The Children’s Home (17 page)

At the bottom of the stairs were two steel doors. Rebecca touched a panel and they opened.

in which Morgan and the others reach the potting shed

O
utside the doors was a narrow garden, with coarse blue-green grass cut short like a lawn, and beyond that a vast windswept field. Slabs of concrete set into the grass led along this side of the garden to a low structure about a hundred yards away, not much taller than a grown man. At first glance, the walls of the structure seemed to be made of vegetation. But as they approached, they saw that netting had been suspended from a metal frame, and camouflaged. From above, the structure would have been invisible; from where they stood, it resembled a greenhouse of sorts, whose function was to protect what grew from the light, from the world outside. As they entered, passing beneath a lifted flap, the dim green light stretched out as far as the eye could see.

Morgan’s sight was fading so what he saw at first looked like an endless field of turnips after the tractor had passed, turnip roots thrown over by the blade, dirt-brown, dirt-crimson, white where the steel had cut into them and split them open. But when he stooped to look more closely at the one nearest his feet, he saw that the white was the whimpering face of a child and the bare flayed stalks its arms and hands. “Oh, my poor dear,” he said, his voice breaking with shock. He bent to take the child to him—boy or girl, he wasn’t sure—and succor it in some way. But the earth resisted. He dug until the neck and the frail soft sweep of the shoulders were visible. The earth was poor, stony: he broke a nail and felt a stab of pain. Behind him he could hear the others, Crane, David, Rebecca, and other voices he didn’t recognize, but he had no time to spare. Slowly he uncovered the tops of the arms. He wanted to slide his hands beneath the armpits and lift the child up, ease it away from soil to be held. But the child’s face changed as Morgan worked. Anxiety swept across it. Morgan struggled to grasp the child—a girl, he was sure of it now—to hold and raise it, as if from the dead. The girl’s head began to shake, her mouth opened as if to speak. “We’re nearly there,” soothed Morgan. “We’re nearly there.”

“No, wait,” said David. “I think we might hurt them. They’ve been here too long. We have to find the others. There must be others somewhere.”

“You can do nothing here, Morgan,” said Rebecca, standing a short way away from him, her arms folded.

“What is this evil place?” he said, his voice trembling, the hissing of the sibilants terrible.

“We call it the potting shed,” said Rebecca. “We had one at home, you must remember it.”

“This can’t be true,” he said, shaking as he tore at the soil, at the white flesh of the girl.

“Of course it’s true. It’s what we are. Surely you know that, by now. Your little errand of mercy.”

But Morgan was on his knees, his hands caked with dirt, his split nail bleeding; he had the girl within his grasp. Her head was pressed to his chest as he straightened up and felt her loosen, slowly at first and then, with a strange wet noise, in a rush. He fell back as the girl came free.

“I told you,” said David. “I told you not to do it.”

in which David works a miracle

M
organ let himself be led out of the potting shed, away from the broken child. He was stumbling, shocked into silence by the horror of what he had done.

“You mustn’t feel bad,” said David, stroking his arm. “It wasn’t your fault. Your sister knew what would happen if you kept pulling. She could have told you. She wanted you to learn the hard way.”

“The hard way is the only way I have ever learned anything,” said Morgan, as much to himself as to David.

“She thinks you’ll change your mind once you see. It wouldn’t have happened otherwise. She doesn’t plan to give up that easily.” He looked away. Morgan followed his eyes and saw Rebecca, standing at a distance, flanked by men in uniform, watching them both. She nodded slowly, as if she had heard David’s words and concurred with them. Perhaps she had, and did. Of course she would want him to go back to the house and to his long, humiliating sleep. Maybe that was why Engel had been sent to him, it occurred to him. To keep him comfortable, and quiet. And there beside him was this field, this interminable field, the small heads breaking the surface of the soil and the noise they made, a pulsing intermittent moan, rising and falling as one, as though they had found this way of being together. Because the potting shed was only the start of it all. There was no end in sight.

“Give what up?” he said.

“Well, you’ll have to give it up as well, of course,” said David. “But you know that, don’t you?”

Morgan nodded. “I want no part of this.”

“But this is what you are,” said David. “As much as she is. You can’t pick and choose, you know.”

“You’re here to take this from me?”

