‘Alan?’ Stella said. ‘Who’s Alan? We don’t know an Alan,’ she told Hursa. C – A – L – L – A – L – A – N, it said again, and, whatever we asked, that’s all it would spell.
I was getting bored. ‘Shall we give it up?’ I said, talking to Stella, not the spirit.
At that moment Bogart came in. He opened the door and stood in the doorway.
‘Piss off,’ Stella said.
‘What you doing?’
‘Communing with the spirits,’ I said, frostily. He came in and watched. I could feel the shape of him in the doorway behind me and I waited for him to start teasing, but he just said, ‘Go on then.’
‘Nothing’s happening,’ Stella said. ‘It just keeps saying, Call Alan.’
He was silent for a moment, then: ‘What did you say?’
‘Call Alan,’ I said. ‘It’s getting on my wick.’
‘Christ,’ he breathed. ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘What?’ Stella and I said together.
‘That’s me,’ he said.
We stared at him in the flickering light. ‘Alan?’ I said. Of course Bogart wasn’t his real name and early on I’d plagued him to know it, and the letters that came to the house said Mr A. Robertson, but I’d forgotten lately: he was just Bogart to me. My arm was aching from holding it in position over the glass.
‘Can I?’ Bogart said.
‘I don’t know if you can join in part way through,’ I said. I didn’t want him there; this was something that Stella and I did together, and really by now it was about the only thing. But he kneeled down by the table and put his finger on top of mine, on top of Stella’s, on the glass.
‘Alan is here,’ I said, and Stella and I pulled a face at each other and she started to giggle. Nothing happened.
‘Are you still there?’ I said. ‘You said call Alan and we’ve called an Alan. Is he the right one?’ My tone had gone facetious, which I thought would kill the mood. But the glass began to move again.
‘Fucking hell,’ Bogart whispered. ‘Are you doing that?’
‘Shhh,’ Stella and I hissed as the glass tremulously spelled out, H – E – R – O – N – H – E – R – O – N – H – E – R – O – N.
‘What?’ we said together. And when we asked what it meant it just spelled the same thing again and then started onto a nonsense jumble of letters till it flew off the table and the seance was over. I switched on the light and Bogart stood, his forehead furrowed, staring at the letters until Stella tipped them back into their drawstring bag.
‘That’s it,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The sign.’
‘Yes?’ Stella pulled a face at me.
‘Heron,’ he said. ‘I have to find a heron.’
‘Or three herons?’ Stella said. She switched on Crackerjack and went back to her puzzle.
I followed Bogart out into the garden. He stood with his head tilted back, staring up at the navy blue sky. ‘Looking for herons?’ I teased.
‘He spake unto me,’ he said.
‘I don’t see why you have to say it like that,’ I said.
‘Herons,’ he said. ‘There are herons at Bawdsey. Remember?’
‘Better go back there then.’
†
Every day after that, Bogart took acid and went to Bawdsey. Term ended and I lay in bed until ten or eleven and so did Stella, but as promptly as if he was going off to work in his dad’s bank, Bogart would be up and out early in the morning. He’d walk to the ferry and get the first boat there and the last one back in the evening. I don’t know what the ferryman thought.
He’d taken to praying and would spend hours on his knees before a shrine he’d made on Mum’s dressing table. There was a picture of a crucified Jesus and one of a heron torn from my Observer Book of British Birds. He lit a candle and joss sticks and put a fresh flower there every day, at the very least a dandelion.
He took me by the shoulders one night – we hadn’t been having sex much since his visions began. I would snuggle up to him, and wrap my legs round him, but his head was usually too full of Jesus to be interested.
But on this night, he said: ‘The Lord wishes me to beget a son.’
‘But –’
He put his finger to my lips and made me look into his eyes. ‘If the Lord wishes, then it shall be so.’
Since my operation, I’d been on the pill to make absolutely sure I would not conceive, as it would be so dangerous to my health. I had an appointment for sterilization in a month’s time. The consultant thought it was the safest and best thing for me to do, and remembering the pain and how I’d nearly died, I went along with it. ‘Dispense with all that nonsense for good and all,’ was how he put it. I thought it would be better than being on the pill for all my life. I hadn’t told Bogart, or anybody except Stella about the sterilization. It sounded so hygienically final, that word, about as far from sexy or desirable as you could get.
