A Division of the Light

by Christopher Burns

  He does not put his shot of the escaping thieves on the slideshow, although unexpectedly he has come to regret that there are no means of identification to be found within it. Indeed, the picture contains so little information that no arrest could ever be achieved from its content. Gregory understands that it is impossible that he should become an agent for justice, and yet to him it is also inexplicable that he should fantasize about being thought of as a kind of savior.

  In almost a week he has not heard from Alice. Although at first he assumes that she has merely been delayed in returning his money, he soon begins to believe that she has never intended to. This does not prevent him from thinking more and more about her.

  After seven days he was due to leave on his next assignment and still he had heard nothing. Her silence was disappointing but perhaps inevitable. Gregory told himself that he, too, had been robbed of cash, but only of twenty pounds, and not by opportunist thieves but by a woman who had probably simply decided that there was no moral need to return a stranger’s kindness.

  Nevertheless he wanted to hear from Alice. The money was not important. He was willing to forget that. At one point he checked the call log of his mobile and discovered her work number. When he rang it an unfamiliar voice answered and quoted a company name. Although he had intended to ask if Alice Fell was there, he immediately closed the connection when she did not answer.

  He told himself he should think no more about the robbery. And besides, he was leaving within the next few hours. And yet when his daughter Cassie rang on the landline Gregory realized that he had wanted the call to be from Alice. Disappointment hit him as a sudden ache across the lower line of his ribcage. This was both irrational and reprehensible; he had, after all, been expecting Cassie to phone.

  After the call was over Gregory felt guilty about his crazy hope that it could have been Alice. He was also uneasy that Cassie might have registered the evident deflation in his tone. Perhaps she could have learned more than he had wanted to reveal.

  For three days each week his daughter worked as his assistant, secretary and unofficial manager, and on the other two days she worked for a national cancer charity. Gregory had grown dependent on her abilities. She organized his contracts, diary, correspondence, and accounts, and often she helped out in the studio. On occasion she had even taken photographs instead of him.

  Although he had told her what had happened Gregory had not confessed that he had given money to Alice Fell. Instead he used the robbery as a cautionary tale of how easily one could be attacked on a city street in broad daylight. Cassie’s reaction had been so offhand that he felt it necessary to repeat how risks could be minimized. He recognized that she and Alice were about the same age, and he could easily imagine Cassie being struck between the shoulder blades in the same callous manner. Furthermore, Gregory could picture how his daughter would look if she were unable to break her fall and instead smashed her head against the pavement. He did not want to have to photograph those injuries. As always, Cassie had allayed his fears with a breezy confidence.

  Twenty minutes later he had just picked up his bag and was about to leave when the landline rang again. Gregory paused by the door. His own voice rasped from the answerphone. The caller hung up without saying anything.

  He wondered if he should go back and check the incoming number, but then decided that this would be madness. If the call had been important then either a message would have been left or he would have been phoned on his mobile. Gregory closed the door and tried to put the incident out of his mind, but all the way to the airport he wondered if he had done the right thing.

  The flight was delayed and made unpleasant by turbulence. By the time it landed Gregory could feel the tensions of the journey in the muscles at the back of his legs. He was jaded and cynical and felt that he was getting old. Around him the airport was featureless and unwelcoming, with armed security guards in illfitting uniforms and a luggage carousel that creaked and squealed as if about to seize up completely.

  Carla from the agency was waiting in Arrivals. Her name was all that he had been told about her. She was in her early forties, had angular features and an unwavering stare, and spoke English as if she had spent time in the States. An ignition key was held in her hand like a valued possession.

  A shower of heavy rain passed across the airport before they reached the car. Droplets pocked the gray dust on its surfaces so that they resembled NASA studies of lunar plains. Gregory sat with one camera on his lap and the equipment lodged behind the passenger seat. He was already telephoning his journalist contact as Carla drove away from the airport.

  Within a few minutes Gregory knew that they would spend most of their long journey in a silence that both he and Carla understood, just as he was confident that she would offer him the opportunity to sleep with her that night. He was not sure that he wanted to. Even if he did, he wondered if he would be doing so just because it was expected of him. Perhaps it would be wiser to remain alone in his hotel room and hunt through the satellite channels.

  In this part of the world even the best roads were narrow. Military vehicles moved along them in short convoys, but so did overloaded lorries that left a smell of burned diesel in the air and tiny cars that looked as if they would fold up under the slightest impact. In litter-strewn lay-bys alongside spruce forests prostitutes stood at intervals of two or three hundred yards. They ignored Carla and, as if under a conditioned reflex, lifted their skirts as the car passed. One stood at the corner of a fenced area, as immobile as a mannequin, her heavy coat left open to show a pale body wearing black knickers and nothing else. Dark glasses covered her eyes like shields, like targets. Momentarily Gregory thought again about Alice and the way she had scrabbled on the pavement for the camouflage of smoky lenses.

