‘I make a commitment to you all now,’ Fern said. ‘This place will be a shelter from oppression, a place women can enter, free of their chains of enslavement, where they may never fear the raised hand of violence again. I will photograph every sister who passes through our home, so that, wherever they go next, they’ll know a real image of them exists in the world – a true representation of themselves, one which cannot be altered by the will of others. Others – partners, children, parents, siblings, so-called friends – they reduce us, whether they mean to or not. Essentially, they are limpets, clinging to us, covering our truth, obscuring our eyes. This is what you’re seeing in those old photographs of yourself, Kathy: it’s the lesser-you, the half-you. But the other half is still there, you understand; it’s just drowning beneath the surface, crying to break free.’
All focus was on Fern, so it wasn’t until she stopped talking that we realised Kathy was silently weeping, nodding almost imperceptibly, her gaze firm on our new leader. Fern gestured to Regine and Susan on either side of Kathy, and they each took a hand; when I joined, the circle was complete, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.
After several long minutes of conscious contemplation, Fern broke away to fetch paper and a pen, and returned to her place with a rolled joint and a half-empty bottle of American whiskey. ‘We will never forget tonight,’ she told us, as she passed the joint one way, the bottle the other. ‘But we need to have our wits about us, so this will be our last night of indulgence, of intoxication. We have a job to do, and stimulants will only dull our resolve. Enjoy this last taste, sisters.’
We each took a swig, and a drag – my first and last ever experience of marijuana – and waited for Fern’s instruction.
Setting the empty bottle aside and extinguishing the stub on the floor between us, she spoke. ‘This will be a place of sanctuary, for thirty-three women. All in this room will be considered Founding Sisters, but it is my aim that we will be six in number. Do you know the significance of the number six?’ She waited for a response, but none came. ‘Six,’ she said, with great ceremony, ‘is a multiple of three. Three is the Holy Trinity, a divine perfection.’
I felt a pang of validation; perhaps all my years of half-hearted church attendance with Father had not been wasted, for was not the Bible itself littered with references to trinity and divinity?
‘I’ve been studying numerology for some time now,’ Fern continued. ‘And you would not believe the power of it, my friends. The more I’ve looked into it, the more enlightened I’ve become, and, sisters, it has blown my mind. Why d’you think my exhibition was called 33 Women? Thirty-three is the highest of the master numbers; whether you follow organised religion or not, it shows up in all of them throughout history – it was the age of Jesus at his death, the number of prayer beads commonly strung. It appears in Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, the Occult.’
‘Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know,’ I said, the line coming to me without thought. ‘Jeremiah 33:3.’
Fern brought her hands together beneath her chin, and I felt the full force of her approval wash over me like heat.
‘Those women-deniers the Freemasons hold it in reverence,’ she continued. ‘Thirty-three is a dominant number of goodness and of chaos, of life-giving and destruction. I myself was born in Solano Beach, California, directly in the path of the circle of latitude known as the 33rd parallel. This is the same latitudinal path on which the Kennedy boys were assassinated in Texas and LA, the very same path where those UFOs landed in Roswell.’ Fern’s voice was rising, her hands dancing expressively as she grew ever more animated. ‘You women each have thirty-three vertebrae making up your spines. Thirty-three is the point at which water boils on the Newton Scale of measure. And 33rpm is the number of turns your record player makes each minute when you turn on and tune into your favourite album.’
There was laughter, a moment of lightness in our dawning understanding of this woman’s great vision.
‘Sisters, thirty-three is associated with love and harmony and creativity – everything we women have striven for since the dawning of time; and yet, somehow, this “master” number has been appropriated by the patriarchy of every society, every religion, every mythology, and so often used in the disservice of women.’
We were rapt.
‘Tonight, my beloveds, if you are with me, we five will write a Code of Conduct for a new community of women, a sanctuary for thirty-three sisters, a new way of life. And when that is written, in the name of balance, the search for our sixth Founding Sister will begin. Are you with me?’
