After Purple (15 page)

Procreation. That was a biblical word, a Janet word. I could see the
feng huang
carrying Lucian, very gently, in its beak. We needed it — for peace, for harmony, for offspring that were part of us and didn't abort, or die, or simply never happen.

“How?” I asked. “I mean, why procreation?”

Leo tugged at the hang-nail with his teeth. “No idea. There are so many different legends, I get confused. They say it's a creature which sprang from the sun, so I suppose it's connected with warmth and growth and harvest — things like that. I saw one on a tapestry once, gazing on a ball of fire, sort of pecking at the flames.”

“
Flames?
” I said, excited. “So it
is
like the other phoenix.”

“Well, no, the fire wasn't really …” His thumb was bleeding now, and he had trapped it under the fingers of his other hand. Another silence. He tried to shovel words into it, like Polyfilla.

“Sometimes I think the Chinese made it a symbol of anything they fancied — fertility, the Emperor, peace, long life, married bliss — ideals of all the things that don't work out in grim reality. Perhaps that's what myths are for — to deal with what you can't explain or control or contrive or …”

“Leo …” I murmured. I didn't want to return to grim reality. I joined our two hands again.

“What?”

“Do you think it could be mended?”

“What d'you mean?” He was still a little irritable. It was as if his gentle, careful side had rusted up, and every time he tried to exercise it, it creaked and grated.

“The vase. The one I …” I didn't dare say “smashed”. The word felt menacing. I knew I was responsible. I had brought war to the land, banished the
feng huang
. I could feel cold, sharp tears pricking against my eyelids.

“Oh, Thea,
don't
…”

He inched towards me very carefully, as if I were made of glass and even his footsteps might shatter me in pieces. I stretched out my arms to him, laid my face against his soft cashmere sweater, making a little nest for it in the hollow of his shoulder. I was safe again. Nothing had happened between us. It was so dark now, you couldn't see my mouth. The shadow on the wall had merged us into one. I didn't need a mate, because I was part of him, man and woman and child with him, immortal, feathered, joined.

“May I come in?” The voice was like a gunshot scaring away a bird.

“No!” I almost shouted. The door was opening. It was Sister Robert, furtive as a poacher, gun in her hand, torn and bleeding feathers at her feet.

Leo leapt up. He looked very dark and old against the nun. Someone seemed to have mangled him in their hands. He no longer stood as proud as I remembered him.

Sister Robert smiled. “Dr Davies would like to see you both. He's waiting just outside.”

“I've … er … got to go,” said Leo. He was snatching up the carrier, shaking out his coat.

Sister Robert took his arm and steered him towards the window. “It'll only take a moment, Mr Rzevski. Dr Davies is our hospital psychiatrist. He's very understanding.”

“Shit,” I murmured. “They're shit.”

She'd ruined everything, lobbed a bullet through our perfect union, brought war and pain again.

“You see, it's really up to Dr Davies how long Thea stays with us. We've seen the X-rays and she's going to need a little operation on her mouth. But we can't do it yet. Not until all that swelling's settled down. She doesn't have to stay here. The immediate dental work can be done in the surgery, or as an outpatient. On the other hand, we think she needs a rest. She's very overwrought. Dr Parkes suggested …”

She was talking about me as if I were just a squiggle on the lino. Leo wasn't listening — backing away, shoulders hunched and steely, hand on the doorknob.

“Leo,
wait
…” His face was barred and shuttered, his eyes so dark, you could have lost your way in them. He had almost gone. He hadn't kissed me, hadn't said goodbye. The vase was broken again, the
feng huang
torn and writhing on the ground.

“Leo, I …”

Gone. He hadn't even left his smell. All I could smell was Sister Robert now — chloroform and death. The pain in my mouth came rushing in again, the lump on my head booming and pounding like a grandfather clock. The bed was littered with baubles — biscuits, bathsalts, cheap romances. There was nothing of Leo left.

Dr Davies must have passed him in the corridor. He knocked and entered before I could even say, “Get out!” He was violating Leo's sanctuary, heaving back the curtains round the bed, unveiling the windows. The light strode in and raped us.

