Chosen

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘But even if I wanted to, I could never leave Jake,’ she says. ‘Not in a million years. Not for anything.’

  ‘What if Jake came here?’ Hannah suggests.

  ‘No! Rod would go ballistic. And no – don’t even think of suggesting that he comes too.’ She laughs at the idea.

  The Mask stands up and holds out his hand. ‘Great to meet you, Sister.’ He encloses her thumb in his palm and squeezes. Hannah opens the door and they all step out into the corridor. The Mask lopes off and turns a corner, out of sight.

  ‘Before anything else, I want you to take instruction,’ Hannah says, and holds her finger up to silence Dodie. ‘It’s what Seth wishes. Martha talked to him this morning. He said he’d see you later, if you take instruction. He needs you to understand where he’s coming from.’

  ‘I do understand.’

  ‘Do you now?’ Hannah’s tone is mocking. ‘Well, you need to understand better then, don’t you? It’s the only way.’

  The way Hannah looks into her face, it’s as if someone’s riffling through her mind.

  Dodie pulls her gaze away. ‘What time is it?’ she says. ‘See, I must ring before Jake’s bedtime.’ What if I screamed? she wonders.

  ‘After this.’ Hannah keys in her code.

  ‘But Martha said –’

  ‘Martha’s busy.’

  ‘If you just let me phone, then I could relax. I do want to learn more,’ she adds, ‘it’s just that –’

  Rebecca goes in, but Hannah puts her hand on Dodie’s arm. She pushes the door almost shut again, with her foot.

  ‘All’s fine at home, no worries.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rod phoned. Martha spoke to him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shhh.’ Hannah puts her finger to her lips.

  ‘But why didn’t you say? Why didn’t she fetch me?’

  ‘No need. He just wanted to know that you’re OK. He said to tell you to take your time, enjoy the break. He’s taking Jake to visit his mother – in Inverness, right?’

  ‘Really?’ Dodie stares at her. ‘But he never visits his mum.’

  Hannah raises her sharp shoulders in a shrug. ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘But I wanted to speak to him.’

  ‘Anyway, you can relax now, can’t you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Hannah raises her sparse eyebrows. Dodie presses her fists to her eyes; she can’t think straight. Her mind is so tired. She longs to sleep, to shut her eyes; maybe then she could think properly. If she sits down to meditate she’ll probably fall asleep, and that wouldn’t be bad, a rest from thinking just for a little while.

  ‘If he rings again before I leave, please tell me.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. Now, in you go.’ Hannah gives her a little shove into the room and shuts the door behind her.

  10

  She recovers her balance in a roomful of kneeling people, all eyes closed, expressions rapt. A man with a mask stands at the front, speaking softly. This one sounds South African. He doesn’t falter in his flow of words, but tilts his head, indicating that she should sit. John is there, looking very pale, and Daniel, both seated near the front. Dodie spots Rebecca at the back and settles down beside her on a kneeling stool.

  Let the edges go, let go the edges.

  Her heart scrambles against her ribs. Rod gone to his mum’s? Well, that’s good. When she gets back she’ll go too, she’ll go and stay in the little bungalow with its chilly view over the Moray Forth. Sometimes you can see dolphins, Jean said, the only time they visited her, when Dodie was about six months pregnant. They’d stood in a row at the window, a cup of tea apiece, gazing expectantly at the glassy grey surface of the water. If she could be there now, eating a scone with bramble jelly. A long growl comes from her stomach and she looks sideways at Rebecca, but she has her eyes clamped shut. Jake giggles when her tummy rumbles.

  Let go the pain of edges, let go the immense effort of holding yourself separate.

  She looks down at her stupid nails and winces, curls her fists to hide the green. She misses the green watchstrap, can’t prevent herself looking at her wrist. It’s a nervous tic, tickless, hee-hee. What time is it? How adrift you feel if you don’t know the time. If only there were windows so you could see the daylight or the dark. It can’t be healthy; it’s like living underground. Don’t you need sunlight to make Vitamin A? Or is it D? Let go the edges. And time is full of edges, edges to the hours, edges to the minutes, edges to every second, what if there were no edges? Dizzying, the sudden expanse of time all washing loose. What is it, time?

