He nods. ‘I thought they might,’ he says, in a voice lacking in indignation. I suppose his parishioners have told him much worse in the past; he must have seen much worse in his time in Africa – mine is a tedious, inconsequential suffering in the greater scheme of things. Hugh’s chest is rising and falling slowly, each breath a deliberate commitment, the pauses between some words are long and I wonder if his speech has suffered a little as a result of his stroke.
‘I haven’t asked about you,’ I say and reach over, putting my hand on his arm. ‘I am sorry. I am something of a Robinson Crusoe here. I have forgotten how to think about other people. How are you?’
‘You’re telling me you haven’t found a Man Friday yet?’
‘No, I’ve found nothing. No footprints in the sand, no empty canoes. This is pretty much what the guide book says, a real-life desert island.’
Hugh smiles and answers my original question. ‘I am fine, very few after-effects really. My left arm isn’t quite what it was and my speech – have you noticed? I find it a little trying at times, but I don’t need to preach any longer, at least not to anyone except you.’
I am desperate to ask him about the internet, but the electronic eye is blinking in the corner and I am weighing up the serious risk of them banning Hugh’s visits against my addiction to information.
I opt for ambivalence. ‘How’s the research going?’
‘My search produced no matches, as they say. Lots of references, discussion, that sort of thing, but not exactly what I’m looking for.’
The disappointment I would have expected to feel at his evasiveness, at the fact that he has turned up empty-handed, is not here because I am so relieved he is back with me and that he is well. Looking at this fat, old priest and knowing the comfort he brings me, I understand that this is what ministry looks like: no virtual prayers, but rather the offer of one man to take on the suffering of another; no thousands worshipping online, but a few, waiting in line for a quiet communion, their feet shuffling on flagstones worn by a thousand years of faith; no icons to download, but a cross. No visions, for all I know, probably no voices either, no obvious replies or advice from on high, a room full of quite ordinary sorrow, shared.
Not so the Sisters. I had been on the Rose site often enough with them when I was at the caravans, following their links to texts and readings, watching Sister Amelia write the ‘Thought for the Day’, listening to Eve record the Sisters singing and then enhance the meditative chants until it sounded like a choir and then put it as a link to worship together. At home, I avoided using it. Mark had been on the site once and lost his temper when he saw photos of The Well uploaded with pictures of his hayfields and captions about the Blessed Land.
‘What gives them the right to act as if they own this place?’
Me responding that nobody owns this place, Mark, we are just guardians. Him tearing a framed photo of us standing in front of the cottage off the wall and smashing it on the tiles on the kitchen floor and shouting, there, we never bought it, we don’t own it, I don’t spend fourteen hours a day farming it, it’s nothing to do with us, it belongs to your sodding nuns. Me, later, rescuing the picture and hammering the nail back into the crumbling plaster.
The day after the service at the Wellspring, Sister Amelia invited me into the hub, said she had something she wanted to show me. The hub was the caravan which acted as the engine room of the spiritual spaceship, wires trailing to the solar charger, print-outs of spreadsheets weighted down with ‘The Song of Solomon’ and with Eve as the chief engineer in communication with earth in front of the laptop. Next to her, sitting on the stool, her hair piled up in a bun, her legs crossed, the first three buttons on her white blouse left undone, Sister Amelia could almost have been in any office, anywhere, tapping out the hours in a heat wave until a five o’clock drink in a little local wine bar with a terrace in the centre of some airless city. She asked Eve to move over so that I could see, put in her password and brought up SistersoftheRoseofJericho.com. The image of me, held by the water of The Well and showered by the fragments of a rainbow dominated the page. I felt my cheeks, my jawbone, my neck and then grasped my hands together. Yes. That was me.
‘Over three thousand hits this morning alone. Watch the counter.’
In the corner of the screen the figure which recorded the number of hits was clicking relentlessly upwards even as we watched. It had a life of its own. Impossible to think it had any connection to me, impossible to think that each of those numbers represented a person in another place watching me on a film on a computer.
‘The word has spread, Ruth. She is moving through the world on the unseen byways of the internet, the spirit is breathing through us. They are waiting to hear from you, Ruth. You must talk to them.’
‘Me? How?’
I think now that if I had been driven to stadiums, called up to address crowds of thousands crying and chanting in their desperation for an answer, interviewed by the press, and featured on breakfast TV, then it might have become clearer to me what I was getting into. But, and it is no excuse, it was all so distant. These thousands were not gathered before me as real people, placing their hope in me – they were site subscribers, paid up online members sitting on their own in their soporific offices and sterile bedrooms, checking their BlackBerrys whilst travelling to hospital appointments on late buses, scratching at their gravel gardens with redundant trowels. We could copy and paste them, delete them, store their details, accept or reject their bids for salvation with a click of the mouse. I may have been the chosen one, but I was a novice in this free-market, religious economy.
Eve wasn’t. She put her PR experience to good use. ‘I’m suggesting we live-stream at dusk. People will have left work and it’s more atmospheric.’ She examined a chipped nail and corrected herself. ‘What I mean is that sometimes it’s easier to focus on what matters.’
