by Rebecca Wait
They started to walk away from the barn and away from the houses, stopping only when they had gone a little way onto the moors. It was too dark and the ground too damp to risk going further.
‘We have to go back,’ Moses said, not moving.
Beside him, Judith was silent. They looked out across the moors, bluish and shadowed in the fading light.
At last, Judith said, ‘We never went into the barn. Do you understand, Moses? We were never there.’ When he didn’t immediately reply, she said again, more fiercely now, ‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
My parents, he thought. Were my parents in the barn? And he thought of Esther, who had always been kind to him.
‘It’s OK,’ Judith said. She patted him gently on the back as he threw up. He had managed to lean forward just enough to avoid his shoes, which was good, he thought. He crouched down when it was over, wiping his sleeve across his mouth. He waited for Judith to tell him again that it was OK, but she didn’t speak.
2
Yes, she had expected the world to look different. Sarah didn’t know whether to be reassured or alarmed by the fact that it didn’t. It was hard to get her head round what it all meant. She tried to focus on it, sometimes, in a concentrated way. She would set aside a few moments when she was by herself at night, or whilst going out to get the firewood; and then she would lie still in her bed or lean against the wall outside and try to think about what she had done. But it shimmered and scurried away from her vision.
It would probably be easy to be overwhelmed by it, if you let yourself. She tried, sometimes, to be overwhelmed. She placed the facts before her one by one. Esther was dead. She had killed her. Esther was dead. But most of the time Sarah found it difficult to react at all. Such a small thing it had been, pushing in the blade. A little, sharp moment that surged forward then dissolved and was lost. Just another passing action like all the other actions you completed every day: brushing your teeth, walking from room to room, kissing someone.
It didn’t change you. It didn’t change anything. Sometimes, she forgot to think about it. When she did remember, the fact of it seemed curious, but somehow not shocking. There even seemed to be an ease to the idea, a naturalness. She thought, perhaps we are all killers underneath.
‘I’m having another baby,’ she said to Rachael as they cleaned the bathroom.
Rachael didn’t seem to hear her for a few moments. She was scrubbing away at the bath, but now Sarah noticed her sponge was moving over the same area again and again, even though it was already clean. Rachael’s eyes were unfocused, the way they were when you were no longer seeing the world in front of you.
‘Rachael,’ she said.
Rachael’s head came up quickly. She looked awful, Sarah thought. Her face was puffy, sagging a little round the cheeks like an old woman.
‘I’m going to have another baby,’ she repeated.
A smile from Rachael, but it looked like it caused her pain. ‘That’s wonderful. Congratulations. We can have a lovely supper to celebrate.’
‘I’m not pregnant yet,’ Sarah said.
‘Oh, but I thought—’
‘I was just telling you. I will be soon. God’s going to send me another baby now the danger’s passed.’
‘Well – that’s nice to hear,’ Rachael said. ‘I hope so.’
‘You don’t need to hope. He will.’
Sarah watched as Rachael resumed her scrubbing, but she herself relaxed for a few moments, holding the mop loosely in her hand. When she was pregnant, there would be no more dwelling on what she had done. It would be a new chapter.
She said, ‘God only sends children to you if He thinks you’re worthy. Esther was never worthy.’
Rachael’s hand slowed for a moment, then continued its rhythmic back and forth motion.
‘God always knew she wasn’t,’ Sarah said.
Finally, Rachael answered. ‘I suppose He did.’
I killed her, Sarah reminded herself, watching for her own reaction. But again, there was only this blankness, this slight feeling that she had been cheated out of something.
She’d tried to explain it to Nathaniel the night before, but he didn’t seem to grasp what she was saying, how difficult it was to get it straight in her head.
He had kissed her passionately, his tongue slipping between her lips so she couldn’t speak any more. When he pulled back, he said, ‘It’s rare for a person to be able to say they’ve served God as you’ve served Him. You’re first amongst the followers of the Ark.’
She had felt proud at his words, but a little lonely, too. Nathaniel had no trouble understanding what had happened. If she felt any confusion, it must be a further sign of her weakness. Once, she might have confided in Rachael, but the days when she talked to Rachael about her fears were gone.
Still, she was not suffering. She knew Seth had nightmares, could sometimes be heard shouting out; knew, because Ruth had told her. Ruth relayed this information with scarcely suppressed rage, as further evidence of Seth’s failings. Sarah was surprised at Ruth’s anger; she might have expected disdain perhaps, but this hiss of fury seemed out of character. Ruth was tightly wound these days, sharp, unfamiliar things jumping below the surface of her skin. Still, Sarah had faith in her. Ruth would get herself back under control soon enough. But it might have been better to have left Seth out of it altogether, as they’d done with Rachael and Deborah. Not everyone had the strength to do God’s work.
Going down the corridor to the kitchen later, Sarah heard Seth and Rachael talking – arguing, even – in low voices. She paused by the door to listen, but couldn’t make out the words. Then their voices broke off, and Sarah decided to take her moment to enter the room. When she pushed the door open, she saw that Seth had his arms around his wife, who was crying again. Rachael cried too much these days. Sarah nodded to them, then filled a glass of water at the sink and drank it. She began to watch them more closely after that. Soon she realized that Nathaniel was watching them too.
