After Purple

by Wendy Perriam

  I walked up to the altar and knelt down in the very front pew. I don’t believe in humility. It only makes dominant people worse, and God, if He exists, is bound to be a Leo. I say ‘if He exists’, but that’s only in deference to Adrian who is what he calls an eclectic agnostic, which means he spent five years studying God in relation to anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics and historical geography, and still couldn’t say for certain whether He was there or not. I knew He was, of course, because of my convent school. Step-fathers make quite an impression on you, especially when they’re all you’ve got. Not that I talk about it much. People always assume that God and sex are incompatible, so that if you screw around, you can’t grab God as well. That’s rubbish.

  Mind you, religion has always been a problem. My father was vaguely C. of E. and missing. My mother was an atheist with a private line to God. She railed at Him without believing in Him, and grudgingly accepted convent education as a sort of insurance policy against the bad vibes and worse morals of a world He hadn’t created. That was the only concession she made to Him — entrusting me to the nuns — and I suspect it was more to improve my accent and my manners than to polish up my soul, or perhaps to put two hundred miles between us. She hadn’t even allowed me to be baptised, although my father had booked the vicar and bought a silver christening mug (which disappeared when he did). The nuns at my school saw me as something between a leper and a freak. When they weren’t struggling to fill the gaps in my religious ignorance, they were praying for my salvation. I feared damnation like other girls fear rape. Only Catholics were indisputably saved. I longed to be a Catholic, not only to avoid the horrors of hellfire, but also to be the blood-child of a close and legal Father.

  Janet wasn’t Catholic, but she had Adrian and her pregnancy instead, and parents who still celebrated their wedding anniversaries and sent each other cards with satin hearts and flowers on.

  She kept squeezing her great swelling belly into the church, even though I’d tried to shut her out. The Blessed Virgin could have been her double — the same vanilla-blancmange complexion and social-worker expression in her eyes. And holding a baby, of course — Janet’s baby — blond, blue-eyed and goody-goody, with her crinkly permed hair and stubby fingers. The church was full of hideous painted statues, all holding Janet’s baby in their arms. One podgy infant was gurgling against St Anthony and another almost sitting on St Joseph’s lily. It was a relief to turn to St Bernadette, who was holding nothing except a candle and who wasn’t even looking at the Virgin, but staring up at the window as if she hoped she might escape. It’s rare to find a statue of St Bernadette — that’s why I liked this church. She’s one of my favourite saints, in fact; a shabby, homely person, who was illiterate for years and never learned to spell. Saints make good substitutes for friends. They never let you down, or answer back, or pinch your boyfriends or your clothes. I always avoid the intellectual ones like St Thomas Aquinas, or the prigs like St Thérèse of Lisieux or the rigid toe-the-liners like St Ignatius.

  St Janet was less easy to avoid. I could see her huge, misshapen stomach everywhere. In the swell of the tabernacle, the curve of the windows. The two fat pillars in front of the altar were nine months gone like she was. The halos of the saints were her white moon breasts. I wondered if it would be a son. Adrian and I had had a son, once. He’s in a jar now, sterilised and labelled, a four-month foetus they saved for the students. It was a big teaching hospital and they asked me if I minded. How could I mind with a ward-round almost swamping me and the remnants of my baby still bleeding into the bed? We’d planned to call him Lucian. It meant light (I think). Adrian chose the name.

  There was no light in the church, only a grey, musty film over everything as if chalk had been mixed with rust. The pews were scratched and grimy, and the kneelers looked as if some rodent had been nibbling them. It didn’t really matter. It’s like sex with a man who’s got holes in his socks — it doesn’t affect your orgasm. I could feel prayer oozing out of me — my soul lying back and opening, moistening to God’s touch. I was almost scared to pray. I knew the prayer would be a savage one. But the words were forming in my mouth, squeezing through my lips, whispering through the church.

  “Let Janet’s baby die,” they murmured. Very simple, very unambiguous. I knew God heard, because at that very moment, all the lights went on and the church burst suddenly into life. The orange wall behind the altar glowed a deep sunset colour and the figures in the stained-glass windows fled into their backgrounds to escape the glare. Even the shabby wooden floor gleamed and shone a little. I turned round. A priest in a skimpy cassock was standing by the light switch. I think he was trying to flush me out, like you might shine a torch on a rodent to blind and startle it.

