First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (2 page)

N
O BOOK’S WORTH
reading that doesn’t offer some information of practical use to the reader. That’s what Harry Greene, steward of the SS
Cumnock
, told me. I think my Uncle Norman might have agreed, too. Once, on the Island of St Jude, he showed me a jar containing a scorpion he’d trapped. It was a brownish colour, the size of my hand.

“Come with me,” he said.

He gave me a can of kerosene to carry and we went out to a bare area in the garden. He poked his finger into the soil and made a little circular ditch about nine inches in diameter and an inch deep. He filled the ditch with kerosene and lit it, making a ring of fire.

“Now watch this,” he said.

He took the lid off the jar and dropped the scorpion into the middle of the ring. It immediately tried to scuttle away. The flames stopped it. It tried again, and again, and again. No matter where it went, the flames drove it back.

The scorpion stopped and crouched for a while in the middle of the ring. Then it raised its sting and slowly lowered it onto its own back. It gently felt around for a crevice in its scales, inserted the sting, paused and jabbed itself.

It went into a trembling frenzy, then it shuddered once or twice more, then it died. The flames still blazed around it.

“See?” said Uncle Norman. “A scorpion would rather sting itself than die with its sting unused. I read that in a book.”

What if a book revealed maybe the most sought-after piece of practical information any human being could ever want? I mean, the location of Paradise on this earth—its exact co-ordinates: latitude and longitude, and a description of how to get there.

I undertake to reveal that information. The location’s straightforward enough. What you may have to go through to get there isn’t. In my journey, I experienced things few, if any, other inhabitants of this earth have ever had to undergo.

But before I get into all of that, I want to give a piece of advice:
Be very careful about putting your nightmares into words. Not only can you
NOT
get rid of them that way, but the words only give them another, more concrete kind of reality. So you might well end up with double the terror
. That’s one piece of advice I don’t think I’ve changed my mind about. Not long ago, I would have added another one to it:
Never trust anyone you know well. You may love them. But you can’t trust them
.

Now, the promise made, the warning given, I’ll begin at the beginning of the journey—the moment of my birth.

I
T HAPPENED IN
S
TROVEN
, one of those little mining towns deep among the Upland hills. Little town after little town, squat hill after squat hill (squat because they’d been flattened by millions of years), it was hard to tell one town or one hill from another. Each town was linked to the next by tortuous roads that followed the traces of ancient paths that came before them.

A few miles south of Stroven lay Carrick, and not far west of that, Muirton, and a little south-west of that, Cumner, then a little south-east, in a valley, Patna. And on and on—Rossmark, Lannick, Taymire, Gatbridge—town after town, each one with grey buildings and low hills. There weren’t many trees. The thick forests that used to grow here were cut down and dragged thousands of feet below the earth to hold up tunnels in the coal mines. The coal was all that was left of even more ancient forests.

Most of the mines are closed now; but at one time they bulged at the edge of every little town, like a tumour. There would be a scattering of grimy sheds and smouldering slag heaps. The mine elevators looked like Ferris wheels, and rose higher than the town halls, or the church steeples. These elevators plunged the miners deep into the earth, or whisked them back up into the daylight—a grey daylight
under grey skies. Grey skies and biting winds were the rule among these hills.

But on the day of my birth, the last day of June, the skies weren’t grey, and the wind didn’t whine across the moors. All that spring in the Uplands, the weather had been unusual. In April the days were warm. By May, hot. No one could remember such a sunny June.

I was born near midday, and the birth, though it was a month premature, could be called successful—in the sense that I was successfully born, in the front bedroom upstairs in the big house. The large, raw hand of Midwife Findley snapped against my buttocks and I howled as I was supposed to.

But my passage through the narrow birth canal had been a rough one, for I didn’t make the journey alone. I came with a sister. We exited together, head first (though my head was slightly in the lead, making me the elder by a few inches). Our arms and legs were tangled together. In fact, our bodies must have been so close together for so long in the womb that each of us had made an imprint on the other. Midwife Findley had to prise us apart. “They’re stuck together like a package of sausages,” she said. A dark purple stain in the shape of a triangle marked the upper body area, from nipple to nipple to belly-button, of both me and my sister. The shape looked vaguely like a dog’s head, or maybe some kind of rodent.

The purple stain stayed with me all my life.

It wasn’t that Stroven didn’t have a doctor—his name was Doctor Giffen—but births were reserved to the midwife. So Midwife Findley had come across her fair share of strange births in the Uplands, mainly babies with extra limbs, or not enough of them. The very night before my birth, she’d delivered a boy without any skin for the
McCabes, who already had ten children. The boy was fortunate enough to die quickly, all the blood seeping out of him on contact with the air.

Midwife Findley was relieved that today’s tangle of limbs wasn’t some monster, but two normal children. She’d separated them, slapped them, they’d issued the desired howl. All was well.

