Requiem (25 page)

Sharon
laughed and threw her arms around him, then took his face in her hands. His
tongue probed her mouth, and she felt dizzy with the pressure of his kiss. His
hand popped the button on her jeans and she felt the zip slide with a soft
tooth-rasp. He dug a hand inside her briefs and inserted his forefinger inside
her.

Sharon
writhed away from him. 'No,' she whispered. 'Not here, Tom.'

But
he persisted pressing against her. Her nipples swelled against the pressure of
his body. She manoeuvred her lips away from his mouth to say, 'Not here, babe.
Come on, Tom. Let's go.'

Tom ignored her. She
jerked back, smiling at him, holding up her hands to signal 'Enough'. Tom's
reply was to lunge forward, catching her by the belt-loop of her jeans,
spinning her around and shoving her against the rough bark of an olive tree. In
a moment he had hooked his thumbs into the waistband of her jeans and briefs,
dragging them around her ankles. Using his weight to pin her against the tree
he fumbled with his own trousers. He struggled to insert his engorged cock into
her anus.

Sharon
wrenched free and swung a closed fist at the side of Tom's head. It was a
well-weighted aim. The blow connected heavily with his ear, knocking him off
balance. He sank to one knee, nursing his ear with one hand and wiping his
mouth with the other. His bobbing erection began to subside.

'What's
wrong with you, Tom?' Sharon hissed, fixing her jeans. 'What the hell is wrong
with you?'

'I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

'Sorry? Fuck
you!' Sharon stormed away towards the periphery of the garden where they'd
crashed an entrance. Tom, still on one knee, watched her slip away through the
trees.

He
waited there for some time, crouched in the dark under the sickle moon.
What's
happening to you? What's happening, man?
He was losing control, moment by
moment. He knew what he'd just done, but he didn't know why. He'd been seized
by a savage impulse. It had broken in him like a wave. Something was trying to
break free inside him.

No,
he wasn't possessed. How easy it would have been to say some spirit had
momentarily possessed him; if it was not exactly he who had jumped on Sharon,
it had certainly been
of him.
Some part of Tom was trying to break free and
assert control, but with a slow, ripping sensation, like stitches popping one
at a time. Each voice another popping. Each phantom another rip. Each hallucination
or outburst another tearing free. He was scared of what was coming.

After
a while Sharon came slowly and wearily back through the trees. She knelt down
beside him. Her anger had passed. She stroked a hand through her hair.

'I feel like I'm coming apart,' said Tom.

'It's all right,' she said in his ear.
'It's all right.'

A
tear formed in the corner of his eye. She brushed it away with her thumb

.'No,
it's not all right,' said Tom.

'I'm
here.' She took his head in her hands, and she kissed him gently on the mouth.
Then she opened her blouse and placed his hand on her breast. 'This is what you
want, isn't it, Tom?'

'Yes.'

Sharon
pressed her breast to his mouth. She cradled him and he sucked at her like a
baby. Then she made him lie down in the dusty soil. Loosening his trousers, she
placed her cool fingers on his cock, wetting her fingers with her mouth to
lubricate him.

'I didn't mean to -' he shivered.

'
Shhh
...' She placed a finger on his lips. Then she slipped
off her shirt, letting her breasts fall free before stepping out of her jeans
and standing naked before him. He could smell her arousal, smell her sex on the
night air, like a ribbon of scent winding around him, snaring him. There was
another scent he recognized,
comingled
with her
delicious
cunt
odour. It was a smell like balsam. He
looked at Sharon in the darkness, standing over him, inspiring and yet
terrible, like a figurehead on the prow of a ghost ship, and saw that it was
not Sharon at all. It was what all this time he had most dreaded and yet most
wanted.

'Katie. Oh, Katie.'

'I had to come.'

'Katie.'

She knelt
before him, holding his face in her cool hands. 'Don't cry. You don't know how
difficult it's been. I've been trying to find a way to you.'

