Seeking Sanctuary

by Frances Fyfield

  She thought of him let loose in a convent and screamed with shrill laughter. A piece of corruption among the lily-white nuns, serve them right. Then she stopped laughing and began to shake. Stuffed her fingers into her mouth and continued shaking, swallowing flakes of her own rose-pink nail varnish as she chewed and considered the phenomenon of her own creation. Francis, Jack, a creature of the devil and his own illusions, the product of a rape.

  She leant over Theo’s desk and stuffed the documents back into their neat folders. He who sups with the devil requires a long spoon,Theo said, or was that Christopher? Her hand hovered over the phone. She withdrew it quickly, slapped her own wrist.

  She would do what she had always done. Tell lies by silence. Do nothing, look capable. Now, which of the drafts of Theo’s will had her bastard read?

  Sundays had a blight. It was too late to gain entry to the convent by the time Anna got back. Not late by the standards of the outside world, only late because it was dark and they had been walking in the park for far too long. At least, she had. Ravi had suddenly turned into a Dracula, needing to be home as soon as it was dark, just at the point when she would have preferred him to kiss her, and then it all turned on its head, just like a Sunday.

  ‘I have to go home. My parents expect me and they worry.’

  She was suddenly, excruciatingly, breathtakingly furious.

  ‘How old are you, Ravi? Twenty-two? Do you still get pocket money?’

  She had thought the afternoon would extend into evening, that they had all the time in the world, and the disappointment was bitter, but she was beginning to understand that every hour of his day was accounted for in work and duty, with so few gaps it was a miracle he had ever had the time to walk her home. He could add an hour or two to each of his shifts, and get away with it, but no more. He did not say as much, but she sort of guessed, and although she did not realise it, envied him the omnipresence of demanding parents. She tried to swallow both her pride and her curiosity and failed.

  ‘Do your mother and father get on?’

  ‘Yes, of course. They irritate each other, sometimes, but they talk, and they love us. Fed us, taught us, tolerated us, were there when we breathed our first, so we must be there for them.’

  ‘Whenever they want?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they come before everyone else?’

  ‘Yes. Here,’ he said, handing her a tiny statue of Ganesh. ‘You said you liked him. I bought it for you.’

  It was no compensation. It came from his pocket and was stuffed into hers, a small, plaster statue of a sturdy elephant man with too many limbs, a gift of kindness and one that failed to placate, although there was nothing to be angry about, no promise made, or broken. That bit was by the duck pond, where the birds muttered and nestled down with families, chirping and burping as the last of the year’s fledglings tried to stay close while Mummy and Daddy drove them away into independence. Her envy was so acute, she was glad when he had to go. Even though she said, Fine, go then, just fucking well bugger off. I’ve gone to your temple and then you’ve got no more time. Just bugger off, you wanker. All of it rage and frustration in the dying embers of a lovely day. Because she was being left. Rootless, parent-less, without direction, fucking deserted, everything else forgotten. She sat by the pond in the growing dark, traversed the football ground at a fast, furious pace, wished she was going to work, wished every living, chirping thing would belt up and when she got to the gates of the fucking park, found them shut. Measured them with her eye, ran at them from ten yards away, clambered over the top. Easy. Pain in her chest, easy; running home easier still. Wanker. She stopped in a pub and had two double vodkas, quickly, left when someone tried to talk.

  On the way home, still cantering, she ran past the convent door and knew it was too late to go in. Agnes might still be sitting in her porch, but after the dot of nine o’clock she was under orders not to answer until she had fetched Barbara to see whoever it was. Barbara might have mellowed towards her, but she was still not going to let Anna inside so late, even if Anna said she wanted to pray. Nor would she be allowed entry to say goodnight to Therese.

