by Marele Day
When the fire was safely at its full strength, she let loose and blasted the full force of her rage and fury. The flames licking hungrily along the twigs and branches now swept through Iphigenia’s vision like the conflagrations of history. This was the fire that burnt midwives and saints, Joan and the other staked martyrs, scourged the heathen, witches and warlocks, the hellfire grave of the sinner, bereft of eternal rest.
Ignatius stood with his burnt hand under his jacket, for warmth, comfort and to keep his injury out of their sight. His throat was parched. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since the meal last night. He was a little shaky and wanted to sit down but felt awkward about joining them at the table without being asked. He felt relieved that they’d got the fire going again. Relieved and useless. Uselessness was not a feeling he enjoyed. ‘Well done,’ he said. If nothing else he could still mete out praise.
Iphigenia could see him through the waves of heat rising from the fire. Even with her clouded vision she could see. And she could smell. He had arrived with intention and he was departing with intention. He might leave but he wouldn’t leave them alone. He would put out more than their fire if he wasn’t stopped.
‘A cup of tea,’ she announced. ‘Carla, fetch some salve for our guest and a special tea.’ He started to demur but Iphigenia took no notice. ‘A nice big cup of stay-at-home.’
Carla could hardly believe her ears.
Away she went, trying to hide her glee. There were lots of special teas, some dried and stored, others freshly growing in the garden and Carla’s secret places. There were plants that kept insects away, plants that made you remember, that made you forget, plants that eased delivery of lambs, that aborted them, plants that soothed the body and soul, plants that made you run like a rabbit. And there was stay-at-home.
Stay-at-home had spiky serrated leaves. It had a different name in the pharmacopoeia, but Carla liked to give each plant her own special name. Stay-at-home grew slowly, one small spurt of growth a year and its flower, in the winter, resembled a rose. Its petals were pale green, almost white.
How wonderful that he had burnt his hand. Carla knew the sensation of burns, of cuts, the scratch of brambles as she ran through them seeking the passion of Christ. She knew the lightness of mind afterwards. Sometimes she even fainted. She recalled the sick in the stomach, the buzzing in her ears, a galaxy of dark stars pricking her vision, all preludes to the final fall into complete and utter black. Then she would wake up on the floor. This happened easily in the days when young Carla got her first blood. How wondrous to discover blood trailing from her like the miracle of saints. Then she grew stronger and she had to do a lot to induce the fainting: starve herself, make incisions to let the blood out. All with careful secrecy because the sisters did not like Carla’s miracles. In the end she had grown bored. Miracles were a lot of trouble and there were other ways to be flooded in God’s ecstasy.
Carla often made up mixtures and potions but rarely did she have a chance to test their efficacy. And fancy Iphigenia suggesting! She took a good pinch of stay-at-home then crushed some lavender flowers into it to disguise its bitter taste. Carla hummed a little nursery tune as she went about her work. Occasionally a word popped out of her mouth—roam, home, bread, dead. She sniffed the mixture and added a tiny bit more stay-at-home. It was done.
And now for the salve. Carla opened the corner cupboard where she kept her salve herbs, laid out like an apothecary’s cabinet. It hadn’t always been like this. In Carla’s childhood this room was the bakehouse. She would sit on a wooden stool, helping Sister Cook peel vegetables, Sister Cook with her sleeves rolled up, arms speckled brown and glistening with sweat. Sister Cook had watery eyes and more than one chin. Friar Tuck. One of Robin Hood’s band of merry men. Carla thought of the sisters as her band of merry men.
Carla remembered the dark cupboard of her childhood, the cupboard in the corner. Corners were places thick with whispers, urgencies, brown dusty things. Spiders built webs in corners. Motes of dust which had danced golden in the late-afternoon light went there to die.
