Chasing Angels (39 page)

‘I’m—’

‘I know who you are,’ he said, in a strong American accent. ‘You look exactly like your mother.’

Not
my
mother, she noticed, not even
our
mother, but
your
mother. She passed the ball. ‘And you look exactly like your father.’

Peter smiled slightly, a strange smile, polite but distantly cold. Then she looked into his eyes and was suddenly horrified by what she saw, or didn’t see, there. She had come here full of
righteous indignation, ready and anxious to face her brother, determined to make him account for himself, to rub his nose in it. And not just about his cult either, it went deeper than that. She
wanted to attack him for the way he had always behaved towards her, then she would leave here and feel vindicated, feel that she had got her revenge. But all that died the instant she looked into
his eyes. He wasn’t there, that was the problem, no one was there. It was as if he was inhabiting an empty space, but there was something else. What? There was no feeling of connection, it
was as if they were looking at each other, talking, thinking, but behind a screen.

‘Peter, is there somewhere we could talk?’ she asked, aware of being watched.

‘You’d better come to our cabin,’ he said. ‘But first we will have to wait for my Teacher to join us.’

‘Your
what
?’ she asked.

‘All discourse with outsiders has to be conducted in the presence of a Teacher. We shouldn’t really have started the conversation without him.’

‘
Conversation? What conversation
?’ she wondered.

‘Virgil will be here any moment,’ he said, falling silent. There was no expression in his voice, but she got the feeling that she was being snubbed, politely, but snubbed.

A few minutes later a tall, thin man arrived, swathed in purple. He smiled at Peter, but there was a feeling that it wasn’t a pleasant smile, there was a hint of censure there too,
presumably he would be held to account for causing the arrival of this unbeliever who had forced her way into the hallowed premises. She wondered if Peter’s wings were already under
construction, if so he would be deducted three feathers for the transgression. As they went outside Kathy looked at the car and driver waiting in the sun. ‘Your driver can wait in the
reception area,’ Virgil said, ‘until you’re ready to leave.’ There was no mistaking the message; she would not be staying here long. In her mind she retorted,
‘
Ah’ve been thrown oota better places, pal!
’, but she made no reply.

The cabin Peter and Rose lived in was identical to many others laid out among the palms and gardens, with the vineyards rolling off into the distance, down a valley to the side. Peter moved
easily through the hot sunshine; he had obviously become accustomed to it over the years. It had become her enemy in the short time she had been here; having left a Scottish winter two days before
she was suffering badly. Looking around the cabin she was struck by the austerity. There were three prints on the walls, all classical subjects, just as she had learned, but no personal touches;
she would’ve laid money on every other cabin being exactly the same. ‘
Little boxes
,’ she thought, ‘
on a hillside, little boxes in a row
,’ recalling the
lines of an old Pete Seeger song, and just as he had warbled, they did indeed all look ‘made out of ticky-tacky’. There was no pink one, green one or blue one, far less a yellow one,
though, they were built of the same wooden construction, arranged around each other like the chambers in a honeycomb, homes fit for drones, or purple clones. Peter indicated a chair on her right
then he and Virgil sat beside each other at a basic table as far from her as they could, and again there was that identical, strange, polite distance about their behaviour. Peter smiled slightly
again, his right elbow on the table at his side, the hand cupping his chin and the fingers spread across his mouth, as though to protect against an unguarded word slipping out. He waited for her to
talk, holding her at bay behind the screen by atmosphere and attitude rather than words. They were brother and sister, they hadn’t seen each other in twenty-five years or more, there was a
generation of news from home he hadn’t heard, but there was no excitement or recognition, not even a shred of curiosity on his part. And it wasn’t just a hangover from those long-ago
days when they had never much liked each other, it was, well,
something
. This wasn’t like the Macdonalds’ way of meeting up again after years apart, there was no underlying
warmth, no low-key pleasure in the greeting, Peter was just coldly polite.

‘I wanted to see you to let you know Con had died recently,’ she said, following the script she had prepared. ‘There was a sum of money left, money he got when my mother died
in 1968 that had been put in the bank.’

Nothing.

