by Marele Day
‘There had been something itching Briar Rose that day, the day that she decided to explore a part of the castle she had never explored before. She went right up as far as the steps would go till she came to an old wooden door. She reached out to push it but before her hand made contact the door opened. “Come in,” said the voice of an old woman who was sitting spinning. The curious girl entered and as soon as she stepped over the threshold she discovered that she was bleeding. She thought it very odd because she hadn’t touched anything, and the blood wasn’t coming from her hand. She entered the room and the door closed forever behind her. Then the thirteenth Wise Woman, for it was she who was spinning the fabric of life, explained to the woman newly emerged from the girl, the mystery of the body that bleeds but is not wounded. And she lived happily ever after.’ Carla sat down, feeling very satisfied and accomplished.
Had she not been so preoccupied with the storytelling she would have noticed him starting to fidget.
‘No, no,’ he protested, ‘she pricks her finger on the spindle and falls asleep for a hundred years, after which she is woken by the kiss of a handsome prince.’
They looked at him, taken aback.
Margarita put down her work and waved a needle at him. ‘Have you seen a spindle? No sharper than this knitting needle. Devil’s own job drawing blood with that!’
For a moment he thought she was going to jab him with it but Margarita fell back into silence, shaken by her own outburst.
‘No doubt you are right,’ he conceded, ‘about actual spindles. But the one in the story is purely symbolic.’
Carla watched the to and fro with excitement, waiting for what would happen next.
The time had come to put his foot down. He had to set these people right. It may only have been a children’s fairy tale but if they couldn’t get a childlike thing right what hope was there?
He stood up, pushing the chair back with his strong calves. ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’ he said with emphasis to let them know that was its proper name, ‘the Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on a spindle and fell asleep for a hundred years. The prince hacks his way through the brambles, finds the princess in her castle and kisses her back to life whereupon they marry and live happily ever after. End of story.’
Margarita’s mouth dropped open but it was Iphigenia who spoke. ‘Yes, Father,’ Iphigenia said, ‘you are quite right.’
Of course he was right, he didn’t need to be told by the likes of her. He had the weight of history behind him, thousands and thousands of years. Nevertheless, before he sat down, he felt something shift underfoot, the feeling he’d had as a child at the beach when the tide was going out.
Margarita lay rigid, gripping the sides of the bed. The room was spinning, she felt as if she was lying on a raft in a dark stormy sea. The darkness swirled around her, it hummed in her ears. Her heart was fluttering in her chest like a bird caught in a trap. Her whole being was trying to cope with the avalanche of events, the shadows of which were now flying around the room like dark, angular angels. Unbound, out of proportion, grotesque.
The priest was floating, horizontal, black and white like a reproduction in a book, his trousers crisp as knives, his collar gleaming around his neck like a fallen halo. The lamb hanging on the hook, dripping blood onto the Eucharist table, Agnes Teresa bumping into the man, bleating for her lamb. And out of the wide-open mouth of the man, in letters bright as scimitars, came the word ‘Devil’.
Despite the enormity of everything else, that was the worst of it. Never in all her time as a nun had Margarita uttered that word. It was a word exorcised from her vocabulary. And there it was, escaping across the threshold of her lips like a thief leaving a house. Something from long ago had spun loose in Margarita tonight, broken free and was giddying around her.
Margarita closed her eyes but still she could see the floating figures. She crept one hand up to her crucifix, holding it to her like a breastplate. ‘Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the Gospel.’ But it was Margarita who had opened her mouth boldly. ‘… the Devil’s own job drawing blood with that!’ As if the Devil’s job was hard. It was not. The Devil’s job was easy. It was the Lord’s job that was hard.
