Seeking Sanctuary

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘So, what do you know about shagging, then?’ Kim said.

  ‘You could put it on the back of a postage stamp.’

  She was busying herself about the sink and Kim, looking at the deftness of her movements as well as the pink blush of her face, wondered how the two personalities she had could be reconciled to one another. Therese was sexy and impossible to understand.

  ‘How fucking old are you, Therese? Don’t you think you should have given it a try before saying you’d never do it?’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘Twenty-one, never been shagged, and a bloody nun. You’re every bloke’s wet dream, you are. Bloody disgrace.’

  ‘So you tell me. Can’t say I miss it. Look where it’s got you. Two kids and no money.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Funny, you’re not like your sister, then. She gets around, I reckon. Shaggable, both of you.’

  ‘I know. I worry about her, and she worries about me. Daft, isn’t it?’

  Kim crashed the last plate into place. ‘I should like someone to explain to me,’ she said, ‘well, I’d like you to explain to me, why someone like you who’s got looks and brains and tits should want to keep it all under wraps.You could get rich and lucky with looks like yours.You wouldn’t even need to shag for it. Beats me. Oh, Treesa, lay off, will you?’

  Therese was doing her catwalk, parading past the cooker with the exaggerated pelvic thrust of a model, hands on undulating hips, head thrown back and her wide mouth pursed in a kiss. She flung herself into a chair, lounged against the back, ran her hands through her hair, crossed her legs, ran her hands down the sides of her body, hitched up her skirt to show her knees and then lowered one eyelid in a vampish wink. Kim screamed with laughter.

  ‘Yeah, just like that. Oh, you slay me, you do. Christ, I’d kill for legs like yours.’

  The distant hammering resumed. The dishwasher rumbled.

  ‘But you aren’t going to get away with it, Sister.You never answer a question, you. Come on, you’ve been a holy nun for a year, you’ve got a bloody lifetime of answering questions, so you might as well start with me. Why the fuck are you doing it? Why?’

  Therese sat up straight, adjusted her skirt and straightened her face. An expressive face, designed for laughter, although at other times, as blank as an empty page.

  ‘Oh, Kim, you’re as bad as Anna. I never thought it would be so difficult to understand or, at least, respect. There isn’t a choice, not for me. I dreamed of a life like this, I dreamed of it, when other girls would dream of men and money and Lord knows what. I’m not giving anything up. Nothing I want, anyway.’ She drummed her fingers on the table, seeking the right words and knowing that none would do. ‘Don’t you see? If you dedicate your life to God, then it means that every single thing you do has value.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘It means every single thing has a purpose. I might hate scrubbing pans, but if I offer it to God, it has a purpose. It has a value. And I myself have a purpose. I have a straight line to follow. Everything I do is for the greater glory of God, and that makes me joyful. It’s so simple, Kim. It means I can endure anything and I don’t need approval from anyone, even though I’m only human and I want to be liked. It means I don’t need to be loved . . .’

  ‘Approval? Where do you get all your long words? And don’t tell me you don’t need to be loved. Everyone does. Except your bloody sister.’

  ‘I am loved, Kim. I’m loved by a father and a brother, whose guidance I can trust with absolute conviction, which is more than most people could ever say. And I got my faith and my vocation from my mother.’

  The fridge door slammed. ‘Blimey, I got two beltings a week from mine. Did she also teach you to cook?’

  ‘Nutrition and contemplation. Also singing.’

  ‘But nothing about shagging?’

  ‘Come on, Kim, what mother ever teaches her daughter that? She got us books, she made us read, she made us learn and she taught us to pray . . . Even Anna can’t shake that.’

  ‘I can’t get my kids to sit still.’

  Therese laughed, scratched her head. Three golden hairs fell on to the table and she brushed them away. However she got her hair to gleam like that with that rotten, cheap shampoo they all used in their crappy bathrooms, Kim never knew. It was a greater mystery than the whole of religious life.

  ‘I don’t know how she managed. But we were very ill, you know, Anna and I. We didn’t leave the house for four years. That’s when we learned to pray.’

