He crossed himself, depressed with guilt. ‘Matilda’s dead?’
‘Matilda’s killed,’ she spat. ‘And I loved her. We were real sisters. She’s the only one who ever loved me.’
Tears flowed. He hesitated, then touched her sleeve gingerly. It was smeared with mucus and tears. She slapped at the hand.
‘You must go back, Sister, you’ll make yourself ill.’
‘Get your hands off me,’ Joseph said with deliberate venom. ‘Save your worry. I’ve got money in my pocket and a will of my own. I don’t need your blessing, I need my anger, so piss off. Is there anything about that phrase you don’t understand?’
It was, he admitted, perfectly clear and did not allow alternatives. She was an adult woman of God, not a child.
‘What did she mean, the devil himself?’
‘Piss off.’
‘If you’re sure?’
She nodded emphatically. There was a clear glass bottle sticking out of a cloth bag, which looked like a laundry bag or the shoe bag he had carried to school, on the bench beside her. The bag was bulky, probably with Matilda’s things, he thought sadly, and not proof against the rain. He felt in the left pocket of his anorak for the small umbrella that always lived there and he never remembered to use, handed it to her. Joseph looked at it in disdain, took it all the same and stuffed it in the bag.
‘Not much of a weapon, is it, Father? I can do better than that. Piss off.’
He knew he would have to come back later and see if she was still there, as well as digest what she had said, but he hurried home. Oh, good God, not another death or another fantasy. The papers crackled inside his jacket, he was no lighter without the umbrella, and for all the strangeness of the meeting, the ghastliness of the last twenty-four hours, he was nursing a small nugget of exhilaration and he had a sense of resolution and purpose, which did not usually come from having too much to do. There was always either too much or too little, with the whole of life revolving around the juggling of priorities, obligations, duties, so that indoors there were messages from Barbara, the office of the Bishop, and twelve others, including the last from the carer of the old, brave invalid whose company he had so often kept in front of the football replay videos, offering no more than mute admiration for bravery and the consolation of another, like-minded presence. They had the same way of praying. The message was a plea for the administration of Extreme Unction. A man wanted blessing for the last rite of passage and there was no choice. Christopher Goodwin changed his trousers, seized his paraphernalia and set out for the other end of his parish.
Ravi was wrong. Anna shunned the park and longed instead for the chapel. Now, look here, Lord. Prayer was an instinctive activity in anyone who had ever become accustomed to it, even if they no longer knew to whom, or what, they prayed. A bad habit, acquired with ease and training, difficult to break, an affliction, a pain-in-the-neck need, which never went away and could never be shared with anyone who had no idea of what you were talking about. Ravi had a religion, so he knew, although he did not know what it was like to pray to Gods who had already abandoned you, and he was wrong about a person being able to do it anywhere. Perhaps he meant anywhere there was a shrine. She meant anywhere it worked well enough to quell the furies, and the places were limited. It had to be a place she loved, the convent chapel, sometimes the park, and otherwise the roof. Other people were probably the same in choosing a place to have an argument. There had to be something to look up at, something to look down on, or something to look across and preserve the idea there was something beyond that and something beyond even that. Anna thought that an aeroplane would be a good place for prayer, provided she could sit near a window.
She was very, very shaken and feeling in a way she could only describe to herself as odd, although that was an understatement, since oddness was her middle name and anyway, there was plenty about which to feel odd and it only created another phrase, oddgod, which she was repeating in the same way she once said bother. And then, How odd of God, To choose Hindus, a couplet distorted from something else. Oh, oddgod, odgod, doggod, dogged, dogged, dogged. The flat was pristine. She was waiting and knowing in her heart of hearts, as well as in her churning stomach, that Francis, the Golden Boy, was making her wait. He was not late yet, but he would be late soon. The ladder was out, up to the roof. There was time.
