breathes in sharply and makes a sudden movement, both arms flying. The ice cream tub rises and tilts, slopping a dark stain across the quilt. Maud starts making noise again – a kind of pulsing hum. Aleksy’s jabbering. So I give him a slap and he wakes up. ‘Christ, Aleksy, look at this mess.’

There’s terror on his face. He blasphemes in his own language. Abigail lifts the tub gently from his hands and he lets her, watching it go. Then he hugs me so I can hardly breath.

‘Aleksy, go to bed.’ Abigail’s voice is quiet but commanding. ‘Take him to his room, Jason, then help me with this. It’s all right, Maud. It’s all over.’

I put my arm round Aleksy’s shoulder and steer him through the door and across the landing. The sky clears as we enter his room and the bed is flooded with cold light.

‘I was dreaming, Jason.’ It’s an apology.

‘I guessed.’

‘I was dreaming that we stood in this garden and there was such food and we stood in the eyes of God, my five brothers and I, and my father home from prison and the twins still alive in their cot.’

‘And the words?’

‘Words?’

‘Washed in the blood…’

I watch him search his memory, draw the vision back from the darkness. ‘We were all priests. All my brothers, all humanity.’ He’s sorry to be awake. ‘And so here we are. And why here? Why us?’

‘No reason.’

‘You got it and survived? No one survived.’

Hear that, Caroline? He speaks like it’s over. It’s time to draw a line between what was and what is.

‘Later maybe, Aleksy, as it went on, people… some of us… built up some kind of immunity. There’ll be others out there somewhere.’

‘But you got it for sure – sweats, staggers, blessing…?’

‘I got it.’

‘You painted? Constructed some beautiful thing?’

‘I sang.’

Aleksy whistles through his teeth. ‘I don’t hear you sing now. And yet you sang. And the rest of us untouched.’

‘We always knew there’d be some.’

‘The immunes, sure. Rumours. But who believed them?’

‘Everyone.’

‘We needed someone to hate. Not so many left to choose from. Russians, Muslims, bankers… dying like the rest.’

‘We had the soldiers to hate. The militias. We had every murdering bastard waiting in the shadows to steal what we’d stolen for ourselves.’

‘Not big enough, not…’ – he makes an expansive gesture – ‘… grand enough. The soul in pain demands an enemy worthy of hatred.’

I find I don’t have much to say about the soul.

‘And so it was us, after all – me, Deedee and Django, Abigail and poor dumb Maud – all immune. We carried the infection of life and we never knew.’

I leave Aleksy’s room. Across the passage, Deirdre’s door is ajar. She sits up in the four-poster bed, pulling the hair from her face. The monkey squats above on the canopy, tasting its own fleas. Just inside the room, a hand reaches up from the shadows and pushes the door shut – Django’s hand.

By the time I get back, Abigail has settled Maud to sleep in the blue bed and pulled the blood-soaked bedding on to the floor. I bundle it up and carry it down to the yard. The shapes of the buildings are beginning to show against the grey sky. I walk into the top field to calm myself, picking my way between the neat rows of Aleksy’s planting.

Days pass, so many that I lose count. I am terribly afraid.

There is something I haven’t written. Something that happened with Brendan when we visited the scroungers. This book, that pulls all my secrets out of me and tells them back to me in my own words, had no words for this. And what words will it find, even now?

When the pictures stopped, when the dream faded and all the light was gone from the wall, I couldn’t wake but must sit with the silence churning. Brendan’s voice was quieter than the pulsing of blood. I felt his breath warm on my neck and his arm around me. He felt huge to me then, like the man dark as an eggplant who sang a kiss is still a kiss. If I had thought of Jane. If I had made a space in my mind for her, as Sarah had taught me. But Sarah was far away. And I was somewhere deep inside myself where I could see nothing and think nothing, but could feel every hair on my skin, and the weight of him shifting in his fever and my own chair pushing sharp against me. And I knew only the strength of his hands and his kisses passing down into me like breath into a reed. Was it pain or pleasure I felt? There was pain, certainly. For him as well I think. I heard the suffering in his voice. But sweetness too at last – to hold him, to hush him into stillness. And a time between, when I was no longer Agnes but a field at seed time and all the horses of the village breaking in to trample me and scatter the starlings, and I was the pressed earth and the stones brittle from the winter frosts and the wings rising and wheeling.

Afterwards we walked in silence to the O, and Dell took me by the arm and showed me where she sleeps. I was glad to be in her company for that time, and away from Brendan. I longed to be with him, but I found myself afraid, because I felt there was a river inside me that might rise and burst out in a flood. It calmed me to talk to Dell, though she has such a strange way of talking that I understood only part of what she said.

There was a litter of kittens in a box by her bed. She told me they would live at the O and their mother would teach them to kill mice and rats. We played with the kittens, hugging and stroking them, and Dell hugged me too and stroked me. And I saw that living with Trevor and no one else she knew even less of mothering than I do. I liked to feel her hair, which was beautiful and dark with tiny curls so you could rest your face against it like a pillow. She asked what it was like to live among the planters and I said it was the only life I knew, and that we lived the way we had been taught to live by Jane, our first Governess, and Maud and Mother Abgale who gathered at the Hall at the endtime with those I have heard called the Moons. And she asked why this name, Moons, and I said it was because they came through the blessing and lived until it was their proper time to die, when their page had turned, as set down in the Book of Moon.

For a while we lay together in Dell’s bed. And it soothed me to hold her and be held. I had envied her a little, though I am ashamed now to write this, because Bernard attended to her so closely. But I had quickly come to love her and take comfort in her company. How I long now to feel such warmth. Even to talk to another person. Even to breathe the air outside this room. I can wait and wait but I won’t bleed. Another life stirs in my belly, feeding off the little food I get. There are plums in the orchard, but I’m not there to pick them. Who now lets the geese out in the morning and shuts them up at night against the fox?

The house creaks and murmurs in its sleep but I’m too agitated to rest. I go down to fetch some tools from the cupboard in the hall – pliers, an adjustable spanner – and climb the stairs again to the bathroom. Your bath floats, sleek and pale against the crimson walls. It reminds me of candles and scented oils, Caro, and your delicate breasts showing above the foam. But it’ll have to go. We need it in the yard for the cattle to drink from. It’s no use here, three flights up with no running water. It won’t take me long to disconnect it – hot and cold, waste and overflow. Aleksy can help me shift it in the morning. No point being sentimental about plumbing. But I hesitate anyway.