A Cleansing of Souls (10 page)

“Ask away, Tom. Ask away.”

Tom thought for a moment.

“Is Michael your real name then?” he asked with little enthusiasm.

“Yes it is. Michael Parrish.”

“And what are you, fifty, fifty-five?”

“Forty-eight.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“So are you from round here then?”

“No, no I’m not. Not really.”

Tom felt, for some reason, a little foolish. “Look,” he said, “this is stupid. Let’s just forget about it. It’s not important.”

Michael thought for a moment. This boy was so young. Jennifer had been young. She still is, he thought to himself. How the past is connected to the present. You are never free, never entirely free. For it is the passing of time, that very abstract of creations, that deceives us all.

In the absence of a response, Tom plodded on with one more question. “So what do you do then?” he asked.

Michael then stood up and took off his jacket, laying it gently on the bench beside him as if anticipating the question. He rolled up the sleeves of his stained white shirt. It was then that Tom realised that through these days of unbearable heat, Michael had remained attired in his suit. And then he looked at Michael’s bare forearms, suppressing disgust as he did so. For up the entire length, from the wrist to the elbow, there were deep scars, perhaps every quarter of an inch. The scars were white and tight, standing out clearly as if they had been painted on. Tom could not help but stare.

“You ask me what I do, Tom,” said Michael. “And I will tell you. I save souls.”

Tom did not speak. No words came to his mind. He just kept staring at those scars.

“I save souls, Tom. I cleanse them. I suffer pain so that others may not.”

All Tom could do was to repeat what Michael had said.

“You save souls?” he said almost mechanically.

“I cleanse them.”

And Tom had to ask the inevitable question, just had to, as you or I would have had to.

“How do you do that?” he asked, as a child talking to a conjurer.

The sky above began to darken a little and it seemed now as if this small corner of the park was entirely on its own, floating in the universe. Seclusion. Desolation. You could feel it in the air. Michael withdrew a small penknife from the inside of his jacket pocket, its blade glinting in the waning sun.

Tom moved, as if to stand.

“Do not fear, Tom,” said Michael. “It is I that will feel your pain.”

Tom stood now and backed away a little.

“Listen to me, Tom. And trust me. I can save your soul. I bear the scars of a nation, of a world. My world. Each mark on my arm is a soul saved.”

He then held the penknife against the skin of his outer right forearm and dragged it slowly across, reopening one of the scars. Blood oozed from it. Tom was unable to look away.

“That is my mother,” said Michael.

He did it again, a little further up.

“That is my father whom I never knew.”

And he did it again.

“That is my childhood.”

Blood was now dripping down his arm, the cuts filling each other with blood, overflowing like some child's painting.

“You see, Tom, the pain is mine.”

Michael then swapped the penknife into his right hand as the first drops of rain began to fall. It was then that Tom noticed one long, snaking scar on Michael’s left arm, from the base of the wrist, like a long vein up to the elbow and possibly even past that.

“And this,” said Michael, “this is Jennifer.”

He then followed the scar with the penknife, his eyes closed, feeling the rain and the pain. Tom just stood there, a carousel of changing images spinning in his mind, bright and reckless. The sounds of Little Norman as his breath was taken from him, sorrow, pain, anger, colours flashing as the images raged on, racing on wild horses of adolescent fury. It was such an assault upon the senses that he thought he would vomit.

“Your pain, Tom. Give it to me. Let me cleanse your soul,” said Michael, his arms outstretched.

But Tom heard him not. When all clarity of thought is gone, when the eyes are the eyes of the desperate and the frightened, there is just for a second a means of expression that stands out above all others, begging to be used.

Tom gazed at the figure before him.

Little Norman.

Little Norman.

You can’t touch Little Norman. You just can’t.

This was the moment for Tom to release his anger and his sorrow and his pain. He had no choice.

So he sighed an imperceptible sigh before crashing his bony fist into Michael’s face, meeting it with a sickening crunch. He did it again. And he just kept doing it. He couldn’t make himself stop. Over and over he punched the unresponsive face until, at last, he staggered back, almost falling with exhaustion. And there before him lay the wreck of a human form.