Whose work had Margarita been doing when she had slaughtered the lamb today? She had killed it to glorify her Lord yet she had caused the death of one of His creatures. She could still see the little lamb’s eye looking at her as she held it to slash its throat. Its little eye that God had placed at the side of its face so it could see what was creeping up behind. Lambs were prey. Hunting beasts had eyes in the front of their faces, to see the thing they stalked. Margarita’s eyes were in the front. She shared her origins with wolves, foxes and tigers, powerful muscular creatures, yet Margarita felt more like a sheep. She would be a sheep one day, an Agnes sister.
She liked her woolliness, she liked the routine. She had no room for new things and new people, even if they were priests. Her head was aching and there was a sour taste in her mouth. Perhaps the wine had soured in the bottle, so rarely did they drink it.
The floating figures dissolved into the fading night as the first thin tendrils of day entered the high window in Margarita’s cell. The crucifix under her hand was warm and glowing. Its warmth entered her heart and calmed her. He was just a minor interruption. He would leave soon. Silence would close over the visitor and he would never be mentioned again.
It was so exciting! Nothing like this had ever happened, not in her whole life! Not a sheep, not a nun, not a bird, not a spider. Not a saint, not a statue. A man of flesh and blood! His teeth were white, he was thin as a stick of liquorice, his skin was smooth like Jesus’, he was not wrinkled and rumpled like Margarita and Iphigenia. He was young. It was a long time since Carla had seen young.
First he had the form of a four-legged creature. In two blinks of an eye the beast of the earth became a man and walked, looked at his piece of paper and came forth to meet them. ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.’
She knew straightaway it wasn’t a sheep. It was more like a dog, a lean black dog, but it didn’t bark, bark, bark. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’ Carla would never forget it. She said the words over to herself, growling them the way he had, feeling her mouth open to let out the middle of the word, her lips coming together again to close off the sound. Now, lying on her bed, eyes wide open to the pinpoints of stars, the circle of moon, her body surging with excitement, Carla decided to weave him into the escapecoat. But later. Iphigenia thought herself so smart, so clever, showing no surprise, as if she knew he was coming all along. But it was Carla to whom God had first revealed Father John. He was hers.
Carla rolled off the bed and down on all fours. Around her tiny room she went, saying, ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ to the floor, her eyes bright as night owls. Then she stood up, the way he had done, wiped imaginary blood from her face and held her hand up in the darkness to smell it.
She let her body go soft and fell lightly to the floor like a baby. She’d done this lots of times, it hardly hurt at all. Babies didn’t hurt themselves when they fell this way, it was just the surprise that made them cry. Carla didn’t cry, she wasn’t a baby. She lay there on her side for a moment, one leg over the other, one eye looking out at the night, one cheek against the stone worn smooth over the years by the wash of her body.
She was ready now. She lifted the stone and took out the escapecoat, and spread it out around her. She had a tiny piece of meat from his fork. Under her fingernail a crust of blood she had salvaged from the trough where he had cleaned his scratches. She blended the two, moulding with her fingers. She picked up the threads of the coat and worked the new element in. In the warmth of her hands it seemed to come to life and grow
. Bigger and bigger. She caressed its contours, teased a detail out, blended other pieces together. Then it was done. She looked upon her creation.
He had the gentle eyes of Jesus, the skin, the face of suffering and the wounds of Christ. Out of his mouth came the words that had changed the story, ‘she pricks her finger on the spindle and falls asleep for a hundred years, after which she is woken by the kiss of a handsome prince’.
Carla slipped into the escapecoat. She swirled it around so that the image hovered above her. ‘My Prince, my Saviour,’ prayed Carla, lifting her arms and pressing him to her. She kissed those flimsy, gauzy lips. ‘Wake me from my sleep and lift me unto Your Rapture,’ she whispered into his mouth. She kissed the lips again but the Lord remained silent and immobile. It didn’t matter, she would try again another night. The girl in Father John’s story had waited a hundred years. Sister Carla would wait a thousand for her Lord. He would come one day, it was prophesied. Or Carla would go to him. She took the coat off, folded it small then put it back in the little hole under the stone. Carla liked to bury things. Bury and dig them up again.
