by Jemma Wayne
A solo guitar strums on and the minister steps forward, inviting the congregation to offer a song to God, anything that is in their hearts. Who has a song? Silence. Then, quietly, from the back of the hall, a single female voice begins, strong and hopeful. We praise you. We praise you Jesus. We praise you. The band joins in. The congregation joins in. We praise you. Vera’s mind flies to Luke, dawdles again over her incapacity to help him. Or to be worthy of him. We praise you. Her thoughts move to Lynn, complicated, ruthless, fearful Lynn. We praise you. To her own forthcoming marriage, devoid of input from her parents. The lump in her throat throbs and pushes higher. To her baby. Her child. The hymn buzzes in her ears. Her son. She grows hot and worries she might faint, but just in time the sound ceases.
The minister approaches the microphone once more and the congregation stills. He begins to speak of responsibility, of Christian responsibility, of Jesus’ revolutionary nature, his political activism, his charity, his example of standing up. Vera stands up. Sally-Ann pulls her hand and she sits down again but her head is muddled now, her mind whirring, her soul in some kind of upheaval. Poor Lynn. Poor Luke. So hurt. So good. And she so sinful. Unheeded infant cries tumble through her head. And so sorry. Forgive me Jesus. Help me to be better, to be worthy, to be clean.
The band starts up again. This time Vera stands and sways with the others, the words in her head marking the tune where her voice cannot. Forgive me. Help me. They tumble over each other, churning, clearing, reshaping. Help me. The minister takes centre stage again and invites anyone who feels in need of a prayer to move towards the pulpit. And suddenly, Vera finds herself moving. Without meditation, or self-consciousness or doubt, she pushes against the paralysing lump and walks where she is called to, as though somebody’s hands are resting on her shoulders, guiding her.
Sally-Ann stands up and follows her. A small group gathers, their brows furrowed, their eyes sore, a collection of aching souls. Around them clusters another group - experienced members of the congregation with a gift for prayer. Sally-Ann is amongst this contingent. She touches Vera lightly on the shoulder and without a word of explanation begins to pray. Her eyes close and her voice is soft but it possesses a quiet confidence, as though her words are for someone she trusts, an intimate. Vera looks up. Another woman joins them, then one more, each of them placing their hands on her shoulders and asking God to help her. She does not know them, they do not know her, but their appeals seem like gifts, all the more potent because they come from strangers who are not obliged to care.
Now Vera closes her own eyes. She thinks of the sterile abortion clinic and the hospital and the steps of the children’s home, and Charlie, and her little Charlie, and charlie. And wanting to tell her parents she is sorry and that she loves them. And wanting to tell herself that she is sorry. And wanting to tell her baby she is so, so sorry and that she regrets it every day and loves him still and has thought of him every second since she left him in that blanket, on those steps, even when she is distracted, even when she is paused, even when her reflection in the mirror is twisting and writhing and making a mess of reality. She clenches her eyes tighter. She is without music now, but the words crawl again across her tongue. They are not beautiful or eloquent, they do not possess poetry or prophecy, but they are there, and she means them, and she is no longer saying them merely to stop herself from thinking of other things. They are not a mantra but an earnest prayer. Help me. Her head is awash with a hundred different memories that she watches as they run through her. Memories she has blocked for too long. Her baby’s blue eyes blink at her helplessly. She continues to pray: Help me, help me, help me.
She whispers the words patiently, expecting nothing except perhaps a moment of calm, of quiet. Then all at once the lump in her throat pumps harder and spills upwards. And Vera can’t breathe. Around her, the women praying seem calm and unconcerned as she tries to yank air upwards. Again and again she heaves her chest for breath, but still she tastes only density until at last, in a moment of panic and surrender, she opens her mouth to gasp for air a final time and instead, an unmistakable sound escapes it: a sob. Startled, she touches her hands to her eyes. They come back wet. Tears stream down her cheeks and streak her make-up. In disbelief she examines her mascara-stained fingertips, then puts her hands to her chest to feel it rising and falling in quick, successive bursts. Slowly and one by one the women praying over her put down their hands. Sally-Ann gives her shoulder one final squeeze. “Don’t rush away,” she whispers. And Vera, who has not cried since she lay on the hard bed at the abortion clinic, stands at the front of the church, alone amidst a group of evangelicals she would a year ago have ridiculed, and she weeps.
