Sarah Hall: The Carhullan Army

Part of me could not blame them for trying to get away. Jackie had offered us few choices within her scheme, and Chloe did not have the stomach for conflict. Nor did she want to leave the fells. It was obvious that Martyn would have been happy to remain in the mountains, eking out an existence; catching fish, growing turnips and cutting firewood, living like a pauper, and remaining independent and Unofficial until that status too was revoked. I was not without sympathy. But in my gut I knew what they had done was small-minded, and inexcusable. I knew they had failed to see the importance of Jackie’s operation.

We circled the village a final time and made our way back to Carhullan via the long southern route. We found the two of them sitting behind a small hummock, leaning close together. One of Chloe’s boots had been taken off. Martyn had his arm around her. She was weeping softly. He looked up as we approached. ‘She’s twisted her ankle,’ he said. ‘She can’t walk any further.’ His eyes were glassy and disconnected. I could see that any determination he had had was spent. Corinne and Nnenna left to find Jackie while I waited with Lillian. Martyn crooned to Chloe, soothing her, and after a few minutes she became quiet and seemed to be asleep on his shoulder. Nobody spoke. On the banks of the grassland all around us were small orange flowers. I stared down at Chloe’s white foot, thrust out in front of her, until it looked like something other. Until it was abhorrent, and did not seem human.

An hour later I heard the dull thump of hooves. Jackie rode up behind us. The pony was lathered with sweat and looked exhausted. She wheeled it round on the spot and then dismounted. ‘Go back to the farm,’ she said to us. ‘I need to speak to them alone. Go on now.’ Chloe was crying again, and cowered against her husband. Lillian hung back but I walked off, and after a few moments she followed me.

As we were neared the ridge, I heard two gunshots. The sound echoed at a distance, the rip of its tail left long around the hills, but it was unmistakable. Lillian had stopped dead, and was rooted to the spot. Her hands were linked at the back of her head, her elbows almost touching in front of her face, and I could not make out the cast of her features. I walked on again. By the time we returned to the compound she was composed, but for the rest of that day there was a short lag between what was said to her and her responses. When Jackie got back the unit reconvened in the courtyard. She said nothing more about the episode, nor did anyone else. It was apparent that the matter was closed.

Before we were loaded into the back of the wagon, before we left Carhullan for the final time, I went to the spot where we had found Chloe and Martyn. I saw a mound of newly turned earth. It was a large grave, almost too big for two bodies. I knew I was complicit in their deaths. I knew it, and I did not feel any guilt. I did not feel remorse. I knew that it had needed doing. But in the nightmares I have had since then, the pit has been filled with the bodies of all those who left the farm, all those I have loved. My father, and Andrew. Shruti.

*

There was no other collateral damage at Carhullan. A small contingency stayed on to cater for those involved in the operation, Ruthie and Lorry among them. There was a dwindling store of food. The turkeys that had once roosted at night in the orchard trees, purring to each other and folding their beaks into their plumes, were now gone. There had been no breeding season for the livestock, and much of it had been slaughtered. Only the hefted sheep had been allowed to produce young, and they had been left up on the tops. We’d seen them as we hiked, ragged and virile on the summits, peering haughtily at us from the edge of the bluffs.

We still ate well, but there was a sense of rationing, of counting out the stocks and calculating how long they would sustain us. Every meal felt as if it might be our last, but every mouthful of mutton and venison tasted better, the early greenhouse currants were tart and exquisite on our tongues. The visits to the men occurred more often and were more thrilling. The bouts of wrestling were more spirited, and the fights continued on after the end of a round had been signalled. I could see it in everyone’s eyes: the polished glitter, the ephedrine of anticipation.

And I felt it too. I could look at the gashes on my hands and see a grotesque attraction in them. I could put the tip of my tongue into the open red slit and taste the salt of myself there. When Calum and I fucked, it was without restraint, it was base and raw, and I left marks on him. We were living at the edge, and everything was amplified; it was beautiful, and it was rancid.

On my birthday, as I undressed beside the copper tub, I looked in the mirror and saw the change in my body, the metamorphosis that had occurred. My head was bald, newly shaved again, and a shadow of follicles ran the reverse globe of it. My skin had darkened almost to beech. I was leaner, had lost weight and gained muscle — there were lattices along my arms and back, docks around my shoulders and above my knees. Along my collarbone was a tattooed blue line. I had sat sweating in front of the dormitory stove while Megan scored my skin and rubbed the ink in.

It was the anatomy of a fanatic. It was the same body the rest of the unit had fashioned for themselves. They had seemed wild to me when I’d first seen them, Corky, Megan and the others, like creatures, both natural and rarefied, but now I was no different from them. If we had stood together on the shoreline two thousand years before, facing the invading ships with fire in our hands and screaming for them to come, they would have called us Furies, and they would have been afraid.

I liked what I saw in the clouded mirror and I was shocked by it. She was a stranger to me, this woman opposite, and yet I saw the truth of her. She moved when I moved, bent to turn off the taps as I did. Her face resembled the one I had sloughed off when I came to Carhullan, but it was newer, stronger. She was my anima.

Lorry knocked on the door while I lay soaking. She came in to the room, sat on the edge of the bath and looked down at me, smiling, her brow pinched in. I could see that she was in pain. She was sixty-three, and looked much older than she had. In the year and a half that I had known her she’d become more arthritic and less mobile. She crooked herself forward when she walked, favouring her bad hip. She continued to care for us as she always had. But we were stronger than we had been, fitter, hardy of constitution; we knew how to repair ourselves in the field, and in this respite she had allowed time to catch up.

‘This is yours,’ she said, and held out a small metal pin on her palm. I lifted my hand from the warm water and took the coil from her. ‘You had it? I wasn’t sure who did. I thought it was long gone.’ She nodded. ‘I borrowed it. I needed something to remind me of why I came here too, Sister, while all this was going on. I hope you don’t mind. I thought it was about time I gave it back. But you haven’t forgotten anything, have you?’ I shook my head. The memory of its implanting was still vivid, as was my escape from Rith. I could remember the first days in the house, being given the oatmeal with butter, and the apple, the wonder of it as I bit down into its flesh. I remembered ghosting to the bathroom, the soiled sheets in my arms, and the strained concentrating face of Lorry as she took the regulator out. Holding it between my fingers, it was hard to believe that I had ever had it inside me.

Lorry was still smiling. ‘Yeah, you’re ready.’

I felt thankful. She’d been the first to accept me and I knew I would never forget it. I placed my hand on hers and asked her what she would do when we were gone. There had been no talk of taking her over to the Pennine settlements with Ruth. ‘Oh, I’ve got my orders too,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry about me, Sister.’ She patted my arm, stood stiffly, and left the bathroom.