  She jumped up from the table with the spring of a dancer, flourished a duster from out of her pocket and flicked it round Kim’s head. Kim giggled and wrenched it away.

  ‘Go and find Mr Shaggable, Kim,’ Therese said. ‘Stop him tempting Sister Agnes into mortal sin, and be nice to Joseph. It’s her feast day and she’s feeling her age.’

  ‘She’s a miserable old cow.’

  ‘No, she’s not. She’s seventy-five, forgotten more than she remembers and I think she has a drink problem. Don’t you women of the world notice anything?’

  It was a big, overbright world that morning. On balance, when it came to the shift work she did (Anna called it shifty work), she preferred to work at night. Up on the rooftop at eight o’clock in the morning, the view into the convent garden was as misty as if someone had lit a fire. There was a fog about the place, an early, misplaced, rogue sense of autumn, as if the mist, which belonged in a field, had been dumped in the wrong place in the middle of the wrong town and lingered there, looking uncomfortable. It was as if it knew it did not belong, but could not find another place to go. Edmund was visible in the unravelling threads of fog, unconscious of it, although from the height of her roof, Anna could see his confusion as he moved away from his over-large shed, which also seemed out of place. He was looking for something he could not find. His bumbling progress was mesmerising to her tired eyes; he looked like a lazy bumblebee. The sun promised to shine and she did not want to move. She watched him get down on to his knees to retrieve something from under a bush, and watched him again while he picked himself up without damage. Maybe he was praying. He carried something cupped in his palms towards the statue of St Michael, where Matilda so often sat in summer, but never this early in the morning. Edmund’s bent posture foretold the imminence of autumn. In May, she had seen him out there at dawn, standing as still and upright as a soldier, mesmerised by the music of the dawn chorus, and she knew his secret; he had never queried her presence and she loved him for that. Anna looked out for the Golden Boy and could not see him at all. It was time to go to work.

  Compucabs’ office was a mile away. A brisk walk, a bus ride, a run, sometimes a combination. She worked five shifts a week, three nights, two days, eight hours a time among the employees, who were all treated with suspicion until they had turned up regularly for months on end and worked their unsociable hours. Payment was per shift and there was no payment for absentees. Each of them was a mouthpiece at the end of a phone, connecting someone who wanted a taxi to someone who was driving it. That simple. Anna entered a big, open-plan office with fifty people clamped like cars into their tiny, individual stations, each with a headphone, mouthpiece and screen. The seat at her station was still warm from the last incumbent and the phone rang immediately. Somehow the missal had crept back into her knapsack. She put it on the desk, hoping someone would notice, unable to get over her unreasonable expectation that the first call of each shift would be personal. Someone out of the blue would know she was there and would call to say hello.

  ‘Hello, Compucabs, how can I help you?’

  Which was, she thought, a foolish greeting. There was only one form of help they could offer and it came in the form of a taxi. They were either phoning to ask for one, or phoning to complain that the one they had ordered had failed to arrive, and it was only in the latter kind of conversation that she had to employ charm. Otherwise tact was sufficient, even in emergencies.

  ‘Can I have your account number, please? And the ac
count name? Same name for the passenger? Do you want him to come to the door?’

  Anna liked the fact that it was all so repetitive. She was hired for being a voice, which spoke first to a customer, then to a driver, while her fingers typed the details on to the screen, flying across the keyboard, faster than she could read.

  ‘Paddington Station, you said? Shall I give you the job number?’

  Conversations with the drivers were equally brief and she had trained herself out of any show of annoyance to become a valued veteran after eighteen months. There was nothing else she felt fit to do. Few lasted as long, although some seemed to have been there for ever. Stop-gap job, well-paid, no questions asked. Inside this room, with its buzz of repetitive words, she felt she had gained approval, and that however simple the routine was, she had mastered it entirely and won respect. The whole place reminded her of a well-disciplined school classroom where no child teased another.

