A Dark Nativity

by George Pitcher

  Ah, there it is. She must have been borderline G3. And he’d wished her dead. He needed somewhere to put the guilt.

  “Well done,” said the police officer at the door when he’d moved away. “They’re told to talk about it quickly afterwards. There’s some counselling too, but it’s pretty useless. It’s the other halves who get it all in the end. They’re the ones who find them whimpering and wet with sweat in a corner of the bedroom in the middle of the night.”

  I went outside and sat next to a priest on a bench in the churchyard. He talked amiably about suicide bombers and newspaper reporters. I noticed one side of his face bore the scars of an old burn and I wondered how it had happened, but I didn’t ask him. We sat and looked out over the empty streets and listened to London in the distance, a shortened lifetime away.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Punish yourself ?”

  I looked at Dr Gray as he slumped in his button-back chair, corduroyed short legs crossed and away to one side, silly maroon-patterned socks in scuffed slip-on brown shoes.

  “Well, I thought it was your job to tell me that.” That was quite an answer for a fifteen-year-old and I was proud of it. It was the same sort of approach I took some years later when I went to that selection conference to be a Church of England priest.

  I’d never had an eating disorder. We’d been through all that. Dr Gray, a bumptious middle-aged man, seemed so fixated on me having anorexia or bulimia that I’d wondered for the first session whether he’d got his files mixed up. This would have been around my third session and I only went about six times.

  “I told you. I cut myself.”

  “Well, that seems a very unpleasant thing to do.”

  He was so useless, I wonder today whether he was qualified at all. I’d told him I self-harmed out of pity for him really. I needed to give him something. He had a consulting room in a mock-Tudor parade of shops, with net curtains and cursory ornaments, scruffily piled books on a cheap self-build bookcase.

  “Shall I tell you why I do it?”

  “Go on, then.”

  “I want to see what’s inside me. It’s hard to explain, but I also feel a pressure in me that needs to be released.”

  I would drag the pointy end of a pair of scissors up the loose white of the inside of my forearm, or the flank of a thigh as I sat on the loo. If you pull with little more than the weight of the blade, as a harrow might bounce over stony, dry earth, little red beads pop up in its furrow, like beads of blossoming vegetation. The trick is to extract blood that can be wiped away, leaving a blushing pink trace, but healed, as easily dried as tears.

  “How often does this happen?”

  “Most days. On the way to school. In a corner of the bus. Sometimes in the loos at dinner time. Even on a couple of occasions in class.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Yes.”

  Scissors were good, but those little plastic white knives from supermarket snacks had a useful little serrated edge that helped with applying exactly the right pressure, and I liked the red against the smooth virginal white. Even the spike of a geometry protractor worked, though it lent itself to jabbing with an angry clenched fist. I was never into jabbing.

  “So why did you come to see me?”

  “My form mistress noticed. She thought it might be drugs.”

  “Do you take drugs?”

  “No.”

  I had to tell this child therapist something, so I told him about my cutting. It made the sessions easier for both of us. There was something to talk about. But he didn’t seem to know much about it. I embellished, extemporised, being sure to do it earlier on the day I saw Dr Gray, so there was a fresh pink-grapefruit streak for him to notice.

  “Why do you think you want to hurt yourself ?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you feel depressed?”

  And then I stopped and that seemed to please everyone, which is all I wanted to do at that time really, I realised. Pleasing people is easy, like passing exams, as easy as wiping away blood on soft toilet tissue, or on to a sanitary towel to make it look like my periods had started.

  “Are you all right now, Natalie, do you think?”

  “Yes, thank you, Dr Gray, I feel much better.”

  “Good. Now are you having any trouble with food? Do you find it disgusting to eat at all?”

  Towards the end of the afternoon, the church had got quieter, the paramedics gone. Most of the crews were now in and out of the entrance to Aldgate station, providing access for forensics and the traffic to mortuaries. I decided to take a tray of tea and cans of fizzy drinks over there.

