Our Lady of Everything

by Susan Finlay

  ‘Or even email?’

  ‘Yeah or video conferencing or text messaging or . . . ’

  But Katarzyna was no longer listening. Instead she adjusted her baseball cap and pulled up the zipper on her pink velvet tracksuit that matched her full, pink mouth and laughed, not because any one specific thing was funny but because she was delighted. Because she believed in Eoin and she believed in belief and two and two made four or five or whatever else you chose to believe . . . And then Dave, who she suspected also longed to escape the mundane reality of this, their present moment, laughed too.

  The Trip to Jerusalem

  MEGHANA BUDANNAVAR WAITED IN YE Olde Trip to Jerusalem (or the Trip to Jerusalem as it was more widely known, or The Trip if you were local), a pub that was famous for three things. Firstly, having been established in the tenth century, it claimed to be the oldest pub in England (hence Ye Olde); secondly, the crusaders had, supposedly, stopped by (or in ye olde English ‘tripped’); and thirdly most of the rooms had been carved out of the soft sandstone rock that rose up out of the hillsides on the city’s edges, so that sitting, waiting, in The Trip was indistinguishable from sitting, waiting, in a cave filled with armchairs and beer.

  Meghana went up to the bar. The only other person besides herself was a man in an England shirt who was on his third pint already. He was watching the football on a flashy-looking mobile that Meghana, noticing his missing front tooth, began to wonder if he might have stolen.

  ‘A gin and tonic please,’ she said to the barman, and upon hearing her voice the man in the England shirt turned round.

  His eyes flitted briefly over her body, the shape of which was emphasised by a dress so bright and colourful that no one would notice anything but it, and then further adorned with her Stop the War Coalition badge, which she had worn, even though it didn’t really go with the dress, just to keep Dave quiet. The man in the England shirt’s eyes moved up, towards her face, and then held her gaze for a second before sneering, and turning away.

  Meghana took her drink from the barman, and returned to her seat and waited. She could feel that the man in the England shirt was still watching her, and, not wanting it to appear as if she was intimidated by him, she took a sip of her drink. And then another, and so on, so that by the time Dave arrived she was already tipsy.

  ‘I ran into Kathy on the way,’ said Dave, motioning to the figure, who, Meg now saw, was standing in the doorway behind him. ‘So can I get you a drink then Meg – oh I see that you’ve already got one, or do you want another one? And, err, can I get—’

  ‘Actually let me get you both a drink,’ said Kathy.

  ‘Oh, yes, okay, a pint of bitter would be great,’ said Dave, and then wriggled round the table until he was sitting very close to Meghana, who was now watching Kathy, as she approached the bar, and the man in the England shirt who had now switched his attention to Kathy’s breasts.

  ‘You know Kathy’s actually alright,’ said Dave, following her gaze.

  ‘Because she’s attractive?’ said Meghana.

  ‘No, because she’s clever. In a kind of weird, self-educated way.’

  Kathy is attractive, and clever in a kind of weird, self-educated way, thought Meghana, and then felt the weight of her hair and the indignity of her dress, whereas I have worn clothes so awful that they have eclipsed my one good feature . . . She looked up at the decrepit model ship above the bar, which, if local folklore was to be believed, would cause anyone who touched it to drop down dead; and then recalled what, at one point, had nearly been her thesis:

  The Nottingham Ghost Walk is the city’s most successful walking tour, centring on the history of England’s oldest public house, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem. My study explores the concept of the ‘moving tourist attraction’ and its attempts to reimagine the emotional and narrative landscapes of the East Midlands area . . .

  The more she thought about it, the more unsure she became as to whether her actual thesis topic was more or less boring than this other one that she had previously rejected; and then she became even more irritated by the fact that they, like everything else in her life, were probably more or less the same. She could see that Kathy was now trying her best to escape from the man in the England shirt, gradually edging away from the bar, and back over towards where she and Dave were sitting. Then, as soon as she reached them she placed one pink velvet thigh on either side of the stool and, still holding all their drinks, sat down, at which point the man in the England shirt shouted: ‘Lucky seat!’