Chapter
Twelve
As he summarised the recommendations of his DRC health initiative to the minister, who would probably read only the first few paragraphs of the 132-page policy document, Luke Hunter felt the weight of the world resting heavily on his shoulders. If he didn’t explain things with sufficient clarity, with enough of a structured imperative as to what must and must not be done, it was likely that the minister would lose sight of the message altogether, or at least his fervour for it, and announce something half-hearted or distorted to the press. Then, thousands of innocent children in the DRC would suffer longer and needlessly, and Luke would have failed. He could not fail. He had to save them.
“I believe that if we follow this framework closely, we’ve got a genuine chance to save her life here,” Luke concluded.
“Her life?”
“Say again?”
“You said her life,” the minister repeated, lifting the first sheet of the heavy document and scanning the page underneath, in what Luke knew would probably be his closest inspection of it.
“Oh,” Luke floundered. “Yes, sorry, by her I mean Africa. After all, she’s a raped woman.”
The minister angled his head up at him, considered this for a moment, and then chuckled to himself. “I like that,” he told Luke. “I’ll use that.”
The Freudian slip did not however escape Luke. At lunch, he shunned the department canteen and walked instead away from the vast government buildings to a small Italian café where he sat alone at a table in the back, ordered a sandwich, and bit the flaking skin around his nails until it arrived. When he discovered that the sundried tomatoes he’d ordered had been substituted for fresh ones, he called loudly across the restaurant to the harassed waitress and sent it back.
“Why is it so difficult to do what the menu specifies?” he asked her, aware of his unreasonableness, and knowing that he wasn’t really talking about his sandwich. But it had never been difficult before - doing what was prescribed. In fact it had been the one thing that made things easier and certain again.
After his father died – of a sudden, massive stroke, aged 45 – Luke had struggled with uncertainty, unanswered questions, and a world spiralling out of his control. Philip had not only been his father but his mentor and inspiration. When there was a decision to be made, it was he who Luke consulted, his approval he sought before deciding what his own opinion would be; and though it had never happened, he’d known that if he was ever in trouble, ever in need of help, it was his father who would rescue him. When he died, Luke was 19. He’d just embarked on his first serious relationship and was in the process of selecting which modules to read the following year. He’d been planning to sit down with his father to thrash it all out when he visited him at his old Cambridge college that weekend. Philip had, with some amusement, been planning his bus and train adventure to get there because the car was being serviced, and Luke had already pulled out his sleeping bag so that his father could have the bed. But the journey, of course, had never been made. Philip had never told Luke what he thought. Luke had spent the following month clenching his jaw to prevent tears he was terrified might choke him. And there had been nobody to come to his rescue.
That was when he’d turned more heavily to Jesus. Philip had always been involved with the church so it f
elt like an apt way to continue his legacy. But more than that, Luke realised that if he followed the scriptures diligently, if he lived by Christian teachings and did exactly what the bible told him was right, then he would not need to wonder what his father would have thought, or explore that gaping space inside. Slowly, over the years, the void was filled with rules and passages and teachings that at first gently guided his choices, then hardened into principles, and gave Luke strength, solidity and order.
But now, it was all crumbling again. For no matter how diligent he was in his bible study, how much money he gave to charity, how often he prayed, or refused alcohol, or abstained from sex, he could not control the pace at which his mother was deteriorating. Endlessly he searched the bible for answers, but something intangible had been shaken and he could feel his might wavering. At night, he lay awake and worried how he was going to hold everyone up: his mother. John. Vera. Africa!