Though she had smelled him coming it still hadn’t prepared Sister Iphigenia for his actual arrival. He had not stumbled in by accident—he had a map. It had been so long since someone had come that Iphigenia had largely forgotten about life outside. The monastery was Iphigenia’s world. It was filled with the light of the Lord in the day and His darkness at night. The stars in the sky were His eternal vigilance and the earth the provider of His bounty. ‘And there shall be in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever abomination, or maketh a lie; but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.’
What was his purpose here? Was he an emissary of the Lord or a thing that defileth or maketh a lie? Priests are from the Lord but this one had said Devil. Sister Iphigenia sniffed the air. The smell of fear entered her nose but it wasn’t the man. It was Margarita. She smelled strongly like an animal caught in a bramble—confused, afraid, wondering how it got there and whether it was going to get out.
Iphigenia watched the steady rhythm of her breast rising and falling, feeling the passage of air in and out of her nostrils. Solid as a rock. A slight queasiness in the stomach, that was all, probably on account of the meat being too fresh and the wine too old.
An unexpected burp rumbled up. The sour taste of it stung the back of her throat. A bit of heartburn, a bit of queasiness, it was to be expected at her age. What had he said? He thought the monastery was uninhabited. Perhaps he was on holiday or on retreat. He’d said monastery in a peculiar fashion. It had sounded like property.
The feeling of queasiness had now diminished in favour of a small headache that intermittently stabbed at a precise point on her left temple. It was the thinking. It was trying to leap from what she knew to what she didn’t know, could only guess at. She wasn’t used to it. For years she had known every detail of her life, the slow turn of the seasons, budding, flowering, withering, dying, green shoots of grass being eaten by the sheep, digested, excreted into clusters of pellets to fertilise more grass, more sheep. And so it went on as the Lord made it so.
She turned her nose in the direction of the priest. He’d said he was so tired he could sleep on a clothesline. The nuns had no clothesline, leaving their clothes out to dry on bushes on the rare occasions they washed them. They made up a bed for him with fresh straw and a woolly blanket. He insisted on blocking off the door so that the sheep couldn’t wander in. His smell came in a regular pulse. Sleeping like a baby. Breathing in the monastery air and subtly altering it in his breathing out.
The nuns are in the courtyard praying when Ignatius enters. He pauses for a moment, contemplating.
‘Where two or three of you gather to pray in my name, there you will find me,’ said Jesus. Ignatius watches them mouth their prayers, sacred passwords to the Kingdom within, a country of infinite riches to the pilgrim. Their heads are bowed, the words spoken into their hearts, he sees the breath falling damply on their chests. Into the silence shapes are cut and the Spirit solidifies into form. Three hermit nuns, the perfect image of mystic Christianity.
The twitter of an early-morning bird interrupts his reverie. Such a pretty little tableau reflects Ignatius before going about his business.
God doesn’t have their full undivided attention this morning. The nuns feel the gaze of the man on their backs, the low slanted rays of the sun invading the courtyard like arrows.
Under the familiar liturgies, Sister Iphigenia is trying to decide a course of action. Or non-action. Today is Shearing Day. Should they proceed as normal or should they entertain their guest? A priest has never stayed overnight. They came with the tide and went back with the tide.
Iphigenia knew he had entered the courtyard but he did not kneel down with them. In the crisp morning he smells warm and vigorous, like a puppy dog after sleep. There is an odd chemical smell too. Like faded ink. His clothes are not made of wool.
There was a stirring of leaves as he entered the chapel. Carla, closest to the entrance, saw him go in and disappear, melding into the darkness as if his cloth was made from its fabric. In half shadow herself, she observed him move about, from pools of shadow to light, according to where the holes and gaps were. He stood squinting up at the sky, hand up like a visor, protecting his vision from the bright light of God. He moved into the shadow, hands on hips, looking upward, surveying the roof, the holes, the swallows nesting in the vaulting. Bats had made a home there too, sleeping like vampires now that the day had arrived. A white dart shot from heaven and landed with a splodge down the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Damn,’ he said and bent down for a leaf to wipe it off.
