Chasing Angels (40 page)

‘And you really believe the guy who founded this is an
angel?
’ she asked. ‘And the rest of you will become angels too?’

He smiled, and she realized that the questions she was asking had been asked before. They were logical, so of course others had raised them and, listening to Peter, she heard the Higher
Seekers’ stock answers. ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘It doesn’t mean we’ll all fly around on wings, but we’ll have the consciousness of angels.’

She wanted to ask how they could be sure of what the consciousness of angels was, but then she remembered that they already had one, Wally himself, so of course they were sure. It was like
asking if the chicken came first or the egg, the answers went round and round, as they were designed to do.

Still, the prospect of flying around on wings had been the only attractive part of the deal, as far as Kathy had been concerned, and now that had gone. What was the point of being an angel
without wings, for God’s sake?

She couldn’t think of anything to say, or rather, there was so much to say that she didn’t know where to start. Besides, she knew none of it would actually reach him behind the
invisible barrier where he lived. But a world peopled entirely by Peter Kellys, wingless ones at that, she thought, now there was something to think about. She decided to change the subject.
‘I hear you’re married,’ she said.

He nodded wordlessly. There seemed no way of conversing with him in a normal manner.

‘And your wife, she believes in this too?’ Kathy persisted.

‘At first she wasn’t as sure as me,’ he admitted, ‘but she’s my wife.’

Kathy wanted to shout ‘So bloody what?’ but she didn’t. ‘Peter, look, I’ve spoken to your wife’s mother, Harry put us in touch. You remember our cousin, Harry
Nicholson?’

‘Family relationships mean nothing,’ Peter said. ‘But Harry and I always had a special connection, we would’ve had that without the blood link. Like always recognises
like.’

Kathy smiled. There it was again; Peter wasn’t as deep and spiritual as he thought, he’d been caught out just like all the rest. He too had mistaken Harry’s blandness for
‘a special connection’, even enlightened, highly-evolved Peter here couldn’t tell a numpty when he grew up with one. ‘Well, Margery Nairn’s really worried about Rose.
Can I meet her, so that I can at least tell her mother that she’s alive and well?’

There was a pause while Peter thought, the strain of making a decision without the guidance of Virgil obviously showing in his worried expression. Finally he nodded again, then, to her shock, he
walked into an adjoining room, spoke quietly, and returned with a woman. ‘This is Sister Rose,’ he said, making no attempt to introduce Rose to Kathy.

Kathy almost felt the hair stand up on her neck. All that time when they had been not quite conversing, Rose had been sitting in the other room, and if Kathy hadn’t asked about her, she
would never have been summoned to join them. She too was dressed in a purple shirt that covered her arms, and she was wearing a skirt that reached to the floor. She had grey hair caught untidily at
the back of her head, and she was pale, painfully, sickly pale. Her eyes had no discernible colour, but there was that identical expression in them, that dead, sad look. What was it?
Disillusionment? Disconnection? Kathy couldn’t find the right word. She decided to push her luck. She put her hand out to her sister-in-law, but Rose ignored the gesture apart from a slight
movement backwards.

‘We don’t,’ Peter said. ‘Not with outsiders.’

Rose retreated into a corner, making it clear that she would take no part in the conversation. Kathy turned her attention to Peter again.

‘Did you never wonder what happened to Lily?’ she asked.

Peter shook his head. ‘I told you, past relationships are meaningless here,’ he said. ‘These connections are from a time we had no control over, therefore we have no allegiance
to them.’

Kathy was shocked by that. His own mother and he had never wondered how or why she had died so young. Lily had given birth to him, raised him as best she could, cared for him, defended him
against Kathy’s frequent verbal onslaughts, and yet she was no more than a ‘past relationship’ to him. How could that be? She tried again. ‘Old Aggie is dead now,’ she
said conversationally.

He looked at her quizzically. ‘Aggie?’ he asked.

