Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1

by Sonia Paige

  ‘“I’m sorry to trouble you…” she said, and sighed as if she had all the cares of the world on her. She came over as a film star and a waif, both at the same time.

  ‘I wanted to reassure her that it was no trouble. Her eyes seemed to pull me towards her, and I went into alert ready to go the extra mile for her. “How can I help?” I said.

  ‘Then she said, “Can I speak to Tel?”

  ‘Crystal pointed out that after the seductive preamble, she wasn’t actually interested in me at all.

  ‘I didn’t hesitate to fetch Tel from the office in the back, though we weren’t meant to leave our positions for something like that. When he came, I saw her accosting him with the same intense eyes. He was a tall man, but he kind of crumpled. “I never understood how she did that,” I told Crystal.

  ‘“Charisma!” Crystal exploded. “She put a spell on him. Simple as that! I’ve got a friend who’s always telling me how power comes from money and class. But there’s also such a thing as personal power, for good or bad. People like that woman ooze their way into you. I recognise the type. They shimmy and chatter like a cobra swaying to distract its prey while it looks for the best place to strike.”

  ‘I tried to tell Crystal that Francine was always very nice to me.

  ‘But Crystal said, “Was she nice, really? Or was she just charming? Did she ever actually do anything for you?”

  ‘I explained to Crystal that she’d had a hard life. Tel had told me that.

  ‘Crystal just said, “So? That left her with wounds. Dangerous wounds.”

  “’She seemed so direct,” I said, “so vulnerable. Almost naked.”

  ‘Crystal pulled a face. “And people never use that to manipulate?”

  ‘I told Crystal that I felt Francine really wanted to connect with me.

  ‘“She did,” said Crystal, “All the better to twist you round her finger. Using the energy in her aura. I know people like that.”

  ‘I asked Crystal what an aura was, and that really got her going. “If you were clairvoyant you’d see her putting out feelers. She latches on to your energy field. She sucks. She has a big hole in her aura and she draws on other people to fill it. It’s a misuse of personal power.”

  ‘At this point she’d lost me. I said perhaps I was daft to get so upset about Tel, seeing as we’d only been together a couple of months.

  ‘She said something strange: “That’s nothing to do with it. Time is an illusion in the physical. What’s important is the quality of the connection, spirit to spirit. That can defy time. On one level you’ve always been with him and always will be.” She said some other weird stuff about maybe I’d known him from a past life and that was why I felt the connection so strong.

  ‘I began to think she was more than eccentric, and I told her I didn’t believe in any of that stuff: “Anyway, if there was any past life it’s over, and I’ve lost him in this life too.”

  ‘She came back with another strange idea. She said, “But some people believe all our lives are happening at once. And they can all affect each other.”

  She said more things I couldn’t follow, but I do remember her saying at the end, “You need to get away from them both, Tel and Francine. Change your life. They’re not good medicine. You need a new direction.”

  ‘That bit made sense. I knew she was right and that I needed help. Everything was wrong with my life. I was washed up with Tel. I was bored and stuck with the job at the bank. I wasn’t happy living at home.

  ‘I can’t remember how it happened but I’d told Crystal about Kledonas in Greece and suddenly she said, “Why don’t you try it here ? Ask the oracle for a new direction?” She pointed out it was the right time of year for the festival of St. John, near the summer solstice. I could do it just like in Greece – ask an important question and then get the answer from the first words I happened to hear from a passing stranger. The sacredness of chance.

  ‘The Sunday afternoon was free and she persuaded me to walk up to a stone circle on top of a hill not far from the house. She said it would be a potent place. I thought it was a peculiar idea, but she was very enthusiastic and I didn’t want to be a wet blanket. I didn’t see how it could do any harm, especially since it wasn’t likely we would hear any chance words at a deserted place in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘As we walked up the hill, there was no-one around for miles except an elderly man in a green track suit who jogged past us in the opposite direction. When we got to the top, they weren’t really standing stones, but lying stones. They didn’t look like they’d fallen over, either. Just huge slabs lying in a complete circle. There were a few blackand-white cows grazing nearby. It was a cold afternoon with clouds scudding overhead. There was a view across Dorset in all directions, 360 degrees, cropped green rolling hills all around. Crystal and I sat down on one of the horizontal stones and shut our eyes to meditate. I scratched my mosquito bites. I was trying to empty my mind but thoughts kept racing through it. Mostly about Tel. Crystal said “Repeat your question.” I felt silly saying it out loud, but inside I framed the words: “Where does my future lie?” Then I tried to meditate again.

