Between

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “Do I lecture? How boring,” said Wilmot. “What I am actually waiting for, is your opinion of your most recent experience. Or shall we call it a holiday?”

  “You know exactly what I thought. What I think.”

  “But,” said Wilmot. “I want your words. Because I want you to recognise what you think you think, which will be slightly different to what I know you think.”

  He hadn’t come all that often lately, so Sophie was particularly pleased to have Wayne back in her bed. When he didn’t come she missed the cuddles and the private chatting, but most of all she felt rejected, as if perhaps she had made a fool of herself by chasing him in the first place. He never seemed an over-keen lover, and although she was hardly an expert, she knew sex could be somewhat more enthusiastic than this. But you couldn’t come to Italy without discovering some element of romance, and maybe Wayne wasn’t actually Italian but he was at least satisfactorily foreign, and besides, he was just so nice.

  The love making hadn’t started yet but they were wrapped up together, and had kissed and stroked a little and now Wayne was on his back staring at the ceiling shadows. They often talked for ages like this, when he came to her room at all.

  Sophie said, “So don’t you ever feel inferior? I suppose you don’t. Well, you’re not inferior of course, so why would you feel it? I mean, it was just so lovely the other day when that really superior woman turned up in Siena, and hung all over Romano, and he just sort of politely pushed her off and turned down her invitations. You didn’t seem impressed by her either, and that was really nice.”

  Wayne shifted sideways and stared at her a moment. He seemed momentarily astonished. “God, women are so stupid,” he said. “I barely even noticed her. None of us even know who she was.”

  “Well, of course we know,” sniffed Sophie. “It was just too obvious. She was after Romano, she came on so strong, and he turned her down. Didn’t you even take an interest?”

  “Why should I? It wasn’t my business,” said Wayne. He paused, eyes back on the ceiling and the single trail of dust. “I think I mucked up that other stuff though. I’m really sorry I never got your mum.”

  Sophie nodded into his shoulder. “I wish you had. It would have been so brilliant. But maybe it’s just as well.”

  The following morning as she stood bathed in sunshine watching Romano make coffee, she remembered the conversation. Coffee was all Romano ever took for breakfast. Julian was making toast under the grill. Wayne was still upstairs presumably asleep, but no longer in her bed. He’d crept out in the early hours, had kissed the tip of her nose goodnight, and gone back to his own room. She hadn’t minded. There had been the best sex before that, better than usual. Her dreams afterwards had been good too and then with the bed to herself she hadn’t had to worry about her own possible snuffles and dribbles and snores and all those things people do while unconscious which can turn off a prospective lover.

  The sunlight pooled over the worn pine of the kitchen table. Romano sat opposite her and watched her spread her toast. “I must admit,” he said pleasantly, “I have never understood this British passion for burning good bread each morning and covering it in a slick of butter, which they then scrape off again, scraping on and off with a sort of mesmerising concentration. They then ruin all that effort of perfection with a cap of marmalade. Very strange. It is a ritual which fascinates me. The symbolism of life perhaps, spreading on, then take back, maybe some type of therapy with which to face the day.”

  ”Oh dear,” laughed Sophie, “I don’t think it’s anything that philosophical.”

  Julian was stretching, exuberant. “I don’t need therapy. Everything is positively delicious this morning. The birds are singing, the sun shining and everything is alright with the world. Sweet Tuscan days, floating on sunbeams.”

  Equally enthusiastic, Sophie grinned. “Yes, isn’t everything lovely. Italy compliments us.”

  “And we are suitably flattered.” Julian nodded happily, crunching on toast.

  “I approve the tattoos,” said Primo. “I used to think about getting one myself. They were just getting popular when – you know. Not that I remember.”

  The person standing beside him was young, distinctly unbeautiful, and rather skinny. “But clearly you remember something then?”

  “Well of course I do. Bits and pieces.”

  Wilmot scratched his Mohawk. The central line of ginger tufts sprang tall from his scalp, finished in a lavatory brush curve of bristled ends. The colour was somewhat virulent. “The horns were easier,” Wilmot sighed. “This itches like fuck.”