Bogart took my pills from the drawer in the bedside cabinet, popped them out of their circular blisters and flushed them down the lavatory. His eyes had a new blank shine in them as if he was seeing an idea in front of him and not a person.
‘Do you still love me?’ I said. He hadn’t said so for ages.
He kissed my forehead and I had to take it that that meant yes. We made love and despite everything there was an extra kind of excitement in it for me, not being on the pill, the danger of it. Did I believe Bogart when he said the Lord had spoken to him? Did I really think that I would have a son? Looking back, I see myself as a little goose imprinted with him. The way goslings will follow the first thing they see when they have hatched, even a fox or a ferret or a football.
‘Tell me about when you were a boy,’ I said, snuggling under his musky armpit.
He said nothing.
‘About your cousins,’ I prompted. I touched his skin with the tip of my tongue to taste the salt.
He sighed. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Just a story.’
‘A bedtime story,’ he said. ‘Such a kid.’
I pulled away from him and sat up. ‘It’s never bothered you before.’
He turned to me. It wasn’t quite dark and I could see the shine of his eyes. ‘I wish you were older,’ he said.
His voice sounded so flat, not like his voice at all.
‘Sod off then,’ I said, ‘and find someone older.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘You are the one.’
‘Am I?’
‘Jesus has confirmed it,’ he said. ‘With you I must beget a son. We must fornicate for that purpose.’
‘Fornicate?’ I repeated, my voice gone weirdly shrill. ‘Fornicate?’
Bogart did a long, patronizing sigh. ‘Lie down,’ he said.
I sat ramrod straight. I wanted to get up and go to my own little bed, but he wrestled me down and put his arms round me to hold me there.
†
Stella came to visit me in hospital. I was only in one night. I told Bogart it was a school trip. How could I tell him I was going to be sterile? Stella came rushing in at the start of visiting and chucked a Caramac and a yellow rosebud on the bed. Her eyes were huge and luminous and she had a pimple on her chin. She had her hand jammed against her side like she had a stitch and was panting.
‘What’s up?’ I said.
She perched on the edge of the bed struggling her hands anxiously together. The ends of her fingers were blunt and ragged where she chewed and chewed.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Aunt Regina’s here,’ she hissed when she’d got her breath back.
My eyes darted round the ward. ‘Here?’
She nodded and talked fast and low, and I went cold as I listened. ‘They turned up. Marion’s mum told the school about Bogart and they rang Aunt Regina and she got here last night and caught Bogart and me smoking and chucked him out, I mean literally chucked, you should have seen it, Derek got hold of his arm and pushed him out of the door and Aunt Regina
threw everything she could find of his out of the window, and said she’d call the police if he hadn’t skedaddled in two minutes flat.’
We stared at each other. ‘Bogart,’ I said. My wound twanged and jangled. Stella opened her mouth but before she could get another word out, Aunt Regina, Derek and a woman in a kaftan arrived and stood in a row looking down at me.
‘Huh-hmm,’ Derek said.
Aunt Regina shook her head. ‘Deary me,’ she said. ‘Deary, deary me.’
I looked at the woman in the kaftan. ‘Kathy,’ Aunt Regina said. ‘My new friend Kathy.’
I saw a cloud cross Derek’s face and guessed that this was the doctor and soulmate.
‘Hi,’ I said. She had a Toby-jug look, with jutting chin and wilderness eyebrows. She stuck out a broad hand for me to shake.
‘How do?’
‘Wonderful,’ I said.
‘You’re coming home with us,’ Aunt Regina said. ‘All packed. Dad knows and agrees.’
‘House on the market, pronto.’
‘No!’ I said.
‘It’s all arranged,’ Aunt Regina said.
‘But school –’
‘There’s a school in Peebles. All arranged.’
