by Trevor Hoyle
‘Hi, Trish, this is Sarah Cawdor welcoming you to Take Five.’ Smoke gusted from her mouth and nostrils. ‘The floor is yours.’
‘Oh, Sarah, I want to say how much I agree with the advice you gave the last caller!’ This was a trembly, lisping voice belonging to a teenager or young woman. ‘You wouldn’t believe the difference it’s made to my life!’
‘Maybe I would, Trish, and glad to hear it. What’s your problem?’
There was a quivering sigh. ‘It isn’t really a problem, not as such… It’s, well… Oh, I don’t know if I can say it!’
‘If you don’t or can’t, Trish, we’ll have to say bye-bye.’
The voice suddenly gushed forth: ‘It’s this tingling I get – it feels right but I’m not sure – every time I see Messiah Wilde coming down the Lovebeams stairway. Kinda hot and can’t catch my breath, and, like I said, tingly. When you see his dreamy brown eyes real close and that little crooked smile he has, like he’s sharing a secret with you, just you and him, nobody else. And I feel kinda… Ooohh.’ She gave a moaning sigh. ‘I never, ever felt that way in my entire life before.’
‘What age are you, Trish?’
‘Fifteen. I’ll be sixteen November eighth.’
‘Nothing to fret about,’ Sarah said with a smile in her voice. ‘You’re a healthy young girl and your feelings are perfectly natural and normal. You’re of an age when your hormones are budding and blossoming, like sap rising in a young tree, and you suddenly discover emotions you never knew you had.’
‘There’s nothin’ wrong with me, then?’
Sarah chuckled. ‘No, just the opposite. Everything’s right with you. Relax and enjoy it!’
‘It’s his eyes, Sarah, and that curl of his lip. I get goosebumps all over.’
‘Well, who wouldn’t!’ Sarah sounded amused in a rather arch, coquettish way. ‘Take it from me, Trish, it isn’t only girls your age he has that effect on. I love his smile, too, and the way he casually tosses back that long black hair of his. And have you noticed he has the most beautiful and expressive hands I’ve ever seen on a man, very slender, with long tapering fingers? Stirs up my imagination even talking about them. Just as well I’m a happily married woman, or who knows!’
‘Oh, thank you, Sarah, I’m really glad now I called you and had the courage to say what I did. I thought it might be, you know, kinda wrong or maybe unhealthy, thinking as I do.’
‘Nonsense, nothing wrong in it at all. Nice talking to you, Trish. Bye.’
Brubeck’s muted chords swelled again. Sarah took a deep pull on her cigarette and tilted her head back, letting the smoke dribble from her nostrils.
In the den that also served as his workroom, across the landing from the master bedroom, Jeff Cawdor sat in the penumbra beyond the circle of light thrown by a table lamp. The temperature in the room was about average, not at all cold, yet Cawdor’s fingertips were frozen, his stomach shrivelled up as if it contained a block of ice.
‘No, that’s true, a lot of people have difficulty grasping it at first. But when it happens – when the Message gets through – it hits like a shock wave running right through you. You’ll know it when you feel it, I promise. No mistake.’
‘Was that how it happened with you – all at once, straight out of the blue?’ The voice was young and male, reedy and anxious. ‘It don’t just creep up on you gradual like?’
‘Don’t worry about it, Gavin. Any day now, when you’re least expecting it, you’ll experience a chill down your spine, as if someone’s walked over your grave, as the saying goes. That’s the first sign. Then you’ll know it’s coming, and you’d better prepare yourself, because when it does happen it’ll knock you straight into tomorrow.’
The voice was Sarah’s, there was no doubt about that, but the words coming over the radio belonged to someone who was a total stranger to him. Someone who bore no resemblance to the woman he was married to, yet who was using the gentle, intelligent, familiar voice of his wife to spout this utter quasi-religious, pseudo-spiritual garbage.
Sitting tense and upright in the leather armchair, Cawdor felt physically sick.
In the past week or so, while eating breakfast, he had caught the odd five minutes here and there of the show Sarah was now praising to the skies. Certainly he’d seen enough to spot a mile off the fake sentiment about ‘lovebeams’ that the slimy host, Messiah Wilde, had been spouting. Even worse, Cawdor felt, was the way the show pretended to understand its youthful audience and to sympathise with their emotional problems, when actually it was manipulating their natural doubts and insecurities to make cheap and salacious entertainment. In short, a cynical media exercise in naked exploitation of a vulnerable age group.
