Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

The child, named Bella after her dead mother, was the only dreamer on the Dreaming Highway that night. The three adults judged valueless by the rustlers did not have any rest. For the first time since leaving the Pesthouse, Margaret spent the night alone, too shocked and frightened to sleep but not allowed to offer any comfort to the net makers or to seek from them any comfort for herself. The Boses had found a narrow, ferrous crevice, damp and unwelcoming but dark enough to hide them from any further passersby. Margaret had tried to squeeze in with them, but they had pushed her back with their feet and elbows, not wanting even to touch her with their hands. Their only conversation after that had been shouted, and brief, just long enough for Melody to warn Margaret to keep her distance “or else.” She’d armed herself with a heavy piece of metal. If Margaret came too close, Melody was ready and prepared, she said, to do some lasting damage to Margaret’s shaven head.

The night was not silent. Andrew Bose, chirring like a katydid, kept up a muttered chorus of curses against humankind for its cruelty and its treachery and against his own mother for ever having given birth to him. Melody soothed the baby and herself with rocking and repetition, “Son. Son. Son…,” not daring to invite more misfortune by naming him out loud. And all around, the relics made noises of their own. Trash disturbed by all the recent hoofs and feet settled back in place. Degraded concrete slabs shifted and wheezed as the night grew cold. Insignificant animals with outsized, moonlit eyes that were only scavenging for scraps sounded to Margaret and the Boses as large and dangerous as horsemen. The taller metal shapes picked up any wind in their hollows and their tubes and played their fluty monotones with it, competing to produce the saddest and most spectral sound.

Margaret was trembling for a long part of the night, too shaken by her loss — her losses — to settle on a single emotion. In just a few days everyone she loved had been carried off. Bitterness piled up on bitterness. She had not expected to get any sleep, but nevertheless, once the Boses had rejected her and she had exhausted herself with weeping and vomiting, she had moved her bedclothes onto the barrow and stretched out on her side, resting an arm across the empty space where Franklin had slept. Another good man gone, she thought, as if somehow it was her fault, that it was as inevitable that misfortune would attend Franklin once he was in her company as it was certain that the men in her family would beat with sticks that older, fine-mannered stranger who had proposed a midnight meeting with her all those years ago. Maybe it was correct what everybody said: “Red hair, bad luck.” But then, she had been lucky in other ways, hadn’t she? Like no one else from Ferrytown, she was alive. Yes, thanks to Pigeon, thanks to him. His touch had rescued her twice, first when his strong slow fingers had massaged her feet and then again when his sudden, quicker fingers had pulled off her scarf.

She should not be angry with the Boses. Margaret knew that, despite her spinning emotions. They had a right to suspect and fear her shaven head, even though her hair was now a few days old and visible, an orange fuzz that felt like the nap of some fine cloth when she ran her palm across her skull. She almost had eyebrows, spiky and stiff. But still she could not expect them to risk exposing a child of Bella’s age to a disease, even if that disease was clearly in retreat. Nor could she expect them to show much sympathy to her for the loss of her “half-brother.” How could that compare to their loss of a full son and their granddaughter’s loss of a full father? Nor could she expect them to stay quiet during the night, when their grief, their shock, and their terror were so burdensome. Yet she was angry with the Boses. She was angry at the way they had turned hostile and despairing so quickly, creating more conflict instead of staying calm. She was angry that only a short time after sharing a fire and their life stories with her, and at a time when the four of them should be unified and thinking of ways to help or rescue their men, they were threatening her with a strip of metal. Not that such a threat was frightening. The Boses didn’t have the pluck or strength to do her any harm. They didn’t have the character.

Margaret’s anger made the time pass more quickly. It kept her warm and busy. Keep your distance or else? The threat was so infuriating and unkind that Margaret succeeded in persuading herself that it would be easy, a pleasure even, to take the metal out of Melody’s hands and give her graying braids some sharp, painful tugs. Or else she would happily find a strip of metal of her own and put an end to all that “Son. Son. Son…” Melody, the crowd of emigrants who had stoned them on the shingle beach at Ferrytown, the short horseman who had stolen Franklin’s coat, anyone ahead of her who’d dare to block her path, they all became one body, dropping to its knees under the thrashing weight of Margaret’s metal strip.

As soon as there was some light, Margaret wrapped her blanket around her shoulders and clambered up a high rampart of rubble to make sure that the junkle was deserted. She could not trust her eyes entirely, but she listened carefully, turning into and against the wind. No whinnying. No brays. No dogs. No men. Not even birds. For the time being they were safe. Safe enough to run away.

The Boses watched her from their hiding place. They seemed so weary and so old suddenly, so frail and defeated, that Margaret, against her instincts to tell them nothing, called out to inform them that she was moving on, and that if they wanted to — and if they had any sense at all in their old heads — they could join her. “At a distance, if you prefer,” she said. “Otherwise you’ll have to manage on your own. Make up your minds.” She sounded like her mother for a moment, impatient and practical, when what she truly felt was desolate and hollow.

“Where will we go? How will we get there?” Andrew Bose asked eventually, after a whispered conversation with the ill-named Melody.

“We walk. How else?” They might be in possession of a carriage and a boat barrow, she reminded them, but without any horses to pull the former or anyone strong enough to push the latter, they had no choice but to leave behind anything they could not carry easily and go ahead by foot.

“But where?”

“I don’t know where. Don’t ask me where. We go. We carry on. That’s what we have to do.” Again she recognized this tone of voice, not her natural, more respectful way of speaking, and not her mother’s. It was the voice her brothers had often used to bully her. It was the voice she’d heard from Franklin just the day before, when he had made her take the highway despite her worries. It “will speed us to the coast,” he’d said. Well, he’d been wrong. Horribly so. And she’d been right. I’ll never take the advice of a pigeon again, she told herself — and it almost made her smile, just to imagine for a moment that she was truly saying it to him, that he was still there with her to be teased.

Well, now she had the chance to take her own advice, to leave the old wide track and all the hard lands thereabouts and follow country routes, ones too narrow, preferably, for horses or groups of men. But Franklin needed her. She was not free to take her own advice. There was no one who’d look for him if she didn’t. So what she’d have to do was try to find where he’d been taken, no matter where it was, even if it meant continuing along the highway.

“Okay, it’s true, I don’t know what we ought to do,” she called out to the Boses. “And nor do you. All I know is that I want my Franklin back.” She fought her sobs. “And you must want your Acton back, too. Her pa. So what’s the choice? There isn’t any choice. We find the horse scuffs and we follow them. What happens then will happen then. We can’t stay here. So let’s pack up our bags and go. Before those men come back for us. Or something worse.”