Tremble (25 page)

The old tramp smelled of urine and centuries of decay. His leathery face loomed at the young property developer from under the canopy of thick serpentine vines that still clung to the decaying wooden verandah.

“Forest come un twisty up your soul, you have nothing, boyo, seep into yer DNA then zap! Dead meat scum. You cursed. You no longer living.
Flitter, flitter
,” Gavin muttered, then spat at the developer’s feet. There was blood mixed in with the spittle.

The young man, meticulous in his dress and his business acumen, reared back, convinced that both insanity and poverty were contagious.

Great, a fucking environmentalist, he thought, some old hippie who’s really lost his marbles.

S
he stood at the prow of the ferry as it rode up the crest of a wave and plunged down the other side, up another and down again, relentlessly plowing toward the island visible on the horizon. The Aegean Sea, she thought, taking a deep breath of the salty air that was tinged with diesel.

“Islands of myth and tragedy,” she whispered into the breeze as white limestone formations appeared on the shore. She could almost see Io, the maiden, suspended in her flight from the amorous Zeus disguised as a bull. Above a rock pool Medusa stared at an army of fossilized lovers and there was Dionysus, clutching a bunch of grapes, facing in the direction of Athens.

The sea winds filled her lungs with a pounding vitality, the churning water below was an unbelievable turquoise and already she could feel the Greek sun burning her skin. She didn’t care. This was life, uninhibited, vibrant. Finding it hard to contain the growing flutter of excitement hidden beneath the gray flannel she crossed her arms.

“The nun, she’s not bad, eh?” A Greek sailor nudged his friend, who cuffed him on the head, warning him to keep his cock holy and his mind clean. But still the sailor stared. The nun was youthful, in her late twenties, with pale skin and startling green eyes. A strand of strawberry blond hair crept out from beneath her traditional habit; tossed by the wind, it twisted with a sensuality of its own. The young man peered closer. It was hard to tell what her body would be like under the robe, but the outline of her bosom was prominent, suggesting a voluptuousness. There was about her a certain self-consciousness and assailability that enabled the sailor, a seasoned authority on women, to guess correctly that she was a virgin. What he would never guess was that her name was Clarissa Metahue and she had lost her faith several months before.

She was twenty-six years old and had been a sister of the Benedictine order for over six years. A priest had set up a recruitment center at the private Catholic girls’ school she’d attended and Clarissa, convinced that the Virgin Mary had appeared to her as a child, had taken the priest’s interest as a reinforcement of her secret calling. Amazed by the resilience of her own courage, Clarissa had chosen a spiritual vocation over Adelaide University. Her choice had almost destroyed her staunchly atheist father, a banker with far more conventional ambitions for his only child. The summer she announced her intentions he had
threatened to disinherit her, then tried to bribe her into a university place, and when that failed announced that he expected her to pay back every single cent he had invested in both her childhood and her education. He only relented when Clarissa’s mother convinced him that if this was a phase the girl was going through, the last thing he should do was to alienate her.

Nevertheless, fleeing his disapproval the novice had taken a position in an impoverished suburb called Taperoo, near Port Adelaide. There she ran a center for single mothers, many of them heroin addicts with histories of abuse. It was a baptism of fire for a middle-class girl from a prosperous home. But she learned to love her job and, despite the ongoing frustrations, the triumphs that tenacity can bring—until she became involved with a small Aboriginal girl called Ruby from the Nunga community. Full of intelligence and energy, the five-year-old would entertain the depressed women with her babbling humor and mimicry. She was the progeny of a local musician—her mother had died from a drug overdose complicated by diabetes—and her twenty-year-old father, dreadlocks to his shoulders, would drop Ruby off at the center in the morning and sometimes fail to collect her at night.

Clarissa let the child sleep over at her cramped one-bedroom house on the edge of the estate. Lying together in her bed they would use shadow play on the wall to invent an imaginary world both of them could escape into, a world where the local social worker became a witch with snakes for hair, where trees walked, postboxes sang, and where the cracks in the pavement led to strange paradises; a dreamworld full of Ruby’s laughter and Clarissa’s misplaced adulthood.

Inevitably the nun found herself fantasizing about motherhood. Lying there she imagined her dedication to Christ as a beautiful white marble path sweeping before her, shaping her whole life, a clear plan that was entirely comforting until the warmth of Ruby’s body became a painful reminder of the childlessness this dedication entailed.

At the end of that winter Ruby was diagnosed with leukemia. Six months later she was dead. It was a slow, anguished death, and somewhere between the child’s terrible pain and the bitter grief of her young father whispering doubts crept into Clarissa’s daily meditations, her anger turning to quiet despair as her prayers proved useless. No humane God would have allowed this to happen; no thinking deity can condone such suffering, she found herself reasoning.

One morning she woke up and found herself pinned to her bed by an overwhelming sense of vertigo. It was only when she had coaxed herself into standing upright on trembling, mistrusting legs that she realized her illness was not physical but spiritual. Clarissa Metahue had lost her faith.

Her Mother Superior visited the community center on her annual pilgrimage and instantly recognized Clarissa’s malaise. After a lengthy interrogation, she announced that she was going to send the young nun to an isolated convent overseas famous for its restorative powers.

It was set on a high cliff on a tiny Greek island that lay next to the most eastern island of the little Cyclades, Donousa, and was known only as the little brother of Donousa. One of the most remote outposts of the Catholic Church surrounded by the Greek Orthodox denomination, the convent was over four hundred years old and had been founded by a pious wife who had accompanied her knight en route to the Holy Crusades.

