Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1

by Sonia Paige

  ‘Like the shield,’ said Anthea.

  ‘What now?’ Morton put his paper down with a touch of weariness.

  ‘Achilles’ shield. The action stops dead and we get a hundred lines of meticulous description of a piece of hardware with the obsession of an antique-collector.’

  ‘OK…’

  ‘Or an acid head staring at a seashell…’

  ‘OK, OK, I get your point.’ Morton picked up a pencil, made a note and then started reading again with a drooping smile:

  ‘His characters also slip through the veil of consensual “reality” to have other-world experiences, meeting a god on the seashore or being prompted by a sudden spirit to unusual behaviour. They do not act against a “filled-in” background as in Western painting, but often hang in limbo. Their world can be meticulously embodied, where we can picture a sea-mew skimming the water; smell the timber cut exactly to size to build a boat; feel the North Wind blowing thistles across the fields. Then it can slip into mirage. Thus these texts, which could in the past be seen as stylized or primitive, now seem curiously resonant with our zeitgeist.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Anthea. ‘Who’s going to be at this lecture?’

  ‘Technically, it’s open to the public. But most will be academics of some sort.’

  ‘So they’ll know what a zeitgeist is? I’m not too sure myself.’

  ‘They’ll know. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter. Really doesn’t, honey.’ He looked longingly at his manuscript. ‘I’ll go on, yeah?

  ‘Suddenly Homer is looking rather up-to-date. Multiauthored, multi-charactered, temporally displaced, set in metaphysically heterogeneous arenas, the Homeric poems weave their yarn in a way strangely fitting for contemporary tastes.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Anthea. She dived under the duvet and came up scratching her calf. ‘I think the dog’s got fleas again. Sorry, go on.’

  Morton hesitated then pressed on: ‘Homer also includes folk tales, a genre that in contemporary thinking has likewise become less marginalized: Bruno Bettelheim has written about their consolatory and therapeutic role, suggesting that in them children could consciously and unconsciously find messages of hope, strength and encourgement. In his words, “This was probably the first pschoanalytic cure on the couch.”’

  ‘I think Bettelheim is a bit of a jump,’ said Anthea. ‘And speaking of cures and the couch, I’ve got to go to my session. But I think it’s good. Read me the rest later.’ She got out of bed, tripped over the tray, and made for the bathroom.

  Tuesday 18th December 9.30 am

  ‘Keep walking, it’s cold.’ I have my arm through Mandy’s as we walk between the bare flower beds in the exercise courtyard. A few small flakes of snow are starting to fall.

  ‘That’s not why I’m shivering,’ says Mandy.

  ‘But it’s good to keep moving.’

  ‘Fuck this,’ she says. ‘Every time I go through this I say I’m not going to get into it again.’ We have reached the furthest wall of the yard. ‘Then I do. Bloody memories… It’s like a voice in your head won’t shut the fuck up…’

  She dives into her jeans pocket and holds out a crumpled piece of paper.

  ‘Is this what you were writing last night?’ I ask.

  ‘Trying to work stuff out,’ she says. ‘Stuff that’s doing my head in.’

  I unfold it. In pencil Mandy has written:

  ‘You said it was love

  ‘But I was too young

  ‘You said it was love

  ‘But it tasted like fear

  ‘You said I loved it

  ‘But the milk was sour

  ‘You said it was our love secret

  ‘But it was like lead in my pocket

  ‘You said it was love

  ‘But I needed a brother, not a lover’

  I read it in silence several times. Slowly the penny drops. I look at Mandy. ‘This happened to you? Your brother?’

  Mandy shrugs. ‘Some brother. Shit happens.’ She takes back the piece of paper and tears it up. ‘That’s why I’m an evil cow sometimes… Dave is the only one who knows. He understands.’ She scatters the pieces of paper on the ground. Snow is starting to fall in earnest as she turns and walks off.

  4

  Crisis Counsels

  Tuesday 18th December 1990 10.15 am

  Anthea stood in the doorway shifting her plump body from one foot to another. Facing her across the small room, a woman with silence around her sat on a wicker chair. She was in her forties. Her face was pale and plain, but her eyes were generous. She was wearing a lilac headscarf.