Blood streamed from Michael’s skin and ran in crimson tears down his face. The crevices that his life had forged with so little mercy carried the blood as if they had been created for that purpose alone. His legs and arms were those of a puppet whose strings were no longer held, lacking in tension and in spirit. Tom just looked on, unable to move. And then suddenly, without warning, Michael’s body slipped off the bench upon which it had fallen, and thudded onto the gravel whereupon his wide eyes met the thunderous sky.

And Tom stood over Michael; his eyes drawn to the now upturned hands, those smooth white doves of hands that had touched the Beautiful Guitar with such gentleness, that had woven patterns in the air, speaking such words as the tongue could not. Those white, white hands so tinged now with red for in the centre of each palm, there issued forth small drops of blood.

Tom felt now unable to control his own breathing. He tried to inhale deeply but found he could not remember how. So hard was his heart pounding, he thought it would burst through his chest. He ached all over, just ached in agony. And as a symphony does change its mood within a single bar, so the sky cracked open, just tore in half like a sheet of paper. The rain thrashed down upon this scene, creeping now down Tom’s neck, scratching the skin of his back as if the drops of rain themselves were the broken slivers of a shattered decanter sky.

The young man lurched sideways and scrambled over to where his bag was and where the Beautiful Guitar lay gently weeping in its case. He grabbed them and tried so hard to keep his eyes from closing, to keep himself upright, as he staggered out of the park. The gravel sprang up from beneath his feet and the black and flashing sky pursued him into the street.

“Tom? Tom Spanner?” came a voice in the darkness.

Tom whirled around, terrified.

And there before him, her hair dripping and her eyes bright, stood a light amidst the storm.

It was Sandy.

She had saved him.

Back in the Country, a man tries to get hold of a situation.

Jennifer. Laura. Laura. Jennifer.

These names shot around Ron’s head. The message from Michael had read that Jennifer was seven years old but Jennifer had died almost a quarter of a century ago. Jennifer had been where it had all started. Laura. Laura was seven years old. Ron could not understand it. All he knew was this sense of terror
. He had no idea what to do next. All he had wanted to find out from Michael was why he had left. He dared not submit to his worst fears. If Michael was ill again, fair enough. Perhaps it was just the illness. But this talk of Jennifer perturbed him. Laura was only seven. Seven year old girls are good little girls. They always do as they are told. Always. Good little girls.

Laura is beautiful, gentle and perfect. She sits in front of the television, her legs crossed, in the lounge, alone. You could draw her and you could paint her. And if you did, you would surely make millions
yet you would never truly capture her. She has the grace and the surety of one who is years older, yet bears so faithfully the fundamental wonder of the child. She does not move. She just sits there in front of the television. But the television is not even switched on. It is her reflection in the dark screen at which she gazes. The face that was once so bright and so vibrant is now old upon her. The tears scrape her skin as they fall, so bitter are they. She neither wipes them away nor pays them heed. She just sits there, in front of the television, her legs crossed, thinking about her dad. And all the while the smell of after-shave lingers in the air.

Sandy’s flat was small, clean and tidy. Leading off from the square entrance hall were four white doors which
led in turn to a compact peach-coloured bathroom, a lounge, the main bedroom and, lastly, to a second bedroom that was home to all assorted bags and boxes. Sandy had not long moved into the flat and was still in the process of decanting her belongings. She had not envisaged the second bedroom as anything other than a place to store her belongings.

Tom sat on the settee in the lounge, shivering. Raindrops trickled from his hair to his forehead then on down his nose where they lingered for a tantalising moment before dropping softly onto the carpet. He was cold and he was tired. As the heat of the room began to warm him, he started to feel sticky and uncomfortable, irritated by the sodden clothes that clung to his skin as they dried. The hard black case of the Beautiful Guitar lay before him and he stared at it as if expecting some form of explanation.

“Tea or coffee?” asked Sandy from the small kitchen that adjoined the lounge. “It’s all I’ve got I’m afraid,” she added, peering at Tom from behind an arched alcove.

“Coffee please,” replied Tom.

His mind had separated into a thousand pieces. He felt as if he were in the body of another and he could not make sense of it at all. He could not get a hold on what was happening to him, could not grasp anything that was in any way familiar. Earlier that month, he had been sitting at a desk, daydreaming, safe, warm and certain of what the next day would bring, even thought it be drudgery. And now here he was quaking in a flat in Big Town with a girl he barely remembered from school offering him solace.

“White or black?” asked Sandy.

“Black, please.”

