Borderliners (2 page)

‘We were happy, but we were concerned too. She wasn’t always loyal to our…values. That was a worry for myself and Iain.’

I nodded my head, a small incline to keep the ball rolling.

Her eyes darkened a touch. ‘Recently, as I’m sure you are aware, she had been frequenting a certain shop on the outskirts of town.’ Her eyes darted from my cards to the bookshelf and I had the feeling she was looking for something. ‘We discouraged people from going there, you know, it’s the-’

I interrupted. ‘Why? Why did you discourage people?’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Because they deal in the occult. We tell our members not to get involved with such things.’

I raised an eyebrow.

She stood up, crossing her hands over her chest. ‘I can see I’m wasting my time here. I wanted to talk to you about that shop. I heard you found the body there, after dark. I came to warn you. Messing about with things you don’t understand will come back to haunt you, and I can guarantee you don’t understand what you are dealing with.

I’d heard enough. ‘You don’t need to worry on my behalf.’

She turned to go. As I followed her out to the hall she stopped again. ‘Tell me, Elena, those cards. What kind of a pack is it? Is it Italian? I’m not familiar with the design.’

I shook my head. ‘Not exactly, Julia. It’s the Tarot. They belonged to my grandmother, on the Italian side of my family, but Tarot cards are universal.’

‘Oh!’ She twitched, a small jerking movement, quickly suppressed.

I saw her out and stayed by the door as she went, watching her walk back to her own house. Remaining in the doorway for a while after she’d disappeared, I stared at the foliage which crawled over the wooden fence between her property and mine. Just like her, the garden next door was impenetrable, the thickly tangled rose bushes, overgrown shrubs and un-pruned trees created an effective barrier between us.

I cocked my head to one side, brushing a strand of straight, mousy-blond hair from my shoulders. I knew I didn’t fit in. In my late twenties, single, and evidently not from around here, I was an outsider. I was neither a daughter nor a wife, and had no local connections whatsoever. I was just some upstart who had taken work where I could find it to get my career started. That, I had achieved, but after a couple of years in the village, I was no closer to making it my home and it didn’t look like I was going to receive an invite to join Julia and Iain’s inner circle any time soon.

Martha had dabbled in the occult, or at least this was Julia’s view. I closed the door with a bang, but Julia’s voice crept back into my head. I shut my eyes but her words coursed through my mind. I didn’t need this; furthermore I had to stay professional. But the temptation was great. I went back into the womb of my house, turned the light off and sat down. Like a self-harmer, I was really close to succumbing as the darkness of my sitting room closed in around me, the cloudy sky having blocked out the moon and the stars, and even, it seemed, the sounds of the outdoors. It was too quiet, the air hanging in thick patches around me.
What if, what if
, I thought. What if Martha wasn’t crazy at all, what if she had just fallen victim to darker forces? And what if those forces were operating somewhere nearby?

My treatment began when I was eight years old, a few months after the first visitations from my dead grandfather. He would appear in my dreams and whisper in my ear, in his thick Sicilian dialect, about returning the Rose to the Garden of Eden. I knew who he meant. People said I was imagining things, but I knew it was more than that. The night I saw my grandmother in my dream, lying on the floor surrounded by the cards and a glass full of the medication she’d failed to take, I tried to warn my parents. My mother lost it.
But she’s going to have a stroke
, I insisted,
you need to keep an eye on her
.

My parents were afraid and I was packed off to a child psychiatrist faster than anyone could say ‘psychotic’. Of course, what I saw came to pass. It was exactly as I had forseen, to the very minute and down to the last detail. This only sent my mother into even greater turmoil, and rather than stopping my treatment, she intensified it.

My psychiatrist was a boring old woman, stiff and uncompromising. Mean. I hated her. Her answer to my issues was to dose me up and attempt to change my behaviour with various different mind control games. My parents bought into her theories about discipline and training of the mind, and so I was doomed to her so-called ‘treatment’ for several years. At least my chosen form of physical discipline - Kung Fu - was fun to learn, and I practised yoga and meditation every day. It helped me excel in sports and, to the disgust of my younger sister, seemed to boost my academic achievements. Despite everything they put me through, I refused to tell them the visions were a figment of my imagination. Anything but that.