  ‘Okay, thanks for that,’ said Kathy.

  The three of them sipped their drinks in silence, and then Kathy smiled at Meghana and said, ‘Dave’s been telling me all about postmodern magik – with a “k”.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said Meg, trying not to sound as angry and pointless as she felt, ‘Did he mention the Skaven too? They’re anthropomorphic mice people.’

  ‘Rat men,’ said Dave.

  ‘Rat toys,’ said Meghana.

  The three of them sipped their drinks again, in silence again, waiting for the alcohol to make things easier, and then after a minute or so Kathy said, ‘So our pal at the bar just told me that that old ship is meant to be haunted?’

  ‘Yes. Apparently if you touch it, or more particularly clean it, then you’ll die immediately,’ said Meghana.

  ‘Well I’ve heard it doesn’t even have to be you touching it. It could just be someone close to you, or the next person that you, err, touched,’ said Dave.

  ‘Anyway it’s all rubbish. Nobody really believes it,’ said Meghana.

  Kathy shivered, and pulled up the zipper on her tracksuit top.

  ‘I believe it. I’m a Romantic, and I believe in belief.’

  Dave laughed awkwardly.

  ‘Well I don’t,’ Meghana said. ‘I’m an anthropologist and I study the science of humans and their works.’ And then, emboldened by her gin and tonics, she stood up and made her way towards the bar.

  ‘Meg don’t do it!’ said Dave, still laughing.

  ‘No Meg don’t,’ said Kathy, her face turning pale.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Meghana, ‘it’s just a dirty old ship, that’s all.’

  She clambered onto one of the stools and reached her right hand out, slowly and dramatically, towards the sails, and as she did so the man in the England shirt’s eyes locked onto hers, then moved all over her. The whites had a yellow tinge from drinking, as did his skin, and there were drops of sweat on his forehead. She looked at him and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘What?’

  Meghana’s right hand was now touching the top of the ship, while her left was balled into a fist. The man in the England shirt continued to stare, opening and closing his unkempt mouth, until Meghana jumped down off the stool and walked triumphantly away. She sat back down with Dave and Kathy and laughed and drank more of her drink and said, ‘See? I’m still here. No one died.’

  ‘Err, right . . . ’ said Dave, looking at the space above her head.

  Meghana swivelled round to see the man in the England shirt standing very close behind her. He gripped her shoulder, pushed his mobile into her hand and said, ‘Look at this then.’

  Meghana looked at the tiny film that was playing out across the phone. Two men, one in a balaclava, the other with a keffiyeh scarf wrapped round his face, were stood looking straight to camera, while a third with his hands bound behind his back knelt on the ground between them. The man in the balaclava began speaking, very fast, in Arabic. Then he stopped, and the man in the keffiyeh scarf took over. Then he pulled out a knife and began to saw at the kneeling man’s neck. The noise of his screaming rose, tinnily, from out of the phone, and a second later his blood covered most of the screen. Dave grabbed the phone out of Meghana’s hand and threw it onto the floor, and then, with a surprising amount of force, he pushed the man in the England shirt away.

  ‘Just fuck off okay mate? Now. Otherwise I’ll get the landlord.’

  ‘Ooo will you.’ The man in the En
gland shirt began to affect a clipped, upper-class accent. ‘Will you get the landlord sir?’

  The man in the England shirt started to stumble backwards, out of the room, pausing, just before he reached the exit, to pick up his phone, which was now lying in the doorway. He put it in his pocket, stood up and looking at Meghana said, ‘You want to stop the war you black bitch? Then stop the fucking war.’

  And then he disappeared.

  01.09.2004

  One of the lads couldn’t find me on the list of new boys. I explained the Irish spelling and from then on I was Paddy. Considering Biffer, Thrombo and Billy the Stain also underwent a baptism of dirt this week, you could say I got off lightly. It’s just that, well, I’m not sure it suits me ...

