Between

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  He was small and extremely old. Bent, aged and silver bearded, he looked like a caricature of Father Time. “How do you do,” said the apparition. “I’m John. How do you like the new room?”

  “Not a demon after all I take it,” smiled Primo. “But haven’t you overdone the wise old sage thing a bit? I thought everyone goes backwards or forwards to their prime age over here. Don’t tell me your optimum age is two hundred or something?”

  “Oh well,” said John, “I thought it would make you more likely to take me seriously. If I turned up the same age as you, only better looking of course, you might not even listen to me.”

  “John who?” said Primo. “You could be Jack the Ripper for all I know.”

  “Now that’s a rather unfortunate analogy under the circumstances, isn’t it?” said the stranger gently. “Perhaps we should keep the conversation away from murder and mayhem for the time being. Now, how about a glass of something?”

  Primo wondered if he was blushing, and then realised his thoughts would be, even if his cheeks weren’t. “I don’t drink. Haven’t drunk anything since I died. I’m surprised you do. This food and drink stuff is just a waste of time.”

  “Depends what’s in the drink,” said the old man, and passed a tall goblet of steaming orange liquid, complete with bendy straw and sparkly paper umbrella. The umbrella gave a quick twirl. The old man smiled encouragingly. “Try it.”

  Primo got up from the bed and took the offered glass. It was elaborate with Grecian designs, and the trembling hand that passed it was as young and strong and supple as his own. Primo remembered vividly what old hands really looked like. Blotched and blemished, skinny with loose skin and stiff joints. He banished the vision and sipped the drink. It tasted positively wonderful and suddenly invigorating. “Yeh, alright, it’s nice. Some sort of drug? Vitamin booster? But I mean, couldn’t you do that directly without all the steaming bubbles and pretend stuff? I’m not a complete idiot. You don’t have to patronise me.”

  “Stop criticising the details,” said the man, drinking from his own identical goblet. The umbrella went up one nostril and he had to flick it away. It bent sideways with a discouraged sigh. “I’m doing my best,” continued the man with a slurp. “This is my first time after all. Virgins all! We’re both learning.”

  Primo stared back at him and refused to smile. “So, under this heavy disguise, who the hell are you really?” Primo demanded. “You’re just another of those do-gooders, aren’t you? I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re my heavenly guide.”

  “That’s right,” said John Somebody. “And I warn you, I’m most persistent. Now are you going to throw me out?”

  Primo sat back down on the bed and gazed at the tremulous figure in its worn white toga. “No. You can stay for the time being. Just answer the questions you think I was asking. But next time, if you think there will be a next time, you can drop the funny costumes.”

  The old man stirred his drink with his finger. The bubbles immediately became excited and exuded some dark green smoke while the umbrella straightened up and gave another twirl. “Where shall I start? Your mind is so positively clogged with questions, it looks more like a flooded sewer. About Karma? Yes, it exists over here. But it’s a whole different business to the daft earth idea. All that childish coming back as a cripple because you kicked some legless guy in your previous life? No, that’s not the way it works. The world would be entirely peopled with cripples, all hating each other. Next question. Why your house is expanding? Pretty obvious, isn’t it! You’re growing out of the narrow old confinements of course. That’s why I’m here too. You’re finally ready for me.”

  “Patronising old twit,” muttered Primo.

  “No doubt,” smiled the man. “I’m your guide, aren’t I?”

  Primo laughed. “So we have to have something in common?”

  “Naturally,” said John. “It wouldn’t ever work if we both thought in entirely different ways. I’m from a higher level, or I couldn’t be of any use to you. But apart from that, we’re much the same.”

  “So, what were you in your last life then?” said Primo, with a sudden stare.

  “Well, not what you were, you can bet your life on that,” John said. “But it’s not what you did or didn’t do that matters just at the moment. It’s how you think. And you’re thinking in questions.”

  “Well, get on with it then,” said Primo. “Answer the rest of them, if you can.”

