The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  ‘Go on, take it,’ says her mum’s voice.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ Sally says to it.

  Her heart seems to squeeze into a single arrow of pain and longing. She knows what she ought to do: find a signal and call the emergency services. Nothing ought to be touched or changed. She should not even have cleaned the baby’s face. She should not touch its nappy, and she should not give it anything to feed or comfort it, unless it is at the point of death.

  The baby is, however, out. It’s as scrawny as a rabbit, but never takes its eyes off her. They follow her movements, good, that means not blind at least. Can it hear? No time to test for that yet, and the ears might well be blocked with the filth of days or even weeks. How can a child, in Britain, in the twenty-first century, look like this? Yet it can, and this is what she has been trained all her life to find, and face. Whatever wickedness this is, she must deal with it. She must find the cool, calm place in her that has made her a good nurse, and hold on to that.

  There is something deeper than her training, however, and if she does not allow some release of anger and concern, she might faint or burst into tears. She can’t leave this child in its filth and stench. She has to do something, even if it means disobeying the proper procedure.

  ‘You are loved, you are loved,’ she keeps murmuring. ‘Oh you poor child.’

  Again the mouth opens, as if screaming soundlessly. Sally makes a decision. She takes off the filthy nappy, and puts it into a plastic bag, together with the wet wipes that got off the worst, and then puts the baby down again for examination. Nothing broken, as far as she can tell, and no bruises. It’s a little girl. Her fine hair swirls around her head like tiny whirlpools of copper. Her arms move, minimally, and the tiny hands clench and unclench. Sally touches the baby’s cheek in a caress. For the first time, the child gives a sigh.

  ‘You poor little lamb,’ she says. ‘Who did this to you? Whose child are you?’

  The head fits into the curve of her hand as if it was always meant to be there, and the small body tucks into the crook of her arm. For a moment, Sally stands there, and it is as if she is standing in sunlight for the first time in her life. The child opens her mouth and the faint pitiful cry comes out again. There’s a bottle of ready-made formula milk in her bag for emergencies; she gets it out and puts it between the child’s lips. Without hesitation, the mouth closes over the teat. In a minute, the bottle is emptied. The baby gives a deep belch, and closes her eyes. Sally feels her own body drenched in a sudden, boiling sweat, like a wave of fever.

  ‘I won’t leave you. I can’t.’

  Wrapping the child in her long cotton scarf, and picking up the plastic bag of rubbish, Sally goes back through the passage, out through the side door, and towards her car.

  35

  The Iron Hook

  To say Xan can’t breathe is not true, or not yet. His throat is constricting and his lungs are turning to stone, but there’s still a trickle of air rasping through. He gasps, and gropes for the inhaler that is supposed to be in his pocket. It isn’t there. He stopped bringing it everywhere months ago.

  He’s bewildered. Why is he here with a cat? He shakes the door. It won’t budge, and putting his shoulder to it does no good because it opens inwards. Why won’t it open? Where is Janet? He can hear the sound of the Dyson again, far away, and thumps on the door.

  ‘Janet! Janet! Let me out!’

  No answer. She has done it deliberately. Why? He looks at the ceiling, the big iron hook stuck in it like an upside-down question mark. No matter. What is more urgent is that he gets out.

  Xan’s last severe asthma attack happened several years ago, occasioned by going to a party at the house of someone who forgot to tell him that his family kept a cat, because Xan himself forgot to ask. Many people, even now, don’t understand how serious it is, even when they know about the anaphylactic shock that can stop your heart with a wasp sting. Allergic asthma takes longer but is no less deadly; without antihistamine or his inhaler, he’d been carried off within minutes to A&E, and put on a nebuliser. That time, however, he’d been in London.

  Here, in the middle of nowhere, it will probably take hours for anyone to find him, let alone bring help. The thought makes it even harder to breathe than the snot pouring down the back of his throat. At all costs, he mustn’t panic, as this constricts breathing further. All these months of being normal and healthy, even in winter, and now this. Asthma crawls through his lungs, swelling and squeezing. It does not as yet have total control of his body, but it will. According to memory, he has at best twenty minutes left. He needs his inhaler, the blue one that squirts a dose of steroids deep into his lungs, reducing inflammation and opening up the threadlike airways. Instead, he has a cat, a creature as deadly to him as a cobra.

