Theft

by Rachel Ingalls

  We came to the door and stepped out, and I stood stock still, blinded by the sun. I thought we must have been wrong about the time; it felt more like midday than morning. But I couldn’t be sure, couldn’t be sure about what time it was or what day. It felt like a day that wasn’t spaced like others, a day that was running like a river and would always be the same wherever you were set down in it, and might go on forever. The other guard jabbed me in the back. “All right,” I said, and moved forward, but I was feeling strange, very good but strange, like I was another height of myself above where my feet were going.

  We walked down the street and there didn’t seem to be too many people around. Some stopped when they saw us and others just looked and kept on walking. Then we came to a knot of people who were shouting things; there were soldiers standing around, and in the middle was the religious nut, bending down, and I thought: they’re beating him up and he doesn’t know what’s happening, I feel sorry for him. But then I caught a look at his face as we passed by. He had on that secret, smug, mealy-mouth look and I realised he was enjoying whatever it was, being in the middle of a fuss.

  I noticed that all the sound had blocked out of my ears. It was very strange. My feet kept walking and I could feel Jake very tense beside me. I said, “Jake, you know, the sound’s just gone,” and I couldn’t hear myself say it but I thought it must be coming out slowly and not all formed. He touched my arm, and that was strange, too. It felt like I didn’t have skin any more but something else that felt all different. I said, carefully, “I think those leaves are beginning to do something.”

  Up ahead the seven men and their guard branched off down a street and started to head in the opposite direction from us. We went around a corner. There were more people now, filling up the side of the street and blocking the corners, looking as though they’d been expecting us. I looked behind and saw the guards and soldiers with the religious nut, following along behind. Then I saw somebody throw something but still I couldn’t hear. More people began to file into the street till it was like walking between walls of them and I could see their mouths opening and their faces having expressions and their hands moving, shaking fists and cupping around their mouths. Then something else started, like I was going away and coming back again, seeing everything far and small and taking place from below.

  And then it happened, suddenly. Like a wall breaking through, it happened far and then it happened near, as if it was all going on inside of me, and the sound came back, loud, people screaming and shouting and calling names and everything near, near. Whatever that stuff was, it hit me all at once, like nothing in this world, making me ten times bigger, lifting me right off the ground so I knew I could do anything, anything at all, I could jump over houses, I could fly. And I shouted.

  “Now, Seth, now!” Jake yelled. Homer fell down, taking a soldier and the other guard with him, and I began to fight like it says in the stories when they slew ten thousand, hitting everything. People were yelling, “Get him,” and a woman spit in my face and I saw Jake lifted like a swimmer coming up for air and lashing around him, and Annie hitting the officer with a stick and a piece of his tooth fly out, separate, into the air. I was down and being kicked and had dirt in my mouth. Jake called out, “Run, Seth, run, run,” and I was up again, running into the crowd. And all at once Maddie was there. I called to her, “Maddie, Maddie,” and had my arms out and she pulled me into the crowd, her breast coming into the crook of my arm, lovely and frightening to feel, like when we danced at the wedding. “Seth!” she shouted and they dragged at me from behind and tore me away. I saw the knife fall and took it up quick and hit everything, everybody, it was happening so near and so strong inside, burning and huge, and lifted me away with it, slashing, seeing the red come out. I fell again and I saw Annie, and two of them hitting her, and Jake on the ground with the others pulling him back and beating him on the face, and saw blood from his mouth and nose, and the religious nut screamed and screamed somewhere but I couldn’t see him. All of them came down on me all of a heap and dragged me along, about five of them hanging on. Jake was saying, “The hell I will, the hell, lift it yourself you bastard, you son of a bitch.” And then I thought how funny it was, how they were going to kill us and Jake had said don’t take it, it’ll kill you. I started to laugh. They punched me around the head and I still couldn’t stop. My knees went under and I sat down in the dust and laughed and laughed. They got me on my feet and I went down again, and then up, laughing, and they had to carry me with my arms all limp, and laughing. Because it was coming from the center and blooming out, enormous all the way through the world, making my arms and legs all laughing too, like my face.

