by Rebecca Wait
It felt too big to confront, the terrible mistake they’d made. Too big even to see properly. The Gehenna they had feared before, the one blighted with suffering and sin: that was nothing more than shadows on the wall. The real Gehenna was something else entirely. It was this sense of wrongness, of having gone so far away from what you intended that now you would never get back. It was this feeling of dislocation you carried about with you, so that wherever you were was Gehenna, and Gehenna was you yourself. He knew that Rachael understood this too.
As the motorway opened up before him, he tried to trace it all back to where it started, as he would often do during the years that followed. It would be tempting to blame God, but of course that was no good now. Difficult to remember what it was like to believe the way he once had. Slowly, over time, God had moved further and further away, until He was eventually nothing more than an idea – and someone else’s idea, at that. A decoy, intended to distract you from what was really before you. Just someone throwing their voice.
After
‘I was worried about you,’ Stephanie said. ‘When you didn’t show up last time. Did Gran tell you I rang?’
‘Yes,’ Judith said.
‘She said you were unwell.’
‘I was.’
‘Are you feeling better?’
‘A bit.’
A long pause, then her mother said, ‘Have you seen Despicable Me?’
Judith was startled out of her silence. ‘What?’
‘It’s an animated film.’ Her mother thought for a moment. ‘Computer animated.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen it.’
‘It was our film last week.’
‘Weird choice.’
‘Yes, I thought so too,’ her mother said. ‘But everyone seemed to like it. It was fun. I like those – little yellow creatures.’
‘Minions,’ Judith said absently.
‘I was thinking,’ her mother said, ‘that it’s just the kind of film I’d have loved to take you to see when you were little.’ When Judith didn’t answer, she added, ‘Perhaps one day we could go to the cinema again together.’
‘Yeah,’ Judith said. ‘Maybe.’ She glanced over to the window, all the way across the room. A bright square of light. She found herself unable to look back at her mother. Her eyes were beginning to water as she kept them on the brightness. She considered telling her mother about Let the Right One In, which she’d watched the night before. But instead she said softly, ‘If Nathaniel had asked you to kill me, would you have done it?’
A shocked pause, as they both absorbed her question. Judith was amazed at herself, but full of a strange, savage delight.
Stephanie’s voice was tight when she finally answered. ‘Of course not. How can you ask that?’
‘Well, how can you say “of course not”? How do you know you wouldn’t have?’
‘Judith—’
‘You would have done anything he asked,’ Judith said.
‘Not that.’
Judith made herself meet her mother’s eye.
Stephanie said, ‘I don’t know what to say. Tell me what to say to you.’
‘Say that you ruined my life. Stop pretending it’s going to be OK. Admit that everything’s ruined. Admit it’ll never be OK.’
‘No,’ Stephanie said. ‘I won’t admit that, because it isn’t true.’
‘Of course not.’
‘No,’ Stephanie said again. She had tears in her eyes, but her voice had taken on a sharpness, and it reminded Judith of being a child again, being scolded for being too loud, too rude, too much for her mother to handle.
‘I’m sorry,’ her mother said. ‘But I’m not going to let you pretend it’s all over for you. It’s not.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I know you. And you’re not like other people. Not – breakable like everyone else. Nathaniel didn’t realize that. But I do.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Judith said.
Stephanie wiped her face, quickly, discreetly. She said, ‘You don’t have to keep visiting me. I think – you find it hard. It might be better for you to stop.’
Judith didn’t reply. Yes, it would be better, she thought.
Her mother reached out tentatively to take her hand. ‘It would be OK, if you stopped. I’d understand.’
Judith pulled her hand away and leaned against the hard back of the chair. Briefly, she closed her eyes. She would walk out of this bleak space into the sunlight and never come back.
