The World Walker Series Box Set

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  Dawn was a pinky yellow of promise as they reached the outskirts of Las Vegas. The flashing lights were off, the tourists finally in bed apart from the hardy few, slack-jawed and dead-eyed, feeding quarters into the slots as the shadows lengthened outside. The early morning light made the whole place look grimy, tired and sick. Lo turned east away from the road as they neared the city limits, heading onto a dirt track that the Galaxie handled by throwing them around like rag dolls on its ancient shocks.

  “Sorry,” called Lo as Bob put a hand on the dash to steady himself and Mee suddenly bounced into view in the rearview mirror, makeup running, looking like an extremely surprised panda.

  “Wassat? What?” said Mee. She was well known for her inability to string together words into coherent sentences until at least one joint and three cups of coffee had fired up her synapses.

  “Nearly there,” said Lo. Eight minutes’ drive took them into rockier terrain, the landscape undulating slightly. As they rounded a corner, a trailer park of sorts hove into view. It looked like it had been there for decades, the newest of the seven trailers had probably rolled off the line circa 1977. The trailers were in a horseshoe formation, the open end of the U-shape closed by the hill it backed up against. The area behind and between the trailers was covered by faded gazebos, garden parasols and tarpaulin, all of it the color of the surrounding desert. Two motorcycles, a pickup truck and a minibus were parked to one side.

  Lo brought the Galaxie to a shuddering stop about thirty feet from the nearest trailer. The three of them were silent for a moment, looking out through the dirt, dust and insect corpses caking the windshield. Eleven people stood between them and the trailers. Ten women and one man. All of them wearing cheap canvas pants and olive or tan t-shirts that looked like they’d been bought in an army surplus store. Each of them held a small purple flower. Bob thought he had seen similar flowers in the scrub of the Verdugo hills.

  “Did you phone ahead?” he said.

  “No need,” said Lo, smiling. “Please give me a minute.”

  Without waiting for an answer she got out of the car and walked toward the line of people. When she was about ten feet away, she knelt in the dirt and leaned forward. Bob and Meera couldn’t see what she was doing, but when she stood up again, she too was holding a purple flower. As she stepped forward, the group moved to meet her and then they were all hugging and laughing in turn, the delight at seeing her evident on their faces. After exchanging greetings, Lo turned and jogged back to the car. “Come on,” she said, “they all want to meet you.”

  Bob and Meera got out of the car. Bob stopped and gently moved his left leg forwards and backward, bending it a little more each time. Walking eased the pain, but he avoided sitting down for long periods as it could become hard to bear. Sometimes, while walking upstairs, the sounds coming from his knee made him wonder how much cartilage was left and how much had been replaced by shrapnel. This had been the longest car journey he had made for a while and he knew he’d suffer for it. He put his weight on the leg carefully, then limped toward the waiting group, putting out his hand. “Bob Geller,” he said. “Good to meet you folks.”

  Meera hung back and lit another joint. She had checked her stash in the car and calculated if she went to the extreme of limiting herself to four spliffs every twenty-four hours, she might make it for another five days before she would feel like tearing anyone’s head off. She looked at the scene in front of her. They were hugging Bob now. She had an innate distrust of physical contact with anyone other than very close friends, partly because of her upbringing in Britain, but mostly because of some unwise relationship decisions in her teens. When the hugging had died down and a few looks were being directed toward her, Lo waved her over with a smile.

  “Hi,” said Meera, ambling over, arms crossed and a cloud of heady sweet smoke drifting up from the joint, “I’m Mee. I don’t hug.”

  Introductions were made, then a matronly woman said she was going to make pancakes and coffee if they were interested. They were.