‘But – but –’ I looked at Stella, but she had her thumb jammed in her mouth. I could see the bulge of Mother Clanger in her cardigan sleeve.
Derek inserted himself between Aunt Regina and Kathy. ‘We went to see the headmaster.’
‘God.’
‘Questionable whether you’ll get your A-levels – altered behaviour, a falling-off of friendships, and of Stella, apparently’ – Stella’s head hunched further into her chest – ‘they’ve seen neither hide nor hair this half-term.’
‘Stell?’ I said, but she wouldn’t look at me. ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said weakly. Kathy gave me a broad and cheery grin quite at odds with the topic of conversation.
Aunt Regina folded her arms. ‘The truant officer called to be confronted by a long-haired beatnik –’
A puff of laugh came out of me at that word.
‘And the parasite has –’
‘Parasite!’ I said. ‘He’s not, he’s –’
‘Don’t get het up,’ Derek said. ‘Sterilization!’ he added. ‘You should have consulted us. I’ll be having words with the authorities about this.’
‘It’s my body. I decided.’
‘This just goes to prove you are not capable of looking after yourselves.’
‘We are,’ Stella whined.
‘He even pays rent,’ I said. ‘Bogart –’
‘Bogart? Bogart!’ Aunt Regina shrieked. Spit flew out of her mouth and landed on the edge of my blanket. The whole ward was riveted. She realized this and lowered her voice. ‘In any case, it’s all arranged,’ she said.
‘I love him!’
‘Love!’ she squawked.
‘They do love each other,’ Stella added, helpfully.
Derek got hold of Aunt Regina’s arm and it seemed to deflate her.
‘Love,’ she muttered, and they all shook their heads in identical gestures of despair.
†
I didn’t see Bogart for a year. Moving to a new country and a new school when you’re seventeen, freshly sterilized and pining for your lover is hard – particularly when you find yourself in the sticks, knee-deep in goats and chickens, and in the middle of a tetchy middle-aged ménage à trois.
School was all right. I got by. I made friends, but no one special. Sometimes a boy would ask me out, and once or twice I even went, but they were boys, not men, and my heart was still too full of Bogart. After him, how could I fancy a skinny youth?
I had no address for Bogart, no way of getting in touch. I wrote to Marion and asked her to find it for me. She said he’d gone off travelling and she didn’t know where. I thought about running away to try and find him – he’d be in Morocco I guessed, he’d often talked about going there. But then he might be in India. How ever would I find him? And anyway, I couldn’t leave Stella.
We each had a tiny room in the loft. You had to go up a ladder and, to get into my side, squeeze round the hot water tank. There was a skylight that I forced open and if I stood on my bed I could stick my head out. This I would do, night after night, all that first long summer, sniffing the air like a caged animal, watching the stars, hearing the owls and the screeches of savagery from the hen coop. In the summer we sweltered, in the winter we shivered under piles of patchwork and Kathy’s home-cured goatskins, that turned out, we discovered during a plague of flies, to be not quite cured enough.
Three years later I went to teacher-training college on the outskirts of London. Aunt Regina was disappointed that I chose to go so far away, but I needed to, I needed distance. And I thought Stella was old enough by then to cope without me there.
I found it a thrill to live just a bus ride from the Embank ment or Regent’s Park, to be able to browse in the British Museum or the Tate, or to swan through Harrods with a bored and snobbish expression on my face. I bought black lipstick from Biba; had my hair cut at Vidal Sassoon. There was an IRA bomb scare one day in Oxford Street and I was caught up in the fantastic rush, the stampede to get out of Debenhams. I watched it on the news that night, back in my hall of residence.
On the last Saturday before the end of term, I went up town to do my Christmas shopping. I’d spent all day trudging about and was standing in Piccadilly Circus gazing at the decorations when I heard a person preaching. He had his back to me. There were a couple of people standing beside him, giving leaflets to anyone who would take one. They all wore long, flowing robes. The guy was saying, ‘Wait and listen for just one moment. Just one moment is enough to save your life and save your soul.’ And he was saying it in Bogart’s voice.