  Your separation is an illusion. Your separate self, illusory. All the soul pain of holding yourself so separate, let it go.

  Is time a thing? Or is anything? Let it go, let it go. Her eyes want to shut, so sleepy. She tries to block the incantation from her mind but the rhythm is lulling, soothing, insistent, and despite herself, her mind seems to like it, wants to listen, to go with it. Think about Jake, the best thing, what? The day of his birth, the overwhelming pain of that separation, outrageous, nothing you could be prepared for, utter agony that afterwards seemed beautiful and pure, the wet head, sticky hair and furious screwed-up little face and how her heart came out of herself as he came out of her and has never been her own ever since.

  The pain of owning. The pain of keeping the things you own, the pain of edges.

  Tiny Jake in Rod’s strong arms, the love flowing from his eyes for her. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. ‘Thank you for this.’ And so he had a son, and then it all collapsed around her. Seth would come round, smelling of school, and sit in the dim beside her, but she couldn’t even smile at him.

  Let go the edges that separate you from the sea of soul. Let go the pain of edges.

  Yes, OK then, she lets it go, just for now, just for this moment and she listens to the words and feels herself let go.

  At some point the voice stops. And at some point it begins again, or perhaps it’s a different voice, but what does it matter? They are all the same voice ultimately. It’s hard sometimes to know if the words are still going on or if they are only reverberating in her memory. The pain of edges: something cries out within her, a creature trapped inside a shell, the pain of edges.

  At some point they all rise, it’s easy just to let herself be guided. They leave the room and walk as one body down the corridor, soft feet soft on the smooth floor. Someone hands her a toothbrush and they wash faces and clean their teeth and use the toilet and it means nothing and no one looks or cares and it’s all so easy like that and now the idea of little secret rooms and the embarrassment of the toilet all her life seems ludicrous, funny, the lengths she’d go to so no one would ever hear her going, or smell her smells, and she finds herself giggling weakly as she sits on the toilet, lighthearted, light-headed, maybe it’s the tea, but never mind, tired that’s all, what time? It doesn’t matter, just sleep, that’s all that matters now, to sleep.

  She notices a sound as she follows Rebecca and the others down a corridor and up some stairs where there’s a window and it’s light outside and the sound is birdsong. Morning then? The dormitory has maybe twenty beds, narrow and simple and lilac, the pillows white. There is a nightgown on the bed, everyone removes their clothes and Dodie climbs straight into bed. She sees the others on their knees muttering prayers, thumbs clasped and then . . .

  The waking bell comes what seems a minute later. One minute of stretching out and sleep. Of course it must have been longer than that. Everyone gets out of bed, so hard – another hour, another minute even – everyone yawning and stretching, and then the movements, she’s the only one still in bed. She gets up and tries to join in, lifting her arms, moving her hands in time with them the best she can. She’s dizzy when she stands, a flurry of white stars at the edges of her vision as if she might faint. There was no dinner, she realizes. Her stomach when she touches it is almost flat, the flattest it’s been since before Jake – Jake – a sickening surge of longing now
, yearning, a pain, a real pain, the real pain of separation. She hasn’t thought about him for hours, for the longest ever, except for the constant thrumming of her missing him, the umbilical ache and breastiness his existence causes in her. What time is it there? No idea even what time it is here.

  They all remove their nightgowns and walk into the shower, one long shower, barely warm, bottles of gel scented with lavender, and entirely unselfconscious soaping of underarms, between the legs, between the buttocks, feet and arms and legs, gel rubbed into the hair, all the short crops so much easier than her own wet strands. A pile of towels white or lilac, nothing is their own, she sees, the clothes, the towels, the nightgowns, you just take the one you get and that’s fine, all the different breasts and bellies, and patches of body hair. Many of the women are thin; Rebecca’s ribs show and her hip bones jut. If Dodie stayed here she’d get like that, lose the last bit of her baby fat. Like a health spa without any of the pampering, think of it that way.

