“Sitting in the dark, when the sun’s trying to shine! It’s a lovely afternoon.” His voice went through my head.
“It isn’t now,” I said.
He wore a white nylon shirt which glared, and a shiny navy suit with tiny shiny lines across it, and horrid shiny shoes with shiny toecaps, and oily hair slicked down with Brilliantine. His skin was greasy and he had blackheads round his nose and glittery metal glasses. Even his voice was shiny.
“Well, young lady, how are you?”
“I’m not young.”
“An old lady, are you?”
“I don’t want to see you.”
“But I want to see you.”
Silence.
“I understand you’ve spoken to Father Sullivan.”
So the priest had betrayed me, had he? All that crap about the Inviolate Secrets of the Confessional, and he’d already branded me as a public criminal. It would be on my case notes, next. Diagnosis: murderer.
“So?” I said. I wasn’t going to be polite, not likely. Psychiatrists were shit.
He had plonked himself down beside me, without even asking. He was desecrating Leo’s chair. There should have been a row of chairs — one for traitor priests, one for lovers who brought bright birds to your shrine, one for shitty shrinks.
“What happened to your mouth?” he asked. He was side-stepping the murder. It was probably a trap.
“I fell down stairs.”
“No, young lady, you did not.”
“On to stone,” I added.
“On to stone?”
I knew that ruse — repeating me. That was Leo’s trick. And mine. “I’d rather talk to Father Sullivan about it.”
“It was Father Sullivan who asked me if I’d see you. I’m a Catholic, too, you know.”
That was a trap as well. Psychiatrists were never Catholics. Adrian said it got in the way of Freud. He was merely hoping I’d confess more crimes, that’s all.
“It’s difficult sometimes, isn’t it?” He cleared his throat as if he had religion stuck inside it. He was trying to suck up to me, suggesting we had common problems — spiritual crises, religious doubts. I had nothing in common with any psychiatrist. He had little black hairs on the backs of his thumbs and a dreadful mottled tie. Leo chose his friends on things like ties.
“I don’t like your tie,” I said.
He laughed. “You don’t like me much, do you?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
He faded the laugh into a smile, a sickly spaniel one which said, “I’ll still wag my tail, even if you kick me.” It made me mad. I tried to look haughty and unmoved. “Anyway,” I added, “I prefer to talk to priests.” I hoped it sounded grand, as if I had my own private confessor, or the Bishop came round to dinner every second Friday, like Sonia Jackson in the Upper Fourth.
“Psychiatrists are priests, Thea — in a sense. Priests for the mind.”
“Balls!”
He didn’t even growl. Psychiatrists spend years and years learning never to react. It bores me, actually. What’s the point of kicking spaniels, if they won’t even show their teeth?
“Aren’t you going to tell me how you’re feeling?” He was fawning on me. If he had been a dog, I think I’d have had him skinned and made into a rug and then walked over him.
“You don’t mind talking to the Sisters, so I understand.” He was sniffing at my skirts again. “Sister Ursula tells me you’re quite a little chatterbox.”
I didn’t answer. Words like chatterbox make my stomach heave. I wiped my lips. A sort of yellowish scum was forming round the stitches. The pain had come roaring back now. He must have brought it with him.
He didn’t like the silence, I could tell. He kept trying to plug it with feeble little openings, offering me a paw, or picking up his rubber bone and laying it at my feet.
“We’re not too happy, are we, Thea?”
“Aren’t we?”
“Perhaps you’d prefer to see Father Sullivan again?”
Silence.
“I could arrange it, Thea.”
I gave the most grudging nod I could. “OK.” At least Father Sullivan didn’t have black hairs on his thumbs, and he might even change his mind about the absolution. In fact, I think they have to give it to you. I remember hearing something like that at school.
“Good girl!” The spaniel had turned into a psychiatrist again and was nodding and smiling as if I had entrusted him with the entire story of my toilet training, with the odd Oedipus complex thrown in as well. “Father may still be in the chapel. I’ll go down there straight away and see if I can catch him.”
I didn’t say “thanks”. Why should I? He was trying to make a cosy little exit. He wanted handshakes from me, gratitude, goodbyes. I stared down at the floor.