The nuns’ mouths stopped in mid-phrase at the word. It gonged out of the chapel, sonorous as a tolling bell. Carla’s eyes quickly returned to her hands, one curved over the other. As if to make up for the sudden suspension, their lips started moving in double time, the prayer engraved on their hearts now manifest in breathy whispers.
He was running his hand over the face of the Virgin Mary. Our Blessed Lady who had, like a miracle, sprouted vegetation from the accumulation of leaf mould and bird droppings on her head. A halo of green vines, in emulation of her Son’s crown of thorns. He pulled at it, to clear the profane from the sacred. The vine had taken root in the statue. He tried again but it did not yield. He yanked more firmly and this time pulled away not only the vine but the top of the statue’s head, all in one piece. His attempts to restore Our Lady to a more civilised, dignified state had resulted in a grotesque clumsy scalping. He looked with horror at the growth in his hand as if it was a lump of living flesh, and quickly replaced it, tamping it down as best he could. Then he brushed his hands together, wiping away the stain of earth.
The nuns finished their Matins and stood up, Carla venturing right to the doorway and looking in. When he became aware of their presence he headed back outside. ‘Well,’ he said, clapping his hands together decisively, ‘needs a bit of work.’
They didn’t quite know why he made this statement. Was he here to do repairs?
‘Well,’ said Carla, clapping her hands in imitation.
Nettle tea was poured into cups, bread was torn apart and chunks of cheese cut with a knife. The nuns ate in silence, their jaws rotating. The sheep had already started breakfast, in fact it was difficult to tell where one meal finished and the next one started with the Agnes sisters. For them life was one long meal. Birds twittering, the soft tearing of grass, the occasional thud as the knife sliced through the cheese and hit the table, it was a fine spring morning.
It unsettled him a little, the eyes watching, the silence. ‘And what’s on the agenda?’ he asked. The three mouths stopped chewing. A cud of wet bread dropped from Margarita’s mouth. He cleared his throat and tried again. ‘What is the routine for today?’
‘Shearing Day,’ announced Iphigenia. The chewing resumed.
‘Perhaps I can help?’ he offered, although he really wasn’t all that keen on
touching animals.
The nuns looked at him blankly.
Ignatius took their hesitancy for reluctance. He would have to tread carefully, he didn’t want to get them offside. He had barely crossed the causeway onto the island when the car had got stuck. He needed a hand to shift it, although he felt a little embarrassed having to ask three old women to help him. It wasn’t exactly a picnic walking up and down that hill. Or getting through all that gorse and the brambles surrounding the monastery. He wondered how they came in and out. Perhaps they didn’t. He seemed to remember that it had been an enclosed order.
He had tried to phone the Bishop as soon as he’d woken up. The mobile had crackled a bit then cut out. Still, it was better than last night when there’d been no action at all. He could go back to the car and recharge but he did need a bit more time here. Better to get the assessment done in one go. He didn’t fancy going down to the car and coming back up. It wasn’t just the climb, he doubted he’d be able to find his way in again. He’d already spent one night out in the open, going round in circles before realising the futility of trying to continue in the dark. He’d waited till daylight but it wasn’t much better. Even with a map he’d only stumbled in by chance.
He remembered one of his uncles leaving batteries in a warm place to revive them. Perhaps that would work. All he needed was enough power for one phone call. He looked up at the sun then around the courtyard. He walked over to a flagstone, felt its warmth and lay the battery down.
When he stood up he found the three of them standing right behind him. ‘Solar power,’ he joked. There was no response. ‘I’ll just walk around, I won’t interfere. Let me know if I can give you a hand.’