  When it was made, I swung easily over the low churchyard wall and started towards a couple of police officers on the far side of the entrance. But at that moment there was a flurry of activity from within, two or three paramedics moving quickly, almost at a run, towards open ambulance doors reversing in our direction.

  A short stretcher emerged between two bearers, something blackened and indistinct on it, under reflective silver blanketing, like a burnt Sunday dinner in tinfoil. My first instinct was that this was a child, but later I deduced that this was a shortened adult body. They have smaller stretchers for that?

  A policewoman followed and stopped about three yards in front of me. The action and raised voices had moved to the ambulance, her role complete. She held her fists under her nose suddenly, then turned towards me.

  I let the tray fall, cups and tea spilling and smashing across the pavement, and held her as she buried her face in my shoulder. Her peaked cap tilted absurdly upwards as if in a raised salute. She was only there a moment and there was no sob, just a stiff little body, tight all over. Then, composed again, she pulled away. She had mousy hair and poor skin.

  “Sorry, Vicar,” she said, gesturing at the tea and broken china. “Bad day at the office.” And she was gone, back on the job.

  I’m told the security services recruit broken people for the dirty work. The Church certainly does. I wondered if they knew this stuff. Incredible if they do, from school reports or doctors’ notes or wherever, because I barely know about this stuff myself. The psychopath doesn’t know she’s a psychopath, right? Obviously I tick some of those boxes.

  Everything looks so normal, dull even, from where I stand. Then I look at what I’ve done and it’s not like anyone else’s stuff. And it looks like someone else did it, but I know it’s just me, the one who can present this normal front to the world. Is everyone like this? I hope so, because then that makes me part of a mass of humanity, like anyone else.

  There was a boy at school. Jon. After I humiliated him, I could see he’d been crying and that was good, because it showed he cared. I heard later on that he’d failed a load of exams and I wondered if that was my fault. But I can’t say I cared. I wish I could.

  He was square, but not short, not really shy, but diffident in that way boys have in their mid-teens before their character kicks in, if they have one. We were paired in some physics experiment, latent heat or something similarly forgettable. He stood there a bit like my assistant at a cookery demonstration, holding the thermometer and a stick of candlewax and glancing between the whiteboard and the apparatus, not much bothered that I appeared to be doing all the prep. I was always practical, always did the heavy lifting.

  Anyway, the wax in the copper pan began to form an inflating dome before us and we stared at it with a kind of fascinated detachment. Then it burst open with a koi carp pout, splattering hot foam over the front of Jon’s trousers, and subsided into itself, a retreating monster.

  With a voice I hadn’t heard before, Jon said in a nasal, officious tone: “Leave him, doctor, there’s nothing more you can do.”

  It wasn’t as if it was that funny, but it burst the tense piety of the physics lab. I gave an involuntary snort and sprayed our submerging creature with spots of saliva, which hissed on the pool like a geyser for a second. I was shaking, with one hand ov
er my mouth and the other on Jon’s thermometer-bearing forearm. He had bowed his head to conceal himself behind the row in front and was hissing rhythmically.

  Some arcane, distant instructions from Mr Paton, the teacher, made matters worse – I couldn’t breathe and felt a small emission moisten me down below. I turned for the door, hand still self-suffocating, as the adult words, “Are you all right, Natalie?” followed me through the door and into the corridor.

  The loos were a short skip away and in that sanctuary I howled, joyously, abandoned, like grief in a war zone, watching my distorted image in the cracked mirror as the peals turned to moans and I regained control. It must have been ten minutes later, school-maximum eyeliner restored and the door clatter of lessons ending to an electric bell, that I emerged, hyperventilated and lighter. Jon ambled along the wall against the tide, his files hung at the hip, naturally, not trying to be cool – I liked that – and asked, “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah, sorry, that really got me.” I ran a finger under one eye to demonstrate my recomposure.