  “Good afternoon,” I said, and added “Father” to placate him.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he griped. “The church is locked. I’ve trouble enough with vandals, as it is …”

  “It wasn’t locked,” I said. “And I’m not a vandal.” I threw in another “Father” for good luck. I like to call them that. Fathers are rare enough, for heaven’s sake.

  He mumbled something about “can’t go away for two seconds without intruders”, so I got up from my knees. Priests are often a stumbling block to prayer. They’re more materially minded than most of the laity — always on about sex, or vandals, or the state of the church roof, or their own poverty. I made a giant-sized sign of the cross to mollify him and walked down towards the door. He was poking about by the rack of religious pamphlets, probably making sure I hadn’t nicked one. I had, in fact, noticed one on Motherhood which I could have pinched for Janet. I knew what it would say — every new baby is a soul for God, and it’s God who puts it there. I only wished He had, instead of Adrian.

  The priest was walking up towards the altar. I strode after him, scrabbling in my pocket. There was still five pounds sixty left from Adrian’s money, and twelve pence of my own. I poured it into his hands. “Say a Mass for me, Father,” I implored. “Special intention, something very urgent.” He seemed to hesitate. Could you still buy Masses, or was that only in the Middle Ages? Adrian would know, but I could hardly inquire of Adrian when it was his and Janet’s baby I was bribing God to kill. Fortunately, a coin dropped on the floor. The priest bent down to pick it up (they never scorn small change), and while he was grovelling on the floor, I nipped through the door and out.

  He’d have to say the Mass, now I’d paid cash in advance. After all, I’d offered all I had for it. I hadn’t even left myself the tube fare. I buttoned up my sheepskin, stuck my hands in my empty pockets, and began the long trek back.

  Chapter Four

  I was so chilled, blistered, and exhausted when I finally limped into Notting Hill, that I made straight for Leo’s vodka, which he keeps hidden in his bureau. There was only a centimetre left, so I topped it up with Lucozade, then added the dregs from a dry martini bottle. It tasted strange, but comforting. I sat in the kitchen with my feet on a chair and tried to think of nothing. Leo wasn’t back yet. The breakfast dishes were sticky on the table, the broken vase still weeping on the floor. I picked it up, tenderly, as if it were part of Leo. There were four main pieces and a little spray of chips. I fitted them together on the table, but the cracks still showed and shivered and there were tiny gaps and crannies in the phoenix. I had disfigured Leo, smashed his youth, clipped his wings. The vase was a sort of proof of his existence. That’s why people have children, I suppose, to prove they were once alive (Leo hasn’t any).

  On the way back, I’d nipped into a bookshop and filched a book called Mending and Restoring China, in reparation to him. I opened it at the step-by-step instructions, spread a copy of The Listener on the table, and fetched glue, sandpaper, and a few of Leo’s tools. There was a picture of the author on the back cover — E. H. Leatherstone Esquire — a finicky old fellow with a white moustache, which looked as if it had been daubed and stiffened with his own flour-paste. Mr Leatherstone suggested making a res
t-bed for the broken object. I liked the word rest-bed. It had overtones of healing, care, compassion. I wished I could lie on one myself and have all my shattered pieces stuck together. The mending wasn’t easy, even with the diagrams. The smallest chips fell off, and the glue squeezed out too quickly, and the phoenix seemed to have lost a lot of plumage. If I held it firmly in my hands against the table, it turned into a bird again and seemed even to be arising from the ashes, but as soon as I let go of it, it broke apart and moulted, and I was left with just a pile of random feathers.

  The trouble with me is I haven’t any staying power. As soon as I start something, I want to give it up. I really wanted Leo. I abandoned the vase and walked along to his bedroom which is the darkest room in the house. He always keeps his curtains closed and has lots of dark purple hangings and gloomy pictures of uninhabitable landscapes. I took off all my clothes and crawled into his bed which is high and covered with a tattered Persian rug with black and scarlet dragons woven into the border. It’s so heavy, it’s like another man on top of you. Sometimes, I lay beneath the two of them (Leo and the rug) and felt I was being crushed into a sort of dark, dragon-haunted past, which I dimly remember from some other, nobler, long-ago existence when I was perhaps a male and probably a Persian.

