Crooked Vows

by John Watt

  Now he stands, swinging his own pack up onto his shoulders. They must move on. Over the sand-hills to the coast. It’s the only way to find an escape from this wilderness.

  She crouches, twists her body to get the straps of the pack over her shoulders, lurches forward onto hands and knees and struggles to stand. He waits until she is upright, then turns and tackles the steep face of the dune. The sand is soft and loose. His feet sink deep into it as he slogs laboriously up the slope.

  Half-way up he hears her call from behind and below.

  ‘Wait. Please, Thomas. For me.’ He turns, plods down the slope again, feet sinking and sliding, and stops a couple of yards short of the bottom.

  She is looking up at him. Tears are running down her cheeks. She can’t do it. The pack is too heavy. Her leg is really painful after they have walked so far. Her feet are sinking into the sand. She will never get to the top.

  Thomas looks down at her. When did a young woman last address him by name? When did one speak to him at all? He notices again how slender she seems. How slight her shoulders and arms. How strange, that these made no lasting impression on him until now. And the bruise down the side of her leg, or as much as he can see of it below her skirt—he hasn’t really noticed before how big and dark it is.

  Sliding down the last of the slope, Thomas hoists the pack off his shoulders. She sits and shrugs hers off with an effort. He sits too, confused, undecided. What is to be done? What can they do? Eventually, he has a suggestion. Perhaps she can stay here. He can go on alone and try to get help back to her when it is possible.

  She looks around.

  ‘Stay here? In this place? By myself? For how long?’ She is silent for a long while. The surf booms from the other side of the dunes. She shivers.

  Finally she turns towards him with another suggestion, sounding tentative, apologetic. Perhaps her rucksack could be left behind. If they left behind everything but the absolute essentials. Food and water bottles. If they shifted those into his pack. Perhaps he might be able to carry the load for both of them. She is sorry, but she doesn’t think she can go any further with weight on her back. But she can probably climb this hill and go on without this burden.

  Thomas feels a moment of resistance. Then he considers. Perhaps it’s possible. They begin to discard spare clothes, shoes. He looks at the clerical collars that have come from the bottom of his pack. Glances across at her, remembering her eyes focusing on them the previous afternoon. He pushes them aside. After a moment’s thought he unfastens the collar from round his neck and drops it with the others. They shift food and water into his rucksack. He tries the weight. It is heavier, but not impossible. He looks at Lives of the Saints, considering, deciding that for him this is one of the real essentials. He stuffs the book back in, between sultanas and peanuts, hoists the pack onto his shoulders, and takes two or three short steps up the face, his feet sinking deep in the loose sand. Jane calls from behind. He turns back, sees her outstretched hand. Can he help her?

  ‘Please, Thomas, just a little.’ She’s sorry. Her leg. This hill is very hard for her, even without the extra weight.

  He reaches out with his right hand, takes her left hand in it, feeling a tense, prickly feeling across his neck and shoulders as their hands touch. There is an urge to withdraw, to pull back into himself. Her hand grips his more firmly. With the pressure of her grip his whole body is taken over by a surge of arousal that he can do nothing to control or conceal. He prays that she will not notice, trying to stay a little ahead of her as they trudge laboriously, hand in hand, up the steep face of the sand-hill under the heat of the mid-day sun.

  At the top a revelation is waiting: a vast expanse of ocean stretching out to the horizon, transparent turquoise close to the shore, shading to deep opaque blue in the distance. Streaks and flecks of white foam chase each other across the surface. Long swells are peaking and curling over slowly and breaking white on a long beach. Away in the distance in both directions the sand ends in rocky headlands. Between where they stand and the shore there is a series of lower dunes: brilliantly white sand, unmarked except for small wind-formed ripples. A few patches of coarse pale-grey grass are growing through the sand. A light breeze from the sea makes the grass clumps ripple and sway.

  Thomas remembers feeling more sharply at the top of that high dune, the prickly discomfort of holding her hand, standing so close. The embarrassing physical excitement. He withdraws his hand and takes a short step to face away, applying his attention to scanning the beach and the sea for any signs of other people. But there are none.

  The two, walking further apart, head down the more gradual seaward slopes towards the shore, in the coolness of the sea breeze drifting inland. The beach drops quite steeply down into the surf. Successive rollers rear up, peak, and curl over to crash down onto the sand, sweeping white foam up the slope, throwing up clouds of fine spray that drift towards them as they walk down the seaward face of the last dune.

  Thomas stares along the shore as far as the next headland in both directions. There is no sign of human presence. He feels a sudden sense of helplessness—of falling into an infinite, featureless space from which there is no possible escape. His head seems to be spinning.

  Jane too has been scanning the beach in both directions. She turns towards him.

  ‘This place. This piece of the coast. I know the coastline east and west of Albany for quite a long way; my family has had dozens of picnics and camping weekends at different spots. This is nowhere near Albany. I’ve no idea where we are. Can you recognise anything we’ve seen?’ The sharp edge of fear is in her voice.

  Thomas shakes his head, spreading his empty hands out.

  ‘There’s nothing here I recognise, no way of working out where we are. I don’t know what we can do.’

