Feeding the Demons

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘I want to see Imelda Moresby,’ said Gemma. ‘Do you know where she is?’ The two of them stood in front of the entry as people flowed around them.

  ‘She was just back there, talking to some people from the country.’ The woman indicated the far corner of the room.

  ‘What does she look like? What’s she wearing?’ asked Gemma.

  ‘You can’t miss Imelda,’ said the woman, smiling. ‘Anyway, she’ll probably know you.’

  Gemma thanked her and battled her way in. She hadn’t been in a church since she left boarding school, she realised, and she looked around, wondering why places dedicated to worship seem always to be so heavy and ugly. In the corner indicated by the orange and black bloused woman stood four people. They had their arms lightly linked around each other, as if they might all suddenly break into the steps of a folk dance. Gemma was about to approach them but something extraordinary started to happen. The four people raised their heads from what had seemed like fervent conversation, lifted their hands in the air and several fine, high notes issued from them. An electric thrill ran through Gemma’s body. An eerie yet beautiful and wordless chord was sustained by the singers, a sound resembling Tibetan singing bowls of subtle pitch, tones and harmonics layering the air. Gemma stopped where she was. Her hair was standing on end and a thrill of heat rushed through her body. Her eyes filled as if she wanted to cry. No one else seemed to be taking any notice of the extraordinary sound, which had reached an ethereal pitch. High, pristine voices sang, using strange words and phrases, the men’s voices of the quartet forming a base of chords and harmonies as the soprano voices floated and spiralled. It reached a climax, hovered there for a few seconds, then softly fell away. Gemma stared at the group of people who had created such unearthly music.

  ‘Are you looking for me?’ One of the women turned around and Gemma saw the regular features, familiar even after thirty years, oval face and soft dark hair.

  ‘Mrs Moresby . . .’ she started to say. But Mrs Moresby broke away from the group and beckoned her to follow. Gemma did so, pursuing the woman down a corridor until they came to a small office. Mrs Morseby opened the door and ushered Gemma in. ‘That singing,’ Gemma said. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it.’

  Mrs Moresby smiled. ‘We call it tongues,’ she said. ‘It’s a way of praying.’ Her fine eyes were tired but they gleamed with intelligence. She picked up a light jacket that lay on the back of a chair, pulling it on while she spoke.

  ‘It’s Gemma Chisholm, isn’t it,’ she said, but it wasn’t a question.

  ‘It is,’ said Gemma. ‘But I don’t use that surname. I use my mother’s maiden name—Lincoln.’

  Mrs Moresby nodded. ‘I think of you often, you and your sister. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘It does,’ Gemma admitted.

  ‘I have never forgotten that night. Or that sound I heard at the back of your house well before your father arrived home.’

  ‘That’s what I want to talk about.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Moresby and she laughed. ‘You don’t have to be clairvoyant to know that!’

  ‘Are you clairvoyant?’ Gemma couldn’t help asking.

  Mrs Moresby sighed. ‘There is a place in mind,’ she said, speaking the words as if she’d said them a thousand times, ‘that is beyond space and time. Every mind shares in it. Every mind has access to it. It’s something like the dream world. Very few people practise getting there. Now, you’re not here to discuss clairvoyance.’

  ‘I’ve got a newspaper clipping,’ said Gemma. ‘You mentioned hearing a noise that night about half an hour before my father’s return to the house,’ Gemma continued. ‘The prosecution lawyer suggested it might have been a possum.’

  ‘Might have been a possum. Might have been anything. I had to agree with him. I didn’t actually see anything.’

  ‘Could you see the french doors from your house?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘Partly,’ the other woman answered. ‘There was a patio—’

  ‘Yes. I remember.’ The old memory came up like a misty vision in Gemma’s mind. ‘With a stone flagging and huge flower tubs. And a trellis.’

  ‘It was the trellis that was in the way. I think it had a passionfruit vine over it. Very dense in parts. Two tubs—I wouldn’t call them huge, but you were only a little child then—with citrus trees in them. Cumquats? Bergamot? Two large containers, at any rate.’ Mrs Moresby closed her eyes. ‘Everything goes in twos in this.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘Two citrus tubs. Two sisters. Two mistresses. Two killers.’