  They were friends. They chatted in a scruffy, smoke-filled restroom at the back during teabreaks, where the opaque fog of nicotine was sometimes undercut by the smell of dope when Jon was there and he thought no one would notice, although they all noticed and no one cared. You could be a serial killer, a turbanned sheikh, an ancient tart or a shepherd from Outer Mongolia and no one would care. Ravi read his battered scripture book and drank nothing but water, saying little, other than into his mouthpiece, but he smiled at her, exclusively. Anna always wanted to talk to Ravi and sensed that he might have liked to talk to her, from the way he eyed her from beneath his fierce black eyebrows, but so far it was confined to pleasantries and a shy, mutual awareness. Instead she talked to Jon the smoker, and Sylla, the Chinese girl, who always brought some knitting, fashioning in between calls a succession of tiny white garments for babies that she was always willing to describe and Anna to admire. She and Ravi were the only ones who always carried a book. Perhaps that gave them something in common. Maybe Sister Jude’s missal, another book of prayer, would finally break the ice. Amid the frenetic activity in the open-plan room with the muted buzz of voices, it was a peaceful, intimate place without scope for rivalry or rows. They could only be as good as one another, they were all paid exactly the same and there was a sense of camaraderie at night.

  Which was one of the reasons why she preferred the night shift, especially in summer when it left the day free to sleep in the sun on the roof. She found it easier to sleep in the day; the night was crowded with images, while afternoon siestas were sound, sound sleep. Anna did not relish sleep and the dreadful waste of time it was, did not even like her own bed and knew it was because Therese and she had spent so much time lying down a whole, separate lifetime ago: a great, yawning hole, which left them incomplete, gullible, untouchable, out of sync with the rest of the world, alien to their contemporaries and only at home with strangers. Warped, somehow. At least, she was.

  The day slid by quickly.

  ‘Good afternoon, Compucabs, how can I help you?’

  ‘I want a taxi.’ It was him, again.

  She smiled. ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place, sir. What was the account number?’

  ‘Haven’t got one.’

  ‘Might take a little longer in that case. Have you ever thought of opening an account with us, sir?’

  Account holders had priority. They had to pay for the journey as soon as it was booked, even if they changed their minds. Drivers preferred them: payment was guaranteed; less chance of a drunk en route to an unpleasant destination at the far end of a back alley.

  ‘I don’t want an account, I want a taxi. I think I want a taxi.’

  ‘Right you are. From where?’

  She knew from the voices when the use of ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ was going to soothe. She could pick up the nuances of anxiety, inebriation, arrogance, loneliness. She knew that a twenty-four-hour number prominently displayed in the London telephone directory attracted the lonely and the cranks, and there was training on the subject too, drummed into them from day one. Get rid of them, quick; the lonely were losers, they did not have cash. Get them off the line; time is money. But Anna could not resist the voices. She was a sucker for voices.

  ‘Do I need a taxi?’ the voice asked. An old voice, full of tiredness and indecision. A voice as old as Sister Jude’s and so reminiscent of it, she was suddenly moved. Probably an old man, staring at a page in the directory, wondering why he had picked up the phone at all. Nothing like the brash, confident voices, bellowing into mobiles, wanting transport now, now, now.

  ‘Are you going somewhere nice?’ Anna asked pleasantly. ‘Only you might be a bit late for lunch.’

  It was the slow time of the day, one forty-five, when half of the population were either eating or thinking of it. She had a sudden yearning to be one of those people, sitting in a restaurant, eating whatever she liked and the only person in the group who could translate the menu. The telephone line crackled with silence. A sigh.

  ‘I never go anywhere.’

  ‘Why not? It’s a lovely day out there. At least it was. Is it raining yet? The forecast was for rain, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t raining yet. Yes, I’ll do that. Yes, I’ll go out.’

  ‘Will you be wanting a taxi, then, sir?’

  ‘Whatever for? I’ll walk.’

  ‘Have a very nice day. ’Bye.’