Emboldened, I showed them the writing which had poured from me the night before.
‘Super. We’ll upload it immediately,’ said Eve. Sister Amelia said she should read it first, to see if anything needed . . . Needed what? Amending? Correcting? No. What strength, what conviction I had. This was the word of the Rose. It had been dictated to me and could not be improved. I put the poetry on the table and left them in the tense silence to read it.
The second blog was no less visionary.
Next I am shown the earth under a footprint of gold.
Come closer.
This is not something you can see from standing.
Lie like a child on your flat stomach.
Rest your chin on your hands and attend the soil.
Write the name of Rose in the earth with your finger.
If the land is bare, it is because you have not attended.
Attend to what is written in the dirt.
Attend to your fires, to the burning effigy,
a guy with no revolution in his mind.
The thumb of the believer strikes the flint.
The breath of the believer blows the flame.
And in the conflagration I see the hand that saves me,
seed, pale and pooled on the leaves of a dandelion,
and a Rose which unfurls and spreads its dryness to the sky
ready for the soft water to touch, for the flowering.
Hugh is a natural listener. Not for him classes in mirroring body language or non-judgemental affirmative silence. He makes no comment, but simply asks ‘May I?’, and I get up and pass him the notebook, reflecting that there are words that still seem to belong here, the gentle words like leaves and seed. It is hard to think that those other violent insurgent words ever found their home at The Well, this quiet land, keeper of a history of sorts, home to woodpeckers and buttercups.
‘So that was the famous First Incantation?’ asks Hugh, turning the pages, one by one, slowly.
It was. It had a life of its own, that poem. It defined what was to become the Dusk Worships, the familiar prayer position of the faithful, th
e writing of the Rose in the soil, the practice of meditating on a handful of dust. But more dangerous than any of those, the hatred of men, the burning of male effigies and the fire-fuelled protests against the men in the government that it provoked. I should undergo a second baptism and take the name of Herod.
Hugh flicks back through the notebook and seems to re-read one page. ‘This hatred of men, Ruth, it’s so intense. Was it men as a species? What about Mark?’
‘Mark was more like a toddler than a man by then,’ I replied.
‘What about young Lucien then? He would have grown up.’
‘But he didn’t, did he?’
Hugh does not respond, but quotes instead from my notebook. ‘We are dry women, but when we kiss the Rose, our lips are touched with dew and we flower also. If men were so bad, Ruth, did you find compensation, shall we say, in the love of women? Even an old high-church Irishman like me can see how that could happen.’
‘You know the history of mysticism better than me, I suspect.’
‘You give me too much credit.’ Hugh waited patiently.
Having taken back the writings from him, I look around the room for a suitable place to put them and, not seeing anywhere, throw them in the basket by the stove where we have always put everything that needed burning. ‘I’ve told you before, there are more questions than answers here. Besides, I’m not sure the line between spiritual and physical ecstasy has been agreed by the Royal College of Psychiatry – or by the Pope for that matter.’ Hugh doesn’t reply, but nods instead, shifting a little uncomfortably in his chair. I take him a cushion. ‘It wasn’t just another country, Hugh, it was another planet. These were just words, hieroglyphics on A4 lined paper.’
We sit for a few minutes, the thick stone walls of the cottage now a barrier, forbidding entry to the rustle of the breeze or the hum of thunder flies. ‘I did write them. There must have been a part of me that created them. What happened to them all, do you think?’
Hugh looks over to me. ‘Who? The words?’
‘The faithful. The ones who bought the T-shirts and downloaded the hymns.’
‘The same as has happened to you. Conviction, dereliction, maybe the restoration of hope. Because, despite this whole clamp-down, Ruth, I detect a little more hope in you, nowadays, compared to my first visit at least.’
‘That’s because you’re back,’ I said.
‘T-shirts? Did they really buy T-shirts?’ Hugh asks suddenly.
‘Oh yes, and more. Mugs, biros, calendars with pictures of The Well for every month of the year – even pants for all I know. Some of it was shipped out from the site; other items, like the T-shirts, Eve said was contracted out, so somewhere I presume there’s a warehouse full of fakery. You could take a look on eBay, Hugh! See if you can’t bring me a fridge magnet with my face on it next time you come. It could act as a reminder for me in case I should ever think of believing in anything again.’
‘What happened to the money, do you think?’ asked Hugh.
‘That I don’t know. People subscribed and donated. Eve talked about all that with Amelia. I think she liked to think there were things not shared with me. Amelia did try to persuade me to buy out Mark’s share, for the Sisters to form a charity and buy the whole thing. But that was later. There must have been a lot of money for her to be talking like that, but I never really got involved.’
‘So many unknowns.’ He is turning the pages of his Bible carefully, scanning the verses, until it seems he reaches what he has been searching for. ‘Time is running out for us, winged chariots and so forth. Do you mind if I read from this?’
‘Carry on.’
‘Ecclesiastes. Nothing about a handful of dust. Something much more useful to remember in life. I think of it almost every time I walk over the hill there.’
‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance . . .’
‘That’s one bit of the Bible I do know,’ I say.
‘You know it and you don’t know it,’ he replies.