  Morning now, she’s got yesterday over and now she’ll get to see Seth, hug him, shake him, get through to him. And phone home. Not home, phone Jean’s. Or Rod on his mobile, but he’s never got it with him. She scrubs the towel over her face and tries to conjure up his face, she knows the words for it – the caramel brown eyes, the wicked slanting dimples in his cheeks, the constant prickly stubble – but can’t make a picture in her mind. Though as she dries between her legs she feels his face pressed there, a little squirm of longing, a secret shock.

  She walks beside a young black woman as they hurry along a corridor, down a flight of stairs and round a corner. ‘I’d never be able to find my way anywhere round here,’ Dodie says. ‘It must be huge.’

  The woman grins. ‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘it’s pretty big. I’m Mary.’

  ‘Dodie.’

  Rebecca catches up with them.

  ‘I wonder what’s for breakfast,’ Dodie says, despite the finger pressed to Rebecca’s lips. She will not just obey every stupid rule. This isn’t school. She isn’t really part of it. It’s funny using her voice again; she realizes she hadn’t spoken since the long meditation last night, and how long ago that was she has no idea. They stop at a door and they issue not into the dining hall but another meditation room.

  ‘I’m starving.’ Alarmed, Dodie grabs Rebecca’s arm. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Just a little meditation, Sister,’ a voice says, and she jumps. It’s another Mask. ‘First thing on waking is a great time, the mind is most receptive.’ It sounds like the first Mask. Are the Masks the same as the fishermen and fisherwomen? There’s nothing she can do; even if she walked out she’d have no idea where to go. Grumpily, she kneels with the others. This is crazy. Her stomach flutters with emptiness. A diet is one thing, but starvation quite another. Her head feels strangely empty too, and bad-tempered; low blood sugar always makes her crabby. Her hair drips and dampens the T-shirt on her shoulders, makes her itch.

  Outside, Brothers and Sisters, bombs are exploding, people are starving, people are blowing each other to pieces in the name of the Lord, those people take the name of our Lord in vain, those perpetrators of evil are doing the devil’s work, you, we, here, every one of us is chosen, chosen by the Lord God to rise above the evil, to defeat it with our purity and with our charity and chastity and with our love.

  Chastity?

  Outside, conditions are gathering for the end; as the world becomes corrupted with greed and ignorance, licentiousness, with all aspects of evil. Even the planet itself rises up in protest and greater upheaval is on the way. You have been chosen to be apart, Brothers and Sisters, in our Lord, so let it go. Let the evil go.

  ‘Let it go,’ everyone says.

  But they’re not all evil, Dodie thinks, they are not. Seth’s not and Rod’s not and Jake’s not and –

  ‘Let it go.’

  ‘Let it go.’

  ‘Let it go.’

  ‘Let it go.’

  The chant swings back and forwards between the Mask and the rest and – even though she can feel the effect of what they say, the effect of those words on her which are beginning to have a physiological effect, a real sense of shedding of load – she will not join in, not be made to join in. The voices rise and become faster and faster so that there is no longer a distinction between the call and the response and it becomes a huge vibrating hum, loud enough to split the building open – and then suddenly it stops and the silence and the echo of the voices in it is a shock, like coming to a sudden edge and hardly being able to stop. She feels as if her legs are cycling frantically in empty air above an abyss.

  Let it go, the voice says, soft now, let it go, let go the pain of edges, give yourself a break and let it go. At his words her hands loosen of their own accord, something in her stomach gives. OK, for now, just being here, just let it go; and it’s a relief to give up the struggle just for this moment. Let go the edges, he says and it’s almost frightening how easy it would be to utterly submit to this. She tightens her fists until her nails dig into her palms; these are her edges and she will not let go, the sharp blades in her palms must work as her reminder of who she is and that this isn’t really her at all. Still. Let it – most of it – go.

  11

  And after a time a bell tingles in the air, like a taste of something thin and fine, and at last they go to the dining room. No pancakes or maple syrup or muffins, not even toast and jam, but a thin porridge sweetened with fruit – not bad and quite filling. Dodie shovels it down quickly, looks up in the hope of more, but actually her stomach feels bloated with the sudden inrush of food. Her eyes want to close, her head to droop. She puts down her spoon and waits for Rebecca – who eats daintily, half a spoonful at a time – and her other companions: Mary, who raises her eyebrows and gives her a humorous grin across the table; Daniel, eating steadily, a secret smile dimpling his cheek; and John, whose skin is blotchy grey and yellow, lifting the spoon to his mouth as if it’s a great weight.

