A Cleansing of Souls (15 page)

Christine had been at the company for six months and she had learned in that time that a smart suit and a bright tie do not necessarily guarantee a sharp mind and a gentle heart.

Michael was different. During that party, he had excused himself, citing the need for  ‘clarity amidst the fervour’ and she had followed him outside into the dark night where they talked together until the moon rose, shone, and slipped beneath the reddening sky of the morning. They had spoken of their loves and their follies, their hopes and their predicaments. But he had not told her everything. Not about his sister, Jennifer, nor about the hospital or the marks on his hands.

As the months and years had passed, Michael and Christine saw more of one another and they eventually married on one cold April afternoon in a registry office. He had been twenty-six, she twenty-three. Ron had been there at the wedding, as had his new girlfriend, Diane. The years following Michael’s discharge from hospital had re-introduced Ron to security. He had visited Michael almost daily during his admission. From what he could gather, they had diagnosed Michael as having some form of thought disorder. And that was fine.

So as each day of Michael’s life went by, events and details were clouded by dreams, wild ideas, illusions and delusions, but, wonderfully, he continued to, what the consultant would call, ‘function’.

As he sits there now though, in that room, alarms going off, waiting for the nurse, all he sees are the dry, broken sticks of a child’s shattered vision.

Dry, broken sticks.

A spark will destroy a forest whose time has come, bring it all down.

All it takes is one flickering light and it’s gone.

The married couple had moved to a pleasant house not too far from the town and Christine had been transferred, at her request, to the same office as her husband. They had lived thereafter, for the next ten years, an uneventful, enclosed life. Neither had made any real demands upon the other. There had been no real expectations, hence no real disappointments.

And then, almost overnight, a short while after his thirty-sixth birthday, Michael had begun to drift away. His communication with his wife and everybody else faltered. He would shut himself in his study, just staring into space only he could see, his eyes fixed, urgent, and aflame. Christine would check if he had been taking his medication – his ‘stress’ tablets. Married for ten years and then this. Meal times would be passed in a heavy silence. Foreboding had taken
a seat at the table and made himself very comfortable.

Christine had dreaded their journeys to work for her husband had grown sombre and detached. Not a word would be spoken between them. It had become impossible for her. So she had turned to their new neighbour and long-time work colleague for advice. Ron. Strong, dependable Ron. She had not wanted her marriage to fall apart. Ron would listen to her, console her. She had always admired him.

And then Laura had come along. The pregnancy had broken the cloud smothering Michael and joy had rained upon him. It had come as a shock for Christine as Ron had just looked on.

So Christine had handed in her notice and prepared herself for the huge change that motherhood would bring to her life, experiencing all emotions to their fullest extent.

Michael took to coming home from work with flowers that he would hide in various parts of the house for his wife to stumble upon. He did all the housework and all the shopping, the cooking and the ironing. The physical effort had been nothing to him, for love was his. And every now and then, he would whisper to himself, “she’s coming back, she’s coming back.” And he would skip a little, whistle and be unable to keep himself from laughing.

Michael had been there at the birth, looking on in wonder as his wife struggled in agony. Of all the sights he had ever seen, and they numbered many, none compared to the birth of this little girl. For he saw things differently from you and me. He saw it all.

When the tiny blood-spattered child had emerged, Michael had wept. He had taken the baby in a towel and held her tight to his heart. A tear had dropped from his eye and splashed onto the fragile forehead of his little girl.

Laura had grown as a flower in Michael’s eyes. He would spend hours just looking at her as she lay in her cot, delicate, fragile, light and beautiful. When she cried, he would hold her and whisper to her, waiting for the moment when their heartbeats were as one. And as he spoke so quietly to her, she would drift back to sleep, drift back to the wonderful land he had created for her. Michael no longer had to search for beauty in all things. It was there before him - his baby, his own baby.

Ron had been named as Laura’s godfather, a role that he had assumed with no discomfort at all. Michael had insisted. Christine had remained silent.

Laura would never tire of Michael’s affections. As she grew older, she was neither embarrassed nor ashamed. Some of her young friends, even at five, six years old, would be so hostile to their parents, resenting physical contact, petulant and proud. Oh so young to be so old. And Laura would look on, confused. She loved her mother dearly, but her dad was her special friend. He was the hero in all her fairy stories, the face she saw when people spoke of Jesus - that thin, pale face with the large sad eyes.