  ‘Two mistresses? Two killers?’

  ‘I get a very strong sense of two killers whenever I think of Mrs Chisholm’s death. But that was a long time ago.’

  ‘Mistresses?’

  Mrs Moresby shrugged. ‘As I said, it’s a long time ago. It’s you and your sister I’m concerned about. There is a double death around us.’ Mrs Moresby opened the door of the office and walked out, switching off the light. Gemma followed her. The phrase ‘double death’ almost made Gemma giggle. It sounded like something an ice-cream company might market, excruciatingly sweet and rich. In the long hall, shadows loomed and the recessed doorways were pools of darkness. She followed Mrs Moresby back along the corridor and into the body of the hall. Only a few people stood around, talking. The chairs had been replaced in piles against the walls, and all except one of the exits was locked. They went out of it onto the grassy area, where two thin cypress trees pointed to a waning moon. Gemma looked around the dark shrubbery of the grounds of the church, suddenly spooked.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked Mrs Moresby. ‘Why are you concerned about me and my sister?’

  ‘Because we are karmically bound, your family and me.’ Mrs Moresby unlocked the door of her car, then straightened up and looked at Gemma. ‘Information comes to me in images and sensations. Sometimes, it’s just a powerful feeling. All I can do is pass on things that seem to be important. Then I’ve done my part. It’s not important to me whether people believe me or not. Sometimes the information is inconclusive. Because it comes from a place beyond time, it’s not clear to me whether it’s about the past, the present or the future. I’m not a perfect receiver so I don’t always know the difference. But there is a lot of energy about two.’ Mrs Moresby opened the door. ‘Evil is stirring,’ she said. ‘Pray,’ she commanded over the top of the little car. ‘You must pray.’

  Great, Gemma thought. That’s all I need. Evil is always stirring, lady, she wanted to say as the car started up. And people have been praying since forever. She stood and watched the car drive away. In her imagination, two shrouded figures now crept between the tubs of citrus trees and soundlessly jemmied open the french doors. She shivered and hurried to her car.

  When she finally went to sleep that night, it was to dream fitfully about her father and the green Ford and two killers who were watching her house.

  Six

  ‘Please come in, Clive,’ Kit said, in a pleasant, neutral voice, standing back to allow him to walk ahead of her down the hallway to the consulting room on the left. While waiting for him, she had opened windows and patted up the cushions and pillows, focusing her mind on her client. Because she worked somatically there was no desk and chair in this office, which troubled many of her clients at the beginning of their work with her. They were used to being safely on the other side of their therapist’s desk, or at least sitting in familiar chairs. Kit’s therapeutic approach, based in bioenergetic analysis, was directed at helping her clients regain the sense of their bodily selves and, eventually, the bliss of being. But at first they sat on the floor with her, with greater or lesser degrees of comfort, depending on their bodily distortions.

  Clive Mindell’s wife had left him after twenty-seven years because they’d ‘grown apart’ as he termed it. To his shock, he’d found himse
lf impotent with his new girlfriend. He’d tried Viagra, but had developed severe headaches. ‘I don’t like the idea of sticking needles in my cock’ he’d told her on his last visit and Kit could only agree. He’d heard that somatic work—‘whatever that means’—could help him to ‘perform’. Kit had listened attentively, noting his language.

  As he walked, his physical and emotional contradictions seemed even clearer to Kit than they’d been the week before. It was often the case that once she’d discussed her work with Alexander, she found more levels of awareness, more clarity. Watch the look before the cringe, she reminded herself. Clive walked straight into her room and looked around.

  ‘This place is hard to find. That’s why I’m late. Still no chairs I see?’ he said in his barking voice.

  ‘Still no chairs,’ she agreed. She sat down on the floor so as to allow him to dominate the space and watched him. From this angle, she could observe Clive’s structure: the puffed-up upper body and neck, all the energy pushing upwards towards the head, neck and chest; his face, too, had a bloated look, as if there was too much pressure pumped up there. In fact, his whole cranium looked distended. She took note again of the small pelvis and underdeveloped thighs and legs, the lack of power and energy in the lower body. Just for a second, she was reminded of a Toby Jug puppet, all huge body and trailing, fabric legs.

