‘It’s life’s subtle, little niceties – these fine, almost honest aesthetic details …’ – Sheila sweeps out her arm, majestically – ‘which are so easy to lose touch with when you’re drawn to a so-called “higher calling”.’
She breaks off, slightly embarrassed. ‘I know it sounds pretentious, but it’s so easy to become brutalized by the all-consuming make-do-and-mend world of the C of E …’ She scowls. ‘It’s recently started to dawn on me what a great pity it is – what a waste, how dangerous it is, even – to close down that side of yourself. To turn away from external beauty as a kind of necessary function of self-realization. It shouldn’t ever need to be a question of either/or.’
‘Although maybe it’s quite nice – quite refreshing – to just ditch all the trivial stuff,’ Valentine muses, her mind turning to Milah, ‘and focus solely on the renunciation part.’
Sheila bends forward over the sink.
‘But is it just trivial?’ she argues. ‘Don’t people create art, celebrate beauty – in whatever medium: words, sounds, clothes or images – as a way of describing the indescribable, a way of engaging with a higher realm, a spiritual realm, even? There are some paintings – some poems – which seem to speak directly to the soul.’
‘Yeah. Maybe …’ Valentine shrugs. She grabs a small, cream enamel jug and commences pouring water over Sheila’s hair, careful to protect her face while she does so.
‘How about you, then?’ Sheila persists. ‘Why do you create art?’
‘One of my biggest inspirations has always been Louise Bourgeois,’ Valentine automatically harks back to her conversation with Gene from the previous day.
‘I love her!’ Sheila exclaims, lifting her head and clanking it into the enamel jug in her excitement. ‘I did a phone interview with her in the eighties for the magazine. She was just … just so incredibly awe-inspiring! So articulate! So mischievous! And believe it or not I actually sensed there might’ve been an influence – very subtle, totally implicit. I think that’s partly what I was responding to so positively this morning.’
‘Well you’ll probably already know that Bourgeois always said she created art “to survive”,’ Valentine doggedly continues. ‘That’s kind of how I feel about it. When I pick up the tattoo gun or I draw a perfect eyebrow on to my face with an exquisitely sharp kohl pencil, I sort of feel my focus shift. I feel a pressure lift. I’m released from the need to think about all this other stuff, this bad stuff, the negative thoughts, the anxieties …’
‘Art’s like a kind of prayer,’ Sheila suggests.
‘Yeah.’ Valentine’s quizzical. ‘I never really thought about it that way before … I guess I tend to forget my emotions when I’m doing a tattoo,’ she struggles to explain. ‘I stop asking questions. I stop panicking. I’m so focused, so intent.’
‘Exactly like a prayer, then.’ Sheila grins, vindicated.
‘Although art’s all about ego’ – Valentine frowns – ‘and isn’t prayer meant to be the polar opposite of that?’
‘It’s just a question of intent,’ Sheila argues, ‘if the art expresses something sublime then how can it help expressing God?’
‘Yeah …’ Valentine doesn’t sound entirely convinced.
‘Was your dad much of an artist?’ Sheila wonders (tactfully moving to less esoteric ground). ‘Did he have a good reputation in the world of tattooing?’
‘He was always very traditional – very old-fashioned. Hated the ultra-realist stuff.’
Valentine chuckles to herself, wryly. ‘It’s actually quite scary to think that I’m continuing his legacy at some level … that I’m the dutiful daughter carefully following in his footsteps; you know, just by maintaining the house, the way I dress, the tattooing. I always thought I was so defiant, such a rebel …’
She trails off, anxiously.
‘You can enjoy things in common with a person without needing to identify with them completely,’ Sheila opines.
‘I was always so embarrassed by him, though,’ Valentine confesses, ‘the things he did and said in public – the political stuff.’
‘But when everything’s said and done, he was still your dad.’
Sheila baldly states the obvious.
‘I’m marked for life!’ Valentine concedes, almost joking, but not entirely.
She applies a small dab of shampoo to Sheila’s hair and gently rubs it in, then performs a brief head massage with her fingertips. The skin on Sheila’s arms forms into appreciative goose-bumps.