The whole period of Laura’s early years had been a tense and nervous time for Christine. She would barely speak to Ron. He would call over on some pretext and find Michael once again there, playing with Laura, having taken another day off work.

Ron and Christine.

The prerogative of the friend.

Laura. Last year at infant school just finished
. The summer holidays about to begin. How do we make sense of it all? Two weeks after breaking up from school, she lies upon her bed, sore, terrified and covered in another’s sweat. Her teddy bears and her dollies gaze on, impotent. And when she wakes in the middle of the night, having finally got to sleep, she wakes in total fear. Michael is there, crouched on the floor, staring at her, tears all over the place, shaking and shuddering. She puts her arms around him, just leans across instinctively and cuddles him. And she cries too. Seven years old. He whispers through his pain and she slumps back into dark sleep.

When I wake up, my daddy is gone. And I am so very old.

Whilst Michael sits in that room, alarms still shattering his silence, Christine rises from her chair and pulls her dressing gown tightly about her. She walks slowly, deliberately, to the study as if being led by the hand. She pushes open the door and enters. It is so neat and so precise. She looks around the room and moves over to the large desk upon which
sits a heavy, garish paperweight. Easily, calmly, she picks it up, turns and crashes it into the glass-fronted bookcase. No sound can be heard. There is no sound. She wrenches open the desk drawers and empties the contents out onto the carpet. She smashes the small lamp against the corner of the desk until the clay base is cracked and shattered. She rips down the curtains and throws them to the floor - still not a sound. She wrenches the telephone cord from out of the wall and hurls the whole thing across the room.

And the destruction continues in complete silence until Christine, beaten, staggers out into the hall, a thin trail of blood seeping from her foot and following her out,

And Laura, Laura is upstairs listening to the silence.

Look closely now, for on the floor, by the study window, amidst the broken glass and the debris, amidst the artefacts of a fool, there l
ies a photograph, a small photograph of a beautiful girl. The edges are a little curled and the background blurred, but the girl herself is bright and smiling. The photograph was taken by a man whose love for that girl was greater than anyone could understand.

And on the back of the photograph, if you look closer now, a name has been crossed through and replaced in ragged writing with another. Where once it had read,
Laura
, it now reads,
Jennifer – my love.

Surely she is an angel.

Sandy decided to organise a party. She just needed to be amongst friends in order to re-affirm her stability. So she invited some people from work and the couple from the flat below. In some odd way, she knew that the trivial talk and the loud music would allow her time to think with more clarity about her situation. Each morning she rose, she was unable to get a grip on her feelings. The common sense that had been with her always had now left her with barely a sense of anything at all.

Tom was enthusiastic when Sandy told him of her plans for the party. He looked forward to meeting others now, for he was a stranger to them. Pre-conceptions and previous meetings would not influence them against him. This was his new life now and these his new encounters.

So long ago the dreamer had set out from his bedroom to tap the true source of his soul. It’s still there for you, Tom. Just stop. Close your eyes. And look all around you.

Throughout the day of the party, Sandy tidied the flat until it looked like an artist had sketched everything into place. She vacuumed and polished, cleaned the windows, washed the kitchen floor and made sure there everything was perfect. She had sent Tom out early in the morning to the shops for food and drink and he had gone willingly. It seemed to her that he had been less tense of late. Maybe he had at last understood how kind she had been to him. As she polished the low coffee table, she wandered into dreams, allowing her eyes to fall into visions amidst the deep, smooth grain of the dark mahogany. She loved him, it's true - but she had never been told that love could hurt this much.

After she had cleaned the flat and while she was waiting for Tom to return, Sandy took the time to decide what to wear that evening. She looked through her wardrobe, all clanging coat hangers and swishing dresses – each dress compelling her to choose it. The feel of the material on her fingertips thrilled her. And as she stood there, her clothes returning her gaze, anticipation began to grow within her. Perhaps Tom would realise when he saw her in one of these dresses, when she had done her hair, put on some make-up, perhaps he would realise she was truly a woman now.

