After Purple (54 page)

“It
wasn
't cracked,” I shouted from the inside of the cab. “Or rotten. You're
lying
! It was never a danger to the public. Janet only said that because …”

I shut my eyes. Leo was responsible. He hadn't paid the bill when they needed thousands. It was the final, crippling blow. Leo's fist was slamming into that building, his bare hands wrenching out whole stone staircases, his strong, steely shoulders buckling walls. I knew he was powerful, violent even, but now he had turned into a Samson and was tearing down my temple, destroying the only refuge I had left. Where was my cool white sanctuary, the top part of my tree? I couldn't see any trees at all. They must have felled them before they even started. Three months ago, I was lying in that hospital, with nuns and nurses ministering to me, fawning on me. And nobody had mentioned a word about demolition. They must have
known
they were doomed. They'd muttered a bit about staff shortages and lack of funds, but never the cruel reality of iron balls and bulldozers, cranes and flames and death throes. I remembered the word summonses. How could a pile of rubble issue summonses? How could a hospital roar and fume and threaten when it was only a stretcher-case itself, too weak to let out a groan? And what about the nuns, and Father Sullivan? Could you demolish twenty-six white nuns and one black chaplain? Batter them with a crane, toss them on a fire, strip them down, scrap them? I almost hoped Sullivan had been crushed by falling masonry. It would be his punishment for screwing me in the confessional, refusing me Absolution. He'd never returned, never inquired about me. And yet we were told to call him Father. I'd had enough of fathers. Deserters, liars, Wildmen.

I opened the door of the taxi. The air slapped hot, smoky, frightening, against my face. I stumbled across the rough, uneven ground. I was looking for the maisonettes, the neat little garden paths, the crew-cut privet hedges. Gone. Only a hole in the ground now, a ragged patch of dandelions pushing through the scrap-iron. I plucked a flower and laid it on the ground, trying to find the spot where I had made my First Confession and pay my tribute to it. It was like a wreath on a grave — Ray's grave, God's grave. The coffin was the packing case where Ray had sat and given me Absolution.

“Where are the nuns?” I shouted. “What have you done with the nuns?”

The foreman grinned at me from the cosy fug of his site hut. “We packed ' em in a tea-chest and shipped 'em off to heaven.”

“
Heaven
?”

“Well, Lacock then. It's not much different really.”

“Where's Lacock?”

“Wiltshire way. I may have heard wrong, of course, but someone said they've bought a house down there and set up shop in the country.”

“
Shop
? You mean another hospital?”

“No, just a convent, luv. There's no place for nuns in hospitals. Not now they're building these new, fancy places with transplants and scanners and the like. Nuns don't hold with transplants. I saw one on telly once, arguing with a doctor. Told him off, she did. If the good God made you, she said, then He don't want you doctors adding new bits and pieces He never bargained for.”

“But didn't they
know
?” I anguished. “I mean why did nobody
tell
me? I was a patient here, yet no one breathed a word. In fact, I'm
still
a patient. They're expecting me. I've got a room here. They kept it for me. It's sort of … permanent.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spat. “Must be some mistake, Miss. They've known for
months
. The surveyors came in over a year ago. It was a fire risk, on top of everything else. They took in patients up to February, but even then, the place was running down.”

“It
wasn
't I shouted. “It couldn't have been. Not at a hundred pounds a day.”

I felt a wave of fury break over me like a flame. A rotting mausoleum cracked and fragile as a teacup, a fire risk on the demolition list, a danger to the public. And then they'd had the cheek to issue summonses while they sat safe in Lacock, forcing Leo to flee the country for a sum you wouldn't charge if you owned the Ritz, let alone a clapped-out pile of debris. It was they who should pay
him
— as compensation, hush-money, restitution for all his worry and fear and travel expenses, for Karma's kennels, Karma's funeral.