  There was an overpowering desire to see Therese. Her sister was a physical presence she missed all the time. She skittered past, left and left again, unready to go home, passing the door at the back, and pausing beside it to draw breath. Stuck with the unpleasant realisation that she had probably shouted at Ravi only because he had better things to do with his evening than spend it with her, and he had left her with all this energy and nowhere to go. That was a lie; there were plenty of places to go and drink away the energy, let everyone know that she knew how to have a good time. Bars and clubs by the dozen, just beginning to warm up for the night, and none of them places where she wanted to be. If she could not have the chapel, she wanted the forbidden territory of the park or the silence of that garden for a quiet shouting match with God. She was shut out from everywhere. Knowing she was behaving like a spoiled child, she kicked the door. Winced and then looked at it more closely.

  It still looked peculiarly naked without the curtain of ivy, which had almost covered it and was now shaggily trimmed so that a couple of branches hung like tendrils around the frame, escaping from the dense foliage that covered the whole wall. The handle was still so rusted, it looked as if it had not been used in several lifetimes, but there were marks in the woodwork on the door, as if someone with heavy boots had kicked, hard and repeatedly. They were futile dents in an obdurately solid door, but they were ugly, angry marks. Anna stared at them in the street light. A car passed, booming with music; on the other side of the road, the houses were softly lit. No one would notice. She thought of Edmund, dying in the garden while she had slept, and the desire to get inside became overpowering. It was simply not enough to spy from the rooftop.

  She went to the middle of the road, zipped her purse into the pocket of her jacket and measured the distance. Ran and leapt for the ivy. Found herself spreadeagled against the wall with her feet scrabbling for hold and her hands seizing fistfuls of branches. The sinews of the ivy held her up. She was a lightweight. Her small feet slithered among the leaves and found purchase. In the distance she could hear another car and the sound of it had the effect of adrenaline. After that it was easy. In another second, before the car headlights passed, she was astride the top of the wall, looking down into the other side, feeling exhilarated but foolish. What the hell did she think she was doing? Below her was a further mass of ivy; getting down the other side and up again was well within her powers. Anna enjoyed sitting on top of the wall; it crossed her mind to stay there, triumphantly, and wave. Not such a high wall after all, a mere fifteen feet, strange that no one had tried this route before, but why should anyone bother? A small amount of street light penetrated far enough into the garden to show the contours of Edmund’s shed and his bench. Otherwise the darkness was intense.The door of the shed was open and the bench was unoccupied. That was a relief. She had been afraid she would find someone sitting there, listening for the quiet birds. Looking up, she could see the outlines of her block with the small back windows of the apartments. She was, after all, very close to home and slithered down the other side, noisily.

  The walls of the garden blocked sound from the road and created the effect of a tunnel. The shrubbery was less dense than it appeared from her high view, when the foliage seemed to cover most of the garden in a carpet of various greens with scarcely a hint of the walkways. On ground level, the grey stone of the path was almost luminous. Anna had scarcely ever been in the garden, except the other day, when the dead presence of Edmund on the bench had blinded her to anything else. Her sense of its geography was skewed by her own perspective: down here, in the dark to which her eyes were slowly adjusting, it seemed bigger and easier to penetrate, although the distance between where she stood and the high window of the chapel seemed further than she could have imagined. The top end of the garden and this were separate worlds, and the world on the outside d
ifferent again. Without any particular purpose, but drawn as always to the chapel, she began to walk up the winding path, arms outstretched to feel her way, as if she was playing Blindman’s Buff, trying to define the different scents she could smell. Something like juniper, walnut, the mossy smell of soil, a whiff of lavender, the oily scent of evergreens and the sharp, ammonia smell of urine. Something brushed against her legs, slinking into the bushes to the left, emerging again, spitting with a guttural hiss, which sounded as loud as a shout. A cat without colour; she could only guess at the size. Its eyes glared like beacons before it disappeared with an angry flourish. Anna’s heartbeat slowed back down to almost normal. Her foot encountered something slimy on the path. Up until then, she had been feeling apologetic to the cat, until she scraped the slime from the bottom of her shoe with the realisation that whatever it was was bloody and fleshy and as likely as not the indigestible portion of a feral meal. She could visualise, without seeing, the uneaten gizzard of a blackbird, shook herself and stepped forward, gingerly, angry with the cat, knowing it should not be here. It was the trespasser, not herself. It should be trapped and taken away from a place that was a sanctuary for birds. At a bend in the path, she could smell blackcurrant, something with the scent of pepper, gooseberry and rust. Her outstretched hand encountered mossy stone. She touched it, felt the damp hem of the robe of St Michael, with big, cold feet, and with that came the realisation that this was all stupid and infantile, because she had no more place here and even less purpose than the cat. Anna turned to retrace her steps, walking away from the light of the windows and back towards the wall. There was a sudden change in the smells, a sensation of warmth.

