Sarah Hall - The Carhullan Army

I opened my eyes and for a minute had to fight the uncomfortable brightness. Above me the sky was whitewashed and cracked. It was a ceiling. A thin bar of sunshine ran the length of it, splitting into a pale green prism at one end that was too luminous and beautiful to look at for long. The last finger of a woman’s hand was sitting like a pink visor over my vision. As I turned my head to face her she took it away and I felt the plush of a pillow underneath my cheek. I was in a bed. I was inside the farm.

‘Long walk,’ she said. I waited for my eyes to focus on her properly. They felt scratchy, and sore, as if surgery had been performed on them. ‘We’re near where the eyries used to be,’ she went on. ‘It’s not clearly marked to scale on the maps. They call it a reservation null. Supposedly it stopped people from stealing the eggs.’ She gave a low laugh. ‘Not very helpful for visitors though, is it? But here you are anyway. Shangri-La.’

Her accent was close to my own, less town-bred and more mobile over its vowels. It was the county’s rural equivalent. I looked up at her face, finally able to see her. She was older of course, in her forties now, but immediately recognisable. Her jawline was thicker, though still slightly misshapen, crooked, with the smile worn higher on the left, as if she had always favoured the teeth on that side when she ate. On the lower inert cheek there was a strange fold of skin, a tucked-in line, like a suture tack. In the newspaper pictures I had never noticed it. Her hair was long; it reached her shoulders and there were colourless strands woven into it. It softened her features slightly, and it looked wrong.

But it was the eyes that gave her away. Jackie Nixon’s eyes were the colour of slate riverbeds. The photographs had never been able to moderate or alter their lustre. Even in black and white she looked out of the pictures clearly and coldly, and I knew that the territory had somehow gone into the making of her.

She was looking at me now with an expression both curious and patient, as if keen that we should communicate but conscious of my disability, aware that we would need some lesser form of exchange. She watched as my eyes filled up, her gaze flickering to the side of my face as the tears ran across the bridge of my nose, over my eyelid and down onto the cotton. I blinked and squeezed out the gathering fluid, embarrassed not to have controlled my composure in front of her. My brain suddenly ignited then. It was her. It was Jackie. Not three feet from me. Alive in the flesh.

I tried to sit up but an aching stiffness ran the length of me and I found that my arm had been knitted up into a gauze sling, so I could only use the other elbow as a prop. After a few attempts I brought myself ungracefully to an upright position. She did not try to assist me, but let me struggle against the soreness and the inhibition of the bindings. She was sitting on a wooden chair next to the bed, leaning forward, with her elbows on her knees, her wrists lopped over and crossed like paws. She had on fatigues and a long-sleeved vest. A thin silver chain fell down below her neckline. I wiped my eyes but the tears still came. The cut on my hand had been wrapped and it smelled sweet when I brought it up to my face, almost sickly, as if there was a floral ointment of some kind under the bandage.

Jackie lifted herself up a fraction, reached down and inched the chair closer in. ‘Don’t worry about it, Sister,’ she said. ‘You’re just hungry. You’re probably ready for some porridge now. I’ll get the girls to make you some.’ She smiled again, sympathetically, as if I were a child who had woken from an illness and would naturally be starving and eager for sustenance. The texture of her face seemed almost burned. There were smooth patches and areas where the skin looked crisp. She stared at me a while longer, then stood abruptly, scraping the chair back along the floorboards. She walked to the door, and though she was relatively short I saw her duck under the low oak beam of the lintel. Then I heard her boots on the stairs.

I found I was holding my breath. My lungs fluttered as I exhaled. I looked around. On the dresser next to the bed was a glass of water. The underlying thirst of the last few days had not left me, so I reached over, took it, and drank it down. My mouth nipped and stung as the liquid passed. The abrasions where I had bitten into the flesh had become ulcers; I could feel the sore little holes with the tip of my tongue. The sickness had passed, but there was a sulphurous taste at the back of my throat. I knew I needed something in my stomach. The rest of me was clean, but my mouth was furred and stale from the risen acid. I took stock of myself. I felt battered and bruised, weak rather than weary, but less confused, and less frantic. The delirium and fear of the metal tank where they’d kept me had gone, but I could sense them flashing around my brain, and I suspected that if I closed my eyes for long enough the terrible images and the feeling of restriction would come slipping back.

I tried to concentrate on the present. They had obviously washed me and dressed my injuries. My upper body was naked except for the sling and underneath the sheets I had on clean underwear from my backpack. The heels and toes of my feet were taped and when I moved them they felt moist and creamy under their stiff plasters. I pulled back the covers. I saw that my knee, where it had struck the rock, was dark purple and grey.

I could hear muffled voices downstairs, banging and general movement, doors opening and closing. Outside there were more sounds, dull thumps and the nickering and lowing of animals. I had met only a handful of the women so far, but I knew there must be more. The shapes framed against the skyline on the night of my arrival had not been a trick of the light or my eyes beginning their false projections. It was likely the farm had been evacuated before my arrival.

I climbed out of bed and hobbled to the window. Below, the courtyard was filled with slanting autumn sunlight. Brown leaves and tufts of fireweed were blowing across the granite slabs. Someone had left a book overturned on the stone steps to an upper door where a pulley hung from a bracket. Its pages fluttered. Two women were standing talking at the entrance of one of the barns. The strong breeze flattened their hair, parting it in white lines along their scalps. One held a box full of what looked to be root vegetables: turnips, carrots, cabbages. The other had a bundle of material in her arms. She shifted the weight a fraction and a tiny hand reached upwards from the folds. The woman next to her cradled the box of tubers and greenery against her hip, took hold of the little fingers with her free hand and leaned down to kiss them. It took a moment for me to comprehend what I had seen. My eyes were still watery and smarting, but they were not mistaken. There was a newborn at Carhullan.

The women below parted company, walking in opposite directions across the yard, and I looked out beyond where they had stood. Through the gaps between the outbuildings I could see the expanse of fields and ditches that I had been escorted through. There was a high three-walled enclosure where a dozen fruit trees were rocking in the wind. Grazing underneath the lowest branches were four white and brown goats. One of them was being milked.

Beyond that I could make out a column of about twenty prostrate bodies on the ground. They were dressed in shorts and their legs looked pale against the turf. After a while I could see they were moving up and down, alternating position every few seconds, their arms spread wide at first, then held tightly in at their sides.

When I turned back from the window Jackie was standing in the doorway of the bedroom. I had not heard her mounting the stairs. In her hands was a tray with a steaming bowl placed on it, a jug, and a dish of apple pieces. ‘You’re up. Good lass. Feel like a run, since you’re not pointing heavenwards any more? I’m about to send my unit out.’ I felt my eyes widen. ‘God, no,’ I said. She laughed a quiet throaty laugh. ‘That’s all right. I’m just fucking with you. First things first, we’ll get you mended.’ She nodded at the tray. ‘It’s poddish. With a little bit of sago thrown in. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was frogspawn, but we’ll not tell Sister Ruthie that. It’s her department and she doesn’t like much feedback.’