“Take care, Thea. God bless.”
I shuddered. He made God sound like some nauseous Jewish uncle. On the way out, he helped himself to one of Leo’s grapes. I chucked the whole bunch into the waste-bin. They were contaminated now.
When he’d gone, I closed my eyes. I wanted to make it dark and quiet again, to tempt the phoenix back.
“Immortal,” I whispered. “Procreation.”
The words were like an ointment. I lay so still, I could feel peace falling on the land like rain, and the bright, good-natured bird hovering closer, closer, down towards my bed.
I looked beyond it, to where the wings of God enfolded the whole dazzling, spinning universe. I tried to make Him hear.
“Mend the vase,” I prayed.
Chapter Ten
Two days later, I woke with my hand between my legs. I hadn’t dared masturbate before, not with Father Sullivan on the premises. I was furious with the priest. He hadn’t come to see me. All those parables about lost sheep and prodigal sons, and he was scared of the first real sinner he’d probably ever encountered in his life. Nor had Leo come again. I suppose he was frightened of meeting Dr Davies. (Not that he came, either.) Don’t think I was lonely. There was a timetable as strict as Adrian’s. I had more X-rays and more maulings about by a sort of sub-Pakistani dental surgeon. Sister Ursula took me to the hospital chapel and said a Hail Mary with me. (There were white chrysanthemums on the altar and a plaque which said “Salus Infirmorum”.) I had double blancmange for lunch and an enema for tea and a bath in a bathroom with yellow coal-tar soap. They gave me phoenix-coloured pills which must have blotted out a lot of things, because I felt smug and drifty and sometimes almost cheerful.
In the afternoon, a fat nun with a fair moustache arrived with a trolleyful of books and said hallo, she was the hospital librarian. The books were mostly lives of saints with brown musty covers and pressed rose petals fluttering from the pages. I chose St Cuthbert and St Philip Neri, then I grabbed a woman saint, in case she thought I was obsessed with men. Nobody mentioned men. It was like my convent school again — quiet and calm and orderly, but short on thrills. Even my food was censored. Toast and chops and apples remained strictly on the Index. I could only manage slops, and everything I drank, I sipped through straws.
I wondered who was paying for all those straws. I knew private hospitals were cripplingly expensive. And why a private hospital at all? Why a Catholic one? I should have questioned Leo, I suppose, but Leo didn’t come, and even if he had done, I still wouldn’t have asked him. Safer just to cut out that slice of my life between the aubergines and waking up with nuns —chuck it in the waste-disposal unit, like a piece of mouldy apple.
It was dark outside, as if the morning was suffering from a hangover and still struggling to get up. I removed the hand from between my legs. I had no idea how long it had been there and what it had been up to. Better, really, to start again from the beginning. Sister Ursula had left my morning tea and departed to the chapel for the Angelus, so I was safe for at least ten minutes. I dipped my finger in the cup and wetted it. I normally use spit, but I didn’t fancy bloody spit. At least the tea was warm. My labia are rather long and droopy. Leo had clipped my dan
gly earrings on them once, one on each side, and then gone down on me with the earrings jiggling and swinging against his nose. I tried to think of Leo and the earrings, but I was really doing it with Father Sullivan. He was sitting in the confessional, fumbling with the zip, while I lurched sort of upside down on the prie-dieu, with my toes hooked through the grille. I don’t know really why I bother with the acrobatics. I’m never simple in my fantasising. I suppose I like it to be difficult or painful. That’s what was wrong with Adrian. It was always such a cop-out — all the CSE positions rather than the A-levels. (Leo screwed me on a camel, once.)
“Bless me, Father,” I whispered. “For I am about to sin.” I was so wet now, I didn’t need the tea. Father Sullivan had his purple stole flung across his thing, and its fringed ends were sending amazing ticklish sensations down the insides of my thighs. Hospital beds aren’t built for masturbation. I tried to stop it creaking.
