Requiem (33 page)

Tom
was taken aback. It was the first time
Tobie
had
sworn at him, and the first time she'd dropped the sweet-little-old-lady
persona. Now she looked quite angry. The three other women, too, were staring
at him as if they thought it was high time he behaved himself.

'I'm sorry -' he tried.

'Don't be
sorry. Be precise. We got more sorry here than we can use.'

'That's true,' Christina added, obscurely.

'And
the truth is, Tom, we're getting a little bit impatient.'

'What
more do you want? I told you everything yesterday. I made a clean breast of
it.'

'Big deal,’ said Christina.

'
Yeh
, big deal,'
said the serial killer.

Tom
was astonished at the way the mood had suddenly turned against him.

'After
all,' said
Tobie
, 'there's more than just your
feelings at stake here. Other people are suffering too.'

Sharon?
Did she mean Sharon? The previous night Sharon had excelled herself. She had,
against all her best instincts, made her apartment beautiful for Tom, cooked
him a meal, filled the place with lighted candles and told him the
truth.

'Always?'
Tom had said, after fifteen seconds of stunned silence.

'Always.'

'Even from college days?'

'From the
first day I met you. Almost everything I have ever done since then was either
to impress you, or to be near you, or to run away from you. It's horrible,
isn't it?'

'Is it?'

'Hiding it,
I mean. All that time. Hardly a day going by without me thinking about you in
one way or another. Having to pretend to be pleased when you were married.
Having to pretend not to have hope for myself when Katie died. Everything in
between.'

'I can
hardly believe what you're saying to me, Sharon.'

'You'd
better. You don't know what it's taken to get me to say this. You've been
inside me, possessing me, haunting me like a spirit, all this time. And yet you
weren't even responsible.'

'I don't know what to say.'

'You
don't have to say anything. You don't have to do anything. I just had to tell
you, that's all. I had to change what I was doing and tell you.'

'Does it feel better?'

'It feels better and it feels worse.'

They
had gone to bed, but too much lay between them: the weight of Sharon's
revelation, his own confession in
Tobie's
sessions,
the ghost of Katie paradoxically drawing ever nearer as he tried to talk it out
of existence. These things were like a set of daggers hovering in the dark,
angled towards his head. When Tom was unable to make love, Sharon had cried
hot, bitter tears.

'Yes,'
Christina echoed
Tobie
, 'other people are copping
the fall-out.'

Rachel,
who until this moment hadn't uttered a word, smiled sweetly and said, 'What
we're suggesting is this. What if we do believe in ghosts, and yet what if it
wasn't Katie at all who wrote those things on the blackboard?'

Tom
looked from one to the other of them. Rebecca and Rachel gazed at him, fascinated.
Tobie
watched him closely, head cocked. Christina
blinked dully.

'Tell us what was written,'
Tobie
said softly.

Tom cleared his throat.
'It was just filth. Juvenile filth.'

'Tell us exactly.' ,
'You know the kind of thing. "Teacher fucks" and all that -'

'Here.’
Tobie
was holding out a felt-tipped marker pen. She nodded
at the gleaming white board behind him and pushed the pen into his hand. 'Show
us.'

'Is this necessary?'

'Don't be
afraid. Nothing you write up there can shock us.'

'Hell, no,' affirmed the serial killer.

Tom
got up stiffly and stood at the board. He shook his head briefly, as if to
distance himself from the unnecessary ritual. Then he calmly wrote the word
'FUCK' on the board in large letters. He looked back at the group.
Tobie
nodded approval. Then he wrote 'TEACHER FUCKS
VIRGINS.'

'You told
me,' said
Tobie
evenly, 'that it was written in
Katie's handwriting. Could you make it look like that?'

He shrugged, wiped what
he had written and wrote it up again in rounded, feminized but decisive
letters. Then, more rapidly, he wrote, 'KELLY MCGOVERN SUCKS MR WEBSTER'S
COCK.' Then he started scribbling faster, as if with a pent-up anger. 'SHE
TAKES IT UP HER ARSE. HE COMES IN KELLY'S CUNT.' His hand scuttled across the
board in an accelerating frenzy, filling the available white space. It was
almost as if his hand was a detached thing, independent of the rest of his
body, scrabbling across the white space like a broken-winged bird or an insect
looking for cover. The white space was filling up with angry, demented
lettering. He began to fill in the spaces between letters. He was sweating
profusely, scrawling more and more juvenile filth and abuse across the first
slogans. Finally, when the board came to resemble a tangled black nest,
indecipherable, his arm fell limply to his side. He turned to his audience.
'Satisfied?'

'Yes,' said
Tobie
.
'Very.'

'Can we go now?' said Christina.

'Yes, you can go now we know.'

Christina
and the serial killer got up and left, as if they'd been doing him, or
Tobie
, some huge favour by sitting in on this exhibition.

'What
do you mean,
now we know?'
Tom's voice keening.

‘I
think you know too,' said
Tobie
. Rachel, who had
stayed, smiled sympathetically.

'What do you mean? What are you saying?'

The
two women looked back at him in silence. Then the light dawned.

‘I
get it,' Tom nodded, smiling. 'You're saying that I did it. You're saying I
wrote the stuff on the blackboard, is that it? Is that what you're saying?'

'It
seems to me,' said
Tobie
, 'that you're the one who is
doing the saying.'

'You're crazy.'

'Guess we all are, Tom. A little bit.'

'You're saying I did this to myself?'