She finally decided upon a long black skirt and a white blouse with frills around the neckline and lace around the sleeves. Small silver buttons fastened right the way up to the neck and the material was a beautiful silk. She slipped the skirt on over her jeans just to assure herself she could still fit into it and looked in the mirror from every conceivable angle. As she was stepping out of it to hang it back up, satisfied, there was a knock on the front door. She tossed the skirt onto the bed and hurried out into the lobby.

“I think I got it all,” said Tom, standing in the doorway holding two bulging carrier bags. Sandy smiled and took the bags off him as he entered.

“These are heavy. Did you walk all the way, or did you get the bus?” she asked as he followed her into the kitchen.

“Walked. I wasn’t sure where the buses stopped,” he replied, looking at his knuckles, willing them to return to even a semblance of their
natural colour.

After packing away the shopping, Sandy came into the lounge to find Tom smoking a cigarette. The smell made her feel ill.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she said testily.

“Yeah. It’s just that I didn’t have any fags.” He smiled brightly. “I just got four less cans of lager and these fags with what I would have spent on the lager. I just won’t drink so much tonight.”

“Well I haven’t got any ashtrays.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll use one of them plastic cups I just bought.”

He went into the kitchen, cigarette in hand, took a plastic cup from the stack that Sandy had just put in the cupboard, poured a little water into it and returned to the living room. He then sat down and, as if to demonstrate, inhaled deeply, rotated his eyes in a comic fashion, exhaled, tapped the ash into the plastic cup and smiled.

“There. You see,” he said. “Sorted.”

That afternoon, Sandy made some cakes and some sausage rolls and organised the rest of the food. Throughout this time, perhaps for an hour, Tom lay in the bath listening to the football on the radio. He emerged as the final whistles blew all around the country, dressed in the jeans that Sandy had bought him and wearing the black sweatshirt he had brought from home that had been washed the night before. He walked into the kitchen where Sandy was doing her third round of washing up.

“They fit okay, don’t they?” he asked her. It was the first time he had worn the new jeans.

Sandy turned and looked at him. He looked lovely - he smelled lovely, so fresh.

“They look really nice”, she replied, her eyes shining.

“Nice?”

“Yes. Really nice,” she repeated.

“Do you remember that English teacher we had at school who looked like Kevin Keegan, well a cross between Kevin Keegan and Russell Osman?” said Tom suddenly, with energy and some humour. “I forget his name, but he always used to say how ‘nice’ was the worst word in the English language, that it meant nothing at all. Do you remember him?”

“Mr Crane,” said Sandy, quietly.

“That’s him.”

Tom smiled. Kevin Keegan. Russell Osman. Mr Crane.

“Do you want a hand?” he asked, reaching for the tea towel.

“No. I’ll be finished in a minute.”

“Okay.”

“You could put the drinks on the table for me, if you want. Put the cloth on first though. It’s in the top drawer, behind the settee.”

“Sure.”

Tom arranged the cans and the bottles neatly on the table, the tallest at the back and the shorter ones at the front. And when he stepped back to view his work, he realised he’d forgotten to put the tablecloth on. Ah, well. He could start again;
it was a small, ineffectual task after all. There was no such thing as time anymore - the next few minutes - that was all that mattered. And then there would be another few minutes. Such was the easy flow of his life now.

Sandy finished the cakes and covered them over with a net. Everything would be ready in time. The guests would be arriving in a couple of hours and all she had to do now was get ready.

Sitting at her little dressing table, she sought in vain to accentuate the beauty of her eyes. She could not - for they were already as beautiful as the eyes of a child. She put deep red lipstick onto her soft lips and when she smiled she emblazoned the room. But, come on, back to her eyes. They were indeed beautiful, but there was nothing she could do about the tiny red vein in the corner of each one – the sole reminder of where the love-fear tears had broken through.

After having made up her face, Sandy put on the white blouse. It was cool against her warm skin and it caressed her spine as it shimmered down her smooth back. She stood up and tucked it into her long, black skirt. And stepping into her shiny, black high heel shoes, she stood before the full-length mirror. She brushed her dark hair gently and let it bounce and swirl about her. But all she saw, all she saw in the mirror was the pain in her eyes. Turning, she walked into the lounge, closing the bedroom door behind her.

