by Katy Gardner
Next to me, Gemma sat down heavily on the grass.
“I’m knackered and thirsty and I’ve had enough.”
“Let’s just go back,” I said in a strange, slurred voice. “This place gives me the creeps.”
She ignored me.
“Look, there’s a pool of water!”
Hauling herself up, she hurried over to the pool. Before I could formulate the words to stop her, she had placed her cupped hands into the water and was drinking from it.
“Gemma, you’re mad!”
She looked around at me crossly. She was pouring the water over her head now, her purple hair plastered over her forehead as the moisture trickled down her face. Perhaps she and Coral had planned the whole thing, I thought wildly, just to frighten me. Perhaps it was all some kind of weird joke.
“I’m going back,” I eventually managed to say.
“And I’m going to have a rest and a little snooze.”
With a loud sigh she closed her eyes and collapsed onto her back. As I stared at her I was suddenly overcome by a crawling sense of dread. The place was evil, I thought; there was something or somebody who did not want us here. Unable to speak another word, I turned and ran back up the path.
The forest closed around me. I kept glancing over my shoulder, irrationally convinced that I was being followed. When I reached the first hairpin bend I stopped and looked back. I could just about make out the stone hulk of the shrine, the coconut trees, and even the tops of Gemma’s and Coral’s heads. They seemed to be kneeling on the ground, as if in prayer. From the canopy above there was a sudden commotion and a flock of rainbow birds lifted into the air. It meant nothing, but in my paranoid confusion I gasped, lurching forward at the bushes to steady myself, then ran as fast as I could back up the hill. From inside the dark interior of the trees, other unknowable beasts chattered.
I stumbled on, my fear only beginning to subside when I reached the glade where I’d seen the monkeys. I had been running for five or ten minutes now, and with the humidity and heat I was exhausted. Finally I stopped, putting my hands on my knees and panting as the sweat dripped from my face onto the grass below. The figure in the trees was a hallucination, I kept telling myself; I was still stoned, it was as simple as that. At last I dropped onto the floor, relaxing as the heat caressed me, coaxing me away from reality, toward the promise of sleep. After a moment I closed my eyes, but just as the image of trees and the tomb started to blur into something else I sat up with a start. I’d heard another scream, this time coming from the direction of the clearing.
Jumping to my feet in alarm, I peered down the hill. There seemed to be a flurry of movement in the trees, the branches rustling and shaking as if something was trapped inside. Perhaps there was human habitation hidden from the track or perhaps I was confused again but for a few brief moments I smelled the smoldering, acrid smell of burning.
I held my breath, my heart hammering. There it was once more: the cry I’d heard at the shrine.
“Gemma?”
Turning back to the path I began to jog back down it, my voice rising in panic. This time I was sure something was there.
“Gemma? Are you there?”
There was no reply, just the whispering of trees and distant cry of birds.
“Gemma! Coral!”
I was almost at the first hairpin bend now. Through the trees, I could still glimpse the tomb. Beside it, I noticed now, Gemma and Coral were standing up and walking across the clearing. They seemed to be moving very slowly.
And then it happened. There was a roar, like the sound of gas rushing into a hot-air balloon, and a terrible, animal scream. For a second there was silence, as if the whole forest was holding its breath, then suddenly a ball of flames came bursting through the trees. I stared at it numbly for a moment, then sucked at the air in shock, my legs almost giving way. What I could see in the clearing beneath me was a human figure, its arms flailing, its torso and head surrounded by leaping flames.
I must have screamed. I lurched forward, my feet slipping.
“Coral! Gemma!”
They were nowhere to be seen. I was running back to the shrine now, screaming hysterically.
“For God’s sake, where are you?”
And then, as if nothing had happened, Gemma and Coral appeared around the corner. They were walking up the path, their arms linked.
“Wow,” Coral was saying as they reached me. “That sure is an amazing place. What a vibe.”
I gazed at them, dumbfounded.