But that Sarah, of all people, should be taken in by it! The listeners to her radio programme, and the millions who watched The Lovebeams Show, might possibly believe themselves to be a joyful band being led by Messiah Wilde towards the golden, sunlit uplands of a better, happier life. Yes, he could accept that; what he couldn’t accept was Sarah’s complicity in the fraud.
The block of ice in his stomach seemed to grow like a malignant black tumour. Because he knew – would have staked his life on it – that his wife would never be hoodwinked by such blatant gimcrack fakery.
And yet, incomprehensibly, she was.
God knows how he kept off the whiskey while he waited for her, but he stuck to his promise to himself, determined to face her calmly and straight up front, his brain unfogged by alcohol.
Sometimes Cawdor waited up for Sarah, sometimes not, so she wasn’t surprised to find him in the living room, sipping at a mug of coffee, the latest issue of National Geographic spread across his knees. Sarah swung her shoulder bag on to a chair and smiled at him through a yawn. She patted her mouth.
‘Oh! – pardon me. It’s the drive home, I guess, knocks me out. I felt fine leaving the studio.’ She paused then, seeing his face so pale and stiff, his brown eyes hard as stones, unblinking.
‘You don’t look too good, Jeff.’ She came round the sofa towards him, her eyes clouding. ‘Aren’t you well?’
She halted in mid-stride as Cawdor held up his hand.
‘I’m sorry, Sarah, but I’m having a real tough time understanding this. I hope you can explain it to me.’
‘Explain …?’ She shook her head a little.
‘Or have you just lost your senses? Suddenly gone crazy?’
‘Jeff, what are you talking about…?’
‘The crock of shit I heard on your programme tonight. Telling people to watch The Lovebeams TV show. How it would change their lives once they received the Message – whatever that is. And then drooling over that huckster charlatan with the shy smile and expressive hands and long black hair he throws over his shoulder – the so-called “Messiah Wilde” and his freak sideshow.’
Cawdor threw the magazine aside and stood up. His mouth had a taste of battery acid. He stared into her face.
‘Where’d you get that stuff? How can you possibly believe any of it, and, even worse, broadcast the crap and encourage other gullible saps to be taken in by it? This isn’t you, Sarah. It isn’t you.’
She stared back at him, her eyes wide and bright. He tried to see into their blue-grey depths, to find the woman he loved residing somewhere deep inside. But all he could see were bright shining orbs containing a look of resentment, hostility even.
‘Thank you for your opinion.’ Sarah kept her voice calm and low-pitched. ‘It just so happens I have a mind of my own and can think for myself. And I have thought about it, long and hard, and I believe in what the Beamers are trying to do, that they’re a power for good. People in the world today have no direction, no purpose; they’re crying out for guidance, for something positive to give their lives meaning and fulfilment.’ She raised her eyebrows and went on in the same quiet, moderate tone: ‘You’re free to believe or not believe anything you want, Jeff. I demand the same right. That’s fair, isn’t it?’
‘You thought about it lo
ng and hard,’ he croaked in a rusty voice, ‘and never said a word to me? Why not?’ He jerked his thumb towards the kitchen. ‘When you were watching that stuff on TV and I asked you about it, you dismissed it as foolish nonsense. A stupid show for stupider people you said –’
‘Maybe I did say that; I don’t deny it.’ Sarah turned away from him. As she did so, the light glinted on something above her right breast. Cawdor had been so intent on her face that he hadn’t noticed till now the Beamers’ silver symbol pinned to her cashmere sweater.
‘That’s all I thought it was at first, until I began to really listen and pay attention to what they were saying.’ Sarah took a pack of Stuyvesant from her bag and lit one. ‘Then I talked it over with Bill – he’s been watching their show too – and he agreed we should carry the Message on the late-night show, because a lot of our callers are young people who are emotionally confused in one way or another and don’t know which way –’
‘I’m not following this,’ Cawdor broke in, his voice hollow with incredulity. ‘You talked it over with Bill Benedict but not with me? You value his opinion, do you, more than mine?’ He stared. ‘I can’t believe it’s you, Sarah, saying these things.’
