The Carhullan Army

They were quiet for a moment and then one of them came forward. Under the wrappings of her head I saw her eyes, a rich sorrel, and the skin surrounding them was dark. ‘Sit,’ she said. ‘No, really, I’m fine to help you,’ I told her, ‘I’d like to. I’ve been doing nothing for weeks.’ Her eyes shone. She seemed amused. ‘Sit down. I need to wrap up your feet. Otherwise you’ll get trench foot.’ I glanced down at her legs and the legs of the others. All of them had plastic sheeting over their boots. I sat down on the coarse moorland.
    She walked to a barrow that was half filled with slabs, and took out two old carrier bags from the canvas satchel hanging on it. She came back and knelt beside me, lifted one of my legs onto her knee and slipped the bag over my boot. She tied the handles at my ankle. Then she repeated the procedure for my other leg. ‘Got to look after your footwear,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bog out here when it rains.’ She reached into the pocket of her coat, fetched out a spare pair of gloves and passed them to me. ‘I’m Shruti. This is Chloe, Katrina, Fish, Lillian, and Maud. They’re all imbeciles. Just ignore them.’ The women cawed with laughter, shouted a few expletives, and started lifting the squares again. Shruti picked up a spade and passed it to me. She held her hands apart. ‘About this big,’ she said. Then she pointed to a row of dun slabs under a tent of canvas. ‘When you get bored you can help turn those ones.’ I couldn’t see her mouth under the tassels of her scarf, but I could see from her eyes that she was smiling.
    The group of cutters was friendly. The women were hard working and used to each other, and they did not mind having me along with them. I liked Shruti as soon as I met her. She was kind, sombre looking under her work gear. She put me at ease and had a serenity about her that gave way from time to time to a droll wit. The other women always called her by one of her nicknames, Shrooms or Titty, and they teased her accent, but she gave as good as she got. ‘If you bunch of white-bread bints have nothing better to do than stand around all day copying me that’s your problem,’ she would say to them. ‘Take your time. Sister and I will keep things running.’
    It was the tamer end of the banter at Carhullan. At first the jokes among the group seemed shocking and vicious to me; little was taboo, too impolitic or too rude, and they called each other terrible names, referred to their gashes and snatches, as if it was nothing to them to use such language. They insulted each other about their sexual proclivities, but no one seemed to take offence. I had heard the harsh way Jackie talked about the women at the farm, describing them as bitches and twats, and I had thought it was just her rough policy, but it seemed endemic to the place.
    Shruti was about my age, and had come to Carhullan when she was twenty. There was a shiny patch of skin on the right-hand side of her neck that I saw when she took her outdoor clothes off for dinner. She wasn’t in my dormitory, so I had never seen her undress, but Nnenna, whom I bunked next to, told me the disfigurement ran on down her shoulder and breast, all the way to her thigh. She’d had acid thrown over her by a member of her family, a brother, an uncle, for some cultural transgression – a marriage refusal or an illicit relationship. But this was not why she left her home and headed north. She had been standing trial for a revenge assault. The charge had been downgraded, taking into account the provocation and the state of her mind, but she was looking at fifteen years’ detention. The Ministry of Justice had not managed to track her. Now, like the rest of the women up here, she had ceased to exist altogether, and that was fine by her.
    It was a good group to be on the fells with. They worked outdoors all year between the gullies, the willow copse and the orchard, and they were bronzed and lively. Because I was new to them, and curious, they seemed to enjoy the opportunity to retell their stories, discuss old war wounds, and boast about their early misadventures. There were fewer victims at Carhullan than I had imagined. Often it was the women themselves who had committed a crime or were misfits: they had been violent, outspoken, socially inept, promiscuous, drug-addicted, and aware they needed some kind of system to bring them in to line. They all agreed that Carhullan was the best thing to have