Mantrapped (24 page)

Trisha, Doralee and Peter visit the parson

Ruby was disturbed when making jam doughnuts for the village fete by a ring on the doorbell, and was surprised to find her daughter, her partner Peter and a strange young woman on her doorstep.

'Let me guess,' Ruby said. 'You've decided to have a baby after all and this young woman is to be the surrogate mother.' 'Give me a break, Mum,' said Doralee. 'Not at a time like this. I need you to be there for me,' and she sat her mother down and told her the story.

'How does it work sexually?' asked Ruby, taking the plain woman's view, unimpressed by philosophical or medical detail. 'The him-her, the her-him, and you?' 'You mean you believe me?' asked Doralee, surprised. Peter and Trisha were wiping out the mixing bowl with their index fingers. The doughnuts had been deep fried and put aside to cool a little before being filled with jam and rolled in sugar. Doralee hated to think of the wasted calories each one represented. If they were hungry why didn't they eat something good for them? She was not surprised her mother was a size 22.

'Nothing surprises me?' said Ruby. 'The Lords of Misrule are abroad, that's for sure and everything is topsy-turvy in the world. Gay weddings and cloned babies! If these two have had a sex change then that's their doing. Perhaps it's just as well you never married the him-her, though heaven knows who else you're going to find.'

Doralee tried to explain that she was not talking about a sex change, rather a personality change, but her mother failed to grasp the difference. Doralee could see why her father had left. Ruby walked them down to the village church to keep their appointment with Father Bryant, who was rumoured to have successfully exorcised a ghost from the Edwardian ladies' loo in the Market Square and a DVD-throwing poltergeist from a house in Bell Street on the council estate, neither having any potential in the local tourist trade. They walked past the old shambles and the estate agents and the new trendy kitchen shop and the cross in the cobbles where a Catholic had been burned by Protestants four hundred years ago. The Peter body kicked a stone along the road while they walked, attracting looks from passers-by.

'I don't think Father Bryant will be blessing any gay weddings,' said Ruby, 'if your friend is a man in drag, as you say. Little hands for a man and no Adam's apple but you're the one with the education, Dora, and the up-to-date life style, so I suppose you know. I dare say they have hand transplants now, and Adam's apple removal on the NHS.' 'Doralee. Not Dora,' said Doralee, automatically. 'I've changed my mind about that. From now on you girls are going to be Dora, Claudia, Gloria and Mary like anyone else,' said her mother. 'I don't know what I was trying to prove. To upset my mother-in-law, I daresay, and give the fox-hunting set something to talk about. But now she's passed on it hardly seems worth it.'

'Well thank you very much,' said Doralee, bitterly. 'After all that!'

'I can see you're in a mood,' said her mother. 'Your London life does nothing for your nerves. Don't say anything to upset Father Bryant. I warn you he's gone very High Church, incense everywhere, refuses to do signs of peace, keeps using the 1662 Prayer Book in defiance of the Bishop, who is trying to excommunicate him. It was bad enough years back getting you girls christened, he certainly wouldn't put up with it now.'

'Names are so important,' said the Peter body. 'My little boy's called Spencer. I think it's a lovely name.'

'You have a child then?' asked Ruby. 'So at least something works, or did. Or perhaps you mean to have it cut off?

Some people do, I believe.'

'A dear little boy,' said the Peter body, 'but I don't see too much of him.'

'You didn't tell me he already had a child,' said Ruby to Doralee. 'He never mentioned it before. You are a dark horse,

Dora. I suppose you know what you're doing with your life.'

They arrived at a little stone Saxon church, set amongst yew trees, the other side of a lychgate. A notice said the place was protected by CCTV cameras, and another that it was Grade 1 listed, and pinned up over the board which gave the times of services was a poster headed
Returning the Nation to its Heritage
and obscuring that poster were warnings to countryside roamers to close gates and not to eat yew berries, and not to put up notices which might be seen as offensive to people of other faiths. But the interior of the church was beautifully restored with mock-Victorian stencilling and evening light struck a rosy glow through arched windows. Doralee began to feel quite hopeful.

