The Carhullan Army

locked with mine. I saw kindness in them. After a few seconds of her gaze, I nodded. She stepped in again and took hold of my jaw, opening my mouth gently but firmly. With her other hand she placed two fingers on my tongue and patted down. She turned them and touched the roof of my mouth, then brought them back out. I winced as she brushed past the bitten rim of my cheek.
    ‘When did you last piss?’ she asked. I shook my head, then remembered. ‘This morning,’ I said. My voice sounded cracked and hoarse, as if I had grown older since I set out. ‘Have you thrown up?’ I nodded. ‘Well, you weren’t carried so your feet can wait,’ she said. There was a lilt at the heart of her accent, perhaps Westcountry or Welsh, but my mind was too disordered to place it. She sighed. ‘OK. Now I’ve got to have a go at that shoulder. I’m sorry.’
    Before I could respond her hands were working over my throat, pressing along the line of my clavicle, and in the hollow under my arm. She took hold of my wrist and elbow and raised them up. I tried not to shout out but the pain was too vivid and I made a strangled noise that sounded shrill and bird-like. She held tighter and moved the arm in a wide circle. The bone from my breastplate to my shoulder cuff felt as if it were grating and splintering as it rotated. I was crying openly now at the agony of her manipulations and though I tried to pull back, the force of her grip kept me from freeing myself. ‘No, no, no,’ she said, simply, as if talking to a stubborn animal. When she was done she placed the arm tightly back at my side, bent it up at the elbow, and pushed my hand between my breasts. ‘Keep it held like this,’ she whispered, almost too quietly for me to hear. Then, raising her voice to its previous level, she said, ‘Yeah. It’s fractured.’
    The examination was over. As I waited for the throbbing in my arm to subside, Megan picked up the rucksack from the ground by my feet. Her eyes met mine briefly, then looked away. I saw that the blue tattoo above her ear ran all the way round her skull, down the median of her neck, disappearing at the hem of her jersey. I looked hard at it, focused on the ornamental border to distract myself from the pain. I imagined the blue ink line running on under her clothes. I followed it as it snaked down her spine, across her ribs and her hip, down her leg and under her foot. I pictured the line continuing on and spilling into the blue twilight, like a river into a lake. Gradually the pain lessened. When I looked at her again she was shrugging the rucksack onto her back. It seemed huge on her slender frame, like an absurd beetle’s carapace. She slipped between the outbuildings. A metal latch lifted and a door creaked. After a few moments she came back without the bag, and carrying instead a plastic container of fluid.
    The woman who had inspected me in the half-dark took a few paces back and sighed heavily again. Her frown had deepened. She looked worried. She put her hands on her hips and her head dropped forward. ‘It’s not recommended,’ she called out. ‘Not bloody well by me!’ From behind her, in the shadows of the courtyard, I heard another voice. ‘Give her the water. Then put her in the dog box. She’s fit enough.’
    The women from the moor took my arms. As they led me away round the thick outer wall of the farm I glanced up towards the fells. There was now so little daylight that the horizon had almost disappeared. I squinted into the distance. The ground had lost its definition and the summit of High Street seemed to bleed into the deep teal of the night. The elements were combining darkly, but for a second or two I thought I saw a long row of black outlines, human figures, standing on the ridge against the sky. I could not be sure of it. But in that one glance, before I was pushed inside the narrow iron structure, there seemed to be a ring of people on the hillside above Carhullan. There were too many of them to count.
    *

    What followed was unbearable. I was kept in the metal tank for maybe three days, though I received no confirmation of how long it had been from the women who had left me there. By the end I had lost all track of time, and I did not know whether I had added the hours together correctly, or if I had forgotten some moments in between. There was no way to measure, no way to count.
    The darkness was absolute. I only knew that the sun had risen by the temperature change inside the