by Liz Jensen
The House of God is, say the background articles, a triumph of market research, thanks to interactive computer technology. Witness the platforms and revolving doors, the laminated glass floors, the mirrored walls, the trompe-l’oeil ceilings, and the impressive central stage which boasts a host of ingeniously devised and cunningly crafted design features. Witness the state-of-the-art gymnasium, the two-, three-, and five-star restaurant facilities, the Terrestrial Communications Centre with its bank of telephones and faxes for the busy executive worshipper, and the Fantasy Garden for the kiddies. Witness a miracle.
Pilgrims have been flocking to the House of God in their thousands. It’s cheaper than a theme park, and better for the waistline. To mention nothing of the soul.
Linda puts the brochure down, inhales smoke deep into her lungs, and gazes out of the window at the red-brick of Gridiron suburbia streaking past.
The soul. Following her brief and bruising encounter with religion, my sister is scathing about the idea of the soul. In the aftermath of her betrayal by Vernon Carmichael, her problem-solving mind has wrestled valiantly with the old chestnut of the existence of God – this she confides to me later – but has reached an epistemological cul-de-sac. Being a Mensa member is no help.
So fuck it all.
And fuck the Reverend Carmichael in particular.
She’d told me about her plan.
‘See it as a form of slow-release capsule,’ she’d said mysteriously. ‘By the time it all dawns on him, it’ll be too late.’
Now she re-opens her research file and smiles over her anchovy sandwich crusts with so much glee that the ticket-inspector has to take a second look to make sure she isn’t suffering from colonic cramp, featured in the First Aid manual. There’s certainly a pungent smell in the vicinity. The countryside skitters past, and as Linda speeds towards the House of God with her bundle of perfection, she sings a thumping religious ditty, with tambourines, a light, Eurovision drum-beat, and soprano parts for the ladies.
Today’s the day
The time is now
Let Jesus in
It’s bollocks hour!
This is her own variation.
Manxheath Institute of Total Dysfunction
Dear departed Brendan,
Holding up there OK? Treat you well, do they? Good. Well, that’s enough of your news. Here’s mine.
Who’d have thought it: a new member. From the wrong side of the tracks, this time. An old face from days gone by. Remember Dr Ishmael Stern? Well, you wouldn’t recognise him now; his wardrobe’s taken quite a nosedive. Gone is Armani. The silk shirts, likewise, disparus. Goodbye, Fifth Avenue chic, hello, M & S leisure slax. Our cardiganed friend sits in a chair, most days, watching television. This seems to be the standard routine for newcomers. It’s what Hazel did, before she buggered off without so much as a wee hanky-wave. I asked our son-in-law Gregory where she was, when he dropped by like a grim reaper, but he said how should he know, he’d come looking for her himself, seeing as she’d ‘stolen’ Billy from a certain Mrs Goody when her back was turned.
‘Goody for her,’ I said, but Gregory didn’t get the joke.
A fog of guilt seemed to cling to him, like that visible body odour you see on the TV in the anti-perspirant ad. He turned on his heel to slope off, but Dr Stern, who’d been sitting all morning with his eyes glazed over, nursing a cup of cold Horlicks, suddenly tuned in at the sound of his voice.
‘Colleague!’ he called out from the deep wing-sided armchair, the best one in the whole joint, which we clientele had agreed to let him have for old times’ sake.
Greg didn’t recognise him at first, and when he did, the shock on his face (the cleanest shave in the North, I always thought, which all goes to show you should never trust a well-shaven man), the shock and the horror were a sight to see. His eyes had the look of sheep on the way to the abattoir. To Arabs, apparently, those thunderstruck eyes are a delicacy.
‘Good God!’
That’s our son-in-law Greg, expostulating in Ishmael’s direction. Ishmael is what we’ve taken to calling Dr Stern, now he’s minus his dignity. It’s friendlier, and it makes him seem like someone else – not the man we all knew as Dr S., who wore a white coat, and had us all stored on floppy disc, and broke my daughter’s heart. This is Dr Stern normalised, pared down to the bone, the thing we laughingly call personality laid bare, a live, vulnerable specimen on the shiny lino of the Day Room.