Father Bryant came forward from the back of the church to meet them, like some amiable, if manic, Friar Tuck. He had a huge double chin beneath a wide face, and astute eyes, and a fine head of light brown hair which looked as if it had been set on rollers before being brushed out. He carried a bag of boiled sweets in his hand but offered the others none. He thanked Ruby for the doughnuts which he said he would give to the fete-organisers in the morning. He wore voluminous white robes draped with a purple sash, and big walking boots.

'Talk about cross-dressing!' whispered the Peter body, too loudly, and the Trisha body kicked his ankle and he squealed. Ruby went home to deep fry another batch of doughnuts.

They sat in the vestry. The Trisha body wriggled in the orange feather stole so it slipped from her pale, sloping shoulders, and she did not bother to pick it up. The Peter body directed flirtatious glances at the priest, looking out from under long lashes. Doralee had not realised before how long they were. Doralee got them settled as best she could. Thus in her childhood she had settled her little brothers and sisters. She told her tale as if she were talking to her editor, in measured and civil terms, and the priest listened attentively.

'It is my opinion,' Doralee concluded, 'that the two of them won't revert of their own accord, but need some kind of cosmic help, and as soon as possible. They're regressing. I don't know how these things work but I would imagine the longer they are out of their bodies the more somehow diffuse they become: they won't fit back properly and that could be disastrous for my relationship. I don't want to share my life with someone who's got a strange woman inside him. I'm the one with the oestrogen. I want a full return to normality. But if you do bring this about I would be happy for Peter and I to go through a marriage ceremony. It would be the least I could do.'

'Thank you,' said Father Bryant, 'but bribes are not necessary, pleased though I would be to welcome you back into the Church. I was there at your christening - the power of the Church reaches out and draws its children back. I am not sure however that the regular exorcism ceremony is appropriate. The unfortunate couple you bring to me, Trisha and Peter, hardly seem to me to be instruments of the devil's malice. They may rather be implements of God's blessing, a miracle, though it would take a convocation or so to get to the bottom of it. They are not lost souls waiting to go to heaven or afraid of going to hell, for whom the ritual has been devised. They are not loitering in public lavatories the better to frighten the living. They are not wandering energies with disturbed spirits, throwing the crockery about. The man is in the woman's body and the woman in the man's. What can this be but God's visual fix? Time and time again my parishioners come to me and tell me their boys are behaving like girls. It is the boys who are modest and sensitive and easily hurt; it is the girls who are forceful, energetic, predatory, notching up sexual conquests while the boys do what they can to preserve their virtue. The transmigration of souls, which seems to me what we have here, was bound to happen sooner or later, and I am most obliged to you, Doralee, for bringing it to my attention. God sends his messengers in the most surprising way. He speaks not from out a burning bush but on the back stairs of a dry-cleaning shop and domestic employment agency!' He was quite excited. 'I will raise the issue with the General Synod at their next meeting in two months' time. That should stir them up a bit. One in the eye for the Bishop, in fact, who, as you may have heard, is not on the traditionalists' side.' 'You mean you're not going to do anything?' Doralee was horrified. 'Not even pray? Surely this counts as possession. Surely you invoke the Archangel Michael? What about bell, book and candle? It worked for the ladies' loo, it worked in Bell Lane for the poltergeist. You have to help!'

Father Bryant said he worried about the validity of trying to perform an exorcism when a miracle might be involved, rather than a curse from hell, and when there were two parties involved, neither of whom were demonstrating any particular distress or showing any signs of diabolic possession. It was without precedent. Doralee said there had to be a first time for everything, and that she would write the exorcism up in her columns. That persuaded him, though he first asked for picture approval, which Doralee promised. She would argue about that when the time came.

Father Bryant led Doralee, Peter and Trisha into the dimmer light of the church, Peter and Trisha whispering and giggling unabashed the while. All were required to kneel. The priest asked for the intercession of the Archangel Michael. He asked for the banishment from these people here present of all spells, black magic, witchcraft, malefics, maledictions, the evil eye, diabolic infestations, oppressions, possessions by all that is evil and sinful, jealousy, perfidy, envy: all physical, psychological, moral and spiritual ailments. The abjuring went on for some time.

