The Follower

by Nicholas Bowling

“Your mum gave me her phone.”

  “Why?”

  “She asked me to call you.”

  “Where are you? Are you at the house?” “We’re outside the Telos Sanctuary. Up on…” She squinted. “… Quail Hill. I think you need to come here. She’s… not feeling well.”

  He paused and listened.

  “Is that Chason?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  “Can you just come?”

  There was a long, crackling exhale from the other end of the phone.

  “Jesus,” said Troy, and hung up.

  Vivian looked down at Shelley.

  “He’s coming,” she said. “I think.”

  Shelley eventually got to her feet and Vivian helped her down to the highway. On the corner of Quail and the 55, right where Shelley had stolen the trash can from, they found a bench that was out of earshot and throwing distance of the other members of the Sanctuary.

  Perhaps ten minutes had passed, and Chason had finally quietened down, when Shelley turned to Vivian and said, “Did you find him?”

  “Jesse? No.” She paused. “He’s gone up the mountain. That’s why I’m, you know…” She gestured to her robes.

  “Good for you,” Shelley said, sadly. “I’m sure you’ll ascend just as quickly as your brother. I’ve been doing this for twenty years and no one has ever invited me up the mountain.”

  “Why do you even need to be invited, though? Couldn’t you just go up there?”

  “Oh Vivian. Do you know how silly that sounds?”

  “Take a map.”

  “The Crystal City isn’t on any maps.”

  Shelley’s eyes still had that blue, alien iridescence that made Vivian want to look away, for fear of being sucked into them.

  “I’m sorry about the book thing,” she said. “I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to show anyone.”

  Shelley shook her head.

  “I had hundreds of those. They were a good earner.” She added, “My boys… What am I going to do about my boys?”

  “I can pay you back for my copy,” said Vivian. She patted her robes. The cash from Jerome and Minnie was back in her room, folded up in Jesse’s coat. “Not right now. But I’ve got the money.”

  “It’s not just about the money, though,” said Shelley. “I really felt I was helping.”

  “Can’t you help, but just not do the Telos thing?” Vivian suggested.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. You can still teach people yoga or something, but just without the brand name.”

  “It’s not just a brand name, Vivian,” said Shelley, sharply.

  “Sure, I get that, but—”

  “It’s the Violet Path or nothing. It’s the one true Path. And now they’ve cast me out.” She stared in front of her, and spoke half to herself. “They told Shiv.”

  “Shiv?” Vivian sat up. “Which Shiv?”

  Before she could say any more she heard Troy’s voice from further along the road.

  “You know I could lose my job too, if I just leave the motel in the middle of the day. Then where would we be? We need that income.”

  “Troy!”

  Shelley stood up and staggered and tried to hug him. This started the baby grumbling again.

  “What did you do, Mom?”

  “She took matters into her own hands,” said Vivian, and jerked her head back towards the Sanctuary.

  Troy looked up.

  “Great, Mom. Just great. As if we didn’t have enough trouble.” He flicked his eyes back down to Vivian. “Nice robes,” he said.

  “It’s not…” said Vivian. “I mean, I’m not…”

  “You’re not what? Totally, hopelessly indoctrinated?”

  He grinned.

  “I just joined to find Jesse.”

  “Sure you did. It’s okay. Don’t worry, I don’t judge you. Happens to everyone.”

  “I mean it.”

  Troy just kept grinning and turned to his mother. “Come on, we’re going home and you’re going to bed. You’ve got your shift tonight. Remember? Mom? You want to impress your new boss, right?”

  Shelley groaned.

  “Wait,” said Vivian. Too many thoughts tried to exit her brain at the same time and got jammed there like the Marx Brothers.

  “See you, Viv. Hope it all works out.”

  “Please, Troy…”

  He already had his back to her. Shelley leaned heavily on her son as he led her down the street. He was so unbelievably tall – he bowed like a bamboo pole where his mother clutched his waist.

  He was nearly round the corner when he stopped and called back to Vivian, “Your mom called again, by the way.”

  He was too far away for Vivian to bother replying.

  “You ever going to call her back?” he shouted.

  She watched them both take an alley up to Vista Street, and they were out of sight before she realised that she was still holding Shelley’s phone, and she honestly couldn’t say whether she’d stolen it on purpose or not.

  13

  WHILE THE others were still cleaning up, Vivian crept back up the stairs to the dormitories. Glenn had regained consciousness by now and was propped up under a blanket in the corner of the room, glasses still slightly askew, a bag of ice on his head. He didn’t look well. The initiates fussed over him, bringing him water and tea and scented candles, but he waved them away, smiling indulgently. He caught Vivian’s eye again. Vivian pretended she hadn’t seen and slipped into her bedroom.

  With one ear on the sounds of sweeping glass, Vivian lay on her futon and took out Shelley’s phone. She found her way to the Telos Sanctuary website and spent half an hour looking at photos of her room, of the big room, of Glenn and his grinning followers. She found nothing of any specificity when it came to Telos and the Crystal City – just the same vague references to ascension and the Thirteenth Stone and so forth. She searched for “Shiv” and “Telos” in various combinations but found nothing.