“Sugar?”

“No thanks.”

Black coffee. Black coffee.

When Tom was eleven years old, he had progressed from his school reading books about children and magic and animals, to those books his father read. It had been a great step for him, not just in terms of literary maturity, but also in terms of moving a step closer to his dad. And he had no moderation in his views of these books. Each one he read was the greatest book ever, for they were grown up books. Real books.

He would scour the small bookcase in the front room and devour the books mercilessly. From the first page to the last, he had been hooked. Every page overflowed with agents, double-agents, spy masters, assassins and wizened old hands who were forever being called back into service for one more crack at their elusive, life-long adversary whom you never met but in the haunted moments of your dreams. They were glorious books, glorious, fantastic books.

Interrogations beneath the single, crackling bulb, midnight flights to dark Berlin, drop zones, safe houses, and ‘dead’ letterboxes. A gunshot was just a snap in the night, a dead body just a dead body. Travelling to the Antarctic on a desperate frozen mission, wasting away in the heat of the South American jungles. Everywhere, there were hidden secrets, hidden pasts and hidden lives. And during his early youth, more than anything else, Tom wanted to be a part of this incredible world of deception.

Irony gets us all in the end.

It kills the best of us.

Just walk away and smile.

That’s all I do.

So black coffee had been Tom’s way in. Every spy drank black coffee. Without exception, they lived on it. During long nights of code breaking and questioning, black coffee flowed through
their veins instead of blood.

Tom had been so innocent, as naïve as the child he surely still was, a young man alone in a world now whose truths no book could ever come close to telling; a truth nobody would ever believe. There is no despair for the very young. There is no terror for the child. There is only shape and form and outline. It is when we grown that fear and terror creep into our days and our nights.

“I don’t know how you can have your coffee like that, no milk or sugar,” said Sandy bringing in a steaming mug and a towel. “It smells so strong.”

Tom took the mug from her and wrapped both his hands around it. Sandy put the towel beside him on the arm of the chair. She had intended for him to dry his hair with it and his face. He looked so forlorn, she thought, as she returned to the kitchen to begin preparing something to eat.

The clatter of the saucepans and the low whoosh of the grill as it was turned on were like a slap to Tom’s face. Only a few weeks ago, he had possessed it all, a monthly income, a room of his own, privacy, and a mother who did everything for him. He missed these things now. Even trivial conversations, banal television programmes, boredom itself. He missed all of these. At the time, they had passed unnoticed like breath; so superfluous were they to the tortured meandering of his mind. But now he realised how secure was his existence then and he couldn’t see what had led him to jeopardise that security.

And the cruelty of loneliness burst upon him.

He had dared to look below the surface. He had questioned the basis and the direction of his life. And then he had acted upon some indefinable instinct sought to be at one with his innate self. If there is such a thing as a crime against society, then Tom had surely committed it. He had breached the surface of the norm. He had crossed the tracks. And like all those wretched souls before him, he would surely break.

“Have you got time to have something to eat, Tom, or have you got to be going soon?” asked Sandy from the kitchen. “I’m just having cheese on toast, but you can have something with chips if you like, or soup.”

“I’m okay for a while,” replied Tom, unable to lift his voice much above a mumble, “Soup would be fine,” he added.

“I can’t hear you. It’s this grill.”

“Soup. Soup will be fine. I like soup. Thanks.”

It had been such an effort to talk.

Tom was very hungry and he would have ravenously eaten two, three, four plates of chips, but he was feeling the need to deny himself – a beautiful, instinctive reaction.

When it came, he ate the soup in silence, holding the bowl close to his chin and scooping the soup into his mouth with such a mechanised action, it were as if the spoon were controlling the hand.

Sandy just watched him from the other side of the room. She had only just recognised him when he flew out of the park, yet she couldn’t quite isolate what it was about him that had changed from the boy she had known at school but a few years previously. There was definitely something different about him, she decided, something almost primeval, basic, indiscernible. It did not detract though from the feelings that pulsed through her – more, it served to fuel them.

While Sandy returned to the kitchen to clear up, Tom took the chance to look at his surroundings. Remaining hunched forward as if he were still sitting on the bench, he just lifted his head, straining his neck a little. It was a homely and uncluttered room. Posters of wild animals and drawings of flowers adorned the walls and a small shelf above the television harboured several miniature bears in various pseudo-human guises. A bookcase rested beside the settee and Tom leaned over to look at the books, his wet jeans tight and hard as he shifted his legs.

