The Followers

by Rebecca Wait

  Moses didn’t reply. He had stopped being a spy and was walking towards the big house as fast as he could.

  ‘It won’t be anything bad,’ Judith said, quickening her pace alongside him.

  But Moses knew it was, although he couldn’t say how he knew.

  They went through the door of the big house and along the corridor. The kitchen door was closed, but they could hear muffled voices. Moses hesitated, but Judith pushed the door open and went straight in. He followed her, because he always did.

  All the women except Ruth were in there, and so were Moses’ father and Joshua. Moses looked at his parents. His mother was crying, and she had her arm round Esther, who wasn’t crying, but who was almost doubled over. Moses wondered if she were the one who was ill. His father was holding onto the back of a chair, looking down at his hands where they held the chair.

  ‘He can’t have meant it—’ Deborah was saying when Moses and Judith came in.

  ‘He did,’ Moses’ father said without looking up. Then, as if he’d been asked a question no one else had heard, he said, ‘I couldn’t have stopped him. How could I have stopped him?’

  Then they all seemed to notice Moses and Judith.

  ‘Go away and play, Judith,’ Judith’s mother said. ‘We’re busy here.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Judith said.

  ‘Nothing’s going on.’

  Moses’ mother said, ‘Go on, Moses. Take Judith outside. You can’t be in here now.’

  But as they were going out, Judith muttering under her breath, there was the sound of feet in the corridor. The prophet burst in, followed by Ruth, who seemed unusually flustered and out of breath.

  Moses and Judith had been forced to jump aside as the prophet came in, and now they shrank back against the wall, unwilling to draw attention to themselves by making their escape.

  ‘Tell me it’s not true,’ the prophet said.

  Moses saw his father’s grip tighten on the back of the chair.

  There was a long pause, then Joshua said, ‘It is.’

  ‘Which of you knew?’ the prophet said.

  ‘None of us,’ Joshua said. ‘We swear. We didn’t know anything until today.’

  ‘Liar,’ the prophet said. His voice was quiet.

  Moses’ nerves felt raw, as though someone had peeled away his skin.

  ‘Are you all so blind?’ the prophet said. ‘I told you to be vigilant. Have you deliberately ignored me, or are you so forgetful you’d let the devil slip in whilst you sleep?’ Anyone else, Moses thought, would be shouting. But the prophet spoke as carefully and delicately as he always did.

  ‘Forgive us,’ Joshua murmured. The prophet’s fist flew out and connected with his jaw. It wasn’t a forceful blow, and it wasn’t well placed. But it was unexpected, and Joshua staggered on the spot. There was an intake of breath around the room.

  ‘Be quiet,’ the prophet said. ‘Forgive you? As though this can be wiped out. The devil is amongst us,’ he said, and his voice began to grow louder now. ‘The devil is amongst us.’ Then he turned, very slowly. ‘Esther,’ he said. ‘Will you tell me you didn’t know?’

  She shook her head.

  Perhaps he would have hit her, if Moses’ father hadn’t spoken up.

  ‘Prophet, Thomas said so himself when he came to my office. That was all he would say – that he was going, but Esther had no idea. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen. He asked me to tell Esther he was sorry.’

  ‘Can we trust his word?’ the prophet said. ‘The word of a sinner?’

  Esther whispered, ‘I didn’t know.’ Her eyes were on the floor. She seemed to be swaying gently.

  As the prophet took a step towards her, she slumped forward, falling to her knees, and then onto her side. It took Moses a few moments to realize she had fainted.

  In the confusion that followed, he felt Judith take his hand. When he still didn’t move, she tugged at his arm harder, and practically pulled him out of the room.

  They went along the corridor and out of the front door, breaking into a run once they were outside and not stopping until they were hidden from sight behind the barn.

  Moses leaned against the wall, trying to catch his breath.

  ‘This is big,’ Judith said.