Vera, he knew, needed him. He didn’t blame her entirely for abandoning his mother. She had never been quite ready. From the moment they’d met he could see the pain that crept so often into her distant blue eyes, the self-doubt that undermined her obvious goodness. He could see her need for Jesus, and he’d wanted so much to help her. There were times of course when her shocking otherness had delighted him. When, weighed down by responsibility, he’d called her just to hear a hint of her recklessness, to listen to her endearing blunders, to remind him (since his father wasn’t there to confirm it), of how far he himself had come. But more often, a spiritual awakening was what he’d wanted for her more than anything. Now that she was trying so hard, he should be nurturing her. But he wanted her to get there faster, to be that pillar of strength he was lacking. And needed. He had agreed finally to let her call Home Care, his mother would have help, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that Vera had fallen short. She had disappointed him. She had hurt his mother. And of course all of that was his fault. Her failures and mistakes and selfishness only mocked his own weakness.
Luke felt tired.
It was his weakness after all. He should be guiding Vera and instead he was picking on her, pushing her away. He was letting her down. He was letting everyone down. He had to find a way to stem the chaos. With the effort of a shorn Sampson he lifted his head as the waitress returned with his replacement sandwich.
“Mozzarella with sundried tomatoes,” she announced. “Exactly as it says on the menu.”
Luke nodded and took a bite. It didn’t taste as good as he’d imagined.
Chapter
Thirteen
The bus was late. Emily didn’t like waiting. It made her feet twitch and forget that sometimes they were needed only to stand upon as well as to run. But it made a change to have a predetermined destination. It gave her purpose and a forward momentum. It helped her not to look back. She wrapped her jacket tighter around her thin frame and stared up at the morning October sky: blue but somehow paler than in her memories of clear, sunny days. A single cloud meandered boldly across the horizon and Emily watched it. There was a time many years ago, when she and Cassien would lie in the graveyard next to the house and spot lone clouds as they appeared above them, taking turns to decipher their shapes, to invent stories for them and make the other one laugh: a haunted house, an elephant, a two-headed dog, a smiling face. Once, later, in a dark, sky-less place, she’d thought back to these never-ending afternoons and would have given anything for the luxury of such a lazy moment. She’d have done all she could and everything for the freedom of even a few seconds to stop, un-harassed, safe, and notice a cloud in the sky.
Emily stared hard at the cloud now: a worthy entity for study. It streamed out in a thinning line as it floated eastwards, its edges changing as the seconds ticked by; but Emily could not think of a single shape that it resembled, or a story, and so it remained merely a blur in the blue.
Mrs Lynn Hunter’s was the first home that Emily had entered since Auntie’s. She didn’t count her own; it wasn’t a home so much as a hole in which she hibernated. Though she didn’t hibernate really. She couldn’t survive for long without food, without air; she knew this acutely.
It wasn’t Lynn who answered the door. Despite having never met her, Emily knew from the people at Home Care that Lynn Hunter was not elderly but a cancer patient, a widow, and in need of light assistance around the house with the probability of increased nursing care as her condition deteriorated. The person at the door was a man, young, white, with dark eyes, a slim frame, and something about him that made him spectacular. And unthreatening. He stepped at once to the side of the corridor and with a debonair sweep of his hand ushered her in, closing the door delicately behind her.
“My mother’s not in the best mood this morning,” he whispered confidingly, taking her coat and scarf and hanging them on a grand wooden coat stand, whose branches she noticed were polished to perfection despite the base being covered in dust. “It wasn’t her idea, to have help, you see. It was my brother’s. But she’s been fending for herself for a few weeks now, and well, struggling, so she’s going along with it. Barely. Don’t be offended if she’s a little gruff.”
“Gruff?”
“Oh, sorry, are you not British?” The man was reassessing her now, playing back her accent inside his head.
