The Lamb

Ruth grows increasingly restless as days pass without a new stray. Margot feels constantly hungry, subsisting on dry pasta. One night, Eden sits up with Margot on the couch, commenting on Margot’s skinniness. Margot tells Eden she worries if Eden and Ruth would even notice if she were gone. Eden tells Margot to think happy thoughts and stay “Nice and juicy. Healthy” (193).

Margot is at school when she gets her first period. Mr. Hill dismisses Margot’s pain at first, but excuses her from class when he sees blood on her chair. He calls Roz, who works in the school office, for assistance. Roz finds Margot in the toilet and gives her hygiene supplies, a hot water bag, and dark chocolate. She helps Margot clean up with great kindness, telling her she must go to the doctor if the pain continues to be terrible. Margot thinks that Ruth would never take her to a doctor, since she mistrusts medical practitioners.

At home, Margot is wracked by pain in her groin and belly, but Ruth appears impatient with her. She asks Margot to get off the couch lest she stain it. Eden asks Margot to come with her to the bathroom and shows her how to wash her underwear clean of blood. Eden tells Margot she too has bad period pains. Men never realize how bad menstrual pain can be, as the agony of women is pretend-pain to them.

On the ride to school, Margot tells the bus driver she wants to visit the fells, where the changeling boys go. The driver tells her to stay away from the boys, as they are trouble. Inwardly, Margot agrees, reflecting on the boys’ shabby treatment of her. She fantasizes about cutting open a changeling boy and eating him, but for the first time, such a thought fills her with guilt. 

As if sensing Margot’s rage toward the boys, the bus driver tells her that despite all the evil in the world, one must put out good in it. When Margot asks the driver if it’s evil to stop a bad person, he wonders what she means. He tells her that there are grownups, such as police officers and doctors, who can handle such people. Margot must leave it to them to sort things out.

Margot plays in the woods, recounting aloud the rabbit-woman story. A tall young woman appears next to her, smiling. The woman—a hiker—tells Margot that she has heard the story before. The rabbit-woman was angry because she could not understand why fate punished her, but the truth is she was not punished by fate—she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

The rest of the story the hiker tells Margot is different from Eden’s rendition. In the hiker’s story, the rabbit-woman holds the hunter to a rock and calls out her mother and sisters from their warrens. The women take the hunter’s fingers and toes and set him free. They grind his bones and sprinkle them in the soil to make it fertile. The women who harvest the soil feed their burrow-sisters. Margot is surprised at the hiker’s version. Just then, she hears Ruth call out to her. Fearing for the hiker, Margot threatens to bust her head with a sharp rock if she doesn’t leave. The hiker backs away.

Forced to stop luring strays, Ruth throws a tantrum, lying in the mud outside the house. Eden shuts the bedroom door in anger. Margot goes up to Ruth, asking her to come in lest she catch a cold. Ruth tells Margot that she cannot survive on regular food anymore. Eden does not understand her hunger, as she is not made like Ruth and Margot. 

Sensing that Margot no longer wants to hunt strays, Ruth tells her that Margot has willfully forgotten her own nature. Margot refuses to remember, but she ate her own father. When Ruth served his meat, Margot had said it was the tastiest thing she ever ate. Horrified and disbelieving, Margot steps back into the house, away from Ruth.

From across the door stead, Ruth taunts Margot that her father was a stray from the beginning. Ruth tried to make him love her, but when he refused to accept her hunger, she knew it was time for him to go. Sometimes, Ruth sees Margot’s father in Margot. Then she is seized by a desire to exhume his bones from Margot’s body and eat him all over again. Margot runs into the bathroom and vomits, repulsed that she ate her own father’s meat.

Ruth gives Margot a thorough bath in boiling hot water, telling her she wants them to talk, like in the old days. Eden has suggested Ruth turn to drawing to channel her frustration. Eden even made paper for Ruth to use. What Ruth wants to draw is Margot. Margot wants to know why Ruth doesn’t just draw Eden, but Ruth says only Margot is her Little One. She wants Margot to feel the same way she did submerged in Ruth’s womb, so holds her head under the water for a few minutes. Ruth only lets her up when Margot’s lungs begin to hurt.

Margot confesses to Ruth that it was she who killed the kits. She expects to be punished, but Margot stares at her in wonder and draws her using charcoal. Margot thinks the drawing makes her look like a monster, but she doesn’t comment on it. Ruth tells Margot to prove her resourcefulness and bring Ruth a stray. Margot wishes Ruth would tell her she loves her.

The next morning Margot decides that finding a stray will fix everything between her and Ruth. She goes out in the woods early, while Ruth and Eden are still asleep. Margot is sure Ruth would want a girl or a young woman, someone she can seduce easily. 

Margot lies down a rock, as if she is lost, and waits. Hours later, a man of indeterminate age spots Margot, asking her why she is in the woods alone. Margot tells the man she likes being on her own. She offers to take him to her house, where he can have some warm food. The man declines her offer.

Margot changes track and tells the man that she wants to go back to her home, but is too scared to go alone. She wants him to take her to her home. The man refuses, promising Margot her parents are bound to come looking for her soon. Margot seizes his leg in desperation, but he pushes her off and goes away. Margot waits till it is dark for more strays, but none show up.

Ruth is angry at Margot for returning empty-handed. As Margot pretends to sleep on the couch, Ruth whispers to her that it was much easier to love Margot when she was young and compliant. 

In the evening, Ruth and Eden drink wine as Eden cooks. Ruth tells Eden she is as hungry as the god Saturn, who ate his own child. Ruth wonders if Margot knows the story, and proceeds to tell her. Saturn, the master of time, feared only one person: his own son, bound to grow bigger and greater than him. One day, Saturn tore apart his son and ate him. Ruth smiles horridly at Margot as she finishes the story.