‘What on earth happened to you?’ asked Greg stupidly. ‘Why aren’t you running the hospital?’
Ishmael’s laugh was dry as a central-heating cough.
‘Don’t you read the newspapers? I’ve been struck off. Incompetence due to insanity. A patient of mine killed herself rather messily, and they found your motherin-law here in possession of a whole arsenal of mind-altering medication. Enough to cook anyone’s goose. So now I’m a voluntary patient in my own hospital. It’s a sort of poetic reincarnation. I’ve been relaxing. Watching television. A bit of clay work. Observing the new management flushing out the old, and learning to Think in New Ways. Dr Apple Tree, we call her. Quite the green fascist, but effective. I expect you’re worried about those incriminating files.’
He paused, for full effect, while Greg grabbed on to a handy Zimmer frame. He stood motionless, turning the colour that I call ‘white with a hint of urine’. I swear, I could hear his aortic sphincters thundering away. Now watch this bit. He staggers along with the walking frame, towards Dr S., or should I say ex-Doctor. His knuckles are clenched on the aluminium, bloodless.
‘Where are they?’ he hisses, his voice all cracking up with strain.
But Ishmael just cough-laughs.
Then suddenly Greg’s cast off the Zimmer frame and grabbed him! And there they are rolling around on the floor wrestling, with the television blaring Holy Hour behind them.
Talk about entertainment.
Thump. Crunch. Praise the Lord. Weugh.
Did you ever see that dirty film, Women in Love, directed by Ken Russell? It was showing on the TV last week. A passionate story of sexual obsession, the Radio Times called it. Well, it was like when they wrestled there, the two men. One was Oliver Reed, naked. The other one, the good-looking one, he was naked too. You kept trying to catch a glimpse of their appendages, but Ken Russell is a clever director and doesn’t show you too much of a good thing.
‘You’ll have to video it and do a freeze-frame if you want a proper look,’ I told Monica Fletcher. So we’d sighed and just settled for the muscular buttocks, and Monica had snivelled at the violence.
Bam. Geuk. Clonk.
On and on it went, until you couldn’t tell one from the other; they merged like a ganglion of Plasticine, the colours all squoilering together, and lots of grunting. But it all comes to a lurching halt when Dr Appleby enters and stops them with a single bark. They separate into individuals; one grey pinstripe, the other casual. Greg stands up and brushes himself down. He loosens his tie, which is half strangling him, with a tug. Ishmael has lost two buttons off his cable-knit cardie but he’s sitting on the floor there and laughing painfully and showing his nice teeth.
‘What’s going on?’ says Dr Appleby.
Her face is hard as a gingernut.
My turn to stir the excrement a bit, with my huge ladle. Old habits die hard, as they used to keep telling us in the socially vulnerable knitting circle, when it was a going concern.
‘Fighting over my precious Hazel,’ I tell her.
‘Who is this man?’ she asks, pointing at Greg, who’s now gathering up the contents of his wallet.
I see a cheque book under the sofa, but I don’t say anything.
‘He is my son-in-law, Gregory Paul Stevenson.’ This loudly, with the contempt it deserves.
‘May I ask what you’re doing here?’ she asks him.
All the staff have a normal voice and a special one reserved for visitors. It’s the speaking-to-visitors one she directs at him now, but there’s something held in check
about it, like it could quickly go the other way.
‘I was looking for my wife,’ says Greg shiftily. ‘And then this patient of yours attacked me.’
But Ishmael said nothing. His eyes were on Holy Hour. He was looking for bargains in another department. Before she left, Hazel said she reckoned he was just pretending to be a person of challenged stability, to escape punishment, but my bones tell me he’s a true convert. What’s this if it isn’t punishment?
‘Have you signed in as a visitor?’ Dr Appleby was asking Gregory snakily.
