The Offering (17 page)

He said: ‘Ah, excuse me, there are two more people still eating!’ My mother flushed.

I sat back down. She asked if we wanted more.

‘What do we want
more
for?’ he said. ‘Keep it for tomorrow! There’s another meal there!’

But we always had second helpings if there was food left. I decided it must be because of there being no work. My mother said nervously: ‘Yes, they were big portions,’ and took the pan back to the stove. I caught his eye. He cleared his throat and began to whistle but it didn’t fool me. The blackness was back. I knew it.

Elijah watched while we dried up and while we sat by the woodstove, still waiting for his scraps. Finally I couldn’t bear it any longer.

‘There’s nothing
for
you!’ I said. ‘There’re no scraps tonight!’ and I ran up the stairs and along the landing to my room, but he came to the bottom and looked up.

At supper I added more dog food to the bread and mashed it well, as he liked it. I stood over him till he finished eating so they wouldn’t find out, and I cried when I took him down to the kennel and locked him up.

17 September

Dear God,

He is horrible to me. I hate to be near him. Mum says I have to do lessons in the morning but as soon as I have finished, Elijah and I run over the fields. Anywhere, as long as we are away from him. Anywhere, so long as we can be by ourselves.

I rest my head in my hands and press my thumbs to my ears and try to remember those early autumn mornings. I suddenly remember that when my mother and I did lessons at the kitchen table, we could hear tractors in the cornfield. The sound was lazy and curdled in the air. What else? I ask the girl. What else is there?

In the garden there were dry brown weeds, fat dandelions and pink feather grasses that I scattered over Elijah. There were swallows in the barn and blackberries in the hedges. The leaves were tinged with carmine and gold, and the fields were strewn with bales that looked as if a giant knife had carved them from butter.

The words the grass spoke were jumbled, the ribbon had knotted, it was twisted and tied in great sheaves, already dead. There was quietness amongst the stubble. It was uncomfortable to sit on and ugly to look at. If the grasses had been blades, they had become needles, and try as I might I couldn’t pass through their eyes.

The kitchen smelt fusty. Flies buzzed above the oilcloth. The bin needed emptying but my mother hadn’t noticed so I did it instead. She was marking my exercise books and wrote ‘Excellent’ in the margin or drew a star. Her stars were fat and looked happy, the points uneven, as if they were dancing on their toes or waving their fingers. Sometimes she drew a face on the star. When she was not marking she stared into the distance. When my father came in she went back to marking.

I was working out whether two thirds was equivalent to four sixths or ten fifteenths.

‘Both,’ a voice said.

He was looking over my shoulder. I flushed but didn’t immediately write the answer. I pretended I was seeing whether what he said was right.

‘How can you work like that?’ he said as he went away. He meant work like that with Elijah’s head on my lap.

I pushed Elijah away and bent over my book but my heart was beating too hard to think. I put my hands over my ears. He went to the sink to get a drink and my mother gestured for me to pass her my maths book. She made a flourish of ticking the page, then said loudly: ‘Look at that: eight out of ten!’

I wondered how he could let me know just by the back of his head that he wasn’t impressed. Was it to do with the way his neck was set, the strength in it, how it was somehow compressed? Was it the way his hair curled spitefully, as if it couldn’t bear to be next to itself and hated the world? It was like a child’s hair, the way the curls jostled. He carried on looking out at the fields where the tractor was. There was an oval of sweat on the back of his shirt. I put my sleeve to my nose.

23 September

Dear God,

Today he made Mum look like a fool and she didn’t know what to do or say. There is no limit to my hatred for him.

I am with the girl again. We are in the garden. The air is full of heat and the smell of dung and hay. The grass is brassy against my legs. It is stiffer than it has been in the summer and rustles when the wind comes. The flowers look heavy, their heads fleshy and browning at the tips. The colours seem to have become even brighter, just before they must fade: the brambles blaze, the sky is bruised and damson, the roofs strawberry, the roses bloody or yolk-yellow. The world seems like a picture from a book from long ago, when the hues glow.