I looked around, at these brave women, my past flashing before me like a great grey disappointment of oppression and abuse, and I knew I had found my place. ‘Yes,’ I said, with true conviction, my voice falling in with the chant of assent. ‘Yes!’
Eyes gleaming, Fern slapped her flat palms against her knees. ‘So! I will kick off with an important code: Every woman must first shed her limpets.’
None of us really knew what Fern meant by this, we just knew we wanted to be part of it. Never before had I smoked cannabis; never before had I taken liquor straight from the bottle. Never before had I mixed with women of different ages and colours and cultures and religions. Never before had I believed I truly possessed power.
‘Limpets?’ Susan asked, and it was natural that it should be she who raised it. Looking back, I realise how grateful I was for Susan and her youth. At sixteen she was forgiven for her endless questions – questions which, if we were honest, were on the tips of our own tongues. ‘How do we shed our “limpets”?’
‘A limpet is a passenger who weighs us down,’ Fern replied. ‘Some of us are free of limpets; others have one or two; some poor creatures carry many, many limpets, and they don’t even know it. Kathy, from what you tell me, your husband is a limpet. Does he weigh you down?’
‘He does,’ Kathy replied with strength.
‘And your patients? You’re a doctor. You must feel the burden of your patients?’
Kathy nodded, perhaps a little less firmly.
Fern leaned in, her expression intensifying. ‘And your children? You have three.’
At this, Kathy, still maintaining eye contact, merely blinked. From where I was sitting, I could see the slow rise and fall of her throat as she swallowed, the long, controlled exhalation of breath.
Fern reached out to lay a hand on her ankle. ‘Of course, every woman who comes here must not only shed those things, she must also bring something of value. In Kathy here we have a distinguished medic. You have plans for a medicine garden, am I right?’
Kathy’s face brightened again, and I think it was then that I knew exactly what Fern’s gift was: she understood people. She knew how to make them believe in their own worth.
‘I hope we can,’ Kathy said, falteringly, ‘as much as is humanly possible, be pharmaceutical-free. We can grow most of what we need right here in the gardens! Garlic, valerian, sage – there are so many real alternatives to conventional medicine. Our bodies don’t need all those chemicals. We can heal ourselves.’
Fern nodded, then turned to Regine, her fellow American. ‘Meditation is part of that process, isn’t it, Regine?’
Regine mirrored Fern’s earlier gesture, laying a hand over her heart. She idolised Fern, it was clear in the way she even aped her code of dress, albeit less elegantly, and despite their obvious differences in colour and background they were cut from a similar cloth. They had history, having travelled together via India, and from the outset Regine never missed an opportunity to bring attention to this special bond. I wondered if she was attempting to use their previous connection to position herself as a close aide. ‘As you know, Fern,’ she said, ‘from our experiences together in the East, my teachings in the arts of yoga and meditation are what I have to bring. The healing benefits of these practices can be transformational. And as for limpets,’ she continued, in an accent somewhat coarser than Fern’s, ‘
I left them all behind in Long Island.’
Fern pressed her palms together again, a symbol of her approval. ‘Susan?’ she said, moving along. I felt my hands begin to sweat, knowing that soon the question would fall to me.
Susan’s expression was momentarily crestfallen, but then she spoke quickly and eloquently, as though she feared getting it wrong would see her ejected from the chosen few. ‘My limpets are my bourgeois parents and their expectations of me. My limpets are the husband they have imagined for me, and the grandchildren they would have me birth for them. But I don’t have any skills—’ she starts to say, her face crumpling.
Still cross-legged, Fern reached out to embrace her. ‘You are young,’ Fern said, ‘and for these first two years you’ll be our apprentice. You’ll shadow us in our work. And you’ll welcome new sisters and show them the way.’
Susan’s relief poured from her, and I thought she looked as charming as a woodland nymph, with her long unbrushed hair and hippy robe, free of make-up or artifice.
