Devils, for a change

by Wendy Perriam

  Her cheeks were flaming as she slunk back to her pew. She had poked God’s body with an unconsecrated finger, a finger used for dipping into sherbet or licking out the mixing bowl, a finger which had wiped her bottom earlier that morning. That was sin, grave sin. Which meant her First Communion was blighted, her frilled white dress and rose-wreath just a sham. She bowed her head as the nuns had taught her, hid it in her hands, felt hot and shameful tears splashing on the wood.

  She wiped her eyes. The blue school nuns in their huge starched wimples, their elaborate fussy pie-frills, had changed into the sombre nuns of Brignor, kneeling in their dusty black for solemn Midnight Mass. She saw her choir stall empty, fought a sudden wave of shock. She hadn’t told them where she was. They would be sick with worry, frantic, searching every niche for her, every inch of ground, even more alarmed for knowing she was ill and faint already. She must be gravely ill if she could forget a thing like that, wreck their peaceful Christmas through her thoughtlessness. Yet she hadn’t meant to leave, had simply gone out for some air, sleepwalked in a fever. Sleepwalkers didn’t plan, leave notes explaining where they were. She would have to phone immediately, tell them she was safe.

  She struggled to the door, stood shivering just outside, looking out at neat black railings, bare but graceful trees. ‘Soho Square’, the plaque said. She recognised the name. That nun had mentioned Soho, warned her to beware of it. Yet the square looked safe enough, with its stylish buildings, quiet deserted streets.

  She broke into a run. The nuns’ Mass would be ending. They would be filing now, in silence, to the refectory, for tea and one plain biscuit, before returning to the Chapel. If she didn’t catch them in that one short break, they’d be back in choir all night, till six a. m.

  She dodged a crowd of party-goers in paper hats and evening dress, turned another corner. The hushed dark square had changed into a maze of narrow streets, throbbing with the lights from lurid bars. She crossed the road, skirted round a crate of mouldy cauliflowers, a box of black bananas rotting in their skins; turned right again, then left; was suddenly confronted by a blaze of spinning signs: ‘PEEPSHOW’, ‘BED-SHOW’, ‘SAUNA’, ‘STRIPTEASE’. She stopped in shock. She could see two nuns – nuns in veils and wimples, but wearing black suspenders, seamed black fishnet stockings, and brandishing black whips. She backed away, disorientated, remembering stories of medieval saints who had seen such things, but only in their minds – peepshows staged by Satan, to wreck and taunt their faith. She glanced back at the window. Those nuns weren’t in her mind. They were paper nuns, painted nuns, pouting in a frieze of flashing lights; crucifixes dangling between huge naked fleshy breasts.

  She turned and fled, her heavy boots thrumming on the pavement, until she found a phone box, collapsed in it, still shaking. A row of small white cards were stuck up on the wall. ‘Heaven or hell. Yasmin offers both. Phone 736 …’ ‘Madame requires submissive subjects …’ ‘Call Cherry, just eighteen, ripe, juicy and ready for picking.’ She shut her eyes. She could see the stern black letters above her cell: ‘Contempt For The World.’ Each cell had its painted sign, its virtue – a custom brought from France, like so much in their Order. She had changed her cell so often, but, every time, she tried to live the virtue which came with it – Obedience, Holy Indifference, and these last two months, ‘Contempt For The World’ – as if God had picked the words to warn her and restrain her.

  She lifted the receiver, suddenly swung round. She could hear a noise outside. A man was urinating, right against the phone box; a coarse-faced, drunken man, gnawing on a dirty piece of pizza, as he stood there with his legs splayed. She watched in horror as he dragged his trousers back, then lurched off down the street, colliding with another man who seemed to wrestle with him.

  These were the souls she had prayed for in the chapel, these dirty vulgar drunks, their trousers tied with string and streaked with faeces; not souls, but bodies: dirty stinking bodies with gummy eyes, whisky breath. She had often seen them in her mind, as she knelt there in her choir stall, but seen them still as souls – poor perhaps, drunk perhaps, but clean poor and noble drunk. How stupidly naive she’d been, how sheltered. Christ had died to save these men, and she’d shrunk in sheer distaste at her first glimpse of a sinner.

  ‘Christ is born,’ she whispered; saw Him dying in the manger, a baby crowned with thorns.