“Harder, Father,” I whispered, as he tore me inside out. The grille was a gaping hole now, where he had thrust his thing right through it. “Harder, harder, harder …”
The whole confessional box was shaking and groaning. He had wrenched down the partition and laid his bare annointed hands across my bum. I was panting and slavering like Karma. I had reached that hair-trigger moment when you have to come. Even if the Pope walked in, or someone shouted “Fire!” and the entire Metropolitan Fire Brigade rushed clanking and slooshing up the stairs, I knew I’d still come before I packed my valuables or thought about escape. Why I like coming is that it’s the only moment in your life when you’re really committed to something. There are no ifs and buts, or analyses of terms, or parentheses, or maybes. Come is written over everything and goes through layers and layers and layers of it, like letters in a stick of rock. (I’ve done it with a stick of rock — in Blackpool.)
I came. And so did Sister Ursula. She was running. Nuns never run. Even if a dozen fires had broken out, she’d still only glide from the inferno.
“What’s the matter, Thea? What’s wrong? I could hear you half a mile away.”
I tried to turn my gasp into a groan.
“I don’t feel well,” I said. I didn’t. There was a roaring in my ears, and the throbbing in my thighs had set my mouth alight.
“You’re feverish!”
I placed my hands innocently on the outside of the counterpane, and tried to inch my nightie down with my feet.
She popped a thermometer underneath my tongue and took my pulse. It was roaring. Neither of us spoke. I was gagged and she was counting. She scribbled something on my chart. Her brow was all puckered up, as if someone was trying to make a pleated curtain out of it.
“I think I’d better get the doctor to take a look at you.”
“I don’t want a doctor,” I peeved. “I want a priest. Father Sullivan promised. Well, he didn’t, but Dr Davies did. He said he’d send him two whole days ago.”
“I expect he’s busy, dear. You mustn’t let it upset you. It’s affecting your temperature.”
“Well, it does upset me. Priests shouldn’t break their promises.”
The puckering pulled tighter. A spiritual crisis and a rise in temperature. She pushed up her sleeves and hovered. “Try and rest, Thea, dear, and I’ll see what I can do. I know Father Sullivan’s around, but …”
Of course I didn’t rest. Coming once only makes me randier. As soon as she shut the door, I started off again. Father Sullivan was more or less insatiable. After fifteen minutes of the straight stuff, I decided to hurt him. He’d abandoned me, hadn’t he, turned me over to a psychiatrist, refused to give me absolution? Right, he’d suffer for it. First, I bit his balls, then I changed the rhythm when he wasn’t expecting it. I made him almost come and then lost contact. He was a gibbering idiot by the time I’d finished with him.
“Satisfied?” I said.
He slunk out of the door with his balls bleeding and his cassock torn, and someone else sneaked in. He looked like one of Adrian’s part-time students at the local F.E. College — youngish, shabbyish, and Leftish. He had raggedy red hair left free to do its own thing, and National Health glasses perched on a pale, tense, shining sort of face which looked as if it were about to announce Universal Revolution to the world. He was wearing glum brown cords with shiny patches where they had lost their pile, and a green home-knit sweater balding at the elbows.
“Hi!” he said. “D’you mind if I sit down?”
I wondered if he was the occupational therapist, except he didn’t come complete with feltcraft kits or wicker baskets. He couldn’t be a dietician or a radiographer — his nails weren’t clean enough. He was possibly a friend of Leo from his earlier, less successful days, come to bring me a message or explanation. (I didn’t fall on stone, I bumped into a brick wall.)
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
I wiped my wet and slimy fingers on the sheet.
“Shagged out,” I said. I knew with this one I didn’t have to be too careful with my words. It was almost a relief. The strain of talking politely for four whole days was beginning to tell on me. Sister Francis had frowned when I’d let out just a “damn”.
“Are they treating you OK?”
“Fine,” I said. I tried to see his eyes behind the glasses. They were a sort of muddyish-brown, like the stuff you find at the bottom of ponds. “Expect I think they regard me as a sort of nutcase.”
“Same here,” he said, cocking one leg over the other and balancing it at an angle on his lap. They were skinny legs, underneath the corduroy. His wrists were thin as well.