My grandfather still visited me in my dreams, as real as ever. Nonna Rosa too, sometimes. If they were just figments of my imagination, then the real world didn’t match up. As revenge for my treatment, I decided to study psychoanalysis at university. In the future, people like me would be treated by those of us who had a more open mind, who didn’t believe the brain was a simple mechanism which had to be wired up either one way or another. There were so many permutations and varieties of normal, so many differences in the way people thought about things and their experiences of reality. I was determined to qualify as a psychotherapist so that I could treat people in a different way. I would be gentler and more careful with people’s precious minds. I would try to help them, and I wouldn’t tell them they had got it all wrong. Sometimes it seemed a tall order. Being so close to people who walked on reality’s borderline kept me close to the edge too.

The gentle floating descent of something outside reflected on my computer screen as I waited for it to power up. It reminded me of snow until I saw the drifting items were large, wispy and flat, a reminder that the nights would draw in further and the trees lose all their leaves before winter was truly upon us. Born at the very beginning of January, I smiled at the thought that my favourite season was just around the corner. It was a shame my patients didn’t feel the same way and it was with some trepidation that I scrolled through my schedule for the day, knowing I would get busier as winter approached.

I was glad I’d chosen not to look at my cards the previous night. Julia’s hawk-eyed presence played on my mind so I’d decided to leave it for another day. What I’d found in the diary needed investigation - and not of the type any police officer could carry out - but I needed time to think before I started delving into card readings and all that it entailed. As desperate as I was to check my hunch, it could wait another few hours. I shivered, despite the heating in the surgery building, which had been turned up full in anticipation of bad weather. I didn’t want to open up that can of worms again, but I was afraid I had no choice. Maybe I would read through the notebook again first. This time more slowly, so I could take in every word and consider its meaning.

My first patient shuffled in, eyes on the floor, hair unkempt and thinning with an inch of grey showing at the roots where she hadn’t bothered to redo her normal rinse. I caught a hint of mental fragmentation, one I was beginning to notice more frequently.

I reached for my glasses as I gestured for her to take a seat. ‘Good morning, Joan.’

She started talking as soon as she sat down, her voice low and her eyes on the door. 'It's as if I've been thrown out of the community. I've been a member for twenty years - since the beginning - and now I've been cast out. Like a demon, the ones she told us to beware of…’ She looked around, her eyes darting this way and that until they came to a halt on a point somewhere beyond my window. ‘I don't know what to do with myself. All my friends are active members, and I was too, with the prayer group in particular. As was my late husband.’ She crossed herself twice, spindly fingers shaking as she did so.

I was taken aback by the change in her appearance, by the lost aura around her, which made her appear at odds with the bustling, busy Joan I’d seen around before.

‘Nobody will speak to me anymore. I don't know what I've done. That's why I'm here, Dr Lewis. I don't know if I can cope.’

A tremor ran through me but I watched her, calm and still.

‘I'm scared, Dr Lewis. I want you to help me. I don't understand what’s happening. Julia came to my house to discuss our stall at the village fair which I help with every year - you know the one Dr Lewis?’ There was a pause as she shifted in her chair.

‘What do you think happened, Joan?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘With the community. What happened? When did it all change?’

‘I think it was when I asked Julia about the Rapture.’

‘The Rapture?’

‘Yes, yes…,’ she nodded. ‘We - the Charismatic Community - believe it will happen in our lifetime.’

She looked through the windows at the sun, already low in the sky. ‘This world of ours, Dr Lewis, its days are numbered. Our days are numbered. Or so we believe. Or so I believed, at least.’

I waited, and as I did so, Martha grew from the lengthening dark shadows of my consulting room, her eyes bright. My hands clenched as I closed my eyes to banish her.

‘Dr Lewis?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, keep going Joan.’

‘Julia said…’ She shifted in her chair again and continued. ‘Well, now everything has changed. I had a note from Julia saying that Mary was going to take over the fair as they knew I was busy this year, but I'm not. If anything, I enjoy doing it. I'm all alone now Jim is dead and Lisa is away.’