  A variation on his last conversation, poor old thing. Anna had taken calls from people who dreamed of getting out of the house, and used the calling of a taxi to fulfil an unfulfillable wish. Called it then cancelled it, because they knew they could not move. Businessmen called taxis in the middle of meetings as a way of encouraging the meeting to end, dreaming of getting away. This old gent, whom she visualised with grey hair to go with his somehow artificially refined voice, was merely muddled and she hoped he lived in comfort with someone to tie his shoelaces before he went out. The spookiest callers were in the middle of the night shift, one, two or three in the morning, lonely or drunk or drugged, forgetful of where they were and unable to quote either a meeting place or a destination, and even when they irritated her, she could sometimes smell their fear, prised information out of them with infinite patience and hated it when she had to leave them on the side of the road. They haunted the rest of the shift. At least the lonely callers, who simply wanted to talk, phoned from indoors.

  Ravi passed by her station on his way and placed a paper cup of water in front of her, pausing only to smile. So much went into a smile. It occurred to her to wonder if they were the only two in the room who ever thought about God and she had worked out that he must think about God, for him to carry his prayerbook with him, refusing to part with it except when he went to the lavatory and left it by his phone. Maybe she should look at his prayerbook, find a clue in it as to how to conduct daily life better than she did. Maybe other people’s scriptures were better than the ones she abhorred. She knew when people were sad, or tired or hungry, but she was otherwise ignorant. The sense of it overwhelmed her. She was twenty-two and she felt like a stupid baby.

  In the slack hours, right up to a fortnight before, Anna would phone Sister Jude. Sister Jude had the dispensation of a phone by her bed, purely for receiving calls, never for the expense of making them. Anna would phone and tell her jokes, infantile communications to punctuate Jude’s insomnia, instead of the urgent requests for information she had wanted to make. Instead of asking, What was my mother really like? Do you know where my money comes from? Why, if you believe in God, are you so frightened to die? she would say, Hi, Jude, it’s me. Have you heard the one about the Catholic priest on the aeroplane just about to make a forced landing? Well, anyway, the stewardess asks him to do something religious to comfort the passengers. So he says, yes, I’ll just organise a collection . . . And they had never had the final conversation. And Anna was suddenly, unspeakably angry with her for dying, severing that last link with what she was and what she was to become. And setting the hound of heaven upon her. She pushed back the wheeled chair and left the
big room.

  Outside, the rain fell in a soft drizzle. She stood in the shelter of the porch and smoked a cigarette. Now what had brought that on? A lonely old voice on a phone? The memory of the day before? The pistol shot through the chapel window? She wiped her nose on her sleeve, remembering being told, Don’t do that. Once she was in the open air, the need to weep had turned itself into a runny nose. There were dripping trees in this quiet street. No one would have guessed the function of the building, which looked like a meeting hall without windows, dwarfed by larger buildings, not ugly but nondescript.

  Ten minutes max, that was all that was allowed before the reprimand followed, in accordance with the strict regime in there, although not slavery and all the restrictions seemed perfectly fair in Anna’s inexperienced estimation. Work and you were paid; don’t work and you got the sack. There was nothing complicated about that. She had only had one other job with which to compare it and that had been in a shop. They had liked her there, too, because she could pick up the complications of the till quicker than anyone else, but when it came to customer relations, she was less successful. Telling someone that if they didn’t like the goods they didn’t have to buy them and why didn’t they just fuck off was not what you did. It was the faces that frightened her, not the voices. With voices she was fine: she could afford patience. Five minutes gone. Anna sighed. Time to go back.

  And then Ravi was standing beside her in the rain, his battered copy of whatever it was stuffed into the top pocket of his shirt and his brown eyes squinting at her with concern. He seemed breathless, as if he had been running, and stood with his hands on his hips as if that would help to get the breath back.

  ‘Wassa matter? You all right?’ He sounded gruff and aggressive, more challenging than comforting. From this close, she could smell what she thought might have been cloves. There was oil in his hair, which made it shine. His sudden appearance and the abruptness of his surprisingly deep voice made her defensive.