by Maggie Gee
‘The thick ones ask me to read to them,’ she said, frowning. ‘It isn’t fair. I want to read my book, but they won’t let me, so I have to read to them, but I don’t want to, and then Adil gets cross and hits me because he says I’m reading too fast.’
‘Sorry,’ said Rhuksana, but she wasn’t really listening. Gerda was not a child with problems. She was white, she was healthy, she was super-bright. Gerda Lamb would have to look after herself. Though the father was missing, and the mother was a pain, the grandparents were always around, and besotted.
‘I know,’ said Gerda, suddenly beaming. (She really was an enchanting child, and Rhuksana, who had come into this profession because she loved children, was caught by the sweetness of her gap-toothed smile, her wide blue eyes, her high clever forehead beneath its cap of burnished copper, the trust which Gerda placed in her, and she laid aside her marking and her prejudice, and listened.) ‘Can I read them my Hans Andersen, Miss?’
‘Do you think it might be a bit hard for them?’
Gerda’s shining face fell, and she looked at her feet, and shook her head, mute, stubborn. ‘It isn’t hard. It’s a fairytale. The boys should listen. Because they don’t like it.’
‘I see,’ said Rhuksana, and sighed. The boys needed football, and air, and fighting. (Once again she thought about Jamila in Loya. Loyan boys liked to play football on the streets; her husband, Mohammed, had once been a star goalie, captain of the Loyan Youth Eleven. At night the boys all spilled out on to the beaches and the car parks, wherever there was space, and electric light; but because of the war, now, they had to stay home. Cooped up inside, they were mutinous; Jamila’s nephews were driving her mad …)
A story could never be as good as football. But the rain rained, and the light was going, and the afternoon break began in one minute. ‘Oh well, try it,’ she said to Gerda, and gave the child a little hug, though a city protocol forbade hugging. ‘Try it, Gerda, my sweet. Why not?’
May was picking up the twins from nursery. She was near the gates, valiantly standing her ground in a surging scum of mothers, all of them fighting for their place in the shallows. In some parts the water was up to their ankles. No one would deliberately thrust her aside, but she had got so much smaller of late. It was that osteo-whatever the doctor talked about, her own bones shrinking, silently receding, as if her whole body was slowly being drawn through a tiny invisible gap in the world, through which she would slip, one day, entirely, and emerge whole on the other side.
But I have to stay here, I’m a grandmother.
The twins need me, Shirley needs me, she told herself, frustrated, squaring thin shoulders, trying to push like the others did.
The first line of children burst out into the daylight from the tall Victorian doors of the school. They had to go carefully, single file, negotiating a temporary walk-way. How tall they looked, the older ones. How quickly they grew, how bold, how loud, but still, one day they would shrink again.
There were Winston and Franklin, grappling, as usual, but then she saw they were helping each other, arms wound tenderly around each other, stopping each other from falling in the water. She thought, they will always have each other. Two was always so much better than one.
But I shall be just one for ever.
She shook off the thought, and shouted, joyful, ‘Winston! Franklin! I’m over here!’
‘Granny!’ called Winston, beaming to see her, since Granny brought sweets, and Mum did not, and throwing Franklin off him, so they almost fell over, raced his brother to get to her, his light golden eyes shining, shining. At that age happiness was total, like sorrow.
They walked down the road, each clinging to one arm, surprisingly strong, robust, demanding. I’m three, she thought. I’m not one at all. As long as they need me, I’m part of them.
And yet, she knew they would grow too heavy, or she would grow too light for them. Inside her body, she was still retreating.
One day soon she would know where she was going.
One day I shall see Alfred again.
Eight
It had not been a good day for the One Way Brotherhood. They had nearly been killed by the devil woman who drove them down near the Bridge of Flowers, leaving most of them piebald with mud; they had been told they needed a bath by jeering teenagers, later, underneath the Towers; the police moved them on in Victory Square.
Now the ‘home prayer’ session was not going well, in the disused church they had taken a lease on, its interior gutted, its windows boarded up except for the rose window at the top of the nave, where they were trying to restore the sanctuary, which had a central lozenge of the Holy Spirit, a halo of white around the head of the dove. This afternoon, it felt dark, and dead, though fluorescent lights blinked and nagged above them.