  A blob of glue had dried hard on my finger. I opened my legs and touched the glue against myself. A man once told me I was over-sexed. That worried me. Men are never over-sexed — only virile. Adrian hinted it was simply boredom and said that once I found a satisfying job, I’d get sex into perspective (which I suppose means doing it once a week, at night, with a shower before and after and all the lights turned out). I haven’t got a sister, or even a close girlfriend, so I’ve no idea how much normal people think about it. All I know is that when we do it, Leo likes me more. If he ever said, ‘I love you’, it would undoubtedly be in bed.

  I was lying there, imagining him saying it, and trying out different approaches with the glue, when Leo came in. Or rather Karma did, with Leo on the end of him. Karma is a cross between a mastiff and an Afghan hound, which is more or less impossible. He had lost all the shaggy, silky, swanky Afghan bits, and retained the square solid shoulders and the black mastiff muzzle. He had the faults of both breeds — being aggressive, neurotic, temperamental and difficult to train. He was also a loner, a fighter, ruggedly independent and rare — all of which Leo is himself. If he weren’t Leo’s dog, he would have looked grotesque. As it was, he looked majestic — dark, large, lowering and explosive.

  He came right up to the bed and sniffed me between the legs, which is one of the reasons I don’t like him. He always knows what I’ve been up to, and then reports to Leo. If I lie in his bed, Leo usually comes and fucks me, anyway. It’s our sign language. Proud men like him can’t demean themselves by asking. My legs were already opening wider and my nipples sitting up and begging. Leo has that effect on me. Even if I see him in a supermarket, I start to moisten among the cornflakes and the Fairy Snow. That’s why sex is so dangerous, I suppose. I’d worship Jack the Ripper or Idi Amin if either of them fucked like Leo does.

  He hadn’t even looked at me. He was standing with his long brown back towards me, dragging off his sweater. The hair grows very low on the nape of his neck and then stops abruptly, as that slope of pale, singing flesh plunges down, down, towards his buttocks. I lay very still and tried to think of Belsen and Cambodia and the sinking of the Titanic, anything to turn me off. Leo pulled another sweater on, a thinner one, and then a grey cashmere polo over that. And finally his sheepskin.

  “I’m taking Karma for a walk,” he said.

  Karma barked when he heard his name. I could almost see him gloating. He had plumed up his tail (which he probably shouldn’t have had, being half a mastiff) and was pawing the ground with his great eager feet.

  “But it’s almost dark,” I objected. I dug the glue in hard, to try and hurt myself.

  “So?”

  “Can I come too?” See how I grovel? I should have shrugged and lain there, read a book, filed my nails. Instead, I was already pulling on my clothes, panting after Karma, zipping up my jeans, wailing, “Wait, Leo,” like a five-year-old. He always walked faster than I could. I had to half run to keep up with him, which is very uncomfortable, not to say undignified (which I suspect is why he does it). He strode, and I trotted, down the hill, round the corner, across three streets and into the entrance to Holland Park. It was twilight and they were almost locking up. Grass and sky were both grey, trees only shapes and shadows. It was raining again, the sort of thin, hopeless drizzle which somehow makes you wetter than an out-and-out downpour. I hadn’t had time to grab my coat. I was wearing only a shirt and a sweater, and I could feel the cold sneaking its hands inside them, turning my breasts goose-pimply and clammy.

  I prayed for Leo to speak. I had no idea what he was thinking, whether his breakfast (lunch) with Otto had gone well, and if he’d bought the vase. Sometimes, he was silent only because he was thinking, or working on a problem like the relationship of relativity to nirvana. He’d been reading a book on modern physics in relation to Taoism. It caused him a lot of anguish which I couldn’t share. I dared not even raise the subject since the time I’d pronounced Tao wrongly. One mispronunciation could ruin a whole day.