  ‘After a few minutes I opened my eyes. It had started to rain. There was a couple heading up the hill towards us. As they came closer I could make out a tall thin lanky young man with dark hair down to his shoulders. With him was a young woman who was smaller and blond. I didn’t want to stare so I shut my eyes and tried to carry on meditating. I heard them walk past quite close then suddenly I heard the woman’s voice yell, “Talking to the dead!” I jumped; I opened my eyes and looked after them. When they got to the other side he picked up a stick and hurled it into the hedge. They stopped and looked back over the stone circle. He gave a curt nod in our direction. Then they turned away and carried on, walking down the path we had come up, her almost running to keep up with him. Then I felt a wave of sadness, it was as if the couple had left it behind them like a trail.

  ‘Once they were out of earshot, Crystal spun round, her hair flying out at the sides: “Wow! What do you make of that?”

  ‘I had to confess, I didn’t make much.

  ‘“Heavy!” she went on, “Talking to the dead! How do you do that? Without joining them? Sorry…” she must have seen my face fall, “…I don’t mean you’re going to die. At least, not soon. You know what I mean.”

  ‘I was sitting there, confused. Crystal was falling over herself trying to apologize. “And did you notice, she had her arm bandaged?” The woman had a mack on and I hadn’t seen. “That’s so weird,” she said.

  ‘I let her chat on about it without taking too much notice. I could feel a migraine coming on, and I needed to eat something urgently to keep it at bay. We went back to the house, there was bean stew for supper and after that I felt a bit better.

  ‘Crystal told me that the migraine was to do with stress and blockages in my aura: “You’re carrying all the problems with Tel in your energy field. You’re repressing your feelings and carrying them all squashed up in your head. No wonder it hurts.” After supper she told me to sit down and she put two of her fingers on the base of my spine and two fingers on a spot at the bottom of my head at the back. She held them there for a while and told me to relax. It did seem to help. “That’s your medulla,” she said, “at the base of your skull. It’s a psychic hot spot. The root chakra at the base of the spine is grounding,” she said. “You need to find your own direction. Your purpose in life.” She was very eccentric with all her talk of auras and charisma and psychic stuff.

  ‘In the evening there was a session on the element of air. Breathing and so on. I forgot all about the stone circle and my half-hearted attempt at Kledonas.

  ‘But it had affected me more than I thought. When something happens to you at a very low moment in your life, it’s like being touched when you’re naked. Soon after I got back I found myself ringing up to get application forms to do a degree. I had the right exams from school. I was accepted on a course at Bristol to do Ar
chaeology and Ancient History and Classics. I even got a grant.

  ‘A few weeks later Tel got taken ill at work. He asked me to feel his forehead. I remember it was the only time I ever touched his face, I had wanted to so much. He definitely had a temperature. I told him he should go home and he did. The strange thing was, he never came back. That was a Friday, because I remember wondering if he’d be well enough to come back in after the weekend, but he didn’t. Not all the next week. The bank didn’t know what happened to him, he didn’t ring in sick. At the end of the week I went round to his place, but there was no-one there. Noone knew what happened to him. He just vanished. Somehow I had a feeling that it was my fault.

  ‘Soon after that I handed in my notice at the bank to go to university. I left Tel and my whole life behind. In the autumn I became a full-time student.’

  ‘A big change in your life,’ said Ren.

  Anthea nodded with enthusiasm. ‘Huge. I loved living in Bristol. Do you know the Clifton Suspension Bridge? Two pieces of string flung across a chasm with a bridge hanging off them. Steel string. I used to go across it every Sunday for a walk in the woods. I used to stand on it and look down at the rocks far below and feel how the engineering played with gravity. What a nerve Brunel had. You can feel the bridge swaying in the wind. It seemed to sum up the intelligence and the vulnerability of human achievement. Spinning out our lives in the face of forces greater than ourselves.

