After Purple (30 page)

Almost absent-mindedly, I broke off one of the blossoms. It was a round sort of daisy thing with small white petals. I sniffed it, but it didn't smell. I could hear my stomach rumbling and complaining. It was difficult to keep my thoughts on heaven, when my belly gasped for food. I remembered my father feeding me at my birthday party (“She's far too old for
that
,” my mother had snapped), cutting the cake into easy little fingers, his own hands huge against my lips.

“One for Daddy,” he'd said. “One for all the poor sick people in the world.”

Strange he'd said that, when here I was in Lourdes surrounded by the sick and poor. It was almost like a Sign.

I plucked off a daisy petal and placed it on my tongue. Flowers didn't count as food. “One for Daddy,” I whispered.

“Hi!” said Ray. He was still in jeans on Resurrection night and pushing a wheelchair. The quiet, deserted square had suddenly turned into Picadilly Circus, as all the crowds streamed out of the basilica, staining the night with their bright, raucous voices. Ray had his own mini-crowd in tow, three-quarters of them male and crippled, but at least a quarter blatantly female, with long hair and longer legs, frothing and giggling all around him. When I saw them, I chucked away my flowers. I didn't want to turn into a laughing-stock.

“Hi!” I said, trying to exclude them from my greeting and fix only on Ray's face, which looked paler and more haggard than I'd remembered it.

He came forward and kissed me on both cheeks. It was such a brief, formal gesture, I didn't count it as a kiss. I wanted him to crush me in his arms, lift me high above the people, and set me down somewhere soft and sheltered, where there were only the two of us.

“This is John,” he said, turning to the boy in the wheelchair. I say “boy”, but he looked like a full-grown man, with huge shoulders and stubble on his chin. When Ray had talked about his boys, I'd always imagined
little
fellows, strapped into push-chairs and playing with their rabbits. Most of these were giants.

John stared at me, not rudely, just stolidly, as if I were a new cow in his field. His mouth was a broken hinge, gaping open as if it were waiting for repair. He had one good hand, strong and almost beautiful, and one left claw, limp and curving inwards, missing two of its fingers. Ray was buttoning up his coat for him. I turned away, but there were other boys, crowding all around us. Half of them were in wheelchairs, two or three in callipers and one lying horizontal on a trolley-bed. That one jeered and pointed at me, the smallest picked his nose.

“I'd like you all to meet Thea,” Ray said. “Mrs Thea Morton, a friend of mine from London.”

There was a sort of awkward silence, made worse by the babbling murmur in the square. I wished my name was Mary and that he hadn't called me Mrs. Perhaps that was to protect himself, so that they wouldn't guess he'd ever touched my breasts. John was still staring at me, the lad beside him making strange convulsive gestures with his head.

One of the girls came forward and shook my hand.

“Hi!” she said. “I'm Cammie. Short for Camilla. Wasn't the service
great?
Bit long I thought, but then they always are. So you're a friend of Ray's.” Ray had turned away again and was busy with the horizontal boy. A younger girl with ginger pigtails was holding on to his arm as if she owned it. I noticed, now, there were more male helpers than female, but somehow the girls loomed larger. “He's really great, isn't he?” said Cammie, lowering her voice as if she were in the confessional. “I mean you'd never guess he was a priest. He's so sort of relaxed. Are you a nurse?”

I mumbled something indecipherable.

“Great!” said Cammie. “Mary-Lou and me are both nurses. And Val's a speech therapist. That's Val, over there. And wait till you meet our doctor. He's a scream! Dr Norman Bradbury. We just call him Fatso. He's trying to lose a stone. Where did you do your training, by the way?”

“Er … Guy's,” I said. I tried to edge out of her way and move closer to Ray who was standing beside a tall sulky boy of about seventeen.

“This is Lionel,” said Ray. “He's deaf and dumb, but he likes it if you smile.”

I smiled. Lionel looked more normal than the rest. All his limbs and features were in their proper places and he was walking on his own legs. He was even beautiful, with dark thick hair and full wet red fat lips. I smiled so hard, my face ached. Ray had said “deaf and dumb” so matter-of-factly, he might have been saying left-handed or blue-eyed.

“Ray,” I whispered. “
Listen
.” I'd never be ill enough to keep him for myself. You had to lose your tongue and your ears for that, or at least a couple of fingers. But he was my priest, too, and I ached to be alone with him, if only for half an hour. I needed him to take me to the Grotto, to light a candle with me.