When she opened her eyes, her mother was still there, still waiting. Stephanie had her hands together in her lap, as though they needed something to hold on to. Judith couldn’t bear to look at her face again, so she stared at her mother’s clasped hands instead. They were dry, the skin cracked around the knuckles. Her mum had used hand cream all the time when Judith was a child, greasy and sweet-scented. Judith pictured Stephanie being led back to her cell, sitting alone in that small room, tuning the radio, unable to bear the silence. Imagined her sitting in the dark watching that week’s film, storing up small details to talk to her daughter about.
There was a long pause. Judith took a breath.
She said, ‘I watched Let the Right One In last night.’
Her mum leaned forward a little. Her hands moved apart in her lap. ‘What’s it about?’
‘Vampires,’ Judith said. ‘But it’s better than it sounds. Actually, I loved it.’
‘Would I like it?’
‘I think so,’ Judith said. She began to explain.
3
Whilst Judith’s grandmother was downstairs talking to Melissa, Judith and Moses stood together on the landing. They were alone for the first time that day. Peter, Jonathan, Abigail and Mary were in the living room, having finally succumbed to one of Melissa’s board games. Ezra had been taken away the previous morning by a mysterious aunt, who bore an unsettling, thin-lipped resemblance to Ruth.
No one was there to listen to their conversation, but they were still finding it difficult to speak to one other. Judith pushed her hands into her pockets, and almost without realizing it, Moses copied her.
‘My gran wrote down her address,’ Judith said. ‘So you can write to me. Your mum will show you what to do.’
Moses nodded.
There was another silence, then Judith said abruptly, ‘They’re probably going to prison for a long time.’
‘I know.’ He knew too, what prison was: a place where you were kept for years and couldn’t leave. But there was no promise that it would earn you heaven.
‘They deserve it,’ Judith said. ‘I’m never going to speak to my mum again. I hate her.’
‘But she’s your mother,’ Moses said.
‘Still.’
Moses had been trying to decide how he felt about his own mother. He settled for saying, ‘You can write to me too. We’re going south.’
‘Yeah. Cornwall. It’s nice there,’ Judith said, though he knew she’d never been.
A fresh start, his mother had said. Melissa said it too. As though you could begin your whole life again, without it even mattering what had gone before. Looking at his mother’s exhausted face, he knew she didn’t believe it either.
‘It’ll be alright,’ Peter had said.
‘How?’ Moses said.
‘Don’t know.’
But Peter really would be alright, Moses thought. He could see his brother more clearly now, as though his outline had grown sharper and bolder. Peter looked at nothing but what was in front of him. He would cope.
‘Do you think God exists?’ he asked Judith.
Judith looked at him carefully. ‘No.’
A world without God was unimaginable once. Now it was here. Inside his chest where he thought his soul had been, there was emptiness and silence. All this struggle and pain for nothing. No promised land to make it all worthwhile. Nobody was going to be saved.
‘I’ll tell you one thing, though,’ Judith said. ‘If I had believed in God, I wouldn’t
let Nathaniel take it away from me.’
‘But he lied,’ Moses said.
‘So what? Nathaniel has nothing to do with God. I don’t think he believes in God.’
Moses nodded. In any case, he thought the heaviness that had come over him wasn’t just the loss of heaven.
As if reading his mind, Judith said, ‘We’ll see each other again. Before we know it.’
Moses tried to think of all the things he ought to be saying. Downstairs they heard the sound of the kitchen door opening, the voices of the women growing louder, and Moses knew that their time was nearly up. Then the door closed again and the voices were muffled once more: a false alarm.
‘It’s horrible,’ Judith said at last. ‘Being able to see how different things could have been, but not being able to go back and change them. If my mum had never met him. If she hadn’t agreed to join him.’
Moses was finding it hard to follow what she was saying. He’d never been able to see another life. He watched her instead: the red hair, the frown. He thought, if you hadn’t come, I’d never have known what it is people live for, apart from heaven. But he didn’t say this out loud.
The kitchen door opened again. The voices became louder and this time they didn’t fade.