‘I think it’s when the sun shines,’ Kilda said. ‘People don’t take us seriously when the sun shines. When it’s, like, raining, the public gets down. And when they’re down, they listen to us.’
Moira glared at her, dismissive. ‘Why do you think,’ she snorted, ‘that the success of our mission depends on the sun? Don’t you believe we are in God’s hands, and that he will reward us according to our deserving? Perhaps some among our number have sinned.’
‘Well if you mean me, I haven’t,’ said Kilda, reddening. She couldn’t stand Moira; she was old and batty, with a frightening white face and pointy nose and a tail of grey hair like a pantomime horse. Besides, Kilda got too much hassle from her own mother to put up with any more snash from a stranger. And she hated Moira’s whining voice, thin, posh, ugly, screeching. Kilda knew she herself had a beautiful voice.
‘Hush, Sister Kilda,’ said Bruno Janes. Unusually, today, he had come among his people, partly because of his expertise with guns, which had come in useful when they were at the Gardens. Now his presence held them, magnetized. Without his pale-lidded, pale-eyed stare, without the white gleam of the fluorescent tubes making something inhuman of his polished scalp, Moira might have physically flown at the girl. (Kilda was young, and stupid, and bursting with hormones, and the Brothers loved Kilda more than her.)
Today had been particularly tormenting for Moira, because Kilda, quite by chance, had been hit by the car (probably, Moira thought, because she was slow-witted, while Moira, who was not, had got out of the way). The girl had been carried along on the bonnet, with all the Brothers and Sisters screaming, until the car swerved and threw her off. And then they were all round her, making a fuss of her, saying it was a miracle that her fall had been cushioned by a privet hedge, thanking God for her delivery. Throughout the whole process, Kilda was quite silent, after a vague moo-ing sound when it hit her, which the Brothers and Sisters thought showed her faith, but Moira knew just meant she was dim. Yet all day the wretched girl had kept this special lustre, the enviable glow of the delivered martyr.
Father Bruno was moving in Kilda’s direction with the curiously stiff, mechanical gait that reassured them he was more than human, and the room fell silent, in awe and dread, for there was something unearthly about their leader, something that chilled and tranquillized, something that said all things were possible; he must have the power to raise the dead. Now Bruno took Kilda’s head in his hands, her dark chestnut hair in his long white hands, with their big blue knuckles and perfect nails, and kneaded her scalp, with an odd expression that looked like a mixture of ecstasy and horror, and ran his white bony fingers through her hair, which after a few passes, stood out, electrified, an arm-wide halo of crackling current, a living force-field around her head. The room went quiet; everyone stared.
It was a metre across, a burning bush, a wheel of glory where the soul could be wracked. ‘A sign, a sign,’ voices whispered. Bruno, in a convulsive gesture, suddenly wrenched his hands away and wiped them, frantic as crabs, on his vestments, clawing the fabric up towards him, but Kilda’s halo still burned dark red.
‘Testify,’ Milly and Samuel were urging. ‘Now you must testify, Sister Kilda.’
Moir
a sat furious, gnawed by envy, tearing fragments off a piece of lined paper.
Kilda looked surprised, and faintly embarrassed, but everyone was staring, which she quite liked. She’d felt like dropping it all today, with the mud, and the rain, and those fit boys jeering – boys never usually jeered at Kilda – and no lunch to speak of, and the sick-making dead birds they were supposed to hump back to the Towers with them, and that silly old woman on her case, though the Brothers and Sisters had been especially nice to her.
‘I could, like, tell you what’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘To each of you, I mean. I can do that. I can see the future. My mother was the seventh of a seventh of a seventh –’
‘Come with me, Sister Kilda,’ Bruno Janes said, his pale eyes fixing her into silence, his pale claw lighting on her shoulder, and she got up, hypnotized, and followed him through to the sanctuary under the stained-glass dove.
