Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

‘Your room in the turret? I’ve been there before. It’s too close to the red room. I’m afraid I might never see the forest again, or the fields, or the geese. How are the geese?’

‘The geese are laying and will go on laying without any help from you. Come to my room and we can talk about the books.’

‘And if I did come, what would Megan say?’

I saw I had unsettled him at last. ‘The night you left.’ He looked at the ground. When he looked up again his eyes were fierce. ‘Until the night you left, Agnes, I didn’t know.’

‘What didn’t you know?’

‘That without you the Hall is an empty ruin and the other villagers worth less to me than a rabble of scroungers.’

I was surprised to feel my heart beat faster to hear him say this, and my breath come less easily. I didn’t know what I would say in reply until the words came. ‘Then knock on my cottage door and I might answer.’

I made to walk away but was stopped by a thought. When I turned back, three or four women had gathered around Roland, old neighbours puzzled to see me, some holding books awkwardly in both hands, while the air tore at their scarves and the hems of their skirts. Bessie joined them, puzzling at a page of words. They were afraid perhaps the Book of Death was come for them in many faces and the world was soon to end. Behind them on the steps, the Mistress moved her arms through the air but her voice was drowned. Daniel, waiting beside her to be flogged, tilted his hooded head as if to catch a sound that would tell him what was happening to the village.

‘I met some scroungers on the road,’ I said. My words were for Roland but I didn’t mind who heard them. ‘They boasted they had killed a villager. An old man who limped in his walk. I thought of Morton. Is Morton dead? They said they cut his throat while he lay in bed asleep and left him to be eaten by rats.’

Roland watched me through narrowed eyes. ‘How did they know of his limp if they killed him in bed?’

I looked at the wild sky, then at the women who waited for an answer. ‘They followed him home from the forest where he’d been gathering firewood.’

‘A loaf of Annie’s bread was in the kitchen, Agnes. Did the scroungers tell you that? Cheese and freshly churned butter. In the yard a shed full of chickens. None of it touched. Only Morton, slashed from the ear to the throat, and enough blood to drench the straw and spill down through the floorboards on to his kitchen table. Is there no hunger any more among the scroungers?’

I shrugged. ‘Scroungers do what scroungers will, Roland, and there’s no accounting for it.’

I left him standing there, and the neighbours gathering round him, and hurried to where Dell stood with Walt, and Sarah clinging to her, while above them the trees tossed and churned. I told Sarah she should come with us to the cottage, but she pulled herself away from Dell and said she must see things right at the Hall. She held me tight for a moment, said she would come to us later, and set off into the storm.

So it was just the three of us again. I led the way on foot back down to the road and over the bridge towards my mother’s cottage.

The fire has died down, and I’ve come to dig Django’s grave. Inside the blackened shell of the church the roof timbers sit precariously in heaps. Embers break here and there into little runs of flame. The walls give off heat and I’m sweating before I’ve begun.

Django lies in the churchyard where he fell. On one side his clothes have burnt off and his flesh is singed. I chase off a couple of buzzards, throw a sheet over him and weigh it down with stones. Then I cover my face and start digging. While I work, the wind shifts direction and grows stronger. The air is pleasantly cool. I catch the smell of tree bark and damp leaves. Before I reach the water level the rain comes and I’m hoisting shovelfuls of mud.

I’m about done, when I see Abigail on the road. I climb out and let the rain wash the mud off me.

Abigail calls out, ‘The others are on their way.’ When she reaches me she puts her hand on my neck and kisses me on the mouth. Then she takes my arm and pulls herself close, resting her head against my chest.

I ask her if Maud’s all right.

‘I think so. The door’s still locked. You won’t let them hurt her will you?’

‘No one will hurt her.’

‘We would have come sooner, but no one could find Rasputin.’

‘Simon was searching for him earlier. Aleksy told him he must have gone off in search of a girl monkey to mate with.’

‘Poor Rasputin. When I went up to talk to Maud, he was playing on your ladder. So I chased him off with a broom and shut the trap door. That’s the last I saw of him.’

The rain stops and we watch the sky clear across the valley, and the faint arc of refracted light.

Abigail says, ‘You did say you’d finished in the roof?’

‘The roof’s OK for now. The house will survive the winter, even if we don’t.’

‘We’ll be all right.’

‘What will happen to us, Abigail?’

‘We’ll grow wheat and bake bread. We’ll make cheese. There’ll be hay in the summer to feed the cows for another year. The orchard will give us fruit. The hens and geese will lay eggs. Maud’s bees will make honey and wax for our candles. And we’ll have children, first Deirdre and then me, and one day Maud. And we’ll take care of each other and our children will take care of us.’

‘And what will we tell them, these children?’

‘That now would be a good time to earth up the leeks.’

‘Have we got leeks?’

‘They were the first thing we planted, Maud and me. We brought what seeds we could find in Lloyd’s barn.’

‘You were thinking ahead.’

‘I’d been thinking for years, thinking myself out of Hebron.’ She reaches into the pocket of her apron. ‘I nearly forgot.’ She takes my left hand and slips my ring on. ‘I thought you’d like to have it with you.’

‘To bury Django you mean. You don’t mind that I wear it? You know it’s my wedding ring.’

‘We shouldn’t forget the people who were important to us. We hold them close, any way we can.’ She puts a hand to her heart, touching through her blouse the star on its silver chain.

Aleksy and Deirdre come, bringing Simon. He stands and watches while we move the stones away, lift Django’s body with the sheet still covering it and lower it into the ground.

Simon asks if he can read from his book.

‘Course you can, Si,’ I tell him. ‘Django would like that.’

‘This is n-Jangle’s… favourite bit,’ he says. He stumbles on the first goodnight. The second and third come more easily. Arbitrary words, they seem to me, though by some mystery they have captured his childish imagination. He draws out the last phrase, hushing his friend to an eternal sleep with his finger to his lips, and twitching in his effort to hold still.

That seems good enough for now. Together Aleksy and I shovel the earth back into the grave.

Later, when the leeks have been seen to and the cows have been milked, when Simon’s been put to bed and Aleksy is helping Deirdre clean the kitchen, I walk with Abigail in the long grass that used be a lawn. All day I’ve been aware of a glow, a vividness I hadn’t seen in her before. She touches me, and it’s as if her whole body is humming with energy, and mine too.

Above us the stars do what stars are supposed to do, what they’ve always done, though for a century or so it was hard to see them through the glare of cathode and neon and the glow of incandescent filaments.

I miss electricity – there’ll always be a hole in my heart where electricity used to be. God knows, I miss plumbing. I miss all the engineered gadgetry of the industrial age. I miss you too, Caroline, but just now you seem a long way off. If I could put everything back the way it was, if I could exchange this little rescued fragment of life for the world we had, in all its astounding, calamitous glory, I wouldn’t hesitate. Not for a second. But I have moments of forgetting. A mist crosses in front of it and I begin to lose the sharpness of its outline. I know it will come back to me, the desolation, the knowledge of all that’s gone. But for now there’s this glimmer of what it might feel like to be glad.