  “Fucking doesn’t itch,” said Primo. “At least, it never did to me. If it did to you, then you probably had scabies.”

  “Talking to you,” said Wilmot, “is invariably such an exhausting business. I frequently wonder why I bother.”

  “You must like me,” Primo said. “You keep coming back.”

  “I’m your guide,” Wilmot said. “It’s a punishment for all my wicked indulgences in past lives. How do you like the new clothes?”

  “Not bad.” Primo nodded. “Don’t tell me you were a punk rocker in your last incarnation.”

  “Dear boy, certainly not,” sighed Wilmot. “I would never have had such abysmal taste. Taste was always my favourite deity. I approved irreverent choices, but never the shoddy. In any case, this style was way after my time. During my last life, this denim business was strictly the attire of the rural worker, in particular of those wading through animal dung.”

  “Cowboys,” suggested Primo.

  “No doubt, but irrelevant, my child,” continued Wilmot, “I am here to discuss your sins and not my own, nor those of others, neither human nor bovine.”

  “It’s a bit hard to take you seriously,” Primo pointed out, “when you look like a delinquent adolescent with a safety pin stuck through one eyebrow.”

  “You feel the safety pin is too much?” Wilmot sighed. “I knew it. A lapse in judgement I fear. I apologise. As I mentioned, the costume is a little after my time, so I am somewhat inexperienced. I bow to your better education in such matters. I hope the rest is suitable?”

  “You mean the ripped pink T-shirt with the skull and cross bones on the back, I suppose? And the nipple rings. Very pretty.” Primo was happy to keep the conversation away from his briefly mentioned sins. “I especially like the black eyeliner. But your legs are a little skinny for such tight jeans. I bet you can’t breathe in those. Come to think of it, I don’t suppose you need to. However did you get them on?”

  Wilmot smiled with a lift of one safety pin pierced eyebrow. “Silly boy! Do you think I invent this absurd nonsense as if it were a wardrobe, and then have to struggle to dress myself? I assure you, that’s not how it’s done. As it happens, I create my appearance directly into your mind.”

  “Shit,” said Primo with an involuntary step backwards. “Get out of my mind then.”

  “But so much fun,” insisted Wilmot. “And it’s not as if I roll around in there, or even hang about on the threadbare fringes. Your mind is far too uncomfortable a place to linger in.”

  Primo glared. The pleasurable atmosphere fled. It meant that the man who had taken him, in such faith, to the glorious magic of the ninth plane and had initiated him into the first secrets of true spirit, knew all his hideous secrets after all. He must know about the strangling, about the dreams of rape, the vile things he’d done, and relished, during his life just gone. “And you keep on telling me to remember. You fucking know I’ve remembered. And you know what I’ve remembered. So, you don’t even have to ask fucking permission to get inside my head?” He paused, waiting for a reaction, and received none. Wilmot continued to study the tattoo of a coiled cobra which encircled his wrist. “So, now you know everything,” Primo went on. He smothered a hiccup. “So stop pretending to be my fucking friend, and piss off.”

  “Friends,” mused Wilmot, still examining the outstretched fangs of the ravenous serpent etched around his arm. “Now, have I ever
spoken of friendship? Such a thing is possible of course, but I doubt it. I am simply your guide, and friendship is something that grows with acquaintance. It does not arrive fully formed. I may have addressed you as my friend at some time of course. I tend to have loose habits of speech. Next time perhaps I should dress as a leprechaun and call you my darling boy.”

  “Don’t bother,” said Primo. “I won’t answer. I don’t fucking want you here. You can bugger off.”

  “How tedious guilt is,” said Wilmot, sitting carefully on a rock. His costume might exist only in Primo’s mind, but Wilmot was still dubious about splitting his jeans. “There really are a few things I should explain before buggering off. Firstly, that in effect, you have already given me permission to get inside your thoughts. Secondly, telepathy, even on my level, does not include much detail, nor those boring personal things that humans tend to clutter their heads with. Emotions stay invariably private, because apart from other more complex reasons, they are just too revolting for anyone else to want to read. Swimming into your emotional quagmire would drown me in silt and sludge before I could lift my nose ring out of the muck. And it’s a very nice nose ring, don’t you think?”