She was
warm, and flesh and blood. He tasted his own tears on her mouth. He kissed her,
and she tasted exactly as he remembered her. 'The old woman. Was it the
Magdalene -?' he tried.

'It
was me. Trying to find you. Don't talk, Tom. Love me.' Katie sank back into the
dust, gently pulling Tom across her. 'Love me, Tom,’ she kept murmuring. 'Love
me.'

She
spread her legs apart, opening herself to him. Tom made to put his hand on her
belly. But where her
cunt
should have been was
something else. It was an open book, not resting in front of her body, but part
of her living flesh. The open covers of the book were formed from the flesh of
her inner thighs. Her pubic hair shaped a mysterious script on the pages. As if
in a high wind, the pages began to flutter, fanning rapidly like a deck of
cards. When they stopped fluttering, there was a hole where the pages came to
rest, as if they had been eaten away by something rotten, corrupting.

'Please!' said Tom.

'Love me, Tom. Love me.'

'Please!' he repeated, urgently.

^‘
De
profundis
.
Katie hissed. She threw back her head and laughed a
vicious, cackling laugh until her entire body convulsed and collapsed in on the
book. It ignited in a noisy burst of flame, ash and cinders discharging in the
air, leaving behind only a scorched odour trailing a whiff of balsam.

Tom threw back his head and howled.

When
he looked up a shadowed figure was standing over him. It was the miniature
monk, his white eyes oscillating wildly in his dark face. He pointed vaguely at
Tom. 'Man or spirit?' he shouted. 'Are you man or spirit?'

40

'Jesus Christ,' Tom said to Sharon
shortly after he'd met
Tobie
for the first time.
'This just isn't going to work.'

'Give her a
chance,’ Sharon hissed. 'Don't underestimate her. And remember she's doing
this as a favour to me.'

Tobie
had stopped taking in men at the Bet Ha-
Kerem
, either as day patients or as residents, ever since
the time Ahmed had run amok. During his period of intense crisis, Ahmed's
party-piece had been to break into women's rooms at night, or to corral female
day patients in some small room. Naked and in a state of considerable
excitement, he would present his quarry with a blunt kitchen knife, begging her
to hack off what he considered at the time to be the root of all his problems.
Apart from frightening some of the women with this extreme request, Ahmed never
harmed any of them and was at greater risk to himself than to anyone else.
Tobie's
chief fear at the time was that one of the women,
in the swirling dark of her own crisis, might take up the invitation.

Sharon
had to lean hard on
Tobie
to get her to see Tom.
'Just see if you can get him to talk,' she'd said. 'He simply won't talk to
me.'

'I'm
already working twenty-five hours a day. How can I?'

'Stay out of
my day group. Leave the accountant alone. Get off the housekeeper's back. Stop
interfering in the kitchen.’

'Half an hour. That's all. I give him half
an hour.'

Sharon kissed her. 'You're a sherbet.'

'Get off me. Is he a walnut or an onion?'

Counselling
shorthand came in fruit and
veg
. Some people peeled
easily, like an orange, revealing a sticky, spongy mass inside. Others cracked
with a struggle, like a walnut. Onions were tricky, pretending to reveal a
layer at a time, but leaving you apparently no further on. Sometimes, when
peeling onions, you were the one who ended up crying. 'Onion,' said Sharon.

Having
persuaded
Tobie
to see Tom the Onion, all Sharon had
to do was persuade Tom the Onion to see
Tobie
the
Knife.

'No way,' Tom had said.

But
Sharon was determined. She reminded him of the condition in which she found him
when she returned to the garden the previous night.

After he bruised her
with his rough handling she stalked out of the garden, determined to drive
away. But by the time she reached the car, her anger had lessened. She sat in
the car collecting her thoughts, bent on giving him a piece of her mind when he
arrived. Some time elapsed before she started to feel anxious. Then she heard
his howl.