Milly and Samuel led praises for the others while Bruno and Kilda stood apart, in the shadows. Special, chosen, the words flayed Moira, who was agonized with jealousy; they pretended to be holy, but really they were sexual. She was sitting with her back to the sanctuary, but she kept craning over her shoulder to watch them, pulling at her hair, which was tied into a rope, a dusty rope of dying matter. Once she had had shining red hair like Kilda. All she could hear was the young woman muttering – almost chattering, her tone matter of fact – in a virtually constant stream of sound. Then it stopped, and Bruno turned towards them.
Silence fell. ‘Praise the Lord,’ he said.
‘Praise him,’ they chorused, in ragged passion.
‘He has seen fit to grant Sister Kilda a vision. In his goodness he has comforted us; he has given a sign to his people. As it says in the One Book, Brothers and Sisters: God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase, and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you shall fall upon all wild animals on earth, on all birds of heaven, on everything that moves upon the ground and all fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Every creature that lives and moves shall be food for you; I give you them all, as once I gave you all green plants …” And so you see, my Brothers, that on a day when some of you doubted the fitness of my teaching, that we should go to the Gardens and kill and eat, for some of our number were hungry, God has reminded us, through Sister Kilda, that every creature that lives shall be food for us. Even as I said, even as I taught you.’
‘Amen,’ Milly called, and ‘Yea, Father,’ Samuel roared.
‘And this is for a purpose, God’s great purpose,’ Bruno continued. ‘For when cities fall, and dominions and palaces come to nothing, our day will come, we shall fill God’s earth. You must be fruitful and increase, swarm throughout the earth and rule over it.’
Now Samuel and Milly’s alleluias crescendo-ed, and even Moira found herself shouting ‘Glory, glory, praise his name,’ and the hot tears ran down her dry cheeks.
It was Moira who had questioned Father Bruno’s instructions about killing the creatures of God in the Gardens. But now she bowed and yielded to him, for she was no longer lost and lonely, she was no longer demeaned, ignored, she was flying with them, God’s chosen people, and all things good would be granted her: greenness and fruitfulness; the kind light of heaven in which her wasted life would be washed, in which all her hurts could be known and forgiven; the birds in the air and the beasts of the field; she would have dominion over warm living things, they would come to shelter against her wracked body, she would feel their soft coats and their small hearts pulsing. Now her barren womb is become a garden; she will be fruitful and increase; it is not too late, for the Great Day is coming; ‘Amen,’ she calls, stroking her belly and weeping, ‘amen, Brothers, amen, amen.’
Kilda sat down looking pleased at first, and joining eagerly in the acclaim, but then, as she realized Bruno had finished, as he started his parting benediction, she briefly looked aggrieved, or puzzled. She almost looked as if she might get up and say something, but there was no room for her to say anything; when Bruno was there, his spiritual power lay over them like a net of white ice, leaving his disciples locked, synchronized, lost in the steely perfection of grace.
As they shut the big wooden door behind them, and moved away in ones and twos into the drenching rain and the fading daylight, Kilda caught up with Brother Dirk. Some of the Brothers and Sisters were afraid of Dirk, with his twisted mouth and shadowy past, though Father Bruno told them God had brought Brother Dirk to the fold. Still, their fear judged; he had been in prison. But Kilda, who had grown up in the Towers and gone to school with the sons of thieves and killers, just saw a white bloke, poor, like her, not black, not posh, not foreign, not educated – more like her, in fact, than most of the rest.
‘Dirk,’ she said, ‘That was weird. It wasn’t, you know, what I told Bruno.’
‘What wasn’t?’ said Dirk, only half-listening because he was trying to gauge the depth of the puddles.
‘That stuff he said about us increasing, and filling the earth, and like ruling all the animals. He got all that from the Bible. It wasn’t what I actually said to him.’
‘What did you say to him, then?’
Kilda was trailing her long velvet scarf in the water. A long time ago, in another life, it had belonged to Mrs Segall’s posh bitch daughter. Sometimes Mum got nice stuff from there. ‘I just said all the things I knew about people. I’m, like, a fortune-teller. I’ve got the sight.’
‘You’re winding me up,’ said Dirk, flatly.