  After that I didn’t mind, about anything. I thought I had blood on my face but I didn’t feel the hurt, and we went forward, the crowd shifting place and changing size, and I’d stopped laughing but I was happy, happier than I knew it was possible, and liking the noise and thinking what a fool I was never to take that stuff before, because I didn’t know there were such things in the world and how it makes you feel, so fiercely happy. The procession went on, seeming happy and joyous, as if we were going to some wonderful thing, and all of it more beautiful and exciting than anything else that had ever happened or anything to come after it in the whole history of time. The people and the noise bright and singing and lovely, and strangely wonderful. I could see the sound, real, and I could hear the shape of the people and what the colors did, the inside of me out and free and the outside beautiful and changed, like being a god, and felt good and thought I never knew what it meant before.

  Then I was standing and I saw Jake’s face altered and large, far away and then near, and the sun and the sky, and a soldier near me.

  “There,” he said. A lot of people came up close and the military pulled me down to the ground and then everything stood still and at peace. I looked up and saw a soldier’s face, I saw the sun on his cheekbone and his eye, spoked with light, perfect and close. I saw him take his arm against the sky and then there was a scream, and I knew it must have come from me though I didn’t feel the hurt. But I looked at my hand and there was blood. I heard praying, and I thought it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  The holes were there and the stones and they got the ropes on. I started to go up.

  “Clear the area,” the officer called. “Clear the area.”

  I went up and I went up and then I fell, all at once I fell.

  And it began.

  You always think it can’t go on, it’s got to have an end. And I thought maybe I shouldn’t have taken those leaves because they say that’s what’s wrong with it: it lifts you up but it drops you down afterwards lower than you were before. I wondered if that could be why and that was why it was hurting so much. I thought: could it go on like this to the end, never getting less but always more and more? Jake was there and the religious nut, and Jake called, “Goodbye, Seth,” and I shouted, “Goodbye, Jake.” Then he called to the religious nut, saying, “Goodbye, put in a good word for us when you get there,” but he didn’t answer.

  They say it usually takes three hours. To me it seemed to be more like three days. I passed out and I came back again and I imagined I saw the light go and the stars come out white, very bright and pure. And I could hear my breathing, loud, reaching, as if I was trying to swallow all the cool darkness and its many stars which make you feel so strange and yearning to see, all of them so small and so many and not touching but looking as if there’s a life there and a special thought in the way they are spread, specially right and like it could be no other way. It seemed to me I saw the dawn and that I was stiff as though I’d been sleeping in the dew, and that I was wet from making water in the night but hadn’t known when it happened and couldn’t believe I’d slept, because of the pain.

  That was growing more. You hear, they always say, nobody can hurt you that much because when the pain is too sharp your body protects you and makes you numb against it so that the bad part only lasts a short while and afte
r that you know you are over it and it can never be so bad again.

  But this was more. I lost the feeling in my arms. Not numb. They had a different feeling now. A no-feeling. And the no-feeling hurt like they say of people who lose an arm or a leg: they will complain of terrible pain in the limb that is no longer there. I thought now, yes, it’s happening, and this no-person is coming over me, starting at the edges, and I can feel him coming more and more, closer to the center of me where I still know who I am.

  I remember the sun and what it did. Sometimes there were tears on my face, I think, and sweat all the time, and I was half blinded, trying not to look but wanting to now and then to make sure I could still see. Drying up, my eyes were drying up and no place to turn my head. Once there was a vulture moving slow in the air above me and I thought: not my eyes, not my eyes. And I shut them though it would have been no use. There is always something to lose, something that can be taken from you. Even at the end you don’t think this is going on forever; nothing else does, so this has to stop too, you think, and at the end I’ll be well again. Even when you know.

  Three days and two nights I thought it lasted. Pulling and pulling. And a wind roaring in my ears. Not the sound of the crowd—that’s my blood going by, like you can hear it jumping in your ear when you lay down your head to sleep.

  I tried to moan then, but my voice was taken in my breathing, stretching for the sky with my mouth open and all dry down to my throat and beyond, drying up and burning out like grass on the hillsides in high summer when the sun stands hard above and kills the green out of them. First they go brown and then like ashes, grey. And lastly they are bone-white, skeletons that were once gardens, and the dust blows from them.

