‘If you want to kill yourself, why do you need me?’ I asked. My voice was husky and I cleared my throat. ‘Why don’t you just get on and do it?’
‘Because I don’t want to be alone and you’re my only person.’
A bird thudded against the window and Stella and I both let out a shriek. I got up, opened the window, and leaned out to see a blackbird flapping about on its side on the grass. ‘I think it’s broken its wing,’ I said. But then it righted itself, hopped about and flew up into the laburnum, swaddled in its puffed-up feathers.
‘What if it doesn’t work?’ she said. ‘I’m scared of that, Mel. Of hanging there. I do want it to be quick. I need you to make sure it’s quick.’
I sat down again. The mattress was trembling.
‘If I helped you,’ I said, and my voice came scraping out, ‘then it might look like murder. I might end up in jail.’ I stared at her face to try and read whether this was her intention, but she was grave and organized and I don’t believe that was her plan.
‘We can clean all the door handles and everything you’ve touched so there are no fingerprints,’ she said. From the way she spoke it was obvious she had this all planned out to the last detail. ‘And scrub the teacups. Then you can wear rubber gloves and take them with you. My fingerprints will be all over everything. I’ll write a note, all Bony Fido.’ The corners of her mouth went up, acknowledging the joke – it was what Derek had called one of Aunt Regina’s pugs. ‘They’ll believe it, with my history of depression and that. You wait till you know it’s worked and then you can take Seth’s passport – I’ll tell you where it is just before – and then you just go. You can be out of the country before I’m found.’
We sat for a moment and then I was moving close to her and putting my arms around her. She was brittle and thin and smelled of shampoo and the old musky, incense-scented velvet. Even though we were two middle-aged women, she was still my little sister and I held her tight.
‘Do you really want it?’ I said.
‘It’s all I want. It’s time.’
We sat and rocked for a while.
‘I would love to have seen Dodie.’ I couldn’t help saying that, but she pulled out of my arms and stood up. I could see her struggling for a moment, emotions flocking across her face, and then she caught sight of herself in the mirror, laughed and did a clumsy twirl. ‘I’ve been saving this dress for years.’ She smoothed the velvet against her thighs. ‘I wore it to your wedding, remember?’
I nodded.
‘It’s lasted very well,’ she said. ‘Only a little moth-hole here and there.’
She sent me down to begin the task of cleaning the banister, the door handles, the cups, and came down with her hair brushed, reeking of fresh patchouli. I wore her yellow rubber gloves and she worked with bare hands. All the time we were cleaning, in such a strange companionable silence, I didn’t think that it would really happen. I didn’t think I could really stand by and let her do it.
She wrote a note on the paper bag she planned to put over her head so I didn’t have to see her dead or dying face. I was thinking I’d wait until she told me where Seth’s passport was and then stop her. She had a rope tied ready in a knot. How did she know what kind of knot to tie? It was brand-new blue polypropylene. Where did she get it? How long had she had it? I finished cleaning the bathroom and when I came out she was on the landing with the rope around her neck.
‘Now,’ she said. She was trembling so hard her teeth were chattering.
‘No.’ I backed away from her intensity. A rank animal smell was coming through the patchouli.
‘Please. You’re the only person I can ask. You don’t have to do a thing. Please just make sure I’ve gone before you leave.’ She squeezed my hands; hers were shaking and cold, yet wet with sweat. ‘Be brave, Mel,’ she said, ‘it’s what I want.’ She got up on to the banister, balanced herself against the wall and put the bag over her head. I watched how her toes bent to cling onto the wood, an instinctive reaction as her body fought to save itself. I grabbed hold of her ankle but she kicked back with such a force I was knocked to the floor.
‘In my sock,’ were the last words she said, and then she dropped with a great creak of wood and a scream from her mouth or my own and a brutal scrunching crack. I crouched on the landing floor with my hands over my eyes and my fingers over my ears. I stayed there for minutes, I don’t know how many. I could hear water running and a faint squeak from the rope but nothing else. I stood up and walked down the stairs. My shoulder was numb where she’d kicked me. The watery sound was urine. I still had the rubber gloves on and they were full of sweat. I reached up. She’d not told a lie. The passport and Seth’s birth certificate were tucked into one of her pop socks and they were warm and wet. It took me a few goes to have the nerve to hold her swinging body still and take them out.
