A Cleansing of Souls (14 page)

Before becoming unemployed, George had known little of the outcasts of his country. He had believed in the ethos of work. Toil is rewarded, sloth rejected. This had been his philosophy. But now he was beginning to perceive an extraneous influence, a force against which there is no answer – not hard work, not honesty, nor, perhaps, even innocence. No answer at all. And it made him quake. He walked through the children, the men, the women, young and old, and the air was filled with smells, sounds and visions, filled with an atmosphere he had never known before and would surely never forget.

Don’t talk to me of numbers and figures.

Show me your comfortable heart.

Show me your comfortable soul.

And let me sleep upon your conscience.

George returned home just before midnight and sat at the kitchen table. He made himself a drink, took a cloth, wet it, and wiped up the coffee stain from the floor.

Tom, I love you so much.

I will look for you tomorrow and forever.

There was courage within George now, as there is courage within all of us. He slept for just four hours before returning to the shattered streets of Big Town.

Tom was discharged from
the hospital ward the day after the assault in the high street. They had kept him in overnight for observations. He had been slightly concussed and had suffered bruising to his ribs and his back. Sandy had stayed with him for as long as visiting hours had permitted and she was there to meet him the next morning when it was time for him to leave.

Sandy had spent the night alone, aching and bruised but not wanting any of her cuts seen to. She had just wanted to get home, have a bath and be taken by sleep - but Tom’s absence had burned into her. It is so easy to become accustomed to the presence of another. You are drawn in despite yourself. It is a trick of life; it is some kind of magic that controls you entirely. You see things differently. You begin to dream, compromise, justify and before you know it, that other person has become a part of you and you a part of them. But in her mind as she had tried to sleep that night, all Sandy heard was Tom’s laugh, that momentary, instinctive laugh that made her shiver every time.

That laugh had cut her like a hefty blade, scything through her cocoon of emotions; that haven in which her love for Tom had been so secretly nurtured. Justify, compromise, and dream. She could not reconcile her view of him with the way he behaved. Her father had always taught her not to pass criticism on that which she did not understand. So she would wait until she saw him again, until he was back in her flat.

“Do you want to lie down?” she asked him as they both sat together on the settee.

“I’ll be all right, thank you. I feel like I’ve been lying down for a week.”

His voice was quiet and detached, subdued in tone, strained.

Tom had been
doing some reflecting too. He had been thrown from one situation to another on some turbulent sea upon whose surface he had striven vainly to walk. He had allowed it to take him. He knew now that he was heading for the bottom, to the depths of his own ocean.

Please teach me how to float. Give me time - time to learn. That is all I ask.

“Would you like a drink?”

“No, I’m fine.”

They sat beside each other in silence. But it had to break. There was too much to be said for it to last.

“Tom,” said Sandy, continuing to gaze at the opposite wall, “why did you laugh with them?”

Tom breathed deeply. What could he say? He knew the question was coming. It had been on his mind from the moment he had awoken in that sharp, white hospital that morning. He couldn’t even look at her.

“What do you mean?” he murmured.

“Those people when they said those things about me. And you laughed. Why did you laugh?”

It is time now for you to come down from the stage, Tom. Take your bow and return to yourself, your true self. Follow your heart again. Go to your soul.

He turned to look at her. She did not acknowledge him. As she stared forward, he allowed his eyes to imbibe of her beauty for she was indeed beautiful. He saw that now. And she was beginning to shake a little.

“Look,” he said at last, unable to take his eyes of her, “I don’t know why I laughed. All I can think is that I was just scared and it just sort of came out. I was a fucking idiot. I know how it must have looked.” He sighed now before continuing. “Last night, I was thinking what I’ve turned into, the things that have happened to me and the things I’ve done, not just recently, for a while now. Like I said, I’m just some fucking idiot, just some fucking idiot chasing something that isn’t there and hurting good people along the way. Sandy, I’m lost, mate. Fucked. I’m sorry.”

She turned to him now and he saw at last the tears upon her face. He felt stranded, naked and vulnerable. He was a child in a strange, strange world. So he reached for her. And she reached for him. They held one another and each accepted the tears of the other in silence.

They stayed sitting there, entwined, for three hours. Neither spoke nor moved. The touch and the warmth of another human being can wash away pain and reconcile loss like nothing else. In that embrace, there was safety and dreams and fear and longing.

And the moon peered through the window, gazed in solemnity at the scene, and could not tear itself away.

Michael sat in his room, eyes deep in the past. There was no present and the future was only days away. They had given him some medication to help him sleep the night before and its effects clung to him still. He felt weary and listless. The room
comprised of just a bed and a locker. The floor was grey and the walls a pale yellow. Light filtered through the single window and reflected the outline of the frame onto the tile floor, a mirror of light there before him. It was a subtle, enticing gateway out of there, out of everywhere. But it was not the one for which he was waiting.

There was a knock on the door and John entered. He was around twenty-three years old, had dark hair and growth of stubble around his face that made him at first appear slightly older. He spoke with a soft Southern Irish accent and he had an easy, natural way about him.

