by Rebecca Wait
Moses had realized by now that he was starving, and thought the others probably were too. Melissa and Kerry and the silent man didn’t seem to know what to suggest, so Moses said, ‘I’ll do it. And if it’s wrong, I’ll be the one who gets punished.’
‘No one’s going to punish you, love,’ Melissa said gently.
‘God might,’ Ezra said, sounding a bit more like himself.
‘Shut up, Ezra,’ Judith said, turning on him. To Moses, she said, ‘Want me to say it instead? I don’t care.’
‘I’m not eating anything if she’s said it,’ Ezra muttered.
‘Shut up, Ezra,’ Judith said again.
‘Come on, guys,’ Kerry said, but they all ignored her.
‘I’ll say it,’ Moses said. ‘It’s fine. I think it’s probably fine.’ For his own part, he found he wasn’t really afraid. He waited till they’d all bowed their heads – Ezra still looked doubtful, but after a moment he copied the others – then began: ‘O God. Thank you for the food you’ve placed before us. Thank you for the Ark you’ve built to house us.’ He faltered. The last part was, ‘Thank you for the prophet you’ve sent to lead us,’ but he wasn’t sure he could say it. There was an agonizing pause.
‘Amen,’ Judith said firmly. She reached for a sandwich, and then Peter did too. This was enough to prompt the others, and soon they were all eating. Moses was beginning to feel calmer now. The fizz of unease in the room seemed to have died down. You didn’t have to let the world grow bigger around you. You could shrink it again, until it consisted only of this house, nothing beyond.
‘Now,’ Melissa said when they’d almost finished eating. ‘There are some people coming to talk to you this afternoon. Nothing to worry about – they’re very nice. They just have one or two things to ask you about. OK? And then the doctor will be here after that, just to check you over, make sure you’re all OK. We thought it would be best if everyone came here, rather than taking you back into town. You’ve had enough moving about today, haven’t you?’
Nobody answered her.
‘We’ve got an hour or two free before they get here,’ she said. ‘How about a game of something? There are some great board games in the cupboard.’
Jonathan pushed his plate away and looked up at the grown-ups. ‘When can we go home?’
There was a silence.
‘I’m afraid we don’t know,’ Melissa said. ‘I wish we could tell you more. We’re just working a few things out. We want to do what’s best for you all. And this is a – slightly unusual situation. For all of us. It might take a day or two before things are sorted.’
Moses looked across at Judith, who met his eye. She gave a small shrug. Moses was starting to see that they were never going home. And anyway, it didn’t exist any longer. The prophet had created a world, and then he’d destroyed it.
The next two hours seemed long. The rules to the games Melissa produced were complicated and nobody could summon up the energy to understand them. They eventually trailed upstairs to their rooms, only able to shake Melissa off by saying they all wanted a nap. Then, since she kept asking if they needed anything, they really did have to go into their separate rooms and get into bed in their clothes. Once Melissa had gone downstairs again, Moses and Peter stayed where they were, exhausted by the events of the day. They might really have fallen asleep if they hadn’t heard a scream from next door.
In the girls’ room, they found Mary and Abigail huddled together on one of the beds, whilst Judith shook her head scornfully at them.
‘I tried to tell them,’ she said. ‘It’s just the TV. It was in the cupboard. I warned them I was going to turn it on.’
Moses watched, transfixed. He was vaguely familiar with the concept of TV, as Judith had talked him through it in some detail whilst they were in the Ark, but it hadn’t prepared him for seeing the real thing. The dark box sitting in the cupboard was lit up, and there was a picture of a person inside it. The picture moved, and the person was speaking to them quietly, as though she had been shrunk and trapped inside the box.
‘Wow,’ Peter murmured beside him, stepping forward and putting out his hand to touch the picture. ‘How do they do that?’
‘Not sure,’ Judith said. ‘But it’s not a miracle or magic or anything like that. It’s just TV. Everyone has one. It’s – something to do with electricity. Something like that. It’s science.’