  Antiphon

  MEGHANA BUDANNAVAR ARRIVED BACK AT the house she shared with Matthew, another PhD student with whom she had nothing in common, shut the door and removed her shoes. She had never particularly liked living in Forest Fields, and had never been cool or edgy enough to find the used condoms and syringes that littered the alleyway behind the house anything other than depressing. But she appreciated how close it was, both to the university and to town, and it was cheap, so she put up with it. Plus, she could never decide on anywhere else that she wanted to live, considering everywhere else to be either too bourgeois or just as common.

  Meghana padded up the stairs hoping Matthew wouldn’t hear her, and then as soon as she was in her bedroom she burst into tears. She had been brought up to believe that the man in the England shirt, along with all those like him, was ignorant, unhappy and therefore to be pitied; and yet the memory of the two masked figures, or more specifically, the person they had slaughtered, was now splattered, irrevocably, across the insides of her skull.

  She wiped her face and turned on her computer. Then she googled ‘Jihadist beheading’ and half a dozen video links immediately appeared. She let the mouse hover uncertainly over them, as if daring herself to confront the violence that each strip of characters contained, before moving it back up to the navigation bar and typing out her usual ‘www.blueyonder.co.uk’. She signed into her account, and clicked on her only unread email, which was from her father:

  Dear Meghu,

  Just a quick note to wish you well and let you know that Auntie Chanda has updated the blog. Also, your mother has been to see the astrologer – who says that you will have some news for us soon.

  With love,

  Pappa X

  Which translated as:

  Dear Meghana who is still my baby,

  It is your duty to post a positive comment on Auntie Chanda’s blog – please do so as soon as possible to avoid bad feeling. Also, your mother has been told, by forces larger than we are, that you will soon become engaged.

  With love,

  Pappa X

  With some love and much duty, Meghana then typed ‘GoTeamBudannavar.blogspot.com’ into the navigation bar, and a picture of her cousin’s graduation ceremony appeared. Then she typed, ‘Congratulations to Sandeep! Good to have another engineer in the family! With love, Meghu X’ into the comments box underneath it, and returned to the wide blue yonder:

  Dear Pappa,

  I just had a quick look on Auntie’s blog and saw Sandeep’s graduation pics. I left a comment saying congratulations. I don’t know what news Mum is expecting, but glad to know that whatever it is it will be good – perhaps a distinction for my thesis?

  With love,

  Meghana X

  Which translated as:

  Dear Pappa who is inescapably my Pappa,

  I have done my duty as and when requested. Also I am not going to get engaged any time soon so please ask Mum to stop going on about it.

  With love (but grudgingly),

  Meghana X

  Meghana clicked on her Google search for ‘Jihadist beheading’ again, and ‘GoTeamBudannavar.blogspot.com’ again, and her emails again – each one of which made her feel a slightly different kind of queasy. Kathy had said that the Internet was the sea, whereas she herself had referred to it as an airport, but both of them had been wrong. The Internet, she now decided, was most definitely a web – and she was the fly it had caught.

  She wiped her face again and turned off her computer. What she really wanted was a cup of tea the way her mother made it, which was very sweet with lemon, but she didn’t want to go back downstairs until her eyes weren’t red or until Matthew left the house. She looked round her depressingly tidy bedroom, taking in the books filled with case studies, and the files filled with photocopies of them, all of which she had arranged alphabetically on the shelves, and then the rail rammed with clothes, and the piles of shoes on the floor, none of which had ever suited her. She had always been seen as one of the good girls at her school, not a geek exactly, but definitely a high-achiever, and she’d also been reasonably well liked without ever fully understanding why. Maintaining order in the shape of excessive tidiness had always helped to quell the fear that she might one day be exposed as being neither particularly good nor particularly deserving of popularity, in much the same way that all the clothes, which she continued to buy compulsively, might somehow solve the question of who she really was.

  ‘I need to put my right mind on the right things,’ she said out loud, and as she did so she felt the weight not of her hair but of her locket.