It had definitely worked.
I went out of the back door still in the rubber gloves and got into the car and drove away. Someone might have seen me, I don’t know. I drove all over the place and stopped by the park. I went into the Ladies and was sick and then I went back to the hotel.
Adam was really too ill to move, but for once I put my own needs first. I moved our seats onto the next flight to Kennedy airport and off we went. At the airport I was terrified each time I saw a policeman and, of course, owing to the current state of security, it was swarming with them. I was sick in the airport Ladies, and again on the plane. I was too shocked to cry. I couldn’t look after Adam the way I liked to. Seth stayed plugged into his electronic world and Adam in his trance of exhausted pain.
†
Seth wasn’t nursed into Soul-Life as you were, Dodie. There was no parlour, no gentle introduction – and no warning about what he was about to be plunged into. Neither Adam nor I were in a state to talk to him on the flight or on arrival. I withdrew. I could think of nothing but Stella. I learned, later, that Seth had become distressed on arrival at Soul-Life and it had been necessary to medicate him to prevent harm to himself or others. I should have stayed with him: maybe then he’d have been all right. But once we were back I was almost paralysed. I couldn’t speak for days, not even to Adam. I couldn’t even hum. Or cry. And the pain in my chest came clamping back, as if someone was taking my heart in their fist and squeezing.
And in the time that I was incapacitated, Hannah took Seth over – and it was she who nursed Adam, too. If it couldn’t be me, he would have no one else. For a time, I didn’t care, but as soon as my strength began to return I went back to Adam’s room, our room, to find Hannah there.
You should have seen her smile. I wouldn’t rise to her. I said nothing. Adam was lying back against the pillows, fidgety and troubled.
‘I want to see my son,’ he said. ‘Bring Seth to me.’
‘I’ve explained to Adam that he has a cold,’ Hannah said. ‘He’s infectious.’
Adam sighed, his old hands fretting each other. ‘Martha?’
‘She’s right,’ I said, though I wouldn’t look at her. ‘We can’t have you catching a cold, can we?’
He seemed to accept this, though he wasn’t happy. And he said to me, his voice petulant, ‘Hannah’s been keeping me abreast of Soul-Life business. She tells me there are problems.’
Hannah smirked over her shoulder at me as she left the room. I took a deep breath and gritted my teeth. Yes, the IRS were demanding access to the accounts; and yes, some families had started actions to reclaim their children, but I’d been deliberately keeping all this from Adam in what must surely be his last days. What was the sense of agitating him now? I didn’t want him going to his death thinking Soul-Life was in collapse.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just details. Obadiah’s dealing with everything.’ I took his hand and soothed it in my own. ‘Nothing for you to worry about. Sleep now, or would you like some tea?’
‘Hannah is bringing me tea.’
He began to mumble the story I hated, about how she was the first of his followers an
d how very faithful she had always been to him. I couldn’t stand to hear it and thought-hummed to try and block his words.
She came in with mugs on a tray, two mugs only – and I don’t think the second one was meant for me. My impulse was to get out of there and scream, but I only smiled at her and said, ‘That’s very kind, Hannah, thank you. Our Father is very tired; you can leave us now.’
She kept her face quite even but I saw the way her eyes flared and her lips tightened against her snaggled teeth.
‘Can we continue our conversation tomorrow?’ she asked Adam, and he nodded and smiled. She grasped her thumb, lowered her eyes, and left us.
‘Hannah shouldn’t worry you,’ I said.
‘You should not keep things from me.’
I scalded my tongue on the hot tea. It was the sedative blend we usually give the novices, excellent for smoothing objections from the mind. Drink too much and you lose all track. It gives a lovely blankness – well, you know that, Dodie. I helped Adam drink his and then he closed his eyes. He looked so done in, so old and finished that my irritation flowed away. I put my head against his chest and he stroked my hair.
