The Carhullan Army

had released. I could sleep. The stool was gone and I was lying in the dirt. And yet it was smooth and there was the fragrance of soap.
    I opened my eyes and for a minute had to fight the uncomfortable brightness. Above me the sky was whitewashed and cracked. It was a ceiling. A thin bar of sunshine ran the length of it, splitting into a pale green prism at one end that was too luminous and beautiful to look at for long. The last finger of a woman’s hand was sitting like a pink visor over my vision. As I turned my head to face her she took it away and I felt the plush of a pillow underneath my cheek. I was in a bed. I was inside the farm.
    ‘Long walk,’ she said. I waited for my eyes to focus on her properly. They felt scratchy, and sore, as if surgery had been performed on them. ‘We’re near where the eyries used to be,’ she went on. ‘It’s not clearly marked to scale on the maps. They call it a reservation null. Supposedly it stopped people from stealing the eggs.’ She gave a low laugh. ‘Not very helpful for visitors though, is it? But here you are anyway. Shangri-La.’
    Her accent was close to my own, less town-bred and more mobile over its vowels. It was the county’s rural equivalent. I looked up at her face, finally able to see her. She was older of course, in her forties now, but immediately recognisable. Her jawline was thicker, though still slightly misshapen, crooked, with the smile worn higher on the left, as if she had always favoured the teeth on that side when she ate. On the lower inert cheek there was a strange fold of skin, a tucked-in line, like a suture tack. In the newspaper pictures I had never noticed it. Her hair was long; it reached her shoulders and there were colourless strands woven into it. It softened her features slightly, and it looked wrong.
    But it was the eyes that gave her away. Jackie Nixon’s eyes were the colour of slate riverbeds. The photographs had never been able to moderate or alter their lustre. Even in black and white she looked out of the pictures clearly and coldly, and I knew that the territory had somehow gone into the making of her.
    She was looking at me now with an expression both curious and patient, as if keen that we should communicate but conscious of my disability, aware that we would need some lesser form of exchange. She watched as my eyes filled up, her gaze flickering to the side of my face as the tears ran across the bridge of my nose, over my eyelid and down onto the cotton. I blinked and squeezed out the gathering fluid, embarrassed not to have controlled my composure in front of her. My brain suddenly ignited then. It was her. It was Jackie. Not three feet from me. Alive in the flesh.
    I tried to sit up but an aching stiffness ran the length of me and I found that my arm had been knitted up into a gauze sling, so I could only use the other elbow as a prop. After a few attempts I brought myself ungracefully to an upright position. She did not try to assist me, but let me struggle against the soreness and the inhibition of the bindings. She was sitting on a wooden chair next to the bed, leaning forward, with her elbows on her knees, her wrists lopped over and crossed like paws. She had on fatigues and a long-sleeved vest. A thin silver chain fell down below her neckline. I wiped my eyes but the tears still came. The cut on my hand had been wrapped and it smelled sweet when I brought it up to my face, almost sickly, as if there was a floral ointment of some kind under the bandage.
    Jackie lifted herself up a fraction, reached down and inched the chair closer in. ‘Don’t worry about it, Sister,’ she said. ‘You’re just hungry. You’re probably ready for some porridge now. I’ll get the girls to make you some.’ She smiled again, sympathetically, as if I were a child who had woken from an illness and would naturally be starving and eager for sustenance. The texture of her face seemed almost burned. There were smooth patches and areas where the skin looked crisp. She stared at me a while longer, then stood abruptly, scraping the chair back along the floorboards. She walked to the door, and though she was relatively short I saw her duck under the low oak beam of the lintel. Then I heard her boots on the stairs.
    I found I was holding my breath. My lungs fluttered as I exhaled. I looked around. On the dresser next to the bed was a glass of water. The underlying thirst of the last few days had not left me, so I reached over, took