Clarissa, numb with grief, packed that same day. After changing planes at Heathrow for Athens, she eventually found herself standing on the deck of the ferry in a place that was already another world.

She felt the heat of the man’s gaze on the back of her neck and blushed. She glanced quickly at his taut figure. The muscles in his naked back rippled like an undulating washboard as he flung the rope to a waiting sailor at the dock. Clarissa had never seen a naked man. And oddly, she had never felt any great rush of desire. Her sexuality was completely dormant and she justified her moment of voyeurism now as objective curiosity. It was difficult to miss what one had never experienced, and secretly Clarissa was thankful to have avoided the machinations of passion, especially after witnessing the abuse the women in the community center tolerated—all justified, she thought, by a nebulous codependency they insisted on calling “love.”

The boat drew up to the wooden dock. Brightly colored fishing boats were beads of bobbing color against the pale limestone. Behind them, the small shops looked as if they had frozen somewhere in the fifteenth century, an illusion broken only by the odd neon sign, antiquated themselves with their flashy 1970s graphics.

The walkway was lowered and the sailor watched the nun gingerly pick her way across carrying a battered suitcase. What a waste, he thought, then forgot her completely.

The holy woman stood beside a high sun-bleached wall that seemed to grow out from the very edge of the cliff face. Dressed in a pale blue habit she was almost invisible against the sky, her face a floating oval of tanned wrinkles, her eyes black slits of knowledge. The pious impression was only slightly offset by the state-of-the-art Nike sneakers that peeped from under the hem of the neatly ironed robe.

Leaning on her walking stick she craned her head to watch the Australian woman, uncomfortably perched on a donkey, make her way up the side of the steep hill. The abbess chuckled deeply. At ninety she had a wicked sense of humor. She could have sent the convent’s car—a donated old Jaguar—to meet their visitor, but had decided to test the fortitude of the newcomer instead.

“Welcome! Welcome!” she yelled. “I trust the journey wasn’t too arduous.” She hobbled toward Clarissa, grinning broadly, and held out her ringed hand for her to kiss.

Clarissa tentatively squeezed the wrinkled hand then looked around her. The view was spectacular. The sea crashed at the bottom of the cliff a couple of hundred feet below, while a swirling ball of gulls circled hungrily, waiting for shoals to be swept in by the breaking waves. The call of an eagle caught her attention; it was a lone black cross floating effortlessly on the wind.

“I like to think that this altitude brings us closer to God, my dear, and I hope that after a time you too will come to share my sentiments.” The abbess watched her closely.

Clarissa’s superior back in Australia had obviously spoken to the Greek woman, who suddenly winked at her. “I hope so, I honestly do,” the nun replied carefully, conscious of the awkwardness of her position.

“You speak perfect English,” Clarissa commented as they walked through the crumbling medieval gates into a courtyard that blazed with flower beds planted in an Arabic geometric pattern and was surrounded by cloisters.

“I am one of the few, I’m afraid. I hope you won’t be too lonely. Sister Evans told me that you had considerable community experience.”

They continued through the quadrangle, into the shade of a vine-covered trellis that ran above the doors of the stone cells that served as the nuns’ sleeping quarters.

“Five years in one of the poorest suburbs in Australia,” Clarissa replied as they entered the spartan room that held a single iron bed, a desk with a portable radio sitting on top, and the obligatory wooden crucifix on the wall.

“Perfect,” the abbess replied. “We serve a small community down in the village. It is a backward place and the women have many problems they can share only with us.”

“But I can’t speak Greek,” Clarissa interrupted, visions of wildly gesturing peasants flooding her mind.

“Even better.” The old woman patted her hand and left.

The next day Clarissa was driven down to the village that nestled at the foot of an extinct volcano beside the small harbor. She was introduced to Pater Dimitri, the local priest. A rosy-faced man in his midfifties who walked with the bounce of the perpetual enthusiast, Dimitri was in charge of the whitewashed church. He walked her through, showing her with obvious pride the garish locally carved crucifix with lurid blood oozing from the feet and hands and thorn-pierced forehead.

“Every year on Saint Barbara’s day we have the holy relic procession. We bring her down from the convent in a cart, parade her through the streets, and every woman comes to be blessed,” the priest declared grandly, breathing a noxious mixture of garlic and peppermints over her.

He also told her about the villagers; how behind the facades of the brightly painted houses lay real poverty, with many of the families barely able to afford to send their children to school. After fourteen most of them worked on the fishing boats or beside their mothers at the factory. Any extra cash came from tourism, but these islanders were deeply religious people who didn’t care to have their beaches polluted with naked German backpackers or their cafés invaded by loud sunburned Englishmen. They had placed an embargo on the pleasure cruises that stopped off at many of the other islands; consequently their economy had stopped growing. The main medical authority on the island was an herbalist who was rumored to be over a hundred years old. To see a conventional doctor one had to travel to nearby Donousa. It was as if time itself had been frozen. Many of the women, even the younger ones, still wore the traditional headscarf and modest long-sleeved blouses.
There was one satellite dish, perched awkwardly on top of the main café, but it was used solely to watch soccer matches or the Eurovision song contest. The locals studiously avoided any coverage of international news or politics. They were a closed, superstitious clan determined to cling onto tradition.