‘Stella . . .’ I began.
He shushed me. ‘She’s free,’ he said, ‘she is at one with the Universal Soul, we should rejoice.’ But I couldn’t think of anything but the awful crunch and the drip, drip, drip of urine down her leg. I pushed my face against him and, while he smoothed my hair, I wept.
†
After the journey back home, Adam had expressed disappointment at how ordinary Seth was, how lacking in special spirituality. What could I say? Adam was tired and in pain and I think it would have been hard for him to be delighted by any mortal at that point. Did he expect light to be flooding from his son’s head, or prophesies spilling from his tongue? Seth is just an ordinary boy; very charming I think, very handsome. But he is only flesh and blood.
It was Hannah’s decision that Seth and Adam should be kept apart until Seth had been rushed through the Process, after which he could be returned, triumphantly transformed, and revealed to all the Brethren as the son of Adam.
But I wouldn’t let her have it all her own way. And one day I pulled myself far enough out of my torpor to go and find Seth, to see for myself how he was faring. I waited till I knew Hannah was occupied, and then I intercepted him on his way out of the dining room after the meal he thought was breakfast.
(Do you realize, Dodie, how we play with time during the Process, so that you might be eating breakfast at bedtime and going for a brief ‘night’s’ sleep – perhaps half an hour – at noon? Warping time and confusing biorhythms is a powerful method of disorientation, and it does no physical harm. It’s necessary to break down the personality before building it up again: the drugs and the repetitive meditations, the scant diet, the interruption of normal patterns of behaviour – all part of the Process. On you, of course, it didn’t work. On nine people out of ten, it’s successful, but, as we say, for every nine sheep there is a goat.)
I took Seth into a side room to be alone with him. I can’t describe to you how deeply strange it was for me to be addressing this version of Adam – younger than I’d ever known him. On the journey home I’d been too much in shock to really take him in. He’s so like Adam physically, but with the trace and flutter of Stella about him too. At first I felt almost shy in his presence, but quickly I became concerned. His pupils were like pinpricks and he was slurring his words – the dosage of narcotic must have been too high – or perhaps it was the combination of drugs; I don’t know what concoction Hannah was giving him.
I’d thought I might trump Hannah by sneaking Seth in to see Adam, before she could. I wanted to be the one to cause a smile to spread like sunrise over Adam’s face. And I wanted to be the one to tell Seth that he was Adam’s son. I wanted to be the one to present him, transformed. He was my nephew, after all, not Hannah’s. But once I’d seen him, it was obvious that he couldn’t be taken to Adam in that state.
I poured his tea, and watched how he held the cup between his elegant, long-fingered hands – the nails bitten to their beds, just like Stella’s – and how the surface of the liquid shivered with the tremble that was going through him.
‘How are you, Seth?’ I asked.
‘Not great,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Dunno.’ He was swaying a bit, even seated, thoroughly disorientated. Too disorientated.
‘Are you enjoying the meditations?’
He nodded and sniffed. The flanges of his nostrils quivered. I wanted to hold him. A tear rolled down his cheek, a huge shiny tear that transfixed me as it crawled through the fuzziness on his jaw and disappeared under his chin. I had to rub away the sensation on my own skin.
‘The meditations?’ I prompted him. ‘Do you have any questions? You can ask me anything.’
‘Did Mum want me sent here?’ he said. ‘Did she know what it would be like?’ He was having trouble making the words, and then I saw him look at the wall behind me, his eyes flickering back and forth. His lips stretched into a half-smile.
‘What?’ I said, and turned to see what he was focusing on, but there was nothing. When I turned back, I saw that he’d gone shuddery and grey.
‘She’s there,’ he said, extending a finger.
‘Who?’
‘Mum. Stella.’
I froze and then all the surface of my skin began to creep. It was all I could do not to bolt out of that room and leave him with his vision of Stella. He kept looking at the wall, the smile playing on his lips. His eyes looked gone-out.