  ‘Hello, I’m Anthea.’

  ‘Hi, I’m Ren. Please sit down. Hang your coat on the back of the door if you like.’

  ‘The snow’s beautiful, but my shoes are wet. Shall I leave them outside?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Thank you for taking me on just before Christmas. I hope it’s going to help me get through the so-called festive season.’ As Anthea came in she brushed past the shiny leaves of a large aspidistra plant. Her feet trod quietly in glittery pink and red striped socks, and without taking her coat off she sank into the wicker chair facing Ren. It creaked as it took her weight. She paused. ‘Now I’m here, I don’t know where to start.’ She put her handbag and two plastic bags on the floor on top of a small striped rug.

  Ren smiled. ‘You can start wherever you like. This is your time to use as you wish.’ She leant forward and pressed the start switch of a tape machine which sat on a low table beside a small clock, a candle and a box of man-sized tissues. The candle flickered gently.

  Anthea stared at the machine. ‘The tape recorder doesn’t help. I know you explained on the phone that it’s for supervision purposes. And it’s confidential. I know I agreed to it. But seeing it whirring around is like watching my life whizzing past.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You might find it easiest to start by telling me a little about yourself,’ said Ren. ‘And why you wanted to come to see me.’

  ‘I didn’t want to come. I’m not into therapeutics of any kind. Let alone anything to do with energy or healing, regression, soul retrieval… I’m not that kind of person. But your card said crisis counselling. And I am in crisis.’

  ‘And so you are here.’

  ‘My friends said I had to. They say I’m going mad.’

  ‘What does that mean to you, “mad”?’

  ‘Crazy. Nutty. Bananas. Bonkers. Off my rocker… I may seem normal to you. I’m perfectly OK most of the time. As long as I don’t have anything to do with bones.’

  ‘Bones?’

  ‘The bones are the problem.’ Anthea paused. ‘What’s the point? You’ll just think I’m crazy, like my friends. You sit here in this cosy room, on your comfy chair, your feet securely planted in 1990… Is that a Greek rug, by the way? That’s weird. Oh, never mind. How could you understand what I’m going through?’ She looked through the window at the snow falling outside.

  ‘You could try me.’

  ‘I was brought up to think that the world was logical, scientific, rational. But things have happened… Things I can’t explain… I don’t know what the rules are any more…’ She hesitated.

  ‘Take your time,’ said Ren.

  Anthea took a deep breath and then plunged into her account like an unconfident swimmer splashing frantically to get to the other side. ‘OK. I’m an archaeologist. Not a very good one. An imperfect archaeologist.

  ‘I grew up in Maidstone. After I left school I worked in a bank, no-one in my family went into higher education. But later on I did get to university. Then into teaching. But I’ve always had a thing about archaeology. So when Bert – that’s my son – got a bit older… He’s eight now and he’s more self-sufficient… I got a grant to go back to studying. Postgraduate. My topic is Aspects of Iatromantic Practices in Ancient Greece: The Archaeological and Textual Evidence.’

  ‘Iatromantic?’ Ren asked.

  ‘Means healing and prophecy. The two elements weren�
��t so separated in ancient Greek culture as they are for us. Nowadays going to a doctor is different from going to a fortune teller. They went to an oracle for a diagnosis, advice on treatment, and a prognosis – that’s the future – all in one. Weird, but fascinating.

  ‘The PhD work has been a struggle, but it’s fulfilling a childhood dream. I’m a single mother. That is, I’m with somebody now – Morton – but he’s not Bert’s dad. He doesn’t do much with Bert, but he’s good with things like the washing up. He’s a kind of sceptical mystic, an Irish American ex-Catholic free thinker, he stands at the sink surrounded by soap bubbles and works through the dirty dishes slowly like a meditation, with a gleam in his eyes. He piles the drying up on the draining board as neatly as he builds one of his arguments in an academic paper. He’s at the university too. His work is on Greek literature.

  ‘You don’t need to know all that, do you? Either I tell nothing, or everything. Can’t keep things in proportion. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that Morton is another one who thinks I’m losing it. Acting weird.’