The smile had returned, but it wasn’t the full works.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Doctor,’ Greg was saying. ‘Please forgive me. As you’ve no doubt diagnosed, I’m in a bit of a distraught state.’ He tried to force a chuckle, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. ‘My wife Hazel – I thought she might be here. She was a patient – ’
‘Hazel Stevenson? I’ve discharged her,’ smiled Apple Tree. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her. She was mis-diagnosed and then inappropriately medicated. And then suffering withdrawal. An appalling mistake, due to an administrative error on the part of Dr Stern here, who as you see is experiencing deep regret. There’s been a full inquiry. We’re currently making sweeping changes. In the meantime we do apologise to you, Mr Stevenson. Your wife says she won’t be pressing charges against the hospital. We’ve allowed her to take her file with her, which is standard policy in such cases.’
Which was all he wanted to know, of course. He was out before you could say hidden agenda, with a wobbly look about the jaw that spelt big trouble. Ishmael and I settled down in front of the television. It was either that or scream some more over Isabella. I’ve screamed myself hoarse lately; I deserve a break. Monica joined us. Holy Hour is about the only thing she can watch without getting hysterical. (Her Ken Russell days are over.) Actually she doesn’t so much watch, as stand in front of the television with her eyes closed and her arm in the air, pushing upwards, palm out, in time with the music, like there’s an invisible tent above her head. Sometimes she tries out her tongues, or goes into a caterwauling routine that she calls ‘harmonics’. It’s all quite experimental. What do you think of the Reverend Carmichael’s House of God, then? Is it as good as the real thing, or wouldn’t you know? Monica sent off for one of those Tshirts with a huge mackerel on.
Yours sincerely,
Moira Sugden
PS: Vegetarian lasagne and fruit cup with live yoghurt again tonight!
SIXTEEN
Billy and I were playing hunt-the-miniature-soap when the phone rang, and I had to crawl out from under the bed to get it. It was Linda calling from a phone box in the House of God’s Terrestrial Communications Centre.
‘Quick, switch on the TV and see what the Wanker’s done now, to cover his tracks!’ she shrieked down the line.
Not quite what I was expecting to hear.
‘Who’s the Wanker?’ I asked, and she explained it was my husband.
Apparently she’d always called him that, behind my back and his. Despite everything, I felt slightly stung.
‘Have you dumped the package?’ I asked.
‘Not yet. After the Service. She’s asleep. Everything’s fine. But I think you should see what he’s up to. Turn on your television right this minute.’
I caught the sound of choirs singing in the background as she-who-must-be-obeyed hung up. I scrambled on to the giant bed and pressed the remote control; the screen flickered on above me.
And there it was, in flames, on live television: the Fertility Management Centre.
It was impressive; some of the fire seemed to be burning blue, and the late afternoon sky was blackened with rising tatters of detritus, while helicopters whirred above like hungry mosquitoes. It reminded me, curiously, of another, smaller fire, the one in which I’d burned Gregory’s matchstick church. The Airfix models would have gone the same way if Jane hadn’t intervened. But this was the real thing, and my adrenalin stirred. Belches of green and grey smoke formed noxious cumuli which sent the firemen scuttling for their walkie-talkies to say Alpha Roger; a wobbly camera panned from a cageful of barbecued laboratory rats to a general view of the disaster. It looked expensive. The chief fire officer on site was being interviewed by the local reporter, who was clearly having some sort of asthma attack. The fire officer, his eyes also streaming, agreed it was definitely the worst fire he’d seen in his long career in the fire-fighting services in this area.
‘And will you be looking into the possibility of arson?’ spluttered the reporter.
‘Yes, as I say, we shall doubtless, hopefully, be investigating the possibility of arson.’
‘Any clues so far, officer?’
‘No clues so far,’ coughed the fire officer.
‘A possibility, then, that we can’t rule out a link between the hostility of the Holy Task Force to the Perfect Baby Project that was partly housed here, and the present, er, fire?’
‘Nothing ruled out for the moment, now if you’ll excuse me.’
The reporter turned his sooty face to the camera and put on one of those expressions that they like to use at disaster scenes. He looked like he might die.
