Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1

by Sonia Paige

  ‘Michelle goes, “Yeah, yeah… Just when you think you’ve seen it all, things can get worse.”

  ‘Michelle’s always been like that. At school she was always going on about hearing things other people couldn’t hear. We done ouija boards and all that stuff. If we were up to something she reckoned she always knew when there was a teacher coming.’

  ‘Hang on,’ says Debs, ‘How come she got nicked then?’

  Mandy shrugs. ‘Ask her. She says it never works for her, like to help her, only to help other people out.

  ‘While we were lying there looking for the quiet place, Michelle and I got the giggles. She had a glass of water and she spat some on me, filthy cow. I jumped on her and next thing we were rolling on the floor and knocked her water over and it spilled on everything. Had a good laugh. My T-shirt’s still wet, see?’

  ‘Did you get chucked out?’ asks Debs.

  ‘No, Miss just goes, “Have we got a problem? I know it’s hard to focus and relax.” She mops up the floor and she puts some dry mats down for Michelle and me, and carries on. “Imagine you can breathe in strength and breathe out tension. Let the tension drain out of you into the floor.” Oh, yeah, then she goes “Imagine a cocoon around you, keeping you safe, protecting you, helping you get through what you’re going through.”

  ‘Michelle says, “Like an egg.”

  ‘Then Ronnie goes, “And it cracks. Crack. Crack, get it?” and we all laughed, and Miss just keeps droning on, “It’s hard to relax. Imagine a cocoon of golden light around you, protecting you,” and in the end it half sends you to sleep.

  ‘We were all flaked out on the floor, that Kathleen was snoring, and Miss asks us if we want to curl up on our sides. “Lots of women in withdrawal find this a good position for sleeping,” she goes.

  ‘“I like it Miss,” goes Cleo. “That’s how babies sleep.”

  ‘So we just lay there quiet and you know what, a bit of sunshine got into the room, Christ knows how, and it was freaky for a minute, like time stopped still, weren’t it, Corinne? You could hear a pin drop. If I believed in that stuff Michelle’s into, I’d say an angel flew by.’

  ‘Took a wrong turning, I expect,’ says Debs.

  Mandy nods, ‘Probably got a shock… But it was that peaceful it could of folded up its wings.’ She pauses to remember and I can see stress rolling off her face like clouds off a mountain.

  ‘Anyroads,’ she picks up, ‘after that we did massage. I was a bit dozy by then. We sat on chairs in twos, one behind the other. The person in front puts the chair sideways. And we did this stroking thing down the back of the person in front. Then we swapped. Miss goes, “It’s a natural gift. Just stay relaxed and move your hands down your partner’s back. Don’t rush. It’s quality, not quantity.”

  ‘Then that Kathleen goes “Do we have to follow you, Miss, or can we do it in our own time?”

  ‘She tells her, in her own time.

  ‘Then Jules goes, “I’m in pain, Miss,” and she lifts her Tshirt to show off her bruises. From the cop shop. All round the top of her back, they really knocked her around.

  ‘Miss goes, “Would you rather it wasn’t touched?” but Jules reckons a massage might make it better. So Miss puts a hand on her head and a hand on the worst bits of bruise and shuts her eyes and tells her to breathe. And that Jules puts a sock in it. Makes a change.

  ‘Then the fucking kangas start looking through the door. Lechy bastards. I didn’t take no notice. Bet they were jealous. That massage is good. It was all just like, go slow. No pressure. Piece of cake, really. “Down the back slow,” Miss goes. Lots of doing nothing. Your hands laid on her shoulders or whatever. Mostly the back and on the head, you know. No naughty stuff. None of that kind of massage you do for the old gentlemen, Debs.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘I had Jamie Lee paired with me. When she moved her hands it was like a river going down my back. Washing it clean. Magic. I think I must have half fell asleep, but when I came round, it was like, “Hello, world, this is a brand new Mandy”. Like I’d been taken apart, cleaned up and put back together again.

  ‘How about you, Corinne? Corinne got left out when we went into pairs. She had to have the teacher do hers. Good, was it? With Miss?’

  I’m sitting there with my eyes shut, resting my head against the wall and listening to Mandy.

