‘So how is it?’
‘I’m trying to tell you but you keep interrupting.’
‘Did you hire me by accident?’ she teased.
‘There are no accidents,’ he said.
‘What was that?’
‘What?’
‘Listen, I thought I heard a siren.’
Tristan strained to hear. Her breathing, shallow and slow. His own, thick and fuzzy inside his head. The joints of the chassis creaking, and dripping perhaps, muffled and intermittent. The wind, ripping and dipping through the valley, rushes of fury wrapped in silence. A lamb, bleating, cold and for a moment lonely. But no siren.
‘Must have imagined it,’ she said. The disappointment settled thickly on them.
‘So, back to the girl,’ she insisted.
‘What girl?’
‘The naked girl.’
‘I never saw her again,’ Tristan said.
‘No, but you thought of her.’
That much he couldn’t deny.
Tristan thought of little else. The next day he worked in the gardens, digging compost into the soil for a new plot of potatoes. The work was hard and repetitive and his head sickened with imaginings of the girl. Her body had faded with the night, but not her frightened eyes. He felt it was a kind of insanity, the way his infected mind brought a stranger so close. Still, he imagined her standing next to him, and in his head explained to her the way the brothers liked their garden. She laughed with him at the institutional fussiness and his ears burned red with gratitude. He heard her approach in the footsteps of other boys, and even composed a poem to her as he worked his spade. But the longer he indulged his weakness the more it made him angry. His head became a battleground and by evening it ached with new wounds.
As the boys filed into the hall for the interrogation Tristan found comfort in the fact that he had been chosen the previous evening. No boy was singled out two nights in a row. It was an unspoken tradition.
The rector prowled before the boys on his small platform. They sat cross-legged on the stone floor, afraid to wriggle or twitch in case they invited his attention.
‘So then—’ The rector stopped suddenly, as if the idea on his tongue had only just that moment occurred to him. ‘This business of the soul. What is the soul, would you say… Samuel?’
Samuel stood, his face edged with cautious relief. He was an older boy, nearing graduation, blessed with good looks and confidence.
The rector began with the easy questions, requiring little more than rote-learnt responses, working up to the greater task in his own good time.
‘The soul is that part of the self that exists outside of space and time, in the dimension of God. It is the seat of the will, the centre of responsibility.’
The rector nodded, the signal for Samuel to be seated.
‘Yes, and this soul, is it a perfect thing, Christopher?’
‘No, for the soul, being of our world, is stained with original sin.’ Despite his years at the college, Christopher had never mastered the trick of hiding his nerves. The rector left him standing.
‘And so our will is imperfect?’
‘Well, yes,’ Christopher conceded.
‘In what way?’
‘It is our will that allows us to divert from the path of God.’
‘But is not the choice to move away from God’s love the work of an irrational mind?’
The question followed quickly. This was the rector’s technique, moving without warning from conversation to bombardment.
‘Yes…’ Christopher drew the word out as he tried to control a stammer. ‘We are capable of acting irrationally. It is one of the choices open to us.’
‘And so should not the blame for the choices of an irrational mind lie with He who made the mind irrational?’
The rector was like one of the old paintings that hung in the great hall. No matter where you sat its eyes found you. Even though this was familiar territory the pressure caused Christopher to falter. The rest of the boys silently rehearsed their responses.
‘Um, God did not make us imperfect; rather, we chose, at the time of the fall, to embrace imperfection. We were tempted by the devil, and succumbed to his charms. We brought imperfection into the world. God did not turn His back on us; we turned our backs on God.’
It was the answer they had all been taught, yet the rector looked unconvinced. He was the master teacher, determined to unsettle their most comfortable thoughts. Christopher stood in front of Tristan and his shaking was clearly visible. The rector left him suffering a moment longer then nodded for him to sit.
‘You have given an answer we all recognise from our catechisms, and so we cannot call it incorrect. But perhaps we can call it incomplete. Does it not avoid the heart of the problem? Surely you have thought this yourselves. How can we be to blame for turning away from God, when it was God who gave us the capacity to turn? There is a problem here, a difficulty of time, of causation, of blame. Yet you say nothing. Why? Is it because secretly you believe this is a question to which we have no good answer? Such a lack of faith is a terrible thing, boys; you must not yield to such cowardice. We will come back to this. We must come back to this. But not now, for we are not ready.
‘Let us move on, then. These things can be approached from many angles. There is another thing about the soul that must interest you. Does every person, Paul, possess a soul?’
Paul stood quickly, sure of his answer.
‘No, the people of the night have no souls.’
Tristan felt a wave of nausea break over him. He looked to the ground, certain the rector’s eyes were on him.
Everybody in the City knew of the people of the night, but few college boys had ever seen them. Ever since the people of the night had been granted readmission to the City it had been decreed they should enter only during the hours of deepest darkness, when the City’s children were cocooned in sleep.
‘Why do they have no souls, Paul?’ the rector continued.
‘In the time of the siege they left the City and tried to join the heathen forces. They turned their back on God, and without God’s grace the soul withers like a leaf without sunshine.’
