The Carhullan Army

rancid air and relentless black of the dog box I felt hysteria boiling through me.

    In the bouts of ragged sleep my bearings failed. I dreamt that my coffin was being buried in the peat gullies on the bields where I had lain face down, tasting the hag, my hands fastened behind my back. I dreamt that I was crawling through underground tunnels, pulling at cords of roots, only to have the soil cave in on top of me, filling my mouth and ears, the holes where my eyes had been. And I dreamt I was in the mouth of an iron woman. Her teeth were closed around me, and she was carrying me back to her den of wrecked metal in the mountains. I heard the creaking of her legs as she strode, like panels of metal beating in the wind.
    I called out for someone to come, for someone to help me, please. When they pushed me inside I had not struggled, only tried to explain myself to the two women. I’d told them I had come because I believed in them. Because of how I felt inside. Because there was a coil in me, fury in me; something clawing to get out. I had come because what was left of the country was the disfigurement of its sickness, the defects left by its disease, and I would not let it infect me.
    In the hours that passed I tried to find better, more accurate words to tell them why I had come, and who I was, who I wanted to be. I babbled to whomever I thought was waiting outside the narrow corrugated door. I pleaded with them, begged for their trust. I refused their silence, their abandonment, dreading to think I had been forgotten and left to die. There had been a mistake, I said. There had been a misunderstanding. I was here because I was like them. I asked forgiveness for not coming sooner. I battered the sides of the enclosure until I could smell my own blood turned loose over my arms, its scent like lead.
    It was not torture. It was not torture because there was no one hurting me, no one peeling away my nails and salting the pulp beneath. The only presence in the iron box was my own. I began to understand that I owned the abuse; I was the only persecutor. They were not killing me slowly, methodically, with scalding instruments and wires. They were letting me break apart, so I could use the blunt edges of reason to stave in my mind, and the jagged ones to lance open the last blisters of sanity. I thought at times I might still have been lying on the fell, my skull cracked open on a lichen-pale rock as the deer raced past. I thought I must be dreaming all this up, waiting to be found. Then I thought of nothing.
    There was the smell of fresh food. On the ground there was a warm heap of something. I had put it into my mouth before I realised it was shit.
    I heard Andrew’s laughter outside. I heard him knocking on the side of the enclosure, saying there was a letter for me waiting at home. The evening lottery had selected my number for reproduction. We could try and conceive now if I still wanted a baby. My mother walked towards me holding a lit taper. Both her breasts were missing and there were pegs along the mastectomy scars, holding the incisions closed. It was not the woman in the photographs I had been given when I was five years old, but the woman who had put her fingers in my mouth, testing to see how long I could withstand this place. She reached between my legs and brought out the decayed dog I’d seen in my father’s garden. I held it in my arms and it felt like a piece of wet leather.
    In the end I knew that if they left me much longer, I would not survive all the deaths of myself that it was possible for me to create.

FILE THREE

COMPLETE RECOVERY

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    She woke me by putting a hand on my forehead. I was lying on my back, finally able to unhook my joints and extend my body. The first sensation was feeling unfastened, so slack and comfortable that I could almost not come round, and if the hand had not stayed where it was, exerting gentle pressure, I would have drawn the soft layers of unconsciousness over myself again and fallen away. But she did not want that. She spoke a word and then a number and I reached towards them, half recognising them, but they slipped away.
    I did not know how I had kicked away the iron walls and freed up enough space to straighten my legs and uncurl my back. My thoughts were slow to arrive and difficult to arrange. If the door of the dog box was open I could escape. If the pen was like a puzzle, somehow I had decoded it, made one sprung move, one solving turn, and the sides of the cage