  He’s pushed the cat onto the floor, but it is still twining hopefully around his ankles. Poor creature, it’s killing him through no fault of its own. He is allergic whether it’s alive or dead because of the dander on its fur. McSquirter is, unfortunately, one of the worst for someone with Xan’s condition. Large, fluffy, and inclined to moult on a warm day, it is in full possession of the feline perversity that makes them avoid the enthusiast and pursue the rejecting. It dances up, trilling insistently, then rolls over to reveal an expanse of pale apricot stomach, determined to win him over.

  ‘Shit,’ he mutters. ‘This is not good.’

  His eyes are itching and streaming, and both eyes and nose are swelling up. It’s a misery that no amount of blowing or rubbing will do anything to help. Far more urgent are his wheezing, whistling lungs. Already he is stooping, buckling, like a young man being transformed into an old one.

  He is squinting to see, but the door is definitely locked. The tiny window which allows some daylight into the room doesn’t open, and is made of security glass. He tries wrapping his T-shirt round his fist and punching it, but all that happens is that his fist gets bruised. The floor is concrete. The ceiling is barred by beams, floorboards and hardboard.

  I can’t get out, I can’t get out.

  He thinks of Lottie and Marta, and how desperately upset they will be if he dies; he thinks of his little sisters, he even thinks of Quentin. When will they return from the beach? If only he knew that, he might feel less panicked, but they are bound to be gone for at least three hours. By then, it will be too late. He has to save himself.

  ‘Come on, think,’ he tells himself. He has rejoiced in his body recently, but it’s his brain whirring in its skull with all the things he knows, and can do that might save him. He can’t let that be lost. Breathe, breathe. The action every living thing performs unthinkingly until it dies is becoming an effort.

  No amount of banging, kicking or turning the door handle affects his predicament. The hinges are long, and made of iron; the door itself is solid. He can’t break it, not without a tool.

  Xan looks around, wiping his streaming eyes. A quarter of the room is taken up with the stone bath, carved out of a single piece of granite, like a kind of sarcophagus. The stone is flecked with tiny red specks, like blood. He remembers Quentin telling them what it was used for, and shudders to think of the pigs hanging upside-down with their throats cut, and the way it would have been filled with salt to cure the pork for winter. Is drowning in your own blood worse than drowning in your own snot?

  The rest of the room has been used as what his family call a sin-bin – a place to put things they can’t throw away but don’t tend to use. It’s a perfect place for a prison, or a tomb. Apart from old wellington boots, all he can see is a plastic bucket with a ragged mop in it. Hopefully, he tries unscrewing the mop-head from its pole, but the plastic splinters as soon as he jabs it at the window. The cat, frightened, retreats to a dark corner, where it watches him, warily. He can see its hairs floating like thistledown through the air in a shaft of light. To be killed by such tiny things … his efforts have caused his lungs to constrict even more. He’s gasping, now.

  If he could just find a crack to the outside,
and breathe through that, his allergy might be reduced. He staggers over to the door. It’s a tight fit around the frame, but there’s a keyhole. He kneels, and puts his eye to it. The key has gone, surprise, but he can at least suck a trickle of clear air through it.

  ‘Help,’ he gasps; then, gathering more breath, ‘Help!’

  There is no reply. In the country, Quentin had told them, nobody can hear you scream. It’s true. He tries to remember the tricks he’s been taught: Stand upright to allow your lungs to expand. If that’s impossible, hunch over on the ground, face down with knees beneath, to get a tiny bit more air from deep within. Never lie on your back. Breathe through your nose, not your mouth. Breathe out, because breathing in happens automatically. He can hear his airways whining like an aeroplane trying to climb too fast.