  “If you can’t read them,” grumbled Primo, “how the fuck do you know my feelings are that fucking bad?”

  “Intelligence, dear boy,” said Wilmot. “I am positively notorious for being astute, and in comparison to you, I am sufficiently superior to make some highly educated guesses.” He smiled and stretched his legs to the water beside which they were sitting. “Besides,” he grinned, “I cheat.”

  Primo shrugged. “You’re a hard fucking idiot to be cross with. But I have enough trouble with my thoughts and memories so I prefer to keep them to myself. At least until I choose to tell you. And what’s more, I hate the boots.”

  “Dear, dear,” said Wilmot, lifting one hob-nail booted ankle. “Have I gone too far again I wonder? A habit of mine I fear. Undoubtedly hideous boots.”

  “So telepathy, even from someone as perfectly superior as you,” insisted Primo, “doesn’t give automatic access to every single little bit of the other person’s thoughts?”

  “Certainly not,” said Wilmot, having switched his attention to his nipple rings flashing sapphire in the low light, which were evidently becoming uncomfortable. “For me, reading your mind is similar to the way you read your eagles. Indeed, your level of intellect is probably similar.”

  Primo dropped the sulk and smirked. “Which is why you thought me worth taking up to the ninth plane, and why I could do it too, even if I was under your aura. I still made it. It hurt like the shits, but I made it.”

  “Indeed you did,” smiled Wilmot, “So kindly behave like the advanced being I actually consider you to be, and not like a spoiled brat from the third.”

  “Tell me about telepathy then,” said Primo.

  “A prevarication, but one I will allow,” said Wilmot, crossing his ankles which showed a flash of candy pink socks beneath the boots. “Human thought exists on many levels until the spirit purifies its memories and desires and emotional baggage. Thoughts waft through the mind like flecks of gauze and threads of cotton, disconnected and aimlessly floating. Some will, illogically, wind themselves around the jutting edges of your brain and become absorbed into the consciousness. Then others, frequently with little innate connection, will attach, gluing one end to another in any ludicrous sequence, until the benighted spirit whose mind is so tainted, believes he has discovered something of importance. A drifting thought with such adhesive qualities is of no more consequence than those which remain disconnected, but because it sticks, it enters the memory banks, and becomes cohesive with the personality. To enter this conglomeration of boredom with telepathic intent would be utterly pointless.”

  “It sounds so fucking unexciting,” said Primo, “and you’re boring me rigid. But do carry on.”

  “Telepathy alights only on the upper surfaces,” nodded Wilmot. “It can hear those thoughts which are purposefully sent as direct messages, invariably in words or pictures. Abstract messages are more difficult both to send and to receive. Naturally, I can do both. However, I can also detect the upper level of the memory banks, the general mood, and any of the more disciplined machinations of the brain. The brain being the country cousin of the mind of course.”

  “Piss off,” said Primo, though he smiled.

  “So,” Wilmot continued, “let us begin again. We were talking, if I remember rightly, about your memories. Going back before you can go forward. And more specifically, about what we can now, in general, call your sins.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The being seemed so explosive with light that no one dared approach it. It blazed brighter than the flaming bus when the bomb had detonated. Its brilliance was far greater than the usual do-gooders who turned up from time to time and gave a few lectures while Pigseed and the rest sneered, sniggered, and threw the occasional stick. This creature was even more magnificent than the rising sun turning golden over the hills. No one had ever seen anything quite like it.

  The camp fire had been burning high, recently built up with a new logging from the woods across the meadow. Now it guttered in shame. Each flame, held in place within the gang’s minds and not in fact by the illusion of collected sticks which they so erroneously supposed to be the source of their light and heat, now faltered and faded into a glow of ashes. Norwen stood beside the rising smoke and stared around him. The gang moved away. A few got up and ran. The rest shifted backwards and hung their heads.