An unnaturally cold wind for June has blasted across the country and, according to Anon, has led to a flurry of speculation that something has shifted in the heavens and it is going to rain. Maybe it is not the heavens moving, but more probably the high pressure that has squatted over Europe for so long, fending off the Atlantic fronts that used to batter at the door of our western coasts. Our own rain-swollen westerlies must come in disguise, or how else would they break the embargo? Nobody seems to know. Certainly not the meteorologists who are studying each minute variation in the pressure charts like fortune-tellers reading the lines on a punter’s hand, or the scientists at the top of the drive, waving their wands in the sky like wizards. The banging doors and the relentless rattling of the window frames is making everyone restless, even Boy is pacing out by the barn. I stick my head out of the back door.
‘You OK?’ I call against the wind.
‘Fine.’ He comes over to talk. ‘Bored that’s all. Seriously bored and devoid of a social life. I’ve finished my last book and can’t face one more game of two-hand poker with Adrian.’
I feel sorry for him, stuck here just the wrong side of his future. He takes up my offer to borrow something, comes in with the door slamming behind him and the dust blowing in with him, and I show him the shelves with the books covered in cobwebs and leave him to it.
‘Found anything?’ I call from the kitchen where I am avoiding the titles and the memories of who read them last and when and where.
Boy sticks his head around the door. ‘I’ve always wanted to read this,’ he says. He holds up a copy of Long Walk to Freedom, catches the expression on my face and then grimaces. ‘God, sorry, I’m so tactless.’
‘Get out of here. Take it, read it. He was an amazing man. Come to think of it, I should probably read it again myself when you’ve finished.’
But I won’t. I am fascinated by my own inability to either manage my imprisonment or envisage a future. I’m no Mandela, with his reading and thinking and writing notes in the margins of his Shakespeare and I can’t imagine I’ll be any more effective if and when I ever get released. If it starts raining again, it’s possible I might be freed – although not innocent. I wonder what I would do then. The thinking moves me from my Groundhog Day grammar to the ‘what if’. A future. Try as I might to be, to breathe, to live in the present, this present continuous, this ‘ing’ is not enough. Eating. Waiting. Tapping. I am not enough. I will be, may be.
The unanswered, unaskable question, then, is whether I would stay here at all, if I was free to leave. I see myself flogging the country, tracking down Mark and Sister Amelia to sniff out the scent of guilt, only to find the trail led to my own fingers, with their nails bitten and black. And if I was ever to leave here, it begs the question of what was the point of not having left before. So, after all that self-discipline, I have returned to the what-might-have-been. It is a magnet and I have little resistance left in me.
The ill wind started this thinking, collaborating with the guards to keep me inside. Although it is summer, it feels like autumn and blows in with it memories of the day when Angie left and Lucien stayed behind with us, for safe-keeping. That again was a strange storm, whipping rainless across the country like a November gale at the beginning of September, sending dry trees crashing over pavements, with mothers walking their children for their first day at school, into bedrooms where the unsuspecting unemployed were sleeping away their empty days, onto a couple sitting on a park bench with rings on their fingers and bells on their toes unaware of the crack in the branch above them.
It was against this wind that I struggled up to the track to see Lucien. The sheep that usually came out to follow me held close to the hedge and I followed their example, so it was not
until I was quite near that I could tell the camp was preparing to leave. Most of the small sleeping tents were already packed up, reduced to inconsequential packages of nylon, the nights spent in them, the dreams dreamt there, the arms enfolded, all compressed into a convenient size. Four of the travellers were fighting to take down the big store tent, shouting instructions which got blown away and clinging on to the canvas which rampaged in the gale. Elsewhere, people were squeezing the last six months into small spaces: bicycles onto the backs of the camper vans, mattresses onto the roofs of cars, sleeping bags into recycled supermarket carriers, saucepans stacked one into another like Russian dolls, inflatable water carriers deflated. Set to music it would have been a grand chorus scene in an opera, with all the crowd and the minor parts working in unison and it seemed as though any minute they would turn to face the front and burst into song for their curtain call.
As far as I was concerned, Angie was centre-stage, taking down a makeshift washing line, standing on tiptoes to undo the knot which held the rope to the branch of the plum tree in the hedge, her midriff exposed, wearing nothing but a silly little top and a pair of jeans regardless of the weather. She always was a teenager, I thought, always will be. I scanned the scene for Lucien and heard him before I saw him. Even if he and the other children had been given some responsible role in this communal effort to move on, they had long given up on it. There they were, two at a time on his blue bike, at the top of the slope.
‘Ready, steady, go!’
They were off, hurtling down the hill with screams, the loose tyres skidding off the hillocks, the one on the back clutching on for dear life, the one in the front with his feet on the pedals, knuckles white and tight on bent handlebars. Oh the winning, the winning, emboldened by the maddening wind. And, of course, as soon as they got to the bottom, they were marching back up to the top of the hill and then back down again.
And when they were up, they were up; and when they were down they were down – Angie found me once singing that to Lucien when he was a baby. That’s called the rhyme of the ancient addict, Angie said to me, it’s what we sing when we’re thieving.
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