  ‘From the beginning I was fascinated by classics and archaeology. And then one day a couple of months into term I was sitting in the university library struggling with an essay when I realized the connection with Kledonas. It was one of those misty late November afternoons when the night seems to draw in before the day has hardly started. I was staring out of the window at the bare trees when that June afternoon came back to me. “Talking to the dead.” Wasn’t that what classics and archaeology are about? Wasn’t that what I was doing? Perhaps Crystal was right about those words being significant. I tried to put the memory out of my mind and concentrate on my essay, “Myth and Truth in Herodotus”. But ever after I always had a feeling that something was propelling me towards studying the ancients. I felt sure that was the direction my future lay.

  ‘Strange, isn’t it, how some things happen?’

  After a pause, Ren asked ‘Were there difficulties or regrets in making that move?’

  ‘I think… in a way… I never got over Tel. I never even saw him to say goodbye. It was like a hole torn in my life. When I went back to visit the bank a few months later, they said they’d heard about some trouble he was in with the police. I didn’t like to ask what. The sadness about him lasted a long time. I thought I would never see him again.’ Anthea sneezed and rummaged in her bag for a tissue.

  Dabbing her nose, she asked ‘Do you think Crystal was right about Francine? Is there such a thing as charisma?’

  Ren was silent for a few moments, then replied, ‘I think it can be a way that some people promise without giving. And attract admiration without returning it. The result is that they feel better by making other people feel worse.’

  ‘How do they do it?’ asked Anthea. ‘Crystal talked as if what Francine did was something like magic.’

  Ren said, ‘Perhaps magic is a term we use to describe physical things that we don’t understand.’

  ‘I didn’t understand what went wrong with Tel. But it left a mark. It set a pattern. After that everything I was involved in seemed to go wrong. I don’t seem to be able to do anything right.’

  ‘That might be more to do with how you feel than with how things really are,’ said Ren, ‘Maybe you do more things right than you realize. We could look at that question now, if you like.’

  Anthea looked past the aspidistra out of the window, onto the London roofs outside. Then she looked at the clock and at Ren. ‘I’ve used up so much time talking again. I wanted to ask what you think about things like Kledonas? Do you believe in them?’

  ‘Anthea, what I believe isn’t important. What’s important is what you believe and how you make sense of your own life.’

  ‘I have so many questions.’

  Ren nodded. ‘And with the big questions you’re asking, there aren’t enough answers to go round.’

  ‘Something else…’ Anthea hesitated. ‘I’m realizing that a lot of these strange events are linked to Greece. The bones, the relaxation class, doing Kledonas… And I haven’t even told you about what happened that night at Knossos. It’s all gradually coming together from talking to you. And it started the very first time I went to Greece, when I was still a student.’

  ‘If you like, we can talk more about this in the rest of this session.’

  ‘I’m lost. I’ve got so many weird experiences bothering me… Sometimes I think what they say is right, that I really am in the process of going mad.’ She took another paper handkerchief from the box on the table and blew her nose. ‘I need the toilet.’

  ‘You’ll have seen it on the stairs. I’ll be here when you come back.’

  Anthea stood up and sneezed. ‘And I think I’ve caught a cold.’

  8

  On Surviving Fatal Accidents

  Wednesday 19th December 1990 11.45 am

  Beverley’s been called to the doctor. Mandy’s lying still as though she would break if she moved an inch.

  Debs has been staring out of the window for ten minutes. Then she turns and looks at me: ‘Here, what happened next?’

  I’m sitting in bed looking at the words of the graffiti and the numbers one, two, three and four written on the wall beside me in worsening scrawl. The words and the numbers are encircled by a tide of wavering spider webs that I’ve drawn with the blue felt tip pen. I don’t feel like answering.

  ‘Here, you, Karina, I’m talking to you! D’ya think you’re invisible?’

  ‘Sometimes I feel like it.’