All through the final hours of the labour, an unlit cigarette dangled from her lips. Now, after the births of me and my sister, Midwife Findley lit it and looked her patient over. The midwife was relieved, and she knew her relief must be nothing next to how my mother must feel after a labour that had lasted almost twenty-four hours. Childbirth, to Midwife Findley, was the ultimate torture: the slow splitting in half of the body. Yet this young woman had neither howled nor whimpered. She lay now on the bed in the big upstairs bedroom, silent and pale—my mother, Sarah Halfnight. She was almost as much a newcomer to Stroven as I was to this world.

I received my name the following week, on the first Saturday morning in July. A hot morning. In weather like this, when the sky was clear and blue, the granite walls and slate roofs of Stroven, which were perfect camouflage under normal conditions, looked out of place—as though a black-and-white set had found its way into a colour movie.

That morning at half past eight, about twenty adult townspeople in groups of two or three sweated their way along the cobblestone street that led to the Square, which was really a patch of grass, some small trees and a few wooden benches around a war memorial. Two sides of the Square contained the more impressive buildings of the town: the Bank, the Library, the Police Station, the Town Hall, the Church, the Stroven Inn. The other two sides of
the Square held an array of small businesses: Glenn’s Pharmacy, Darvell’s Grocery, MacCallum’s Bakery, Morrison’s Tailor and the Stroven Café. The owners of the businesses lived in apartments above their stores.

Into this Square that hot Saturday morning came almost all the people my mother knew in Stroven. The men wore plaid caps, heavy blue suits with waistcoats, and black boots. The faces of most of them were pale, and their bodies were wiry, hunched from a life of stooping in low tunnels. The women were stocky and wore black overcoats and black felt hats. Everyone looked as though they were dressed for the usual chilly weather—afraid the heat might suddenly disappear and catch them unprepared.

They had no children with them, for children weren’t welcome at formal occasions.

At the south-west corner of the Square, the group of townspeople had to step carefully to avoid another procession: a thousand hairy caterpillars dragging themselves across the hot main street on some caterpillar business. None of the townspeople could remember ever having seen anything like that.

The human procession arrived at the Church and filed inside. The shade and the cool of the granite sucked the prickly heat out of their bodies. The Church was bare. The benches and the pulpit and the altar and all the accoutrements of religion had been removed long ago, except for the words engraved in the arch above the sanctuary:
AN EYE FOR AN EYE
. No clergyman presided in the building any more; but people still liked rituals, and the Provosts of Stroven decided the old Church was a perfect place for the performing of the three civil ceremonies: marriages, funerals and the naming of children.

This morning, the people stood in awkward, silent
groups till a small door squealed open at the front. Provost Hawse appeared; then my mother, carrying my sister; then my aunt, carrying me. My father came last.

The Provost led the way to a circle of white marble tiles in the floor at the middle of the Church. The tiles were all that was left of an even older building. In the middle of each tile was a small blue gargoyle head. The townspeople stood on the fringe of this circle and made sure they didn’t bring bad luck upon themselves by stepping on the tiles, or staring at the gargoyles.

Provost Hawse was a small, thin man. His back was stooped too, but in a different way from the miners’. He looked more like a sick rat and had little almond-shaped eyes. He wore a bronze medallion of office round his neck, and he hobbled as he walked, as though the medallion was too heavy.

My mother was taller than any of the other women. Her green eyes were clear and confident. Her age wasn’t easy to tell. Her face might have been that of a very young woman who’d seen a lot; or of an older woman who’d led a sheltered life. In her arms she held my sister, fast asleep in a white, knitted shawl.

My aunt was a shorter, heavier version of my mother, with a similar face, the same eyes. She held me wrapped in another white shawl. Unlike my sister, I was awake and watchful.

As for my father: he walked last to the marble circle. He was in his mid-thirties, a plumpish man of average height. His thinning fair hair was sleeked sideways to cover his baldness. Now and then he’d pat it nervously. He hadn’t removed his black leather gloves.

Everyone was quiet.

The Provost checked a slip of paper he’d taken from his jacket. He looked at my mother with his little eyes.

“You are Sarah Halfnight, the mother of this child?” His voice was loud for such a slight man.

“Yes.” She spoke quietly.

“Is this the girl?”

“Yes.”

The Provost again checked the slip of paper, then looked at my sister. He put his veined hand on her forehead. She already had a head of silky brown hair.

“By the power vested in me, I name this child …” He looked again at his paper, “… I name this child … Johanna Halfnight.”

My sister had opened her eyes when he touched her head. Her face slowly contorted and purpled. She began to howl bitterly. My mother soothed her, and she sobbed for a while then was silent.

The Provost faced my aunt, who was still holding me. He seemed puzzled. He checked his paper again then turned to my father.

“You’re the father—Thomas Halfnight?”

My father nodded.

“Then the father must hold the male child at the naming,” said the Provost.

My father was about to say something when my mother spoke.

“We’ve agreed my sister, Lizzie, should hold him.”

Provost Hawse’s face was a maze of tiny intersecting lines. He looked into her unflinching green eyes for a moment, then shrugged his thin shoulders.