My father is still clearing the ground. The heap of stones is even bigger. He barrows them to the bottom of the garden then comes back for more.

‘We’ll be able to make a rockery soon,’ my mother says.

‘I don’t know how they managed to grow anything here!’ He stands up, straightening his back.

‘Maybe it’s just around the house,’ she says.

‘Don’t be stupid – it’s the same all over the island!’

I wonder whether this is true, whether the ground is stony everywhere. I wonder why he has to be unkind to her.

24 September

Dear God,

Today we helped him in the garden with the stones again. The stones were crawling with things and every time I touched one I wanted to retch.

I hated touching those stones. He says that gods lived here. Sometimes in the garden I think I can feel their bones beneath the grass and hear their voices in the trees. The stones are their eyes – or perhaps they are their hearts. We should leave them where we found them, in the dirt and the dark.

We were at the table when my father came in. He said: ‘Give me a hand, will you?’ His face was dark red. He was angry at having to ask for our help and angry at us for being there to ask, but it wasn’t a question anyway. We closed the books and went out.

My mother had the spade with the broken handle and she had to keep stopping to tape it up. Her body juddered as she dug because she was digging so hard. Her hair was slicked over, her mouth open. She grinned and said: ‘All right, love?’ Why does she always look so silly? Are some people just like that?

When I threw the stones into the barrow Elijah yapped and jumped at them. He knew they were only old stones but he was bored and trying to amuse himself, he was very clever like that, he could pretend the same as I could. I think he was also trying to cheer me up, cheer us all up, but it didn’t work.

‘Take that dog away from here!’ he said.

I hated doing it. I took Elijah up to the courtyard and told him to stay in the house. He put his head on his paws.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. I cupped his nose in my hand. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong. He’s just grumpy.’

He wasn’t any happier with Elijah gone. We worked all afternoon but the stones kept appearing. They were crawling and slithering with things. They were pale and round, almost circular. I thought they looked like the eyes of statues. Once I thought that, I didn’t want to touch them any more, or see them in the pile, or watch them fall thundering onto the grass.

The next day I didn’t want to be where my father was so I sat with Elijah in the kennel. He was chewing a piece of wood, snuffling and sneezing when bits got up his nose.

‘Do you understand what’s happening?’ I said.

He snuffled and shook his head to clear his nostrils.

‘Neither do I,’ I said. ‘I wish God would talk to me. I want to ask Him questions.’

I stroked Elijah and watched tractors in the long field. The engines rippled through the afternoon like slow farts. The sound came towards us, then faded again on the thin breeze. The great arms lifted the bales into the air so that they sailed for a little while in the white sky. Everything seemed pointless. I lay back in the straw and made God come to me. There was still that.

The sky was white. I didn’t know where the blue had gone. Every day the land lost a little more colour. The orchard smelt of cider and water and old leaves. The ground was soggy and the air filled with wasps and flies. One afternoon my mother and I held bedsheets under the apple trees while he climbed up and shook them.

The apples were foamy, the flesh fibrous, the skins loose. We washed them and laid them on newspaper in the chests upstairs in the dairy. My father said we had to collect more.

‘Leave spaces!’ he said. ‘Or they’ll go bad.’

He snatched an apple out of my mother’s hand and relaid it, and she seemed to shrink as if she were plastic and a flame had been held up to her. I glared at him; I didn’t care if he saw that I hated him.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing.’

My temples hurt. I went into the yard and swung the rope with the stick at the end for Elijah. I swung it so fast you could hear it slicing the air. I swung it till my shoulder was burning, then swung it some more.

I decided not to call him ‘Dad’ any more; he was not my father and never had been.

I get up from the chair and move to the bed. I curl on my side and begin reading the journal again, where I left off.

27 September

Dear God,

Where do You take me when You come? Today I made You come to me in bed and everything went away. But afterwards I felt empty and the world was dark. When I am sad the world seems darker still. Can that be true? I have noticed something else too: when I am sad the ground seems close, as if I am going to bump into it. It has been feeling close for over a week now.