Nobody answered her because suddenly the woman was gone and instead there was a picture of the big house and the small house.
‘What on—’ Peter began, but Judith shushed him.
A voice was still speaking, but Moses didn’t take in much of it. He heard the word ‘police’, but mainly he just looked at the tiny Ark locked away inside the box.
Then it vanished.
Melissa was in the doorway, holding something in her hand which she was pointing at the TV. The screen had gone black.
She said, ‘Guys, it’s best if you don’t watch television right now. To be honest, I didn’t realize it was in here. I’m going to take it out.’
‘We’re not stupid,’ Judith said. ‘We’d rather know what’s going on.’
‘I know you’re not stupid, Judith,’ Melissa said. ‘But things get jumbled by reporters and I don’t think that’s going to be very helpful.’ When Judith didn’t answer, she added, ‘I’ll keep you in the loop as much as I can. Alright?’
‘Alright,’ Judith said. She sounded sullen, but Moses could tell she didn’t hate Melissa the way she hated Ruth.
When Melissa had wheeled the cupboard with the TV out of the room, the girls and Peter and Moses sat together on the beds. Soon after, Ezra and Jonathan came in as well. No one said much, but Moses was glad they were together. It was odd, not being able to picture the future.
The people who came to talk to them were another strange man and a woman, though this pair weren’t dressed in black and white. The woman wore trousers like Melissa, and she had such short hair that Moses thought she was a man when he saw her from the top of the stairs, except that her body was wrong for a man’s (this thought made him blush as soon as it occurred to him).
They went into the sitting room, and then Melissa brought the children in one at a time. Peter was called first. The rest of them stayed where they were in the girls’ room, eating the biscuits Melissa had given them.
‘What do you think they’re talking about?’ Abigail asked. It was almost the first thing she’d said since coming to Gehenna.
‘They’ll be trying to make him curse God,’ Ezra said. ‘And if he lets them corrupt him, he’ll go to hell.’
‘Don’t pretend to know what you’re talking about when you don’t,’ Judith snapped. They all looked at her, since she was the expert on Gehenna.
‘Well, I don’t really know either,’ she said. ‘But I think they’re going to ask us about Nathaniel. And – about Esther.’
A silence.
Jonathan said, ‘About – how she sinned?’
‘No,’ Judith said. ‘About what happened to her.’ She got up and went to the window.
Abigail said, ‘I want to see Mum. When can I see Mum?’
Nobody spoke. Ezra had turned away and was rubbing his hands over his face. Moses almost felt sorry for him.
When Moses’ own turn came, the man and woman in the living room told him their names and a bit about themselves, but Moses found it hard to listen. There had been too many unfamiliar people already today. He held his hands together tightly.
‘We’ll keep this short, Moses,’ the man said. ‘We’ll need to talk to you a bit more another time, but I know you’ve been through a lot already. This is just a quick chat, OK?’
Moses nodded.
‘To start us off, can you tell us your parents’ names?’
‘Rachael and Seth,’ Moses said – he had almost answered ‘Mum and Dad’.
The man wrote something down, and the short-haired woman said, ‘You’re doing brilliantly, Moses.’
This confused
him, since he had only said three words so far.
A series of questions followed, mostly delivered in the man’s soft voice, with the woman adding bits in occasionally. Moses wasn’t sure at first whether he should answer their questions, whether he was supposed to do as the people of Gehenna asked. He knew Ezra wouldn’t say much. But right and wrong were jumbled together now.
The man was asking him about Nathaniel. He said, ‘Did he ever hurt you?’
Moses thought about it. He had been hit once or twice during sessions, but that had mainly been Ruth, and he said so.
‘Hit you round the face?’ the man said, writing again.
‘Yes.’
‘Did it hurt a lot?’
‘No.’
‘A bit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did either of your parents ever hit you?’
Moses shook his head.
‘What did they do when Ruth hit you?’
‘They were upset.’
‘Did they try to stop it?’