  It was therefore from a distance that Norwen eventually spoke. He spoke directly into Father Martin’s mind. He said, “I have come to offer you progress. Do you acknowledge me?”

  Father Martin, like some of the others, had fallen flat on his nose. Being unsure how the words in his head had alighted, he did not answer. Ayakis however, although afraid of the momentous majesty with which this being seemed endowed and the brilliance of his aura which could hardly be faced but certainly not ignored, scrambled up and ran towards him, finally throwing himself at Norwen’s feet. There he attempted to kiss the angel’s toes. “Master,” squeaked Ayakis tremulously, “I am here. You have come for me at last.”

  Norwen answered aloud. “I am not your master. I am neither angel, nor messenger of God. I have not come for you. Why do you believe that your acts of hatred, of vengeance and of self-regard, should earn you reward in Paradise?”

  Ayakis gasped, gulped and then began to sob. His head hurt very badly. As he cried, the pain in his burned eyes and broken nose was aggravated. “Master,” he repeated, “I acted out of love for the Lord. I did what I was taught was right. If I did wrong, it was the fault of those who persuaded me.”

  “Every spirit,” said Norwen softly, “is responsible for what he thinks. Your actions do not constitute sin, but your thoughts do. You sought personal reward through intentionally promoting the suffering of others. This is why you remain here. In time you will rise. In time you will be as I am and travel down to help others, but that time is not yet. I am not come to help you. You are not ready.”

  His crying became screams, and Ayakis grabbed at Norwen’s ankles. The swirling golden blaze of light burned him and he shrieked, drawing back his hands. “Don’t leave me here. I did only what I thought was holy.”

  “That is a blasphemy far worse than personal hatred,” Norwen said directly into his mind. Ayakis blanched. “To thrive on hatred is the choice of a regressing soul,” continued Norwen. “To impute that hatred to God is a terrible sin. Consider this, while you wait.”

  “But I’ve already been punished beyond any deserving,” Ayakis yelled as Norwen moved away towards Father Martin. “Look how I’m disfigured. Look what I’ve been made to suffer. It is that fool who burned me, when I did nothing to him.”

  Norwen was walking towards Father Martin, but he stopped then, and turned. “You cursed him,” Norwen said. “Any curse made in the Summerlands, on whatever plane, will turn against the insti
gator. Practise blessings, and the bliss will return to you.”

  Father Martin had sat up, facing the miraculous being he now knew had come for him. He was afraid, and was hugging himself, rocking backwards and forwards. Norwen stopped beside him, and bent. “Come with me,” he said. “We will not go far, but come walk with me. I have things I need to say.”

  Quivering, Father Martin rose and followed Norwen. They walked together away from the gang, towards the copse of trees ahead. Father Martin tried to keep up. Finally he said, “Lord, what you said about hatred and not apportioning blame, I know those things. I know why I’m here in this wretched place, instead of rising to the higher planes like Father Spiro. I don’t blame anyone else except myself. But I’ve been trying to do right. Like you said, give out blessings and they’ll return to you. I’ve been helping the lost souls here. I’ve been converting them. I’ve done good work in the name of the Lord.”

  Norwen smiled but shook his head. “You have been trying to make some reparation,” he said, “but only now that you find yourself in misery. Before, when you still lived, you made no effort to repair the terrible harm you did to those in your care. You did nothing because you feared your sins being discovered, and shame coming to yourself. Now you simply fear punishment. You do not try to help others from love, but from guilt and fear. Where there is fear, there is no love, for each of these will cancel out the other.”

  Father Martin nodded. “You’re right. I understand. I am trying to help others because I fear for myself. But at least I’m trying. Does that count for so little?”

  “But you are attempting to convert your companions into the dogma and doctrine you barely believe yourself,” Norwen said, “not into understanding of love and forgiveness. Unconditional love is not bounded by intolerance, nor the favouring of one belief above another. Your attempts to convert the wicked are pointless. You must attempt only to convert yourself.”