  I tried to look, to see Jake, but it was like looking into a wall of brass. My eyes opening, heavy and swelled, the glare striking deep into them, and closing up again slowly and not able to shut tight. I thought: it’s too late now, I can’t call, and it’s too hard to look, eyes turning to leather and the no-person weighing down on me, blood falling through my ears.

  I thought I heard the other one, the religious maniac, screeching high and thin into the air. And then I heard him clearly. He was starting to pray again, quoting that psalm, saying, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me, why art thou so far from helping me and from the words of my roaring?” And I heard Jake, from where he was, cough. And then I tried, my eyes wincing back from the light, to look, and I saw Jake heave himself and yell, all strangely misshaped like he was singing, “God almighty, why can’t you pull yourself together and take it like a man?” And I blacked out again, not knowing whether he’d meant it for himself or for the other one.

  When I came to, I thought it must be either dawn or sunset, the air still and calm, and I could open my eyes on it and see.

  There was a terrible sound coming from somewhere. And then I placed it: the sound I was making in trying to breathe.

  The things I knew now, it would almost have been worth it to find them out: how important it is to breathe. You gulp in the air, you fight for it and try to hold onto it and there is no holding.

  Strong in the chest, that made me need food. But I knew now, all the things you need in life have to be stolen from somewhere, from the earth or from other people—food, water, warmth, you need them to live. But they can be taken from you. And you can live for a while and can come back to health after you have had fire and food and water taken from you. But the air—take away all the air just for a few moments and life is over. It is death to take that away, because it is free and freely there, the only thing in the world that is truly free. And you live on it as much as you live on food, but do not realise.

  I thought I would look down for the last time. But something had happened to my neck and my head; I thought somebody must be holding me and pressing something against me there. I tried to move, and my face was like stone, and all the parts that could make it turn, like iron. I tried and I forced. And I tried it until it worked, stone coming into motion, iron bending, my head sideways, and I could look down.

  I saw the hills and the trees and the city beyond, and below me some of the crowd still huddled behind the guards and some looking up, I thought. A shine came off something, a weapon or a helmet, and as I looked to see what it was, a breeze lifted the corner of a soldier’s cloak and threw it back over his shoulder, showing the scarlet suddenly like a bird turning wing. I thought: quickly, turn your head back, quickly, or it will stay like this and you won’t be able to look up again.

  This time it was harder and took much longer. When I had my head up again my eyes were on the religious nut. He was dead by the look of him, and he looked at peace and beyond the moving of any pain. He looked somehow better that way, stretched out, better than he’d looked when he was alive. Being all skin and bones, he seemed to look right there, as though he’d meant to be there all the time and his body had fulfilled itself in the shape it took when he died.

  Then I looked at Jake, and a smarting came into my eyes, needing tears. He was dead, you could tell, but not like the other one. You saw the agony of it on him, all of him, the strong body and the open-mouthed face, swollen, wrenched, disfigured with pain. And, looking desecrated, shameful to look at, like butchers’ meat if they did that to men. I wanted to cry aloud to him, and saw him like it was my own soul I was looking at but more than my soul. And wanted to call to him though he could not hear, hanging as he was bloody-armed from the cross and dead as the other one against the other cross that stood between us on the hill.

  I was the last. And this is the last thing, I thought, the last I’ll ever see.

  I was looking at the sky. I saw it and I knew it as no man ever saw it before, looking into the heart of it, as no other man will ever know it.

  I’d never noticed before just how it is, how it is a face that looks back and looks with love, and is arms that open for you. How sweet and calm it is. How blue. How it is lovely beyond belief and goes flying away into farther than can be known. And it goes on like that, on and on. Forever and ever. Without end.

  About the Author

  Rachel Ingalls grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has had various jobs, from theatre dresser and librarian to publisher’s reader. She is a confirmed radio and film addict and has lived in London since 1965. She is the author of several novels and collections of short stories.

  Copyright

  This collection first published in 1970

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © Rachel Ingalls, 1970

  The right of Rachel Ingalls to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29977–5