The Carhullan Army

happened.
    The women complained into the early hours about the treatment and in the morning the yellow banner was taken out of the dresser and hung above the fire, and a meeting was called for that evening. I had lain awake a long time afterwards going over the details of the incident. It was the second time I had had a rifle trained on me by one of the Sisters. The first had been an empty threat, though I had not known it then. This time the weapons were of a different calibre; they looked heavy-duty and I wondered where they had come from, and whether they were loaded. I wondered why Jackie had chosen that night in particular to test us. I knew there was little she did without reason. I had not noticed the absence of those in her unit from the dormitory earlier on, and nothing had occurred in the main house at supper to indicate something was afoot. They must have gotten out of bed, I thought, without waking anyone, after Shruti had gone. Or perhaps it had all been staged from within. I felt less shaken and insulted than the others in the byre. I was used to Authority checks and searches. Instead I was curious about the purpose of the raid.
    Breakfast was a sullen affair. As if in compensation, Ruthie put slices of ham and cheese out. No one said anything to Jackie when she entered the room and if she was braced for criticism she did not show it. She appeared pleased with herself. She stood under the yellow swatch hung on the lintel, eating a slice of the hock and some bread. Next to me on the bench, Chloe snorted. ‘God, look at her!’
    That day we ran through the usual routines. My work group had moved from the gullies to the willow copse. As Shruti and I sawed through the trunks I asked her what she made of the drill. ‘Something’s going on for sure,’ she said. ‘Even before you got here it was like this, not as bad, admittedly. They weren’t kicking down the door in the middle of the night. And they aren’t just playing around either, like some people think. Jackie doesn’t play around.’ ‘So what is it?’ She winced and removed her gloves, gently rubbing a blister on her hand. I took a roll of tape out of my pocket and handed it to her. I watched her picking at the end of it, trying to get hold of the edge so she could wind it back. ‘Well, we’ll find out tonight, won’t we?’
    Against the pale flaking tree-bark, in the low sun, she looked burnished and glossy from the outdoor air. I felt strongly towards her. It was not infatuation or yearning, like I had felt for Andrew and the other men I had slept with. But I felt close to her, an attraction that was complicated when I thought of it apart, but simpler when we were together, touching each other. She sometimes teased me, saying I was intrigued by the novelty of her, and underlying it was a gentle worry. I knew it was not so very different from what I had associated with love before.
    Since the settlement we had been together a number times, in the dark storerooms, against the walls of the nearby cave where Carhullan’s mushrooms were grown in moss troughs and it smelled of underground spores and mould. We had gone wherever there was a private space, wherever we could undress enough, and not be heard. We had risked each other’s curtained berths once or twice at night, and the outdoor shower, and there the cold had not mattered as I cupped my fingers inside her. And in the warm drying room of the farmhouse, with the women’s wet clothes hung on wooden dollies around us, dripping steadily on the flagstones, she’d knelt over me, her tongue slow at first, then frantic as I pushed my hips towards her mouth.
    I knew her body now. I knew that the burns on her skin felt like chalk. She was a soft-hearted woman and she had fallen for me. She’d looked after me through the violent sickness and aches of giardiasis, for ten days bringing me nettle teas and small dry pieces of bread, apologising all the while for letting me drink water from the croft barrel, and waving Lorry away when she approached my bed.
    The temper she had once had was now held firmly in check, though when she came she clutched my hair and hissed my name. I knew she felt something more than just fondness for me, and I liked that. She had heard my own confessions, my account of life in the town with Andrew. But I hadn’t asked her history, whether it had included the men at the crofts or some of the Sisters. Whom she had last been with, and the crimes of her earlier life,