  Anthea paused.

  Ren smiled in encouragement. ‘What is it he finds weird?’

  ‘It’s all because I’ve had these experiences… Scary. You could call them supernatural. I don’t know what to make of them. I always used to see life in black and white. But nothing holds together any more. I’m worried about the repercussions.’

  ‘On?’

  Anthea had lost her momentum. ‘On?’ She stood up suddenly and took her coat off. ‘I’m sorry, this is wet.’ She looked at the hook on the back of the door then rolled the coat up and tried to stuff it into a plastic bag she was carrying. It fell out immediately. ‘It’s not good for Bert that I’m acting strange. And what if I’m not acting strange, what if what I fear is true?’ She sat down again. ‘That would be even worse for him. And for Morton. What about him?’

  There was a long silence.

  Then Anthea added. ‘And my migraines are getting worse.’

  ‘Would you like to tell me about the migraines?’

  ‘Like an axe in the head. I always had them. From childhood. The family doctor said I was overworking my brain. My mother said it was my own fault, I brought them on myself with too much reading. She didn’t like books in the house, said they made clutter. When I got older the headaches got worse, with vomiting and shaking. And a weird feeling. I started having these dreams. I was in an attic room, trapped, and sun was shining in through the windows so bright I could hardly open my eyes. Dazzling light filling the room attacking me. My head was throbbing. I couldn’t escape. Then I’d wake with a migraine.’

  Anthea clasped her forehead. ‘I had one in Greece too on the day I found the bones.’

  Ren asked, ‘Do you want to start from the beginning with the bones?’

  Anthea looked at the window and the door as if considering escape. Then she let her hands drop.

  ‘I suppose I have to.

  ‘It was in Crete last February. The morning after a scary experience brought on by a… cake. Well, it’s hard to explain, let’s just say a scary experience. I won’t go into that now. I haven’t been the same since. I woke up the next day feeling dreadful, like the mother of a hangover except that I hadn’t drunk anything: it was a migraine. The pain pounding in my head. My brow hot and heavy. The light hurt my eyes.

  ‘There was all the clearing up to do – I won’t go into that. Then we set off to visit a tomb. We were doing fieldwork. Archaeology.

  ‘Morton drove the hired car. I sat next to him taking painkillers, drinking water and trying not to shake. We didn’t have many days there, and a lot of sites to visit.

  ‘When we got near the place, we left the car and had to climb to reach the tomb. The sky was overcast and there was a little breeze. I felt so fragile I thought it could knock me over. Every sensation was extreme. The colours unusually bright. I was raw, as if I had no skin. Although I had heavy walking boots, the soles of my feet could feel the stones on the path. The low prickly bushes seemed extra green. The loamy earth seemed especially red. The bare pale grey rocks of the mountains above us were dazzling. Everything seemed about to erupt with an inner life. There were tears in my eyes although I didn’t know what I was crying about.

  ‘What survived of the tomb wall was about a metre high and it stood for about a half of the original circumference. The tombs are round,’ she gestured with her hand. ‘We examined the structure: any signs of hatches in the wall, slots, niches, seats, the approach path through the outbuildings. These were the kind of things we were looking for. They can give clues about what rituals happened at the tombs.

  ‘It was when I sat down on a big boulder to write up my notes that I noticed the spoil heap.’

  ‘Spoil heap…?’ Ren turned the words over.

  ‘That’s a mound of earth left by the excavators after they dig out the tomb. They dump any little bits of pottery, or whatever, which they didn’t think worth taking away to wash and sort and put in the museum. This heap must have been there some time because there was grass growing up one side of it.

  ‘I was curious. I got a stick and poked into it. Immediately a bone jumped out. It was only two or three inches long. But it was too thick for a finger bone. It looked like human bone, perhaps from an arm – a radius or an ulna. I was struck by its consistency. It wasn’t like the bone you get in a shoulder of pork. It was hard like a fossil. Like bone china. At one end it looked as if it had been cut across neatly with a knife. I wondered what person it had belonged to. Someone who’d been buried in the tomb. I put it down carefully and poked around in the spoil heap ’till I found another one. Wider and shorter. Then a whole load more. Some looked as if they had been cut across at both ends. I was shocked that human remains had been left on a rubbish heap. By the time Morton came over, there was a row of little bits of bone laid out neatly side by side.

