She remembered that conversation now, sitting beneath the swirling colours as her mind blazed with the amazing and mystifying music. It seemed unutterably delicious that a spirit as evolved as Norwen should choose her company, and even miss her in her absence. Yet they were not in any respect partners. They were not even friends.
“I consider us friends,” Norwen interrupted into her mind. “Do you not?”
“Thank you,” Georgia said. “I would truly love to think so. Is that a sign I’m growing?”
“Apart from my guidance, it is your travels to the lower plane to visit your mother, and your treatment of her, that has helped you grow,” Norwen said. “When you go again, you will find her friend Sven, whom you will not instantly like. You will also discover her guide, who is Darial from my plane. You will, naturally, like her a great deal.”
Georgia had switched her replies to silent telepathy. “And should I take my father?” she asked. “He wants very much to meet my mother again. He knows it’s a blockage he needs to overcome.”
“He must not use contact with another to overcome his own repressed emotional trials,” said Norwen, “and you must not involve yourself in another’s problems, which you cannot fully appreciate. Before introducing each to the other again, you must have your mother’s permission, which she is not yet ready to give. She has not conquered her own sense of shame. First she must learn to forgive herself. Your father must also learn to forgive before he can face the past.”
“Alright,” nodded Georgia. “I get the point. I have to mind my own business.”
“It’s not that you have to,” smiled Norwen, “it is that you may, with freedom and impunity, do so. You wish only to mind other people’s avenues of learning because you care, and feel responsible. Relax. There are powers with greater insight than yours, which take that responsibility. You do not need to shoulder such concern for those you love. Giving love is quite sufficient, being the ultimate and most useful gift. What happens need not concern you. It is in sacred hands.”
She settled back then, reabsorbing herself into the music. It entered her mind as the telepathy did, and began to solve the knots that remained there. By the time her father smiled and got up to leave, Georgia was asleep. She was dreaming of the music that soared still through her memories, and sped into her deepest thoughts.
Romano’s dreams were of a fast beating heart and the lightening jab of utter loneliness. He woke to thunder and the rain. The louvered shutters had loosened their latch and were rattling in the wind for the storm was sudden and a mild evening had turned to drama. His dreams had been dramatic in hopelessness, one echoing the other.
It had been proved to him, and the memory remained alive, that Georgia was not entirely lost. Although she was removed, the denial would not be eternal.
But at three in the morning when the sun denied the earth its energy, it masked its indeterminate secrets in great distortions of mind while trust, faith and the straight path became impossibly winding and once clear goals became lost in bewildered cloud. A good time for nothing except wistful memories; the mind’s music in a minor key and the contemplation of shadows into suicide. The helter- skelter of blood sugar and the sudden belief in predestined failure.
Romano shook his head clear from foggy fingers of self-pity, rolled from the bed and shrugged on a robe. He pattered bare foot downstairs to the kitchen and filled the coffee pot. Before lighting the gas, the fresh ground beans perfumed the damp air and snapped him fully awake. He smiled and waited for the pot to bubble. He was surprised to hear someone else pacing the corridor outside.
“I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
Romano indicated his coffee cup. “I was up already. I imagine the storm has woken us all.”
“Oh well. To be honest, I’ve been awake a lot lately.” Wayne accepted the proffered cup and Romano filled both. “Probably a guilty conscience.”
Romano smiled. “Sometimes circumstances demand we try to fulfil others’ expectations. But perhaps sometimes we should try a little less.”
Wayne paused, blinked, stared at Romano a moment, and nodded. “Yes, well, that sounds as if you know more than I’d realised. I expect you know pretty much what goes on here. You don’t mind?”
“There are many things in life that I mind. But we are all adults. A mistake to one man is success to another.” Romano drank his coffee, leaning back against the cooking range, watching the storm continue to pound through the long unshuttered windows.
Wayne went to stand in front of the dark glass, his back to Romano, staring at the leaden sleet. “I reckon I owe you,” he said. “And I don’t just mean money. Okay. That too. Food, and bed and everything else, it’s been fantastic. True blue. I’m grateful.” He turned and faced his host again. “It’s time I went, isn’t it?”
Romano refilled the coffee cups, and stood, stirring in the sugar. “I haven’t actually asked you to leave.”
“Perhaps you should have,” said Wayne. “I’m sorry about the other stuff too. You know, the séance.”
“Don’t apologise,” said Romano. “I found it interesting and I know it was genuine. Even though you did not contact Georgia, the exercise could be said to have been successful. I am not, in fact, entirely sure I would have wished you to be the go-between for Georgia and myself. For Sophie however, it would have been a blessing.”
Wayne smiled. “I’m not sure anything to do with me could be called a blessing for Sophie.”
“True. But that is up to you,” said Romano. “As is telling her the truth.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
They sat, Primo cross legged and Wilmot outstretched, by the deep pool of the grandest water fall. Above them the cliff wall created its own shadows. No direct correlation between the angle and any direction of the sun commanded the shape and force of shade, nor of its substance. Where each shadow lay was a personal choice. Some were almost haphazard. Others were sharp and black and Primo thought, almost sinister.