  Xan sits down on the edge of the granite bath and tries to straighten up. Outside, life simmers and seethes in a summer sun so strong that its syrup stains the little room into a semblance of warmth. It’s cold, inside. At least, he hopes it is cold. Xan holds up his hand to the light to check. His fingertips are not blue, yet … The pain of his lungs and back and face is almost driving him crazy, he wants to rub his eyes until they fall out of his head like weeping jellies. His nostrils are stuffed with salt glue, his sinuses have a skewer through them, his lungs are continually constricting. He’d cry, if he had enough breath.

  For as long as he’s alive, the inflammation to his mucous membranes will continue; and then it will stop. His sinuses will no longer react, his nostrils, eyes and face will go down and he will look perfectly normal again. It will seem as if he had an attack while alone – for asthma is a mysterious affliction which can take its victims suddenly.

  It really is the perfect crime.

  McSquirter comes and sits by his feet, purring loudly. It wants to be his friend, not his murderer. It’s a beautiful animal, like Orlando the Marmalade Cat, gooseberry-green eyes and all, only not to him. Death by cat, how ridiculous it sounds. But why has Janet done this? Why does she hate him so much? It can only be because he’d told her about Dawn’s illness – and now he comes to think about it, she hadn’t been surprised.

  Janet knew what was wrong with her daughter, because what she wanted was for Dawn to become more and more stupid. Why? He can’t imagine, but thanks to Devon’s glacial broadband speeds, he has seen enough about hypothyroidism to know that it’s something all babies are tested for immediately. To be at all normal, Dawn must have been on thyroxine from birth. Only then could her brain have grown normally, so that she had been, until a year ago, bright and beautiful, instead of the weak, slow, stupid girl she is now.

  The most horrible realisation is that for Dawn to change as she had done must mean that her medication has been withheld, deliberately, for months and months. It would have been a gradual process. Wouldn’t a GP have noticed? Possibly not, if the practice was overburdened.

  Why would a mother have stopped medicating her daughter? Presumably, she cared about her. If anything, she seemed overprotective, driving her to the factory and back. Dawn isn’t starving, quite the reverse, she has clothes and a roof over her head. Yet a parent might do all that and still hate their child. Xan has seen enough fights between his peers and their parents to know that this is possible, and he can remember the struggle for control on the one hand and independence on the other. Even he had rebelled against the constant nagging. Lottie had almost had a heart attack when she found out he was smoking weed. She wept and begged him to stop because of his asthma, and when he took no notice, cancelled his allowance.

  ‘I hate you,’ he had told her, in a passion of resentment; and for a short time he’d seen her face reflect this. However, she’d backed off. But some people he knew had quarrelled so badly with their parents, or vice versa, that the breach had been irreparable. He’d heard boys in his school say that they wished their parents were dead; it was entirely possible that a parent might feel the same way.

  Or maybe Janet had just wanted to make Dawn less stroppy. Didn’t most mothers of teenagers wish for more docility? A child could be as aggravating as his little sisters, but full-scale rebellion of the sort he’s heard about, especially from girls, is a whole other story. Maybe Dawn had been full of all that girl-power stuff they all got into as teenagers, and Janet just wanted her living doll back. He remembers how she’d brushed and plaited her daughter’s long blonde hair, how creepy that seemed. She must have either denied Dawn the thyroxine, or substituted it with something else. One pill looks much like another, and the change would be so slow that the girl had probably not noticed until it was too late. She would have become more tired, more depressed, more exhausted. Perhaps Janet gave her just a tiny bit of the real medication so she could do her factory job. The cunning required to do this makes him shudder.

  He tries unscrewing a nail on the handle of the locked door with his thumb-nail. It snaps in a white flare of pain.

  Tears pour down his face. I will die here, he thinks. His heart feels as if it’s going to burst, and he can’t even find the breath to sob.

  Suddenly, there’s a burst of music. He wonders whether he’s hallucinating, then realises that somebody is playing the piano next door. The long, sinuous ripples of melody unfurl, rising and falling up the scale, repeating and reinforcing each other with propulsive energy, like a great and marvellous plant spiralling towards the sun. ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ … The long interlocking melodies sing to him, so gentle yet so unshakeable in their goodness that they could go on for ever. As he listens, his heartbeat slows and his breathing steadies.

