Awakening by Stevie Davies Page A

know what you are going to say before you say it?’
    â€˜No. Not always. Do you always?’
    â€˜Yes, Anna, on the whole yes, I think I do.’
    â€˜Poor you, Beattie, you are deprived of the spice of novelty.’
    Beatrice, not for the first time, flinches from her sister’s thinking-aloud; pretends to laugh it off. Anna is an odd mind out and really can’t help it. Since you cannot gain complete control of her, you need to veil her anomalies from other people’s sight. Sitting back, Beatrice contemplates her sister’s melancholy but beautiful eyes, looking into the distance; she admires the lustrous darkness of Anna’s hair, just washed, all brought forward over one shoulder. Her face is gaunt but Anna has rallied significantly since the medical treatment, indicating to Beatrice that Dr Quarles knew what he was talking about.
    There’s a pile of books sticking out from under the bed. Aha, you forgot to hide them! ‘Fissiparous’: Anna could not have dreamed that up on her own: Miriam Sala is somewhere behind that. ‘Christianity is fissiparous! Worms in a garden!’ Is that a sample of Anna’s reflections when she’s lying prostrate in her room all those tedious hours?
    â€˜But perhaps an Awakening would bring all the churches back together again, Annie. That, I am sure, is the idea. General Baptists would reunite with Strict and Particular Baptists, Congregationalists, all the different Wesleyans, Unitarians, Brethren, even the Anglicans, High and Low and High-low. All of us would be one. So perhaps there is something in it and we should pray earnestly about it? This may be the moment.’
    While Anna dozes on the couch after tea, Beatrice runs lightly upstairs and removes the offensive books. Without examining the titles or investigating their soiled contents, she conceals them in the cupboard under the stairs until evening. In the wilderness at the end of the garden, Beatrice lights the pyre. She tears out pages quire by quire. The fire licks, then rages. Kindling’s all they’re good for. Flakes of charred paper float up into the air but on a windless evening they don’t travel far. The fire burns low and Beatrice stirs the ashes with a stick until every trace is extinguished. And she’ll be watchful and do it again and again, should the need arise. Her heart is choking her throat with its drumming.
    *
    Turdus philomelos , Anna records in her diary, the speckled song thrush has had her nest smashed. Five eggs, powder blue, 9 days old & near to hatching, stolen. This whole nesting arrangement was a mistake on her part. She should build nearer heaven for we down here are raptors. Never trust us. We do not trust one another or ourselves – & how wise we are in this regard. But our thrush too is an engine of death: an empty litter of snail shells marks her presence. She beats them against the post to extract the meat. & this she must do until the Almighty calls a halt to the slaughter.
    Anna will get up today. She’s sick of sickness. Meeting her own sallow face in the mirror, she’s shaken. ‘Emaciated; not long for this world’ are the words she reads in the sympathetic faces of visitors: they conceal what Lore would have called their Schadenfreude . Hens peck the runty chicken to death, after which deed they run about squawking with five minutes’ relief. The healthy feed on the ill: that’s a fact. It ensures that the mad and bad survive. And then, generation by generation, they select and breed for madness. Outwit the mob or be devoured. Outwit Beatrice. But Anna was sad through and through to see her observations confirmed by Mr Darwin in one of the snatched books. The zoologists sorrow over the bloodbath of nature and are reluctant to acknowledge it. It has made Mr Darwin ill. But tell it he must. Tell it and be vilified. Speak and be mobbed by the beaks of the cognoscenti .
    Mrs Bunce brought trout from the