  The Mass was over, the last stragglers shuffling out. She crept back inside the church, tried to wrap herself in smells – candle wax and incense, damp coats, hot feet, ripe flowers. The congregation had left their smell behind – the good odour of good Catholics who believed in God, who had fed on Bread and Wine, not dirty pizza, urine. She was totally alone. The empty church seemed to echo all around her: heavy laboured breathing, whispered accusations, yet no one there except the ghostly watching statues. She had to pray. It didn’t matter what she felt, believed. St Anthony had said that no man was really praying if he knew what God was, or what he was himself. The void, the mystery, was simply part of prayer. She looked back at the crib. The Christ was born now, a plump and solid bundle in a dirty plaster nappy.

  She limped towards the figures, swaying, almost falling, as a sudden wave of dizziness seemed to make the church dissolve. All the flashing lights and flickering signs had come in from the street and were whirling in her head. Slowly, she bent over, picked up the plaster baby, held Him very awkwardly, His pudgy feet jabbing in her side. She wasn’t used to babies, had vowed her womb to God. ‘Rejoice, thou barren, that bearest not, for many are the children of the desolate, more than of her that hath a husband.’ ‘Rejoice,’ she repeated silently, tears sliding down her cheeks, splashing on the infant’s face, so that He was weeping, too. She ought to rest, sit down. The hammering in her head had merged now with the throbbing in her feet; the double pain dulling thought and will. The baby felt too heavy, His naked body dragging down her arms. She wasn’t a good mother, was letting Him get cold – burning hot herself, but her baby stiff and chilly like a corpse. She returned Him to His coffin, sank back on her knees. Must pray – not rest – pray for souls. She was Mother to all souls.

  The noises in her head had changed, sounded now like footsteps, heavy booming footsteps tramping closer, closer. She mustn’t listen, must block out all distractions, keep her mind on God; pray in sickness, darkness, as Father Martin urged. She closed her eyes, bowed low.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you in your prayers, my dear, but it’s getting on for two o’clock, so I’ll have to lock the church.’

  She glanced up at the shifting blur of black. A larger, kinder priest than Father Martin, but without a clear-cut outline; maybe two of him, or three.

  ‘It’s time you got back home now. You have a home, do you?’

  She tried to think through the fog and swirl of images, the stab of hurting lights. Oxford Circus. N14. ‘My aunt,’ she said. ‘Aunt Eva.’

  ‘You live with her?’

  She shook her head. Words seemed very difficult.

  ‘She’s meeting you from Mass?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, uncertainly; could hear Aunt Eva’s pounding feet rushing down the platform, as time hurtled back to childhood and she met her from the train; saw the clashing swirl of colours as Eva’s emerald raincoat embraced her blue school mac.

  ‘Well, if you could wait outside … All right? If there’s any problem and she doesn’t show up, I’ll get Father John to sort it out. Okay?’

  Priests didn’t say ‘okay’. He was someone in the play. The one with the deep voice. St Joseph, or an innkeeper. ‘No room at the inn. I’m sorry, we’re full up.’

  ‘Sure you’ll be all right, dear?’

  The innkeepers were surly, didn’t call you ‘dear’. He must have got his lines wrong. She was forgetting hers, as well. Yet she’d been given the main part – Mary, God’s own Mother, trudging into Bethlehem. Would she ever get there, when she felt so weak and faint, or simply fall, lie useless in the road? Mary hadn’t fainted. Mary always smiled and s
truggled on.

  ‘You’re not ill or something, are you? I mean, if you need a doctor, I can always …’

  She shook her head, made one last desperate effort, gripped the bench in front of her, used its strength to haul her to her feet; then smiled at him, as Mary would, as she staggered to the door.

  Chapter Four

  Hilary lay, still half-asleep, groping for the shreds of psalms which kept drifting through her head; fumbling for the blankets – those thin grey scratchy blankets which must have fallen off the bed. The bed itself felt hard, so hard it made her ache. She was stiff all over, could hardly move her legs, which seemed encased in plaster casts. It must be time for chapel, time for Morning Prayer. She forced her eyes to open, blinking in the harsh and jolting light. Light? She always woke in darkness; Morning Prayer was said before the dawn.