“You aren’t so important, Morgan,” said David with an unexpected smile. “Neither am I. Now that you know. It’s what we do now that matters, not what we are.”

“How could I have saved the life of that poor child?”

“You can’t save everyone, Morgan. Nobody can.”

“I wasn’t trying to save everyone,” said Morgan. “Just her. Can’t we do that too? I mean, save people one by one?” As Crane has saved me, he thought. Crane and Engel, and you, David, all of you. As all of you have saved me. One by one, my oneness saved, and for what? For what we do.

David took his hand, the hand with the broken fingernail. “Let me look at that,” he said. He touched it, then wrapped his own hand round the nail and closed his eyes. A moment later the pain had gone.

“You work miracles,” said Morgan. “I thought so.”

“Well, some people call them that,” said David.

“I have to get away from this,” said Morgan. He began to cross the field, eyes focused on his feet as they picked their way along a path that led through the dreadful crop all round him, Melissa and the others a few steps behind.

in which the children are freed

B
y the time they reached the far side of the field, Rebecca and her silent guards could hardly be seen through the misting fall of rain. Morgan was exhausted. He had almost ceased to notice the ground beneath his feet and what it held. So it came as a surprise to him when David touched his arm.

“Here,” he said, pointing down to their left. “We can start here.” He knelt beside a small blond head, its eyes closed, the face turned up to the light, and began to clear the soft damp earth away from the neck. “Come on,” he said, with a child’s impatience. “You start on that one.” He nodded along the line. Morgan saw that Crane had also begun to scrape at the soil ten yards further down, Melissa beside him. Beyond them stood Goddie, with Mite in his arms. He dropped to his knees.

“We’ll soon have you out of here,” he said. The face beneath him was different from that of the first child. It seemed unformed, more like a bud than a face, the skin across the eyes translucent; Morgan imagined—or saw, he wasn’t sure—the pupils beneath, like small bright beads of light. The lips too seemed sealed. It startled, and thrilled him when he noticed as he dug a tremor around the mouth and the hesitant blossoming of a smile. His hands worked harder, until the child was free of earth to the waist, and then, because he could not bear the memory of the other, to the knees. This child was a boy, his genitals cupped by his palms. “Nearly there,” said Morgan. “Nearly there.” Kneeling beside him, David had already cleared a space and eased a girl out of the soil. The roots and all, thought Morgan, the image of the first girl in his head. And then he recalled something he’d read in one of his grandfather’s bound magazines, the words of an artist who had traveled the world. Where are your roots? the artist had been asked, and he had answered, I am not a plant, I am a human being. Is this what is wrong with us, Morgan wondered, that we think we have roots and are bound to where we are?

And then his child was free. Morgan lifted him out of the hole he had made. Before his eyes, the skin, which had been as pale and delicate as the brittle skin of an onion, took on color and depth and softness, and became human skin. The eyes opened, and then the mouth, and the smile which had been no more than the shadow of a smile was all at once complete. It’s like a birth, thought Morgan. A human birth. David was wrong, he said to himself. One by one is the only way.

The child he had freed lay by the hole for a moment, gathering his strength, the skin above his heart a sort of glimmering sheen, and then, as though held by invisible hands, he rose to his feet, shaking the loose earth from his skin. He kissed Morgan’s cheek before walking along the row and sinking to his knees to dig out a second child. Morgan looked round. The part of the field they had reached was alive with children, David and the girl he had freed, Melissa and Crane helping others to rise from the soil and fall to the work themselves. It’s exponential, thought Morgan, one by one becoming two by four. One by two by four by eight is the only way, he said to himself. So David was right after all. And then into his head came another story from his childhood, about dragon’s teeth that had been sown and an army that had risen from the ground, fully armed.

In the distance, where Rebecca had stood with her guards, was a line of uniformed men. “We need to hurry,” he said.

in which Goddie finds himself

B
y the time Rebecca and her men arrived, the children had been freed in the hundreds, naked as the day they were born, that other day before this day, that other birth before this second birth. It was hard to judge their age—some seemed infants, others almost adult—and Morgan wondered how much this mattered. They were alive, after all. He felt an exhilaration in his blood as he watched them moving around the field, their first few steps uncertain, like newborn deer, sizing one another up, as dogs would almost, a recognition that had to do with scent and feel, it seemed, that lay beyond words. Still, there were greetings too, and embraces, reunions, sometimes of siblings, at times of friends. The past was flowing back, to fill them up. All of this power, Morgan thought, returned to its rightful owners. Not everyone spoke the same language, he noticed. Standing beside him, Crane said, “Listen to them, chirruping like birds,” and began to laugh, and Morgan laughed with him.