  Recalling Saint Euthymius and Saint Sabas in the desert, he makes a silent plea for divine guidance, but none comes. Thomas sits on the sand, trying to control the dizzy sensation of falling into empty space.

  His mind is suddenly invaded by memories of the wrecked plane: the flames and black smoke, the roar of the inferno, the frightful screams of the victims trapped within it and that terrified face at the window. He tries to turn his attention elsewhere, to shut the memories away, to focus on the realities around him: the beach, the sea, the distant headlands, Jane.

  She sits beside him, a little too close for him to feel comfortable. Her skirt slips up above her knees for a moment before she smooths it down again. He notices before he turns his eyes away that her thighs seem more substantial than he would have expected from the lightness of her arms and shoulders. Is this usual for women? They both stare out across the breakers to the horizon.

  She speaks again, after several minutes. Her voice sounds firmer, more purposeful.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, trying to work out where we are. I’ve made this flight once before. The road trip, too, a few times. The plane follows much the same line as the road. It should do anyway, but in our case it didn’t. I was waiting to see the Stirlings, you know, the mountains. We should have passed quite close, and I always look for them as a sign that I’m nearly home. I caught a glimpse of the peaks not long before the plane crashed. But it was just a glimpse; they were tiny spots far away on the horizon. They should have been almost beside us. We were a huge distance off course, heaven knows how far. This place here, it must be miles and miles beyond Walpole.’

  She is silent for a few moments. When she speaks again her voice is subdued, less confident. The edge of fear has crept back into it.

  ‘This is not a good place. To be stranded, I mean. A big stretch of empty land. No farms, no roads, nothing. Nothing that we need, anyway. I don’t know what we can do. What do you think?’

  Thomas, listening, has been taken over by a sense of inadequacy. Isn’t it a man’s role to be knowledgeable, authoritative, in control? What has he to contribute? Nothing except his first thought of the previous afternoon.

  ‘We don’t have many opti
ons. There’s no point in going back into the forest. We’ll just have to go along the coast and hope to find … something. Somebody. The only question is which way: left or right. Which makes better sense?’

  She sits silent for some time, staring one way and the other along the shore. Thomas glances at her momentarily, and notices the beginning of sunburn on her nose and cheeks. The pink areas stand out against her fair skin. Eventually she speaks, her voice a little unsteady.

  ‘I don’t know, I’d be guessing. If we go left the first place we get to is Walpole. But I don’t know how far it is. A long way, definitely. And if we’re following the shore, we might even miss it. There’s nothing right on the coast there. The town is some distance in from the coast. Going the other way, I’m not sure. There’s nothing like a town for miles. Much further than Walpole. But I’ve heard about a little collection of fishing huts somewhere on the coast in that direction. Which one is closer—I’ve no idea. They could both be a few days away if we’re walking.’ She tries to force a half-smile. ‘And I can’t see any other way of getting there. Left or right—it’s a toss-up as far as I can see. So there’s an idea. It’s the only one I have. We have no way to decide which way to go. What about flipping a coin?’

  Thomas looks away from her for a moment, feeling uncertain. Could this be seen as having a taint of superstition about it? A suggestion of consulting an oracle? Probably not. He feels relieved that the responsibility for the decision is not his.

  He reaches into his pocket and brings out a two-shilling coin. Heads, we go right; tails, we go left. He tosses it in the air, watching it spinning, anxiously aware that their fate, either safety or disaster, might be resting on the chance outcome of the spin.

  Jane drops to her knees over the coin where it lands on the strip of beach washed smooth by the waves. She looks up at him.

  ‘Heads. We go right.’

  They both turn, looking along the beach towards the next headland. Through the faint mist drifting in from the breakers it looks a huge distance away: a vague darker shape looming above the end of the beach. They both stand silent.

  *

  Thomas opens his eyes to see Macpherson closing his notebook and leaning forward across his desk.

  ‘That’s fine. Excellent, in fact. I think we should leave the story for today. But perhaps we might explore one or two details that have come to light. I was interested in what you said about your reaction to touching the young lady’s hand. An awkward, prickly feeling, I think you said. An urge to withdraw, to pull away.’

  Thomas nods, looking down.

  Macpherson puts his notebook aside and continues, ‘It’s a— what should I say—an unusual response in a young man. Most of us, at your age, would probably have found it rather a pleasant experience. The physical response too, though I understand that you might not have wanted it to be obvious.’

  Thomas shifts forward to the edge of his chair. He clasps his hands together between his knees. Some of that same sensation is coming back: the prickly feeling in his head and neck and shoulders, the urge to withdraw. He can’t meet the older man’s eyes. What does this have to do with the recovery of his memories?

  Macpherson waits, rubbing his cheek with his hand, but no response comes. When he speaks he sounds tentative.

  ‘This is perhaps a side issue. But I would like to pursue it a little further, if you have no objection. Your plan to become a Roman Catholic priest—that would call for celibacy of course.’

  Thomas nods.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I believe you explained to me earlier that the training institutions occupied most of your time. I think you said that apart from the usual holidays you hardly left them at all.’