The shadows relaxed and the two men sitting within them accepted the lines of pale and grey, of dark and golden upon their faces. A particularly bright strand of sunlight caressed the punk rocker’s Mohawk. Wilmot put on sunglasses. They had purple lenses in scarlet frames and did not really match the rest of his costume. His words were considerably less comical than his appearance. He spoke through the haze of water sheen where the falling cascade bounced back in a flurry of silver dampness, like ten million dancing stars. Wilmot said, “I want to talk about your memories.”
It seemed endless, a black hole of repetition, memories regurgitated into infinity. Primo took a deep breath, sadly disappointed, and said, “What, yet again? Screw you.”
“You have no idea how to,” answered Wilmot cheerfully. “However, since screwing specifically relates to your former life, it therefore constitutes a memory. Let us continue.”
Primo said, “You fucking know. I’ve talked. Do I have to humiliate myself all over again? What for? I was a monstrous shit and it disgusts me, but I can’t fucking die again can I? If I could, I’d let some poor bugger strangle me slow, just to get their own back, but it doesn’t work that way. I’m ready now to face Daisy and start the big effort, atonement and everything. So what more?”
“Atonement for what?” said Wilmot, rather more gently.
“Oh fuck,” Primo gulped. “Do you want me to go through it all, over and over?”
“I am actually suggesting something a little different,” said Wilmot, and lay back, hands clasped behind his head. Where he lay, the water did not pass and the grass beside him remained strangely dry. Something of Wilmot’s hidden aura gleamed through, a pale sparkle which rejected the natural fall of the vapour.
Primo was soaked. “Tell me,” he said, leaning forwards.
Being so close to her old nesting grounds, the harpy had flown on and was now unseen, back on the peaks where Primo had built his first home. Without her Primo felt even more vulnerable but some fleck of instinct kept him stil
l and waiting.
“We have already established,” said Wilmot, “that your memories are brutal. They encompass dreams of cruelty achieved by the abuse of power, and indulged over time. Have you by any chance, amongst your other newly acquired recollections, remembered why you discarded your real name on arrival in the Summerlands, and why you chose the particular pseudonym that you did?”
“Primo?” said Primo and shook his head. “Not really. I didn’t want my real name, that’s obvious. It was probably well known. I was a murderer. Serial killer. Was I executed in prison? I suppose I was. That’s something I don’t remember. But I wouldn’t have wanted to carry that name over here, would I.”
“You have so consistently blocked all your memories,” Wilmot sighed, “that you are even confused as to what you remember and what you do not. When you died, you see, you came directly into the hospital on the third plane, which was your natural point of arrival. There you should have slept for a very, very long time. Perhaps an eon. You would have cleansed almost everything from your past, and your dreams, although not always easily, would have enabled you to understand. You would have relinquished blame, bitterness, guilt and confusion. Everything would have been neatly ironed out in the sweet scented never-never, as it is planned to be. But your ever bilious pride refused to give up the power of control, and your nauseas fear blocked, one by one, the memories which you were meant to relive and categorise. You rose from your hospital bed still quite unwashed. Yes, indeed, most unhygienic. It did you a great deal of harm and you remained in a state of ignorance and regression, thereby naturally attracted to the aimless violence of the third plane gang where you believed you belonged, although you did not. Your choices were absurd and inspired by self-loathing.”
”But I left there eventually,” muttered Primo. “I got away.”
“One of the few ventures to your credit,” nodded Wilmot. “However, it is not your actions which I now wish to analyse. It is your state of mind.”
Primo groaned. “Shit. Must you? Must I?”
“Indeed we must,” said Wilmot. “You, with all your vaunted memories of lust and sadism, should not now be fearful of a little dark delving.”
Primo looked sick. “Go on. I take it you don’t object if I spew?”
“Spew away,” smiled Wilmot. “But you must also listen. First I wish to point out that I am not a great admirer of logical thought. I consider it the timid man’s refuge when he dare not take the leap of inspiration. However, in this instance I believe you must begin with the most logical sequence. Start, dear boy, with childhood. It remains the part of your last life which you have persistently failed to revive.”
“If I try and dredge it up,” Primo pondered, “will you let me off facing Daisy?”
“We are not yet at bargaining level,” said Wilmot. “We are at master and slave, and I believe I am playing master. Therefore you will simply obey. We will start with your birth.”
“Shit,” said Primo. “How the fuck am I supposed to remember that?”
“During your very brief interlude in the hospital of your arrival,” continued Wilmot, balancing one scuffed and booted ankle on the bony point of his knee, “you began to relive the deeper and more unpleasant of your memories. Instantly, instead of allowing each consequent frame past your barriers, you closed your mind and erected barbed wire. Cowardice, dear boy, the shameful arrogance of cowardice. You could not admit the horror of what you quickly supposed your soul to be. Cowardice is not your customary sin of choice, yet from that denial it was two steps to banish memory altogether. You forced yourself awake and left the hospital, determined to forget everything of what you had been. That is a great deal of brick wall for you to demolish now. So we will start at the beginning.”