‘That’s lovely,’ she sighs. Valentine’s fingers instantly stiffen.
‘So you have a formal background in art?’ she asks, quickly picking up the jug and starting to rinse.
‘Nope.’ Sheila shakes her head (miraculously avoiding getting water in her eyes). ‘I studied English at Oxford – did a PhD – but in my free time I helped set up this radical arts magazine called OnTheRag. It caused quite a stir at the time – was considered ground-breaking in terms of graphics and content. We had a strong art agenda. A lot of the people I brought through ended up becoming big figures in the international art establishment.’
‘That woman you mentioned in your email?’ Valentine suggests.
‘Exactly. I’ve been off the radar for quite a few years now, but I like to think I still have pretty good instincts.’
Valentine finishes rinsing, then wrings the excess water from Sheila’s hair and uses the spare towel from the draining-board to rub it dry.
‘Okay’ – she forms the towel into a little turban – ‘I think we’re pretty much done here.’
Sheila straightens up, carefully holding the turban in place with her hand, then follows Valentine to a nearby chair and sits down on it.
‘So you …’ – Valentine opens the dresser to find a comb and some scissors – ‘you met your husband at university?’
She remains turned away from Sheila as she asks this question, her voice purposely casual.
‘Heavens, no!’ Sheila snorts. ‘Gene’s not remotely academic!’
She pauses, guiltily. ‘Although that’s through no fault of his own, obviously,’ she quickly modifies, ‘his education was so heavily disrupted as a kid by cancer therapy.’
‘So how many times …?’ Valentine locates the comb and scissors in their special, leather pouch.
‘Seven, all told. Then a major car accident a few years back which killed his sister, severely injured his niece and shattered his leg.’
Valentine’s shocked. She immediately recalls the crazy-paving of scars on Gene’s belly and his chest. Her skin tingles as she visualizes that body so beautiful and strong and lean, yet so clumsily sewn together – carelessly hacked together, like a badly made rag doll – with reams of wild, shiny white stitching. Her pupils expand. Her nostrils flare. Her throat contracts.
‘We actually met while my dad was having minor surgery on his gall bladder,’ Sheila explains, oblivious. ‘I grew up in Suffolk, but my parents moved to Luton when I was nineteen. Dad had a job in air-traffic control. I was in the middle of a divorce at the time, stuck at home with Stan …’
‘Stan?’ Valentine echoes, hoarsely.
‘My son. Gene’s stepson.’
Valentine nods.
‘Anyhow,’ Sheila continues, ‘I met a few people while visiting Dad on the ward – some of the local volunteers. They persuaded me into doing a couple of shifts on the hospital radio station. There was a Christian-led group in charge of the rota. Gene was constantly in and out of the place having bouts of chemo. His cancer had been declared terminal at that stage, but he was such a positive person, really inspirational.’
‘You were married previously?’ Valentine double-checks the bow on her apron, places the open pouch on to the table, then moves to the back of Sheila and carefully unwinds her turban.
‘Yeah. I’d got hitched to this Polish guy at college.’ Sheila grimaces. ‘I guess you could call it a marriage of convenience. He was the brother of a dear friend of mine who needed to secur
e residency in the UK. We’d liked each other from the off … It was kind of calculated and completely un-calculated at the same time …’
‘Spontaneous,’ Valentine interjects, fluffing out her wet hair and then grabbing the comb.
‘Exactly.’ Sheila nods. ‘He’d run this Polish film cooperative – pre the ’89 revolution. It was all very “underground” and exciting as I recall. Either way’ – she shrugs, as Valentine commences combing – ‘it was a huge mistake. I fell pregnant with Stanislav and he ran a mile. I dropped out of college, had this huge crisis of confidence …’
‘That’s pretty difficult to imagine!’ Valentine grins, almost disbelieving.
‘You don’t know the half of it!’ Sheila retorts. ‘I’d always been very ambitious, very centred, very driven – wanted to grab the world by its lapels and really shake it up. Then suddenly all that certainty, all that focus seemed to fall away from me.’