  Thomas nods again. His mind flicks back to a memory from his first year at the seminary, and the first time he was permitted to leave as an individual for a day. It was for his grandfather’s funeral, which had followed several years of increasing dementia in a Perth nursing home. The rector often advised his students to think about death, about their own deaths. A wedding in the family was of no great importance, but a funeral was an occasion not to be missed: a salutary reminder of mortality. He suggested never passing the local undertaker’s establishment without looking into the corner window where a sample coffin was on display, and imagining themselves inside it.

  Thomas remembers feeling detached from the funeral’s ritual and the family’s sorrow. The old man of his memories, in the old country town, with his garden, his summerhouse, his monkey-puzzle tree and his snapdragons, had gradually slipped away into a fog.

  Macpherson calls him back to the task in hand.

  ‘I see. A semi-enclosed establishment. And this would be an all-male institution.’

  ‘Of course. All the students, and the teachers, lecturers. All men. Or boys, among the students. There are some nuns who do the cooking and cleaning, and so on. But we hardly have any contact with them. None, really.’

  Macpherson leans forward, looking more intently at Thomas.

  ‘Boys. Together with men. That is interesting’. He sits back in his chair and breathes out. ‘So you have spent nine years from the age of fourteen in an all-male institution, with a view to being a celibate. And that was after years spent in another all-male institution, during school hours at least. Obviously holding a young woman’s hand was going to be a very unfamiliar experience for you. But why would it be an uncomfortable experience? Why the urge to pull away? Why would it not have been an unfamiliar pleasure? Can you shed any light on this for me?’

  Thomas looks down at the floor, searching in his mind for a response that he might be able to offer. A pleasure attached to close contact with a young woman—surely any such pleasure would fall within a vaguely understood but extensive range of pleasures that are sinful. Except, of course, in marriage, and then only within stringent limits. How can he explain all of this to a man who apparently doesn’t deal with the idea of sin?

  The older man pursues the issue.

  ‘I would like you to consider this thought. Is it possible that your discomfort arose from a deep-seated sense of guilt that you feel about anything of a sexual nature? This is not a question to answer now. It’s one to take away and think about. To think about in relation to what you have been taught over all those years.’ He looks up at the ceiling for a few moments, and sighs. ‘Perhaps this is not altogether my business, but on a slightly more practical level, do you think that spending nine years of adolescence and early adult life out of touch with people of the opposite sex would put anyone in a good position to decide whether he wanted to be a celibate for the rest of his life?’

  Thomas considers, wonders whether this question really calls for an answer, and if so, what answer can he give? He can think of nothing to say.

  Macpherson sits back, taking another line.

  ‘Your saint for the day, who was she?’ He glances down at his notes. ‘Saint Bibiana. That was a—what can I say—an intriguing story. To me, I mean. Intriguing from a professional point of view. I was struck by the emphasis on pain. Suffering. There seemed to be some sort of fascination with it. People dying in quite horrible ways. Is that why this young lady was a saint: because she died in a horrible way? Flogged to death with whips loaded with lead weights. It’s a hideous image. But any number of people have horrible deaths, one way and another, poor souls. Every week. Every day. Are they all saints?’

  Thomas is still perching awkwardly on the edge of his chair. His neck and shoulders still feel locked tightly in position, hands stiffly curled on his thighs. How can he explain so that this man can understand?

  ‘It’s not just the pain. She was a martyr. She died for her faith. She refused to renounce Christianity. That’s the reason.’

  Macpherson rubs the side of his face with a finger. He still looks dubious.

  ‘I see, perhaps. Perhaps I can follow that, up to a point. So people who die because of accident, or carelessness, or stupidity, or something like that—they’re n
ot saints, no matter how unpleasant their ends might be.’

  He pauses.

  ‘But I’m still a little puzzled. This young lady who died for her faith, apparently she is to be admired. I still don’t grasp why. What good did her dying do for anyone? If she had told a few lies to the governor to get out of that awkward situation so that she could stay alive and carry on running her soup kitchen for the destitute behind the Colosseum, I would admire that. And if I thought that a God existed I might imagine that God would admire it too. Depending on what sort of God I had in mind. Because she would have been relieving some of the suffering in the world. As it was she just added her own suffering to what was there already. Why would anyone admire that? Even if it were for the faith.’

  Thomas feels all his joints locked tight. His mind also. There are answers to these questions. There must be answers. But he scans his memory and finds none. And he has fallen, somehow, into a situation where there is no authority to refer to. He must find his own answers, but he can’t see where answers might be found. He is relieved when the doctor moves to another approach.

  ‘Perhaps we should put those issues aside for the time being and think for a while about your dreams. The dream you described to me at our last meeting about floating down a channel between two high banks—I take it that you have been thinking about it from time to time. I don’t want to discuss that just now, or what you have made of it. I want you to hold it in mind, and, keep considering what it might mean. But what about this last week? Have you had any memorable dreams over these few days?’

  Thomas relaxes back into his chair.

  ‘Yes, there is one. I dreamt that I was out at the seminary— the first one I went to. Though what I saw there was rather different from the reality—–’

  The older man intervenes.