“Oh, horrid,” I said. I remembered it with Lucian. “Tell her I’m sorry, will you.” I was sorry. Who wanted to be pregnant, with all that morning sickness and cramps and swelling ankles, and only pain and death at the end of it? I didn’t even want to go to Kashmir. There would be flies and germs and roaring feverish roads and gaunt suspicious border-people who couldn’t speak your language. I had a white nest waiting for me, quiet and uncorrupted, a Calling.
Adrian turned his back on the waste-disposal unit. “Why don’t we go out together? Take a little walk, or have a cup of coffee in the high street. I’ll buy you a skirt or something, if you like. You’ll need some decent clothes if you’re going to get a job.”
“I’ve got a job,” I said. “And I don’t need anything.” The nuns would give me my robes and daily bread.
Adrian still had the piece of carrot in his hands, picking at it, shredding it, littering Janet’s floor. His face was strained, taut, wary. The drop of blood had congealed on his chin, but he looked as if he might bleed again all over, if I even raised my voice. No point in talking to him about souls or saints or nuns — he’d never been religion. Religion for him was just another string of isms — Deism, theism, Judaism — explored in his neat scholarly handwriting in essays and dissertations, and then contrasted with atheism, rationalism, materialism. He couldn’t understand that I might crave bread and wine and sackcloth rather than coffee and a skirt. I knew I’d have to lie to him.
“It’s all right,” I breezed. “I know what I’ll do — I’ll go to Patricia Jane’s. She said I could stay with her. She’ll even find me a job. Her father runs a kennels and he told me once I could help him with the dogs.”
I had kennels on my conscience. I’d never liked Karma, but I knew he’d droop and die without his master. Everyone would loathe him in a kennels. He was far too big, for one thing, and too opinionated. He hated other dogs and refused to fawn on people. They only like dogs who wag and squirm and grovel and conform. I could see him standing tall and proud and suffering, refusing to eat or drink or knuckle under, his black non-Afghan ears pricked to hear Leo’s footsteps on the path. When he didn’t hear them, he’d just lie down and wait for loss and pain and hunger to snuff him out.
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Adrian. “You’re talking sense at last. Look, where does Patricia live? I’ll take you there, if you like. Perhaps we’d better phone her first, in case she’s …”
“No need,” I said. “There’s always someone in. She’s got an enormous family — cousins and aunts and brothers and sisters and things. I’m always welcome. I don’t even have to knock. ‘Just walk straight in’ her father says. He’s wonderful, her father. He …”
Adrian dropped the last shred of carrot and took my hand instead. “Thank God for that, Thea. You need to be with normal decent people. I’ve been worried sick, if you really want to know. I’ve never liked you shacking up with Leo.”
I wished he wouldn’t say that name. It was like wheels running over and over me on a ten-lane motorway. “Just lend me some money for the train fare, will you?”
“I’ll come with you, better still.” He was already turning off the extractor fan and bolting the back door. “Make sure you arrive there safe and sound. And I ought to have a word with them about your job. People tend to exploit you, you know, especially if you work for friends.”
“No, really, Adrian, I …”
“I’d like to, Thea. Please.”
“No.”
“Well, just to the station, then.”
“No.”
I still had his sweater on. I didn’t hand it back — it would be the one last link between us. I knew I wouldn’t see him again. I kissed him very slowly and solemnly on the lips. He tasted of low-calorie marmalade and Janet. I could feel his heart beating strongly through his chest like an efficient and well-regulated machine. Rationalism. Mechanism. We stood for a moment holding hands, while the bird in the laburnum tree called “Bernadette, Bernadette”, and at last I pulled away and walked slowly down the hall.
The last I saw of him, he was standing at the door, still sweaterless, calling out final, hopeful, new-start sort of things after my dwindling form. I think it was his way of telling me he loved me.
He had also given me two dirty ten-pound notes.
Chapter Thirty
I sat slumped on the taxi seat and stared. The driver had tried to warn me, but I’d thought he was simply one of Janet’s stooges and hadn’t listened when he’d gone on about redevelopment and demolition men. I’d been planning my campaign with Bernadette and couldn’t be bothered to chat to taxi drivers.
