Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

I walk past Abigail and take the main staircase to the second floor, and the half-flight to our bedroom. The door’s wide open, wedged to stop it banging, and to let Simon in. Whatever books were on the shelves are gone. I go to our bed, where I sleep alone, and pull all the pillows off. It’s still here, your copy of Jane Eyre . This at least I’ve still got. It’s nothing much to look at – a cardboard cover the colour of pondweed. But yours, loved by you since childhood, and all I’ve got left of you. Now I’m on the bed, I’m not sure I can get up, not sure I want to. My body shakes, gripped by the memory of sickness. I hear the murmur of voices and then nothing but the sound of my own breathing.

Django’s out there somewhere, and others like him, skulking in the woods, hiding in ditches, scuttling through atriums and shopping malls, bedding down where the roof doesn’t leak with their valuables held close and one eye open for snatchers.

I was sick five days they say, sweating with fever. I rode hard in my dreams. At every turn of the road I met Brendan, his eyes puzzling over the strange tilt the world had taken and me rushing backwards from the sight of him to swing away through the trees, like the Monk, with my heart torn out of me.

And how many days before that, dragging through the forest, blinded by rain, all the time thinking I would never find the O. And I would have stayed lost, that’s certain, if a woman leading a mule cart hadn’t spoken to me kindly. What she said I couldn’t tell, but when I said I was looking for the O, she smiled, showing me the few teeth she had left, and nodded for me to climb on her cart, a wild-looking woman with an unsteady walk, wrapped in rags. She let me nest among her vegetables, and I saw nothing until she shook me awake and we were here.

Trevor says I was lucky. There are some on the road, he says, who would have stripped me of everything, or roped me with the dogs and set me to work till I was all bone. But this pelting rain had likely driven them to shelter. Even a tracker would find the scent bleared and the trail washed from the road.

I understand more of what they say now than before, though there are still words I have to guess at. They asked me why I came without Brendan. I told them I am punished and sent away from the village for something I did. I haven’t told them what. How would I say? I haven’t told them I killed Brendan, if that’s truly what I’ve done. He was their friend. More than that, I think he was Dell’s father, though perhaps she doesn’t know it.

I see more of how they live at the O. Every night there’s eating and drinking. Singing often, too. So every night is like the village at the end of a wedding, except different people from one time to another, not always the same neighbours. I see that all this pleasure is work for Trevor and Dell. People come with animals for cooking and other things they call gear or tat and Dell gives them some of what’s in the pot and fills their mugs. And later those who want are put somewhere to sleep.

Dell lets me help her in the kitchen, though I’ve hardly the strength to shell peas. I asked her today how many scroungers are there. She didn’t understand. ‘The villagers that you call planters come to forty,’ I told her. ‘Fifty maybe.’ I showed with my fingers in case she didn’t know her numbers. ‘People die and there are babies so it changes, but maybe fifty. So how many scroungers?’

She shrugged. ‘As many as there are people in the world. Because that’s all we are, us you call scroungers.’

‘So how many does that come to?’

‘Cheese, Agnes, no one can tell that.’ She put her hand on my forehead then to see if my fever was still up.

‘But if you had to guess.’

‘See, Ag,’ she said, sitting by me, ‘it’s this way. There are some we know. More we don’t and never will. Some live nearby, catching and cropping. Some live by dealing, moving on to find in one place what’s wanted in another. Some we see regular when the weather changes. Some once and never again. Maybe they tell us their names and we remember. Or else we know them by something they brought one time – a strong pan or a sack of partridge eggs. They might tell us their racket. They might not. It doesn’t matter. If they’re hungry or need a bed they come to the O.’

I think of the O as a circle and always room inside. Like the letter. I tried to explain this to Dell, but she didn’t understand. She told me O is short for O Tell Do, though not many call it that. ‘But its real name,’ she said, ‘is O Tell Do Lucks, which no one calls it except Trevor. When he’s drunk, or sad about Cat.’

‘Who’s Cat?’ I asked her.

‘Cat was Trevor’s girl. Lovely she was, and sharp as a knife. She was born at the O and always lived here. It was her mother’s, and then hers when her mother died. Cat raised me from a baby. Then she got knocked up. She’d carried before, Trevor says, but always lost them. She cried out all day long when it was her time, then all the night after, but not so much. By morning she was dead, and the tiddler dead inside her. Now it’s just Trevor and me.’

Later Dell came to see I was warm in my bed. She asked who’d sent me away and why.

I told her the Mistress. ‘But she didn’t really send me away. She locked me in the red room, a room at the Hall. And I escaped.’

Dell looked me up and down and asked me, ‘Have you had your minstrels?’

I told her I didn’t understand.

‘Your rag time,’ she said. Then I wept and that was all the answer she needed. ‘And for that you’re sent out?’

I cried harder to see myself as Dell saw me, punished and rejected for what any woman might come to.

She shook her head and said, ‘That isn’t right.’ She put her arms round me then and rocked me this way and that saying ‘shush’ and ‘poor rabbit’.

It was cold so she got under the blanket with me and it was nice holding her close and being held.

After a while I asked her what would happen here to someone in my case.

She shrugged. ‘Anything. Or nothing. There are some men who’ll care for a child but more who talk big while you’re giving them what they want, then first sign of trouble they’re gone.’ A shudder passed through her. I looked in her face and her eyes were wet.

‘Oh Dell,’ I said, ‘sweet Dell, you’ve had a baby.’

‘If you call it that. A tiddler the size of a carrot.’

‘And it died?’

‘A trader came wanting breakfast and I’d puked up in the meat pot and I had nothing to feed him. Trevor made out it was dogs broke into the kitchen, but the trader guessed it was me. He slapped me up, kneed me in the belly.’

‘And did Trevor know? I mean, about the baby?’

‘Not until after, when he had to mop me up.’

I thought how much easier than hers my life had been, everything neat and ordered.

I asked her if she ever thought about how she might have lived if Cat and Trevor hadn’t raised her.

She said, ‘All I know is what Trevor told me. I was brought here as a baby by Brendan and a planter girl, a sad-eyed wisp called Janet, who maybe was my mother but didn’t say.’

‘Not your mother, Dell. My mother.’

‘Janet was your mother? Then I’m sorry she wasn’t mine too, so we could have been sisters.’

I knew then I must tell her what I could about her parents. That the man she called Brendan was truly her father – she wept at that and said she’d always felt it – and that her mother was the best and most beautiful woman.’

‘Still alive, then,’ she said. ‘So why did she ditch me?’

‘Oh, she would have kept you and loved you, I’m sure of it, if they’d let her.’