The Power

  ‘Listen,’ says Roxy, ‘we should talk about the North. The war. You’re a powerful woman now.’ She makes a little half-smile. ‘You always was on your way somewhere. But there’s bad things happening up there. I’ve been thinking. Maybe you and me together can find a way to stop it.’

  ‘There’s only one way to stop it,’ says Mother Eve, calmly.

  ‘I just think, I don’t know, we could work it out somehow. I could go on telly. Talk about what I’ve seen, what’s happened to me.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Show them the scar. Tell what your brother did to you. There would be no stopping the fury then. The war would begin in earnest.’

  ‘No. That’s not what I mean. No. Eve. You don’t understand. It’s going to absolute shit up there. I mean, crazy fucking batshit weirdo religious nutcases going around killing kids.’

  Eve says, ‘There’s only one way to put it right. The war has to start now. The real war. The war of all against all.’

  Gog and Magog, whispers the voice. That’s right.

  Roxy sits back a little bit in her chair. She’s told Mother Eve the whole story, every last part of what she saw and what was done to her and what she was made to do.

  ‘We have to stop the war,’ she says. ‘I still know how to get stuff done, you know. I’ve been thinking. Put me in charge of the army in the North. I’ll keep order, we’ll patrol the border – real borders like a real country – and, you know, we’ll talk to your friends in America. They don’t want fucking Armageddon breaking out here. God knows what weapons Awadi-Atif has.’

  Mother Eve says, ‘You want to make peace.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You want to make peace? You want to take charge of the army in the North?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  Mother Eve’s head starts to shake as if someone else is shaking it for her.

  She gestures to Roxy’s chest.

  ‘Why would anyone take you seriously now?’

  Roxy jerks her whole body away.

  She blinks. She says, ‘You want to start Armageddon.’

  Mother Eve says, ‘It’s the only way. It’s the only way to win.’

  Roxy says, ‘But you know what’s going to happen. We’ll bomb them and they’ll bomb us and it’ll spread out wider and wider, and America will get involved and Russia and the Middle East and … the women will suffer as well as the men, Evie. The women will die just as much as the men will if we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age.’

  ‘And then we’ll be in the Stone Age.’

  ‘Er. Yeah.’

  ‘And then there will be five thousand years of rebuilding, five thousand years where the only thing that matters is: can you hurt more, can you do more damage, can you instil fear?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘And then the women will win.’

  A silence spreads through the room and into Roxy’s bones, up through the marrow, a cold, liquid stillness.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Roxy. ‘So many people have told me you’re crazy, you know, and I never believed any of them.’

  Mother Eve watches her with great serenity.

  ‘I was always, like, “No, if you met her you’d know she’s clever, and she’s been through a lot, but she’s not crazy.”’ She sighs, looks at her hands, palms and backs. ‘I went looking for information about you ages ago. I mean, I had to know.’

  Mother Eve watches her, as if from very far away.

  ‘It’s not that hard to find out who you used to be. It’s all over some bits of the internet. Alison Montgomery-Taylor.’ Roxy takes her time with the words.

  ‘I know,’ says Mother Eve. ‘I know it was you who made it all disappear. And I’m grateful. If that’s what you’re asking, I’m still grateful.’

  But Roxy frowns, and in that frown Allie knows she’s made a mistake somewhere along the line, some little minor misalignment in her understanding.

  Roxy says, ‘I get it, right? If you killed him, he probably deserved killing. But you should go and look up what his wife’s doing now. She’s called Williams now. Remarried a Lyle Williams, in Jacksonville. She’s still there. You should go and look her up.’

  Roxy stands up. ‘Don’t do this,’ she says. ‘Please don’t.’

  Mother Eve says, ‘I’ll always love you.’

  Roxy says, ‘Yeah. I know.’

  Mother Eve says, ‘It’s the only way. If I don’t do it, they will.’

  Roxy says, ‘If you really want the women to win, go and look up Lyle Williams in Jacksonville. And his wife.’