  ‘But what’s happened?’ Moses said.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? Thomas has done a runner.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A runner. He’s left.’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Moses said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Nobody leaves. Nobody’s ever left.’

  ‘Well,’ Judith said. ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

  Then she was quiet for a while. Moses wondered what she was thinking. He himself was finding it difficult to think anything at all. His head felt too full, or too empty, or something—

  ‘Are you alright?’ Judith said.

  Moses nodded and tried to take some deep breaths. He thought of Thomas, out in Gehenna, walking away from God.

  The door at the side of the barn opened then, and Ezra, Peter and Jonathan emerged, Peter idly throwing a ball up in the air and catching it one-handed.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Jonathan said to Moses. ‘Has Judith said she won’t marry you?’

  ‘Shut up,’ Moses said savagely, and Jonathan looked surprised, though not nearly as surprised as Moses himself.

  ‘It’s Thomas,’ Judith said.

  There was no supper that night. The adults remained shut away in the prayer room for hours, except for Esther, who’d been put to bed.

  The children sat huddled together on the stairs: Moses and Judith, Jonathan, Peter and Ezra, Abigail and Mary. For long periods of time, they didn’t talk at all. But there was no one to tell them to go to bed, so they stayed.

  ‘They’ve been quiet for a while,’ Peter said eventually. ‘Perhaps it’s over.’

  Then they heard the distant sound of the prophet’s voice starting up again.

  ‘I think it’ll go on a while yet,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Will Thomas come back?’ Mary asked.

  Nobody answered.

  Moses was next to Judith, a couple of steps above the others. Their knees touched. She whispered, ‘This is going to be bad, isn’t it?’

  Moses thought for a moment. Then he nodded.

  After

  If you’re doing data entry, don’t do it sober. Judith had found that taking a water bottle full of vodka with her had transformed a soul-destroying task into something pleasantly restful. There was a beautiful, rhythmic simplicity to data entry. You had a system and you stuck to it, just like the Romans with their lovely straight roads. P for Part-time. F for Full-time. A single number for Hours Attended.

  After a while, she ceased even pretending to look at the list in front of her and entered whatever figures she felt like, depending on her reaction to each student’s name. (Luke Baker: you sound like a full-timer, she thought, pressing the F key with a flourish.) She was careful not to sip from the bottle too often, and not to do it when anyone was looking, for fear of betraying herself with even the most infinitesimal shudder.

  The voices of her colleagues drifted gently across the room, though never actually speaking to her, of course. They were discussing last night’s television: Silent Witness, by the sound of it. Judith had actually watched this with her gran. I could join in, she thought in surprise, but then it seemed too much effort to formulate a coherent sentence that wouldn’t give away the fact that she was smashed.

  God, I love databases, she thought instead, punching in another F in triumph.

  It was overkill, she knew, but at lunchtime she took half an oxycodone, and then, when she didn’t feel any different by the end of her break, the other half as well. But the pill proved a mistake, and sitting at her desk that afternoon she felt increasingly dizzy and sick. A cold sweat had broken out on her forehead and under her arms. Was she going to die, right here, in the poky back office of a second-r
ate FE college? Forgetting for a moment that it wasn’t actual water in the bottle, Judith took a large swig and then spluttered it out all over the keyboard.

  ‘Are you OK?’ large Kathy asked with evident disdain.

  Judith nodded wildly, still trying to catch her breath. ‘Went down the wrong way,’ she managed to wheeze.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ mousy Jeanette said. ‘You ill?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’

  Soon enough, she’d been packed off home, still sweating and shivering, wondering if she’d even survive the journey. But at least I won’t die in the office, she thought. At least I’ll die free, with the wind on my face.

  Too nauseous to risk getting the bus, she walked a little way, and then, when her headache grew so pounding and insistent that even her steps seemed to be making it worse, she sat down shakily on a low wall by the side of the road and got out her phone to distract herself. Another missed call from Nick, but she knew he’d give up in the end.