  He thumps the door feebly.

  ‘Dawn!’

  The music stops. There’s silence, then a hoarse voice says, ‘Hello?’

  Xan leans against the door, exhausted. His voice comes out in gasps. ‘Help!’

  ‘Who is it?’ She shuffles to the back hall.

  He tries to sound authoritative.

  ‘Xan. Call – 999.’

  Each word comes out on a gasp. He can picture her moon-face looking blank. They are both sick, and he only has her to help him fight her crazy mother. Then another thought strikes him. He puts his mouth as close as he can to the keyhole.

  ‘Mobile?’

  ‘She won’t give me one.’

  Of course Janet wouldn’t give her a mobile. Why would she, since she has kept her daughter as a virtual prisoner? Whom would she have to ring, anyway?

  But Quentin has a landline.

  ‘Try—’ he’s going to say stepfather, but it takes too much breath – ‘upstairs. 999. Ambulance. Asthma.’

  It’s like talking to a child, but he can hear her climbing the steps. Has she understood? If she can remember how to use a telephone, if she can recognise a telephone, she might get help. It’s a small chance, but better than none. She probably doesn’t even know the postcode here, but they can trace a landline, can’t they?

  Xan slumps on the floor. The trickle of cat-free air is not enough. His head has grown boiling hot with effort. What he needs is something to prise off the hinges, smash the window or widen the keyhole. A lever. There must be something. His gaze wanders to the ceiling, and the big iron hook sticking out of the beam as if inviting him, over the granite bath. If I could get that out, I’d have a lever, he thinks. It’s bound to be fixed deep though, or it would never have taken the weight of a pig.

  Painfully, he reaches up, and tugs. Nothing. He gives it a twist, more in despair than hope. Perhaps the beam is starting to rot, but unexpectedly the hook rotates. He can hear Marta’s voice saying, Practise, practise, your strength must be in your back and your wrists.

  Sweat pours down his sides and back. Even reaching up is agony, but the iron screw turns. Its thread has not rusted. Flakes of old wood come off. He uses one hand, then the other. His weakness would be shocking if it were not for the ache in his lungs.

  The hook releases itself, and suddenly he’s holding it. He shuffles back to the door, and puts the hook into the jamb. Give m
e a lever long enough, and I shall move the world, Archimedes said, and he leans on the arm of the hook so that its curve goes into the wood, and pushes. Come on, come on, come on … It sinks in, splintering, but not enough.

  He pauses, and listens. Is that Dawn on the other side?

  ‘Hello?’

  Some instinct of caution makes him not say her name, and the next moment he’s glad because Janet says,

  ‘It’s no use. You won’t get it open without the key.’

  ‘Why?’ Xan gasps. He hasn’t the breath to say it all – but she grasps his question.

  Janet answers, ‘To protect her.’

  ‘Protect?’

  ‘From herself.’

  Xan says nothing. A spell of dizziness has overtaken him, so intense he thinks he must faint.

  Janet’s voice continues, ‘And from her father, my shitty Ex. He couldn’t be bothered to marry me, but he loved her. He thought he could take my Dawn away from me. Only I stopped him.’

  ‘How?’

  Xan’s head is steadier. He works at the handle. What he’ll do if he gets out and is confronted by her, he has no idea. All he can think of is air.

  ‘I thought you must have worked it out, seeing as you’re supposed to be so clever. He was going to ruin our lives all over again.’

  ‘What?’ Xan asks. He has no idea what this lunatic is on about.

  ‘Don’t you know what happened here? I bet your ma and stepfather do. The bastard who lived here before was my Dawnie’s dad.’

  Xan prises the handle off the door at last. It pops its screws, and the plate and handle come off, falling to the floor with a clatter. He almost loses consciousness again but the shaft is loose. He slides it out. With a bigger hole to breathe through, he might be able to break the lock itself. A nasty thought strikes him: all she has to do is squirt some household spray through the hole, or block it with a cloth, and he won’t have any hope left.

  ‘So?’

  She can’t resist telling him. Xan can hear the hate hissing in her voice like steam from a kettle.