She was dressed like a girl, like a miniature tart, in a dress. Floral thingummy, with little roses printed in the lightweight cloth, buttoning up the front from mid-calf to neck and a touch of lace, for oddgod’s sake, at the neck. She hated it all but her bare feet, climbing the ladder stack and getting them dirty in the gunwales of the roof, who cared? The thought of the wine in the fridge made her sick.
Better, up on the parapet, with sultry city air cleansed by the rain, which only threatened to resume, but not yet, please oddgod, not yet. She propped her elbows on the parapet, so that they were level with her shoulders, and put her feet inside the shelf she had created between the lead flashing and the brick, to give her a better view. Saw a clear evening, prematurely dark, and the garden further darkened by the lights from the chapel window, although, as yet, she could see the details. There was a breeze, teasing at her long, clean hair, washed again for the occasion.
‘Oh Lord, help me. Am I to be a sacrifice? Am I going to have to let him have me in order to get to Therese? Help me to see in the dark.’
Edmund’s bench began to fade. She thought she could hear from the chapel the sounds of the singing of the Misericordia. O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria, sung in those voices by Jude’s graveside, followed by the voice of the hound of heaven. I fled Him, down the nights and down the days, I fled Him down the arches of the years; I hid from Him . . . She yelled into the darkening sky, Just leave me alone. Let me see. Make me concentrate and make me see all that my fogged-up mind is missing. I am not old, I’m not wise.
First she looked at the sky, which was a blank, bumpy landscape, turning dark, but not dark enough for stars. There was nothing on which to focus the eyes, no nice arrangement of clouds, no inspirational moon. She watched the branches of the trees, daring them to move, and then she looked at the window of the chapel, so brightly lit that the shape of it, upturned boat or bishop’s hat, was appealingly clear and the desire to be on the other side as sharp as homesickness. To the left of this beacon, lower down, there was a visible light from the parlour windows and from the rooms on the floors above. The place seemed lit for a celebration, indicating crisis, visitors, or a death. This was the way it had looked on the night Sister Jude died, as if the death of a Sister created the need to bustle and spring-clean, to fix everything so that the gap was obscured. They were busy.
There was no birdsong, not a single cry of alarm.
Anna concentrated on the smaller details, the shape of the flower tubs, the shiny damp path into the shrubbery, the point where St Michael stood, currently visible, and then let her eyes follow the path to the point further down where the bushes obscured it and where she had been when Francis had intercepted her. She could not pinpoint the exact spot, but focusing on the likely place made her begin to think of everything she knew about the Golden Boy and place it in the context of what he had said. She knew nothing, but looking at the garden, she could see what he had done.
There were no birds any more.
There was Edmund’s bench, with the light, scrubbed wood of it still visible in the clear area surrounding it. Francis had obliterated any sign of his predecessor and mentor so that it was difficult to remember that Edmund had ever existed at all. Edmund, whom she had watched neglecting the garden and feeding the birds with whom he shared that filthy bench. Ironic that Edmund was the gardener who should have been called Francis, after the saint who could magic the birds from the skies. Now there were dead birds in the garden, she had trodden on one; dead birds and a killing cat. The wrongly named Francis had lied last night. Edmund would never have shot at a bird, any bird, and he would never have broken the window.
Francis would have done that as part of his ruthless cleansing operation and his preliminary step to the gaining of power. She thought of how he would have achieved that power, first by breaking Edmund’s hold on the place, then by becoming indispensable and always by being beautiful. His saintly beauty and his sex, powerful passwords. Agnes would let him to and fro whenever he pleased; Barbara adored him. There was no place sacrosanct, nothing he could not contradict. And then, although she had played a part in her own banishment through her stupidity, it was he who had achieved it. She stroked her fingers down the side of her face, remembered his hand holding her claw and raking it down his own face. The scratches had made him even more beautiful. Why, when she had faced him the night before, had that memory faded, melted by that self-same, humble charm? Why had she believed him? She clenched her own hand into a fist and looked at it. A small, puny weapon.
And as for Therese sending the bird . . . Therese would never have touched a dead bird, except, perhaps, to bury it. She would have been afraid; she was fastidious. Look at what Francis has done to the birds.