The cupboard was used for the game of bread-in-the-oven. Usually it was Carla who suggested it but sometimes the nuns themselves initiated the game. ‘Ho there, Carla, time to play bread-in-the-oven.’ And into the cupboard she went. The nuns wanted to play this game even when Carla wasn’t in the kitchen and they had to come and fetch her specially. Carla did think it was a bit strange because she noticed that whenever this happened, special preparations were going on, a time when the nuns would surely be too busy for games. Cloths on tables, flowers in vases, brass polished. A quickened beat, a flurry in the slow daily round of the sisters. They popped her in and shut the cupboard door. It was very quiet and there was no sound at all except for a buzzing in her ears. Nothing to see save the swirl of dark formless souls and nothing to feel but the damp settling on her. She liked it in there, it was small and quiet, like having a special friend. When she thought she was cooked she knocked on the door for Sister Cook to let her out.
But one time no-one came. She banged and banged till her knuckles were raw. She was frantic, she knew what happened to bread if you left it too long. It burnt. Burnt till it was black as death. Black and smoking. The cupboard became hot with her panting breath. She was in Hell, she could feel the tongues of fire lapping at her.
The hard cupboard walls melted in the heat, became red, spongy and wet, she was in a boiling sea. Her eyes squashed shut, body curled up like a worm, the tiny hands banging but no sound coming. She wanted to scream but was unable to do a simple thing like bring her lips apart.
Then the expulsion began, her whole body urgent with movement, bursting to be free. Crawling, swimming, pushing against the spongy dark walls. Finally she passed through. She was out. With a shock she felt cold dry air. She took in a breathful of it and gave it back in a scream.
And then there was light. A thousand pinpricks of it in the firmament. Huge hands wiping pulp, stickiness from her face and body, cleaning her tiny eyes. She followed an ancient path, the map of it deep within her, till her tiny mouth latched onto the scent of milk and coaxed out its warm sweet fluid. The beached mother body on which she lay, rose and fell in great waves, gentle respite from its labours. Mary and her Child. No midwives, no wise men beneath the myriad stars, just the watchful eye of the beasts of the earth.
Later, years later, when Carla had come back to look for the thing that had happened to her in the cupboard, she found it had become an innocuous place. A small tidy cupboard with no hidden panels, no trapdoor, the walls quite solid and not a bit spongy. It was hardly big enough for a cat to crawl into let alone a child. Nevertheless, she had smoked it out with slow-burning leaves to expel any residue of her dark brown episode.
The pot was boiling merrily when Carla arrived back in the courtyard, unctuous green salve in one hand and special tea in the other. A few sheep had idled by. Iphigenia and Margarita were sitting at the table, the man standing to the side with his hand still under his jacket. The Three Bears. Carla, Iphigenia and Margarita were the three bears and now they had a Goldilocks. He had wandered into their forest while they were away at prayer. He had tried the porridge but it was too hot and he had burnt his hand. He had broken something, not a chair, but he had broken something. And he was about to run away and leave the damage. But the story didn’t say what happened next. How the bears went after Goldilocks and ate her, because bears do eat little girls who wander into their forest.
‘Let me mend your hand,’ said Carla in her sweetest voice.
‘I will fetch the water,’ sang Iphigenia.
‘And I will fetch the cloth,’ said Margarita.
‘No, it’s perfectly all right,’ he protested, ‘I don’t think it will blister. Just a bit of redness, that’s all.’
He brought his hand out of his jacket and turned it over and back to show it still worked. ‘Better to be safe,’ said Margarita.
‘For your long journey,’ said Iphigenia.
‘
Come. Sit,’ said Carla.
It was a storm in a teacup, but it was the way of old women to fuss. Still, if it made them feel better, the least Ignatius could do was oblige. He sat.
He watched the pouring of water for tea, watched the unction being applied to his hand. It made him feel drowsy, a pleasurable drowsiness he felt at the barber’s when all he had to do was lean back and let Rodney massage his head.
They wrapped his hand up snugly and although he felt soothed, it was as if the hand didn’t belong to him.
Carla poured the tea into a mug and held it up to his lips. A sharp whiff of something as the steam hit his nostrils then it was lost in a cloud of lavender.
‘Thank you, I can manage.’ They were going a little overboard treating him like an invalid. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t use his free hand to pick up the mug. Still, he reflected, it was fortuitous the way things had turned out. All this fussing over him, it meant they would be parting on good terms. He could put up with it for fifteen minutes. The gesture made him feel magnanimous. He sipped his tea.
