Requiem (27 page)

'Yes. It
crouches in the dark, and it watches. I don't care anymore.'

'
Ohhh
. . . When you kiss my belly like that . . . Make love
to me again. When you make love to me, the
djinn
can't get inside me. I'm afraid of them getting inside me.'

'You're not afraid of me being inside
you?'

'Never. But
I'm afraid of love getting inside me. I'm afraid of letting myself love you,
Tom.'

'Is love a
djinn
.’

'Yes, I
think it must be. Love is a
djinn
,
crouching
in the dark, waiting to get inside you.’

'No. The
djinn
is what comes when love is gone, when
it's seen enough.'

'You're right. Love gets
bored. Love gets tired. It wants to go somewhere else. But when it comes out it
leaves a terrible hole, a gaping wound, bleeding, hollow. A place for
djinn
to live. That's why I'm afraid of love.
Don't make me love you, Tom. Don't make me do that.'

43

'So what about Katie?
Why won't you talk to anyone about Katie?'
Tobie
was
nothing if not direct. She slurped coffee and clattered cup on saucer. At this
second session Tom had been ordered to make the coffee himself in the kitchen
and was upbraided when he'd failed to add biscuits to the tray. 'Ginger snaps,
darlink
.
In the cupboard you will find ginger
snaps, or I can't work.'

As well as
ginger snaps Tom had found Christina in the kitchen. She was seated at a
Formica table, her long hair hanging either side of an untouched glass of
water. 'Hello,' Tom had said brightly. She'd ignored him, hadn't even moved her
head to acknowledge him. When he returned to the room in which the first
meeting had taken place,
Tobie
had rearranged the
chairs. Now there were two chairs facing each other and a third adjacent to the
other two.

'Why the spare chair?' Tom asked lightly.

Tobie
shrugged. 'Gould be
for someone, could be for no one. What about Katie?'

'What about her?'

Tobie
reached
over and put a tiny pink hand on his arm. 'You know this notion of release,
it's not a joke. It's very important.'

'Yes.'

'So tell me about her.'

'What do you want to know?'

'Where
does it hurt,
darlink
?
Where does it
hurt?' Tom looked nonplussed.

Tobie
looked tired. 'This is why I don't bother no more with men. You are all too
stupid. Why do I waste my energies? So you can pretend you don't know what I'm
talking about? Only for Sharon I do this. OK. Have it your way. Let's start
with the funeral. What can you tell me?'

'She
was cremated. The usual thing. Quick job. Some vicar she never even knew.
Standard verses. Curtain closed. Done. Wheel in the next.'

'You sound bitter.'

'What else could be done?'

What
else indeed? thought Tom. Death placed you in the grip of ritual forces which
either did the job or left you profoundly dissatisfied. But it was the
institutional efficiency which had dismayed him most about Katie's funeral,
the punctilious execution of the event. There was something terrifying about
the way in which the vicar had swung into the ritual, a smooth meshing of
gears, a dynamo whistling, some well-greased words swished across the face of
the thing like dependable old curtains. You felt like you were at a hanging but
all you saw was the trap door falling open. Then you were led away and pushed
into a car with a noiseless engine. A kind of silence took over. The
dispatching job was done, but it touched no one. It settled nothing. It was
like watching a film of a funeral; God, it was even raining when you came out.
Afterwards everyone came up and mouthed feeble words of consolation before
going home; but you, you were left with the feeling that there was still
somewhere a body dangling from a rope, struggling, kicking, screaming.

'How did she die, your wife?'

'A tree fell on her.'

'Not a normal way to go.'

'She
was driving. There were gale-force winds. Not uncommon in England in the
autumn. It blew a lot of trees down. One of them landed on her car as she drove
home from church.'

'Was
she alone in the car?'

'Yes.'

'Pretty bad luck.'

'Bad as luck gets.'

'So why do you feel shitty about it?'

Tom looked up. 'I'm not finding this easy,
you know.'

'I
know that,
darlink
.
I'm not finding it
easy either. Being grown-up about these things isn't about it being easy.'

Tom
plummeted into an abyss of silence. If he was waiting for
Tobie
to drag him out of it, she resisted. Perhaps five minutes went by, but it was
impossible to tell when each second rounded and fattened itself in the howling
vacuum. At last he looked up at her, finding her gentle, sea-grey eyes resting
patiently on his. 'What?'

'You
were about to tell me why you feel shitty about all this.'

The
door opened. Christina walked in and without asking for, or receiving,
permission sat down on the third chair. Tom looked at
Tobie
.

'We
have a kind of open system,
darlink
.
Everybody
helps everybody. It means nobody is the patient, nobody is the doctor.
Christina and all the other women here have experiences and insights which can
be of help.'

Christina was staring dead ahead. If
Tobie
was suggesting she might act as one of his 
therapists, Tom was beginning to wonder how low he'd sunk.

'Low enough.' Christina said.

'What?' said Tom.

'You heard.'

'I heard, but I didn't -'

'Oh, fuck.'

'Don't be aggressive,'
Tobie
soothed.

'He's
the one,' Christina said, 'he's the one who's being hostile.'

'But
I didn't-'

Christina ignored
him and turned to the older woman. 'I'm trying to be grateful,
Tobie
, really I am. But listen to what he's giving out. How
can anyone be grateful? His mind is way outside his skull. Fuck it, if he's
going to be like this, I'm going.' Her chair fell backwards as she stood up and
left the room.

