Sarah Hall - The Carhullan Army

The lights were on but the place was still and empty. It was apparent that we were waiting for something or someone. The two had turned their backs to me. From their posture they were making it clear that if I was going to faint again they were not going to catch me. I was responsible for my own conduct and I would have to summon the strength and coordination to keep my balance. I squeezed my eyes closed, opened them and blinked rapidly several times, fighting to maintain concentration and alertness. I knew that I had to remain standing, that for all their coolness and detachment they wanted me upright, aware of what was happening, and capable of representing myself. But I craved unconsciousness, and was close to passing out. What I wanted to do was give in, let the blackness and numbness claim me. I wanted to crumple to the floor and stay there until the sickness and pain and exhaustion passed, leaving me ready to face this strange and desolate community.

Inside the settlement walls, a door opened and shut. There were footsteps on the courtyard flagstones and I saw a figure walking towards us. The silhouette grew more distinct, then, from the middle of the buildings, a broad-waisted woman emerged. She had on a floor-length skirt and a waxed coat. Over that she wore a sleeved plastic apron, like a vet’s. She paused for a moment in front of the otter-haired woman and the girl whose name I now knew was Megan. They murmured a few words together and the woman nodded.

As she stepped towards me I felt a last rush of panic. I was not ready to meet her. I was not composed, not cognitive enough. The long hike had taken its toll and she would surely think the worst of me for arriving in this state, for being too weak. But as she came into view I saw that it was not Jackie. Nor was it Veronique. I did not recognise this woman. She was middle aged, perhaps in her fifties, and stout. Her hair was long and loose, falling in thin dry curls to her waist. There was a deep groove above her nose where her brow pinched in. It was the mark of a perpetual frown, an expression that seemed to be worn perhaps even when she did not mean for it to be present. On her apron there were dark pragmatic smears.

‘Take off the bag, please,’ she said to me, pointing to my rucksack. ‘Go on, it’s OK.’ I pulled the straps off my shoulders as slowly and carefully as I could, and tipped it to one side, catching it in the crook of my good arm. Then I let it drop to the floor. She could see from my face the distress caused by the manoeuvre. Her eyes were bright hazel and fast, taking in my level of discomposure and processing what she saw. ‘Right. I’m going to check you out. I know you’re hurt,’ she said to me. ‘Do I have your permission?’ I did not reply. She kept her eyes locked with mine. I saw kindness in them. After a few seconds of her gaze, I nodded. She stepped in again and took hold of my jaw, opening my mouth gently but firmly. With her other hand she placed two fingers on my tongue and patted down. She turned them and touched the roof of my mouth, then brought them back out. I winced as she brushed past the bitten rim of my cheek.

‘When did you last piss?’ she asked. I shook my head, then remembered. ‘This morning,’ I said. My voice sounded cracked and hoarse, as if I had grown older since I set out. ‘Have you thrown up?’ I nodded. ‘Well, you weren’t carried so your feet can wait,’ she said. There was a lilt at the heart of her accent, perhaps Westcountry or Welsh, but my mind was too disordered to place it. She sighed. ‘OK. Now I’ve got to have a go at that shoulder. I’m sorry.’

Before I could respond her hands were working over my throat, pressing along the line of my clavicle, and in the hollow under my arm. She took hold of my wrist and elbow and raised them up. I tried not to shout out but the pain was too vivid and I made a strangled noise that sounded shrill and bird-like. She held tighter and moved the arm in a wide circle. The bone from my breastplate to my shoulder cuff felt as if it were grating and splintering as it rotated. I was crying openly now at the agony of her manipulations and though I tried to pull back, the force of her grip kept me from freeing myself. ‘No, no, no,’ she said, simply, as if talking to a stubborn animal. When she was done she placed the arm tightly back at my side, bent it up at the elbow, and pushed my hand between my breasts. ‘Keep it held like this,’ she whispered, almost too quietly for me to hear. Then, raising her voice to its previous level, she said, ‘Yeah. It’s fractured.’

The examination was over. As I waited for the throbbing in my arm to subside, Megan picked up the rucksack from the ground by my feet. Her eyes met mine briefly, then looked away. I saw that the blue tattoo above her ear ran all the way round her skull, down the median of her neck, disappearing at the hem of her jersey. I looked hard at it, focused on the ornamental border to distract myself from the pain. I imagined the blue ink line running on under her clothes. I followed it as it snaked down her spine, across her ribs and her hip, down her leg and under her foot. I pictured the line continuing on and spilling into the blue twilight, like a river into a lake. Gradually the pain lessened. When I looked at her again she was shrugging the rucksack onto her back. It seemed huge on her slender frame, like an absurd beetle’s carapace. She slipped between the outbuildings. A metal latch lifted and a door creaked. After a few moments she came back without the bag, and carrying instead a plastic container of fluid.

The woman who had inspected me in the half-dark took a few paces back and sighed heavily again. Her frown had deepened. She looked worried. She put her hands on her hips and her head dropped forward. ‘It’s not recommended,’ she called out. ‘Not bloody well by me!’ From behind her, in the shadows of the courtyard, I heard another voice. ‘Give her the water. Then put her in the dog box. She’s fit enough.’

The women from the moor took my arms. As they led me away round the thick outer wall of the farm I glanced up towards the fells. There was now so little daylight that the horizon had almost disappeared. I squinted into the distance. The ground had lost its definition and the summit of High Street seemed to bleed into the deep teal of the night. The elements were combining darkly, but for a second or two I thought I saw a long row of black outlines, human figures, standing on the ridge against the sky. I could not be sure of it. But in that one glance, before I was pushed inside the narrow iron structure, there seemed to be a ring of people on the hillside above Carhullan. There were too many of them to count.

*

What followed was unbearable. I was kept in the metal tank for maybe three days, though I received no confirmation of how long it had been from the women who had left me there. By the end I had lost all track of time, and I did not know whether I had added the hours together correctly, or if I had forgotten some moments in between. There was no way to measure, no way to count.

The darkness was absolute. I only knew that the sun had risen by the temperature change inside the corrugated walls, the warming of the vault’s iron sides and the smell of urine and sweat growing stronger in the heat. The dimensions of the cell were tiny, perhaps two feet square, and barely wide enough to sit in, let alone lie down or stretch out. In it was a single broken wooden stool. Its seat was flat and hard, too small to rest on comfortably. A single pole ran from the cross piece to the ground. It had not been hammered down securely, so the chair rocked and tipped in its shaft, moving whenever my weight shifted. Every few minutes I would have to adjust, and if I had drifted into shallow sleep I’d wake with a start, panicked by a sensation of falling, or by the clanging echo of the metal partition as I fell against it.