‘Judith, are you ready?’ Her grandmother’s voice, calling up the stairs. Stiff, covering its awkwardness.
Judith took her hands out of her pockets. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said.
‘But we’ll see each other again,’ Moses said, trying to believe it. ‘Very soon.’
She smiled at him, an unusually gentle smile for her. But he didn’t see it for long because she was already turning away.
After
Judith sat at the kitchen table whilst her gran made tea. Laid out in front of her was the Sunday magazine featuring Jo Hooper’s story, a four-page spread entitled God’s Slaughter. It had been so long since her encounter with the journalist that Judith had stopped thinking about her. But Jo Hooper had clearly just been taking her time to make sure she got the story exactly right.
A large and rather unflattering picture of Judith’s mother stared out at her, above a blurry image of a smiling, blonde-haired teenager who could only be a young Esther. On the next page, there was a full-length shot of Nathaniel being led away from the courtroom after sentencing. Adrian Fisher, the caption said, known to his followers as Nathaniel. There was a small picture below of his parents at the trial, a faded, elderly couple who looked bewildered to be there.
‘A load of dross,’ her grandmother said when Judith brought the magazine home. ‘Throw it away.’
But Judith had to look.
‘They mention me by name,’ she said now. ‘But not the other kids. Not Moses.’
Her gran didn’t reply. She was wiping down the counter with fierce concentration.
Judith stared at the photograph of Esther. Jess Sadler, pictured before she joined the group. Poor Esther. She turned the page, hoping Moses, all the way down in Cornwall, hadn’t seen it.
She studied the picture of Nathaniel again. It was strange seeing him like this, dressed in a rumpled suit, eyes on the ground. He looked shockingly ordinary. She peered closer, trying to work out what it was that had given him such power, where that weird magnetism had come from. She had never felt it herself, but there seemed no denying other people had.
She said, ‘Do you think he’s got a new band of followers around him in prison?’
Her gran paused in her scrubbing. ‘That’s a nasty thought,’ she said.
‘I hope he dies in there.’
‘If he doesn’t, he’ll be a very old man by the time he’s released.’
‘Mum will be out soon, though. A few more years.’ She paused, trying to imagine it. ‘What then?’
‘We’ll try to help her,’ her gran said shortly, ‘as best we can.’
‘I always thought they should have got as long as him,’ Judith said. ‘They’re all guilty. I didn’t see what difference it made, whether or not he told them to do it.’
She waited for a comment from her gran, but none was forthcoming.
‘Anyway, I don’t know any more,’ Judith murmured. She returned to the article. ‘She makes it sound like a freak show, this Jo Hooper woman. Maybe it was. But nobody who wasn’t there understands it.’
‘Of course not,’ her gran said.
Judith turned to the beginning of the article and looked at her mother’s face. Despair was creeping in again.
‘But what about the people who were there?’ her gran said.
When Judith pretended not to hear, her gran came over to the table and sat down opposite her. She said crisply, ‘I’m not one for blind optimism, but I do think unpleasant circumstances can be outweighed by other things.’
Judith raised her eyebrows.
‘The strongest bonds,’ her grandmother added, ‘are often forged in fire.’
‘You don’t have to be so cryptic,’ Judith said. ‘We’re not at Bletchley Park.’
‘It’s a pity to spend your whole life missing someone when there’s no need.’
Judith thought of her grandfather, who’d died in a road accident in his thirties. She knew none of the details. It was never mentioned.
‘I’m trying to move forward,’ she said blandly.
‘Well,’ her grandmother remarked, ‘you’re certainly making an excellent job of that.’ She got up and went back to the counter, picking up her cloth again.
A week later, Judith sat on the train and watched the countryside moving past. She had already eaten the cheese sandwich she’d found slipped into her bag. It had taken her about thirty miles of the journey just to wrestle it free from the cling film, but all the same, she was touched. Now she had nothing to do but look at the scenery. Should’ve brought Swann’s Way with her.