David was walking among them and it soon became clear that lines were being formed as he passed, lines of defense. The taller ones moved to the front, boys and girls alike, while the smaller ones fell back. Melissa had taken her place at the center, with Mite, and with those too young to walk, who had found their home in some older child’s arms. The uniformed men were closer now, thirty or forty of them, no more than that, Rebecca no longer with them. There was a ribbon, broad as a road, of upturned earth between the men and the children. David stood at the front, with Goddie by his side, both clothed, surrounded by the almost blinding whiteness of rain-damp skin. Morgan and Crane walked forward, to where they could watch both forces face off. Goddie was trembling, but fierce. David stared ahead. Morgan saw him as if for the first time, a man now, and was thrilled. He reached in his pocket for his face and pulled it out. It hung from his hand like a limp rag, formless. It had nothing to do with him, he thought; it belonged to the head in the house. He stroked it with his free hand before putting it away again.

“You don’t need it,” said Crane, who had been watching him.

“I realize that now,” said Morgan.

That was when they heard the noise of the bullhorn. It came from the factory. As one, the men turned and walked away, towards the noise. The children began to murmur among themselves, until a cheer broke out from somewhere behind them, and spread through the crowd. Crane raised his arms in the air. It had stopped raining, and Morgan, looking up, saw the sun still high in the sky. It can’t be much past noon, he thought. How quickly all this has happened. And then he remembered the child he had torn in half, and the potting shed, and felt sick with shame and disgust. This was no time to celebrate. He reached up and grabbed Crane’s arm. “We must leave this place,” he said.

David stepped forward, then turned to face his army. There were hundreds, tens of hundreds. Morgan saw that a dozen or more had slipped away to enter the potting shed, and wondered what they might be doing. But he was distracted by a whistle, and the clear high voice of David. He had started to sing, a wordless song, and everyone’s eyes were on him as the two boys at his side moved closer and lifted him onto their shoulders. He sat between them, enthroned, his song an anthem, an incantation, the two boys rotating slowly with their charge until they faced the factory once more. They started to walk, with measured strides, and the nature of David’s song was instantly transformed into a march. Slowly at first, and then in a rush, the other children joined in, their voices harmonious and tuneful, pitched with confidence as though the song were known to them already, and Morgan found himself also singing, words that were not words but that nonetheless had meaning to him, although what that meaning was he couldn’t say, and would never know, however hard he tried. The song, its melody, would always elude him. There, in the upturned field, with the loose clods shifting beneath his feet, his chest filled with the roundness of it, his mouth seemed healed as he sang, the sibilance of certain consonants no obstacle to him. Crane too had begun to sing. He glanced across at Morgan as they moved to follow the children, to follow David, and raised an eyebrow, startled by what he saw.

Ahead of them, the orderly flock of children had reached the low sweep of the factory and were pouring through the doors, which had been opened wide to admit them, by whom Morgan didn’t know. Rebecca was nowhere to be seen. The uniformed men had disappeared, as Mill had when they came for Moira, thought Morgan, dissolved into thin air. And there was Mite now, held up in the air like a banner, only yards away from him. And all the babies were hoisted up with him, unfurled and chuckling, their small hands opening and closing, clutching at the ebb and flow of the song as it streamed around them. Moira was there as well, he saw, Moira without whom they might never have risked this journey. Moira, first born, first found, whose name means Fate. So everything has served its purpose. But surely it can’t be this easy, he asked himself. Shall we simply walk away, this power unleashed and free to roam, the walls of the factory, like those of some ancient and now forgotten city, left to crumble around their own irrelevance? He was about to say this to Crane when a low roar came from the front of the group, already inside the factory, a roar that grew louder and deeper as it flowed back through the clamorous crowd of children, and seemed to flex itself, a roar as dense and blood-saturated as a muscle.