  She got herself home eventually, and found her gran in the sitting room by the electric fire, reading Proust. It was such an unlikely sight that Judith almost started sniggering, and had to turn away and cough a few times to mask it.

  Her gran took one look at her and put her to bed with a hot-water bottle.

  ‘This isn’t acceptable, Judith,’ she said once she’d brought her a cup of hot water with lemon and honey. ‘This is disgraceful.’ Her eyes moved over the heaps of dirty clothes on the floor, the old mugs of half-drunk tea, globs of sour milk pooling on the surface. ‘And look at the state of this room.’

  Judith was glad she hadn’t left her drawer of pills open. She’d become careless recently, emboldened by the knowledge that her gran never came into her room whilst she was absent. Quailing under that severe gaze, she could see there was no point in protesting that she was ill. ‘Just overdid it a bit,’ she said, and tried giving her gran what she hoped was a disarming smile. She had a suspicion it came out wrong, since her gran did not look appeased.

  ‘We’ll talk about this tomorrow,’ her gran said, turning to leave the room.

  ‘Can I borrow Swann’s Way when you’ve finished with it?’ Judith asked, and then laughed so hard she almost threw up.

  The temping agency rang at the end of the week to say her services were no longer required at the college. It wasn’t clear to Judith whether the job was finished or if she was being fired, which probably just meant that the person at the other end of the phone was a coward.

  ‘I’ll find something else,’ she said to her gran, without any clear idea whether this was true. She had a suspicion the agency wouldn’t be forthcoming with any more work, and she couldn’t go back to the pub because Nick worked there; it was he who’d got her the job in the first place.

  ‘Why not take it as an opportunity to look for something better?’ her gran said. ‘Use that degree of yours.’

  Judith had a feeling that since the coming-home-drunk incident, her gran was being stiff with her, but since this was her gran’s natural state anyway it was rather difficult to tell.

  She said delicately, ‘Sorry again about Wednesday—’

  But her gran held up her hand to silence her. ‘The less said about that, the better.’ Judith was about to breathe a sigh of relief when her gran went on, ‘But let me tell you, Judith, if this goes on, you won’t have a home here. Do you understand that? Get yourself together, or you won’t be living under my roof any longer. Is that clear?’

  Judith managed to nod.

  Her gran seemed to relent a little. ‘It’s for your own sake, Judith. Do you see that? I sometimes think if I’d been stricter with your mother—’ But she apparently decided against pursuing this line of thought and said instead, ‘I want you to have a good life. That’s all.’

  Judith went up to her room and lay down on the bed. Maybe this time she really would sort herself out, she thought. Perhaps she would get a proper job and settle down and be happy. And then at last she’d write Moses a letter. Even though he’d have given up waiting by then, she’d write one anyway, because finally she’d have something good to tell him.

  She let herself think about this for a while, feeling it soothe her. Then she let it go.

  V

  Deluge

  1

  ‘The baby’s a symbol of hope, isn’t it?’ Stephanie said to Nathaniel. Always these days she was looking for ways to comfort him, even if it was only repeating his own words back to him.

  ‘It’s not enough,’ he said. He didn’t turn towards her, and when she tried to put her arm around his shoulder, he moved away from her to the edge of the mattress.

  ‘I should go back to my room,’ he said.

  ‘Stay a little longer.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘He was my right hand,’ Nathaniel said, as he often had over the past couple of weeks.

  Stephanie remained silent.

  ‘I gave him everything,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I raised him up from nothing to look on the face of God. How could he do this?’

  Stephanie reached out and laid her hand on his back. This time he didn’t shake her off. She’d seen him weep for the first time in the days after Thomas left, though not in front of the others – only her. It touched her, that he would trust her with his unhappiness.

  ‘Soon the baby will start to move,’ she said. She sometimes thought she could feel it already, coiled and pulsing inside her, though it was only about seven weeks old.