‘Bread,’ said Margarita, who looked the picture of health. Strange he hadn’t noticed it before. Her round beady eyes bright as newly minted coins, her cheeks red and shiny as apples.
He took the offered bread but instead of eating it he put it in his pocket. He rationalised this unusual action by reminding himself that he needed something to sustain him on the long walk down to the car.
‘Apple?’ coaxed Margarita. Now her head looked more like a pumpkin, a Halloween pumpkin. She was holding an apple in front of him. So he hadn’t been mistaken before, there had been apples. But this wasn’t red and shiny like her cheeks. It was a wizened winter apple. When he bit into it, it tasted sweet and mellow as an autumn afternoon.
Then he felt stuffy. He pulled at his collar. He needed to go outside, to get some fresh air. He couldn’t really understand why, he already was outdoors. He needed more, he needed to stand on a rocky outcrop and have a gale-force wind in his face. His hand lay on the table wrapped in its swaddling. He seemed not to be able to move it. He would leave it behind if necessary. Stomach cramps now and an excess of saliva. A gob of it hit the table like a tear. Oh God, he was dribbling. ‘Shock … burn … drink plenty of fluids.’ The three faces, Halloween pumpkins with cut-out mouths, the words spitting out like pips.
His mouth tasted bitter, he lurched, his hand sprang off the table and the poultice fell away. He lunged towards the air through the archway then up came the apple, tasting on its return journey like bad cider. Then he heard the ringing and saw Carla’s dark stars of ecstasy. But he was sick, very sick, and ecstasy was the last thing on his mind.
His head was aching, his mouth was dry and everything was far too bright. He had the world’s worst hangover. He closed his eyes in the vain hope that when he opened them again he would find himself back at the palace. But he wasn’t. The three were still there, standing by the bed like nurses.
‘Fell …’
‘And hit your head …’
‘Vinegar and brown paper.’
Did they really say that or was he hallucinating? He opened his eyes wide, needing to stay alert. How had he gone from a simple burn to being bedridden? Was this his body’s way of telling him to slow down? He thought all that listening to your body business was a lot of mumbo jumbo. But perhaps this excursion, the uncomfortable beds, lack of decent food, had taken more of a toll than he realised. Thus weakened, the shock of what had been a superficial burn had a greater effect. He remembered his own father falling off a ladder, getting up complaining of nothing more than a slight bump on the head, then having to be rushed to hospital with concussion.
He looked around the room. It was not the same one as before. It was larger, there was a wicker chair in the corner with a neat pile of garments on it, pictures of saints on the walls and the bed, though not the springy mattress with fresh crisp sheets he had at the palace, was at least softer than the straw-covered ironing board of a bed he’d slept on the last couple of nights. He was lying on layer upon layer of sheepskins. On top of the bed, covering him, was a blanket with coloured patterns knitted into it. A Bible scene at first glance.
He felt his burnt hand. Or rather, he didn’t feel it. The redness had cleared and it was no longer tender to the touch. Miraculously it had healed. The nuns’ folk remedy had worked, at least on the hand. Pity it wasn’t strong enough to stave off the consequences of shock. His stomach was cramped and his head overcome with waves of pain. He felt as if he’d spent the night in a threshing machine.
Margarita pressed a bowl to his lips, tilting it so that the liquid moistened them. His tongue came out and gathered the liquid in. It tasted like clear water though his taste buds were not at their most objective, neither were his critical faculties. But his instincts were strong, his body needed water. He brought his hands up to replace Margarita’s, tilting the bowl up further and further till eventually it obscured his face completely.
So hungry was he for the bowl, so greedily did he slurp at the water that it trickled onto his chin, his neck and right the way down; a sensation that he remained unaware of till he felt the cold furrow extend as far as his navel. He quickly put his hands under the cover and felt for his clothes but all he came across was his goosepimply flesh. He gulped. He was in a nun’s cell, the cell of the abbess judging by the size of it, and he was naked. He looked wildly around the room. The garments neatly piled on the chair were his.