She took out her phone and typed a text to Nick. Sorry I was such a dick. She pressed Send before she could change her mind. He would reply, or he wouldn’t. At least she’d said it
She thought of Moses making this same journey by car years before, shocked and disorientated, seeing all this for the first time. Seeing any landscape that wasn’t moorland for the first time. Now she saw the courage that lay behind those quiet, stoical letters he’d written her. He always ended by saying he hoped she was OK. He never talked about God, and rarely mentioned what he’d lost. There were other kinds of heroism besides the sort that held its fists up.
Once the bus had dropped her at the edge of the village, she followed the directions she’d written down. The coastal path was easy to find and soon the whitewashed house rose up before her. It looked strangely familiar, a bit like the big house perhaps, only infinitely fresher and cleaner. She thought of them then, the two old houses and the barn, battered in the wind and abandoned on the moors. They were infamous now, their image reproduced often in newspapers and on TV news during the trial. It was unlikely anyone would live there again.
She rang the bell and waited, twisting her fingers together, too nervous to keep still. Nobody came, and she was beginning to think she’d left it too late, that it was all for nothing now. But then the door opened and a woman stood there. She was wearing jeans and an old sweatshirt, and her greying hair was cut short, so it took Judith a few seconds to realize it was Rachael.
‘It’s me,’ Judith said, unnecessarily, because even as she said it Rachael had given a small cry and put her hand to her mouth. Judith was afraid she’d upset her, brought with her reminders Rachael would rather avoid, but the next moment Rachael’s arms were round her. There was a keen relief in laying her head against Rachael’s shoulder and allowing herself to be folded into this solid warmth, even as she reminded herself Rachael wasn’t to be trusted – none of them were, except for Moses. You were in danger the moment you forgot how easily people lost themselves. She felt Rachael’s tears on her face.
‘Is he here?’ she said.
Rachael was still holding her by the shoulders, but she took one hand away now to wipe her eyes
. ‘Yes. He’s in the garden. I’ll show you.’
So Judith followed her through the narrow hallway, through the light, neat living room into the kitchen, and then she was being ushered out of the French windows into the garden.
Rachael seemed to melt away.
And there he was, his back to her, feeding the chickens. Taller, of course, his shoulders broader. She wondered what she should say, and could think of nothing.
But she didn’t need to speak. He turned, as though he’d been called. His eyes fixed on hers. The stain on his face, the dark hair. Perhaps he looked different, he surely looked older, but to Judith he looked like no one but himself.
Not knowing what to do, Judith took a step towards him.
‘Hi, Moses.’
It was difficult to see what he was thinking behind the shock on his face. It didn’t help that he wasn’t saying anything. He was angry with her, probably, for ignoring him for so long, for acting as though they’d never been friends. In his place, she would have been furious.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t write to you,’ she said hopelessly. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you before.’
He just stared at her. It reminded her of that first day she’d been taken to the Ark, when he kept offering her orange squash.
She tried to make herself see things clearly so she could explain them to him. At last, she said, ‘I thought it would be alright, but none of it was. I thought I’d cope, but I didn’t.’
She was waiting for his anger to break. But she should have known him better. The shock on his face was becoming something else. His eyes were bright.
He said, ‘Judith!’ And he walked towards her, his smile growing wider and wider.
Judith took a step forward. She opened her arms.
Acknowledgements
It takes a village to write a book. I’m so grateful for the support I’ve had. Thank you once again to my superb editors Francesca Main and Sophie Jonathan, who helped me unpick the tangle of my intentions to end up with the book I wanted to write. Thank you to my agent Caroline Hardman, whose calm and common sense can always be relied on, and to Jo Swainson, whose support has been invaluable. Most writers are lucky to have one brilliant agent; over the past few months, I’ve had two. Thanks also to the rest of the Picador team – it’s a pleasure to work with you.
