The Carhullan Army

anti-climactic.
    The gathering broke up. A swell of noise rose as women filed out and began to talk among themselves. Those who had been sitting on the cold flagstones rubbed their rumps to warm up. Some of the women stayed in the kitchen, as usual, to drink cider, and Lorry brought me a glass. ‘You did well,’ she said. ‘Not easy the first time, but you did well.’ I shook my head. ‘All I did was tell them what they already know. They’ve probably heard it all before. Their stories are probably far worse.’ Lorry lowered herself onto one of the benches. I sat with her and drank quickly to the half-way mark of the glass. ‘No, that’s not true,’ she said. ‘You’re of interest to most people. We all got out before things really deteriorated, more or less. It’s hard to appreciate it when you’re up here. It’s still hard to believe of this country. I think some of them still imagine things are the way they were when they left. We thought we were unlucky when we came. But we weren’t.’
    I shrugged. She was being kind and I knew it. ‘Anyway. How’s your shoulder?’ she asked. ‘A lot better now, thanks,’ I said. ‘It only hurts when I roll onto it at night.’ Lorry ran her hand along my collarbone. ‘It’s good it didn’t break or dislocate. Never would have healed right without being set, and you’d have been left with a weak spot.’ Her eyes in the flickering of the candles glimmered between brown and topaz. They looked flawed and lovely. She cleared her throat and her tone became more confidential and earnest. ‘Jackie’s picked up the Authority’s communications before, out on patrol. She’s good at tracking frequencies; hell, she’s had years of practice at it. There are things we’ve known for a while. But it’s quite another thing to hear what they are doing from someone else, first hand. It makes a difference.’
    She stretched her legs out in front of her, under the long pleated skirt, and placed her elbows back on the table behind her. I had never seen her not looking tired, but she often stayed up late in the kitchen. ‘So what’s your story, Lorry?’ I asked quietly. ‘You mean why did I come here?’ I nodded. ‘Oh well, it was a long time ago now. I was in my forties, divorced, and pissed off at work – everyone in the health industry was back then. It was in bits, about to go bust. I was doing more bloody paperwork than anything useful.’ She paused, took a sip of her drink. ‘You were a doctor?’ She shook her head. ‘Nurse.’
    She took another sip and continued. ‘There was one little atrocity too many for me to stomach I suppose. Domestic abuse. I was on duty. Nothing I hadn’t seen before. But … I had to hold this little girl together while she told the social worker her father had attacked her and her mother. He’d just got back from service in South America. He had Clough’s syndrome and wasn’t being looked after. Not a very popular diagnosis with the Ministry of Defence, you see. He was in the next room, yelling away; he’d had a go at himself with the knife too.’ Lorry paused and then grimaced. ‘Angharad, her name was. I remember it. Poor little thing. Six pints of blood she took and it all pissed away out of her. I suppose that was my tipping point. You just know when the world is about to break apart. I think you just know it, don’t you?’
    She patted me on the leg and smiled. ‘I’m glad you came, Sister. But be careful, won’t you? And be sure about what you want. Jackie is a brilliant woman, but she has her demons. She’s seen more terrible stuff than everyone here put together. She’s had to do things you couldn’t even imagine. Some days I pity her. Other days … oh well.’ Her voice trailed away. She lifted her glass and drained it.
    I stayed up with her and a couple of other women. They were careful not to ask me too much about anything I had said, as if it were out of bounds, or they were keen not to pry. Instead, perhaps to show camaraderie, they swapped memories of what had been topical in the years before they had come to the farm. There had been a spate of poisonings in London. House prices had started to drop as the insurance companies refused policies. The Red Paper on climate change had been published. Funding for the new Windscale reactor had been approved. And another wave of terrorist attacks had hit. It was news almost two decades old.
    I drank more cider from the flagon before it was put away in