  Out of interest, she checked the prices for a residential stay at the Sanctuary. They were eye-watering.

  She put the phone on the bed and fetched the envelope that Jerome and Minnie had given her. It contained two photos of Nathan Carter, one a passport photo, the other taken at his graduation. A smart, young African American. It also contained three thousand dollars, which according to the list of fees would cover one week’s residence at the Sanctuary, with not quite enough left over to pay for her First Stone ceremony and certificate. If Glenn decided to call in his debts, Vivian would be out of money again in four days.

  She rang her bank and spent half an hour listening to options and pushing buttons and getting nowhere. When she finally spoke to an operator she was told her account had already been frozen due to irregularities in spending, and there was some special number she needed to unfreeze it, a special number she couldn’t remember. All this took much longer than expected because Vivian knew she wasn’t supposed to be using a phone in the Sanctuary, and was speaking in almost a whisper, and the man on the other end kept asking her to repeat everything two or three times.

  Vivian hung up in frustration. She’d have to beg from her mother if she wanted to stay on at the Sanctuary. And of course she wanted to stay on at the Sanctuary.

  She slipped out of her room and went to the bathroom down the hall. It didn’t have a lock – none of the rooms had locks – but she closed the papery door and turned on the taps in an attempt to conceal her voice. Everyone seemed busy with tidying up, anyway. She sat in the stall (which, far from having a lock, had no door at all) and dialled her home number and hung up before it started ringing. She did this three more times. Her heart was thumping so vigorously the mouthpiece shuddered beside her lips. She didn’t know if this was from fear of being caught, or pre-emptive adrenaline at the prospect of speaking to her mother.

  On the fifth attempt, she let the phone ring. Her mother answered almost immediately. She must have been perched by the pho
ne. Perhaps she’d been like that for days.

  “Hello?”

  She sounded tired and faint.

  “Hi Mum,” said Vivian.

  “Jesse?”

  “It’s Vivian,” said Vivian.

  “Oh.” She was disappointed. There was a pause.

  “How are you doing?” asked Vivian.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “It’s the taps.”

  “The what?”

  “I’m in the bathroom.”

  “Why?”

  “I just am.”

  “You’re just what?”

  She was having to shout over the noise of the water anyway so she came out of the stall, turned the taps off, and went back in.

  “Better?” she said.

  “I called you at the motel and you didn’t call back. Why didn’t you call back?”

  “Sorry, Mum.”

  “I called you three times.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. About midday I think.”

  “I thought it was later than that. It’s dark outside already.”

  “That’s the time here. You’re eight hours ahead, Mum. Remember? I’m in California. It’ll be about eight o’clock there. In the evening.”

  “Oh yes. Yes, yes. I’m being an idiot. I’m sorry, Vivian.”

  “No, it’s confusing.”

  “It is confusing.”

  This was her mother’s take on most of the world, and it had only got worse since her husband had died. Vivian never knew whether to humour her or correct her. Both seemed equally patronising.

  “You’ve found him then?” her mother said, hopefully, and Vivian’s heart broke a little.

  “Sort of,” she said.

  Silence.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, sort of. I think I’ve found him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know where he is. I just don’t know how to get there. I mean, I do, but… It’s difficult to explain.”

  She sounded like Glenn, deliberately obfuscating.

  “I don’t understand. Is he at his summer camp or isn’t he?”

  “It’s not a summer camp, Mum. It’s a…” What the hell was it? After so long in Mount Hookey’s spiritual microclimate, she found it impossible to describe it to an outsider. “It’s a sort of course. Sort of self-help course.”

  “Oh right.”

  The way she said that made it clear that “self-help” meant nothing to her. The very ideas of self-help, self-care, mindfulness, wellness, perhaps even happiness, were completely alien to her mother. Her husband’s money had kept her insulated from all that.

  “I’ve joined the course, now,” said Vivian. “So I think I’ll see him soon. He’s just in a different… class.”

  “But he’s okay?”

  “I think so.” She honestly had no idea.

  “I’m confused. You haven’t seen him or spoken to him?”

  “No, but other people have. Other people on the course.”

  “Oh right.”

  “I’m sure I’ll see him soon.”

  Shelley’s phone beeped with the arrival of a text.

  “What was that noise?” said her mother.

  Vivian heard the tones of buttons being pressed at her mother’s end of the line. When she had trouble hearing, she had a tendency to press the handset very close to her face and mash the buttons with her cheek and jaw.

  “It’s nothing, Mum.”

  “I heard a noise.”

  “It’s nothing. Just a message.”

  “From Jesse?”

  “No.”

  Her mother sighed.

  “Why hasn’t he called home? I wish he’d let us know.”

  “I know. I think the course is quite intense. That’s why I haven’t called, either. Sorry. I’m just quite busy. There’s a lot going on here.”

  “Oh well.”

  “How are you, anyway?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “Are you sleeping alright?”

  “Not really. You know I don’t sleep when you and Jesse aren’t here.”