  They drove to a tiny village that was two hours away along potholed zigzag roads and so high above the central plain that the air was permanently cold and damp. Tall conifers dripped rain. Below the village a few tents had been pitched on a level band of earth sheltered by a thin line of broadleaf trees. At the edge of the houses a tall cross of raw pine had been erected. The heads of nails gleamed like silver against the wood. A tractor’s rusty hulk stood nearby, stripped of all usable parts. Just beyond it a series of cars had been parked on a stretch of mud. One had its window open, and behind its wheel the driver was talking excitedly into his phone. In another a woman in a fur coat snoozed with her chin sunk on her chest.

  It was here that they met the journalist. He guided Gregory and Carla up through the village while its people gazed at them as if they could not quite decide whether they should be welcomed. When the journalist asked if he made a specialty of recording such cases Gregory told him that he did not, and that neither had he any religious belief. It was possible, he added wryly, that his editor thought he would be interested merely because he had recently photographed a controversial bishop and turned him into something monolithically baroque. He did not say that it had been on his return from this assignment that he had witnessed a woman being thrown to the ground and robbed.

  A small group of visitors waited near the home of the girl who had seen the vision. Most were silent, but some prayed quietly and continuously. Others knelt on the stony soil with their hands clasped. Some were evidently poor, but one woman had brought a plush velvet cushion to kneel on; another wore clothes for a skiing holiday, the manufacturer’s logo bold across her back. Carla asked if they minded having their photographs taken. No one objected. One woman even asked which newspaper Gregory worked for. He lied and said the English Sunday Times.

  “They all want to be part of this,” Carla said as they walked away.

  “They always do,” the journalist said.

  A few chickens scratched around their feet and a goat ate a sparse shrub at the end of its tether.

  “You must have covered other stories like this,” Gregory said.

  “I’ve read the files on dozens of cases,” the journalist answered. “They’re all simi
lar. You’ll see what I mean when you meet the family. Miraculous visitations are the product of marginal communities with deep religious beliefs, and the person who sees the vision is always a lonely pubescent girl. Mostly the visions fade when she grows up.”

  “You think that will happen here?”

  “Maybe, but there’s a force behind this. You can feel the pressure. This girl fascinates believers, but the rest of the world is fascinated too. If she didn’t have that quality then you and I wouldn’t be here, and neither would anyone else. There’s another TV crew arriving tomorrow because the world wants to know about Little Maria. And a few weeks ago she wasn’t ever called that; she was Anamaria until a newspaper rechristened her. Now even the villagers call her by her new name. Her family does, too.”

  “Everyone believes it is better to call her that,” Carla told them.

  “And do you?” Gregory asked.

  “Perhaps. If she saw what she tells us she saw.”

  “What she saw,” the journalist said, “was what these disturbed young women always see—an apparition that resembled a naïve painting. Little Maria saw a Virgin Mary who was just like an illustration in an instructional book for children. Adults in advanced societies don’t ever see visions like that.”

  “A vision can come to anyone,” Carla said.

  “We don’t have visions; we hallucinate,” the journalist answered. “We hear voices inside our heads, or get blinded by non-existent lights, or lose ourselves in the numinous. We don’t get visited by images from picture books. Look around us: we’re at the very edge of subsistence here. It’s like stepping back into feudal Europe. People see what they’ve been taught they will see at the moment of death.”

  The family was what Gregory expected. A few weeks ago the parents might have been credulous, but now they had become used to media attention. He photographed them against a scabbed and whitewashed wall to show off their frayed clothing and lined faces. He asked them to make sure their hands were on display so that readers would be able to study the stumpy fingers and broken nails.

  An ambitious local priest asked to be photographed, too; after all, he was the only one able to provide spiritual guidance to these people. They were, he confided, simple, goodhearted, and unable to understand why their daughter should be so honored by Our Lady. Why, Little Maria herself was perplexed that she had been chosen. Although he doubted if the photographs would be required, Gregory allowed the priest to pose alongside the crucifix that hung above the deeply recessed window.

  The girl he photographed standing outside the broken-roofed cowshed where the Virgin Mary had appeared and promised to return. Her brothers and sisters looked on with a mixture of puzzlement and envy.

  Gregory was certain that the priest had advised the family that Little Maria should be dressed as if for a communion. Probably he had also supplied the dress: it was slightly too large and its frills were out of place in such bleak surroundings. Little Maria’s face was bony and pale, as if she had lost blood, and she stared into the lens with a stubborn unearthly superiority. Throughout the short session she said nothing. There was animal shit on her boots and the hem of her white dress was spotted with mud.

  As soon as Gregory indicated that he had finished she spoke. It was a sentence of only a few words, delivered in a monotone. Her expression did not change. Then she walked back into the house and the door was closed behind her.

  “What did she say?” he asked.

  “She said,” Carla began, and then seemed to consider her translation for a moment before she continued in a quieter voice. “She said that you do not need to live your life like this.”

  Gregory smiled. “If I’d known that, I would have asked you to tell her that I live the kind of life that I want, and that I’m happy with it.”