‘So. Live from the scene, no clues as yet, but one thing is certain, nobody will be coming to any conclusions as to the nature and cause of this fire until they’ve managed to extinguish it.’
A fit of coughing overtook him, but he soldiered on. ‘Now back to Patrick in the studio.’
One last glimpse of the wall of flame, and then on to junior royalty competing in an egg-and-spoon race at a charity event. So Gregory was trying to destroy the evidence by sending the whole mess up in smoke. I’d better move quickly. I called a Zippikab, cancelled the cheese and pineapple pizza with extra mushroom I’d ordered from room service, and stuffed Billy into his duffel coat.
Soon we were speeding through the wet streets of Gridiron towards the Fertility Management Centre, moths to the flame.
You are what you make. Is it then stating the all-too-obvious to point out that when you burn what you have made, you are doing something of an enormity close to suicide? I could have watched Greg’s life’s work blaze all night. It hissed and burped a pitiful song of folly.
Billy was in seventh heaven: police cars, ambulances, firemen, sirens going, blue lights flashing, heat, flames, soot, smoke, and men of action with calloused hands doing brave deeds with elbow grease and technology, killing the dragon and wiping their brows on oily rags. A scene of heroes. I approached the least heroic-looking, a callow police officer with a weak and incompetent lower lip, perhaps a trainee, who was taking notes and stammering into a walkie-talkie.
I said, ‘Excuse me, officer. I think I know who started this fire.’
He said, ‘Beg pardon, madam?’ The lip hung loose as though a muscle had died.
I said, ‘Get your notepad and write this name down: Dr Gregory Stevenson. Got that?’
He said, ‘Beg pardon, madam?’
I had chosen well. Eventually, despite his exploded biro, he got the name down, and a muddled grasp of why he was making a record of it.
‘So you’re alleging, madam, that a certain Gregory Stevenson deliberately started this fire as an act of arson, to destroy some kind of, er, evidence about another, er, crime to do with babies. Now, madam, can I take your name?’
But by then I was slamming the door of my waiting Zippikab. Through the window, Billy waved goodbye to the trainee policeman and we sped off into the night.
Linda slid out of the shadows as the organ began to tune up and squeezed into the last remaining space in a pew near the front. She put the basket containing Katie-Koo, three nappies and a bottle of milk on the floor, out of sight. She had given the Perfect Baby a hefty tranquilliser, supplied from our mother’s emergency stash of drugs. It never hurts to be sure. Katie-Koo would sleep for at least five more hours. Long enough. The whole House of God compound was a smoke-free zone, so Linda was keeping her nerves at bay by chain-sucking her way through a packet of u
ltra-strong medicinal lozenges. Katie-Koo and Carmichael were made for one another, she reflected, inhaling a rush of searingly cold mint. The bogus angel and the bogus saint.
The cathedral was filling up with tracksuited worshippers, some of them in wheelchairs, bearing gifts for the altar: cans of tinned tuna, mostly, from what Linda could make out; bananas, a lardicake, some smoky bacon crisps, a bunch of tulips. Every day was harvest festival at the House of God.
Slowly, the lights were dimming to almost black and for a second there was silence before the TV show countdown started and the giant screen ran the opening sequence of Holy Hour, while portentous music groaned from a specially modified organ steered by twin dwarfs in red velvet suits.
An elderly gent with abnormally freckled ears was seated next to Linda; as she stared accusingly at his profile, he began to babble something very fast as the music groaned and wavered to a plateau of vibration. Others around her joined in, and soon everyone was putting in their ha’porth. Linda exhaled in frustration. There was a time, not so very long ago, when the Lord had whispered to her soul, too.
Abandoned again!
A good slogan for a Love Heart.
She’d applied for a new job. Euro Ag. Planning in Brussels, in charge of a whole department. If there was any justice in the world, once this business was finished, she’d be an international commuter with an apartment overlooking the Mannekin Piss and her own space in the executive car-park. Sometimes you just know when it’s time to move on.