“Sitting in the dark, when the sun's trying to shine! It's a lovely afternoon.” His voice went through my head.

“It isn't now,” I said.

He wore a white nylon shirt which glared, and a shiny navy suit with tiny shiny lines across it, and horrid shiny shoes with shiny toecaps, and oily hair slicked down with Brilliantine. His skin was greasy and he had blackheads round his nose and glittery metal glasses. Even his voice was shiny.

“Well, young lady, how are you?”

“I'm not young.”

“An
old
lady, are you?”

“I don't want to see you.”

“But I want to see
you
.”

Silence.

“I understand you've spoken to Father Sullivan.”

So the priest had betrayed me, had he? All that crap about the Inviolate Secrets of the Confessional, and he'd already branded me as a public criminal. It would be on my case notes, next. Diagnosis: murderer.

“
So
?” I said. I wasn't going to be polite, not likely. Psychiatrists were shit.

He had plonked himself down beside me, without even asking. He was desecrating Leo's chair. There should have been a
row
of chairs — one for traitor priests, one for lovers who brought bright birds to your shrine, one for shitty shrinks.

“What happened to your mouth?” he asked. He was side-stepping the murder. It was probably a trap.

“I fell down stairs.”

“No, young lady, you did not.”

“On to stone,” I added.

“On to stone?”

I knew that ruse — repeating me. That was Leo's trick. And mine. “I'd rather talk to Father Sullivan about it.”

“It was Father Sullivan who asked me if I'd see you. I'm a Catholic, too, you know.”

That was a trap as well. Psychiatrists were never Catholics. Adrian said it got in the way of Freud. He was merely hoping I'd confess more crimes, that's all.

“It's difficult sometimes, isn't it?” He cleared his throat as if he had religion stuck inside it. He was trying to suck up to me, suggesting we had common problems — spiritual crises, religious doubts. I had nothing in common with any psychiatrist. He had little black hairs on the backs of his thumbs and a dreadful mottled tie. Leo chose his friends on things like ties.

“I don't like your tie,” I said.

He laughed. “You don't like
me
much, do you?”

“No,” I said. “I don't.”

He faded the laugh into a smile, a sickly spaniel one which said, “I'll still wag my tail, even if you kick me.” It made me mad. I tried to look haughty and unmoved. “Anyway,” I added, “I prefer to talk to priests.” I hoped it sounded grand, as if I had my own private confessor, or the Bishop came round to dinner every second Friday, like Sonia Jackson in the Upper Fourth.

“Psychiatrists
are
priests, Thea — in a sense. Priests for the mind.”

“Balls!”

He didn't even growl. Psychiatrists spend years and years learning never to react. It bores me, actually. What's the point of kicking spaniels, if they won't even show their teeth?

“Aren't you going to tell me how you're feeling?” He was fawning on me. If he
had
been a dog, I think I'd have had him skinned and made into a rug and then walked over him.

“You don't mind talking to the Sisters, so I understand.” He was sniffing at my skirts again. “Sister Ursula tells me you're quite a little chatterbox.”

I didn't answer. Words like chatterbox make my stomach heave. I wiped my lips. A sort of yellowish scum was forming round the stitches. The pain had come roaring back now. He must have brought it with him.

He didn't like the silence, I could tell. He kept trying to plug it with feeble little openings, offering me a paw, or picking up his rubber bone and laying it at my feet.

“We're not too happy, are we, Thea?”

“Aren't we?”

“Perhaps you'd prefer to see Father Sullivan again?”

Silence.

“I
could
arrange it, Thea.”

I gave the most grudging nod I could. “OK.” At least Father Sullivan didn't have black hairs on his thumbs, and he might even change his mind about the absolution. In fact, I think they
have
to give it to you. I remember hearing something like that at school.

“Good girl!” The spaniel had turned into a psychiatrist again and was nodding and smiling as if I had entrusted him with the entire story of my toilet training, with the odd Oedipus complex thrown in as well. “Father may still be in the chapel. I'll go down there straight away and see if I can catch him.”