“I’m, I… ” Emily froze. Instinctually she stepped backwards. It was always the same questions that triggered such unsteadiness. What was she? The only thing she wanted to be was human, and sometimes she wasn’t even sure about that. But everyone seemed so fixated on defining themselves and everyone else. Must she too? She held a British passport but what would happen if one day it was bad to be British? It was better to have no label. If blood was spilled, a label would not damn the flow. “I just don’t know the word,” she managed finally.
“Gruff? Oh, I suppose it is a little old-fashioned. It just means harsh, abrupt. You understand.”
Emily smiled. It was unusual for people to make such an assumption of her.
“Yes.”
The man smiled back at her, an easy, charming smile she suspected was used often. Oddly, the presence of this man made Emily feel reassured.
“Let me show you around and introduce the two of you,” he said, making that gallant sweep of his hand again. “Oh, and I’m John.”
They shook hands. John’s were soft, his fingers long and elegant, squeezing her rougher palm tightly to register his sincerity. Cassien, Simeon, Rukundo and her father had had altogether tougher palms, and Gahiji’s had been like leather, calloused underneath from working at the soap factory, which she always thought was ironic. Sometimes Gahiji rubbed milk into his hands in an attempt to soften them, but even when the hard blisters had diminished she winced dramatically when he hugged her, joking, “A snake! A leathery snake!”
She followed John into the kitchen. The house was at least four times the size of Auntie’s and everything was old. Not in the sense of being dirty or threadbare or in need of replacing, but ancient, as though it contained history, a personal one. The floorboards creaked underfoot but were made of solid wood that had obviously been cared for. There was a slightly dank smell to the kitchen, as if it hadn’t been used properly for a while, and when she opened the cupboards she saw that old packets of biscuits needed to be thrown out and everything inside dusted. But there was no washing-up in the sink and the surfaces were clear, except for a teapot with two teabags already waiting at the bottom for boiling water to be poured upon.
The lounge was oppressive. Books were everywhere: lining shelves on the walls, stacked upon coffee tables where they acted as platforms for small antique lamps, and on the floor, leaning against steel sculptures whose strange angles made the balancing act look precarious and like a piece of art in itself. It would have been impossible, she thought, for one person to have read so many books, or at least, to have read them and lived a life as well. John pointed out the television and showed her where Lynn kept her CDs.
“She likes music sometimes,” he said. He didn’t
mention the array of awards in the glass cabinet, or the grand chesterfield armchair, or the pictures of glamorous looking white people above the fireplace. Instead, he led her back into the hallway and apologetically showed her where the cleaning products were kept. “My mother was so house-proud,” he said. “She was famed for it.” Then finally he took her upstairs.
Lynn was sitting up in bed holding a book in front of her, though there was something about the way in which her eyes gazed through the pages and not across them that made Emily suspect she was not really reading at all. This was a woman, she realised at once, who inhabited two separate worlds: the one her eyes could see and the one only her mind could navigate, somewhat like Emily herself. On the bedside table there stood an empty glass and a bottle of pills, but this was the only hint of the woman’s illness. Clothes were put away, cupboards were shut, and beyond the bed a curtain had been tied neatly, the window behind it opened just enough to expose the small garden at the back of the house below. From the doorway Emily could make out a great, wide tree at the end that made her think about swinging on branches, and so of Cassien.
John pushed the door open wider and Lynn looked up. She put down her book and Emily suspected that this was a relief. Her wrists were as spindly as twigs. She wore a wool cardigan despite being wrapped up under a duvet in bed, and her hair was set on top of her head as though she was going to a party. When they entered, she jumped as though being caught looking at herself in the mirror, but she barely glanced at Emily. Instead, her eyes grew suddenly furious and bore directly into her son’s.
“This is Emily, Mother. From Home Care,” John ventured quickly, imploringly through the awkward quiet, but Lynn quelled her rage only long enough to take a breath before speaking. When she did, Emily expected her voice to be weak and thinning like the rest of her, but instead it came out solid, steady and severe.