“Just look at that!” he said.
I looked. Three brutal yellow cranes towered above what had once been the middle section of St Maur’s. The roof had already gone and most of the outside walls. You could see right inside, into bare, gaping rooms with all their skin scraped off. The hospital looked as if it was having an operation on itself. It had been drugged and anaesthetised, then opened up and gutted, all its vital organs wrenched out, tubes and scaffolding shoring up its body. The surgeons had sauntered off before bothering to stitch it up again. They’d left it sick and bleeding, switched off its life-support system, declared it a hopeless case. A gang of looters was snatching all its treasures, the rings from its fingers, the gold from its teeth. Beside it stood a towering pile of rubble — iron bars and wooden frames, twisted piping, broken bricks — its own guts and entrails shovelled out of its belly and flung into a slop-bowl.
One of the cranes gripped a huge iron ball in its yellow teeth and was crashing it into what was left of the walls. Two tons of Portland stone crumbled like sugar. It was a child’s game, knocking skittles down, dismantling houses made of cards, except this time, it wasn’t wood or paper, but a hundred-year-old fabric built to outsmart man and time. Elegant stone pillars, slim and white and gracious like the nuns, had snapped in half like matchsticks, triple-bonded walls sunk to their knees with no one to help them up again or drag them to a convalescent home.
“Blimey!” said the driver, as another storey bellowed to the ground in a shroud of dust. I had paid him, tipped him, over-tipped, but I still sat there in his cab, like a numb and stupid chunk of masonry myself, unable to move my limbs. I turned my back on the window, but the view from the other one was even worse. A huge whooping fire was gobbling up window-frames and floorboards, its gloating flames leaping to the sky, showers of sparks singing against the charred, distorted corpses of bookcases and bedsteads. It was like a sacrament — fire and smoke and incense pouring up to God, and instead of gilded and embroidered priests, a gang of demolition men in filthy dungarees, with picks and spades for gleaming chalices.
The driver had opened his door and was staring out across the carnage. “Bloody hell!” he muttered. “Bloody bleeding hell.”
“I was a patient here,” I faltered, turning back to the other window and watching the cruel iron ball shatter a marble portico as if it were plywood. “I’m still a patient here.”
“Don’t think you’d stand a chance, Miss.” He laughed. “Only terminal cases, I’d imagine.” He lit a cigarette and settled down in his cab to watch the larger blaze. “They told us down at the Plough they were going to pull it down, but I never dreamed this quick. Hey, gov,” he called to one of the demolition men. “What the hell you up to?”
“What d’you think we’re up to? Having a party? The place was rotten, cracked right through like a teacup. A danger to the public. Would have cost thousands to restore. No one had thousands, so …” He shrugged.
“It wasn’t cracked,” I shouted from the inside of the cab. “Or rotten. You’re lying! It was never a danger to the public. Janet only said that because …”
I shut my eyes. Leo was responsible. He hadn’t paid the bill when they needed thousands. It was the final, crippling blow. Leo’s fist was slamming into that building, his bare hands wrenching out whole stone staircases, his strong, steely shoulders buckling walls.
I knew he was powerful, violent even, but now he had turned into a Samson and was tearing down my temple, destroying the only refuge I had left. Where was my cool white sanctuary, the top part of my tree? I couldn’t see any trees at all. They must have felled them before they even started. Three months ago, I was lying in that hospital, with nuns and nurses ministering to me, fawning on me. And nobody had mentioned a word about demolition. They must have known they were doomed. They’d muttered a bit about staff shortages and lack of funds, but never the cruel reality of iron balls and bulldozers, cranes and flames and death throes. I remembered the word summonses. How could a pile of rubble issue summonses? How could a hospital roar and fume and threaten when it was only a stretcher-case itself, too weak to let out a groan? And what about the nuns, and Father Sullivan? Could you demolish twenty-six white nuns and one black chaplain? Batter them with a crane, toss them on a fire, strip them down, scrap them? I almost hoped Sullivan had been crushed by falling masonry. It would be his punishment for screwing me in the confessional, refusing me Absolution. He’d never returned, never inquired about me. And yet we were told to call him Father. I’d had enough of fathers. Deserters, liars, Wildmen.