“Ray,” I tried again. He wasn't even looking at me, but fussing over a boy in a bib who was dribbling in a wheelchair and had a huge head lolling on top of a shrunken pygmy body, as if someone had muddled up the parts of two separate people.

“And we mustn't forget Jimmy, must we. Say hallo to Thea, Jim.”

Jimmy dribbled in my direction, grinned at his own wasted, twisted legs, and said “Hallo Jim.”

I backed away. “Look, Ray, there's something I want to …”

“And this is Mike, who comes from Wales. He can even talk a bit of Welsh, can't you, kid? And that's Barry there beside him. Barry's a whiz with a football.”

I stared at Barry. There was only a hollow blanket where his football legs should have been.

“Hi,” I said. “Ray, I think it might be better if …”

“And these are all our helpers. Sam's the tall one there, Desmond next to him, Alan, Eddie … Oh, and this is Mary-Lou. She's a midwife. Though we're hoping not to need her in
that
capacity!”

They all laughed. I hated her at once. Midwives have privileges enough, without being beautiful on top of it. She had hair as long as mine, but fairer, and the sort of breasts which make tee-shirts look obscene. Ray went over to her.

“Do you think the group would mind if Thea came up to the house with us? She's on her own, you see. Her friend broke a leg and couldn't come.”

“Oh, bad luck! Yes, of course, Thea, do join us. It's John's birthday and we're going to have some wine and stuff.”

“Look, I don't really think …” I started. I didn't want to join them. I hadn't even seen the Grotto yet, and I hated the thought of being granted permission by a “group” I clearly didn't belong to; made into an outsider again when all the rest were midwives, helpers, priests. I hadn't even the distinction of being handicapped. A gammy tooth or two couldn't compare with
these
cases.

“Great!” said Cammie. “We'll squeeze you on the bus. Can you sing, by the way?”

“No.”

“Pity. We'd planned to have a sing-song and we need a few more female voices. We girls are rather heavily outnumbered. We have to be careful with all these lady-killers around! Especially Jimmy, there. You're a terror, aren't you, Jim?”

Jimmy grinned and dribbled. I wondered if he wore his bib when he killed the ladies. I made one last attempt to prise Ray away from the group. “Listen, Ray, I know you're busy, but I thought perhaps …”

He took my hand and squeezed it. “Not now, Thea, my girl. It's the lads' time now. But you come along with us — they'd like that. In fact, if you push John, I can go on ahead and find our bus.”

That “my girl” was the only thing he'd given me. He'd more or less ignored every word I'd said, and now he'd disappeared into the crowds.
Why
was it the lads' time? They'd had him now for two solid days, not to mention all the months before. He
lived
with them, for God's sake.

I'd never pushed a wheelchair in my life. I was terrified I'd do it wrong or tip John out or something. He kept turning round and staring at me. Lionel tagged behind, pulling at my arm and making strange soundless movements with his lips. I felt deaf and dumb myself. I'd always kept well away from the disabled. Even back in London, when Ray had suggested that I meet his boys, I'd totally refused. But now they were surrounding me, jostling me, touching me, and Ray himself was not even there to help.

John had turned round again. I could see his lips moving, his broken mouth struggling to get a word out.

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

The noise he made bore no relation to normal speech. I had no idea whether to smile or frown or answer yes or no, or whether he'd understand me anyway. I'd seen a television programme once, about a brilliant mathematician in a wheelchair — thick glasses, stunted limbs, the lot — yet he had a mind as sharp as Einstein's. John could be like that. Or a moron with a mental age of six. The mouth was still struggling, the sounds just strange zoo noises.

“I'm sorry,” I muttered. “I don't quite follow.”

“He's saying, ‘isn't it cold?'” That was Mary-Lou, chief translator.

“Oh, I
see
. Yes, it
is
cold. Well, I suppose it isn't really. I mean, back in London … Oh hell!”

How did Mary-Lou know, anyway? Just because she was a midwife, it didn't mean she had the Gift of Tongues. John might have been gasping out a new formula for relativity, or the fourth law of thermodynamics, for all she knew.