  Ten minutes later, they were sitting in one of the trailers which had been converted into a communal dining area with two long tables and benches. The matronly woman—Jackie—brought the coffee first, in tin mugs with a jug of cream and bowl of sugar, coming back a few minutes later with a steaming pile of pancakes. Another jug contained warm maple syrup. There was a bowl of blueberry jelly, a platter of chopped fruit: bananas, strawberries, blueberries and grapes with a side of whipped yoghurt. There were no cooking facilities in the dining trailer - Bob assumed another trailer had been converted to serve as a kitchen. The food and coffee was fresh and amazingly good. Bob couldn’t remember ever having had better pancakes and the coffee was strong and rich. Mee was equally impressed, but put it down to the fact that she hadn’t had any hot food for nearly a week.

  The food was consumed in near silence. Understandable from the point of view of the visitors, who were exhausted, but unusual in most social situations. Bob glanced up as he finished a fourth pancake and washed it down with the last of his coffee. Jackie came over with a refill, smiling. Then Bob really noticed it for the first time. Everyone was so damn quiet. And kind of happy looking. The weird thing was, he would expect a room full of silent smiling people to freak him out. He had once been invited to church by a lady he’d met buying groceries. He had gone along that Sunday, partly out of curiosity, more because he thought there was a chance he might get laid. They’d all smiled there. From the moment he walked in and was welcomed with smiles, all the way through the service which featured a sermon in which the young smiling preacher had expressed his support of carrying concealed weapons ‘for Christ’ and his great sadness that sodomites had turned their backs on Jesus and would go to hell. Smiles all the way through plates of cookies and weak coffee afterwards where he was asked at least nine times if he was saved. Smiles, smiles, smiles. Right up to the point where he’d asked his “date” if she believed in sex outside of marriage.

  “Of course not,” she said, primly, looking around her fellow churchgoers who gave her some smiling nods of confirmation.

  “Well, that’s a shame,” said Bob, “since I was planning on taking you to bed this afternoon and having a great deal of sweaty, fun and downright dirty sex with you.” There was a gratifyingly sharp intake of breath from the half-dozen people close enough to hear. “Two or three times at least,” he said. His intended bedfellow’s smile had finally slipped, but—to his surprise—Bob was sure he could see lust in her eyes behind her feigned shock.

  He stepped in closer. “And I’d keep an eye on that preacher of yours,” he said. “Think he was just a little too fired up about the evils of gay sex. Check his phone for a Grindr account if you get the chance. Bit of rough trade last night, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. And get someone to sort out the coffee, it’s god-damn awful.” He had left in silence, but, to his satisfaction, at least they weren’t smiling any more.

  The difference now seemed to be the naturalness of the smiles, of the silence. Firstly, the smiles weren’t there all the time. If you met someone’s eye, they smiled at you. And it was the kind of smile that reached the eyes. The silence was unstrained, natural. No one seemed to feel the need to fill it with small talk. It wasn’t uncomfortable, it was accepting, warm. Bob rubbed his eyes. It had been an intense couple days. Maybe he was reading too much into a trailer-full of happy introverts. He finished his second mug of coffee and sighed.

  Across the table from Bob, Mee belched contentedly. Even habitual dope-smokers still got the munchies and five loaded pancakes had certainly hit the spot. She, too, had noticed the silence. It was hard not to. But she found herself thinking about her Auntie back in Britain. Aunt Anita had first upset her Hindu grandparents by converting to Christianity, then scandalized them by becoming a Sister in a Carmelite monastery in East London. A nun in the family - or penguin, as she and her cousins used to call her, despite the fact that only the very oldest of the Sisters wore a habit. Aged fifteen, Meera
had given in to curiosity and gone to visit Auntie Anita. She told her parents she was going shopping with friends. Second-generation Indian Londoners at that time were less suspicious of their children’s acceptance of Western materialism than they would be by a sudden interest in Christianity.

  Auntie Anita was Meera’s favorite Aunt. She had achieved that honor by being able to listen without judging. Which meant Meera had kept telling her about her problems, all the way from injuries sustained by a toy unicorn, through school reports so awful that she doctored them before they reached her parents, all the way to that first boyfriend, a dreadlocked drug-dealer from a middle-class background called Edmund. She had always known him as Dog, until she found his passport. She had laughed, but Edmund hadn’t. When Auntie Anita saw the bruises at the top of her arms (easy to hide), she advised calling the police, but she respected Meera’s choice not to. A year later, Auntie had entered the convent as a novice. “I’m not dying,” she told Meera, hugging her. Mee even hugged her back, crying. “Come visit,” said Auntie.