Moses was about to shake his head again, but he had an anxious feeling, like he was facing some hidden danger. After a pause, he said ‘Yes’, and was interested to see that the man didn’t detect the lie.
The woman asked him some odd questions then about the grown-ups touching him, and Moses said his mother hugged him sometimes, but not so often since he was older.
He saw the man and woman glance at each other, and then back at him.
‘We’re nearly finished, Moses,’ the man said. ‘You’re doing really well, and in a moment we’ll leave it for today. But can you just tell me, as truthfully as you can, if you know what happened to Jess Sadler?’ He corrected himself: ‘Esther.’
Moses stared down at his hands for a while and tried not to see the bloodstain again. He thought, I must protect the Ark against the sinners of Gehenna. But it was an automatic thought, and brought with it no emotion.
His next thought was sharper and clearer: there’s nothing left to protect. So instead, he listened to his own feeling, which might have been God or might have been the devil, or something else entirely. He didn’t know if he could trust it, but he didn’t know if he could trust anything now, and it seemed better, after everything, to be led astray by yourself than by someone else.
So after a moment he looked up at the man. ‘They killed her,’ he said.
2
Thomas met Rachael in the corridor at the police station. It was a shock, seeing her like that, though he’d known she was somewhere in the building, being asked a few final questions – there seemed to be endless questions. He himself had answered so many by then that he felt muddled and exhausted, far less certain of his replies than when he started.
Rachael didn’t speak except to say his name, and then she stopped dead in the middle of the corridor.
Thomas tried to recover himself. Rachael didn’t belong in the world of police stations and paperwork and styrofoam cups of tea. This thought had obviously occurred to her as well. She looked almost transparent, as though willing herself to fade away and reappear somewhere else, somewhere safe. Her hair was lank, and she was oddly dressed, presumably in clothes lent to her by the social workers or police: a red skirt and shapeless white T-shirt; clumpy lace-up shoes. Some kind of insane compromise between Gehenna’s dress code and her own. She looked ugly, Thomas thought, and then was surprised at himself. But thoughts, as he knew so well, rarely did what you wanted or expected them to do.
‘Please,’ he said to the officer accompanying him. ‘Can we have a minute? Is there somewhere we can talk?’
Another officer was fetched, along with the liaison officer, an inappropriately cheerful woman called Sally. Eventually Rachael and Thomas were ushered into a small, peach-coloured room with an orange sofa and armchair.
‘I don’t need to tell you not to discuss your statements.’ Sally beamed at them.
‘No,’ Thomas said. ‘You don’t need to tell us.’
Rachael had gone quickly to the sofa and sat down. When he stared at her, she seemed to fade a little further.
And he found he couldn’t say anything at all, just felt his way to the chair and sat down as well, suddenly an old man.
Neither of them spoke. Thomas didn’t know what he’d wanted to talk about. He knew everything already. Perhaps he’d just wanted to look at her.
Then Rachael said, as though he’d asked her, ‘I didn’t know it was going to happen. Thomas, I didn’t know.’
He nodded slowly. No use trying to work out whether she was telling the truth. She probably didn’t even know herself. Her face was taut, like she was in pain. Thomas saw that it was in his power to help her; that perhaps, since he was able to, he should.
He said, ‘They’ll be punished, thanks to you. Nathaniel will be punished.’ A pause, then he brought out with difficulty, ‘It was brave of you.’
Her mouth twisted. ‘I hardly knew what I was doing. I just found that I – had to. I barely remembered how to drive. Managed it, though.’ Another silence, then she added, ‘They’re all being charged with murder. All of them. Except Deborah. And me.’
‘I know.’
‘I thought it would only be him. Nathaniel. I didn’t think it would be the others as well.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I think – I’d got so used to the idea that we didn’t decide things. That only he decided things, so if something happened it was because of him, and not because of anyone else. I know now that’s not true.’ Obediently, she added, ‘I know none of us are innocent.’
‘Would you still have left,’ Thomas said, ‘if you’d known Seth would be charged?’