  When the massage teacher put her hand between my shoulder blades it felt red hot. Burning into my skin. In a nice way. Like an imprint.

  I open my eyes and say, ‘When she moved her hand away, I could still feel it warm there on my back. I can still feel it there now.’

  Mandy nods. ‘All the girls were like, “Miss, that was great.” Kathleen goes, “That was the first time I relaxed since I’ve been in here.”

  ‘That Janice, though. She goes “I’ve never seen them so happy. They’ve all been dancing and massaging and no time for swearing.” Stuck up cow. She talks like she wasn’t one of us. She’s no better.

  ‘Then at the end Miss gets us all standing in a circle again, she goes on about feet on the ground so we feel strong to go back out into this dump but she don’t say that exactly. And she asks has anyone got anything to say and the Portuguese woman is going, “Thank you for this time,” and Michelle goes, “I like your karma, Miss.” That Jules had gone quiet. Then suddenly she blurts out that they told her she’s HIV. Just like that. We all clammed up. Didn’t know what to say. Miss asked her what the group could do that would help. Jules goes on about she reckons no-one’ll want nothing to do with her now. Like she’s out in the cold. Like the Plague. So Miss checks it out with everyone and gets us all to hold hands. Standing there. Jules with the rest of us. She looked like a kid been given an ice cream.

  ‘That was when Bev started singing, eh Bev?’ The bedclothes in the corner did not respond. ‘She come out with “Stand by Me.” She’s got a good voice, that one. She started up and then they all joined in. Even me, and I can’t sing a note. It was fucking loud, the kangas came and peered in through the glass. We didn’t take no notice, just sang louder. Up yours, arseholes.’

  Tuesday 18th December 5.30 pm

  Anthea sat in Seminar Room 64B as Lefteris Chrysostomos came to the end of his talk on ‘A Return Ticket to the Underworld? Hell and Healing in Ancient Greece’. The heating was on full, and beyond the curtainless windows a black void gave no hint of the snow lying in Gordon Square below.

  ‘In conclusion,’ Lefteris was saying, ‘We have seen that in the early Greek literature the idyllic Elysian fields formed no part of the realms of the dead, and the view of the afterlife was generally the depressing one. One can perhaps understand better the appeal of the new Christian ideology of the resurrection if it is compared to the pagan alternative, a bleak one, of a shadow life in the kingdom of Hades.’

  The audience – some students, some academics – sat round four rectangular wooden school tables which had been pushed together to make one large table. The students leant on the varnished surface busily taking notes; most of the academics leant back calmly in their chairs as if they thought they knew what was going to be said.

  ‘One of the earliest cases and most poignant is the veteran from the Trojan War, Achilles. Odysseus meets him on his visit to the underworld.’ Lefteris briefly consulted his notes and looked up. A smile creased the scar on his left cheek, ‘Achilles is perhaps one of our first “celebrities”: he was destined to a short life with fame rather than a long life without it – the priority to be on other people’s lips rather than in his own skin… But in Hades, Odysseus finds Achilles’ shade having empty hands: he is robbed of everything except the memories of his famous exploits in the world above. Achilles makes to Odysseus the famous comment that he would rather be a serf in the land of the living than a king among the shades, and this sums up the picture of what we might call literally a dead end. This is all so different from the Christian happy ending. Could human life really finish like this, as a dead end, a full stop?’ Lefteris pa
used and looked around the faces of his audience. They fidgeted and looked down.

  Anthea sneezed loudly and fumbled in one of her bags for a tissue. Some of the people sitting near her turned to look.

  ‘So,’ continued Lefteris, ‘one does not want to end up in the Greek underworld. My question has been, can one return from there? Odysseus, we saw this, visited as a tourist on a mission to have a consultation, to receive prophetic advice, and he used his return ticket, so to speak. Trophonios had some kind of afterlife, returning from the dead to his tomb to frighten as well as enlighten the petitioners at his oracle.’ Lefteris hesitated for a moment to give a friendly glance in Anthea’s direction. ‘Eurydice was rescued by her husband Orpheus but only on the condition that as they walked up and out to the world above he did not look back to see if she was still following him. At the last moment he lost his courage, he turned and lost her forever.