Religion again — that's what it was — metal jugs and priests' tithes screwing the last shivering cent out of cringing congregations, great granite churches pressing down on tissue-paper men. Busy-body bishops setting up frauds and shams and miracles so that gullible people would pour into a sleepy one-horse town and make it into a metropolis. No wonder Bernadette had looked so stricken. They'd used her as a stool-pigeon, battered on her simple trusting soul, turned her into the biggest money-spinner after the Sistine Chapel and the Eiffel Tower. Right — I'd help her. Even without the hospital and my safe white sanctuary, I'd still pass on her message, dethrone the Blessed Virgin, shatter Lourdes. I'd be the iron ball on the crane, the dynamite, the bulldozer, tearing down that whole deceitful town until it was only a handful of shacks again, a few scrawny sheep grazing on a mud patch, a dot on the map so small you could flick it off like dust.

It wouldn't be easy — not without the nuns. I'd have no means of livelihood, no soft white Sisters to feed and shelter me, or lend me books and give me introductions to the bishop. I'd be back to bedsits, dole queues, loneliness. Penances again. Fasting not because I wanted to, but because there was nothing in the larder; shunned by society as a wrecker and a scourge. There was wreckage enough already. I gazed around at the bruised and bleeding masonry, the whimpering hulk of the hospital, dying beside its own twisted guts. The sky pressed down on it — white, bland, totally expressionless. No colour, no hint of sun. It could have been any season. Spring meant nothing here.

One small, stupid chair sprawled on its face in a rubbish tip, the only human object in a pile of slag and sweepings. I stared at its crippled legs, its gashed cane seat. It was
my
chair, the one that had watched beside my hospital bed all the hours I'd been there. It was still alive, still breathing. Leo had sat on it, and Ray, and Adrian and Sister Ursula. I could almost hear them calling out to me.

I blocked my ears, turned away, ran towards the fire. Heat and light rushed into everything. Even the sky was live and scarlet now, dipping its cold white fingers in the flames. Little flakes of ash were drifting and curling in the air, falling on my hair, turning me grey too early. The flames made wild, leaping patterns on my clothes, the whole horizon blazing and crackling in front of me. A gang of workmen were sitting round the fire, brewing tea, their faces ruddy from the flames, their bodies bright, solid, dirty. This was the real world — those loud, brawny men with their legs and cocks and raucous laughing mouths and huge calloused hands, swapping stories, telling jokes, stretching out their bodies to the heat.
They
weren't crippled, battered, deported to Kashmir. They weren't even rationed. There was a whole five-pound tin of sugar at their feet and they were gulping tea not from prissy little teacups, but from cock-sized, pint-sized milk bottles filled sweet and scalding to the brim. This was where I belonged. I'd seen those men before, or others like them — greasing and steaming in the workman's caff, flinging ketchup on to fry-ups and custard on to stodge, cackling and swearing in the public bars, wiping froth from their lips or sperm from their overalls. I envied them. They knew each other's names, knew which ones took sugar and how much, knew what they were doing with their lives. They took their orders from a four-square foreman who didn't speak in riddles. They belonged together, were free to spend their lifetime taking tea-breaks. Bernadette had never cocked them up, forced them to give up sex and peace and leisure, to fight for barrenness and truth. I inched a little closer to their circle, stood trembling on the edge. I could feel the fire panting in my face, the men's own heat and sweat and friendliness melting into mine.

“Thirsty?” asked the tallest, holding out his bottle. He had dark tufts of body hair pushing through the rents in his tee-shirt. His hand grazed mine as I took the bottle. He grinned. White teeth. Fat lips. The tea scalded down my throat, the glass hot and hard between my hands. I held the bottle close against my chest, then inched it lower, lower, down. It was so long since I'd had a man, a proper man, and here were twelve of them — big dirty blokes, with bulging forearms, slurping mouths, legs sprawled wide apart, huge trampling boots.

“What's yer name, luv?”

“Bernadette.”

“Come again?”

“Bernadette,” I repeated, louder. One of the men was stripped to the waist, a scarlet eagle tattooed on his belly, which fluttered as he moved. His navel was deep and secret like a tiny chalice. You could have stored sugar in it.

“Fancy sort of name. French, in't it? What's your Mum call you? Bernie?”

“No,” I said. “She doesn't call me anything.”

One of the men cackled, showing stained and broken teeth. “Run away from your Mum, then, 'ave you? Come to join us? Can you work a crane?”