I was glad when we reached the gates. The bus was waiting just outside, but it took over half an hour to load everybody in. The wheelchairs were folded and the boys lifted up like sacks. There was a subtle difference, though. The helpers handled them like sacks of coal, Ray like sacks of diamonds.

Everybody laughed and joked and told stupid stories about shaggy dogs and Irishmen, and generally carried on as if they were Adrian's First Year on a school spree. Ray tried to include me in the camaraderie, but it didn't work. They had travelled eight hundred miles together, slept and sung together, fed and toileted each other, were wearing the same grey and orange badge. Mine was an alien blue badge. I belonged to Pax, but had lost my peace along with my family.

Ray drove the bus himself. I'd never imagined him doing things like driving. He seemed too vague and holy and unmechanical to be messing about with gears and carburettors. When we'd gone to the dentist together, we'd always caught an eighty-eight and sat on the top like schoolkids, telling our fortunes with the numbers on the bus tickets.

I stared out of the window. It was almost midnight now, and swirly dark outside. The bus was climbing, but the mountains climbed still higher, so they were always taller, always ahead of us. We stopped too soon. At least the noise of the bus had prevented any need for conversation. We were parked in a sort of clearing, outside a long, low ruin of a house which had once been painted white. A man came out to greet us. He must have been forty-five at least, but was wearing tight faded denims, a checked cowboy shirt which barely concealed his paunch, and a little cap with “Elvis” printed on it.

“Hi Boss!” he called to Ray.

“Hi Doc!”

So that was their famous doctor, flaunting his mufti and trying to pretend he was just the caretaker, or a guitarist in a rock band, when he probably had strings of letters after his name and three or four degrees and had written books on Paroxysmal Tachycardia. It was part of the whole jolly, matey, social-worker thing. We're all equal, kid, even though I've got a First from Cambridge and you've lost your eyes or your brain or the odd limb or two. It was almost worse than pop priests. Clerics should stick to their dog-collars and doctors their white coats; midwives should be plain and spinsterish and wear their hair short, and cripples and dribblers should stay shut up in their hospitals.

“Right, everybody out and in the Rumpus Room,” called Sam. That took an hour, by the time they'd all been washed and brushed and put their things away and been taken to the toilet. One of the boys had even wet his trousers. No one minded. The helpers made a joke of everything, even pissed pants. “If you do it again, I'll put you in my nightdress,” Val giggled.

“I'll go to bed with Father, then.”

Everybody screamed with laughter. I just stood by the door, cracking my thumbs. I'd noticed that several of the boys called Ray “Father”, though he answered to anything — you, boss, mister, Four-Eyes, Murph. He was somehow the star and centre of them all. He didn't say a lot, but everyone deferred to him, even the doctor. I noticed how he spread gentleness on everything, like jam.

Cammie was setting out the glasses. There was beer, wine, Pepsi and an assortment of crisps and biscuits brought from England. It should have been cosy — all those Chocolate Crunch and Golden Wonder reminding me of home — but I just felt more and more an alien. Mary-Lou had baked a huge cake with “Happy birthday, John. Deo Gratias” piped on it in pink and white icing. I wondered what the Deo Gratias was for. Were we thanking God that John had six fingers rather than just three, or that he was alive at all to celebrate his birthday? Ray had told me one of the boys had died just three weeks before he was due to come to Lourdes. Aged fifteeen and a half.

Val moved the cake in front of John who was sitting in his wheelchair in the place of honour. Ray sprawled on the floor surrounded by his harem, and I slumped in a corner. It was a shabby cheerless room, with lino on the floor and broken sofas, but no one seemed to notice. They were far too busy singing “Happy birthday, dear Jo — ohn” and linking arms and stamping feet and wolf-whistling each other. The whole thing was like a midnight feast in a dormitory. Half of them were even wearing their pyjamas and Jim had changed his bib for one with a clown on.

The singing was the worst bit. I've always hated sing-songs — they remind me of guide camps and drunken soccer crowds — but when half the party have speech deficiencies and can't even get the words out, the results are shuddersome. Sam kept trying to organise us all, which only made it worse. Jimmy got the giggles in the middle of “Lead Kindly Light”, and Cammie crowed “Great, oh absolutely great!” after every number, even the ones which foundered. We covered everything from “Ten Green Bottles” to “Faith of Our Fathers” (which I always thought had been banned, on account of its being unecumenical). Actually, it was the only one I liked. I even joined in the chorus: