Devil's Food (22 page)

We accompanied her to a small room lined with books. Sister Blithe poured us all a cup of carob, which I did not really dislike, since I had drunk litres of it as a student. Coffee cost much more than the wholefood collective’s carob with honey and soy milk. It was quite good unless you thought of it as coffee, because it isn’t. Coffee, I mean. In any case it was hot and wet. The small room was agreeably warm. Sister Blithe was looking so uncomfortable that I decided on a few pleasantries.

‘This is fine work you are doing. How long have you been here?’ I said.

‘Just on a year now,’ she replied, sipping her carob. ‘We are feeding quite the five thousand these cold mornings. That’s why the heating is good and the food is nourishing. The poor and the old feel the cold. We’re not licensed to have more than ten sleepers-in and our places always fill up long before dark. But we can provide food and a bath and some clean clothes to most of them. Joy is our creed. So much of the world is dark and despairing. Someone has to remember joy and delight. God wants us to laugh as well as cry.’

‘True indeed,’ murmured Daniel.

‘God is a true refuge,’ she said, almost as if speaking to herself. ‘If you lose your only love, as I did, if you despair and weep all day, God is not pleased and fate cannot be turned aside. Only when I began to laugh again — at a kitten, as I recall, chasing her tail, so small and fluffy and determined — did I know to what God was calling me.’

‘How sad,’ I said conventionally. ‘How did he die?’

‘Die?’ she said, startled. ‘I never said he died. I lost him, that’s all. Lost him. He followed another path. One where I could not go. I inherited quite a lot of money from my grandfather. I came here, found some like-minded friends and formed a community. We bought this old school and refurbished it, and we have been doing God’s work ever since. We have a small cinema, you know, and we show movies,’ she told us, a little proud of her innovation.

‘What sort of movies?’ I had to ask.

‘What the old people like. Ealing comedies. My favourite is
Whisky Galore
. But there is a strong groundswell in favour of the Marx Brothers. And you know — they laugh! Some of them haven’t laughed in years. It is so touching to see them laugh. Their life is spent entirely in finding a place to sleep, something to eat, a way of surviving another day. There aren’t a lot of laughs in that. It’s a grim business. So here, for a couple of hours at least, they aren’t dirty or hungry or cold, and they can laugh.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ said Daniel sincerely.

‘But your cuisine isn’t getting rave reviews,’ I pointed out.

Sister Blithe laughed aloud. ‘No, but they need the vitamins. Some of our regulars get used to it, even prefer a nice apple to a lolly. There is the problem of teeth, of course. We shall have to do something about that. Now, it is kind of you to have listened to me for so long. You are looking for your father. But you were not sure if you would know him?’

They were innocent blue eyes but it would not do to fib to them. ‘I don’t know him very well,’ I said. ‘I was taken away when I was five and adopted by my grandmother. I have seen him perhaps ten times since. I don’t know what he looks like now — besides, he must be considerably bruised.’

‘Yes, he was. Well, he came here with a couple of Salvos. He didn’t like being in their shelter because there were rude men there — very likely, of course, one’s society cannot be select in homeless shelters. Also he said the food was greasy and he was a vegetarian. So they brought him to us, which was wise. We can easily cater for vegetarians. In fact we use very little meat, just one meat dish for each dinner. Protein is good for the old people, despite what Sister Joy says about lentils. One can have too many lentils in one’s life, don’t you feel?’

I nodded. One certainly could. Lentil soup is cheap and filling and I had already eaten as much of it as I was ever going to eat.

Sister Blithe took a strengthening sip of carob. ‘So you didn’t actually know your father very well?’ She was endeavouring to tell me something. I tried to find out what, because she was drying up.

‘No, but by the time you met him I am willing to bet that he was thoroughly out of control and extremely annoying,’ I said, wondering if that was what she was hinting at.

‘Just so,’ she said, pinkening like a Gloucestershire sunrise. ‘We gave him a bath and some new clothes, and then offered him a nice meal of bread, cheese and fruits. He said that this was not what he was used to. Apparently he only eats organic fruit, and ours isn’t organic. It won’t be in the foreseeable future, either, unless the prices go down.’

‘Indeed,’ I agreed. ‘How provoking, and how very ungrateful. I would not blame you if you showed him the door, you know.’

‘Even Christ only got a thank-you from one ex-leper out of ten, and we are not in his class,’ she told me, smiling again. She had a most beautiful smile. ‘We are not in this for the gratitude, which is fortunate, because there isn’t a lot of it about, as you say. Sister Joy gave him her own lunch, which was an organic apple and an organic pear, and he accepted them and settled down in the common room to read some of the literature. A lot of them sleep there, you know, all day, because they will have to walk about all night. We have an application in for forty more beds, but we haven’t heard back from the Fire Department yet.’

‘The poor are always with us,’ I said. ‘You do what you can in the circumstances. That’s what Sister Mary says. And God is aware of what you do.’

‘Indeed,’ sighed Sister Blithe. ‘Well, he drank some of our water and accepted peppermint tea made with fresh peppermint. Sister Bliss was wondering if he had perhaps some residual concussion, though the hospital had discharged him. But they discharge people so early these days. It’s all right if they have a home and loving care to go to, but not in this case … Anyway, Bliss couldn’t get him to talk to her at all and she’s a nice woman. He seemed to think that we were too frivolous. He didn’t like the bright colours and the singing and he didn’t like the film. It was
The Titfield Thunderbolt
, too, I always like that one. We put him to bed but the night nurse said he didn’t sleep. It was Jenny, she’s a strong woman, and she caught him at the door in his pyjamas and put him back to bed and told him he could leave in the morning, so he stayed there. But in the morning out he went, wouldn’t eat a mouthful, and I’m very much afraid that he was carrying a pamphlet from the Discarnate Brotherhood.’

‘Haven’t I heard that name before?’ asked Daniel.

‘The fleshless friars,’ I told him. ‘We make their famine bread out of lentil flour, which for some reason smells like sawdust. The creepy dudes who scare Jason.’

‘Oh,’ said Daniel. ‘Well, what’s wrong with them?’

Sister Blithe looked concerned. ‘Your Jason is right,’ she said. ‘Though I would call them alarming and their doctrine quite vicious. But you will see for yourself. They, at least, are not interested in feeding the poor and the lost. They aren’t interested in feeding anyone at all. I’ll see if one of their pamphlets is still in the common room. Someone must have snuck them in. If so, you will oblige me by taking it away.’

We followed her into a big, warm room which contained the cinema screen and projection apparatus, a lot of comfortable chairs and couches, and shelves of books and magazines. There was even a smokers’ corner for the intractable nicotine addicts with a kitchen extractor fan above it. Only the Sisters of Joy would have done that. I entirely approved of them as I saw the reluctant breakfasters fumble their way in, take up a magazine or book, or just slump quietly down and close their eyes. Everything was made of easy-clean surfaces, but they were new and soft. Soft music was playing. Bach, simple and pure. It was soothing and serene. Rare commodities in a city the size of Melbourne. The old thick walls would probably keep the traffic noise down to a low, rather soothing hum. An old lady in a red woolly gown yawned, showing clean pink gums. I yawned, which made Daniel yawn. We had to get out of there before we joined the sleepers.

Sister Blithe came back and showed us into the corridor again. ‘Here it is,’ she said, putting a grey leaflet into my hand as though she was passing me a soiled nappy. ‘I hope it’s the only one.’

‘I apologise for my parent,’ I said. ‘He was ungrateful and foolish. You are doing very good work. Let us give you some small token of how much we appreciate you. We work on the Soup Run. We know what we’re talking about.’

This time Daniel slid a few notes into Sister Blithe’s work-worn hand.

She blushed again. ‘Thank you. And I’m so sorry he found that thing here. And — I hope you find him,’ she said.

And we were out into the ordinary street with the sunflower door closing behind us. I looked at Daniel. He looked at me.

‘Won’t find anything stranger today,’ he said.

‘Or better,’ I added.

We walked on in the Sunday streets, so quiet and still. It was early. Not too early for what Pooh Bear would call a little smackerel of something, however. Honey, in his case. In ours, coffee. I needed to take the good wholesome taste of carob out of my mouth.

When we found a small cafe with the right sort of brass shrine to the Goddess Caffeinia, Daniel and I sat down to absorb some unexpected sunlight and look at the leaflet for the Discarnate Brotherhood.

‘Fat?’ it demanded in big black letters. ‘Hate it?’

‘Well, that’s saying it like it is,’ observed my beloved. We read further.

‘Obesity not only kills, but damns you to hell,’ it went on. I put the leaflet down and fanned myself. Daniel read aloud.