  Five months later, Mee had caught a bus and found the anonymous redbrick building tucked half a street away from a well-known soccer stadium. She had signed a visitor book in a room containing a formica-topped table covered in magazines like Woman’s Own and Reader’s Digest. Ten minutes later, Auntie Anita had swept into the room, kissed her and, taking her hand, given her ‘the tour’. On Friday afternoons there was one room in the monastery—the refectory—where the sisters were permitted to talk between 2-5pm. The only time, barring emergencies, when the Sisters were permitted to speak. Auntie Anita put the kettle on.

  “Three hours?” said Mee, disbelievingly. “Don’t you go crazy the rest of the time?”

  “That’s the funny thing,” said Auntie. “I thought I’d miss talking and for the first few months I really did. But I always preferred listening, really. 'Cause I’m so nosy.” She pushed a mug of tea over to Meera and sat opposite her. She looked radiant, her eyes shining. Like a bride on her wedding day, Mee told her so.

  “Well, that’s what we are,” said Auntie. “Brides of Christ.”

  Mee pulled a face and addressed the issue with the kind of implacable sarcasm only a teenager can pull off. “But no sex, and hardly any talking. Great marriage, that is. Sounds brilliant.”

  Auntie Anita refused to rise to the bait. “Well, I miss sex, certainly,” she said, “I aways did enjoy it. Even after your uncle died there were a few memorable occasions.”

  “Auntie!” said Mee, protesting and reddening, putting her hands over her ears. I’m not listening to this filth. La la la la, I can’t hear you.”

  Auntie Anita leaned forward and gently took Meera’s hands away from her ears. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “Sex can be wonderful at any age. But it’s not the be all and end all. It was just one of the things I was prepared to give up, along with my privacy, owning any property, personal ambition -,”

  “- and talking,” said Mee.

  “And talking,” said Auntie Anita. “Which was the most difficult for me. At first. Because when I stopped talking, I had to listen to the rubbish swirling around my head every minute of every day. And it is such rubbish. Jealousy, envy, trivia, anger, hurt, guilt, shame, fantasies, memories, good and bad, all repeating themselves. To begin with, it was awful.”

  Mee sipped her tea and watched her auntie. Her body language was different somehow. Mee realized what had changed. Auntie Anita was almost completely still. She wasn’t fidgeting, wasn’t finding something to do. She was just sitting there. Comfortable.

  “So I listened to my personal radio station,” said Auntie Anita. “Day in and day out. And gradually I became aware of the silence behind it. Like the static behind a bad radio signal, I found silence behind mine. And it was the same silence that drew me here in the first place.”

  “And that’s God, is it?” said Mee.

  “To me, yes,” said Auntie. “Others might call it something else, that’s fine, but this is where God is for me and this is where I need to be.”

  Then she had shown Mee around the convent, a scrupulously clean, cold brick building with Victorian flagstones underfoot and dark green walls. The bedrooms—unnervingly called ‘cells’—were tiny; a bed with a thin mattress, a washbasin, a desk and hard chair. A cross above the bed and what looked like a Russian Icon on the wall seemed to be the only decoration, until Mee looked closer and found a tiny framed photo of herself on the corner of the desk. Anita saw her looking and stroked her cheek with the back of her hand.

  When Mee had said goodbye and walked back to the bus stop, she was almost overwhelmed by the frenetic activity and noise of the outside world. And as she watched the workers hurrying home, the cars honking in five solid lanes of gridlock, the blasts of music from open shop doorways, the billboards everywhere encouraging her to fit in by spending money on the right accessories, she had a sudden urge to run back to the convent. She had gone to see Auntie Anita because she missed her, but Mee had thought she was running away from the world, from real problems. Now she wasn’t so sure. She sat at the back of the bus, rolled a fat spliff and stopped thinking about it.