“You’re Thea, aren’t you? I’m Ray. That’s a formal introduction.” He grinned, showing strong, sturdy teeth (though perhaps they only seemed that way, compared to the ruin of my own mouth. I peered at people’s teeth now with a sort of fierce, fascinated envy, whereas before I’d hardly noticed them).
“I hear you’ve had a bit of a rough-up?”
I ignored the question. He spoke standard English, but with a faint undertone of northern dance-halls and a slight broadening of the vowels which Leo would have shuddered at. Leo never knew people called Ray, in any case. All his acquaintances had foreign names like Jochen or fancy ones like Jasper, and spoke either breathy Sloane Street or Middle European ponderous.
“So you’re not a friend of Leo’s?”
“No, I’m afraid I’m not. Were you expecting one?”
“Well, not exactly.” I’d learned from experience never to expect Leo or his friends.
“So who’s this famous Leo?”
“My lover,” I said, sort of nonchalantly. I liked the word lover. It made me feel doomed and romantic, like Mary Queen of Scots or Judy Garland. I’d told Sister Francis that Leo was my uncle, but there was no point in lying to Ray. He was the sort of man you could say “fuck” in front of, and he wouldn’t turn a hair.
“The one who hit you?” he asked.
“No,” I said, too quickly. “I bumped into a brick wall.”
Ray had taken off his glasses and was polishing them with a fag-end of the sheet. His face looked soft and vulnerable without them, like a clam without its shell.
“I think he hit you, Thea, didn’t he?”
“No.”
“Didn’t he?” The eyes were very gentle. You could have snuggled up inside them and gone to sleep.
I paused. “Yes,” I whispered.
He took my hand. Both our hands were hot and sticky like slabs of toffee that had stuck together and melted in a sweet-shop window. I felt a tremendous lightness saying “yes”, as if granite had turned into candyfloss. I could feel tears sliding down my cheeks — somebody else’s tears, distant and cleansing and permissible.
“It was my fault,” I explained, through sniffs.
He nodded. “Bit of both, I expect. Always is.”
I stared at him. He had made my mouth acceptable, given us absolution. Leo was no longer a brute, a batterer. Nor had I driven him to violence by being a cruel and lying bitch. We weren’t rough and d
angerous delinquents any more, just two normal people who bashed each other up a bit. I suddenly felt starving. I didn’t want slops for breakfast, but a roasted ox.
“I’m famished,” I said.
“So’m I. Shall we ring for breakfast?”
I laughed. He’d turned the hospital into a four-star hotel with room service. I hadn’t believed I could ever laugh again. “Ask for sausages,” I said. “Pork ones. Fat ones. Not those mingy chipolatas.”
“Sausages,” he repeated to the nun. “Big ones, please, with lots of fried bread. Oh — and some good strong English mustard.”
I thought she’d kick him out. It wasn’t a doss-house for shabby-sweatered drop-outs to give their orders in. But she thought the breakfast on a silver tray with matching silver covers over the food. It was usually melamine and lukewarm. There were three tiny little cereal packets, the one-portion size from Variety Pack. They reminded me of Adrian. (Though, actually, we’d never bought that size when we were married. They were too uneconomical and didn’t come with competitions or free Bugs Bunnies.)
Ray ate my slops himself. They had brought me watery porridge, swamped with still more liquid until it looked like a greyish puddle in a builder’s yard. Then he mashed my sausages into a sort of soggy paste with mustard, and fed me with the mustard spoon, which was small enough to slip between my stitches. The pain nagged away like a spiteful third person sitting down to breakfast with us.
“Sore?” he asked.
I nodded. Ray wasn’t one for words, and those he chose were mainly monosyllables. It made me feel protected. He wouldn’t try and outsmart me or give me history lessons.
“What is this place?” I asked him. I hadn’t dared ask anyone else before. I was terrified the answer might lead back to paper-weights. But with Ray I felt protected. “I’m not even sure where I am, you see.” I knew he’d understand how strange (and yet safe) it felt to be living in a limbo where no one could flush out or find you on a map. “I wasn’t really with it when they brought me here.”
“You’re in Surrey, Thea — the Walton and Weybridge bit — but nearer Weybridge. The hospital’s called St Maur’s.”
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