I opened the door of the taxi. The air slapped hot, smoky, frightening, against my face. I stumbled across the rough, uneven ground. I was looking for the maisonettes, the neat little garden paths, the crew-cut privet hedges. Gone. Only a hole in the ground now, a ragged patch of dandelions pushing through the scrap-iron. I plucked a flower and laid it on the ground, trying to find the spot where I had made my First Confession and pay my tribute to it. It was like a wreath on a grave — Ray’s grave, God’s grave. The coffin was the packing case where Ray had sat and given me Absolution.
“Where are the nuns?” I shouted. “What have you done with the nuns?”
The foreman grinned at me from the cosy fug of his site hut. “We packed ’ em in a tea-chest and shipped ’em off to heaven.”
“Heaven?”
“Well, Lacock then. It’s not much different really.”
“Where’s Lacock?”
“Wiltshire way. I may have heard wrong, of course, but someone said they’ve bought a house down there and set up shop in the country.”
“Shop? You mean another hospital?”
“No, just a convent, luv. There’s no place for nuns in hospitals. Not now they’re building these new, fancy places with transplants and scanners and the like. Nuns don’t hold with transplants. I saw one on telly once, arguing with a doctor. Told him off, she did. If the good God made you, she said, then He don’t want you doctors adding new bits and pieces He never bargained for.”
“But didn’t they know?” I anguished. “I mean why did nobody tell me? I was a patient here, yet no one breathed a word. In fact, I’m still a patient. They’re expecting me. I’ve got a room here. They kept it for me. It’s sort of … permanent.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spat. “Must be some mistake, Miss. They’ve known for months. The surveyors came in over a year ago. It was a fire risk, on top of everything else. They took in patients up to February, but even then, the place was running down.”
“It wasn’t I shouted. “It couldn’t have been. Not at a hundred pounds a day.”
I felt a wave of fury break over me like a flame. A rotting mausoleum cracked and fragile as a teacup, a fire risk on the demolition list, a danger to the public. And then they’d had the cheek to issue summonses while they sat safe in Lacock, forcing Leo to flee the country for a sum you wouldn’t charge if you owned the Ritz, let alone a clapped-out pile of debris. It was they who should pay him — as compensation, hush-money, restitution for all his worry and fear and travel expenses, for Karma’s kennels, Karma’s funeral.
Religion again — that’s what it was — metal jugs and priests’ tithes screwing the last shivering cent out of cringing congregations, great granite churches pressing down on tissue-paper men. Busy-body bishops setting up frauds and shams and miracles so that gullible people would pour into a sleepy one-horse town and make it into a metropolis. No wonder Bernadette had looked so stricken. They’d used her as a stool-pigeon, battered on her simple trusting soul, turned her into the biggest money-spinner after the Sistine Chapel and the Eiffel Tower. Right — I’d help her. Even without the hospital and my safe white sanctuary, I’d still pass on her message, dethrone the Blessed Virgin, shatter Lourdes. I’d be the iron ball on the crane, the dynamite, the bulldozer, tearing down that whole deceitful town until it was only a handful of shacks again, a few scrawny sheep grazing on a mud patch, a dot on the map so small you could flick it off like dust.
It wouldn’t be easy — not without the nuns. I’d have no means of livelihood, no soft white Sisters to feed and shelter me, or lend me books and give me introductions to the bishop. I’d be back to bedsits, dole queues, loneliness. Penances again. Fasting not because I wanted to, but because there was nothing in the larder; shunned by society as a wrecker and a scourge. There was wreckage enough already. I gazed around at the bruised and bleeding masonry, the whimpering hulk of the hospital, dying beside its own twisted guts. The sky pressed down on it — white, bland, totally expressionless. No colour, no hint of sun. It could have been any season. Spring meant nothing here.
One small, stupid chair sprawled on its face in a rubbish tip, the only human object in a pile of slag and sweepings. I stared at its crippled legs, its gashed cane seat. It was my chair, the one that had watched beside my hospital bed all the hours I’d been there. It was still alive, still breathing. Leo had sat on it, and Ray, and Adrian and Sister Ursula. I could almost hear them calling out to me.