  “Another pancake?” said Jackie, bringing Mee’s attention back to the present. Mee was full, but meals hadn’t been regular lately and these pancakes were really good.

  “Go on, then,” she said, holding her plate up. Her lips twitched. It was almost a smile. Around the table, everyone else had finished eating. Some were drinking coffee or water, some were just sitting. Comfortable. As if here was where they were, there was nowhere else to be and that was that. Like Auntie Anita.

  The sixth pancake turned out to be the limit. Mee looked at the women around them. The man was there, too, but he seemed to blend in. They all seemed to blend in, actually, with their khaki clothes. And their ready smiles. And their stillness.

  A tall woman at the far end of the table stood up. She walked to the door. Lo followed her.

  “I’m Diane,” said the tall woman. “Welcome to the Order. Would you like to see the garden?”

  26

  Seventeen Years Previously

  St. Benet's Children’s Home, New York

  Seb spent eighteen days in the hospital after picking up an infection from the knife wound in his stomach. Father O’Hanoran told him later it had been touch and go for a few days, with Seb drifting in and out of consciousness, his face nearly as white as the starched pillowcase underneath. Seb guessed it must have been during that time that he thought he saw Melissa standing at the end of the bed. She didn’t say anything, just smiled sadly at him. It couldn’t have been her, there was no black eye, but Seb accepted the fever-born hallucination gratefully as his body healed. He knew his body would heal, of course, once they moved him from the ICU to a small ward. His mind was a different matter. As he moved into a more normal pattern of waking and sleeping, he found it impossible to rest properly. The first thing he thought of on waking, and the image that entered his mind as soon as he began to settle down to sleep was Jack Carnavon’s pink-frothed lips as he exhaled for the last time. The awful, unavoidable, finality of death.

  The police came during the second week, as soon as the doctors decided he was stable. Two NYPD officers, one a short Irishman in his fifties with no neck, the other a young, pretty black woman who said very little but looked at him throughout the interview with a keen, intelligent gaze. She looked like someone you wouldn’t get away with lying to. Seb hoped his edited version of the truth would get past her scrutiny. He had read that liars usually over-elaborate, give too many details, remember the order in which events unfolded too accurately. There was no real danger of that in Seb’s case, as his mind had evidently made the decision to recall parts of the fight with Jack in pin-point, laser-sharp slow-mo, while allowing other chunks of time to evaporate completely. Seb had decided to leave Melissa out of the story entirely. She needed to move on, and making a statement to the police about what Jack had done to her wouldn’t help. At least, that w
as what Seb figured.

  Sister Theresa sat in the corner, knitting. Every time Seb had opened his eyes during his recovery, one of the Sisters had been there, bringing him drinks, talking to him, reading or praying the rosary. Sister Theresa looked up at him as the two officers came in. He caught her glance. He wondered what she thought of him now.

  The Irish cop was called Mahoney. “Yeah, just like the guy in that Police Academy movie,” he said, “only not funny. Not funny at all.” He shook his head slowly as if to emphasize his lack of comedic ability. He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and sat down, dragging a chair to the head of Seb’s bed. He nodded at his partner, who took out a small voice recorder and placed it on the bedside table.

  “Sergeant Dalney,” she said, after pressing record and noting the date and time. “Witness is Sebastian Varden, aged fifteen.” She looked at him and smiled. A professional, polite smile, no warmth. “Now, Sebastian, we are here for a statement about what happened on the evening of Wednesday 23rd September at St. Benet's. You are not under any suspicion at this point, we just need to present your evidence to the coroner. You’ve been through a traumatic event, we appreciate that, but we need you to co-operate fully. This will mean answering some questions that may be difficult for you.”

  “It’s ok,” said Seb. He took a drink of water. Dalney sat a bit further back from the bed and made very few further comments.