‘Brenda?’ Fern asked finally, and I flinched at the sound of my own name, the conventional consonants of it, its internal rhyme with tend and fend and end and penned. Had I been predestined to minister to the needs of others my entire life, by the poetics of my name alone?
‘I have no one,’ I replied, and for the first time since my father had died the year before I felt no pain in the truth of it. ‘I am limpet-free.’
Fern laughed with warmth, and rewarded me with her pressed-together palms. ‘Tell me,’ she said now, addressing us all, ‘what rules, or codes, would you have me write on this piece of paper?’
‘May we change our names?’ I asked, though I knew it wasn’t what she was asking.
She glanced around the group. ‘If a woman is prepared to shed her limpets, I don’t see why she shouldn’t shed her name too.’ Her pen hovered over the paper. ‘What would you call yourself, Brenda?’
Without conscious thought, my mind’s eye conjured up a moment of almost perfect contentedness, of skipping Sunday School to pick blackberries from the churchyard hedgerow with ‘that gypsy girl’ Annie Jessop. The late autumn sun was warm on the backs of our hands as we reached for the high fruit on tiptoes, pricking our fingers on brambles and rolling our eyes at the divine sweetness of the fruit. I had liked Annie, with her gaudy gold earrings and scuffed patent shoes, but I hadn’t been allowed to keep her as my friend.
‘Bramble,’ I replied. ‘I’d like to be called Bramble.’
Fern nodded sagely and bent over her legs to write on the sheet. ‘Bramble, you have inspired our first condition. Number one: Come as yourself, whoever that may be.’ She looked up from the list, and fixed her hard gaze on me. ‘And what do you bring, Bramble?’
The intense heat of the night weighed down on me, and for a moment I was light-headed, out of myself as I allowed my gaze to drift over my fellow sisters. They all had so much to offer, and I had … what? My parents had restricted and constricted me my entire life, and now they were both dead, and I was forty years old, all alone in the world, with no real talents, with nothing to offer …
‘I have money …’ I said, and in the pause which followed I feared this was the wrong thing to say.
‘How much?’ Fern asked, her expression unchanged.
I looked around the high-ceilinged room, with its grand French doors, rotten and peeling, its walls soft with damp, and my confidence soared. ‘Enough to do up this place,’ I replied. ‘Enough to make it fit for thirty-three women.’
Something flickered across Fern’s face, and she lowered her eyes, appearing to study the backs of her hands. When she looked up again, she was smiling, her straight white teeth gleaming in the candlelight. ‘That is a fine gift, Bramble,’ she said.
And, with that smile, my life, as I know it now, began.
4. CELINE
Present day
For a few moments Celine doesn’t move from the driver’s seat, unable to avert her gaze from the front door of this house she’s never visited – never been invited to.
That awful word plays at the back of her throat, and she realises she hasn’t yet managed to say it aloud. Dead. Delilah is dead. Still, despite all these years without seeing her mother, it seems barely possible to imagine that she is no longer alive, somewhere in the world.
Una appears in the ivy-draped doorway and on seeing Celine her face breaks wide and warm. Something in that wholehearted smile, in the abnormal scenario – the strange house, the early heat, the sweet scent of jasmine on the breeze – quite knocks the air out of Celine, and emotions rush in. She feels her face collapse as she steps out of the van, hating herself for it as Una sweeps her up in her tough little arms, just as she did when Celine was still that gawky kid who lived in the terraced house next door.
‘Hey, baby,’ Una says, pulling back to appraise her, running her hand down the contours of her cheek, her touch solid and affectionate. It’s not hard to see why Una had made such a successful police officer: she had an ease about her, a manner which suggested that all people were equal, that all would be treated even-handedly. ‘Nice to see the old rust-bucket’s still on the road,’ she says, her eyes wrinkling up as she nudges Celine towards the front steps. ‘Wanna see your sister? I’ll stick the kettle on.’