‘And why would the heathens not accept the people of the night?’
‘God turned the heathen hearts against them. The heathens believed they were spies, sent by us to learn their secrets. Some people thought they carried the plague.’
Like everybody else Tristan knew the story by heart. Families split in two, with half choosing to stay and fight while the others chose to flee and take their chances with the enemy. But those who left found themselves at the mercy of the wastelands and most quickly died. The survivors begged the City fathers to let them return until finally, in a show of great mercy, the Holy Council announced they could visit at night to perform any lowly tasks that might be required of them in return for the right to sift through the City’s rubbish. As a final punishment, it was decreed that inside the City walls they were forbidden to speak.
Each night they moved silently past the guarded gate to scrape filth from the paving stones and pull debris from the drains. Tristan remembered lying in bed as a child hearing their shuffling feet and creaking wagon wheels moving past the window, imagining them as great insects, emerging from their decaying underworld to cleanse that which no one else would touch.
But they were not insects. Their thoughts flowed freely through bodies as warm as his own and their eyes flickered with the same uncertainties. She was one of them, the girl he had drawn. The rector had chosen her because she could never speak of it.
‘And so what then must we conclude of the will of the people of the night?’ The rector continued and Tristan, barely trusting himself, looked up at his tormentor.
‘They have no will,’ Paul confidently replied. ‘What we see in them is an apparition, just as we might see slyness in a cat, or enthusiasm in a puppy.’
‘Yes,’ the rector said. ‘And yet, if we truly have here creatures without will, t
hen how is it we can continue to hold them responsible for their own failings? Do we not first have to grant them the capacity for failure? Is this not at the very heart of our notion of responsibility?’
It was the type of abstraction Tristan usually revelled in, but tonight he was exhausted and soaked in confusion. He stood up without thinking, feeling somehow detached from his body, as curious as every other boy in the room to see what would happen next. The rector paused. The questions had been rhetorical. He motioned for Tristan to sit.
Breathing ceased and every eye turned to Tristan, captivated by his lunacy.
‘It is wrong to say the people of the night have no souls.’
Tristan’s trembling voice rippled the air. The rector arched his eyebrows, daring him to continue. And having started, Tristan knew no way of stopping.
‘We have nothing but a history of our own invention to support this view. It suits us to believe it. It allows us to mistreat them, but convenience is not truth.’
The words rode on the crest of his rising fury. He had sat close enough to touch her. He had smelt her fear. Now he imagined her watching him, smiling with approval. His eyes watered, his voice and legs shook, but he didn’t sit. He waited for the eruption. They all waited for the eruption.
The rector, when he finally spoke, remained inscrutable.
‘Work awaits you in the kitchens, Tristan.’ Said as if they were discussing a small housekeeping matter. The rector understood the boys would invent implications more terrible than any he could name, just as he understood the value of maintaining the tension. Tristan understood it too. His legs wobbled an uncertain path to the door. For the first time in his college life he felt the warm weight of sympathy.
For six hours Tristan peeled potatoes. He imagined the girl beside him, sharing the burden, sneaking shy admiring glances.
Brother Kevin came in to announce the end of the duty. Tristan guessed Brother Kevin had been specially chosen for the task. He was a kind and humble man, liked by the boys. Tristan burned with shame to be seen this way.
‘I have disgraced us all,’ Tristan mumbled. ‘I am sorry.’
Brother Kevin paused, as if there was something in this simple statement worthy of lengthy consideration.
‘Wash your hands and go to bed.’
Tristan walked towards the long stone sink and was surprised to hear the brother following him. Brother Kevin waited until the room filled with the sound of running water, then leaned forward.
‘You are not the only one to feel this way,’ he whispered.
But that was unthinkable. Tristan kept his head down, concentrating only on his hands and the way they broke the falling water into chaos.
‘Did you hear me?’ Brother Kevin asked, and Tristan, too frightened to look up, could only nod. ‘I will come for you tomorrow night and you will see.’
Tristan wanted to look up. He wanted to watch the brother leave, to try to read something in the way he walked from the room, but his head stayed down. He watched the water: each drop, no matter the angle of its bounce, still found itself swirling down the drain.
Tristan spent the two hours before dawn in the place between sense and dreams. He thought of her again, and the more he thought, the clearer the memory became. He remembered her in lust and in anger. He imagined brave conversations with the rector, assaulting him with venom and logic. He imagined being called before the Holy Council and, by the power of words alone, reversing its policy on the people of the night. And he imagined her hand, joined with his in gratitude, her skin, smooth against his own. He imagined knowing things that for now were just the beginnings of a rumour, things that made her smile.
Sleep came late the next night, smuggled in on the back of exhaustion. Tristan awoke in darkness to a smooth hand across his mouth. Brother Kevin’s. Tristan sat up, his stomach sick with sleeplessness, his mind coated in fur.