“You sent me back to the hospital,” said Primo. “I did what you told me and I even met the doctor. He didn’t tell me anything. What Pigseed said didn’t help either.”
“Of course not,” agreed Wilmot. “In spite of my persistent attempts to nudge your feeble mind into the proper avenues, you have equally persistently avoided discovering anything at all useful. Both those exercises you mention could have opened memory paths, but your innate resistance insured no doors opened. So now I am forcing the issue. I really cannot have you wasting your potential like this any longer.”
“You sent that fucking vile nothing hole too, didn’t you?” demanded Primo suddenly. “I never thought of it before. Of course, I hadn’t even met you when that happened. But it was your shitty black hole, wasn’t it?”
“Naturally, dear boy,” said Wilmot, closing the smile of his eyes behind his purple lenses. “I have been trying to dig you in the ribs ever since you marched out of the third plane hospital a long time ago, bleating about how you never asked for life after death and would have preferred total annihilation. You then started to block every remaining particle of memory. Memory, after all, is a valuable tool. Did you think it had been presented to your psyche simply as a means to remember how to masturbate, or the easiest way to tie your shoe laces? Instead, you turned one of God’s most valuable gifts into a forgettery.”
“Well, I still can’t remember being born,” muttered Primo, sullen. “Nag all you want, but that memory’s gone.”
“Your excretion from the birth canal is not the relevant point,” said Wilmot patiently. “It is what you were born into that I am asking you to recount.”
Primo swallowed hard and watched a centipede navigate the short damp grass by his elbow. “Mother and step-father,” he mumbled obediently. “My father was already dead. Hot desert and a rundown shack. Tumbleweed and turkey vultures. No water. No mountains, no rivers, no waterfalls. No forests. Lots of fucking bleached out sky.”
“You conveniently turn to memories of the land, and not of the people,” smiled Wilmot. “Tell me about your mother.”
“Always tired,” said Primo. “Little and pretty and fucking exhausted.” His voice had lapsed into a chant, almost lost beneath the swell of falling water and the gurgle of the deep pool. Wilmot was listening to his mind, however, and not his words. “She used to shout a lot, but she was alright. She tried.” Primo glanced up, frowning. “Look,” he said, “do I have to do this? It’s making me feel fucking sick. I know what I did and so do you. So what’s all this childhood puke then? Finding excuses for the warped little prick I finally turned into? Putting the blame on the poor sad misunderstood boy gone wrong?”
“Never,” said Wilmot firmly, “even in my wildest dreams, and I assure you I’ve enjoyed some deliciously wild dreams in my time, would I ever consider finding you an excuse for anything. Excuses are as fundamentally deceptive as is the concept of blame. Now, if you have finished whining, please continue.”
Primo sighed and stretched slowly out beside Wilmot on the ground. Whereas Wilmot appeared to enjoy a bed of soft dry green, where Primo lay was distinctly wet, but he stayed and, like Wilmot, clasped his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. It helped him concentrate. Rediscovering the machinations of his memory meant clearing away the rust of stiffened hinges and took much silent effort. It was beginning to hurt. To his left the pool of the water fall sang gently beneath its silver mist of droplets. Somehow, the song began to help.
“Then she had another kid,” said Primo at last. His voice was now a whisper. “My little half-brother. That’s what you want me to remember, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Wilmot. “It is. Go on.”
“They were alright, my mother and step-father. They meant well. They didn’t have the time for gushy stuff and they weren’t the sort of people to hug much. A bit life-beaten, like the parts of the desert where nothing managed to grow. But they tried. My real father’d been killed by farm machinery before I even got born, speared by some mechanical pitchfork or other. No one ever explained much. I just sort of felt he hadn’t bothered to hang around for me. I mean, being abandoned before I even got born. I had a bit of a complex about that. I was pretty stupid I guess.”
�
�It was your later stupidity that hindered you more,” said Wilmot. “But we will get to that afterwards.”
“Okay,” said Primo. “I’ll keep to the fucking point. You want me to talk about Gary. He was born when I was five. I hated him on sight. All that soft pink, when I was scorched brown without an ounce of flesh, so I loathed the little bastard. I was as jealous as shit.”
“Is shit prone to jealousy?” wondered Wilmot. “No matter. Tell me about this interloper into your family’s affections.”
“Well, he grew up,” said Primo. “I grew up. He grew up. Until I was nine and he was four. Just four years old, poor little bugger. He followed me around but not because the little brat adored me or anything. None of that younger sibling hero worship crap. My mom just kept saying, go play with your brother. So he did, even though I didn’t want him. I used to pinch him. Nice big fat yellow bruises on all that plump pink bouncy flesh. He still toddled after me, obedient and fucking stupid. He was a real bore. I couldn’t go off and run, or kick balls or any of the things I wanted to. I had to hang around and walk slow because Gary couldn’t keep up. After school I helped my mum, didn’t have much time off to play. But when I did, I had to look after Gary even though he stank. You know, dribble and shit and farts and stuff. He was a right puke stained little bastard. Probably got born with a faulty digestive system. Anyway, I didn’t like him.”
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