  They had been sitting on the bridge for so long that they were all feeling extremely stiff. No staircase had miraculously appeared in the clouds. No mystical aeroplane had materialised, nor a set of parachutes, para-gliders, or winged angel messengers with outstretched hands to offer an easy way down. They had hoped, at first, that walking a little further would supply a solution, but it had not. The walkway had simply come to an end. The fogs had reformed and within the sudden damp mist, the way had finished. The huge arch in the sky that constituted their narrow path, had come to such a sudden conclusion that everyone nearly fell off. Instead they had clutched at each other, teetered on the edge, and quickly backed up. Then, ashamed and embarrassed to discover themselves all entwined with the men they so heartily despised, they had shuffled off separately and sat down, legs swinging into the nothingness, (Father Martin nearly lost his sandals) clutched the balustrade and peered down to the place they longed to be.

  “This is bloody ridiculous,” said Francesco. “Someone’s got something wrong. Why should we be suspended up here in the sky, with nowhere to go but back? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I fear,” said Father Martin, “that we are meant to find our own way down.”

  “Rubbish,” sniffed Ayakis. “If this is Paradise, which it has to be, then someone is supposed to come and get us. There’s been a mistake. Maybe the right message never got to the right place.”

  “You think Heaven might have an even more inefficient postal service than we did?” demanded Gregorio. “Even back home, they’d have got a phone call through by now, and come to pick us up. My bus was always reliable. I was always at the right place at the right time. Well, never more than an hour late anyway.”

  “I don’t think they have a bus service in Heaven, my son,” sighed Father Martin with a superior sniff.

  “Well, I hope something happens before night comes,” said Gregorio. “We’re so high up. I wouldn’t like this in the dark.”

  “Idiot,” said Francesco, more for something to say than anything else.

  “I have faith,” insisted Ayakis. “Someone will come for me.”

  “Yes,” said Francesco, “and damned soon I hope, because you’re getting on my bloody nerves. And I know who’ll be coming for you. He’ll have horns and a nice long forked tongue.”

  “Stupid children’s tales,” said Ayakis with a toss of black hair. “You and your nonsense about Purgatory. And what is this then, this land below? Purgatory? Hell? Don’t you realise how puerile your silly beliefs really are?”

  “Not like yours I suppose?” demanded Francesco. “Call me puerile? You - you’re a blatant loony. Whatever nonsense you were brainwashed with certainly is disproved now, even you must see that, cretin though you are. Now at least have the sense to admit you murdered us all for fucking nothing.”

  The clouds had thickened and Francesco swallowed a mouthful mid-sentence and began coughing. Ayakis started to answer him, but stopped, suddenly blinded by the damp swirls of enclosing fog. Gregorio shouted out, frightened to find himself alone. “Are you all still there? I can’t see a thing.”

  “I can’t see anything either,” shouted back Francesco, interrupted and choked by the swirling damp. The fog was beginning to freeze.

  “Quick, come close,” called Father Martin, “hold onto each other, or we shall all fall into the abyss.”

  “More like you’ll pull me over the edge,” yelled Francesco in growing panic. The ice was in his mouth, his throat, and his chest. He felt it closing him off from life.


  “It’s like dying all over again,” whimpered Gregorio.

  “It’s worse, far worse,” said Father Martin. “Dying was no challenge. I saw bright blue and floated for a moment. Then I was standing solid beside the bus with all of you. But this is terrible. What is happening?”

  “They are coming for me,” squealed Ayakis, shivering but suddenly triumphant. “This is the beginning of your utter annihilation. They are leading me to God while you infidels face your final destruction.”

  “I must insist,” Father Martin shouted louder, “if we don’t hold to each other, we will all fall. Our only chance of safety is to pull together. If poor Ayakis is deluded into wishing to stay isolated, then so be it, but for the love of Christ, the rest of us must hold hands and keep close.”