‘Yes.’ Unblinking. ‘That doesn’t make any difference.’
There was a long silence. Thomas stared down at the carpet. Pale orange, flecks of red.
‘I can’t seem to make myself feel the things I ought to feel,’ he said. ‘I try to hate Seth, but it’s difficult. It doesn’t feel real. I want to hate him. He was part of it.’
‘Do you know what he said to me?’ Rachael said after a few moments. ‘What Seth said to me?’
‘What?’
‘He said that you don’t realize until it happens to you, how easy it is to – forget yourself. I’m not defending him,’ she added. ‘Just – he knew it was wrong. Or he knows now. He’ll live with it forever.’
Perhaps he will, Thomas thought. And either way, Seth was right – it was easy. There was a time when Thomas, too, would have done anything for Nathaniel. That was the horror of it; the word ‘anything’ had come to mean so little. Beyond a certain point, all acts were the same.
‘Do you still love him?’ he asked. It was difficult to say the word ‘love’.
‘He’s my husband,’ Rachael said.
‘Yes.’
She paused, then went on, ‘Do you remember, Thomas, what it felt like in the beginning? It was so pure, wasn’t it? But we went too far. We got lost. So – maybe that was one reason why I had to do it. It was the only way to save him. And to save all of us.’
‘Too late to save Esther.’
He must have meant to hurt her, and he could see he had. She’d been dry-eyed until now, but suddenly the tears were coming, and she bent over as if winded.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
There were stories he could tell himself to make it bearable. He told himself he couldn’t have guessed. He told himself he never suspected, not in a million years. But here was the truth, ugly and insistent: the moment he’d seen the barn on the front page of the newspaper – just the building, nothing more – he’d known. Which means the knowledge must have been there already, patiently awaiting its time. In any case, it didn’t matter what stories he told himself. Nothing made it bearable.
‘He’ll suffer for what he did,’ Rachael said. ‘They all will.’
‘Not as much as she suffered.’ And without warning, he felt himself beginning to cry as well. He didn’t realize what was happening at first; it felt like h
is whole body was convulsing, and then, after a few struggling, panicked moments, the sobs burst out. Rachael didn’t try to comfort him.
‘I try not to picture it,’ he said. ‘I try not to let myself think of what her last moments must have been like. But I can’t help it.’ He cried and cried, and in rhythm with his sobs his mind threw out Esther, Esther, Esther.
‘I met her parents,’ he said, when he’d regained some control. ‘Met them last week. They’re just – destroyed. They waited for her to come home—’ He broke off.
Rachael was still crying too, but softly.
When Thomas spoke again, his voice was almost steady. ‘I told her I loved her.’
‘You did,’ Rachael said.
‘No, not enough. I didn’t love her enough to stay.’ He rubbed his hands over his eyes. Gave one more dry sob. ‘Fourteen years in the Ark. Fourteen years of trying to break myself, trying to obey God, and all I’ve learnt is this. You never love anyone enough.’
They sat quietly after that. Sally came in at one point to offer them tea – more styrofoam cups – which they both declined. After their misery had burned itself out, a kind of deadness seemed to come over them. They struggled to push the conversation back onto its rails, to get to the moment when they could say goodbye and not see each other again.
‘What will you do now?’ Thomas said at last.
‘I’ll go to my parents. In Cornwall. I hope the boys will like it.’
‘By the sea?’
‘Yes. I’m lucky,’ she added, ‘that they’ll take me in. Deborah’s parents are already dead.’
‘What will she do?’
‘There’s some money left for her and the children. She’s going to Derbyshire, I think. Where she grew up.’
‘Everyone returning home,’ Thomas said.
‘But there is no home now, is there?’ Rachael said.
After he had said goodbye, he got into the car to drive back down south. He wouldn’t be needed again until the trial started. He would put distance between himself and what had happened. He would return to his small flat and close the curtains and go to sleep. The next day he’d get up and return to work, where no one would question him. He would not think of her. He would think of her constantly.