I blocked my ears, turned away, ran towards the fire. Heat and light rushed into everything. Even the sky was live and scarlet now, dipping its cold white fingers in the flames. Little flakes of ash were drifting and curling in the air, falling on my hair, turning me grey too early. The flames made wild, leaping patterns on my clothes, the whole horizon blazing and crackling in front of me. A gang of workmen were sitting round the fire, brewing tea, their faces ruddy from the flames, their bodies bright, solid, dirty. This was the real world — those loud, brawny men with their legs and cocks and raucous laughing mouths and huge calloused hands, swapping stories, telling jokes, stretching out their bodies to the heat. They weren’t crippled, battered, deported to Kashmir. They weren’t even rationed. There was a whole five-pound tin of sugar at their feet and they were gulping tea not from prissy little teacups, but from cock-sized, pint-sized milk bottles filled sweet and scalding to the brim. This was where I belonged. I’d seen those men before, or others like them — greasing and steaming in the workman’s caff, flinging ketchup on to fry-ups and custard on to stodge, cackling and swearing in the public bars, wiping froth from their lips or sperm from their overalls. I envied them. They knew each other’s names, knew which ones took sugar and how much, knew what they were doing with their lives. They took their orders from a four-square foreman who didn’t speak in riddles. They belonged together, were free to spend their lifetime taking tea-breaks. Bernadette had never cocked them up, forced them to give up sex and peace and leisure, to fight for barrenness and truth. I inched a little closer to their circle, stood trembling on the edge. I could feel the fire panting in my face, the men’s own heat and sweat and friendliness melting into mine.
“Thirsty?” asked the tallest, holding out his bottle. He had dark tufts of body hair pushing through the rents in his tee-shirt. His hand grazed mine as I took the bottle. He grinned. White teeth. Fat lips. The tea scalded down my throat, the glass hot and hard between my hands. I held the bottle close against my chest, then inched it lower, lower, down. It was so long since I’d had a man, a proper man, and here were twelve of them — big dirty blokes, with bulging forearms, slurping mouths, legs sprawled wide apart, huge trampling boots.
“What’s yer name, luv?”
“Bernadette.”
“Come again?”
“Bernadette,” I repeated
, louder. One of the men was stripped to the waist, a scarlet eagle tattooed on his belly, which fluttered as he moved. His navel was deep and secret like a tiny chalice. You could have stored sugar in it.
“Fancy sort of name. French, in’t it? What’s your Mum call you? Bernie?”
“No,” I said. “She doesn’t call me anything.”
One of the men cackled, showing stained and broken teeth. “Run away from your Mum, then, ’ave you? Come to join us? Can you work a crane?”
“No”, I said. I knew I could learn, though. I longed to stay with the world, the heat, the rough, the purple, to play groupie to a gang of demolition men; to live in a hut and drink from bottles, to lie with navvies who smelt of filth and fire, to lick the sweat from their stomachs, to have my cunt tattooed. I didn’t want babies — bad-tempered wombs which botched their job, morning sickness, swollen breasts. Or marriage with its damask napkins and its ration-books, someone else’s initials branded on my birth certificate, somebody else’s smell trapped inside my skin. All I wanted was to sprawl beside a fire with a gang of workmen who couldn’t read, or write, or reason, or play pianos, or reassess medieval kings. Men who’d use a piece of Ch’ing to piss in, or tear up The Listener to wipe their arses on. Men who lusted after women, not crawled and slavered after other men, men who’d jeer at Otto as a nancy and a perv.
“Let’s see yer ’ ands, luv,” bawled a red-haired Londoner. “You can always tell a worker by ’is ’ands.”
I put down the bottle and spread out my hands on the slab of concrete they were using as a table. I had always thought I had large, ugly hands, but now they looked small and delicate. They were dwarfed by the huge hams stretching all around me, hulking hairy wrists, cracked and calloused palms, filthy broken fingernails. Hands had never looked so beautiful. I could feel them clawing down my breasts, dragging off my clothes, hauling me back and down and powerless while they grappled down my thighs.
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