Then she remembered Edmund’s fist, his arm outstretched on the bench, with the gold crucifix and broken chain lying next to it, which she had thought was his and preserved for Matilda until Francis had reclaimed it. A thing he had worn since childhood, almost outgrown. Too small by far for Edmund’s fleshy neck. A hypocritical adornment, a badge of solidarity, an indication of faith. She thought of it being inside her pocket alongside the statue of Ganesh, and, staring at the bench now, imagined Edmund in the throes of dying, ripping the crucifix from the neck of the man who might have helped him. Or murdered him. The scene enacted itself in front of her eyes with hideous clarity. Matilda was the only one who might have known. Matilda with her bright eyes, and burned hands. He would have seen to that, too.
Craning over the parapet, she could just see the back door to the garden. That was how he came and went. He did not even need the complicity of Agnes. Most of all, she remembered her frantic scouring of the place the night before, the instinct to eradicate traces of him, although as he had sat there, she had believed everything he said and the mist of credulity had descended. She had been sorry for him; she had wanted to be liked. Oh, Lord, she said. We believe what we want to believe. And disbelieve what does not suit. Was it you who phoned with the warning? Good people do not see evil. Evil has no inhibitions.
She looked at the luminous dial on her watch. She could hear the door buzzer from here. Francis had not arrived and what was more, she could see now that he had never intended to arrive on this particular night. That promise was yet another lie. Perhaps he enjoyed the idea of her waiting for him, a piece of control, designed to humble her and make her long for him next time. Or perhaps it was something else. Perhaps he simply needed her to be captive in her own flat, waiting as he could guess she would wait for the very mention of Therese, or out of the pathetic desire for love or friendship; she would wait, poor, lonely, powerless thing. And then she remembered the other words, You are even prettier than your sister, and retched over the wall. He had never wanted her. He wanted her out of the way, and with that settled conviction came another, namely that Therese was suffering.
When they had been ill, their symptoms were originally different, but had come to coincide as if they cross-infected one another, and then it was more than that. It had turned into a physical empathy with how the other felt, an instinctive knowledge, which lessened with health and absence, but still persisted. In the friendlier conversations, the normal ones that followed the confrontational ones after Therese joined the convent, they had laughed about it. Thought of you yesterday, Therese would say. Did you have toothache, because I did. And period pain? Yes. Now, on the parapet, her empty stomach was churning. She felt for her sister an almighty fear, as if Therese was up alongside her and about to jump, and she felt for Francis the Golden Boy a hatred so intense it would have poisoned the moon. He was a monstrous corruption. Instinct said it all. Instinct knew best. He killed the birds. He would hurt and corrupt and never know conscience.
She could not bear to look at the bench, which now blurred into nothing as the last light died and she vainly tried to concentrate on what little she could see, willing it to expand into clarity. The outline of the shed was just visible. There was a light inside.
A tiny, flickering light, so small she could have imagined it. A signal, the arc light of the chapel window pointing the way to the tiny light in Edmund’s store.
Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us . . . Agnes was muttering, grumbling and frantic and confused and hungry and . . . Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi. Joseph had come home and God bless them all. This was no way to respect the dead, no way at all, coming home from the care of dear Matilda, stinking of the drink and shouting like a banshee, all over the black and white corridor, half sick, half demented, the colour of a bruised plum and yelling, Where is he, where is he? not even able to remember if it was day or night. Where’s who, Sister? Who do you mean? and only getting back, Where is she, where is she, the bitch? In the name of the blessed virgin, they couldn’t call the police to one of their own, and if only Francis would come back, her darling son, and instead of him, there was Anna running down the road in a pretty frock and those ugly training shoes she wore and which she herself privately craved. Agnes was not going to let in anyone else who made trouble and the only person she wanted to gain entry was her own darling boy. Or maybe the priest. Heaven help her, she was sick of the sight of women. After she slammed the door shut, and returned to her cubicle, waiting against hope for either the food to which they had not been called, or the return to order, which Barbara would surely restore, she put the phone under her chair where it had rested all evening with the receiver detached. She had taken the unilateral decision that they had enough to cope with, and from the depths of the black and white corridor, she could hear Joseph, shouting, tried to close her ears to what Joseph said and could not. Joseph had a way with words.