‘I purposely didn’t talk it over with you, Jeff, because I already knew precisely how you’d react.’ Sarah sucked in a lungful of smoke sharply. She looked at him defiantly. ‘And I was proved right, wasn’t I? I knew you’d put me down, make a mockery of it. Not even bother to listen.’ Her mouth twisted in a thin bitter smile. ‘It can seem rather sad, you know, a man your age being jealous of someone like Messiah Wilde just because he’s young and good-looking and charismatic.’
Charismatic? Cawdor thought. That wasn’t one of Sarah’s words. He’d never heard her describe anybody as charismatic in all the years he’d known her. But this woman he didn’t know. She was a stranger to him.
Cawdor felt suddenly very frightened.
There was a torrent of feeling dammed up inside him. As well as fear, there was bewilderment and incredulity, but above all a deep anguish that she was slipping away, and a yearning to bring her back. He tried to break the dam, let the torrent pour out, but couldn’t. One look at the expression on Sarah’s face – a mixture of scorn and amused pity she didn’t bother to conceal – and he was struck dumb. Anything he might say would be treated with contempt, as someone making a crude and pathetic effort to salve his wounded ego, and at the same time mock her beliefs. The very thing she had a moment ago accused him of doing.
Sarah stubbed out her cigarette and slung her bag over her shoulder. Tm tired. I’m going to bed.’ She went up the three wooden steps to the hallway. Motionless, Cawdor stood listening to her weary tread ascending the staircase, feeling as cold and abandoned as a corpse.
4
Gil Gribble’s spine went rigid with shock as he watched Doctor Khuman stick a hatpin laterally through the thumb of Cawdor’s left hand.
‘Tell me what you feel,’ Doctor Khuman said in a gentle, modulated voice.
Gribble turned to look at Annie Lorentz, questions dancing in his eyes. She was too mesmerised to notice him, sitting on the arm of his tattered, bulging sofa, one leg drawn up, hands clasped round it. She had a faint bemused smile on her face, and was shaking her head slightly, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Gribble turned back to stare; neither could he.
‘Nothing,’ Cawdor said.
‘No sensation at all?’
‘No.’
Cawdor was sitting on a cheap kitchen chair that Doctor Khuman had positioned next to the windows, facing into the room. The coned metal shade of the desk lamp had been angled so that one half of Cawdor’s face was brightly illuminated, the other half in shadow. His eyes were open, looking straight ahead with an expression that was slightly out of focus, quite placid and untroubled. Not a hint of any pain.
Doctor Khuman withdrew the hatpin. It shone clean and bright, not a trace of blood to be seen. There was no blood on the thumb either, as Doctor Khuman placed Cawdor’s hand back in his lap. He slid the hatpin into a leather pouch and put the pouch away in his inside pocket. Then, perched on the edge of the workbench, he clasped his slender brown hands together and raised his head and gazed at the ceiling through silver-rimmed glasses that magnified his already large and luminous brown eyes. Except for the distant rumble of traffic two blocks away, the room was silent.
What happens now? Gribble wondered. Do we meditate? Join hands and contact the undead? Spriritual shenanigans of this nature left him on the cusp between deep scepticism and irreverent mirth. Again he looked to Annie Lorentz, who this time reacted, glancing towards him with raised eyebrows and a waggle of thumbs clasped to her knee.
Gribble hadn’t actually seen Doctor Khuman do anything – that was the thing that perplexed him the most. No hypnotic stare, no gold watch swinging to and fro like a pendulum. No chanted gobbledegook or numbers counted backward. All he had done was place the fingertips of both hands on the sides of Jeff’s neck, with the lightest of touches, for five seconds, no longer. And Jeff had stayed exactly the same. He hadn’t slumped forward or moaned or turned into a zombie, nothing like that. His eyes had gone a bit fuzzy… and that was it, as if his mind had floated off somewhere.
And then Doctor Khuman stuck the hatpin through his thumb.
Christ, Gribble thought, what if, instead of saying, ‘Nothing,’ in answer to Doctor Khuman’s question, Jeff had leapt up yelling, ‘Yes, it hurts like fuck, you stupid bastard!’ What then?
