Sarah Hall - The Carhullan Army

Jackie’s bedroom was the largest upstairs and it overlooked the mountains to the west. Whoever had built the farm four centuries ago had fashioned for themselves a chamber of suitable status. When I knocked she did not call out, but I heard the squeak of a mattress and then her heavy-soled footsteps crossing the boards to let me in. She had on wire-framed reading glasses, and they tempered the hard aspect of her face, made her appear scholarly. I felt as if I had disturbed her, even though she had asked me to come. But she motioned for me to enter, and I went in.

I had not known what to expect of her private space. When I’d looked in on them, the dormitories were small and crowded. The bunks were sometimes separated by curtains, but mostly through the day they were left open, even if shared by two women, and they were immaculately tidy. The beds were made, many with matching khaki blankets — army surplus I guessed — or carthens, and the floors looked swept. On the first visit I had thought perhaps they would be strewn with items of clothing and bedding, that a natural dishevelment would prevail, but it was as if they had been prepared for an inspection. I did not know if this was on my account, whether Jackie had prearranged it, knowing that she would be taking me there that day, or if this was one of the expected standards at Carhullan. Military neatness.

Her bedroom was not as chilly as the rest of the house, though the window was wide open. There was a cast-iron grate in the corner of the room. It was empty and there was no wood stacked beside it. The temperature was still falling on the mountain, but it was not yet cold enough for Jackie to need the heat, and perhaps she never did. Every wall was lined almost from floor to ceiling with books. Where they would not fit on the shelves they sat in loose piles or were slotted into the gaps above the rows. They seemed to absorb the light and distort the angles of the room, and probably went some way towards insulating it.

Her bedroom was as tidy as the barns, but it contained much more. It was Carhullan’s library. Suddenly Megan’s boast of having read all the farm’s books seemed worthy; I stood in the centre, surrounded by them. ‘Are these all yours?’ I asked her. ‘There must be thousands.’ ‘Yes and no,’ she said. ‘I brought most of them. But they belong to us all. It’s quite a collection now. You fetched nothing up with you. Do you want something to read?’

She sat down in the chair by her desk, pushed a stack of written papers back against the wall, and removed her glasses. She handled them with great care, folding them back in their case gently, as if they were the most precious thing she owned. I couldn’t remember the last time I had read a book. Even though there had been enough time between work shifts — the only public television now ran during the hours of allocation and it was pitiful and full of propaganda — I had never found true solace in reading; I had never turned to it as an escape. ‘Honestly? I wouldn’t know what to ask for,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know what I’d enjoy really.’ She nodded. ‘OK. There are a couple of things I’d like you to look at though.’

She stood and walked across the room, bent to one of the lower shelves and searched out a thick volume. On the cover was a grey photograph. I could not see what the picture was, perhaps a man in a long coat carrying something, but the image was hard to make out from where I stood. She opened it and removed a thin pamphlet from between the pages and then she handed it to me. ‘Why don’t you start with this?’ I took it from her and looked at it. It was flimsy and old. The sheets had been stapled together in a couple of places and the words looked typed rather than printed. Its title was ‘The Green Book’. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Let’s just say it’s a limited edition,’ she replied.

Jackie put a hand on my shoulder. I could almost feel a current passing from her body to mine. ‘Look. You know why you got the hood, don’t you? Well, you’ll never go back into the box without first agreeing to it. I promise you that. If you read this, it might give you a way of dealing with it. It might give you some context. And some company.’ Her voice remained gentle, but I felt a flutter of panic in my chest at the thought of ever returning to the blackness, the stench, and the abrasive metal sheeting in that tight solitary space. There were moments in daylight when I closed my eyes and I could still see the iron-jawed woman carrying me off, still feel the rotting shrunken dog held in my arms. And when I woke from my dreams I sometimes thought I had not yet been released from the cage and I’d yell out in the dark of the room.

I held the pamphlet in my hand. I wasn’t sure what Jackie was asking of me, or telling me to do, past reading it, but I knew there was a subtext. I felt she was again crediting me with more understanding than I possessed, expecting more of me than I knew how to give, and I felt out of my depth. She took her hand away from my shoulder, stepped back, and lowered herself into her chair again, folding the energy of herself away. I was standing above her and through her thin hair I could see several raised red marks on her scalp. ‘Sit down, Sister,’ she said. ‘We’d better have a quick run over matters before tonight. There are things you need to know.’

Her bed was the only other place to sit, and I could not move to it, so I remained standing. I already knew there were tensions at work in the farm. It had not taken long to realise the smooth operation of the smallholding countered an opposing gravity, and that something separated the women in their beliefs. It was why the meal shifts always contained the same faces. And why some of the relationships had broken up. ‘Is this about the defence council?’ I asked her.

‘Yes it is,’ she said. ‘But it’s not just about that. Listen, the beauty up here is that we can disagree, we have the space, we have the time. And we do disagree, Sister. Especially when it comes to the outside world.’ She sighed and crossed an ankle over her thigh, held the knotted laces of her boot. ‘But I don’t blame the Sisters for shutting it out. Truly, I don’t. They’ve come up here to make a better life, and not make the same mistakes. They’ve … Let’s say they’ve washed their hands of the past.’

Her expression darkened. ‘Fine. Yes. Women were treated like cunts back down there. Like second-class citizens and sex objects. They were underpaid, under-appreciated. Trust me, I know all about being told you aren’t suitable for a job. Fifty per cent of the world’s female population was getting raped, the fanatics had the rest bound up in black. We were all arguing over how women should look and dress, not over basic rights. And in this country, women have treated each other just as poorly. Fighting like cats and dogs. Competing for men. Eating our own young. No solidarity. No respect. No grace, if you want to call it that.’

She let go of her bootlace and spread her arms wide. ‘And here, we’ll we’ve more or less cracked it, haven’t we? Everyone’s employed. No one’s made to kneel in a separate church. No one’s getting held down at bayonet point. We’re breeding. We’re free. Why would anyone want to risk this, Sister?’ I gave a small brief nod, but I don’t think Jackie noticed. ‘And the government down there now? Well, it would be madness to interfere with it and draw attention to what we’ve got here, wouldn’t it? Sheer madness. Too much of a risk. What possible kind of campaign could we run? Surely it’s better to just bolt the door. Hole the fuck up. And pray to be left alone.’

There was a smile on her face. It was not derisive but it seemed somehow mannered, and patronising, as if she were acknowledging a moderate and rudimentary opinion presented by a child, like the reciting of a basic commandment: Thou shall not kill . Her sympathy was so great it almost looked like disappointment.