When she confided in Nathaniel her hopes of getting pregnant, he raised his eyebrows and said, ‘God will send us a child in His own time.’
‘I know.’
‘He’ll need to see first that the Ark is truly free from sin,’ Nathaniel said. ‘There may still be certain – elements holding us back.’
Sarah nodded, but she felt tired. She wasn’t sure she could manage to hold the knife again.
Occasionally, old memories came back to her, odds and ends from the past. Helen and Liz in the coffee shop. Her mum’s cramped front room. The mouse she’d had to stamp on, the bright blood smear inside the plastic bag. The person she’d been back then seemed like a stranger. But she knew better than to be surprised at how far she’d come. That was the mistake other people made, thinking things were fixed in place. Nothing was fixed. You might have thought you had one self, and you took it everywhere with you. But the truth was, you were fluid and shifting. You had no edges, no outline at all.
3
‘We can’t stay here,’ Judith said. ‘We have to escape. Don’t you see that, Moses?’
He tried to understand what she was saying. He saw that at some point the two of them had become ‘we’, which was perhaps what he had wanted ever since he’d watched the strange red-haired girl climb out of the car so many months before. But that was another life.
They sat in their usual clearing in the forest. It wasn’t the same, of course, not now the forest was cut open, but they returned to it from time to time, as though it might still be possible to discover somewhere safe. It was difficult for Moses to remember what life had felt like before they’d gone into the barn. It was as though the flood had come after all, unseen and dreadful.
The earth at the edge of the forest, near the baby’s grave, was freshly disturbed.
Judith held her arms across her body. She was rocking slightly, backwards and forwards, as though it were dangerous to be still. ‘It’s not safe here,’ she said.
Moses thought of Nathaniel, eating sausages the morning they’d seen the stain. ‘But there’s nowhere to go,’ he said.
‘We’ll find somewhere. We could go to my gran. She’d look after us.’
‘What about my parents? And Peter?’
‘We can’t tell them,’ Judith said. ‘It’s not safe to trust anyone. Not my mum, not yours. Not even Peter.’ Seeing his face, she added, ‘But they could join us afterwards. Once we’re there and we’re safe. When no one can hurt us.’
‘The prophet would find us,’ Moses said. ‘If he wanted to, he could easily find us.’
‘He isn’t a prophet,’ Judith said.
‘He is. He was anointed by God.’
‘Who told you that?’ Judith said.
‘The grown-ups.’
‘And who told them?’
‘The prophet.’
Judith said nothing.
Moses searched and searched for the truth, but he no longer knew what that meant. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Of course you don’t,’ Judith said. ‘You don’t know how.’
Perhaps she was the devil after all. Anything was possible now. But it hardly mattered if she was, Moses thought; it was too late. He already loved her.
He said, ‘Are you the devil?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Judith said.
Going into the kitchen later, Moses came across his mother. She was standing by the sink, unmoving. She had washing-up gloves on and he could see the pile of dirty plates, but his mother’s hands were still and she didn’t turn as he came in, didn’t appear to hear the door. Lot’s wife, transformed utterly.
He said, ‘Mum.’
When she did turn round, Moses saw her trying to smile at him. He wondered again, without wanting to, if she had been in the barn; if she had tried to smile at Esther, too.
He was about to mutter an excuse and slip away again, but something in her rigid posture and the quietness of the room unsettled him. So instead he made himself pause, and say, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just – washing up,’ she said, but there was a little break between the words as though she had struggled to form them in her head, struggled even to remember what washing-up was. The dirty plates remained untouched.
‘Would you like some help?’
His mother shook her head. ‘No.’ Then, softly, ‘No help, thanks.’
She looked like she might cry again, and Moses realized he didn’t want to see this. She didn’t seem like his mother any longer. She had become someone else entirely. I feel very old, he thought suddenly. I feel a hundred years old.
‘We’ll have to go across the moors,’ Judith whispered to him that evening. They knelt side by side in the sitting room, laying the fire.
‘It’s too far,’ Moses said.
‘We’ll manage. You know them better than me.’
‘I’ve never been as far as Gehenna,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been anywhere near it.’ He had a terrible, sad feeling: the knowledge that now of all times, when she trusted him to help her, he was going to fail. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Judith had been assembling a pyramid of twigs in the grate, pushing smaller twigs and balls of paper into the middle, but now she stopped and put her hands to her face.
Helplessly, he touched her arm. ‘Don’t cry.’
‘Just say it, if you’re not coming,’ Judith said, her voice muffled. ‘Don’t be a coward. Just say it.’
He tried to imagine staying in the Ark without her. ‘Please don’t cry,’ he said again.
She wiped her hands roughly across her face and reached for the logs in the basket next to them, beginning to lay them around the base of the pyramid. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Are you going to report me?’
Shock prevented him speaking for a few moments. ‘Of course not.’