  “I’m sorry, Mum. I should have called earlier.”

  “I had an appointment for my eye.”

  “Your eye?”

  This was another habit of her mother’s: she would name a body part, and tell Vivian she was seeing someone about it, without ever explaining what was specifically wrong. It was a generational thing, Vivian thought, an attempt to minimise fuss. She compared it to Jesse, to Forrest, to all the other initiates, whose whole lives were spent examining and analysing and explaining everything that could be wrong with them, both physically and spiritually.

  “You know, my eye thing. Anyway I missed the appointment. I just completely forgot about it. I am a stupid woman!”

  “No you’re not, Mum.”

  “I gave the doctor my urine, for my blood thing.”

  “Your blood thing?”

  “You know, the thing with my blood.”

  “I’m not sure you told me.”

  “Well, he’s got my urine now, so we’ll know soon enough. Couple of weeks, he said, but you know what they’re like, could be months in reality. I saw Mrs Holmes in the surgery. Do you remember Mrs Holmes? She made that jam you liked. Her husband died. Just like that. She looked awfully thin.”

  There was another patch of silence. From where Vivian was, under the shadow of the mountain, looking at the bear holding its neon sign, the concept of sitting in a North London doctor’s surgery talking about jam seemed unfathomably alien; as alien, no doubt, as Telos would have seemed to her mother.

  “So you’ll be seeing Jesse soon?” her mother said.

  “Wait, Mum, this blood thing…”

  “How soon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell him to call me, please.”

  “I will.”

  “When are you coming home?”

  “I’m not sure. Once I’ve found him and made sure he’s okay.”

  “I thought you said he was okay?”

  “He is, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Me?” Vivian didn’t know how to answer that. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’ve lost my card though.”

  “What card?”

  “My credit card.”

  “Oh Vivian… That was silly. How did you lose it?”

  “I don’t know.” She definitely wasn’t going to tell her mother about the mugging in Lewiston.

  “Then how are you paying for things?”

  “I’ve got some cash. But, actually, I was wondering if maybe…” There was a taut silence from the other end. The purpose of the call was unavoidable now. “…maybe you could send me some more?”

  “I don’t know how to do that, Vivian. It was your father who knew how the money worked. I’ll just make a mess of it, you know I will. I’ll have to use the internet, won’t I?”

  “You could maybe just post some cash to me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know that’s not really the right way to do things.”

  “I don’t think I can get you any more money, though. The bank have been sending me letters, Vivian.”

  “Letters? What kind of letters?”

  “They’re very confusing. And the writing is so small! Why do they print them like that?”

  “What do the letters say?”

  “I’ve been writing back to them but I never got a reply. I suppose they want me to email or something.”

  “Mum? What do the letters say?”

  She eventually convinced her mother to fetch one of the bank’s letters, along with a handful of recent statements. Her mother read it aloud, slowly, cursing her eyesight. It made for sobering listening. The account was frozen. It was gone. All of it. Courtesy of a variety of direct debits to the House of Telos, the Telos Sanctuary,
Telos Multimedia Productions, Telos Outreach, Telos Pharmaceuticals. It wasn’t just the Telos franchise, either. In the last year, Jesse had signed up for every wellness and self-help course he could find. He was a member of countless secular and religious groups, from the Stoic Fellowship to the Hare Krishna Temple to NASA, each staking a claim to their parents’ apparently limitless wealth, and each slowly but surely draining it dry.

  Vivian felt a renewed sense of urgency and wanted to get off the phone, but her mother was warmed up now and wanted to talk. They got onto the subject of Vivian’s father. Vivian wanted to discuss the practicalities of the frozen bank account, but her mother had become suddenly sentimental. She had bought back a lot of her husband’s clothes from a charity shop, it turned out. “I thought Jesse might want them,” she reasoned. She told Vivian that she’d found an old dressing gown from the seventies that Vivian might like. Vivian told her that she didn’t think that was a good idea, and it would be healthier to clear the house out properly. There was silence at the other end. Vivian tried to say it again, more kindly.

  “But I miss him so much,” her mother said.

  Vivian said nothing. She could hear someone coming.

  “Don’t you?”

  Frantic little footsteps.

  “Vivian?”

  She hung up while her mother was still calling her name and stuffed the phone deep into her pocket.

  14

  FORREST WAS outside the bathroom.

  “Happy now?” she said.

  “About what?” said Vivian.

  It looked like all of Forrest’s features had been gathered into a couple of square inches in the middle of her face. The sinews of her jaw twitched.

  “You’re already Glenn’s favourite, honey. You don’t have to try so hard.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You just couldn’t let me have my moment, could you? My one little bit of joy. Well, Vivian, the Lord does not look kindly upon the likes of you.”

  “The Lord?”

  “God forgive me for saying so, but you’re some liar. You ain’t seen John of Telos. I seen him. I had the vision. Me. But you couldn’t bear not being centre of attention for once.”

  “I did see him, actually,” said Vivian. She couldn’t believe she was arguing the point.

  “Then what’s he look like?”

  Vivian shrugged. “He was like you described him, I guess.”