There was a mixture of popular novels, magazines and household instruction manuals, as well as a few videos and some old newspapers. He decided, after not recognising the majority of the titles that they were not worth reading anyway. His views on anything cultural or aesthetic had always been tinged with an ardent snobbery and a stubborn disdain for everything other than that which satiated him alone. As people, we are so diverse, our component parts so magically discordant.

Tom was still looking at the spines of the books when Sandy came back in and sat down on the settee, careful to avoid any dampness. She picked up the towel and placed it, still folded, on her lap, stroking it, smoothing it. Tom did not acknowledge her presence.

“I haven’t got many books,” she offered apologetically, “I think there’s a few more in the back room that I haven’t unpacked yet. I’ve not really had much time for reading since we left school. There’s some old school books down there actually, I think, on the bottom shelf.”

“I chucked all mine,” said Tom, still with his back to her. It was easier to talk that way.

At last, he drew himself from the bookcase and sat back on the settee, beside Sandy. It was only a small settee and he could almost smell the perfume she had put on that morning before going to work. It meant nothing to him though. The scent of fear and confusion still filled his nostrils and clung to his every breath. There was little time for beauty as yet.

“Was the soup okay?” asked Sandy.

“Yes. Thanks.”

“Do you have to be back at any particular time, Tom? I don’t want you to miss your train or anything.”

“It’s fine.”

“That’s good.”

It had been so very long since Sandy had seen him. She had since become a woman and he a man.

“So, how have you been? School seems so long ago, doesn’t it? You were going to that bank, weren’t you, or was it an insurance company?”

Sandy felt herself racing. She became suddenly aware of her speech being pressured but was somehow unable to intervene in order to slow it down. Perhaps it was a fear of silence, for she was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.

“Insurance,” replied Tom, at last, his voice flat and indifferent. “I’m not there anymore.”

“It does get boring, doesn’t it? I’ve been at the same bank since school. It gets to me sometimes but, then again, I wouldn’t have got this place without it. Everything has its good side, when you think about it.”

Her voice was lively and alert, particularly in contrast to the dreary monotone of her guest.

Tom did not respond. He was barely listening at all, his mind drifting from one scene to the next, one world, and one vision after another. He was the shipwrecked cabin boy, all dripping clothes and pale skin, washed up bewildered.

“You should dry your hair really, Tom. You’ll get a cold,”

Tom did not answer.

A strand of Sandy’s long dark hair fell across her face and she pushed it back gently. Tom saw this out of the corner of his vision and momentarily marvelled at the femininity of the act. It was the cue for him to look at her secretly as she brushed some minuscule piece of nothing from her shoulder. And he saw the innocence in her face and he began to feel the perceptible warmth of her being. He had not been this close to anybody for so long, save Michael, not so physically close. An aura of gentility and acceptance floated about Sandy, emanating from every breath and every inconsequential movement.

“How long have you been here?” asked Tom, looking back now towards the floor, his voice still devoid of tone.

“About three months now. I’ve changed quite a few things. Still can’t find room for all my stuff though. It’s funny, I move out of a little room at my mother and father’s, but I can’t fit all my stuff into this big flat.”

“I bet it cost you a few quid.”

“Don’t ask!” replied Sandy, her eyes dark, playful, gleaming. “My father helped me out quite a lot. I’m going to pay him back though. He says I don’t have to, but I will.”

“Worth it though, I reckon. Your own place.”

“Yes. It makes you feel…..” Sandy paused, searching for the words. “Grown up.”

And then, as suddenly as it had sprung to life, the interaction thundered to a halt.

Sandy cursed her friends. They had ruined her conversation. All they seemed to talk about were soap operas, shoes, men and each other. They would sit in the bank, stereotyping in an easy, unconscious way. She realised now that she had been sucked into the routine of it all, a routine whereby a conversation was merely the exercising of facial muscles, routine where talking is no longer a source of learning, revelation, excitement, but just the exchange of already known and perceived views and observations – no more enlightening than chewing a stick of gum. And now she was struggling in her attempt to gauge mood, feeling, direction, looking for the words to regain the momentum, and to somehow keep Tom involved. He was her guest after all.