‘But you kept the baby,’ Valentine observes (oddly protective of the student Sheila).
‘Yeah. I was into my thirteenth week when I found out about it – pretty late. I stayed at college until the end of my third trimester then moved back home for the birth. My mother was very supportive. She’s one of those really lovely, wholesome, nurturing types. She offered to take care of Stan, full-time, when I returned to university. I was eager to finish my education – attended for one term, enjoyed the holidays; everything seemed hunky-dory – and then on the train journey back up to Oxford after the Easter break I had a kind of … well, I guess you’d call it an epiphany.’
Valentine has combed out Sheila’s hair and is now slowly walking around her, assessing the work to be done. She stops in front of her.
‘An epiphany?’ She reaches over and grabs the scissors from the pouch.
‘Yeah. I mean it sounds so ridiculous when I describe it in actual words and sentences – it was more of a feeling than an event as such.’
‘An epiphany,’ Valentine repeats, savouring the four, sharp syllables on her tongue, and then: ‘What kind of a feeling, exactly?’
‘Well, I was sitting on the train’ – Sheila adjusts the towel around her shoulders – ‘it was fairly empty, not peak hour or anything, and I had my back to the engine. The countryside was flowing by backwards – I remember that very clearly for some reason. I’d been enjoying a book. It was part of the reading list for a course I was attending on the Colonial Novel: An Area of Darkness by V.S. Naipaul?’
Valentine just shrugs, apologetically.
‘I’d reached this section – about seventy-odd pages in – when Naipaul spends almost an entire chapter describing the Indian attitude to defecation. It was kind of funny and disgusting. I was eating an apple. I put the book down on to the seat beside me and just sat there for a moment trying to dislodge a piece of apple skin from between my teeth with my tongue.
‘I sort of de-focused. Then the door at the far end of the carriage opened and a woman – a British Rail employee – came trundling into the compartment with a drinks trolley. The trolley made that loud, jiggling-clinking-clanking sound as she shoved it along. She pushed it down the middle of the carriage towards me. I was still holding my half-eaten apple. And as she approached I just …’ Sheila’s voice breaks slightly. ‘I saw God. I just saw God – moving towards me in a kind of heatwave with the woman and the drinks trolley …’
‘Crazy!’ Valentine’s amused and startled.
‘I know. Completely weird. Completely random and nonsensical. It was just this … this overwhelming sensation. Like the world was suddenly turned inside out. The hairs on my arms stood on end. I just felt God inhabiting the train, filling the train, filling me. I was touched by God. It was completely out of the blue. Came from totally left field’ – she shrugs (almost regretfully) – ‘and that was that. My old life was over.’
‘You were born again.’
‘Yes.’
Valentine moves to the back of Sheila and pulls her hair into a ponytail with her hand.
‘Speak now or forever hold your peace!’ she intones, mock-warningly.
‘My peace is held,’ Sheila maintains with comic sobriety.
Valentine cuts the hair above her fist then flashes Sheila the disembodied ponytail.
‘Toodle-oo!’ Sheila waves, grinning, as Valentine shows it to Nessa (who strokes it, with a coo) then places it into a nearby pedal bin.
‘You’ve got loads of cats,’ Sheila idly volunteers (as four saunter into the kitchen in quick succession).
‘Eight. Mum used to breed them. Now she hates them.’
‘I quite like cats,’ Sheila muses.
‘God turning up with the drinks trolley!’ Valentine chuckles, returning, with renewed vigour, to the task at hand. ‘Who’d’ve thunk it?’
‘Depressingly prosaic,’ Sheila snorts, ‘I’m hardly giving St Paul much of a run for his money.’
Valentine chuckles and commences the cut, proper. Sheila closes her eyes and relaxes for a while as Valentine snips and fluffs and fusses.
‘Is Gene very religious?’ Valentine suddenly asks.
‘Gene?! Heavens, no!’ Sheila exclaims. ‘Not remotely! Although …’ She pauses for a second. ‘Credit where credit’s due – it was basically down to Gene that I became a vicar in the first place.’