“Michael,” he said, “sorry to bother you. It’s just that we need to have a chat. I’m going to be your named nurse while you’re here and we need to work out what we can do to get you out.” In the absence of a reply, he added, “I’m John, you remember, from yesterday. When you came in.”

Michael looked at him and sighed. He liked John. He had liked him from the moment he had met him.

The two men walked down the long ward corridor into a room at the end. John put his heavy key in the lock and turned it, allowing Michael to enter first. The room was well lit and contained four or five chairs. Michael looked about him before sitting down on a chair beneath one of the windows. John shut the door, pulled up a chair, and sat down also.

“How did you sleep last night, Michael?”

“As well as I need, thank you. I took your tablet.”

John smiled.

“It wasn’t my tablet. It’s just what the doctor prescribed to help you sleep. If you don’t want it tonight, don’t worry. Its just there if you need it.”

Michael enjoyed John’s voice, his accent. He was identifying beauty now, concerning himself not with anger and despair. For his time was short. And there truly was beauty everywhere.

“Anyway,” continued John, “what we need to talk about is what needs to happen for you to leave here and go back home. So, basically, I need to know a bit more about you, how you’re feeling, what your plans are for when you get out of here, and if there’s anything we can do to make things more comfortable for you.”

Michael looked into John’s eyes. There was redness at the edges of them, sore veins creeping into the blue pupils in which Michael saw honesty and something indefinable - life, perhaps. Or death.

“Where would you like me to start, John?”

“Wherever you like. We’ve got a while, so don’t worry about time.”

Michael felt relaxed in John’s company. The room was quiet and it seemed to be far away from the unpredictable suffering of the rest of the ward. Were the walls to crumble and fall, he imagined there would be meadows all around, buzzing green fields strolling into Heaven.

Don’t worry about time.

Michael thought deeply.

“We all live in a story, John. Our lives are just tales that nobody hears or reads. But you are now in mine and I am now in yours. That is how beautiful life is. That is the beauty of life.”

John just looked at Michael. He was listening also for key words. Any mention of medication that he had been on in the past, names of family members, previous diagnosis, names of other hospitals. Anything perhaps that would make this man fit into the parameters of your average patient. But he was prepared to wait. The alcohol from the previous night had stalked him throughout the early morning and he was appreciating now the solitude of this isolated room. So he nodded, indicating to Michael that he should continue.

“I have always known that I was different from others. I have known that for a very long time. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way it was meant to be.”

“Different in what way?” asked John.

“In the sense that, well, in the sense that, yes I live in this time, this place, but outside it too. I see what you see but also I see within it, around it and through it. I see lots of things, beautiful things.”

“What sort of things?”

“I see life.              That is all. I see life and goodness in everything. And where there is no life, I give life. Where there is no goodness, I dream and there is goodness. My life is a cleansing of souls.”

Michael closed his eyes. Not long now. Not long.

“Are you okay?” asked John. “We can carry on later if you want.”

“I had a sister. She left me a long time ago. That was when I first realised that not everybody was like me.”

“Was she older than you, or younger?”

“She was young then, but she is younger still now, so much younger, so young. At least I thought she was. I thought I had her back. I thought that she had come back to me, but I was misled. So now I must go and find her."

“Do you see her much?”

“I see her every day, every minute. She is with us now. She will be with me always.”

“Right.”

This man is great, thought John, really great.

“So you’ve got a sister. Do you see her when other people can’t?”

“I see her with my soul. I cannot speak for others.”

Fair enough, thought John.

“When she left me, they put me in a hospital like this. Not as nice as this, but the same kind of place. That was a difficult time for me. Without my sister, I had nothing. So I gave myself.”

“Gave yourself?”

“Yes.”

“To who?”

“To you, John.”

Suddenly, there was shouting and thudding from out in the corridor followed by the shriek of a panic alarm and John leapt from his seat, flying out of the room.

Michael stood up slowly and looked upwards. He looked past the ceiling, past the roof and past the sky. He saw only Heaven now.

On leaving the psychiatric hospital just before his nineteenth birthday, Michael had begun his life again with a vigour and a pleasure in the world, a world of natural beauty of which he was the creator. Nature was, for him, the perfect embodiment of the spirit, the true bridge from vision to reality. And he was never to leave that exalted plateau. He would never return to the hatred and the factories and the smoke. His country was not one of steel and rust and fog and grime, but one of brightness, possessing a profundity that could only be found in the essence of the human soul.

The office where Michael had begun work at the age of twenty-one had not been ideal for the pursuit of inner paradise. Though he acquired a reputation as a capable employee, he had been known more for his lapses in concentration and his distractibility. He was often intentionally induced into long orations about flowers or the sea or the sky, merely as a means of alleviating the boredom of his colleagues. They felt this strange young man humorous. And they would turn him on and switch him off at will.

It had been at an office party that Michael first met Christine. He had been talking to a small group of people about some subject or other and
it was as they gradually dispersed, one by one, both amused and bemused, that Christine stepped from the shadows full of joy and admiration. She worked at a branch on the South Coast and the party had been arranged for all those in the Southern Area Division. Such parties were frequently lurid affairs where inebriated characters, old and young alike, would weave through the night, staggering and crawling upon hands and knees, faces blotched and heads in shreds.