  ‘“What the hell’s that?” he said.

  ‘I said “Bones of people who lived here. Whose bodies were put in this grave. Chucked out of it and abandoned on the mountainside.” I wanted to rescue them, bring them back to England, bring them home. When I held them in my hand I felt a thrill, as if I was touching people who were still alive. I had a strong sensation that they wanted to come with me. One of them in particular, the first one I found. Morton was against it, but I was determined. I wrapped a few of them in paper hankies and put them in my knapsack.

  ‘It was as we walked back that I started to get scared. I had the remains of people in my knapsack. People who lived thousands of years ago. People I didn’t know, whose names were long lost. The mountains towered over us. Wild, god-forsaken crags. Like spikes of grey knives cutting the air, with fatal sheer drops smooth as a glacier. Rubblestrewn slopes where a tremor could start an avalanche. So many ways to die up there, and no-one to save you. Such a loneliness and desolation about those mountains. I think it was the emptiness scared me more than anything. I wanted to run to the city, to crowds, noise, bustle. Away from that void you could fall into forever.

  ‘After we got back to England I sometimes dreamt about those mountains.’

  Ren ran her fingers along where her eyebrows would have been. She had no hair. She pulled her headscarf down a little at the back. ‘Some people say that everything in a dream is you. Part of your psychic landscape. Those scary empty places,’ she asked, ‘Were they only outside you in the mountains? Or were they inside you as well?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d have to think about that.’

  Ren watched her in silence.

  Anthea stared at her feet.

  ‘Back at home I unpacked the bits of bone out of the clothes in my suitcase where I’d wrapped them up. Morton teased me: “Those poor bastards. They thought they were going to rest on a Cretan hillside for eternity and here they’ve ended up mixed with dirty washing in inner London.”

  ‘I argued with him. “Their millennia of peace were already shattered by the archaeologist’s trowel. They’d been turfed out of
their tomb and ignominiously dumped. Exposed to the elements.”

  ‘”The Cretan sun. They’re not going to like your British weather.”

  ‘I wrapped them carefully and put them in a little wicker box. And I didn’t think any more about it.’

  Anthea sighed and looked at Ren. ‘It was not long after that the dreams started. They were always set in some place that wasn’t now. People in different clothes. Perhaps some place in the past. I was being pushed, I was being chased, I was falling… Always I was going to die. I would wake up and lie there shaking. Sometimes Morton would roll over and put his arm round me. That was the only thing that could get me back to sleep. Gradually the dreams got worse… ’

  Ren asked, ‘When was this?’

  ‘This autumn. Morton started teasing me seriously. When he saw my tired face in the morning, he’d say “Another painful historical episode? I think it’s those bones. ‘Take us back to Crete!’ they’re saying. ‘Let us out of this box!’”

  ‘I tried to tell him that the bones were my friends. That I felt they were warning me. He made screwy movements with his finger and kissed me on the forehead. He wouldn’t take me seriously.’

  Anthea slumped in her chair. ‘Nor would anyone else. When I started reading books about past lives my friends said I was losing my grip. Do you believe in reincarnation?’

  Ren shrugged. ‘How can we believe or not believe in something we have no way of knowing? What I know is that people who do believe in it always stress one thing. They say that when something comes up in this life, it needs to be dealt with in this life. It is the present we need to focus on, not the past.’

  ‘The present?’

  ‘They believe sometimes the present can heal the past.’

  Anthea sat for some time as if trying to understand what Ren had said. Then she set off again in a rush. ‘Anyway, it was because of all this that I started thinking about bones. The ancient Greeks attached a lot of importance to bones. Cities went to war with each other to have the bones of a particular hero buried on their patch. In the prehistoric Cyclades and Crete at some cemeteries they piled up the skulls. Greek traditions involved doing rituals and stuff with parts of the skeletons. But in the West now we have no respect for them. Skeletons are the raw material of horror. And the ones in museums, how would those people feel about being gawped at by strangers? Were they asked for permission?