After Purple (45 page)

“The Lord be with you,” chanted the Irish priest from Pax.

“And also with you,” I responded, almost automatically, along with the rest of the congregation.

The
Lord
— for heaven's sake —they still had Him. God Himself, the Blessed Trinity, the gospels, the mysteries of the Mass. All those consoling, gentling, Sister Aidan-ish phrases I'd heard spoken in this service would still be there to comfort them — child of God, love of God,
agnus dei
, kiss of peace, unity, eternity —
those
I wasn't spoiling. Even without a Blessed Virgin at all, would it really be such a loss? Frankly, I'd always preferred a
man
in heaven, a Father, not a Virgin. I myself had rarely prayed to Mary. She always looked a little too like Janet with that superior smile and perfect skin and everlasting baby in her arms. Everything she'd done was a put-down. Conceiving her baby via the Holy Ghost without even taking off her clothes, when I'd have insisted on a hot-blooded man and the whole works, including simultaneous orgasm. Giving birth in a stable after a rough and dangerous journey by donkey-back to Bethlehem. I hadn't even risked a bicycle and yet I'd still miscarried. All those paintings of her kneeling on the straw and
beaming
, only minutes after the birth, when I'd have been howling on my back, sore and stitched and drugged, with puerperal fever or post-natal depression, or breast-feeding problems. I couldn't identify with her at any point at all, from her immaculate conception to her deathless death. Perhaps it was because I was so involved with her Son — a sort of mother-in-law problem if you like. I'd always kept away from Adrian's mother, so I suppose I did the same with Mary.

There was a sudden wail from one of the handicapped, a creak and rustle from the congregation as they all fell to their knees. I was still standing, rambling again, my mind on Adrian's mother instead of on the service. How would I ever carry out a vital months-long mission, if I couldn't even concentrate on one mingy Mass? Ray and his fellow priests were grouped around the altar, already preparing for Communion.

“The Lord has risen and has appeared to Peter, Alleluia,” announced Ray in his new, phoney voice.

No one contradicted him. Every pilgrim present was happy to accept that a man three days dead could slip out of his winding-sheet and carry on as usual. Christ had appeared to his disciples at Emmaus — spoken to them, eaten with them, and then vanished up to heaven. One of the priests had read it to us in the gospel only five minutes previously. If dead people could appear and disappear in first-century Emmaus, then why not in twentieth-century Lourdes? My story was no more exceptional than the one they'd just swallowed, standing there fidgeting and yawning while the priest dropped phrases like “rose from the dead” or “vanished from their sight” as casually as if he were saying “lovely weather” or “mind the step”.

The priests had consecrated the bread and wine and were receiving their own Communion. I watched Ray's rough red hands clasp the silver chalice and tip it to his lips. No longer illicit brandy in a toothmug, but Christ's own blood steaming hot and crimson down his throat. Ray was a priest again and his sin forgiven. I could hardly take it in. The living God was crouching on that altar — God in a goblet, the world in a grain of wheat. A million million priests from the time of Peter onwards had believed it unwaveringly, and all their countless congregations through the centuries. Seeing Bernadette was nothing to that miracle. Indeed, the dead were probably all around us, supernatural powers hovering over our gas-stoves or our easy-chairs, and all we did was slam the door or spray them away with Air-fresh. People tried to make a sane and safe society, pin things down in catechisms, define them in dictionaries, cage them up in fusty encyclopaedias. All the rest they fled from, or unloaded on to madmen or to children. Witches, ghosts and magic they gave away like presents to their kids. Snowqueens and stepmothers were dismissed as myths or fairy tales and any remaining mysteries re-labelled “religion” or “physics” or “philosophy” so they didn't sound so threatening, then sternly separated, so no one went berserk trying to reconcile them all. Other societies hadn't been so blinkered. The Greeks had talked to ghosts and gods and dealt in dreams and entrails, at the same time as inventing geometry and being better at rational things like maths and medicine and astronomy than anyone before them. The Chinese allowed mystery to curl up in their souls and homes like cats. We had only science.

Maybe I should turn to science. It had often rushed in like a shining knight to slay the last expiring remnants of some religious dream. The scientific world might even
welcome
my announcement, set up a laboratory where Our Lady's statue had stood. New facts for their textbooks could flow from Thea Morton's humble message, new definitions of death or time or ghosts cluster around my name. Scientists and ESP societies might flock to Lourdes as new-style priests and pilgrims.