‘Your grandmother,’ Kathy said, not sure if he was joking, then realised with a feeling of bewilderment that he wasn’t. Old Aggie, who had kept his rare, non-communicative
postcards till they fell apart with age and fond handling, unaware that they represented the final throes of his ‘connection’ with his family, Aggie included, and Peter couldn’t
remember her. She had had no great love for Aggie, but the old harridan was due more than that from someone
she’d
loved. She wanted to tell him what a rotten sod she thought he was,
but it would’ve been a waste of emotion, Peter wasn’t there to be offended. Even so, she struggled to keep the tone of her voice light. ‘And all the old characters from the Barras
are gone now too,’ she waffled on brightly. ‘The Pearsons still have businesses in Moncur Street, but they’re the third generation now.’

Silence. He wasn’t pretending; it was as though familiar people and places from his past had been wiped from his mind. Every time she tried to jog his memory an occasional, puzzled
expression would flit across his eyes, only to disappear as quickly as it had come, leaving behind only blankness.

‘Glickman’s is still there, but Frances, Anne and Max are long gone.’ Her voice sounded very loud in the silence. Peter didn’t remember any of them, she could see that,
but more than that, she realised, he didn’t want to remember them either. That’s when it hit her; it was called brainwashing. How many times had she heard that description and assumed
she understood it? Only she hadn’t, not really, not till now. He had gone, Peter no longer existed, and with him had been banished all his memories of his family, except for Lily, because
Kathy looked like her. The place where he grew up, his background, they had all been erased. He’d told her this, of course, he’d said he didn’t want anyone in this strange place
to know of his background, because he had reinvented himself. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’ll be going back to Scotland tomorrow night. Why don’t you meet me in LA in the
morning or the afternoon, and we can have a proper chat?’ She took a piece of paper from her bag and wrote on it the address and telephone number of her hotel, then placed it on the table in
front of him. Peter didn’t look at it or attempt to pick it up, nor did he make any reply. ‘I’ll wait for you to call me,’ she said brightly, but she knew that she
wouldn’t hear from him.

On the long drive back from Gabriel’s Gateway she frantically tried to marshal her thoughts. It should have been the showdown of the century, her revenge, the outpouring of the anger that
had been simmering against him all these years, about the way he had always treated her, about his non-appearance at Lily’s funeral and his total lack of concern afterwards. About being so
bloody loved for no bloody reason! But there had been nothing there to fight against, it would’ve been like punching marshmallow. Whoever that weird, purple-clad creature was, and however
much he resembled Con, he wasn’t her brother. She had seen only pictures of Rose before, and the woman she had met without exchanging a word was as dead as Peter. He would now be in his
mid-fifties, which meant Rose herself was barely fifty, but they both looked much older, and Rose looked ill; she had the look of someone in the latter stages of a terminal disease, and maybe she
was. Yet she and Peter also looked so alike, as if they were related by blood rather than marriage. She had an overpowering impression that they weren’t happy, but they were caught, trapped
where they were and had been for many years, and there was no turning back. She knew that even if she’d said, ‘Peter, Rose, I can get you out of this place,’ neither one of them
would’ve accepted; they had gone too far down the road they were on to turn back. She couldn’t believe it, the tragedy of it. Peter was always going to make it big, Peter, as Jessie had
said, couldn’t wait to shake the dust of the East End off his shoes, he was going places, and yet he had ended up like
this!
It was such a waste, such a tragedy, somehow. Even now that
she had seen him and talked to him, in a fashion, she still found it hard to believe; every now and then she’d stop and think ‘
It
can’t
be
!’ She thought back
to her conversation with the pleasant chap from the organization that kept watch on cults. She had tried to explain what Peter was like, that it wasn’t possible for him to be a follower of
anything but the Cult of Peter, and the chap had replied wearily, ‘Please don’t tell me he’s the last person you’d expect to join something like this. That’s what
every relative in your position says. But the fact is that it’s the strong personalities who get caught up in these things. They’re the ones who have high expectations and ideals,
that’s what leads them to look for something more than ordinary life.’ Well, he’d been spot-on with his analysis, even his ‘vulnerable moment’ prediction had proved to
be true. But what could she do about it anyway? Sneak back through the golden gates at dead of night and rescue Brother Peter and Sister Rose? People did that, of course, kidnapped their
brainwashed relatives from the clutches of cults and tried to remove the brainwashing then reprogram them back into normality, into who they had been. But she could see there was no possibility of
that. Peter and Rose would never be able to live in the normal world again, they were stranded in this bizarre life that they had freely chosen, and they would never leave, could never leave.