“What’s the matter?” Gemma said. She was regarding me unsympathetically, blinking and shielding her eyes as she stepped into a stream of light pouring through the tree tops.
“What’s the matter? Did you see that guy?”
She looked up at me blankly. “What guy?”
“Didn’t you see? There was man . . . in the clearing . . .”
She folded her arms, unimpressed. “We didn’t see anyone.”
“But there was a man! I just saw this man, on fire . . . !”
“There wasn’t anyone,” Gemma said quietly. Behind her, Coral was staring at me. She had scratches on her arms, I noticed, and the bottom of her sarong was torn. Unlike Gemma, who was frowning censoriously, her mouth was hanging slightly open, her eyes wide.
“What do you mean, on fire?” she whispered almost reverentially.
“He was burning . . . he came out of the trees . . .”
Gemma stared at me silently. She doesn’t believe me, I realized. She thinks it’s because I’m stoned.
“There’s nothing there,” she said firmly.
I followed her gaze. The figure had disappeared. There was no lingering smoke and no sign of a fire; from what I could see, the grass wasn’t even singed.
“Shit, there’s a stone in my shoe.”
She crouched down, presumably to pick it out, and as she bent over, I saw that the wispy hair at the nape of her head was singed black. I must have shrieked again because she and Coral both jumped back a fraction, like horses shying at a sudden noise.
“What’s happened to your hair? Look! Oh, Christ, Gem, it’s black!”
She put her hand to her neck.
“What are you going on about?”
“It’s all burned.”
“What do you mean, it’s all burned?”
Her fingers came back with a clump of charred hair.
“How did that happen?”
“I told you I saw something . . .”
She paused, looking at the hair in her hand and then up at Coral’s face.
“It must have been that match I lit,” Gemma said slowly. Coral was still staring at the charred hair. “When we had that fag.”
“I don’t remember,” Coral whispered.
“Of course you do. The bugger flew off. Remember?”
“It must have got caught in your hair . . .”
I stared at them. Gemma seemed irritated, her eyes screwed up against the light, her cheeks hot; Coral, for some reason, was smiling. Then, very slowly, Gemma leaned over and put her hand on my shoulder. For perhaps a second she looked into my face. Possibly it was longer. I couldn’t tell, for time suddenly slowed and as our eyes met something passed across her face which I’d never seen there before. Was it an assumption of superiority, or something closer to triumph? Whatever it was, I did not like it. I flicked my eyes away.
“The thing is,” she said gently, “you really are very stoned.”
“I mean, like, it’s a powerful place?” Coral was saying now. “I could tell from the moment I walked into the glade it was really, really heavy.”
“You don’t believe me,” I whispered to Gemma.
“I just think you need to go back to the bungalow and sleep it off,” Gemma said slowly, as patiently as if she was talking to an errant child. “Look, think about it rationally. All that’s happened is that I set my hair alight with a match. You’ve just smoked too much dope. It never agrees with you, does it?”
I shook my head
. I felt empty, drained of every emotion, utterly alone. “Okay,” I said eventually. “I guess you’re right.”
13
CORAL and Gemma linked arms and strode up the track as I trailed slowly behind. From time to time the breeze carried snatches of their conversation down the hill. I heard Coral say, “Focus your energies,” missed Gemma’s quieter reply, and then caught the word “Esther” and the muffled sound of laughter.
I felt overwhelmingly anxious. Perhaps Gemma was right and in my stoned state I had hallucinated the burning figure, but I was sure I’d seen it. I took one careful step after another. Now that I was moving away from the clearing I felt completely sober. My head was clear, my reactions normal. Could I really have imagined it? If there had been a fire, there would have been smoke, yet when I had looked back at the shrine the air was clear. And Coral and Gemma said they’d seen nothing. It must have been a mirage, I decided, a trick of the light.