  There were no footsteps, there was simply a presence, cannoning into her from behind, sending her stumbling to the ground. She broke the fall with her hands, felt the bones in her wrists jarring against stone. He had hit her with the full force of his body, launching out of space, like a heat-seeking missile, wham into her shoulders. She twisted as she fell, resisting some of the force, and was slithering out of his grasp in a frantic crawling away towards the bushes, like the cat. Slower than the cat, easier to pursue, clumsy as a cripple. There were big paws, grasping at her ankles, then her thighs as she crawled ineffectually until he pressed her into the ground of the grey path, and she felt he would bite her in the neck. Her feet drummed against the ground; she lay, pinned beneath him, his torso coming to rest against her back like a dead man, while her legs thrashed and his hand circled her throat and as they lay, breathless, groin to buttock, she could feel his prick against the curve of her buttocks, rigid as a stick. She struggled with every ounce of strength and as he began to release her, screamed every obscenity she knew, so loud that the birds flew out of the trees with a caw! caw! caw! of outrage and the ground-floor lights of the building flickered awake. You fucking cunt bastard shitface leggo of me bastard.

  ‘Scream away,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘Love it. That’ll get them running.’

  He pulled her up against himself, raising them both so that he seemed to have her in his lap in a willing embrace. As the lights from inside grew visible, they were suddenly partially outlined, her silhouette drawn against his, extremities entwined, legs and bodies fixed in an unholy glow. He lifted her to her feet, held her in his arms briefly and dropped her unceremoniously on to the path. Then he placed his foot on her waist, so great a foot, bigger than St Michael’s, it could have crushed her spleen unless he held it there, neatly balanced, like some big game hunter posing for a photo with the newly killed prey he did not want to damage. Leaning over her gently with the lights coming closer, he took hold of her right, curled fist and held it against his face.

  ‘Go on, my lovely, Go on.’

  She clawed at him, vainly, scratching him harmlessly down the left cheek. He took her open hand, fastened his own around her knuckles and dragged the imprisoned fingers with their long nails down the other side of his face.

  ‘Good girl,’ he murmured, hauling her to her feet, pinning her arms behind her, linking his own through her crooked elbows, bending her forward. Her shoulder blades seemed to scrape together and she began to cough with a ghastly, chest-clearing throttle, like an old man fetching up phlegm. He yanked her upright with the same deceptive gentility, hair hanging over her face, until she found herself staring through it at the waist of Sister Barbara’s dressing gown, and saw her large feet lit by a torch. She could see the glimpses of another uniform, up to the neck and down to the ankles, with cloth slippers resembling boots, on which Anna kept her eyes fastened, listening to the angry voice of fear.

  ‘Francis, what is this?’

  Barbara was trying to exert control, but the voice, even with the muted resonance of plainchant attached, sounded shrill in the silence, descending to a tut, tut, tut as she squinted at the tableau they made. There was large, manly Francis, pillar of the Establishment, with blood beginning to seep from the scratches on his face, holding a captive as sweetly as a trainer might hold a potentially fierce dog, with one hand on her bent neck, the other pinning her arms.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Francis addressed the back of Anna’s neck. ‘I’ll let you go if you behave.’ He was speaking unnecessarily loudly.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Barbara yelled.