  Leo walked, too fast, down towards the Holland Walk entrance where dogs are allowed off the lead. Karma wasn’t on one, anyway. He was swooping in proud, swaggering circles, like a race horse. He was so large, he made the grass throb. After every eight or ten circuits, he bounded back to Leo, rammed his huge black head in his master’s hands, and then crashed away again. He seemed to be flaunting his own simple joy in rain and speed and motion. If I ever return to earth in some reincarnation, I hope I return as Karma. Only then could I be best beloved of Leo and yet spared his anger.

  I didn’t even know if he was angry. But the silence made me so tense, I filled the spaces with what I imagined was his fury, and then built it up, up, until I was almost choking in it. I was always doing that. Then, when I was all but dead with terror, he’d lean across and kiss me, or pick up a pebble in the shape of a heart and smuggle it into my palm, or ask me what I thought of Olive Schreiner.

  It was like falling up a step you didn’t know was there. I’d realise, then, the fury had all been mine, something I’d cultivated in my head like a patch of dark, spongy fungus. Often, I made him angry simply by assuming that he was. Even now, I could hear myself trying out phrases in my head, stupid, dangerous things guaranteed to wound him. I wanted to grovel, humble myself, lie at his feet and lick them, but all the loving, healing phrases had rotted away like summer leaves and there was only the thick black mulch we were squelching underfoot.

  The sky was turning darker and darker. The clouds were like chunks of rough grey pumice stone, chafing and scouring the trees. I kept glancing at my watch and playing little games with it. If Leo didn’t speak within one more minute, then I would stop in my tracks and scream. The minute passed. Two more minutes. If he hadn’t broken the silence by another two, I would kneel in the mud and beg him to kick me, trample me, anything to prove I still existed. Three minutes, four. It was almost closing time. Any moment now, they would switch on the floodlights in the Belvedere Gardens, lock all the other gates, turn us out. The park was almost empty, anyway. Only the odd drenched dog with its owner, birds muttering their bedtime stories, a tramp growing on a bench like mould.

  Only Karma was alive, pounding and streaking past us, throwing up the grass, barking to the sky. I had never seen such exultation in a dog, rolling on his back, shaking the water from his coat, pouncing on sticks, terrorising trees. I knew he was mocking me, my misery, my silence, the strange, stupid fears I was piling in my head. I longed to race and flaunt like him, to bark, romp, flurry, chase my tail. All I had to do was break the tension, fling my arms round Leo’s neck and yell out wild, singing, leaping, glorious things; tell him I loved him, loved the park, the rain, the sky, the earth, the cold. But somehow, the words woul
dn’t form themselves. They were broken, soggy, unravelling. Another minute passed. Leo’s feet made blurred, sludgy noises on the path. The rain was drammering through the trees, shining and streaming on the holly leaves. Karma rocketed past, spattering me with mud. I tried again. It should have been so easy. The park was full of things I could pick up and present to him — the greys, the greens, the shadows, peacock feathers, skeleton leaves. Or if I could just say something ordinary — “Was he tired, would it rain tomorrow, weren’t the puddles deep?” I edged a little closer, cleared my throat.

  “I went to Twickenham today,” I said. My voice had suddenly come louder, as if someone had switched an amplifier on. Leo hadn’t answered. He was striding ahead, lashing into the branches with a stick.

  “And Adrian screwed me on the kitchen floor.”

  Leo stopped. I realised now, he hadn’t been cross before, at all. He’d simply been meditating, or digesting his lunch with Otto, or watching the changing colours in the sky. Karma stopped, too. Even the rain seemed to let up for a moment — one brief, shocked, paralysing moment while Leo caught his breath. I could see the bare trees fidgeting and whispering behind him. He grabbed my wrist and twisted it behind me. Karma dropped his tail. He could pick up anger like a seismograph.

  “You’re a whore, Thea, a dirty little whore.”

  His hand had made red marks across my wrist. I shook it free. “I can hardly be a whore when Adrian’s my husband.”

  “He’s not your husband. Not any more.”

  That hurt. Marriage to Adrian was like saving with the Abbey National. It had made me feel cosy and protected, sensible, conventional, joined to all the other savers in the land. Now I was a debtor, a drop-out, who didn’t have a number any more, or a little blue book which told me who I was and how much that was worth.