  Finger tip felt finger tip, hands clasped tight, curling, gripping, damp, cold palm to palm. But it was more than the three of them, it was four. Ayakis, not yet trusting entirely to his righteous salvation, clung to the monk beside him, and Gregorio to his right. Opposite, just a sharp nose and the glare of fiercely belligerent eyes, out of the obliterating mists Francesco faced him, himself gripping to those either side. They huddled there as their sweeping arc of bridge began to sway and then disintegrate beneath them into the haze.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was a theatre, more superbly and exotically splendid and far more beautiful than any marble palisade in life, soaring higher than any man could build for it would have challenged Icarus. Above, like dancing rainbows exploring an eternal labyrinth, colours swirled. They became patterns, loosened, separated, and then, in kaleidoscopes of invention, became colours which had never before existed.

  “And you say it’s a theatre?” said Georgia, rapt and still, gazing to the flaming pinnacles. “A theatre for what? Why so huge and amazing? I would have thought it would be a church at least. A temple of some kind.”

  “My friend Wilmot,” sighed Norwen with exaggerated patience, “would no doubt tell you to open your mind and discover such matters for yourself.” Norwen now stood beside her. “And he would tell me to take you by the hand and fly through the puzzles, laughing at such simplicity. But,” and Norwen nodded, abandoning the sighs, “That is not my way, although sometimes I wish it was. So let me explain in words more bland and banal. There are churches, mosques, temples, shrines and chapels on some planes. Especially on the sixth, where new arrivals expect the comfort of their chosen religions expressed in solid form. The people congregate and worship. To most, it brings great spiritual pleasure, and often significant progress.”

  Had she been on earth, her limitations of sight would have blinded her to the entirety of the incredible theatre, but here, unrestricted by the illusions of science, she did not have to stretch her neck or turn her head. Vision was unhampered by horizons. She was still, however, restricted by the capacity to wonder.

  “But all religion is one here,” continued Norwen. “Arrivals to the seventh plane learn to accept that Love unites, not separates. We also realise that understanding spirit and the source of the Source is a private and personal matter. You do not need any temple beyond your own mind.”

  “I get that,” said Georgia. “But why a theatre?”

  “It encompasses all presentations of creation,” said Norwen. “We tend to call it a theatre because here we still need words to communicate, though it might as easily be called a gallery, a museum or a library. It operates on many levels. You can come here to explore the truth of history. You can come to read, to watch ballet, opera or plays. You can choose to act yourself, or paint, or sculpt. It is a great concert hall, and the music of all lands is performed here. It is everything that is beautiful in the creative arts which those recent arrivals from life still choose to practise.”

  Georgia felt her body bubble up, alive with enthusiasm. “So you don’t need to be an actor. I don’t need a ticket. And I shall come here very often.” She grinned, spreading out her arms as if to begin her soliloquy. “I had no special talents myself when I was alive, but perhaps I can learn some here. I mean, I could learn to play the harp and sit on a cloud.” She giggled. “Or play the piano perhaps. I always wanted to learn as a kid.”

  “Of course, many do those things,” said Norwen. “Come to learn, to watch and listen to all the artistic genius of history. Those who die do not immediately relinquish the desire to practise their skills, and here of course they can achieve far more than they ever could when hampered by the physical.”

  “And on your plane?” asked Georgia suddenly, intrigued and imagining vast galleries of art, literature and outlandish achievement. “Do you have even more beautiful places? Even greater theatres?”

  “There is no simple answer to that,” smiled Norwen. “From the seventh plane onwards, the spirit’s existence loses its physical pretence. All the illusions of solidity begin to evaporate, and the essence of true spirit takes over. By the ninth plane, creation is breath and no theatre is needed to house what is inherent in every wave and particle of growth. In the meantime, what you see here is the greatest physical representation of accumulated artistic talent that could manifest. Spend days here if you like. Weeks. There are no limits.”

  “I wish I could bring my mother,” murmured Georgia.

  “Ah, yes,” smiled Norwen. “Now that is another subject altogether.”