  “Do you mind if I ask,” he said, as we walked and he pointed to his own eye, “what did you do to your eyebrow?”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I had a cyst removed. It weakened the muscle and made that eyebrow droop.”

  “It’s nice,” he said.

  In an American high school we’d have dated, right? As it was, I usually walked with Jon between lessons. And, I promise, I really honestly did get something in my eye. The wind funnelled between temporary school cabins and picked up crisp bags and leaves. Something slapped into the corner of my eye like a tiny fly, just wedged against the bridge of my nose. It was my bad eye, the one with the scarred lid, and I felt the separated muscles in my brow buckle. It felt perfectly normal to hold my face in Jon’s direction, eyelids lowered, and he carefully and surprisingly gently flicked it away.

  That was a moment, wasn’t it? Or it would have been for a normal girl. But already I was feeling stupid and there was a welling resentment that something trustful was forming, some dependence on another that exposed me and took account of his place in the world.

  And that’s what I don’t understand. I can’t even ask myself why. I don’t have the answer, but I don’t have the right question either. If I knew where you were, Jon, I’d say sorry. Not because I am, in truth, sorry at all, but because I carry this burden of self-loathing for having led you to believe you were my friend in the first place. It would be easier to say sorry to you, Jon, if there was some way to explain the way I am. Maybe it has something to do with the woodwork project in my father’s shed. I don’t know.

  There was a hoodie playing an orange and white traffic cone like a clarinet in Leicester Square once, slow jazz between his knees, and I gave him a two-pound coin because it could have been you. He made me think of you anyway, Jon. I let you into a bit of my life, so I had to make you suffer, you see. It’s the way it works in my world. Maybe it was because you made me laugh like a girl.

  It was a sunny afternoon around exam time. We walked down the grassy banks beyond the hockey pitches and into the woods, where the less self-assured went for cigarettes they didn’t know how to smoke properly. I sensed a new nervousness in you, like you were assimilating the real circumstance with an idea. So I pushed you up against a tree and kissed you hard, a long slippery one with teeth grinding together. When I broke away and looked at you with that expressionless passion I’d seen girls do at dances, your breath had quickened in little pants and you’d hardened against me.

  I rolled a kiss around your cheek to your ear, which I nuzzled in my mouth like a calf on a teat, and then I started to whisper clearly and deliberately: “I’m not going to let you, Jon, I’m not going to let you, and you know why? Because you’re pathetic and you make me sick. You’re pathetic, you hear?”

  Then I broke away completely and stood in front of you with a calm and conclusive defiance. You were doing the bewildered expression, half-smiling, because this was a joke, right? And you hadn’t asked for any of this. You shook your head slightly and tried a laugh, one eyebrow dipping quizzically, and for a moment I considered accusing you of mocking my disfigurement. But no, this wasn’t a catty row, it was a statement.

  So I said, “I don’t want you Jon, so leave me alone, you creepy cock. You’re pathetic.” And I slapped your crotch, where you were still tight against the cheap school nylon. And then I turned and ran, ran up the banks like a warrior princess, and across the fields to school, hardly touching the ground. I could have run for ever, free and exhilarated again.

  As I burst through the swing doors of our block, ribcage heaving to supply me with the power I craved to kick and yell, I didn’t know who I wanted to see or what I would do next. But I wanted someone, a witness, anyone with whom to dance and shout.

  The hallway was empty, but for one presence. Sarah was sitting in her wheelchair, looking at me intently. And she was smiling, just faintly.

  *

  Towards the end of the afternoon, it had become apparent that there was no more to be done at Botolph’s. Those coming in and out now were firemen and police looking to use the loo, and the demand for tea and food had disappeared. We could leave it to the incumbent clergy and their staff. So they thanked me and I left.