‘I’m not.’ Kilda felt happy, suddenly. This was something that she could really do, unlike the subjects they had taught at school, though her mother thought she just made things up. Things she was good at made her feel better. ‘Have a polo,’ she said, on a generous impulse.
Dirk stared at her transfixed. Was she having a laugh? But the mints still hung from her hand in front of him.
‘All right,’ he said, feeling suddenly shy. The peppermint was making his eyes go prickly. He stuffed three polos into his mouth and choked them down before she changed her mind.
‘Go on then,’ she said, grinning at him. ‘Ask me something. I’m good at this.’
‘Go on then, tell me something about – I dunno. Can you do the past, as well? Cos if you do the past, I’ll know if you’re right. You could say complete bollocks about the future. Not being funny,’ he added, to be nice, with something he hoped was a friendly smile, because he had noticed they did it a lot: the Brothers and Sisters always smiled at people.
‘Are you all right?’ Kilda asked him, alarmed. ‘Your face went really weird, for a moment.’ But she wanted to get on with her fortune-telling. ‘Say who you want me to tell you about. Past, future, I can do both.’
Dirk thought of himself, naturally. But his past was something to avoid with people. The Brothers and Sisters had a policy: ‘Total Truth and Total Forgiveness’. It couldn’t actually apply to him, though. Some of them knew what he had done, in outline – that he had been forced to defend himself – but they didn’t seem to want him to go into detail, and that, of course, was fine by him. They all held hands and confessed their sins, all except Father Bruno, naturally, but Dirk’s sins seemed to be off the scale – there wasn’t a single murderer among the lot of them, which was disappointing, given the numbers.
The future was a problem, too. He’d never been able to imagine his future, which was why the Last Days provided the answer. This was the way it was going to end, for him and God and everyone else. That was where all his enemies were headed, the immigrants, the coloureds, the filth-bags in prison who had made him do things he could never forget, his sister’s husband, his brother, his sister. His fucking awful mother, who never really loved him. When they got to God’s Kingdom, so Bruno said, it would all be made up to them, everything bad, all the unfairnesses, the hurts, the insults. And the wicked would be scourged, which meant whipped till they bled, then tipped into the burning lake. (Dirk loved the idea of a lake, burning, black with his enemies, tr
ying to get out. What a laugh he’d have, looking down from heaven!) Though Bruno wouldn’t promise how soon it would be. The important thing was to be ready, and Dirk was ready, now he was a Brother, and had, at long last, a proper family. Kilda wasn’t bad: he didn’t mind her. She didn’t seem to hate him, like his real sister.
But now Dirk began to feel a bit unhappy that Kilda had her own ideas about the future. Which made you think it was a long way off, the things he was looking forward to, the flaying and scourging, the milk and honey, though he personally meant to stay off the milk, which had made him throw up ever since he was a baby, when Mum didn’t breastfeed him, so she said, because all her milk had gone to the two others, and so he just got silver top, which nearly killed him. That was May for you; she was a crap mother.
He thought of someone at random to ask about. ‘Thingy,’ he said. ‘You know. That white woman who goes around with the big ugly coloured bloke. African, I think he is.’
‘Milly?’ Kilda said. ‘She’s with Samuel right? Samuel’s quite fit, as a matter of fact. Well she’s going to marry him, isn’t she? I can see that.’ She thought for a while; she appeared to be listening, and every so often nodding and smiling, or having a little chat to herself. (Dirk thought, she’s got to be a bit mental. But Father Bruno seemed to think she was holy.)
Kilda continued, full of confidence. ‘They’re going to have a little boy, called Saul. And a grandson called Luke, I can only see one, but then he has, like, a whole tribe of children.’ She was off, then, chattering, smiling away, going on and on like she had in church, ‘… and it all, like, happens, a long way away,’ she finished triumphantly. Her cheeks were all pink, like she’d been really clever.
‘Well done,’ said Dirk, after a short pause. He had learned people liked it when you praised them. He couldn’t give a monkey’s about Milly and Samuel. ‘So how about you?’ he said. ‘If you’re so clever – I mean, being so clever – can’t you tell what’s going to happen to yourself?’