‘They’d kill me, wouldn’t they?’ Judith said. ‘My mum wouldn’t stop them. And if they knew you hadn’t reported me, they’d kill you as well.’ Her hands were shaking so much she knocked over the tower when she tried to add the final log.
Moses said, ‘I’d never report you.’
‘Why not?’ Her voice had grown louder and he made a gesture with his hands to shush her.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just wouldn’t.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘I don’t know. But I am.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Judith hurled the log she was holding back down with such force it knocked the basket over. ‘Everyone’s a liar!’
Moses tried to calm himself so he could calm her. But it was impossible to make her see how clear she was in his head, how she was the only clear thing now. Impossible to make her see that she stood in front of everything, even in front of the prophet and in front of all his words about the devil and hell.
‘I wouldn’t report you,’ he said, ‘because you’re my friend. It’s – the main thing.’
Judith stared at him. At last, she nodded and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
Gently, they relaid the logs around the pyramid. Moses handed Judith the box of matches and she struck one and held it against the paper. It flared, and fire surged over the smaller kindling.
Moses said, ‘We’ll find a way across the moors. We’ll manage.’
She let out her breath. ‘So you’re coming?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I think we should go tomorrow.’
Moses hesitated, but only for a moment. He nodded.
‘Shall we go after lessons in the afternoon?’ Judith said. ‘We’ll have a couple of hours before they notice. And the light will be fading so it’ll be harder for him to catch us.’
What about bogs? Moses wanted to say, but he could see that bogs were the least of their problems. He didn’t think they’d make it. But he would go with her anyway.
‘We’ll manage,’ he said again.
They watched as the flames began to trickle up the tower and grab onto the larger logs.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Judith said.
‘Alright.’
‘You’re my best friend,’ she said. ‘It was Megan once. Now it’s you.’
He turned quickly to her. He thought she had gone red, but it might have been the heat from the flames, or the fact that she’d been crying.
‘You needn’t look so pleased with yourself,’ she added. ‘It’s not like you had loads of competition.’
4
Moses struggled to fall asleep that night. He listened to the gentle breathing of the other boys, and wondered how they could be so peaceful when the Ark had fallen away, leaving them high on the moors in the cold wind. But the others hadn’t been in the barn, he thought.
Judith was right. They had to escape, even if they couldn’t reach Gehenna. Perhaps God would help them. Moses tried to decide if this was likely, but God wouldn’t speak to him when he was on his own. Still, he tried to cling on to what he had always believed. My God is a good God.
He must have fallen asleep eventually, because it was a shock to feel Peter pulling at his arm, to open his eyes and for it to be morning.
Ruth was standing in the doorway, and Moses blundered upright, seized with terror, knowing at once they had been discovered.
But Peter said, ‘It’s Mum.’
Moses was so unused to seeing his brother at a loss that it took him a few moments to recognize the expression.
‘What about her?’
‘She’s missing,’ Peter said. He looked at Moses with a desperate, beseeching confusion, as if he expected Moses to be able to explain what had happened, though he’d only just been pulled awake. Moses felt the bed heave beneath him, like the great earthquake promised at the end of days.
Ruth said, ‘Get dressed and come downstairs. Both of you.’
They pulled on their clothes in silence as she waited outside the door, and stumbled downstairs after her. Behind them, Jonathan and Ezra slept on.
In the kitchen they found their father sitting at the
table, his shoulders slumped.
‘I don’t know where she is,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I just woke up—’
Deborah was at the stove. She said, ‘It’ll all turn out fine, Seth. I know it will.’ She came over to the table and sat down, then got up again.
‘I’m making porridge,’ she said, to no one in particular.
When Nathaniel came in, Moses stared at him as though he were seeing him for the first time. The unkempt hair, the shadows under his eyes. What have you done to my mother? Moses wanted to say. But he couldn’t speak.
Nathaniel took the cup of tea Deborah proffered, but his hand was trembling and he spilled it.
‘Nathaniel—’ Deborah began, but he spoke over her.
‘Be quiet.’
He strode out again.
Deborah stirred the porridge rapidly. ‘It’ll all be fine, Seth,’ she said again. ‘Just have faith.’
Moses and Peter sat down at the table, because there seemed to be nothing else to do, and Deborah placed bowls of porridge in front of them.
‘You can have honey in it today,’ she said.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Peter said.
‘Eat it,’ their father said, though not angrily, and because they were afraid he might cry – unthinkable – they did, drizzling in honey from the pot Deborah pushed towards them. Moses didn’t twist the spoon quickly enough and dribbled honey down the side of the jar. He wiped it away with his finger, hating the stickiness.
A short while later, the other children trailed in.
‘Your mother’s gone,’ Abigail said to Moses and Peter in wonder.
‘Yes, I think they know that,’ Judith snapped at her. She laid her hand on Moses’ arm.
‘Porridge, everyone!’ Deborah said. ‘You can have honey today.’
Stiffly, Seth stood up and went out of the kitchen. Peter and Moses got up to follow him, but their father headed upstairs without looking back at them, so they remained in the hallway. They could still hear voices from the kitchen, Mary saying, ‘Did she sin?’ and Judith saying, ‘Shut up, Mary.’