I had to speak — it was my duty to truth and textbooks — and I had to do it now, or as soon as the singing was over. The Liverpool mixed choir had launched into a noisy and discordant rendering of the “
Adore Te Devote”
.

“Truth itself speaks truly,” the sopranos were shrilling. “Or there's nothing true.”

Truth, true. My head was spinning with the word. It was like that game you play as a child, where you repeat one word over and over until it loses all its meaning and disintegrates into a fraying web of empty syllables. How could so many battles have been fought for truth, so many lines written in its honour when it was only four consonants with a vowel shoved between them? And yet I had been entrusted with it, chosen to make it manifest to the entire Christian world, to change history, challenge science, to bring the ancient world nearer to our own.

The last verse wavered to an end. I sprang up on a bench so that I could address the crowds from a higher vantage point and lifted up my hands. I could see the sun rising in my honour, climbing in the sky. The mountains seemed to bow to me.

“I have a message for you …” I announced, cursing the shake and wobble in my voice. I stopped a moment. A train was rumbling by on the railway line high up behind me, the noisy river rushing through my words. They couldn't hear. I'd have to go up to the altar itself, where there was sure to be a hidden microphone. I clambered off the bench and pushed my way towards the priests.

“Wait your turn, can't you?” muttered an angry Liverpudlian, jostling me out of the way. I shook her off, fought my way towards the altar, then turned to face the congregation.

Christ Almighty! The whole seething, struggling crowd was surging towards me. They had somehow guessed the content of my message and were out to get my blood. They didn't want truth or science, only miracles and Masses. Heavy shoes and flailing arms were bearing down on me. I slipped through a gap in the offensive and hid behind an invalid carriage. Yet the charge continued, not towards me any longer, but still towards the altar. I stared at the tangled limbs, the shoving bodies. It was the Communion rush — nothing to do with my message. They weren't out to lynch me, just to grab their God. Mouths open, elbows jabbing, they pressed towards the priests like parched and angry tipplers shut out of the pub all week. Ray was filling mouths like tankards. Greedy lips smacked shut. I hadn't a hope of speaking. Not only would they never hear nor see me, but they were so avid for everything religious, they'd flay me alive if I trampled on their favourite shrine. What did they care for laboratories or textbooks, or for contributing to the march and clash of knowledge? All they craved were the old safe solid rituals, the comfort and luxury of hope, the Virgin they had prayed to since they were babes in arms, even if she was a fraud.

The bells of the basilica were chiming out the notes of the Lourdes hymn, before the clock struck seven. “
Ave, ave, ave Maria
.” The Aves showered across the town like advertising leaflets dropped from an aeroplane. All the streets spelled Mary here, all the shops sold her as their number-one product, even the clocks cried out her name before they told the time. The Blessed Virgin had become as huge and indestructible as the Pyrenees which ringed her round. She was imprinted on every page of Lourdes like that hospital library stamp on all my books. However much I chipped away at her, or tried to rub her out, she would still stamp and stain the town like a tattoo.

I slipped away, dodging the crowds, weaving in and out of wheelchairs, treading on toes. More and more people were sweeping down towards the Grotto, buying candles, booking Masses. It was only early morning and yet the rush hour had begun, the whole busy ferment centred on a sham. I couldn't buy a candle, I wouldn't buy a Mass. I'd splurge my few mean francs on a decent cup of coffee and something to dip into it. I hadn't swallowed a morsel since I'd set foot in France. Christ Himself had eaten before He ascended into Heaven — hadn't we just heard it in the gospel? Right — I, too, must break my fast before I descended any further into the hell of being a heavenly messenger.

I entered the first café I came to which was open. It was almost empty, but the noise made up for the lack of customers. A jukebox was playing some wailing heartbreak song with extra sobs from three electric guitars; a coffee machine was whooshing and whirring on the counter; and the radio was turned up full volume so that the waiter could hear it over the clattering of his cups. Even the cafés thrived on Our Lady's presence. It was she who swelled their profits and left the tips. I felt more and more like a messenger of doom. How many cafés would I close, how many waiters would I turf out into the street?