  ‘Perhaps the best-known case is that of Persephone – Core – the maiden seized and stolen by the King of the Underworld, Hades. She is called back to the light only through the efforts of her mother Demeter. Being the goddess of food with the power to starve humanity, Demeter had – how shall we say – influence in high places. But before Core left the underworld, Hades arranged that she ate some pomegranate which bound her to return to the underworld at certain intervals.’

  He put his script down on the table for a moment and folded his arms. ‘So much for the ancient myth,’ he said. ‘But what about now?’ He paused and surveyed the room as if genuinely hoping that someone from the audience might volunteer an answer. No-one did and he returned to his script:

  ‘So. If we take the view widespread among our contemporaries that hell is not a place but rather a state of the mind, and if we follow Sigmund Freud in using the Greek myths to extract truths about the psyche which, he tells us, are relevant in our 20th century, then what can we say that these stories tell us?

  ‘Perhaps we should ask whether human beings – or in Freud’s thinking, patients – can return from the private hell of neurosis to rejoin the world of the living? And if so, how? There is a large metaphysical question still staying, which we cannot answer despite millennia of debate: that is the question of whether there is any return from death. The smaller question we might however dare to consider, that is whether humans can return from those traumas that take them to a different experiential world. Those small deaths of depression and breakdown. And perhaps this smaller question also has a metaphysical dimension.

  ‘Can one human help another find the way back to the land of life? Orpheus failed, Eurydice was victim of her husband’s anxiety: enough faith was not there. Perhaps the help of another can only be brittle, with the outcome unsure. In the case of Core, her mother’s grief and insistence brought her back, but only in part. Core lived marked for ever by her experience, with this shadow of the unavoidable return always hanging over her. Can this polysemic metaphor offer to us ways of thinking about the process of healing?’

  Anthea’s gaze moved from the speaker to the man sitting next to him, a bespectacled middle-aged academic with pale gingery hair in a crew cut. She caught his eye and he hastily glanced away. Anthea looked back towards the speaker.

  ‘Odysseus, of course, goes of his own will,’ Lefteris was saying. ‘He strictly follows the due procedure, he cuts the throat of two sheep and pours the blood for the shades of the dead to drink to enable them to speak. He forces the crowds of the dead to keep at a distance so that he can first ask the dead prophet Teiresias for advice about his journey home. The dominant theme of his visit is sadness as he meets the great people brought down low and the poor unfortunates who were cut off out of time, but he returns wiser from his contact with the other world.

  ‘It seems a paradox that contact with the dead could be deliberately seeked for, not only for the insight but also for the healing it could bring, at incubation sites such as the one of Amphiaraeus near Thebes where inquirers slept within the precinct to consult the oracle: here the dead could help the living.

  ‘The experience of the maiden Core suggests that in other circumstances such an experience makes a scar from which the person never fully recovers.’

  Including his audience in the sweep of a dazzling smile, Lefteris launched into his last sentence: ‘While hell surely means something different for each and every person, the question of how it affects us and whether we can return from it produces implications for our imaginative phrasing of the possibility of healing in human life,’ he glanced down at his text, ‘as well as for our understanding of the beliefs and ideas of the ancient Greeks.’

  He sat down amid sporadic applause.

  The ginger-haired academic next to him stood up: ‘Thank you, Lefteri. I appreciate that it is late, and – dare I say it – uncomfortably close to Christmas, and in view of the snow some of you may fear that travelling home may indeed be a journey from hell, but are there any questions?’

  After a pause, a male student wearing a brown cardigan put his hand up at the back: ‘If hell is not a physical place, would you like to comment on the oracles of the dead at specific locations known in antiquity?’

  Lefteris stood up to answer. ‘Yes, indeed, this is a good point. There were as you say specific places where contact with the underworld was easier, where it was more possible to touch that world. Tombs play a role here: the tomb of Trophonios that I mentioned is only one example. There were also generic sites, including Thesprotia and Tainarum, where the souls of the dead could be summoned and questions asked to them. It is just as, to follow our Freudian parallel, that there are in the present day places, times, events and people that are more likely to throw the individual into their own private underworld or hell. The conditions for the – shall I say – bleeding through between the two worlds can be specific.’