“You look nice,” said Tom.

“Thanks,” replied Sandy, picking up an empty can of lager and putting it in the bin in the kitchen.

It had barely crossed Tom’s mind to think of Sandy as anything more than a friend, somebody that was helping him out, being kind to him; just a girl he used to know from school. That was all. He hadn't the emotional intelligence to notice all those sideways glances, the way she looked at him, stared at him, the hurt she felt when he dismissed her or failed to respond as anything more than a young man who has fallen on his feet. He missed it all.

And who can say why?

Love, you conquer and you kill, you maim the innocent and you destroy the naïve. You break me apart with your lies and your deceptions. Were it not for you, Love, I may understand my life a little better.

Sandy stood in the kitchen, her eyes closed for a moment.

And she grew strong.

The first guests started to arrive at around eight o’clock and Sandy led each of them in turn into the lounge. There were thirteen or fourteen in total and in the small flat that was plenty. Tom felt at first a terrible loneliness as each person came in, one stranger after another. The regard everybody had for Sandy was obvious. He just sat uncomfortably at one end of the settee, peering over a magazine, like a teenager in the doctor's waiting room.

The party meandered along, polite conversations punctuated now and then by lewd comments from two young men who had attached themselves tenuously to the table of drinks. One of them worked with Sandy, the other was his friend, the two of them all shiny hair, earrings and painted on stubble. By ten o’clock, they both looked ill. An hour later, one was asleep in the armchair, the other vomiting into the bath. Sandy ordered them a taxi and they left in tatters like two survivors from a bomb blast. Another great Saturday night lads.

Tom had begun to enjoy the conversations that permeated the air around him. He was a little disappointed to see the two young men leave. They were in fact a similar age to him though he viewed them as being much younger. On their departure, he became acutely aware that he was the only male left at the party and the huddle of women who stood before him continued to talk boisterously, competing with the music from the stereo. He looked at them, leaning back, nodding at the required moments and smiling when he had to, pulling himself into their group. The alcohol was beginning to lend him confidence.

After two or three more of the guests had pleaded early mornings, Sandy came over to join the group of women who had edged perceptibly closer to the settee where Tom sat. Up until that point, for most of the duration of the party in fact, she had actually been in her bedroom consoling a middle-aged middle manager from the bank whose love was a love unrequited. This love in question had discovered her huge desire the previous night and she didn’t know how she could face him on the Monday morning. Sandy had nursed her with kind words and a gentleness of touch until the woman fell asleep on the bed, cradling a diminishing bottle of vodka and wondering at the cruelty of life.

Sandy ushered one of the women to one side of the room and spoke to her briefly - moments later, the two of them sat down beside Tom on the settee. The woman was tall and bright and she exuded a wonderful vitality that immediately contrasted with the soft, quiet demeanour of her friend. From what Tom could see, through the veil of smoke before his eyes, she was definitely worth getting to know.

“This is Karen,” said Sandy, introducing her friend to Tom. “She works at the bank, don’t you Kay?”

“I show my face,” replied Karen from beneath her painted eyelids. She took Tom’s hand and shook it limply. “And you must be Tom?” she said, still holding his hand.

“Yes.”

Karen withdrew her hand before continuing. “You’re a lucky man,” she said, in her seductive, cigarette-damaged voice. “This woman here can’t stop talking about you. Isn’t that right, Sand?”

Karen grinned the grin of an idiot. Sandy smiled, embarrassed – but she remained strong.

“Do you want another drink, Tom?” she asked.

“No, I’m fine. Thanks. I’ve still got one,” he replied, motioning to the can in his hand.

“Kay?”

“Vodka and tonic please, Sand.”

“Vodka?”

“Yes. Vodka and tonic. The water of life. My life, anyway.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Sandy, drifting back towards the bedroom, wondering how she was going to wrest baby from mother.

As soon as Sandy was gone, Karen shuffled still closer to Tom until their hips touched. She was wearing a short, black leather skirt and a tight, low-cut top. And when she spoke to him, he could almost feel her lipstick upon his ear.

“So are you and Sandy together then?” she asked, her voice luscious and gorgeous.