  Slowly, carefully, she opened it, removed the ishtalinga, and placed it in the centre of her palm. Slowly, carefully, she raised her hand until it was at eye level, and focused all her thoughts upon it, and then, only when everything inside of her was silent, did she begin to speak:

  Kala beda, Kola beda

  Husiya nudiyalu beda

  Muniya beda

  Anyarige asahya padabeda

  Thanna bannisa beda

  Idira haliyalu beda

  Ide anthranga shuddi

  Ide bahiranga shuddi

  Ide namma koodala Sangamdevana

  Olisuva pari

  Which almost translated as:

  Do not steal, do not kill

  Do not lie

  Do not get angry

  Do not demean others

  Do not glorify one’s self

  Do not hate others

  This purifies the internal self

  This purifies the external self

  This is the way to get the love of Kudalasangama

  Which would have translated as row upon row of curlicues had she been able to read, as well as speak Kannada, which she always did with her family, in Leicester.

  Kala beda, Kola beda

  Husiya nudiyalu beda—

  ‘Meg, I’m going to the shop, do you want anything?’ came Matthew’s voice from the other side of the door.

  Muniya beda

  Anyarige asahya padabeda—

  ‘I said I’m going to the shop do you want anything?’ he repeated, and then, ‘I SAID I’M GOING TO THE SHOP—’

  ‘I’M FINE THANKS MATT!’

  There was the sound of heavy footsteps and then the door slammed behind him, making the whole house shudder. A silence that wasn’t just inside her filled up the rest of her depressingly tidy room. Slowly, carefully, Meghana lowered her hand and put the ishtalinga back inside her locket. Then she stood up and padded back downstairs. She put the kettle on and made herself a cup of tea and then, without thinking, she took out her mobile and called Dave’s number.

  ‘Hey Meg, are you alright?’

  Straight away the man in the England shirt surged back into her brain, and after him the beheading and all the blood that, one way or another, had stained her. In the background she heard the door slam, and felt the whole house shudder, followed by the sound of Matthew trudging back upstairs.

  ‘Yes of course. Of course,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m fine now. I don’t know why I rang really.’

  ‘Oh well, seeing as you did, are you doing anything Wednesday?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Well I was thinking that maybe we could, err, that maybe we could go
for a drink . . . ?’

  Confession and Absolution

  KATARZYNA KWIATKOWSKA ATTEMPTED TO REARRANGE herself into a more comfortable position than the rather uncomfortable seats in the New College Media Hub allowed. Everything in the Media Hub, like everything everywhere, was becoming smaller and flatter, and generally being designed to take up less physical space, unlike the old monitor and accompanying hard drive that she had just managed to acquire free of charge as the result of this recent refurbishment, and which were now wedged between her knees for the rest of her session, until she could lug them onto the bus and then round to Margaret’s, so that Margaret could email Eoin whenever she wanted and not have to rely on static-filled phone calls anymore.

  ‘Okay so I’m going to give everyone ten more minutes to get organised and then we’ll begin the presentations,’ said Jackson, the Access to Media lecturer.

  Katarzyna and the other students looked up at him for a second and then back down at their computer screens.

  ‘Actually could we have twenty minutes?’ said the boy beside her.

  ‘Well the hand-in was officially one hour ago. So ten minutes is already kind of pushing it.’

  ‘But the Media Hub was closed at the weekend,’ said a girl whose attendance had averaged once a term so far. ‘So really we all need an extra two days.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said the boy. ‘I mean we should all have extensions really because of exten – extenuat . . . ’

  ‘Extenuating circumstances?’

  ‘Yeah that’s right.’

  ‘Alright then. Twenty minutes.’

  Jackson looked over at Katarzyna and sighed, and Katarzyna looked down at the monitor wedged between her knees. She knew that she was his favourite, in part because she was clever, but mainly because she always did her homework, and she knew too that both these things were embarrassing. Likewise, she knew that he would especially like her current project, ‘St Barnabas Cathedral: The Architecture of Belief’, because it sounded like something that Meg or Dave or another member of the bona fide middle classes might have written, even though it had actually not been written, but filmed, by her.