‘Really?’ Valentine’s intrigued.
‘Yup. It was being around Gene, experiencing his patience and his quiet optimism and his … well, his goodness in the face of such terrible adversity that finally developed what’d been a pretty random, religious experience into something way more coherent.’
‘But if Gene isn’t religious himself’ – Valentine’s confused – ‘then how can you –’
‘I struck a kind of … well, I suppose you’d call it a deal with God,’ Sheila hastily interrupts. ‘I hadn’t known Gene very long at that stage, but late one night – after we’d been chatting for hours over mugs of watery drinking chocolate in the hospital cafeteria – I went home, knelt down at the foot of my bed and said to God: “If you’re powerful enough to turn me inside out like this – and for no apparent reason – then you’re powerful enough to heal that lovely, good, patient man at the hospital.”’
Valentine stops the cut for a moment, surprised.
‘I mean I was very green back then, very silly, very pushy, slightly scared, even,’ Sheila confesses, ‘and – in all truthfulness – I think I was secretly hoping to be disappointed at some level, looking for a way out.’
Sheila blows an especially ticklish chunk of cut hair from the end of her nose. Valentine recommences the cut, frowning.
‘It was also a subtle way of consciously engaging with the feelings I’d started to develop for Gene,’ Sheila expands, ‘feelings which’d gradually evolved – over a series of days and weeks and months – from pity to compassion to love. And of course there was an element of pragmatism to the whole thing, too,’ she confesses, wryly. ‘I just sensed – knew – right up front, that Gene was to be a vital part of my journey; a necessary part, an essential part. I honestly don’t think I would’ve had the mental and emotional strength to go on and pursue a career in the Church without Gene’s example – his constant guidance and good counsel and support.’
‘You think your prayer cured Gene?’ Valentine demands, almost indignant.
Sheila winces. ‘A man’s steps are of the Lord,’ she promptly quotes – almost ironically, ‘How then can a man understand his own way?’
‘But you do think that you saved him?’ Valentine persists. ‘That he owes his life to you?’
‘Nope. I think he owes his life to God. I think God saved him. I was just a lucky filter. An adjunct.’
‘But how does it … how does it all work, exactly?’ Valentine wonders, still inexplicably irritated. ‘I mean if Gene isn’t religious. If you’ve never actually shared the same, core beliefs? Doesn’t it make him feel almost …’
She’s going to say ‘used’, but then stops herself at the last moment.
‘Thank God you’re finally here!’ Toby yanks open the Hummer’s door, his face flushed, his glasses slightly awry, visibly stressed. ‘Ransom’s gone to ground. There’s a photographer halfway through a shoot, a publicist having a meltdown and a weirdly argumentative, freelance beautician in war-paint and a skin-tight, white jumpsuit …’
Gene opens his mouth to answer. He’s barely had a chance to unfasten his seat belt.
‘Oh, and Esther’s had the baby,’ Toby runs on, oblivious, ‘a girl – ten pounds, green eyes – but she haemorrhaged during the delivery and has this ridiculously rare blood type …’
‘AB negative?’ Gene jerks to attention (both hands instinctively returning to the wheel).
‘Uh. No … Yeah … I’m not sure …’ Toby blinks. ‘She’ll be fine. They texted earlier to say she’s stable.’
Gene reaches for his phone and starts scanning through his contact details. ‘I’m actually O negative,’ he confides, ‘which means my blood is compatible for transfusion to all other blood types.’
‘Promiscuous blood, eh?’ Toby grins, intrigued.
‘I have a close relationship with the local blood donor group,’ Gene murmurs, somewhat stiffly. ‘You start to feel a certain responsibility …’
‘Stonking wheels, by the way.’ Toby takes an appreciative step back, straightens his glasses and inspects the jeep.
‘Yeah. I’ve got it on a kind of permanent loan.’ Gene finds the number he’s searching for and presses ‘dial’. ‘It belonged to my son’s dad – my wife’s ex. He bought it to promote his war games shop.’
The Yips Page 33