It had been a day of surprises right enough, starting that morning when Annie had called him the minute he arrived at his office in the Theoretical Physics department. At first, he assumed it was coincidence that the phone was ringing as he stepped through the door and hung up his leather jacket, but no, it was so urgent that she had been calling every few minutes for the past half-hour. The man she had told him about, Doctor Khuman of the Troth Foundation, was in town, and had agreed to meet Gil’s friend. But it had to be today, Annie insisted, because Doctor Khuman was leaving later that evening. Saying he’d try to arrange it, Gribble had put the phone down with a horrible sickly feeling. There was a tiny complication in that he hadn’t, as yet, mentioned any of this to Jeff What the hell was Jeff going to say? Not only had he, Gil Gribble, discussed Jeff’s personal business with a third party, Annie Lorentz – he’d also fixed up some kind of damn consultation with a doctor (doctor of what? Gribble had no idea) to discuss matters confided to Gribble in a private conversation between friends. It crossed his mind not to call Jeff at all – just forget the whole deal – and then spin a small white lie to Annie that his friend was out of town or something. In the end, however, he had called him. As he pressed the dialpad, Gribble had been rather desperately thinking up a long litany of apologies for betraying a confidence. Then the biggest surprise of all. Jeff had listened and quietly asked who this person was who Gribble wanted him to meet. Gribble had told him. There followed a long silence. Clenching his teeth and waiting for the thunderbolt, Gribble heard Jeff’s calm voice at the end of the line say, ‘Yeah, I’ll come. I can get away about five. At your apartment?’
Gazing at the ceiling, Doctor Khuman spoke in the cultured tones of a high-caste member of his race, worldly and intellectual.
‘Tell me about your thoughts, your dreams, your worries, Mr Cawdor. Anything that has troubled you recently, or perhaps merely puzzled you. I do not ask you to reveal anything you wouldn’t ordinarily, were we speaking together on a professional basis. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
Doctor Khuman looked down. ‘Very good. Proceed.’
When Bill Benedict broke the news to her, Sarah thought she was going to faint.
She was on her way to the studio on the second floor when the shorn white head was thrust into the corridor and he beckoned urgently to her. He propelled Sarah inside his office and strode past her to the desk, smacking his meaty, sunburnt hands and chortling under his breath. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt
of black and salmonpink stripes, its pink buttons straining over his beer belly, the open neck revealing tight little white curls beneath the hanging brown pouch of his throat. He jabbed a blunt finger at the chair in front of the desk, nodding briskly at her, eyebrows like bushy white caterpillars against his craggy, tanned forehead.
‘Better siddown, Sare. Somethin’ to tell you, girl!’
Sarah looked at her wristwatch. ‘I don’t have much time, Bill. I’m on air in forty-five minutes and there’s a mountain of mail I have to sort through. And I mean mountain – we had five sackfuls come in this morning alone.’
‘I know, I know. Siddown, you got time. It’s like we breached a dam when we introduced the new format. Like there’s a hunger out there – people are going wild for it.’ Bill Benedict cocked one of the white caterpillars at her. ‘And, before you say anything, I’ll say it first. You were right all along. I was wrong to hold out against the idea; I didn’t have the faintest notion of the potential we were tapping into. Just damn glad you persuaded me!’
Sarah gave him a smile and a teasing wink. ‘It took a while, but the Message finally got through to you, hey, Bill?’
‘Did, sure ‘nough,’ he acknowledged. ‘And have I got a message for you’
Sarah waited. He was spinning it out, she realised, relishing every minute. He sat back in the leather chair and pointed at arm’s length to the phone.
‘Guess who I bin talkin’ to, not ten minutes ago. You’ll never guess in a million years, Sare.’
‘The President?’
‘Hah! Better’n that.’ He leant towards her, lowering his voice to a throaty whisper. ‘Somebody from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Now who’d ya think that might be, huh? Huh?’
Sarah felt her heart quicken its beat. She was suddenly impatient to know, to have it confirmed. Bill Benedict saw the look in her eye and a slow, devilish smirk spread across his beefy face. He was teasing her now, keeping her in an agony of suspense.