I can’t go out to the fields because it is wet. Besides, I have found You, there is no point in looking for You any more.

29 September

Dear God,

The world still seems dark today, as if it has been unplugged. In the afternoons after Mum and I have finished lessons I go down to the stream. In the stream there are small animals. I call them crayfish. Mum doesn’t know what they are either. They are like small grey shrimps. There are pools in the stream, dams and waterfalls I have made, marked with stones. They smell of ponds and mud and saliva. Clouds and shadows move upside down in them. Beside the largest pool is a stone. It is made of the same stone as the millstone beside the front door, and when the sun catches it, it flashes colour like a diamond.

I was patching a leak in the dam of the top pool when I saw one crayfish carrying another. I’ve never seen that before. The one underneath was hollow and looked white. I wondered whether they were eating each other. The more I watched the surer I became. I fished them out and separated them on the rock but couldn’t be sure whether I was hurting them as I had to pull them apart. I put the white one back in the water and he sank, then puttered along the bottom.

I was shaking. It made me sick having to touch them even though I was using a stick. I didn’t know what to do with the other one. Why should he go back into the water just to eat someone else? He was walking on his side on the rock, making his way back to the water. I took my knife and crushed him with the side of it. I did it quickly and pressed very hard because I was frightened. I pressed so hard there was immediately nothing but grey juice.

I sat back and suddenly felt dizzy. I wiped my hands on my jeans, though nothing was on them, and I had to get up and walk around before I could go back to the stream. For a minute, after I had cried, the day got brighter again, as if someone had plugged it back in.

I washed the rock and wiped the knife clean. I looked for the hollow crayfish but couldn’t find him.

I am going to go down to the stream tomorrow, and if I can, I will save another life.

I remember that clearly, every detail. I turn over and lie on my back because my heart is beating hard, because I am torn between reading on and getting this over with, between stopping here and putting it off.

1 October

Dear God,

We have spaced the apples like he said but the badness seems to travel anyway. Today when Mum and I went upstairs in the dairy we found sagging patches of scented brown flesh. Mum said: ‘It must be the weather.’ She looked frightened. She said: ‘We’ll get rid of them.’

We took the apples and hurled them over the fence at the bottom of the garden. I had to stop Elijah bringing them back. Then we rearranged the others and put them in the places where the bad ones had been. We went inside with more apples in our jumpers and she set me lessons. When I had finished I helped her. All afternoon we peeled and cored and baked and stewed and fried apples. Then we began on the potatoes.

‘The nights are drawing in,’ he said, coming in from clearing brambles. He was soaked through. I didn’t think we needed to clear any more but he is always doing something even if there is no point to it. He didn’t have to say that, either: ‘The nights are drawing in’ – it made my stomach turn, it made me frightened for nothing.

‘Fantastic!’ he said at dinner. ‘Food from our own garden!’ But he was just pretending to be jolly. The blackness is there, I know. I’m watching him. It came out when I said I was full and couldn’t eat any more. ‘We don’t have any waste in this house!’ he said. So I wasn’t allowed to leave any of my stewed apples – though usually he is telling us to keep leftovers for tomorrow. He makes up his own rules.

If I never see another apple in my life it will be too soon.

3 October

Dear God,

The blue has finally come back.
When I get up the sunlight is like a needle over the rim of the hills and there is a mist of water at the corners of the window-panes. The air feels clean. Breezes have taken away the smell in the kitchen.

We went preaching today with apples and potatoes in our lunchboxes. We ate lunch in a lane. The man who is technically my father thanked You for giving us the apples and potatoes. I wondered whether I should say ‘Amen’ because I would be lying. He made noises when he ate, smacking his lips, and I hated him. There was a little bit of ham, which I saved for last, to take away the taste of the apples and potatoes. We didn’t get to share any verses from the bible except with an old lady who we thought might have been deaf.