Yet it wasn’t just the illusion of the burning man that was making me feel so desolate. As Coral and Gemma disappeared up the track, I brooded over my increasing sense of isolation. It was as if I was the stranger, and Gemma and Coral the old friends; they’d been giggling at me in the bungalow, and even now, when I was clearly shaken and upset, seemed intent on ignoring me. Gemma, in particular, had been completely dismissive. I picked my way miserably over the stony path, no longer attempting to catch up. It was almost as if she didn’t want me around.
Finally the path came out on the main road. There was no sign of the others. I turned dejectedly onto the sidewalk. Gemma was obviously angry with me, I thought miserably, yet as usual she refused to express it directly. It was the same old pattern. When she flunked her A-levels and I did better than expected, she didn’t ring me for weeks; when I took up my place at Sussex she withdrew from our friendship for almost a year, leaving my letters unanswered and only visiting once. Even then she was in such a sulk that she caught the train back to Stevenage early rather than party with my new friends. And now there was this thing with Steve. But how could she know about that? It was my terrible, shameful secret.
I sniffed, trying not to cry. Since I’d kissed him that rainy evening three weeks ago, I felt as if I was dragging a great sack of guilt behind me. I pictured my betrayal as a dismembered body: the bulk of flesh massing at the bottom of the sack, the hessian stained a sticky, reddy brown. I wanted to dispose of it quietly, forget the whole thing, but every day it grew heavier, the stench from its contents more overwhelming. What I had to do was confess, I knew; but I didn’t have the courage. And what could I say to absolve my guilt? That I hadn’t meant it to happen? That I wanted her to be happy, for it to all work out? The truth was that even though Gemma had been giving me blow-by-blow accounts of her every encounter with Steve for the last six months, I’d flirted with him from the first moment we met.
I couldn’t bear to think about it. I stared at the battered post office, the dusty window of the pharmacy next door, but still couldn’t prevent the image of Gemma sitting in the pub that night from forcing its way back into my thoughts. She’d been squeezed up next to him, her thighs touching his, and they were laughing. When she saw me she waved eagerly, beckoning me over. She thought of him as hers, I suppose, and she wanted to show him off. She’d lost weight, and was wearing pink lipstick and, under her battered suede jacket, a pair of tight jeans.
“This,” she said proudly, “is Steve.”
And there he was. I’d been expecting a slightly improved version of the other boyfriends she’d produced over the last few years: no-hoper slobs, to the last man, all of whom had managed to hurt her in ways I found impossible to comprehend. She was so manifestly their superior, and yet she always let them take the upper hand. Like Gary, the so-called “thrash guitarist” who had acne and a runny nose and who got off with someone else in front of her at an R.E.M. gig for which she’d supplied the tickets. Or Neil, the creepy manager of the pub where she sometimes worked, who’d sacked her the day after he’d bizarrely told her that making love to her was like sleeping with his granny.
But from the moment I glimpsed him from the other side of the pub, I knew Steve was different: not a spotty creep, but jaw-droppingly good-looking, with a mass of dark hair, amused brown eyes I could have gazed into all evening, and beautiful, strong hands I wanted to reach out and grasp. And what was my first, shameful thought as I saw them sitting and laughing together? Not that Gemma had chosen well, or that I should be sisterly and try to help her in her quest for his affections. No, what I thought—even as I pushed the disloyal words hastily from my mind—was that she was aiming far too high, that she’d never be able to get a guy like this.
“Hi.”
I smiled at him, glancing guiltily away from his eyes. But just by the way he took my hand and moved over for me, I knew that he fancied me, too.
And now I was in this terrible mess. I walked more quickly, resolutely ignoring the men who milled around me. Why had it had to happen? Despite his good looks he was, after all, just an ordinary Stevenage bloke with a penchant for motorbikes and the Smiths, who’d flunked his A-levels and now wanted to work with the mentally ill. And yet I couldn’t stop myself from being drawn to him, for he had another quality which I’d never yet encountered in a man his age, a grounded certainty about life, some kind of internal calm which made all the others seem like little boys.