It’s a hallucination, I told myself. Stella is not there, she is not there.
‘She’s dead,’ he said. ‘Is she really dead?’
It seemed to me then that I could feel Stella standing behind me, the cold shape of her shadowing my own shape and causing me to shrink, the blood in my veins to turn to ice. I had to tell him yes. How could I lie to him with her shadow on me? And so I said yes and that’s when he had a seizure of some sort, or panic attack, I don’t know. He stumbled to his feet and began waving his arms and shouting and then he fell, twitching, to the floor. Maybe it was the drugs – they don’t suit everyone – or maybe the short rations, maybe the way he’d been allowed very little sleep at all – Hannah’s doing, not mine. I would have been kinder, if I’d stayed in control. I wouldn’t have tried to rush him through.
I ran out into the corridor for help, and there was Hannah – looking for us, no doubt. But I was glad she was there. And once again I let her take him over. I didn’t want to be with him if he could make Stella come. Stella saw our mother after death, and now he saw Stella. And what if he saw, if she was able to tell him, how it had occurred? It wasn’t my fault, Dodie, I’ve told you how it happened with Stella, and I swear on my life that every word is true. But Stella after death? She might say anything.
Seth wasn’t safe. Even Hannah agreed that we couldn’t continue the Process with him, nor allow him to mix with the other Brethren any longer. Perhaps he was not quite stable anyway? As Stella’s son that wouldn’t be surprising. Or perhaps it was only the effect of the Process so far, of rushing him. To sabotage a personality takes time and patience. But, anyway, it had to stop. And it had to be broken to Adam that Seth was not, could not be, the next Messiah. Neither Hannah nor I could decide how best to do this. We always found a way to distract or stall him when he asked to see Seth – who was in a peace-pod – while we decided how to go on.
And then, one day as I was sitting by Adam’s bed, Hannah came bursting in, without even a knock on the door. Her face was flushed with self-importance.
‘Adam,’ she said, disregarding me.
I don’t care what was happening, I don’t care how ill he was, she should still have called him Our Father; she should still have paused to grasp her thumb.
‘Hannah?’ he said.
‘I have such news.’ She darted a look at me.
I thought she was going to tell him about S
eth and I was puzzled by her excitement.
‘Go on then,’ I said.
‘We’ve had to put Seth in a peace-pod.’
‘Martha?’ Adam looked to me for confirmation.
‘I’m sorry,’ was all that I could say.
Adam struggled to sit up, his mouth falling open.
‘He’s not well,’ I said, gently pushing him back against the pillows. ‘He’s not mentally strong enough, Adam. We’ve had to stop the Process.’
‘But I have good news too!’ Hannah crowed, leaning forward, getting between us so that her beaming face was pressed almost into his. ‘You have a grandson!’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Yes! I was talking to Seth this morning about his family and he told me that your daughter’ – emphasizing the your, of course, to exclude me – ‘has a baby son! Stella had made him promise to never mention the child, but I got it out of him.’
I felt the tremor of surprise in Adam’s hand.
I was thrown into confusion. Joy, surprise – and fury that it was Hannah who’d brought this news. It should have been me. I should have spent less time beside Adam and more time with Seth, talking to him, getting this confidence out of him. This was my family, not Hannah’s.
And why hadn’t Stella told me she had a grandchild? Did she think she couldn’t trust me? What did she think I’d do?
Adam closed his eyes, and we waited and watched and held our breaths. You could actually see the shifting flicker of expressions on his face as he switched his allegiance and his hopes from his son to his grandson. He opened his eyes at last and there was a new bright glaze in them. ‘I am sorry for my son,’ he said. ‘But, after all, he is Stella’s son. He must be well cared for. And we must bring the infant here. This is where he belongs.’ He let go of my hand and hauled himself up in the bed. ‘I must pray for guidance. I must . . .’ But he was too breathless to continue.
‘What do we know about the child?’ I asked.
‘He’s called Jake,’ Hannah said. ‘He’s about fifteen months old.’
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