When she got back to the hotel she immediately arranged her flight back for the following evening. If Peter called and they met again before she left, she would tell him about her life, about
where she was and what she was doing now, she decided, let him know, as the nice chap had suggested, that the normal world was still out there. She felt like a child telling herself reassuring
fairy tales. ‘And they all lived happily ever after?’ she asked herself wryly. That night she went over it all in her mind, trying to make whatever sense there was of it. All the things
she had liked, he had hated. Her bad memories of the East End were to do with Con and his drinking, and the rest of her mixed-up family, too, of course, because, let’s face it, Old Aggie was
hardly an asset. But she had never blamed the other people she grew up amongst for that, they couldn’t be held accountable for the sins of her family circumstances. It was hard to believe
that Peter had found it all so disgusting. The familiar smell of the Barras that to her had meant safety and security, he had loathed, even the way the people struggled to survive marked them as
almost degenerates in his eyes. To Kathy they had been heroic. She admired the fact that they never went under, that however hard it got they managed to get through it, to get their families
through it. They didn’t have the time or the opportunity to ‘evolve’, that was a dream they had for the next generation. The women her mother worked with in Stern’s, most of
them were doing it to support children through university. They had given up on the dream of a better education and a better life for themselves, but they knew it was there and it would happen for
their children and their grandchildren. And they were still involved with each other, they all had the usual problems of working-class life, but they had time for each other too. She remembered the
anger of the women at Stern’s when Nancy tried to pretend her handicapped granddaughter was ‘a wee bit slow’, and how they had felt her anguish so much that they’d
occasionally attack her for deliberately fooling herself and prolonging the agony. What was that but fellow feeling for one of them in pain? She had known people like that all her life, had
instinctively recognised their situations and their feelings; why hadn’t Peter seen it too? He had even held their poverty against them, condemning them for living through cold winters in
poor housing as though they had caused it. How could you blame people for being poor? They were all good people, decent, hard-working, kind – well, OK,
most
of them were, you
couldn’t include the usual suspects – yet he had been disgusted. How dare he! She had worked herself into a rage, almost ashamed of herself for not telling him all of this, telling him
exactly what she thought of his pathetic, self-absorbed attitude. Then she thought of how he had looked and her anger evaporated. He had achieved his ideal life among ideal people, he said, higher
beings just like himself, but there was no happiness there. She would go home tomorrow and she would never see him again, but the memory she would carry with her would be of his utter sadness.
Inexplicably, great sobs broke from her throat and floods of tears ran down her cheeks. ‘Why dae
you
care?’ she demanded of herself angrily, blowing her nose and trying to stem
the tears, and the truth was that she didn’t know why, just that she did care. He was Lily’s son, she reasoned, Lily would’ve wanted her to try to reach him, to make sure he was
OK, and though he wasn’t, there was nothing she could do about it. And, of course, there was her natural instinct to finish things, to tie up the loose ends, but it was more than that. They
were all that was left of Lily and Con, they had common beginnings, common memories, not many of them good, but still. She was feeling her way towards it. He had been unfinished business; somewhere
in her mind, though she hadn’t consciously thought about him for decades, somehow she hadn’t really believed that she would never see him again. Unfinished business then, was that it?
Maybe. They should – what? – know each other? No, it was more than that. It came to her, not with the flash of a thunderbolt, but with a slow, soft, sadness that gradually came into
focus till she saw it clearly: she had wanted him to be her brother, that’s what it was. After all these years she had wanted his approval, to have him look at her and admit that he’d
been wrong, that she was OK after all, that she’d made something of herself. Maybe she’d wanted a big argument, a clearing of the air, then for him to hug her and, what? – to
love
her? She laughed harshly and blew her nose again. ‘Ah think that’s takin’ things a bit far, Kathy!’ she scolded herself.