Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

He looks up and I see he’s got his favourite book. He clutches it tight to his chest. ‘I won’t. You can’t make me.’

‘Burn Moon?’

‘I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.’

‘Course not. Why would you?’

‘Just the others.’

‘What others?’

‘The others. From the house.’ And I see what’s on the fire. The smouldering remains of books – your books, Caroline. Your favourite girls – George and Virginia, Margaret and Angela, Ali and Zadie. Books I’d never got round to and maybe never would, but important to you, part of who you were. Because if my way of knowing the world was to feel its texture and to shape it under my hand, yours was to read. You once said you thought of characters in a story as leaves that show you the force and direction of the wind. The wind is too big, too unseeable, you said. But the leaf stirs and twists and makes the wind visible.

‘Simon, Simon, what have you done?’

‘What’s happening?’ Deirdre comes round from the yard with Aleksy.

Through the flames, I see Abigail pushing a wheelbarrow of windfall apples up through the grass from the orchard. ‘Did we need a fire?’ She rests the wheelbarrow, draws a sleeve across her forehead and tucks the stray hairs under her scarf.

‘It’s not your fire, then?’ Aleksy asks her.

I’m listening to that two-note call again, faint above the spitting and cracking. ‘It’s too early for a fire,’ I tell him, ‘and it’s too sodding late for a cuckoo.’

The cuckoo stops and there’s a giggle. Then the same two clarinet notes, a little falling tune.

‘That bastard, I should have known.’ I look up at the house, at the open bedroom windows.

Aleksy steps in front of me. ‘A fire, Jason. Not such a big deal. A bit of petrol, maybe, siphoned from your car.’

‘He burned the books. Look.’ The edges curl and shrivel. Black flakes drift up and scatter. The immensity of it catches in my throat.

‘Books.’ Aleksy shrugs and makes a puffing noise. ‘Maybe these are not so important. You got penicillin on your bookcase? You got sausages? We got to eat, old man. We got to feed ourselves and stay warm. We don’t got to read. Punish the boy if you like, but don’t make a meal of it. He’s five years old. He burns your books, so give him a slap, give him a hug. He don’t do it no more. Now we get back to work.’

‘This is nothing to do with Simon. It’s Django’s going to have to pay for this.’

‘Pay, of course. Give Django a shovel. He can spread the cowshit on the field. Hear that, Abigail. Django works tomorrow or he don’t eat.’

I hear the sound of a sliding sash and see Django stepping through the landing window on to the roof of the portico, naked apart from his clarinet. ‘The people that walked in darkness,’ he says ‘have seen a great light.’

‘Come down here and say that, you fucker.’

‘And a little child shall lead them.’

Maud, who has just appeared at the corner of the house, covers her face and walks to join us with her eyes on the ground.

‘We grope like the blind along a wall,’ Django says, ‘feeling our way like blind people. The sun shines but we stumble about in the dark. The world is full of life, but we’re dead .’

‘You will be!’

‘Your graven images are all vanity. Your delectable things will do you no good.’

‘Yes, but they were my graven images, fuckwit, not yours.’ He turns his back on me, turns his skinny backside to climb in through the window. I shout after him, ‘They were my delectable things.’

Aleksy puts his hand on my arm to calm me. ‘Mine, yours. What does this matter?’

‘It matters to me. Mine, not Django’s. My house, my books.’

‘By what law? A dead law for dead people.’

‘I worked for this house.’

‘And now we all work for it. Maud, look, with her milking. Abigail in the orchard. Me, I help you fix up the roof good. Django, even, making a fire. Maybe we cook on it.’

‘We didn’t need a fire. There’s a stove in the kitchen. We needed books.’

‘Why we need these books? Who said about books until now? The world is full of books and no one to read them. We need books, we write our own. The world is ours now. No one to tell us to read this or that.’

‘See, Jason.’ Django comes down the steps from the front door, easy in his nakedness. ‘A new heaven and a new earth.’

Maud blushes and stares at the grass.

‘No, Django. The same heaven, the same sodding earth. And everything we ever knew and ever remembered, where is it? Not on Wikipedia anymore.’

‘No, Jason,’ Aleksy says, ‘you are right. Not on Wikipedia, but here – head and heart.’ He puts his forefinger to his temple, then his hand to his chest. ‘This is where we know things. Let’s go help Maud with the cows.’

‘No.’

‘Then sleep. You work too hard.’

‘I don’t need sleep. I need to sort out that bastard.’

‘It’s done now, Jason,’ Abigail says. ‘Spilt milk.’

‘See, Abigail agrees. We’ll find more books later, my friend, when the planting’s done and all the fruit is in.’

But I’ve already lunged at Django and knocked him to the ground. I hear him say, ‘Mind my reed,’ see the instrument fall in the grass. Then my hands are round his neck. I want to stop his mouth, fix him so he can’t smile. His legs squirm and kick. I feel his fists on my shoulders and against my head. My mind goes blank. There are other hands on me and I’m rolling on the grass and there’s blood coming from my nose.

‘These books,’ Aleksy says, angry and breathing hard, ‘they tell us how to make power from wind?’ His face hovers low over mine, not quite in focus.

I shake my head.

‘How to make a machine to grind corn, maybe? How to irrigate in a dry season, how to kill greenfly or blight?’

‘Probably not.’

‘What then?’

‘I don’t know. They tell stories.’

‘Stories? What stories?’

‘I never read them. They were my wife’s.’

‘All your life, you never read them. And you’re alive still and she’s dead.’

I stand up, leaving Django coughing into the grass, shake myself free of Aleksy’s hand. Maud stands apart, humming to herself. Abigail is holding Simon against her, stroking his head. She looks at me sadly and I’m stung to a new fury that she should blame me for Django’s crime.

I walk rapidly towards the orchard where the sun is setting among the trees.

I hear Deirdre say, ‘He’s right though, Aleksy. He’s right, Django. Look at all you’ve burned. What a waste. What are we going to do now on winter evenings?’

Aleksy laughs. ‘Milk cows same as summer. Chop wood so we don’t freeze. Save candles.’

‘And when the cows are milked?’

‘What you like, Deedee – play party games, make babies.’

I turn and stride back towards them, shaking with rage. Abigail is on her knees, tending to Django’s bleeding lip. She’s pulled her apron off and laid it on his lap. I’m glad to see them all shrink from me as I approach, to know they respect my anger if not my rights.

‘That’s it, Django,’ I tell him, ‘I want you out of here.’

No one argues. They can see I might do anything. Even I don’t know what I might do. I’ll take them all on, smash up the fragile order of things. I want Django gone. I’ll give him five minutes to get dressed and pack some clothes, I’ll let Deirdre and Abigail stuff food in his bag if they want, but I won’t stop until he’s off my land. Because of what he’s done. Because the others can’t grasp the horror of what he’s done. Because I can’t find the words to explain it to them.

And it happens, just that way, because I say it must. No one argues. I watch him walk off into the woods in his tight trousers and stripy blazer, stepping lightly like a boy on a camping trip, fearless of hunger or of having his throat cut for a decent pair of boots. The others watch too, keeping their thoughts to themselves. I turn from the front door and Abigail’s behind me in the hall, studying my face. And I see that I’m being managed. We’ve lost your books, Caroline. Django, who I never trusted, has burned them. I should at least feel vindicated, but I find myself diminished.