  She glanced around her, startled. Her tiny cell with its plain white walls, its window too high up to give a view, was swelling into a tangled maze of buildings, lampposts, windows, rooftops, sky. The jumble settled, steadied, though not her sense of shock. She was lying in the open, in an anorak and Wellingtons, in an exposed and public street. Her bed was just a dirty piece of cardboard, laid out on the pavement against the warm flank of a building. Warm in late December? She felt her hands, her head – both sweaty hot. She remembered being very ill, must still have a temperature, but it wasn’t simply that. Some sultry breath was blowing on her body. Slowly, she sat up, turned round to find a metal grille set into the wall, hot air panting out of it from a basement boiler-room, a grotesque and filthy dungeon, housing hugely swollen pipes. It must belong to some hotel, be pumping out the heat for baths and breakfasts.

  She heard a cough, swung round. Just beyond her lay a huddled shape, also sprawled on cardboard and wrapped in three old coats. What was it? Male or female? Human, certainly. She could hear its laboured breathing, see one hand flung out, a large hand in an old brown glove, with holes in all the fingers. The face was turned away from her, a fringe of greasy hair flattened beneath a black and broken hat.

  Her first instinct was to run. That body might be dangerous, or even verminous. She struggled to her feet, about to dart away, then glanced back at the heap of tangled coats, the battered shoes tied round with dirty newspapers. That ‘thing’ could be her rescuer, could have brought her here, shared its cardboard couch with her, laid on central heating. She had prayed so often for the outcasts and the homeless. Had one of them repaid her prayers, shown her how to manage when the pavement was her mattress and her alarm clock a police siren? Or had she just collapsed here? That could be a proof of God – a good God – that He should have saved her from exposure, hypothermia; made sure she fell where there was heat and help at hand. She could remember nothing, except a frightening snarl of noises in her head, looming faces, then falling into black. If she had stayed in the Infirmary, she would be restored to health by now. The contaminating world had made her worse, kicked her in the gutter with the lowest of the low – which was what she was – lower than the lowest.

  The piled coats jerked and shuddered in a second rasping cough. She glimpsed a bony foot, the ankle bare, engrained with filth, the shoe gaping at the sides without its fastening. There was still no face – no ear to hear her thanks, no mouth to answer if she asked what had happened in the night. Perhaps better not to know. ‘Thank you,’ she said silently, as she crept away, limped off down the street, then turned into a dark and narrow alley. She still felt the need to hide – from God, from tramps, from further punishment. She smoothed her crumpled clothes, re-tied her scarf. Important to be neat. Nuns could look shabby – patched habits, veils with darns in – but never messy or unkempt. She glanced down at the baggy skirt, the oil stains on the anorak. Today she should be in her best, for Christ, Christ’s birthday. Was it really Christmas Day – this grey and silent morning with overflowing dustbin-bags the only decorations in the street?

  Twenty-two long, years ago, she had woken on a different Christmas morning, a radiant one, with a new-born sun spilling its gold tinsel on her curtains. She’d flung them back, stood exultant at the window, greeting God in sun, in sky, in the glinting furrows of frosted winter fields. She was going to be a Sister of Notre Dame de Bourges! She hugged the secret to herself, knelt down to say her thanks. God had revealed His will to her last night at Midnight Mass – not the perfunctory gabbled Mass at St Augustine’s, where the priest was old and irritable and her mother’s sniffs and shufflings made it hard to concentrate, but the exquisite chant and singing of the nuns of Notre Dame. It was the first time she had seen them. The convent was remote; not far in terms of miles, but buried in the Norfolk wilds, deliberately removed from human noise or commerce, even from a bus route or main road. But her best friend Katy’s parents had a cousin there, who’d entered seven years ago, invited Katy’s family to come for Midnight Mass, meet the Sisters afterwards for coffee and mince pies.

  ‘Like to come along as well?’ Katy had asked casually, the last afternoon of term. ‘They’re nothing like our school nuns. All they do is pray all day. Imagine!’

