He steps back. Surveys each of us in turn. His gaze lingers on Freya and for a moment he seems about to speak to her. He stops himself: an almost imperceptible shake of the head. Raises his blasphemous roll-up and takes a drag. Proffers it to me. I find myself leaning in, nose and lip touching his dirty fingers. I inhale the profane offering. Freya, moving quickly, does the same.
“What are you doing?” asks Violet, looking shocked. She’s staring at me like I’m a stranger. She looks like the girl I met by the water’s edge, lost and thoughtful, back when we were little more than girls. I wonder if she’s jealous and like the thought.
“Chill,” I say, and it feels so silly in my mouth that I start giggling. “We’re not harming anybody.”
“You’ll get germs,” snaps Violet. Her world seems to be shifting and I’m enjoying it. Enjoying the limelight; the attention.
“Forest green,” says the man, his eyes moving over Violet’s body like searchlights. “Sensitive to criticism. Jealous. Lacking in personal responsibility. A pretender. Unkind.”
“You can’t say that to me,” says Violet, and her eyes start to fill. “You don’t know me, you don’t know anything about me …,”
“I do,” he says, and somehow his voice is a calm and kindly thing, like a damp flannel upon fevered skin. “I see things. I understand. I see what is within. I can help you.” He looks at each of them in turn. “Don’t you want to be whole again? Don’t you want to put the pieces of yourself back where they belong?”
“Don’t be mean to her,” says Freya, shaking her head. “She’s nice. She’s been nice to me.”
Violet wipes a tear away, defiance and misery making her striking features suddenly seem very young. “You’re just a smelly man,” she says, petulantly. “Just a man with no shoes. With no money. Her dad’s a vicar. She’s never even kissed anybody so I don’t know why you’re going all mad ga-ga over her. I bet you live in a caravan or something.”
At this, his smiles. Smiles so wide that his ears seem to move, like a cat’s.
“Do you want to see?” he asks. “All of you.” He turns gimlet eyes on Violet. “I would dearly love to help you find your path, as I have found mine. I am a healer. A guide.”
“I knew a guide once,” I say, and my voice sounds dreamy. “He talked like you.”
The singer stares at me, his mismatched eyes blending, cyclcops-like, into one shimmering orb. I feel like he’s pulling me towards him with his mind.
“I would love to help you both,” he says, to Violet and me. He shoots a quick glance at Freya. She holds his gaze as something passes between them. Something I’ve taken a long time to understand.
In a swift movement, he turns away. Walks, sure-footed, across the damp grass.
I’m the first to follow.
Freya next.
In time, Violet will come too.
She would rather die than be left out.
Part III
30
St Michael and All Angels Church
December 3, 1991
8.03pm
Violet sits in the front pew, shivering. It’s colder indoors than out. She wears her bone-white exhalations like a scarf: wraith-like shapes stark against the pure black of her coat and the inky curtains of loose-hanging hair.
It’s peaceful here, in a melancholy way. It makes her think of damp Sundays at Catherine’s house: Mum and Dad gently arguing; the sour fug of boiled greens and roasting lamb; one of the weekend boarders inflicting clandestine dead legs during the ad breaks in the Grand Prix; Rev Marlish fussing with his notes for the evening sermon.
She trembles, as if somebody is blowing on her neck. Raises her eyes from the cold flagstone floor. Glances up at prayer books and psalm numbers. There’s a damp patch on the wall behind the altar. A page marker lolls from the splayed pages on a big, red-bound Bible: a tongue of silk dangling in the frigid air. Technicolour disciples gaze down from the stained glass, faces serene, halos golden. One is captured mid-blessing, his hand raised, three fingers extended. He looks like he’s asking the others if they’ve stolen his glove-puppet. The blessed onlookers seem bemused: fat angels and unfeasibly clean shepherds, shouting out a chorus of denials from the white clouds that adorn the masterful painting on the far wall. The image seems to shimmer in the pin-pricks of heat that rise from the candles, and Jesus, sat atop the mural like a fairy on a cake, looks at once beatific and sinister in the rippling air.
She tries to pray. Feels like a dick-head and stops herself. Screws up her eyes and scratches at the cold, red skin on her knees. She feels dirty. Stained, as if there’s a smudge of grease somewhere inside her that she can’t reach, no matter how hard she scrubs at herself with the black, chemical-scented soap.
Violet lowers her head. Folds her lips in on themselves and tries again. How to start? What to say? Dear God? Dear Lord? Our Father? She wants to scream, and cry and take a hammer to something beautiful.
Hello God, she mutters, her lips barely moving. It’s me. Violet. You know my friend’s dad. Um, I don’t really know how to do this. I think you wouldn’t like what I’ve been doing. What I’ve been seeing. Um, I’ve been trying to remember. To make sense of what I feel. I don’t know what to say. Um, please bless the poor. And the weak. And the hungry. Um, please bless the people who deserve it and, well, help those who don’t to become better people. If you want. I mean, just do what you’re doing, really, I’m not offering advice…
She stops, appalled at herself and feeling ridiculous. Tries again.
Is she okay, God? Freya, I mean. Nobody will talk to me about her, you see. They just want to forget. People always say that it’s better to talk about things and not bottle them up but that’s what they want me to do whenever I mention it. They want it to not have happened. But it did happen, God. You know it did. He tricked us. Made us believe he loved us. All that talk of how special we were, what we could become – all those lies about greater truths and higher selves.
Violet opens her eyes to find her vision clouded by tears. She realises she has been speaking aloud, the words gathering softly about her mouth. She feels like sucking them back in: inhaling the uttered secrets before they can be swallowed up by anybody else.
Is she alive, God? I don’t know how badly he hurt her. He hurt me, I know that. It still hurts sometimes. But I’m here. Catherine too, and somehow it seems to have all done her some good. There’s a light in her now that wasn’t there before. She won’t talk about it either. The police have made it plain – we talk and everybody finds out what happened. Everybody finds out what we did. They’ve got their own secrets to hide. I know they think we’ve got more to tell them but I promise, I don’t. All I remember is waking up on the floor, all muddy and bloody and numb. Catherine was shaking me, crying like she’d never stop. All her fingernails were gone. There was dirt all over her. And Freya was gone. He was gone. And nobody will tell me what really happened. They’re scared of something. Sometimes I think they’re scared of me ….