When the good Father paused for breath the Peter body made a fuss about the state of his knees and demanded the right to just sit on the pew and bend his head. Father Bryant pointed out that a state of humility was desirable when supplicating the Almighty but conceded it was okay. The Trisha body pointed out that she was half Jewish, and the Peter body said he was as Christian as anybody else, it was just that all this grovelling got up his nose. The Father said that exorcism was well accepted in the Jewish tradition. He asked if either of them had drunk from rivers or lakes the previous night because that was when, traditionally, the hazard of demons was acute. The Trisha body said in horror that she'd taken a swig from some bottled water the night before, she hoped that didn't count, but it did describe itself as spring water. Father Bryant, who was beginning to show signs of annoyance, said it well might. The Peter body sobbed and gulped a little, and actually knelt and prayed a little, but the Trisha body said this was all a waste of time and wouldn't it be more sensible to go to the police. To which Doralee replied sharply that that was fine, if he wanted them all to be locked up and certified, or used by the CIA for research. Surely prayer was safer. The Peter body recovered from its fright and complained to Father Bryant that it was the first time, and he hoped the last, that he'd heard that bit about not being worthy to pick up the crumbs under the table. 'They'd have a fit in my self-assertiveness class,' he said. 'I am just not going to say that. What have I got to be humble about? I won the lottery! Surely that means I'm God's favourite!'

Doralee shushed them and calmed them down and Father Bryant was able to continue. He seemed more prepared to believe now that the couple were not just possessed but that the devils were intractable. He asked on Doralee's behalf that the healing waters of her baptism now flow back through the maternal and paternal generations to purify her family name of Satan and sin, and for calling upon powers that set themselves up in opposition to God, which Doralee thought was unnecessary. Surely, of all of them, she was the innocent party here, and certainly the most likeable.

The rosy light faded. A dim sepulchral light suffused the chapel. Father Bryant's white and purple robes moved in front of the altar. He now had bell, book and candle. He asked for the breaking and dissolving of all curses, hexes, spells, snares, lies, obstacles, deceptions, diversions, spiritual influences, evil wishes and desires, hereditary seals known and unknown, and any dysfunction and disease and any and all links with astrologers, channellers, charters, clairvoyants, crystal-healers, crystals, fortune-tellers, mediums, movements and occult seers, palm- and tarot-card readers, satanic cults, witches and voodoo.

Doralee thought guiltily about the times she had filled in on the astrological feature in
Oracle
: was it worse to make it all up or to report - as best she could, not being an expert - on the state of play in the heavens? The Peter body yawned, and the Trisha body seemed to be asleep. 'I rebuke you,' cried Father Bryant suddenly in a loud voice, so they all jumped. 'I command you to go directly to God without harm to me or any here present!' It was at that moment, and probably fortuitously, since the pattern of light in the church changed as a cloud moved off the face of the sinking sun, and a rosy light shone in through stained-glass windows for an instant, only to be gone again, leaving a denser gloom behind, that a flock of black-winged creatures took sudden leave of the rafters. They circled the air above Father Bryant's head, flapping leathery wings, making an impatient, angry sound. Father Byrant waved them away, protecting his hair, for which they seemed to have a fascination. Then as one they rose, and streamed out into the dusk through one of the arched windows in the tower, which Doralee could see had been left without glass. Doralee gasped in shock. Peter and Trisha were suddenly wide awake and transfixed, clinging together.

'Only bats,' said Father Bryant, when the church was quiet again, and his hair was safe. 'I thought they'd gone but I see they're back. Take no notice. Long-nosed, alas, a protected species. They won't let me get rid of them. Only last week I had an e-mail from the Bat Preservation Society forbidding me to play the organ in case it disturbed them. We may use a piano and sing, however, since it is a place of worship and if we can produce a performers' licence. But I shall now have to bring in Health and Safety because of the danger of verminous infection to the congregation. Let them fight it out between them. Now, about the interview?'

'Well?' asked Ruby, when they got back to the house. 'Nothing has changed,' said Doralee. 'Except they seem to be growing up a little,' and it was true. On their way home from the church the couple seemed quite adult and serious, as if the bats had taken at least part of the spirit of entropy with them. But Peter was still in Trisha, and Trisha in Peter, the ropes of reality that had bound soul to body - the image of the fluttering clouds would not leave her - having worn so thin, or been so badly tethered, that they had cast loose. It could happen to her too, now, at any time, and she was alone with the fact, and where was she going to find help?