  A hand on her shoulder makes her start and Martha’s warm breath comes close to her ear. ‘Seth will speak to you now,’ she says, and Dodie jumps up, jolting the table. ‘Whoops, sorry,’ she says. Martha hushes her. She clambers out over the bench. Martha nods from her bowl to the hatch and Dodie takes it, gives it to the poor pair of dishpan hands behind the hatch. Martha leads her to a tiny room with a couple of the low squashy sofas, one slit and leaking mustard-coloured foam.

  ‘Sit down,’ she says.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Patience. Sit down.’

  ‘Why didn’t you fetch me when Rod rang?’

  Martha touches her finger to her lips.

  Dodie perches on the edge of the damaged sofa. Who damaged it, someone driven mad by all the rules, no, the encouragements? She runs her finger through her dryly tangling hair. No conditioner, no hairbrush: she must look a wreck; her fingernails are chipped to hell.

  Martha sits down beside her. ‘How are you today?’

  ‘Fine.’ She waits. ‘So. Seth?’

  ‘A moment first. How did you find the meditation?’

  ‘OK, I suppose. Where is he then?’

  Martha shakes her head smilingly and takes a phone from her pocket.

  Dodie’s stomach scrunches tight with disappointment. ‘I thought you meant see him.’

  ‘Seth?’ Martha checks he’s waiting and hands over the phone.

  ‘Dodie,’ Seth says. It’s the bad line again.

  She steadies her voice as she speaks. ‘Where are you?’

  She hears another voice. Hannah’s? And then he says: ‘Across the state.’

  ‘What? Seth?’

  ‘Dodie,’ he says, as if he’s only just clicked that it’s her.

  ‘Yeah, it’s me.’

  And at last she feels the old connection between them. ‘Can you get over here?’ she asks. ‘Or I’ll come there. I need to talk to you.’ Through a crackle of static she hears him breathe. She looks at Martha, puts her hand over the receiver. ‘Do you mind?’ she sa
ys, nodding at the door.

  Rather to her surprise, Martha goes to the door. ‘Tea?’ she asks.

  Dodie nods and waits until Martha’s gone. ‘Seth,’ she says. ‘I’ve come all this way. Stop pissing about. It’s me, fuck it, Seth. Remember Dodie? Remember me?’

  This is not a place for swearing in, of course, but he’s driven her to it, and anyway, the way he used to swear when out of Stella’s earshot, the way he used to swear about Stella. And suddenly, in a big black whoosh comes the memory, the toes, the empty hands, the broken puppet head. She takes a deep steadying breath, stares at the stuffing bulging from the slit cushion. ‘OK. You know Mum’s dead?’ Silence. Has he gone? ‘Seth?’

  She hears Hannah murmuring and then another surge of static.

  ‘Seth? I need to tell you what happened,’ she says. ‘Face to face. Seth?’

  No answer. There’s a click and a hum then nothing. She hurls the phone across the room and it cracks and comes apart, pieces of plastic spinning across the floor. Martha comes back in with two mugs on a tray. She sees the phone and tightens her lips, but says nothing.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Dodie says.

  Martha puts a mug of tea in front of her and sits down.

  ‘He said he was across the state. I’ll go there then.’

  Martha shakes her head. ‘Not possible.’

  ‘I heard Hannah!’

  ‘Hannah?’ Martha looks startled. ‘No, Hannah’s here. Ah . . .’ Her face lightens. ‘That’ll be Abigail – she’s Australian. She does sound a bit like Hannah.’

  Dodie stares at Martha’s face, her eyes. Is there an insincere flicker. Is she lying? Martha?

  ‘Or is he here? Is someone not letting him see me?’

  ‘Don’t be so silly, Dodie! Drink your tea.’

  ‘Yeah, and drug myself!’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Only a little camomile to soothe you.’

  ‘Doesn’t taste like camomile. Are you lying to me?’