  ‘It’s a blessing,’ Nathaniel said, but his voice was distant. After a pause, he added, ‘I understand now why God never let Esther carry a child. I always wondered. He knew her wickedness all along.’

  ‘But Thomas told Seth she didn’t know anything,’ Stephanie said.

  For a moment, from the way he froze, she thought he might hit her again. But he seemed to hold himself back. He said, ‘Are you really so naive?’

  Perhaps she was. Nathaniel said Esther was bad, so Stephanie supposed she must be. This was the triumph and vindication she’d been waiting for; but it brought her no joy. She’d watched Esther since Thomas had left. They all had, couldn’t help it, even as Esther turned away from them. Without Thomas, Esther became clumsy. She broke plates in the kitchen. Her sewing was awkward and uneven. The others said she would improve in time, but time passed, and Esther became clumsier still. Stephanie pitied her, which must be another sign of her own weakness.

  None of them mentioned Thomas as they went about their work tasks, though he was in every silence between them. They adjusted the laying of the table so there wouldn’t be an empty place at supper. Rachael and Deborah were jittery and awkward, Ruth fierce in her efficiency.

  For a week after Thomas had gone, Seth and Joshua went straight into the prayer room with the prophet after work, and stayed shut in there for an hour or more, although nobody knew what they were discussing. Perhaps the other men had been searching for him in the town, though Stephanie didn’t think there was much point in this. Thomas would be far away by now.

  ‘I’ve been a fool,’ Nathaniel said as she stroked his back. ‘I didn’t see what was right in front of my face.’

  ‘You’re not a fool,’ Stephanie said.

  ‘I’ve been blind,’ he said. ‘But I won’t be blind any longer. Thomas and Esther tricked us all. I should have known better. But Esther can be—’ He broke off, so Stephanie never found out what Esther could be. Nathaniel said instead, ‘She was so unhappy when I met her.’ He paused again for a moment, then said briskly, ‘Her brother was murdered. Did you know that? Stabbed to death outside a pub. They never found out who did it, or why.’

  Stephanie hadn’t known this – it was horrible. It seemed strange that she was being given the information she’d craved about Esther’s early life only when it was too late to be of any use.

  ‘Now I think I misread the signs,’ Nathaniel said. ‘God wasn’t telling me to save her from all that misery. He
was telling me her family was marked, that she was marked. I thought I could help her. She was so young. And I was weak. But I was wrong. I believed what I wanted to believe.’

  ‘No,’ Stephanie said. ‘You were kind and good. This isn’t your fault.’

  *

  That night she dreamed of Esther’s brother, faceless and indistinct as he was, felt the terror of his final moments as though they were her own.

  When she woke she was being stabbed in the gut. She clutched her stomach and strained to see through the dark. Nathaniel, holding the knife above her. That brilliant smile.

  Then she woke again and there was no blade. But there was still the pain, and a sticky wetness beneath her that turned out to be a mess of blood. There was no woman to scream for now Esther had been moved to the big house to sleep in Thomas’s old room, but Stephanie screamed anyway and after what seemed a very long time Nathaniel came. He stood in the doorway and she wondered why he wasn’t coming closer, why he wasn’t coming to help her. Then he disappeared, just turned and went away. She tried to call after him, to plead, don’t leave me, but another slice of pain doubled her up. She clutched herself, smearing her hands with the blood that soaked her nightdress.

  It was dawning on her now, what was happening. But it’s much too early, she thought. It’s coming much too early. And then – oh.

  She would die with the baby. No doctors here, nothing but the wild moors. At first, as another cramp convulsed her, and she thought of how Nathaniel had come and looked at her and left again, she found she didn’t much mind the idea of death. But Judith, what about Judith? From the depths of pain, Stephanie pulled a single clear thought: leaving Judith in the others’ care wasn’t good enough. The realization shocked her, and it was this that made her unfurl herself and cry, ‘Help! Please, help.’