  Carla nodded, but said nothing else.

  The priest had remained outside the house, his face expectant. The journalist suggested an amount of cash Gregory should hand over. “For the upkeep of the church,” he explained drily. Gregory paid up and received a cursory blessing. The priest made a little speech that Carla translated.

  “He said that we are all instruments of God. He said that we do not understand what is really happening to us, just as musical instruments are not conscious of the tune that is played on them.”

  “Right,” Gregory said. They thanked the priest and walked away.

  “You’ll not have got as much as that from the famous Little Maria,” the journalist said wryly. “She’s laconic at the best of times.”

  “She told me that I needn’t live in the way that I do. Not that she knows anything at all about how I live. But that’s what they call faith, I suppose.”

  “The girl only says what you expect her to say. None of it is thought-provoking. She doesn’t know why she was chosen and she has no idea what will happen next. But the Virgin says that one of these days she will pass on a great secret. That kind of thing.”

  “These people believe it is certain that the Virgin will return,” Carla added.

  “When she does I bet she won’t be visible on film,” Gregory told her.

  “But the visual isn’t everything,” Carla responded. “Neither are words. Some things are beyond photography just as they are beyond description.”

  The journalist shrugged. He had seen so much of the world that he could no longer be bothered to argue such points. When Carla turned away he raised his eyebrows at Gregory, who gave a wry complicit smile in return.

  By early evening Gregory had uploaded the photographs to his laptop, judged and selected them, and then transmitted his choice to the picture desk. Later, he ate with Carla from a hotel menu that exhibited only the faintest trace of national cuisine, and immediately afterward they went to bed together.

  Gregory felt no guilt about this. He was merely choosing to take something that was being made available. He was neither excited nor intrigued by Carla, and he viewed their sexual union as a purely technical exercise, one that he would perform and then forget. It had happened often enough before. And even though he obtained a certain amount of pleasure from it, a part of his mind remained aloof. For Carla, it was different. Like a castaway, she strove for something that seemed to have drifted forever out of her grasp.

  In the morning their farewells were perfunctory and slightly embarrassed. They both knew the night had been a failure. Gregory was certain that he would never return to that part of the world. Why, he had not even bothered to take a photograph of Carla.

  As he walked to the plane across the windy tarmac, and as he unexpectedly began to examine the way in which he had lived his life, he became convinced that a change was about to come. But he shook the feeling off because he knew it was irrational. Gregory prided himself on a clear-eyed perspective of the world. He thought that perhaps tiredness, or the rarefied air of the village, or its barely suppressed hysteria, had begun to seep unwanted into his dreams.

  3

  Even before he opened the envelope he guessed the sender. Inside was a twenty-pound note fastened to a postcard by a red paperclip. The picture on the card was an Edward Weston photograph of a seashell. Silver and pearl-gray, the shell folded in on itself like a swan asleep.

  Knowing that Cassie was watching, Gregory looked across the room to where she sat at the desk with her papers and computer screen. She inclined her head in a wry, questioning manner that always reminded him of his wife. His daughter had inherited her strong features and yet she, too, disliked being photographed.

  “They say you should never send cash through the post.”

  “So they do,” Gregory said drily, unclipping the note to find the message written on the card’s reverse. The first thing he did was look at the signature, even though he was certain whose it would be. He was unable to suppress a tiny smile of pleasure even though Cassie kept watching.

  “You’re keen to find out about this, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “It looked personal so I didn’t open it. You know I never—�
�

  “Yes, I know. You’re very discreet for a daughter. Or so you often tell me.”

  “I’m discreet about all kinds of things. You should know—you’ve tested me several times. Officially and without my knowing.”

  The note was short and to the point.

  Dear Mr. Pharaoh

  Thank you so much for looking after me and for being so

  trusting. Here is the money that you kindly lent me.

  Disappointingly, the police tell me it is unlikely that anyone will

  be charged with the theft. Best wishes and thanks again. Alice Fell.

  Beneath the message she had written the number of a mobile phone.

  Gregory looked across to his daughter.

  “I lent her twenty pounds. It was for a taxi.”

  “The woman who had her bag stolen? You didn’t say you’d given her money.”

  “It must have slipped my mind.”

  “I see. Maybe you’re lucky that you got it back.”

  “Maybe. But if it had happened to you I would have wanted a good Samaritan to give you the taxi fare back home.”

  “Dad, I’ve been surviving on my own for a long time now. And do you know what? I’ve never been robbed. You needn’t worry about me.”

  Gregory thought about confessing that in some ways he had never stopped worrying, and that it would be comforting if his daughter could find someone to live with. Cassie had had a few casual relationships and then an extended but unsatisfactory one, after which she had given up on matters of the heart. She remained determinedly alone, unattached, and, as far as Gregory knew, celibate. His behavior and his needs were utterly different to hers. And yet, paradoxically, he envied his daughter’s resolve, and could understand her contentment at being free of the tightening coils of intimacy and romance.