‘’Aven’t you finished reading The Answer yet?’ snapped spiky-haired Vivienne. ‘We must’ve entered the Season of the Stolen Prophet. Red’s his colour.’
‘Very good, Vivienne,’ called Becca Pirbright, smiling from a few beds away, and Vivienne visibly preened herself.
But there was something else on Robin’s bed beside her folded scarlet tracksuit: a box of hair colour remover with a slip of paper lying on top of it, with what she recognised as a quotation from The Answer printed on it.
The False Self craves that which is artificial and unnatural.
The True Self craves that which is genuine and natural.
Robin glanced across the dormitory and saw green-haired Penny Brown also examining a box of hair colour remover. Their eyes met; Robin smiled and pointed towards the bathroom and Penny, smiling back, nodded.
To Robin’s surprise, Louise was standing at the sink, carefully shaving her head in the mirror. Their eyes met briefly. Louise dropped her gaze first. Having towelled off her now completely bald pate, she left the bathroom without speaking.
‘People were telling me,’ whispered Penny, ‘that she’s been shaved for, like, a year.’
‘Wow,’ said Robin. ‘D’you know why?’
Penny shook her head.
Tired as she was, and resentful that she had to give up valuable sleeping time to removing her blue hair dye, Robin was nevertheless glad for the opportunity to talk freely to another church member, especially one whose daily routine differed so markedly from her own.
‘How’re you doing? I’ve barely seen you since we were in Fire Group together.’
‘Great,’ said Penny. ‘Really great.’
Her round face was slimmer than it had been on arrival at the farm and there were shadows beneath her eyes. Side by side at the bathroom mirror, Robin and Penny opened the boxes and began to apply the product to their hair.
‘If this is the start of the Season of the Stolen Prophet,’ said Penny, ‘we’ll be seeing a proper Manifestation soon.’
She sounded both excited and frightened.
‘It was incredible, seeing the Drowned Prophet appear, wasn’t it?’ said Robin.
‘Yes,’ said Penny. ‘That’s what really – I mean, once you’ve seen that, there’s no going back to normal life, is there? Like, the proof.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Robin. ‘I felt the same.’
Penny looked disconsolately at her reflection, with her green hair now covered in a thick white paste.
‘It was growing out anyway,’ she said, with an air of trying to convince herself she was happy to be doing what she was doing.
‘So what have you been up to?’ asked Robin.
‘Um, loads of stuff,’ said Penny. ‘Cooking, working on the vegetable patch. I’ve been helping with Jacob as well. And we had a really good talk this morning, on spirit bonding.’
‘Really?’ said Robin. ‘I haven’t had that yet… how’s Jacob doing?’
‘He’s definitely getting better,’ said Penny, evidently under the impression that Robin knew all about Jacob.
‘Oh, good,’ said Robin. ‘I heard he wasn’t too well.’
‘I mean, he hasn’t been, obviously,’ said Penny. Her manner was somewhere between anxious and cagey. ‘It’s like, difficult, isn’t it? Because someone like that, they can’t understand about the false self and the pure spirit, and that’s why they can’t heal themselves.’
‘Right,’ said Robin, nodding, ‘but you think he’s getting better?’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Penny. ‘Definitely.’
‘It’s nice of Mazu to have him in the farmhouse,’ said Robin, subtly probing.
‘Yeah,’ said Penny again, ‘but he couldn’t be in the dormitory with all his problems.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Robin, carefully feeling her way. ‘Dr Zhou seems so nice.’
‘Yeah, it’s really lucky Jacob’s got Dr Zhou, because it’d be a nightmare if he was on the outside,’ said Penny. ‘They euthanise people like Jacob out there.’
‘D’you think so?’ asked Robin.
‘Of course they do,’ said Penny, in disbelief at Robin’s naivety. ‘The state doesn’t want to look after them, so they’re just quietly done away with by the NHS – the Nazi Hate Squad, Dr Zhou calls it,’ she added, before looking anxiously in the mirror at her hair and saying, ‘How long d’you think it’s been on? It’s hard to know, without a watch or anything…’
‘Maybe five minutes?’ said Robin. Seeking to capitalise on Penny’s mention of the lack of watches, and encourage the girl to share anything negative she might have noticed about the UHC, she said lightly,
‘Funny, having to get our dye out. Mazu’s hair can’t be naturally that black, can it? She’s in her forties and she hasn’t got a single bit of grey.’
Penny’s demeanour changed instantly.
‘Critiquing people’s looks is pure materialist judgement.’
‘I’m not—’
‘Flesh is unimportant. Spirit is all-important.’
Her tone was didactic, but her eyes were fearful.
‘I know, but if it doesn’t matter what we look like, why have we got to take out our hair dye?’ said Robin reasonably.
‘Because – it was on the bit of paper on the box. The true self is natural.’
Now looking alarmed, Penny scurried away into a shower cubicle and closed the door behind her.
When she estimated that twenty minutes had passed, Robin stripped off her tracksuit, showered the product out of her hair, dried herself, checked in the mirror that all traces of blue dye were gone, then returned to the dark dormitory in her pyjamas.
Penny remained hidden in her shower cubicle throughout.
46
An individual finds himself in an evil environment to which he is committed by external ties.
But he has an inner relationship with a superior man…
The I Ching or Book of Changes
The routine of the higher-level recruits changed with the arrival of the Season of the Stolen Prophet. They were no longer spending entire mornings watching footage of war atrocities and famine in the farmhouse basement but were given more lectures on the nine steps to pure spirit: admission, service, divestment, union, renunciation, acceptance, purification, mortification and sacrifice. They were given practical advice on how to achieve steps one to six, which could be worked on concurrently, but the rest were shrouded in mystery, and only those who were judged to have successfully mastered the first half dozen were deemed worthy to learn how to achieve the last three.
Robin also had to endure a second Revelation session. For the second time, she escaped sitting in the hot seat in the middle of the circle, although Vivienne and the elderly Walter were less fortunate. Vivienne was attacked for her habit of changing her accent to disguise her moneyed background and accused of arrogance, self-centredness and hypocrisy until she was reduced to heaving sobs, while Walter, who’d admitted to a long-running feud with an ex-colleague at his old university, was berated for egomotivity and materialist judgement. Alone of those who’d so far been subjected to Primal Response Therapy, Walter didn’t cry. He turned white, but nodded rhythmically, almost eagerly, as the circle threw insults and accusations at him.
‘Yes,’ he muttered, blinking furiously behind his glasses, ‘yes… that’s true… it’s all true… very bad… yes, indeed… false self…’
Meanwhile the bottoms of the medium-sized tracksuits Robin was given once a week kept sliding down from her waist, because she’d lost so much weight. Other than the irritation of having to constantly pull them up again, this didn’t trouble her nearly as much as the awareness that she was slowly becoming institutionalised.