‘What did Julia say?’

‘Oh. It doesn’t matter really. It’s just that I’ve been having doubts about the…the end times. I don’t know if I believe it. You know, the idea that only the believers will be saved.’ She paused. ‘Well, you see, it’s my daughter, too. She’s become an atheist, but she’s a good person. Heart of gold. I just can’t accept the idea that I would be saved and she wouldn’t.’

‘Can you explain why?’

‘She’s a better person than me.’

I tried to smile my best, comforting smile. ‘Don't you think you're a good person, Joan?’

‘It’s not that, dear. You’re still young and you’ve not been here that long, but I’ve seen so many people come and go. Not everything is as it seems. You begin to doubt yourself, you know? I’ve been thinking a lot about them. About Julia and Iain. They’ve been here a fair few years now - I can still remember when they first arrived.’

‘When was that?’

‘About twenty years ago. They were quite young when they came. And they were different from the start. It wasn’t long before they started the Charismatic Community up and started recruiting people. Julia can be very persuasive. So many joined. It was a way of life, it gave you a sense of belonging. I can’t describe it. But then, over the years. All this.’ She stopped, a red flush creeping up from the base of her neck to her chin like a nettle rash.

‘This what?’ I risked prompting her.

‘All the compulsory donations and prayer groups. Over the years it seems to have got worse. We have to pay them so much now, it’s getting ridiculous. Julia says they need it to prepare people for the Rapture.’ The red patch on her neck grew angrier, but I prompted her again.

‘Are you afraid?’

‘No, no.’ She paused and coughed. ‘Well, maybe a little. I hadn’t thought of it like that before.’

I let her talk for a bit longer, allowing the tension to fizzle out as she moved onto more mundane topics: her sleepless nights, bad eating habits and smaller niggles. She talked, I listened. That was what I was there for. But as I did so, shivers travelled down my back. When I tried to feel my way through hunches and half-formed ideas, it struck me that her words echoed those of Martha just before her death.

Back home that evening, my post was waiting for me on the mat along with a small envelope. After dropping most of the junk mail into the recycling, I turned my attention to the Basildon Bond envelope, its old-fashioned, creamy texture as affected as the writing scrawled across the middle. Inside was an invitation to a drinks party for ‘Friends of Julia and Iain’. They made it sound like a charity. I tutted and dropped it onto the table whilst I rummaged in the fridge for the leftovers from the giant salad I’d made the previous day.

The TV sat, blank and mute in the opposite corner as I sat down in the living room and started to pick at my food. It was as tasteless as ever - food for one had never been my forte. As I forked through my dinner, a scent of heavy perfume caught my nostrils. I sniffed the air, trying to locate where it was coming from, but it came and went, as if eluding me on purpose. Looking round, my eyes fell on the bookshelf next to the fireplace on the back wall of the room. Propped up, in the very centre of shelves, sat Martha’s little black notebook, its pages splayed open as if on display.

I slammed down my fork and cast my plate aside before grabbing it off the bookshelf and flicking my thumb across the pages, a cloud of dust hit my nostrils. I coughed, gulping back a rising sense of nausea as an odd scent sunk into my lungs. It was musky with something retro about it, like a perfume from another age. The brand Samsara came to mind, a heavy scent I remembered from my childhood. My stomach contracted, just as it had the previous night but I was like an addict. I knew what was in the diary, and I had to read it again. Just to be sure.

Turning to the beginning, I started to read.

While I was skimming through the diary I was interrupted by a knock at the door. If it was Julia again, I wasn’t in the mood. But the shape on the other side was small and hunched: Mrs Dobson from next door. I hesitated for a second before opening the door to the old lady. Well over eighty, she and her husband were surprisingly independent, but every so often they needed help. Sometimes it was shopping, other times they needed assistance with household items which broke down. The boiler, a leaky tap, a drawer which had got stuck. Occasionally it was worse than that, but so far I’d never had to call an ambulance or drive them to a doctor. Most intriguing of all, they managed to get by in the village despite not belonging to the Charismatic Community.