And yet Gemma thought of him as hers. Even if, so far, he’d done no more than kiss her goodnight—an event she had related in detail to me several times—she was convinced that their relationship was a fait accompli. She was obsessed with him, talked about him all the time, told me this was really “it.”
And what had I done to avert the inevitable? Absolutely nothing. I carried on meeting them in the pub, night after night. Of course I knew what was about to happen; I’d had enough experience of men to recognize the signs. But unlike all those other dalliances, when I’d been unable to let myself go, with Steve I was unable to stop the feelings which sprang up so suddenly between us. All those rapidly appearing shoots, the spreading, fertile green which pushed my qualms aside, taking root. I just stood and watched them grow. And one evening, when Gemma had conveniently left the pub early, I gave him my number. He called the very next day, just as I knew he would. I should have taken the situation in hand there and then, feigned disinterest or an absent boyfriend but instead I pretended to myself that it was all part of Gemma’s campaign, that Steve and I would meet and what we’d discuss was her. And even after he’d spent all day walking with me in the woods and not mentioned Gemma once, still I didn’t come clean. And then finally, when Mum and Dad were out, I let him come around and kiss me and tell me how he’d never even remotely fancied Gemma.
And what had I done to help my best friend? I’d kissed him back. I’d betrayed her, I thought bitterly. I’d taken the only man she’d ever really wanted and didn’t even have the decency to tell her. Instead, I’d carried on as if nothing had happened.
WHEN I reached the bungalow I found Gemma lying on top of her bed, her arms outstretched under the fan’s halfhearted flutter, her eyes closed. I stared at her for a moment, listening to her snuffly snoring. I could put it off no longer, I decided. We had to talk about Steve. That was the cause of all this hostility; like a throbbing abscess, it had to be removed. When she woke up I’d tell her the truth. I glanced away from her, trying to think of what I’d say, and suddenly jumped back with a gasp.
Crouching in the other, darker corner of the room, was a figure.
“Christ almighty!”
It was Coral. As my eyes readjusted to the light I saw that she was sitting in the lotus position, her clothes strewn untidily around the room. She looked better with them on; in her angular pose the bones jutted uncomfortably from her thin brown skin and her hard, rubbery tits seemed even flatter.
“What are you doing?”
She opened her eyes and jumped up. “It’s you!”
“Who else did you expect?”
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br /> I stared into her face. Her pupils were dilated and her eyes kept darting across the room to the door, as if she was expecting it to open. She looked back at me and suddenly smiled, her eyes creasing up, her white teeth small and sharp.
“No one. I was just meditating.”
“Why have you taken off all your clothes?”
“My skin needed to breathe.”
Behind her, she groped for her dress. When she found it she pulled it on over her head.
“It doesn’t, like, offend you? I thought you guys would be cool.”
“No, it’s fine.”
She took a step toward me. Instinctively, I took a step back.
“Sister,” she said softly. “Let me touch you.”
Before I could stop her, she’d reached out and placed the tip of her finger on my cheek. I swallowed uncomfortably. I wanted to jerk my face away, but then she’d see how embarrassed I was. She was gazing into my face.
“So you felt it, too?” she whispered.
“What?”
She looked enigmatically at me, then cupped her hands and placed them around my face. Her fingers were warm and moist. I couldn’t stop myself from wincing.
“The power of the Pir. It hit me like a wave the moment we walked into the glade.”
“I was just stoned.”
“Oh no. No way. It wasn’t that.”
I moved back a step. She had bad breath, and was standing too close.
“I didn’t see anything,” I said decisively. “Gemma was right. I just imagined it.”
Coral laughed. “You don’t want to listen to Gemma, hon. She’s just struggling with all the things that are going to happen. It’s, like, a lot to take onboard?”
I didn’t know what she meant. She was still gazing meaningfully at me.
“You guys have just got to open up,” she said. “I mean, can’t you sense it? All around us?”
“What?”
“The power of transformation!”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”