The rush of love went up from the wet pavement through the soles of my boots, whooshed through my body and out into the drizzly light. It was strong enough to stop my heart. Because I’d halted so abruptly, a man bumped into me and swore, but I didn’t care. I stood still and became an island that the crowd flowed round. I moved closer to Bogart and his fellows and became one with them.
I kept my eyes on the side of his head where his curls were beaded wet and his nose was reddened with the cold. A current snaked from me, from my heart to his, a golden snake of light. And he felt it, and turned. He’d been speaking but when he saw me he stopped. Our eyes met and I went straight into his outstretched arms and it might be a cliché, but it’s true, that it felt like coming home. The lipsticks and the records and the lesson plans; the posters, the discos, the whole flimsy construction of my life rattled to the ground around me. There was only love and there was only Bogart.
He was living in a squat in Tooting Bec with thirteen other people. This was the foundation of the movement, before we even called it a church. It was the Soul-Life commune and it was bursting full. The community was spreading the word and raising funds to buy the house, which had been scheduled for demolition. Through a miracle – the discovery that the portico was of art-historical interest – the demolition order was lifted. Such, it seemed, was the power of prayer.
Bogart called himself Adam now, since he was the first, the founder, of the Soul-Life Community. Something in him had changed. The magic, always in his eyes, had got into his voice, giving it a new resonance (at least a resonance I didn’t remember), and into his demeanour. There was a kind of light around him, and people were attracted to that light as if it was something they needed to see by.
All his followers had taken biblical names. Isaac and Hannah had been with him in the street that day, but I’d scarcely registered them. There were not supposed to be any partnerships in the commune. There were dormitories for each sex, sleeping bags and carry-mats in every corner. Everyone wore black socks and pants so they could all be washed together, and in the morning you just helped yourself to any from the sock and undie mountains on the landing.
Because he was prey to frequent visions, Bogart – Adam – slept alone. He had a
single room with a tiny balcony, just wide enough to stand on, and when you did and craned your neck you could see a pub and a small triangle of the common. The walls were covered in pictures of herons: postcards, pages torn from books, a couple of paintings. He slept on an airbed with a slow leak that had to be re-pumped with a foot pump every night.
‘This is my bride in Jesus,’ Adam told people that first night. ‘And we will call her Martha.’
I would have liked a prettier name. The Bible is full of lovely names, but with all the eyes – interested, jealous, suspicious even – on me, I couldn’t object.
We sat down to share a meal of curried chickpeas with yogurt and chapattis.
‘We’ve heard about you,’ Hannah told me. She was a thin and pretty Australian, with a pointed nose and teeth that crossed foxily.
‘What did he say about me?’ I asked her.
‘He was waiting for the Lord to bring you back to him,’ she muttered.
‘And he did,’ I said proudly, but privately doubtful. Was it really the Lord who’d made me move to London? Was it really the Lord who’d carried my feet towards where Adam was preaching?
‘Believe in miracles and they happen,’ Adam said, tuning in to our conversation. He had a chapatti crumb caught in his beard and, as I leaned forward to pick it off, I caught the narrow look that Hannah gave me.
‘Always?’ I said.
‘If it’s the Lord’s will.’
‘But how do you know if it’s the Lord’s will?’
‘If it happens.’
‘But –’
‘Martha will be staying here,’ he said firmly, and loudly enough to count as an announcement, ‘and as my wife, she will share my room.’
I said nothing more and didn’t dare to look at Hannah again. It was Saturday and it didn’t matter if I stayed away from halls that night. But there were only two more days of term and then I was set to go home. On Wednesday Derek was driving all the way to fetch me.
After the meal the women cleared the table and washed up while the men chatted, making plans for raising funds. I’d begun stacking plates but Adam put his hand on my wrist.
‘Go and bathe,’ he said. ‘There are robes in the airing cupboard.’ Hannah’s hair flew out in zigzags as she flounced off to the kitchen. I went up the stairs. You could tell that this was once a rich person’s house; the banister was a gracious curve of shiny wood held up with ornamental ironwork, acorns and corn sheaves and dormice that some idiot had painted over with a thick white gloss.
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