  “Yes, she visits,” said Romano softly. “I feel her. You must surely feel that too.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Sophie. “Well, perhaps in a way I do. But it isn’t enough, is it? It’s so nebulous and I feel I ought to be sure, so then I tell myself I could be imagining it. Breezes where there shouldn’t be breezes, you know, things like a sudden movement in the big pot of geraniums indoors when there aren’t any windows open. But then I think, well it could be vibrations. Just a lorry going past outside.”

  “Lorries don’t go past this road,” Romano pointed out.

  “Yes. Well no. I mean exactly, but it just could be. The first lorry ever, and I happened to feel the vibration which moved the leaves of the geranium. You must know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I do the same thing,” Romano smiled. “I think we are cowards in such matters.”

  “But I’m not scared,” said Sophie. “I couldn’t be scared of seeing my own mother.”

  He laughed. “I don’t mean frightened of ghosts. It is our own idiocy that worries us, the pathetic desire to feel the presence of the one we’ve lost, which matters so much that we cannot risk being wrong. We simply fear to be deluded.”

  Sophie nodded. “Yes, that’s it. So, would you like to try what Wayne suggests?”

  “I am not sure,” said Romano eventually and carefully, “that Wayne is the person I would care to trust with the details of my personal emotions. Nor do I feel I would choose him as the ideal messenger in such a delicately unusual situation.”

  “But he’s the psychic one,” said Sophie. “At least, he says he is.”

  “Absurd hypothesis,” smiled Romano, “but interesting too of course. Do I understand that you are enthusiastic?”

  Sophie nodded vigorously. “Either it works or it doesn’t. But I’d hate not to try. If it does work, then it’ll be so exciting and that’s worth risking possible disappointment. Don’t you think?”

  “Life is full of disappointments,” murmured Romano.

  The sun, a golden blaze, shot between long black fingered shadows from the cypresses, snoozing in the softer sun trapped tangle of wild flowers and dozing beneath the olives, carpeting the shadows in white and yellow. Bee-drone; muffled lullabies, and hard to believe in the dangers of the supernatural while the land smelled like honey and clover and fat black grapes.

  “Georgia loved this time of year,” said Romano sleepily. “The early summer, when all the growth of this land is so spontaneous and rich. She would come, if she could.”

  “Then you agree to try?” Sophie leaned forward.

  Romano laughed. “I could hardly refuse, nor do I wish to deny such a possibi
lity. But I should like to talk to Wayne first myself, and see what he promises.”

  “I don’t suppose he can promise anything,” dubiously, “but he seems to think someone’s often here.”

  “This land carries echoes of three thousand years of building, ploughing and earnest human endeavour,” said Romano. “There will be a hundred ghosts wandering here, for those sensitive to seeing such things. I do not expect Wayne to guarantee Georgia’s appearance. I was simply thinking of denying entrance to others.”

  Sophie wrinkled her nose and squinted into the sunshine. “You don’t believe in evil spirits do you?”

  Romano paused before answering. “No. Nor do I believe that harm can come to those who have no malignant motive in calling to the other side. But I am no expert on such matters. We know so little.”

  “I wouldn’t mind talking to some Roman soldier or Etruscan farmer,” said Sophie. “It’s Mum I really hope will come of course, but anything would be exciting.”

  “You are charmingly susceptible to a variety of avenues for excitement,” said Romano, smiling again. “Such youthful exuberance! I am too old to expect excitement so easily. But if your mother will accept your friend Wayne as an avenue between worlds, then I shall be deeply satisfied. It would be the fulfilment of everything I could hope for.”

  “I’ll tell him,” said Sophie.

  Georgia stood on her mother’s polished doorstep, took a deep breath, and knocked. With an effort of concentration, she stopped her hand going straight through, and she stopped the door swinging open on its lopsided hinges. The knock reverberated into the building.

  “Oh don’t be so silly and just come in,” called Rita. “I know you can walk right through if you want. And you are my daughter after all. No locks and keys where family’s concerned.”

  Well, that was new. “And I went to all that trouble to knock first and be polite,” said Georgia. “Where are you?”