Sarah Hall - The Carhullan Army

She sat on a drum, crossed her arms and pointed at me. ‘I’ve seen a lot of what’s gone on, Sister, just as you have. I’ve even been down to the so-called capital. It’s in a bad state. You would not believe it if I told you. But I’m not interested in London. London’s finished. We’re no longer the nation we were. If you think about it, there’s no central command. We’re back to being a country of local regimes.’ She paused, put a hand to her face and rubbed her jaw. ‘Sister, you’ve been on the inside, I want you to tell me everything you can about Rith. I want to know exactly how the Authority operates. And I want to know where the weaknesses are.’

*

There were two meals at Carhullan: breakfast and dinner. And most evenings there was a gathering of some kind in the large downstairs kitchen. If the generator was switched on there was power for the CD player, bickering about whose turn it was to select the music, and if not, those with instruments usually played for a while. There were a couple of guitars and a fiddle, a flute, and an accordion. Some of the women could sing very well, Benna among them, and I liked it when the tallow candles were lit and the musicians played.

I had begun to put more names to faces. The otter-haired woman in Megan’s patrol was Cordelia. Everyone called her Corky. I had smiled at her a few times across the room, but she remained distant, perhaps suspicious of me. Most of the women were Caucasian; there were a couple of Asians, and a black girl called Nnenna, who had been the most recent arrival at Carhullan before me. The rest of her family had been deported. The mother of Carhullan’s newborn was Helen. Every time I heard a new name I said it a few times to myself in order to remember it. Katrina. Sil. Tamar. Corinne. Maia.

People came and went, to and from the dormitories, so it often seemed chaotic and crowded, but there were always routines in place to ensure everyone was fed and comfortable. The apple cider was in plentiful supply and it was wonderful to drink. There were batches of sloes from the year before that had been turned into a sweet spirit. I was passed a cup of the purple syrup. I soon realised it was what Lorry had dosed me with before taking out the coil, and when I smelled its aroma of cloves and berries, it brought back that memory and I couldn’t sip it. I handed the cup back to Sonnelle and she shrugged and drank it herself.

The atmosphere lightened after the dinner shifts. The work of the day was done, though the unit was still on duty, and Jackie posted a four-woman patrol every night to keep a lookout over the surrounding area. I found this out from Megan one evening when she wasn’t on the night watch. She did not mind usually, but the temperatures had dropped in the last few weeks, and she was glad not to be out in the boggy dark, she said, freezing her arse off.

Megan was fourteen years old. She was the most confident girl I had ever met. Where some of the other women held back at first, glancing at me across the room, and leaving space around me as if I were a frail being in need of air and insulation, she was not so shy about finding a spot on the bench beside me. She shoved the women closest to me along the wooden seat and straddled it. Her arm rested against mine as she sat down.

‘Took your time getting up, didn’t you? Nice togs. I never had to wear one of those,’ she said, tugging the strings of the tunic. There was a directness about her, but no trace of hostility in her smile, and I knew in her mind I had ceased to be a problem. Then, as she had done on the moors, she reached up and touched my hair. ‘God. It’s so fluffy it could blow off, like a dandelion clock.’ ‘Yeah, well, maybe I should get a buzz cut like you then,’ I replied. She reached up and rubbed her own scalp. Under the ginger bristles the blue tattoo stood out. Up close I could see the intricacy of the line pattern. It looked Celtic. I wondered who had done it for her at so young an age. ‘I had lice last year, didn’t I? So, it had to go.’ I pulled a face. ‘Not very nice for you.’ She shrugged. ‘I like it like this. I’ve got a good shaped head. The Sisters are all copying me now. You should do it.’

I liked Megan’s company and I was glad of it. She was tough and easy in equal measure. She was keen to tell me her story, and proud of her status as the oldest of the second generation. Her blood-mother had walked up to Carhullan, bruised from her father’s fists and seven months pregnant, she told me, instantly putting my own journey to shame and confirming the rumours I had heard that the place had in part been a sanctuary for abused women. Megan’s tone became prideful. Her mother had been beaten once too often by him, and fearing not only for her life now but for the baby’s also, she had stolen his car and driven the breadth of Ireland. She had taken a ferry from Dublin to Holyhead and buses from there to Kendal, where she had had a cousin, holding a suitcase of nappies and a stuffed toy on her knee. Then she had made her way on foot, up through Mosedale and over the pass, to the Sisters at the farm. She had thought it was a convent.

She’d died in labour — this was only just before Lorry’s time — and she was now buried in the small graveyard, by the Five Pins. ‘Is that where Veronique is too?’ I asked. Megan ignored the question and continued outlining her own biography. ‘I’m multi-mothered,’ she declared, and went on to say the women had all raised her among themselves, as a community daughter. She had been an experiment in a way, she told me. ‘To see what they could do without the influence of nem.’ ‘What’s a nem?’ I asked her. ‘It’s men turned around and made to face the other way,’ she said. ‘Ha-ha-ha.’ She delivered the explanation flatly and tonelessly, as if reciting a standard expression of which she had become bored. ‘So, have you been a success?’ She shrugged nonchalantly, and without shame or uncertainty reached up to my hair again and felt a lock of it.

She did not seem like any teenager I had known. But neither was she fully an adult. There were qualities of youth about her; a greenness to her personality, but she gave the impression of practical maturity, durability. I could see the strong influence of Jackie in her. She handled weapons with skill, I had witnessed it myself, and she had easily ‘neutralised’ me on the fell. But she was playful and open too, and fiercely considerate. At dinner she gave me one of the three potatoes on her plate in order that I be better sustained for winter. She was worried that I might find it too hard in the first year. It was colder up here than in the towns.

Two of her fingers were still taped together. ‘That’s from bringing you down off the wall,’ she said, holding them in front of me. They looked swollen and blue but she seemed not to register the pain as she retied my tunic. It was clear that there was no remaining dispute between us over my introduction to the farm. She had just been doing her job. I wondered what schooling she had had and when I asked her if she could read and write she looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘I’m not backward,’ she said. ‘I’ve read every book here.’ I had not seen much literature at Carhullan — there were a few volumes on the alcove shelves in the parlour next to the kitchen — well thumbed and cracked through their spines, mostly classics. But Megan’s statement sounded boastful, as if it had been some feat or other.

We ate our food and then she began to interrogate me. ‘Which do you like best, prick or pussy? Everyone wants to know. There are bets on.’ I imitated the blasé shrug she had just given me. ‘Not much of the former up here, is there?’ I said, and she grinned.

Megan was curious about my life, and my experiences in a society that she had never been part of. But she was not bemused or awed, or afraid of its ugly side. There seemed to be little attraction or repulsion to the outside world. It was more a question of pragmatism. What she had learned at Carhullan had been second hand and subjective. She had watched the towns from afar, and it seemed she had not been taught to despise or fear, or wish for some other way of life, some earlier existence. When I told her about the recovery efforts she described the government as temporary and misguided. I knew they were not her words and I was not sure how much she comprehended of the system in place, or whether she realised she still fell under its power. She talked about the Authority as if it were bad weather, something that had to be taken into account, and could be endured, until it passed.