  If I could slip through the centre of the web. Become everything and nothing. Disappear. Then the pain would dissolve along with me. Not to be is to be everything. Like that Hindustani King said: From now on my body does not belong to me or all the world belongs to me. It was in that book Hayden had at the cottage. I can remember the author’s name. Borges. In the centre is nothing, a void. There lies freedom.

  ‘Wakey, wakey,’ says Debs. ‘Come on, tell us some more about your adventures shagging in Greece.’

  ‘It wasn’t all shagging,’ I protest. ‘Somewhere through it all I was searching for myself.’ Do I really believe that? At least it’s true that I was lost.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ says Debs. ‘So do us all a favour and get on with the story.’ She looks at Mandy, ‘She ain’t shy no more, see?’

  ‘Past caring,’ I say. My choice, not your victory.

  ‘You were sleeping with both blokes,’ says Mandy, levering herself up to sitting.

  ‘You got used to two at a time?’ Debs asks me. She plonks herself down on her bed opposite.

  ‘Not always. Sigurd only ever went down on me when we were alone. His tongue squirming inside drove me crazy.’ You want details, you get details.

  I remember the fun. One afternoon in the tent after making love, when Joris was in the village, I did Sigurd’s long hair into plaits. He put my red towel over his head and did Little Red Riding Hood: ‘Help! Help! Een wolf komt eraan!’ He pretended to hide behind my wicker basket. I roared and pulled him out and dropped onto him. There was a kind of squelch and he pretended to be horrified and let out a scream. He let his red riding hood slip and swooned like a maiden in distress. I piled onto him, he gasped like a virgin.

  ‘He was the greedy one,’ says Debs.

  I groan. ‘He always wanted double helpings. Copulating like there was no tomorrow.’

  ‘How come you know all these long words for screwing?’ Debs asks.

  ‘That’s education, girl,’ says Mandy.

  ‘Joris was always businesslike,’ I remember. ‘No mouths, no breath, poised and impersonal. I liked it with him too. I liked the mole o
n his back. I liked his confidence as he eased himself inside. But sometimes I wanted to dent his cool. One night after we made love, just the two of us, and he was lying there on his front, blank and unreachable, I pinched him on the arm to get a reaction.

  ‘He said, “Yes?”

  ‘I said, “So you are alive?”

  ‘“Yes,” he said.

  ‘I said, “Sometimes I wonder.”

  ‘He said, “Do that again. I like that.”

  ‘I pinched him again, this time on his shoulder blade.

  ‘“Yes,” he said, “Do that more.”

  ‘I started pinching him all over, not hard, but enough to feel. In the falling dark with my fingers and my mouth I pinched his back, his arms, his legs. Then I couldn’t resist his buttocks, they felt strong and muscle bound, and I tweaked them hard. I could hear his breathing. When he turned over he was ready to start again, but this time he had a different idea. I couldn’t see what was happening, so I didn’t realize he was steering it towards my face. That was a first for me, a scary first.’

  I still don’t want to talk about it. The first I knew was he squeezed my jaw and put his fingers in my mouth, pushing it open. I found myself flat on my back with him on his knees above my face, leaning over me, and the next thing I knew he was feeding it in between my lips little by little. I tensed up, I started shaking. He was sighing quietly. He said, “Come, baby, that will not hurt you.” By then my jaw was wedged open and my mouth was full. Even thinking about it now, it feels peculiar.

  ‘That was your first time? You was a late developer,’ says Mandy.

  ‘I don’t like that stuff. Makes me feel sick,’ says Debs.

  ‘You got to be in the mood, eh, Corinne?’ says Mandy. ‘Was you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I remember a salty taste.’

  Debs twitches. ‘I think I’m going to puke.’

  ‘Fat lot of use you’d be as a sex slave,’ says Mandy.

  After a while the muscles in my jaw started to ache. Through the sleeping bag I could feel the bumps of the sand under my back and one of my feet was sticking out of the tent. But I couldn’t see anything. His crotch blotted out the world. And he was getting off on it, I could tell. I’d never known Mr. Smooth Guy with his feathers so ruffled. When he came he took a long time doing it. Afterwards he held me very tight as if he were saying thank you. He shuddered for a while. For a moment there was a crack in his armour. That was the only time.