‘Even though you haven’t been in contact for a long time,’ she continued in her stilted, pre-rehearsed manner, ‘you’re still his son and entitled to a say in what
happens to the money.’

He looked at Virgil, then ‘I have no need of it,’ he said quietly. Virgil gave a slight nod.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Neither have I. I thought we could donate it to some charity, Save the Children perhaps. Would that be OK with you?’

Peter nodded and the silence stretched.

‘Peter,’ she started, deviating from the script, ‘this place. Are you happy here?’

He nodded again.

‘I think what Brother Peter is trying to say –’ Virgil announced.

‘Who asked you?’ Kathy shot at him.

Virgil fell silent, but she could hear another couple of feathers hit the deck.

‘Do you see yourself ever coming back to Scotland again?’

This time he shook his head. ‘There’s nothing for me there,’ he said.

‘Brother Peter does not regard Scotland as somewhere to return to,’ Virgil tried again.

Kathy looked directly at Peter and jerked her head towards Virgil. ‘Who is this joker?’ she demanded.

‘Virgil is my Teacher,’ Peter replied. ‘As I explained, we cannot have conversations with outsiders without our Teachers being present.’

‘Well he’s no’
ma
bloody Teacher!’ Kathy said in broadest Glaswegian. ‘An’ mibbe ye’d better tell him that where we come frae, articles like him
don’t get too many chances before they get a slap on the kisser!’

Virgil looked from Peter to Kathy and back again, he clearly hadn’t understood a word.

‘You must realise,’ said Peter, ‘that we have certain rules here, and you’re on our territory, so you must obey our rules.’

‘So whit ye’re sayin’ is that ye’re that feeble ye canny risk talkin’ tae yer ain sister withoot this numpty talkin’ for ye?’ Kathy demanded in a
furious whisper. She turned to Virgil before Peter could reply. ‘Listen, pal,’ she said reasonably. ‘Now you may very well be my brother’s keeper, but you’re not mine.
This is a private, personal conversation, and I object to having you here even listening to it, never mind trying to take part. I’ve compromised, I’ve let you stay, but one more
interruption and you’ll be picking fingernails out of the back of your throat for a month after I’ve gone. OK, pal?’

Virgil clearly did. She heard the clunk of a whole wing hitting the floor. He leaned forward, a smile so tolerant and beatific on his face that she had trouble not fulfilling her threat without
further warning. ‘You have to understand,’ he said, ‘that we can’t have our community upset. That is why I am here.’

‘And you’d better understand that there’s more chance of it being upset if you don’t sling your hook and leave me to talk to my brother. Please believe, Thingmy,’
she said, using the Glasgow putdown, ‘I am a nasty bitch, the sooner you let me say what I’ve come to say, the sooner I’ll bugger off and leave you to whatever it is you do
here.’

There was a hurried, whispered conversation between Virgil and Peter, resulting in Virgil walking out of the door, taking care to leave it ajar.

‘That’s fine, pal,’ Kathy called after him. ‘You’ll hear me trying to put him into a big sack and cart him off over my shoulder from there.’ She turned her
attention to her brother. ‘Look, I can’t explain this, but since Con died you’ve been on my mind. I think I just need to know what’s happened to you before I can get on with
my life. The last time I saw you was at home—’

‘That depends where you call home,’ he said.

‘Well, the East End, where you were born, where you were raised. Let’s for argument’s sake call that “home”, OK?’ She was floundering. She could make the same
claims for herself, yet she no longer lived in the East End either.

‘None of that matters,’ he said. ‘This is where I belong.’

‘But your family…’

‘The only family I have are the people here, and I don’t want those I’m involved with now to know of my original background.’

She looked at him, looked at the dead eyes. If this was what it was like to discover your own Heaven, Valhalla and Utopia rolled into one, she thought, you could keep it. There was no happiness
in those eyes, just a vast, empty sadness, and that feeling she still couldn’t pin down.

‘Peter, how did this happen?’ she asked, in a kinder tone than she could ever have imagined using to her brother. ‘I don’t understand. You were always an arrogant bloody
know-it-all, you ordered everybody around. Now look at you!’

He said nothing.

