Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

I heard Dell calling for me then and was afraid to be found listening. So I took Walt with me on my hip and set about gathering the dishes to be scraped and stacked, all the while dizzy with fear.

I told Dell when we had a moment alone in the kitchen. It put her in a rage, though she kept her voice low. ‘I know his sort,’ she said. ‘You’d be skivvied hollow. See his boy, standing out now in the cold. Dead on his feet. And at least the boy gets snoring time. Cheeses, Ag, you’d be nursing his precious charlies all day and then he’d be slobbering at you. And the lads he speaks of, they’ll all want their turn. And what does he want with a kid? You leave here with Quinlan, Walt won’t live to see another spring. He’ll get plump, all right. He’ll be fattened for the pot.’

I told her that Trevor had spoken up for me and said it must be my choice. She calmed down then. But how feeble Trevor had sounded I did not say. Walt began to squirm and whimper, so I sat in a high-backed chair in the darkest corner of the kitchen near the log pile and let him feed. This time he was ready and took it eagerly. I felt the force of his mouth on me and the pulse of it, stronger than my heartbeat, reaching deep down inside. I thought of all the jobs to be done. Tidying and sweeping. Damping the fire in the stove. Taking the stew from the heat before it spoiled. It was a good stew, with parsnips and onions, and a good rich flavour of thyme and rosemary. It had been a quiet night and there’d be plenty for tomorrow. Warmed by the stove, I let my eyes close and gave way to sleep.

I woke to feel the roughness of a man’s hand on me. I was uncovered, and still tender from Walt’s sucking. Rigid with fear, holding the baby tight, I opened my eyes. There was very little light, only the red glow from the stove. But I could see it was Quinlan. He had pulled his smock up to his waist and stood as naked as Old Sigh, his thing nudging at me and twitching like a creature with its own will. I drew my head back as far as the chair would let me.

‘Your turn, sweetheart,’ he said, ‘your turn to suck.’

I shut my mouth tight then, and my eyes too, and held on to Walt. I hummed maybe in my fear but couldn’t think straight to make any other sound.

‘Don’t be like that,’ he said. ‘You’re with me now. It’s settled.’ His voice was soft but there was menace in it.

From another room came the clatter of dishes and the scraping of chairs across the floor as Dell and Trevor worked, and from outside among the ruins the soft scrabbling noises of creatures that like darkness. After a moment I heard the hiss of Quinlan’s breath. His hand moved and withdrew. I waited sick with terror to feel it again, calloused, palsied, damp with sweat, settling on some other part of me. I remembered Brendan the night he took me from the red room, his hands reaching up under my skirt. But the strange disturbance I felt then was a pale shadow of this fear that seemed to rob me of motion.

When nothing came, I opened my eyes and saw that there was a knife at Quinlan’s throat and it was Dell behind him holding it. I watched them in the light of the fire. Dell looked ready to kill, but I could see no fear in Quinlan’s face, only cunning.

I looked down only to see if Walt was still sleeping and to lift him closer, but when I raised my eyes again everything had changed. Quinlan had turned about and forced Dell to her knees, gripping her wrist to keep the knife safe. Her cry had brought Trevor running from the outer room. There was a desperate scramble then, all three tangled together, and the firelight throwing their huge shadows on the wall. I stood, pushing my chair back. I could think of nothing except keeping Walt from harm. Laying him in the log basket by the stove, I looked about for something to fight with in case Quinlan should come for me again.

There was a grunt of effort or of pain and Trevor was on the ground, curled up as though winded from a blow. Dell too had fallen, upsetting a table, and lay dazed and breathless against it.

‘Now then sweetheart. You come without any squealing, or we unstitch the tadpole and see what his insides look like.’ Quinlan was talking to me. He was holding Dell’s knife, which was already stained with blood, unless it was only the flame from the stove gave it its colour.

Some power surged through me then, a rage such I had never felt. I reached for the nearest thing, which was the lid of the cooking pot, and hurled it at Quinlan’s head. He made to duck, but it clipped his ear and clattered away into the dark. While he was still reeling, I held up the pot, took two steps towards him and threw the stew in his face. I stepped back, letting the pot fall, feeling only then the searing heat of it.

I watched him lumber about, howling, crashing into furniture, blinded by the scalding broth, and had no thought of what to do next, except to find some way to soothe my poor burnt hands. I didn’t see where Dell came from, nor what she held beside her, until she was close enough to take a blow at him. It was an axe she struck him with, and I felt the heat of his blood on my face as he went down and was sickened, all at once, by the smell of blood and ash and rabbit meat and rosemary and burning skin.

There were figures then in the doorway, sleepers roused by our noise, gaping and wide-eyed in the glow of the flames. But none of them stepped forward. It wasn’t their fight. Dell rolled Trevor on to his back and cried out to find there was a bleeding gash near his heart and not a breath of life left in him.

Some of the men helped us dig graves for Quinlan and Trevor. We carried them to the patch of ground where Cat is buried, which was a garden once I think, though long neglected like the ruins all around. We put Quinlan in a far corner so that their bodies might not be eaten by the same worms. Dell bound two sticks together into a shape like a t to mark the place where Trevor’s body lay. I asked her was it for the t of Trevor’s name, thinking I might one day show her the difference between a big and a small t, but she frowned and shook her head and said it would be the same for anyone loved and missed. Then she wept bitterly.

She told me it wouldn’t be safe for us now at the O. People would come looking for Quinlan. The boys he had spoken of would want to know where he had gone and his boat full of leather. She said we should trust no one, not the men who had helped us, not Madge, not the regulars who had been Trevor’s friends. If we meant to go north we should set off south. I saw she was right. So we packed up what food and clothes we could carry, with some precious things of my own to load on Gideon’s back. We thought of taking the cow to help with our burden – such a fine strong beast and the boy who tended it nowhere to be seen. But we knew it was too pale and strange and would mark us out on the road. We slipped away while it was still dark.

I think now of life at the O as a dream from which I have woken. I once feared more than anything to watch a flogging at the Hall. But a flogging had its own shape, always the same. You knew the worst of it from the beginning. Even in the red room I knew why they had put me there. I see now that here among the scroungers, at the best of times, everything must be haggled over from day to day and everyone lives by chance like a weed in a cottage wall.

I have lived here no one’s wife and free to care for my child without shame. But all the business of calling and being called and then standing on the lawn among neighbours to hear certain texts from the Book of Air was as warm and comforting to me as sunshine, and it seems to me now that shame was its necessary shadow.

After Walt was born no one stood with me to ask, as after any birth in the village, ‘What crime was this that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion? What mystery that broke out now in fire and now in blood at the deadest hours of night?’ And no one to explain that through these hard words of Jane’s we are reminded that from the moment of our making we are fire as well as air, that Bertha no less than Jane is in all of us, that we are conceived in crime and must live a mystery to ourselves.