  Allie lights a cigarette, in the quiet of a stone room in the convent overlooking the lake. She brings it to flame in the old way, with the spark from her fingertips. The paper crackles and blackens into glowing light. She breathes it in to the edges of her lungs; she is full of her old self. She has not smoked for years. Her head swims.

  It’s not hard to find Mrs Montgomery-Taylor. One, two, three words typed into a search box and there she is. She runs a children’s home now, under the auspices and with the blessing of the New Church. She was an early member, there in Jacksonville. In a photograph on the website of their children’s home, her husband stands behind her. He looks a great deal like Mr Montgomery-Taylor. A shade taller, perhaps. A little bushier in the moustache, a little rounder in the cheek. Different colouring, a different mouth, but the same broad category of man: a weak man, the kind of man who, before any of this, would still have done what he was told. Or perhaps she’s remembering Mr Montgomery-Taylor. They look sufficiently similar that Allie finds she’s rubbing her jaw in the place where Mr Montgomery-Taylor hit her, as if the blow had landed only moments ago. Lyle Williams and his wife, Eve Williams. And together they care for children. It is Allie’s own church that has made this thing possible. Mrs Montgomery-Taylor did always know how to work a system to best advantage. The website for the children’s home she operates talks about the ‘loving discipline’ and ‘tender respect’ they teach.

  She could have looked any time. She cannot think why she has not turned on this old light before.

  The voice is saying things. It’s saying: Don’t do it. It’s saying: Turn away. It’s saying: Step away from the tree, Eve, with your hands up.

  Allie doesn’t listen.

  Allie picks up the handset of the telephone on the desk here in the convent room overlooking the lake. She dials the number. Far away, in a hallway with a side table topped by a crocheted runner, a telephone rings.

  ‘Hello?’ says Mrs Montgomery-Taylor.

  ‘Hello,’ says Allie.

  ‘Oh, Alison,’ says Mrs Montgomery-Taylor. ‘I hoped you’d call.’

  Like the first drops of rain. Like the earth saying: I’m ready for it. Come and get me.

  Allie says, ‘What have you done?’

  Mrs Montgomery-Taylor says, ‘Just what the Spirit has commanded me to do.’

  Because she knows what Allie means. Somewhere inside her heart, for all the twisting and turning, she does know. As she’s always known.

  Allie can see in that moment that ‘everything will disappear’ is a fantasy, has always been a delightful dream. Not the past, not the lines of pain inscribed on the human body, not a thing will ever disappear. While Allie has been making her life, Mrs Montgomery-Taylor has also continued, growing monstrous as the clock turned.

  Mrs Montgomery-Taylor keeps up a bright line of chatter. She’s so honoured to receive a telephone call from Mother Eve, although she always knew she would; she understood what was meant by the name Allie had taken on, that she was Allie’s real mother, her spiritual mother, and hadn’t Mother Eve always said that the mother is greater than the child? She understood what was meant by that, too, that the mother is the one who knows best. She is so happy, so delighted, that Allie understood that everything she and Clyde did they did for her own good. Allie feels sick.

  ‘You were just a young girl, so wild,’ says Mrs Montgomery-Taylor. ‘You drove us to distraction. I saw that a devil was in you.’

  A
llie remembers it now, as she has not brought it out into the light these many years. She pulls it from the back of her mind. She blows the dust from this heap of rags and bones. She stirs them with a fingertip. She arrived at the home of the Montgomery-Taylors, a jangled child, beady and birdlike and wild. Her eyes seeing everything, her hands in everything. It was Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who brought her, and Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who wanted her, and Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who spanked her when her hand was in the raisin jar. It was Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who grabbed her arm and threw her to her knees and commanded her to pray that the Lord would forgive her sin. Over and over, on her knees.

  ‘We had to drive that devil out of you, you see that now, don’t you?’ says Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, now Mrs Williams.

  And Allie does see it. It is as clear to her now as if she were watching it through the glass panes of their own sitting room. Mrs Montgomery-Taylor tried to pray the devil out of her and then to beat the devil out of her, and then she had a new idea.

