Girl A(84)

I had expected them to be stern and suspicious, but now that I was here, they seemed mostly sad.

‘You may know me better,’ I said, ‘as Girl A.’

Let me tell you about the community centre.

The building would be constructed from wood and steel, and it would rise from the side of the moor. There would be a long wooden ramp from Moor Woods Road to the glass front. Already you can see the welcome area, with communal tables and a row of computers. For the first year, it smells of lumber. There will be coding classes, hosted by a local IT consultant; she once owned a computer shop in town. An open corridor extends to the back of the building, and on either side of the corridor is a door, each facing the other. Behind one of the doors is a children’s library, with bean bags and bookshelves, and stencils of two children on the wall, guiding your way. Behind the other door is a hall, with a small stage and couches to rest from the dancing. On certain afternoons, adults gather in a circle here, talking when they wish. If you pass them both, you will find that the corridor expands into a further room, cut with skylights. Our kitchen was once here, and there is still a counter and a sink and a fridge, for events. The fridge is usually full. You slide back the glass doors at the end of the building, and step onto a veranda. On summer evenings, once the clouds have burnt, you can sit on this terrace and watch the hills eclipse the sun. There will be small events: a choir recital, or a beer festival. There will be music.

I understood the curse that we had cast on the town. Once the mills had spun cotton and money. Canal boats jostled for a mooring. Loud men came from cities you hadn’t seen, to survey their investments. Now your town is known for something individual, rather than communal. For something cruel and small. I know how that feels. You can demolish the house, or request us to sell it. But you can’t erase the past, or make it right, or misremember it as something better than it was. Take it, and use it. It’s still possible for you, like us, to salvage something good.

‘It’s ambitious,’ I said. ‘I acknowledge that.’

The councillor in the middle of the row gestured for me to sit down. I understood that the others were watching her. Waiting for her to speak.

‘There are worse things than ambition,’ she said. ‘That’s for sure.’

I sat opposite her, and from my folder I took Christopher’s drawings and the accounting sheets, and the planning application which I had worked through with one of my colleagues, late into the night.

‘Do you have a name?’ the councillor asked. ‘A name for the place?’

I hadn’t; and then, once she asked, I had.

‘The Lifehouse,’ I said.

There were more and more days when we weren’t allowed from our rooms, and so there were events – a noise, late in the evening, or a missed meal – which I have never understood. The lost stories of the house. Performed still in a bedroom in Oxford, in the hospital room in the Chilterns and in rented apartments across Europe, during those multitudinous hours when nobody else in the world seems awake.

For example: one morning, Mother left the house with Daniel, his cries fading down Moor Woods Road. They returned in the middle of the next night, with footsteps on the stairs and the touch of my parents’ bedroom door. For a handful of days after that, Daniel was quieter, and Mother didn’t look at Father, not even when he gathered her body against his, and kissed her face.

Or: Noah’s birth, which happened in my parents’ room, without ceremony, so that one day Daniel’s cries divided, and he was demoted from the cradle to the sofa, or to the kitchen table, or to the floor.

Or: Ethan’s conversations with Father. Father deigned to allow Ethan his freedom more often than the rest of us, and sometimes I heard them in the garden, talking together; mostly Father talking and Ethan assenting, laughing, the same laugh which he had refined at the dinner table with Jolly, when we still went to school. I prised a few snippets of conversation through the bedroom window, all of them useless: ‘—but you must have thought about it—’

‘—our own kingdom—’

‘—the eldest—’

I spent each of these days willing Ethan to come into our room. He would know if things had gone too far, I thought. He would know exactly what to do. There was one afternoon – it was the time when Father would have been resting – when I heard his footsteps on the stairs. He walked past the room where Delilah and Gabriel were bound; past Mother and Father’s doorway; past his bedroom. The footsteps paused. Evie was asleep, a muddle of limbs beneath the sheet. ‘Ethan,’ I said. My voice was timid; it didn’t even reach the door. ‘Ethan,’ I said, louder, and one of the floorboards shifted in reply. His footsteps retreated.

Then the day of the chains.

It started with Father’s form through the morning light, releasing the bindings. The troughs of muscle shifting beneath his shirt. Bread for breakfast, and the usual slew of lessons. It was always the Old Testament, now. (‘There are times,’ Father said, ‘when I think that Christ was a moderate.’) In my memories of this day, Gabriel and Delilah sit together at the kitchen table, their heads touching. It’s difficult to make out whose hair is whose.

I was thinking about the possibility of lunch as a percentage, based on the data of the last ten days. That was as far back as I could remember, and it made the calculations easy. Starvation was such a boring affliction: the thought of food coated the words of the Bible, until I could no longer read them; it spilt into my games with Evie, so that midway down Route 1 I would suggest a stop for hamburgers and become lost in the thought of mince, onions, bun, swallowing down my saliva, no longer able to speak or imagine. I dreamt of feasts. When Mother served us, I divided my portion into small, delicate mouthfuls, and moved them to each corner of my tongue before I would swallow.