“
Bonjour, Mam'selle!
” It was the barman come to take my order. He looked fat, almost glossy, as if starving in the gutter was a long way from his plans.
“Que prenez-vous, Mam'selle? Du café au lait? Des croissants?”

I was ravenous. I'd assumed my hunger had faded, but now that food was all around me, I felt weak and dizzy with desire for it. A baker's boy had just walked in, staggering under a tray of fresh-baked croissants. Their scent wafted behind him like a golden vapour trail. A man at the table opposite was dunking his brioche into a mug of steaming chocolate, ruffed with a high white collar of whipped cream. Someone had left a crust and a sugar lump on a dirty plate on my table. I crammed them into my mouth, swilled the dregs from the almost empty coffee cup. The prices were appalling. Bacon and eggs cost more than I'd allowed for lunch and supper combined, let alone a paltry little breakfast. Even coffee took a chunk out of your wallet. Ray had warned me that the prices got higher the nearer you approached the Grotto, which was good business but rotten religion. I should have walked on further, but I was so famished now, I stayed where I was and ordered the two cheapest things on the menu which were hot milk and plain bread. When they arrived, I mixed them together into a sort of gruel, which made them easier to eat. Although my teeth had been temporarily fixed, the gums were shrinking slowly as they healed, so that my denture slipped a bit and couldn't be trusted to cope with things like crusts. Anyway, gruel was more comforting than plain unbuttered bread.

I felt I needed comfort. I was the only person in the whole of Lourdes who knew that it was hollow. And here in the café, I was the only woman and the only English customer. The radio spoke French, the waiters looked Algerian, and the four other break-fasters were resolutely foreign. Even the pilgrims streaming past the café window on their way to the basilicas were mostly aliens. The food itself was French. No comforting English toast and marmalade, or homely fried bread soggy with Heinz baked beans. Only swarthy strangers sipping red wine for their breakfast, or gulping pale gutless tea from smoked glass toothmugs with one anorexic teabag floating on a tide of lemon pips. I longed for the sizzle of bacon, the Kellogg's packet with its consoling list of vitamins, boil-in-the-bag kippers with their frozen pat of butter slowly melting into fishy yellow juice. Breakfast with Leo — Bran-flakes and
The Listener
and peanut butter kisses. I felt weak and sick with loss. True, Leo was a foreigner, but he didn't count as one because he lived in England and bought English watercolours and proper Fortnum's tea. God Himself would be a Middle Easterner. So would His Blessed Mother, come to that. I'd always pictured her pale and smug like Janet, but in fact she'd be Jewish like some of the mothers of Adrian's private pupils, with their coiled black hair and dark eyes.

But, wait a minute — the Lady whom Bernadette had seen had
blue
eyes. I remembered that distinctly. One of the books had described them as azure, and another as forget-me-not. Wasn't that a perfect piece of evidence to back up Bernadette's words? Surely no woman of Galilee could be born with forget-me-not eyes. They belonged strictly to the West. In fact, true blue eyes are exceptionally rare. Adrian had done some research on it once, and worked out that not much more than one per cent of the world could boast blue eyes. They were a product of the gloomy north, he said, specially adapted for seeing more acutely in overcast conditions of fog and haze. Mary wouldn't need them — she was a southerner who lived with blazing sun and cloudless skies.

I picked up the menu and scribbled “Blue eyes” on the back of it, next to the
soupe du jour
. Odd, really, that no one had puzzled about it at the time. Even odder that in another vision, a good three centuries earlier, the Madonna had had
brown
eyes. I remembered that from school. Mother Perpetua had read the story to us during our embroidery lessons. I was always pricking my finger or losing my thimble while she rattled on about the dark-eyed, dark-skinned Virgin who had appeared in Guadalupe in 1531. Surely the Blessed Virgin wouldn't keep on changing her appearance in every different century and country — a Mexican Indian one time, a blue-eyed northerner the next? It seemed neither honourable nor fair. I'd have to mug up all the other times and places Mary had appeared to people and see if she looked alike in any of them. Maybe the whole lot of them were shams. At this rate, I'd be destroying not just Lourdes, but Fátima, Knock, La Salette, Guadalupe itself —
all
the Marian shrines.