  ‘Everything we did,’ she says, ‘we did for love of you. You needed to be taught discipline.’

  She remembers the nights Mrs Montgomery-Taylor would put the polka on the radio real loud. And then Mr Montgomery-Taylor would ascend the stairs to give her the teachings. She remembers, all at once and with great clarity, which order those steps occurred in. First the polka music. Then the ascent of the stairs.

  Beneath every story, there is another story. There is a hand within the hand – hasn’t Allie learned that well enough? There is a blow behind the blow.

  Mrs Montgomery-Taylor’s voice is sly and confidential.

  ‘I was the first member of your New Church in Jacksonville, Mother. When I saw you on the television I knew that God had sent you to me as a sign. I knew that She was working through me when we took you in, and that She knew that all I had done I had done for Her glory. I was the one who made the police documents disappear. I’ve been caring for you all these years, darling.’

  Allie thinks of all that was done in the house of Mrs Montgomery-Taylor.

  She cannot pull apart the strands of it, has never separated the experiences into individual moments to examine each one closely and particularly. Remembering it is like a sudden flash of light upon carnage. Body parts and machinery and chaos and a sound that builds from a reedy cry to a full-throated scream and then cuts off to a low-humming almost-silence.

  ‘You understand,’ she says, ‘that God was working in us. All that we did, Clyde and I, we did so that you would be here.’

  It was her touch she felt every time Mr Montgomery-Taylor laid himself upon her.

  She cuppeth the power in her hand. She commandeth it to strike.

  Allie says, ‘You told him to hurt me.’

  And Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, now Mrs Williams, says, ‘We didn’t know what else to do with you, angel. You just wouldn’t listen to anything we said.’

  ‘And do you do the same now, with other children? With the children in your care?’

  But Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, now Mrs Williams, has always been shrewd, even in her madness.

  ‘All children need different kinds of love,’ she says. ‘We do what’s needed to care for them.’

  Children are born so small. It does not matter if they are boys or girls. They are all born so weak and so powerless.

  Allie comes to pieces quite gently. All the violence in her has been spent out a hundred times. When this thing happens, she is calm, floating above the storm, watching the raging sea below.

  She puts the fragments together, sorting and re-sorting them. How much would it take to put it right? Investigations and press conferences and admissions. If it is Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, it is others, too. More than she can count, probably. Her own reputation will suffer. Everything will come out: her past, and her story, and the lies and half-truths. She could move Mrs Montgomery-Taylor quietly on elsewhere; she might even find a way to have her killed, but to denounce her would be to denounce everything. If she roots this out, she roots out herself. Her own roots are rotten already.

  And with this she is undone. Her mind disconnects from itself. For a while, she is not here. The voice tries to speak, but the howling of the wind inside her skull is too loud and the other voices now too numerous. In her mind, for a time, it is the war of all against all. It cannot sustain.

  After a while, she says to the voice: Is this what it’s like to be you?

  And the voice says: Fuck you, I told you not to do it. You should never have been friends with that Monke, I told you and you wouldn’t listen; she was just a soldier. What did you need a friend for? You had me; you always had me.

  Allie says: I never had anything.

  The voice says: Well, what now then, if you’re so clever?

  Allie says: I keep meaning to ask. Who are you? I’ve wondered for a while. Are you the serpent?

  The voice says: Oh, you think because I swear and tell you to do stuff I must be the devil?

  It’s crossed my mind. And. Here we are. How am I supposed to tell which side is good and which is bad?

  The voice takes a deep breath. Allie’s never heard it do that before.

  Look, says the voice, we’ve reached a tricky moment here, I’ll give you that. There were things you were never supposed to look at, and now you’ve gone and looked at them. The whole point of me was to keep things simple for you, you see? That’s what you wanted. Simple feels safe. Certainty feels safe.

  I don’t know if you’re aware, says the voice, but you’re lying on the floor of your office right now with the phone cradled under your right ear, listening to the sound of beep-beep-beep, and you won’t stop shaking. At some point someone’s going to come in and find you like this. You’re a powerful woman. If you’re not back soon, bad things are going to happen.