By
the time she got to him, the little monk was struggling to help a naked,
dust-caked Tom to his feet. Tom was
blubbing
Katie's
name.

'Thank you,' Sharon said to the monk.
'I'll take him.'

'He's
very distressed,' the monk said, his huge, unseeing white eyes trying to
locate her somewhere in the sky.

'Yes. He is.'

She managed
to get Tom to dress himself, and the monk opened the gate for them.

'How much of last night
do you remember, Tom?' The fact was he remembered all of it.

'Admit you're in
trouble,' Sharon told him. 'You won't talk to me. Talk to
Tobie
.'

Sharon didn't
let the matter drop and badgered him until he agreed to go in to work with her
for an initial meeting. When
Tobie
called him
darlink
for the third time Tom developed a
serious loathing for the woman. Then she claimed to be unable to see him until
after Sharon had gone home in the afternoon. 'Too busy,
darlink
.
And Sharon's too busy to have you under her feet.'

So he was
sent away with an invitation to come back later. Before leaving the centre he
looked in on Sharon, who was talking with some women in the kitchen. They
hushed when he walked in.

'Well?' Sharon inquired.

Tom shook
his head. 'It won't work.' Sharon made her eyes into plutonium-tipped darts.
'All right,' he conceded. 'Just the one meeting.' He left, knowing that the
other women in the kitchen were now quizzing Sharon about him.

He returned,
as scheduled, moments before Sharon was ready to leave. She took him aside,
kissed him and made him promise to give it a fair trial. Then she parked him in
an immaculate, magnolia-painted room, with nylon carpet and nylon-upholstered,
steel-frame chairs arranged in a circle, where he was told to await
Tobie
.

After
fifteen minutes
Tobie
put her head around the door
and waved a hand at him, manipulating her fingers like a spider. 'Coming,
darlink
.
Coming.' Then she was gone again.

Tom
fidgeted for another twenty minutes or so before
Tobie
showed up. By then he was feeling restless and irritable. He didn't know that
Sharon's parting words to
Tobie
had been 'Make him
wait. Get him on edge.'

Tobie
sat down. 'You want some coffee?

'No,' he said coldly.

'I do. I
want some coffee.' She was gone again for another five minutes, returning with
a tray on which there were two cups. She sat down, rubbing her hands. 'Is it
comfortable for you? I don't like all these empty chairs. They make me think
the room is full of ghosts.'

'It'll do fine.'

'You're sure?'

'Perfectly.'

'Fine and
good. Well, let's have this coffee before we begin. Black or white?'

Tom
allowed the coffee to be pressed on him.
Tobie
made a
grand fuss of offering him sugar, which he declined, and a biscuit, which he
accepted. Finally, with the coffee ritual over, cups and saucers were settled
on adjacent chairs and
Tobie
was ready to begin.
'Well, now,
darlink
.
Here we are. Now
what did you want to tell me?'

'Pardon?' said Tom.

‘I
understand from Sharon you have something to tell me. Fire away. Here I am.'
Theatrically, she put a hand behind her ear. 'Look, I'm listening.'

'You're kidding.'

'Kidding? Why I should be kidding?'

'There's a
misunderstanding. Sharon implied that
you
had something to say to
me.
^’

'Honey, I don't know you from Adam.'

Tom shook his head in
disbelief.
Tobie
glanced at her watch. 'I don't want
to rush you,
darlink
,
but we really
don't have all night. Half an hour to be exact. I've got one of those ladies'
birthdays to think about. We always make a cake and all those nice things, you
know?'

Tom looked
at her in disbelief. What was Sharon up to? Why was he here listening to this
fussy old dame with the blue rinse and the birthday cakes? 'Sharon thought it
was a good idea, that's all,’ he said. She smiled sweetly, then seemed
distracted by a small stain on her skirt, which she picked at in animated
fashion. 'She thought I should talk.'