  Clive was very uneasy, looking around, trying to seem unconcerned. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘here goes.’ He got down clumsily on legs that seemed disconnected from the rest of him. Kit sat nearby, waiting for him to start.

  ‘My girlfriend has called it off with me,’ he suddenly said. ‘Because I came here. So impotence doesn’t matter now, does it.’ Suddenly it was there again, the cringe, but she was too late, she’d missed the moment just before it.

  Kit smiled. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Does it?’

  There was a silence. ‘What will you do?’ Kit finally asked.

  Clive shrugged. ‘Not sure. Probably focus more on my work. I might take up flying again.’

  Kit was beginning to get the story of his childhood. Over the months, she would get the rest, the suffering, the grief that had gone to make up this difficult man; the way he had learned to defend himself from the earliest times, creating this puffed-up structure to hide his vulnerability from the world. Clive leaned closer to her, uncomfortable at their mutual eye levels. ‘I want you to get stuck into me,’ he said. ‘Start the body work. I’m really ready for it.’ There was something like a leer behind his eyes, Kit thought.

  ‘When your body energy tells me it’s ready for that, I will,’ she said. ‘But not until then.’

  ‘But I’m telling you,’ he said. ‘You can start now.’

  Kit smiled and gently shook her head. ‘I can sense a lot of resistance in your body,’ she said.

  He looked bewildered. ‘What do you mean, resistance?’

  Kit looked squarely at him. It was not her practice to discuss too much with people who’d lived in their heads all their lives; people who could talk all day about feelings without ever experiencing any. ‘I connect with you at an energy level and I know you are telling me to keep away. I’m respecting that.’

  ‘What energy? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your energy. The part of you that makes you go.’ She smiled again. A child would understand exactly what she meant, she thought, visualising children so filled with fizzing energy that they had to run and yell and spin around for the sheer joy of it. She saw Clive’s bafflement and decided to tell him something of herself. ‘My body was once very tight and narrow,’ she said, and she could see him looking at her and frowning. ‘I used to get terrible headaches, as well.’

  ‘What happened,’ asked Clive, who had been listening intently, ‘that made things different?’

  ‘I started doing the sort of therapy that I now offer you,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all a bit vague though, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘This energy business.’

  ‘If you don’t eat and drink you have no energy and you die,’ said Kit matter-of-factly. ‘The nutrients move around in the blood. That’s energy. There’s nothing magic or mystical about it.’

  Clive looked past her out the window. He seemed to be deep in thought. ‘A woman was murdered at Maroubra,’ he suddenly said after a short pause and without looking at her. ‘Did you hear about it?’

  Kit looked at him closely. ‘I wonder why you mention her now,’ she said, because the remark seemed almost like a warning.

  Clive turned to look at her. ‘I was looking out the window,’ he said, ‘and I read where she’d left the window open a little bit. Your opened window reminded me.’

  Kit considered the plausible connection. ‘Are you wondering,’ she asked him, ‘whether if you open up a little bit of your “window”—start to feel a little bit—I might come in and kill you?’

  Clive stared at her and there was a long silence. ‘When my wife left me,’ he said finally, still avoiding her eyes, ‘she took her Burmese cat with her. Shortly after that, I saw a similar cat lying on the lawn of a house where I was parking the car. I got a sort of pain in my chest.’ There was an even longer silence and Clive became increasingly uneasy. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he finally said. ‘Some of the things you’ve said don’t make sense to me. But some of it—I don’t know—seems to be quite sensible.’

  Kit picked up an exercise book and a pencil. ‘I’d like you to tell me what you expect from this work you’re paying for. What relationships create difficulties for you. What areas you would like to see improved in your life.’ As she waited for him to speak, she noticed the gathering energy in his brows and eyes, the movement in his face that accompanied his barking laugh.

  ‘I would like to kill my mother,’ he said. ‘That would improve our relationship out of sight.’ But he cringed away from her as he spoke, as if he believed she might strike him. When she didn’t react, Clive continued.