‘Greed is a sin! Gluttony is a sin! The love of food comes from the Devil!! Join the Discarnates and be cleansed. Join the Discarnates and be purified! Join the Discarnates and lose five kilos a week!’

I wished I still smoked so I could have lit a cigarette to the Goddess Nicotinia.

‘A weight loss cult?’ asked Daniel, smiling.

‘Not funny,’ I told him. ‘Sort of thing that had to happen. God, no wonder poor Sister Blithe found them vicious. This is definitely not feeding the poor, is it? It’s starving the rich, which isn’t the same thing at all.’

‘He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away,’ said Daniel, still not taking it seriously.

‘Look, this is really nasty stuff,’ I tried to convince him. ‘People risk death to be thin — look at the girls and that weight loss tea from the Mollyhouse. I wonder if the Discarnates are the source of it? The Professor said that he didn’t trust anyone who said that they were fleshless.’

‘And I don’t trust anyone who says that they are pure,’ said Daniel, ‘or can become pure just by not eating. Purity isn’t as easy as that, you’re right. But austerity is always attractive. For a while, at least.’

‘I don’t like this at all,’ I said, sipping. ‘On the other hand, this coffee is wonderful.’ It was. Hot, dark, with a swirl of crema on the surface, redolent of volatile oils and giving rise to visions of dark forests full of dazzling birds. To sip it was to glimpse a macaw flashing past on blue and yellow wings. I can get quite romantic about coffee. And Daniel, of course. At the moment he was annoying me.

Just when I was about to renew my argument, his mobile phone rang.

I do not like mobile phones, but sometimes they are useful. When Daniel’s phone rang it did not play the Ride of the Valkyries. It did not, as far as I knew, vibrate. It did not emit that crazy frog tune which has been the cause of so many otherwise law-abiding people snatching the phones of perfect strangers and flinging them out of tram windows to the detriment of good order and at considerable danger to the public. It just rang. He answered it.

All mobile phone conversations tend to be the same. Except for the ones where the person on your end has an earpiece and is therefore walking along having an interesting argument with, apparently, the air. Ever since people got those remote control phones it has been very hard to distinguish a respectable businessman from a wandering loony. Who can tell, in the absence of other clues, whether ‘Sell Timeo and buy Dona Ferentes’ is a sane stock exchange instruction to a secretary back at the office or an attempt to deflect the attentions of mind-reading Martians?

Daniel’s conversation went, as they usually do, ‘Yes, it’s me. You did? Where? And you are … okay. Be right there.’

‘Drink up,’ said Daniel, now back with me. ‘Jon and Kepler have caught their smuggler. We’re going to pick him up. I’ll just call Timbo and have him bring round the car. You don’t have to come,’ he added. ‘Do you want to tackle the Discarnates first?’

‘No,’ I said. I was not all that enthusiastic about finding my father. What was I going to do with him when I did? Jacqui was all right for the moment with Therese Webb, on whom I hoped that the Goddess Arachne was shedding blessings by the armload. But what was I going to do with Sunlight, who was evidently not in a good frame of mind after his adventures, if the two of them didn’t want to go home to their commune?

I shuddered briefly and returned to the coffee and the macaws. They really are gorgeous birds. The vision of those wings lasted right to the bottom of the cup.

Walking down hills is always preferable to walking up them, and we were back at Insula in a few minutes. There we met the charming Timbo, who smiled. Good, he had obviously forgiven me for putting stinking blankets into his sacred boot. Jon and Kepler were waiting. They looked both excited and grieved.

‘I would have said he was a good worker, too,’ said Jon, getting into the back of the car and making room for me and the willowy Kepler. ‘Where are my manners? Hello, Corinna, Daniel. Nice to see you again, Timbo. Meroe has reported on the herbs. They are not all poisonous, and some grow perfectly well here. Can you have a look at the list, Corinna?’

‘Certainly, but I won’t know much,’ I said. ‘I only know about herbs you can cook with.’ I scanned the list. ‘And most of these are,’ I said, surprised. ‘Why would anyone import thyme? Borage? Bay leaves? Mint? Mint doesn’t even dry properly, and we’ve got acres of it. Forests of it. Trudi keeps us all supplied with peppermint, she rips it out of her garden in armfuls. Says it’s nearly a weed. Jon dear, this is mad.’