  Anthea raised her hand: ‘In contact with the dead in ancient Greece, could you say something about the significance of bones?’

  ‘The bones were important, yes, was there something specific?’

  Anthea hesitated. ‘Well… did people talk to bones?’

  The male student at the back gave an audible sneer: ‘Is that a serious suggestion?’

  The whole table-full of academics and students erupted into laughter. Anthea looked down at the table and a red blush rose from her neck up to her face.

  Lefteris raised a restraining hand. ‘I should say that talking to bones is indeed a part of modern Greek tradition. However there is, as far as I am aware, no evidence for it in the classical period.’

  The ginger-haired academic beside him volunteered: ‘For Bronze Age Crete, Xanthoudides has pointed out the shortage of skulls in relation to bones at a number of cemetery sites. And the find of a fragment of human skull in a settlement site near Myrtos suggests they may have done things with bones in that period.’ His English had the perfect intonation of an Austrian who has been naturalised British for many years.

  Lefteris nodded. ‘Dr. Scheiner is right. But the lack of deciphered textual evidence from that era means that we cannot be sure what practices, if any, were followed along those lines.’

  ‘And, Lefteri,’ said the ginger-haired academic, ‘I feel we’re being rather led away from your topic here. This is perhaps something of a red herring.’ He glanced in Anthea’s direction.

  ‘Not entirely,’ said Lefteris. ‘To me there is some irony in the fact that despite the Christian rhetoric of the resurrection, in the Greek Orthodox practices of the 20th century we find that traditions have survived which involve a clinging to the bones. The preserving and handling of the skeleton material, this underlines the concern to adhere to the physical remains. This brings to foreground the mortality of humans, and the wish to maintain contact with what still remains of the dead person as they once were – rather than a sense of transcendence or revitalization under new forms. Perhaps the old pagan ideas have shown to be more tenacious than we might have imagined.’

  Tuesday 18th December 6.30 pm

&n
bsp; Alex and Duane met outside Ren’s house. There were eight steps up to the front door, which was framed by imitation columns set into the wall. The paint on the plaster decoration was peeling. Alex, in her navy-blue coat with the hood up, stood on the top step pressing the bell. Duane appeared at the gate, picking his way carefully in trainers over the packed snow. He was wearing a faded beige anklelength overcoat with 1970s lapels.

  Alex took her finger off the bell. ‘Evidently Ren’s not home yet. I’m Alex.’

  ‘I’m Duane. Pleased to meet you.’ He scratched his head through the brown woolly hat bulging with hidden hair and looked up at her. ‘So, she’s expecting you too? You want to wait here?’

  ‘She said to go to the pub.’

  Duane put a lager and a gin and tonic down on the dark varnished table. ‘You know, I think I’ve heard Ren mention your name. Strange us meeting on the doorstep at that moment. Like it’s fate, right?’

  Alex studied the tonic fizzing around the ice and lemon. When it had settled down she drank a couple of gulps. ‘I’ve known her a long time. You don’t believe in fate, do you?’

  ‘I do and I don’t. You?’

  ‘Mystical rubbish. Religion, fate, spirits, the after-life, it’s all nonsense cooked up to distract us from what’s wrong with the real world.’

  ‘You know what you think, don’t you? But as it happens that does not mean you’re right. If you like, I will tell you why I believe in ghosts.’ He took a neat sip of his lager and put his glass down.

  Alex arched her eyebrows and looked into her glass. ‘Honestly, I’m sure it’s very fascinating, but…’

  ‘Personally,’ Duane continued, ‘I wasn’t sure, I never believed in nothing ’till I saw a ghost with my own eyes.’

  Alex’s smile was sarcastic. ‘People can always see things if they want to see them.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Duane. He caressed his brown cheek slowly. ‘You’re an attractive woman,’ he said. He stared at her with brown eyes in which her reflection floated. ‘You think you know a lot, don’t you. Maybe you do. But you don’t know everything. Do you want to hear something you don’t know about?’