Fuelled by fear, it was even easier for Anna to get up to the top of the wall than it had been the last time. Bugger who watched, let them. She could kick, she could scream, she could yell, and the extra power came from thinking, if they close that door on me one more time . . . Ripping the dress while straddling the wall did not matter either; she tore a strip off the hem when she paused at the top, wrapped the material round her wrist like a bracelet, and then slithered down the other side with sickening speed, because the ivy was wet and slippery as oil, so that she clutched enough to impede freefall and landed with a silent thud that winded her and shook her into where she was. It was the time of the evening when sounds from outside penetrated as far as they ever would in here. The jarring of the final landing made her breathless, squatting where she landed, suddenly as careful as a cat. And there was the cat, eyeball to eyeball. She hissed at it, watched it scurry away, scared of her.
You are even prettier than your sister. Stronger, too. Anna tiptoed from the back door towards the area of the bench, looking for the clutter which had been visible from the window only three weeks before and was now startling for its absence. The scent of autumn flowers arrested her, but the flickering light from the shed drew her into the circle outside it. She could hear whimpering from the half-open door, felt the waft of body heat and sweat. Whimpering from the body beneath the other body on the patterned fabric she could see through the door, in tune with the voice of the Golden Boy, who half knelt, glisteningly naked, with his long legs too long for the couch, above the body of her sister, who lay face down with her hands clutched in her hair, saying no, Mother, no, trying to prise together the legs he had forced apart with his knees, so that her forelegs thrashed without purpose, and as she watched, he bent his whole torso towards her and bit her ear. You know you want this.You waited for me, naked. I am your brother. We do it this way so you don’t have to watch, trust me.
Anna hesitated. Then she took in the detail of the way he massaged his enormous pric
k and smeared it with spit while his other, big, brown hand, held down Therese by the neck. Therese might want this, but Therese was held by the neck. Passion did not whimper, did it? And then Therese screamed, bucked, used all her tiny weight to shrug him away. Anna felt around for a stone. His voice reverberated. Shush, no one’ll hear, sister.
She was going to kill him, smash in his head, now. To the mind’s echo, Thou shalt not kill, or suffer the death of thine own soul.
Golden Boy had left a pile of jagged lumps of concrete. She found one at her feet. She was going to kill him.
And then she was knocked sideways. A figure in black superseded her, yanked open the door, and punched repeatedly at that naked back as if she was trying to revive it, making repetitive, unrepeatable sounds, hmuph, hmumph, humph, then humph, humph, humph, as if she was digging into his neck. The screams grew into a symphony, his like an electrified pig, hers the sound of fury, and the body beneath adding a whimpering chorus. Then Sister Joseph of Aragon yanked back Francis’s head and plunged her small-bladed knife into his throat. She did it with a degree of determined attachment, seven times, and even in the frenzy of the attack avoided his eyes. The candle fell with the vibration of movement, caught at the damp hem of her gown, flared and went out. After that, it was all darkness and voices.
Anna dropped her lethal piece of concrete. She ran to the shed and dragged Therese from beneath a warm and twitching body. She heard only the sound of the incessant sobbing, which came from Joseph. Then there was a flurry of Sisters surrounding Therese, shushing her, covering her, leading her gently back to the house, three of them, masking the bloody nakedness and saying there, there, there. Someone else took Joseph, equally gently. Barbara remained, scuffing the earth with her shoe, addressing the sky with her authoritative voice, shining her torch into the open doorway. The Golden Boy closely resembled Sebastian, with his multiple wounds. She stepped inside and felt for a pulse, stepped back, with blood on her hands.
Seeking Sanctuary Page 26