The Carhullan Army

When Jackie got back the unit reconvened in the courtyard. She said nothing more about the episode, nor did anyone else. It was apparent that the matter was closed.
    Before we were loaded into the back of the wagon, before we left Carhullan for the final time, I went to the spot where we had found Chloe and Martyn. I saw a mound of newly turned earth. It was a large grave, almost too big for two bodies. I knew I was complicit in their deaths. I knew it, and I did not feel any guilt. I did not feel remorse. I knew that it had needed doing. But in the nightmares I have had since then, the pit has been filled with the bodies of all those who left the farm, all those I have loved. My father, and Andrew. Shruti.
    *

    There was no other collateral damage at Carhullan. A small contingency stayed on to cater for those involved in the operation, Ruthie and Lorry among them. There was a dwindling store of food. The turkeys that had once roosted at night in the orchard trees, purring to each other and folding their beaks into their plumes, were now gone. There had been no breeding season for the livestock, and much of it had been slaughtered. Only the hefted sheep had been allowed to produce young, and they had been left up on the tops. We’d seen them as we hiked, ragged and virile on the summits, peering haughtily at us from the edge of the bluffs.
    We still ate well, but there was a sense of rationing, of counting out the stocks and calculating how long they would sustain us. Every meal felt as if it might be our last, but every mouthful of mutton and venison tasted better, the early greenhouse currants were tart and exquisite on our tongues. The visits to the men occurred more often and were more thrilling. The bouts of wrestling were more spirited, and the fights continued on after the end of a round had been signalled. I could see it in everyone’s eyes: the polished glitter, the ephedrine of anticipation.
    And I felt it too. I could look at the gashes on my hands and see a grotesque attraction in them. I could put the tip of my tongue into the open red slit and taste the salt of myself there. When Calum and I fucked, it was without restraint, it was base and raw, and I left marks on him. We were living at the edge, and everything was amplified; it was beautiful, and it was rancid.

    On my birthday, as I undressed beside the copper tub, I looked in the mirror and saw the change in my body, the metamorphosis that had occurred. My head was bald, newly shaved again, and a shadow of follicles ran the reverse globe of it. My skin had darkened almost to beech. I was leaner, had lost weight and gained muscle – there were lattices along my arms and back, docks around my shoulders and above my knees. Along my collarbone was a tattooed blue line. I had sat sweating in front of the dormitory stove while Megan scored my skin and rubbed the ink in.
    It was the anatomy of a fanatic. It was the same body the rest of the unit had fashioned for themselves. They had seemed wild to me when I’d first seen them, Corky, Megan and the others, like creatures, both natural and rarefied, but now I was no different from them. If we had stood together on the shoreline two thousand years before, facing the invading ships with fire in our hands and screaming for them to come, they would have called us Furies, and they would have been afraid.
    I liked what I saw in the clouded mirror and I was shocked by it. She was a stranger to me, this woman opposite, and yet I saw the truth of her. She moved when I moved, bent to turn off the taps as I did. Her face resembled the one I had sloughed off when I came to Carhullan, but it was newer, stronger. She was my anima.
    Lorry knocked on the door while I lay soaking. She came in to the room, sat on the edge of the bath and looked down at me, smiling, her brow pinched in. I could see that she was in pain. She was sixty-three, and looked much older than she had. In the year and a half that I had known her she’d become more arthritic and less mobile. She crooked herself forward when she walked, favouring her bad hip. She continued to care for us as she always had. But we were stronger than we had been, fitter, hardy of constitution; we knew how to repair ourselves in the field, and in this respite she had allowed time to catch up.

    ‘This is yours,’ she said, and held out a small metal pin on her palm. I lifted my hand from the warm water and took the coil from her. ‘You had it? I wasn’t sure who