I didn't say “thanks”. Why should I? He was trying to make a cosy little exit. He wanted handshakes from me, gratitude, goodbyes. I stared down at the floor.

“Take care, Thea. God bless.”

I shuddered. He made God sound like some nauseous Jewish uncle. On the way out, he helped himself to one of Leo's grapes. I chucked the whole bunch into the waste-bin. They were contaminated now.

When he'd gone, I closed my eyes. I wanted to make it dark and quiet again, to tempt the phoenix back.

“Immortal,” I whispered. “Procreation.”

The words were like an ointment. I lay so still, I could feel peace falling on the land like rain, and the bright, good-natured bird hovering closer, closer, down towards my bed.

I looked beyond it, to where the wings of God enfolded the whole dazzling, spinning universe. I tried to make Him hear.

“Mend the vase,” I prayed.

Two days later, I woke with my hand between my legs. I hadn't dared masturbate before, not with Father Sullivan on the premises. I was furious with the priest. He hadn't come to see me. All those parables about lost sheep and prodigal sons, and he was scared of the first real sinner he'd probably ever encountered in his life. Nor had Leo come again. I suppose he was frightened of meeting Dr Davies. (Not that
he
came, either.) Don't think I was lonely. There was a timetable as strict as Adrian's. I had more X-rays and more maulings about by a sort of sub-Pakistani dental surgeon. Sister Ursula took me to the hospital chapel and said a Hail Mary with me. (There were white chrysanthemums on the altar and a plaque which said “
Salus Infirmorum
”.) I had double blancmange for lunch and an enema for tea and a bath in a bathroom with yellow coal-tar soap. They gave me phoenix-coloured pills which must have blotted out a lot of things, because I felt smug and drifty and sometimes almost cheerful.

In the afternoon, a fat nun with a fair moustache arrived with a trolleyful of books and said hallo, she was the hospital librarian. The books were mostly lives of saints with brown musty covers and pressed rose petals fluttering from the pages. I chose St Cuthbert and St Philip Neri, then I grabbed a woman saint, in case she thought I was obsessed with men. Nobody mentioned men. It was like my convent school again — quiet and calm and orderly, but short on thrills. Even my food was censored. Toast and chops and apples remained strictly on the Index. I could only manage slops, and everything I drank, I sipped through straws.

I wondered who was paying for all those straws. I knew private hospitals were cripplingly expensive. And why a private hospital at all? Why a Catholic one? I should have questioned Leo, I suppose, but Leo didn't come, and even if he had done, I still wouldn't have asked him. Safer just to cut out that slice of my life between the aubergines and waking up with nuns —chuck it in the waste-disposal unit, like a piece of mouldy apple.

It was dark outside, as if the morning was suffering from a hangover and still struggling to get up. I removed the hand from between my legs. I had no idea how long it had been there and what it had been up to. Better, really, to start again from the beginning. Sister Ursula had left my morning tea and departed to the chapel for the Angelus, so I was safe for at least ten minutes. I dipped my finger in the cup and wetted it. I normally use spit, but I didn't fancy bloody spit. At least the tea was warm. My labia are rather long and droopy. Leo had clipped my dangly earrings on them once, one on each side, and then gone down on me with the earrings jiggling and swinging against his nose. I tried to think of Leo and the earrings, but I was really doing it with Father Sullivan. He was sitting in the confessional, fumbling with the zip, while I lurched sort of upside down on the prie-dieu, with my toes hooked through the grille. I don't know really why I bother with the acrobatics. I'm never simple in my fantasising. I suppose I like it to be difficult or painful. That's what was wrong with Adrian. It was always such a cop-out — all the CSE positions rather than the A-levels. (Leo screwed me on a camel, once.)

“Bless me, Father,” I whispered. “For I am about to sin.” I was so wet now, I didn't need the tea. Father Sullivan had his purple stole flung across his thing, and its fringed ends were sending amazing ticklish sensations down the insides of my thighs. Hospital beds aren't built for masturbation. I tried to stop it creaking.

“Harder, Father,” I whispered, as he tore me inside out. The grille was a gaping hole now, where he had thrust his thing right through it. “Harder, harder, harder …”