  The sun was lower, winking between the high-rise office blocks, and it was peaceful as I headed for the top of Fenchurch Street again. A quick word with the officer at the tapes – the one who had laughed at my identity card earlier, but he seemed bored now – and I stepped out of my parallel universe.

  The office workers were finishing for the day and were tripping out and on to the street. Some of the younger ones held squash racquets or bike bags. The transport links were down, but the sense of apprehension of the morning had gone and the City had moved on.

  I felt invisible, as I sometimes had when I’d returned from an aid trip. I could stare at people without feeling that they could see me. But down by the Bank of England, it was if I’d never been away. I checked my phone. A load of missed calls from numbers rather than names in my contacts list.

  But there were two names there. Adrian and Hugh. Adrian had called about six times in the morning. I phoned Hugh first.

  “You OK, love?” he said as soon as he came on the line.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “Busy day at the office.”

  “The Bishop is beside himself with pride. Never has he had such cause to be grateful for our partnership in the gospel,” said Hugh, invoking one of the bishop’s favourite pay-offs. “Did you have to do any last rites?”

  “Nah, wasn’t like that, Huge. Emergency-services pastoral, mostly. Any messages?”

  “Your husband called several times. Wanted us to guarantee that you weren’t doing anything stupid. I said it was a bit late for that and he bit my head off, sorry. He wanted to be sure you weren’t going underground.”

  “No danger of that either,” I said and smiled.

  Then I went to dial Adrian, changed my mind and texted him. I told him I’d make supper.

  10

  Adrian had been very anxious to find out how the child porn had got on his computer, though he may have been further signalling his innocence. He’d made a huge fuss with the internet provider, but seemed to assume that it was solely a failure of technology. So now it was down to me to interpret its real provenance.

  I sat in a coffee shop on Ludgate Hill, watching the quantum of humanity on the pavements and a shunting line of traffic edging down to the Circus. There was a cold and low sun. Neutral tones. Chidden of God. I was at a small brown table, with a cappuccino cooling, beside the glass wall that separated me from all the atomised energy outside, witnessing the chaos theory of commercial life. A matching brown stripe made a horizontal bar across the window, the cafe brand printed on it next to me, presenting itself to the world beyond. It was my fourth wall and I watched the street performance beyond it, entirely alienated.

  It was like being in a tranquillising adverti
sement for coffee – like one of those in which everyone in the background moves faster than the heroine. I remember wondering, as I waited, whether this was depression. I was barely thinking. I did have a sense, I think, of being washed along on a tide. I’d thrown the rope ashore.

  In an overpriced coffee shop in east-central London, my feet were losing their purchase on the silt of a slippery seabed and I was being carried away by a current. And I was letting it happen, willing freely to be washed out to sea.

  So when Toby arrived, I was surprised by my serenity. My neck moved my head only slowly as he approached, yellow and navy college scarf hanging loose in the collar of a smart new grey coat that I guessed his mum, not a girlfriend, far less a wife, had bought him for Christmas.

  He stood for a moment, smiling inanely down at me. No, thank you, I didn’t want another coffee. I didn’t think I’d ever want another coffee again.

  “I’ll just get something,” he said and bounced to the counter.

  I resumed watching the world perform its quantum mechanics for me.

  “Thanks for calling and sorry I couldn’t speak to you,” he said as he tore the top off a narrow sugar sachet like an aidie opening a swab. “How are things?”

  I doubt this easy-going intro was part of his training. It was just the way he was.

  “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll go to Israel,” I said.

  I hadn’t actually planned to get straight to it. But I was in a kind of meditative trance and it was as if the words bubbled up natur-ally. Maybe I was speaking in tongues.

  He expelled one beat of a surprised laugh.

  “Really? Well, that’s fabulous news. I’ll tell the office right away. They will be pleased. Well, after we’ve had coffee, I’ll tell them, huh.”

  He could have been a salesman winning a photocopier contract. Then he talked about speakers at the conference and I didn’t listen. I waited until he’d finished his flapjack.