He was grateful for feeling so poorly, otherwise his embarrassment would have been even more acute. It was all so preposterous. He sank lower under the blanket as if that would hide his nakedness, but of course it was too late. They had undressed him. They had looked, they had seen and they may have even … He felt his genitals shrivelling up, trying to hide at the mere thought. He found small comfort in the fact that they were old women. He’d heard that the older ones often make the lewder jokes.
He felt weak, helpless and humiliated, the way he had as a young seminarian when he’d had his appendix removed. The nurse was young and buxom, freckles smattered across her nose and cheeks, a cheery smile and dimpled arms, a country girl fed on milk and potatoes. She had come to shave him, drawn a curtain round the bed and asked him to pull down his pyjama trousers. ‘Now then,’ she’d said, ‘don’t be embarrassed on my account, I’ve done this millions of times.’ She was too young to have done it millions of times. Was it really necessary to verbalise the embarrassment? His penis had shrivelled up so small on that occasion that it was lost in the tangle of hair.
Till her hand brushed against his groin. Then the curious penis popped out. The warmth of her through the surgical glove excited him. Her warm rubber touch. He looked to the ceiling, glued his eyes there during the whole procedure and tried to quell the rising sap with furious prayer. ‘Thy rod and thy staff …’ one of his favourite invocations, had to be quickly dismissed. In fact he had started several familiar prayers with their words of strong, fatherly support and dismissed them all, finally deciding to direct his will at the fly spots on the ceiling and hope for the best.
He knew it wasn’t working when he felt his stiffened member find the girl’s hand, as if it had an inbuilt radar device for searching its target. He flinched back from it, his face reddening. ‘It’s only natural. At least you’re normal,’ she said, as if that was a consolation. Of course it was natural, of course he was normal, he didn’t need to be reassured of that. Normal but without the liberties of a normal man.
The Church was ablaze with the celibacy issue and while he wasn’t an active participant, he stood, as a matter of principle, for Progress. The Church had to look to its own future if it was not to become a moribund institution. Hence the economic rationalism, hence the sale of properties. As for where he personally stood or what he had to gain from the celibacy issue he wasn’t sure. He had entered the seminary as a young man with a bright future in mathematics, a gift that he’d dedicated to the Church. He was sure that, had he chosen the path
of the family man, he would have found a good woman willing to share it with him. It would be quite nice to have a family. He saw himself at the head of the table, the youngsters’ heads bowed in grace, all washed and polished, the wife ladling out soup. He couldn’t see her face but saw quite clearly her delicate long-fingered hands.
But he had chosen otherwise. He had never felt all that comfortable with girls. They called him names. He was mortified when the girls from the neighbouring school tipped his cap, and he had shied away instead of taking part in the good-natured banter, the rough and tumble. He could never quite tell whether they were genuinely interested when they gave him difficult mathematical problems to solve or whether they were nudging each other behind his back.
Sexual release at his own hand was not the issue. It had not sent him blind, nor even remotely dimmed his sight. At times he was quite elaborate, stroking different parts of his body first before taking the matter in hand. No, as far as he understood it, the issue at the heart of celibacy was intimacy. How could you fully give yourself to God if there was another?
‘Better?’ asked Iphigenia. Their guest appeared to be smiling.
‘Thank you,’ he said. He was feeling a little brighter than when he’d first awoken but he didn’t think he was yet ready to travel. He could put up with their ministrations for another day, then he would be off.
‘Margarita will watch over you tonight,’ announced Iphigenia.
Watch over him? As if he was dying? He didn’t need that. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he assured them.
‘In case you need anything,’ said Margarita. ‘I’ll sit in the corner.’
He was hardly in a position to argue. Still, it was only for one night. It wasn’t as if he had a chronic illness. A bit of rest and he’d be fine. Night. It was early morning when he burnt his hand, now it was night. But which night? He was an organised man who could account for every minute of his day. Now there was a gap. He had stopped and time had gone on without him. He needed to catch up.