I said, ‘I’m thirsty, they don’t bring enough water.’ I said, ‘Open the door. The key is in the lock, which I know because no light comes through the keyhole, and I hear only the key turning not the scraping of it in or out.’ I said, ‘I’m not mad but this room will make me mad.’
I think I slept for a while down there in the darkness.
I said, ‘Hang pans on your fence that will clang when the children climb over.’ I said, ‘Peel a carrot for the baby to gnaw on, small enough for its little mouth, but not so small that it will choke.’ I said, ‘He will love you but only when you have stopped wanting him and then it will be his turn to blush and stammer, and the sight of his staring will make you think of nothing more interesting than field work that must be done and what you must cook for tea.’
There was light that came and went so quickly I thought I’d dreamt it. Then a low rumble of thunder. So it was lightning I’d seen, but too far off to bring rain.
I said, ‘Your father is dead and there is nothing to be thought about it except now it is you that must plant the potatoes.’
I said, ‘Sarah taught me to read the Book of Air and every utterance in it four times each time different, and was kind to me at my mother’s burial, and I would kiss her hands if she was here.’
I said, ‘There are four books but what if there were five?’
I said, ‘We contain air and are contained by air, but the air in the red room was breathed in and in out a thousand times before I was born and in all these years no one has taken a broom to its dust.’
I said, ‘Bring me water. Or turn the key and let me fetch my own water.’ I said, ‘This room is memory and I am lost in it.’ I said, ‘This room is mad and I am its only thought.’
Jason
The goat has begun squealing again and jerking its legs. A final desperate struggle. When Aleksy carried it into the yard, it seemed to have no strength left for squealing, but made an odd snoring noise, staring white-eyed at nothing. He’d wrapped the broken leg with strips torn from his own shirt. You could see the bent shape of it even so, and the angle where the shattered bone had broken the skin, and the seeping blood.
‘Deedee mustn’t see,’ Aleksy said. ‘You know how she is. She loves her animals.’
But Deirdre, standing at the kitchen door, held herself together, though the colour drained from her face. ‘Poor Esther. What happened? Did she wander on to the road? Stupid question. Sorry. No traffic.’
‘Bring a bucket,’ Aleksy said, ‘and a sharp knife.’
‘Funny word, traffic. So many words with nothing left to attach them to.’
‘And a bowl or saucepan. To catch blood.’
‘Yes, sorry. Knife, bowl. And you’ll want a needle and thread.’
‘Needle and thread?’
‘For afterwards. For stitching her up.’
‘Deedee…’ Aleksy faced her with the goat twitching in his arms. ‘Jason and I must kill the goat.’
‘Oh.’
‘For food. And all the goats one time or other. You know this. And pigs, and chickens.’
‘Just a knife then.’
‘And a bucket. And a bowl for blood.’
‘How did you say it happened?’
‘There was a trap in the wood.’
‘And you don’t think they’re out there?’ All her feeling for the goat has risen suddenly and spilled out in this question. ‘You still don’t think they’re coming for us?’
‘An old trap, Deedee. For rabbits. Rusted and forgotten.’
She turns in the doorway and retreats into the shadows.
Aleksy shouts after her, ‘Make sure it’s sharp, this knife.’
It knows it’s done for. When Aleksy lays it down, the legs flail, scrabbling for purchase on the flagstones, and the squealing starts. I kneel on its chest, the way Aleksy tells me, and feel it heaving against me and put more weight on it to stop its bastard noise. It’s Abigail who brings the knife and hands it to Aleksy. She sets down the bucket, while Aleksy squats, and she hands him a plastic ice cream tub. He puts it to one side of him and then to the other, and his face goes through its routine of involuntary grimaces. He’s feeling the neck with his free hand. The knife shakes and then seems to jump forward, pulling his arm behind it. Aleksy’s grunt is lost in the grunting of the goat. And the blood is on his trousers and on the stones and spirting at last into the ice cream tub. He takes the front leg and works it as if he’s pumping water. The back legs kick and the whole body struggles under me and lies still. I’m panting as though I’ve run a mile, and when I stand up my legs shake.
Aleksy kneels in closer with the knife and saws an opening from the neck to the groin.
‘Take hind legs,’ he says. ‘Hold her up, like this.’
I lift until only the head lies sideways on the stones. Abigail comes forward with the bucket, and the stomach and the intestines and all the neatly packed organs flop into it and rearrange themselves.
‘Now water.’
Abigail goes to the corner of the yard, where a wheelie bin, fed by a truncated downpipe, brims from the recent rain.
Aleksy, still on one knee, looks up at me, his shoulders rising and falling. ‘Next time easier,’ he says.
‘You’ve done it before though.’
‘I watched my uncle maybe five, six times. Summers I helped on the farm.’
He helps me tie the goat by its hind legs to the stable door for the blood to drain, and I’m stirred suddenly with love for this short-legged bull of a man who knows things I don’t know. I ask him, ‘Was there fresh meat where you were… during the end times?’ The phrase comes to me from my childhood, to name a time for which there is no name.
‘Not so much.’
He isn’t ready to talk about it, and I’m glad because neither am I.
Abigail is back with an aluminium bucket trailing a wet rope. Aleksy washes his hands and arms to the elbow, then slops water into the cavity and over the skin, sluicing the stones at our feet.
Later I help Abigail prepare a stew with onions, tinned carrots and tomatoes. We gather round the kitchen table. Aleksy raises a glass to Esther whose life was cut short to give us strength and pleasure, and we drink to her in water cold from the spring. We eat the stew with boiled turnip. It tastes good. Deirdre eats hungrily and takes the scrapings from the pot. Simon pushes the pieces of meat to the edge.
I say to him, ‘Simon, eat what’s on your plate.’
Django says, ‘Simon’s a vegetarian.’
‘Simon will eat what the rest of us eat.’
‘Yes, but only the vegetables.’
‘There’s little enough food, God knows. He needs protein.’
‘Today is a new heaven, a new earth. Simon knows that better than any of us.’
‘Don’t speak for Simon. He can speak for himself. Simon, eat everything. You’ll get sick if you don’t eat.’
Abigail rests her hand on mine. ‘Jason’s right,’ she says, looking at no one in particular. ‘Simon must eat and grow strong. And when he’s hungry, that’s what he’ll do.’
We don’t stay long after the sun’s gone down. Our life together has narrowed to these basic forms. Only Aleksy lingers in the kitchen, slumped in an armchair by the stove. Abigail has given him the biggest bedroom, but I don’t know if he ever sleeps there. The monkey, who sat on his lap for a while searching his hair and beard for insects and morsels of food, has wandered off around the house. Abandoned, Aleksy would share a bed with any one of us, I suspect, or have us move all our beds together. Meanwhile he hugs himself in the glow of the fire, while footsteps creak overhead and the old timbers settle around him.
I’m woken by a sound that could be water singing in a loose pipe, but the plumbing’s drained and the taps are stiffening with disuse. I’m reminded of mating cats but can’t dispel the thought that the noise is human. It floats up from a lower room and pulls the hairs upright on my scalp. I put on a shirt and trousers and follow it down the half flight of stairs, along the passage, past the empty second floor bedrooms. I tread quietly, bare-footed on the oak steps, sliding my hand down the spiralling rail. It’s a kind of keening I can hear, a quavering song of panic. It comes from Abigail’s room, the room she shares with Maud, but there’s nothing of Abigail’s voice in the sound.