“No”, I said. I knew I could learn, though. I longed to stay with the world, the heat, the rough, the purple, to play groupie to a gang of demolition men; to live in a hut and drink from bottles, to lie with navvies who smelt of filth and fire, to lick the sweat from their stomachs, to have my cunt tattooed. I didn't want babies — bad-tempered wombs which botched their job, morning sickness, swollen breasts. Or marriage with its damask napkins and its ration-books, someone else's initials branded on my birth certificate, somebody else's smell trapped inside my skin. All I wanted was to sprawl beside a fire with a gang of workmen who couldn't read, or write, or reason, or play pianos, or reassess medieval kings. Men who'd use a piece of Ch'ing to piss in, or tear up
The Listener
to wipe their arses on. Men who lusted after women, not crawled and slavered after other men, men who'd jeer at Otto as a nancy and a perv.

“Let's see yer ' ands, luv,” bawled a red-haired Londoner. “You can always tell a worker by 'is 'ands.”

I put down the bottle and spread out my hands on the slab of concrete they were using as a table. I had always thought I had large, ugly hands, but now they looked small and delicate. They were dwarfed by the huge hams stretching all around me, hulking hairy wrists, cracked and calloused palms, filthy broken fingernails. Hands had never looked so beautiful. I could feel them clawing down my breasts, dragging off my clothes, hauling me back and down and powerless while they grappled down my thighs.

“You'd never make it,” grinned a stocky man with a red woolly cap over his matted thatch of hair. “Not with ' ands like that, mate.

You gotta be tough in this job. It's bloody good pay, but they don't take weaklings.”

“You could always make the tea,” said Eagle.

“Or scare away the ghost,” chipped in the Irishman.

“
What
ghost?” Despite the fire, I shivered.

“Some nun, they say, creeping around the corridors with her head in her hands. Load o'rubbish, I call it. I don't believe in ghosts. I never trust what I can't see plain with me own eyes.”

“There's
loads
of stuff you can't see, but it's still there, i'n it?” That was Red-cap. “I mean, what about electricity?”

“I
seen
the ghost. Last week it was. It rapped my knuckles when I swore!” Loud laughs.

“Don't scare the girl. She's pale enough already.”

“Looks as if she's seen a ghost herself.”

More laughs. I crept towards the laughter. It was a hot, bright, reassuring sound. I needed to escape from ghosts. Bernadette kept tapping me on the shoulder, pale and chill and sullen like the sky. I had slipped down and was lying on my back. Above me soared the white, uncalloused clouds. That was where the saints lived, pure and clean and shining, with no blokes, no entanglements.

“Just once,” I begged her. “Just one last taste before I leave it all.” She must have heard me because suddenly everything blurred and snarled and darkened and I could feel my voice choking through a sort of purple fug. It was as if the sky had somersaulted and trapped me in its underside, dark and hot and feverish. There were no clear outlines left, only flickering shadows, hungry groping flames. I could hardly tell where earth ended, and fire and air began.

The man with the eagle seemed to be bending over me, its cruel scarlet talons only inches from my crotch. I could smell his hot raunchy body, his rancid underarms.

“So you want to join us, do you?” As he grinned, I glimpsed the gap in his teeth, the dark blur of his tongue.

“Oh,
please
,” I breathed to Bernadette. She was still there somewhere, although she didn't answer. The world had contracted to the black crevice of my cunt.

Eagle was already fumbling with his jeans, while his mate grabbed my wrists and held me down. He pinioned my arms so fiercely, I couldn't feel much else. It was over in a minute, anyway. He was zipping up again before I even knew he'd come. Then he and his mate swapped places. The mate was rougher and took his time about it. He was a dark, swarthy bloke with bluish stubble and oil stains on his face. He started off just staring at me, peering closely at my body, as if it were some new piece of machinery which might be dud or dangerous. Then he moved against me, almost insolently at first, as if I wasn't worth the effort. I was so annoyed, I bucked and back-jumped underneath him. He soon fought back and I came at least three times before his one. He still clung on, though. He was shouting now, calling out words in some wild foreign language which sounded thick like Czech, and threshing with his heels against my buttocks. I knew he wanted to outdo me, so I let him come at least twice more, and then again, the back way, before I kicked him off. Even then, his cock was still half-stiff and wouldn't fit back properly in his jeans. He left them open while he stood there watching, jeering, as the third one clambered on.