  She warmed to Katy’s family; her funny scatty father who was always making jokes, her calm and kindly mother, her two kid brothers who bulged at hip and cheek with pocketsful of marbles, huge half-sucked gobstoppers. The six of them had knelt in the tiny extern chapel, peering through the grille at the rows of black-robed nuns, who seemed to move and chant as one. She was utterly transported; had never heard such pure and perfect singing. She was musical herself, on grade seven for piano at sixteen and a half. She shivered with an almost hurting pleasure at the high soprano solo from a young and ardent novice, her white veil standing out from the black ones all around it. Everything was perfect – the plain white chapel walls, uncluttered by the plaques and pomps which carbuncled St Augustine’s; the ancient figures in the Christmas crib, the soaring Latin anthems. But it was the nuns themselves who drew her. They seemed so other-worldly with their bare feet, straight black backs; their complete absorption in the Mass, as if nothing else existed – no villagers behind them, no fidgety kid brothers; nothing but their God.

  She had thought, already, of a future as a nun, hoped for it and dreaded it alternately; though feared to say a word back home, where the only talk was A levels and Oxbridge. She’d even braved her own headmistress, to discuss the issue with her. Mother Gabriel suggested that she wait till after university, then, if she was still certain God was calling her, she could enter their own mother-house in Ely.

  That Christmas night, as she went up for Communion, received the host through an opening in the grille, she knew suddenly, indubitably, that it was this house she must enter; this strict and silent convent where ‘all they do is pray all day. Imagine!’

  ‘Wake up, Gee! You haven’t said a word for hours.’ Katy had nudged her in the car, as they motored home through dark and winding lanes. ‘Tired from all those prayers,’ quipped Mr Brent, passing back the mints. ‘Have a Polo, Gloria – hole-y sweets, for after Mass.’ She didn’t take one, didn’t even laugh. God’s Body was still blazing on her tongue.

  She licked her lips, tasting neither host nor mint, only the sour taste of her illness in her mouth; smelt mould and urine as she leant against the crumbling alley walls. She eased her rubber boots off, wincing at the pain. Her feet were sore and swollen, the skin rubbed raw in patches. Too bad. She rammed them back. She had to walk, walk for souls, as St Thérèse had walked for missionaries in the last months of her life when she was dying of consumption, hobbling up and down her sickroom, offering her exhaustion to lift or lessen theirs. She would walk for drunks, for huddled shapes on cardboard, for Katy Brent – now Dawes – who had left her husband, run off with an artist.

  She trudged on down the alley, crossed a wide main road. A car flashed past, three balloons streaming from its bonnet – on its way to celebrate, or perhaps speeding home for Christmas. She hadn’t got a home.

  My dwelling is plucked and removed from me

  l
ike a shepherd’s tent;

  like a weaver I have rolled up my life;

  He cuts me off from the loom …

  She struggled down an incline, crossed another road, found herself facing a wide river, a sad and sluggish river, the colour of stained concrete. Everything was still – dead tugs, sleeping barges, huge hibernating bridges slumped heavy over heavy brooding water. She would walk beside that water, seek to find her God.

  When you pass through the waters, I shall be with

  you.

  And through the rivers, they shalt not overwhelm you.

  She set off along the bank, watching the reflections: wharves trembling on the water, huge warehouses dissolving into ripples. The road beside her was lined with naked plane trees; grey clouds streaked with purple barely breathing overhead. Everything seemed muzzled – birds silent, branches drooping – as if somebody had drugged both earth and sky. Her own legs felt dead and lumpen as she forced them to trudge on, her skirt clinging damply round her thighs. Strange to have no wide black sleeves to hide and warm her hands in; no long and heavy habit to protect her from the wind. She was even walking differently without the habit to restrain her, walking like a secular, lurching like a drunk.

  She stopped to rest a moment, grateful for the hard iron bench which looked out across the river. It was probably only hunger, this dizzy nauseous feeling, this sense of constant weakness. She felt no hunger, but she hadn’t eaten since her ‘drink’ the day before, a whole day and night ago. No – more. It must be well past noon now. She sat straighter on the bench, smoothed her skirt, as if to spread her starched white linen napkin on her lap. She was sitting in the refectory at Brignor, her eleven Sisters smiling round the table, about to start their Christmas dinner – never turkey – fried fish and Christmas pudding. Meat was forbidden, even on Christ’s birthday, as was speaking in the refectory; both invariably prohibited, regardless of the feast. The silence, though, was joyful, broken by the snap of Christmas crackers – plastic rings comic on old fingers, paper crowns set rakish on black veils – even the stern-faced statue of St John softened by his second tinsel halo. The food itself was something of a trial – fish too flat and greasy for their rounded wooden bowls, pudding damply heavy after all the weeks of fasting.