  ‘Shhh. Wait a minute, Sister. I’ll just get her to sit.’

  Propelled by sheer weight, Anna sat at the feet of Michael, Archangel, where the stray light from the parlour, augmented by Barbara’s torch, almost penetrated. The voices of Francis and Barbara seemed to come from another planet. Hers was sharp.

  ‘What are you doing here, Francis? We don’t pay you for Sundays.’

  He took a deep breath and stood calmly in the light of her torch, which wavered at the end of her wrist. Someone hovered behind him. Anna raised her head and gazed into the limpid eyes of Sister Matilda, who was standing to one side gazing at her, with one finger pressed against her own lips, the instruction for silence. Anna scarcely needed any such advice; she could hardly speak, but she refrained from trying. Of all of them, Matilda was a favourite, the one she trusted simply because she was the most visible, the one who came into the garden most often as a gentle and undemanding presence, just visible from the roof and therefore the most familiar, and she had forgotten to give her Edmund’s crucifix. It lay in her pocket, ready for morning Mass, with Ganesh alongside. Matilda was fully dressed, as if the veil was something she never shed, even in sleep.

  ‘Oh, do get out of the way, Matilda.’ The light from Barbara’s torch swung into Anna’s face and down over her body. Her dress was filthy. Barbara gasped, swung the beam back towards Francis, where it lingered on the scratches, oozing blood. He reached his hand towards Anna, then let it drop to his side.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked softly. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

  The torchlight wavered back to her face. Matilda had disappeared into the background. In a gesture of extraordinary childishness, which she would remember afterwards with greater embarrassment than anything else, Anna stuck her tongue out and pulled a face. It was a stupid, unsympathetic thing to do, acting as an admission of guilt, and if there was any chance that Barbara was going to side with her, she lost it in that moment of puerile rebellion. The voice of Francis continued.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t be here, Sister,’ he was saying to Barbara, apologetically. ‘But I was passing on my way home and I saw someone climbing over the wall. There was no time to phone you, which would have been the most sensible thing. So I came in after her. I thought it was a kid. I didn’t realise it was someone you knew. Someone I saw in chapel this morning.’

  Apology and certainty oozed from him and Anna was suddenly furious all over again, for being so small. His voice was so quiet and confident and masculine, it could cut a swathe through all their female voices and command instant attention. If she spoke now, she would sound as silly as a parrot. A man could always do that, with the same ease he had knocked her over. The grit on the dress felt like
ash as she clutched at the fabric to cover her knees, automatically trying to hide the grazes. She could almost have believed his voice herself, apart from knowing what a noise it made to scramble down the ivy and knowing that she would have heard him long before he could ever have surprised her. He had been there, waiting. She opened her mouth to protest, closed it again. Nausea threatened. Barbara’s sympathy, if it had ever been there for the taking, was waning so fast words would not help, although when Anna thought about it later, she would wonder what she could have said. I had two vodkas and fancied climbing a wall for a chat to God. Wanted to tell him he would look better if he grew a long nose.Yeah, great. There was nothing to say. The last realisation before he overpowered her had been the right one. She had no business here. She began to shiver. Barbara was listening to him.

  ‘I thought it was a kid,’ he was repeating. ‘And . . .’ He hesitated. ‘I thought it was the same kid I saw last week, hanging round on the day the chapel window was broken. I thought it was the same kid, with a catapult, maybe even an air gun. I couldn’t take the risk of it happening again.’

  ‘You bastard,’ she hissed. ‘You bloody liar.’

  ‘Be quiet!’

  He turned to Barbara beseechingly. ‘On that evening, Sister, I walked on by, because it was still light and I didn’t want to interfere. I was always sorry about that, which is why I didn’t tonight. I didn’t think, I just reacted. I haven’t hurt her, have I? I’m so sorry. I only asked her who she was and she leapt at me like a cat. Is she a friend of yours?’