‘Get dressed and follow me.’ The words were whispered so close Tristan could feel their moisture on his skin. He did as he was told, putting on his Augustinian robe and following the brother through the night-quiet halls. They crept to the rector’s study and from there through the same passage the girl had used. The tunnel soon became too low for standing and they were reduced to crawling, Tristan with a hand raised above his scalp tracing the rough contours of the roof. Stone and darkness pressed in from every side and he quickly lost all frame of reference. Just when he began to believe he had been lured into a trap they emerged into a world both familiar and strange.
After the tunnel, the muted night lights of the City burned bright and exposing. The streets hummed with the dark industry of the people of the night: kinetic melodies of scurrying, tearing, pulling and sweeping. Their forms were all around, heads down and backs bent to the task of relieving the City of its detritus, paying no attention to Tristan’s curious eyes.
‘This way.’ Brother Kevin motioned for Tristan to follow him. ‘Don’t worry, they recognise our robes and know better than to touch us. We are perfectly safe.’
They walked past the Grave of the Martyrs, the mound at the eastern end of the City where those who had fallen during the war were buried, then on through the market places, by night stripped of colour and life. Tristan saw a small boy moving on all fours, seeking fallen scraps of food, lapping at the ground with his tongue like a dog. He paused at the shameful sight, but Brother Kevin’s hand touched his elbow, urging him on. Then he heard the sound. It came dancing on a breeze—the hint of a choir, children’s voices tangled in a single breath—and then it was gone so quickly Tristan thought he might have imagined it. He waited, transfixed, and the sound swooped in a second time.
‘They’ve started,’ Brother Kevin whispered. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? We must hurry.’
The singing came from the Chapel of St Paul. As they drew near they slowed, as if afraid their presence might shatter the melody. Brother Kevin moved into the porch; Tristan followed at his shoulder.
A choir of boys, perhaps twenty in all, gathered before the small altar. They wore the long white tunics of the service boy with high black lace collars which exaggerated their moon-round faces. Their black undergowns were shorter than those worn at service, leaving their legs uncovered from mid-calf to the ground and giving them the appearance of stick people. Their hair was uniformly black and lush, as if they had been manufactured as a batch in some strange musical factory. Tristan guessed they were about ten, too young to understand the impossibility of the sound they created.
It was as if the voices had risen clear of their source. They were no longer the sounds of mouths and throats but had found a life of their own, playing beneath the rafters, mingling for the sheer pleasure of vibration. Voices touching, falling in love, giddy with beauty, and yet entirely, perfectly, unaware.
‘I am sorry,’ Tristan gasped, the memory now jagged with pain. ‘It was better than that. It was more beautiful. I, it’s just…’
He waited for the word but his mind remained perfectly blank. It was closing in on him, he could feel it. ‘This story, there is no point, it is just…’
He felt her shift against him. She was about to speak. He wished she wouldn’t, but left her room nonetheless. Manners.
‘They were farewelling,’ she said, the words falling soft and sure.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘They were farewelling.’
Three young mothers stood to the side of the choir, each holding her heartbreak, a small bundle wrapped in the grey swaddling of an unbaptised child. Standing opposite were three women of the night, the stoop of their shoulders suggesting great age. One at a time a mother stepped forward to hand over her dead baby. They received nothing in return, no words, no touch. The crones turned away leaving the mothers stranded before the altar, mothers no longer. Tristan could barely watch as the hell-bound babies were laid together in a single dark box, their deaths sealed by the voices of angels.
Remembering it, Tristan began to weep, as he had on that first night.
‘How did i
t make you feel?’ she asked.
‘Disgusted, of course.’
‘So what did you do?’ It was less a question than an accusation. Tristan paused, aware of the absurdity of the answer. But he would give it. The time for not telling had passed.
‘I fell in love,’ he admitted. ‘I had no choice.’
He closed his eyes, embarrassed at how it sounded, how foolish and indulgent. But it was the truth. It was his story. If there was a way of changing it he would have, but they were entangled now, her cheek heavy on his chest, her breath wheezing through him.
‘Tell me,’ she prompted. Tristan was surprised to hear no judgment in her voice. ‘Tell me how it happened.’
Tristan remembered it with perfect fidelity, that moment of distilled need in which he first beheld the church’s failure: three mothers beyond consolation, deprived of religion’s anaesthetic. What manner of cruelty was it that kept the Holy Council from finding in its shape-changing scriptures a place for these children?
The voices of the choir licked at the air, their beauty turned ghoulish.
‘Appalling, isn’t it?’ Brother Kevin whispered. The women of the night moved silently towards a side door with their abandoned freight. The hymn swelled to an unnatural chorus and the mothers were reduced to the roles of extras in their own tragedy. Tristan nodded, not trusting his voice.
‘We can’t stay much longer,’ Brother Kevin said.
But Tristan couldn’t move. As if he already knew. As if in that moment his future had reached out to him and pinned him there.
‘All right. You know the way. You must return before the light comes. We will talk soon.’ The brother squeezed Tristan’s shoulder and was gone.
The choir softened, now no more than wisps of voices twisting through the broken air. Tristan knew he had no place there, a spectator at the frayed edges of grief. The woman in the middle collapsed, racked with sobbing. The death of a child, the most sorrowful of all the mysteries.
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