Girl A(60)

‘Nothing, Dad.’

And for a while, that was true. At university, I often searched for Noah and Cragforth online, but with a habitual curiosity, the same way that I checked the weather or legal updates. I had become accustomed to the three results which returned to me on each occasion: a theological essay by Bradley Cragforth of Wisconsin State University, which involved a close analysis of Genesis (and which was, I thought, rather good); details of Cragforth Primary School’s reception class syllabus, which included ‘listening to and discussion of stories from both the Bible and other religions (e.g. Noah and the Ark)’; and an advertisement for the amateur dramatic performance of The Grapes of Wrath, held in Cragforth Park in the summer of 2004, which featured Gary Harrison as Noah Joad.

I considered the options. His family might have moved to another town, or abroad. They might have changed his name.

I was twenty-eight and in New York before a fourth result appeared. It was past midnight, and I was waiting for documents from the Los Angeles office. There were few people left on the corridor. I typed the old combination into the search bar and hit return. At the top of the page was a new link. This was a team listing for the Cragforth Under 15s Junior Cricket team. The Vice-Captain was Noah Kirby.

I leaned back in my office chair and crossed my arms. Noah Kirby, of Cragforth. I clicked through to the results for the season so far. They hadn’t been updated for several weeks, but as of mid-July the team had won two games, lost five, and had one rained off. A trying season. If somebody had emerged at my office door and asked me why I was crying, I wouldn’t have been able to answer them. I didn’t know.

The summer before I started high school, we lived under Father’s regime. On the first day of the holidays, when we scrambled down for breakfast, there was a brilliant gold parcel on the kitchen table.

‘What’s inside it?’ Delilah asked. The parcel was tied with a bow. It was the size of a small television, or a whole stack of books.

‘Six weeks,’ Father said, ‘of good behaviour.’

‘And then we can open it?’

‘That’s not much to ask,’ Father said. ‘Is it?’

It was a slow, dank summer. At the front of the Lifehouse, Father sweated for the empty pews. A congregation of flies weakened at the windows, unable to find their way to the door. The garden at Moor Woods Road was rain-logged, and most of our games involved navigating the swamp. When Father was away, we clambered over the fence and scattered across the moors, combing for sheep bones and slow worms. On the boldest days, we arranged a mission to the river at the bottom of Moor Woods Road, moving single-file and close to the wall, with the nominated lookout – Gabriel, usually – giving us the all-clear at the bends. We washed in the shadow of the mill, in the black tea water close to the banks, and when we returned to the house, the present surveyed us from the kitchen table.

Mother’s womb was still empty. That was how Father said it. When I looked at her, I thought of a cavern beneath her clothes, cool and dark. She had become a strange, rare sight: a blink of white nightdress between a parted doorway, or cracked feet, retreating up the stairs to bed. Each evening, we filed into my parents’ room and kissed her goodnight, while Father watched us. She touched bones new-risen, like rocks at low tide. ‘Small again,’ she said. ‘Like when you were babies.’

There would be another child, Father said. But we would have to be ready. We would have to be deserving. Week by week, he adjusted the rules of the house, tuning to a pitch which the rest of us couldn’t hear. We would wash only our hands, and only to the wrists. The Lifehouse would run three services on Sundays, rather than two. We would demonstrate our self-discipline.

The child would come.

There were lines on my arms where the dirt began, like a tan in reverse. The edge of the pew had printed a bruise at the top of my spine. Our portions had shrunk, and on other days, when he dined with Jolly, Father made nothing at all. When I thought about starting at Five Fields Academy in the autumn, slick with sweat-dirt and the smallest in my year, my stomach ached. The library only had half of the reading list. I hadn’t even got a uniform. And I had seen the students in Hollowfield before, on my way home from the primary school. The girls had curated faces, and wore their uniform so you thought of what was underneath it. They moved in tight, glossy packs, like a whole different species.

By September, we were scavengers. We sniffed at the parcel, hoping to catch a food-smell. We poked at the cupboards and scoured for leftovers at the back of the fridge. Father’s refusal to throw anything away meant that there was always something there, mouldy or unrecognizable. The question was whether you were hungry enough to try it.

It became a game to us, which we called Mystery Soup. The name came from our first discovery: a murky substance sealed by clingfilm, in a drawer at the bottom of the fridge. Evie dipped in a finger, licked it, and nodded.

‘It’s actually pretty good,’ she said.

‘But what is it?’ I asked. She shrugged, and fetched herself a spoon.

‘Mystery soup,’ she said.

Anything could be Mystery Soup: cheese, coated in emerald fur, languishing on the counter; a few scraps of fried chicken, in paper from the takeaway on the high street, which Father abandoned on the kitchen table; a year-old box of cereal, never unpacked from the move. I have an encyclopedic recollection of the meals at Moor Woods Road; they were so precious that I stored them in my memory, to eat again.