All the men twisted and leant into the wind and the women watched from the Sustenance Tables. The men hoisted lumber onto their backs and the tall grass swam around their boots and parted as they stomped towards the skeletal buildings. The women – most of them pregnant – ferried pies and hams and aquarium quantities of lemonade from 4x4s to trestle tables, bustling and fertile.
Almost no one paid any attention to Merrick, who went undetected while others battled the elements or the possibility of hunger. He was young and disconcerting to look at; a pigeon’s chest tented his hemp tunic and his beard was a rash made of hair. But like everyone else, Merrick moved with purpose and intent. This was his disguise. Almost no one noticed that his purpose and intent were entirely opposite to theirs – that he worked secretly to undo what was being done.
Merrick's small, sunken eyes zeroed in on areas of activity and determined where the best progress was being made. That’s where he’d scurry and loosen a crucial screw – not so anyone would notice – but enough to make a difference one day, hopefully. Frowning to look busy and involved, he sawed notches from load-bearing joists. He frowned while thinking a funny thought about Shepherd Jeayes falling through a floor.
Rowena watched Merrick and knew him, though they had never spoken once. She stood separately from the expectant child-bearers, along with a few other sullen girls yet to take seed in their belly. Shepherd Jeayes said a woman without seed is like a car without petrol, which grows weeds on its insides and rusts, and is a shame. The Big Girls looked down on the Little Girls. Once, Rowena heard Shanti telling the other Big Girls that Rowena couldn’t make a Baba as she had a wrong-shaped widget, so that night Rowena ladled Shanti’s stew with a Mooncup.
Rowena had watched Merrick for two years now. When Merrick was found with the anatomical playing cards, Shepherd made him be unspeakable in front of his mother and the entire Flock, and everyone laughed except Merrick’s mother (even Rowena, who at that time didn’t know better). Merrick’s mother died shortly after, and it was salt in the wound for Shepherd to include the penance footage in the behind-the-scenes featurette on the Tithe of Love 2013 Blu-ray/DVD.
Rowena liked the way Merrick carried himself since then. The way he had turned inwards and become stronger – not from Shepherd, or the rest of the Flock, but from something inside himself. She watched him scurry and learned to extrapolate his plans. She let him scurry into her dreams and special thoughts, pushing out all the bad things Shepherd Jeayes had put in there. Watching Merrick sabotage Jeayes’ work made her smile inside.
Merrick carefully hammered a nail upwards through a floorboard of the New Gymnasium, making sure the sharp point sat half an inch above the surface, but not too obviously. He thought about bloodied feet. He thought about fire, and whether there was a not too obvious way to start one. Maybe a magnifying glass.
“Merrick, my good, close friend!”
He looked up with an automatic smile. It was Chan; muscular, bare-chested, smug.
“Chan!” said Merrick, birthing an uncomfortable pause.
“How goes it?
“A fine day to be spiritual with a hammer.” Merrick held up his hammer, still grinning.
“A fine day.” Chan made a show of looking at the sun in a masculine way, shielding his eyes with a hand the size of a shovel. Light bounced off his sheeny pectorals and into Merrick’s eyes. “We wondered if you’d help us in the annex.”
“The annex?”
Chan nodded slowly with eyes closed and a beatific smile, as if he had given an underprivileged child a bicycle.
Rowena saw Chan put his arm across Merrick’s shoulders and felt her stomach swallow itself a little. She saw them going towards the small bungalow-in-progress at the edge of the field, some distance from the rest of the compound. The place that would be for Shepherd only. Edward was painting the outside maroon. Rowena thought it would make a pleasant change from the mildewed tent in the woods at unearthly hours, then scolded herself - angry for thinking the way Shepherd wanted her to.
***
Shepherd Jeayes sat in a corner of the annex, a selection of maroon to almost-maroon swatches spread out around his feet. Head leant back to rest where two walls met, his eyes were neither open nor closed and he breathed in a way that could be mistaken for snoring or vice versa. His matted beard collided with the potbelly jutting from his unbuttoned shirt and in no way was it clear whether he could see or hear what was happening around him.
Merrick stood before Jeayes, waiting to be acknowledged. He saw tools all over the annex floor. He saw the chalk outline of a large rectangle in the middle of the room, as if someone had murdered a bed. He saw Edward peering through a window. He coughed.
“MERRICK GOES UPSTAIRS!” boomed Jeayes, barely moving.
“I thought it was a bungalow,” said Merrick.
“UP!” Jeayes’ eyelids burst open, deep lines in his tanned face quivering. He had been handsome once. His eyes were cold and blue.
***
It was a one-way mirror, transparent on the loft-side. Merrick looked through it, down at Shepherd Jeayes, who was standing in the chalk rectangle and looking up, shouting at his own reflection. Chan and the other men in the annex had stopped their work and were listening. Saliva accumulated in Jeayes' beard and his fat yellow tongue flapped like a caught fish. His eyes bulged with fury as he spat venom at the mirror and made his image reverberate. The words were muffled but Merrick heard them. He felt queasy.
The words bloomed into humiliating accounts of Merrick’s past. He felt himself standing before the Flock again – before the women – limp with fear and violently waggling his bobbin. Scared of getting the belt buckle. Jeayes shouted then, too, harder! harder!, while the others jeered and mother cried quietly. Look her in the eyes, boy! Merrick saw himself through the prism of her tears. Playing cards danced before his eyes, flung with great force by a sadistic conjurer: the two of spades with her legs splayed; the eight of clubs with a messy face. The jokers laughed long and hard. His mother appeared as the Queen of Hearts, folded herself in two and caught fire.
Merrick, in the loft, looked down at the blood on his hand. He had picked a splinter from a beam and pushed it under the nail of his ring finger, numb to the agonising pain. The pain could not drown out Shepherd Jeayes. He was determined to break the boy.
“He is too weak to be forged in the flames of public penance. We tried! He turned. So let us brick him up in the dark, and plant him in his own shameful filth. Like a tuber! We can but pray he grows,” Jeayes addressed the group of strong, smirking men who were gathered around him and nodding.
The Shepherd looked up again now, still in the centre of the bed-sized chalk oblong. His low, booming voice was becoming unusually high-pitched, strangled by his own excitement. He pointed at himself in the mirror.
“You’ll find no soil for seed in paper women, Merrick! Bind yourself to the flock – I’ll show you how, through this mirror. Stay up there from now on, because you like to look! I’ll bring them here and you’ll look, again and again. You’ll see how I made your mother fat with you, and dozens more!”
Merrick took the hammer from his belt.
***
The sound of a thousand glass shards tinkling pleasantly to the ground drifted across the field like succinct music. The encore was a chorus of male screams.
Merrick walked out calmly, covered in blood and sequined with pieces of mirror, hammer still in hand. Rowena turned to look straight into his eyes and Merrick held her gaze as he walked towards her. He made her heart flutter.
Chan followed, staggering dizzily, splinters of glass embedded in his torso. He carried a chisel. He came up fast behind Merrick.
Rowena saw, and picked up a knife from the Sustenance Table.