Following Una through the imposing front entrance, her eyes adjusting from the bright light of outdoors, Celine finds she’s lost for words, assaulted as she is by so much that is unfamiliar. Her mother has lived here for over seventeen years, and yet this is the first time Celine has set foot in the place. The sensation of being here is unreal.
‘Pip’s out back with the girls,’ Una says as they pause at the foot of a sweeping staircase.
It’s a small palace, Celine thinks, composing herself with a long, slow breath as she glances at the gallery of original artwork adorning the walls, at the aged Persian rugs and antique sideboard. A trio of silver-framed photographs sits beside the telephone, and, even before she reaches to pick one up, Celine knows that none of them will be of her or her sisters. Indeed, the three pictures are all of Delilah: Delilah as a pretty toddler on the beach in Cornwall, as a show-stopping bathing beauty at the edge of a pool in her twenties, and, in the last one, as a sophisticated forty-something in a cocktail dress on the deck of a Thames riverboat. ‘So, this is home,’ Celine murmurs to herself.
Una takes the photograph from her and returns it to the sideboard, tilting her head to appraise Celine’s expression. ‘I don’t think any of us knew what to expect, did we?’ She holds Celine’s gaze.
‘I’m fine,’ Celine says with a decisive nod which tells Una to lead the way.
As they reach the large, light kitchen at the side of the house, Celine lingers in the doorway, taking in the unmistakable smell of Una’s Caribbean rum cake.
‘You go on, see your sister,’ Una urges as she scans the room with a frown, before grabbing up a tea towel and heading for the oven. ‘I’m still finding my way around the place.’ She smiles warmly.
Celine hesitates, glancing down the hall towards an elegant living room with patio doors opening on to the garden, where the chatter of songbirds drifts along with the distant sound of children’s voices. She knows she’s stalling, scared perhaps of her younger sister’s reaction; scared perhaps of her own. If only Vanessa were here. Things wouldn’t feel so entirely broken if Vanessa were still here.
With a puff of heat, Una deftly flips the dark cake on to a cooling rack before filling the kettle. She’s so efficient, so warm and homely, and Celine realises she’s missed her more than she’s missed her own mother. She crosses the kitchen and reaches out a flat hand, hovering it over the cake, savouring the warmth that rises from it. ‘It’s my favourite.’
‘I know. Aunty Una special.’
Celine anchors herself against the worktop, fighting the feelings which threaten to overtake her again.
Frowning, Una’s face momentarily owns the years that have passed, before her expression eases back into a smil
e and she pats down her tight-cropped hair, now more grey than black. She moves closer, to hook an arm through Celine’s, lowering her voice confidentially. ‘We had the solicitor here this morning, Ceecee. Stuffy old suit, he was. White as a ghost and bald as a coot. He reminded me of one of Delilah’s old boyfriends – Johan, the banker. Yawnhan, I used to call him – remember?’ And now she laughs raucously, the unmistakable bellow of it thawing Celine, forcing her to join in.
‘You’re so wicked,’ Celine says, hating herself for the time she’s let slide by without Una. She feels a little pang of jealousy that Pip has remained close to her, still living as she does in their old family home in Kingston, with Una next door. ‘I’d forgotten just how bad you are.’
‘Ha!’ Una laughs again, releasing her arm to pick up the tray and head for the garden. ‘Bad cop, that’s me. Here, let me take you to your sister.’
The back garden is even more glorious than the front, with a well-tended lawn rolling downhill towards a riverbank carpeted with crocuses and bluebells. A gardener pushes his wheelbarrow along the far perimeter, stooping every now and again to gather small piles of cuttings; in another life, this might be an idyllic scene of British springtime. Celine scans the lawn slowly, trying to imagine Delilah here, before her gaze lands on Pip, who stands waiting for her on the decked veranda, one small hand clamped to her mouth. Una sets down the tray and leaves them alone.
33 Women: A gripping new thriller about the power of women, and the lengths they will go to when pushed... Page 2