She tried again. ‘I’m not here to try to drag you away, I just want to understand.’

Peter sighed. ‘I don’t think you can,’ he smiled.

‘Well, that’s more like the Peter Kelly I know,’ she replied coolly. ‘You
can
understand, but
I
can’t.’

‘I mean that you and I are different, that’s why you won’t understand.’ He fell silent.

She sat looking at him, wondering again why she was here, why she was wasting her time being baked alive in this God-forsaken dump of a place. Then she thought that as she was here, she’d
get part of what she came for or die in the attempt. ‘Try me,’ she said.

‘I never liked the East End,’ he said. ‘No, it was stronger than that; I hated it. From as far back as I can remember I was repulsed by the place, repulsed by the people too.
When you arrived it was obvious that you fitted it, and that made it worse somehow.’

‘What was there to repulse you?’

‘Everything. The fact that we had ice inside the windows in winter, that we slept with coats instead of blankets over us in bed, the fact, too, that everyone accepted it was how it should
be. I hated the way they all scrabbled about for a few shillings, that they didn’t try to improve themselves. That existence, it was sleazy, dirty,’ he gave a little shiver of disgust.
‘I never felt I belonged there, never felt I was one of them, all I wanted was to get out.’ He stopped and thought. ‘You remember the smell of rotten fruit as you passed the
market stalls?’

Kathy nodded, smiling, Maggie, saver of horses, immediately springing to mind.

‘It made me sick,’ Peter said sourly. ‘And the smell of old clothes, and the way they yelled at the crowds and the way the crowds were all jammed together, all that noise
and—’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Kathy said tightly, ‘the smell of them.’

He nodded. ‘Exactly.’

And yet, she thought, they had all adored him, these people he had so despised.

‘But I got away, I made something of my life when I came to America,’ he continued. ‘It wasn’t enough though, I still carried that place, that background, around inside,
I couldn’t get rid of the memories. And no matter how much money I made and how well I lived, I knew I still wasn’t living how I wanted, with the people I wanted to live among. I felt,
dissatisfied somehow, nothing was ever enough. I felt I might be going mad. Then I met someone, and he told me about the Higher Seekers.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘That was it really.
It was like finding the place where I should’ve been born, the people I should’ve been born among. When you come here everything before is cancelled, your life begins here. We’re
interested in learning, in the Arts, in being the best that we can be.’

So the cult sleuth had been right, then. What Peter had just described was that ‘vulnerable moment’ scenario, when, coincidentally, along had come a Higher Seeker with all the
answers to his unhappiness and a once-in-a-lifetime offer to forgive him for his poor background and wipe it out for ever. It wasn’t too different from Frank McCabe hearing confessions and
handing out absolution, when you thought about it. Peter had stumbled across these people, this higher caste than existed in the East End he hated so much, that he was clearly too good for, and
instead of a few Hail Marys he had only had to hand over his mind for the rest of his life. Who could resist that? Well, she was pretty sure
she
could, but as she had always maintained, no
matter how alike she and Peter were, they were different too.

‘But Peter,’ she said, ‘you always had opinions, free will for God’s sake. Here you’re told what to do, you live behind a high wall with a locked gate. You
can’t even speak to anyone without being monitored!’

He shook his head. ‘I said you wouldn’t understand. Here we think alike, we don’t need to have our own opinions, we have a collective opinion. It’s like finding a world
of identical beings, they’re all just like me. We have evolved together into a higher consciousness. And Virgil isn’t monitoring me, he’s here to help me, to make sure I
don’t stray into old ways and misguided loyalties. Free contact with outsiders contaminates the communal thoughts we all have here, we all understand and accept that it would undo years of
meditation and work. As it is, this will take some work after you’ve gone.’

‘But, Peter, you say you belong here, but you don’t look as though you’re enjoying life.’

‘We have so many gifts here, we are evolving to higher levels than ordinary people, why should that come cheaply? Just because something is difficult, doesn’t mean we should give it
up,’ he smiled. ‘Life here can be hard, anything worth achieving can never be easy after all. Enjoyment, happiness comes from knowing that we have endured, because by doing so we evolve
more.’