'Tom, face
it. You felt responsible for Katie's death. Maybe, you think, if you hadn't
seen this girl, you would have been with Katie. Or maybe you should have gone
with Katie that morning. Whatever. You blame yourself. And you can't forgive
yourself, can you? Oh, maybe it would have been better if you'd loved Katie.'

'Shut up,
Tobie
.'

'Yes, that's the hard
part. The really hard part. If you'd loved Katie, it would all have been
different. You could have grieved differently. Things would have been
different. But what you really can't forgive yourself is the terrible sin of
not
having loved her. You think that's what killed her. You think that from the
moment you stopped loving her, she began to die. The double-death. Death from
lack of love. Didn't she say that to you: "I'd die if you ever stopped
loving me"? Didn't she say that? Well, you have to believe me, Tom: you don't
have that much power. Yet, still, every day you go on crucifying yourself, all
because of the unforgivable crime of not loving her enough.'

'Fuck you,
Tobie
.'

'Self-crucifixion, Tom. It's all the rage
in this place.'

'I said, "Fuck you.'"

'You'll
think about what I said. You haven't any choice.'
Tobie
got up. 'At least your hostility is a little more out in the open. I'm going to
leave you with Rachel here for a moment. She's got something to say.'

Tobie
went out, closing the
door behind her with a quiet click.

'Did you see
that?' Tom shouted at Rachel. 'Can you believe that woman?'

'Sit down,'
said Rachel. 'Sit down beside me. I've got something to tell you.'

Tom slumped into a chair
across the room from Rachel, so she got up and pulled a chair close to him. 'I
was one of
Tobie's
patients. She asked me to come
today, to talk to you. I was addicted to pills, I had eating disorders, all of
that thing I went through. Some of this was caused by phone calls I used to
get. Obscene phone calls from some anonymous man, almost every night I spent
alone. I reported it to the police, changed my number, did everything. Still
they continued. Then the phone calls became letters, addressed not only to my
home but to all the people who were close to me. The letters offered graphic
accounts of all of my sexual perversions. In lovingly rendered detail. I liked
orgies. I liked to be whipped. I liked to eat my lover's shit. Of course it was
all lies, but can you imagine how my mother and father felt about receiving
this kind of stuff through the mail?’

'I can't tell you what I
imagined I would do with this man if I ever found out who it was.

'Anyway,
you know what I'm going to say. It was
Tobie
who
showed me that I was the one who was sending the letters. The phone calls may
have been real to start with, I don't know. But I never had one when anyone
else was with me.'

Tom was only
partly listening to Rachel's story. He was recalling the night when he stayed
behind at school, hiding in the store cupboard at the back of the classroom,
with the door locked. He knew he had slept, and the words had appeared on the
blackboard while he had slept.

'The point
is,' Rachel continued, 'I'm here to tell you it happens. Of course, I didn't
want to believe it. I
couldn't
believe it. I hadn't even heard of half
the bizarre practices I'd dreamed up for myself in those letters. But when it
was shown to me, when it was pieced together, when I finally admitted to myself
what a dark side of me was doing, then I started to get better.

'That's all
I have to tell you, Tom. And I can't stay any longer: I've got a family, and I
have to go back to them now. But
Tobie
asked me to
tell you my story. Talk to her; she's a great healer. A bit odd, but a great
healer.' Rachel stood up, offering a handshake. 'I want to wish you well.'

Tom accepted
the handshake, limply, without a word. Rachel hesitated, then stroked his
shoulder affectionately.

"Bye,'
she said. 'I'll tell
Tobie
I'm leaving. She won't want
to leave you alone.'

Rachel went
out. Tom sat alone in the crushing silence.
Tobie's
words were still echoing inside him. The searchlight of a terrible truth had
been turned on him. It burned like lime.

The sound of
a door slamming further down the corridor jolted him back to awareness. He
leapt off his chair and dragged a cupboard away from the wall, wedging it in
front
of the door.

Tom was barricading himself in.

51

Sharon arrived back at her
apartment to find the message light winking on her answer phone. Before playing
back the message she opened the fridge and pulled out a
Maccabee
,
uncapped it and bumped the fridge door shut with her bottom. Unable to face
him, she'd managed to get out of the centre just as Tom had arrived.

It
had been a terrible day. Exhausted from a night of crying and lack of sleep,
she'd been little use to anyone at the centre.
Tobie
had been in an irritable mood, and all of the women resident at the centre had
given her pre-menstrual hell. She had never understood how it was that women
living in institutionalized proximity all managed to synchronize their
menstrual cycles; but it had been true in college, in the kibbutz and in the
rehabilitation centre, and it was not a natural advantage. She slumped in a
chair.

Now
she was going to have to face Tom, having unloaded on to him the full weight of
her obsession. Revealing everything, she'd sensed immediately, was a mistake.
She was still inwardly cringing. She'd been prepared for several different
reactions but not for the dumbfounded silence which had followed her announcement.
Tom had simply frozen.

After
work that evening she had gone to Ahmed's, where she had confessed it all
again. Ahmed had been in a strange mood, lying quietly on his floor cushions,
nodding his shaved head, listening to Sharon's emotional account of everything
she'd said to Tom.

When
Sharon had talked herself into silence, he'd said, 'So, you have suffered as I
have suffered.'

'How
have you suffered?'

'We're
the same, you and I. We're both damned by the fact that we are liked by the
person we love. It's hell to be liked when we would be loved. It would be
easier to be hated.'

She looked into the Arab's liquid eyes and
realized about whom he was talking.  'No, Ahmed, don't say that.' ‘It’s
true. I've always felt this.'

She
got up. 'I'm sorry, Ahmed, I have to go. It's all too much. I can't take all of
this.'