After the
door had closed Tom looked again at
Tobie
, who was
patting the back of her hair. She said, 'You were about to tell me why you feel
shitty about all this.'

Odd. She
seemed to repeat the words in exactly the same tone of voice she'd used before
Christina had interrupted. Tom looked at the chair. It had righted itself, but
he hadn't seen
Tobie
pick it up.

'You looked confused, Tom.'

'What was she talking about?'

"Who,
darlink
.’

'Christina. What did she mean about being
grateful?'

'You
lost me, honey. What does Christina have to do with this?'

'She
just came in and -'
Tobie
was looking blank. '- and
knocked the chair over.'

'Nobody
came in,
darlink
.
Not Christina, not
anybody.'

Tom looked hard at her, suspecting
some kind of game. 'Wait here.' He got up, left the room and stalked along the
corridor to the kitchen. Christina was still in her place at the table, staring
ahead, the untouched glass of water before her. 'Did you just come into the
room? Answer me.'

Christina
didn't move. Tom put his face aggressively close to hers. She didn't blink.
Then she drew her lips back across her teeth, somewhere between a sneer and a
smile. Tom went back to the room.

'Now
you look upset,' said
Tobie
. 'Tell me what's upsetting
you.'

'Hell! I saw
- or I
thought
I saw - Christina join us. She was sitting on that chair.
She said something to you about feeling grateful or not feeling grateful.'

'Was
it that?'
Tobie
pointed to a hand-drawn sign on the
wall which said:

Be Grateful to All Those You Meet Here
for Giving You the Chance to Work on Yourself.

Tom sighed,

'So you met
Christina, huh? Sharon's very good with her. Let me tell you about her: she's
like a radio station, picking up all this stuff from the airwaves. Only when
you tune in you don't know what you're going to get. Interference. Pirate
stations. Police calls. She's got a dial that won't stay still, no matter what
we do. No, Tom, she didn't come into the room just now. But someone did. And we
think we know who it was, don't we,
darlink
.’

'Do we?'

'Yes. Oh, yes, we both know who it was.
Don't we?'

'She was driving home from church. It was a Sunday.'

'Was she religious?' asked
Tobie
.

'Not until
the last few months of her life; not at all before then. I was the one with
vestigial religious beliefs. She used to take the piss in the early days. She
and Sharon both. In fact, it was Sharon who weaned me off religion at college.'

'She  
would.   But   we're   talking  
about   Katie, not Sharon.'
Tobie
wouldn’t
let him run away from the subject.

'It was
incredibly windy that morning. Even before she set off.'

Tom
remembered the colour of the sky, like heated steel buckled under a hammering.
He recalled the autumnal tree tops waving furiously as she climbed into her
car. She'd asked him to go with her again. It had become a ritual by then.
Every Sunday she would ask; he would refuse. 'Coming?' 'No.' But that morning
the request had a special tone, a renewed significance. The question pealed
like a bell. That morning she'd applied her make-up with a particular haste,
plastered it on, trying to cover up what was cracking underneath.

Then the car wouldn't
start. He recalled waiting behind the door with a sinking feeling as the
starter motor brayed hollowly in the yard, again and again. The overnight rain
had dampened the electrics. He was afraid she might change her mind and stay at
home. Finally he'd put on his shoes and had gone out to help. Throwing open the
bonnet, he'd sprayed the terminals before trying the thing himself, muttering
under his breath, 'Start, damn you, just start.'

At
last the motor had coughed into life, dirty exhaust smoke pulled ragged by the
wind as he revved the engine. She'd taken over from him in the driving seat
without a word. They didn't exchange a kiss. They didn't even meet each other's
eyes. She drove away. It was the last time Tom had seen her alive.

'You didn't want to go with her?' asked
Tobie
.

‘I wouldn't have gone anyway.'

'Anyway? What do you mean anyway?'

'I
had to ... I had an appointment that morning. I had to see someone, but even if
I hadn't, I wouldn't have gone.'

The church
Katie had started attending was some twelve miles from their home. There were
nearer options, but this was a medieval sandstone church, part Saxon, part
Norman, which they'd discovered while out walking. Katie had fallen in love
with its leaning bell tower and the bizarre inscriptions of its
seventeenth-century gravestones; with the rain-chewed gargoyles outside and
the interior carvings dreaming under centuries of wood polish; with the cracked
baptismal stone font and the odours of dying flowers; with the pyrotechnics of
stained glass; and with the weight of expended prayers, embedded in the stone
walls like stacked hymn books.

And most of
all she'd been taken by its greatest treasure, something preserved under the
bell tower only because the rampaging iconoclasts were unable to reach it or
were too sickened or dispirited by their own vandalism. Standing in a trefoil
perpendicular niche in the east wall was a rare statue of Mary, the patron
saint. Shielded from the weathering of centuries, it was not Mary the Virgin, not
the Mother, but the darker Mary, the shadow one, the sexual Mary. She was
represented with flowing hair and clad in a gown, holding a vase of balsam in
her outstretched hand. She gazed south-east, it was said, in exact compass
alignment with the city of Jerusalem.

The Magdalene, watching from the tower.

‘I've
thought of something,' Tom said to
Tobie
. 'It hadn't
occurred to me before. The church she'd started going to, it was the Church of
Mary Magdalene.'

'Is that significant?'

'No. Yes. God, I don't know.
^’

'Sounds like it might be.'

'If you say so.'

'Let's try
another tack. Who were you going to see that morning when she died?'