  So I’m giving you the crib sheet right now. Maybe you’ll understand it and maybe you won’t. Your whole question is the mistake. Who’s the serpent and who’s the Holy Mother? Who’s bad and who’s good? Who persuaded the other one to eat the apple? Who has the power and who’s powerless? All of these questions are the wrong question.

  It’s more complicated than that, sugar. However complicated you think it is, everything is always more complicated than that. There are no shortcuts. Not to understanding and not to knowledge. You can’t put anyone into a box. Listen, even a stone isn’t the same as any other stone, so I don’t know where you all think you get off labelling humans with simple words and thinking you know everything you need. But most people can’t live that way, even some of the time. They say: only exceptional people can cross the borders. The truth is: anyone can cross, everyone has it in them. But only exceptional people can bear to look it in the eye.

  Look, I’m not even real. Or not real like you think ‘real’ means. I’m here to tell you what you want to hear. But the things you people want, I’m telling you.

  A long time ago, says the voice, another Prophet came to tell me that some people I’d made friends with wanted a King. I told them what a King would do. He’d take their sons for soldiers and their daughters for cooks – I mean, if the daughters were lucky, right? He’d tax their grain and their wine and their cows. These weren’t people with iPads, you feel me; grain and wine and cows were what they had. I said: Look, a King will basically make you into slaves, and don’t come crying to me when that happens. That’s what kings do.

  What can I tell you? Welcome to the human race. You people like to pretend things are simple, even at your own cost. They still wanted a King.

  Allie says: Are you trying to tell me there’s literally no right choice here?

  The voice says: There’s never been a right choice, honeybun. The whole idea that there are two things and you have to choose is the problem.

  Allie says: Then what shall I do?

  The voice says: Listen, I’ll level with you: my optimism about the human race is not what it once was. I’m sorry it can’t be simple for you any more.

  Allie says: It’s getting dark
.

  The voice says: Sure is.

  Allie says: Welp. I see what you’re saying. Been nice working with you.

  The voice says: Likewise. See you on the other side.

  Mother Eve opens her eyes. The voices in her head are gone. She knows what to do.

  The Son in Agony, a minor cultic figure. Of roughly similar age to the portrayals of the Holy Mother here.

  On the desk of Margot’s assistant, a phone rings.

  She’s in a meeting. The assistant tells the voice on the other end of the line that Senator Cleary can’t be reached right now, but she can take a message.

  Senator Cleary is in a meeting with NorthStar Industries and the Department of Defence. They want her advice. She’s an important person now. She has the ear of the President. Senator Cleary cannot be disturbed.

  The voice on the other end of the line speaks a few more words.

  They sit Margot on the cream-coloured couch in her own office when they tell her.

  They say, ‘Senator Cleary, we have bad news.

  ‘We’ve had word from the UN: she’s been found in the woods. She’s still alive. Just barely. Her injuries are … extensive. We don’t know if she’ll pull through.

  ‘We think we know what happened, the man is dead already.

  ‘We’re so sorry, Senator. We’re so sorry.’

  And Margot is falling.

  Her own daughter. Who put the tips of her fingers in the centre of Margot’s palm once and gave her the lightning. Who curled her little, waving hand around Margot’s thumb once and held on so tightly that Margot knew for the first time that she was the strong one. Now and for ever she would put her body between this little scrap and harm. That was her job.

  There was a time when Jocelyn was three. They were exploring the apple orchard at her parents’ farm together, mom and little daughter, with the slow intensity with which a three-year-old examines each leaf and stone and splinter. It was late autumn, the windfalls just turning to rot. Jos stooped down, turned over one of the browning fruit, and a cloud of wasps flew from it. Margot had always had a particular terror of wasps, ever since a child. She grabbed Jos and wrapped her arms around her, holding her close to her body, grabbed her and ran for the house. Jos was fine; not a scratch on her. And Margot, when they were comfortably seated on the couch again, found that she had been stung seven times, all the way down her good right arm. She had not even felt it. That was her job.