  ‘What I’d really like is a woman who didn’t speak or move. Just someone who would lie there.’ He looked away as he spoke the next words. ‘Then I’d be able to get hard. I’d like to undress her, piece by piece, taking off her blouse and skirt, then her stockings and shoes, and then her panties and bra. Nice and neat, in order. Then I’d like to just lie there with her, neither of us saying a word or touching. Just thinking about this is making me hard.’ He looked at her, wondering if he’d gone too far, wondering if this degree of honesty was permissible. It appeared that it was and he relaxed as he noticed Kit’s unruffled demeanour.

  Kit checked her watch and nodded. ‘Sex is safe in the mind,’ she said to him. ‘It’s very easy to get aroused by our own images.’

  ‘Real women are dangerous,’ said Clive. ‘It’s much safer and easier to have sex by yourself.’

  Kit looked at him in wonder. It never failed to amaze her, the speed with which some clients started to see their fear and its defences. Clive was moving fast.

  ‘Some women are deadly,’ she agreed. ‘Some women do kill their men. They kill them emotionally with their negativity and criticism. Their chronic hostility. Sometimes they kill them in reality, too.’

  ‘And sometimes men kill women,’ he grinned. ‘I don’t know what the statistics would be, but lots more men kill women than the other way round.’ He seemed extremely pleased with the fact.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Kit. ‘Lots more.’ It took all her professionalism to keep a light and neutral voice, to keep her father out of the therapy room. One day, said a small voice in her mind, you are going to have to deal with him. And the sooner the better. Clive slyly looked at her face, to see how she might take what he was going to say. ‘I could go to a prostitute,’ he said. ‘Get her to do what I want. All I’d have to do is give her money and she’d lie there still as a corpse. She would have to do what I told her because I’d pay for it.’
/>   ‘You could do that,’ said Kit. ‘Like you say, all it would take is money.’

  Clive looked around the room and saw the photograph of Will on the mantelpiece. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘My son,’ she said.

  Clive looked at her and then back at the photograph again, comparing them. ‘He looks like you,’ he said. Then he seemed to be deep in thought. ‘That woman who was killed at Maroubra,’ he continued and for a second Kit didn’t understand to whom he was referring, ‘she looked a bit like you, I thought.’ Kit nodded non-committally, noting how he’d moved from his mother, to someone looking like her, to a murdered woman, and wondering whether this was just transference hostility or something more. ‘The newspaper said the killer had done something with her clothes. I wonder what that means.’ He was watching her closely and Kit felt uneasy.

  The session finished shortly afterwards, and she walked with him to the front door to say goodbye. As he turned away from her, he missed his balance on the step from the hall to the verandah.

  ‘Be careful as you go,’ Kit told him. ‘Sometimes, even talking about these things stirs up body energies and you might become a little unbalanced.’ He looked at her closely and she couldn’t read his expression at all. As she closed the door behind him prior to writing up her notes on the session, she realised she had still failed to notice the movement before the cringe.

  Seven

  Gemma couldn’t get Imelda Moresby out of her mind. Although, in the clear light of day in the comfort and security of her pale blue office, the woman’s words of the night before seemed contrived and portentous. But they kept coming back. She looked up the number of the church at Lindfield and left her phone number and a message asking Mrs Moresby to call her.

  After several more calls and trying to do estimates on a couple of surveillance jobs, she realised that the gnawing feeling in her stomach was not only unease. She was hungry and she made herself a chicken salad. Taxi drove her crazy getting between her legs and winding around her as she carried the plate and a glass of wine out to the deck. The sea and the sky were settling into night, with only a luminous horizon line dividing the darker Pacific from the evening sky. Taxi jumped up onto the table and the wine glass would have toppled to the ground had not Gemma grabbed it. She smacked him and he yeowed, skidding away into the lounge room to sit with his back to her, involving himself with compulsive washing. ‘Oh come here,’ she finally called to him, but he sat resolutely lashing his tail from side to side, ignoring her. She was drinking coffee and watching the first stars come out before she and Taxi became reconciled. She snuggled him into her neck and shoulder, listening to his astonishing purr.