Eden too has a story to tell, but one from her own life. Eden took a stray once before in her life: an infant called Bobby, Eden’s own son. Bobby was born to 15-year-old Eden. Eden had wanted to terminate the pregnancy, but her father insisted she give birth and place the baby for adoption. As soon as Bobby was born, Eden realized she had no desire to give him to the staid, boring couple slated to adopt him. She grabbed the newborn and ate him whole in a single bite, right in front of the nurses. Then she ran away, happy that Bobby would always be perfect within her. Eden travelled to many countries, doing odd jobs, till one day she returned to England and found the article about the missing girls. 

Ruth tells Eden that she doesn’t need to run way anymore, as she is home. As they embrace, Margot can see something is permanently broken in Eden. She also wonders if Eden’s story about eating an entire baby in a single bite is true. Margot imagines Bobby is now 20, at university. Perhaps he looks like Margot.

At lunchtime in school, Abbie and Margot sit in the bark pit—lined with tree bark, an alternative to a sandpit—at the edge of the playground. Abbie tells Margot that Patrick has asked her to accompany him to the tuck shop after school. He plans to show Abbie a pen knife he stole from his father. Margot wonders which creature the brutal Patrick has killed with the knife. She pictures him with his face buried in a kit’s fur, his mouth smeared with blood. Margot asks Abbie not to go to the tuck shop with Patrick.

Patrick comes to the bark pit, asking Abbie if she got money for the tuck shop. Abbie tells Patrick she won’t be accompanying him. Margot smiles. An enraged Patrick calls her a “freak” (235). He taunts Margot that soon he and Abbie will be in secondary school together, while Margot gets left behind. Margot sees red and pushes Patrick while he grabs her hair. Patrick fishhooks Margot’s jaw open and spits into Margot’s mouth as the other boys cheer him on. Margot bites down on the finger holding her jaw open till she hears a crunching sound. A crying Patrick rushes to a teacher, his finger bleeding profusely.

By the time Margot gets home, Ruth has received a call from school. Margot can hear Ruth apologizing to someone on the phone. Eden sternly tells Margot to wait. Margot had expected Ruth and Eden to be proud of her animalistic behavior, but they seem enraged. 

After Ruth is done on the phone, she tells Margot to sit still on the couch, without moving a muscle. From now on, Margot is to obey Ruth to the smallest detail. Ruth crouches next to Margot and digs her nails in Margot’s knees, telling her that having Margot was a huge mistake.

Margot is suspended from school for a week. At home, she feels something has shifted. Eden and Ruth treat her like an interloper, slamming doors in her face and having secret conversations. 

Feeling angry, Margot sneaks out of the house one day and unearths the buried belongings of various strays, including their bones and the bottle of purple nail polish from the girl whose fingers Margot ate as a four-year-old. She hides the items in the trails leading away from the house, hoping someone finds them. Then she covers the now-empty plots with soil so they appear undisturbed.

When she returns, she hears Eden and Ruth whispering in their bedroom. Eden tells Ruth that the best course of action is to consume Margot so she stays safe inside them. If Margot lives, she will draw too much attention to them, like she already has. Consuming her will be an act of love, because this way Eden and Ruth will be protecting Margot from the terrible world. Margot steps back in shock, making a sound. Eden whips the door open and grabs Margot before she can run. She drags Margot to her bedroom, asking Ruth to lock the doors and windows.

Margot almost gets away with the exhumation of the belongings of the strays. As she watches from the window, Eden notices something amiss about the garden. She begins to dig. Unable to find the bones, she shouts for Ruth. They realize Margot is behind the disappearance of the bones. The women barge into the house, shaking Margot and asking her where the bones and other items went. Margot refuses to answer.

Ruth and Eden comb the area around the house for the belongings. Ruth comes in and tells Margot that Eden has found some of the things and will soon locate all of them. She squeezes Margot’s face hard, telling her that she has become very disobedient. When Margot counters that Ruth is just bored of her, Ruth says she is more than bored of Margot, she is sick of her daughter. Having Margot ruined Ruth’s body and life. Ruth has often wondered what Margot will taste like. Now she knows she will taste like Ruth’s own regret. 

Ruth locks Margot in the room. Margot grabs the tin of hemlock she knows Ruth keeps in the top shelf. She decides to nibble on the hemlock every day she is alive so her flesh grows poisonous. Margot also licks the black mold on the wall.

Margot wakes up to see Ruth and Eden in the garden, burying all the belongings of the strays again. Her eyes meet Ruth’s. Margot realizes that the reason Ruth has always worn the clothes of the strays is because she doesn’t have a coherent identity: She is an empty person. 

When Margot’s bus stops in the distance, she nearly weeps, thinking of the bus driver. Margot’s suspension is over, but Ruth doesn’t plan to send her to school.

Margot sees Ruth go up to the bus. When Ruth returns, she says through the window glass that she told the bus driver Margot is sick. Margot stays quiet and secretly eats an entire stem of hemlock, building the poison in her body.

Eden makes cable bonds to tie around Margot’s ankles, so she can move around a bit, but not too far. Margot is not allowed to come out into the living room. Margot says she is hungry and cold, acting for once like a real child. Ever since she was much smaller, she has hidden her pain from Ruth because any display of weakness only made Ruth angry. Eden tells Ruth that Margot should be given a treat as she is getting too wiry. She takes Margot into the kitchen so they can bake a cake together.

However, at dinner, Margot refuses to eat the cake as she wants to stay thin and deny Ruth and Eden their longed-for meal. Ruth grabs her jaw open and Eden force-feeds Margot the cake.